Kindred (22 page)

“Damn!” he said to Rufus. “Kindest thing you could do for her would be to shoot her.”

I think the look Rufus gave him scared him a little. He went away without saying anything else.

I changed Alice’s bandages, always checking for signs of infection, always hoping not to find any. I wondered what the incubation period was for tetanus or—or for rabies. Then I tried to make myself stop wondering. The girl’s body seemed to be healing slowly, but cleanly. I felt superstitious about even thinking about diseases that would surely kill her. Besides, I had enough real worries just keeping her clean and helping her grow up all over again. She called me Mama for a while.

“Mama, it hurts.”

She knew Rufus, though. Mister Rufus. Her friend. He said she crawled into his bed at night.

In one way, that was all right. She was using the pot again. But in another …

“Don’t look at me like that,” said Rufus when he told me. “I wouldn’t bother her. It would be like hurting a baby.”

Later it would be like hurting a woman. I suspected that wouldn’t bother him at all.

As Alice progressed, she became a little more reserved with him. He was still her friend, but she slept in her trundle bed all night. And I ceased to be “Mama.”

One morning when I brought her breakfast, she looked at me and said, “Who are you?”

“I’m Dana,” I said. “Remember?” I always answered her questions.

“No.”

“How do you feel?”

“Kind of stiff and sore.” She put a hand down to her thigh where a dog had literally torn away a mouthful. “My leg hurts.”

I looked at the wound. She would have a big ugly scar there for the rest of her life, but the wound still seemed to be healing all right—no unusual darkening or swelling. It was as though she had just noticed this specific pain in the same way she had just noticed me.

“Where is this?” she asked.

The way she was just really noticing a lot of things. “This is the Weylin house,” I said. “Mister Rufus’s room.”

“Oh.” She seemed to relax, content, no longer curious. I didn’t push her. I had already decided I wouldn’t. I thought she would return to reality when she was strong enough to face it. Tom Weylin, in his loud silence, clearly thought she was hopeless. Rufus never said what he thought. But like me, he didn’t push her.

“I almost don’t want her to remember,” he said once. “She could be like she was before Isaac. Then maybe …” He shrugged.

“She remembers more every day,” I said. “And she asks questions.”

“Don’t answer her!”

“If I don’t, someone else will. She’ll be up and around soon.”

He swallowed. “All this time, it’s been so good …”

“Good?”

“She hasn’t hated me!”

10

Alice continued to heal and to grow. She came down to the cookhouse with me for the first time on the day Carrie had her baby.

Alice had been with us for three weeks. She might have been twelve or thirteen mentally now. That morning, she had told Rufus she wanted to sleep in the attic with me. To my surprise, Rufus had agreed. He hadn’t wanted to, but he had done it. I thought, not for the first time, that if Alice could manage to go on not hating him, there would be very little she couldn’t ask of him. If.

Now, slowly, cautiously, she followed me down the stairs. She was weak and thinner than ever, looking like a child in one of Margaret Weylin’s old dresses. But boredom had driven her from her bed.

“I’ll be glad when I get well,” she muttered as she paused on a step. “I hate to be like this.”

“You’re getting well,” I said. I was a little ahead of her, watching to see that she did not stumble. I had taken her arm at the top of the stairs, but she had tried to pull away.

“I can walk.”

I let her walk.

We got to the cookhouse just as Nigel did, but he was in a bigger hurry. We stood aside and let him rush through the door ahead of us.

“Huh!” said Alice as he went by. “’Scuse me!”

He ignored her. “Aunt Sarah,” he called, “Aunt Sarah, Carrie’s having pains!”

Old Mary had been the midwife of the plantation before her age caught up with her. Now, the Weylins may have expected her to go on doctoring the slaves, but the slaves knew better. They helped each other as best they could. I hadn’t seen Sarah called to help with a birth before, but it was natural that she should be called to this one. She dropped a pan of corn meal and started to follow Nigel out.

“Can I help?” I asked.

