Conjure Women Read online

  “He was playin’ just this morning,” Beulah had said the night she’d roused Rue from her cabin to come have a look at her sick little child. When the fever started rising, Beulah had braided her son’s Red Indian hair into a silken rope, perhaps to keep him cool. It lay beside him on the bed, that braid, and it was intricate and lovely, made of four wound strands that snaked in and out of each other, that held without the aid of a ribbon or a pin. Rue counted the knots with her eyes while she waited.

  “I’m sorry,” she said and she was, but more so, she was frightened.

  * * *

  —

  Li’l Sylvia had five children and each of them caught the sickness, and each of them died of it, one by one. She took to her kitchen in her inconsolable grief, cooked ashcake after ashcake, good as her mama Big Sylvia used to make for the master in slaverytime. Li’l Sylvia set all of them ashcakes down on her supper table, a place laid out for each of her little ones, and waited and waited like she hoped they’d come back from the grave with a hunger.

  Three of Ma Doe’s orphans came down with it next. Two lived, one died, and though the one who died had no people alive to mourn him, the whole town took up the job of steady grieving. The sorrow was in everything they did, the sorrow and the fear.

  When it got to be at its worst, Rue heard, though no one would tell her straight, that they had sent Charlie Blacksmith to get the white doctor down the way. Down the way was a journey of two days’ walking, less if Charlie could beg a ride along the big road someplace, and at the end lived the Quaker doctor who was known to show a kindness to black folks provided they could pay. They’d sent Charlie with a purse of money, an appropriately enticing offering, and they had set aside another amount waiting for the doctor to arrive, which he never did. When it had gone a week with no sign of Charlie Blacksmith, Rue knew that they had all given up, though they hadn’t said so. She could see it in the slack set to their faces that they had come to believe that what they were needing was not a healing woman, or a white doctor, after all, but a preacher man.

  * * *

  —

  Ol’ Joel was the first of the old folks to get it and to die of it. He went to bed in the afternoon and didn’t get up after. Rue knew it was the same sickness. Folks said he’d been complaining all day of the heat though the day was mighty cold. The townsfolk sent Rue after him and she found him that evening, cocooned in his sheets like he was a body already bound for the coffin maker. When Rue neared his bedside he began thrashing, fighting like he had as a boy when the slavers had plucked him out of the jungle in Africa.

  “There’s a witch,” the old man insisted. “She setting on my chest.”

  “Hush now,” Rue said, glad no one else was there to hear. To accuse.

  She was afraid to leave him lest somebody else were to take up the vigil and hear the madness that was frothing up like the spittle in the corners of his toothless mouth.

  “Witch done made that boy-child outta river clay,” Ol’ Joel railed.

  Bean. Rue wouldn’t say his name, like to bring mention of him into this sick room was to curse him. But it was on her tongue. She knew he was the boy-child Ol’ Joel was speaking on.

  “Witch gave him air from her own mouth an’ fire from her own belly. Marse Charles’ll know of it.”

  Or was he speaking on the hidden shame? How could he know?

  Rue stood up so fast the chair she’d perched in crashed to the ground.

  “Marse Charles ain’t know nothin’ but what the inside of a grave look like,” she said. “And you gon’ know the same, soon enough.”

  Ol’ Joel’s cheeks went hollow as he gasped out his shock, like the sunken-down face of a skull. Rue stepped back from his bedside and righted the chair and tried to right her breathing but there was nothing for it.

  “I ain’t mean to say that,” Rue said. “I’m sorry.”

  Ol’ Joel’s expression turned gleeful. He clapped his hands together like a child at play, spoke singsong as he made mud pies in the air. “I know about Bean.”

  “Hush,” Rue said. If she could only soothe him. Get him to rest.

  “Miss May Belle tol’ it to me.”

  But Miss May Belle had not lived long enough to see Bean born. “Tol’ you what?”

  “She say Bean’s eyes is the hole you dug to bury the baby in.”

