Conjure Women Read online

“I’m to watch,” Bruh Abel said, walking the length of her supper table. He began sorting through the food, busying his hands on leeks and squashes and sweet potatoes. “Three days. On the third day I ought to know the truth a’ the matter.”

  “So you set yo’self up as the judge and the jury a’ my trial?” And the executioner, Rue thought, and she clipped her mouth shut, suddenly afraid. “Is that why you come?”

  “If I ain’t come, they aimed to run you off, or worse.” Bruh Abel’s expression was more honest than she’d ever seen it. “They tol’ me to come to you, the townsfolk did. They begged it. Do you know what they sayin’ ’bout you, Miss Rue?”

  She hadn’t for one moment stopped thinking on Jonah’s accusations. Knowing him like she did she didn’t doubt that Jonah had softened the threat, only repeated half the hateful accusations he’d heard, too cowardly or too cautious to give voice to the worst of it.

  “I ain’t come to hurt you,” Bruh Abel said. “I mean only to bring reason to the matter. I come to settle things before it’s all gone too far. They all of ’em convinced that Bean’s yo familiar. That he’s workin’ as yo’ spirit to steal life from the li’l ’uns. They say it must be that Bean come from the Devil. What kinda preacher would I be if I ain’t confront the Devil?”

  “You ain’t no real kinda preacher.”

  Rue’s venom seemed to surprise him. Well, she had surprised her own self. She sat down heavy on her bed, her face hid in her hands, her poison crushed up in the dirt under her feet.

  “Last night you saw my weakness for drink, it’s true,” Bruh Abel said after a time. “Just ’cause I’m a preacher man don’t mean I can’t sometimes lose faith. Just ’cause you a healin’ woman don’t mean you can’t sometimes fall ill.”

  He came round the table to her and Rue did not back down. He laid his hand on her head like he was feeling for fever.

  “Are you sufferin’ some sickness, Miss Rue? I mean to find it and flush it out.”

  * * *

  —

  They passed the evening and late into the night like two strangers, man and woman in too small of a home.

  Despite his swagger before a crowd, Bruh Abel was not altogether comfortable in the presence of one person, that one person being Rue, who was watching him from the corner of her home, distrustful.

  Seemed Bruh Abel didn’t want to be hated. He kept trying to talk at her. All the while her mind stayed hopping about, figuring at some way out. She’d play along at sweetness if she had to. For Bean’s sake. And her own.

  It brought Rue to mind of slaverytime when Marse Charles had took it upon himself to pick a man slave and woman slave to couple together for no other reason than that he liked the look of them and figured them for good stock. Sometimes they wouldn’t hardly have the hour to get acquainted before Miss May Belle was sent in to scent the sheets, check between the woman slave’s legs for blood if she were a virgin, leastwise for slick if she was not. As a child Rue had always figured if she were to ever get a man, that would be how it went. Hadn’t that been how her mama had got her daddy after all, that first time? And Rue had followed some nine months after, just a tick mark on Marse Charles’s accounting book.

  Freedom turned everything all over. Now a man was something you took because you wanted him. A baby something you might have for the sake of loving it.

  Maybe Rue had let some of her confusion snake onto her face because Bruh Abel asked, “What you thinkin’ on?”

  Rue could not say what she was thinkin’, which was how to be rid a’ you, so she answered instead “Bean.”

  Bruh Abel perked up. “You layin’ some kinda conjure? Is that how it works? By thinkin’ on him?”

  She cussed. “I’m worryin’ ’bout him.”

  Bruh Abel settled himself down. “I heard you the one that named him.”

  Rue shrugged. “I ain’t mean to. Just somethin’ I said, and Sarah repeated it to Jonah maybe and Jonah repeated it to somebody and it just got goin’ like that and there he was, Black-Eyed Bean.”

  “Black-eyed peas what my mama called ’em where she from. Ain’t that somethin’?”

  Rue had not altogether thought that Bruh Abel had a mama. Thought maybe he sprung up like some weed of his own volition.

  “We come from the same people,” he went on, “but we come up with all different ways a’ sayin’ the same thing.”

