6
I sponged Rufus off as best I could and bandaged his ribs with pieces of cloth that Nigel brought me. The ribs were very tender on the left side. Rufus said the bandage made breathing a little less painful, though, and I was glad of that. But he was still sick. His fever was still with him. And the doctor didn't come. Rufus had fits of coughing now and then, and that seemed to be agonizing to him because of his ribs. Sarah came in to see him—and to hug me—and she was more alarmed at the marks of his beating than at his ribs or his fever. His face was black and blue and deformed-looking with its lumpy swellings.
"He will fight," she said angrily. Rufus opened his puffy slits of eyes and looked at her, but she went on anyway. "I've seen him pick a fight just out of meanness," she said. "He's out to get himself killed!"
She could have been his mother, caught between anger and concern and not knowing which to express. She took away the basin Nigel had brought me and returned it full of clean cool water.
"Where's his mother?" I asked her softly as she was leaving.
She drew back from me a little. "Gone."
"Dead?"
"Not yet." She glanced at Rufus to see whether he was listening. His face was turned away from us. "Gone to Baltimore," she whispered. "I'll tell you 'bout it tomorrow."
I let her go without questioning her further. It was enough to know that I would not be suddenly attacked. For once, there would be no Margaret to protect Rufus from me.
He was thrashing about weakly when I went back to him. He cursed the pain, cursed me, then remembered himself enough to say he didn't mean it. He was burning up.
"Rufe?"
He moved his head from side to side and did not seem to hear me. I dug into my denim bag and found the plastic bottle of aspirin—a big bottle nearly full. There was enough to share.
"Rufe!"
He squinted at me.
"Listen, I have medicine from my own time." I poured him a glass of water from the pitcher beside his bed, and shook out two aspirin tablets. "These could lower your fever," I said. "They might ease your pain too. Will you take them?"
"What are they?"
"They're called aspirin. In my time, people use them against headache, fever, other kinds of pain."
He looked at the two tablets in my hand, then at me. "Give them to me."
He had trouble swallowing them and had to chew them up a little.
"My Lord," he muttered. "Anything tastes that bad must be good for you."
I laughed and wet a cloth in the basin to bathe his face. Nigel came in with a blanket and told me the doctor was held up at a difficult childbirth. I was to stay the night with Rufus.
I didn't mind. Rufus was in no condition to take an interest in me. I would have thought it would be more natural, though, for Nigel to stay. I asked him about it.
"Marse Tom knows about you," said Nigel softly. "Marse Rufe and Mister Kevin both told him. He figures you know enough to do some doctoring. More than doctoring, maybe. He saw you go home."
"I know."
"I saw it too."
I looked up at him—he was a head taller than me now—and saw nothing but curiosity in his eyes. If my vanishing had frightened him, the fear was long dead. I was glad of that. I wanted his friendship.
"Marse Tom says you s'pose to take care of him and you better do a good job. Aunt Sarah says you call her if you need help."
"Thanks. Thank her for me."
He nodded, smiled a little. "Good thing for me you showed up. I want to be with Carrie now. It's so close to her time."
I grinned. "Your baby, Nigel? I thought it might be."
"Better be mine. She's my wife."
"Congratulations."
"Marse Rufe paid a free preacher from town to come and say the same words they say for white folks and free niggers. Didn't have to jump no broomstick."
I nodded, remembering what I'd read about the slaves' marriage ceremonies. They jumped broomsticks, sometimes backward, sometimes forward, depending on local custom; or they stood before their master and were pronounced husband and wife; or they followed any number of other practices even to hiring a minister and having things done as Nigel had. None of it made any difference legally, though. No slave marriage was legally binding. Even Alice's marriage to Isaac was merely an informal agreement since Isaac was a slave, or had been a slave. I hoped now that he was a free man well on his way to Pennsylvania.
"Dana?"
I looked up at Nigel. He had whispered my name so softly I had hardly heard him.
"Dana, was it white men?"
Startled, I put a finger to my lips, cautioning, and waved him away. "Tomorrow," I promised.
But he wasn't as co-operative as I had been with Sarah. "Was it Isaac?"
I nodded, hoping he would be satisfied and let the subject drop.
"Did he get away?"
Another nod.
He left me, looking relieved.
