Kindred

by Butler, Octavia

“About what? That you should have been an accountant?”

  I surprised myself again by laughing aloud. The food was reviving me. “They didn’t think of accounting,” I said. “But they would have approved of it. It’s what they would call sensible. They wanted me to be a nurse, a secretary, or a teacher like my mother. At the very best, a teacher.”

  “Yes.” He sighed. “I was supposed to be an engineer, myself.” “That’s better, at least.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Well anyway, now you have proof that you were right.”

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  He shrugged and didn’t tell me what he would later—that his parents,

  like mine, were dead. They had died years before in an auto accident still hoping that he might come to his senses and become an engineer.

  “My aunt and uncle said I could write in my spare time if I wanted to,” I told him. “Meanwhile, for the real future, I was to take something sen- sible in school if I expected them to support me. I went from the nursing program into a secretarial major, and from there to elementary education. All in two years. It was pretty bad. So was I.”

  “What did you do?” he asked. “Flunk out?”

  I choked on a piece of pie crust. “Of course not! I always got good grades. They just didn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t manufacture enough interest in the subjects to keep me going. Finally, I got a job, moved away from home, and quit school. I still take extension classes at UCLA, though, when I can afford them. Writing classes.”

  “Is this the job you got?”

  “No, I worked for a while at an aerospace company. I was just a clerk- typist, but I talked my way into their publicity office. I was doing articles for their company newspaper and press releases to send out. They were glad to have me do it once I showed them I could. They had a writer for the price of a clerk-typist.”

  “Sounds like something you could have stayed with and moved up.” “I meant to. Ordinary clerical work, I couldn’t stand, but that was

  good. Then about a year ago, they laid off the whole department.” He laughed, but it sounded like sympathetic laughter.

  Buz, coming back from the coffee machine, muttered, “Chocolate and vanilla porn!”

  I closed my eyes in exasperation. He always did that. Started a “joke” that wasn’t funny to begin with, then beat it to death. “God, I wish he’d get drunk and shut up!”

  “Does getting drunk shut him up?” asked Kevin. I nodded. “Nothing else will do it.”

  “No matter. I heard what he said this time.”

  The bell rang ending the lunch half-hour, and he grinned. He had a grin that completely destroyed the effect of his eyes. Then he got up and left.

  But he came back. He came back all week at breaks, at lunch. My daily draw back at the agency gave me money enough to buy my own lunches—and pay my landlady a few dollars—but I still looked forward

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  to seeing him, talking to him. He had written and published three nov- els, he told me, and outside members of his family, he’d never met anyone who’d read one of them. They’d brought so little money that he’d gone on taking mindless jobs like this one at the warehouse, and he’d gone on writing—unreasonably, against the advice of saner people. He was like me—a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on try- ing. And now, finally …

  “I’m even crazier than you,” he said. “After all I’m older than you. Old enough to recognize failure and stop dreaming, so I’m told.”

  He was a prematurely gray thirty-four. He had been surprised to learn that I was only twenty-two.

  “You look older,” he said tactlessly. “So do you,” I muttered.

  He laughed. “I’m sorry. But at least it looks good on you.”

  I wasn’t sure what “it” was that looked good on me, but I was glad he liked it. His likes and dislikes were becoming important to me. One of the women from the agency told me with typical slave-market candor that he and I were “the weirdest-looking couple” she had ever seen.

  I told her, not too gently, that she hadn’t seen much, and that it was none of her business anyway. But from then on, I thought of Kevin and I as a couple. It was pleasant thinking.

  My time at the warehouse and his job there ended on the same day. Buz’s matchmaking had given us a week together.

  “Listen,” said Kevin on the last day, “you like plays?”

  “Plays? Sure. I wrote a couple while I was in high school. One-acters. Pretty bad.”

  “I did something like that myself.” He took something from his pocket and held it out to me. Tickets. Two tickets to a hit play that had just come to Los Angeles. I think my eyes glittered.

  “I don’t want you to get away from me just because we won’t be co- workers any more,” he said. “Tomorrow evening?”

  “Tomorrow evening,” I agreed.

  It was a good evening. I brought him home with me when it was over, and the night was even better. Sometime during the early hours of the next morning when we lay together, tired and content in my bed, I real- ized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought—and much less than I would know when he went away.

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  2

  I decided not to go to the library with Kevin to look for forgeable free papers. I was worried about what might happen if Rufus called me from the car while it was moving. Would I arrive in his time still moving, but without the car to protect me? Or would I arrive safe and still, but have trouble when I returned home—because this time the home I returned to might be the middle of a busy street?

