Conjure Women Page 18

  The movement of mourning had turned to a tight circle around the coffin. The four strongest men lifted the coffin up high onto their shoulders. Rue’s daddy made up the back left corner and she watched closely as he and the other men bent as one, like something they’d practiced, to heave the dead man forward. They made the lifting of it look easy, and for sure it was compared to the back-breaking labor to which those sun-blackened field hands were accustomed. It was an honor to lift this burden and so the burden was light.

  They processed through the wood and someone far back kept time with just the clap of their two hands in lieu of a drum, which was surely a devilish instrument to hear white folks tell it, but those two hands were as good as one drum, thundering off the trees so that it was joined up a hundredfold in furious echo. Rue kept an eye to the white faces, tried to keep solemn sight of them. They kept an equal distance from the black mourners, but they did follow, all the way up through the trees and there they stayed as the casket borne by the black men crested up the graveyard hill, illuminated full for their audience in the big moonlight.

  They laid him down in his plot slow. At the head of the grave they were meant to place his belongings so he wouldn’t come out again, a hungry spirit jealous after their own belongings. But he’d come to them with nothing but the twisted collar on his neck, and so that’s what they left there to mark his rest. It bloomed from the ground, rusted and bent and broken, as good as any bit of stone bearing words could be. Better.

  They formed up in a final circle for him and took up singing. Rue felt strange to be part of it, to hook her arms in with folks who’d paid her little mind before. But there was a warmth there that she liked and the song they gave was easy to learn, looping through them as it did, the words simple and sharp and real. Rue thought even that the white faces could learn the song if they chose to journey up the hill, but they didn’t join and they didn’t sing, only watched from the black shadow of the trees as on the graveyard hill the singing rose and rose.

  “Wonder where is my brother gone?” a voice would lament.

  And then another would come from the night. “He is gone to the wilderness,” and another would join: “He ain’t comin’ no more.”

  “Where is my brother gone?”

  “He gone to wilderness, ain’t comin’ no more.”

  “Wonder where will I lie down?” Rue asked when the circle of the song came round on her. Her voice felt thin but she made it hold. “Wonder where will I lie down?”

  THE RAVAGING

  On the third day of Bruh Abel’s watch, he took Rue walking. They moved through the town square on a gray rain-slicked afternoon, and though no one came out of doors, Rue knew that all of them were watching through windows as the preacher man and healing woman passed.

  “They ready to forgive you,” Bruh Abel said.

  “Are they?”

  “They will want to witness yo’ redemption.” Already he was planning it, like a show. “You need only to admit yo’ wrongdoing.”

  Rue did not feel like she had committed wrongdoing that needed admitting, not yet anyway, but she walked beside Bruh Abel just the same, going where he led her, up the steep hill to where the town cemetery sat veiled in mist.

  At the peak of the hill, they stopped to look down on the town below. They watched as a line of black smoke plumed from behind a cabin. The sickness wasn’t gone.

  “You broke my mama’s spell,” Rue told him.

  He looked at her confused.

  “Folks say before she died she laid a curse on the town, made it so’s no one could come in an’ no one could come out. But you come in and you come out easy. How’s that?”

  “Maybe I’m magic too,” Bruh Abel said, “and don’t even know it myself.”

  He spoke of magic with that amused expression that lit up his crooked dimple.

  “C’mon,” he said, and he took her over to her mama’s grave. He knelt beside it. “She was a good ’un, yo’ Miss May Belle. Glad I knew her the time I did.”

  Rue stayed standing, didn’t speak. At the end she’d felt her mama hadn’t been really happy with her. She’d always felt that, throughout her life, she’d gone up and down on the bobbing tide of Miss May Belle’s esteem. That last year her mama hadn’t been proud of her for choosing to hide away Varina. Wanted no part in it. Cussed Rue for a fool and worse.

  It was like Bruh Abel was picking thoughts from her mind when he said, “My mama wasn’t so kind always.”