  Rue had never left a dying man or woman or child, not ever, not even when she herself was a child, kneeling beside deathbeds. She’d listened to every rasp and rattle and final godforsaken wheeze. But she could not listen to this. She fled.

  Come the morning, Ol’ Joel was dead. She returned to his bedside at sun-up to find him still, silenced. Rue took up the chair she’d toppled over when she’d run. She sat herself down and let folks think she’d been sitting there all night.

  * * *

  —

  Then Bean’s brother and sister both caught the sickness. The skin of their high-yellow cheeks became dotted with twin flushes of red.

  Rue, afraid for Bean, afraid for them all, was sleepless. She spent most of her evenings visiting the sick—children and the elderly came down with it the quickest and fared the worst—and even when she was not needed she’d wake suddenly in the middle of the night, imagining that somebody had been pounding at her door, though nobody had.

  Sarah had the same harried look as all the mamas in the town, a kind of sickness in itself, that worry, but at the mention of Bean a line creased deeply between her brows.

  “Bean, he’s the onlyest one the sickness ain’t touched,” she said. And the suspicion was there in her voice. “These ’uns need you, now.”

  Rue looked over the brother and sister who lay together in the same bed, fighting against each other in helpless writhes against the heat, but at least they were fighting. The boy’s ways for breathing seemed clear but the girl’s nose was blocked up; it dripped in a sad puddle onto her upper lip.

  Rue drew out her pipette. It was only a bit of tin that she’d found and rolled and smoothed so it had no rough edges, and ever so gently she placed it into the girl’s one nostril and then the other, drawing the plugged-up business out of her with a careful inhale. The trick was to get it just far enough up the pipe to give the child ease of breath but not to draw so far as to have the snot end in her own mouth. It had happened once or twice, the sickness sitting thick on Rue’s tongue. It had so worried her each time that she’d taken to her roots and plants ’til she was dizzy with it, unsure if she was suffering more from the sickness or the cure.

  The trick with the pipette was more a balm for the mamas’ nerves. They were given to panic when their babies gulped open-mouthed for air. The only cure she knew of was time. Either the babies would die or they wouldn’t, but that’s not what anybody wanted to hear, and so Rue knew better than to say so.

  Rue insisted on looking over Bean before she left. She found him with Jonah behind the house. He was at the age of walking now, and he stood wobbly and watched with those wide black eyes of his as his daddy worked. Jonah was carving up the carcass of a wild pig for their supper. He had it hoisted up on a wood frame, swinging by its neck, tongue out and listless.

  She observed them for a while, daddy and son, recollecting two years back. After Bean’s birth she had spied Jonah cutting firewood, wet with sweat as he was now. Then she had shoved into Jonah’s arms the black caul from which Bean had slithered and told Jonah to burn the sheets. For luck, she’d said. Now the whole of the town stunk of burning sheets, and behind each house great plumes of dark smoke would rise like a silent signal for a grief that had gotten so bad that they no longer had the words for it. The thinking was to get rid of the sheets as marks of their dead, but the sickness, Rue feared, was well beyond being burnt up.

  Jonah put a long, neat slit down the belly of the barrow hog he’d strung up. He began to peel back the skin, buried his hands d
eep into its belly to tug away its innards.

  “It’s a bad year, sho’ ’nuff.” He spoke round a grunt of effort. The pig’s intestines slopped downward. “Folks is down on they knees, prayin’. We needin’ you to help us, Miss Rue.”

  Bean reached for her. “Up,” he was saying. “Up, up.” He raised his arms in that easy gesture of children, and Rue wanted to hold him as much as he wanted to be held. When she hefted him up, he was a nice weight in her arms, and that close he smelled sweet to her, healthy, even over the sickly smell of the hog Jonah was butchering.

  “I can’t answer all a’ them prayers,” Rue said.

  “ ’Course not,” Jonah said.

