Butler, Octavia - Kindred

I nodded. “What bothers me,” I said, “is what’s going to happen to them if you live.”

“You don’t think I’m going to do anything to them, do you?”

“Of course you are. And I’ll have to watch and remember and decide when you’ve gone too far. Believe me, I’m not looking forward to the job.”

“You take a lot on yourself.” “None of it was my idea.”

He muttered something inaudible, and probably obscene. “You ought

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to be in the fields,” he added. “God knows why I didn’t leave you out there. You would have learned a few things.”

“I would have been killed. You would have had to start taking very good care of yourself.” I shrugged. “I don’t think you have the knack.”

“Damnit, Dana … What’s the good of sitting here trading threats? I

don’t believe you want to hurt me any more than I want to hurt you.” I said nothing.

“I brought you down here to write a few letters for me, not fight with me.”

“Letters?”

He nodded. “I’ll tell you, I hate to write. Don’t mind reading so much, but I hate to write.”

“You didn’t hate it six years ago.”

“I didn’t have to do it then. I didn’t have eight or nine people all want- ing answers, and wanting them now.”

I twisted the pen in my hands. “You’ll never know how hard I worked in my own time to avoid doing jobs like this.”

He grinned suddenly. “Yes I do. Kevin told me. He told me about the books you wrote too. Your own books.”

“That’s how he and I earn our living.”

“Yeah. Well, I thought you might miss it—writing your own things, I

mean. So I got enough paper for you to write for both of us.”

I looked at him, not quite sure I’d heard right. I had read that paper in this time was expensive, and I had seen that Weylin had never had very much of it. But here was Rufus offering … Offering what? A bribe? Another apology?

“What’s the matter?” he said. “Seems to me, this is better than any offer I’ve made you so far.”

“No doubt.”

He got paper, made room for me at the desk. “Rufe, are you going to sell anyone else?” He hesitated. “I hope not. I don’t like it.”

“What’s to hope? Why can’t you just not do it?”

Another hesitation. “Daddy left debts, Dana. He was the most careful man I know with money, but he still left debts.”

“But won’t your crops pay them?” “Some of them.”

“Oh. What are you going to do?”

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“Get somebody who makes her living by writing to write some very persuasive letters.”

10

I wrote his letters. I had to read several of the letters he’d received first to pick up the stilted formal style of the day. I didn’t want Rufus having to face some creditor that I had angered with my twentieth-century brevity—which could come across as nineteenth-century abruptness, even discourtesy. Rufus gave me a general idea of what he wanted me to say and then approved or disapproved of the way I said it. Usually, he approved. Then we started to go over his father’s books together. I never did get back to Margaret Weylin.

And I wasn’t ever to get back to her full time. Rufus brought a young girl named Beth in from the fields to help with the housework. That even- tually freed Carrie to spend more time with Margaret. I continued to sleep in Margaret’s room because I agreed with Rufus that Carrie belonged with her family, at least at night. That meant I had to put up with Margaret waking me up when she couldn’t sleep and complaining bitterly that Rufus had taken me away just when she and I were begin- ning to get on so well …

“What does he have you doing?” she asked me several times—

suspiciously.

I told her.

“Seems as though he could do that himself. Tom always did it himself.”

Rufus could have done it himself too, I thought, though I never said it aloud. He just didn’t like working alone. Actually, he didn’t like working at all. But if he had to do it, he wanted company. I didn’t realize how much he preferred my company in particular until he came in one night a little drunk and found Alice and I eating together in her cabin. He had been away eating with a family in town—“Some people with daughters they want to get rid of,” Alice had told me. She had said it with no con- cern at all even though she knew her life could become much harder if Rufus married. Rufus had property and slaves and was apparently quite

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He came home, and not finding either of us in the house, came out to Alice’s cabin. He opened the door and saw us both looking up at him from the table, and he smiled happily.

“Behold the woman,” he said. And he looked from one to the other of us. “You really are only one woman. Did you know that?”

He tottered away.

Alice and I looked at each other. I thought she would laugh because she took any opportunity she could find to laugh at him—though not to his face because he would beat her when he decided she needed it.

She didn’t laugh. She shuddered, then got up, not too gracefully—her pregnancy was showing now—and looked out the door after him.

After a while, she asked, “Does he ever take you to bed, Dana?”

I jumped. Her bluntness could still startle me. “No. He doesn’t want me and I don’t want him.”

She glanced back at me over one shoulder. “What you think your wants got to do with it?”

I said nothing because I liked her. And no answer I could give could help sounding like criticism of her.

“You know,” she said, “you gentle him for me. He hardly hits me at all when you’re here. And he never hits you.”

“He arranges for other people to hit me.”

“But still … I know what he means. He likes me in bed, and you out of bed, and you and I look alike if you can believe what people say.”

“We look alike if we can believe our own eyes!”

“I guess so. Anyway, all that means we’re two halves of the same woman—at least in his crazy head.”

11

The time passed slowly, uneventfully, as I waited for the birth of the child I hoped would be Hagar. I went on helping Rufus and his mother. I kept a journal in shorthand. (“What the devil are these chicken marks?” Rufus asked me when he looked over my shoulder one day.) It was such a relief to be able to say what I felt, even in writing, without worrying

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that I might get myself or someone else into trouble. One of my secre- tarial classes had finally come in handy.

I tried husking corn and blistered my slow clumsy hands while expe- rienced field hands sped through the work effortlessly, enjoying them- selves. There was no reason for me to join them, but they seemed to be making a party of the husking—Rufus gave them a little whiskey to help them along—and I needed a party, needed anything that would relieve my boredom, take my mind off myself.

It was a party, all right. A wild rough kind of party that nobody mod- ified because “the master’s women”—Alice and I—were there. People working near me around the small mountain of corn laughed at my blis- ters and told me I was being initiated. A jug went around and I tasted it, choked, and drew more laughter. Surprisingly companionable laughter. A man with huge muscles told me it was too bad I was already spoken for, and that earned me hostile looks from three women. After the work, there were great quantities of food—chicken, pork, vegetables, corn bread, fruit—better food than the herring and corn meal field hands usually saw so much of. Rufus came out to play hero for providing such a good meal, and the people gave him the praise he wanted. Then they made gross jokes about him behind his back. Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer’s job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean.