Butler, Octavia - Kindred

Kevin stroked his beard. “I grew this to come back.” “Why?”

“To disguise myself. You ever hear of a man named Denmark Vesey?”

THE ST ORM 193

“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 under- stand 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.”

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“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 type- writer. “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.

THE ST ORM 195

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

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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.