THE FALL

The Fall

1

I think Kevin was as lonely and out of place as I was when I met him, though he was handling it better. But then, he was about to escape.

I was working out of a casual labor agency—we regulars called it a slave market. Actually, it was just the opposite of slavery. The people who ran it couldn’t have cared less whether or not you showed up to do the work they offered. They always had more job hunters than jobs anyway. If you wanted them to think about using you, you went to their office around six in the morning, signed in, and sat down to wait. Waiting with you were winos trying to work themselves into a few more bottles, poor women with children trying to supplement their welfare checks, kids trying to get a first job, older people who’d lost one job too many, and usually a poor crazy old street lady who talked to herself constantly and who wasn’t going to be hired no matter what because she only wore one shoe.

You sat and sat until the dispatcher either sent you out on a job or sent you home. Home meant no money. Put another potato in the oven. Or in desperation, sell some blood at one of the store fronts down the street from the agency. I had only done that once.

Getting sent out meant the minimum wage—minus Uncle Sam’s share—for as many hours as you were needed. You swept floors, stuffed envelopes, took inventory, washed dishes, sorted potato chips (really!), cleaned toilets, marked prices on merchandise … you did whatever you were sent out to do. It was nearly always mindless work, and as far as most employers were concerned, it was done by mindless people. Nonpeople rented for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks. It didn’t matter.

I did the work, I went home, I ate, and then slept for a few hours.

Finally, I got up and wrote. At one or two in the morning, I was fully

awake, fully alive, and busy working on my novel. During the day, I carried a little box of No Doz. I kept awake with them, but not very wide awake. The first thing Kevin ever said to me was, “Why do you go around looking like a zombie all the time?”

He was just one of several regular employees at an auto-parts warehouse where a group of us from the agency were doing an inventory. I was wandering around between shelves of nuts, bolts, hubcaps, chrome, and heaven knew what else checking other people’s work. I had a habit of showing up every day and of being able to count, so the supervisor decided that zombie or not, I should check the others. He was right. People came in after a hard night of drinking and counted five units per clearly-marked, fifty-unit container.

“Zombie?” I repeated, looking up from a tray of short black wires at Kevin.

“You look like you sleepwalk through the day,” he said. “Are you high on something or what?”

He was just a stock helper or some such bottom-of-the-ladder type. He had no authority over me, and I didn’t owe him any explanations.

“I do my work,” I said quietly. I turned back to the wires, counted them, corrected the inventory slip, initialed it, and moved down to the next shelf.

“Buz told me you were a writer,” said the voice that I thought had gone away.

“Look, I can’t count with you talking to me.” I pulled out a tray full

of large screws—twenty-five to a box.

“Take a break.”

“Did you see that agency guy they sent home yesterday? He took one break too many. Unfortunately, I need this job.”

“Are you a writer?”

“I’m a joke as far as Buz is concerned. He thinks people are strange if they even read books. Besides,” I added bitterly, “what would a writer be doing working out of a slave market?”

“Keeping herself in rent and hamburgers, I guess. That’s what I’m doing working at a warehouse.”

I woke up a little then and really looked at him. He was an unusual-looking white man, his face young, almost unlined, but his hair completely gray and his eyes so pale as to be almost colorless.

He was muscular, well-built, but no taller than my own five-eight so that I found myself looking directly into the strange eyes. I looked away startled, wondering whether I had really seen anger there.

Maybe he was more important in the warehouse than I had thought.

Maybe he had some authority … “Are you a writer?” I asked.

“I am now,” he said. And he smiled. “Just sold a book. I’m getting out of here for good on Friday.”

I stared at him with a terrible mixture of envy and frustration.

“Congratulations.”

“Look,” he said, still smiling, “it’s almost lunch time. Eat with me. I want to hear about what you’re writing.”

And he was gone. I hadn’t said yes or no, but he was gone.

“Hey!” whispered another voice behind me. Buz. The agency clown when he was sober. Wine put him into some kind of trance, though, and he just sat and stared and looked retarded—which he wasn’t, quite. He just didn’t give a damn about anything, including himself. He drank up his pay and walked around in rags. Also, he never bathed. “Hey, you two gonna get together and write some books?” he asked, leering.

“Get out of here,” I said, breathing as shallowly as possible.

“You gonna write some poor-nography together!” He went away laughing.

Later, at one of the round rusting metal tables in the corner of the warehouse that served as the lunch area, I found out more about my new writer friend. Kevin Franklin, his name was, and he’d not only gotten his book published, but he’d made a big paperback sale. He could live on the money while he wrote his next book. He could give up shitwork, hopefully forever …

“Why aren’t you eating?” he asked when he stopped for breath.

The warehouse was in a newly built industrial section of Compton, far enough from coffee shops and hot dog stands to discourage most of us from going out to eat. Some people brought their lunches.

Others bought them from the catering truck. I had done neither. All I was having was a cup of the free dishwater coffee available to all the

warehouse workers.

“I’m on a diet,” I said.

He stared at me for a moment, then got up, motioned me up.

“Come on.”

“Where?”

“To the truck if it’s still there.”

“Wait a minute, you don’t have to …”

“Listen, I’ve been on that kind of diet.”

“I’m all right,” I lied, embarrassed. “I don’t want anything.”

He left me sitting there, went to the truck, and came back with a hamburger, milk, a small wedge of apple pie.

“Eat,” he said. “I’m still not rich enough to waste money, so eat.”

To my own surprise, I ate. I hadn’t intended to. I was caffeine jittery and surly and perfectly capable of wasting his money. After all, I’d told him not to spend it. But I ate.

Buz sidled by. “Hey,” he said, low-voiced. “Porn!” He moved on.

“What?” said Kevin.

“Nothing,” I said. “He’s crazy.” Then, “Thanks for the lunch.”

“Sure. Now tell me, what is it you write?”

“Short stories, so far. But I’m working on a novel.”

“Naturally. Have any of your stories sold?”

“Some. To little magazines no one ever heard of. The kind that pay in copies of the magazine.”

He shook his head. “You’re going to starve.”

“No. After a while, I’ll convince myself that my aunt and uncle were right.”

“About what? That you should have been an accountant?”

I surprised myself again by laughing aloud. The food was reviving me. “They didn’t think of accounting,” I said. “But they would have approved of it. It’s what they would call sensible. They wanted me to be a nurse, a secretary, or a teacher like my mother. At the very best, a teacher.”

“Yes.” He sighed. “I was supposed to be an engineer, myself.”

“That’s better, at least.”

“Not to me.”

“Well anyway, now you have proof that you were right.”

He shrugged and didn’t tell me what he would later—that his parents, like mine, were dead. They had died years before in an auto accident still hoping that he might come to his senses and become an engineer.

“My aunt and uncle said I could write in my spare time if I wanted to,” I told him. “Meanwhile, for the real future, I was to take something sensible in school if I expected them to support me. I went from the nursing program into a secretarial major, and from there to elementary education. All in two years. It was pretty bad. So was I.”

“What did you do?” he asked. “Flunk out?”

I choked on a piece of pie crust. “Of course not! I always got good grades. They just didn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t manufacture enough interest in the subjects to keep me going. Finally, I got a job, moved away from home, and quit school. I still take extension classes at UCLA, though, when I can afford them. Writing classes.”

“Is this the job you got?”

“No, I worked for a while at an aerospace company. I was just a clerk-typist, but I talked my way into their publicity office. I was doing articles for their company newspaper and press releases to send out. They were glad to have me do it once I showed them I could.

They had a writer for the price of a clerk-typist.”

“Sounds like something you could have stayed with and moved up.”

“I meant to. Ordinary clerical work, I couldn’t stand, but that was good. Then about a year ago, they laid off the whole department.”

He laughed, but it sounded like sympathetic laughter.

Buz, coming back from the coffee machine, muttered, “Chocolate and vanilla porn!”

I closed my eyes in exasperation. He always did that. Started a “joke” that wasn’t funny to begin with, then beat it to death. “God, I wish he’d get drunk and shut up!”

“Does getting drunk shut him up?” asked Kevin.

I nodded. “Nothing else will do it.”

“No matter. I heard what he said this time.”

The bell rang ending the lunch half-hour, and he grinned. He had a grin that completely destroyed the effect of his eyes. Then he got up and left.

But he came back. He came back all week at breaks, at lunch. My daily draw back at the agency gave me money enough to buy my own lunches—and pay my landlady a few dollars—but I still looked forward to seeing him, talking to him. He had written and published three novels, he told me, and outside members of his family, he’d never met anyone who’d read one of them. They’d brought so little money that he’d gone on taking mindless jobs like this one at the warehouse, and he’d gone on writing—unreasonably, against the advice of saner people. He was like me—a kindred spirit crazy enough to keep on trying. And now, finally … “I’m even crazier than you,” he said. “After all I’m older than you.

Old enough to recognize failure and stop dreaming, so I’m told.”

He was a prematurely gray thirty-four. He had been surprised to

learn that I was only twenty-two.

“You look older,” he said tactlessly.

“So do you,” I muttered.

He laughed. “I’m sorry. But at least it looks good on you.”

I wasn’t sure what “it” was that looked good on me, but I was glad he liked it. His likes and dislikes were becoming important to me.

One of the women from the agency told me with typical slave-market candor that he and I were “the weirdest-looking couple” she had ever seen.

I told her, not too gently, that she hadn’t seen much, and that it was none of her business anyway. But from then on, I thought of Kevin and I as a couple. It was pleasant thinking.

My time at the warehouse and his job there ended on the same day. Buz’s matchmaking had given us a week together.

“Listen,” said Kevin on the last day, “you like plays?”

“Plays? Sure. I wrote a couple while I was in high school. One- acters. Pretty bad.”

“I did something like that myself.” He took something from his pocket and held it out to me. Tickets. Two tickets to a hit play that had just come to Los Angeles. I think my eyes glittered.

“I don’t want you to get away from me just because we won’t be co-workers any more,” he said. “Tomorrow evening?”

“Tomorrow evening,” I agreed.

It was a good evening. I brought him home with me when it was over, and the night was even better. Sometime during the early hours of the next morning when we lay together, tired and content in my bed, I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought— and much less than I would know when he went away.

2

I decided not to go to the library with Kevin to look for forgeable free papers. I was worried about what might happen if Rufus called me from the car while it was moving. Would I arrive in his time still moving, but without the car to protect me? Or would I arrive safe and still, but have trouble when I returned home—because this time the home I returned to might be the middle of a busy street?

I didn’t want to find out. So while Kevin got ready to go to the library, I sat on the bed, fully dressed, stuffing a comb, a brush, and a

bar of soap into my canvas bag. I was afraid I might be trapped in Rufus’s time for a longer period if I went again. My first trip had lasted only a few minutes, my second a few hours. What was next?

Days?

Kevin came in to tell me he was going. I didn’t want him to leave me alone, but I thought I had done enough whining for one morning.

I kept my fear to myself—or I thought I did.

“You feel all right?” he asked me. “You don’t look so good.”

I had just had my first look in the mirror since the beating, and I didn’t think I looked so good either. I opened my mouth to reassure him, but before I could get the words out, I realized that something really was wrong. The room was beginning to darken and spin.

“Oh no,” I moaned. I closed my eyes against the sickening dizziness. Then I sat hugging the canvas bag and waiting.

Suddenly, Kevin was beside me holding me. I tried to push him away. I was afraid for him without knowing why. I shouted for him to let me go.

Then the walls around me and the bed beneath me vanished. I lay sprawled on the ground under a tree. Kevin lay beside me still holding me. Between us was the canvas bag.

“Oh God!” I muttered, sitting up. Kevin sat up too and looked around wildly. We were in the woods again, and it was day this time.

The country was much like what I remembered from my first trip, though there was no river in sight this time.

“It happened,” said Kevin. “It’s real!”

I took his hand and held it, glad of its familiarity. And yet I wished he were back at home. In this place, he was probably better protection for me than free papers would have been, but I didn’t want him here. I didn’t want this place to touch him except through me.

But it was too late for that.

I looked around for Rufus, knowing that he must be nearby. He was. And the moment I saw him, I knew I was too late to get him out of trouble this time.

He was lying on the ground, his body curled in a small knot, his hands clutching one leg. Beside him was another boy, black, about twelve years old. All Rufus’s attention seemed to be on his leg, but the other boy had seen us. He might even have seen us appear from nowhere. That might be why he looked so frightened now.

