But for now, they would go on being abysmal parents, neglecting and abusing their children not out of cruelty, but because they hurt too badly themselves to notice their children’s pain. In fact, they were likely to notice that pain only as a new addition to their own. Thus, sometimes their kind murdered children. Doro had not believed the Sloanes were dangerous in that way. Now, he was less certain.
“Isaac … ?”
Isaac looked at him, understood the unspoken question. “I assume you mean to keep the parents alive for a while.”
“Yes.”
“Then you’d better find another home for the child—and for every other child they have. Anyanwu says they should never have had any.”
“Which means, of course, that they should have as many as possible.”
“From your point of view, yes. Good useful people. I’ve already begun talking to them about giving up the child.”
“Good. And?”
“They’re worried about what people might think. I got the impression they’d be glad to get rid of the child if not for that—and one other thing.”
“What?”
Isaac looked away. “They’re worried about who’ll care for them when they’re old. I told them you’d talk to them about that.”
Doro smiled thinly. Isaac refused to lie to the people he thought Doro had selected as prey. Most often, he refused to tell them anything at all. Sometimes such people guessed what was being kept from them, and they ran. Doro took pleasure in hunting them down. Lann Sloane, Doro thought, would be especially good game. The man had a kind of animal awareness about him.
“Anyanwu would say you have on your leopard face now,” Isaac commented.
Doro shrugged. He knew what Anyanwu would say, and that she meant it when she compared him to one kind of animal or another. Once she had said such things out of fear or anger. Now she said them out of grim hatred. She had made herself the nearest thing he had to an enemy. She obeyed. She was civil. But she could hold a grudge as no one Doro had ever known. She was alive because of Isaac. Doro had no doubt that if he had tried to give her to any of his other sons, she would have refused and died. He had asked her what Isaac said to change her mind, and when she refused to tell him, he had asked Isaac. To his surprise, Isaac refused to tell him, too. His son refused him very little, angered him very rarely. But this time …
“You’ve given her to me,” Isaac had said. “Now she and I have to have things of our own.” His face and his voice told Doro he would not say any more. Doro had left Wheatley the next day, confident that Isaac would take care of the details—marry the woman, build himself a house, help her learn to live in the settlement, decide on work for himself, start the children coming. Even at twenty-five, Isaac had been very capable. And Doro had not trusted himself to stay near either Isaac or Anyanwu. The depth of his own anger amazed him. Normally, people had only to annoy him to die for their error. He had to think to remember how long it had been since he had felt real anger and left those who caused it alive. But his son and this tiresome little forest peasant who was, fortunately for her, the best wild seed he had ever found, had lived. There was no forgiveness in Anyanwu, though. If she had learned to love her husband, she had not learned to forgive her husband’s father. Now and then, Doro tried to penetrate her polite, aloof hostility, tried to break her, bring her back to what she was when he took her from her people. He was not accustomed to people resisting him, not accustomed to their hating him. The woman was a puzzle he had not yet solved—which was why now, after she had given him eight children, given Isaac five children, she was still alive. She would come to him again, without the coldness. She would make herself young without being told to do so, and she would come to him. Then, satisfied, he would kill her.
He licked his lips thinking about it, and Isaac coughed. Doro looked at his son with the old fondness and amended his thought. Anyanwu would live until Isaac died. She was keeping Isaac healthy, perhaps keeping him alive. She was doing it for herself, of course. Isaac had captured her long ago as he captured everyone, and she did not want to lose him any sooner than she had to. But her reasons did not matter. Inadvertently, she was doing Doro a service. He did not want to lose Isaac any sooner than he had to either. He shook his head, spoke to divert himself from the thought of his son’s dying.
“I was down in the city on business,” he said. “Then about a week ago when I was supposed to leave for England, I found myself thinking about Nweke.” This was Anyanwu’s youngest daughter. Doro claimed her as his daughter too, though Anyanwu disputed this. Doro had worn the body that fathered the girl, but he had not worn it at the time of the fathering. He had taken it afterward.
“Nweke’s all right,” Isaac said. “As all right as she can be, I suppose. Her transition is coming soon and she has her bad days, but Anyanwu seems to be able to comfort her.”
“You haven’t noticed her having any special trouble in the past few days?”
Isaac thought for a moment. “No, not that I recall. I haven’t seen too much of her. She’s been helping to sew for a friend who’s getting married—the Van Ness girl, you know.”
Doro nodded.
“And I’ve been helping with the Boyden house. I guess you could say I’ve been building the Boyden house. I have to use what I’ve got now and then, no matter how Anyanwu nags me to slow down. Otherwise, I find myself walking a foot or so off the ground or throwing things. The ability doesn’t seem to weaken with age.”
“So I’ve noticed. Do you still enjoy it?”
“You couldn’t know how much,” Isaac said, smiling. He looked away, remembered pleasure flickering across his face, causing him to look years younger than he was. “Do you know we still fly sometimes—Anyanwu and I? You should see her as a bird of her own design. Color you wouldn’t believe.”
