Conjure Women Page 15

  “That’d be Red Jack.”

  Bruh Abel grunted, went on. “Red Jack say that he’s ridden down the whole length of the coast lookin’ for me. There’s a terrible sickness, the Ravagin’ he call it, in one of the out-of-the-way towns in which I sometimes stop. He say, ‘We need you,’ and I say, ‘I shall pray for you,’ and he say, ‘Come on back to town with me,’ and I say ‘No.’ ”

  “They believe in you,” she said. But then, they had used to believe in her and look all the good that had done them, or her, or anybody.

  “Yo’ Red Jack took himself away and I stayed down there in the gulf. But I found that it didn’t sit right with my soul, thinkin’ on all ’em children, children I baptized. Just dead.

  “I gathered my courage and I wound my way back up here and it wasn’t ’til I was half a day’s walk away that I realized I come empty-handed. I ain’t got nothin to give y’all. They need me? I can’t save nobody.” He stopped himself with a hiccup. “Thought I’d buy myself some thinkin’ time when I bought myself some whiskey at a stand along the road. But it ain’t make the thinkin’ any easier.”

  Rue stood up. “It seldom does.”

  She stepped over his body, clutching her dress tight to her legs for the long leap over his torso so he couldn’t see up her skirt. He was only a man, after all.

  “Why’d you tell me all that?” Rue half-expected him not to answer, expected he’d fallen back into the pit of his drunken sleep.

  “You understand.” He slurred. “Don’t ya, Miss Rue?”

  She did understand. What it meant to be praised and praised and then suddenly tumble from grace. It was a long, lonesome way down.

  Rue left him lying there, and he let her go this time with only a mewl of regret. She didn’t go far. What she could assemble would be crude, only the plants that thrived in the wet that could live in the ever-present shade cast by the shed. But they were there to be found and she picked them.

  Back in the shed Bruh Abel’s gaze followed her as she moved about. Rue stood on the tips of her toes to examine the shelves that hung by halves on the wall. Feeling in the darkness, Rue found his Bible and beside it the bottle of liquor with nothing but a puddle left at the bottom. She pulled it down. It would have to do.

  “You lookin’ like Miss May Belle,” Bruh Abel said. “I used to pray with her, you know, before she passed.”

  Rue knelt on the ground. “She was foolish for believin’ in you too.”

  She bashed the bottom of the bottle against the thistle she had collected. The poison she’d gathered for Bean was still in her basket, waiting. She thought about it and beat harder. She kept bashing ’til the job was done.

  “Hey now, with that racket.”

  “See these here thorns?” she held up the battered stems to him. “They set out to prick you. Y’all can swallow ’em whole if you like, and bleed. Or y’all can do it my way. I’m curin’ you like you was askin’. Unless you was hopin’ to wake up with the devil on yo’ back in the mornin’.”

  Bruh Abel smirked. “And look, here I ain’t got nothin’ to pay you with.”

  Rue said, “Don’t come into town tomorrow.”

  He looked away, perhaps ashamed as he should be. He swirled the handful of seeds she had given him. They were smooth and as black as Bean’s eyes, and free of nettles.

  “But iff’n you do come,” Rue went on, “then come as their preacher man. Don’t show them yo’ doubt or yo’ fear neither; they got enough a’ their own. You can’t save them babies what’s meant to die. And I can’t neither.”

  Rue thought of her mama, saw her there, same as she had in the shadows of the cabin. Bruh Abel’s kind of faith hadn’t kept Miss May Belle from dying any more than Rue’s healing had. But it had made the difference in her last few hours that he’d sat at her bedside. He had made her dying easier. Rue had never thanked him for that.

  “If you gon’ be a liar, Bruh Abel,” Rue said, “then be a useful one.”

  * * *

  —

  When Rue walked back home she was looking for the sunrise but there was none to be had, only the gradual receding of the black night in favor of the hard glow of day. The morning was gray all over with a fog that came up heavy from the river and hung low, made it hard to see anything clearly through the thick of the woods and made her think of Bruh Abel’s eyes, that same kind of unknowable gray.