I stood up and went over to Rufus. He didn’t see me at first. His face was twisted with pain and streaked with tears and dirt, but he wasn’t crying aloud. Like the black boy, he looked about twelve years

old.

“Rufus.”

He looked up, startled. “Dana?”

“Yes.” I was surprised that he recognized me after the years that had passed for him.

“I saw you again,” he said. “You were on a bed. Just as I started to fall, I saw you.”

“You did more than just see me,” I said.

“I fell. My leg …”

“Who are you?” demanded the other boy.

“She’s all right, Nigel,” said Rufus. “She’s the one I told you about.

The one who put out the fire that time.”

Nigel looked at me, then back at Rufus. “Can she fix your leg?”

Rufus looked at me questioningly.

“I doubt it,” I said, “but let me see anyway.” I moved his hands away and as gently as I could, pulled his pants leg up. His leg was discolored and swollen. “Can you move your toes?” I asked.

He tried, managed to move two toes feebly.

“It’s broken,” commented Kevin. He had come closer to look.

“Yes.” I looked at the other boy, Nigel. “Where’d he fall from?”

“There.” The boy pointed upward. There was a tree limb hanging

high above us. A broken tree limb.

“You know where he lives?” I asked.

“Sure. I live there too.”

The boy was probably a slave, I realized, the property of Rufus’s

family.

“You sure do talk funny,” said Nigel.

“Matter of opinion,” I said. “Look, if you care what happens to Rufus, you’d better go tell his father to send a … a wagon for him.

He won’t be walking anywhere.”

“He could lean on me.”

“No. The best way for him to go home is flat on his back—the least painful way, anyhow. You go tell Rufus’s father that Rufus broke his leg. Tell him to send for the doctor. We’ll stay with Rufus until you get back with the wagon.”

“You?” He looked from me to Kevin, making no secret of the fact that he didn’t find us all that trustworthy. “How come you’re dressed like a man?” he asked me.

“Nigel,” said Kevin quietly, “don’t worry about how she’s dressed.

Just go get some help for your friend.”

Friend?

Nigel gave Kevin a frightened glance, then looked at Rufus.

“Go, Nigel,” whispered Rufus. “It hurts something awful. Say I said

for you to go.”

Nigel went, finally. Unhappily.

“What’s he afraid of?” I asked Rufus. “Will he get into trouble for leaving you?”

“Maybe.” Rufus closed his eyes for a moment in pain. “Or for letting me get hurt. I hope not. It depends on whether anybody’s made Daddy mad lately.”

Well, Daddy hadn’t changed. I wasn’t looking forward to meeting him at all. At least I wouldn’t have to do it alone. I glanced at Kevin.

He knelt down beside me to take a closer look at Rufus’s leg.

“Good thing he was barefoot,” he said. “A shoe would have to be

cut off that foot now.”

“Who’re you?” asked Rufus.

“My name’s Kevin—Kevin Franklin.”

“Does Dana belong to you now?”

“In a way,” said Kevin. “She’s my wife.”

“Wife?” Rufus squealed.

I sighed. “Kevin, I think we’d better demote me. In this time …”

“Niggers can’t marry white people!” said Rufus.

I laid a hand on Kevin’s arm just in time to stop him from saying whatever he would have said. The look on his face was enough to tell me he should keep quiet.

“The boy learned to talk that way from his mother,” I said softly.

“And from his father, and probably from the slaves themselves.”

“Learned to talk what way?” asked Rufus.

“About niggers,” I said. “I don’t like that word, remember? Try calling me black or Negro or even colored.”

“What’s the use of saying all that? And how can you be married to him?”

“Rufe, how’d you like people to call you white trash when they talk to you?”

“What?” He started up angrily, forgetting his leg, then fell back. “I am not trash!” he whispered. “You damn black …”

“Hush, Rufe.” I put my hand on his shoulder to quiet him.

Apparently I’d hit the nerve I’d aimed at. “I didn’t say you were trash.

I said how’d you like to be called trash. I see you don’t like it. I don’t like being called nigger either.”

He lay silent, frowning at me as though I were speaking a foreign language. Maybe I was.

“Where we come from,” I said, “it’s vulgar and insulting for whites to call blacks niggers. Also, where we come from, whites and blacks

can marry.”

“But it’s against the law.”

“It is here. But it isn’t where we come from.”

“Where do you come from?”

I looked at Kevin.

“You asked for it,” he said.

“You want to try telling him?”

He shook his head. “No point.”

“Not for you, maybe. But for me …” I thought for a moment trying to find the right words. “This boy and I are liable to have a long association whether we like it or not. I want him to know.”

“Good luck.”

“Where do you come from?” repeated Rufus. “You sure don’t talk like anybody I ever heard.”

I frowned, thought, and finally shook my head. “Rufe, I want to tell you, but you probably won’t understand. We don’t understand ourselves, really.”

“I already don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t know how I can see you when you’re not here, or how you get here, or anything. My leg hurts so much I can’t even think about it.”

“Let’s wait then. When you feel better …”

“When I feel better, maybe you’ll be gone. Dana, tell me!”

“All right, I’ll try. Have you ever heard of a place called California?”

“Yeah. Mama’s cousin went there on a ship.”

Luck. “Well, that’s where we’re from. California. But … it’s not the California your cousin went to. We’re from a California that doesn’t exist yet, Rufus. California of nineteen seventy-six.”

“What’s that?”

“I mean we come from a different time as well as a different place.

I told you it was hard to understand.”

“But what’s nineteen seventy-six?”

“That’s the year. That’s what year it is for us when we’re at home.”

“But it’s eighteen nineteen. It’s eighteen nineteen everywhere.

You’re talking crazy.”

“No doubt. This is a crazy thing that’s happened to us. But I’m telling you the truth. We come from a future time and place. I don’t

know how we get here. We don’t want to come. We don’t belong here. But when you’re in trouble, somehow you reach me, call me, and I come—although as you can see now, I can’t always help you.”

I could have told him about our blood relationship. Maybe I would if I saw him again when he was older. For now, though, I had confused him enough.

“This is crazy stuff,” he repeated. He looked at Kevin. “You tell me.

Are you from California?”

Kevin nodded. “Yes.”

“Then are you Spanish? California is Spanish.”

“It is now, but it will be part of the United States eventually, just like

Maryland or Pennsylvania.”

“When?”

“It will become a state in eighteen fifty.”

“But it’s only eighteen nineteen. How could you know …?” He broke off, looked from Kevin to me in confusion. “This isn’t real,” he

said. “You’re making it all up.”

“It’s real,” said Kevin quietly.

“But how could it be?”

“We don’t know. But it is.”

He thought for a while looking from one to the other of us. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

Kevin made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I don’t blame you.”

I shrugged. “All right, Rufe. I wanted you to know the truth, but I can’t blame you for not being able to accept it either.”

“Nineteen seventy-six,” said the boy slowly. He shook his head and closed his eyes. I wondered why I had bothered to try to convince him. After all, how accepting would I be if I met a man who claimed to be from eighteen nineteen—or two thousand nineteen, for that matter. Time travel was science fiction in nineteen seventy-six.

In eighteen nineteen—Rufus was right—it was sheer insanity. No one but a child would even have listened to Kevin and me talk about it.

“If you know California’s going to be a state,” said Rufus, “you must know some other things that are going to happen.”

“We do,” I admitted. “Some things. Not very much. We’re not historians.”

“But you ought to know everything if it already happened in your time.”

“How much do you know about seventeen nineteen, Rufe?”

He stared at me blankly.

“People don’t learn everything about the times that came before them,” I said. “Why should they?”

He sighed. “Tell me something, Dana. I’m trying to believe you.”

I dug back into the American history that I had learned both in and out of school. “Well, if this is eighteen nineteen, the President is

James Monroe, right?”

“Yeah.”

“The next President will be John Quincy Adams.”

“When?”

I frowned, calling back more of the list of Presidents I had memorized for no particular reason when I was in school. “In eighteen twenty-four. Monroe had—will have—two terms.”

“What else?”

I looked at Kevin.

He shrugged. “All I can think of is something I got from those books we looked through last night. In eighteen twenty, the Missouri Compromise opened the way for Missouri to come into the Union as a slave state and Maine to come in as a free state. Do you have any

idea what I’m talking about, Rufus?”

“No, sir.”

“I didn’t think so. Have you got any money?”

“Money? Me? No.”

“Well, you’ve seen money, haven’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Coins should have the year they were made stamped on them,

even now.”

“They do.”

Kevin reached into his pocket and brought out a handful of change. He held it out to Rufus and Rufus picked out a few coins.

“Nineteen sixty-five,” he read, “nineteen sixty-seven, nineteen seventy-one, nineteen seventy. None of them say nineteen seventy- six.”

“None of them say eighteen-anything either,” said Kevin. “But here.” He picked out a bicentennial quarter and handed it to Rufus.

“Seventeen seventy-six, nineteen seventy-six,” the boy read. “Two dates.”

“The country’s two hundred years old in nineteen seventy-six,” said Kevin. “Some of the money was changed to commemorate the anniversary. Are you convinced?”

“Well, I guess you could have made these yourself.”

Kevin took back his money. “You might not know about Missouri, kid,” he said wearily. “But you’d have made a good Missourian.”

“What?”

“Just a joke. Hasn’t come into fashion yet.”

Rufus looked troubled. “I believe you. I don’t understand, like Dana

said, but I guess I believe.”

Kevin sighed. “Thank God.”

Rufus looked up at Kevin and managed to grin. “You aren’t as bad

as I thought you’d be.”

“Bad?” Kevin looked at me accusingly.

“I didn’t tell him anything about you,” I said.

“I saw you,” said Rufus. “You were fighting with Dana just before you came here, or … it looked like fighting. Did you make all those marks on her face?”

“No, he didn’t,” I said quickly. “And he and I weren’t fighting.”

“Wait a minute,” said Kevin. “How could he know about that?”

“Like he said.” I shrugged. “He saw us before we got here. I don’t know how he does it, but he’s done it before.” I looked down at Rufus. “Have you told anyone else about seeing me?”

“Just Nigel. Nobody else would believe me.”

“Good. Best not to tell anyone else about us now either. Nothing about California or nineteen seventy-six.” I took Kevin’s hand and held it. “We’re going to have to fit in as best we can with the people here for as long as we have to stay. That means we’re going to have

to play the roles you gave us.”

“You’ll say you belong to him?”

“Yes. I want you to say it too if anyone asks you.”

“That’s better than saying you’re his wife. Nobody would believe that.”

Kevin made a sound of disgust. “I wonder how long we’ll be stuck here,” he muttered. “I think I’m getting homesick already.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But stay close to me. You got here because you were holding me. I’m afraid that may be the only way you can get home.”

3

Rufus’s father arrived on a flat-bed wagon, carrying his familiar long rifle—an old muzzleloader, I realized. With him in the wagon was Nigel and a tall stocky black man. Tom Weylin was tall himself, but too lean to be as impressive as his massive slave. Weylin didn’t look especially vicious or depraved. Right now, he only looked annoyed. We stood up as he climbed down from the wagon and came to face us.

“What happened here?” he asked suspiciously.

“The boy has broken his leg,” said Kevin. “Are you his father?”

“Yes. Who are you?”

“My name’s Kevin Franklin.” He glanced at me, but caught himself and didn’t introduce me. “We came across the two boys right after

the accident happened, and I thought we should stay with your son until you came for him.”

Weylin grunted and knelt to look at Rufus’s leg. “Guess it’s broken all right. Wonder how much that’ll cost me.”

The black man gave him a look of disgust that would surely have angered him if he had seen it.

“What were you doing climbing a damn tree?” Weylin demanded

of Rufus.

Rufus stared at him silently.

Weylin muttered something I didn’t quite catch. He stood up and gestured sharply to the black man. The man came forward, lifted Rufus gently, and placed him on the wagon. Rufus’s face twisted in pain as he was lifted, and he cried out as he was lowered into the wagon. Kevin and I should have made a splint for that leg, I thought belatedly. I followed the black man to the wagon.

Rufus grabbed my arm and held it, obviously trying not to cry. His

voice was a husky whisper.

“Don’t go, Dana.”

I didn’t want to go. I liked the boy, and from what I’d heard of early nineteenth-century medicine, they were going to pour some whiskey down him and play tug of war with his leg. And he was going to learn brand new things about pain. If I could give him any comfort by

staying with him, I wanted to stay.

But I couldn’t.

