Conjure Women Read online

  Rue recognized it was Marse Peter who held her only because he was the youngest of the three brothers. He tilted back Rue’s head roughly, and for a terrible moment they breathed the same air. She tried to figure what he was after by the tick in his jaw, the pulse of a vein in his temple. He had Varina’s tight lips and round blue eyes. But his hair was a murky brown, and above his lip an equally dark mustache was pushing its way through. It looked like a smudge of dirt on his mouth.

  He squeezed her jaw. “What you about, huh? Answer me, girl.”

  “Miss Varina sent me, suh,” Rue stuttered out. Her mouth was near clinched shut in his grip. He shoved her off, and her teeth clicked together so hard she feared they’d shatter.

  “I don’t think you’re tellin’ me the truth,” he said. “I think you’re up here stealin’ my sister’s belongin’s.”

  Rue cringed away and feared she would be hit for it. “No.”

  “No? I saw you. At my baby sister’s hair things first and then at the dolls. Shall I tell my father that he’s got a li’l thief in his house?”

  “No, suh, no.”

  “Perhaps if you ask me kindly I’ll keep it from Father. Rather I see to the punishment myself?”

  Marse Peter grabbed the pull of her apron strings. The knot came undone easy, fell away to swing at Rue’s bare legs.

  There was a high-sharp giggle at the doorway, no humor in it.

  “There you are, Rue.” Varina bounded into the nursery, skipping, laughing again that high false laugh. Her face was overbright and flushed, her curls undone in the heat.

  Marse Peter slid his eyes to his half sister, just rolled them like marbles in his head without even turning his neck.

  Rue tried to catch Varina’s gaze and plead, but Varina was grinning gap-toothed at her brother.

  “We was playin’ hide-and-go-seek, weren’t we, Rue?”

  They were doing no such thing. Rue didn’t know whether Varina wanted her to speak the lie or if she’d be punished for it.

  “Peter, do you want to join our game?”

  Marse Peter spat. Right there on the nursery floor, a gleaming glob flecked black with old tobacco tar. “Shit no, I don’t. That’s children’s stuff.”

  “I’ll tell Daddy you were cussin’.”

  Marse Peter whirled on Varina. He grabbed his half sister’s wrist as she let out a cry, seemed to crumple to her knees in pain.

  “Peter, you’re hurtin’ me!”

  “Aw, hell,” he said. But he let her go.

  He thrust his hands deep into his pocket and turned his back on them. He began to whistle, a jaunty manic tune, and he kept on whistling walking out of the nursery. They heard him descend the main staircase in great thudding stomps, whistling the whole while, so that they weren’t sure he was gone ’til they couldn’t hear him any longer. Only then did Varina rise from the floor.

  “Y’alright, Miss Varina?” Rue’s voice shook. “Let me look on yo’ wrist.”

  “Oh, it don’t hurt none,” Varina said, waving the arm that Marse Peter had grasped. The expression of screwed-up pain she’d shown her brother was gone. She had a big pleased grin on her face. She’d played him like a song and now she looked about her room with her hands fisted on her hips, like she was figuring what she could conquer next. “Rue, shall we play a game?”

  * * *

  —

  Rue kept it a secret. She couldn’t say why precisely, only that she felt ashamed of the way Marse Peter had leered at her, of the way she’d stuttered, of how her apron had come untied like it meant to betray her too. She kept the secret even from her mama—whereas before she had told her everything—because Miss May Belle didn’t lately listen well to her daughter’s hurts.

  “Ain’t we all of us hurtin’?” she’d say, if Rue uttered any complaints.

  Miss May Belle was making a doll baby at the supper table. A white one, with a face made from an old handkerchief, blue corn seeds for eyes, lips painted on red, thin as a wound. The hair was of straw, stewed to bright orange in calendula and carrot juice, save for a sprig of Varina’s real hair in the very center. The twisting real strand was hid in plain sight, where you’d have to know to look for it to find it. That secret lock was where the magic lived that bound up Varina’s fate to her home.

  The doll baby was Varina all over, right down to the cranberry red dress, a scrap of fabric cut from a dress she’d fast outgrown.

