“I have never seen him and I hate him.”
“Go,” Anyanwu told her.
Luisa hurried across the grass. She moved well for her age. Like Anyanwu’s children, she had lived a long, healthy life. Cholera, malaria, yellow fever, typhus, and other diseases swept across the land and left Anyanwu’s people almost untouched. If they caught a disease, they survived it and recovered quickly. If they hurt themselves, Anyanwu was there to care for them.
As Luisa disappeared into the trees, Doro came out of the house. “I could go after her,” he said. “I know you sent her to warn your field hands.”
Anyanwu turned to face him angrily. “You are many times as old as I am. You must have some inborn defect to keep you from getting wisdom to go with your years.”
“Will you eventually condescend to tell me what wisdom you have gotten?” There was an edge to his voice finally. She was beginning to irritate him and end the seductive phase. That was good. How stupid of him to think she could be seduced again. It was possible, however, that she might seduce him.
“You were pleased to see me again, weren’t you?” she said. “I think you were surprised to realize how pleased you were.”
“Say what you have to say, Anyanwu!”
She shrugged. “Isaac was right.”
Silence. She knew Isaac had spoken to him several times. Isaac had wanted them together so badly?the two people he loved best. Did that mean anything at all to Doro? It had not years before, but now … Doro had been glad to see her. He had marveled over the fact that she seemed unchanged?as though he was only now beginning to realize that she was only slightly more likely to die than he was, and not likely at all to grow decrepit with age. As though her immortality had been emotionally unreal to him until now, a fact that he had accepted with only half his mind.
“Doro, I will go on living unless you kill me. There is no reason for me to die unless you kill me.”
“Do you think you can take over work I’ve spent millennia at?”
“Do you think I want to?” she countered. “I was telling the truth. These people need me, and I need them. I never set out to build a settlement like one of yours. Why should I? I don’t need new bodies as you do. All I need is my own kind around me. My family or people who feel like my family. To you, most of my people here wouldn’t even be good breeding stock, I think.”
“Forty years ago, that old woman would have.”
“Does that make it competition for me to give her a home now?”
“You have others. Your maid …”
“My daughter!”
“I thought so.”
“She is unmarried. Bring her a man. If she likes him, let her marry him and bear interesting children. If she doesn’t like him, then find her someone else. But she needs only one husband, Doro, as my son needs only one wife.”
“Is that what your own way of life tells them? Or shall I believe you sleep alone because your husbands are dead?”
“If my children show any signs of growing as old as I am, they may do as they please.”
“They will anyway.”
“But without you to guide them, Doro. Without you to make them animals. What would my son be in your hands? Another Thomas? You are going everywhere tending ten different settlements, twenty, and not giving enough of yourself to any of them. I am staying here looking after my family and offering to let your children marry mine. And if the offspring are strange and hard to handle, I will handle them. I will take care of them. They need not live alone in the woods and drink too much and neglect their bodies until they are nearly dead.”
To her surprise, he hugged her very much as Luisa had, and he laughed. He took her arm and walked her over to the slave quarters, still laughing. He quieted though as he pushed open a random door and peered into one of the neat, sturdy cabins. There was a large brick fireplace with a bake kettle down amid the nearly dead coals.
Someone’s supper bread. There was a large bed in one corner and a trundle bed beneath. There were a table and four chairs all of which looked homemade, but adequate. There was a cradle that also looked homemade?and much used. There were a wood box and a water bucket with its gourd dipper. There were bunches of herbs and ears of corn hung from the ceiling to dry and cooking utensils over and alongside the fireplace. Overall, the cabin gave the impression of being a plain but comfortable place to live.
“Is it enough?” Anyanwu asked.
“I have several people, black and white, who don’t live this well.”
“I don’t.”
He tried to draw her into the cabin toward the chairs or the bed?she did not know which?but she held back.
“This is someone else’s home,” she said. “We can go back into the house if you like.”
“No. Later, perhaps.” He put an arm around her waist. “You must feed me again and find us another earthen couch to lie on.”
And hear you threaten my children again,she thought.
As though in answer, he said: “And I must tell you why I laughed. It isn’t because your offer doesn’t please me, Anyanwu; it does. But you have no idea what kinds of creatures you are volunteering to care for.”
Didn’t she? Hadn’t she seen them in Wheatley?
