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.
She had saved him. The slightest scent of her skin or breath of her voice would set off a tremor inside him, but a tremor that seemed to make him stronger. Back with his parents, chattering about the road ahead to Texas or lying on his slender dog shuck on the floor of their cabin, the memory of something she had said, or the whiff of her body that still clung to him, could make him dizzy. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw her scars burning in his mind, a diabolical language of pain, but a beautiful secret language, too, of survival—the kind of deeper language he felt underlay the world, which he one day hoped to read as easily as algebraic equations or sheet music.
He understood in some storm-lit, intuitive way that she represented a kind of psychic union of the females whose lives or spirits had touched his most profoundly: Lodema, his mother, and Viola Mercy. But the girl was too much her own person, too much her own parents, guardian, and deliverer to be compared with anyone else. Sometimes he thought of her as the gift from his phantom sister, charmed out of his mixed-blood refugee life to give him gumption—more precious than anything Mother Tongue or Schelling had promised. No dusty scientific secret or antique treasure but a contraband friend and soul mate.
Lloyd spent every possible moment he could with the runaway girl. When he was not with her, he was thinking about her. Fixated on her. Hattie was a gift. A sacred, unexpected gift. A mercy. The miseries and sins of St. Louis were all washed away in her presence. She took his mind off the suffering of the past and the uncertainties of the future. He wanted the time with her to extend—for the boat never to reach its destination, but for them to be stealthy, secret, and together always. In all ways.
For her part, she waited with pining impatience for his arrival (although she would never have admitted this and tried hard to suppress any perceptible exuberance at all when he appeared in the dark or in the lull of the afternoon, when the other passengers were fat and sweaty with drowse. It was getting cooler now, though, and oftentimes when they got naked together they needed to hold each other all the tighter so as not to ripple with gooseflesh.
Then they got teeth-chattering cold, when Lloyd let Hattie talk him into something that would have seemed insane to anyone who had not gone sailing three hundred feet into the air, in what amounted to a membrane of handmade spiderweb above a teeming city. She coaxed him into joining her in dangling from one of the towropes down into the river. They did it fully clothed; Hattie referred to it as “doin’ laundry,” and made it sound practical, but Lloyd suspected it was pure adventure that thrilled her, and that it was a kind of challenge to him. He smuggled along another set of his ragged clothes, in case by some wild chance they managed to survive.
They did it at night, when the boat was barely moving. Still, the risks were great. It was a long way even from the service deck down to the water, and of course it seemed infinitely farther coming back up the rope, especially shivering with wet, slippery hands.
“You think you strong enough to make it?” she asked.
“You bet I am!” he snapped back. Good Lord, he thought. She is more boy than I am, and more woman than girl. He could not let himself be shown up by her, even if she was older. But there was something about her that inspired confidence, and made this daredevil rite seem not just possible but casual. Fun. And perhaps something more serious, too. Strengthening. Lloyd had never known such a quality of leadership in a female before. “She would make a good soldier,” he told himself. “A captain of midnight raids. Or … a spy.”
But all the confidence she projected did not take away from the threat of falling off the rope into the current, which was too swift to swim against. It did not keep the floating logs away, or make it any easier to be quiet so as not to alert the crew. Hattie was, after all, a stowaway and a fugitive slave. She had, as she said, “folks affer her for sure.” The river was colder than he had ever known the water to be back in Ohio. It seemed to move with a 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, not to see one swimming, when you are in the water, too, can be fatal.)
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 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.
How often we forget, or are forced to overlook because of lack, that the true fire of connection between hearts and souls is fundamental. Are you seen by the adored as less than you are at your best, or as all that you could be? That is the one sure measure of the health of any adoration. Both of them grasped in the other what was unique, what shone, what was to be prized, and that is rare at any age.
So it became graceful and relaxed to share other secrets, and commonplaces as well. Hattie told Lloyd more about the persecutions she had endured, the horrors she had felt, along with just the day-to-day fowl-plucking, slop-bucket, and weed-pulling life of the Corners. She painted a bright, detailed picture of working, loving, hating, surviving life on a major plantation, and filled in many gaps in his understanding.
