his little hands touched, not long after his second birthday it had become necessary to remove him from the house and install him in his own dedicated section of the family barn, where Hephaestus kept his tools and maintained his blacksmith’s forge.
Here the father had designed a kind of labyrinth to keep the boy’s insatiable sense of experimentation occupied (and also to keep him somewhat protected from the prying eyes of visiting neighbors, whose dry, thick Zanesville tongues took to wagging whenever anything, let alone anyone, out of the ordinary crossed their paths). This combination of protective and distractive measures proved to have remarkable consequences.
What to other parents might have seemed a rather dangerous obstacle course of materials of various kinds (the debris of Hephaestus’s own inventions, miscellaneous bits of scrap metal and lumber, spare tools, and the like) provided yet more spark to the boy’s intellect and hunger for creation. To the blacksmith’s astonishment, the miniature minotaur embraced the labyrinth and began turning it into a working machine of its own unique kind, so that he was soon in no sense constrained by it but using it in the prosecution of new discovery and manufacture.
“If I didn’t know better,” Hephaestus said to himself, “I’d say that he had somehow a very good idea of what a first-rate metal shop, carpenter’s barn, and apothecary’s formulary looked like.”
It was not long before the supposed labyrinth become laboratory and workshop began to produce its own strange offspring—articulated puppets, for instance, brutish in appearance, perhaps, but subtle in their capabilities.
By the time Lloyd was four, he had produced a functioning aeolipile, a steam-driven monorail that ran from their house to the barn, a crude family telephone exchange, and an accurate clock that needed no winding. A rocking horse had turned into a simple bicycle, and a giant slingshot had propelled a meat safe over the river. The boy had even experimented with the use of primitive anesthetics while performing surgery on various farm animals. No wonder Hephaestus felt threatened—and the need to keep his son’s innovations under wraps wherever possible. Zanesville was like that.
Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd had hair the color of rye grass, skin the color of river sand, and green animal irises that gave the impression that they saw more than ordinary human eyes saw. There was nothing childlike about him other than his size. His vocabulary was already immense, and his mathematical ability was that of a savant. (When Judith Temby, the wife of the dry-goods-store owner once remarked, “The tree is best measured when it’s down,” the boy replied bluntly, “You don’t know much about trigonometry, do you?”)
After spending a single Saturday with Mr. Fleischer, the knife sharpener, he could speak passable German. The same was true for Norwegian and Spanish—and, even more remarkably, Chinese, as Hephaestus discovered following the boy’s visit to the laundry shack down by the carriage bridge. From Hayden Zogbaum, the prodigy absorbed four full years of Latin and Greek in just four afternoons, in return for supplying the former parson with a serving of pork cheese (an Ohio delicacy made from the head, tongue, and jowls of a young pig, boiled with marjoram and caraway, poured into pudding molds, and eaten cold).
The boy’s most profound aptitude lay in the area of mechanics—an innate understanding/curiosity regarding how things worked: windmills, water wheels, animals, insects, flowers. He was forever noticing and diagramming, taking things apart and putting new things together.
Though his father’s inventions failed to blossom, they ensured that Lloyd was provided with tools, problems to solve, and, above all else, a pathologically optimistic climate of possibility, which was a good thing because the little schoolhouse in town had very little to offer even an intelligent child, let alone this one.
The first exposure to the sod kickers’ children of Zanesville had brought instant ridicule upon him—and an undisguisable degree of contempt in his heart for their bacon-brained doltishness. Every time he got a question right, his fellow schoolchildren (some of whom were five years older) despised him more. Every time he encouraged the teacher to contemplate more interesting questions, a look of horror and fear passed over her face. It was not long before whispers and rumors about the “legend boy” began to spread throughout the town and the surrounding hamlets—and the parents became committed to their earlier wisdom of keeping the boy as sheltered from the community as possible. After all, with such a pronounced capacity for self-education, not to mention the special knowledge of his