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Conjure Women Page 24


  They had chosen just three boys to serve as the symbols for all the other babies they’d lost since the sickness took hold. “The Ravaging” they called it amongst themselves, as though the illness was a swarm of locusts, a collective doom fallen on a mutual harvest, a force so great it could not be attributed to one man, or one woman neither. Give Him the glory, Rue thought darkly as she gathered death’s flowers. She was careful what ones she picked, steering wholly clear of the type that grew in the graveyard, particularly wary of the pot marigolds that grew thick as head hair around her mama’s stone. She didn’t wish to call up the spirit of Miss May Belle, not on this occasion, as she made to decorate Bean’s small body with no more special favor than she paid the other two child bodies she had been charged with. Preparing them in her cabin, she set Bean out as the one on the far left instead of the one in the center for that same reason; he was not a Christ, just some third criminal hung on a lesser cross.

  Rue wept. Hard and heavy ’til she thought her body would be wrung completely dry of all its water. She was glad folks had let her alone in her work preparing the bodies so she could afford the right to cry. She was glad especially that Bruh Abel was scarce. If he suspected that she had made him her vessel, he did not show it. He did not slow down, but moved from house to house, ministering to folks, praying.

  What did Bruh Abel ask for, Rue wondered, when he talked to that God of his? And did He ever give a good answer back?

  Bean’s body was small and waxen and fully white. With his eyes closed he was just as harmless as any child could be in sleep. His russet hair grew in tight at the root of his head, but the longer locks weighed themselves down into fine loose ringlets. Rue cut them neat and short with the thought that she’d give a piece to Sarah. But she wouldn’t, for Sarah could not be trusted to weep on it as well as Rue would. No, Rue would keep the lock for herself, in the depths of her pockets.

  Set in the corner was her small metal tub and she tugged it out to the center of the room in three sharp pulls, the bottom scraping at her floor in sickening squeals. When she lifted him Bean was light. She set him down inside the empty tub like a baby into a crib.

  She covered him waist to knees with a washcloth but she left his face clear, didn’t mask him as she sometimes did with bodies she feared might stare back at her. No, she wanted to look on him, to look upon what she had done.

  She poured cold water from out of clay pots, cascaded it over the still planes of his body. First the right then the left. He’d once screamed when water touched him. It’d woken him once before. She turned him slightly to clean along his legs, his behind. Rue’s hands shook through the whole of the scrubbing.

  She added camphor to the water. The deliberate perfume, that flavor of hidden death, left her choking. She had to stop and gasp in acrid breaths that made her weak, cracked inhales that cut straight through her. She was sick in her guilt. There was a sharp pain in the bottom of her stomach that grew and had her suddenly bent double, spitting up yellow-tinged sorrow right there on the floor. She thought of how her mama had used to rub her back when she was a sick child, a strange rhythmic motion she didn’t know the point of. Rue felt it then in the small of her back, that up-and-down love rubbing, even though she was alone with only the dead for companions.

  “Bean?” His hands hung limp from the tub.

  Rue stood. She wiped at her mouth and her eyes. Dried Bean’s body and drew him up again in her arms. She finished all the preparations, washed the body of the middle boy, arranged the flowers in a neat wreath around the head of that boy’s casket, and started in on the third. There was always something more to do, and had that not been what she’d wanted? To be needed just like this?

  * * *

  —

  By the time the wake came, Rue was already a full day sleepless. Sitting up with the dead had always brought haints to the back of her tired eyes. She’d not seen so many bodies buried as others had on the plantation during slavery times. She was young then, and those last years before the war had been a relatively robust time if not an easy one. Black folks young and old still died, sure, died in numbers—of overwork and over-tiring, of having lived too old or having been born too young, of hunger or fever, of sorrow or neglect, but just as many new healthy babies were being born at Marse Charles’s behest, and if there was birthing happening or liable to happen, it was that vigil Rue and her mama were tasked to keep. Naught to do for dead bodies once they’d been cleaned, no promise there and no profit made on mourning.

