spirit-perhaps even, one day, call her forth to join him.
You could not have stood amid the Lilliputian wind machines and not be moved by both the ingenuity of their design and the air of devotion that drove them. This was what the boy had meant in speaking to his father about the need to vibrate at a harmonic angle to Time. Here, among the crude graves and ever-moving vanes that defined and responded to even the stillest air, Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd felt the kind of peace that deep motion can bring.
But so deep was the meditative state he fell into that afternoon, he did not hear the figures creeping toward him until they were upon him. Jeering and stamping, and smashing his beautiful wind ghosts and carnival-colored prayer wheels! It was Grady Smeg and the Marietta Street Boys, a snotnosed gang with a fondness for decapitating geese and pelting the wood alcohol-imbibing town drunk with rotten pears. The moment they realized they had happened upon Lloyd, who was maybe half the size of any one of them, the brats knew what they were going to do-and when they were close enough to strike they charged him with a whoop of derision. Their fear and hatred of the boy was well known throughout the town and shared by more than a few adults. Not even a Jew should be able to do long division in his head, they thought. And the gift he gave to Mrs. Czeski-a butternut squash with the likeness of her own face-was unnatural. The boy was bright, people agreed, but maybe it was the light of the Devil.
Such sentiments did not fuss Lloyd much (although his parents, who were already sensitive about their mixed blood, were plenty troubled). He had never known otherwise, and most of it was just talk. Still, he was not so foolish now not to run-or, at least, to appear to run-and he led the Marietta Street tribe through a stand of poplars into an area that Hephaestus had used as a scrap yard until he found a black cat dead of snakebite. Lloyd had since turned the wasteland into a maze of chicanes and surprises.
Booth Tanner and Buddy Pitch took the first hits, tripping a crawdad wire that hurled a corn-popping basket full of fishing shot at them. A smaller but more tightly wound hairspring catapult almost plinked out Mason Griddle’s left eye, while Andy Cudrup took a palm-size flywheel straight to the forehead. Then Willie Best and Oscar Trogdon stepped on partially buried potato rakes and knocked themselves silly, while Ezra Fudge planted both feet in a concealed wagon wheel and just about broke off at the ankles. The gang halted or retreated in disarray at this point-all except the hellion general, Grady Smeg, who lumbered after Lloyd with the sticking plaster from his father’s strappings hanging off him.
Even with his comrades downed or deserted, Grady could not grasp that he had been led into a trap. Lloyd had covered the hole with a big swath of burlap floured with dirt and sneezeweed. Grady never suspected a thing until he landed with a thud. Everything hurt, and blood filled his mouth with a taste of iron and chagrin.
As predicted, Lloyd came home as the lengthening shadows of dusk were spreading out over the goat pen, where Hephaestus was milking the two long-eared Anglo-Nubians 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.
After Grady’s father was gone, Lloyd said, “Farruh, do you think he’ll try to burn down our barn?”
“Naw,” Hephaestus mused. “But I reckon we should keep an eye open for trouble. He’s right when he says there’s folks in town who are mad with me about money.”
“Because of the Ark?” Lloyd asked.
“Yep,” his father said, sighing. “And the self-pulling planter… and the milking glove… and the air wheel. You don’t know anything about what Smeg was saying, do you? I get the impression that you did have a run-in with them Marietta whelps.”
“They chased me. I got away.”
“Did they?”
“What do you mean?” asked the boy, his eyes flaring.
“I mean did you lead them into some snare of yours? That deer noose ’bout broke my good leg.”
“They tripped a catapult,” Lloyd answered.
Hephaestus wanted to believe that that was all there was to the story. It was enough to accept that his son even knew what a catapult was, let alone how to build and wire one.
“All right. You go lock up the hens and tend to Phineas’s grave. I’m going to help your mother bring in some beans.”
Hephaestus did not see that the boy headed back to the well and then off toward the no-man’s-land where he had led the stooges to ambush. And he did not know how many other secrets Lloyd had on hand, from wild-turkey snares he had modified in size to deadfall netting and fermentation jars full of nasty things ready to fly up off a
