sick.”
“I wish I had.” “Why didn’t you?” “I don’t know.”
I turned away from him in disgust. “You killed her. Just as though you had put that gun to her head and fired.”
He looked at the gun, put it down quickly. “What are you going to do now?”
“Nigel’s gone to get a coffin. A decent one, not just a homemade box. And he’ll hire a minister to come out tomorrow.”
“I mean what are you going to do for your son and your daughter?” He looked at me helplessly.
“Two certificates of freedom,” I said. “You owe them that, at least. You’ve deprived them of their mother.”
“Damn you, Dana! Stop saying that! Stop saying I killed her.” I just looked at him.
“Why did you leave me! If you hadn’t gone, she might not have run away!”
I rubbed my face where he had hit me when I begged him not to sell
Sam.
“You didn’t have to go!”
“You were turning into something I didn’t want to stay near.” Silence.
“Two certificates of freedom, Rufe, all legal. Raise them free. That’s the least you can do.”
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4
There was an outdoor funeral the next day. Everyone attended—field hands, house servants, even the indifferent Evan Fowler.
The minister was a tall coal-black deep-voiced freedman with a face that reminded me of a picture I had of my father who had died before I was old enough to know him. The minister was literate. He held a Bible in his huge hands and read from Job and Ecclesiastes until I could hardly stand to listen. I had shrugged off my aunt and uncle’s strict Baptist teachings years before. But even now, especially now, the bitter melan- choly words of Job could still reach me. “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not …”
I kept quiet somehow, wiped away silent tears, beat away flies and mosquitoes, heard the whispers.
“She gone to hell! Don’t you know folks kills theyself goes to hell!” “Shut your mouth! Marse Rufe’ll make you think you down there with
her!” Silence.
They buried her.
There was a big dinner afterward. My relatives at home had dinners after funerals too. I had never thought about how far back the custom might go.
I ate a little, then went away to the library where I could be alone, where I would write. Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn’t say them, couldn’t sort out my feelings about them, couldn’t keep them bot- tled up inside me. It was a kind of writing I always destroyed afterward. It was for no one else. Not even Kevin.
Rufus came in later when I was nearly written out. He came to the desk, sat down in my old Windsor—I was in his chair—and put his head down. We didn’t say anything, but we sat together for a while.
The next day, he took me to town with him, took me to the old brick Court House, and let me watch while he had certificates of freedom drawn up for his children.
“If I bring them back,” he said on the ride home, “will you take care
of them?”
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I shook my head. “It wouldn’t be good for them, Rufe. This isn’t my home. They’d get used to me, then I’d be gone.”
“Who, then?”
“Carrie. Sarah will help her.” He nodded listlessly.
Early one morning a few days later, he left for Easton Point where he could catch a steamboat to Baltimore. I offered to go with him to help with the children, but all that got me was a look of suspicion—a look I couldn’t help understanding.
“Rufe, I don’t have to go to Baltimore to escape from you. I really want to help.”
“Just stay here,” he said. And he went out to talk to Evan Fowler before he left. He knew how I had gone home last. He had asked me, and I had told him.
“But why?” he had demanded. “You could have killed yourself.” “There’re worse things than being dead,” I had said.
He had turned and walked away from me.
Now he watched more than he had before. He couldn’t watch me all the time, of course, and unless he wanted to keep me chained, he couldn’t prevent me from taking one route or another out of his world if that was what I wanted to do. He couldn’t control me. That clearly both- ered him.
Evan Fowler was in the house more than he had to be while Rufus was gone. He said little to me, gave me no orders. But he was there. I took refuge in Margaret Weylin’s room, and she was so pleased she talked endlessly. I found myself laughing and actually holding conversations with her as though we were just a couple of lonely people talking with- out the extra burden of stupid barriers.
Rufus came back, came to the house carrying the dark little girl and leading the boy who seemed to look even more like him. Joe saw me in the hall and ran to me.
“Aunt Dana, Aunt Dana!” And a hug later, “I can read better now. Daddy’s been teaching me. Wanna hear?”
“Sure I do.” I looked up at Rufus.
He glared at me tight-lipped as though daring me to speak. All I had wanted to say, though, was, “What took you so long?” The boy had spent his short life calling his father “Master.” Well, now that he no longer had a mother, I supposed Rufus thought it was time he had a father. I man-
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aged to smile at Rufus—a real smile. I didn’t want him feeling embar- rassed or defensive for finally acknowledging his son.
He smiled back, seemed to relax.
“How about my getting classes going again?”
He nodded. “I guess the others haven’t had time to forget much.” They hadn’t. As it turned out, I had only been away for three months.
The children had had a kind of early summer vacation. Now they went back to school. And I, slowly, delicately, went to work on Rufus, began to push him toward freeing a few more of them, perhaps several more of them—perhaps in his will, all of them. I had heard of slaveholders doing such things. The Civil War was still thirty years away. I might be able to get some of the adult slaves freed while they were still young enough to build new lives. I might be able to do some good for everyone, finally. At least, I felt secure enough to try, now that my own freedom was within reach.
Rufus had been keeping me with him more than he needed me now. He called me to share his meals openly, and he seemed to listen when I talked to him about freeing the slaves. But he made no promises. I won- dered whether he thought making a will was foolish at his age—or maybe it was freeing more slaves that he thought was foolish. He didn’t say anything, so I couldn’t tell.
Finally, though, he did answer me, told me much more than I wanted to know. None of it should have surprised me at all.
“Dana,” he said one afternoon in the library, “I’d have to be crazy to make a will freeing these people and then tell you about it. I could die damn young for that kind of craziness.”
I had to look at him to see whether he was serious. But looking at him confused me even more. He was smiling, but I got the feeling he was completely serious. He believed I would kill him to free his slaves. Strangely, the idea had not occurred to me. My suggestion had been inno- cent. But he might have a point. Eventually, it would have occurred to me.
“I used to have nightmares about you,” he said. “They started when I
was little—right after I set fire to the draperies. Remember the fire?” “Of course.”
“I’d dream about you and wake up in a cold sweat.” “Dream … about me killing you?”
“Not exactly.” He paused, gave me a long unreadable look. “I’d dream about you leaving me.”
THE ROPE 255
I frowned. That was close to the thing Kevin had heard him say—the thing that had awakened Kevin’s suspicions. “I leave,” I said carefully. “I have to. I don’t belong here.”
“Yes you do! As far as I’m concerned, you do. But that’s not what I mean. You leave, and sooner or later you come back. But in my night- mares, you leave without helping me. You walk away and leave me in trouble, hurting, maybe dying.”
“Oh. Are you sure those dreams started when you were little? They sound more like something you would have come up with after your fight with Isaac.”
“They got worse
