Conjure Women Page 26
Sarah came in at the lead of the next flood of parishioners, heading straight for her son with a sense of duty if not of ease. She laid a kiss on Bean’s forehead, one he didn’t seem even to feel, then straightened up slow to greet Bruh Abel and then Rue. Her expression was tight and tired. Jonah was away working at some port, here-and-gone the way only a man could be in the name of supporting his family.
“Bean, you mindin’ Bruh Abel?” she asked her son. She petted his head the same way the other faithful had. No feeling in it, just a kind of reluctant awe.
“Yes’m,” Bean said.
Rue wanted nothing more than to scoop him up and run. Instead she said in a hush to Bruh Abel, outside of Sarah’s hearing, “I just ain’t think it’s a good sign. White folks wonderin’ after us. After all a’ this.”
Bruh Abel raised his arms wide. If he could’ve he would’ve held in his palm the very idea of all-of-this. “Ain’t you heard? This our time. The time that was Promised.”
He kissed her, full on the lips, there in front of Sarah and Bean and those waiting on worship. Rue extracted herself quick from his arms. She was dizzy from just the sheer force of how free he thought he was. Nothing like that could last.
“Miss Rue.” “Good evening, Miss Rue.” “Sister Rue.” It all clattered around her brash as church bells as she forced her way out of the tent against a crowd clambering to get in.
It was never fully dark anywhere now, not with the candlelight in the tent always burning, emanating that constant soft glow of promise. The woods on the periphery were what was all dark; the distance in between stayed stuck in everlasting twilight. That’s where Rue lingered, masked in shadow, with a steadying palm to her belly. She was making herself afraid, she reasoned, because it had always felt safer to her to be afraid. From the tent she heard the beginning of Bruh Abel’s second sermon, thick and clear and well-rehearsed.
“Out of the land of Egypt,” he was proclaiming, “out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.”
“Miss Rue,” a man’s voice called. There was no getting away from folks, was there? Rue stopped and put a smile on.
It was Charlie Blacksmith approaching her. His wide face was weighted down with contrition as it had been the whole time he’d been back. If anyone had killed them babies it was him, she might have said, if she were to let hard devil thoughts in. He’d run off with the money meant for the white Quaker doctor who might’ve healed them. Rue was not a preacher, or a Quaker, or an angel besides. She didn’t have to be forgiving.
He pulled his hat from his head, showing the place where his hair was thinning, the roots coming in a startling gray. She’d known him all her life. He’d known her daddy, too, ’til he’d died.
“I got a story for you, Miss Rue, if you’ll oblige an ol’ fool,” Charlie said. “After I left here I went searchin’ for word of any relations I had still livin’. Had three sisters an’ four brothers that got sold away, always wondered where they got to, what they’d grown up to be like, but I couldn’t find no trace of ’em. Got round to the place I myself was born to see if I could find my mama’s grave at least, but that place is all gone too. The white folks stayin’ there now ran me off their land with the assistance of a shotgun.
“In the end I just roamed. Got to feelin’ that everybody I’d ever known was gone. But then I recalled an ol’ sweetheart a’ mine by the name a’ Airey. Y’all remember her, don’tchya? You was only such a little thing back then.”
Rue remembered her: Airey, that pretty runaway so many of them had envied when she’d stayed and envied more when she’d gone. And Rue remembered her mama’s hand in it, though the miracle at the river when Airey had taken flight, just disappeared like a bird, surely was just a wish, a muddling of Rue’s childhood memories and dreams. Still, didn’t miracles abound?
“I remember.”
Charlie grew excited. “Weren’t she beautiful?”
“She was.”
“Well, I went lookin’ an’ askin’ round an’ finally I found her.” He paused to grin, perhaps stirred by the memory. “She made it up to the North, she did, an’ once there she hired herself out as a cook like she was always wantin’. Done real well fo’ herself. Got herself a lawful husband an’ a whole crop a li’l ’uns, littlest of ’em favors her mama.” He moved his hand over his own arms like he was sprinkling stardust, to indicate the birthmark patterns up Airey’s body. “She done named that last baby May, after yo’ mama’s memory.”
A bubbling sadness rose up in Rue but underneath was joy. “It’s a good name.”
“It is,” said Charlie. “But Airey, she say she missin’ home, this place the onlyest one her family ever known, goin’ back generations. Her daddy plant the first seed, that’s what folks says. I tol’ her if she can scrape together the money maybe she oughta come back to look on it like I done. I hope that she do.
“Anyhow, I got to askin’ Airey how she made it north when so many others didn’t or couldn’t, how she escaped the patrolmen an’ the swamp an’ the sickness an’ the dogs. Well, she set me down an’ she cry a li’l for all the time an’ all the years an’ all them people we done lost, an’ at the end a’ it she tol’ me how she got over. She say, ‘Charlie, I just flew.’ ”
* * *
—
That night, Bruh Abel came to her, crawled to her, woke her from sleep and kissed her and worried at her chest and nipples with his teeth ravening as only a man could. He’d leave moons with his front teeth, bite marks that would remain as indents on her skin for lovely long hours after.
