Conjure Women Page 20

  She caught eyes with him from across the room. He didn’t say anything but shook his head the way Red Jack had shook his head when they’d arrived.

  Rue’s daddy was playing spoons, a trick she’d never known he had, and he did not stop playing when she stood dumbstruck in the doorway watching the metal flash in his hand like the anxious metallic heartbeat of the whole of them.

  “S’alright,” Varina said at last over the hushed music. “Y’all carry on. We not here to stop you.”

  Someone provided the white girl a stool, wiped off the dust from the seat, and bade her sit a spell. Rue settled in by Varina’s feet, which tapped along feverishly with the music. Sarah was singing again, joined in a lilting harmony by others.

  Red Jack came in next, trading his post with one of the other young fine-armed boys. They didn’t need to speak to swap the sentinel but passed a jug of something swishing clear between their two hands. Red Jack leaned his head back and drank and then passed the bottle to Ol’ Joel, who thanked him with a wink of one of his clouded eyes. He released Opal, giving her three rhythmic taps on her bottom along to the music, which was fine with her. She swished her way over to the center of the cabin floor where the dancing was.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” Rue said.

  Varina said, “Huh,” and continued her foot tapping.

  Across the room, Rue’s own daddy rested down his spoons. He took up the floor to where they danced a breakdown, their legs sawing to the beat like it was a job of work. Their whoops of laughter started out for Varina’s benefit, but surely they grew genuine as the beat deepened. Rue felt it too—there was no earthly way to deny a good beat.

  Marse Charles did not altogether frown at his slaves dancing. He’d been known, especially at Christmastimes, or after a particularly bountiful harvest, to encourage it, to bring certain visiting guests of his to look upon the boundless happiness of his slaves, to even clap with them if he felt so moved by their native kind of frivolity. But it seemed different when he wasn’t there looking on. Like as if their amusement, for its own sake, was a waste. Now Varina clapped like her daddy might have clapped as the dance floor grew crowded.

  Red Jack slid up to them. The close room was overwarm with so much activity, and a fine sheen of sweat was shining up his face. His eyes glittered too, and someone had passed him back the jug and this time the smell of whiskey wisped clear out when he swallowed. He smiled toothily and began to pass it back on down the line.

  “Now wait.” Miss Varina snaked out her arm and took the jug from him. He didn’t resist, couldn’t really. Varina took a dainty sip, grimaced, but tipped back some more. “Go on,” she said and held it out to Rue.

  Rue still held in her lap her bottle of unneeded castor oil and she hugged at it with one arm while she reached out for the proffered jug. Varina would not hand it over but motioned that Rue should tip back her head. Now Rue did so and Varina spilled into her a burning mouthful. Rue’s tongue floated, her lips burned. A trickle escaped down her cheek as she swallowed thickly. Varina returned the jug to Red Jack, and between them they seemed to share an easy amusement that made Rue’s stomach roil.

  “Take a turn, Rue.” Varina didn’t take her eyes off Red Jack. “Rue’s the finest dancer.”

  Red Jack raised his brows, feigning at being impressed. “That so?”

  “Show him.” At Varina’s urgings Rue got to her feet, feeling the slosh of the whiskey and the slide of the earth as she did so.

  Red Jack led her out with the briefest tap on the small of her back. The music was already at its swell and, bidding her to watch him, Red Jack strutted to the foot-stomping rhythm that was taking up the whole of the cabin. Feeling loose, she rocked with him, then bent her knees and hopped from foot to foot as he did. Their arms wheeled in large, free circles in the air like they might any minute take off into flight. They caught elbows and spun past each other, not certain where they’d end up.

  Rue laughed breathlessly as Red Jack aimed to outdo her with his own enthusiasm, throwing back his elbows, launching himself forward in wild skillful imitation of a hot-footing chicken. Rue found herself clapping, dancing in improvised whirls ’til she couldn’t draw a blessed bit of breath and had to break free of Red Jack and sit herself back down. She fanned herself at Varina’s feet and caught her daddy smiling at her from his own side of the dance floor.