  He said it like they were sharing a joke. It lighted the dimple on his cheek. Rue shrugged, decided it was better to not look at him at all if he was going to try to be friendly. She suspected his friendliness for a trap.

  Having him there in her cabin reminded Rue of the first time she’d seen him at the side of Miss May Belle’s bed, ministering.

  He’d been there when Rue had not been. How much did he know of Miss May Belle? Of the townsfolk? Of Rue herself? Were there secrets Rue’s mama might have told him? Confessions of her deathbed? Fact was at her end Miss May Belle had trusted in him, and in his vials of holy water. He had that way about him, to get everybody’s trust. Whether he served poison or snake oil or whiskey water, why was it that they all of them were so ready to drink it up?

  “You gon’ save Bean, won’t you?” It was the first thing she’d said without his prompting, and it got his attention right off.

  He looked at her, somber. “I meant what I said. No harm is to come to him.”

  “Then do somethin’.”

  “That’s my intention. I’ll save yo’ soul and I’ll save him, also.”

  Rue meant to save herself and might have said as much. But an idea flitted through her head, small at first, on moth wings, then larger still.

  “Minister to Bean, Bruh Abel,” she said, “same as you did my mama. I ain’t never rightly thanked you for that. But when you came to her, folks saw that she was healed.”

  Bruh Abel nodded like it was all his idea. “I mean to do the very same.”

  Rue smiled at him and her smile was all poison.

  * * *

  —

  The second day he made a soup, he told her a tale, and Rue devised a way to get herself out.

  She set down a bottle of good strong brandy on the table between them, the kind she saved for sicknesses, and she put beside it a crystal glass, a pretty one, one she’d saved from her white folks’ house before the fire.

  Didn’t matter, she knew, if a fish saw the hook so long as the bait was something they couldn’t help but hunger after.

  “Go ’head, Bruh Abel.”

  Rue tried to make herself sweet, the least like a witch that she could be, and she filled the glass up high and set it before him glinting amber in the firelight. She knew men had a myriad of weaknesses, but she only trusted herself to seduce him with the one.

  He pushed the glass over to her. “For you, Rue.”

  Then he took up the bottle itself, winked at her, and drank from it straight. Bottle in hand, he went on cooking.

  Bruh Abel cooked with the same flare with which he preached. He alternated between a whistle and a hum as he chopped up vegetables at her small table, made a broth in her only pot, rolled dough in the bowl she usually used to make a draught for colic.

  Sitting on the sharp edge of her bed, Rue watched him, sipped at the glass she’d poured. She aimed to keep her wits about her as his slipped from him. Then when he was fast asleep she could steal into the woods. Fetch more poison leaves for Bean. Finish finally the idea she’d started.

  Bruh Abel came over to her with the soup and coaxed her to taste his concoction, proffering an outstretched spoonful. She looked into his heavy-lidded eyes and smiled, took the spoon for herself, and tasted. It was hot, it was good.

  “Where’d you learn all that?”

  “From Queenie, where else? My mama.”

  He told Rue about Queenie in a heavy slur. He called her Queenie ’
cause everybody called her Queenie and everybody called her Queenie, he supposed, because she was the queen of her kitchen. Her master was a sea captain, though Bruh Abel in his overflowing enthusiasm made him sound something more like a pirate—thickly bearded, full gray eyes—and that sea captain had loved Queenie so much he’d had her likeness etched into the figurehead of his boat, down to every last quirk and birthmark. He’d made her a mermaid. The snaking curve of her back jutted her out over the sea, and the sea captain even had them sculpt in the two dimples on her back where her ass spread wide and became the scaled pattern of the bow. That ten-foot Queenie was made all of mahogany picked for its perfect match, the exact color of her skin.

  “He weren’t a superstitious man and he’dda had her on the ship with him if he could, but his men weren’t gonna have none of that,” Bruh Abel told Rue in a hiccup. “Women on ships is sour luck.”

  Rue had to wonder why the wood figure of a woman on a ship was good when a real, flesh woman on a ship was bad but she didn’t ask, just watched Bruh Abel tip back the bottle.

