She didn’t move, stood glaring at him until the older woman, probably her mother, reached her and pulled her away.
I caught Rufus by the hand and spoke low to him. “Please, Rufe. If you do this, you’ll destroy what you mean to preserve. Please don’t …”
He hit me.
It was a first, and so unexpected that I stumbled backward and fell. And it was a mistake. It was the breaking of an unspoken agreement
between us—a very basic agreement—and he knew it.
I got up slowly, watching him with anger and betrayal.
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“Get in the house and stay there,” he said.
I turned my back and went to the cookhouse, deliberately disobeying. I could hear one of the traders say, “You ought to sell that one too. Trou- blemaker!”
At the cookhouse, I heated water, got it warm, not hot. Then I took a basin of it up to the attic. It was hot there, and empty except for the pal- lets and my bag in its corner. I went over to it, washed my knife in anti- septic, and hooked the drawstring of my bag over my shoulder.
And in the warm water I cut my wrists.
The Rope
1
I awoke in darkness and lay still for several seconds trying to think where I was and when I had gone to sleep.
I was lying on something unbelievably soft and comfortable … My bed. Home. Kevin?
I could hear regular breathing beside me now. I sat up and reached out to turn on the lamp—or I tried to. Sitting up made me faint and dizzy. For a moment, I thought Rufus was pulling me back to him before I could even see home. Then I became aware that my wrists were bandaged and throbbing—and I remembered what I had done.
The lamp on Kevin’s side of the bed went on and I could see him beardless now, but with his thatch of gray hair uncut.
I lay flat and looked up at him happily. “You’re beautiful,” I said. “You look a little like a heroic portrait I saw once of Andrew Jackson.”
“No way,” he said. “Man was skinny as hell. I’ve seen him.” “But you haven’t seen my heroic portrait.”
“Why the hell did you cut your wrists? You could have bled to death! Or did you cut them yourself ?”
“Yes. It got me home.” “There must be a safer way.”
I rubbed my wrists gingerly. “There isn’t any safe way to almost kill yourself. I was afraid of the sleeping pills. I took them with me because I wanted to be able to die if … if I wanted to die. But I was afraid that if
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I used them to get home, I might die before you or some doctor figured out what was wrong with me. Or that if I didn’t die, I’d have some grisly side-effect—like gangrene.”
“I see,” he said after a while. “Did you bandage me?”
“Me? No, I thought this was too serious for me to handle alone. I stopped the bleeding as best I could and called Lou George. He bandaged you.” Louis George was a doctor friend Kevin had met through his writ- ing. Kevin had interviewed George for an article once, and the two had taken a liking to each other. They wound up doing a nonfiction book together.
“Lou said you managed to miss the main arteries in both arms,” Kevin told me. “Said you didn’t do much more than scratch yourself.”
“With all that blood!”
“It wasn’t that much. You were probably too frightened to cut as deeply as you could have.”
I sighed. “Well … I guess I’m glad I didn’t do much damage—as long as I got home.”
“How would you feel about seeing a psychiatrist?” “Seeing a … Are you kidding?”
“I am, but Lou wasn’t. He says if you’re doing things like this, you need help.”
“Oh God. Do I have to? The lies I’d have to invent!”
“No, this time you probably won’t have to. Lou is a friend. You do it again, though, and … well, you could be locked up for psychiatric treat- ment whether you like it or not. The law tries to protect people like you from themselves.”
I found myself laughing, almost crying. I put my head on his shoulder and wondered whether a little time in some sort of mental institution would be worse than several months of slavery. I doubted it.
“How long was I gone this time?” I asked. “About three hours. How long was it for you?” “Eight months.”
“Eight …” He put his arm over me, holding me. “No wonder you cut your wrists.”
“Hagar has been born.”
“Has she?” There was silence for a moment, then, “What’s that going to mean?”
242
KINDRED
I twisted uncomfortably and, by accident, put pressure on one of my wrists. The sudden pain made me gasp.
“Be careful,” he said. “Treat yourself gently for a change.” “Where’s my bag?”
“Here.” He pulled the blanket aside and let me see that I was securely tied to my denim bag. “What are you going to do, Dana?”
“I don’t know.” “What’s he like now?”
He. Rufus. He had become such a fixture in my life that it wasn’t even necessary to say his name. “His father died,” I said. “He’s running things now.”
“Well?”
“I don’t know. How do you do well at owning and trading in slaves?” “Not well,” Kevin decided. He got up and went to the kitchen, came back with a glass of water. “Did you want anything to eat? I can get you
something.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“What did he do to you, finally, to make you cut your wrists?” “Nothing to me. Nothing important. He sold a man away from his fam-
ily when there was no need for him to. He hit me when I objected. Maybe he’ll never be as hard as his father was, but he’s a man of his time.”
“Then … it doesn’t seem to me that you have such a difficult decision ahead of you.”
“But I do. I talked to Carrie about it once, and she said …” “Carrie?” He looked at me strangely.
“Yes. She said … Oh. She gets her meaning across, Kevin. Weren’t you around the place long enough to find that out?”
“She never tried to get much across to me. I used to wonder whether she was a little retarded.”
“God, no! Far from it. If you had gotten to know her, you wouldn’t even suspect.”
He managed to shrug. “Well, anyway, what did she tell you?”
“That if I had let Rufus die, everyone would have been sold. More families would have been separated. She has three children now.”
He was silent for several seconds. Then, “She might be sold with her children if they’re young. But I doubt that anyone would bother to keep her and her husband together. Someone would buy her and breed her to a new man. It is breeding, you know.”
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“Yes. So you see, my decision isn’t as easy as you thought.” “But … they’re being sold anyway.”
“Not all of them. Good Lord, Kevin, their lives are hard enough.” “What about your life?”
“It’s better than anything most of them will ever know.” “It may not be as he gets older.”
I sat up, trying to ignore my own weakness. “Kevin, tell me what you want me to do.”
He looked away, said nothing. I gave him several seconds, but he kept silent.
“It’s real now, isn’t it,” I said softly. “We talked about it before—God knows how long ago—but somehow, it was abstract then. Now … Kevin, if you can’t even say it, how can you expect me to do it?”
2
We had fifteen full days together this time. I marked them off on the calendar— June 19, through July 3. With some kind of reverse symbol- ism, Rufus called me back on July 4. But at least Kevin and I had a chance to grow back into the twentieth century. We didn’t seem to have to grow back into each other. The separations hadn’t been good for us, but they hadn’t hurt us that much either. It was easy for us to be together, knowing we shared experiences no one else would believe. It wasn’t as easy, though, for us to be with