  “Yo’ Queenie?” Rue had rather liked the fanciful tales Bruh Abel had told of his mama, though she didn’t half-believe them. “Thought that you was her favorite.”

  Bruh Abel rocked on his haunches. “Favorites come and go,” he said. “First thing she did when the captain gave us our freedom? She turnt round and sold me right back to bondage.”

  Rue took a step back from him. Recoiled at the very idea of it. “Y’own mama? Sold you?”

  “Sho’ ’nuff. She had other mouths that were wantin’ to be fed, how she told it. Her older sons were grown by then, no property of hers. She weren’t like to sell off her daughters neither. Men do nasty stuff when they buy up pretty mulattas, she tol’ me, but I was a boy, and sons is meant to leave, that was her thinkin’. Or leastwise what she said aloud. When I recollect it all now, though, I suspect it was more the eyes.”

  Bruh Abel tilted his head all the way back. He opened his eyes wide for Rue so that she could examine them for herself.

  “Like the captain’s,” he explained.

  Rue looked hard. He was kneeling below her still, the same height as the lesser gravestones all around him, and in the bright of high noon his eyes were the same swampy mixed-up gray of those rocks. His whites were red-rimmed, like he’d lost as much sleep as she had been losing. He blinked hard and carried on. “I was the only one that got ’em. Ain’t it funny what we pass down? Her man was dead but she always said I had a haint in my eyes. Now, how could she be free with a white man looking on her from beyond?”

  Rue said nothing, had nothing to say to something so hard.

  “Ain’t no one reason for anybody doin’ anythin’, is there?” Bruh Abel said. “Like as not it was just as much that I was what my new marse was lookin’ for to buy. Boy, young enough to still be molded. He used to be a breaker before he got religion. Don’t think they have a word for what he become.”

  Breakers. Rue had heard of such men. In slaverytime Marse Charles would threaten to send his more discourteous slaves to a famed breaker a few counties over, though he never had done it, perhaps more because of the prohibitive cost than the cruelty of the breaker’s methods. But the threat still rang in their heads, which was just as good to keep them in line and cheaper besides, a fear on the inside of their backs, always rolling up their spines, the knowledge that they could be sent away to a place whose whole function was to leech you of your spirit, to send you back home hollowed and broken and thankful for it.

  Bruh Abel pulled Rue close to him and leaned his head on the soft bottom of her stomach, buried his nose briefly in her belly button like it was meant to fit there naturally. Rue had a sudden moment of sorrow, and of wanting. A flash thought that she ought not go forward with her poison scheme. But just like that it passed in her. She did not pull away from him, not even when his grip on her hips tightened, each finger digging in with individual need.

  “I ain’t mad at what my mama done or what the breaker done,” Bruh Abel said. “The scripture teaches forgiveness and the scripture is what my marse branded into me without even lifting a hand. There’s other ways to make a boy the man you want him to be, and that’s what he was after. To prove it could be done another way. Through the spirit, he said.”

  Bruh Abel went on, and said, “It started off as a drunken parlor bet. Can you teach a bird, teach a monkey, teach a black man how to worship so good he draws in a white crowd? Funny thing is,
he never did collect on that bet, my marse. Man he laid the bet with said in the end it didn’t count, didn’t prove nothin’ seein’ as my ability might’ve come from my half-white side. Well, my marse, bein’ white and smart hisself, he recoup in another fashion. He took me all round. To every state and out on the ocean, in trains and steamboats, and out west to wildernesses not even yet staked or named, all so that folks could look on me as an example. Of all the things a black man could and could not be. That’s the part I ain’t forgive, Miss Rue, that he aimed to diminish other black folk through use a’ me.”

  Bruh Abel pulled himself up by her hips. Rue bristled but did not pull away. His truth had his body shivering, nothing eloquent about him now. Just another mama-less child.

  “I’ve been wantin’ you to know that,” he said. “Didn’t know how to tell it but in a story. Figure you’d understand. I don’t care for what folks are expectin’ a’ Bean, lookin’ the way he does. Layin’ they burdens at his feet. Seems to me they should ’llow him to be a boy, not just an evil or a spectacle.”

