Kindred

by Butler, Octavia

  Rufus did not move from blocking our path. He looked at me. “Good-bye, Rufe,” I said quietly.

  And without warning, with no perceptible change in mood, Rufus turned slightly and trained his rifle on us. I knew a little about firearms now. It wasn’t wise for any but the most trusted slaves to show an inter- est in them, but then I had been trusted before I ran away. Rufus’s gun was a flintlock, a long slender Kentucky rifle. He had even let me fire it a couple of times … before. And I had looked down the barrel of one like it for his sake. This one, however, was aimed more at Kevin. I stared at it, then at the young man holding it. I kept thinking I knew him, and he kept proving to me that I didn’t.

  “Rufe, what are you doing!” I demanded.

  “Inviting Kevin to dinner,” he said. And to Kevin, “Get down. I think

  Daddy might want to talk to you.”

  People kept warning me about him, dropping hints that he was meaner than he seemed to be. Sarah had warned me and most of the time, she loved him like one of the sons she had lost. And I had seen the marks he occasionally left on Alice. But he had never been that way with me—not even when he was angry enough to be. I had never feared him as I’d feared his father. Even now, I wasn’t as frightened as I probably should have been. I wasn’t frightened for myself. That was why I challenged him.

  “Rufe, if you shoot anybody, it better be me.” “Dana, shut up!” said Kevin.

  “You think I won’t?” said Rufus.

  “I think if you don’t, I’ll kill you.”

  Kevin got down quickly and hauled me down. He didn’t understand the kind of relationship Rufus and I had—how dependent we were on each other. Rufus understood though.

  “No need for any talk of killing,” he said gently—as though he was quieting an angry child. And then to Kevin in a more normal tone, “I just think Daddy might have something to say to you.”

  THE FIGHT 187

  “About what?” Kevin asked. “Well … about her keep, maybe.”

  “My keep!” I exploded, pulling away from Kevin. “My keep! I’ve worked, worked hard every day I’ve been here until your father beat me so badly I couldn’t work! You people owe me! And you, Goddamnit, owe me more than you could ever pay!”

  He swung the rifle to where I wanted it. Straight at me. Now I would either goad him into shooting me or shame him into letting us go— or possibly, I would go home. I might go home wounded, or even dead, but one way or another, I would be away from this time, this place. And if I went home, Kevin would go with me. I caught his hand and held it.

  “What are you going to do, Rufe? Keep us here at gun point so you can rob Kevin?”

  “Get back to the house,” he said. His voice had gone hard. Kevin and I looked at each other, and I spoke softly.

  “I already know all I ever want to find out about being a slave,” I told him. “I’d rather be shot than go back in there.”

  “I won’t let them keep you,” Kevin promised. “Come on.”

  “No!” I glared at him. “You stay or go as you please. I’m not going back in that house!”

  Rufus cursed in disgust. “Kevin, put her over your shoulder and bring her in.”

  Kevin didn’t move. I would have been amazed if he had.

  “Still trying to get other people to do your dirty work for you, aren’t you, Rufe?” I said bitterly. “First your father, now Kevin. To think I wasted my time saving your worthless life!” I stepped toward the mare and caught her reins as though to remount. At that moment, Rufus’s com- posure broke.

  “You’re not leaving!” he shouted. He sort of crouched around the gun, clearly on the verge of firing. “Damn you, you’re not leaving me!”

  He was going to shoot. I had pushed him too far. I was Alice all over again, rejecting him. Terrified in spite of myself, I dove past the mare’s head, not caring how I fell as long as I put something between myself and the rifle.

  I hit the ground—not too hard—tried to scramble up, and found that I

  couldn’t. My balance was gone. I heard shouting—Kevin’s voice,

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  Rufus’s voice … Suddenly, I saw the gun, blurred, but seemingly only inches from my head. I hit at it and missed. It wasn’t quite where it appeared to be. Everything was distorted, blurred.

  “Kevin!” I screamed. I couldn’t leave him behind again—not even if my scream made Rufus fire.

  Something landed heavily on my back and I screamed again, this time in pain. Everything went dark.

  The Storm

  1

  Home.

  I couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a minute. I came to on the living room floor to find Kevin bending over me. There was no one for me to mistake him for this time. It was him, and he was home. We were home. My back felt as though I’d taken another beating, but it didn’t matter. I’d gotten us home without either of us being shot.

  “I’m sorry,” said Kevin.

  I focused on him clearly. “Sorry about what?” “Doesn’t your back hurt?”

  I lowered my head, rested it on my hand. “It hurts.”

  “I fell on you. Between Rufus and the horse and you screaming, I

  don’t know how it happened, but …”

  “Thank God it did happen. Don’t be sorry, Kevin, you’re here. You’d be stranded again if you hadn’t fallen on me.”

