parents, would not he be much better off? Would not they all be? Small towns are notorious for their tendency to scythe down the tall blooms—and if the bloom is small and young, how much keener the edge of the blade! The problem was that such a retreat could go on just so long. Zanesville, like many, many towns across America then, was rife with reform-minded women who were intent on “education” and “civilization,” without the slightest clue about what either entailed. The Sitturds knew it was but a matter of time before pressure was brought to bear to drag Lloyd once more back into the glare of the local school, however little good it would do him, and however much frustration it might bring. And they were correct in thinking that they had something to offer him within the border of their own property.
Complementing his father’s anvil-and-plumb-line orientation was his mother’s organic sympathy with nature. A gifted herbalist, healer, and midwife, Rapture Meadhorn was well up on biology, generally—specifically zoology, entomology, botany, and pharmacology. It was said that she knew things the Wyandot Indians had forgotten. And she was inventive in her own way, too. She had pioneered a form of acupuncture and a remedial massage technique that had worked on subjects as different as a Clydesdale mare and a Columbus socialite—not to mention cultivating some esoteric personal abilities, including, possibly, continuous orgasms and short-distance telepathy. (It was also believed that she could talk to ghosts—like Benjamin Dumm’s sister, who had drowned in a tank at the tan yard.)
Rapture was the proud and voluptuous daughter of a Creole cane farmer from the Sea Islands, who had been born into slavery but had proved himself too shrewd for his plantation masters and so was freed. He left the islands and headed west, joining forces with a trapper who traded pelts in Kentucky. The trapper had a daughter who had been raised to be a “granny woman,” a cross between a root doctor and a witch. The girl was as pretty as a wildflower and as randy as a river pirate, and the freedman ended up eloping with her, fleeing north to Ohio to escape the father’s Hawken rifle.
Rapture’s parents had both died in a cabin fire when she was fourteen, but she survived and grew up clever and curved. Although she referred to herself as a “pumpkinskin” around the family, she was in fact blessed with a creamy complexion that had but a hint of nutmeg to suggest her colorful ancestry. Her speech she could pinch into everyday white diction, but with family and friends she would lapse into the rich rhythms and eccentric phrasings of the Gullah language she had picked up from her Cumberland Island father. (If you were to speak to her, she might in private say that you had “cracked e teet.”)
She eventually fell in love with the crippled but competent Hephaestus, not yet knowing about his predilection for inventing. Twins were conceived in a wild lovemaking session in the moonlight down on the Great Serpent Mound to the south, but the girl, Lodema, had died at birth, leaving them with just one child, Lloyd.
While Hephaestus struggled to earn a decent and regular living and to keep pace with his son, Rapture made money for the family with her valerian preparations, royal-jelly pills, and medicinal teas (along with two hardy crops of rich, green marijuana every year). Women from all over the river junction came to her for relief from menstrual discomfort, and more than a few men, once they’d conquered their embarrassment, sneaked out to meet her in the tent she set up down by the riverbank to enhance or resurrect their virility.
From her, young Lloyd learned how to build a cage to protect the gooseberries from the bullfinches, and more desperate arts, too, like that moment after the mallet had slammed the skull, when you had to stick the pig in the throat and catch the blood to make black pudding. He liked catching the blood.
In an era when it was not uncommon for a child to know how to pluck a squab or tap a sugar maple, Lloyd was a bright, burning candle in a class of his own. He reveled in all the intricate detail of life, sketching, with sliced sticks of charcoal made in his father’s furnace, surgically precise drawings and technical determinations of the tensile strength of an orb weaver’s web or some new design for a water turbine.