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.