His head and heart were inundated-the hosanna-shouting Mule Christian below the courthouse, the chatter of the freakish twins borne away into the sky. Every detail of the infernal incident came rushing back upon him like the rising of the ground. And before he could master himself he burst into tears.
“Boy, stop that!” Hattie demanded. “You gots nuthin’ to cry over. You want me to strike a light and show you what these scars of mine look like?”
Lloyd choked on his words. “I… I was done, too,” he gasped. “In St. Louis… this ugly man… in an alley one night.”
The girl paused at this announcement. This sounded to her like a much more believable claim than the murders the boy had mentioned before. But she wanted to be clear before projecting any sympathy.
“He take down your pants?”
“Ripped them down,” Lloyd sobbed. “Then he slammed my head down into a dung cart… and… and… he did me. Hard as he could.”
Hattie LaCroix remained silent and still, waiting for him to catch his breath. She knew there was more to come.
“He said… he said… I felt just like a little… pig!” Lloyd wailed at last, and even though his voice never broke above a whisper, the admission broke him wide open.
Had that horror and humiliation been what had driven him to take to the sky? He had dreamed up the flight before the rape, but there in the dark intimacy of the hold, with this fellow fugitive, it struck him that maybe there was more to the grand design of his disastrous undertaking-the insistence on fulfilling it-than he had seen before. He knew the man had a harelip, but it was the meat-slab hands he remembered. The terrible, grunting skewering-so different from his afternoon with Miss Viola… so different…
More like some hideous revenge… of… Phineas…
The floodgates were open now, and when she saw that she could not command the boy’s tears away she set aside the unlit lantern and moved, so that her legs were twined around him. His body fell against hers, his wet, sputtering face pressing against her still exposed bosom-half boy’s, half girl’s and raked like a battlefield-hot tears soaking her like an Indian-summer rain across shallow graves. His breathing heaved as she clutched him closer, at first to quiet him and then out of some deeper need of her own.
He smelled like other children she had cradled in dirt-floor cabins and dogwood arbors, like the Persian rugs she had helped Sarah beat with a stick broom out on the fine green, rolling lawn. He smelled like her desperate, chicken-stealing tramp-night stowaway antics. He smelled like life-dreadful, sinful, tragic, precious-and she held him and held him. The baby she would never have, the white child she would never be.
“Shush, boy,” she whispered in his ear, embracing him, though the tears soaked her more than him. And still he cried. She suspected that he was not one to cry much-too proud, just like herself. So he would be full of it, like a tent roof too heavy with rain to tip. He was full of a lot of things, she sensed.
Boy though he was, she felt the manhood bursting out of him. It was surprising in one his age, but she had become accustomed to surprises. She stripped down his britches, as the garments had been rent from her in the past, taking hold of his privacy as if reaching for a chunk of meat. Maybe a different kind of darkness would cure his grief. Boys, like men, were like that.
Yes, he was young. Very young. But what did that matter when there were people hunting her?
She had done it before with a boy named Samuel and another named Tee, with a white man named Johnson and another called Cooley. She had always done what she had had to do. And she had survived what had been done to her. In a corncrib and a canebrake. In a shell-pink high-ceilinged bedroom, razor-stropped to an iron cot with the queer scents of magnolia and quinine oozing in.
Lloyd was too jangled to resist. Even as his precocious lust sprang forth, he gave in-let her lead. Hattie used him like a rag to staunch a hemorrhage. Hers-and his, too. She always imagined blood streaming from between her legs now. She would wake in a cold sweat at the memory of it. Not like the blood of the moon, the blood of the garden. No, like the blood of the living dead. She could take no pleasure and extract no seed that would take fruit-still, she would take something. And maybe in doing so now she would give something back.
They merged into each other’s wounds with an urgency that made them both quake.
CHAPTER 3. No One Sees the Thunder
THE SUDDEN CHANGE IN LLOYD’S DEMEANOR RAPTURE ATTRIBUTED to the return of her husband’s sobriety and health. Even the bung foot seemed to bother Hephaestus less now, and he took to exercising in their tiny cabin and accepted with grace the restrictions on his open appearance throughout the boat in daylight. Lloyd, meanwhile, had lost his sullen casing of detachment and seemed positively cheerful. To Rapture, it was a blessing. Perhaps the past was behind them.
The Defiance plowed on westward, and Lloyd sneaked out of the cabin every single chance he could, which allowed his parents to rebuild their romantic bridges as well as to talk about the next stage in their journey. Of course, Rapture worried about her son when he was out of sight. Not understanding the nature of the crisis that had forced their removal from St. Louis, she retained anxieties both about what the boy would get up to and who might be taking an interest in him. However, the thought that her only child, who was still only a child, was often, at the very same moment that she was in the arms of her recovering husband, languishing and coming to life in the arms of a half-breed girl (much as she had been at the same age) in the world hidden between decks of the riverboat never once crossed her mind.
That he satisfied himself with his hand and took great satisfaction from the practice, she knew well and discreetly ignored. Her own upbringing had been free and earthy in matters of the body, and the enjoyment of sex fit into her view of the world just as a belief in haints or the protective and restorative powers of lynx spice and fennel. But the thought that her son was not a virgin, and was in fact engaged in the most torrid romping that Hattie’s stowaway status would allow, would have come as a shock, and Lloyd was careful to spare her and his fragile father.
Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd, the willful prodigy and fallen angel, had found something he had known only in his imagination while lying among the wind machines of his shrine to his lost sister back in Zanesville. It was an energizing, redemptive peace that seemed to flood his entire being.
There would have been countless other things that might have occupied his mind, such as the performance of the steam engines or the physics of the current. There was plenty of river traffic to note and wildlife to observe along the shore: deer, wolves, bison, elk, and the now extinct Carolina parrots. There was a joint-skinny German on board, whose sagging flesh told a story of hardship and deprivation, who nonetheless would ascend to the hurricane deck at twilight and play a mournful silver cornet-in thanks, he said, for coming to America. And there were always stories to hear among his fellow passengers-tales of taxes and lost farms, of grubbing out trees and burying sick children, whispered fears of Indians and blizzards, and of fortunes to be made in trading whiskey, salt, tobacco, and beeswax.
But Hattie LaCroix, bastard mulatto woman-child, was all he could think of. The smell of her on his hands, the sounds she made, the things she said, the tears that she gave him, were like rain from a higher sky. They watered and nourished him out of his arrogance and guilt, his self-pity and his clumsy bootencased boyness. He always felt naked with her, even when they sneaked out late to smoke her corncob pipe, dressed and wrapped in a stolen horse blanket, beside the distress boats up on deck, where on that first murky night he had contemplated leaping into the river and she had saved him.