After seeing to the earthworms, father and son scrubbed up at the pump. They found Rapture hanging curds and whey with rennet in a muslin bag in the cool room. Waiting for them on the kitchen table was a plate of smoked trout with horseradish sauce, asparagus sprinkled with lemon juice, and a small pitcher of beer.
Rapture let the two males take a few bites before opening her mouth in a grin.
“Berry well, den…”
Hephaestus cleared his throat and shuffled in his chair.
“Yass?” she purred.
“All right,” he confessed at last with a shrug. “I heard you. Even inside the Ark.”
“T’engk Gawd, man!” Rapture declared in her spiced Gullah. “So yuh woan be sayn me peepul be fass.”
“I don’t know how you do it. It’s some kind of witched-up ventriloquism.”
“Na treken, man. Tru!”
“Magic,” her husband insisted.
“Kerse tis! Kerse tis!”
“Well, I heard you all right.” Hephaestus shrugged again, thinking to himself that it was sometimes surprising that he could understand his wife’s more conventional style of conversation, let alone her conjure-woman mind talk. As the man of the house, it was difficult for him to accept that his son had developed a speaking form of telegraphy, while his wife, when the “sperit” moved her, could communicate without any apparent means whatsoever. Yet he loved them both dearly. Whenever Rapture grew excited, which was often, her accent and her idiomatic expressions became as thick as Spanish moss, and then he would become enraptured with her all over again. And when he thought of what Lloyd might one day accomplish-if they could survive the Second Coming-he felt profound stirrings of father-bear pride that more than offset his jealousy, most of the time.
Glancing at the boy now, Hephaestus noticed that the child had crumbled some soda bread and rolled it into a human form, but with the antlered head of a stag.
“Where did you get the idea for that?” Hephaestus asked, wiping his chin.
“In a dream,” Lloyd replied, thinking of all the strange dreams that seemed to possess him. In catacombs, creatures beyond description shrieked-living sphinxes with forked tongues and stinging tails… serving maidens with the heads of ibises and dogs… hooded cobra women… things with wings and scales… and a hulking silhouette with the legs of a camel, the barrel-chested torso of a rude galley slave, and the awful engorged head of a baboon.
Monkish shapes in tornado-green tunics shuffled behind frail curtains of snakeskins where embalmed and dismantled bodies sprawled on stone tables. Jackal-faced children could be seen gnawing on carcasses in a cage-and in transparent jars floated lilies that looked as if they had sprouted tentacled nerves… frogs becoming human embryos, or almost human… while in slick, drained pits there lurked soft machine reptiles and enormous tube worms made of meticulous spun metal wrapped in an oozing tissue cultivated in vats.
In the hotter months the boy would flail about in his corn-shuck bed, so that Rapture took to giving him a hypnotic that she made using melatonin. While this remedy often controlled the sleeping problem, it did not alter the periods of black depression the boy could slip into, or the relationship he carried on with his dead twin sister, whom, of course, he had never known except in that blind amphibious time within Rapture’s womb. He often said that his sister was right beside him, and if asked whether he could see her he would answer that he could feel her and that he could smell her. Like licorice and rain wind, he said. Rapture, who had grown up with revenants and hairball oracles, was more accepting of the boy’s beliefs-but Hephaestus argued that imaginary friends were one thing, an imaginary dead sister something else.
On top of his already radically superior intelligence, the boy’s mood swings and bouts of disjointed behavior did not make his socializing with other children in Zanesville any easier. That he would have some kind of seizure or burst into tears without reason, or perform some inexplicably cruel deed, made any hope for his schooling awkward and trips into town tense. Hephaestus even steered clear of other Adventists (although in truth he was worried about them learning about the Ark).
The family was just finishing their repast and Hephaestus was about to inquire further about the boy’s ideas on the Ark (a discussion he hoped would lead to an opportunity to suggest the possibility, at least, of returning to school in autumn and spending more time with children his own age before this became an issue that the reform marms would raise), when their fifteen-year-old redbone, Tip (short for Tippecanoe), woke up under the porch and began howling lugubriously to announce the arrival of Philomela Ogulnick and Edna Vanderkamp, the town’s two most notorious gossips and exactly the kind of women the family most dreaded seeing. Neither parent was surprised to look up and see that the lad had skedaddled.
Hephaestus had an inkling that the women were an advance party sent out by the men of Zanesville he was in debt to, while Rapture was pretty sure they were on a mission regarding Lloyd’s lack of attendance in school (a tedious waste of time for him and all too often a torture of taunts and spitballs to boot). As it turned out, they were both right-and what was more, Philomela’s Joe had eaten some horse chestnuts by accident and had the trots and would Rapture recommend barley water?
Of course, little Lloyd gave all this not a thought, slipping off in his mind the moment he had slipped away from the house. He went, as he always did in such situations, to his secret refuge beyond the veronica that Rapture harvested for her soporifics. The main Zanesville cemetery extended from the old Wheeling Road to Mill Run and was surrounded by chestnut trees, but this was a different, eldritch sort of place. The sprinkling of humble graves dated back only to the days of Ebenezer Zane and John McIntire, who had founded the town, but Lloyd liked to think they were much older. The tombs were marked by unnamed lichen-stricken stones but they filled him with admiration and awe, for he saw them not as stones but as doors to the world where his sister lived and played, whirling about in a singsong game until, dizzy and laughing, she would fall to the ground, looking up at the sky. That was how he pictured her-blowing dandelions to bits and tying satin ribbons between the alders and the buckeyes to give shape to the wind.
Rapture had kept Lodema’s burial plot a secret to herself-an old superstition she inherited from her mother-but Lloyd identified the cove with his lost twin and had taken to grounds-keeping and decorating this secluded burial ground as a monument to her. Over the months he had made pinwheels, windmills, weather vanes, and whirligigs of all descriptions and from all materials (junk wood, scrap metal, animal bones, hunting arrows, and scavenged glass), placing them in precise arrangements, so that each blade fed off the breeze created by the others, however slight or gusty, creating a constant energy exchange that he believed would please and invigorate his sister’s spirit-perhaps even, one day, call her forth to join him.
You could not have stood amid the Lilliputian wind machines and not be moved by both the ingenuity of their design and the air of devotion that drove them. This was what the boy had meant in speaking to his father about the need to vibrate at a harmonic angle to Time. Here, among the crude graves and ever-moving vanes that defined and responded to even the stillest air, Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd felt the kind of peace that deep motion can bring.
But so deep was the meditative state he fell into that afternoon, he did not hear the figures creeping toward him until they were upon him. Jeering and stamping, and smashing his beautiful wind ghosts and carnival-colored prayer wheels! It was Grady Smeg and the Marietta Street Boys, a snotnosed gang with a fondness for decapitating geese and pelting the wood alcohol-imbibing town drunk with rotten pears. The moment they realized they had happened upon Lloyd, who was maybe half the size of any one of them, the brats knew what they were going to do-and when they were close enough to strike they charged him with a whoop of derision. Their fear and hatred of the boy was well known throughout the town and shared by more than a few adults. Not even a Jew should be able to do long division in his head, they thought. And the gift he gave to Mrs. Czeskì-a butternut squash with the likeness of her own face-was unnatural. The boy was bright, people agreed, but maybe it was the light of the Devil.