His father had spoken a few private words with Kevin and was now climbing back up onto the seat of the wagon. He was ready to leave and Kevin and I weren’t invited. That didn’t say much for Weylin’s hospitality. People in his time of widely scattered plantations and even more widely scattered hotels had a reputation for taking in strangers. But then, a man who could look at his injured son and think of nothing but how much the doctor bill would be wasn’t likely to be concerned about strangers.

“Come with us,” pleaded Rufus. “Daddy, let them come.”

Weylin glanced back, annoyed, and I tried gently to loosen Rufus’s grip on me. After a moment, I realized that Weylin was looking at me —staring hard at me. Perhaps he was seeing my resemblance to Alice’s mother. He couldn’t have seen me clearly enough or long enough at the river to recognize me now as the woman he had once come so near shooting. At first, I stared back. Then I looked away, remembering that I was supposed to be a slave. Slaves lowered their eyes respectfully. To stare back was insolent. Or at least, that was what my books said.

“Come along and have dinner with us,” Weylin told Kevin. “You may as well. Where were you going to stay the night, anyway?”

“Under the trees if necessary,” said Kevin. He and I climbed onto the wagon beside the silent Nigel. “Not much choice, as I told you.”

I looked at him, wondering what he had told Weylin. Then I had to catch myself as the black man prodded the horses forward.

“You, girl,” Weylin said to me. “What’s your name?”

“Dana, sir.”

He turned to stare at me again, this time as though I’d said something wrong. “Where do you come from?”

I glanced at Kevin, not wanting to contradict anything he had said.

He gave me a slight nod, and I assumed I was free to make up my own lies. “I’m from New York.”

Now the look he was giving me was really ugly, and I wondered whether he’d heard a New York accent recently and found mine a poor match. Or was I saying something wrong? I hadn’t said ten words to him. What could be wrong?

Weylin looked sharply at Kevin, then turned around and ignored us for the rest of the trip.

We went through the woods to a road, and along the road past a field of tall golden wheat. In the field, slaves, mostly men, worked steadily swinging scythes with attached wooden racks that caught the cut wheat in neat piles. Other slaves, mostly women, followed them tying the wheat into bundles. None of them seemed to pay any attention to us. I looked around for a white overseer and was

surprised not to see one. The Weylin house surprised me too when I saw it in daylight. It wasn’t white. It had no columns, no porch to speak of. I was almost disappointed. It was a red-brick Georgian Colonial, boxy but handsome in a quiet kind of way, two and a half stories high with dormered windows and a chimney on each end. It wasn’t big or imposing enough to be called a mansion. In Los Angeles, in our own time, Kevin and I could have afforded it.

As the wagon took us up to the front steps, I could see the river off to one side and some of the land I had run through a few hours—a few years—before. Scattered trees, unevenly cut grass, the row of cabins far off to one side almost hidden by the trees, the fields, the woods. There were other buildings lined up beside and behind the house opposite the slave cabins. As we stopped, I was almost sent off to one of these.

“Luke,” said Weylin to the black man, “take Dana around back and get her something to eat.”

“Yes, sir,” said the black man softly. “Want me to take Marse Rufe

upstairs first?”

“Do what I told you. I’ll take him up.”

I saw Rufus set his teeth. “I’ll see you later,” I whispered, but he wouldn’t let go of my hand until I spoke to his father.

“Mr. Weylin, I don’t mind staying with him. He seems to want me to.”

Weylin looked exasperated. “Well, come on then. You can wait with him until the doctor comes.” He lifted Rufus with no particular care, and strode up the steps to the house. Kevin followed him.

“You watch out,” said the black man softly as I started after them.

I looked at him, surprised, not sure he was talking to me. He was.

“Marse Tom can turn mean mighty quick,” he said. “So can the boy, now that he’s growing up. Your face looks like maybe you had enough white folks’ meanness for a while.”

I nodded. “I have, all right. Thanks for the warning.”

Nigel had come to stand next to the man, and I realized as I spoke that the two looked much alike, the boy a smaller replica of the man.

Father and son, probably. They resembled each other more than Rufus and Tom Weylin did. As I hurried up the steps and into the house, I thought of Rufus and his father, of Rufus becoming his father. It would happen some day in at least one way. Someday Rufus would own the plantation. Someday, he would be the slaveholder, responsible in his own right for what happened to the people who lived in those half-hidden cabins. The boy was literally growing up as I watched—growing up because I watched and because I helped to keep him safe. I was the worst possible guardian for him—a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children. I would have all I could do to look after myself. But I would help him as best I could.

And I would try to keep friendship with him, maybe plant a few ideas in his mind that would help both me and the people who would be his slaves in the years to come. I might even be making things easier for Alice.

Now, I followed Weylin up the stairs to a bedroom—not the same one Rufus had occupied on my last trip. The bed was bigger, its full canopy and draperies blue instead of green. The room itself was bigger. Weylin dumped Rufus onto the bed, ignoring the boy’s cries of pain. It did not look as though Weylin was trying to hurt Rufus. He just didn’t seem to pay any attention to how he handled the boy—as though he didn’t care.

Then, as Weylin was leading Kevin out of the room, a red-haired woman hurried in.

“Where is he?” she demanded breathlessly. “What happened?”

Rufus’s mother. I remembered her. She pushed her way into the room just as I was putting Rufus’s pillow under his head.

“What are you doing to him?” she cried. “Leave him alone!” She tried to pull me away from her son. She had only one reaction when Rufus was in trouble. One wrong reaction.

Fortunately for both of us, Weylin reached her before I forgot myself and pushed her away from me. He caught her, held her, spoke to her quietly.

“Margaret, now listen. The boy has a broken leg, that’s all. There’s nothing you can do for a broken leg. I’ve already sent for the doctor.”

Margaret Weylin seemed to calm down a little. She stared at me.

“What’s she doing here?”

“She belongs to Mr. Kevin Franklin here.” Weylin waved a hand presenting Kevin who, to my surprise, bowed slightly to the woman.

“Mr. Franklin is the one who found Rufus hurt,” Weylin continued. He shrugged. “Rufus wanted the girl to stay with him. Can’t do any harm.” He turned and walked away. Kevin followed him reluctantly.

The woman may have been listening as her husband spoke, but she didn’t look as though she was. She was still staring at me, frowning at me as though she was trying to remember where she’d seen me before. The years hadn’t changed her much, and, of course, they hadn’t changed me at all. But I didn’t expect her to remember. Her glimpse of me had been too brief, and her mind had

been on other things.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said.

Hell! “Yes, ma’am, you may have.” I looked at Rufus and saw that

he was watching us.

“Mama?” he said softly.

The accusing stare vanished, and the woman turned quickly to attend him. “My poor baby,” she murmured, cradling his head in her hands. “Seems like everything happens to you, doesn’t it? A broken leg!” She looked close to tears. And there was Rufus, swung from his father’s indifference to his mother’s sugary concern. I wondered whether he was too used to the contrast to find it dizzying.

“Mama, can I have some water?” he asked.

The woman turned to look at me as though I had offended her.

“Can’t you hear? Get him some water!”

“Yes, ma’am. Where shall I get it?”

She made a sound of disgust and rushed toward me. Or at least I thought she was rushing toward me. When I jumped out of her way, she kept right on going through the door that I had been standing in front of.

I looked after her and shook my head. Then I took the chair that was near the fireplace and put it beside Rufus’s bed. I sat down and Rufus looked up at me solemnly.

“Did you ever break your leg?” he asked.

“No. I broke my wrist once, though.”

“When they fixed it, did it hurt much?”

I drew a deep breath. “Yes.”

“I’m scared.”

“So was I,” I said remembering. “But … Rufe, it won’t take long.

And when the doctor is finished, the worst will be over.”

“Won’t it still hurt after?”

“For a while. But it will heal. If you stay off it and give it a chance, it will heal.”

Margaret Weylin rushed back into the room with water for Rufus and more hostility for me than I could see any reason for.

“You’re to go out to the cookhouse and get some supper!” she told me as I got out of her way. But she made it sound as though she were saying, “You’re to go straight to hell!” There was something about me that these people didn’t like—except for Rufus. It wasn’t just racial. They were used to black people. Maybe I could get Kevin

to find out what it was.

“Mama, can’t she stay?” asked Rufus.

The woman threw me a dirty look, then turned gentler eyes on her son. “She can come back later,” she told him. “Your father wants her downstairs now.”

More likely, it was his mother who wanted me downstairs now, and possibly for no more substantial reason than that her son liked me.

She gave me another look, and I left the room. The woman would have made me uncomfortable even if she’d liked me. She was too much nervous energy compacted into too small a container. I didn’t want to be around when she exploded. But at least she loved Rufus.

And he must have been used to her fussing over him. He hadn’t seemed to mind.

I found myself in a wide hallway. I could see the stairs a few feet away and I started toward them. Just then, a young black girl in a long blue dress came out of a door at the other end of the hall. She came toward me, staring at me with open curiosity. She wore a blue scarf on her head and she tugged at it as she came toward me.

“Could you tell me where the cookhouse is, please?” I said when she was near enough. She seemed a safer person to ask than Margaret Weylin.

Her eyes opened a little wider and she continued to stare at me.

No doubt I sounded as strange to her as I looked.

“The cookhouse?” I said.

She looked me over once more, then started down the stairs without a word. I hesitated, finally followed her because I didn’t know what else to do. She was a light-skinned girl no older than fourteen or fifteen. She kept looking back at me, frowning. Once she stopped and turned to face me, her hand tugging absently at her scarf, then moving lower to cover her mouth, and finally dropping to her side again. She looked so frustrated that I realized something was wrong.

“Can you talk?” I asked.

She sighed, shook her head.

“But you can hear and understand.”

She nodded, then plucked at my blouse, at my pants. She frowned at me. Was that the problem, then—hers and the Weylins’?

“They’re the only clothes I have right now,” I said. “My master will buy me some better ones sooner or later.” Let it be Kevin’s fault that I was “dressed like a man.” It was probably easier for the people here to understand a master too poor or too stingy to buy me proper clothing than it would be for them to imagine a place where it was normal for women to wear pants.

As though to assure me that I had said the right thing, the girl gave me a look of pity, then took my hand and led me out to the cookhouse.

As we went, I took more notice of the house than I had before— more notice of the downstairs hall, anyway. Its walls were a pale

green and it ran the length of the house. At the front, it was wide and bright with light from the windows beside and above the door. It was strewn with oriental rugs of different sizes. Near the front door, there was a wooden bench, a chair, and two small tables. Past the stairs the hall narrowed, and at its end there was a back door that we went through.

Outside was the cookhouse, a little white frame cottage not far behind the main house. I had read about outdoor kitchens and outdoor toilets. I hadn’t been looking forward to either. Now, though, the cookhouse looked like the friendliest place I’d seen since I arrived. Luke and Nigel were inside eating from wooden bowls with what looked like wooden spoons. And there were two younger children, a girl and boy, sitting on the floor eating with their fingers. I was glad to see them there because I’d read about kids their age being rounded up and fed from troughs like pigs. Not everywhere, apparently. At least, not here.

There was a stocky middle-aged woman stirring a kettle that hung over the fire in the fireplace. The fireplace itself filled one whole wall.

It was made of brick and above it was a huge plank from which hung a few utensils. There were more utensils off to one side hanging from hooks on the wall. I stared at them and realized that I didn’t know the proper names of any of them. Even things as commonplace as that. I was in a different world.

The cook finished stirring her kettle and turned to look at me. She was as light-skinned as my mute guide—a handsome middle-aged woman, tall and heavy-set. Her expression was grim, her mouth turned down at the corners, but her voice was soft and low.

“Carrie,” she said. “Who’s this?”

My guide looked at me.

“My name is Dana,” I said. “My master’s visiting here. Mrs. Weylin

told me to come out for supper.”

“Mrs. Weylin?” The woman frowned at me.

“The red-haired woman—Rufus’s mother.” I didn’t quite catch myself in time to say Mister Rufus. I didn’t really see why I should

have to say anything. How many Mrs. Weylins were there on the place anyway?

“Miss Margaret,” said the woman, and under her breath, “Bitch!”

I stared at her in surprise thinking she meant me.

“Sarah!” Luke’s tone was cautioning. He couldn’t have heard what the cook said from where he was. Either she said it often, or he had read her lips. But at least now I understood that it was Mrs. Weylin— Miss Margaret—who was supposed to be the bitch.

The cook said nothing else. She got me a wooden bowl, filled it with something from a pot near the fire, and handed it to me with a wooden spoon.

Supper was corn meal mush. The cook saw that I was looking at it instead of eating it, and she misread my expression.

