“Tess?” I called once more, willing her to answer. She knew my voice, surely. Why wouldn’t she look up? Why wouldn’t she speak? Why wouldn’t she even move? It was as though I didn’t exist for her, as though I wasn’t real.
I stepped toward her. I think I would have gone to her, taken the rope from her neck or gotten shot trying. But at that moment, Rufus reached me. He grabbed me, hustled me into the house, into the library.
“Stay here!” he ordered. “Just stay …” He stopped, suddenly stumbled against me, clutching at me now, not to hold me where I was, but to keep himself upright. “Damn!”
“How could you do it!” I hissed as he straightened. “Tess … those others …”
“They’re my property!”
I stared at him in disbelief. “Oh my God …!”
He passed a hand over his face, turned away. “Look, this sale is something my father arranged before he died. You can’t do anything about it, so just stay out of the way!”
“Or what? You going to sell me too? You might as well!”
He went back outside without answering. After a while, I sat down in Tom Weylin’s worn arm chair and put my head down on his desk.
8
Carrie covered for me with Margaret Weylin. She wanted me to know that when she caught me heading back upstairs. Actually, I don’t know why I was heading upstairs, except that I didn’t want to see Rufus again for a while, and there was nowhere else to go.
Carrie stopped me on the stairs, looked at me critically, then took my arm and led me back down and out to her cabin. I didn’t know or care what she had in mind, but I did understand when she told me through gestures that she had told Margaret Weylin I was sick. Then she circled her neck with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands and looked at me.
“I saw,” I said. “Tess and two others.” I drew a ragged breath. “I thought that was over on this plantation. I thought it died with Tom Weylin.”
Carrie shrugged.
“I wish I had left Rufus lying in the mud,” I said. “To think I saved him so he could do something like this …!”
Carrie caught my wrist and shook her head vigorously.
“What do you mean, no? He’s no good. He’s all grown up now, and part of the system. He could feel for us a little when his father was running things—when he wasn’t entirely free himself. But now, he’s in charge. And I guess he had to do something right away, to prove it.”
Carrie clasped her hands around her neck again. Then she drew closer to me and clasped them around my neck. Finally, she went over to the crib that her youngest child had recently outgrown and there, symbolically, clasped her hands again, leaving enough of an open circle for a small neck.
She straightened and looked at me.
“Everybody?” I asked.
She nodded, gestured widely with her arms as though gathering a group around her. Then, once again, her hands around her neck.
I nodded. She was almost surely right. Margaret Weylin could not run the plantation. Both the land and the people would be sold. And if Tom Weylin was any example, the people would be sold without regard for family ties.
Carrie stood looking down at the crib as though she had read my thought.
“I was beginning to feel like a traitor,” I said. “Guilty for saving him. Now … I don’t know what to feel. Somehow, I always seem to forgive him for what he does to me. I can’t hate him the way I should until I see him doing things to other people.” I shook my head. “I guess I can see why there are those here who think I’m more white than black.”
Carrie made quick waving-aside gestures, her expression annoyed. She came over to me and wiped one side of my face with her fingers—wiped hard. I drew back, and she held her fingers in front of me, showed me both sides. But for once, I didn’t understand.
Frustrated, she took me by the hand and led me out to where Nigel was chopping firewood. There, before him, she repeated the face-rubbing gesture, and he nodded.
“She means it doesn’t come off, Dana,” he said quietly. “The black. She means the devil with people who say you’re anything but what you are.”
I hugged her and got away from her quickly so that she wouldn’t see that I was close to tears. I went up to Margaret Weylin and she’d just had her laudanum. Being with her at such times was like being alone. And being alone was just what I needed.
9
I avoided Rufus for three days after the sale. He made it easy for me. He avoided me too. Then on the fourth day he came looking for me. He found me in his mother’s room yes-ma’aming her and changing her bed while she sat looking thin and frail beside the window. She barely ate. I had actually caught myself coaxing her to eat. Then I realized that she enjoyed being coaxed. She could forget to be superior sometimes, and just be someone’s old mother. Rufus’s mother. Unfortunately.
He came in and said, “Let Carrie finish that, Dana. I have something else for you to do.”
“Oh, do you have to take her now?” said Margaret. “She was just …”
“I’ll send her back later, Mama. And Carrie’ll be up to finish your bed in a minute.”
I left the room silently, not looking forward to whatever he had in mind.
“Down to the library,” he said right behind me.
I glanced back at him, trying to gauge his mood, but he only looked tired. He ate well and got twice the rest he should have needed, but he always looked tired.
“Wait a minute,” he said.
I stopped.
“Did you bring another of those pens with the ink inside?”
“Yes.”
“Get it.”
I went up to the attic where I still kept most of my things. I’d brought a packet of three pens this time, but I only took one back down with me—in case he still took as much pleasure as he had last trip in wasting ink.
“You ever hear of dengue fever?” he asked as he went down the stairs.
“No.”
