CHAPTER 4
River of Secrets, River of Mercy
LOUISVILLE WAS A TOWN OF EXTREMES. THE THICK SMELL OF horse piss alternated with gentle sniffs of blooming wisteria. Newly rich planters mixed sugar into their bourbon while slaves hauled tobacco and cotton crops to market, and the streets flurried with open-air stalls that sold live animals along with dried catfish, mud turtles, and skinned rabbits swarming with yellow jackets—a sight that fascinated Lloyd and disgusted Hephaestus (stirring memories of Phineas the rabbit). There was a friend left behind in Zanesville that the family never spoke of, and the blacksmith rather feared that Lloyd gave more thought to the mechanical beaver he had made than to the life he had taken.
Desperate again for funds, the family hocked most of their remaining possessions for food and lodging, and for raising enough money to cover waterline passage on a stern-wheeler called the City of Paducah all the way to Cairo, where the Ohio melds into the Mississippi. There they found planks and piers, mule-lined dust streets, and frame houses peering across the river to Kentucky.
Amid hanging sides of bacon and buckets of nails that smelled like dirty rain, the Sitturds negotiated passage to St. Louis on board a paddle wheeler that had been christened the Festus in a Memphis shipyard but which its prudent new owners had renamed the Fidèle. The steamboat was crowded with all manner of unusual passengers, but none who intrigued Lloyd more than the man with the silver hand.
The possessor of the mechanical prosthesis was supposedly named Henri St. Ives and while he claimed to be from Vicksburg, he had the aura of those who habitually obscure their origins. It was at a card table in one of the parlors on the upper deck, surrounded by a stack of coins and greasy notes, that young Lloyd officially made his acquaintance.
The boy had been attracted to the drawing room by the smoky male voices of the players, punctuated by the ping and rustle of money and cards on the thick felt cloth. Once in position, Lloyd had refused to leave, standing so steadfast that the general conclusion around the table was that he was simpleminded.
The game was straight poker, and it was clear that St. Ives’s fellow players were becoming disgruntled and a little suspicious about his run of luck. After he swept another pot, several unkind remarks were made, to which the maimed man replied, “Gentlemen, please. Good and bad fortune finds us all in its own time.” He then raised his shining left mitt with a flourish and, one by one, the other men at the table grunted their acceptance and chipped in their money.
Another hand was dealt and then another, both won by St. Ives. By this time, one of the men had suffered such losses that the presentation of the artificial appendage and its suggestion of some past catastrophe was no longer sufficient to ease the tension. The man, a plump horse doctor named Fundy, lurched up, almost capsizing the table, and shouted, “I don’t know how you’re doing it, but I know a cheat when I see one!”
St. Ives remained impassive, save for a lightning wink at little Lloyd.
“Good sir. Here you’ve been allowed to play at the gentlemen’s table, which, given your level of skill, is a gift. Now sit down and wager or make a dignified retreat.”
A roped vein in the accuser’s forehead began to throb and his skin reddened. “Retreat?”
The blustering quack then drew from his coat a tendon scalpel, which he carried for protection. The lethal nakedness of it gleamed for all to see.
St. Ives’s face did not blanch, but his silver hand came alive. With a click like the lock in a drawer, from out of the index finger snapped a dagger that doubled the length of the digit—and then, with a flick of the wrist, as if he were flipping a card into a hat, St. Ives doubled the length of the blade yet again, so that he was able to slice the ribbon that held the man’s pocket watch in place without stirring from his chair.
Flabbergasted, Fundy clutched his paunch as if to make sure his entrails had not spilled out across the table. St. Ives laid his cards facedown and nudged the severed timepiece forward.
“Now, my friends, if any of you feel similarly discomfited I am prepared to meet you man to man on the afterdeck to settle this affair with honor. Alternatively,” he rasped—and the silver hand clicked and expanded again to reveal a set of razor-sharp claws, one from each finger—“you can learn what justice comes from molesting a helpless cripple. It’s your call, gentlemen. I am at your pleasure.”
This last remark was uttered through an unwholesome smile that the pudgy accuser would never forget. Faced with such an unexpected display of weaponry, the poker players decided in unison to yield the table, and when their chairs were empty the claw blades retracted and the gambler eyed the young boy.