  “You mean to go to him now?” Rue asked. “To pray over him the way you done my mama?”

  “Just this minute,” Bruh Abel said.

  “Before all to see?” Rue pressed.

  “I swear it.”

  Rue kissed Bruh Abel. A brief pressing of her lips to his in which neither of them moved or even breathed, the better to feel. She wound her hands down his body and lingered at his taut chest, and then at the waist of his belt, and then at his pocket, where she swapped the vial of holy water he kept there for her own plugged-up vial of poison.

  When she pulled back, she was almost reluctant to leave him. It was like peeling away from a place that she belonged.

  “Go on then, Bruh Abel,” she said. “With my blessin’.”

  He moved her hair and kissed her again, easy, like he’d always had the right.

  * * *

  —

  Rue waited and imagined. She was not to be seen when Bruh Abel led Bean out amongst the townspeople to be healed through prayer and singing and drinking holy water. So she had to picture it, and sit and wait, alone.

  Her cabin seemed overlarge now that it was hers alone again and empty of Bruh Abel. His watch was over. He had the truth of her, or so he thought. He’d gotten the witch to promise that she would admit before everybody her misdeeds. It was to be done in the harsh light of the next day’s dawn. Now he was free to minister to her changeling, to free Bean of her hold.

  Bruh Abel had no sense of how well his freeing would go. He didn’t know that his praying was laced, that by daybreak Bean would have the froth and the fever that had wracked the other children. Just enough sickness to silence all suspicions.

  Rue had to imagine too, Varina in the old white church, imagine how she must have sat for hours in the prison she had put herself in, ’til she could be certain it was safe to return to the rectory. Rue had cautioned Varina over and over that she must never be seen, and if she were to be seen she must do everything she rightly could to appear like she was dead, only an apparition in the eyeblink of any superstitious gaze. Seemed Varina had took Rue’s warnings to heart.

  So Rue kept on, waiting, sat by the warm of her fire as the things she had laid unfurled. She pulled from her pocket the bottle of holy water she had stolen from Bruh Abel, replaced with her own more potent liquid. Rue pulled up the cork stopper and at the fireplace she overturned the vial and let the whiskey-water out. It hissed and sizzled where it met the heat but the fire kept on burning.

  * * *

  —

  When the sickness came, they needed her, Jonah and Sarah did. They had to believe Rue had been absolved by Bruh Abel’s word, because he said so. She was the only one with enough knowledge to tell them what had befallen their youngest son. They sent Bruh Abel to fetch her and he led her to their door, hovering behind her, like he was still suspect of her power for all that he had vouchsafed her coming redemption.

  The poison had worked quicker even than Rue had figured. In his bed, Bean twisted and sweated against an inferno fever. They had called on her for help though they had not trusted her. What else could they do?

  “Don’t touch nothin’,” Bruh Abel told her, and Rue did as she was told.

  Rue stood beside him as he looked over the sick boy.

  “He’s sweatin’ out somethin’ awful,” Bruh Abel said. Rue could see that. Could see the way the boy was succumbing to the fever. Like he was being cooked alive.

  “Y’all need to cool him.” Rue turned to the mama and daddy. Jonah eyed her with suspicion but seemed to be thinking on the whole situation, deciding. Sarah’s expression was drawn, like she’d gone away and left her body behind.

  In the bed Bean reared up. The black in his eyes seemed to have spread. He spoke. Not sentences, not even words, just the harsh sounds of a muddy guttural language, hard tongue pangs on the back of his teeth.

  “Take him to the river,” Rue said.

  Sarah and Rue followed behind the men as they went ahead. Bean, slung over Bruh Abel’s shoulder, was a limp weight in his arms, looking back at them through half lids, an uncanny stare like an accusation.

  “The cold water outta help cool his burnin’,” Rue told them.

  “You know he afraid a’ the water,” Sarah said.