  He sighed, nodded. “Can you get up? I think I’d hurt you more by lift- ing you than you’d hurt yourself by walking.”

  I got up slowly, cautiously, found that it didn’t hurt any more to stand than it did to lie down. My head was clear now, and I could walk with- out trouble.

  “Go to bed,” said Kevin. “Get some rest.” “Come with me.”

  Something of the expression he’d had when we met in the laundry

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  yard came back to him and he took my hands. “Come with me,” I repeated softly.

  “Dana, you’re hurt. Your back …” “Hey.”

  He stopped, pulled me closer. “Five years?” I whispered. “That long. Yes.”

  “They hurt you.” I fingered the scar on his forehead. “That’s nothing. It healed years ago. But you …” “Please come with me.”

  He did. He was so careful, so fearful of hurting me. He did hurt me, of course. I had known he would, but it didn’t matter. We were safe. He was home. I’d brought him back. That was enough.

  Eventually, we slept.

  He wasn’t in the room when I awoke. I lay still listening until I heard him opening and closing doors in the kitchen. And I heard him cursing. He had a slight accent, I realized. Nothing really noticeable, but he did sound a little like Rufus and Tom Weylin. Just a little.

  I shook my head and tried to put the comparison out of my mind. He sounded as though he were looking for something, and after five years didn’t know where to find it. I got up and went to help.

  I found him fiddling with the stove, turning the burners on, staring into the blue flame, turning them off, opening the oven, peering in. He had his back to me and didn’t see or hear me. Before I could say anything, he slammed the oven door and stalked away shaking his head. “Christ,” he muttered. “If I’m not home yet, maybe I don’t have a home.”

  He went into the dining room without noticing me. I stayed where I

  was, thinking, remembering.

  I could recall walking along the narrow dirt road that ran past the Weylin house and seeing the house, shadowy in twilight, boxy and famil- iar, yellow light showing from some of the windows—Weylin was sur- prisingly extravagant with his candles and oil. I had heard that other peo- ple were not. I could recall feeling relief at seeing the house, feeling that I had come home. And having to stop and correct myself, remind myself that I was in an alien, dangerous place. I could recall being surprised that I would come to think of such a place as home.

  That was more than two months ago when I went to get help for Rufus. I had been home t
o 1976, to this house, and it hadn’t felt that homelike.

  THE ST ORM 191

  It didn’t now. For one thing, Kevin and I had lived here together for only two days. The fact that I’d had eight extra days here alone didn’t really help. The time, the year, was right, but the house just wasn’t familiar enough. I felt as though I were losing my place here in my own time. Rufus’s time was a sharper, stronger reality. The work was harder, the smells and tastes were stronger, the danger was greater, the pain was worse … Rufus’s time demanded things of me that had never been demanded before, and it could easily kill me if I did not meet its demands. That was a stark, powerful reality that the gentle conveniences and luxuries of this house, of now, could not touch.

  And if I felt that way after spending only short periods in the past, what must Kevin be feeling after five years. His white skin had saved him from much of the trouble I had faced, but still, he couldn’t have had an easy time.

  I found him in the living room trying knobs on the television set. It was new to us, that television, like the house. The on/off switch was under the screen out of sight, and Kevin clearly didn’t remember.

  I went to it, reached under, and switched the set on. There was a pub- lic service announcement on advising women to see their doctors and take care of themselves while they were pregnant.

  “Turn it off,” said Kevin. I obeyed.

  “I saw a woman die in childbirth once,” he said.

  I nodded. “I never saw it, but I kept hearing about it happening. It was pretty common back then, I guess. Poor medical care or none at all.”

  “No, medical care had nothing to do with the case I saw. This woman’s master strung her up by her wrists and beat her until the baby came out of her—dropped onto the ground.”

  I swallowed, looked away, rubbing my wrists. “I see.” Would Weylin have done such a thing to one of his pregnant slave women, I wondered. Probably not. He had more business sense than that. Dead mother, dead baby—dead loss. I’d heard stories, though, about other slaveholders who didn’t care what they did. There was a woman on Weylin’s plantation whose former master had cut three fingers from her right hand when he caught her writing. She had a baby nearly every year, that woman. Nine so far, seven surviving. Weylin called her a good breeder, and he never whipped her. He was selling off her children, though, one by one.

  Kevin stared at the blank TV screen, then turned away with a bitter

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  laugh. “I feel like this is just another stopover,” he said. “A little less real than the others, maybe.”

  “Stopover?”

  “Like Philadelphia. Like New York and Boston. Like that farm in

  Maine …”

  “You did get to Maine, then?”

