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By Root 947 0

for the second time that day. The boy stopped by the well and washed his face, but his father could tell that something was up by the way he flustered the Indian Runner they called Cotton Mather (because the duck would often alight on the roof of the forge and “preach”). The bottle-shaped drake squawked with indignation and wobbled off to what green ooze was left of the pond. The boy marched on toward the house without pause. Such behavior worried Hephaestus more than the fits and the invisible friends. There was a scary side to the child. Normally, Lloyd was kind to all creatures, a lover of animals—but things could change, as Hephaestus had discovered to his disgust and anguish one afternoon when he interrupted the young student in the midst of a vivisection of his once favorite Flemish giant rabbit, Phineas. The sounds the creature made, its long soft ears drooping—it was something he would never forget. The boy’s punishment had been to dig a regal tomb for the creature and to tend the grave every day. But Hephaestus could never get the pitiful rabbit’s eyes out of his mind.

That evening they ate a pale celery soup served cool and a spatterdock-and-spikenard salad tossed with crushed coriander. Not much was said. Then, just as they were washing up and Hephaestus was thinking about getting out of working in the garden and enjoying some parsnip wine, Lionel Smeg, Grady’s ham-fisted father, rattled into their yard in his logging cart, old Tip crooning balefully.

“Sitturd! Yoo get that boy-a-yoors out here!” Lionel commanded.

The elder Smeg had been top bulldog in the local sport of brawling until his love of the “Democratic comforter” had made him too stout for such exertions, so he had taken to imbibing vinegar to reduce his flesh, and this was now ruining his stomach.

Lloyd was already out in the settling dust, patting Tip and staring defiantly at the blood pressure—red visitor, whose cheek bulged with chewing tobacco.

“Somep’n’s heppend to ma boy!” the man blubbered. “This one done somep’n to ’im!”

“What?” asked Hephaestus, limping out of the house. “Lloyd? He’s only a runt compared to Grady. What do you mean?

Lionel’s face blotched even redder at this reminder of the physical inequity of the boys, but he stammered on, lolling the tobacco wad around in his mouth like a second tongue.

“Thair ’as some shenanigans. Lloyd heer done somep’n dirty to Grady. Now we kaint fine ’im.”

“What’s this about, Lloyd?” Hephaestus asked.

The boy looked back with his green eyes and said, without blinking, “Grady plays with some rough boys and in some rough places. Remember when Corky Niles almost drowned in that sinkhole? I’d be talking to them if I were you, Mr. Smeg.”

“Oh, yoo wudd, wudd yoo? Yoo little freak! Let me tell yoo what they said—them that weernt too humped up to talk.”

“That’ll be enough, Smeg,” snapped Hephaestus. “You don’t come to my house to insult my family. You can do your own foaling and blacksmithing—your business isn’t wanted anymore.”

“Zat so?” the big red-faced man snarled. “Well, wee’ll see about that. Be a shame if that furnace-a-yoors was to set yoor barn on fire. Happens in summer, yoo know.”

“You threaten me and my family and you’ll be the one who’s sorry, Smeg. I’ll get my wife to put a spell on your pecker and it’ll never rise again!”

Hephaestus gave a snort of laughter at the expression on Smeg’s face, for he knew that Rapture’s hoodoo reputation held sway over many people in town. As hard as Smeg talked, he would be worried now. You could see it in his eyes.

Lloyd’s eyes, meanwhile, shone back in the deepening sunset like lightning bugs.

“All right, Sitturd. But yoo’re bad business and the word’s out. I reckon yoo’ll lose all that high an’ mighty come winter. Yoo kaint git by on what that witch cooks up firever.”

“Good evening, Smeg. And don’t drive those nags too hard—I can see you’re about to bust an axle.”

“Pshaw!” Smeg exclaimed, and spat out a stream of stringy black juice that landed on his boot before hauling himself onto the wagon and whipping the two rib-stickers out of the yard.