  She was nearly halfway up her own porch when she saw the billow of smoke, moving only the way smoke can move, distinguishing itself from the sedentary thick of the fog to say Someone has died here.

  It came from the house nearest to hers where a family of three was living, a mama and her two boys, the daddy long ago gone, took up his freedom and left with it. Had one of them boys died? Rue changed course. In the pocket of her dress she held her pipette and she pulled it out, something like a talisman, hoping there was a child left alive that might need her. But when she came upon the house, there, blocking her way, were Red Jack and Jonah and Si’s daddy and Beulah’s man, their arms full of kindling to stoke the fire of the sickbed sheets.

  “Both boys?” Rue asked it to Jonah but he didn’t answer.

  “The eldest passed,” said Red Jack. “The younger one’s caught it. He sweatin’ fierce.”

  Rue meant to pass them, but they did not move for her. Those four men held bundles of wood in their arms and their eyes moved near as one to look her up and down. She’d forgotten where she’d come from and how she must look, her skin flush, her dress dotted with nighttime mud and stains of grass. Madness, that’s what they were seeing. Her gone mad. The witch they had been whispering after.

  Rue tried to smile at Jonah but he wouldn’t let her. His face was set.

  He asked, “Where you come from?”

  Rue didn’t know what to say. “I was out there,” she answered as if she’d descended with the fog.

  Behind Jonah, Beulah’s man made a noise of disgust in his throat, shared a glance with Si’s daddy, who nodded at some unsaid thing. Rue wanted to smack the cradled wood from out of their hands. “It’s true then,” Si’s daddy muttered.

  “What’s true?”

  But they would not say more.

  “Jonah. What’s true?” Rue stepped forward that she might speak to only him but in the same moment he backed away, evading, as if to be touched by her was to know some plague.

  “What Ol’ Joel said before he passed.” Jonah hesitated. “That you out conjurin’ with somebody in them woods.”

  “You know ain’t none of it true,” Rue said. But she herself did not know it to be fully a lie. “Let me by now, let me see to the sick child.”

  Before her the four men were a barricade, and at any moment they could turn against her. In her eyes the sticks they bore were no longer kindling but menacing switches. She felt herself shrinking.

  “Please let me by.”

  “We takin’ care of him. He’ll survive it,” Red Jack said with finality. He stuck a bit of tobacco in his mouth, gnashed at it with a purpose.

  Rue took a step back.

  “Go on then,” she said. “Don’t waste yo’ precious time threatenin’ me. Go see to the sick boy.”

  They went. They moved toward the cabin that plumed still more black smoke. She knew that they thought they could do what she could not, those men with bundles of sticks cradled in their arms thinking the work of carrying kindling was as precious as carrying a newborn.

  “Jonah, wait,” she said. She feared he would ignore her.

  Yet, he stopped on the porch and waved the others on into the cabin before he turned back toward her. His expression seemed as shut to her as a locked door.

  “Jonah, what’s happened?” She meant to ask What’s changed? but couldn’t. It cut too close to what she was feeling. “Is somethin’ the matter with yo’ li’l ’uns? Is Bean took sick
?”

  It was the wrong thing to ask. “Why you worryin’ so much after Bean?”

  “I tol’ you I’d take care of him,” Rue said and tried not to think of her deception, or her plan of false poison, lest it show on her face.

  “Folks keep tryna tell me you workin’ devilment.” He looked about like he feared he would be heard. Or worse, like he feared he would be seen with her. “They wanna run you outta town. They say Bean’s the only one that ain’t took sick. That it must be your doin’. If you don’t loose yo’ hold over Bean they plan to leave him out in the woods for the foxes to eat.”

  To hear it said pained her, but she’d known all along that that’s what this all was tipping toward. Ma Doe had warned her of it; even Bruh Abel in his way had suggested trouble would come from Bean. And to Bean also.

