Conjure Women Page 25

  “Who you saw, Miss Varina?”

  The window Varina gazed out of looked over the woods and the river and beyond, to the graveyard on the hill and to the plantation that used to be. It was the whole of the world as much as either of them ever knew it.

  “Soldiers,” Varina said. “They’ve come to kill us.”

  “You was only dreamin’.”

  How many times now had Rue quieted this same fear? How many times too had Rue stoked it? For it was fear that kept Varina locked away, and fear that kept her safe.

  “I wasn’t sleepin’. You don’t dream if you don’t sleep,” Varina said. Then, “There. Rue, look.” She pointed her gloved finger out the window.

  Rue looked and saw, or dreamed she saw, down below on the path she’d walked and walked: one pale rider on a horse. He was all white except the black holes cut out for his eyes. But then Rue blinked, and he was gone or he never was, swallowed up by the woods, made black by the midnight.

  PROMISE

  1871

  Have you heard about him? The boy that rose?

  There was word of mouth to stretch out the news, the telling and retelling. The gossip ran upriver, so it was that people were tramping down to them from a journey of weeks, of months, from all over and kingdom come, just to come up close on a miracle.

  Now a tent rose to house those multitudes. It sat on the cleared-up ruins of the old House. Gone were the broke-down balustrades of Marse Charles’s plantation home, gone the ashen outlines of his grand rooms. The high, swirling stairway existed now only in memory, and who could say for sure that any of it had ever existed at all?

  That tent might have been magicked, it rose up so fast. Rue could see it, just, from the one window of her cabin, its cresting top poked up higher than the tree line. She had near forgotten that the plantation had been structured around the House and not the other way around. Her home then felt like it was set in the back row of a gathering crowd, all eyes riveted on the show.

  Strangers came. Rue did not like it. First they were relations of folks she knew or had known, folks dispersed to different counties, sold away or run away in slaverytime, or folks that had took their after-war freedom and fled with it.

  Charlie Blacksmith was among these; he’d came on back ashamed of the money he’d stolen that had been meant to buy the town a white doctor during those dark days of the Ravaging. The money was long since spent, but Charlie’s mouth was filled up with apologies like apologies were tobacco chew. They forgave him. At Bruh Abel’s pious suggestion they were forgiving everybody.

  The peak of the tent replicated the chimney of the fallen House. The whole tent structure, white once and quickly dust-darkened, was like a ghostly afterimage of what had been, a stain of light on closed eyes.

  Bean had healed up slow, but he had healed up. The Ravaging had left them. The babies had begun being born again in earnest, and of that season two were boys, two were girls, like someone repaying a debt by giving double. Their people had given them names, not like Joseph or Mary or Charles, but like Divinity and Freeman and Jubilation and Promise.

  Folks thought Bean ought to remember something about God or heaven, but he did not. He was like any five-year-old child, really; he fussed when asked too many questions, he sucked his thumb. They all came with the idea of wanting to see him, the Wonder, the Imperishable Seed, but once they saw him and got their own glimpse of his black eyes, they were sated. They came to see Bean, but they stayed for the tent, where inside Bruh Abel was known to give great, thunderous sermons so stirring they had crowds of people falling over in stunned worship. Rue sometimes sat in the back aisle and watched Bruh Abel. There was something about his strut, his absolute confidence, that she could admit now she had always hoped to learn from him.

  It was on the nights of his most impassioned sermonizing that he’d come to her cabin, lie down beside her with all of his sweat and fervor still shining on him. She always let him in, kept him ’til morning.

  Rue began to heal again in fits and starts, began with visits to Bean and Ma Doe, and then just carried on, unable as she’d always been to ignore a body in need. Just as, after the war, folks had returned to Miss May Belle in gradual dregs, so now they returned to Miss Rue, first for aches and pains, then for bigger things, for matters of life or death. She had to keep telling people, there was no promising she could raise their dead. Still, they kept after her, asking.