  Still, Rue knew how a sitting-up went as well as anyone, and she had always liked those nights in a sad kind of way for the simple honesty of them, just singing and wailing and reflecting in long stretches of impenetrable quiet ’til it was time to lay the body, and the saved up sorrow, to a final rest.

  But this day it seemed none of them could raise the exuberance that had harbored them in tragedy so many times before. Their sitting-up was no sitting-up at all but a march of stations, the crowd moving in a stunned roulette amongst the three houses to look in at a child for a spell and then to move on to the next with promises to come back round in an hour or so. They passed each other in the square, mourners with solemn candles, crisscrossing their lights to keen at one another’s doorstep.

  What singing there was came low and listless. It was orphan Sarah who’d been the loudest, strongest singer amongst them in all the time that Rue had been alive, as though the girl could be possessed by the full-limbed spirit of grief on the behalf of others. But now that little girl was a grown woman, and a mama besides, and she sat black-veiled with both her two living children in her lap, perched at the far end of the mismatched chairs they’d hastily assembled in the front room of her home. Sarah kept that single vigil for Bean, not singing or weeping or anything but just struck still, same as her dead son, there in his open coffin. Any tune her visitors took up, even those songs laden with love for the Lord and his wisdom, seemed to taper off into thin scraps of nothing without Sarah’s voice.

  A fine red oak casket held Bean, the brass handles of which winked yellow in the low candlelight. He wore a little white calico sleep gown, the ends sewn up like a sack. His head was lofted on a white pillow, and all around him was a hedgerow growth of flowers as though he were a doll someone had left out in the yard for weeds to grow up and around.

  Folks came and went as the night darkened, but after one respectful circuit Rue stayed with Bean. The men, Rue noticed, came the latest, stayed as long as they were able, which was not long at all. It reminded Rue of the birthing rooms, the anxious daddies with no stomach for the pushing or the hollering or the waiting on the water to boil.

  They’d come back to carry the casket, she knew, just as they’d show up when the babies were born, washed, and snipped.

  Rue had always been quietly proud of her own endurance for suffering. Being surrounded by the mamas’ grief-stained faces seemed to her to be the first in a receiving line of self-inflicted punishments she might bestow upon herself.

  * * *

  —

  Bruh Abel came along to Bean’s wake round midnight with some of the other men. Bean’s daddy, Jonah, was mute amongst them. Certain of the men passing through smelled of liquor, but the smell was miasma on them, a vapor that couldn’t be husked from the group to be better assigned to one or another in particular. Bruh Abel seemed the most sure on his feet, but Rue knew him for a drunk. He’d always had strong sea legs and could keep his mask painted on just right when he had need of it. Rue kept her eyes on him as he trailed past Bean’s body.

  All night she’d received compliments on how well she’d made the three boys look; she could vomit again with the bile of that poor pride. But Bruh Abel didn’t look like he was fixing to pay her any sort of compliment. He walked right by her, didn’t even look at her, but came to settle after a time with Jonah and Sarah. He knelt before them with one hand on their daughter’s head and the other
as a slow-rubbing comfort on Sarah’s knee.

  He leaned forward and Rue watched him whisper in Sarah’s ear. Didn’t need to hear it to know it. He’d asked her to sing. For the first time that evening she obliged, setting down her son and daughter and starting with no preamble or pretense on the slow steady words: “Wade in the water, children. Wade in the water.”

  This was the part of the song they all knew well, where her call was to earn a response, but Sarah didn’t stop for it, and no voice in her small, close house joined hers. She continued singing alone, her voice straining roughly on the top notes so that every time she trilled for one Rue held her breath, afraid she wouldn’t make it, but she did, every time.

  “Look o’er yonder, what you see? God’s gon’ trouble the water. The Holy Ghost a-comin’ on me. God’s gon’ trouble the water.”

