Kindred

by Octavia Butler

  I washed very quickly.

  Then I went back to the books in the living room, but Kevin had almost finished shelving them.

  “Forget about any more unpacking today,” he told me. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

  “Go?”

  “Yes, where would you like to eat? Someplace nice for your birthday.”

  “Here.”

  “But …”

  “Here, really. I don’t want to go anywhere.”

  “Why not?”

  I took a deep breath. “Tomorrow,” I said. “Let’s go tomorrow.” Somehow, tomorrow would be better. I would have a night’s sleep between me and whatever had happened. And if nothing else happened, I would be able to relax a little.

  “It would be good for you to get out of here for a while,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Listen …”

  “No!” Nothing was going to get me out of the house that night if I could help it.

  Kevin looked at me for a moment—I probably looked as scared as I was—then he went to the phone and called out for chicken and shrimp.

  But staying home did no good. When the food had arrived, when we were eating and I was calmer, the kitchen began to blur around me.

  Again the light seemed to dim and I felt the sick dizziness. I pushed back from the table, but didn’t try to get up. I couldn’t have gotten up.

  “Dana?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Is it happening again?”

  “I think so.” I sat very still, trying not to fall off my chair. The floor seemed farther away than it should have. I reached out for the table to steady myself, but before I could touch it, it was gone. And the distant floor seemed to darken and change. The linoleum tile became wood, partially carpeted. And the chair beneath me vanished.

  2

  When my dizziness cleared away, I found myself sitting on a small bed sheltered by a kind of abbreviated dark green canopy. Beside me was a little wooden stand containing a battered old pocket knife, several marbles, and a lighted candle in a metal holder. Before me was a red-haired boy. Rufus?

  The boy had his back to me and hadn’t noticed me yet. He held a stick of wood in one hand and the end of the stick was charred and smoking. Its fire had apparently been transferred to the draperies at the window. Now the boy stood watching as the flames ate their way up the heavy cloth.

  For a moment, I watched too. Then I woke up, pushed the boy aside, caught the unburned upper part of the draperies and pulled them down. As they fell, they smothered some of the flames within themselves, and they exposed a half-open window. I picked them up quickly and threw them out the window.

  The boy looked at me, then ran to the window and looked out. I looked out too, hoping I hadn’t thrown the burning cloth onto a porch roof or too near a wall. There was a fireplace in the room; I saw it now, too late. I could have safely thrown the draperies into it and let them burn.

  It was dark outside. The sun had not set at home when I was snatched away, but here it was dark. I could see the draperies a story below, burning, lighting the night only enough for us to see that they were on the ground and some distance from the nearest wall. My hasty act had done no harm. I could go home knowing that I had averted trouble for the second time.

  I waited to go home.

  My first trip had ended as soon as the boy was safe—had ended just in time to keep me safe. Now, though, as I waited, I realized that I wasn’t going to be that lucky again.

  I didn’t feel dizzy. The room remained unblurred, undeniably real. I looked around, not knowing what to do. The fear that had followed me from home flared now. What would happen to me if I didn’t go back automatically this time? What if I was stranded here—wherever here was? I had no money, no idea how to get home.

  I stared out into the darkness fighting to calm myself. It was not calming, though, that there were no city lights out there. No lights at all. But still, I was in no immediate danger. And wherever I was, there was a child with me—and a child might answer my questions more readily than an adult.

  I looked at him. He looked back, curious and unafraid. He was not Rufus. I could see that now. He had the same red hair and slight build, but he was taller, clearly three or four years older. Old enough, I thought, to know better than to play with fire. If he hadn’t set fire to his draperies, I might still be at home.

  I stepped over to him, took the stick from his hand, and threw it into the fireplace. “Someone should use one like that on you,” I said, “before you burn the house down.”

  I regretted the words the moment they were out. I needed this boy’s help. But still, who knew what trouble he had gotten me into!

  The boy stumbled back from me, alarmed. “You lay a hand on me, and I’ll tell my daddy!” His accent was unmistakably southern, and before I could shut out the thought, I began wondering whether I might be somewhere in the South. Somewhere two or three thousand miles from home.

  If I was in the South, the two- or three-hour time difference would explain the darkness outside. But wherever I was, the last thing I wanted to do was meet this boy’s father. The man could have me jailed for breaking into his house—or he could shoot me for breaking in. There was something specific for me to worry about. No doubt the boy could tell me about other things.

  And he would. If I was going to be stranded here, I had to find out all I could while I could. As dangerous as it could be for me to stay where I was, in the house of a man who might shoot me, it seemed even more dangerous for me to go wandering into the night totally ignorant. The boy and I would keep our voices down, and we would talk.

  “Don’t you worry about your father,” I told him softly. “You’ll have plenty to say to him when he sees those burned draperies.”

