Butler, Octavia - Kindred

I looked away. “It doesn’t matter. Most of it missed anyway.” “Why didn’t you tell me? She could have hurt you.”

“She didn’t.”

“I don’t think we should give her another chance.” I looked at him. “What do you want to do?”

“Get out of here. We don’t need money badly enough for you to put up with whatever she plans to do next.”

“No, Kevin. I had a reason for not telling you about the coffee.” “I’m wondering what else you haven’t told me.”

“Nothing important.” My mind went back over some of Margaret’s petty insults. “Nothing important enough to make me leave.”

“But why? There’s no reason for …”

“Yes there is. I’ve thought about it, Kevin. It isn’t the money that I care about, or even having a roof over my head. I think we can survive here together no matter what. But I don’t think I have much chance of sur- viving here alone. I’ve told you that.”

“You won’t be alone. I’ll see to it.”

“You’ll try. Maybe that will be enough. I hope so. But if it isn’t, if I do have to come here alone, I’ll have a better chance of surviving if I stay

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here now and work on the insurance we talked about. Rufus. He’ll prob- ably be old enough to have some authority when I come again. Old enough to help me. I want him to have as many good memories of me as I can give him now.”

“He might not remember you past the day you leave here.” “He’ll remember.”

“It still might not work. After all, his environment will be influencing him every day you’re gone. And from what I’ve heard, it’s common in this time for the master’s children to be on nearly equal terms with the slaves. But maturity is supposed to put both in their ‘places.’”

“Sometimes it doesn’t. Even here, not all children let themselves be molded into what their parents want them to be.”

“You’re gambling. Hell, you’re gambling against history.”

“What else can I do? I’ve got to try, Kevin, and if trying means taking small risks and putting up with small humiliations now so that I can sur- vive later, I’ll do it.”

He drew a deep breath and let it out in a near whistle. “Yeah. I guess I

don’t blame you. I don’t like it, but I don’t blame you.”

I put my head on his shoulder. “I don’t like it either. God, I hate it! That woman is priming herself for a nervous breakdown. I just hope she doesn’t have it while I’m here.”

Kevin shifted his position a little and I sat up. “Let’s forget about Mar- garet for a moment,” he said. “I also wanted to talk to you about that … that place where you sleep.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh. I finally got up to see it. A rag pallet on the floor, Dana!” “Did you see anything else up there?”

“What? What else should I have seen?”

“A lot of rag pallets on the floor. And a couple of corn-shuck mat- tresses. I’m not being treated any worse than any other house servant, Kevin, and I’m doing better than the field hands. Their pallets are on the ground. Their cabins don’t even have floors, and most of them are full of fleas.”

There was a long silence. Finally, he sighed. “I can’t do anything for the others,” he said, “but I want you out of that attic. I want you with me.”

I sat up and stared down at my hands. “You don’t know how I’ve wanted to be with you. I keep imagining myself waking up at home some

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morning—alone.”

KINDRED

“Not likely. Not unless something threatens you or endangers you dur- ing the night.”

“You don’t know that for sure. Your theory could be wrong. Maybe there’s some kind of limit on how long I can stay here. Maybe a bad dream would be enough to send me home. Maybe anything.”

“Maybe I should test my theory.”

That stopped me. I realized he was talking about endangering me him- self, or at least making me believe my life was in danger—scaring the hell out of me. Scaring me home. Maybe.

I swallowed. “That might be a good idea, but I don’t think you should have mentioned it to me—warned me. Besides … I’m not sure you could scare me enough. I trust you.”

He covered one of my hands with his own. “You can go on trusting me. I won’t hurt you.”

“But …”

“I don’t have to hurt you. I can arrange something that will scare you before you have time to think about it. I can handle it.”

I accepted that, began to think maybe he really could get us home. “Kevin, wait until Rufus’s leg is healed.”

“So long?” he protested. “Six weeks, maybe more. Hell, in a society as backward as this, who knows whether the leg will heal at all?”

“Whatever happens, the boy will live. He still has to father a child. And that means he’ll probably have time to call me here again, with or without you. Give me the chance I need, Kevin, to reach him and make a haven for myself here.”

“All right,” he said sighing. “We’ll wait awhile. But you won’t do your waiting in that attic. You’re moving into my room tonight.”

I thought about that. “All right. Getting you home with me when I go is the one thing more important to me than staying with Rufus. It’s worth getting kicked off the plantation for.”

“Don’t worry about that. Weylin doesn’t care what we do.”

“But Margaret will care. I’ve seen her using that limited reading abil- ity of hers on her Bible. I suspect that in her own way, she’s a fairly moral woman.”

“You want to know how moral she is?”

His tone made me frown. “What do you mean?”

“If she chases me any harder, she and I will wind up playing a scene

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from that Bible she reads. The scene between Potiphar’s wife and

Joseph.”

I swallowed. That woman! But I could see her in my mind’s eye. Long thick red hair piled high on her head, fine smooth skin. Whatever her emotional problems, she wasn’t ugly.

“I’m moving in tonight, all right,” I said.

He smiled. “If we’re quiet about it, they might not even bother to notice. Hell, I saw three little kids playing in the dirt back there who look more like Weylin than Rufus does. Margaret’s had a lot of practice at not noticing.”

I knew which children he meant. They had different mothers, but there was a definite family resemblance between them. I’d seen Margaret Weylin slap one of them hard across the face. The child had done noth- ing more than toddle into her path. If she was willing to punish a child for her husband’s sins, would she be any less willing to punish me if she knew that I was where she wanted to be with Kevin? I tried not to think about it.

“We still might have to leave,” I said. “No matter what these people have to accept from each other, they might not be willing to tolerate

‘immorality’ from us.”

He shrugged. “If we have to leave, we leave. There’s a limit to what you should put up with even to get your chance with the boy. We’ll work our way to Baltimore. I should be able to get some kind of job there.”

“If we go to a city, how about Philadelphia?” “Philadelphia?”

“Because it’s in Pennsylvania. If we leave here, let it be for a free state.”

“Oh. Yes, I should have thought of that myself. Look … Dana, we might have to go to one of the free states, anyway.” He hesitated. “I mean if it turns out we can’t get home the way we think we can. I’ll probably become an unnecessary expense to Weylin when Rufus’s leg heals. Then we’d have to make a home for ourselves somewhere. That probably won’t happen, but it’s a possibility.”

I nodded.

“Now let’s go get whatever belongs to you out of that attic.” He stood up. “And, Dana, Rufus says his mother is going out visiting today. He’d like to see you while she’s gone.”