I stayed up with Rufus until he managed to fall asleep. The aspirins did seem to help. Then I wrapped myself in the blanket, pulled the room's two chairs together in front of the fireplace, and settled in as comfortably as I could. It wasn't bad.
The doctor arrived late the next morning to find Rufus's fever gone. The rest of his body was still bruised and sore, and his ribs still kept him breathing shallowly and struggling not to cough, but even with that, he was much less miserable. I had gotten him a breakfast tray from Sarah, and he had invited me to share the large meal she had prepared. I ate hot biscuits with butter and peach preserve, drank some of his coffee, and had a little cold ham. It was good and filling. He had the eggs, the rest of the ham, the corn cakes. There was too much of everything, and he didn't feel like eating very much. Instead, he sat back and watched me with amusement.
"Daddy'd do some cussin' if he came in here and found us eating together," he said.
I put down my biscuit and reined in whatever part of my mind I'd left in 1976. He was right.
"What are you doing then? Trying to make trouble?"
"No. He won't bother us. Eat."
"The last time someone told me he wouldn't bother me, he walked in and beat the skin off my back."
"Yeah. I know about that. But I'm not Nigel. If I tell you to do something, and he doesn't like it, he'll come to me about it. He won't whip you for following my orders. He's a fair man."
I looked at him, startled.
"I said fair," he repeated. "Not likable."
I kept quiet. His father wasn't the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn't a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper. But I had seen no particular fairness in him. He did as he pleased. If you told him he wasn't being fair, he would whip you for talking back. At least the Tom Weylin I had known would have. Maybe he had mellowed.
"Stay," said Rufus. "No matter what you think of him, I won't let him hurt you. And it's good to eat with someone I can talk to for a change."
That was nice. I began to eat again, wondering why he was in such a good mood this morning. He had come a long way from his anger the night before—from threatening not to tell me where Kevin was.
"You know," said Rufus thoughtfully, "you still look mighty young. You pulled me out of that river thirteen or fourteen years ago, but you look like you would have been just a kid back then."
Uh-oh. "Kevin didn't explain that part, I guess."
"Explain what?"
I shook my head. "Just … let me tell you how it's been for me. I can't tell you why things are happening as they are, but I can tell you the order of their happening." I hesitated, gathering my thoughts. "When I came to you at the river, it was June ninth, nineteen seventy-six for me. When I got home, it was still the same day. Kevin told me I had only been gone a few seconds."
"Seconds …?"
"Wait. Let me tell it all to you at once. Then you can have all the time you need to digest it and ask questions. Later, on that same day, I came to you again. You were three or four years older and busy trying to set the house afire. When I went home, Kevin told me only a few minutes had passed. The next morning, June tenth, I came to you because you'd fallen out of a tree…. Kevin and I came to you. I was here nearly two months. But when I went home, I found that I had lost only a few minutes or hours of June tenth."
"You mean after two months, you …"
"I arrived home on the same day I had left. Don't ask me how. I don't know. After eight days at home, I came back here." I faced him silently for a moment. "And, Rufe, now that I'm here, now that you're safe, I want to find my husband."
He absorbed this slowly, frowning as though he was translating it from another language. Then he waved vaguely toward his desk—a new larger desk than he had had on my last visit. The old one had been nothing more than a little table. This one had a roll-top and plenty of drawer space both above and below the work surface.
"His letters are in the middle drawer there. You can have them if you want them. They have his addresses … But Dana, you're saying while I've been growing up, somehow, time has been almost standing still for you."
I was at the desk hunting through the cluttered drawer for the letters. "It hasn't stood still," I said. "I'm sure my last two visits here have aged me quite a bit, no matter what my calendar at home says." I found the letters. Three of them—short notes on large pieces of paper that had been folded, sealed with sealing wax, and mailed without an envelope. "Here's my Philadelphia address," Kevin said in one. "If I can get a decent job, I'll be here for a while." That was all, except for the address. Kevin wrote books, but he'd never cared much for writing letters. At home he tried to catch me in a good mood and get me to take care of his correspondence for him.
"I'll be an old man," said Rufus, "and you'll still come to me looking just like you do now."
I shook my head. "Rufe, if you don't start being more careful, you'll never live to be an old man. Now that you're grown up, I might not be able to help you much. The kind of trouble you get into as a man might be as overwhelming to me as it is to you."