  The boy seemed to deflate. His shoulders sagged and he turned to stare into the fireplace. “Who are you anyway?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

  So he didn’t know either—not that I had really expected him to. But he did seem surprisingly at ease with me—much calmer than I would have been at his age about the sudden appearance of a stranger in my bedroom. I wouldn’t even have still been in the bedroom. If he had been as timid a child as I was, he would probably have gotten me killed.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “Rufus.”

  For a moment, I just stared at him. “Rufus?”

  “Yeah. What’s the matter?”

  I wished I knew what was the matter—what was going on! “I’m all right,” I said. “Look … Rufus, look at me. Have you ever seen me before?”

  “No.”

  That was the right answer, the reasonable answer. I tried to make myself accept it in spite of his name, his too-familiar face. But the child I had pulled from the river could so easily have grown into this child—in three or four years.

  “Can you remember a time when you nearly drowned?” I asked, feeling foolish.

  He frowned, looked at me more carefully.

  “You were younger,” I said. “About five years old, maybe. Do you remember?”

  “The river?” The words came out low and tentative as though he didn’t quite believe them himself.

  “You do remember then. It was you.”

  “Drowning … I remember that. And you …?”

  “I’m not sure you ever got a look at me. And I guess it must have been a long time ago … for you.”

  “No, I remember you now. I saw you.”

  I said nothing. I didn’t quite believe him. I wondered whether he was just telling me what he thought I wanted to hear—though there was no reason for him to lie. He was clearly not afraid of me.

  “That’s why it seemed like I knew you,” he said. “I couldn’t remember — maybe because of the way I saw you. I told Mama, and she said I couldn’t have really seen you that way.”

  “What way?”

  “Well … with my eyes closed.”

  “With your—” I stopped. The boy wasn’t lying;
he was dreaming.

  “It’s true!” he insisted loudly. Then he caught himself, whispered, “That’s the way I saw you just as I stepped in the hole.”

  “Hole?”

  “In the river. I was walking in the water and there was a hole. I fell, and then I couldn’t find the bottom any more. I saw you inside a room. I could see part of the room, and there were books all around—more than in Daddy’s library. You were wearing pants like a man—the way you are now. I thought you were a man.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “But this time you just look like a woman wearing pants.”

  I sighed. “All right, never mind that. As long as you recognize me as the one who pulled you out of the river …”

  “Did you? I thought you must have been the one.”

  I stopped, confused. “I thought you remembered.”

  “I remember seeing you. It was like I stopped drowning for a while and saw you, and then started to drown again. After that Mama was there, and Daddy.”

  “And Daddy’s gun,” I said bitterly. “Your father almost shot me.”

  “He thought you were a man too—and that you were trying to hurt Mama and me. Mama says she was telling him not to shoot you, and then you were gone.”

  “Yes.” I had probably vanished before the woman’s eyes. What had she thought of that?

  “I asked her where you went,” said Rufus, “and she got mad and said she didn’t know. I asked her again later, and she hit me. And she never hits me.”

  I waited, expecting him to ask me the same question, but he said no more. Only his eyes questioned. I hunted through my own thoughts for a way to answer him.

  “Where do you think I went, Rufe?”

  He sighed, said disappointedly, “You’re not going to tell me either.”

  “Yes I am—as best I can. But answer me first. Tell me where you think I went.”

  He seemed to have to decide whether to do that or not. “Back to the room,” he said finally. “The room with the books.”

  “Is that a guess, or did you see me again?”

  “I didn’t see you. Am I right? Did you go back there?”

  “Yes. Back home to scare my husband almost as much as I must have scared your parents.”

  “But how did you get there? How did you get here?”

  “Like that.” I snapped my fingers.

  “That’s no answer.”

  “It’s the only answer I’ve got. I was at home; then suddenly, I was here helping you. I don’t know how it happens—how I move that way—or when it’s going to happen. I can’t control it.”

  “Who can?”

  “I don’t know. No one.” I didn’t want him to get the idea that he could control it. Especially if it turned out that he really could.

  “But … what’s it like? What did Mama see that she won’t tell me about?”

  “Probably the same thing my husband saw. He said when I came to you, I vanished. Just disappeared. And then reappeared later.”

  He thought about that. “Disappeared? You mean like smoke?” Fear crept into his expression. “Like a ghost?”

  “Like smoke, maybe. But don’t go getting the idea that I’m a ghost. There are no ghosts.”

  “That’s what Daddy says.”

  “He’s right.”

  “But Mama says she saw one once.”

  I managed to hold back my opinion of that. His mother, after all … Besides, I was probably her ghost. She had had to find some explanation for my vanishing. I wondered how her more realistic husband had explained it. But that wasn’t important. What I cared about now was keeping the boy calm.

  “You needed help,” I told him. “I came to help you. Twice. Does that make me someone to be afraid of?”

  “I guess not.” He gave me a long look, then came over to me, reached out hesitantly, and touched me with a sooty hand.

  “You see,” I said, “I’m as real as you are.”

  He nodded. “I thought you were. All the things you did … you had to be. And Mama said she touched you too.”