“You think I cheated? You think me a scoundrel?”
Lloyd shook his head. “You count the cards. You calculate in your head. You have a method. It merely gives you an advantage.”
“Hah! Do you know how to play the gentlemen’s game, then?”
“I think I do now,” the boy replied.
“How do you mean?” St. Ives puzzled.
“I watched. I listened.”
“That you did, lad. I could feel your glance penetrating me like one of my own fingers. But have you ever played? Do you know the rules?”
“You just taught me. All of you … by how you played,” Lloyd answered.
“Posh!” declared the gambler.
“Would you care to bet your winnings to find out?”
St. Ives smiled. There was something about this child, preternatural and unnerving—and yet engaging, too. “I like your manner, lad. Always up the ante.”
At this point a burly steward with great muttonchop sideburns barged into the drawing room and jabbed a muscular digit into the gambler’s chest.
“See here, charlatan. And don’t think of taking a swipe at me with that fancy stump. I don’t like your kind. Gambling is only allowed when it’s honest and aboveboard.”
With that the steward reached out and seized a wad of the notes that still remained on the table.
“Is that your commission for overseeing the play?” St. Ives jibed.
“That’s the price a cheater pays.”
“He didn’t cheat,” Lloyd piped up behind the man. “I was watching.”
The steward withdrew his finger from St. Ives’s chest and whirled around.
“What are you?” he demanded, noticing the boy for the first time. “His hired monkey? A poker table is no place for young’uns. Get along with you! Or I’ll throw you to the bilge rats, you little shit.”
“I don’t know if the captain would be pleased to know you’re taking that money,” Lloyd returned without moving. “He might want some of it himself.”
A spark of anger and resentment flared across the steward’s face, mingled with a flush of surprise that someone so young could be both so astute and so matter-of-fact. But the boat’s whistle blew just then and some other passengers waltzed by, so that he became flustered and chucked the money back on the table and stomped out.
“Well, Monkey,” St. Ives said, grinning. “What a good team we make, eh? Here. Here’s your share. Rightfully earned and, from the look of you, rather needed.”
St. Ives swiped the notes the steward had returned to the table and stuffed them into the boy’s eager hands.
“If you are the savant you appear to be, who knows what we could achieve?” the gambler mused. “As partners.”
“Equal partners?” Lloyd inquired. “That’s the only kind of partnership I think works.”
“Right you are.” St. Ives smiled. “There’s wisdom in you, too.”
And so their little conspiracy began.
There was a sign in the dining saloon that St. Ives enjoyed. It read, IF YOU NEED TO CARRY LARGE SUMS OF MONEY, WEAR A MONEY BELT. AVOID GAMES OF CHANCE ON RIVERBOATS. Thanks to the gambler, Lloyd made a new friend and had something to look forward to other than reading his uncle’s letter yet again. He also made some much needed money. His parents were glad to have a little privacy, as their intimate life had suffered in recent times, and so let the boy wander the boat at will. Lloyd, meanwhile, was careful to keep the banknotes he accumulated for helping St. Ives hidden from his parents.
The Sitturds’ stateroom was in a sorry state, six feet square with crimson moth-eaten curtains, a narrow slat bed, and a mothball-scented dresser, but it was considerably more luxurious than the bales and boxes the deck passengers were forced to share with animals ranging from horses to chickens, all sheltering among the walls of crates they arranged, and all scrambling for space as cargo and passengers came and went and the manure was scooped.
A blasted and recently repaired boiler (which had scalded a billy goat and one of the crew members) required continuous adjustments and seemed to inhale fuel, so that there were regular and lengthy interruptions to the journey to allow for wooding parties to scour the shoreline. One of the passengers, who volunteered to assist with such an expedition in order to reduce his fare, was stricken with heart failure and had to be buried in a tea chest, while another was bitten by a snake. Then a cow leaped off the deck and tried to swim home to the Illinois side, only to have the bucktoothed lad whose family owned it make the mistake of trying to swim after it. Neither the hefty milk cow nor the overbite boy was seen again.
