Conjure Women Page 11

  “It’ll be alright,” Rue told them, and it would.

  Rue took the climb to her mama’s grave on the hilltop cemetery slowly. She felt she was dragging along all her fear behind her like a yolk. Fear for the sick children, fear of Bruh Abel, fear for Bean.

  Folks believed they’d found in Bean the evil that needed washing away: Bean, a baby boy born with hideous black eyes like he’d come up from a coffin, rather than from a womb. Now they demanded to flush the evil out, through baptism.

  As she walked, Rue came upon the newest graves first, closest to the town by planning. The white family’s graves were as large as monuments—cherubs and weeping women and ornate crosses all.

  When she and Varina were children they’d often played in the solitude of this cemetery. Varina had read aloud the headstones on one such visit. They had loved always to play the type of games that contained secrets, Rue and Varina had, loved even more the forbidden thing that was their friendship.

  Beyond the white graves, where the former slaves were laid to rest, there were no headstones. There were, instead, bits of wood and pretty glass and here and there a natural stone, renewed each season like a clearing of harvest and a sowing of new seeds.

  After Surrender, after the war and the fire that ate up the House, after the Northern army had marched through, plundered what they liked, and moved on to the next place they could pick at as any scavenger would, after all of that and after freedom, the black folks had made their way up onto this hill and begun calling out the names of their lost dead, names for bodies they couldn’t bring home or bury.

  Ma Doe, ancient as she was, learned her letters in a time when there weren’t yet laws against slave-learning, and when the laws did come it was too late; they could not take the knowing away from her. On the plantation there were a few other former slaves who had also learned their writing and reading, in secret, all of them having done so despite threat of death or worse if they were caught at knowing. But just like that, the threat was lifted, knowledge emancipated. And so in the graveyard Ma Doe and the other learned black folks etched into crude planks the names of the lost dead. Everybody had promised that if by some miracle lost bodies came walking back from the far-off places they’d been sold to, then they’d pluck the crosses right up, but few of the lost had ever returned.

  Folks had made a grave for Varina, after she’d been burnt up in the fire that took the House. Even though their young Missus was not their black kin she was still theirs, and lost, and they figured she needed remembering also. Remembering for good or remembering for ill—well, that was a private matter.

  Rue touched the crooked cross she knew spelled out Varina’s name, touched the first letter, which Rue knew was called V only because Varina had taught her that letter over and over in their girlhood.

  In front of the little cross Rue bent her head and mumbled words like prayer, and anybody that might’ve spied her at it would think she was caught up in sorrow.

  Rue moved on to sit at her mama’s grave. Miss May Belle’s body had been laid down in a most mighty plot, because Miss May Belle had dictated what it ought to look like. The planning of it was the only thing that had made her smile from deep inside the swamp of her sickbed. She’d chosen for herself pot marigolds in the yellow and orange of a slow-burning fire, and now, two years since she’d been gone, the things grew wild, threatened to spill over onto other graves, eat up the white folks’ monolith headstones. For certain she’d meant it that way, and it fell to Rue to beat the plants back.

  Rue pulled up an armful of her mama’s weeds before they could come to seed. She swam in the musky scent. Whatever else her mama had intended, the marigold plant made for a fine base for a number of tinctures, a thousand kinds of healing. Might they be the first ingredient in a cure to heal the town’s sick children?

  It was only on her way out that Rue allowed herself to look at the newest grave, freshly dug, a small plot suited for an infant child: Baby Si.

  Though she knew who was laid in that child grave, strangely she thought first of Bean and shivered. But that was wrong, and foolish besides; this grave was not his. She would not believe that Bean was some omen, nor some dead child come again. Rue was determined not to believe it. How else to go on and convince the town of the same, before their hate of Bean turned to some desperate, dangerous action against him?

