“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