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By Root 906 0

to forget where he was lying. His restlessness set him floating back down a dark river of memories … to the trunk in Miss Viola’s cabin … to the trapdoor graveyard that Schelling had led him to the night that he met Mother Tongue … to the box of the Martian Ambassadors … and the secret hold where he had hidden in Hattie’s arms, making the love a child his age should not have understood. Then there were thoughts of the man who had brought the music boxes—his embalmed child—and the box with the Vardogers’ symbol, which seemed to contain an unnaturally suggestive music embedded in the workings of the miniature metal orchestra. It was a lot for him to think about. Just missing Hattie was enough.

Rapture had similar problems getting adjusted, but after a couple of dozy nightmares that startled her sheer exhaustion took hold and she collapsed into a deep slumber, grateful not to have been seized by stomach cramps. Hephaestus, who in his time on the bottle had grown accustomed to blacking out and waking up in unusual places, gave himself over to sleep with the peace of a baby after the satisfaction of the nipple—every so often releasing a pop of flatulence.

Lloyd listened for a while to his father’s regular snoring and fluffing, his mother’s shallower but soothing respiration, and he began to be aware of faint strains of music. The sadness he felt at losing Hattie—the need to know where she was and if she was all right—would not let him alone. And then, the very moment he experienced any reprieve from his pain, some wriggling other anxiety sneaked in—like music he did not want to hear.

At first he had a bizarre fear that the music boxes in the next room had opened of their own accord, but then he realized that the melody he was hearing came from outside, somewhere down the mud-and-plank streets, and was familiar to him. He picked out a banjo, a fiddle … and a squeezebox … folks singing. He recognized the song “The Pesky Sarpent” and then “Rosin, the Beau.” He crept out of the coffin and tiptoed to the window to listen.

A tall hatted figure passed outside, then a thin white cat. In the starlit space between two buildings across the street, he glimpsed the reflected shadows made by a small fire. He was seized with curiosity to explore the night town—as much to escape the stultifying atmosphere of the coffin room and the lingering smell of supper as anything—but he had trepidations about the safety of venturing out alone in the dark without a lantern or any definite idea of who might be abroad. He would have resigned himself back to a stiff attempt at sleep in the wooden box, when he heard a song that made his hair needle up on his neck.

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.

It was a female voice coming in on a cooling night breeze, which even through the plate glass carried with it the odors of charred wood and burned beans—but it was not, his keen ears told him, the voice of Viola Mercy. The poignancy of the melody made his head swim, though, wondering where the chanteuse might be. Louisville? Memphis? New Orleans? And what of St. Ives, his first business partner? Or the professor, the partner he had lied to and cheated? Or proud, scarred Hattie, his partner in a deeper way. His mind and soul reached out to them all, and through them to the phantom at the far edge of his field of inner vision: His sister, Lodema. Stillborn in Ohio and still being born inside himself.

No, it was not the steamboat entertainer he heard singing in the storm-rinsed, clearing Missouri night. Still, it seemed an omen that he could not ignore, and so he unlatched and unbolted the shop front door, unsure why anyone would break into an undertaker and coffinmaker’s place of business, anyway (unless, of course, it had something to do with the music boxes). He stepped lightly out into the gloom, leaving his parents breathing in their open coffins.

He glanced up and down the hog trough of the dark street.