Kindred

I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. Before the police would release Kevin from jail, I had to convince them he wasn't to blame. “An accident,” I heard myself whisper from the hospital bed, the word feeling small and useless. “My fault.” They asked about Kevin, their questions circling, trying to pin this horror on him. But when I finally awoke, clear-headed and aching, he was there, dozing in the chair beside me. I tried to look at the empty space where my arm had been, the stump above the elbow, but he gently turned my head toward him. I had to see it to accept it. After a moment, I lay back and closed my eyes. The truth was, there was no honest explanation I could give them - none they would believe. If I told those deputies the truth, Kevin wouldn't be in jail; he'd be locked in a mental hospital.

The trouble began on my twenty-sixth birthday. One moment I was in our new house in California, sorting books with Kevin; the next, the room blurred and darkened. I felt a wave of dizziness, and then the house, the books, everything vanished. Suddenly, I was kneeling at the edge of a woods, before a wide, tranquil river. A small, red-haired boy was splashing, screaming, drowning. I didn't think; I ran into the water and pulled him to shore. He was unconscious, but I breathed into his mouth until he coughed and cried for his mother. Just as relief washed over me, I found myself looking down the barrel of the longest rifle I had ever seen, held by an angry man. The world went sick and blurry again, and then I was back in my living room, soaking wet and muddy, with Kevin staring at me in frozen disbelief. “You vanished,” he whispered. He said I was gone for only ten or fifteen seconds.

It happened again. The sick dizziness returned, and the world dissolved. I found myself in a dark room where the same red-haired boy, Rufus, now a few years older, stood watching the draperies he had just set on fire. I pulled them down and threw them out the window, averting disaster a second time. But this time, I did not return home. Stranded, I learned the terrifying truth from the boy. It was not 1976. It was 1815, and I was on the Weylin plantation in Maryland. Rufus was my ancestor, his daughter Hagar the first name listed in my family's old Bible. This accident-prone boy was the reason I was being pulled through time. His fear called to me, and my own fear of death, I would later learn, was the only thing that could send me home. That night, I witnessed the casual brutality of the patrollers, who whipped a slave for visiting his free wife, Alice - the woman who would one day be Hagar's mother. I was beaten myself before I finally fell into a starless darkness and woke up bloody and bruised in my own bed, in my own time.

On my next journey, Kevin was holding me when the dizziness struck, and he was pulled back with me. We arrived to find a twelve-year-old Rufus with a broken leg. For weeks, we lived on the plantation, caught in a dangerous charade. To survive, Kevin, my husband, had to pose as my master. He became Rufus's tutor, and I was relegated to the cookhouse, learning the rhythms of slave life from a woman named Sarah, whose own children had been sold away by Tom Weylin, Rufus's father. I slept on a pallet in the attic with the other house slaves, enduring the petty cruelties of Rufus's mother, Margaret. I saw a man whipped for answering back, the sight of it searing into my memory. I was property here, a thing, and the ease with which we all fell into our roles was the most frightening thing of all.

Years passed for Rufus between my visits. When his life was threatened again, I was pulled back alone. Kevin, stranded in the past, had finally given up and gone north. Rufus was now a young man, his face a mess of bruises from a fight. I found him near a stream, beaten by Isaac Jackson, the husband of his childhood friend, Alice. Rufus had tried to rape her. He was no longer a boy in need of saving; he was a man who had inherited the casual cruelty of his time. “She got so she'd rather have a buck nigger than me!” he seethed. When Isaac and Alice ran, Rufus bought Alice at a slave auction, bringing her back to the plantation broken and defeated. He had destroyed her life to possess her, and I was forced to nurse her back to health, to watch her become his unwilling mistress.

My next trip began in a storm. I found Rufus lying face down in a puddle, drunk and sick with what I soon realized was malaria. His father was dead, and he was now master of the plantation. To punish me for some imagined wrong, he sent me to the fields to chop corn under the eye of a brutal overseer. The man's whip fell on me for being too slow, for being too fast, for nothing at all. The pain was a constant fire, and I worked until I collapsed in the dirt. Rufus came for me then, remorseful in his own way. “People don't die when you're taking care of them,” he told me, a strange and terrible faith in his eyes. He had become a man of his time, selling a field hand named Sam simply for speaking to me, then striking me when I objected. It was a line crossed between us, a promise broken.

The discovery that Rufus had never mailed my letters to Kevin - that he had been holding them, trapping me - was the final betrayal. I attempted to run, but he and his father caught me on the road. For my escape, Tom Weylin tied me to a rafter in the barn and beat me until I was a screaming, half-conscious ruin. Later, to get home, to escape the hopelessness that was consuming me, I cut my wrists. The act was a key, a desperate prayer. It worked. But my time at home with Kevin was short. On the Fourth of July, I was pulled back a final time.

I found Alice hanging from a rafter in the barn. She had killed herself. Rufus, in a fit of rage after she had tried to run away again, had not actually sold her children as he'd threatened; he had only sent them away to Baltimore to scare her. But the threat was enough. He had driven her to it. His grief was a bottomless, selfish thing. He looked at me, his eyes hollow. “You were one woman,” he said. “You and her. Two halves of a whole.” He came for me then, to take what he believed was his. I sank my knife into his side, and then his back. As he collapsed across me, his hand still gripping my arm, I felt a wrenching, impossible agony. I was going home, but not all of me would make it. My arm, where his fingers were clamped, was being absorbed into the wall of my own living room, fused with plaster and wood, and then severed.

Kevin and I flew to Maryland. We searched for records, for some trace of the people I had known. The Weylin house was gone, the land a cornfield. An old newspaper reported that Rufus Weylin had died in a fire that destroyed his home - a fire Nigel must have set to cover my escape and my crime. The notices of the estate sale listed the slaves by name. Sarah was there, but not her daughter Carrie, or her husband Nigel. Alice's children, Joe and Hagar, were not on the list either. They had been in Baltimore when Rufus died. Perhaps their grandmother Margaret had kept them, raised them as her own. Perhaps. I will never know what became of most of them. I touched the scar on my face, the empty sleeve of my left arm. The past is over, but it is not gone. It is not gone at all.