  “She sure did.” I rubbed my shoulder where the woman had bruised it with her desperate blows. For a moment, the soreness confused me, forced me to recall that for me, the woman’s attack had come only hours ago. Yet the boy was years older. Fact then: Somehow, my travels crossed time as well as distance. Another fact: The boy was the focus of my travels — perhaps the cause of them. He had seen me in my living room before I was drawn to him; he couldn’t have made that up. But I had seen nothing at all, felt nothing but sickness and disorientation.

  “Mama said what you did after you got me out of the water was like the Second Book of Kings,” said the boy.

  “The what?”

  “Where Elisha breathed into the dead boy’s mouth, and the boy came back to life. Mama said she tried to stop you when she saw you doing that to me because you were just some nigger she had never seen before. Then she remembered Second Kings.”

  I sat down on the bed and looked over at him, but I could read nothing other than interest and remembered excitement in his eyes. “She said I was what?” I asked.

  “Just a strange nigger. She and Daddy both knew they hadn’t seen you before.”

  “That was a hell of a thing for her to say right after she saw me save her son’s life.”

  Rufus frowned. “Why?”

  I stared at him.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Why are you mad?”

  “Your mother always call black people niggers, Rufe?”

  “Sure, except when she has company. Why not?”

  His air of innocent questioning confused me. Either he really didn’t know what he was saying, or he had a career waiting in Hollywood. Whichever it was, he wasn’t going to go on saying it to me.

  “I’m a black woman, Rufe. If you have to call me something other than my name, that’s it.”

  “But …”

  “Look, I helped you. I put the fire out, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right then, you do me the courtesy of calling me what I want to be called.”

  He just stared at me.

  “Now,” I spoke more gently, “tell me, did you see me again when the draperies started to burn? I mean, did you see me the way you did when you were drowning?”

  It took him a moment to shift gears. Then he said, “I didn’t see anything but fire.” He sat down in the old ladder-back chair near the fireplace and looked at me. “I didn’t see you until you got here. But I was so scared … it was kind of like when I was drowning … but not like anything else I can remember. I thought the house would burn down and it would be my fault. I thought I would die.”

  I nodded. “You probably wouldn’t have died because you would have been able to get out in time. But if your parents are asleep here, the fire might have reached them before they woke up.”

  The boy stared into the fireplace. “I burned the stable once,” he said. “I wanted Daddy to give me Nero—a horse I liked. But he sold him to Reverend Wyndham just because Reverend Wyndham offered a lot of money. Daddy already has a lot of money. Anyway, I got mad and burned down the stable.”

  I shook my head wonderingly. The boy already knew more about revenge than I did. What kind of man was he going to grow up into? “Why did you set this fire?” I asked. “To get even with your father for something else?”

  “For hitting me. See?” He turned and pulled up his shirt so that I could see the crisscross of long red welts. And I could see old marks, ugly scars of at least one much worse beating.

  “For Godsake …!”

  “He said I took money from his desk, and I said I didn’t.” Rufus shrugged. “He said I was calling him a liar, and he hit me.”

  “Several times.”

  “All I took was a dollar.” He put his shirt down and faced me.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. The boy would be lucky to stay out of prison when he grew up—if he grew up. He went on.

  “I
started thinking that if I burned the house, he would lose all his money. He ought to lose it. It’s all he ever thinks about.” Rufus shuddered. “But then I remembered the stable, and the whip he hit me with after I set that fire. Mama said if she hadn’t stopped him, he would have killed me. I was afraid this time he would kill me, so I wanted to put the fire out. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to do.”

  So he had called me. I was certain now. The boy drew me to him somehow when he got himself into more trouble than he could handle. How he did it, I didn’t know. He apparently didn’t even know he was doing it. If he had, and if he had been able to call me voluntarily, I might have found myself standing between father and son during one of Rufus’s beatings. What would have happened then, I couldn’t imagine. One meeting with Rufus’s father had been enough for me. Not that the boy sounded like that much of a bargain either. But, “Did you say he used a whip on you, Rufe?”

  “Yeah. The kind he whips niggers and horses with.”

  That stopped me for a moment. “The kind he whips … who?”

  He looked at me warily. “I wasn’t talking about you.”

  I brushed that aside. “Say blacks anyway. But … your father whips black people?”

  “When they need it. But Mama said it was cruel and disgraceful for him to hit me like that no matter what I did. She took me to Baltimore City to Aunt May’s house after that, but he came and got me and brought me home. After a while, she came home too.”

  For a moment, I forgot about the whip and the “niggers.” Baltimore City. Baltimore, Maryland? “Are we far from Baltimore now, Rufe?”

  “Across the bay.”

  “But … we’re still in Maryland, aren’t we?” I had relatives in Maryland—people who would help me if I needed them, and if I could reach them. I was beginning to wonder, though, whether I would be able to reach anyone I knew. I had a new, slowly growing fear.

  “Sure we’re in Maryland,” said Rufus. “How could you not know that.”