Butler, Octavia - Kindred

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

190

KINDRED

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 to 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

192

KINDRED

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.”