The fine packet boats operating between St. Paul and New Orleans were famous for their excellent cuisine. This was not one of those. Salt pork, mutton, and boiled potatoes and beans were the usual fare, although wine, stout, porter, and brandy could be found in abundance. Like stage drivers, steamboat captains tried to make the most of the daylight, pulling in toward shore when darkness fell. Dead trees, snags, and sandbars, not to mention smaller craft without illumination, posed a constant threat to travel at night, although most captains would run at reduced steam if the moon or starlight allowed. The crew was a blind barrel mix of Irish, German, blacks, and those St. Ives referred to as “pure muddy.” Fleets of rafts, with their cook shanties puffing out greasy odors of fried fish, could be seen en route to the sawmills. Not infrequently, what appeared to be the body of a man or a gassy inflated horse drifted by and, once, a dollhouse with a ginger cat aboard.
Travelers flowed back and forth on the gangplanks in chimney hats or swishing skirts. One afternoon the men had a shooting competition on the top deck, blasting at buzzards circling the remains of a runaway slave who had washed up on a sandbar. The weather was growing warmer and the bugs thicker, sultry nights becoming humid with whiskey and cigar smoke, perfume dabbed to wrists and crotches.
St. Ives was well acquainted with the ship’s chief entertainer, a singer named Viola Mercy, a tall buxom brunette whose lavender-scented pantaloons filled Lloyd’s mind with notions and cravings of a new and exquisitely painful kind. Thrice a day she performed in the dining saloon of the Fidèle, which was laid out around a dance-hall stage with a heavy velvet aubergine curtain. And thrice a day she would sing a song that the boy grew to love.
There’s a place I know
Where I always go
There to dream of you
And hope that you’ll be true
And someday I pray
That you’ll find your way
Back to the secret place
Within my heart.
He became obsessed with the songstress and her exotic apparel: ostrich feathers, silk stockings, lace brassieres. How he wanted to infiltrate her private domain and experience the majesty of this dark beauty. (In truth, she kept a flask of rye in her garter belt and had done as much singing on her back as she had onstage.)
Meanwhile, St. Ives opened the boy’s eyes to the larger world, relating to him the news of the day, with its cults of gangsterism becoming political forces—Tammany Hall warring with the Bowery Boys in New York, angry hordes descending on Mormons, Protestant secret societies with names like the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner murdering Catholics, abolitionists dragged through the streets, slave families broken, the women raped, the men castrated and lynched. St. Ives had dire warnings about what lay ahead, although he himself took no sides and indeed was chiefly concerned about how such turmoil might be turned to personal advantage. “In confusion there is profit, my young friend,” he told Lloyd.
More to the boy’s liking, however, the gambler let him examine the metal hand. The plates that formed the exterior were made of polished steel, but so well forged that they provided exceptional strength without the corresponding weight. Inside lurked the potential for a fantastic array of implements, from the throat-cutting blades that had appeared at the poker table to a choice of such accessories as cigar scissors, a lock pick, and a sewing kit—not to mention that the miniature compartments could also be used to hold coins or keys, vials of various potions (such as chloral hydrate), snuff, ink, even poison. However, St. Ives was not forthcoming with any intelligence about how he had come by it, until one evening.
It was a close night and a full moon shone down on the river, so the captain had the boiler fired. Lloyd had been encouraged out of the family’s cabin to allow his parents some time alone, a practice he was growing more and more curious about. Only the thump of the paddle blades stirred the quiet, so that the occasional sounds of a baying dog or the crashing of a caving bank reached the deck, where he found the gambler smoking a cigar, staring down at the wake.
“You wonder about it, don’t you, boy?” St. Ives asked, and tapped a bright ash into the water. “How I came by the hand—and how I came to lose my own.”
“I do,” Lloyd agreed. “There’s no hiding there’s a story behind it.”
“Well put, lad,” the gambler said, nodding. “And well spoken. Like a gentleman. I will reward your discretion. After all, we’re friends, aren’t we?”
“Partners,” Lloyd responded.
“Indeed. Gentlemanly put again. Well. Some people would say I asked to have this done to me.”
“You asked for it?”
“I said some people would say that,” the gambler answered, and his face went glassy, as if he were now looking at something long ago. Then some hatred surged up within him, like a dead log that had been submerged in the river.