  “Why couldn’t Ma Doe just’ve asked after the conjure straight?” Rue wanted to know. It hurt her somehow to see her mama put so much love and care into a thing that was not for Rue herself.

  “She know the cost’s too high for her, if she had a hand in it,” said Miss May Belle. She didn’t raise her head from her sewing to say it.

  Seemed to cost Miss May Belle nothing to sit there and sew, humming to herself a little. Seemed it had cost Rue too high to do what Ma Doe wouldn’t, to snatch Varina’s hair for the conjure. But Rue thought on Airey, and the way she’d been whipped raw in the yard of the House at Marse Charles’s whim. Was that the cost? Rue couldn’t imagine Ma Doe treated that way. Ma Doe was everybody’s mama, white folks’ too, even if she was colored, and who could dare hurt their own mama?

  “You thinkin’ too hard, Rue-baby, I can see it.” Miss May Belle clicked her tongue. “Lord, you just like yo daddy, ain’t you? Come on over here.”

  Rue crossed the cabin to sit on the floor at her mama’s feet. She was about-to-be seven—she was no baby, and Miss May Belle was never oversentimental, said she didn’t have the time for petting. It was rare and wonderful for Rue to rest her head in her mama’s lap, to feel her mama’s long, thin fingers drift lovingly through the tangles of her tight head hair.

  “Mama?”

  “Yes, Rue-baby?”

  Rue wanted then to tell her more than anything, about the hunger she’d seen in Marse Peter’s eyes that had made her stomach curdle. But she didn’t know quite how to begin it, and perhaps it was as Ma Doe had said. Miss May Belle didn’t know everything, or need to neither.

  “Nothin’,” Rue said.

  She let her mama’s threading fingers on her scalp lull her into an almost sleep and she did not wake, even when she felt one sharp twang at the very center of her head.

  * * *

  —

  Varina ripped through paper, through ribbon and lace. The box opened up, and from its innards she drew out a little model carriage pulled by a little white horse.

  “How lovely,” Varina cooed from up above. The rocking chair she sat in creaked with her delight.

  Curled up at Varina’s feet with the other black children, Rue bit back a yawn. It had been a treat at first, to be picked with Sarah and Beulah and Li’l Sylvia to make an oohing-and-aahing audience as Varina opened her birthday presents. But now the floor of the veranda was littered with ribbons and bows, with shreds of paper, with piles of toys and books, knitting needles and sewing sets, dresses and hats and hairpins, and Varina placed the pale horse burdened with its white carriage on the very top of that mess of gifts where it threatened to fall over but did not. Rue oohed and aahed with the rest of them.

  “I painted it myself,” Marse Peter boasted. He leaned on one white pillar of the veranda, watching at a distance, smoking from his daddy’s pipe.

  “Why, thank you, Peter,” Varina said, but she was already on to the next gift. A simple box of brown paper and twine. “No name on it. Now who could this be from?”

  Varina didn’t wait on an answer but began working furiously at the knot of the twine. Rue peeked behind her to look at the white family. It was rare to see them all assembled, Marse Charles and his three sons, the elder two dressed in new, stiff military uniforms, and Missus there too, complaining of the early spring heat in little mumbles that no one was paying any mind.

  Rue couldn’t know it then, but it wou
ld be the last time she would see them all gathered, the last time she’d see the elder two sons at all. They’d joined up, to defend King Cotton and the honor of their womenfolk, showing allegiance to the very cause their step-mama was afeared of, to be called Rebels and worse. Marse Peter would follow not too far behind his brothers. He’d live two more years, dead before he was eighteen—or presumed so leastwise—on a battlefield, in the midst of a Northern ice storm. Varina would read aloud the letter that made it so, with her remaining slaves gathered around her, just like this, like children primed for a bedtime story, Rue amongst them, and Varina would not even weep on the words that presumed her last living brother gone to meet his maker. She had never liked him much and anyway with the last of her daddy’s sons dead she would finally be the sole mistress of her daddy’s land, which would soon be only vast ashes.

  Varina would never leave that place and Rue wouldn’t neither—but they couldn’t know that then, couldn’t know how well Miss May Belle’s conjure would take. Today Rue was seven years old because Varina was, and even that she couldn’t know for sure.

