Butler, Octavia - Kindred

Evan Fowler was in the house more than he had to be while Rufus was gone. He said little to me, gave me no orders. But he was there. I took refuge in Margaret Weylin’s room, and she was so pleased she talked endlessly. I found myself laughing and actually holding conversations with her as though we were just a couple of lonely people talking with- out the extra burden of stupid barriers.

Rufus came back, came to the house carrying the dark little girl and leading the boy who seemed to look even more like him. Joe saw me in the hall and ran to me.

“Aunt Dana, Aunt Dana!” And a hug later, “I can read better now. Daddy’s been teaching me. Wanna hear?”

“Sure I do.” I looked up at Rufus. Daddy?

He glared at me tight-lipped as though daring me to speak. All I had wanted to say, though, was, “What took you so long?” The boy had spent his short life calling his father “Master.” Well, now that he no longer had a mother, I supposed Rufus thought it was time he had a father. I man-

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aged to smile at Rufus—a real smile. I didn’t want him feeling embar- rassed or defensive for finally acknowledging his son.

He smiled back, seemed to relax.

“How about my getting classes going again?”

He nodded. “I guess the others haven’t had time to forget much.” They hadn’t. As it turned out, I had only been away for three months.

The children had had a kind of early summer vacation. Now they went back to school. And I, slowly, delicately, went to work on Rufus, began to push him toward freeing a few more of them, perhaps several more of them—perhaps in his will, all of them. I had heard of slaveholders doing such things. The Civil War was still thirty years away. I might be able to get some of the adult slaves freed while they were still young enough to build new lives. I might be able to do some good for everyone, finally. At least, I felt secure enough to try, now that my own freedom was within reach.

Rufus had been keeping me with him more than he needed me now. He called me to share his meals openly, and he seemed to listen when I talked to him about freeing the slaves. But he made no promises. I won- dered whether he thought making a will was foolish at his age—or maybe it was freeing more slaves that he thought was foolish. He didn’t say anything, so I couldn’t tell.

Finally, though, he did answer me, told me much more than I wanted to know. None of it should have surprised me at all.

“Dana,” he said one afternoon in the library, “I’d have to be crazy to make a will freeing these people and then tell you about it. I could die damn young for that kind of craziness.”

I had to look at him to see whether he was serious. But looking at him confused me even more. He was smiling, but I got the feeling he was completely serious. He believed I would kill him to free his slaves. Strangely, the idea had not occurred to me. My suggestion had been inno- cent. But he might have a point. Eventually, it would have occurred to me.

“I used to have nightmares about you,” he said. “They started when I

was little—right after I set fire to the draperies. Remember the fire?” “Of course.”

“I’d dream about you and wake up in a cold sweat.” “Dream … about me killing you?”

“Not exactly.” He paused, gave me a long unreadable look. “I’d dream about you leaving me.”

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I frowned. That was close to the thing Kevin had heard him say—the thing that had awakened Kevin’s suspicions. “I leave,” I said carefully. “I have to. I don’t belong here.”

“Yes you do! As far as I’m concerned, you do. But that’s not what I mean. You leave, and sooner or later you come back. But in my night- mares, you leave without helping me. You walk away and leave me in trouble, hurting, maybe dying.”

“Oh. Are you sure those dreams started when you were little? They sound more like something you would have come up with after your fight with Isaac.”

“They got worse then,” he admitted. “But they started way back at the fire—as soon as I realized you could help me or not, just as you chose. I had those nightmares for years. Then when Alice had been here awhile, they went away. Now they’ve come back.”

He stopped, looked at me as though he expected me to say some- thing—to reassure him, perhaps, to promise him that I would never do such a thing. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to say the words.

“You see?” he said quietly.

I moved uncomfortably in my chair. “Rufe, do you know how many people live to ripe old ages without ever getting into the kind of trouble that causes you to need me? If you don’t trust me, then you have more reason than ever to be careful.”

“Tell me I can trust you.”

More discomfort. “You keep doing things that make it impossible for me to trust you—even though you know it has to work both ways.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I never know how to treat you. You confuse everybody. You sound too white to the field hands—like some kind of traitor, I guess.”

“I know what they think.”

“Daddy always thought you were dangerous because you knew too many white ways, but you were black. Too black, he said. The kind of black who watches and thinks and makes trouble. I told that to Alice and she laughed. She said sometimes Daddy showed more sense than I did. She said he was right about you, and that I’d find out some day.”

I jumped. Had Alice really said such a thing?

“And my mother,” continued Rufus calmly, “says if she closes her eyes while you and her are talking, she can forget you’re black without even trying.”

“I’m black,” I said. “And when you sell a black man away from his

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family just because he talked to me, you can’t expect me to have any good feelings toward you.”

He looked away. We hadn’t really discussed Sam before. We had talked around him, alluded to him without quite mentioning him.

“He wanted you,” said Rufus bluntly.

I stared at him, knowing now why we hadn’t spoken of Sam. It was too dangerous. It could lead to speaking of other things. We needed safe sub- jects now, Rufus and I—the price of corn, supplies for the slaves, that sort of thing.

“Sam didn’t do anything,” I said. “You sold him for what you thought he was thinking.”

“He wanted you,” Rufus repeated.

So do you, I thought. No Alice to take the pressure off any more. It was time for me to go home. I started to get up.

“Don’t leave, Dana.”

I stopped. I didn’t want to hurry away—run away—from him. I didn’t want to give him any indication that I was going to the attic to reopen the tender new scar tissue at my wrists. I sat down again. And he leaned back in his chair and looked at me until I wished I had taken the chance of hur- rying away.

“What am I going to do when you go home this time?” he whispered. “You’ll survive.”

“I wonder … why I should bother.”

“For your children, at least,” I said. “Her children. They’re all you have left of her.”

He closed his eyes, rubbed one hand over them. “They should be your children now,” he said. “If you had any feelings for them, you’d stay.”

For them? “You know I can’t.”

“You could if you wanted to. I wouldn’t hurt you, and you wouldn’t have to hurt yourself … again.”

“You wouldn’t hurt me until something frustrated you, made you angry or jealous. You wouldn’t hurt me until someone hurt you. Rufe, I know you. I couldn’t stay here even if I didn’t have a home to go back to—and someone waiting for me there.”

“That Kevin!” “Yes.”

“I wish I had shot him.”