"Yes. But this time thing …"
I shrugged.
"Damnit, there must be something mighty crazy about both of us, Dana. I never heard of anything like this happening to anybody else."
"Neither have I." I looked at the other two letters. One from New York, and one from Boston. In the Boston one, he was talking about going to Maine. I wondered what was driving him farther and farther north. He had been interested in the West, but Maine …?
"I'll write to him," said Rufus. "I'll tell him you're here. He'll come running back."
"I'll write him, Rufe."
"I'll have to mail the letter."
"All right."
"I just hope he hasn't already taken off for Maine."
Weylin opened the door before I could answer. He brought in another man who turned out to be the doctor, and my leisure time was over. I put Kevin's letters back into Rufus's desk—that seemed the best place to keep them—took away the breakfast tray, brought the doctor the empty basin he asked for, stood by while the doctor asked Weylin whether I had any sense or not and whether I could be trusted to answer simple questions accurately.
Weylin said yes twice without looking at me, and the doctor asked his questions. Was I sure Rufus had had a fever? How did I know? Had he been delirious? Did I know what delirious meant? Smart nigger, wasn't I?
I hated the man. He was short and slight, black-haired and black-eyed, pompous, condescending, and almost as ignorant medically as I was. He guessed he wouldn't bleed Rufus since the fever seemed to be gone—bleed him! He guessed a couple of ribs were broken, yes. He rebandaged them sloppily. He guessed I could go now; he had no more use for me.
I escaped to the cookhouse.
"What's the matter with you?" asked Sarah when she saw me.
I shook my head. "Nothing important. Just a stupid little man who may be one step up from spells and good luck charms."
"What?"
"Don't pay any attention to me, Sarah. Do you have anything for me to do out here? I'd like to stay out of the house for a while."
"Always something to do out here. You have anything to eat?"
I nodded.
She lifted her head and gave me one of her down-the-nose looks. "Well, I put enough on his tray. Here. Knead this dough."
She gave me a bowl of bread dough that had risen and was ready to be kneaded down. "He all right?" she asked.
"He's healing."
"Was Isaac all right?"
I glanced at her. "Yes."
"Nigel said he didn't think Marse Rufe told what happened."
"He didn't. I managed to talk him out of it."
She laid a hand on my shoulder for a moment. "I hope you stay around for a while, girl. Even his daddy can't talk him out of much these days."
"Well, I'm glad I was able to. But look, you promised to tell me about his mother."
"Not much to tell. She had two more babies—twins. Sickly little things. They lingered awhile, then died one after the other. She almost died too. She went kind of crazy. The birth had left her pretty bad off anyhow—sick, hurt inside. She fought with Marse Tom, got so she'd scream at him every time she saw him—cussin' and goin' on. She was hurtin' most of the time, couldn't get out of bed. Finally, her sister came and got her, took her to Baltimore."
"And she's still there?"
"Still there, still sick. Still crazy, for all I know. I just hope she stays there. That overseer, Jake Edwards, he's a cousin of hers, and he's all the mean low white trash we need around here."
Jake Edwards was the overseer then. Weylin had begun hiring overseers. I wondered why. But before I could ask, two house servants came in and Sarah deliberately turned her back to me, ending the conversation. I began to understand what had happened later, though, when I asked Nigel where Luke was.
"Sold," said Nigel quietly. And he wouldn't say anything more. Rufus told me the rest.
"You shouldn't have asked Nigel about that," he told me when I mentioned the incident.
"I wouldn't have, if I'd known." Rufus was still in bed. The doctor had given him a purgative and left. Rufus had poured the purgative into his chamber pot and ordered me to tell his father he'd taken it. He had had his father send me back to him so that I could write my letter to Kevin. "Luke did his work," I said. "How could your father sell him?"
"He worked all right. And the hands would work hard for him—mostly without the cowhide. But sometimes he didn't show much sense." Rufus stopped, began a deep breath, caught himself and grimaced in pain. "You're like Luke in some ways," he continued. "So you'd better show some sense yourself, Dana. You're on your own this time."
"But what did he do wrong? What am I doing wrong?"
