Hephaestus could do when the boy passed judgment on the progress of the Time Ark was the hardest thing of all:consider, once again, that he might very well be right. He shifted on his clubfoot and stepped between the hourglasses. This time he heard his wife instruct him to water down the burlap walls of the earthworm farm. “C’mon,” he called to Lloyd.
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