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 nickname conveyed more than it appeared. She had first thought of Li’l Pig, to help Lloyd own the evil that had preyed on him and to turn it around-to transform shame into a badge of honor, which was how she felt about her scars and welts. But she knew instinctively that those words rubbed too close to the wound. He would have to make his treaty with them himself now. She had shown him the way.
She chose Li’l Skunk instead, because he was both black and white, because a skunk protects itself through ingenuity rather than physical strength and aggression, and because it gave concise expression to her joshing about his body odor. She meant, in part, that he already had a man smell about him, even though he was still so young.
Rather than taking offense, Lloyd found any comment about his scent amusing, because he was pretty certain that if either of them was more odiferous it was she. Both in a womanly way and because he had the refuge of an official cabin with a washtub, while she was stranded down in her hiding place.
He dubbed her the Brown Recluse, a moniker that at first puzzled and almost pipped her temper. “Why you call me that? A spider? And a dangerous spider, too.”
“There’s something of the spider in all females,” he replied. “And a spider is the first thing I remember, other than my dead sister. It used to come down to visit me on an invisible thread in the kindling scuttle I slept in as a baby. She taught me about time and light, and how to make something out of thin air. But brown recluses don’t spin webs-they hunt on their own, just like you. And in case you didn’t know, you are dangerous,” he told her. “You are very dangerous. You aren’t afraid of things you should fear and that others would. You’re clever and brave, and you have the control to strike when you have the advantage but the sense to conceal yourself, as a rule. You would go about your business without disrupting anyone, yet you have poison enough if the need arises.”
Hattie had to smile at this. Presented thus, the title seemed more a badge of honor than she could have imagined. It was like a promotion in life rank-a reflection from out of the depths of a very subtle mirror of all that she valued and hoped to be seen as-to be.