"Luke … he would just go ahead and do what he wanted to no matter what Daddy said. Daddy always said he thought he was white. One day maybe two years after you left, Daddy got tired of it. New Orleans trader came through and Daddy said it would be better to sell Luke than to whip him until he ran away."
I closed my eyes remembering the big man, hearing again his advice to Nigel on how to defy the whites. It had caught up with him. "Do you think the trader took him all the way to New Orleans?" I asked.
"Yeah. He was getting a load together to ship them down there."
I shook my head. "Poor Luke. Are there cane fields in Louisiana now?"
"Cane, cotton, rice, they grow plenty down there."
"My father's parents worked in the cane fields there before they went to California. Luke could be a relative of mine."
"Just make sure you don't wind up like him."
"I haven't done anything."
"Don't go teaching nobody else to read."
"Oh."
"Yes, oh. I might not be able to stop Daddy if he decided to sell you."
"Sell me! He doesn't own me. Not even by the law here. He doesn't have any papers saying he owns me."
"Dana, don't talk stupid!"
"But …"
"In town, once, I heard a man brag how he and his friends had caught a free black, tore up his papers, and sold him to a trader."
I said nothing. He was right, of course. I had no rights—not even any papers to be torn up.
"Just be careful," he said quietly.
I nodded. I thought I could escape from Maryland if I had to. I didn't think it would be easy, but I thought I could do it. On the other hand, I didn't see how even someone much wiser than I was in the ways of the time could escape from Louisiana, surrounded as they would be by water and slave states. I would have to be careful, all right, and be ready to run if I seemed to be in any danger of being sold.
"I'm surprised Nigel is still here," I said. Then I realized that might not be a very bright thing to say even to Rufus. I would have to learn to keep more of my thoughts to myself.
"Oh, Nigel ran away," said Rufus. "Patrollers brought him back, though, hungry and sick. They had whipped him, and Daddy whipped him some more. Then Aunt Sarah doctored him and I talked Daddy into letting me keep him. I think my job was harder. I don't think Daddy relaxed until Nigel married Carrie. Man marries, has children, he's more likely to stay where he is."
"You sound like a slaveholder already."
He shrugged.
"Would you have sold Luke?"
"No! I liked him."
"Would you sell anyone?"
He hesitated. "I don't know. I don't think so."
"I hope not," I said watching him. "You don't have to do that kind of thing. Not all slaveholders do it."
I took my denim bag from where I had hidden it under his bed, and sat down at his desk to write the letter, using one of his large sheets of paper with my pen. I didn't want to bother dipping the quill and steel pen on his desk into ink.
"Dear Kevin, I'm back. And I want to go North too …"
"Let me see your pen when you're finished," said Rufus.
"All right."
I went on writing, feeling myself strangely near tears. It was as though I was really talking to Kevin. I began to believe I would see him again.
"Let me see the other things you brought with you," said Rufus.
I swung the bag onto his bed. "You can look," I said, and continued writing. Not until I was finished with the letter did I look up to see what he was doing.
He was reading my book.
"Here's the pen," I said casually, and I waited to grab the book the moment he put it down. But instead of putting it down, he ignored the pen and looked up at me.
"This is the biggest lot of abolitionist trash I ever saw."
"No it isn't," I said. "That book wasn't even written until a century after slavery was abolished."
"Then why the hell are they still complaining about it?"
I pulled the book down so that I could see the page he had been reading. A photograph of Sojourner Truth stared back at me solemn-eyed. Beneath the picture was part of the text of one of her speeches.
"You're reading history, Rufe. Turn a few pages and you'll find a white man named J. D. B. DeBow claiming that slavery is good because, among other things, it gives poor whites someone to look down on. That's history. It happened whether it offends you or not. Quite a bit of it offends me, but there's nothing I can do about it." And there was other history that he must not read. Too much of it hadn't happened yet. Sojourner Truth, for instance, was still a slave. If someone bought her from her New York owners and brought her South before the Northern laws could free her, she might spend the rest of her life picking cotton. And there were two important slave children right here in Maryland. The older one, living here in Talbot County, would be called Frederick Douglass after a name change or two. The second, growing up a few miles south in Dorchester County was Harriet Ross, eventually to be Harriet Tubman. Someday, she was going to cost Eastern Shore plantation owners a huge amount of money by guiding three hundred of their runaway slaves to freedom. And farther down in Southampton, Virginia, a man named Nat Turner was biding his time. There were more. I had said I couldn't do anything to change history. Yet, if history could be changed, this book in the hands of a white man—even a sympathetic white man—might be the thing to change it.