  Around town administering to folks, suddenly Rue had gone and gained herself a shadow. Bean had fixed his black eyes on her upon his waking and now it was if he could not look away.

  Even when she shooed him off she’d come home to find him curled up like a sow bug at her doorstep.

  There was no way to wake him then but to crouch down beside him, smooth his soft brown hair. It had grown back since she’d cut it, sprang up in wilder corkscrews.

  “What you doin’ here?”

  “I like where it’s quiet, Miss Rue.” The peak of the tent loomed in his sights like a mountaintop.

  “Wanna know something secret?” Rue said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t much like that tent either.”

  Rue let him come inside her cabin only when he promised to let her alone, not ask so many questions. He was fond of touching things, asking what’s this and what’s that to every stem and leaf, asking why, before she’d hardly got round to answering the last thing he’d asked.

  Still, better to have him there than amongst all them strangers, or worse, wandering on the edge of the woods. One time, Bean had wandered out of the tent in the middle of one of Bruh Abel’s more fervent orations, just walked on out under all the amen-ing. Rue had chased after him only to find him standing at the place where the wilderness thickened, the place where the trees grew so mightily that it was almost always night. Bean was there, at the very edge of the sunlight, squinting in at the dark.

  Rue caught up to him, breathless. “What you lookin’ for?”

  “My friend,” he said.

  He’d pointed then into the shadows, at nothing.

  * * *

  —

  There came a day that a knock sounded on Rue’s door. She said, “I’m comin’ and comin’,” and she swung it open and startled.

  There in front of her was a white woman with a newborn baby, smallish and wrinkled and pink, drooling on the woman’s shoulder. She could have been Varina, and for a long, bad moment Rue thought she was, and she couldn’t say a word or hardly breathe.

  The white woman’s teeth were brown spokes in her gums. “You the conjure woman, ain’t you?”

  Well, when a white woman told you you were a thing, that’s what you were. Rue nodded dumbly, and the white woman and her baby came right on in.

  Rue knew poor and this woman was poor—she could see it, and smell it, on her. Still, the woman wasn’t ashamed to make herself at home. Rue had but the one good chair, and the white woman dropped herself down in it, raised one mud-blackened foot, and rubbed at the heel.

  “Come a long way, Missus?” Rue asked.

  The white woman nodded, dislodging the pink body on her shoulder. “Heard this was a place a’ healin’.”

  “Preacher’s in the tent.” Rue gestured through the window. The tent was so blaring white it was like a presence in the room with them. “He’ll be preparin’ for the night’s sermon, but I can take you to him if you like.”

  The white woman shook her head. “I come lookin’ for you.”

  Rue stood and waited, afraid to sit or even slouch in the presence of this white lady, no matter how poor she might seem.

  “All my babies I ever had were taken from me before they first birthday.”

  “Taken?” Rue thought of Ma Doe, who’d had every last one of her children sold off.

  “Taken to heaven,” the white woman said. “All ’em doctors came an
d went each time and still ’em babies died, and I says to my husband I gotta find me somebody what knows what they about, that’s got some divine correspondence what can save this here boy.”

  Rue could have laughed. If divinity was coming now in forms of correspondence, then she was more than illiterate to it; she was deaf and blind besides.

  “I tell you, Miss Conjure, I do got a fear.”

  “Rue.”

  “Huh?”

  “My name. It’s jus’ plain Rue, Missus.”

  The white woman put her baby to her knee and bounced both in agitation. The baby yawned and jiggled, unbothered. “You got a baby, don’t you?”

  Only a white woman could ask something so intimate so pointedly. Rue shook her head. The woman leaned forward, really squinted at her through a fall of grease-stiffened hair, looked at her like she didn’t quite believe it, which was fair enough. It was strange, Rue supposed, hard to think of a girl, and then a woman, who’d made her whole life and livelihood from other folks’ babies never having one. Not wanting one herself. Well, Rue had never thought it would or could be. But now.