  Queenie lived on the quay, Bruh Abel explained as he ladled out a bowl of soup, in a sea-battered cottage with her baker’s dozen of children, who had a way of being born nine months or thereabouts after the captain’s ship left her port. Bruh Abel had been the youngest of those and the petted favorite. Her boys she offered to the sea, her girls to other folks’ kitchens, but Bruh Abel, being her littlest, she kept close. He’d learned her cooking looking up from under her skirts.

  Bruh Abel made his way to where Rue sat on the edge of the bed. He tasted his soup, made a noise of satisfaction, and tasted it again. He sat himself down on the bed too, his legs tangled in her sheet. Rue had to push up against the headboard to give his tall angular body room.

  “The sea captain loved her and her way with food so much he done declared that when he died he’d free her and all us li’l ’uns with her. He died inside a year a’ writing the words. Folks says she killed him on purpose.”

  Rue frowned. “Did she?”

  Bruh Abel laughed so hard he spit out some of his soup. “Nah, just he loved her cookin’ so much he got to weighin’ half a ton and died from the strain of it.”

  He handed her the bowl and Rue ate from it, sharply hungry and hungrier still with each bite. The salty broth floated with greens and sweet potatoes that must have come from Ma Doe’s garden, and a dark meat so smooth she could swallow it whole.

  “Don’t you want any?” she asked him.

  “Nah,” he said, smiling dreamily, “I got all I need right here.” He patted the brown bottle like a lover. Rue felt almost sorry for him.

  * * *

  —

  Bruh Abel didn’t stir from where she’d left him, blanketless on her bed. She’d watched him sleeping for a while, perhaps longer than she should have, listening to his easy snore and wondering if she ought not stay and pray with him after all.

  In the end she snatched up her basket, her mortar, and her pestle and left, stepped out into the wilderness with only a dim lantern as a beacon, so determined to go through with her plan that she could hardly wait out the inky dark to conceal her. She walked to the little bed of green leaves she’d come to two nights before. Their dotted surface glistened with the start of dew drops as if to greet her. With sure fingers she plucked them from the ground.

  This time, though, she did not return home, turned instead to that old fall-down church, the only place she knew for certain she’d go unseen.

  After the war, folks had forgotten the white folks’ church, shunned it as a hated place, a place they’d been taught to submit, to bow down in the Lord’s name. To hush and to surrender. Bruh Abel’s church was water and sky, his Bible was a hymn and a battle cry. What use did they have for the grim gray four walls of the old Protestant church? They’d shiver just to go into it, to feel encased all in brick. They’d sooner let it crumble, but they’d never tear it down. The Northern army, too, had stopped their hellfire short of burning it—as Rue had bet they would—just as superstitious in the end as they accused black folks of being. They feared the ill luck that destroying a sacred place would bring, and who could blame them? Whatever folks believed or didn’t believe there was no sense fueling the wrath of things not seen.

  Now Rue came to the pews and set down her bowl and began to grind down the leaves by lantern light. A fine powder, finer than fine. She didn’t dare hesitate. When she was finished she stowed the poison in a little vial and hid it in the folds of her dress.

  Above her the roof creaked sharply. She glanced upward.

  Up, where the slaves, when there had been slaves, had listened to those sermons, had had obedience whupped into their minds with words as sharp as any cat-o’-nine. The boards groaned again with the noise of someone shifting their weight, unsure, and from the corner of her eye Rue caught the movement of a woman’s white night shift rippling back into the shadows.

  “Varina,” Rue said.

  The woman rippled out again at the sound of her name.

  “S’alright, Varina,” Rue said. “You might as well come on.”

  Varina took the steps down from the loft slowly, taking care to step where she knew the old boards would still hold her. She creaked all the way down and then crossed the church slow, too, trailing her long white nightgown through dust, came like a reluctant child about to be scolded though she was a woman grown, and a used-to-be mistress. “Is it safe?”

