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By Root 912 0

recognized that the issues involved in powered flight could not be solved in his present circumstances. The development of an internal-combustion engine both effective and light enough to drive an aerocraft would require tools, time, access to a machine shop, money, and fuel that he did not have. His idea was not to try to invent something new from scratch but to perfect what he already knew about. For background and inspiration, he had taken from Schelling’s shop The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, with his drawings of the famous ornithopter, The History of Ballooning, and the book of Chinese kites (a slender seventeenth-century Dutch text on using kites to lift fireworks that he had referred to before), George Pocock’s sketches of his carriage-pulling kite system, a book on bird anatomy, the best physics manual he could find—and the published works to date of Sir George Cayley, the English aeronautical pioneer who had identified the separate properties of lift, thrust, and drag.

From initial experiments with kites, Lloyd read that Cayley had moved on to gliders (a progression that would lead to the first recorded manned flight from the top of a dale in Brompton, England, with his terrified and soon-to-resign coachman as the pilot guinea pig). Eight years before the English baronet, the so-called father of aviation, would achieve this first fragile success, young Lloyd Sitturd, on the outskirts of slave-era St. Louis, was on the verge of another order of breakthrough all his own.

He began by building models, trying to understand and outline the precise sequence of events involved and therefore the technical problems he would need to overcome, in the exact order that he would confront them—collecting the materials he needed for assembly from his different roundabout journey each day to what he called the Field of Endeavor. The summer heat rose like his hopes, and Hephaestus still did not return to the mission house.

One night he found his mother talking to herself via a string sack of onions that she often consulted with in the cool room. He knew that she despised the “sweetmout” rot doctor she worked for, and that coming back to the gristly “bittle” of the long-plank church dinners was too close a reminder of things she had witnessed during the day. She had to “tie up me mout,” as she put it, around the other women, and the “she-she talk affer praisemeetin’ ” always left her silent in a grim, hurricane a-comin’ Gullah way. The onion sack at least provided some consolation.

“Dey, dey,” she mumbled. “He naw be attackid. Naw capse. Jes gone ’way.”

Lloyd could see that she was “bex vexed,” and he did his best to console her. To help her “ ’traight’n.” The last thing he needed just then was for her to slip her chain, too.

Where had that image come from? St. Louis was getting to them. More of the ominous words of Mother Tongue came back to him. He tried to hold Rapture’s hand, something he rarely did and had not done for quite some time.

“Saw a blackbu’d attuh brekwus widda bruk-up wing,” she said with a sigh.

“That’s just superstition,” he said.

“Eb’nso. Fell down a chimbly. Buckruh seen it, too.”

“But that doesn’t mean anything. Birds sometimes fall out of the sky. It wouldn’t be anything to fly if it was easy,” he said, trying to soothe her. “Even for birds.”

“Seen a plateye affer!” she hissed, by which she meant an apparition.

“Murruh, you can’t go around thinking you see ghosts all the time,” he told her, but he thought that his voice seemed to lack conviction. The ghost of his lost sister, Lodema, had been very real to him back in Zanesville. And now he was coming to think of ghosts in a new way yet again, as that familiar ghost slipped further into the past. The trouble was, it was in a ghostly way—not fully formed, just out of clear sight. Yet present somehow. Active. Intent.

“He be haa’dhead. A hebby cumplain. Bit Ah’s sponsubble.”

“No more than I am,” Lloyd replied solemnly. He knew that his father resented his talents, even as he so very much appreciated them. The old man was like a crib-sucking mule