  “How lovely!” Varina said. She’d managed to work the box of her last gift open and she’d pulled out the prize. Rue turned back around to see it emerge, though she knew already that it would be the little redheaded doll baby her mama had fixed to conjure for Ma Doe to keep Varina tied to the land. Perched in her lap it really was a perfect double of Varina. And Rue knew the girl would love it for that.

  “Well, ain’t this darlin’,” Varina said, inspecting the doll.

  “Isn’t it darling,” Missus corrected.

  Varina ignored her mama. Instead she turned the doll over and lifted up its skirts, and for a moment, stunned, Rue thought she meant to strip the baby nude right there, before her brothers and her daddy.

  But Varina flipped the doll baby on its head and pulled down the bright red dress over the white face. Sewn on the opposite side was another dress, a bold green one, as bright as the trees in springtime, and there where the white doll’s legs ought to have been was another head, this one black with fat red lips and brown eyes and hair wild like bramble.

  “It’s a topsy-turvy doll! How clever!” Varina said. She hugged the black side close. “Look! A li’l nigra.”

  Rue ached in secret where only she could know. Was this the gift that Miss May Belle had all along meant for Rue to receive? Not a present but an emptiness where a present might be? Rue at seven realized then what she ought to have known all along—that she, and even her own doll baby, a thing made in her own image, would belong always to Miss Varina.

  FREEDOMTIME

  What would Miss May Belle have done? Rue had only the memory of her dead mama to put the question to. But the dead did sometimes answer, in their way, and Miss May Belle answered Rue now with a way to save Bean.

  All at once that mind-apparition of Miss May Belle turned back to the empty dust-dark corners of the one-room cabin, and Rue might have felt lonely if not for the fact that she knew the spirit of her mama was upon her, that spirit being conjure.

  She left her cabin almost in a run, her skirts fisted up in sweating palms so she could hit a full fast stride. If she was going to do it, if she was going to find the cure for Bean’s vitality, she’d have to do it quick.

  The skeleton of the House loomed, the black remains of Marse Charles’s mansion, its charred stairs leading nowhere. Rue rubbed her hand against the white pillar at the entryway as she always did when she passed, but she couldn’t stop there. She made her way into the clearing beyond. She knew at once which plant she needed but it was a struggle to find it in the little moonlight, and it had to be right.

  It was a pattern to the leaf—Rue knew to look for black backward raindrops, and, true, she’d need only the barest hint of it, a handful, no more, crushed down into a dust, into a powder; it would be so easy to go into Sarah’s house and put it on the tip of Bean’s tongue. He trusted her now. If she timed it rightly the swirls of red would rise up on his pale skin as brightly as it had risen in his sister and brother, and a fever was bound to take hold. If taken by mouth, there might be vomiting, a flux—not quite the symptoms the other children had, though it would not be so different as to raise doubt, and it was all good toward the growing curse and toward the show. If Rue timed it rightly and gave Bean just enough, the sickness would overtake him in the evening, so that Sarah would have to knock at her door, would have to ask for her help plainly where everyone could see, and by the morning the artificial sickness would pass, as though Rue had healed him, and likewise the pestilence of suspicion would pass, and pass by Bean and Rue with it.

  But with her face so close to the ground that the grass tickled her ears she felt suddenly ashamed. Maybe she was ill herself to dream such a wild thing. Was this the madness of fear, or a fever coming on? Or worse, was this the way her mama had felt in that final year of her hate-filled grief, hanging fruit that spun from the eaves? Rue sat upright to catch her breath, to feel the cool earth against her hands, which she had planted firm against the ground. She was not Miss May Belle. She did not rush headfirst into madness, sorrow, or wanting. She did not spit curses. She had to think. She waited.

  The woods were almost quiet as she listened to the beating of her own heart and tried to breathe away that coil of fear. In the distance she saw the trees and heard something give a mournful hoot from high amongst the leaves but that something did not show itself. The creek beat quiet against the pebbles of the bank, rushing down a ways to the place it opened to the river and then, she supposed, somewhere beyond that, to the sea.

