Kindred

by Octavia E. Butler

  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, 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 lifting 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 without 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 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 familiar, yellow light showing from some of the windows—Weylin was surprisingly extravagant with his candles and oil. I had heard that other people 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 to 1976, to this house, and it hadn’t felt that homelike. 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 public 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 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, realizi
ng 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 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 understand 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.”

  “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 typewriter. “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 stranger 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 …”

  He pulled away from me and walked out of the room. The expression on his face was like something I’d seen, something I was used to seeing on Tom Weylin. Something closed and ugly.

  I didn’t go after him when I left his office. I didn’t know what to do to help him, and I didn’t want to look at him and see things that reminded me of Weylin. But because I went to the bedroom, I found him.

  He was standing beside the dresser looking at a picture of himself—himself as he had been. He had always hated having his picture taken, but I had talked him into this one, a close-up of the young face under a cap of thick gray hair, dark brows, pale eyes …

  I was afraid he would throw the picture down, smash it as he had tried to smash the pencil sharpener. I took it from his hand. He let it go easily and turned to look at himself in the dresser mirror. He ran a hand through his hair, still thick and gray. He would probably never be bald. But he looked old now; the young face had changed more than could be accounted for by the new lines in his face or the beard.

  “Kevin?”

  He closed his eyes. “Leave me alone for a while, Dana,” he said softly. “I just need to be by myself and get used to … to things again.”

  There was suddenly a loud, house-shaking sonic boom and Kevin jumped back against the dresser looking around wildly.

  “Just a jet passing overhead,” I told him.

  He gave me what almost seemed to be a look of hatred, then brushed past me, went to his office and shut the door.

  I left him alone. I didn’t know what else to do—or even whether there was anything I could do. Maybe this was something he had to work out for himself. Maybe it was something that only time could help. Maybe anything. But I felt so damned helpless as I looked down the hall at his closed door. Finally, I went to bathe, and that hurt enough to hold my attention for a while. Then I checked my denim bag, put in a bottle of antiseptic, Kevin’s large bottle of Excedrin, and an old pocket knife to replace the switchblade. The knife was large and easily as deadly as the switchblade I had lost, but I wouldn’t be able to use it as quickly, and I would have a harder time surprising an opponent with it. I considered taking a kitchen knife of some kind instead, but I thought one big enough to be effective would be too hard to hide. Not that any kind of knife had been very effective for me so far. Having one just made me feel safer.

  I dropped the knife into the bag and replaced soap, tooth paste, some clothing, a few other things. My thoughts went back to Kevin. Did he blame me for the five years he had lost, I wondered. Or if he didn’t now, would he when he tried to write again? He would try. Writing was his profession. I wondered whether he had been able to write during the five years, or rather, whether he had been able to publish. I was sure he had been writing. I couldn’t imagine either of us going for five years without writing. Maybe he’d kept a journal or something. He had changed — in five years he couldn’t help changing. But the markets he wrote for hadn’t changed. He might have a frustrating time for a while. And he might blame me.

  It had been so good seeing him again, loving him, knowing his exile was ended. I had thought everything would be all right. Now I wondered if anything would be all right.

  I put on a loose dress and went to the kitchen to see what we could make
a meal of—if I could get Kevin to eat. The chops I had put out to defrost over two months ago were still icy. How long had we been away, then? What day was it? Somehow, neither of us had bothered to find out.

  I turned on the radio and found a news station—tuned in right in the middle of a story about the war in Lebanon. The war there was worse. The President was ordering an evacuation of nonofficial Americans. That sounded like what he had been ordering on the day Rufus called me. A moment later, the announcer mentioned the day, confirming what I had thought. I had been away for only a few hours. Kevin had been away for eight days. Nineteen seventy-six had not gone on without us.

  The news switched to a story about South Africa—blacks rioting there and dying wholesale in battles with police over the policies of the white supremacist government.

  I turned off the radio and tried to cook the meal in peace. South African whites had always struck me as people who would have been happier living in the nineteenth century, or the eighteenth. In fact, they were living in the past as far as their race relations went. They lived in ease and comfort supported by huge numbers of blacks whom they kept in poverty and held in contempt. Tom Weylin would have felt right at home.

  After a while, the smell of food brought Kevin out of his office, but he ate in silence.

  “Can’t I help?” I asked finally.

  “Help with what?”

  There was an edge to his voice that made me wary. I didn’t answer.

  “I’m all right,” he said grudgingly.

  “No you’re not.”

  He put his fork down. “How long were you away this time?”

  “A few hours. Or just over two months. Take your pick.”

  “There was a newspaper in my office. I was reading it. I don’t know how old it is, but …”

  “It’s today’s paper. It came the morning Rufus called me last. That’s this morning if you want to believe the calendar. June eighteenth.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I wasted my time reading that paper. I didn’t know what the hell it was talking about most of the time.”