  Bean fought them. As Bruh Abel and Jonah both walked into the deep of the river, the little boy between them thrashed and hollered. They had to hold him in it, beneath the water made icy with night. But he did soon calm, maybe shocked by it into an eerie still. On the bank, Rue’s heart ached for what she’d done to him. But she’d had to. Every wrong she’d ever done, she’d done to protect others. Bean. Varina. The whole of the town and every soul in it.

  “Folks won’t come after him no more at least. They can’t say he ain’t suffered.” Sarah spoke the words of the thing that Rue had been hoping after, but to see it there before them enacted, it seemed a cruel means, hardly worth its end.

  “I love him,” Sarah said. They watched Bruh Abel and Jonah drag themselves out of the river, Bean hanging limp between them. “You may not think it, but I do. I love him the way anyone loves any child, because they a child. It’s not like he mine. It’s like he came outta me but he ain’t hardly touched me.”

  In the silver of the light Sarah looked pale, resigned, like the haint of someone Rue used to know. “You’ll know when you got one a yo’ own what it’s like,” Sarah said. “That Bean, he don’t belong to me. I can’t say who he was meant for.”

  They took the boy back home, dripping, to shiver in his bed.

  WARTIME

  1861

  Varina never did bleed. Varina had been their pacer for all those years, the girl and then the woman by whom they, her black servants, might set the clocks of their own bodies, for they had no better way of knowing their own age besides looking and guessing at their reflections in the glass they were scrubbing or in the water pails they were fetching. Then all at once Varina, who was always first, fell behind, came up dry.

  Sarah bled, and then Beulah that same spring that they counted as their thirteenth year. Then Rue bled in the rainy season, the last of a crop of girls turned to women in the course of one evening, now elevated in value by the promise of their multitudes.

  Varina came to Miss May Belle’s cabin each time she heard that one of the black girls had become a woman. She pestered, sniffed it out of them, like a beast for the blood, and when she caught the scent she’d come knocking at Miss May Belle’s door.

  “Girl, ain’t nothin’ wrong with you,” Miss May Belle would say. “It’ll happen when it has cause to happen.”

  It was Rue that set Varina on wanting to bleed. They were where they should not have been, up in the lofted gallery of the little church, which, every Sunday, creaked and buckled under the weight of the black congregation. It seemed so much
smaller, Rue realized, absent of that press of bodies. Rue and Varina lay together on their backs, the way they might’ve in their field. Outside the sky flashed and rocked with thunder and lightning, working itself up to a downpour.

  The little church was much farther down the path outside the plantation than either of them had the right to go, but Varina had urged them one step farther and one step farther still.

  “If we come across someone I’ll say you mine.” Varina had it all figured. “I’ll tell ’em I brought you out here to give you some religion.” But they did not meet anyone as they picked their way east through the wood and there was no religion to be found in the building—only below them the simple pulpit and the empty pews, important to no one on a black-cloud afternoon, for the minister lived in the next county, which was by horse hooves still a day’s trip.

  Still, Varina said it was better to stay hidden in the church’s second story than to be caught out by the pews should anyone wander in. But they had trouble lying still on the wood floor, and Rue felt that they were only doing a gimcrack imitation of their younger selves, those carefree children who could lay about, mindless and gathering grass stains.

  The passing of time was most obvious in Varina, whose round, full face had grown pointed, whose freckles had faded altogether. In Rue’s memory was Varina as she’d always been, fat and thumb-sucking, defiant in a calico dress bearing patterned flowers. Now Varina was growing round-chested, requiring new sets of lacy frocks and fresh fine-boned corsets seemingly every fortnight.

  Rue had hardly grown. She still wore an apron of her mama’s, so long it had to be hemmed. But beneath her thin, easy muslin skirt she had a secret.

  “Touch here,” she said, and she guided Varina’s hand to her waist and moved her fingers for her as though they were her own, letting Varina feel the smooth round shape of each bead on the ribbon hid beneath the rough fabric.