“I’m afraid I’ll see you as a corpse if you go on doing such things. Firearms are improving slowly. Flying is a stupid risk.”
“It’s what I do,” Isaac said quietly. “You know better than to ask me to give it up entirely.”
Doro sighed. “I suppose I do.”
“Anyway, Anyanwu always goes along with me—and she always flies slightly lower.”
Anyanwu the protector, Doro thought with bitterness that surprised him. Anyanwu the defender of anyone who needed her. Doro wondered what she would do if he told her he needed her. Laugh? Very likely. She would be right, of course. Over the years it had become almost as difficult for him to get a lie past her as it was for her to lie successfully to him. The only reason she did not know of his colony of her African descendants in South Carolina was that he had never given her reason to ask. Even Isaac did not know.
“Does it bother you?” he asked Isaac. “Having her protecting you that way?”
“It did, at first,” Isaac said. “I would outdistance her. I’m faster than any bird if I want to be. I would leave her behind and ignore her. But she was always there, laboring to catch up, hampered by winds that didn’t bother me at all. She never gave up. After a while, I began expecting her to be there. Now, I think I’d be more bothered if she didn’t come along.”
“Has she been shot?”
Isaac hesitated. “That’s what the bright colors are for, I guess,” he said finally. “To distract attention from me. Yes, she’s been shot a couple of times. She falls a few yards, flops about to give me time to get away. Then she recovers and follows.
Doro looked up at the portrait of Anyanwu on the wall opposite the high, shallow fireplace. The style of the house was English here, Dutch there, Igbo somewhere else. Anyanwu had made earthen pots, variations of those she had once sold in the marketplaces of her homeland, and stout handsome baskets. People bought them from her and placed them around their houses as she had. Her work was both decorative and utilitarian, and here in her house with its Dutch fireplace and kas, its English settle and thronelike wainscot chairs, it evoked memories of a land she would not see again. Anyanwu had never sanded the floor as Dutc
h women did. Dirt was for sweeping out, she said contemptuously, not for scattering on the floor. She was more house proud than most English women Doro knew, but Dutch women shook their heads and gossiped about her “slovenly” housekeeping and pretended to pity Isaac. In fact, in the easy atmosphere of Wheatley, nearly every woman pitied Isaac so much that had he wished, he could have spread his valuable seed everywhere. Only Doro drew female attention more strongly—and only Doro took advantage of it. But then, Doro did not have to worry about outraged husbands—or an outraged wife.
The portrait of Anyanwu was extraordinary. Clearly, the Dutch artist had been captured by her beauty. He had draped her in a brilliant blue that set off her dark skin beautifully as blue always had. Even her hair had been hidden in blue cloth. She was holding a child—her first son by Isaac. The child, too, only a few months old, was partly covered by the blue. He looked out of the painting, large-eyed and handsomer than any infant should have been. Did Anyanwu deliberately conceive only handsome children? Every one of them was beautiful, even though Doro had fathered some with hideous bodies.
The portrait was a black Madonna and child right down to Anyanwu’s too-clear, innocent-seeming eyes. Strangers were moved to comment on the likeness. Some were appreciative, looking at the still handsome Anyanwu—she kept herself looking well for Isaac even as she aged herself along with him. Others were deeply offended, believing that someone actually had tried to portray the Virgin and Child as “black savages.” Race prejudice was growing in the colonies—even in this formerly Dutch colony where things had once been so casual. Earlier in the year, there had been mass executions at New York City. Someone had been setting fires and the whites decided it must be the blacks. On little or no evidence, thirty-one blacks were killed—thirteen of them burned at the stake. Doro was beginning to worry about this upriver town. Of all his English colonial settlements, only in this one did his blacks not have the protection of powerful white owners. How soon before whites from elsewhere began to see them as fair game.
Doro shook his head. The woman in the portrait seemed to look down at him as he looked up. He should have had too much on his mind to think about her or about her daughter Ruth, called Nweke. He should not have allowed himself to be drawn back to Wheatley. It was good to see Isaac … but that woman!
“She was the right wife for me after all,” Isaac was saying. “I remember her telling me she wasn’t once before we married, but that was one of the few times I’ve known her to be wrong.”
“I want to see her,” Doro said abruptly. “And I want to see Nweke. I think the girl’s a lot closer to her change than you realize.”
“You think that’s why you were pulled back here?”
Doro did not like the word “pulled,” but he nodded without comment.
Isaac stood up. “Nweke first, while you’re still in a fairly good mood.” He went out of the house without waiting for Doro to answer. He loved Doro and he loved Anyanwu and it bothered him that the two got along so badly together.
“I don’t see how you can be such a fool with her,” he told Doro once—to Doro’s surprise. “The woman is not temporary. She can be everything you need if you let her—mate, companion, business partner, her abilities complement yours so well. Yet all you do is humiliate her.”
