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.