  Rue finally drew the strength to go back into the town proper, and even there she slowed to force a smile and talk a little with folks. Yet now they hurried past her, as though afraid to linger in her company, and the little children she came upon at the roadside declined the posy of marigold she offered them like she held out a bloom of poison.

  Bruh Abel passed her, aloud wished her blessings, and whispered in her ear. “Soothe them away from this foolishness about the haint. They’ll listen to you, Sister Rue. In matters of superstition,” the preacher man said, “yours is the voice they hear.”

  Rue soothed them by bidding them to take a broom about with them to sweep away footsteps they left in their wake, so that the haint could not follow them home.

  “You can be known by a footprint as sure as a face,” she told Dinah, who began to sweep her pathway in earnest, her baby on her back. Dinah had got to feeling particularly fixed upon, seeing as she’d seamstressed so many of those fine white clothes that had been torn down.

  “Will that haint try an’ take out my eyes, Miss Rue?” Dinah asked as she moved the dust in swirls behind her. On her back her baby still looked sickly. Looked worse. “I can’t see my stitches. My eyes, they burn in my head.”

  “How long this been going on?”

  “Well, now. Started up round the time folks started wanting to see Bean washed.”

  “Boil some mullein leaves in whiskey,” Rue said, unsettled. “And rub it on the back a’ yo’ neck and the soles a’ yo’ feet, and any spirit will lose the scent a’ you. Do it every morning, every night. Do it three mornings, three nights.”

  Dinah said that she would, and she would too, Rue reckoned. The cure would do nothing for a haunting, but it would keep Dinah off her sewing for a time and the smell of the leaves might cut through her baby’s sniffling.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes Rue dreamed of Miss May Belle, and she dreamed of her on that next night before she got herself out of bed at the hour of the midnight moon.

  Rue had nightmared a memory: Miss May Belle standing before her with a bloodied sheet bundled in her arms.

  “Mama? Is it Varina?” Rue asked her dream-mama. “Is she alright?”

  Miss May Belle wouldn’t answer, only held out the black bundle.

  “The shame,” her mama called it. She said, “Bury the shame in the river and let us be rid a’ it.”

  But there was no sure way to be rid of shame, no conjure to be rid of guilt. Even if the bundle never rose again it still flooded around Rue, the shame did. It rose in the mind, in her dreams and then in her waking, and in the face of every slowly sickening child she could not save.

  She woke feeling as though Miss May Belle were truly there, standing over her. There was nothing for it but to get up and out of the cabin. She gulped the cool night air to clear her nightmare, like clarity was breath. She had to think. She had to act to save herself.

  While others slept Rue walked a long lone circle round the plantation to weave a protection spell. A sprinkling of black pepper here and there on the long, sweeping trails folks had left with their brooms to dispel the hungry foxes that were said to be Miss May Belle’s familiars—her eyes where her eyes could not see. Rue did not wish to be seen.

  Then Rue went way out past the burnt-up edges of the plantation where most folks were afeared to go, on to the old church, a basket filled with fruit and biscuits and a bloom of fiery marigolds tucked under her arm.

  The double doors of the church were shut against the ni
ght, but there was a slight, silent rocking up there at the top of the small bell tower. Its rope swung with a motion more forceful than could be accounted for by the wind alone. At the doorstep she laid down the basket and left, returned to her cabin, careful to see that she had not been followed or observed. There she waited, sleepless, for morning.

  * * *

  —

  It was the day that Bean was to be baptized and so folks hardly paid much mind to the other news: Dinah’s baby girl had died in the night.

  “I called for you,” Dinah said when Rue came to confirm what was already cold and clear. The little baby’s body was wrapped up in the fine linen Dinah had seamstressed herself. “You wasn’t home.”

  Rue had missed the knock at her door. It had come when she’d been out, tending to haints, and in that little time Dinah’s baby had sickened and died.

  In folks’ fervent enthusiasm for Bruh Abel they did not pay much mind to one more quiet tragedy that had moved through the town while they slept. But Rue was altogether haunted by this new-come illness, by its stealth and its power.