  “Bean’s just a child,” Rue spat. “Yo’ child.”

  Jonah flinched. She’d struck where she’d meant to.

  He led her away from the main road, closer to the edge of the woods where no one was likely to pass and hear them.

  “Sarah say he was born dead but that you brung him back from the dead. Is that true, Miss Rue?”

  “He was born different,” she said slowly, as if she were trying to remember. But of course she had never stopped fearing that exact thing, that Bean was a curse come back from the past, to be visited upon her alone. A shame she could not escape.

  Rue said, “Bean was born with a caul. A veil like. Heard tell it’s lucky, means he got the Sight.”

  “Sarah say you jealous a’ her,” Jonah went on. “That you made Bean as a curse on her. That you was gon’ give her a poison to stop havin’ more babies.”

  Rue felt horror stab through her, sharp as a dagger.

  “Sarah say maybe you put somethin’ evil in Bean when he was born. That you hid evidence of it. Somethin’ sinister.”

  “I didn’t.”

  Jonah looked ill. “I burnt them sheets he was born in like you said. Was it conjure, Miss Rue, what you tol’ me to do?”

  “No, no. It was only what Miss May Belle used to do.”

  “Folks seen you go out into the woods at night. They say you go to practice yo’ witchery.” Jonah was looking at her like he was afraid of her. She could not bear it.

  “What about that night I saw you with Ol’ Joel?” Jonah said. “Did he have it figured? Is that why he died?

  “Where’d you go last night, Miss Rue?” He asked it like he was desperate for her to come up with a good lie, an explanation that would make the danger pass. But she didn’t have one ready. Her head was full of secrets. Her basket was full of poison.

  “Folks say you nigh on twenty but you won’t take no man. Is it true you got a lover in the woods?” Jonah asked it like it was the worst of her sins. “That you conceived Bean there to lay in Sarah’s stomach? Is that the truth of his black eyes? Why he don’t cry when you hold him?”

  By now Jonah’s chest was heaving with the tumble of accusations, more passion than Rue had ever seen from him in all the years she’d known him, and suddenly she resented it, her anger coming on her like a hot brand, the realization that’d he’d never looked on her ’til now and that this was how it was going to be.

  “ ‘Folks say,’ ” she mimicked. “What do you say, Jonah? You believe it? If I am a witch maybe you ought not to cross me.”

  Jonah took a reeling step back, good as if she’d slapped him. “I don’t want no harm to come to the children.”

  “Neither do I,” said Miss Rue. “You go on and tell folks I never did none of those things they say. I ain’t much more than a woman that knows some things, things anybody could know if they wanted to. Ain’t no devil in the woods, Jonah. Ain’t no lover.”

  * * *

  —

  When Bruh Abel came amongst them, she heard it: the simple commotion of him, that thing she’d told him to stir up. Hope. By the way folks were carrying on, you would have thought Jesus had finally come, that or the white doctor with his shining black bag of medicine vials, but it was just Bruh Abel and his prayers, as though hope was better than healing. They were all of them out of their houses—the healthy, the living, the left behind—and then they were praying and then they were singing something mournful.

  She tried to picture Bruh Abel coming out from the accursed woods, his timing perfect. They could have no sense of how he’d spent his night, or his months away from the town. He existed to them only when he came down from the trees, as seasonal as falling fruit. But she knew.

  Rue was bent at the table with pestle, with mortar, grinding down the green leaves with their little black raindrop pattern, a sign she’d learned to avoid, a sign for poison. She ground the leaves down as fine as she could and finer still and swore to herself it was the right thing to do to save Bean and herself. Never mind the right thing to do, it was the only thing, and that mattered more. She would make him sick for a short time. A spell.

  THE RAVAGING

  Folks would not trust the healing woman to heal. All her days, Rue had been a healing woman, and that meant waiting her whole life on sickness. On some calamity to befall others so that she could come in and stop it. But for all the calamity amongst the children, Black-Eyed Bean had shown no signs of sickening.