  She stood and approached the cabin by the creek. Heard from within it the telltale sounds of a scurrying animal. A fox?

  The door to the shed almost didn’t move. The bottoms of the wood had burrowed themselves deep in the mud, and Rue put all her strength into one forceful tug.

  Inside she found him, not a fox but a man. She near toppled over at the sight of him. He lay on his back fully on the ground, his legs splayed unnaturally, his fingers laced over his chest in the way she’d lately been arranging the dead. She would have thought him dead if not for the slight rising and falling of those pale fingers with his chest, and then he confirmed himself alive by giving off a grunt of a snore.

  He was white. Had to be—the pale hands, the ease with which he slept out in the open. And what she could make out of his face in the shadow was the sandy color of wheat. She had not seen a white man in years. Not since the war, at its fiery end. If she stepped away slowly she would not wake him, but already her hand on the door was rattling with fear and if she had to walk backward the way she had come, she was certain she would fall.

  Then Rue saw that his face was not his face but was a hat made of straw, one she’d lost, she realized, some months back. The clothes he wore were in the shape of a crumpled suit separated from its jacket. Then a flood of knowing came on to her so fiercely that she cried out. It was Bruh Abel. Come back.

  His whole body jerked at the sound as though his sleeping had been only surface deep and he sat up without pulling away the hat, which tumbled into his lap. Bruh Abel’s gray eyes quirked into a squint and he looked right at Rue in bafflement.

  Was he ill? He had that glassy gaze in the brief blinking open of his eyes that she had seen over and over in the town. He leaned all the way forward, his head rolling in a tilt on his chest.

  Rue crept closer. After some unsureness she picked a safe place on the inside of his wrist. His body felt warm beneath her hand and there was a slickness to his skin made of clammy sweat.

  “Rue,” he said in a husky hiccup and she knew then, from the smell that wafted out with her name, that he was not sick. He was drunk. She dropped his hand.

  She didn’t like the strength of the liquor smell that was suddenly all around her. It smelled to her of danger.

  He said, “Don’t go, Rue.” It was the lack of “Sister” befor
e it that made her stop a moment, one leg over him, the other still trapped against the shed wall.

  “If ya go I might die.”

  Rue had heard of a man that had died that way, a white man who had drunk himself quite on purpose to his death when the Yankees took his little mulatto children away to freedom.

  “Gimme a cure,” Bruh Abel said and stuck his arms straight up. Rue feared he was grabbing at her, but as she stumbled back she saw he was not grabbing but pointing, pointing upward with both hands at a bottle that sat above them on the curve of a collapsing shelf.

  “Oh, you don’t need no more of that damned mess,” Rue said and surprised herself. She sounded like her mama. “What’s the matter with you? All them folks in town is waitin’ on you and this is what you doin’?”

  Bruh Abel swatted at her. He rolled over on his side, showed his back to her now. She grabbed his shoulder and rolled him back over, so he could be looking at her for what she had to say to him.

  “You a shame,” Rue said. “They need you.”

  She was upset with herself most of all because in that first moment when she had seen him and when she had recognized him, she had felt relief. A hope down in the warm of her belly. She could hear the voices of the townsfolk in the back of her head. Bruh Abel has come. Bruh Abel will know what to do.

  But now, that hope had dispersed in her like so much smoke. He didn’t know any more than she did. He wasn’t a savior any more than she was. He was just a man, fallible as she was. More so.

  Bruh Abel took her hand, squeezed it weakly the way any invalid might. He was lucky he hadn’t froze to death, sleeping in this fall-down shed, gaps in the wood and sharp cutting drafts, and she found she wasn’t mad enough to wish that he had froze.

  “That’s exactly what I’m afeared of. They need me.” His words scuttled around on a slur but he seemed to want to make himself understood. “This winter I was down almost to the gulf, got me a good setup down there, ministerin’ to dockmen and to the women that work the wharfs when the sailors come in. They got them a lot of sins, them women, and they cook mighty good too. I’m thinkin’ to myself I could stay down there the whole length of the winter season. Maybe into spring too. But one fine day a rider comes up say he’s been lookin’ for me all over. Red-haired mulatto?”