  * * *

  —

  Bean was to be washed in the eyes of the Lord at midday.

  The townsfolk passed by Rue’s cabin on the way to the river, and inside Rue pretended at grinding pokeweed berries for longer than was needed. She burst the black skin of the berries in her agitation, freed the red juice and still continued to pound and pound. Errant flecks of red stained the front of her dress and still she pounded as though she could work herself to the kind of exhaustion they’d all felt in slavery times, a complete utter exhaustion too great to leave room for rage. She felt rage at herself for allowing Bean to dredge up that old secret shame inside of her. The past was made up of bloody losses she could not change, while here, now, real living babies might suffer and die.

  Yet Rue’s rage grew, not only at herself but also at Bruh Abel and his false spectacle ’til finally she marched on out to the bright morning. Still she took the long way round, came upon them at the river from the height of the trees.

  They were all in white. Bean, Jonah, and Sarah with their elder boy and their only girl. Someone had made them all little white caps that gave them the closest approximation they had ever had to a unified family resemblance. Bruh Abel, for his part, was not in his usual suit but was instead dressed in white too, in a robe that showed his audacity as the length of it caught and rippled on the water’s surface.

  Rue took careful steps on the slope that led down to the riverbank, and many times her feet failed to find a grasp on the shifting silt and rock, but she didn’t look down; she kept her eyes on the curious scene, on Bruh Abel, who was leading the family one by one into the river. She kept right on watching them as she reached the edge of the crowd, where a few people murmured or nodded to her, said in greeting, “Miss Rue.” They couldn’t hardly pull themselves away from the show to look at her; they were transfixed, all of them, and singing.

  Rue did not know the words to their song. She could not join them but she could listen, and she picked out the words on which their voices lingered: Jesus and Jordan and river. The refrain was something heavy with wanting, and she liked the part they kept repeating about going home, going on home.

  Out in the water they had formed a snaking chain, Bruh Abel at its head, then came Sarah holding Bean, then the boy and the girl and last Jonah. He made them form a half circle, so that the two older children stood in the shallowest part of the river where the water lapped up against their chests, and Jonah and Sarah beside them looked as small as the children because of the way the bank dipped down. Bruh Abel stood just beyond them and took Bean from Sarah’s arms.

  Bean was in Bruh Abel’s hands when the first splash of water reared up against his skin and there it was, his horrid cry. It pierced their ears as Bruh Abel tried to cross the boy’s pale arms against his chest. Everyone hushed their singing, waited for Bruh Abel to set things right, to stop the awful child with his awful crying. If only he could catch Bean’s flailing fists, could halt that otherworldly wailing.

  Bean’s family stood in the water beside him and seemed shamed, like they wanted to look away but couldn’t. You could not draw away from such painful screaming.

  Rue didn’t know she was moving. It was not until she felt the shock of cold water at her thighs—each step was a struggle of pride, a struggle just to push her legs against the water. Her last thought before she reached for Bean was that there could be no worse death than this, being pulled down by a river. But that was a pure fool thought as well, because there were so many worse ways to die—hadn’t she seen some of them?

  Her foot hit a loose stone that spun and bobbed away from the riverbed and she was falling sideways. Rue saw Jonah’s shocked face first and then Sarah’s blank one, then she saw nothing but the expanse of the river’s underside, which was black and black. There was no bottom and no top to swim to, and all the while she heard Bean’s crying and yearned to comfort him the way she yearned after air.

  Bruh Abel caught her and pulled her up and set her on her feet again with one hand, Bean clutched in the other. Water ran down her face into her mouth. Jonah and Sarah had not moved to help her. Already Bruh Abel was placing Bean into Rue’s arms. The baby reached out to her. His crying stopped and she held him tight.

  Around her Rue heard voices begin to pray. Lord trouble the water.

