Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [12]
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.
So all 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