rolled in a pinched oilskin furnace apron, with separate corn-sack pockets for each item, which he stitched himself with a heavy bagger’s needle that he had kept from St. Louis, while his parents were preparing food. (His experience with the kites had taught him a great deal, and he had the artificial hand of St. Ives in mind.)
The kit included a general lock pick that he had sharpened out of harvested wire, a jimmy made from some window flashing, a miniature hammer he had fabricated from a hickorybarrel hove and one of the large bolts from the boat rigging, a carving knife and whetstone, along with a flint and striker from the cabin crew’s quarters, an adjustable wrench he had nipped from the engine room, some lady’s sewing implements that had been left about, a small hatchet that had dropped below the boilers, a magnifying lens he made from some plucked spectacles, and an assortment of bandages and a bottle of iodine wrapped in cotton wool so that it would not break, which he had nicked from a doctor’s bag.
From this same bag he took a vial of laudanum and added to the kit the one bottle of LUCID! that survived from his medicine-show career, in case she became injured and needed pain relief. What he did not find in the bag was an item that he felt was important, and so he made one himself from one of the extra steam valves in the engineer’s room-a stethoscope.
“What’s this for?” Hattie asked, when he proudly laid out his offerings.
“That’s for listening to sounds,” he said. “To hearts-and to the other side of walls, if you have to. I didn’t have time to make a good one. But you’ll hear better than you would on your own. And this, this is for making sounds- music-if you’re alone and need to make noise, instead of shushing all the time. To cheer yourself up.”
The final inclusion was a crude bunch of short, tensioned metal rods screwed into the base of a burgled clock with a hollowed-out hole for a resonator, which Lloyd, in what remained of his innocence, believed at that point he had invented. It was in fact a very old kind of musical instrument-what today we would call a kalimba, or African thumb piano-like a Jew’s harp but with a much wider range of tones. He had at least adjusted the rods in the precise order to create a true musical scale, and the simple strumming of these vibrating keys produced a quiet yet pleasing sound.
To his surprise and delight, she played a plaintive yet charming melody on it. She had seen and heard many such instruments in the secrecy of plantation cabins, and was herself surprised that Lloyd knew what one was.
As to the whole of the gift-for it was a whole-she did not know what to say. Not since her father had anyone given her anything but a belting or a form of torture, and even her father had not given her things he had made himself. And so many things! Each with a sense and a purpose, but with flexibility-the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. She admired the things stolen as much as the items made, because she intuited that everything would have been made specially if there had been time and materials at hand. The important thing was the totality of the package, and she had the wit to appreciate that.
“Is there anything you can’t make if you set your mind to it?” she asked. “I means-mean-if you had the time?”
“I can’t make more time to be with you,” Lloyd answered. “Not just yet.”
Her kiss then was something that would sustain him through many trials to come, because it was not a lewd or debauched kiss as Miss Viola’s had been. It was as innocent as his desire to help her, to give what he could. But it was filled with the fire of passion-and of something so often missing in all romance, whatever the ages: true partnership.
Therein was the great problem. The Sitturds’ way, once arrived in Independence, lay back south, into unknown territory, but almost certainly greater risk for a runaway slave girl-even one who knew that through any two points in space there is one line, and that it was Wordsworth who had suggested the shooting of the albatross in Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” (That she could also bend the note of a white-bean fart and have at least the semblance of an orgasm through the sensitive indulgence of a tongue kiss were other talents that won Lloyd’s deepest admiration.)
What might have been a joy thus became a torture for the young Ohioan. Once more he felt that the blessing of travel and adventure, discovering intimacies with strangers, was a cruel and unusual punishment.
For Hattie, as hard as her heart had become, she too felt the pang of inevitable separation. Lolling with him in the dark of her smelly hidey-hole-or risking all and venturing out at night into the open air of the top deck to smoke some stray leaf-she knew that her life would never be the same if this boy-man were taken from her. She had never had the luxury of not being cunning-of letting down her guard or saying anything she did not really mean. She had lived her whole life with at least “one eye open,” but with Lloyd she relaxed for the first time, drawing energy for what she knew would be more strenuous times ahead.
“You could… come with us,” Lloyd whispered in the dark of her smuggler’s coffin, which was permeated now by the aroma of the sharp cheddar they had plundered from the boat’s larder.
Hattie gave his scrotum a gentle grope. The pain inside was greater than he had ever known. Even the sins and crimes of St. Louis, when he had sailed above the row houses and cobblestones to fall through his own shadow, seemed to have been rinsed from his conscience.
“Then what will you do?” he asked, when she remained silent. “What will you
“I’ll make my way,” Hattie answered. “Just like I tole you. I’m headed west. Where I can be free. I’m going to California. And I’m going to be rich.”
“You’re thirteen,” Lloyd reminded her. “You’re a runaway slave, and you’ve got-”
“My markings? Boy, it’s these markings of mine that are going to make me rich. You may be smart when it comes to numbers and ideas, but you’ve still got a world to learn about folks. Especially white folks-and especially menfolks. You take a good, Christian white man, never laid a hand on his wife-he get with a colored girl and he’s another creature. The thing I got in my favor is that I
“So you’ll be a whore?” Lloyd groaned.
“I may be a queen!” Hattie snapped. “I’ll do what I need to do. What you have to do to get by isn’t who you are, Lloyd. You remember that-and remember I tole you. You say I act and talk white sometimes. That don’t make me white. I got no intention of lowering myself, believe you me. I’m goin’ to learn French. And I’m goin’ to play the harpsichord, and I’m goin’ to have me some silk dresses, buttercup-yellow and watermelon-pink, and I’m goin’ to make sure other black folks learn how to read-and know the names of the stars and how to measure a circle without thinkin’ they have to walk around it.”
“What about me?” Lloyd asked.
The forlorn, honest tone in the boy’s voice reeled Hattie back from her dream. She felt her vulnerability full force once more, and yet she saw what she had sensed the very first moment she had met Lloyd: that here was someone lonelier than she, lonelier than she would ever be. A creature so different, not by markings or skin color, or anything anyone could definitely see, but by who he was inside. He could not just run away to find a better part of the world to live in; he would have to invent his own world if he was to survive. He might have to invent many worlds-so many that he might end up forgetting which were his creations.
“You’ll be something nobody’s ever thought of, Lloyd,” she answered.
“But I want to be with you!” he wailed, and she had to stifle his plea with her warm hand.
“Shush. Don’t you be ruinin’ things now. You gotta buck up and be strong. That’s what bein’ a man is. I’d want to be with you, too, if life would let me-but it won’t, so there’s no use cryin’.”
As she said this, the Zanesville prodigy saw that the older girl was working very hard to restrain her tears. She has enough to cry about, he thought to himself. No need for me to make her sadder still.
It was the first time in his life that Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd had ever had such a sentiment about another person, and the novelty of it took him by surprise. He reached out and embraced her, with a firmness and a tenderness that made even the resourceful runaway tremble inside.
“One day I’ll come find you,” Lloyd said, and to Hattie these words hung in the tight, cramped air like a melody on the thumb piano. There was nothing more to be said on the subject of the future and their different destinies, for those words, uttered with complete calm and conviction, had done what every inspired melody does: condense a welter of emotions into an unconflicted clarity that one can instantly recall and call upon. Like a hierogram.
Those words gave Hattie the courage to seek a deeper hiding place when the