“That’s not enough?” she asked.

“Oh, it’s plenty!” I held my bowl protectively, fearful that she might give me more of the stuff. “Thank you.”

I sat down at the end of a large heavy table across from Nigel and Luke. I saw that they were eating the same mush, though theirs had milk on it. I considered asking for milk on mine, but I didn’t really think it would help.

Whatever was in the kettle smelled good enough to remind me that I hadn’t had breakfast, hadn’t had more than a few bites of dinner the night before. I was starving and Sarah was cooking meat —probably a stew. I took a bite of the mush and swallowed it without tasting it.

“We get better food later on after the white folks eat,” said Luke.

“We get whatever they leave.”

Table scraps, I thought bitterly. Someone else’s leftovers. And, no doubt, if I was here long enough, I would eat them and be glad to get them. They had to be better than boiled meal. I spooned the mush into my mouth, quickly fanning away several large flies. Flies. This was an era of rampant disease. I wondered how clean our leftovers would be by the time they reached us.

“Say you was from New York?” asked Luke.

“Yes.”

“Free state?”

“Yes,” I repeated. “That’s why I was brought here.” The words, the questions made me think of Alice and her mother. I looked at Luke’s broad face, wondering whether it would do any harm to ask about them. But how could I admit to knowing them—knowing them years ago—when I was supposed to be new here? Nigel knew I had been here before, but Sarah and Luke might not. It would be safer to wait —save my questions for Rufus.

“People in New York talk like you?” asked Nigel.

“Some do. Not all.”

“Dress like you?” asked Luke.

“No. I dress in what Master Kevin gives me to dress in.” I wished they’d stop asking questions. I didn’t want them to make me tell lies I might forget later. Best to keep my background as simple as possible.

The cook came over and looked at me, at my pants. She pinched up a little of the material, feeling it. “What cloth is this?” she asked.

Polyester double knit, I thought. But I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

She shook her head and went back to her pot.

“You know,” I said to her back, “I think I agree with you about Miss Margaret.”

She said nothing. The warmth I’d felt when I came into the room was turning out to be nothing more than the heat of the fire.

“Why you try to talk like white folks?” Nigel asked me.

“I don’t,” I said, surprised. “I mean, this is really the way I talk.”

“More like white folks than some white folks.”

I shrugged, hunted through my mind for an acceptable explanation. “My mother taught school,” I said, “and …”

“A nigger teacher?”

I winced, nodded. “Free blacks can have schools. My mother talked the way I do. She taught me.”

“You’ll get into trouble,” he said. “Marse Tom already don’t like you.

You talk too educated and you come from a free state.”

“Why should either of those things matter to him? I don’t belong to him.”

The boy smiled. “He don’t want no niggers ’round here talking better than him, putting freedom ideas in our heads.”

“Like we so dumb we need some stranger to make us think about freedom,” muttered Luke.

I nodded, but I hoped they were wrong. I didn’t think I had said enough to Weylin for him to make that kind of judgment. I hoped he wasn’t going to make that kind of judgment. I wasn’t good at accents.

I had deliberately decided not to try to assume one. But if that meant I was going to be in trouble every time I opened my mouth, my life here would be even worse than I had imagined.

“How can Marse Rufe see you before you get here?” Nigel asked.

I choked down a swallow of mush. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I wish to heaven he couldn’t!”

4

I stayed in the cookhouse when I finished eating because it was near the main house, and because I thought I could make it from the cookhouse into the hall if I started to feel dizzy—just in case.

Wherever Kevin was in the house, he would hear me if I called from the hallway.

Luke and Nigel finished their meal and went to the fireplace to say something privately to Sarah. At that moment, Carrie, the mute, slipped me bread and a chunk of ham. I looked at it, then smiled at her gratefully. When Luke and Nigel took Sarah out of the room with them, I feasted on a shapeless sandwich. In the middle of it, I caught myself wondering about the ham, wondering how well it had been cooked. I tried to think of something else, but my mind was full of vaguely remembered horror stories of the diseases that ran wild during this time. Medicine was just a little better than witchcraft.

Malaria came from bad air. Surgery was performed on struggling wide-awake patients. Germs were question marks even in the minds of many doctors. And people casually, unknowingly ingested all kinds of poorly preserved ill-cooked food that could make them sick

or kill them.

Horror stories.

Except that they were true, and I was going to have to live with them for as long as I was here. Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten the ham, but if I hadn’t, it would be the table leavings later. I would have to take some chances.

Sarah came back with Nigel and gave him a pot of peas to shell.

Life went on around me as though I wasn’t there. People came into the cookhouse—always black people—talked to Sarah, lounged around, ate whatever they could put their hands on until Sarah shouted at them and chased them away. I was in the middle of asking her whether there was anything I could do to help out when Rufus began to scream. Nineteenth-century medicine was apparently at work.

The walls of the main house were thick and the sound seemed to come from a long way off—thin high-pitched screaming. Carrie, who had left the cookhouse, now ran back in and sat down beside me with her hands covering her ears.

Abruptly, the screaming stopped and I moved Carrie’s hands gently. Her sensitivity surprised me. I would have thought she would be used to hearing people scream in pain. She listened for a moment, heard nothing, then looked at me.

“He probably fainted,” I said. “That’s best. He won’t feel the pain for a while.”

She nodded dully and went back out to whatever she had been doing.

“She always did like him,” remarked Sarah into the silence. “He kept the children from bothering her when she was little.”

I was surprised. “Isn’t she a few years older than he is?”

“Born the year before him. Children listened to him though. He’s

white.”

“Is Carrie your daughter?”

Sarah nodded. “My fourth baby. The only one Marse Tom let me keep.” Her voice trailed away to a whisper.

“You mean he … he sold the others?”

“Sold them. First my man died—a tree he was cutting fell on him.

Then Marse Tom took my children, all but Carrie. And, bless God, Carrie ain’t worth much as the others ’cause she can’t talk. People think she ain’t got good sense.”

I looked away from her. The expression in her eyes had gone from sadness—she seemed almost ready to cry—to anger. Quiet, almost frightening anger. Her husband dead, three children sold, the fourth defective, and her having to thank God for the defect. She had reason for more than anger. How amazing that Weylin had sold her children and still kept her to cook his meals. How amazing that he was still alive. I didn’t think he would be for long, though, if he found a buyer for Carrie.

As I was thinking, Sarah turned and threw a handful of something into the stew or soup she was cooking. I shook my head. If she ever decided to take her revenge, Weylin would never know what hit him.

“You can peel these potatoes for me,” she said.

I had to think a moment to remember that I had offered my help. I took the large pan of potatoes that she was handing me and a knife and a wooden bowl, and I worked silently, sometimes peeling, and sometimes driving away the bothersome flies. Then I heard Kevin outside calling me. I had to make myself put the potatoes down calmly and cover them with a cloth Sarah had left on the table. Then I went to him without haste, without any sign of the eagerness or relief I felt at having him nearby again. I went to him and he looked at

me strangely.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine now.”

He reached for my hand, but I drew back, looking at him. He dropped his hand to his side. “Come on,” he said wearily. “Let’s go where we can talk.”

He led the way past the main house away from the slave cabins and other buildings, away from the small slave children who chased each other and shouted and didn’t understand yet that they were slaves.

We found a huge oak with branches thick as separate trees spread wide to shade a large area. A handsome lonely old tree. We sat beside it putting it between ourselves and the house. I settled close to Kevin, relaxing, letting go of tension I had hardly been aware of. We said nothing for a while, as he leaned back and seemed to let go of tensions of his own.

Finally, he said, “There are so many really fascinating times we could have gone back to visit.”

I laughed without humor. “I can’t think of any time I’d like to go back to. But of all of them, this must be one of the most dangerous—

for me anyway.”

“Not while I’m with you.”

I glanced at him gratefully.

“Why did you try to stop me from coming?”

“I was afraid for you.”

“For me!”

“At first, I didn’t know why. I just had the feeling you might be hurt trying to come with me. Then when you were here, I realized that you probably couldn’t get back without me. That means if we’re separated, you’re stranded here for years, maybe for good.”

He drew a deep breath and shook his head. “There wouldn’t be anything good about that.”

“Stay close to me. If I call, come quick.”

He nodded, and after a while said, “I could survive here, though, if

I had to. I mean if …”

“Kevin, no ifs. Please.”

“I only mean I wouldn’t be in the danger you would be in.”

“No.” But he’d be in another kind of danger. A place like this would endanger him in a way I didn’t want to talk to him about. If he was stranded here for years, some part of this place would rub off on him.

No large part, I knew. But if he survived here, it would be because he managed to tolerate the life here. He wouldn’t have to take part in it, but he would have to keep quiet about it. Free speech and press hadn’t done too well in the ante bellum South. Kevin wouldn’t do too well either. The place, the time would either kill him outright or mark him somehow. I didn’t like either possibility.

“Dana.”

I looked at him.

“Don’t worry. We arrived together and we’ll leave together.”

I didn’t stop worrying, but I smiled and changed the subject.

“How’s Rufus? I heard him screaming.”

“Poor kid. I was glad when he passed out. The doctor gave him some opium, but the pain seemed to reach him right through it. I had

to help hold him.”

“Opium … will he be all right?”

“The doctor thought so. Although I don’t know how much a doctor’s opinion is worth in this time.”

“I hope he’s right. I hope Rufus has used up all his bad luck just in getting the set of parents he’s stuck with.”

Kevin lifted one arm and turned it to show me a set of long bloody

scratches.

“Margaret Weylin,” I said softly.

“She shouldn’t have been there,” he said. “When she finished with me, she started on the doctor. ‘Stop hurting my baby!’”

I shook my head. “What are we going to do, Kevin? Even if these people were sane, we couldn’t stay here among them.”

“Yes we can.”

I turned to stare at him.

“I made up a story for Weylin to explain why we were here—and why we were broke. He offered me a job.”

“Doing what?”

“Tutoring your little friend. Seems he doesn’t read or write any

better than he climbs trees.”

“But … doesn’t he go to school?”

“Not while that leg is healing. And his father doesn’t want him to fall any farther behind than he already is.”

“Is he behind others his age?”

“Weylin seemed to think so. He didn’t come right out and say it, but I think he’s afraid the kid isn’t very bright.”

“I’m surprised he cares one way or the other, and I think he’s wrong. But for once Rufus’s bad luck is our good luck. I doubt that we’ll be here long enough for you to collect any of your salary, but at least while we’re here, we’ll have food and shelter.”

“That’s what I thought when I accepted.”

“And what about me?”

“You?”

“Weylin didn’t say anything about me?”

“No. Why should he? If I stay here, he knows you stay too.”

“Yes.” I smiled. “You’re right. If you didn’t remember me in your bargaining, why should he? I’ll bet he won’t forget me though when he has work that needs to be done.”

“Wait a minute, you don’t have to work for him. You’re not supposed to belong to him.”

“No, but I’m here. And I’m supposed to be a slave. What’s a slave for, but to work? Believe me, he’ll find something for me to do—or he would if I didn’t plan to find my own work before he gets around to

me.”

He frowned. “You want to work?”

“I want to … I have to make a place for myself here. That means work. I think everyone here, black and white, will resent me if I don’t

work. And I need friends. I need all the friends I can make here, Kevin. You might not be with me when I come here again. If I come here again.”

“And unless that kid gets a lot more careful, you will come here

again.”

I sighed. “It looks that way.”

“I hate to think of your working for these people.” He shook his head. “I hate to think of you playing the part of a slave at all.”

“We knew I’d have to do it.”

He said nothing.

“Call me away from them now and then, Kevin. Just to remind them that whatever I am, they don’t own me … yet.”

He shook his head again angrily in what looked like a refusal, but I knew he’d do it.

“What lies did you tell Weylin about us?” I asked him. “The way people ask questions around here, we’d better make sure we’re both

telling the same story.”

For several seconds, he said nothing.

“Kevin?”

He took a deep breath. “I’m supposed to be a writer from New York,” he said finally. “God help us if we meet any New Yorkers. I’m traveling through the South doing research for a book. I have no money because I drank with the wrong people a few days ago and was robbed. All I have left is you. I bought you before I was robbed because you could read and write. I thought you could help me in my

work as well as be of use otherwise.”

“Did he believe that?”

“It’s possible that he did. He was already pretty sure you could read and write. That’s one reason he seemed so suspicious and mistrustful. Educated slaves aren’t popular around here.”

I shrugged. “So Nigel has been telling me.”