  “Really such fun.” Varina clapped gaily but she didn’t seem to mean it. She kept her eyes on Red Jack pivoting and twirling in the midst of all the others, light as air, his two feet gifted with springs on the bottoms.

  “We best get back before you missed, Miss Varina,” Rue said.

  Varina got reluctantly to her feet, made her way around the dancing to the door. “G’night, Miss Varina,” folks were saying with ingratiating smiles stretching their faces, and they looked more than glad to see the back of her as Varina and Rue went out into the night. “An’ Merry Christmas.”

  Full-on dark seemed to have taken over the evening. Rue could have cussed with the trouble they’d be in if anyone noted that Varina’d been gone so long.

  “Oh, Jack.”

  Rue jumped. She hadn’t known Red Jack had followed but there he was, slinking behind them. “Mightn’t you escort us back?”

  The boy could not be so foolish as to keep getting close to this girl so near to being a woman, and a white woman at that. Rue answered for him. “We be alright. We know the way.”

  Red Jack echoed her. “You be alright, Miss Varina. It ain’t so far.”

  “Yes, if you say so,” Varina said. “G’night then.”

  “A Happy Christmas to ya.”

  “And say g’night to your sweetheart.”

  Rue balked. Whose sweetheart?

  “G’night, Rue,” he obeyed.

  “It’s alright,” Varina said. She bared her teeth. “You may kiss Rue if you like. I won’t tell.”

  Red Jack leaned in. Rue didn’t know whether she could pull away. In her face his whiskey breath was a visceral thing; it had manifested itself in the cold night air and clung between them, as good a barrier as any cloud was, ’til Red Jack got up his courage and kissed Rue through it, leading, lizard-like, with his tongue. When he pulled back, it was not to check on Rue’s pleasure but on Varina’s.

  “Good night,” their mistress said again. “And a very Merry Christmas.”

  Rue’s lips felt wetter for the cold. She wondered then if Red Jack was so dull after all, or if he’d just devised a way early on to seem to dance to the white folks’ tempo.

  Varina and Rue walked side by side back to the House. Rue aimed to put the kiss far from her mind, found she was thinking instead of her daddy and the easy way he’d rattled those spoons.

  “Have you ever kissed anybody before, Rue?”

  “No’m.” She hadn’t and had never found that she’d particularly wanted to.

  “I have,” Varina said, dreamily.

  Rue reckoned she ought to ask who but she wasn’t sure she really wanted to know the answer. They were coming up onto the House, preparing to part ways.

  Ahead of them came the noise of crunching footsteps on frost-hardened grass.

  Illuminated by the lantern she carried, Miss May Belle was coming around the corner like a bad omen borne of light. The shadows that skittered across her face told of her displeasure better than the frown on her lips or the hardness of her words ever could. The lantern in and of itself was a bad sign. It came from the House, a place Miss May Belle never had cause to go except in the case of some unusual trouble.

  “She been callin’ for you, Miss Varina,” Miss May Belle said. Varina stopped just behind Rue as if knowing she’d be in need of a shield. Their shoulders overlapped. Rue could feel Varina’s body shiver.

  “Who is?”

  “Missus took ill in the night. Ain’t you heard?” Miss May
Belle knew full well they hadn’t heard. She must’ve been smelling the corn whiskey on them heated up by their sweat. Rue, self-conscious, wiped at her lips, fearful they were glistening still.

  “What’s the matter with Mother?” Varina sounded troubled.

  “Can’t say. But they done called for the county doctor. They say he on his way.” That was a journey of miles.

  “Why won’t you help her?” Varina stomped her foot same as she had when she was a child, a child still in so many ways.

  “It ain’t won’t, Miss Varina.” Miss May Belle held higher her head and her lamp. “It’s can’t. She won’t ’llow me or anyone else to see her. Cusses and spits and foams when we get near. But she been askin’ fo’ you.”

  “For me?” said Varina. “What can I do?”

  “Set with her, I s’pose. Just be with her.”

