Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [11]
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 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