  I didn’t want to find out. So while Kevin got ready to go to the library, I sat on the bed, fully dressed, stuffing a comb, a brush, and a bar of soap into my canvas bag. I was afraid I might be trapped in Rufus’s time for a longer period if I went again. My first trip had lasted only a few min- utes, my second a few hours. What was next? Days?

  Kevin came in to tell me he was going. I didn’t want him to leave me alone, but I thought I had done enough whining for one morning. I kept my fear to myself—or I thought I did.

  “You feel all right?” he asked me. “You don’t look so good.”

  I had just had my first look in the mirror since the beating, and I didn’t think I looked so good either. I opened my mouth to reassure him, but before I could get the words out, I realized that something really was wrong. The room was beginning to darken and spin.

  “Oh no,” I moaned. I closed my eyes against the sickening dizziness. Then I sat hugging the canvas bag and waiting.

  Suddenly, Kevin was beside me holding me. I tried to push him away. I was afraid for him without knowing why. I shouted for him to let me go.

  Then the walls around me and the bed beneath me vanished. I lay sprawled on the ground under a tree. Kevin lay beside me still holding me. Between us was the canvas bag.

  “Oh God!” I muttered, sitting up. Kevin sat up too and looked around wildly. We were in the woods again, and it was day this time. The coun- try was much like what I remembered from my first trip, though there was no river in sight this time.

  “It happened,” said Kevin. “It’s real!”

  I took his hand and held it, glad of its familiarity. And yet I wished he

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  were back at home. In this place, he was probably better protection for me than free papers would have been, but I didn’t want him here. I didn’t want this place to touch him except through me. But it was too late for that.

  I looked around for Rufus, knowing that he must be nearby. He was. And the moment I saw him, I knew I was too late to get him out of trou- ble this time.

  He was lying on the ground, his body curled in a small knot, his hands clutching one leg. Beside him was another boy, black, about twelve years old. All Rufus’s attention seemed to be on his leg, but the other boy had seen us. He might even have seen us appear from nowhere. That might be why he looked so frightened now.

  I stood up and went over to Rufus. He didn’
t see me at first. His face was twisted with pain and streaked with tears and dirt, but he wasn’t cry- ing aloud. Like the black boy, he looked about twelve years old.

  “Rufus.”

  He looked up, startled. “Dana?”

  “Yes.” I was surprised that he recognized me after the years that had passed for him.

  “I saw you again,” he said. “You were on a bed. Just as I started to fall, I saw you.”

  “You did more than just see me,” I said. “I fell. My leg …”

  “Who are you?” demanded the other boy.

  “She’s all right, Nigel,” said Rufus. “She’s the one I told you about. The one who put out the fire that time.”

  Nigel looked at me, then back at Rufus. “Can she fix your leg?” Rufus looked at me questioningly.

  “I doubt it,” I said, “but let me see anyway.” I moved his hands away and as gently as I could, pulled his pants leg up. His leg was discolored and swollen. “Can you move your toes?” I asked.

  He tried, managed to move two toes feebly.

  “It’s broken,” commented Kevin. He had come closer to look. “Yes.” I looked at the other boy, Nigel. “Where’d he fall from?” “There.” The boy pointed upward. There was a tree limb hanging high

  above us. A broken tree limb.

  “You know where he lives?” I asked. “Sure. I live there too.”

  The boy was probably a slave, I realized, the property of Rufus’s

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  family.

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  “You sure do talk funny,” said Nigel.

  “Matter of opinion,” I said. “Look, if you care what happens to Rufus, you’d better go tell his father to send a … a wagon for him. He won’t be walking anywhere.”

  “He could lean on me.”

  “No. The best way for him to go home is flat on his back—the least painful way, anyhow. You go tell Rufus’s father that Rufus broke his leg. Tell him to send for the doctor. We’ll stay with Rufus until you get back with the wagon.”

  “You?” He looked from me to Kevin, making no secret of the fact that he didn’t find us all that trustworthy. “How come you’re dressed like a man?” he asked me.

  “Nigel,” said Kevin quietly, “don’t worry about how she’s dressed. Just go get some help for your friend.”

  Friend?

  Nigel gave Kevin a frightened glance, then looked at Rufus.

  “Go, Nigel,” whispered Rufus. “It hurts something awful. Say I said for you to go.”

  Nigel went, finally. Unhappily.

  “What’s he afraid of ?” I asked Rufus. “Will he get into trouble for leaving you?”

  “Maybe.” Rufus closed his eyes for a moment in pain. “Or for letting me get hurt. I hope not. It depends on whether anybody’s made Daddy mad lately.”

  Well, Daddy hadn’t changed. I wasn’t looking forward to meeting him at all. At least I wouldn’t have to do it alone. I glanced at Kevin. He knelt down beside me to take a closer look at Rufus’s leg.

