Kindred

by Octavia Butler

  The white stranger chose that moment to come out of the library with Tom Weylin.

  “What’s going on here?” demanded the stranger.

  Carrie moved away from me quickly, head down, and I said, “We’re old friends, sir.”

  Tom Weylin, grayer, thinner, grimmer-looking than ever, came over to me. He stared at me for a moment, then turned to face the stranger. “When did you say his horse came in, Jake?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  “That long … you should have told me.”

  “He’s taken that long and longer before.”

  Weylin sighed, glanced at me. “Yes. But I think it might be more serious this time. Carrie!”

  The mute woman had been walking away toward the back door. Now, she turned to look at Weylin.

  “Have Nigel bring the wagon around front.”

  She gave the half-nod, half-curtsey that she reserved for whites and hurried away.

  Something occurred to me as she was going and I spoke to Weylin. “I think Mister Rufus might have broken ribs. He wasn’t coughing blood so his lungs are probably all right, but it might be a good idea for me to bandage him a little before you move him.” I had never bandaged anything worse than a cut finger in my life, but I did remember a little of the first aid I had learned in school. I hadn’t thought to act when Rufus broke his leg, but I might be able to help now.

  “You can bandage him when we get him here,” said Weylin. And to the stranger, “Jake, you send somebody for the doctor.”

  Jake took a last disapproving look at me and went out the back door after Carrie.

  Weylin went out the front door without another word to me and I followed, trying to remember how important it was to bandage broken ribs—that is, whether it was worth “talking back” to Weylin about. I didn’t want Rufus badly injured, even though he deserved to be. Any injury could be dangerous. But from what I could remember, bandaging the ribs was done mostly to relieve pain. I wasn’t sure whether I remembered that because it was true or because I wanted to avoid any kind of confrontation with Weylin. I didn’t have to touch the scabs on my back to be conscious of them.

  A tall stocky slave drove a wagon around to us and I got on the back while Weylin took the seat beside the driver. The driver glanced back at me and said softly, “How are you, Dana?”

  “Nigel?”

  “It’s me,” he said grinning. “Grown some since you seen me last, I guess.”

  He had grown into another Luke—a big handsome man bearing little resemblance to the boy I remembered.

  “You keep your mouth shut and watch the road,” said Weylin. Then to me, “You’ve got to tell us where to go.”

  It would have been a pleasure to tell him where to go, but I spoke civilly. “It’s a long way from here,” I said. “I had to pass someone else’s house and fields on my way to you.”

  “The judge’s place. You could have got help there.”

  “I didn’t know.” And wouldn’t have tried if I had known. I wondered, though, whether this was the Judge Holman who would soon be sending men out to chase Isaac. It seemed likely.

  “Did you leave Rufus by the side of the road?” Weylin asked.

  “No, sir. He’s in the woods.”

  “You sure you know where in the woods?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’d better.”

  He said nothing else.

  I found Rufus with no particular difficulty and Nigel lifted him as gently and as easily as Luke once had. On the wagon, he held his side, then he held my hand. Once, he said, “I’ll keep my word.”

  I nodded and touched his forehead in case he couldn’t see me nodding. His forehead was hot and dry.

  “He’ll keep his word about what?” asked Weylin.

  He was looking back at me, so I frowned and looked perplexed and said, “I think he has a fever as well as broken ribs, sir.”

  Weylin made a sound of disgust. “He was sick yesterday, puking all over. But he would get up and go out today. Damn fool!”

  And he fell silent again until we reached his house. Then, as Nigel carried Rufus inside and up the stairs, Weylin steered me into his forbidden library. He pushed me close to a whale-oil lamp, and there, in the bright yellow light, he stared at me silently, critically until I looked toward the door.

  “You’re the same one, all right,” he said finally. “I didn’t want to believe it.”

  I said nothing.

  “Who are you?” he demanded. “What are you?”

  I hesitated not knowing what to answer because I didn’t know how much he knew. The truth might make him decide I was out of my mind, but I didn’t want to be caught in a lie.

  “Well!”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say,” I told him. “I’m Dana. You know me.”

  “Don’t tell me what I know!”

  I stood silent, confused, frightened. Kevin wasn’t here now. There was no one for me to call if I needed help.

  “I’m someone who may have just saved your son’s life,” I said softly. “He might have died out there sick and injured and alone.”

  “And you think I ought to be grateful?”

  Why did he sound angry? And why shouldn’t he be grateful? “I can’t tell you how you ought to feel, Mr. Weylin.”

  “That’s right. You can’t.”

  There was a moment of silence that he seemed to expect me to fill. Eagerly, I changed the subject. “Mr. Weylin, do you know where Mr. Franklin went?”

  Oddly, that seemed to reach him. His expression softened a little. “Him,” he said. “Damn fool.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Somewhere North. I don’t know. Rufus has some letters from him.” He gave me another long stare. “I guess you want to stay here.”

  He sounded as though he was giving me a choice, which was surprising because he didn’t have to. Maybe gratitude meant something to him after all.

  “I’d like to stay for a while,” I said. Better to try to reach Kevin from here than go wandering around some Northern city trying to find him. Especially since I had no money, and since I was still so ignorant of this time.

