After the second successful performance, Lloyd invited his parents along to watch him work. He was proud of himself. Meanwhile, Rapture had humbled herself and found employment as a scrubwoman for a fetid old wharf doctor who sold laudanum and performed abortions on the sly. She was upset to learn of Lloyd’s exploits, but grateful that her son had risen to the occasion.

However, the boy’s new career did not sit at all well with Hephaestus. Lloyd’s dressing down of him had yanked him out of his blither for a day or so, but without any inventions to occupy his mind, with Micah and Texas now seemingly out of reach, and with a growing sense of impotence as the head of the household, and no house to hold, the former blacksmith soon began to wallow in drink, exaggerating his limp for the purposes of begging, so that he could afford a cheap charcoal-flavored mash that a freedman named Little Jack Redhorse made.

When not moping and sulking in the loft of the stable, where they were forced to remain, he took to panhandling near the main market-and if fortunate in his takings he went in search of companionship and diversion, which he ended up finding at a place called the Mississippi Rose, an apparent chop shop and taproom that was in fact a seedy house of blue lights (a favorite among the preachers and the civic leaders). In addition to five floury white floozies and a very popular quadroon named Black Cherry, the entertainments ranged from cards and billiards to wagers on rat-catching dogs or bouts of barefisted boxing if two Irishmen could be found.

The proprietor was known as Chicken Germain, a Melungeon woman built like a cart horse with straight black hair and steel-blue eyes. She loved fried food and men, especially well-endowed men-and especially well-endowed men who also had some physical deformity. The first night Hephaestus managed to sneak in the door, Chicken was about to have him evicted when she noticed his limp. An hour later she noticed that he was anything but limp, chicken bones and gaudy silk stockings strewn on the floor beside her carved oak bed upstairs.