  “You soon to have one,” said the white woman. She sat back, satisfied like she’d won an argument. “And when you do you’ll know just exactly what I’m feelin’, all the fear and the baby love. Every single minute a’ every single day. It’ll eat you up.”

  She leaned forward and kissed the top of her baby’s creamy head. The baby crooked its mouth in pleasure; drool dribbled from his open lips and dangled down to the woman’s blue-scabbed knees. She didn’t seem to feel it puddle.

  “Come back on Friday,” Miss Rue said. It was a thing her mama often said, because magic was meant to be best on Fridays. Probably it was just to give her space to think. Friday was in two days’ time.

  The woman nodded and stood. She swooped up the fussing, restless baby. Rue would’ve liked to hold him, but she didn’t.

  “Y’all got some place you stayin’?” Rue wasn’t offering.

  “We on at my uncle John’s place.” It took Rue longer than a moment to remember Ol’ Marse John. He’d been her daddy’s old master. The Marse John who had died under his wench saying, Goddammit goddammit god—

  “You a relation to him?” Rue did not remember any living family, but a son, Jack, who had died, not in lovemaking like his daddy, but in the war. Rue thought, it seems the dead is rising.

  “I’m the daughter a’ his sister what married up and lived east a’ here. Government man come to me and said he was tracing up white folks’ properties that were deserving. A bit a’ Christian charity that. Yank devils tore Uncle John’s whole house asunder but no matter,” the white woman said. She was talking singsong to her baby, her voice roiling as she bobbed him in her arms. “Don’t matter, no it don’t. We come here for the land.”

  * * *

  —

  Varina’s expression was haunted. “I seen ’em. A white man and a white woman. A mangy black dog. A baby.”

  “They ain’t see you?” Rue asked.

  “No, no, I stay well clear of that white man.” Varina made white man sound like a cuss word every time she said it.

  “Good.” Rue walked the length of the rectory. Five steps, turned, walked the other way. It made for agitated pacing. She thought, not for the first time, how could Varina stand it here?

  “They lay traps in the woods catchin’ rabbits and varmint.” Varina sniffed, that old plantation daughter’s affectation. “They let that baby go round stark naked.”

  Varina still carried herself stiff with her lost wealth and station, queen of a cotton industry so mighty she could play the hostess to visiting princes and have them feel grateful to be received.

  “Miss Varina,” Rue said, startled. Knew then what about the room had set her so suddenly on edge. Varina had hid her bedroll, neatened her one dress, tamed down her curls. She turned her chair toward the door and there were two tea cups set out, like they were just waiting for a housegirl to run up and fill them. Sweet tea for company. “Has somebody been in here with you?”

  Varina’s blush rose on her pale skin like a fever tell.

  “ ’Course not. Whyever would you think that?”

  Secrets. They had always had them.

  * * *

  —

  Weren’t the meek to inherit the earth? Rue felt she’d heard a preacher say that once or twice before. It was the truth. The tent near glowed in the dark as she approached it. Inside, lit lanterns and the fiery passion of all them people made the thin covering shine yellow from the outside. As Rue neared, the applause that emanated shook away the smudge of black on the tent’s far side that she’d been thinking was a shadow. It was, in fact, a thick murder of crows that took flight and cawed as they did so. Such a synchronous exodus that. How’d they know? Not just to flee but to flee as one, none left behind.

  Rue parted the flaps of the tent. The enthusiasm shook her, a blast of hot air. Standing before hard-hewn benches, a crowd of fifty or so folks, come from far and wide, were on their feet, praising. They needn’t have bothered making the benches. This was not a place for sitting but for standing up and hollering, for rising up in ecstasy to be that much closer to the good Lord. Their hands worked in clapping and fanning and upturned exalting. They stomped and sweated, raised up whorls of dust and grass into the air, audacious on the very spot that had once been the plantation House.

  Rue’s man hotfooted at the front of the crowd in his usual glory, and there beside him, like a miniature in white robes, was Bean, holding out a collection basket half his size, taking in the action with the full of his big black eyes.

