Butler, Octavia - Kindred

“Be careful,” he said. “Treat yourself gently for a change.” “Where’s my bag?”

“Here.” He pulled the blanket aside and let me see that I was securely tied to my denim bag. “What are you going to do, Dana?”

“I don’t know.” “What’s he like now?”

He. Rufus. He had become such a fixture in my life that it wasn’t even necessary to say his name. “His father died,” I said. “He’s running things now.”

“Well?”

“I don’t know. How do you do well at owning and trading in slaves?” “Not well,” Kevin decided. He got up and went to the kitchen, came back with a glass of water. “Did you want anything to eat? I can get you

something.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“What did he do to you, finally, to make you cut your wrists?” “Nothing to me. Nothing important. He sold a man away from his fam-

ily when there was no need for him to. He hit me when I objected. Maybe he’ll never be as hard as his father was, but he’s a man of his time.”

“Then … it doesn’t seem to me that you have such a difficult decision ahead of you.”

“But I do. I talked to Carrie about it once, and she said …” “Carrie?” He looked at me strangely.

“Yes. She said … Oh. She gets her meaning across, Kevin. Weren’t you around the place long enough to find that out?”

“She never tried to get much across to me. I used to wonder whether she was a little retarded.”

“God, no! Far from it. If you had gotten to know her, you wouldn’t even suspect.”

He managed to shrug. “Well, anyway, what did she tell you?”

“That if I had let Rufus die, everyone would have been sold. More families would have been separated. She has three children now.”

He was silent for several seconds. Then, “She might be sold with her children if they’re young. But I doubt that anyone would bother to keep her and her husband together. Someone would buy her and breed her to a new man. It is breeding, you know.”

THE ROPE 243

“Yes. So you see, my decision isn’t as easy as you thought.” “But … they’re being sold anyway.”

“Not all of them. Good Lord, Kevin, their lives are hard enough.” “What about your life?”

“It’s better than anything most of them will ever know.” “It may not be as he gets older.”

I sat up, trying to ignore my own weakness. “Kevin, tell me what you want me to do.”

He looked away, said nothing. I gave him several seconds, but he kept silent.

“It’s real now, isn’t it,” I said softly. “We talked about it before—God knows how long ago—but somehow, it was abstract then. Now … Kevin, if you can’t even say it, how can you expect me to do it?”

2

We had fifteen full days together this time. I marked them off on the calendar—June 19, through July 3. With some kind of reverse symbol- ism, Rufus called me back on July 4. But at least Kevin and I had a chance to grow back into the twentieth century. We didn’t seem to have to grow back into each other. The separations hadn’t been good for us, but they hadn’t hurt us that much either. It was easy for us to be together, knowing we shared experiences no one else would believe. It wasn’t as easy, though, for us to be with other people.

My cousin came over, and when Kevin answered the door, she didn’t recognize him.

“What’s the matter with him?” she whispered later when she and I

were alone.

“He’s been sick,” I lied. “With what?”

“The doctor isn’t sure what it was. Kevin is much better now, though.” “He looks just like my girl friend’s father did, and he had cancer.” “Julie, for Godsake!”

“I’m sorry, but … never mind. He hasn’t hit you again, has he?” “No.”

244

KINDRED

“Well, that’s something. You’d better take care of yourself. You don’t look so good either.”

Kevin tried driving—his first time after five years of horses and bug- gies. He said the traffic confused him, made him more nervous than he could see any reason for. He said he’d almost killed a couple of people. Then he put the car in the garage and left it there.

Of course, I wouldn’t drive, wouldn’t even ride with someone else while there was still a chance of Rufus snatching me away. After the first week, though, Kevin began to doubt that I would be called again.

I didn’t doubt it. For the sake of the people whose lives Rufus con- trolled, I didn’t wish him dead, but I wouldn’t rest easy until I knew he was. As things stood now, sooner or later, he would get himself into trou- ble again and call me. I kept my denim bag nearby.

“You know, someday, you’re going to have to stop dragging that thing around with you and come back to life,” Kevin said after two weeks. He had just tried driving again, and when he came in, his hands were shak- ing. “Hell, half the time I wonder if you’re not eager to go back to Mary- land anyway.”

I had been watching television—or at least, the television was on. Actually, I was looking over some journal pages I had managed to bring home in my bag, wondering whether I could weave them into a story. Now, I looked up at Kevin. “Me?”

“Why not? Eight months, after all.”

I put my journal pages down and got up to turn off the television. “Leave it on,” said Kevin.

I turned it off. “I think you’ve got something to say to me,” I said. “And I think I should hear it clearly.”

“You don’t want to hear anything.”

“No, I don’t. But I’m going to, aren’t I?” “My God, Dana, after two weeks …”

“It was eight days, time before last. And about three hours last time. The intervals between trips don’t mean anything.”

“How old was he last time?”

“He turned twenty-five when I was there last. And, though I’ll never be able to prove it, I turned twenty-seven.”

“He’s grown up.” I shrugged.

“Do you remember what he said just before he tried to shoot you?”

THE ROPE 245

“No. I had other things on my mind.”

“I had forgotten it myself, but it’s come back to me. He said, ‘You’re not going to leave me!’”

I thought for a moment. “Yes, that sounds about right.” “It doesn’t sound right to me.”

“I mean it sounds like what he said! I don’t have any control over what he says.”

“But still …” He paused, looked at me as though he expected me to say something. I didn’t. “It sounded more like what I might say to you if you were leaving.”

“Would you?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Say what you mean. I can’t answer you unless you say it.”

He drew a deep breath. “All right. You’ve said he was a man of his time, and you’ve told me what he’s done to Alice. What’s he done to you?”

“Sent me to the field, had me beaten, made me spend nearly eight months sleeping on the floor of his mother’s room, sold people … He’s done plenty, but the worst of it was to other people. He hasn’t raped me, Kevin. He understands, though you don’t seem to, that for him that would be a form of suicide.”

“You mean there’s something he could do to make you kill him, after all?”

I sighed, went over to him, and sat down on the arm of his chair. I

looked down at him. “Tell me you believe I’m lying to you.”

He looked at me uncertainly. “Look, if anything did happen, I could understand it. I know how it was back then.”

“You mean you could forgive me for having been raped?”

“Dana, I lived there. I know what those people were like. And Rufus’s attitude toward you …”

“Was sensible most of the time. He knew I could kill him just by turn- ing my back at the right moment. And he believed that I wouldn’t have him because I loved you. He said something like that once. He was wrong, but I never told him so.”