10
I wrote his letters. I had to read several of the letters he'd received first to pick up the stilted formal style of the day. I didn't want Rufus having to face some creditor that I had angered with my twentieth-century brevity—which could come across as nineteenth-century abruptness, even discourtesy. Rufus gave me a general idea of what he wanted me to say and then approved or disapproved of the way I said it. Usually, he approved. Then we started to go over his father's books together. I never did get back to Margaret Weylin.
And I wasn't ever to get back to her full time. Rufus brought a young girl named Beth in from the fields to help with the housework. That eventually freed Carrie to spend more time with Margaret. I continued to sleep in Margaret's room because I agreed with Rufus that Carrie belonged with her family, at least at night. That meant I had to put up with Margaret waking me up when she couldn't sleep and complaining bitterly that Rufus had taken me away just when she and I were beginning to get on so well …
"What does he have you doing?" she asked me several times — suspiciously.
I told her.
"Seems as though he could do that himself. Tom always did it himself."
Rufus could have done it himself too, I thought, though I never said it aloud. He just didn't like working alone. Actually, he didn't like working at all. But if he had to do it, he wanted company. I didn't realize how much he preferred my company in particular until he came in one night a little drunk and found Alice and I eating together in her cabin. He had been away eating with a family in town—"Some people with daughters they want to get rid of," Alice had told me. She had said it with no concern at all even though she knew her life could become much harder if Rufus married. Rufus had property and slaves and was apparently quite eligible.
He came home, and not finding either of us in the house, came out to Alice's cabin. He opened the door and saw us both looking up at him from the table, and he smiled happily.
"Behold the woman," he said. And he looked from one to the other of us. "You really are only one woman. Did you know that?"
He tottered away.
Alice and I looked at each other. I thought she would laugh because she took any opportunity she could find to laugh at him—though not to his face because he would beat her when he decided she needed it.
She didn't laugh. She shuddered, then got up, not too gracefully—her pregnancy was showing now—and looked out the door after him.
After a while, she asked, "Does he ever take you to bed, Dana?"
I jumped. Her bluntness could still startle me. "No. He doesn't want me and I don't want him."
She glanced back at me over one shoulder. "What you think your wants got to do with it?"
I said nothing because I liked her. And no answer I could give could help sounding like criticism of her.
"You know," she said, "you gentle him for me. He hardly hits me at all when you're here. And he never hits you."
"He arranges for other people to hit me."
"But still … I know what he means. He likes me in bed, and you out of bed, and you and I look alike if you can believe what people say."
"We look alike if we can believe our own eyes!"
"I guess so. Anyway, all that means we're two halves of the same woman—at least in his crazy head."