  In her arms Bean had quieted. She didn’t know what it was about her that soothed him, and he her. Maybe it was that he remembered her, the first person that had held him. Or maybe it was that he remembered her, from before even that.

  Rue felt Bruh Abel’s hand squeeze the nape of her neck, felt his other hand rest on her waist a moment before he tipped her backward.

  When she felt the water again it was a shock, like she was falling in a dream when she hadn’t yet figured out that she was sleeping. She held fast to Bean. His head on her breasts positioned him just high enough that he was not all the way submerged beneath the water. He was halfway in; she was the one who was submerged, who was drowning. She was the island he clung to.

  Bruh Abel put his hand on her stomach, his thumb in the dent of her navel, and he kept her down, pushed her down even as she struggled to rise. She saw the flush of bubbles leave her nostrils and rush to the surface. Held just above the water, Bean was a weight on her chest and there was Bruh Abel’s hand below her belly, pushing down into a place she’d never felt any hand pushing but her own.

  Then that cold upward rush and Rue knew she was standing again only because she heard his voice, hard and brassy, confident: “As Jesus died and was reborn, so Rue and Bean, you have both died and been reborn.”

  Surely, they had died. With Bean in her arms Rue was shivering cold like they were still down there, stuck together in the watery grave of their shared baptism waiting to rise, waiting on a rebirth she did not believe in.

  * * *

  —

  It was just after Bruh Abel left town that the sickness began to pull down more children. It had taken away Dinah’s baby girl, but soon enough death rode boldly through the town, made itself well known in every home. The men plowed graves and laid the lost children in them, and Rue stood behind in the furrowed field, unable to offer any help or any explanation. Faced with the blooming grief of the mamas and daddies, she did not know what to think, nor what to do.

  When Bruh Abel had been in town they’d all still been hopeful, basking in their fall of plenty. But as he did every year, Bruh Abel followed the warmth, descending south. The season turned quick to winter. An unusual cold glazed the grass in rare stiff white as more of the children began to burn with fever, to writhe in their beds, to moan and cry out and fight, and then to die.

  Dinah’s girl might have been the first, but gradually it took hold from all directions and before long there was at least one suffering child in each home with children. For the
first three nights of the thick of it Rue did not sleep but drifted from door to door facing folks who wanted healing but didn’t trust her to deliver it. Rue did not trust herself. What would Miss May Belle have done? they started asking, and she didn’t have an answer there either. Folks blamed Bean and Rue. She knew that all round town they told and retold the story of Bean’s baptism so that it had become more legend than memory in the retelling.

  One truth was repeated over and over: Bean had not been fully submerged, nor fully baptized. For Miss Rue, the witch, had held Bean half aloft.

  Rue did not have an answer for all the illness, but she did have a rule, one she had not learned from her mama, but one she’d come, in that grim time, to form for herself. That rule was to wait. It was only the difference of a moment, a hair’s breadth of time between when the knowledge of a death came to her and when the grave words came out. But there was power in that moment of stillness, power in waiting before telling a mama her baby was dead, and Rue held tight to that power.

  She told herself it was a kindness, the waiting, because a mama might know it already, holding her baby as a stiffened bit of flesh in their arms. Only moments ago, that same baby would have been writhing fever-hot. Now they were still.

  The desperate mama had to know it, but ’til Rue said it, it was as if they could convince themselves it wasn’t so, as if Rue might have a cure-all with which to raise the dead. She did not. What she did have was the power of pronouncement, the power to delay absolute sorrow for a few long, weighty seconds.

  Dinah’s girl and Beulah’s boy were the first of them to die, though after those deaths many turned to saying it had all begun even before, when Bean’s cry had yielded Si’s death all them months back. Si had never been baptized and now look here, all these little children, dying, before they could properly get saved. Rue told them it was only a grim coincidence. After all, the sickness had taken Beulah’s boy suddenly, in the space of a single evening.