“Weylin doesn’t like the way you talk. I don’t think he’s had much education himself, and he resents you. I don’t think he’ll bother you

—I wouldn’t stay here if I did. But keep out of his way as much as you can.”

“Gladly. I plan to fit myself into the cookhouse if I can. I’m going to tell Sarah you want me to learn how to cook for you.”

He gave a short laugh. “I’d better tell you the rest of the story I told Weylin. If Sarah hears it all, she might teach you how to put a little

poison in my food.”

I think I jumped.

“Weylin was warning me that it was dangerous to keep a slave like you—educated, maybe kidnapped from a free state—as far north as this. He said I ought to sell you to some trader heading for Georgia or Louisiana before you ran away and I lost my investment. That gave me the idea to tell him I planned to sell you in Louisiana because that was where my journey ended—and I’d heard I could make a nice profit on you down there.

“That seemed to please him and he told me I was right—prices were better in Louisiana if I could hold on to you until I got you there.

So I said educated or not, you weren’t likely to run away from me because I’d promised to take you back to New York with me and set you free. I told him you didn’t really want to leave me right now

anyway. He got the idea.”

“You make yourself sound disgusting.”

“I know. I think I was trying to at the end—trying to see whether anything I did to you could make me someone he wouldn’t want anywhere near his kid. I think he did cool a little toward me when I said I’d promised you freedom, but he didn’t say anything.”

“What were you trying to do? Lose the job you’d just gotten?”

“No, but while I was talking to him, all I could think was that you might be coming back here alone someday. I kept trying to find the humanity in him to reassure myself that you would be all right.”

“Oh, he’s human enough. If he were of a little higher social class, he might even have been disgusted enough with your bragging not to want you around. But he wouldn’t have had the right to stop you from betraying me. I’m your private property. He’d respect that.”

“You call that human? I’m going to do all I can to see that you never come here alone again.”

I leaned back against the tree, watching him. “Just in case I do,

Kevin, let’s take out some insurance.”

“What?”

“Let me help you with Rufus as much as I can. Let’s see what we can do to keep him from growing up into a red-haired version of his father.”

5

But for three days I didn’t see Rufus. Nor did anything happen to bring on the dizziness that would tell me I was going home at last. I helped Sarah as well as I could. She seemed to warm up to me a little and she was patient with my ignorance of cooking. She taught me and saw to it that I ate better. No more corn meal mush once she realized I didn’t like it. (“Why didn’t you say something?” she asked me.) Under her direction, I spent God knows how long beating biscuit dough with a hatchet on a well-worn tree stump. (“Not so hard! You ain’t driving nails. Regular, like this …”) I cleaned and plucked a chicken, prepared vegetables, kneaded bread dough, and when Sarah was weary of me, helped Carrie and the other house servants with their work. I kept Kevin’s room clean. I brought him hot water to wash and shave with, and I washed in his room. It was the only place I could go for privacy. I kept my canvas bag there and went there to avoid Margaret Weylin when she came rubbing her fingers over dustless furniture and looking under rugs on well-swept floors. Differences be damned, I did know how to sweep and dust no matter what century it was. Margaret Weylin complained because she couldn’t find anything to complain about. That, she made painfully clear to me the day she threw scalding hot coffee at me, screaming that I had brought it to her cold.

So I hid from her in Kevin’s room. It was my refuge. But it was not my sleeping place.

I had been given sleeping space in the attic where most of the house servants slept. It apparently never occurred to anyone that I should sleep in Kevin’s room. Weylin knew what kind of relationship Kevin was supposed to have with me, and he made it clear that he didn’t care. But our sleeping arrangement told us that he expected discretion—or we assumed it did. We co-operated for three days. On the fourth day, Kevin caught me on my way out to the cookhouse and took me to the oak tree again.

“Are you having trouble with Margaret Weylin?” he asked.

“Nothing I can’t handle,” I said, surprised. “Why?”

“I heard a couple of the house servants talking, just saying vaguely that there was trouble. I thought I should find out for sure.”

I shrugged, said, “I think she resents me because Rufus likes me.

She probably doesn’t want to share her son with anyone. Heaven help him when he gets a little older and tries to break away. Also, I don’t think Margaret likes educated slaves any better than her husband does.”

“I see. I was right about him, by the way. He can barely read and write. And she’s not much better.” He turned to face me squarely.

“Did she throw a pot of hot coffee on you?”

I looked away. “It doesn’t matter. Most of it missed anyway.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? She could have hurt you.”

“She didn’t.”

“I don’t think we should give her another chance.”

I looked at him. “What do you want to do?”

“Get out of here. We don’t need money badly enough for you to put up with whatever she plans to do next.”

“No, Kevin. I had a reason for not telling you about the coffee.”

“I’m wondering what else you haven’t told me.”

“Nothing important.” My mind went back over some of Margaret’s petty insults. “Nothing important enough to make me leave.”

“But why? There’s no reason for …”

“Yes there is. I’ve thought about it, Kevin. It isn’t the money that I care about, or even having a roof over my head. I think we can survive here together no matter what. But I don’t think I have much chance of surviving here alone. I’ve told you that.”

“You won’t be alone. I’ll see to it.”

“You’ll try. Maybe that will be enough. I hope so. But if it isn’t, if I do have to come here alone, I’ll have a better chance of surviving if I stay here now and work on the insurance we talked about. Rufus.

He’ll probably be old enough to have some authority when I come again. Old enough to help me. I want him to have as many good memories of me as I can give him now.”

“He might not remember you past the day you leave here.”

“He’ll remember.”

“It still might not work. After all, his environment will be influencing him every day you’re gone. And from what I’ve heard, it’s common in this time for the master’s children to be on nearly equal terms with the slaves. But maturity is supposed to put both in their ‘places.’”

“Sometimes it doesn’t. Even here, not all children let themselves be molded into what their parents want them to be.”

“You’re gambling. Hell, you’re gambling against history.”

“What else can I do? I’ve got to try, Kevin, and if trying means taking small risks and putting up with small humiliations now so that I can survive later, I’ll do it.”

He drew a deep breath and let it out in a near whistle. “Yeah. I guess I don’t blame you. I don’t like it, but I don’t blame you.”

I put my head on his shoulder. “I don’t like it either. God, I hate it!

That woman is priming herself for a nervous breakdown. I just hope she doesn’t have it while I’m here.”

Kevin shifted his position a little and I sat up. “Let’s forget about Margaret for a moment,” he said. “I also wanted to talk to you about

that … that place where you sleep.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh. I finally got up to see it. A rag pallet on the floor, Dana!”

“Did you see anything else up there?”

“What? What else should I have seen?”

“A lot of rag pallets on the floor. And a couple of corn-shuck mattresses. I’m not being treated any worse than any other house servant, Kevin, and I’m doing better than the field hands. Their pallets are on the ground. Their cabins don’t even have floors, and most of them are full of fleas.”

There was a long silence. Finally, he sighed. “I can’t do anything for the others,” he said, “but I want you out of that attic. I want you with me.”

I sat up and stared down at my hands. “You don’t know how I’ve wanted to be with you. I keep imagining myself waking up at home some morning—alone.”

“Not likely. Not unless something threatens you or endangers you during the night.”

“You don’t know that for sure. Your theory could be wrong. Maybe there’s some kind of limit on how long I can stay here. Maybe a bad dream would be enough to send me home. Maybe anything.”

“Maybe I should test my theory.”

That stopped me. I realized he was talking about endangering me himself, or at least making me believe my life was in danger— scaring the hell out of me. Scaring me home. Maybe.

I swallowed. “That might be a good idea, but I don’t think you should have mentioned it to me—warned me. Besides … I’m not sure you could scare me enough. I trust you.”

He covered one of my hands with his own. “You can go on trusting

me. I won’t hurt you.”

“But …”

“I don’t have to hurt you. I can arrange something that will scare you before you have time to think about it. I can handle it.”

I accepted that, began to think maybe he really could get us home.

“Kevin, wait until Rufus’s leg is healed.”

“So long?” he protested. “Six weeks, maybe more. Hell, in a society as backward as this, who knows whether the leg will heal at all?”

“Whatever happens, the boy will live. He still has to father a child.

And that means he’ll probably have time to call me here again, with or without you. Give me the chance I need, Kevin, to reach him and make a haven for myself here.”

“All right,” he said sighing. “We’ll wait awhile. But you won’t do your waiting in that attic. You’re moving into my room tonight.”

I thought about that. “All right. Getting you home with me when I go is the one thing more important to me than staying with Rufus. It’s worth getting kicked off the plantation for.”

“Don’t worry about that. Weylin doesn’t care what we do.”

“But Margaret will care. I’ve seen her using that limited reading ability of hers on her Bible. I suspect that in her own way, she’s a

fairly moral woman.”

“You want to know how moral she is?”

His tone made me frown. “What do you mean?”

“If she chases me any harder, she and I will wind up playing a scene from that Bible she reads. The scene between Potiphar’s wife and Joseph.”

I swallowed. That woman! But I could see her in my mind’s eye.

Long thick red hair piled high on her head, fine smooth skin.

Whatever her emotional problems, she wasn’t ugly.

“I’m moving in tonight, all right,” I said.

He smiled. “If we’re quiet about it, they might not even bother to notice. Hell, I saw three little kids playing in the dirt back there who look more like Weylin than Rufus does. Margaret’s had a lot of practice at not noticing.”

I knew which children he meant. They had different mothers, but there was a definite family resemblance between them. I’d seen Margaret Weylin slap one of them hard across the face. The child had done nothing more than toddle into her path. If she was willing to punish a child for her husband’s sins, would she be any less willing

to punish me if she knew that I was where she wanted to be with Kevin? I tried not to think about it.

“We still might have to leave,” I said. “No matter what these people have to accept from each other, they might not be willing to tolerate ‘immorality’ from us.”

He shrugged. “If we have to leave, we leave. There’s a limit to what you should put up with even to get your chance with the boy.

We’ll work our way to Baltimore. I should be able to get some kind of job there.”

“If we go to a city, how about Philadelphia?”

“Philadelphia?”

“Because it’s in Pennsylvania. If we leave here, let it be for a free state.”

“Oh. Yes, I should have thought of that myself. Look … Dana, we might have to go to one of the free states, anyway.” He hesitated. “I mean if it turns out we can’t get home the way we think we can. I’ll probably become an unnecessary expense to Weylin when Rufus’s leg heals. Then we’d have to make a home for ourselves somewhere. That probably won’t happen, but it’s a possibility.”

I nodded.

“Now let’s go get whatever belongs to you out of that attic.” He stood up. “And, Dana, Rufus says his mother is going out visiting today. He’d like to see you while she’s gone.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner? A start finally!”

Later that day, as I was mixing some corn-bread batter for Sarah, Carrie came to get me. She made a sign to Sarah that I had already learned to understand. She wiped the side of her face with one hand as though rubbing something off. Then she pointed to me.

“Dana,” said Sarah over her shoulder, “one of the white folks wants you. Go with Carrie.”

I went. Carrie led me up to Rufus’s room, knocked, and left me there. I went in and found Rufus in bed with his leg sandwiched between the two boards of a wooden splint and held straight by a device of rope and cast iron. The iron weight looked like something

borrowed from Sarah’s kitchen—a heavy little hooked thing I’d once seen her hang meat on to roast. But it apparently served just as well to keep Rufus’s leg in traction.

“How are you feeling?” I asked as I sat down in the chair beside his bed.

“It doesn’t hurt as much as it did,” he said. “I guess it’s getting well.

Kevin said … Do you care if I call him Kevin?”

“No, I think he wants you to.”

“I have to call him Mr. Franklin when Mama is here. Anyway, he said you’re working with Aunt Sarah.”

Aunt Sarah? Well, that was better than Mammy Sarah, I supposed. “I’m learning her way of cooking.”

“She’s a good cook, but … does she hit you?”

“Of course not.” I laughed.

“She had a girl in there a while back, and she used to hit her. The girl finally asked Daddy to let her go back to the fields. That was right after Daddy sold Aunt Sarah’s boys, though. Aunt Sarah was mad at

everybody then.”

“I don’t blame her,” I said.

Rufus glanced at the door, then said low-voiced, “Neither do I. Her boy Jim was my friend. He taught me how to ride when I was little.

But Daddy sold him anyway.” He glanced at the door again and changed the subject. “Dana, can you read?”

“Yes.”

“Kevin said you could. I told Mama, and she said you couldn’t.”

I shrugged. “What do you think?”

