“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 dan- gerous 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
132
KINDRED
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 had 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 bot- tle 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.
THE FIGHT 133
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 noth- ing 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 cere- monies. They jumped broomsticks, sometimes backward, sometimes for- ward, 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 infor- mal 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
134
Isaac?”
KINDRED
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 some- thing, and he doesn’t like it, he’ll come to me about it. He won’t whip you for following
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 ordi- nary 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.
