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,
“
“Let go of me! 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
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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 lit- tle 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.”
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“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 igno- rance 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.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked bitterly. “You could have said something, got me out of his room, his bed … Oh Lord, his bed! And he may as well have cut my Isaac’s ears off with his own hand.”
“He never told anyone Isaac beat him.” “Shit!”
“It’s true. He never did because he didn’t want you to get hurt. I know because I was with him until he got back on his feet. I took care of him.”
“If you had any sense, you would have let him die!”
“If I had, it wouldn’t have kept you and Isaac from being caught. It might have gotten you both killed though if anyone guessed what Isaac had done.”
“Doctor-nigger,” she said with contempt. “Think you know so much. Reading-nigger.
I said nothing. She was getting angrier and angrier, shouting at me. I turned away from her sadly, telling myself it was better, safer for her to vent her feelings on me than on anyone else.
Along with her shouting now, I could hear the thin faint cries of a baby.
11
Carrie and Nigel named their thin, wrinkled, brown son, Jude. Nigel did a lot of strutting and happy babbling until Weylin told him to shut up and
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get back to work on the covered passageway he was supposed to be build- ing to connect the house and the cookhouse. A few days after the baby’s birth, though, Weylin called him into the library and gave him a new dress for Carrie, a new blanket, and a new suit of clothes for himself.
“See,” Nigel told me later with some bitterness. “’Cause of Carrie and me, he’s one nigger richer.” But before the Weylins, he was properly grateful.
“Thank you, Marse Tom. Yes, sir. Sure do thank you. Fine clothes, yes, sir …”
Finally he escaped back to the covered passageway.
Meanwhile, in the library, I heard Weylin tell Rufus, “You should have been the one to give him something— instead of wasting all your money on that worthless girl.”
“She’s well!” Rufus answered. “Dana got her well. Why do you say she’s worthless?”
“Because you’re going to have to whip her sick again to get what you want from her!”
Silence.
“Dana should have been enough for you. She’s got some sense.” He paused. “Too much sense for her own good, I’d say, but at least she wouldn’t give you trouble. She’s had that Franklin fellow to teach her a few things.”
Rufus walked away from him without answering. I had to get away from the library door where I had been eavesdropping very quickly as I heard him approach. I ducked into the dining room and came out again just as he was passing by.
“Rufe.”
He gave me a look that said he didn’t want to be bothered, but he stopped anyway.
“I want to write another letter.”
He frowned. “You’ve got to be patient, Dana. It hasn’t been that long.” “It’s been over a month.”
“Well … I don’t know. Kevin could have moved again, could have done anything. I think you should give him a little more time to answer.” “Answer what?” asked Weylin. He’d done what Rufus had pre-
dicted—come up behind us so silently that I hadn’t noticed him.
Rufus glanced at his father sourly. “Letter to Kevin Franklin telling him she’s here.”
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“She wrote a letter?”
KINDRED
“I told her to write it. Why should I do it when she can?”
“Boy, you don’t have the
