then,” he admitted. “But they started way back at the fire—as soon as I realized you could help me or not, just as you chose. I had those nightmares for years. Then when Alice had been here awhile, they went away. Now they’ve come back.”
He stopped, looked at me as though he expected me to say some- thing—to reassure him, perhaps, to promise him that I would never do such a thing. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to say the words.
“You see?” he said quietly.
I moved uncomfortably in my chair. “Rufe, do you know how many people live to ripe old ages without ever getting into the kind of trouble that causes you to need me? If you don’t trust me, then you have more reason than ever to be careful.”
“Tell me I can trust you.”
More discomfort. “You keep doing things that make it impossible for me to trust you—even though you know it has to work both ways.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I never know how to treat you. You confuse everybody. You sound too white to the field hands—like some kind of traitor, I guess.”
“I know what they think.”
“Daddy always thought you were dangerous because you knew too many white ways, but you were black. Too black, he said. The kind of black who watches and thinks and makes trouble. I told that to Alice and she laughed. She said sometimes Daddy showed more sense than I did. She said he was right about you, and that I’d find out some day.”
I jumped. Had Alice really said such a thing?
“And my mother,” continued Rufus calmly, “says if she closes her eyes while you and her are talking, she can forget you’re black without even trying.”
“I’m black,” I said. “And when you sell a black man away from his
256
KINDRED
family just because he talked to me, you can’t expect me to have any good feelings toward you.”
He looked away. We hadn’t really discussed Sam before. We had talked around him, alluded to him without quite mentioning him.
“He wanted you,” said Rufus bluntly.
I stared at him, knowing now why we hadn’t spoken of Sam. It was too dangerous. It could lead to speaking of other things. We needed safe sub- jects now, Rufus and I—the price of corn, supplies for the slaves, that sort of thing.
“Sam didn’t do anything,” I said. “You sold him for what you thought he was thinking.”
“He wanted you,” Rufus repeated.
“Don’t leave, Dana.”
I stopped. I didn’t want to hurry away—run away—from him. I didn’t want to give him any indication that I was going to the attic to reopen the tender new scar tissue at my wrists. I sat down again. And he leaned back in his chair and looked at me until I wished I had taken the chance of hur- rying away.
“What am I going to do when you go home this time?” he whispered. “You’ll survive.”
“I wonder … why I should bother.”
“For your children, at least,” I said. “Her children. They’re all you have left of her.”
He closed his eyes, rubbed one hand over them. “They should be your children now,” he said. “If you had any feelings for them, you’d stay.”
For them? “You know I can’t.”
“You could if you wanted to. I wouldn’t hurt you, and you wouldn’t have to hurt yourself … again.”
“You wouldn’t hurt me until something frustrated you, made you angry or jealous. You wouldn’t hurt me until someone hurt you. Rufe, I know you. I couldn’t stay here even if I didn’t have a home to go back to—and someone waiting for me there.”
“That Kevin!” “Yes.”
“I wish I had shot him.”
“If you had, you’d be dead yourself by now.”
THE ROPE 257
He turned his body so that he faced me squarely. “You say that as though it means something.”
I got up to leave. There was nothing more to be said. He had asked for what he knew I could not give, and I had refused.
“You know, Dana,” he said softly, “when you sent Alice to me that first time, and I saw how much she hated me, I thought, I’ll fall asleep beside her and she’ll kill me. She’ll hit me with a candlestick. She’ll set fire to the bed. She’ll bring a knife up from the cookhouse …
“I thought all that, but I wasn’t afraid. Because if she killed me, that would be that. Nothing else would matter. But if I lived, I would have her. And, by God, I had to have her.”
He stood up and came over to me. I stepped back, but he caught my arms anyway. “You’re so much like her, I can hardly stand it,” he said.
“Let go of me, Rufe!”
“You were one woman,” he said. “You and her. One woman. Two halves of a whole.”
I had to get away from him. “Let me go, or I’ll make your dream real!” Abandonment. The one weapon Alice hadn’t had. Rufus didn’t seem to be afraid of dying. Now, in his grief, he seemed almost to want death. But he was afraid of dying alone, afraid of being deserted by the person he had depended on for so long.
He stood holding my arms, perhaps trying to decide what he should do. After a moment, I felt his grip loosen, and I pulled away. I knew I had to go now before he submerged his fear. He could do it. He could talk himself into anything.
I left the library, went up the main stairs, then the attic stairs. Over to my bag, my knife …
Footsteps on the stairs. The knife!
I opened it, hesitated, then slipped the knife, blade still open, back into my bag.
He opened the door, came in, looked around the big hot empty room. He saw me at once, but still, he looked around—to see whether we were alone?
We were.
He came over and sat next to me on my pallet. “I’m sorry, Dana,” he said.
Sorry? For what he had nearly done, or for what he was about to do?
258
KINDRED
Sorry. He had apologized to me many times in many ways before, but his apologies had always been oblique, “Eat with me, Dana. Sarah is cook- ing up something special.” Or, “Here, Dana, here’s a new book I bought for you in town.” Or, “Here’s some cloth, Dana. Maybe you can make yourself something from it.”
Things. Gifts given when he knew he had hurt or offended me. But he had never before said, “I’m sorry, Dana.” I looked at him uncertainly.
“I’ve never felt so lonesome in my life,” he said.
The words touched me as no others could have. I knew about loneli- ness. I found my thoughts going back to the time I had gone home with- out Kevin—the loneliness, the fear, sometimes the hopelessness I had felt then. Hopelessness wouldn’t be a sometime thing to Rufus, though. Alice was dead and buried. He had only his children left. But at least one of them had also loved Alice. Joe.
“Where’d my mama go?” he demanded on his first day home. “Away,” Rufus had said. “She went away.”
“When is she coming back?” “I don’t know.”
The boy came to me. “Aunt Dana, where’d my mama go?” “Honey … she died.”
“Died?”
“Yes. Like old Aunt Mary.” Who at last had drifted the final distance to her reward. She had lived over eighty years—had come over from Africa, people said. Nigel had made a box and Mary had been laid to rest near where Alice lay now.
“But Mama wasn’t old.” “No, she was sick, Joe.” “Daddy said she went away.” “Well … to heaven.”
“No!”
He had cried and I had tried to comfort him. I remembered the pain of my own mother’s death—grief, loneliness, uncertainty in my aunt and uncle’s house …
I had held the boy and told him he still had his daddy—please God. And that Sarah and Carrie and Nigel loved him. They wouldn’t let any- thing happen to him—as though they had the power to protect him, or even themselves.
I let Joe go to his mother’s cabin to be alone for a while. He wanted
THE ROPE 259
