“Did you come here to kill?” she asked. “Am I to die? Are my children to become mares and studs? Is that why you could not leave me alone!”
“Why do you want to be alone?” he asked.
She closed her eyes. “Doro, tell me what is to happen.”
“Perhaps nothing. Perhaps eventually, I will bring your son a wife.”
“One wife?” she said, disbelieving.
“One wife here, as with you and Isaac. I never brought women to Wheatley for him.”
That was so. From time to time, he took Isaac away with him, but he never brought women to Isaac. Anyanwu knew that the husband she had loved most had sired dozens of children with other women. “Don’t you care about them?” she had asked once, trying to understand. She cared about each one of her children, raised each one she bore and loved it.
“I never see them,” he had answered. “They are his children. I sire them in his name. He sees that they and their mothers are well cared for.”
“So he says!” She had been bitter that day, angry at Doro for making her pregnant when her most recent child by Isaac was less than a year old, angry at him for afterward killing a tall, handsome girl whom Anyanwu had known and liked. The girl, understanding what was to happen to her, had still somehow treated him as a lover. It was obscene.
“Have you ever known him to neglect the needs of the children he claims?” Isaac had asked. “Have you ever seen his people left landless or hungry? He takes care of his own.”
She had gone away from Isaac to fly for hours as a bird and look down at the great, empty land below and wonder if there was nowhere in all the forests and rivers and mountains and lakes, nowhere in that endless land for her to escape and find peace and cleanness.
“Stephen is nineteen years old,” she said. “He is a man. Your children and mine grow up very quickly, I think. He has been a man since his transition. But he’s still young. You’ll make him an animal if you use him as you used Isaac.”
“Isaac was fifteen when I gave him his first woman,” Doro said.
“Then he had been yours for fifteen years. For you, Stephen will be as much wild seed as I was.”
Doro nodded agreeably. “It is better for me to get them before they reach their transitionsif they’re going to have transitions. What will you give me then, Anyanwu?”
She turned to look at him in surprise. Was he offering to bargain with her? He had never bargained before. He had told her what he wanted and let her know what he would do to her or to her children if she did not obey.
Was he bargaining now, then, or was he playing with her? What could she lose by assuming that he was serious? “Bring Stephen the woman,” she said. “One woman. When he is older, perhaps there can be others.”
“Do you imagine there are none now?”
“Of course not. But he chooses his own. I don’t tell him to breed. I don’t send him women.”
“Do women seem to like him?”
She surprised herself by smiling a little. “Some do. Not enough to suit him, of course. There is a widow paying a lot of attention to him now. She knows what she is doing. Left alone, he will find a good wife here when he is tired of wandering around.”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t let him get tired of it.”
“I tell you, you will make an animal of him if you don’t!” she said. “Haven’t you seen the men slaves in this country who are used for breeding? They are never permitted to learn what it means to be a man. They are not permitted to care for their children. Among my people, children are wealth, they are better than money, better than anything. But to these men, warped and twisted by their masters, children are almost nothing. They are to boast of to other men. One thinks he is greater than another because he has more children. Both exaggerate the number of women who have borne them children, neither is doing anything a father should for his children, and the master who is indifferently selling off his own brown children is laughing and saying, ‘You see? Niggers are just like animals!’ Slavery down here opens one’s eyes, Doro. How could I want such a life for my son?”
There was silence. He got up, wandered around the large room examining the vases, lamps, the portrait of a slender white woman with dark hair and solemn expression. “Was this your wife?” he asked.
She wanted to shake him. She wanted to use her strength, make him tell her what he meant to do. “Yes,” she whispered.
“How did you like itbeing a man, having a wife?”
“Doro …!”
“How did you like it?” He would not be rushed. He was enjoying himself.
“She was a good woman. We pleased each other.”
“Did she know what you were?”
“Yes. She was not ordinary herself. She saw ghosts.”
“Anyanwu!” he said with disgust and disappointment.
She ignored his tone, stared up at the picture. “She was only sixteen when I married her. If I hadn’t married her, I think she would have been put in an asylum eventually. People spoke about her in the way you just said my name.”
“I don’t blame them.”
“You should. Most people believe in a life that goes on after their bodies die. There are always tales of ghosts. Even people who think they are too sophisticated to be frightened are not immune. Talk to five people and at least three will have seen what they believe was a ghost, or they will know another person who has seen. But Denice really did see. She was very sensitive; she could see when no one else couldand since no one else could, people said she was mad. I think she had had a kind of transition.”
“And it gave her a private view into the hereafter.”
Anyanwu shook her head. “You should be less skeptical. You are a kind of ghost yourself, after all. What is there of you that can be touched?”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“Of course.” She paused. “Doro, I will talk to you about Denice. I will talk to you about anyone, anything. But first, please, tell me what you plan for my son.”
“I’m thinking about it. I’m thinking about you and your potential value to me.” He looked again at the portrait. “You were right, you know. I came here to finish old businesskill you and take your children to one of my settlements. No one has ever done what you did to me.”
“I ran from you and lived. Other people have done that.”
“Only because I chose to let them live. They had their freedom for only a few days before I caught them. You know that.”
“Yes,” she said reluctantly.
“Now, a century after I lost you, I find you young and wellgreeting me as though we had just seen each other yesterday. I find you in competition with me, raising witches of your own.”
“There is no competition.”
“Then why have you surrounded yourself with the kinds of people I seek out? Why do you have children by them?”
“They need me … those people.” She swallowed thinking of some of the things done to her people before she found them. “They need someone who can help them, and I can help. You don’t want to help them, you want to use them. But I can help.”
“Why should you?”
“I’m a healer, Doro.”
“That’s no answer. You chose to be a healer. What you really are is what’s called in this part of the country loup-garoua werewolf.”
“I see you’ve been talking to my neighbors.”
“I have. They’re right, you know.”
“The legends say werewolves kill. I have never killed except to save myself. I am a healer.”
“Most … healers don’t have children by their patients.”
“Most healers do as they please. My patients are more like me than any other people. Why shouldn’t I find mates among them?”
Doro smiled. “There is always an answer, isn’t there? But it doesn’t matter. Tell me about Denice and her ghosts.”
She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, calming herself. “Denice saw what people left behind. She went into houses and saw the people who had preceded her there. If someone had suffered or died there, she saw that very clearly. It terrified her. She would go into a house and see a child running, clothing afire, and there would be no child. But two, ten, twenty years before, a child would have burned to death there. She saw people stealing things days or years before. She saw slaves beaten and tortured, slave women raped, people shaking with ague or covered with smallpox. She did not feel things as people do in transition. She only saw them. But she could not tell whether what she was seeing was actually happening as she saw it or whether it was history. She was slowly going mad. Then her parents gave a party and I was invited because I seemed young and rich and handsomeperhaps a good prospect for a family with five daughters. I remember, I was standing with Denice’s father telling lies about my origins, and Denice brushed past. She touched me, you see. She could see people’s past lives when she touched them just as she could see the past of wood and brick. She saw something of what I am even in that brief touch, and she fainted. I didn’t know what had happened until she came to me days later. I was the only person she had ever found to be stranger than herself. She knew all that I was before we married.”