“Ten years ago, I used to be the secretary to a very rich man in the East. He valued my memory and my head for calculations. He was a fellow of extreme cleverness and cruelty—Junius Rutherford, or so he called himself then, but that was not his real name, I am sure. Owner of the Behemoth Formulary and Gun Works in Delaware. For himself he made the hand—and others like it. Said he’d lost his own in a foreign war—or with the Injuns or in a sword fight. His stories changed with his audience.”
“So do yours,” Lloyd pointed out.
“W-ell … yes …” stammered St. Ives. “A man must be flexible, given the unkindness of fate. But I am inclined to think that he was the cause of his own misfortune. He had the marking of an acid burn on his face as well. My belief is that one of his experiments backfired on him. He was always fiddling with new combinations of chemicals—schemes for weaponry. And other things. Weirder things. ‘Better to be the head of a louse than the tail of a lion’ was his motto, and if ever there were a fellow to plant the head of one creature upon another he was the one. His estate was like nothing you can imagine.”
“How so?” Lloyd asked, certain that he could imagine much more than St. Ives.
“He called it the Villa of the Mysteries, and the name was apt. There were lightning rods all about, and he had hung up effigies around the grounds to keep the meddlesome townsfolk from spying. That and his dogs, a breed I had never seen before and hope never to see again. Gruesome beasts.”
“Go on,” Lloyd said.
“Well … I know this will sound like flapdoodle, but he carried a seashell around with him. Like a polished black conch. He listened to it—as people sometimes do with shells, thinking they can hear the sea. But he did it often and, stranger still, he spoke into his.”
“What did he say?” Lloyd asked. “Who was he talking to?”
“I wish I knew.” St. Ives sighed. “He spoke in a language I could never understand. To whom, I have no idea. I assumed he was touched in the head. And I had good reason to think so. The estate had an artificial lake, and on the water he had a fleet of automatic model ships that reenacted the British defeat of the Spanish Armada. And there was a greenhouse full of orchids that looked like they were made of glass, but they were alive and grew. God’s truth. He loved books and fine things, but most of all he prized unexplainable things.”
“How do you mean, unexplainable?” Lloyd asked. There were not many things you could actually perceive that could not be explained, he felt. Even the way the fancy woman with the medicine show had seemed able to be in two places at once back in Zanesville. It was the things that went unnoticed that were mysterious.
“There was a collection of paintings. Flemish, I think,” the gambler continued, puffing. “Milky, watery landscapes without much obvious interest—except that over time they changed.”
“You mean with the light?”
“No!” the gambler exclaimed. “I mean changed. One day a peasant in the picture would be pitching hay, the next day a hay cart would be seen departing—a cart that had not been there before!”
Interesting, Lloyd thought.
“And Rutherford had a huge aquarium that he would swim in himself. He had a kind of vessel built—it looked like a diamond coffin—in which he could stay submerged for long periods of time. He used it to study his electric eels and those jellyfish creatures we call the Portuguese man-of-war.”
Lloyd gave a low whistle. He would have liked some eels himself.
“Yes!” St. Ives shook his head. “You see, I would not have been in his service had I not found something in him to admire—and there was much to hold my interest. The trouble was I found too much to admire and ended up taking too much interest in his wife, an auburn-haired beauty with eyes like sapphires.”
“You fell in love—with his wife?” Lloyd blurted, but when he spoke an image of Miss Viola rose up in his mind. A glimpse he had had of one of her corsets. It had become confused in his mind with his mystic twin.
“And she with me!” St. Ives replied. “My beautiful Celeste. Never will I experience such bliss in this life again!”
A storm of rage passed through the gambler’s eyes.
“Rutherford was cruel to Celeste and ignored her—spent too much time with his compounds and machines. He was also addicted to a narcotic that he manufactured himself. A transparent liquid, tinted a faint blue—like damson plums. He called it Mantike. Every night he would inject some of the foul stuff and slip off into a meditative stupor in his library. But there were other eyes and ears about the place, and when that bastard found out about our sin he drugged me with something—whether it was the Blue Evil I do not know. I woke to find myself secured to a table in one of his infernal laboratories. And I remained awake. No drugs or sedatives after that. There he conducted a little piece of theater involving surgical instruments.”
At these words the gambler’s body seemed to quiver in the warm air, while Lloyd’s thoughts flashed back to his rabbit Phineas. His father was wrong about him never thinking of Phineas. St. Ives spat into the river.