“Quit that,” she said in the midst of her sleep. She was trying to stay angry at him.
“Can’t,” he said. He was cupping her breasts now in his hands like water he was bringing to his mouth to drink. “These gon’ heavy. Like to break yo’ back.”
She hadn’t quite noticed that. She hadn’t been letting herself notice a lot of things. But there it was: the tightening of the click-clack beads Miss May Belle had taught her to wear, and just earlier that white woman’s telling grin. Rue’s brimming senses, her full breasts teeming with promise, spreading longways and sideways across her chest, her body making ready, making room.
Rue pulled Bruh Abel’s head away from her flesh-full nipples.
“That ain’t for you no more.”
“What?”
“Them is for the baby now.”
She watched for what seemed like hours but was only one small moment as Bruh Abel caught on to her meaning, his gray eyes going just the littlest bit wide, his lips parting in wonderment. And then the whole of his face brightened with revelation, with delight, and only then was it real, because it was real for him, the whole idea, a quickening of her heart.
“You sure?”
She laughed. “I make my name on being sure when a woman’s got with child.”
“Yeah, you do, but it’s different when it’s you, ain’t it?”
“Lord.” It was so different.
He pulled away from her, drawing back his weight, suddenly careful. He inspected her naked body now like he’d never seen a woman before in the whole of his life. It was sort of wonderful, even just to shock him, to make Bruh Abel, of all people, care-filled and new.
* * *
—
On Friday, early morning, the white woman came back, and Rue had to see to her, like it or not. She had the vial ready, one of Bruh Abel’s empty jars, cork stopped on whiskey and water. The white woman had made herself at home again.
“I done made you three cures,” Rue told her.
Her baby looked well, Rue had to admit. He was smallish, but boys she’d found were often smallish ’til they all of a sudden grew into men. She hoped she herself would have a girl.
Rue didn’t know what she would say, even as she cast a handful of emptied walnut shells across the open floor, s
hells upon which the white woman was singularly transfixed, believing without even being told that those cast shells had the power of divination simply because they’d been cast by Rue’s black hand in the close mystical quarters of a fall-down plantation house in the woods.
Next Rue brought out the necklace she’d made. It was a simple bleach-boiled bone wrapped in rough twine. The white woman tied it around her neck quick and eager. The little hooking bone sat primly on the top of her low-slung cleavage, the twine already irritating her neck, splotches of red forming.
“What is it?”
Rue struggled. “It a coon’s penis, Missus.”
The white woman nodded reverently, her baby cooed. “What it for?”
“Keep yo’ husband virile.”
“ ’Course.”
Lastly Rue handed her the vial, held out her hand, and waited for payment. It came, one silver coin in her palm, that simple.
“It’ll work?”
“It’ll work,” Rue lied. “This one won’t be took from you.”
The white woman showed again her habit, bending over and kissing on her baby’s head, breathing that scalp in greedily, like that was where all the air in the world was coming from.
“Thank you, Miss Conjure,” the white woman said. Rue did not correct her.
* * *
—
When the woman had gone Rue went walking, past the crowds, past the tent poles, past the graveyard and the creek. The knot on the tree faced north, that was how she always found it, occluded as it was by a thick matting of moss. Making sure that no one had followed, she slipped her two coins—one coin from the easy work she’d done, the other spirited out of Bean’s collection plate—into her little bag of treasure hid away in the hollow.
WARTIME
1864
The drumming was in the sky. Marse Charles had woke the whole plantation to come and hear it. It was before sunup even, that he’d sent out the trumpet player whose bellow usually started the day. Come so early, this music had not been meant to signal work time for the field hands, or to summon house slaves who felt they’d only just rested down their heads. It was to herald doom. The trumpeter played a mournful tune, like a sad, strange accompaniment to the distant syncopation of warfare.
But who did Marse Charles think he was waking? They were all already awake, braced in their beds. Was this it now—kingdom come?
“Come on now,” Miss May Belle said to Rue.
They joined the sweeping crowd of black folks being summoned by their master, a black cloud moving dazed in the first crack of morning light.
The mood was tense. They were shaken, like a whole mess of sleepwalkers startled awake to find themselves in the yard of the House, field workers on one side, house workers on another, and between them Marse Charles high on the top step of the porch, which reminded Rue of the stage he’d constructed and deconstructed in the space of a day for his fete. Six months had passed since the party, but it still made her dizzy just to think on it.
A loud bottomless boom echoed in the distance, and the house seemed to rock within their vision. Behind her daddy, Varina came out as if summoned by the cannon fire. She was dressed already for the day, looked small and pale and likely to break the next time the crashing sound came down. It shook through them all like they were the bunched leaves on the same branch of a tree. With no means of knowing from which way the echo was coming, they all of them instinctively turned their eyes to the North.
“Y’all hear that?” Marse Charles’s voice was high and strained, harder than any of them had ever heard it. This man who had whupped them and cussed them and told them he was selling them off or ripping apart their families. He who had plain said no to any bit of independent hope they’d ever thought they’d found—never in any of those times did he sound so tore up as he did now. So downright sorry.
