Butler, Octavia - Wild Seed

He picked up her basket and drew her to her feet. “Come into the house and talk with me.”

“There is nothing to say.”

“Come in anyway. Humor me.” He put his arm around her and walked her back to the house.

He started to take her into the library, but a group of the younger children were being taught to read there. They sat scattered in a half circle on the rug looking up at one of Anyanwu’s daughters. As Doro guided Anyanwu away from them, he could hear the voice of one of his sons by Susan reading a verse from the Bible: ” `Be of the same mine one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits.’ ”

Doro glanced back. “That sounds as though it would be an unpopular scripture in this part of the country,” he said.

“I see to it that they learn some of the less popular ones,” Anyanwu answered. “There is another: ‘Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee.’ They live in a world that does not want them to hear such things.”

“You’re raising them as Christians, then?”

She shrugged. “Most of their parents are Christian. They want their children to read so they can read the Bible. Besides”—she glanced at him, the corners of her mouth turned down—“besides, this is a Christian country.”

He ignored her sarcasm, took her into the back parlor. “Christians consider it a great sin to take one’s own life,” he said.

“They consider it a sin to take any life, yet they kill and kill.”

“Anyanwu, why have you decided to die?” He would not have thought he could say the words so calmly. What would she think? That he did not care? Could she think that?

“It’s the only way I can leave you,” she said simply.

He digested that for a moment. “I thought staying with you now would help you get used to … to the things I have to do,” he said.

“Do you think I’m not used to them?”

“You haven’t accepted them. Why else should you want to die?”

“Because of what we have already said. Everything is temporary but you and me. You are all I have, perhaps all I would ever have.” She shook her head slowly. “And you are an obscenity.”

He frowned, staring at her. She had not said such things since their night together in the library. She had never said them this way, matter-of-factly, as though she were saying, “You are tall.” He found that he could not even manufacture anger against her.

“Shall I go away?” he asked.

“No. Stay with me. I need you here.”

“Even though I’m an obscenity.”

“Even so.”

She was as she had been after Luisa’s death—uncharacteristically passive, ready to die. Then it was loneliness and grief pressing on her, weighing her down then. Now … what was it now, really?

“Is it Susan?” he asked. “I didn’t think you had gotten that close to her.”

“I hadn’t. But you had. She gave you three children.”

“But …”

“You did not need her life.”

“There was no other way she could be of use to me. She had had enough children, and she could not care for them. What did you expect me to do with her?”

Anyanwu got up and walked out of the room.

Later, he tried to talk to her again. She would not listen. She would not argue with him or curse him. When he offered again to go, she asked him to stay. When he came to her room at night, she was strangely, quietly welcoming. And she was still planning to die. There was an obscenity. An immortal, a woman who could live through the millennia with him, yet she was intent on suicide—and he was not even certain why.

He became more desperate as her pregnancy advanced, because he could not reach her, he could not touched her. She admitted she needed him, said she loved him, but some part of her was closed away from him and nothing he said could reach it.

Finally, he did go away for a few weeks. He did not like what she was doing to him. He could not remember a time when his thoughts had been so confused, when he had wanted so badly, so painfully, something he could not have. He had done what Anyanwu had apparently not done. He had allowed her to touch him as though he were an ordinary man. He had allowed her to awaken feelings in him that had been dormant for several times as long as even she had been alive. He had all but stripped himself before her. It amazed him that he could do such a thing—or that she could see him do it, and not care. She, of all people!

He went down to Baton Rouge to a woman he had once known. She was married now, but, as it happened, her husband was in Boston and she welcomed Doro. He stayed with her for a few days, always on the verge of telling her about Anyanwu, but never quite getting around to it.

He took a new body—that of a free black who owned several slaves and treated them brutally. Afterward, he wondered why he had killed the man. It was no concern of his how a slaveholder treated his chattels.

He shed the slaveholder body and took that of another free black—one who could have been a lighter-skinned brother to the one Anyanwu had liked, compact, handsome, red-brown. Perhaps she would reject it because it was too like the other one without being the other one. Perhaps she would reject it because it was too unlike the other one. Who knew which way her mind would turn. But perhaps she would accept it and talk to him and close the distance between them before she shut herself off like used machinery.

He went home to her.

Her belly got in the way when he hugged her in greeting. On any other occasion, he would have laughed and stroked it, thinking of his child inside. Now, he only looked at it, realized that she could give birth any time. How stupid he had been to go away and leave her, to give up any part of what might be their last days together.

She took his hand and led him into the house while her son Julien took his horse. Julien gave Doro a long, frightened, pleading look that Doro did not acknowledge. Clearly, the man knew.

Inside the house, he got the same kinds of looks from Leah and Kane, whom Anyanwu had sent for. Nobody said anything except in ordinary greeting, but the house was filled with tension. It was as though everyone felt it but Anyanwu. She seemed to feel nothing except solemn pleasure in having Doro home again.

Supper was quiet, almost grim, and everyone seemed to have something to do to keep from lingering at the table. Everyone but Doro. He coaxed Anyanwu to share wine and fruit and nuts and talk with him in the smaller, cooler back parlor. As it turned out, they shared wine and fruit and nuts and silence, but it did not matter. It was enough that she was with him.

Anyanwu’s child, a tiny, sturdy boy, was born two weeks after Doro’s return, and Doro became almost sick with desperation. He did not know how to deal with his feelings, could not recall ever having had such an intense confusion of feelings before. Sometimes he caught himself observing his own behavior as though from a distance and noticing with even greater confusion that there was nothing outwardly visible in him to show what he was suffering. He spent as much time as he could with Anyanwu, watching her prepare and mix her herbs; instruct several of her people at a time in their cultivation, appearance and use; tend those few who could not wait for this or that herb.

“What will they do when they have only the herbs?” he asked her.

“Live or die as best they can,” she said. “Everything truly alive dies sooner or later.”

She found a woman to nurse her baby and she gave calm instructions to a frightened Leah. She considered Leah the strangest and the brightest of her white daughters and the one most competent to succeed her. Kane did not want this. He felt threatened, even frightened, by the thought of suddenly greater visibility. He would become more noticeable to people of his father’s class—people who might have known his father. Doro thought this too unlikely to worry about. He found himself trying to explain to the man that if Kane played his role as well as Doro had always seen him play it, and if also he clearly possessed all the trappings of a wealthy planter, it would never occur to people to assume that he was anything but a wealthy planter. Doro told the story of Frank’s passing him off as a Christianized African prince, and he and Kane laughed together over it. There had not been much laughter in the house recently, and even this ended abruptly.