  Varina paled. She did not argue but followed last in line behind Miss May Belle and Rue as they hurried to the House, came out into the clearing together, purposeful, like nocturnal creatures starting their day. Varina went up to the porch. The lanterns were all lit in the windows, despite the late hour, further signaling that all was amiss. Only in the circle of their light could Rue see that it had begun to snow, white bits of nothing-ice were hanging in the air, melting before they ever hit the ground. From the depths of the House there came a high, sharp woman scream. Rue already knew death by the turn of a scream the way she knew when babies were hungry or wanting to be held by the turn of their cry. She thought, the white doctor won’t come in time.

  In the doorway Varina stalled at the sound her mama was making. Miss May Belle nodded her on, and the girl disappeared all the way in.

  Now alone with her own mama, Rue feared a scolding but all Miss May Belle said was, “Ain’t nothin’ we can do here now. Best we get us some rest. Long days ahead.”

  Her mama reached out to her then and put her palm on Rue’s cheek, a gesture that felt loving. Rue smiled, and her mama looked in her eyes. Miss May Belle licked the end of her thumb, and Rue saw there the sparkle of a silver ring that she had never seen before. It belonged to Missus. Or used to. Miss May Belle wiped the wet thumb across Rue’s cheek, cleaning away something only a mama could see.

  “Ain’t nothin we can do,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Missus’s funeral fell in the cradle between Christmas and New Year. She’d put it in her will that her slaves ought not to mourn too heavily for her and should not be expected to cease in their work at all. Bless her heart, the black folks said, for even in death she could give them the gift of toil. They did not have the day off to attend her burial, and those of the House were put to work double, preparing for the elaborate stages of weighty mourning, black ribbons and black crepe veils, black door pulls and flowers blackened for wreaths. Black makes you blameless, folks said, makes death look the other way when it’s deciding on who to chomp at next.

  They’d all know the moment she was put into the ground when they’d hear the church bells ringing out her years.

  “Forty?” Red Jack had asked, wide-eyed.

  “Yea, forty,” Ma Doe had told him, exasperated, and then she’d had to call on Rue, who wasn’t strong enough to pull on the bell’s thick cord to set it ringing—but she was good at keeping count. Rue had never had cause for reading, but she’d learned her figures, had to learn them well when keeping labor time for the mamas.

  Rue and Red Jack crawled up in the church bell tower like thieving mice, unseen by the mourners just then pouring out from the lower levels behind the fine, heavy coffin. Red Jack was fast and agile with his climbing. Rue was slow and clumsy and had to be helped up the last few rungs. She brushed away his helping hands when she got to the top and tucked herself in the farthest corner from him.

  From above they could see clearly the white mourners retreat up to the graveyard, trailing behind the coffin like black ants bearing a prize back to their hill. Rue was nervous. If they timed the bells wrong they’d surely be whupped. You didn’t get between folks and their mourning. She told Red Jack as much, but he just shrugged.

  “I been whupped before,” he said, which was surely true and maybe explained why he was so damned slow. He seemed excited by the pull cord for the heavy brass bell. He kept running his hands over the knots in anticipation.

  “Why’d you do what you done on Christmas night?” she asked. She’d never quite shook off the taste of that whiskey kiss. For days after it had come to her, swirled into her nose like it was fresh, a kiss just laid.

  Red Jack shrugged again. Rue hoped his head would fall plum off with the movement. “Miss Varina said to, ain’t she?”

  “That all?” Rue didn’t want her voice to give out or to give away her true feelings. He’d only been obeying Varina.

  “Sure, I thought it might be nice to kiss you.” He let go of the cord. Crossed over to her, hopping the dangerous place where the floor of the tower was opened for the ladder.

  “You alright, Rue,” he said. “When you ain’t frownin’ at every damned thing.”

  He kissed her again. She tried to decide if she liked it at all. It was warm and strange. Her teeth got in the way.

  She let his lips go. The mourners were all on the hill.

  “One,” she said and Red Jack leaped back to his position and began to toll. “Two,” she said.

