mind that. As long as you recognize me as the one who pulled you out of the river …”
“Did you? I thought you must have been the one.”
THE FIRE 23
I stopped, confused. “I thought you remembered.”
“I remember seeing you. It was like I stopped drowning for a while and saw you, and then started to drown again. After that Mama was there, and Daddy.”
“And Daddy’s gun,” I said bitterly. “Your father almost shot me.”
“He thought you were a man too—and that you were trying to hurt Mama and me. Mama says she was telling him not to shoot you, and then you were gone.”
“Yes.” I had probably vanished before the woman’s eyes. What had she thought of that?
“I asked her where you went,” said Rufus, “and she got mad and said she didn’t know. I asked her again later, and she hit me. And she never hits me.”
I waited, expecting him to ask me the same question, but he said no more. Only his eyes questioned. I hunted through my own thoughts for a way to answer him.
“Where do you think I went, Rufe?”
He sighed, said disappointedly, “You’re not going to tell me either.” “Yes I am—as best I can. But answer me first. Tell me where you think
I went.”
He seemed to have to decide whether to do that or not. “Back to the room,” he said finally. “The room with the books.”
“Is that a guess, or did you see me again?”
“I didn’t see you. Am I right? Did you go back there?”
“Yes. Back home to scare my husband almost as much as I must have scared your parents.”
“But how did you get there? How did you get here?” “Like that.” I snapped my fingers.
“That’s no answer.”
“It’s the only answer I’ve got. I was at home; then suddenly, I was here helping you. I don’t know how it happens—how I move that way—or when it’s going to happen. I can’t control it.”
“Who can?”
“I don’t know. No one.” I didn’t want him to get the idea that he could control it. Especially if it turned out that he really could.
“But … what’s it like? What did Mama see that she won’t tell me about?”
“Probably the same thing my husband saw. He said when I came to
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you, I vanished. Just disappeared. And then reappeared later.”
He thought about that. “Disappeared? You mean like smoke?” Fear crept into his expression. “Like a ghost?”
“Like smoke, maybe. But don’t go getting the idea that I’m a ghost. There are no ghosts.”
“That’s what Daddy says.” “He’s right.”
“But Mama says she saw one once.”
I managed to hold back my opinion of that. His mother, after all … Besides, I was probably her ghost. She had had to find some explanation for my vanishing. I wondered how her more realistic husband had explained it. But that wasn’t important. What I cared about now was keeping the boy calm.
“You needed help,” I told him. “I came to help you. Twice. Does that make me someone to be afraid of?”
“I guess not.” He gave me a long look, then came over to me, reached out hesitantly, and touched me with a sooty hand.
“You see,” I said, “I’m as real as you are.”
He nodded. “I thought you were. All the things you did … you had to be. And Mama said she touched you too.”
“She sure did.” I rubbed my shoulder where the woman had bruised it with her desperate blows. For a moment, the soreness confused me, forced me to recall that for me, the woman’s attack had come only hours ago. Yet the boy was years older. Fact then: Somehow, my travels crossed time as well as distance. Another fact: The boy was the focus of my travels
— perhaps the cause of them. He had seen me in my living room before I was drawn to him; he couldn’t have made that up. But I had seen nothing at all, felt nothing but sickness and disorientation.
“Mama said what you did after you got me out of the water was like the Second Book of Kings,” said the boy.
“The what?”
“Where Elisha breathed into the dead boy’s mouth, and the boy came back to life. Mama said she tried to stop you when she saw you doing that to me because you were just some nigger she had never seen before. Then she remembered Second Kings.”
I sat down on the bed and looked over at him, but I could read noth- ing other than interest and remembered excitement in his eyes. “She said I was what?” I asked.
THE FIRE 25
“Just a strange nigger. She and Daddy both knew they hadn’t seen you before.”
“That was a hell of a thing for her to say right after she saw me save her son’s life.”
Rufus frowned. “Why?” I stared at him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Why are you mad?”
“Your mother always call black people niggers, Rufe?” “Sure, except when she has company. Why not?”
His air of innocent questioning confused me. Either he really didn’t know what he was saying, or he had a career waiting in Hollywood. Whichever it was, he wasn’t going to go on saying it to me.
“I’m a black woman, Rufe. If you have to call me something other than my name, that’s it.”
“But …”
“Look, I helped you. I put the fire out, didn’t I?” “Yeah.”
“All right then, you do me the courtesy of calling me what I want to be called.”
He just stared at me.
“Now,” I spoke more gently, “tell me, did you see me again when the draperies started to burn? I mean, did you see me the way you did when you were drowning?”
It took him a moment to shift gears. Then he said, “I didn’t see any- thing but fire.” He sat down in the old ladder-back chair near the fireplace and looked at me. “I didn’t see you until you got here. But I was so scared … it was kind of like when I was drowning … but not like any- thing else I can remember. I thought the house would burn down and it would be my fault. I thought I would die.”
I nodded. “You probably wouldn’t have died because you would have been able to get out in time. But if your parents are asleep here, the fire might have reached them before they woke up.”
The boy stared into the fireplace. “I burned the stable once,” he said. “I wanted Daddy to give me Nero—a horse I liked. But he sold him to Reverend Wyndham just because Reverend Wyndham offered a lot of money. Daddy already has a lot of money. Anyway, I got mad and burned down the stable.”
I shook my head wonderingly. The boy already knew more about
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revenge than I did. What kind of man was he going to grow up into? “Why did you set this fire?” I asked. “To get even with your father for something else?”
“For hitting me. See?” He turned and pulled up his shirt so that I could see the crisscross of long red welts. And I could see old marks, ugly scars of at least one much worse beating.
“For Godsake …!”
“He said I took money from his desk, and I said I didn’t.” Rufus shrugged. “He said I was calling him a liar, and he hit me.”
“Several times.”
“All I took was a dollar.” He put his shirt down and faced me.
I didn’t know what to say to that. The boy would be lucky to stay out of prison when he grew up—if he grew up. He went on.
“I started thinking that if I burned the house, he would lose all his money. He ought to lose it. It’s all he ever thinks about.” Rufus shud- dered. “But then I remembered the stable, and the whip he hit me with after I set that fire. Mama said if she hadn’t stopped him, he would have killed me. I was afraid this time he would kill me, so I wanted to put the fire out. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to do.”
So he had called me. I was certain now. The boy drew me to him some- how when he got himself into more trouble than he could handle. How he did it, I didn’t know. He apparently didn’t even know he was doing it. If he had, and if he had been able to call me voluntarily, I might have found myself standing between father and son during one of Rufus’s beatings. What would have happened then, I couldn’t imagine. One meeting with Rufus’s father had been enough for me. Not that the boy sounded like that much of a bargain either. But, “Did you say he used a whip on you, Rufe?”
“Yeah. The kind he whips niggers and horses with.”
That stopped me for a moment. “The kind he whips … who?” He looked at me warily. “I wasn’t talking about you.”
I brushed that aside. “Say blacks anyway.
