Butler, Octavia - Kindred

“Thanks. Thank her for me.”

He nodded, smiled a little. “Good thing for me you showed up. I want to be with Carrie now. It’s so close to her time.”

I grinned. “Your baby, Nigel? I thought it might be.” “Better be mine. She’s my wife.”

“Congratulations.”

“Marse Rufe paid a free preacher from town to come and say the same words they say for white folks and free niggers. Didn’t have to jump no broomstick.”

I nodded, remembering what I’d read about the slaves’ marriage cere- monies. They jumped broomsticks, sometimes backward, sometimes for- ward, depending on local custom; or they stood before their master and were pronounced husband and wife; or they followed any number of other practices even to hiring a minister and having things done as Nigel had. None of it made any difference legally, though. No slave marriage was legally binding. Even Alice’s marriage to Isaac was merely an infor- mal agreement since Isaac was a slave, or had been a slave. I hoped now that he was a free man well on his way to Pennsylvania.

“Dana?”

I looked up at Nigel. He had whispered my name so softly I had hardly heard him.

“Dana, was it white men?”

Startled, I put a finger to my lips, cautioning, and waved him away. “Tomorrow,” I promised.

But he wasn’t as co-operative as I had been with Sarah. “Was it

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Isaac?”

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I nodded, hoping he would be satisfied and let the subject drop. “Did he get away?”

Another nod.

He left me, looking relieved.

I stayed up with Rufus until he managed to fall asleep. The aspirins did seem to help. Then I wrapped myself in the blanket, pulled the room’s two chairs together in front of the fireplace, and settled in as comfortably as I could. It wasn’t bad.

The doctor arrived late the next morning to find Rufus’s fever gone. The rest of his body was still bruised and sore, and his ribs still kept him breathing shallowly and struggling not to cough, but even with that, he was much less miserable. I had gotten him a breakfast tray from Sarah, and he had invited me to share the large meal she had prepared. I ate hot biscuits with butter and peach preserve, drank some of his coffee, and had a little cold ham. It was good and filling. He had the eggs, the rest of the ham, the corn cakes. There was too much of everything, and he didn’t feel like eating very much. Instead, he sat back and watched me with amusement.

“Daddy’d do some cussin’ if he came in here and found us eating together,” he said.

I put down my biscuit and reined in whatever part of my mind I’d left in 1976. He was right.

“What are you doing then? Trying to make trouble?” “No. He won’t bother us. Eat.”

“The last time someone told me he wouldn’t bother me, he walked in and beat the skin off my back.”

“Yeah. I know about that. But I’m not Nigel. If I tell you to do some- thing, and he doesn’t like it, he’ll come to me about it. He won’t whip you for following my orders. He’s a fair man.”

I looked at him, startled.

“I said fair,” he repeated. “Not likable.”

I kept quiet. His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordi- nary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper. But I had seen no particular fairness in him. He did as he pleased. If you told him he wasn’t being fair, he would whip you for talking back. At least the Tom Weylin I had known would have. Maybe

he had mellowed.

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“Stay,” said Rufus. “No matter what you think of him, I won’t let him hurt you. And it’s good to eat with someone I can talk to for a change.” That was nice. I began to eat again, wondering why he was in such a good mood this morning. He had come a long way from his anger the

night before—from threatening not to tell me where Kevin was.

“You know,” said Rufus thoughtfully, “you still look mighty young. You pulled me out of that river thirteen or fourteen years ago, but you look like you would have been just a kid back then.”

Uh-oh. “Kevin didn’t explain that part, I guess.” “Explain what?”

I shook my head. “Just … let me tell you how it’s been for me. I can’t tell you why things are happening as they are, but I can tell you the order of their happening.” I hesitated, gathering my thoughts. “When I came to you at the river, it was June ninth, nineteen seventy-six for me. When I got home, it was still the same day. Kevin told me I had only been gone a few seconds.”

“Seconds …?”

“Wait. Let me tell it all to you at once. Then you can have all the time you need to digest it and ask questions. Later, on that same day, I came to you again. You were three or four years older and busy trying to set the house afire. When I went home, Kevin told me only a few minutes had passed. The next morning, June tenth, I came to you because you’d fallen out of a tree…. Kevin and I came to you. I was here nearly two months. But when I went home, I found that I had lost only a few min- utes or hours of June tenth.”

“You mean after two months, you …”

“I arrived home on the same day I had left. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know. After eight days at home, I came back here.” I faced him silently for a moment. “And, Rufe, now that I’m here, now that you’re safe, I want to find my husband.”

He absorbed this slowly, frowning as though he was translating it from another language. Then he waved vaguely toward his desk—a new larger desk than he had had on my last visit. The old one had been nothing more than a little table. This one had a roll-top and plenty of drawer space both above and below the work surface.

“His letters are in the middle drawer there. You can have them if you want them. They have his addresses … But Dana, you’re saying while

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I’ve been growing up, somehow, time has been almost standing still for you.”

I was at the desk hunting through the cluttered drawer for the letters. “It hasn’t stood still,” I said. “I’m sure my last two visits here have aged me quite a bit, no matter what my calendar at home says.” I found the let- ters. Three of them—short notes on large pieces of paper that had been folded, sealed with sealing wax, and mailed without an envelope. “Here’s my Philadelphia address,” Kevin said in one. “If I can get a decent job, I’ll be here for a while.” That was all, except for the address. Kevin wrote books, but he’d never cared much for writing letters. At home he tried to catch me in a good mood and get me to take care of his correspondence for him.

“I’ll be an old man,” said Rufus, “and you’ll still come to me looking just like you do now.”

I shook my head. “Rufe, if you don’t start being more careful, you’ll never live to be an old man. Now that you’re grown up, I might not be able to help you much. The kind of trouble you get into as a man might be as overwhelming to me as it is to you.”

“Yes. But this time thing …” I shrugged.

“Damnit, there must be something mighty crazy about both of us, Dana. I never heard of anything like this happening to anybody else.”

“Neither have I.” I looked at the other two letters. One from New York, and one from Boston. In the Boston one, he was talking about going to Maine. I wondered what was driving him farther and farther north. He had been interested in the West, but Maine …?

“I’ll write to him,” said Rufus. “I’ll tell him you’re here. He’ll come running back.”

“I’ll write him, Rufe.”

“I’ll have to mail the letter.” “All right.”