  “You got to work for your keep,” said Weylin. “Like you did before.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That Franklin comes back, he’ll stop here. He came back once — hoping to find you, I think.”

  “When?”

  “Last year sometime. You go up and stay with Rufus until the doctor comes. Take care of him.”

  “Yes, sir.” I turned to go.

  “That seems to be what you’re for, anyway,” he muttered.

  I kept going, glad to get away from him. He had known more about me than he wanted to talk about. That was clear from the questions he hadn’t asked. He had seen me vanish twice now. And Kevin and Rufus had probably told him at least something about me. I wondered how much. And I wondered what Kevin had said or done that made him a “damn fool.”

  Whatever it was, I’d learn about it from Rufus. Weylin was too dangerous to question.

  6

  I sponged Rufus off as best I could and bandaged his ribs with pieces of cloth that Nigel brought me. The ribs were very tender on the left side. Rufus said the bandage made breathing a little less painful, though, and I was glad of that. But he was still sick. His fever was still with him. And the doctor didn’t come. Rufus had fits of coughing now and then, and that seemed to be agonizing to him because of his ribs. Sarah came in to see him—and to hug me—and she was more alarmed at the marks of his beating than at his ribs or his fever. His face was black and blue and deformed-looking with its lumpy swellings.

  “He will fight,” she said angrily. Rufus opened his puffy slits of eyes and looked at her, but she went on anyway. “I’ve seen him pick a fight just out of meanness,” she said. “He’s out to get himself killed!”

  She could have been his mother, caught between anger and concern and not knowing which to express. She took away the basin Nigel h
ad brought me and returned it full of clean cool water.

  “Where’s his mother?” I asked her softly as she was leaving.

  She drew back from me a little. “Gone.”

  “Dead?”

  “Not yet.” She glanced at Rufus to see whether he was listening. His face was turned away from us. “Gone to Baltimore,” she whispered. “I’ll tell you ’bout it tomorrow.”

  I let her go without questioning her further. It was enough to know that I would not be suddenly attacked. For once, there would be no Margaret to protect Rufus from me.

  He was thrashing about weakly when I went back to him. He cursed the pain, cursed me, then remembered himself enough to say he didn’t mean it. He was burning up.

  “Rufe?”

  He moved his head from side to side and did not seem to hear me. I dug into my denim bag and found the plastic bottle of aspirin—a big bottle nearly full. There was enough to share.

  “Rufe!”

  He squinted at me.

  “Listen, I have medicine from my own time.” I poured him a glass of water from the pitcher beside his bed, and shook out two aspirin tablets. “These could lower your fever,” I said. “They might ease your pain too. Will you take them?”

  “What are they?”

  “They’re called aspirin. In my time, people use them against headache, fever, other kinds of pain.”

  He looked at the two tablets in my hand, then at me. “Give them to me.”

  He had trouble swallowing them and had to chew them up a little.

  “My Lord,” he muttered. “Anything tastes that bad must be good for you.”

  I laughed and wet a cloth in the basin to bathe his face. Nigel came in with a blanket and told me the doctor was held up at a difficult childbirth. I was to stay the night with Rufus.

  I didn’t mind. Rufus was in no condition to take an interest in me. I would have thought it would be more natural, though, for Nigel to stay. I asked him about it.

  “Marse Tom knows about you,” said Nigel softly. “Marse Rufe and Mister Kevin both told him. He figures you know enough to do some doctoring. More than doctoring, maybe. He saw you go home.”

  “I know.”

  “I saw it too.”

  I looked up at him—he was a head taller than me now—and saw nothing but curiosity in his eyes. If my vanishing had frightened him, the fear was long dead. I was glad of that. I wanted his friendship.

  “Marse Tom says you s’pose to take care of him and you better do a good job. Aunt Sarah says you call her if you need help.”

  “Thanks. Thank her for me.”

  He nodded, smiled a little. “Good thing for me you showed up. I want to be with Carrie now. It’s so close to her time.”

  I grinned. “Your baby, Nigel? I thought it might be.”

  “Better be mine. She’s my wife.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Marse Rufe paid a free preacher from town to come and say the same words they say for white folks and free niggers. Didn’t have to jump no broomstick.”

  I nodded, remembering what I’d read about the slaves’ marriage ceremonies. They jumped broomsticks, sometimes backward, sometimes forward, depending on local custom; or they stood before their master and were pronounced husband and wife; or they followed any number of other practices even to hiring a minister and having things done as Nigel had. None of it made any difference legally, though. No slave marriage was legally binding. Even Alice’s marriage to Isaac was merely an informal agreement since Isaac was a slave, or had been a slave. I hoped now that he was a free man well on his way to Pennsylvania.

  “Dana?”

  I looked up at Nigel. He had whispered my name so softly I had hardly heard him.

  “Dana, was it white men?”

  Startled, I put a finger to my lips, cautioning, and waved him away. “Tomorrow,” I promised.

  But he wasn’t as co-operative as I had been with Sarah. “Was it Isaac?”

  I nodded, hoping he would be satisfied and let the subject drop.

  “Did he get away?”

  Another nod.