  Rue could not wait any longer for Bean to prove that he was an ordinary boy capable of ordinary illness. It might never happen. All the while other children would fall sick around them, fall sicker, die.

  Rue was resolved to go on with her scheme. She had set aside her hesitation over serving Bean a treatment of poison. No power in hesitation—Miss May Belle had taught Rue that in her every action.

  Rue commenced to cook the sickness up in her kitchen. She had no food to prepare there anyhow. The goodwill of the townsfolk had fed her before but that goodwill was gone, dwindling with every child she hadn’t saved, with every whisper made against her that the pestilence that had befallen their babies was because of her and Bean.

  Stooped at her fireplace, Rue tended to a swinging pot filled with the black dotted leaves she’d gathered and their rolling seeds. Poison. She refused to call it otherwise. She had to have a clear mind on what she was doing, on why she was doing it. No sugar, no dose of molasses syrup to ease the going. Poison, plain, simple. If Bean showed the same sickness as the other children for a spell—and Rue could make it so—then no one could think him special. Nobody could think him favored as some witch’s creation, or by some conjure of protection that she had given him, nor could they go on believing that he was leeching away the vitality of the other children for his own benefit.

  She’d fallen asleep with Jonah’s threats inside her head and she woke that morning terrified. At her front door there came a scratching.

  They come to burn me up, Rue feared.

  She pulled the pot from where it hung; the metal handle burned her skin. Still she clutched tight to it. They couldn’t find her out. She had to get rid of the poison before she was caught at doing precisely what they’d accused her of all along. Cooking up sickness. They’d kill her for it.

  Rue tossed the simmering poison to the ground, stashed the heated pot amongst cool ones on a high shelf just as Bruh Abel barreled through, rocked the door on its hinges. He held in his arms bundles of vegetables. He wasn’t in his suit but a pair of overalls too large and clean for working in, the shirt too small. Looking at her from the doorway he sucked wind through his teeth the way her mama might’ve if she weren’t so long ago dead, so long past drawing breath, angry or otherwise.

  No time to hesitate. Rue ground away her secret, crushed the leaves away with her boot heel.

  “Why you here?”

  “Christian charity,” he said.

  He set down the food on the table, and the spread rolled out wide enough to make Rue’s stomach growl. She didn’t move out from her corner, hid her burnt hand behind he
r back.

  “Unless, you already got supper goin’.” He glanced at her spitting fire and above it the empty place her cooking pot was meant to hang.

  “No,” she said too loud.

  “Figured that.” Bruh Abel looked down like he was embarrassed, or pretending to be leastwise. “Folks loaded me up with all they had when they saw me. In thanks for my comin’ and all. You was right. It brightened ’em to see me come.”

  “I knew it would.” She wasn’t going to let herself get jealous for it, not now. She realized that Bruh Abel had the power to ease the suspicion amongst the townspeople. But he could just as easily stoke it if he had a mind to.

  It came to Rue then that folks all had been waiting on his healing, same as they had once waited on her, and on Miss May Belle before her. Likewise they would wait on his assessment of the state of things. If he pronounced she was accursed, then she was accursed and Bean along with her. What would it take, she wondered, for him to pronounce them otherwise?

  Rue crossed the room, blowing at her burnt hand. She tried to lead Bruh Abel to the door, but he stood still in the middle of her home.

  “It was good a’ you to come,” she finally said.

  “I ain’t leavin’,” he said. “I’m stayin’ here.”

  “What you mean you stayin’?”

  “You one a’ my flock now,” he told her. “I stay amongst my own and administer after they needs. There’s somethin’ asunder in yo’ home, Miss Rue. Right here is where I’m needed. So right here is where I’m stayin’.”

  The air all around them smelled sweet with the poison she’d been cooking. No way he couldn’t smell it.