She explained that because there was always some movement or migration of slaves due to sales or exchanges between owners, news and gossip about other plantations spread. They were each run in their own ways, yet most of the same larger principles applied. There were pecking orders, an assignment of tasks and a deployment of resources that remained relatively constant. Conditions and treatment might be very different, but there were protocols and codes of action that never varied.
As she spoke, Lloyd realized that what she was providing in her descriptions was both an internal and an exploded view of a very intricate machine. An organic machine, yes, but to him the concept of a machine was organic. Without knowing, she brought forth into illumination the idea of the self-assembling, self-consuming, self-sustaining complex system in his mind.
It suddenly struck him, for instance, that the definition of a complex machine was one that was five-dimensional—time defining the fourth, psychology the fifth. Mind transcended time, the same way that language tried to, and could indeed transcend space.
He thought back to Mother Tongue’s remarks about Spiro of Lemnos, the Enigmatist who had glimpsed more deeply than all others into the mesh of things—all that was hidden in plain sight.
It also came to him for the first time that if the complicated workings of something like a plantation—a machine both built by humans and including them as critical components—could be understood as a machine, working within a network of other similar machines to form a bigger, still more complicated machine, then there were two contrary but very pregnant implications.
First, the notion of mechanism, as in the mechanistic philosophy he had become acquainted with in Schelling’s bookshop—as in a reductionist strategy—was categorically deficient, if not totally wrong. Second, the far more interesting idea that such a thing even as multifaceted as a plantation could be rendered diagrammatically, as could any machine. It was just a question of what the hierogram looked like. Then he said to himself, “I meant diagram.”
Even as she spoke, his mind raced. The problem with the traditional mechanists, he grasped, was that they merely broke processes and subassemblies down. There was no integration. Therefore no creation. Everything their method touched died in their hands. Their wholes were always less than the sum of their parts. That had been his problem with the parafoil system in St. Louis. It was not a lack of time and quality materials. It was not just hubris and pilot error. He had not had the model clear enough in his mind, because it was the wrong model. It was only a model.
Without realizing, Hattie taught him—or helped him teach himself—more than all that he had learned up to that moment. She was like the frizzen that fires a flintlock, for a consideration began to take form in his mind: when you really understand something—even a very complex process or system (and what is not complex, if you give it deep enough attention?)—then you can picture it whole. And the picture somehow is the whole.
The hierograms of the Martian Ambassadors streamed through his mind, and it occurred to him to ask, What if their inscrutable emblems were not symbols representing sounds, ideas, and things as other languages do but, rather, intense distillations of relationships between concepts, so that figuratively speaking, if you could step to the other side of them in your mind they would be prismatic ways of seeing certain kinds of complexity whole and clear?
He was wise enough to leave off this spiral train of thought for the moment, but it released him to tell Hattie about the mutant brothers and the ravaging remorse at what he had done.
At first she was very skeptical about his claims of flying, but he spoke so matter-of-factly of how he had gone about it that her doubt wavered. There was no gainsaying his guilt over the deformed twins—and, like her descriptions of plantation life, she heard in his words the unmistakable accuracy of the authentic.
She chided him about what he had done, and yet when he made mention of them having apparently, at least, fallen out of a tornado, she posed another surprising question. “How you know they wasn’t taken back?”
“How do you mean?” Lloyd asked, eager, of course, to find any mitigating circumstance.
“Mebbe, you didn’t do ever-thing. You was just the way it happened. The way you talk about ’em, they wasn’t from here.”
“No,” Lloyd agreed. “They were from Indiana.”
“I doan mean that, fool! I mean from somewheres else.”
“Like Mars? I don’t think so.”
“Mebbe, more places to be from than you think.”
Lloyd heard the wisdom in that.
“Some kines of knowin’ just doan answer ever question. My Papa, he had a sayin’:
I seen what the sun, the moon
And the lightning do
But no one sees the thunder
Till they learn how to
Indeed, thought Lloyd.
Learning to see the thunder is what he should have told Schelling when asked his greatest aspiration.