She looked at me as though she’d just noticed me. “See to the supper,” she said. “I was going to send somebody in to finish cooking, but you can, can’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She and Nigel hurried away. Nigel had a cabin away from the quarter, not far from the cookhouse. A neat wood-floored brick-chimneyed cabin that he had built for himself and Carrie. He had shown it to me. “Don’t have to sleep on rags up in the attic no more,” he’d said. He’d built a bed and two chairs. Rufus had let him hire his time, work for other whites in the area, until he had money enough to buy the things he couldn’t make. It had been a good investment for Rufus. Not only did he get part of Nigel’s earnings, but he got the assurance that Nigel, his only valuable piece of property, was not likely to run away again soon.

“Can I go see?” Alice asked me.

“No,” I said reluctantly. I wanted to go myself, but Sarah didn’t need either of us getting in her way. “No, you and I have work to do here. Can you peel potatoes?”

“Sure.”

I sat her down at the table and gave her a knife and some potatoes to peel. The scene reminded me of my own first time in the cookhouse when I had sat peeling potatoes until Kevin called me away. Kevin might have my letter by now. He almost surely did. He might already be on his way here.

I shook my head and began cutting up a chicken. No sense tormenting myself.

“Mama used to make me cook,” said Alice. She frowned as though trying to remember. “She said I’d have to be cooking for my husband.” She frowned again, and I almost cut myself trying to watch her. What was she remembering?

“Dana?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t you have a husband? I remember once … something about you having a husband.”

“I do. He’s up North now.”

“He free?”

“Yes.”

“Good to marry a freeman. Mama always said I should.”

Mama was right, I thought. But I said nothing.

“My father was a slave, and they sold him away from her. She said marrying a slave is almost bad as being a slave.” She looked at me. “What’s it like to be a slave?”

I managed not to look surprised. It hadn’t occurred to me that she didn’t realize she was a slave. I wondered how she had explained her presence here to herself.

“Dana?”

I looked at her.

“I said what’s it like to be a slave?”

“I don’t know.” I took a deep breath. “I wonder how Carrie is doing—in all that pain, and not even able to scream.”

“How could you not know what it’s like to be a slave. You are one.”

“I haven’t been one for very long.”

“You were free?”

“Yes.”

“And you let yourself be made a slave? You should run away.”

I glanced at the door. “Be careful how you say things like that. You could get into trouble.” I felt like Sarah, cautioning.

“Well it’s true.”

“Sometimes it’s better to keep the truth to yourself.”

She stared at me with concern. “What will happen to you?”

“Don’t worry about me, Alice. My husband will help me get free.” I went to the door to look out toward Carrie’s cabin. Not that I expected to see anything. I just wanted to distract Alice. She was getting too close, “growing” too fast. Her life would change so much for the worse when she remembered. She would be hurt more, and Rufus would do much of the hurting. And I would have to watch and do nothing.

“Mama said she’d rather be dead than be a slave,” she said.

“Better to stay alive,” I said. “At least while there’s a chance to get free.” I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.

Suddenly, she threw the potato she had been peeling into the fire.

I jumped, looked at her. “Why’d you do that?”

“There’s things you ain’t saying.”

I sighed.

“I’m here too,” she said. “Been here a long time.” She narrowed her eyes. “Am I a slave too?”

I didn’t answer.

“I said am I a slave?”

“Yes.”

She had risen half off the bench, her whole body demanding that I answer her. Now that I had, she sat down again heavily, her back and shoulders rounded, her arms crossed over her stomach hugging herself. “But I’m supposed to be free. I was free. Born free!”

“Yes.”

“Dana, tell me what I don’t remember. Tell me!”

“It will come back to you.”

“No, you tell—”

“Oh, hush, will you!”

She drew back a little in surprise. I had shouted at her. She probably thought I was angry—and I was. But not at her. I wanted to pull her back from the edge of a cliff. It was too late though. She would have to take her fall.

“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” I said wearily. “But believe me, you don’t want to know as much as you think you do.”

“Yes I do!”

I sighed. “All right. What do you want to know?”

She opened her mouth, then frowned and closed it again. Finally, “There’s so much … I want to know everything, but I don’t know where to start. Why am I a slave?”

“You committed a crime.”