  Rue wanted to thank him for that, his comforting lie. She knew what folks were saying. They’d lost faith in her, even feared her, some of them. She juggled Bean in her arms and reached out, touched the swell of Jonah’s upper arm, the only place the pig blood hadn’t reached. It was supposed to be a loving gesture, but she pulled sharply away before she could give it. She hardly had to get near him to realize: His skin was near to burning.

  It would pass in him, wouldn’t it? It had to, a man so strong and grown. Even if he had the sickness it would not ravage him like it might his children, but something about the power of it, to weaken even Jonah, made Rue feel weak herself. She told Jonah he better lay himself down for a rest, and she pulled Bean tight into her arms and hid her face in the softness of his baby hairs to rest there awhile herself.

  * * *

  —

  Beulah, who had been among the first to lose her baby, was the worst.

  “He gone,” Rue told her. The woman had begun to wail as if the scream had been building and building in her, saved ’til just this moment.

  Beulah collapsed like her legs were of no use and Rue went down with her as an instinct, afraid she’d smack her head against the ground. Beulah did the opposite. She reared her head back as she screamed those two words: Your fault. She smashed forward, catching the edge of Rue’s jaw. Rue felt her mouth filling up with a rush of blood—she didn’t have a second to worry or to spit—because Beulah was hitting her with her fists now, punching at her shoulders in time with the repeated hollow syllables of her son’s name. She was saying it over and over, and saying, “You done this! You and that Bean. This y’all curse.”

  Beulah’s man came out of nowhere to pull Beulah away. He did it easily, put his arms around her waist and picked her up like she was a child, and she weakened and wept against him, the whole shape of her fitting to his chest.

  * * *

  —

  Rue heard it all over then in every corner of the used-to-be plantation, what folks were saying. They wanted help. But not from her. Bruh Abel. Send someone to find him, to fetch him. Give him word. Bring him to pray over us. For Bruh Abel is, they were saying, the only hope we got as more children sickened daily. It seemed to be passing through all of them in no sort of order, only weakening some, but snatching away others. It was Ma Doe’s health that Rue feared after especially, though to say so was an ugly thing. If Ma Doe died all those orphans would be orphaned again, but most importantly, if Ma Doe died the spell of protection Rue had created with her over the town would be broken. Without Ma there was nobody Rue trusted with the secret, nobody to send correspondence north, nobody to pose as their white mistress behind the looping lines of oak gall ink. And if there were no letters to the Northern auntie it would only be a matter of time before some white official came along wondering after their white mistress and her untouched acres. Freedom wasn’t free.

  On this day Ma Doe was teaching in the usual way. She held up letters that she’d written big and bold, each one existing solitary on either side of thirteen sheets of yellowy paper. She made the sounds and the children made them back, a call and response that Rue found soothing. Sometimes she mouthed the sounds with them, though she did not add her voice to theirs. From Ma Doe’s side she looked them over, the children, checking for sweat sitting on the skin of the darker ones, red blooming on the cheeks of the lighter, or for a pair of shiny, unfocused eyes struggling to make sense of their mud-made letters.

  Rue hoped each day would be the day when they’d finally be free of the spreading fever. Winter would soon be giving way to spring, and everything, as her mama would have said, good or bad, had an end.

  When Rue arrived this morning, Ma Doe dismissed the children in a hurry. The younger ones were pardoned to go play then return for a lesson in figures; the older went off for the work waiting on them at the side of their mamas and daddies. Rue found herself sorrowing after it, those blind simple days when she herself had been a child.

  “How you doin’, Ma Doe?” she asked. She took Ma Doe’s hand in hers in greeting, believing that whatever the old woman said, she’d find the true answer in the heat of her palm. The skin was warm but dry, and Rue held on long to a callous that rose up when Ma Doe had been writing.

  “Well, you know what folks are sayin’,” Ma Doe said. She culled gossip from her children who were in the habit of repeating, with some authority, the things their daddies and mamas said in private. “They’re all of ’em mistrustful of you and your Bean.”

  Now when had Bean become hers? Ma Doe was slowly retracting her one hand from between Rue’s two.

  “And what they sayin’?”