  “Good thing he was barefoot,” he said. “A shoe would have to be cut off that foot now.”

  “Who’re you?” asked Rufus.

  “My name’s Kevin—Kevin Franklin.” “Does Dana belong to you now?”

  “In a way,” said Kevin. “She’s my wife.” “Wife?” Rufus squealed.

  I sighed. “Kevin, I think we’d better demote me. In this time …” “Niggers can’t marry white people!” said Rufus.

  I laid a hand on Kevin’s arm just in time to stop him from saying what- ever he would have said. The look on his face was enough to tell me he

  should keep quiet.

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  “The boy learned to talk that way from his mother,” I said softly. “And from his father, and probably from the slaves themselves.”

  “Learned to talk what way?” asked Rufus.

  “About niggers,” I said. “I don’t like that word, remember? Try call- ing me black or Negro or even colored.”

  “What’s the use of saying all that? And how can you be married to him?”

  “Rufe, how’d you like people to call you white trash when they talk to you?”

  “What?” He started up angrily, forgetting his leg, then fell back. “I am not trash!” he whispered. “You damn black …”

  “Hush, Rufe.” I put my hand on his shoulder to quiet him. Apparently I’d hit the nerve I’d aimed at. “I didn’t say you were trash. I said how’d you like to be called trash. I see you don’t like it. I don’t like being called nigger either.”

  He lay silent, frowning at me as though I were speaking a foreign lan- guage. Maybe I was.

  “Where we come from,” I said, “it’s vulgar and insulting for whites to call blacks niggers. Also, where we come from, whites and blacks can marry.”

  “But it’s against the law.”

  “It is here. But it isn’t where we come from.” “Where do you come from?”

  I looked at Kevin.

  “You asked for it,” he said. “You want to try telling him?” He shook his head. “No point.”

  “Not for you, maybe. But for me …” I thought for a moment trying to find the right words. “This boy and I are liable to have a long association whether we like it or not. I want him to know.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Where do you come from?” repeated Rufus. “You sure don’t talk like anybody I ever heard.”

  I frowned, thought, and finally shook my head. “Rufe, I want to tell you, but you probably won’t understand. We don’t understand ourselves, really.”

  “I already don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t know how I can see you when you’re not here, or how you get here, or anything. My leg hurts so

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  much I can’t even think about it.”

  “Let’s wait then. When you feel better …”

  “When I feel better, maybe you’ll be gone. Dana, tell me!”

  “All right, I’ll try. Have you ever heard of a place called California?” “Yeah. Mama’s cousin went there on a ship.”

  Luck. “Well, that’s where we’re from. California. But … it’s not the California your cousin went to. We’re from a California that doesn’t exist yet, Rufus. California of nineteen seventy-six.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I mean we come from a different time as well as a different place. I

  told you it was hard to understand.” “But what’s nineteen seventy-six?”

  “That’s the year. That’s what year it is for us when we’re at home.” “But it’s eighteen nineteen. It’s eighteen nineteen everywhere. You’re

  talking crazy.”

  “No doubt. This is a crazy thing that’s happened to us. But I’m telling you the truth. We come from a future time and place. I don’t know how we get here. We don’t want to come. We don’t belong here. But when you’re in trouble, somehow you reach me, call me, and I come— although as you can see now, I can’t always help you.” I could have told him about our blood relationship. Maybe I would if I saw him again when he was older. For now, though, I had confused him enough.

  “This is crazy stuff,” he repeated. He looked at Kevin. “You tell me. Are you from California?”

  Kevin nodded. “Yes.”

  “Then are you Spanish? California is Spanish.”

  “It is now, but it will be part of the United States eventually, just like

  Maryland or Pennsylvania.” “When?”

  “It will become a state in eighteen fifty.”

  “But it’s only eighteen nineteen. How could you know …?” He broke off, looked from Kevin to me in confusion. “This isn’t real,” he said. “You’re making it all up.”

  “It’s real,” said Kevin quietly. “But how could it be?”

  “We don’t know. But it is.”

  He thought for a while looking from one to the other of us. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

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  Kevin
made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I don’t blame you.”

  I shrugged. “All right, Rufe. I wanted you to know the truth, but I can’t blame you for not being able to accept it either.”

  “Nineteen seventy-six,” said the boy slowly. He shook his head and closed his eyes. I wondered why I had bothered to try to convince him. After all, how accepting would I be if I met a man who claimed to be from eighteen nineteen—or two thousand nineteen, for that matter. Time travel was science fiction in nineteen seventy-six. In eighteen nineteen— Rufus was right—it was sheer insanity. No one but a child would even have listened to Kevin and me talk about it.