Butler, Octavia - Kindred

“If you had, you’d be dead yourself by now.”

THE ROPE 257

He turned his body so that he faced me squarely. “You say that as though it means something.”

I got up to leave. There was nothing more to be said. He had asked for what he knew I could not give, and I had refused.

“You know, Dana,” he said softly, “when you sent Alice to me that first time, and I saw how much she hated me, I thought, I’ll fall asleep beside her and she’ll kill me. She’ll hit me with a candlestick. She’ll set fire to the bed. She’ll bring a knife up from the cookhouse …

“I thought all that, but I wasn’t afraid. Because if she killed me, that would be that. Nothing else would matter. But if I lived, I would have her. And, by God, I had to have her.”

He stood up and came over to me. I stepped back, but he caught my arms anyway. “You’re so much like her, I can hardly stand it,” he said.

“Let go of me, Rufe!”

“You were one woman,” he said. “You and her. One woman. Two halves of a whole.”

I had to get away from him. “Let me go, or I’ll make your dream real!” Abandonment. The one weapon Alice hadn’t had. Rufus didn’t seem to be afraid of dying. Now, in his grief, he seemed almost to want death. But he was afraid of dying alone, afraid of being deserted by the person he had depended on for so long.

He stood holding my arms, perhaps trying to decide what he should do. After a moment, I felt his grip loosen, and I pulled away. I knew I had to go now before he submerged his fear. He could do it. He could talk himself into anything.

I left the library, went up the main stairs, then the attic stairs. Over to my bag, my knife …

Footsteps on the stairs. The knife!

I opened it, hesitated, then slipped the knife, blade still open, back into my bag.

He opened the door, came in, looked around the big hot empty room. He saw me at once, but still, he looked around—to see whether we were alone?

We were.

He came over and sat next to me on my pallet. “I’m sorry, Dana,” he said.

Sorry? For what he had nearly done, or for what he was about to do?

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Sorry. He had apologized to me many times in many ways before, but his apologies had always been oblique, “Eat with me, Dana. Sarah is cook- ing up something special.” Or, “Here, Dana, here’s a new book I bought for you in town.” Or, “Here’s some cloth, Dana. Maybe you can make yourself something from it.”

Things. Gifts given when he knew he had hurt or offended me. But he had never before said, “I’m sorry, Dana.” I looked at him uncertainly.

“I’ve never felt so lonesome in my life,” he said.

The words touched me as no others could have. I knew about loneli- ness. I found my thoughts going back to the time I had gone home with- out Kevin—the loneliness, the fear, sometimes the hopelessness I had felt then. Hopelessness wouldn’t be a sometime thing to Rufus, though. Alice was dead and buried. He had only his children left. But at least one of them had also loved Alice. Joe.

“Where’d my mama go?” he demanded on his first day home. “Away,” Rufus had said. “She went away.”

“When is she coming back?” “I don’t know.”

The boy came to me. “Aunt Dana, where’d my mama go?” “Honey … she died.”

“Died?”

“Yes. Like old Aunt Mary.” Who at last had drifted the final distance to her reward. She had lived over eighty years—had come over from Africa, people said. Nigel had made a box and Mary had been laid to rest near where Alice lay now.

“But Mama wasn’t old.” “No, she was sick, Joe.” “Daddy said she went away.” “Well … to heaven.”

“No!”

He had cried and I had tried to comfort him. I remembered the pain of my own mother’s death—grief, loneliness, uncertainty in my aunt and uncle’s house …

I had held the boy and told him he still had his daddy—please God. And that Sarah and Carrie and Nigel loved him. They wouldn’t let any- thing happen to him—as though they had the power to protect him, or even themselves.

I let Joe go to his mother’s cabin to be alone for a while. He wanted

THE ROPE 259

to. Then I told Rufus what I had done. And Rufus hadn’t known whether to hit me or thank me. He had glared at me, the skin of his face drawn tight, intense. Then, finally, he had relaxed and nodded and gone out to find his son.

Now, he sat with me—being sorry and lonely and wanting me to take the place of the dead.

“You never hated me, did you?” he asked.

“Never for long. I don’t know why. You worked hard to earn my hatred, Rufe.”

“She hated me. From the first time I forced her.” “I don’t blame her.”

“Until just before she ran. She had stopped hating me. I wonder how long it will take you.”

“What?”

“To stop hating.”

Oh God. Almost against my will, I closed my fingers around the han- dle of the knife still concealed in my bag. He took my other hand, held it between his own in a grip that I knew would only be gentle until I tried to pull away.

“Rufe,” I said, “your children …” “They’re free.”

“But they’re young. They need you to protect their freedom.” “Then it’s up to you, isn’t it?”

I twisted my hand, tried to get it away from him in sudden anger. At once, his hold went from caressing to imprisoning. My right hand had become wet and slippery on the knife.

“It’s up to you,” he repeated.

“No, Goddamnit, it isn’t! Keeping you alive has been up to me for too long! Why didn’t you shoot yourself when you started to? I wouldn’t have stopped you!”

“I know.”

The softness of his voice made me look up at him.

“So what else do I have to lose?” he asked. He pushed me back on the pallet, and for a few moments, we lay there, still. What was he waiting for? What was I waiting for?

He lay with his head on my shoulder, his left arm around me, his right hand still holding my hand, and slowly, I realized how easy it would be for me to continue to be still and forgive him even this. So easy, in spite

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of all my talk. But it would be so hard to raise the knife, drive it into the flesh I had saved so many times. So hard to kill …

He was not hurting me, would not hurt me if I remained as I was. He was not his father, old and ugly, brutal and disgusting. He smelled of soap, as though he had bathed recently—for me? The red hair was neatly combed and a little damp. I would never be to him what Tess had been to his father—a thing passed around like the whiskey jug at a husking. He wouldn’t do that to me or sell me or …

No.

I could feel the knife in my hand, still slippery with perspiration. A slave was a slave. Anything could be done to her. And Rufus was Rufus—erratic, alternately generous and vicious. I could accept him as my ancestor, my younger brother, my friend, but not as my master, and not as my lover. He had understood that once.

I twisted sharply, broke away from him. He caught me, trying not to hurt me. I was aware of him trying not to hurt me even as I raised the knife, even as I sank it into his side.

He screamed. I had never heard anyone scream that way—an animal sound. He screamed again, a lower ugly gurgle.

He lost his hold on my hand for a moment, but caught my arm before I could get away. Then he brought up the fist of his free hand to punch me once, and again as the patroller had done so long ago.

I pulled the knife free of him somehow, raised it, and brought it down again into his back.

This time he only grunted. He collapsed across me, somehow still alive, still holding my arm.

I lay beneath him, half conscious from the blows, and sick. My stom- ach seemed to twist, and I vomited on both of us.