"History like this could send you down to join Luke," said Rufus. "Didn't I tell you to be careful!"
"I wouldn't have let anyone else see it." I took it from his hand, spoke more softly. "Or are you telling me I shouldn't trust you either?"
He looked startled. "Hell, Dana, we have to trust each other. You said that yourself. But what if my daddy went through that bag of yours. He could if he wanted to. You couldn't stop him."
I said nothing.
"You've never had a whipping like he'd give you if he found that book. Some of that reading … He'd take you to be another Denmark Vesey. You know who Vesey was?"
"Yes." A freedman who had plotted to free others violently.
"You know what they did to him?"
"Yes."
"Then put that book in the fire."
I held the book for a moment, then opened it to the map of Maryland. I tore the map out.
"Let me see," said Rufus.
I handed him the map. He looked at it and turned it over. Since there was nothing on the back but a map of Virginia, he handed it back to me. "That will be easier to hide," he said. "But you know if a white man sees it, he'll figure you mean to use it to escape."
"I'll take my chances."
He shook his head in disgust.
I tore the book into several pieces and threw it onto the hot coals in his fireplace. The fire flared up and swallowed the dry paper, and I found my thoughts shifting to Nazi book burnings. Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of "wrong" ideas.
"Seal your letter," said Rufus. "There's wax and a candle on the desk there. I'll send the letter as soon as I can get to town."
I obeyed inexpertly, dripping hot wax on my fingers.
"Dana …?"
I glanced at him, caught him watching me with unexpected intensity. "Yes?"
His eyes seemed to slide away from mine. "That map is still bothering me. Listen, if you want me to get that letter to town soon, you put the map in the fire too."
I turned to face him, dismayed. More blackmail. I had thought that was over between us. I had hoped it was over; I needed so much to trust him. I didn't dare stay with him if I couldn't trust him.
"I wish you hadn't said that, Rufe," I told him quietly. I went over to him, fighting down anger and disappointment and began putting the things that he had scattered back into my bag.
"Wait a minute." He caught my hand. "You get so damned cold when you're mad. Wait!"
"For what?"
"Tell me what you're mad about."
What, indeed? Could I make him see why I thought his blackmail was worse than my own? It was. He threatened to keep me from my husband if I did not submit to his whim and destroy a paper that might help me get free. I acted out of desperation. He acted out of whimsy or anger. Or so it seemed.
"Rufe, there are things we just can't bargain on. This is one of them."
"You're going to tell me what we can't bargain on?" He sounded more surprised than indignant.
"You're damn right I am." I spoke very softly. "I won't bargain away my husband or my freedom!"
"You don't have either to bargain."
"Neither do you."
He stared at me with at least as much confusion as anger, and that was encouraging. He could have let his temper flare, could have driven me from the plantation very quickly. "Look," he said through his teeth, "I'm trying to help you!"
"Are you?"
"What do you think I'm doing? Listen, I know Kevin tried to help you. He made things easier for you by keeping you with him. But he couldn't really protect you. He didn't know how. He couldn't even protect himself. Daddy almost had to shoot him when you disappeared. He was fighting and cursing … at first Daddy didn't even know why. I'm the one who helped Kevin get back on the place."
"You?"
"I talked Daddy into seeing him again—and it wasn't easy. I may not be able to talk him into anything for you if he sees that map."
"I see."
He waited, watching me. I wanted to ask him what he would do with my letter if I didn't burn the map. I wanted to ask, but I didn't want to hear an answer that might send me out to face another patrol or earn another whipping. I wanted to do things the easy way if I could. I wanted to stay here and let a letter go to Boston and bring Kevin back to me.
So I told myself the map was more a symbol than a necessity anyway. If I had to go, I knew how to follow the North Star at night. I had made a point of learning. And by day, I knew how to keep the rising sun to my right and the setting sun to my left.
I took the map from Rufus's desk and dropped it into the fireplace. It darkened, then burst into flame.
"I can manage without it, you know," I said quietly.
"No need for you to," said Rufus. "You'll be all right here. You're home."