“But then why did he give you this?” Lloyd asked, pointing to the hand.
“Another of his hideous experiments.” St. Ives chuckled. “How the nerve connections work I have no idea. But this is not the metal addition that it may appear. I feel the hand. It is a part of me, or I a part of it. There are other extensions and accessories that I carry, but the hand itself I cannot remove. I will die with it attached to me. Yet it will not die. And that is perhaps why he enabled me so—as an expression of his power and ingenuity. The rest he did to me was not enough. He wanted a constant, visible, and necessary reminder always before me. To make me forever dependent on his technics. Who knows? Perhaps, for all the agony he inflicted, I may have been lucky not to have been turned more fully into one of his gadgets. I might well be a mannequin whole, and not just in hand.”
“I don’t understand,” Lloyd murmured.
“He was far, far ahead of his time, was Mr. Rutherford. His toy caravels were ingenious, but he was capable of many other feats. Oh, yes! He had designed and built a mechanical manservant. A sort of butler named Zadoc. What it was powered by I do not know, he would not reveal it—but it was not steam. A very handsome but ghastly porcelain face. Gave Celeste nightmares. But he was working on much more complex contraptions still.”
“And what … happened … to him?” the boy whispered.
“I set a booby trap in his laboratory,” the gambler replied with a vengeful, melancholy laugh.
“His body was never found. But pieces of another’s were. My sweet Celeste. I believe she thought that I was trapped in the fire and was trying … to save me.”
St. Ives’s silver prosthesis flashed in the moonlight.
“I was questioned by the authorities, but I knew enough of his ways to make it look like an accident. And what an accident!”
“But what … became of Rutherford?” Lloyd asked.
“Ah! That is the question,” the gambler said, nodding. “Well, you see, he was not a well-liked man. Almost everything he did he did in secret. He was a hard employer and a recluse who rarely ventured off the estate, and he seemed to have no close friends or immediate kin—other than my poor darling. The neighbor folk all feared him. There were stories about children in the vicinity who had gone missing. Who can say? But the members of the local constabulary were willing to take the path of least resistance. They came to believe that perhaps he had perished in the explosion, too—blown to bits, as I had hoped he would be.”
“But you think differently?” Lloyd asked.
“I am certain in my soul that he is still alive!” St. Ives ejaculated. “His will left his estate to some distant relative in Louisiana—probably himself under another name. His business interests were absorbed by a consortium called the Behemoth Innovation Company, and the estate was systematically denuded of all its objets and apparatus.”
“Did you investigate?” Lloyd asked meekly.
“Can you imagine me not doing so?” the gambler exclaimed, and then he drew his voice back down low. “The so-called relative now lives abroad, and I have not been able to find a trace of any news about him in any of the foreign papers—I even hired a London detective. Not a skerrick of a clue. As to the consortium, they have offices registered in several cities but there is no information about any of their directors. They are but shadows, as near as I can tell. And that is why I ride the riverboats, or one of the reasons—to one day learn something of his whereabouts. He would have a new name, and perhaps a new-looking face. But he is not dead! The hidden may be seeking and the missing may return. Remember that, my young friend. Beware, if you should ever cross paths with a man a few years older than I—with a hand like this, or some such invention. He would have found a way to make a better one by now, devil take him. Who knows what he has learned how to do in the years that have passed since what he did to me?”
With a vehemence Lloyd had not seen before, the gambler heaved his cigar into the river and spun on his heel, heading to his stateroom. Nothing more was said about the mutilation or the vanished designer of the mechanical hand, but the creatures and contrivances of the lost Villa exerted a pronounced fascination for Lloyd that was outweighed only by his ripening interest in Viola Mercy.
She said that she came from Maryland but, like the gambler, she seemed a child of the river and the road. Bawdy and quicktempered, in the boy’s presence she became demure. When she drank, however, in between performances, her voice deepened and her eyes burned with a lecherous yearning. One afternoon he found himself sneaking into her cabin. He had meant to steal but a glimpse, then he was sniffing her pillow—when there came the sound of hushed, lewd voices at the door!