“Those vile Yankees. Those perfidious devils. They mean to snatch y’all up in yo’ sleep,” he warned. “They brought this feud to blood, them Northerners. To get at y’all.” He leveled a shaking finger at the assembled crowd. He was so pale there in the gloaming. Did any of them believe him? “Y’all hear that? That’s the stamp of their cloven feet.”
What they did hear over their master’s small, reedy voice was another explosion in the night, the seams of the world coming all undone. On his whim they waited there for what seemed like hours as the twilight eased to day, waited on him to release them.
* * *
—
“I’m to be married.”
Varina had been in front of the mirror when she said it, and Rue was behind her brushing out her red curls. Everywhere about them was the heady scent of ash blown downwind from the battlefield. The fighting was miles away and yet too close; its smoke was pervasive as a plague and Varina, fool she was, seemed to think the smell was about her. She’d already taken two baths that day, made Rue carry bucketfuls of bathwater up the stairs each time and lug it away again after. Varina had stunk up the water with rose syrup enough to make herself gag. She hadn’t allowed Rue or any of the house girls in to help her wash but had gotten into the hot bath alone, and there stewed herself for what seemed like hours before she’d let anyone in to dote on her. Now her hair was taking up an agitated frizz from all the washing and it wouldn’t obey Rue’s ministrations as she tried to gather it in a low braid. Rue never had liked white folks’ hair, the way it clung wet and stringy, the way it slipped and slid and would not hold.
“Did you hear me, Rue? I said I’m to be married at last.”
They caught eyes in the glass, neither one of them looking glad. It seemed to Rue that they were waiting, watching for the drama of these two people to play out before them. Who were these strange, tired little women they’d turned into? They’d lost the children they’d been—now they were grown and picking bits of war-flung ash out of their hair. The mirror told of the years, but there were things the mirror couldn’t tell. The time-flattened scars from a tree branch on Rue’s back, the price of a friendship she couldn’t let go—and for Varina, were there marks from the minstrel show six months back? Hurts of the kind that left no earthly scar, showed no reflection?
They never spoke on it, that awful night. It was meant to have been Varina’s coming out, but instead Rue felt she’d collapsed in on herself. Like a promised harvest that never came, Varina had wilted before she’d ever come to bloom.
The misery that had lately plagued Varina had little to do with her brothers turned to soldiers, brother against brother at war, or a world made suddenly bereft of men, eligible husbands slim for the picking. It seemed to Rue that there was a corruption now growing in Varina that had never quite been there before. Just because you couldn’t see it or hold it or heal it didn’t mean it didn’t exist. The Rue of the mirror eased her face into passable excitement and said, “I heard you, Miss Varina, and I am happy for you.”
“Do you want to see him?” Varina pulled herself and her hair out of Rue’s grasp, pawed through her belongings. Ribbons and pins and nets and combs tumbled from in front of the mirror, and in it Rue watched herself watching Varina, watched herself trying to stay small and out of her mistress’s way, lest she become just another bit of clutter to be knocked to the floor and trampled on.
“Here it is.”
It was a little nothing bit of tin that Varina could hold in her two hands, and at the insistence of her fingernails it peeled open like a storybook might. It revealed no stories, only the one little picture: a man, his uniform, his gun.
“Henry is his name.”
Henry peered up at Rue, and Rue had to push back on that self-saving instinct to look away from the probing eyes of a white man, real or no. He was young and thin-lipped, and someone had rosed up his cheeks in the image like they thought it would give him life. It hadn’t done anything but made him look sterner. Beneath the dark shadow of his heavy brow and th
e flat brim of his soldier’s hat, his colorless eyes seemed like empty places where something had been left out.
“Handsome Henry,” Varina sung out. She wasn’t even looking at his hard-tin face. She was instead waiting on Rue’s expression like it held some soothsaying, reading for tea leaves in her squinting eyes and wrinkled brow.
“Handsome,” Rue agreed.
Varina shut the tintype like it was a sprung trap.
* * *
—
Sarah and Rue were summoned to the parlor. Just them two. Led there by Ma Doe, who would tell them nothing of what they were about to hear.
All that week they had been in preparations, flushing the house of every single sign of mourning, searching out every inch of black and removing it in preparation for Miss Varina to receive her suitor, who, visiting temporarily from the somber northern battle lines, would not want to come to his future wife’s home and find death clinging there also.
“Sit,” Ma Doe told them. Neither of them moved. They’d never been asked to sit in a white person’s living room a single moment of their lives. Their knees wouldn’t bend that way.
Ma Doe said, “He’s in a gracious mood so you best keep him that way and do as he say.”
Ma Doe left and the both of them sat on the very edge of two wooden chairs like they thought comfort would lick at them from behind. Marse Charles didn’t come in for nearly half an hour. That whole length of time Rue and Sarah did not speak. The sun-dense parlor grew hot from the daylight streaming in through the wide bay window. The light played tricks with the pattern of the floral lace curtain hung from the windowsill, sent an illusion of black roses across the floor to pass the time.