serpentine force, and there was always the chance that there still were some snakes in it-and to see a snake swimming, as he often had from the decks on their travels, is a disturbing thing. (Of course,
The clasping, gasping, reddened hand-over-hand, leg-and-foot-shimmying drag back up the heavy hemp braid- freezing with even just a light breeze on soaked clothes and skin-was the hardest thing Lloyd remembered ever doing.
It was made no easier when one of the crew appeared in silhouette above them, smoking a cheroot, which forced them to pause in their ascent, just about the time Lloyd felt that his arms would explode or drop off. The pain and strain were excruciating, but there was cloud cover above and a fine mist rising off the water, as if the river really were a kind of monstrous snake and the vapor was the skin it was shedding.
As exhausting as it was, it somehow filled him with an electric zest, because he was not clutching onto the rope in the dark alone. Hattie was just below him, and he knew that she was exerting extra effort to help keep him braced. He knew that she would not have hesitated a second to leap into the current if he had slipped. He was not sure what he would have done if she had fallen, as deep as his feelings ran. She had more than courage. She had a mastery of herself that made her a captain of split-second decisions.
At last the infernal idler finished his smoke and abandoned the deck to them, where they scrambled up and over, dripping, shaking with the wet, the cold, the struggle-and the grand achievement of clandestine triumph. Then they crept back as quietly as they could, given the drenched garments, to Hattie’s hideaway, where with almost ritual devotion they undressed each other by stubbed candlelight.
It was then, with the bracing sensation of ducking down into the fast black water still fresh and vivid in his very bones, that Lloyd realized that Hattie had “bactize” him, as his mother would have said.
What was more, she had enacted with him-virtually holding his hand, certainly holding his heart-a ceremonial variation of the blind, desperate act he had been contemplating the night she had intervened. She had made the darkness visible and livable. He was cured of that attraction forever.
He held her and held her and held her. They melded together for warmth, and the heat of their longing softened their chafed palms. Mother Tongue had teased him with the promise of learning the art of love. But, in all the world, Lloyd doubted if he could have found a better teacher-one more generous or less ashamed.
Sexually maimed though she was, Hattie had not lost her young, powerful libido. It had diffused across her whole body. The blossom may have been cut, but her deeper bloom had not perished. Her skin had a hunger to be touched, and her scars an incandescent need for acceptance and blessing. She found in Lloyd the eye and tender hand witness she had hoped for, without even knowing it.
She was both rough and gentle with him-giving and greedy. She let herself open her broken wings to his mingling, teaching him how to use his penis; it was in the end a tool, just as it is often called. She understood the driving male pleasure, and shared an injured version of the penetrative desire herself. There was the two- becoming-one delight that no mutilation could revoke. But she showed him there was more. Oh, so much more.
There was tongue and breath, kneading and brushing. There were eyelashes and whispers, and the simple ecstasy of mutual grooming. Instead of rutting, panting, and spurting hot wet seed, Lloyd learned some of the secrets of temptation-of fondling, kissing, the exquisite anticipation of a feather down a belly. And he learned the profound wholeness of a shared silence.
It was like being back in the womb again, in a way, he thought. But a new kind of guiltless womb made by consensual, collusive imaginations-two people giving birth to themselves through the vulnerability, faith, and vigor of true nakedness. For all the talk of conspiracies back in St. Louis, this was the one conspiracy he was certain that he wanted to join.
That night, after they had returned from out of the river-after they had mated and consecrated each other with hushed entwinement-Hattie said to him softly, “Roll over.”
Lloyd winced at this, bristling with fear and embarrassment. Some intuition born of their intimacy warned him of what she was thinking. Yet he could not resist her direction, although he asked in a quavering voice, “What are you going to do?” Knowing already.
She moved the candle closer and produced from behind a crate a tin stew pan full of soapsuds, water, and a flannel rag. “You seen how I was hurt,” she said. “That all’s had time to heal. I want to see if you all right. You likely didn’t say nuthin’.”