  Forty years resounded off the corpse bell loud enough to give Rue a headache. She watched Red Jack, who partway through the counting had felt it necessary to undo his shirt. His back muscles worked as he pulled, and when he was done he used his bundled shirt to wipe the sweat from his brow and then from each tuft in the red-brown coils of hair in his armpits.

  “Forty,” Rue said and then, “Don’t never kiss me again. Iff’n you do I’ll put a goopher on you, fix it so yo’ lips turn black-blue and fall right off one night in yo’ sleep.”

  Red Jack let her precede him down the ladder and through the empty church where the bell’s last echoes still pealed. He held the double doors open for her and let her leave before him down the way.

  He said, “Uh, thank you, Rue. For the countin’,” and he didn’t say one more word to her for years after that but hello and goodbye and ain’t the weather fine.

  * * *

  —

  The belt for Varina was done. It clicked nutmeg shells when Rue gave it over to her. Still swathed deep black in heavy mourning, Varina looked pale and suspect but she took it anyway.

  “I ain’t yet bled, Rue,” she said. She held the belt with its dark seeds and bright red ribbon around the tapered black waist of her mourning gown.

  “I know, but I wanted to give you somethin’. Figure you still a woman bein’ that you turnin’ fourteen years.”

  There were no invitations, no letters to mark the occasion of this birthday. Varina, who had so longed for visitors, could receive none, then, or for a full year after her mama’s death. In that season there was only brittle frost on trees and crepe black sheets over mirrors in the parlor, crippling Varina’s vanity. The white doctor had come too late and said after that it was the flu that took Missus. They’d sealed up her room right off just as tight as if it were the tomb in which she’d been interred. Afterward, the house girls gossiped, said Varina sometimes walked the hallways at night to stand in front of the door like she was still waiting on her mama to summon her in.

  Marse Charles wore his grief as a tight black armband and nothing more. Folks said all his widower thoughts were of expansion. The whispers of the war coming to their doorstep might’ve had others making themselves smaller, less vulnerable to change, but that was not Marse Charles’s way, never had been. He was wanting more, another acre, another wife. He’d had made a mourning locket for Varina, woven gold from her mama’s brown hair, and Rue was yet to see her wear it.

  Now Varina pulled back her skirts and her
petticoats, which had been all hemmed black lest anyone spy her underthings and think her lost-mama grief was not full. She held her skirts close to her skin. Beneath the flurry of fabric Rue helped her secure the belt above her small freckled hips. The bloom of color looked like a scandal and Varina laughed in giddy delight, despite her mourning, as she smoothed down the many layers of black.

  THE RAVAGING

  “Now, Sister Rue, in Jesus’s name,” Bruh Abel said, “renounce the Devil.”

  Rue’s redemption, when it came, didn’t feel the way she thought it might. She hadn’t pictured the way that folks wouldn’t look at her. They stared. They stared so hard she felt she could hear it, like a low contemptuous buzz, but when she picked out eyes from among the crowd at the river, they shifted and skittered away. They thought Bruh Abel safe to look at, it seemed—when they caught his eye, they smiled.

  Rue pictured Bean, hoped thinking on him would give her strength. Bean was likely home with Jonah still boiling up with a fever, not made by nature or the displeasure of God but out of her own benevolence. She would not be ashamed of that, whatever this day brought.

  Ma Doe was absent from the crowd also, though Rue hadn’t truly thought the old woman would be there. Sarah had come, bringing only her eldest boy, not Bean, with her. The boy stood between his mama’s legs and twisted his face into her skirts when Rue passed by, like he was scared of her, she who he had known his whole little life, she who had twisted his head and tugged him out on the end of Sarah’s meager, singing thrust. There were only a handful of other children there. Most were still weakened, she knew, from the sickness she was said to have cursed them with.

  As she made the long, slow walk toward Bruh Abel, he looked at her with a certainty. He strutted forward, and the crowd parted for him as he approached Rue head-on.

  “Renounce the Devil,” he said again.