petulantly.
“I needed three. No one has been beating you.”
He looked away from me, put the one into his mouth. He still had to chew tablets before he could swallow them. “This tastes worse than the others,” he complained.
I ignored him, put the bottle away in the desk. “Dana?”
“What?”
“I know you tried to help Daddy. I know.”
“Then why did you send me to the field? Why did I have to go through all that, Rufe?”
He shrugged, winced, rubbed his shoulders. He still had plenty of sore muscles, apparently. “I guess I just had to make somebody pay. And it seemed that … well, people don’t die when you’re taking care of them.”
“I’m not a miracle worker.”
“No. Daddy thought you were, though. He didn’t like you, but he
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thought you could heal better than a doctor.”
“Well I can’t. Sometimes I’m less likely to kill than the doctor, that’s all.”
“Kill?”
“I don’t bleed or purge away people’s strength when they need it most. And I know enough to try to keep a wound clean.”
“Is that all?”
“That’s enough to save a few lives around here, but no, it’s not all. I
know a little about some diseases. Only a little.”
“What do you know about … about a woman who’s been hurt in child- bearing?”
“Been hurt how?” I wondered whether he meant Alice.
“I don’t know. The doctor said she wasn’t to have any more and she did. The babies died and she almost died. She hasn’t been well since.”
Now I knew who he was talking about. “Your mother?” “Yes. She’s coming home. I want you to take care of her.”
“My God! Rufe, I don’t know anything about problems like that! Believe me, nothing at all.” What if the woman died in my care. He’d have me beaten to death!
“She wants to come home, now that … She wants to come home.”
“I can’t care for her. I don’t know how.” I hesitated. “Your mother doesn’t like me anyway, Rufe. You know that as well as I do.” She hated me. She’d make my life hell out of pure spite.
“There’s no one else I’d trust,” he said. “Carrie’s got her own family now. I’d have to take her out of her cabin away from Nigel and the boys …”
“Why?”
“Mama has to have someone with her through the night. What if she needed something?”
“You mean I’d have to sleep in her room?”
“Yes. She’d never have a servant sleep in her room before. Now, though, she’s gotten used to it.”
“She won’t get used to me. I’m telling you, she won’t have me.” Please heaven!
“I think she will. She’s older now, not so full of fire. You give her her laudanum when she needs it and she won’t give you much trouble.”
“Laudanum?”
“Her medicine. She doesn’t need it so much for pain anymore, Aunt
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May says. But she still needs it.”
Since laudanum was an opium extract, I didn’t doubt that she still needed it. I was going to have a drug addict on my hands. A drug addict who hated me. “Rufe, couldn’t Alice …”
“No!” A very sharp no. It occurred to me that Margaret Weylin had more reason to hate Alice than she did to hate me.
“Alice will be having another baby in a few months anyway,” said
Rufus.
“She will? Then maybe …” I shut my mouth, but the thought went on. Maybe this one would be Hagar. Maybe for once, I had something to gain by staying here. If only …
“Maybe what?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. Rufe, I’m asking you not to put your mother in my care, for her sake and for mine.”
He rubbed his forehead. “I’ll think about it, Dana, and talk to her. Maybe she remembers someone she’d like. Let me sleep now. I’m still so damn weak.”
I started out of the room. “Dana.”
“Yes?” What now?
“Go read a book or something. Don’t do any more work today.” “Read a book?”
“Do whatever you want to.”
In other words, he was sorry. He was always sorry. He would have been amazed, uncomprehending if I refused to forgive him. I remem- bered suddenly the way he used to talk to his mother. If he couldn’t get what he wanted from her gently, he stopped being gentle. Why not? She always forgave him.
7
Margaret Weylin wanted me. She was thin and pale and weak and older than her years. Her beauty had gone to a kind of fragile gaunt- ness. As I was reintroduced to her, she sipped at her little bottle of dark brownish-red liquid and smiled beneficently.
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Nigel carried her up to her room. She could walk a little, but she could- n’t manage the stairs. Sometime later, she wanted to see Nigel’s children. She was sugary sweet with them. I couldn’t remember her being that way with anyone but Rufus before. Slave children hadn’t interested her unless her husband had fathered them. Then her interest had been negative. But she gave Nigel’s sons candy and they loved her.
She asked to see another slave—one I didn’t know—and then wept a little when she heard that one had been sold. She was full of sweetness and charity. It scared me a little. I couldn’t quite believe she’d changed that much.
“Dana, can you still read the way you used to?” she asked me. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I wanted you because I remembered how well you read.”
I kept my expression neutral. If she didn’t remember what she had thought of my reading, I did.
“Read the Bible to me,” she said.
“Now?” She had just had her breakfast. I hadn’t had anything yet, and
I was hungry.
“Now, yes. Read the Sermon on the Mount.”
That was the beginning of my first full day with her. When she was tired of hearing me read, she thought of other things for me to do. Her laundry, for instance. She wouldn’t trust anyone else to do it. I wondered whether she had already found out that Alice generally did the laundry. And there was cleaning. She didn’t believe her room had been swept and dusted until she saw me do it. She didn’t believe Sarah understood how she wanted dinner prepared until I went down, got Sarah, and brought her back with me to receive instructions. She had to talk to Carrie and Nigel about the cleaning. She had to inspect the boy and girl who served at the table. In short, she had to prove that she was running her own house again. It had gone along without her for years, but she was back now.
She decided to teach me to sew. I had an old Singer at home and I could sew well enough with it to take care of my needs and Kevin’s. But I thought sewing by hand, especially sewing for “pleasure” was slow tor- ture. Margaret Weylin never asked me whether I wanted to learn though. She had time to fill, and it was my job to help her fill it. So I spent long tedious hours trying to imitate her tiny, straight, even stitches, and she spent minutes ripping out my work and lecturing me none too gently on how bad it was.
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As the days passed, I learned to take longer than necessary when she sent me on errands. I learned to tell lies to get away from her when I thought I was about to explode. I learned to listen silently while she talked and talked and talked … mostly about how much better things were in Baltimore than here. I never learned to like sleeping on the floor of her room, but she wouldn’t permit the trundle bed to be brought in. She honestly didn’t see that it was any hardship for me to sleep on the floor. Niggers always slept on the floor.
Troublesome as she was, though, Margaret Weylin had mellowed. She didn’t have the old bursts of temper any more. Maybe it was the laudanum.
“You’re a good girl,” she said to me once as I sat near her bed stitch- ing at a slip cover. “Much better than you used to be. Someone must have taught you to behave.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I didn’t even look up.
“Good. You were impudent before. There’s nothing worse than an impudent nigger.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She depressed me, bored me, angered me, drove me crazy. But my back healed completely while I was with her. The