To his amazement, he found himself turning over onto his stomach, as she brought the candle closer still. He flashed back to Mother Tongue’s story about the Vardogers, the Order of the Claws & Candle. That was the thing about candles-about all sources of light, heat, and hope, he realized. Some have caring fingers… some have seeking claws. The desire to help and heal… the call to crush or to possess. The two sides of the coin of bewonderment: inspiration or terror.
Hattie’s hands were both firm and respectful. She washed him there, the part of our bodies we are all most sensitive about. She dried him, and then brought the candle in close enough for him to feel the urgent caress of the flame. In truth, he had often bled when relieving himself since the incident in the alley, and the feedbag-and-gut- clog diet had not helped. But the pain had eased. He felt very exposed for her to have bathed him that way, though-to examine him. But who better to do it?
“You all right,” she pronounced at last. Then she said, “You gwain be all right, too. Lotta boys had that done to ’em, they’d neva be good inside again. You got nuthin’ to be ’shamed of-hear? You let the pain go, all right? You keep yo’ anger. But you let the pain go.”
“How… how do I do that?” Lloyd asked, his voice muffled, as he lay facedown on the strewn hole floor.
Hattie said, “Reach behine you and pull your cheeks apart.”
He did. To his intense bewonderment, she kissed him there-with the fullness of her soft mouth.
“You be all right,” she said, blowing on his lower back, so that he squirmed. “And doan ever let that hurt you inside anymore. No shame.”
For the second time that night, she had worked a kind of magic-the type you can feel and smell. Lloyd trembled beneath her body, as she enveloped him, the heat of her scars and her tenacity melting into him, just as the wax dripped from the shaft of the candle into its cup-lipped dish.
But despite this depth of animal affection, physical intimacy was not all they shared-by a great measure. They were, after all, still very young-even Hattie. They both savored pickles and would pilfer them from the oily jars in the storeroom, feeding them to each other. They stole squab nuts and beef jerky, a sumptuous wheel of fragrant cheese-and a smoked chicken, too. Then they would dine down in the murk of Hattie’s cubbyhole, pretending they were a lordly couple in some fancy stateroom or a luxurious private railway carriage, rattling through the snowcapped mountains of Europe.
Both of them had at least glimpsed books with brilliant illustrations of the Alps and the lakes of Italy and Switzerland, Paris, Rome, the temples of Greece. Those visions seemed so remote from their circumstances, to openly conjure them would have seemed plain cruel with anyone else. But they had each other, and they somehow gave each other permission to dream aloud-perhaps the greatest intimacy of all.
“I think I should like to be… the first lady prime minister of England,” Hattie announced at one point, with her mouth full of plundered pork crisp and what passed for quince paste (and later passed as gas, which set them both snorting). She had put on her best, crispest “elegant” white accent for this confession, and it set Lloyd chortling, trying to stifle his hilarity-with his own mouth full of what he hoped was smoked side ham. For someone whose thoughts had stretched into abstruse realms far beyond his years, he had done precious little laughing. It was like balm for his inner being. But it did not stop him from ribbing her.
“I don’t… think… that they’ll let you be… prime minister,” he asserted at last, almost hiccupping.
“ ’Cause I’s a girl?” Hattie retorted, chucking his cheek.
“Because… because… you’re not English!” Lloyd replied, which made them both collapse into the delicious foolishness of shared hysterics.
They both seemed to want dogs-several of them-so the hounds could keep one another company. They wanted dogs, books, art. Hattie stressed the importance of music, Lloyd the essentiality of science.
Hattie wanted horses, too-she had never been allowed to ride. Lloyd insisted that new forms of transportation were already taking shape (and he recalled the bizarre locomotive, seemingly made of glass, that Schelling had shown him).
She named him Li’l Skunk. It was not easy for her to express affection, in spite of her passionate nature, so the