He took a leather-bound book from under his pillow. “Kevin brought me this from downstairs. Would you read it to me?”

I fell in love with Kevin all over again. Here was the perfect excuse for me to spend a lot of time with the boy. The book was Robinson Crusoe. I had read it when I was little, and I could remember not really liking it, but not quite being able to put it down. Crusoe had, after all, been on a slave-trading voyage when he was shipwrecked.

I opened the book with some apprehension, wondering what archaic spelling and punctuation I would face. I found the expected f’s for s’s and a few other things that didn’t turn up as often, but I got used to them very quickly. And I began to get into Robinson Crusoe.

As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else’s trouble.

I read and read and drank some of the water Rufus’s mother had left for him, and read some more. Rufus seemed to enjoy it. I didn’t stop until I thought he was falling asleep. But even then, as I put the book down, he opened his eyes and smiled.

“Nigel said your mother was a school teacher.”

“She was.”

“I like the way you read. It’s almost like being there watching

everything happen.”

“Thank you.”

“There’s a lot more books downstairs.”

“I’ve seen them.” I had also wondered about them. The Weylins didn’t seem to be the kind of people who would have a library.

“They belonged to Miss Hannah,” explained Rufus obligingly.

“Daddy was married to her before he married Mama, but she died.

This place used to be hers. He said she read so much that before he married Mama, he made sure she didn’t like to read.”

“What about you?”

He moved uncomfortably. “Reading’s too much trouble. Mr.

Jennings said I was too stupid to learn anyway.”

“Who’s Mr. Jennings?”

“He’s the schoolmaster.”

“Is he?” I shook my head in disgust. “He shouldn’t be. Listen, do you think you’re stupid?”

“No.” A small hesitant no. “But I read as good as Daddy does already. Why should I have to do more than that?”

“You don’t have to. You can stay just the way you are. Of course, that would give Mr. Jennings the satisfaction of thinking he was right

about you. Do you like him?”

“Nobody likes him.”

“Don’t be so eager to satisfy him then. And what about the boys you go to school with? It is just boys, isn’t it—no girls?”

“Yeah.”

“Well look at the advantage they’re going to have over you when you grow up. They’ll know more than you. They’ll be able to cheat you if they want to. Besides,” I held up Robinson Crusoe, “look at the pleasure you’ll miss.”

He grinned. “Not with you here. Read some more.”

“I don’t think I’d better. It’s getting late. Your mother will be home

soon.”

“No she won’t. Read.”

I sighed. “Rufe, your mother doesn’t like me. I think you know that.”

He looked away. “We have a little more time,” he said. “Maybe you’d better not read though. I forget to listen for her when you read.”

I handed him the book. “You read me a few lines.”

He accepted the book, looked at it as though it were his enemy.

After a moment, he began to read haltingly. Some words stopped him entirely and I had to help. After two painful paragraphs, he stopped and shut the book in disgust. “You can’t even tell it’s the same book when I read it,” he said.

“Let Kevin teach you,” I said. “He doesn’t believe you’re stupid, and neither do I. You’ll learn all right.” Unless he really did have some kind of problem—poor vision or some learning disability that people in this time would see as stubbornness or stupidity. Unless.

What did I know about teaching children? All I could do was hope the boy had as much potential as I thought he did.

I got up to go—then sat down again, remembering another unanswered question. “Rufe, what ever happened to Alice?”

“Nothing.” He looked surprised.

“I mean … the last time I saw her, her father had just been beaten because he went to see her and her mother.”

“Oh. Well, Daddy was afraid he’d run off, so he sold him to a trader.”

“Sold him … does he still live around here?”

“No, the trader was headed south. To Georgia, I think.”

“Oh God.” I sighed. “Are Alice and her mother still here?”

“Sure. I still see them—when I can walk.”

“Did they have any trouble because I was with them that night?”

That was as near as I dared to come to asking what had happened to my would-be enslaver.

“I don’t think so. Alice said you came and went away quick.”

“I went home. I can’t tell when I’m going to do that. It just

happens.”

“Back to California?”

“Yes.”

“Alice didn’t see you go. She said you just went into the woods and didn’t come back.”

“That’s good. Seeing me vanish would have frightened her.” Alice was keeping her mouth closed too then—or her mother was. Alice might not know what happened. Clearly there were things that even a friendly young white could not be told. On the other hand, if the patroller himself hadn’t spread the word about me or taken revenge on Alice and her mother, maybe he was dead. My blow could have killed him, or someone could have finished him after I went home. If they had, I didn’t want to know about it.

I got up again. “I have to go, Rufe. I’ll see you again whenever I

can.”

“Dana?”

I looked down at him.

“I told Mama who you were. I mean that you were the one who saved me from the river. She said it wasn’t true, but I think she really

believed me. I told her because I thought it might make her like you

better.”

“It hasn’t that I’ve noticed.”

“I know.” He frowned. “Why doesn’t she like you? Did you do something to her?”

“Not likely! After all, what would happen to me if I did something to

her?”

“Yeah. But why doesn’t she like you?”

“You’ll have to ask her.”

“She won’t tell me.” He looked up solemnly. “I keep thinking you’re going to go home—that somebody will come and tell me you and Kevin are gone. I don’t want you to go. But I don’t want you to get

hurt here either.”

I said nothing.

“You be careful,” he said softly.

I nodded and left the room. Just as I reached the stairs, Tom Weylin came out of his bedroom.

“What are you doing up here?” he demanded.

“Visiting Mister Rufus,” I said. “He asked to see me.”

“You were reading to him!”

Now I knew how he happened to come out just in time to catch me. He had been eavesdropping, for Godsake. What had he expected to hear? Or rather, what had he heard that he shouldn’t have? About Alice, perhaps. What would he make of that? For a moment my mind raced, searching for excuses, explanations. Then I realized I wouldn’t need them. I would have met him outside Rufus’s door if he had stayed long enough to hear about Alice. He had probably heard me addressing Rufus a little too familiarly. Nothing worse. I had deliberately not said anything damaging about Margaret because I thought her own attitude would damage her more in her son’s eyes than anything I could say. I made myself face Weylin calmly.

“Yes, I was reading to him,” I admitted. “He asked me to do that too. I think he was bored lying in there with nothing to do.”

“I didn’t ask you what you thought,” he said.

I said nothing.

He walked me farther from Rufus’s door, then stopped and turned to look hard at me. His eyes went over me like a man sizing up a woman for sex, but I got no message of lust from him. His eyes, I noticed, not for the first time, were almost as pale as Kevin’s. Rufus and his mother had bright green eyes. I liked the green better,

somehow.

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Twenty-six, sir.”

“You say that like you’re sure.”

“Yes, sir. I am.”

“What year were you born?”

“Seventeen ninety-three.” I had figured that out days ago thinking that it wasn’t a part of my personal history I should hesitate over if someone asked. At home, a person who hesitated over his birthdate was probably about to lie. As I spoke though, I realized that here, a person might hesitate over his birthdate simply because he didn’t know it. Sarah didn’t know hers.

“Twenty-six then,” said Weylin. “How many children have you had?”

“None.” I kept my face impassive, but I couldn’t keep myself from wondering where these questions were leading.

“No children by now?” He frowned. “You must be barren then.”

I said nothing. I wasn’t about to explain anything to him. My fertility was none of his business, anyway.

He stared at me a little longer, making me angry and uncomfortable, but I concealed my feelings as well as I could.

“You like children though, don’t you?” he asked. “You like my boy.”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Can you cipher too—along with your reading and writing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How’d you like to be the one to do the teaching?”

“Me?” I managed to frown … managed not to laugh aloud with relief. Tom Weylin wanted to buy me. In spite of all his warnings to Kevin of the dangers of owning educated, Northern-born slaves, he wanted to buy me. I pretended not to understand. “But that’s Mr.

Franklin’s job.”

“Could be your job.”

“Could it?”

“I could buy you. Then you’d live here instead of traveling around the country without enough to eat or a place to sleep.”

I lowered my eyes. “That’s for Mr. Franklin to say.”

“I know it is, but how do you feel about it?”

“Well … no offense, Mr. Weylin, I’m glad we stopped here, and as I said, I like your son. But I’d rather stay with Mr. Franklin.”

He gave me an unmistakable look of pity. “If you do, girl, you’ll live to regret it.” He turned and walked away.

I stared after him believing in spite of myself that he really felt sorry for me.

That night I told Kevin what had happened, and he wondered too.

“Be careful, Dana,” he said, unwittingly echoing Rufus. “Be as careful as you can.”

6

I was careful. As the days passed, I got into the habit of being careful. I played the slave, minded my manners probably more than I had to because I wasn’t sure what I could get away with. Not much, as it turned out.

Once I was called over to the slave cabins—the quarter—to watch Weylin punish a field hand for the crime of answering back. Weylin

ordered the man stripped naked and tied to the trunk of a dead tree.

As this was being done—by other slaves—Weylin stood whirling his whip and biting his thin lips. Suddenly, he brought the whip down across the slave’s back. The slave’s body jerked and strained against its ropes. I watched the whip for a moment wondering whether it was like the one Weylin had used on Rufus years before.

If it was, I understood completely why Margaret Weylin had taken the boy and fled. The whip was heavy and at least six feet long, and I wouldn’t have used it on anything living. It drew blood and screams at every blow. I watched and listened and longed to be away. But Weylin was making an example of the man. He had ordered all of us to watch the beating—all the slaves. Kevin was in the main house somewhere, probably not even aware of what was happening.

The whipping served its purpose as far as I was concerned. It scared me, made me wonder how long it would be before I made a mistake that would give someone reason to whip me. Or had I already made that mistake?

I had moved into Kevin’s room, after all. And though that would be perceived as Kevin’s doing, I could be made to suffer for it. The fact that the Weylins didn’t seem to notice my move gave me no real comfort. Their lives and mine were so separate that it might take them several days to realize that I had abandoned my place in the attic. I always got up before they did to get water and live coals from the cookhouse to start Kevin’s fire. Matches had apparently not been invented yet. Neither Sarah nor Rufus had ever heard of them.

By now, the manservant Weylin had assigned to Kevin ignored him completely, and Kevin and his room were left to me. It took us twice as long to get a fire started, and it took me longer to carry water up and down the stairs, but I didn’t care. The jobs I had assigned myself gave me legitimate reason for going in and out of Kevin’s room at all hours, and they kept me from being assigned more disagreeable work. Most important to me, though, they gave me a chance to preserve a little of 1976 amid the slaves and slaveholders.

After washing and watching Kevin bloody his face with the straight razor he had borrowed from Weylin, I would go down to help Sarah

with breakfast. Whole mornings went by without my seeing either of the Weylins. At night, I helped clean up after supper and prepare for the next day. So, like Sarah and Carrie, I rose before the Weylins and went to bed after them. That gave me several days of peace before Margaret Weylin discovered that she had another reason to dislike me.

She cornered me one day as I swept the library. If she had walked in two minutes earlier, she would have caught me reading a book.

“Where did you sleep last night?” she demanded in the strident, accusing voice she reserved for slaves.

I straightened to face her, rested my hands on the broom. How lovely it would have been to say, None of your business, bitch!

Instead, I spoke softly, respectfully. “In Mr. Franklin’s room, ma’am.” I didn’t bother to lie because all the house servants knew. It might even have been one of them who alerted Margaret. So now what

would happen?

Margaret slapped me across the face.

I stood very still, gazed down at her with frozen calm. She was three or four inches shorter than I was and proportionately smaller.

Her slap hadn’t hurt me much. It had simply made me want to hurt her. Only my memory of the whip kept me still.

“You filthy black whore!” she shouted. “This is a Christian house!”

I said nothing.

“I’ll see you sent to the quarter where you belong!”

Still I said nothing. I looked at her.

“I won’t have you in my house!” She took a step back from me.

“You stop looking at me that way!” She took another step back.

It occurred to me that she was a little afraid of me. I was an unknown, after all—an unpredictable new slave. And maybe I was a little too silent. Slowly, deliberately, I turned my back and went on sweeping.

I kept an eye on her, though, without seeming to. After all, she was as unpredictable as I was. She could pick up a candlestick or a vase

and hit me with it. And whip or no whip, I wasn’t going to stand passively and let her really hurt me.

But she made no move toward me. Instead, she turned and rushed away. It was a hot day, muggy and uncomfortable. No one else was moving very fast except to wave away flies. But Margaret Weylin still rushed everywhere. She had little or nothing to do.