  “Yes. Almost bought a farm there. Would have been a stupid mistake. Then a friend in Boston forwarded me Weylin’s letter. Home at last, I thought, and you …” He looked at me. “Well. I got half of what I wanted. You’re still you.”

  I went to him with relief that surprised me. I hadn’t realized how much I’d worried, even now, that I might not be “still me” as far as he was concerned.

  “Everything is so soft here,” he said, “so easy …” “I know.”

  “It’s good. Hell, I wouldn’t go back to some of the pestholes I’ve lived in for pay. But still …”

  We were walking through the dining room, through the hall. We stopped at my office and he went in to look at the map of the United States that I had on the wall. “I kept going farther and farther up the east coast,” he said. “I guess I would have wound up in Canada next. But in all my traveling, do you know the only time I ever felt relieved and eager to be going to a place?”

  “I think so,” I said quietly.

  “It was when …” He stopped, realizing what I had said, and frowned at me.

  “It was when you went back to Maryland,” I said. “When you visited the Weylins to see whether I was there.”

  He looked surprised, but strangely pleased. “How could you know that?”

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” “It’s true.”

  “I felt it the last time Rufus called me. I’ve got no love at all for that place, but so help me, when I saw it again, it was so much like coming home that it scared me.”

  Kevin stroked his beard. “I grew this to come back.” “Why?”

  “To disguise myself. You ever hear of a man named Denmark Vesey?”

  THE ST ORM 193

  “The freedman who plotted rebellion down in South Carolina.”

  “Yes. Well, Vesey never got beyond the planning stage, but he scared the hell out of a lot of white people. And a lot of black people suffered for it. Around that time, I was accused of helping slaves to escape. I barely got out ahead of the mob.”

  “Were you at the Weylins’ then?”

  “No, I had a job teaching school.” He rubbed the scar on his forehead. “I’ll tell you all about it, Dana, but some other time. Now, somehow, I’ve got to fit myself back into nineteen seventy-six. If I can.”

  “You can.” He shrugged.

  “One more thing. Just one.”

  He looked at me questioningly.

  “Were you helping slaves to escape?”

  “Of course I was! I fed them, hid them during the day, and when night came, I pointed them toward a free black family who would feed and hide them the next day.”

  I smiled and said nothing. He sounded angry, almost defensive about what he had done.

  “I guess I’m not used to saying things like that to people who under- stand them,” he said.

  “I know. It’s enough that you did what you did.”

  He rubbed his head again. “Five years is longer than it sounds. So much longer.”

  We went on to his office. Both our offices were ex-bedrooms in the solidly built old frame house we had bought. They were big comfortable rooms that reminded me a little of the rooms in the Weylin house.

  No. I shook my head, denying the impression. This house was nothing like the Weylin house. I watched Kevin look around his office. He circled the room, stopping at his desk, at the file cabinets, at the book cases. He stood for a moment looking at the shelf filled with copies of The Water of Meribah, his most successful novel—the novel that had bought us this house. He touched a copy as though to take it down, then left it and drifted back to his typewriter. He fumbled with that for a moment, remembered how to turn it on, then looked at the stack of blank paper beside it and turned it off again. Abruptly, he brought his fist down hard on it.

  I jumped at the sudden sound. “You’ll break it, Kevin.”

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  “What difference would that make?”

  I winced, remembered my own attempts to write when I’d been home last. I had tried and tried and only managed to fill my wastebasket.

  “What am I going to do?” said Kevin, turning his back on the type- writer. “Christ, if I can’t feel anything even in here …”

  “You will. Give yourself time.”

  He picked up his electric pencil sharpener, examined it as though he did not know what it was, then seemed to remember. He put it down, took a pencil from a china cup on the desk, and put it in the sharpener. The little machine obligingly ground the pencil to a fine point. Kevin stared at the point for a moment, then at the sharpener.

  “A toy,” he said. “Nothing but a damned toy.”

  “That’s what I said when you bought it,” I told him. I tried to smile and make it a joke, but there was something in his voice that scared me.

  With a sudden slash of his hand, he knocked both the sharpener and the cup of pencils from his desk. The pencils scattered and the cup broke. The sharpener bounced hard on the bare floor, just missing the rug. I unplugged it quickly.

  “Kevin …” He stalked out of the room before I could finish. I ran after him, caught his arm. “Kevin!”

  He stopped, glared at me as though I was some str
anger who had dared to lay hands on him.

  “Kevin, you can’t come back all at once any more than you can leave all at once. It takes time. After a while, though, things will fall into place.”

  His expression did not change.

  I took his face between my hands and looked into his eyes, now truly cold. “I don’t know what it was like for you,” I said, “being gone so long, having so little control over whether you’d ever get back. I can’t really know, I guess. But I do know … that I almost didn’t want to be alive when I thought I’d left you behind for good. But now that you’re back …”