  “Safe as it ever is,” Rue said. She put down the bowl and pestle, made room for Varina beside her on the bench. The white woman sat down next to her, so close their two dresses touched.

  Varina petted Rue’s hand like she wanted to make sure Rue was altogether real. She looked sallow in the lantern light, and there were black rings beneath her eyes.

  “You’ve been gone away too long,” Varina complained. She always complained no matter if it was a day or a month since Rue had last been to see her in her hiding place.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Varina. I met with a bit a’ trouble in town. Nothin’ to worry after. Cure’s in hand.” Rue patted her pocket where she’d kept the poison for Bean.

  “Is it Ma? She unwell?”

  Rue shook her head. “No, no, ain’t nothin’ like that. Ma Doe’s well as ever. She asks after you.”

  Varina looked up at the broken rafters. “May I come out soon, Rue? I’d so like to.”

  “Soon,” Rue lied. “When all is well and settled.”

  Rue could go on and on putting off Varina’s demands, could keep on telling the woman that it was not safe for her to venture beyond the confines of the old church. But she looked at Varina now and there was some of that old defiance starting to crackle on Varina’s face, there and gone, fast like lightning.

  In their hide-and-seek game, Varina kept herself well hid in the distant church, far off from the plantation. The old routes to the church had been cut off by a particularly bad swell of the river that made the woods look all turned around if a body wasn’t over-familiar with traversing them.

  Varina made her home in the rectory. On braver days she ghosted through the empty church aisles or up in the vaulted second story where the corpse bell swung through dust and gleaming spider webs.

  Those first hard months after the fire destroyed her home, Miss Varina had near wasted away in her bedroll, her mind gone, fogged over with fear and sorrow and shame. Every shadow was sin or a Northern soldier in a war she didn’t know was ending. Without Rue, Varina might have died, or lost her senses altogether. Might have hurt herself, in some final brutal way, just to be free of the torment of her own memories.

  But Varina had gradually healed. And Rue knew that one of these days she was going to reclaim that old hunger. Then she wasn’t going to stay satisfied eating up the simple lies that Rue kept on feeding her.

  Rue’s ears pricked up to some sound outside. Was that the crack
of twigs beneath a quick approach? She stood from the bench. Tried to listen. There again, motion.

  Varina stilled. “Rue?”

  “Go.” Rue took up her lantern, moved as swiftly as she could, and slipped her way out through the double doors. Shut them behind her, hard.

  Bruh Abel was there in the field of the church. His eyes were arrowhead sharp in the rocking light of her lantern.

  “There you are, Miss Rue.” His breath smelled of brandy, but his voice was steady when he spoke. Exacting. Sober.

  “You ain’t drunk,” Rue said.

  “I poured out the brandy, boiled it up into the stew, while you wasn’t lookin’.” He seemed pleased with himself. “I wanted to know what it is you hide in these woods. What you ain’t want me to see.”

  Rue glanced behind her, tried to make it look like she wasn’t looking for anything. But she was looking, up at the high windows of the church and into the bellhouse, but there was no movement there, just the chill of a disused building, frozen in time.

  Bruh Abel was wanting an answer. She had to give him something, she thought, one secret to keep another.

  “Go on and look then.”

  He stepped through the doorway of the church. He took Rue’s lantern from her, held it high and set it to swinging, and the shadow his body cast stretched out long and sinister over the empty room.

  Rue followed close behind him, struggling in his wake to see over his shoulder. She tried to see it through his eyes, the cracked church pews and the broke-down altar and the second story that looked about ready to collapse. She tried to read the shadows for a hint of white movement.

  Where had Varina hid herself?

  “What is this place?” he asked. It was like his preacher voice knew it was a church house and felt at home—it echoed sharply taking up the whole of the room, made Rue’s heart scud in terror.

  “Nothin’ but where we used to get made to worship,” she told him. “Forced to worship.”

  “And you stay comin’ here?” Bruh Abel illuminated one sharp corner. In it was a rocking chair. There was a handkerchief draped across the seat with a half-finished bit of embroidery, lily of the valley, in neat green stitch, the flowers not bloomed in yet.