Slaves kept her house clean, did much of her sewing, all her cooking and washing. Carrie even helped her put her clothes on and take them off. So Margaret supervised—ordered people to do work they were already doing, criticized their slowness and laziness even when they were quick and industrious, and in general, made trouble.

Weylin had married a poor, uneducated, nervous, startlingly pretty young woman who was determined to be the kind of person she thought of as a lady. That meant she didn’t do “menial” work, or any work at all, apparently. I had no one to compare her to except her guests who seemed, at least, to be calmer. But I suspected that most women of her time found enough to do to keep themselves comfortably busy whether they thought of themselves as “ladies” or not. Margaret, in her boredom, simply rushed around and made a nuisance of herself.

I finished my work in the library, wondering all the while whether Margaret had gone to her husband about me. Her husband, I feared.

I remembered the expression on his face when he had beaten the field hand. It hadn’t been gleeful or angry or even particularly interested. He could have been chopping wood. He wasn’t sadistic, but he didn’t shrink from his “duties” as master of the plantation. He would beat me bloody if he thought I had given him reason, and Kevin might not even find out until too late.

I went up to Kevin’s room, but he wasn’t there. I heard him when I passed Rufus’s room and I would have gone in, but a moment later, I heard Margaret’s voice. Repelled, I went back downstairs and out to the cookhouse.

Sarah and Carrie were alone when I went in, and I was glad of that. Sometimes old people and children lounged there, or house servants or even field hands stealing a few moments of leisure. I liked to listen to them talk sometimes and fight my way through their

accents to find out more about how they survived lives of slavery.

Without knowing it, they prepared me to survive. But now I wanted only Sarah and Carrie. I could say what I felt around them, and it wouldn’t get back to either of the Weylins.

“Dana,” Sarah greeted me, “you be careful. I spoke for you today. I don’t want you making me out to be a liar!”

I frowned. “Spoke for me? To Miss Margaret?”

Sarah gave a short harsh laugh. “No! You know I don’t say no more to her than I can help. She’s got her house, and I got my kitchen.”

I smiled and my own trouble receded a little. Sarah was right.

Margaret Weylin kept out of her way. Talk between them was brief and confined usually to meal planning.

“Why do you dislike her so if she doesn’t bother you?” I asked.

Sarah gave me the look of silent rage that I had not seen since my first day on the plantation. “Whose idea you think it was to sell my babies?”

“Oh.” She had not mentioned her lost children since that first day either.

“She wanted new furniture, new china dishes, fancy things you see in that house now. What she had was good enough for Miss Hannah, and Miss Hannah was a real lady. Quality. But it wasn’t good enough for white-trash Margaret. So she made Marse Tom sell my three boys to get money to buy things she didn’t even need!”

“Oh.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. My trouble seemed to shrink and become not worth mentioning. Sarah was silent for a while, her hands kneading bread dough automatically, maybe with a little more vigor than necessary. Finally she spoke again.

“It was Marse Tom I spoke to for you.”

I jumped. “Am I in trouble?”

“Not by anything I said. He just wanted to know how you work and are you lazy. I told him you wasn’t lazy. Told him you didn’t know how to do some things—and, girl, you come here not knowing how to do nothing, but I didn’t tell him that. I said if you don’t know how to do

something, you find out. And you work. I tell you to do something, I know it’s going to be done. Marse Tom say he might buy you.”

“Mr. Franklin won’t sell me.”

She lifted her head a little and literally looked down her nose at me. “No. Guess he won’t. Anyway, Miss Margaret don’t want you

here.”

I shrugged.

“Bitch,” muttered Sarah monotonously. Then, “Well, greedy and mean as she is, at least she don’t bother Carrie much.”

I looked at the mute girl eating stew and corn bread left over from the table of the whites. “Doesn’t she, Carrie?”

Carrie shook her head and kept eating.

“Course,” said Sarah, turning away from the bread dough, “Carrie don’t have nothing Miss Margaret wants.”

I just looked at her.

“You’re caught between,” she said. “You know that don’t you?”

“One man ought to be enough for her.”

“Don’t matter what ought to be. Matters what is. Make him let you

sleep in the attic again.”

“Make him!”

“Girl …” She smiled a little. “I see you and him together sometimes when you think nobody’s looking. You can make him do just about anything you want him to do.”

Her smile surprised me. I would have expected her to be disgusted with me—or with Kevin.

“Fact,” she continued, “if you got any sense, you’ll try to get him to free you now while you still young and pretty enough for him to listen.”

I looked at her appraisingly—large dark eyes set in a full unlined face several shades lighter than my own. She had been pretty herself not long ago. She was still an attractive woman. I spoke to

her softly. “Were you sensible, Sarah? Did you try when you were younger?”

She stared hard at me, her large eyes suddenly narrowed. Finally, she walked away without answering.

7

I didn’t move to the quarter. I took some cookhouse advice that I’d once heard Luke give to Nigel. “Don’t argue with white folks,” he had said. “Don’t tell them ‘no.’ Don’t let them see you mad. Just say ‘yes, sir.’ Then go ’head and do what you want to do. Might have to take a whippin’ for it later on, but if you want it bad enough, the whippin’ won’t matter much.”

There were a few whip marks on Luke’s back, and I’d twice heard Tom Weylin swear to give them company. But he hadn’t. And Luke went about his business, doing pretty much as he pleased. His business was keeping the field hands in line. Called the driver, he was a kind of black overseer. And he kept this relatively high position in spite of his attitude. I decided to develop a similar attitude—though with less risk to myself, I thought. I had no intention of taking a whipping if I could avoid it, and I was sure Kevin could protect me if he was nearby when I needed him.

Anyway, I ignored Margaret’s ravings and continued to disgrace

her Christian house.

And nothing happened.

Tom Weylin was up early one morning and he caught me stumbling, still half-asleep, out of Kevin’s room. I froze, then made

myself relax.

“Morning, Mr. Weylin.”

He almost smiled—came as near to smiling as I’d ever seen. And he winked.

That was all. I knew then that if Margaret got me kicked out, it wouldn’t be for doing a thing as normal as sleeping with my master.

And somehow, that disturbed me. I felt almost as though I really was

doing something shameful, happily playing whore for my supposed owner. I went away feeling uncomfortable, vaguely ashamed.

Time passed. Kevin and I became more a part of the household, familiar, accepted, accepting. That disturbed me too when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclimatize. Not that I wanted us to have trouble, but it seemed as though we should have had a harder time adjusting to this particular segment of history—adjusting to our places in the household of a slaveholder. For me, the work could be hard, but was usually more boring than physically wearing.

And Kevin complained of boredom, and of having to be sociable with a steady stream of ignorant pretentious guests who visited the Weylin house. But for drop-ins from another century, I thought we had had a remarkably easy time. And I was perverse enough to be bothered by the ease.

“This could be a great time to live in,” Kevin said once. “I keep thinking what an experience it would be to stay in it—go West and watch the building of the country, see how much of the Old West mythology is true.”

“West,” I said bitterly. “That’s where they’re doing it to the Indians instead of the blacks!”

He looked at me strangely. He had been doing that a lot lately.

Tom Weylin caught me reading in his library one day. I was supposed to be sweeping and dusting. I looked up, found him watching me, closed the book, put it away, and picked up my dust cloth. My hand was shaking.

“You read to my boy,” he said. “I let you do that. But that’s enough reading for you.”

There was a long silence and I said tardily, “Yes, sir.”

“In fact, you don’t even have to be in here. Tell Carrie to do this

room.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And stay away from the books!”

“Yes, sir.”

Hours later in the cookhouse, Nigel asked me to teach him to read.

The request surprised me, then I was ashamed of my surprise. It seemed such a natural request. Years before, Nigel had been chosen to be Rufus’s companion. If Rufus had been a better student, Nigel might already know how to read. As it was, Nigel had learned to do other things. At a husky thirteen, he could shoe a horse, build a cabinet, and plot to escape to Pennsylvania someday. I should have offered to teach him to read long before he asked me.

“You know what’s going to happen to both of us if we get caught?”

I asked him.

“You scared?” he asked.

“Yes. But that doesn’t matter. I’ll teach you. I just wanted to be sure you knew what you were getting into.”

He turned away from me, lifted his shirt in the back so that I could see his scars. Then he faced me again. “I know,” he said.

That same day, I stole a book and began to teach him.

And I began to realize why Kevin and I had fitted so easily into this time. We weren’t really in. We were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors. While we waited to go home, we humored the people around us by pretending to be like them. But we were poor actors. We never really got into our roles. We never forgot that we were acting.

This was something I tried to explain to Kevin on the day the children broke through my act. It suddenly became very important that he understand.

The day was miserably hot and muggy, full of flies, mosquitoes, and the bad smells of soapmaking, the outhouses, fish someone had caught, unwashed bodies. Everybody smelled, black and white.

Nobody washed enough or changed clothes often enough. The slaves worked up a sweat and the whites sweated without working.

Kevin and I didn’t have enough clothes or any deodorant at all, so often, we smelled too. Surprisingly, we were beginning to get used to it.

Now we were walking together away from the house and the quarter. We weren’t heading for our oak tree because by then, if Margaret Weylin saw us there, she sent someone with a job for me.

Her husband may have stopped her from throwing me out of the house, but he hadn’t stopped her from becoming a worse nuisance than ever. Sometimes Kevin countermanded her orders, claiming that he had work for me. That was how I got a little rest and gave Nigel some extra tutoring. Now, though, we were headed for the woods to spend some time together.

But before we got away from the buildings, we saw a group of slave children gathered around a tree stump. These were the children of the field hands, children too young to be of much use in the fields themselves. Two of them were standing on the wide flat stump while others stood around watching.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“Playing some game, probably.” Kevin shrugged.

“It looks as though …”

“What?”

“Let’s get closer. I want to hear what they’re saying.”

We approached them from one side so that neither the children on the tree stump nor those on the ground were facing us. They went on with their play as we watched and listened.

“Now here a likely wench,” called the boy on the stump. He gestured toward the girl who stood slightly behind him. “She cook and wash and iron. Come here, gal. Let the folks see you.” He drew the girl up beside him. “She young and strong,” he continued. “She worth plenty money. Two hundred dollars. Who bid two hundred dollars?”

The little girl turned to frown at him. “I’m worth more than two hundred dollars, Sammy!” she protested. “You sold Martha for five hundred dollars!”

“You shut your mouth,” said the boy. “You ain’t supposed to say nothing. When Marse Tom bought Mama and me, we didn’t say nothing.”

I turned and walked away from the arguing children, feeling tired and disgusted. I wasn’t even aware that Kevin was following me until he spoke.

“That’s the game I thought they were playing,” he said. “I’ve seen them at it before. They play at field work too.”

I shook my head. “My God, why can’t we go home? This place is diseased.”

He took my hand. “The kids are just imitating what they’ve seen adults doing,” he said. “They don’t understand …”

“They don’t have to understand. Even the games they play are preparing them for their future—and that future will come whether

they understand it or not.”

“No doubt.”

I turned to glare at him and he looked back calmly. It was a what- do-you-want-me-to-do-about-it kind of look. I didn’t say anything because, of course, there was nothing he could do about it.

I shook my head, rubbed my hand across my brow. “Even knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t help,” I said. “I know some of those kids will live to see freedom—after they’ve slaved away their best years. But by the time freedom comes to them, it will be too late.

Maybe it’s already too late.”

“Dana, you’re reading too much into a kids’ game.”

“And you’re reading too little into it. Anyway … anyway, it’s not their game.”

“No.” He glanced at me. “Look, I won’t say I understand how you feel about this because maybe that’s something I can’t understand.

But as you said, you know what’s going to happen. It already has happened. We’re in the middle of history. We surely can’t change it.

If anything goes wrong, we might have all we can do just to survive it. We’ve been lucky so far.”

“Maybe.” I drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But I can’t close my eyes.”

Kevin frowned thoughtfully. “It’s surprising to me that there’s so little to see. Weylin doesn’t seem to pay much attention to what his

people do, but the work gets done.”

“You think he doesn’t pay attention. Nobody calls you out to see

the whippings.”

“How many whippings?”

“One that I’ve seen. One too goddamn many!”

