I didn’t need the reminder. I got up, feeling that I had to move around, distract myself, or I would cry again.
“You sure fought like sisters,” said Sarah. “Always fussin’ at each other, stompin’ away from each other, comin’ back. Right after you left, she knocked the devil out of a field hand who was runnin’ you down.”
Had she? She would. Insulting me was her prerogative. No trespassing. I paced from the table to the hearth to a small work table. Back to Sarah.
“Dana, where is she?”
“In the barn.”
“He’ll give her a big funeral.” Sarah shook her head. “It’s funny. I thought she was finally settlin’ down with him—getting not to mind so much.”
“If she was, I don’t think she could have forgiven herself for it.”
Sarah shrugged.
“When she ran … did he beat her?”
“Not much. ’Bout much as old Marse Tom whipped you that time.”
That gentle spanking, yes.
“The whipping didn’t matter much. But when he took away her children, I thought she was go’ die right there. She was screaming and crying and carrying on. Then she got sick and I had to take care of her.” Sarah was silent for a moment. “I didn’t want to even be close to her. When Marse Tom sold my babies, I just wanted to lay down and die. Seeing her like she was brought all that back.”
Carrie came in then, her face wet with tears. She came up to me without surprise, and hugged me.
“You know?” I asked.
She nodded, then made her sign for white people and pushed me toward the door. I went.
I found Rufus at his desk in the library fondling a hand gun.
He looked up and saw me just as I was about to withdraw. It had occurred to me suddenly, certainly, that this was where he had been heading when he called me. What had his call been, then? A subconscious desire for me to stop him from shooting himself?
“Come in, Dana.” His voice sounded empty and dead.
I pulled my old Windsor chair up to his desk and sat down. “How could you do it, Rufe?”
He didn’t answer.
“Your son and your daughter … How could you sell them?”
“I didn’t.”
That stopped me. I had been prepared for almost any other answer—or no answer. But a denial … “But … but …”
“She ran away.”
“I know.”
“We were getting along. You know. You were here. It was good. Once, when you were gone, she came to my room. She came on her own.”
“Rufe …?”
“Everything was all right. I even went on with Joe’s lessons. Me! I told her I would free both of them.”
“She didn’t believe you. You wouldn’t put anything into writing.”
“I would have.”
I shrugged. “Where are the children, Rufe?”
“In Baltimore with my mother’s sister.”
“But … why?”
“To punish her, scare her. To make her see what could happen if she didn’t … if she tried to leave me.”
“Oh God! But you could have at least brought them back when she got sick.”
“I wish I had.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
I turned away from him in disgust. “You killed her. Just as though you had put that gun to her head and fired.”
He looked at the gun, put it down quickly.
“What are you going to do now?”
“Nigel’s gone to get a coffin. A decent one, not just a homemade box. And he’ll hire a minister to come out tomorrow.”
“I mean what are you going to do for your son and your daughter?”
He looked at me helplessly.
“Two certificates of freedom,” I said. “You owe them that, at least. You’ve deprived them of their mother.”
“Damn you, Dana! Stop saying that! Stop saying I killed her.”
I just looked at him.
“Why did you leave me! If you hadn’t gone, she might not have run away!”
I rubbed my face where he had hit me when I begged him not to sell Sam.
“You didn’t have to go!”
“You were turning into something I didn’t want to stay near.”
Silence.
“Two certificates of freedom, Rufe, all legal. Raise them free. That’s the least you can do.”
4
There was an outdoor funeral the next day. Everyone attended—field hands, house servants, even the indifferent Evan Fowler.
The minister was a tall coal-black deep-voiced freedman with a face that reminded me of a picture I had of my father who had died before I was old enough to know him. The minister was literate. He held a Bible in his huge hands and read from Job and Ecclesiastes until I could hardly stand to listen. I had shrugged off my aunt and uncle’s strict Baptist teachings years before. But even now, especially now, the bitter melancholy words of Job could still reach me. “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not …”
I kept quiet somehow, wiped away silent tears, beat away flies and mosquitoes, heard the whispers.
“She gone to hell! Don’t you know folks kills theyself goes to hell!”
“Shut your mouth! Marse Rufe’ll make you think you down there with her!”
Silence.
They buried her.
There was a big dinner afterward. My relatives at home had dinners after funerals too. I had never thought about how far back the custom might go.
I ate a little, then went away to the library where I could be alone, where I would write. Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn’t say them, couldn’t sort out my feelings about them, couldn’t keep them bottled up inside me. It was a kind of writing I always destroyed afterward. It was for no one else. Not even Kevin.
Rufus came in later when I was nearly written out. He came to the desk, sat down in my old Windsor—I was in his chair—and put his head down. We didn’t say anything, but we sat together for a while.
The next day, he took me to town with him, took me to the old brick Court House, and let me watch while he had certificates of freedom drawn up for his children.
“If I bring them back,” he said on the ride home, “will you take care of them?”
I shook my head. “It wouldn’t be good for them, Rufe. This isn’t my home. They’d get used to me, then I’d be gone.”
“Who, then?”
“Carrie. Sarah will help her.”
He nodded listlessly.
Early one morning a few days later, he left for Easton Point where he could catch a steamboat to Baltimore. I offered to go with him to help with the children, but all that got me was a look of suspicion—a look I couldn’t help understanding.
“Rufe, I don’t have to go to Baltimore to escape from you. I really want to help.”
“Just stay here,” he said. And he went out to talk to Evan Fowler before he left. He knew how I had gone home last. He had asked me, and I had told him.
“But why?” he had demanded. “You could have killed yourself.”
“There’re worse things than being dead,” I had said.
He had turned and walked away from me.
Now he watched more than he had before. He couldn’t watch me all the time, of course, and unless he wanted to keep me chained, he couldn’t prevent me from taking one route or another out of his world if that was what I wanted to do. He couldn’t control me. That clearly bothered him.
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 without 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 managed to smile at Rufus—a real smile. I didn’t want him feeling embarrassed 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 wondered 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 innocent. 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.”
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 nightmares, 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 something—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 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 subjects 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 hurrying 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.”
“If you had, you’d be dead yourself by now.”
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? 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 cooking 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 loneliness. I found my thoughts going back to the time I had gone home without 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.