  In the midst of Sarah’s dirge Rue let her head bow down, dug her hands in her pockets, stroked the sprig of Bean’s baby hair. She tried to call up the words of the song for herself, feeling like if only she could draw the strength, if only she could sing beside Sarah, it all would be made right, or else not have happened at all, none of it. Instead she’d be back at the river where she’d last heard the hum of this particular song from that assembled earnest crowd on the day Bruh Abel had baptized her and Bean both: “God gon’ trouble the water.”

  But Rue couldn’t sing. She couldn’t speak; all she could get her messed-up mind to do was pray. She was there again, under the river, gasping out bubbles, falling headlong, and there was no one to pull her up from it this time, no one to bring up her head from this dry, barren drowning on land.

  “If you don’t believe I’ve been redeemed, just follow me down to the Jordan’s stream,” Sarah sang. “God’s gon’ trouble the water.”

  The silence that followed that last note of hers was filled up fast with keens and claps and folks borrowing bits of her song and humming it to themselves as they wiped in vain at their tumble of tears. Sarah had sat back down heavy, like her legs had been snatched from under her, and her man and her babies crowded around her in her swoon. Bruh Abel stood aside from them as though completing some biblical picture, but soon, without saying any more, he turned from them and made to leave.

  Rue took to her feet. “Wait. Bruh Abel. Wait.”

  Wait for what? Her senses were far ahead of her mind. Her eyes had spied something her head hadn’t even put words to yet, for there in the little coffin was a small, stirring movement. A little white hand raised itself up, grabbing at the air as though falling and looking for something to catch on to.

  Rue ran over so fast she clattered past chairs and stools, tripped over her own anxious feet, but she landed at the head of Bean’s coffin and grabbed on to that searching hand. With her other she began tugging at the flowers, throwing them from around his stirring head same as she’d plucked them from the dirt. She tossed them over her shoulder not caring where the stems and leaves and heads landed or who they hit, not caring when one landed smack in Bruh Abel’s face—he’d come to join her kneeling on the ground. Once the casket was cleared of its bouquet she could feel for the little boy’s neck and yes, there, there was the slow but steady streaming thrum she’d been looking for. In the red oak casket below Bean opened wide his black eyes and looked around, blinking away the dust of death.

  * * *

  —

  Bruh Abel said, “I told ’em all it was a miracle.”

  Rue nodded. “It was.”

  They were walking from Jonah and Sarah’s cabin where everybody had gathered at that sitting-up that ended like none they’d ever seen before. Rue had been the one to pluck Bean wholly from his casket. When she’d buried her face into his good clean skin, he’d wriggled in her hug and said that he was very hungry. He had fallen asleep again a few moments later, clutching a heel of bread someone had fetched. It bore only a few tiny nibbles when he fell into a doze, but his sleep was light, his breathing even. He fussed when Rue handed him over to Sarah but he did not wake again as he was carried off to the bed, safely draped on his mama’s shoulder. Even then folks had tried to follow after him, an unsure parade, ’til Jonah had intervened, thanked them and shooed them all from his home.

  “Bean,” he said, “he need his rest.” It was a funny thing to say after all that time he’d spent sleeping.

  No one else slept. The town was alit with curiosity, and they just about hummed with questions they couldn’t give voice to other than to say how good was God and hallelujah.

  How long, Rue wondered, ’til they’d get their minds around to asking other things? Eventually they’d have to close the other boys’ coffins over their still faces. Those boys hadn’t woken, hadn’t stirred, and with morning approaching no one had moved to put them in the ground. No one could say the words.

  Going through the quarter, Rue and Bruh Abel let others linger behind or go ahead of them so that they walked side by side now as if by chance.

  “Is it a miracle?” Bruh Abel asked. It was the first time she’d ever heard his voice ring with doubt, and she found she didn’t like it.

  “I wished it,” she answered.

  The lines on his forehead wrinkled at that.

  “I prayed,” she said instead.

  “We ought to look after him,” Bruh Abel said, and Rue could see his mind grinding down each thought. “Ain’t Bean goin’ to need us more now?”