“I’ve never hurt her,” Doro had told him. “Never hurt one of her children. You show me one other wild-seed woman I’ve allowed to live as long as she has after childbearing.” He had not touched her children because from the first, she promised him that if any one of them was harmed, she would bear no more. No matter what he did to her, she would bear no more. Her sincerity was unmistakable; thus he refrained from preying on her least successful children, refrained from breeding her daughters to her sons—or bedding those daughters himself. She did not know what care he had taken to keep her content. She did not know, but Isaac should have.
“You treat her a little better than the others because she’s a little more useful,” Isaac had said. “But you still humiliate her.”
“If she chooses to be humiliated by what I have her do, she’s creating her own problem.”
Isaac had looked at him steadily, almost angrily, for several seconds. “I know about Nweke’s father,” he had said. He had said it without fear. Over the years, he had come to learn that he was one of the few people who did not have to be afraid.
Doro had gone away from him feeling ashamed. He had not thought it was still possible for him to feel shame, but Anyanwu’s presence seemed to be slowly awakening several long dormant emotions in him. How many women had he sent Isaac to without feeling a thing. Isaac had done as he was told and come home. Home from Pennsylvania, home from Maryland, home from Georgia, home from Spanish Florida … Isaac didn’t mind either. He didn’t like being away from Anyanwu and the children for long periods, but he didn’t mind the women. And they certainly didn’t mind him. He didn’t mind that Doro had begotten eight of Anyanwu’s children. Or seven. Only Anyanwu minded that. Only she felt humiliated. But Nweke’s father was, perhaps, another matter.
The girl, eighteen years old, small and dark like her mother, came through the door, Isaac’s arm around her shoulders. She was red-eyed as though she had been crying or as though she hadn’t been sleeping. Probably both. This was a bad time for her.
“Is it you?” she whispered, seeing the sharp-featured stranger.
“Of course,” Doro said, smiling.
His voice, the knowledge that he was indeed Doro, triggered tears. She went to him crying softly, looking for comfort in his arms. He held her and looked over her shoulder at Isaac.
“Whatever you’ve got to say to me, I deserve it,” Isaac said. “I didn’t notice and I should have. After all these years, I surely should have.”
Doro said nothing, motioned Isaac back out the door.
Isaac obeyed silently, probably feeling more guilt than he should have. This was no ordinary girl. None of her brothers or sisters had reached Doro miles away with their desperation as their transitions neared. What had he felt about her? Anxiety, worry, more. Some indefinable feeling not only that she was near transition, but that she was on the verge of becoming something he had not known before. Something new. It was as though from New York City he had sensed another Anyanwu—new, different, attracting him, pulling him. He had never followed a feeling more willingly.
The girl moved in his arms and he took her to the high-backed settle near the fireplace. The narrow bench was nearly as uncomfortable as the wainscot chairs. Not for the first time, Doro wondered why Isaac and Anyanwu did not buy or have made some comfortable modern furniture. Surely they could afford it.
“What am I going to do?” the girl whispered. She had put her head against his shoulder, but even that close, Doro could hardly hear her. “It hurts so much.”
“Endure it,” he said simply. “It will end.”
“When!” From a whisper to almost a scream. Then back to the whisper. “When?”
“Soon.” He held her away from him a little so that he could see the small face, swollen and weary. The girl’s coloring was gray rather than its usual rich dark brown. “You haven’t been sleeping?”
“A little. Sometimes. The nightmares … only they aren’t nightmares, are they?”
“You know what they are.”
She shrank against the back of the bench. “You know David Whitten, two houses over?”
Doro nodded. The Whitten boy was twenty. Fairly good breeding stock. His family would be worth more in generations to come. They had a sensitivity that puzzled Doro. He did not know quite what they were becoming, but the feeling he got from them was good. They were a pleasant mystery that careful inbreeding would solve.
“Almost every night,” Nweke said, “David … he goes to his sister’s bed.”
Startled, Doro laughed aloud. “Does he?”
“Just like married people. Why is that funny? They could get into trouble—brother and sister. They could …”
“T
hey’ll be all right.”
She looked at him closely. “Did you know about it?”
“No.” Doro was still smiling. “How old is the girl? Around sixteen?”
“Seventeen.” Nweke hesitated. “She likes it.”
“So do you,” Doro observed.
Nweke twisted away, embarrassed. There was no coyness to her; her embarrassment was real. “I didn’t want to know about it. I didn’t try to know!”
“Do you imagine I’m criticizing you for knowing? Me?”
She blinked, licked her lips. “Not you, I guess. Were you going to … to put them together anyway?”
“Yes.”
“Here?”
“No. I was going to move them down to Pennsylvania. I see now that I’d better prepare a place for them quickly.”
“They were almost a relief,” Nweke said. “It was so easy to get caught up in what they were doing that sometimes I didn’t have to feel other things. Last night, though … last night there were some Indians. They caught a white man. He had done something—killed one of their women or something. I was in his thoughts and they were all blurred at first. They tortured him. It took him so long … so long to die.” Her hands were clinched tight around each other, her eyes wide with remembering. “They tore out his fingernails, then they cut him and burned him and the women bit him—bit pieces away like wolves at their kill. Then …” She stopped, choked. “Oh, God!”