“One is too many, yes, but still, this place isn’t what I would have imagined. No overseer. No more work than the people can manage …”

“… no decent housing,” I cut in. “Dirt floors to sleep on, food so inadequate they’d all be sick if they didn’t keep gardens in what’s supposed to be their leisure time and steal from the cookhouse when Sarah lets them. And no rights and the possibility of being mistreated or sold away from their families for any reason—or no reason. Kevin, you don’t have to beat people to treat them brutally.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’m not minimizing the wrong that’s being done here. I just …”

“Yes you are. You don’t mean to be, but you are.” I sat down against a tall pine tree, pulling him down beside me. We were in the woods now. Not far to one side of us was a group of Weylin’s slaves who were cutting down trees. We could hear them, but we couldn’t see them. I assumed that meant they couldn’t see us either—or hear us over the distance and their own noise. I spoke to Kevin again.

“You might be able to go through this whole experience as an observer,” I said. “I can understand that because most of the time, I’m still an observer. It’s protection. It’s nineteen seventy-six shielding and cushioning eighteen nineteen for me. But now and then, like with the kids’ game, I can’t maintain the distance. I’m drawn all the way into eighteen nineteen, and I don’t know what to do. I ought to be doing something though. I know that.”

“There’s nothing you could do that wouldn’t eventually get you

whipped or killed!”

I shrugged.

“You … you haven’t already done anything, have you?”

“Just started to teach Nigel to read and write,” I said. “Nothing more subversive than that.”

“If Weylin catches you and I’m not around …”

“I know. So stay close. The boy wants to learn, and I’m going to teach him.”

He raised one leg against his chest and leaned forward looking at me. “You think someday he’ll write his own pass and head North,

don’t you?”

“At least he’ll be able to.”

“I see Weylin was right about educated slaves.”

I turned to look at him.

“Do a good job with Nigel,” he said quietly. “Maybe when you’re

gone, he’ll be able to teach others.”

I nodded solemnly.

“I’d bring him in to learn with Rufus if people weren’t so good at listening at doors in that house. And Margaret is always wandering in and out.”

“I know. That’s why I didn’t ask you.” I closed my eyes and saw the children playing their game again. “The ease seemed so frightening,”

I said. “Now I see why.”

“What?”

“The ease. Us, the children … I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”

8

I said good-bye to Rufus the day my teaching finally did get me into trouble. I didn’t know I was saying good-bye, of course—didn’t know what trouble was waiting for me in the cookhouse where I was to meet Nigel. I thought there was trouble enough in Rufus’s room.

I was there reading to him. I had been reading to him regularly since his father caught me that first time. Tom Weylin didn’t want me

reading on my own, but he had ordered me to read to his son. Once he had told Rufus in my presence, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! A nigger can read better than you!”

“She can read better than you too,” Rufus had answered.

His father had stared at him coldly, then ordered me out of the room. For a second I was afraid for Rufus, but Tom Weylin left the room with me.

“Don’t go to him again until I say you can,” he told me.

Four days passed before he said I could. And again he chastised Rufus before me.

“I’m no schoolmaster,” he said, “but I’ll teach you if you can be

taught. I’ll teach you respect.”

Rufus said nothing.

“You want her to read to you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you got something to say to me.”

“I … I’m sorry, Daddy.”

“Read,” said Weylin to me. He turned and left the room.

“What exactly are you supposed to be sorry for?” I asked when Weylin was gone. I spoke very softly.

“Talking back,” said Rufus. “He thinks everything I say is talking back. So I don’t say very much to him.”

“I see.” I opened the book and began to read.

We had finished Robinson Crusoe long ago, and Kevin had chosen a couple of other familiar books from the library. We had already gone through the first, Pilgrim’s Progress. Now we were working on Gulliver’s Travels. Rufus’s own reading was improving slowly under Kevin’s tutoring, but he still enjoyed being read to.

On my last day with him, though, as on a few others, Margaret came in to listen—and to fidget and to fiddle with Rufus’s hair and to pet him while I was reading. As usual, Rufus put his head on her lap

and accepted her caresses silently. But today, apparently, that was not enough.

“Are you comfortable?” she asked Rufus when I had been reading for a few moments. “Does your leg hurt?” His leg was not healing as I thought it should have. After nearly two months, he still couldn’t

walk.

“I feel all right, Mama,” he said.

Suddenly, Margaret twisted around to face me. “Well?” she demanded.

I had paused in my reading to give her a chance to finish. I lowered my head and began to read again.

About sixty seconds later, she said, “Baby, you hot? You want me to call Virgie up here to fan you?” Virgie was about ten—one of the small house servants often called to fan the whites, run errands for them, carry covered dishes of food between the cookhouse and the main house, and serve the whites at their table.

“I’m all right, Mama,” said Rufus.

“Why don’t you go on?” snapped Margaret at me. “You’re supposed to be here to read, so read!”

I began to read again, biting off the words a little.

“Are you hungry, baby?” asked Margaret a moment later. “Aunt Sarah’s just made a cake. Wouldn’t you like a piece?”

I didn’t stop this time. I just lowered my voice a little and read automatically, tonelessly.

“I don’t know why you want to listen to her,” Margaret said to Rufus. “She’s got a voice like a fly buzzing.”

“I don’t want no cake, Mama.”

“You sure? You ought to see the fine white icing Sarah put on it.”

“I want to hear Dana read, that’s all.”

“Well, there she is, reading. If you can call it that.”

I let my voice grow progressively softer as they talked.

“I can’t hear her with you talking,” Rufus said.

“Baby, all I said was …”

“Don’t say nothing!” Rufus took his head off her lap. “Go away and stop bothering me!”

“Rufus!” She sounded hurt rather than angry. And in spite of the situation, this sounded like real disrespect to me. I stopped reading and waited for the explosion. It came from Rufus.

“Go away, Mama!” he shouted. “Just leave me alone!”

“Be still,” she whispered. “Baby, you’ll make yourself sick.”

Rufus turned his head and looked at her. The expression on his face startled me. For once, the boy looked like a smaller replica of his father. His mouth was drawn into a thin straight line and his eyes were coldly hostile. He spoke quietly now as Weylin sometimes did when he was angry. “You’re making me sick, Mama. Get away from me!”

Margaret got up and dabbed at her eyes. “I don’t see how you can talk to me that way,” she said. “Just because of some nigger …”

Rufus just looked at her, and finally she left the room.

He relaxed against his pillows and closed his eyes. “I get so tired

of her sometimes,” he said.

“Rufe …?”

He opened weary, friendly eyes and looked at me. The anger was gone.

“You’d better be careful,” I said. “What if your mother told your father you talked to her that way?”

“She never tells.” He grinned. “She’ll be back after ’while to bring me a piece of cake with fine white icing.”

“She was crying.”

“She always cries. Read, Dana.”

“Do you talk to her that way often?”

“I have to, or she won’t leave me alone. Daddy does it too.”

I took a deep breath, shook my head, and plunged back into Gulliver’s Travels.

Later, as I left Rufus, I passed Margaret on her way back to his room. Sure enough, she was carrying a large slice of cake on a plate.

I went downstairs and out to the cookhouse to give Nigel his reading lesson.

Nigel was waiting. He already had our book out of its hiding place and was spelling out words to Carrie. That surprised me because I had offered Carrie a chance to learn with him, and she had refused.

Now though, the two of them, alone in the cookhouse, were so involved in what they were doing that they didn’t even notice me until I shut the door. They looked up then, wide-eyed with fear. But they relaxed when they saw it was only me. I went over to them.

“Do you want to learn?” I asked Carrie.

The girl’s fear seemed to return and she glanced at the door.

“Aunt Sarah’s afraid for her to learn,” said Nigel. “Afraid if she learns, she might get caught at it, and then be whipped or sold.”

I lowered my head, sighed. The girl couldn’t talk, couldn’t communicate at all except in the inadequate sign language she had invented—a language even her mother only half-understood. In a more rational society, an ability to write would be of great help to her.

But here, the only people who could read her writing would be those who might punish her for being able to write. And Nigel. And Nigel.

I looked from the boy to the girl. “Shall I teach you, Carrie?” If I did and her mother caught me, I might be in more trouble than if Tom Weylin caught me. I was afraid to teach her both for her sake and for mine. Her mother wasn’t a woman I wanted to offend or to hurt, but my conscience wouldn’t let me refuse her if she wanted to learn.

Carrie nodded. She wanted to learn all right. She turned away from us for a moment, did something to her dress, then turned back with a small book in her hand. She too had stolen from the library.

Her book was a volume of English history illustrated with a few drawings which she pointed out to me.

I shook my head. “Either hide it or put it back,” I told her. “It’s too hard for you to begin with. The one Nigel and I are using was written

for people just starting to learn.” It was an old speller—probably the one Weylin’s first wife had been taught from.

Carrie’s fingers caressed one of the drawings for a moment. Then she put the book back into her dress.

“Now,” I said, “find something to do in case your mother comes in.

I can’t teach you in here. We’ll have to find someplace else to meet.”

She nodded, looking relieved, and went over to sweep the other side of the room.

“Nigel,” I said softly when she was gone, “I surprised you when I

came in here, didn’t I?”

“Didn’t know it was you.”

“Yes. It could have been Sarah, couldn’t it?”

He said nothing.

“I teach you in here because Sarah said I could, and because the Weylins never seem to come out here.”

“They don’t. They send us out here to tell Sarah what they want.

Or to tell her to come to them.”

“So you can learn here, but Carrie can’t. We might have trouble no matter how careful we are, but we don’t have to ask for it.”

He nodded.

“By the way, what does your father think of my teaching you?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t tell him you was.”

Oh God. I took a shaky breath. “But he does know, doesn’t he?”

“Aunt Sarah probably told him. He never said nothing to me though.”

If anything went wrong, there would be blacks to take their revenge on me when the whites finished. When would I ever go home? Would I ever go home? Or if I had to stay here, why couldn’t I just turn these two kids away, turn off my conscience, and be a coward, safe and comfortable?

I took the book from Nigel and handed him my own pencil and a piece of paper from my tablet. “Spelling test,” I said quietly.

He passed the test. Every word right. To my surprise as well as his, I hugged him. He grinned, half-embarrassed, half-pleased. Then I got up and put his test paper into the hot coals of the hearth. It burst into flames and burned completely. I was always careful about that, and I always hated being careful. I couldn’t help contrasting Nigel’s lessons with Rufus’s. And the contrast made me bitter.

I turned to go back to the table where Nigel was waiting. In that moment, Tom Weylin opened the door and stepped in.

It wasn’t supposed to happen. For as long as I had been on the plantation, it had not happened—no white had come into the cookhouse. Not even Kevin. Nigel had just agreed with me that it didn’t happen.

But there stood Tom Weylin staring at me. He lowered his gaze a little and frowned. I realized that I was still holding the old speller. I’d gotten up with it in my hand and I hadn’t put it down. I even had one finger in it holding my place.

I withdrew my finger and let the book close. I was in for a beating now. Where was Kevin? Somewhere inside the house, probably. He might hear me if I screamed—and I would be screaming shortly, anyway. But it would be better if I could just get past Weylin and run into the house.

Weylin stood squarely in front of the door. “Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want you reading!”

I said nothing. Clearly, nothing I could say would help. I felt myself trembling, and I tried to be still. I hoped Weylin couldn’t see. And I hoped Nigel had had the sense to get the pencil off the table. So far, I was the only one in trouble. If it could just stay that way … “I treated you good,” said Weylin quietly, “and you pay me back by stealing from me! Stealing my books! Reading!”

He snatched the book from me and threw it on the floor. Then he grabbed me by the arm and dragged me toward the door. I managed to twist around to face Nigel and mouth the words, “Get Kevin.” I saw Nigel stand up.

Then I was out of the cookhouse. Weylin dragged me a few feet, then pushed me hard. I fell, knocked myself breathless. I never saw where the whip came from, never even saw the first blow coming.

But it came—like a hot iron across my back, burning into me through my light shirt, searing my skin … I screamed, convulsed. Weylin struck again and again, until I couldn’t have gotten up at gunpoint.

I kept trying to crawl away from the blows, but I didn’t have the strength or the coordination to get far. I may have been still screaming or just whimpering, I couldn’t tell. All I was really aware of was the pain. I thought Weylin meant to kill me. I thought I would die on the ground there with a mouth full of dirt and blood and a white man cursing and lecturing as he beat me. By then, I almost wanted to die. Anything to stop the pain.

I vomited. And I vomited again because I couldn’t move my face away.

I saw Kevin, blurred, but somehow still recognizable. I saw him running toward me in slow motion, running. Legs churning, arms pumping, yet he hardly seemed to be getting closer.

Suddenly, I realized what was happening and I screamed—I think I screamed. He had to reach me. He had to!

And I passed out.