  “He isn’t sick. He hasn’t been sick. So people are thinkin’ he isn’t goin’ to be sick. Of all the children, seems he’s the only one that’s kept his health.”

  Rue frowned. “Say it plain, Ma.”

  “Some folks think you’re the one keepin’ him healthy. And some folks think you pullin’ vitality from the other little ones to do it. Usin’ that contraption you’ve got.”

  “Contraption?” Rue stumbled on the word.

  “Your tool for suckin’. It isn’t natural. Like root magic, they’re sayin’. Like witchcraft.”

  “Where this come from?” But Rue, as soon as she asked it, knew where it had come from. It was inevitable, like birth and death and birth, like smoke rising toward the sky, it was just the way things went. Folks were scared. They needed their finger-pointing for succor.

  “They talk of little Si,” Ma Doe continued. Rue thought on Si often, thought on how he’d lived three days and died before they could put him to the water. They’d wanted him baptized but she’d wanted him to live.

  “Folks say you went to see him and tracked graveyard dirt by his sleeping face. They don’t want you near their children, Miss Rue,” Ma Doe said. Her voice held that steely finality she used to end her lessons. “They’ve asked me to not allow you in here any longer whilst the children are near.”

  “You tol’ ’em I could help their babies, ain’t you?” Her voice was rising. “You tol’ em that ain’t none a’ that foolishness is true?”

  Ma Doe shrugged. “I felt I hadn’t the right to tell them anythin’.” She touched a hand to the pouch of asafetida that she wore just under her collar, perhaps without even realizing. “I find in my old age I haven’t got any more strength for lyin’.”

  Rue felt something awful building up inside of her chest, something like a sob. “It ain’t a lie.”

  Ma Doe’s nimble fingers were unsteady as she pulled a key from a chain of many at her waist. She put it to the desk drawer, turned the key in the lock with a sharp clink that sounded loud in the empty schoolroom, like bullet to chamber. “I haven’t yet sent a reply to our Northern relation. I don’t know that I will.”

  “Why not?”

  “Nigh on two years we’ve been tellin’ lies about Miss Varina. One lie to the auntie, another to the townspeople. Our own people.” Ma Doe bowed her head as if it was too heavy suddenly for her to hold on her neck.

  “Ain’t nobody the wiser,” Rue said.

  “Don’t you sometimes think, Miss Rue, that the Lord has been takin’ his good time to punish us? That
the best contrived punishment is the one that you near forgot you deserved?”

  “This ain’t to do with us, Ma, or with Varina neither,” Rue said, and she gestured at the empty air like their haint was right there with them. “It’s a simple sickness. It’ll pass. You best send that letter.”

  Ma Doe relented. But Rue couldn’t help it: She thought of Bean and the day he was born, the moment she first saw him swathed in a caul as black as a blood-soaked blanket, like something she’d seen before. Another ill omen. A wrong come again. Rue knew why she had thought about killing Bean in that moment. But she had not. The past was the past.

  Now she wanted Bean to live. Jonah already seemed stronger than he had on the night she’d touched his skin. Sarah had complained of a sudden bout of sweating, but there was little that could put her down, and anyway the sickness seemed to flutter more easily past grown folks and instead settled its grip on children.

  But soon there was only Bean, untouched.

  * * *

  —

  That night Rue didn’t sleep. She felt she ought to be crying. But she could not make tears or didn’t trust herself to. At any moment she feared she’d have to get up and answer another accusation. The pounding of death again at her door.

  The longer the night stretched the longer her fear did. She thought on Bean, on the sideways glances folks would give him when they saw him playing in Sarah’s yard. He played alone. Rolling a ball or a hoop from one end of the narrow garden to the other, then rolling it back again in the same little rut. He’d always been a solitary sort of child, but now the other mamas wouldn’t let their babies play anywhere near him. Like he was the pestilence himself. It ought to have been the other way around. Their children carried the sickness; he thrived. And because he did thrive and showed no signs of sickening, Rue figured they were both of them in an even worse kind of danger.