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By Root 855 0

outposts of western Missouri. A fresh autumn breeze strengthened as the blood sun sank. A lone chicken hawk circled beneath high smoke-signal clouds, and the artery of muddy green river lapped up to the ravaged base of rampart sand cliffs that flowed and smeared out like time itself into the starved suggestion of lonely prairie beauty that lay beyond the shoreline chains of surging settlement. Voices echoed in the speaking tube, but the family from Zanesville was listening farther away. Rapture was trying to hear the spirits of her lost parents, the ghost music of places she knew that she would never see again. Hephaestus was trying not to hear the demons of backsliding degradation and oblivion, and to catch some whisper on the wind of his brother and the promise of what awaited them in Texas. Young Lloyd, who no longer looked young—at least not the way a child should look—was listening for pursuit, still reeling from his attempt to mate with the sky: the terrible inviting softness of death, the fatalities he had caused. Somewhere, out there in the distance, or perhaps as close as on board the same boat, were forces that he barely understood, if at all. But the piles of cloud above the river gave no sign of collusion with anything other than the setting sun and the strident smashing of the wooden wheel in the current.

It was this pervasive sense of doubt that had kept the boy sharp enough to stay free of the clutches of a deep depression from which he might not have recovered—a survival instinct channeled through the fine filaments of his heightened intellect, which kept him linked to the world despite an anguish and a regret that made his father’s look paltry. The voices of the past—Zanesville bullies tormenting him, St. Ives and Miss Viola, the professor, Schelling, Mother Tongue, Brookmire, the black man beneath the courthouse crying out to heaven, and the insane chatter of the doomed Martian Ambassadors—they were all stilled in the splash of the steam-driven wheel and the new look of longing in his father’s eyes.

Lloyd reasoned that he must maintain not just his mother’s pretense about what had caused them to leave St. Louis but the much larger and more complex fantasy of a world without the Spirosians and the Vardogers. “I cannot tell them about what I do not understand myself,” he admonished himself. “They have lost innocence enough, better to keep these other, longer shadows to myself.” And so he did.

Both adults experienced a wave of reassurance in the few remarks their son offered before they all slipped back down to their cabin for refreshment and rest. They chose to forgo the dining saloon (as much to avoid what passed for the “boiled meat” as to avoid questions). There was still a span of river to survive, not to mention the so-called Indian Frontier, which at that moment in history extended from the Lake of the Woods in the north to Galveston Bay in the south (and, of course, was being pushed inexorably west).

All the known routes to the Pacific were alive with white settlers. The great thrust of migration along the Oregon Trail had commenced in earnest, making mad boomtowns of places like Council Bluffs and Omaha. The Potato Famine in Ireland and the war with Mexico were about to send more shock waves rippling out through the long grass. Then the insanity of the gold rush. Once peaceful relationships with tribes of Indians across the continent had already strained to the point of bloodshed and were building in intensity, just as the tensions over slavery and the great ideological and cultural differences between the North and the South were mounting to what would end up being a sprawling red mountain of corpses in the years to come.

Farmers, freed slaves, miners, Mormons, and families like theirs came spilling domesticated animals and heirlooms in the hope of finding some semblance of home, disrupting cycles of wild game and dispossessing native tribes on a scale and at a speed unseen on the planet before. The newspaper editor John O’ Sullivan was about to coin the phrase “manifest destiny.” It insinuated