  He left me, looking relieved.

  I stayed up with Rufus until he managed to fall asleep. The aspirins did seem to help. Then I wrapped myself in the blanket, pulled the room’s two chairs together in front of the fireplace, and settled in as comfortably as I could. It wasn’t bad.

  The doctor arrived late the next morning to find Rufus’s fever gone. The rest of his body was still bruised and sore, and his ribs still kept him breathing shallowly and struggling not to cough, but even with that, he was much less miserable. I had gotten him a breakfast tray from Sarah, and he had invited me to share the large meal she had prepared. I ate hot biscuits with butter and peach preserve, drank some of his coffee, and had a little cold ham. It was good and filling. He had the eggs, the rest of the ham, the corn cakes. There was too much of everything, and he didn’t feel like eating very much. Instead, he sat back and watched me with amusement.

  “Daddy’d do some cussin’ if he came in here and found us eating together,” he said.

  I put down my biscuit and reined in whatever part of my mind I’d left in 1976. He was right.

  “What are you doing then? Trying to make trouble?”

  “No. He won’t bother us. Eat.”

  “The last time someone told me he wouldn’t bother me, he walked in and beat the skin off my back.”

  “Yeah. I know about that. But I’m not Nigel. If I tell you to do something, and he doesn’t like it, he’ll come to me about it. He won’t whip you for following my orders. He’s a fair man.”

  I looked at him, startled.

  “I said fair,” he repeated. “Not likable.”

  I kept quiet. His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper. But I had seen no particular fairness in him. He did as he pleased. If you told him he wasn’t being fair, he would whip you for talking back. At least the Tom Weylin I had known would have. Maybe he had mellowed.

  “Stay,” said Rufus. “No matter what you think of him, I won’t let him hurt you. And it’s good to eat with someone I can talk to for a change.”

  That was nice. I began to eat again, wondering why he was in such a good mood this morning. He had come a long way from his anger the night before—from threatening not to tell me where Kevin was.

  “You know,” said Rufus thoughtfully, “you still look mighty young. You pulled me out of that river thirteen or fourteen years ago, but you look like you would have been just a kid back then.”

  Uh-oh. “Kevin didn’t explain that part, I guess.”

  “Explain what?”

  I shook my head. “Just … let me tell you how it’s been for me. I can’t tell you why things are happening as they are, but I can tell you the order of their happening.” I hesitated, gathering my thoughts. “When I came to you at the river, it was June ninth, nineteen seventy-six for me. When I got home, it was still the same day. Kevin told me I had only been gone a few seconds.”

  “Seconds …?”

  “Wait. Let me tell it all to you at once. Then you can have all the time you need to digest it and ask questions. Later, on that same day, I came to you again. You were three or four years older and busy trying to set the house afire. When I went home, Kevin told me only a few minutes had passed. The next morning, June tenth, I came to you because you’d fallen out of a tree…. Kevin and I came to you. I was here nearly two months. But when I went home, I found that I had lost only a few minutes or hours of June tenth.”

  “You mean after two months, you …”

  “I arrived home on the same day I had left. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know. After eight days at home, I came back here.” I faced him silently for a moment. “And, Rufe, now that I’m here, now that you’re safe, I want to find my husband.”

  He absorbed th
is slowly, frowning as though he was translating it from another language. Then he waved vaguely toward his desk—a new larger desk than he had had on my last visit. The old one had been nothing more than a little table. This one had a roll-top and plenty of drawer space both above and below the work surface.

  “His letters are in the middle drawer there. You can have them if you want them. They have his addresses … But Dana, you’re saying while I’ve been growing up, somehow, time has been almost standing still for you.”

  I was at the desk hunting through the cluttered drawer for the letters. “It hasn’t stood still,” I said. “I’m sure my last two visits here have aged me quite a bit, no matter what my calendar at home says.” I found the letters. Three of them—short notes on large pieces of paper that had been folded, sealed with sealing wax, and mailed without an envelope. “Here’s my Philadelphia address,” Kevin said in one. “If I can get a decent job, I’ll be here for a while.” That was all, except for the address. Kevin wrote books, but he’d never cared much for writing letters. At home he tried to catch me in a good mood and get me to take care of his correspondence for him.

  “I’ll be an old man,” said Rufus, “and you’ll still come to me looking just like you do now.”

  I shook my head. “Rufe, if you don’t start being more careful, you’ll never live to be an old man. Now that you’re grown up, I might not be able to help you much. The kind of trouble you get into as a man might be as overwhelming to me as it is to you.”

  “Yes. But this time thing …”

  I shrugged.

  “Damnit, there must be something mighty crazy about both of us, Dana. I never heard of anything like this happening to anybody else.”

  “Neither have I.” I looked at the other two letters. One from New York, and one from Boston. In the Boston one, he was talking about going to Maine. I wondered what was driving him farther and farther north. He had been interested in the West, but Maine …?

  “I’ll write to him,” said Rufus. “I’ll tell him you’re here. He’ll come running back.”

  “I’ll write him, Rufe.”

  “I’ll have to mail the letter.”

  “All right.”

  “I just hope he hasn’t already taken off for Maine.”