“Well, according to the doc in town, that’s what I had. I told him about it.” He had been going back and forth to town often since his father’s death. “Doc said he didn’t see how I’d made it without bleeding and a good emetic. Says I’m still weak because I didn’t get all the poisons out of my body.”
“Put yourself in his hands,” I said quietly. “And with a little luck, that will solve both our problems.”
He frowned uncertainly. “What do you mean by that?”
“Not a thing.”
He turned and caught me by the shoulders in a grip that he probably meant to be painful. It wasn’t. “Are you trying to say you want me to die?”
I sighed. “If I did, you would, wouldn’t you?”
Silence. He let go of me and we went into the library. He sat down in his father’s old arm chair and motioned me into a hard Windsor chair nearby. Which was one step up from his father who had always made me stand before him like a school kid sent to the principal’s office.
“If you think that little sale was bad—and Daddy really had already arranged it—you better make sure nothing happens to me.” Rufus leaned back and looked at me wearily. “Do you know what would happen to the people here if I died?”
I nodded. “What bothers me,” I said, “is what’s going to happen to them if you live.”
“You don’t think I’m going to do anything to them, do you?”
“Of course you are. And I’ll have to watch and remember and decide when you’ve gone too far. Believe me, I’m not looking forward to the job.”
“You take a lot on yourself.”
“None of it was my idea.”
He muttered something inaudible, and probably obscene. “You ought to be in the fields,” he added. “God knows why I didn’t leave you out there. You would have learned a few things.”
“I would have been killed. You would have had to start taking very good care of yourself.” I shrugged. “I don’t think you have the knack.”
“Damnit, Dana … What’s the good of sitting here trading threats? I don’t believe you want to hurt me any more than I want to hurt you.”
I said nothing.
“I brought you down here to write a few letters for me, not fight with me.”
“Letters?”
He nodded. “I’ll tell you, I hate to write. Don’t mind reading so much, but I hate to write.”
“You didn’t hate it six years ago.”
“I didn’t have to do it then. I didn’t have eight or nine people all wanting answers, and wanting them now.”
I twisted the pen in my hands. “You’ll never know how hard I worked in my own time to avoid doing jobs like this.”
He grinned suddenly. “Yes I do. Kevin told me. He told me about the books you wrote too. Your own books.”
“That’s how he and I earn our living.”
“Yeah. Well, I thought you might miss it—writing your own things, I mean. So I got enough paper for you to write for both of us.”
I looked at him, not quite sure I’d heard right. I had read that paper in this time was expensive, and I had seen that Weylin had never had very much of it. But here was Rufus offering … Offering what? A bribe? Another apology?
“What’s the matter?” he said. “Seems to me, this is better than any offer I’ve made you so far.”
“No doubt.”
He got paper, made room for me at the desk.
“Rufe, are you going to sell anyone else?”
He hesitated. “I hope not. I don’t like it.”
“What’s to hope? Why can’t you just not do it?”
Another hesitation. “Daddy left debts, Dana. He was the most careful man I know with money, but he still left debts.”
“But won’t your crops pay them?”
“Some of them.”
“Oh. What are you going to do?”
“Get somebody who makes her living by writing to write some very persuasive letters.”
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.”
11
The time passed slowly, uneventfully, as I waited for the birth of the child I hoped would be Hagar. I went on helping Rufus and his mother. I kept a journal in shorthand. (“What the devil are these chicken marks?” Rufus asked me when he looked over my shoulder one day.) It was such a relief to be able to say what I felt, even in writing, without worrying that I might get myself or someone else into trouble. One of my secretarial classes had finally come in handy.
I tried husking corn and blistered my slow clumsy hands while experienced field hands sped through the work effortlessly, enjoying themselves. There was no reason for me to join them, but they seemed to be making a party of the husking—Rufus gave them a little whiskey to help them along—and I needed a party, needed anything that would relieve my boredom, take my mind off myself.
It was a party, all right. A wild rough kind of party that nobody modified because “the master’s women”—Alice and I—were there. People working near me around the small mountain of corn laughed at my blisters and told me I was being initiated. A jug went around and I tasted it, choked, and drew more laughter. Surprisingly companionable laughter. A man with huge muscles told me it was too bad I was already spoken for, and that earned me hostile looks from three women. After the work, there were great quantities of food—chicken, pork, vegetables, corn bread, fruit—better food than the herring and corn meal field hands usually saw so much of. Rufus came out to play hero for providing such a good meal, and the people gave him the praise he wanted. Then they made gross jokes about him behind his back. Strangely, they seemed to like him, hold him in contempt, and fear him all at the same time. This confused me because I felt just about the same mixture of emotions for him myself. I had thought my feelings were complicated because he and I had such a strange relationship. But then, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationships. Only the overseer drew simple, unconflicting emotions of hatred and fear when he appeared briefly. But then, it was part of the overseer’s job to be hated and feared while the master kept his hands clean.