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brought him back tonight.
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I found a music station and turned the radio up loud to drown out my thinking.
The time passed and I did more unpacking, stopping often, taking too many aspirins. I began to bring some order to my own office. Once I sat down at my typewriter and tried to write about what had happened, made about six attempts before I gave up and threw them all away. Someday when this was over, if it was ever over, maybe I would be able to write about it.
I called my favorite cousin in Pasadena—my father’s sister’s daughter
—and had her buy groceries for me. I told her I was sick and Kevin wasn’t around. Something about my tone must have reached her. She didn’t ask any questions.
I was still afraid to leave the house, walking or driving. Driving, I could easily kill myself, and the car could kill other people if Rufus called me from it at the wrong time. Walking, I could get dizzy and fall while crossing the street. Or I could fall on the sidewalk and attract atten- tion. Someone could come to help me—a cop, anyone. Then I could be guilty of taking someone else back with me and stranding them.
My cousin was a good friend. She took one look at me and recom- mended a doctor she knew. She also advised me to send the police after Kevin. She assumed that my bruises were his work. But when I swore her to silence, I knew she would be silent. She and I had grown up keeping each other’s secrets.
“I never thought you’d be fool enough to let a man beat you,” she said as she left. She was disappointed in me, I think.
“I never thought I would either,” I whispered when she was gone.
I waited inside the house with my denim bag always nearby. The days passed slowly, and sometimes I thought I was waiting for something that just wasn’t going to happen. But I went on waiting.
I read books about slavery, fiction and nonfiction. I read everything I had in the house that was even distantly related to the subject—even
Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin’s World War II books—a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in
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only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred.
The books depressed me, scared me, made me stuff Kevin’s sleeping pills into my bag. Like the Nazis, ante bellum whites had known quite a bit about torture—quite a bit more than I ever wanted to learn.
3
I had been at home for eight days when the dizziness finally came again. I didn’t know whether to curse it for my own sake or welcome it for Kevin’s—not that it mattered what I did.
I went to Rufus’s time fully clothed, carrying my denim bag, wearing my knife. I arrived on my knees because of the dizziness, but I was immediately alert and wary.
I was in the woods either late in the day or early in the morning. The sun was low in the sky and surrounded as I was by trees, I had no refer- ence point to tell me whether it was rising or setting. I could see a stream not far from me, running between tall trees. Off to my opposite side was a woman, black, young—just a girl, really—with her dress torn down the front. She was holding it together as she watched a black man and a white man fighting.
The white man’s red hair told me who he must be. His face was already too much of a mess to tell me. He was losing his fight—had already lost it. The man he was fighting was his size with the same slen- der build, but in spite of the black man’s slenderness, he looked wiry and strong. He had probably been conditioned by years of hard work. He didn’t seem much affected when Rufus hit him, but he was killing Rufus.
Then it occurred to me that he might really be doing just that—killing the only person who might be able to help me find Kevin. Killing my ancestor. What had happened here seemed obvious. The girl, her torn dress. If everything was as it seemed, Rufus had earned his beating and more. Maybe he had grown up to be even worse than I had feared. But no matter what he was, I needed him alive—for Kevin’s sake and for my own.
I saw him fall, get up, and be knocked down again. This time, he got
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up more slowly, but he got up. I had a feeling he’d done a lot of getting up. He wouldn’t be doing much more.
I went closer, and the woman saw me. She called out something I didn’t quite understand, and the man turned his head to look at her. Then he followed her gaze to me. Just then, Rufus hit him on the jaw.
Surprisingly, the black man stumbled backward, almost fell. But Rufus was too tired and hurt to follow up his advantage. The black man hit him one more solid blow, and Rufus collapsed. There was no question of his getting up this time. He was out cold.
As I approached, the black man reached down and caught Rufus by the hair as though to hit him again. I stepped up to the man quickly. “What will they do to you if you kill him?” I said.
The man twisted around to glare at me.
“What will they do to the woman if you kill him?” I asked.
That seemed to reach him. He released Rufus and stood straight to face me. “Who’s going to say I did anything to him?” His voice was low and threatening, and I began to wonder whether I might wind up joining Rufus unconscious on the ground.
I made myself shrug. “You’ll say yourself what you did if they ask you right. So will the woman.”
“What are you going to say?”
“Not a word if I can help it. But … I’m asking you not to kill him.” “You belong to him?”
“No. It’s just that he might know where my husband is. And I might be able to get him to tell me.”
“Your husband …?” He looked me over from head to foot. “Why you go ’round dressed like a man?”
I said nothing. I was so tired of answering that question that I wished I had risked going out to buy a long dress. I looked down at Rufus’s bloody face and said, “If you leave him here now, it will be a long while before he can send anyone after you. You’ll have time to get away.”
“You think you’d want him alive if you was her?” He gestured toward the woman.
“Is she your wife?” “Yeah.”
He was like Sarah, holding himself back, not killing in spite of anger I could only imagine. A lifetime of conditioning could be overcome, but not easily. I looked at the woman. “Do you want your husband to kill this
man?”
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She shook her head and I saw that her face was swollen on one side. “’While ago, I could have killed him myself,” she said. “Now … Isaac, let’s just get away!”
“Get away and leave
“She talks like that ’cause she comes from a long way off,” said the girl.
I looked at her in surprise. Tall and slender and dark, she was. A little like me. Maybe a lot like me.
“You’re Dana, aren’t you?” she asked. “Yes … how did you know?”
“He told me about you.” She nudged Rufus with her foot. “He used to talk about you all the time. And I saw you once, when I was little.”
I nodded. “You’re Alice, then. I thought so.”
She nodded and rubbed her swollen face. “I’m Alice.” And she looked at the black man with pride. “Alice Jackson now.”
I tried to see her again as the thin, frightened child I remembered—the child I had seen only two months before. It was impossible. But I should have been used to the impossible by now—just as I should have been used to white men preying on black women. I had Weylin as my exam- ple, after all. But somehow, I had hoped for better from Rufus. I won- dered whether the girl was pregnant with Hagar already.
“My name was Greenwood when you saw me last,” Alice continued. “I married