  “He got us,” Rue said. She found she ached inside for leaving Bean with Jonah and Sarah. They never had known what to make of him. Would know even less now that he was “a miracle.”

  Bruh Abel was following her, she realized after a time, or else letting himself be led straight to her home at the far end of the town, past where all the good folks lived, close and huddled together.

  “Come on in,” she said at her door. “We can talk on it.” The memory of Bean’s black eyes opening up and seeking hers.

  Inside they did not talk at all but stood facing each other. Bruh Abel hovered near the shut door like he was trying to build up a good reason to run through it. Rue stood tensed with her hip hitched up on her table, feeling she’d fall without the aid of something solid.

  Bruh Abel chuckled at some joke that didn’t need speaking and then his laughter grew and Rue joined him in laughing, shook her head like it might loose the shock. It didn’t.

  The laughing made her belly hurt. Rue crossed the room to Bruh Abel, tired of their being on separate ends of the same thing.

  It was some strange affirmation from somewhere that flooded through her mind then. Want, it said, and you shall receive. She put her hands on the sides of Bruh Abel’s face because she wanted to. She pulled him near because she wanted to. She kissed his open, slack-jawed mouth—usually so slick-tongued but now gaping, yielding—because she wanted him.

  He regained himself in a moment, kissed her back. She moaned the words of her wanting right into his mouth with the unrelenting force of her own lips, felt the rising feeling of wanting like a swell in her whole elastic body as she reached and reached and reached ’til, short of air, they pulled apart and gasped in shallow mismatched breaths, like they’d swum across a river and come out on the opposite side together.

  “Jesus,” Rue said.

  Bruh Abel took her by the waist, so suddenly sure, and stirred her over to her own bed. There he folded her over easy like she was a sheet so that her back was on the thin mattress and her knees were so bent they near about touched her shoulders. He scratched at her when he pulled up her dress and she might’ve drawn blood tugging at his pants, but they worked it together in the end, got each other free.

  Rue bucked. He pressed into her like a blazing fire, and the thrill of him spread wild as one too. She felt him in even the tips of her fingers, burning. He buried himself deep and his eyes grew wide and unfocused like he’d gone over to some other place, and she put her hand to his cheek, dra
wing him back to her in slow, careful measures.

  No tricks, now, no sprung trap, just wanting.

  Simple and just the thought brought her over to that cresting pleasure she’d been after, just as Bruh Abel burrowed his face into her neck and ground out, “Rue, Rue, Rue,” as desperate as a man drowning that wanted rescue.

  “I’m here,” she said to him. Loud and clear. “I’m here.”

  * * *

  —

  Rue made a visit to the church, basket in hand.

  “You listenin’?” She called out to Varina, and there was no answer.

  She went down the dusty aisle and up the bowing steps and, she couldn’t help it, she was humming. She felt Bruh Abel’s wanting in her body and Bean’s rising in her heart and she would not let the shadows of the old white church despair her, even in the face of one of Varina’s tempers.

  “You hidin’ from me, Miss Varina?”

  Rue had to look up to find her. Varina sat in the bell tower, and from below Rue could only make out her legs swinging off the landing of the third floor. Rue climbed the ladder, clutching nervously on each rung, and Varina didn’t reach out to help her even when Rue struggled up beside her onto the thin wood slats. The thick rope for the corpse bell hung heavy between them.

  Varina had bunched her skirts round her thighs and her bare legs were pale in the moonlight, dotted with russet downy hairs. She’d put on a bonnet and wore a moth-bitten pair of evening gloves like she had someplace to be, though, of course, she did not.

  “What you doin’ way up here?” Rue said.

  Varina did not answer, but kept on looking where she was looking, out through the arrow slit window. Rue watched her in profile, studied her harsh gaunt face. Varina’s tongue darted out to lick her lips, a nervous gesture like a troubled snake.

  “I saw them comin’.”