Mortified, he leaped under the bed. The door opened and Miss Viola entered with the gambler. They drank at first, absinthe, the green liquor with the bittersweet licorice scent that St. Ives favored, preparing it with the long ornamental perforated spoon that reminded Lloyd of a decorative trowel, ceremoniously straining water poured from a carafe through a crystal chunk of sugar and then waiting and watching, and finally stirring the mix of liquor, water, and sugar until it reached a cloudy green shade he deemed right. They took a few sips, and Miss Viola shed her long dress with the plunging neckline and her bodice and something else that Lloyd couldn’t see. They tumbled onto the bed and lay there together, sipping their drinks for what seemed a long time. Then they came together and started to thrash about—until St. Ives muttered something and began to fiddle with his prosthesis.
Miss Viola’s cabin had once been one of the more opulent staterooms, but times had not been kind to the owners of the Fidèle and the chamber’s former glamour had faded, so that it now possessed a peeling gaudiness along with a noisy excuse for a brass bed (which William Henry Harrison had once slept in before becoming president). It was the audible complaint of the bedsprings that allowed the boy to wriggle into a position on the floor where he could catch sight of the looking glass, in which the figures of the two adults were partially visible. There he lay, trying hard to hold his breath.
Viola Mercy’s bosom was exposed, her hips arched, providing a tantalizing hint of that taboo passage that led to the secret place within her heart. The gambler still had on his once dapper but now worn britches, and his bull’s blood Spanish leather boots. The sleeve of his frilled shirt drooped down from a chair. His silver hand, however, was hard at work. The dagger that had been projected from the index finger had been replaced by a device of equal length, significantly greater girth, and arguably far more ingenious utility, which St. Ives referred to as the tickler.
The “tickling” went on for a long time, with Miss Viola’s rough whisper rising into what sounded like an asthmatic crisis. The boy had heard a similar sound coming from his mother from time to time, but nothing as both feral and restrained as this. Another scent filled the room, distinct but confused—like wild onions and fish eggs. Then there was a shudder that shook the bed, and Lloyd was sure that he was going to be found out. Instead, St. Ives rolled off and began dismantling his mechanical finger piece.
“Don’t you fret, honey,” Miss Viola said. “Most men can’t do as well.”
The gambler started to say something but choked on his words and reached for his clothes after draining his glass. Not long after he’d left the room, Miss Viola rose, poured water from a jug into a bowl, and bathed, humming to herself. Powder and perfume were added, and then came the slow, measured ritual of dressing. It was a delicious agony for Lloyd, who could more hear and smell than see her, and he was forced to wait, with his heart pounding, until she was at last prepared for another performance. The door clicked behind her when she departed, and still he waited until he was sure she was not about to return to make his escape.
That night, when Lloyd closed his eyes and tried to imagine his dead sister, all he could see was Miss Viola.
The next day he sneaked into the entertainer’s cabin again. He couldn’t help himself. This time he chose as his vantage place her steamer trunk, a great battered box that reminded him of a coffin but had the consolation of facing directly toward the bed and of being filled with costumes and underthings, all permeated by her woman scent. There, snuggled tight, he waited and watched through a tiny crack that he made by balancing the lid on his head, counting the terrible wonderful minutes. Finally, she returned—without the gambler. Slowly—oh, so slowly—she disrobed, poured herself a drink from a flask, then water for bathing from the jug. It was excruciating. Then she reclined on the bed—without a stitch on. She began to sing to herself, stroking her breasts and thighs with her right hand. And that was when it happened. He let the lid slip with a thump! Everything went so silent he could hear the piston rods driving in the distant engine room. He waited, then cracked the lid.
“Don’t you know not to come into a lady’s room without an invitation,” Miss Viola scolded, and then let out a trill of confusing laughter.
“I—I’m s-sorry …” Lloyd stuttered.
“No, you’re not,” the dark lady replied. “Come. Here.”
He rose from the trunk as if from the dead, stiff, and yet intensely alert.
“Take off your clothes,” she commanded, and with fumbling sweaty fingers he obeyed.
Perhaps the chanteuse first intended merely to teach him a lesson about spying. But as soon as she saw the boy, naked and aroused beside her bed, something happened in a secret place inside her, and she knew that for herself as much for him this was an opportunity that would never come again.
“You must never speak a word of this to anyone,” she said. “Anyone.”
Lloyd was not sure if he would ever be able to speak again at all.