  Bruh Abel threw Rue a wink across the crowd when she came in. Didn’t miss a step. Bean moved amongst the parishioners with his little wicker basket, collecting dark-colored coins and even dirty, coiling slips of paper money that he had to tamp down with his little hand, lest they get caught up by the wind. Folks gave and gave. Here Bean was, a little miracle, or the little miracle that they had made him, five years old, and he carried himself like a man. Who had taught him that? Up in the front Bruh Abel was kissing the wrinkled hands of some reed-bent old grandmama who was moved to weeping just to see him.

  Folks left in an unhurried fashion. They kissed and hugged and goodbyed each other, exuberant, congratulating themselves for worship well done. They dropped money in Bean’s basket, rubbed his thick brown hair, same as if he were a rabbit’s foot, a disembodied thing for other folks’ luck. They streamed on past her and said, “Miss Rue,” if they knew her or just cast a smile in her direction if they didn’t. They knew she was someone important, leastwise, because she was important to Bruh Abel.

  Rue waited as the tent all but emptied. Bean, drifting, neared her, and she caught his eye. “Miss Rue,” he said politely, and she liked the way he said it. He mashed the two words together like they were one. For him, there was no distinction. She was who she was.

  “Bean, I brung you somethin’.”

  He held out the collection basket and it made her heart hurt to see that that was what he was expecting. From her apron pocket she pulled out a little bag full of marbles. Bean’s eyes narrowed down to strange black stitches of delight when he smiled. He pulled the drawstring open and spilled them right out onto the grass aisle.

  “I can have ’em?” he asked. His collection basket was all but forgotten now as he plopped down to play with the marbles. Rue laughed and scooped the basket up.

  “ ’Course you can.”

  “Can I take ’em to play with her?”

  An ill chill ran through Rue at that. Her enthusiasm shriveled but surely he had meant Sarah, his mama. Who else?

  Bruh Abel came up on her from behind and put his arm around her waist, took Bean’s basket from her in the same motion.

  “Y’all stayin’ on to listen to the next sermon?”

  Bruh Abel’s serv
ices had grown so sought after, he’d lately had to double them. It was a fascinating thing to see them back-to-back. To watch the things he mirrored in himself and the words that came to him in one and not the other, the movements of his hands, the twitch of a smile in his face. It was like catching someone admiring their own reflection. “Ain’t vanity one of them big sins?” she’d sometimes say to him, and sure enough he’d just grin, suck her into that sinking cheek dimple. There was no shaming him. Not there under his own big white tent, with his own Lazarus playing marbles at his feet.

  “I come to speak to you in fact,” Rue began. Now that she was here to say it, she didn’t know quite how to put words to her urgency or the fear that was rising up inside her. “I seen a white woman.”

  Bruh Abel quirked his eyebrow. “What? You ain’t never seen one before?”

  “She come to see me about her baby.”

  “You help her, ain’t you?”

  Rue worried her lip. “I tol’ her to come back. I plan to help her,” she hurried to say. “But she a relation a’ Ol’ Marse John who owned the only other plantation near here durin’ slavery times. She stayin’ on at his place. Got a husband with her.”

  “Tell ’em to come hear some prayin’,” Bruh Abel said. He busied himself adjusting the tall wood lectern he’d had made. It was where his Bible often sat, open but untouched. Already, the tent was filling up again for the second go-round.

  “That ain’t it,” she said. She hated him a little then. How easy he was with words when she wasn’t.

  The last time strange white folks had come through the woods, her mama had been alive and the country had been warring. And they had come as an army.

  Bruh Abel bent to start picking up Bean’s marbles, ignoring the small whine of protest the little boy made. Rue couldn’t understand why Bruh Abel didn’t see it. That he had made Bean in his image, made him a curiosity on which the town hinged, when he’d said all along that that was what they’d been trying to avoid. For her part in it Rue felt sorry, but in a town now known for its curiosities, she had begun to fade quietly into the weave. Hadn’t that fact saved both of their lives—hers and Bean’s?