“A crime? What’d I do?”

“You helped a slave to escape.” I paused. “Do you realize that in all the time you’ve been here, you never asked me how you were hurt?”

That seemed to touch something in her. She sat blank-faced for several seconds, then frowned and stood up. I watched her carefully. If she was going to have hysterics, I wanted her to have them where she was, out of sight of the Weylins. There were too many things she could say that Tom Weylin in particular would resent.

“They beat me,” she whispered. “I remember. The dogs, the rope … They tied me behind a horse and I had to run, but I couldn’t … Then they beat me … But … but …”

I walked over to her, stood in front of her, but she seemed to look through me. She had that same look of pain and confusion she’d had when Rufus brought her from town.

“Alice?”

She seemed not to hear me. “Isaac?” she whispered. But it was more a soundless moving of her lips than a whisper. Then,

“
Isaac!
” An explosion of sound. She bolted for the door. I let her take about three steps before I grabbed her.

“Let go of me! Isaac!
Isaac!
”

“Alice, stop. You’ll make me hurt you.” She was struggling against me with all her feeble strength.

“They cut him! They cut off his ears!”

I had been hoping she hadn’t seen that. “Alice!” I held her by the shoulders and shook her.

“I’ve got to get away,” she wept. “Find Isaac.”

“Maybe. When you can walk more than ten steps without getting tired.”

She stopped her struggles, stared at me through streaming tears. “Where’d they send him?”

“Mississippi.”

“Oh Jesus …” She collapsed against me, crying. She would have fallen if I hadn’t held her and half-dragged and half-carried her back to the bench. She sat slumped where I put her, crying, praying, cursing. I sat with her for a while, but she didn’t tire, or at least, she didn’t stop. I had to leave her to finish preparing supper. I was afraid I would anger Weylin and get Sarah into trouble if I didn’t. There would be trouble enough in the house now that Alice had her memory back, and somehow, it had become my job to ease troubles—first Rufus’s, now Alice’s—as best I could.

I finished the meal somehow, though my mind wasn’t on it. There was the soup that Sarah had left simmering; fish to fry; ham that had been rock-hard before Sarah soaked it, then boiled it; chicken to fry and corn bread and gravy to make; Alice’s forgotten potatoes to finish; bread to bake in the little brick oven alongside the fireplace; vegetables, including salad; a sugary peach dessert—Weylin raised peaches; a cake that Sarah had already made, thank God; and both coffee and tea. There would be company to help eat it all. There usually was. And they would all eat too much. It was no wonder the main medicines of this era were laxatives.

I got the food ready, almost on time, then had to hunt down the two little boys whose job it was to ferry it from cookhouse to table and then serve it. When I found them, they wasted some time staring at the now silent Alice, then they grumbled because I made them wash. Finally, my washhouse friend Tess, who also worked in the main house, ran out and said, “Marse Tom say get food on the table!”

“Is the table set?”

“Been set! Even though you didn’t say nothin’.”

Oops. “I’m sorry, Tess. Here, help me out.” I thrust a covered dish of soup into her hands. “Carrie is having her baby now and Sarah’s gone to help her. Take that in, would you?”

“And come back for more?”

“Please.”

She hurried away. I had helped her with the washing several times—had done as much of it as I could myself recently because Weylin had casually begun taking her to bed, and had hurt her. Apparently, she paid her debts.

I went out to the well and got the boys just as they were starting a water fight.

“If you two don’t get yourselves into the house with that food …!”

“You sound just like Sarah.”

“No I don’t. You know what she’d be saying. You know what she’d be doing too. Now move! Or I’ll get a switch and really be like her.”

Dinner was served. Somehow. And it was all edible. There may have been more of it if Sarah had been cooking, but it wouldn’t have tasted any better. Sarah had managed to overcome my uncertainty, my ignorance of cooking on an open hearth and teach me quite a bit.

As the meal progressed and the leftovers began to come back, I tried to get Alice to eat. I fixed her a plate but she pushed it away, turned her back to me.

She had sat either staring into space or resting her head on the table for hours. Now, finally, she spoke.