Conjure Women Page 27

When Marse Charles did come, he was wearing a soldier’s uniform and was trailed by a reluctant-looking Varina, her eyes downcast. There was a large desk there in front of the wide window and he sat behind it, seeming to struggle to bend at the middle in the uniform. It was not like the one Varina’s beau was wearing in his little photograph. It bore no buckles or spangles. It was a ragged moth-eaten thing in a river-bottom brown. Rue thought she could make out old blood on its hem before he sat. Where did he think he was marching to in that?

  Marse Charles drew out a piece of paper from the drawer. Peeped out his tongue in a pink point and wet the nib of a pen. Began writing. To Rue the scratching sounded violent.

  “I’m making a gift of them to you and your future husband,” he said. “To round out your household.”

  “Thank you, Daddy,” Varina said.

  Rue didn’t understand. She didn’t catch on that he was referring to the two of them, to Sarah and herself, to the facts of their bodies, not ’til Sarah began suddenly to cry. It was a silent crying, just the hitch of her chest and one slow track of hushed wet down her jaw and neck. Rue doubted that Marse Charles and Varina at the other end of the room had even noticed. Sarah curled her head down so the light wouldn’t catch on her tears. If he saw, Marse Charles would certainly smack her face dry.

  “What this one’s name. May Belle’s girl?” He sighted his pen at her.

  “That’s Rue, Daddy.”

  “How many years?”

  Rue didn’t know if she was meant to answer or if Varina was, but no one spoke. Marse Charles grunted and scribbled something down for himself.

  “And Sarah. Quadroon. Sixteen years,” he added with a pen flourish. “Belongin’ to you and yo’ husband now.”

  Varina kissed her daddy dutifully on the cheek.

  * * *

  —

  Miss May Belle cackled when Rue came home and asked her what it all meant. The sound wasn’t laughing. It was the brittle cracking of something, some illusion Miss May Belle had let Rue have, maintained the way someone lovingly raises a pig knowing full well they plan to plate it and make a feast.

  “It mean”—Miss May Belle leaned in, pausing to look around their one-room cabin like she thought that someone might be there to overhear—“that yo’ new Marse Henry is gettin’ hisself quite the dowry along with his new wife. Sarah’s the dish, sure. But you the seasoning.”

  “Mama—?”

  Miss May Belle wouldn’t let her finish, in fact couldn’t seem to stop herself. “It mean too that Marse Charles don’t want Sarah round no more. Can’t have her round no more. Not growin’ so pretty like she’s doin’. Even he won’t let that kinda sin tempt him. Though Lord know he wouldn’t be the first, would he? To take a drink from his own stream?

  “And it mean most, Rue-baby, that they gon’ take you away from me like I always knew that they would.”

  * * *

  —

  When Rue shut her eyes at night she’d be cast back in the darkness of the box that Varina had locked her in, like maybe she had never left it. Like maybe this Marse Henry would be the one to open up the trunk this time instead of Varina. Lay her open like she was a gift-wrapped present from one master to another. Varina had allowed it. Asked for it even.

  In Rue’s mind, Varina had laid for her a curse. But Rue knew well the way that curses worked, for Miss May Belle often warned against them, saying, you can tell who’s got a mind to curse you by who you done wrong. A curse was a problem that could be countered. Rue would need a piece of him to do it, a lock of hair, a toenail clipping. An image to direct her curse toward.

  In the midday empty, the air in Varina’s bedroom was a stale outline of the mistress—it smelled of rose hip and burning hair and sweat, all a uniquely Varina scent that Rue had never been able to put words to ’til she smelled it in the air of the room without her there. It gave Rue pause, that smell—made her feel that Varina was right behind her, ghosting in her steps. She persisted despite it. Began searching under and behind things just as Varina had. She’d have secreted the photograph of her sweetheart away, no doubt.

  When Rue couldn’t find the photograph, she turned to the dolls, like they might hold the answer. All in a row, gorgeous doll babies that had been handmade in far distant places Rue could not even cobble up enough imagination to dream about. They were the only acceptable gifts of Varina’s childhood, Rue knew, and the only real education. Varina had been taught to want to be a wife and a mama from the very day that she was born.

  Rue unscrewed their heads. Ignored the plaintive squeaks their hinges made. Inside their hollow was cobwebs and disused fly parts some spider hadn’t thought to eat. Nothing.

  She thought about smashing them, Varina’s porcelain babies, even took one by the head and raised her arm high and willed herself to do it, waiting on the satisfying crash and crunch, the sound of the porcelain skittering across the hardwood she’d just scrubbed clean. In the end she didn’t do it. Couldn’t. She set the doll down back in its outline of dust on the shelf, even smoothed down its hair like it was a child she was putting to sleep.

  There was no use in fighting Marse Charles’s commandment. Varina and Rue, they were bound to their roles, and always had been, Rue figured, by something stronger than curse and conjure—simply, they’d been raised to be the women they had become.

  PROMISE

  Ma Doe had lost her words. She had always had that slow, stately way of speaking, the deliberateness of a schoolteacher, every breath of hers a lesson. But by the summer that the tent swelled, Ma Doe’s speech had slowly turned into a slurry. Worse than this—and Rue cussed herself for thinking there could be worse—Ma Doe could not write.

  The pen trembled violently in her hands whenever she took it up, as if some fear of her own failure started even before she could lay the nib to paper.

  It had begun when Bean had died, Rue recollected; the grief of it had sunk Ma so low. Even when he rose again, Ma Doe, who had been battered by so much loss the whole length of slaverytime and after, could not herself be resurrected to her former buoyant majesty.

  The letters from the North piled up and Rue hardly knew what to make of it. She lied to Ma Doe, told her not to fret over it, but Rue fretted enough for the both of them. Varina’s auntie in Boston would have to note the silence soon, and rather than take it as her due, she was liable to be sparked to action, of what type Rue dared not think on. She’d never known a white lady to leave well enough alone, and the scribbles of words on all them unanswered letters began to follow Rue everywhere she went, shading her as black clouds on the horizon.

  They’d devised together a plan, Rue and Ma Doe had, but it was slow going. Every evening they’d sit at the back of the emptied classroom, and Rue would lay her hand atop Ma Doe’s and together they would write. They wrote ’til their candle burned low and still only got to a sentence a night if that, had yet to finish even one letter, but they kept on.

  “What’s that word?” Rue asked. They’d taken a break, exhausted at the bottom of a page. Rue pointed to a word they’d just finished. It was short but she liked well the loops and swirls of it, recognized the tiny V in the center.

  “That one?” Ma Doe’s voice trembled, also. “That one says ‘love.’ ”

  “It’s so small.” Rue’s hand, which ached from holding Ma’s still, went straight to her belly in wonder. “ ‘Love.’ ”

  * * *

  —

  There were a thousand different ways to love somebody. But Rue still hadn’t settled on which was the one Bruh Abel was needing. They’d never made promises. She did not know where he slept when he did not sleep with her, and she did not want to know. But with her stomach growing fat he’d been lured into her bed every night, and despite herself she made room for him.

  After their lovemaking he was bound for his tent. He climbed up and out from their bed, put on h
is suit with quick, well-practiced movements, always did it the same way, dressed himself pants first, regimented, like if the day called for it he could go just like that, running at a moment’s notice.

  “You comin’ to hear the sermon?”

  Still naked, sheet tangled, Rue thought about saying no. She hadn’t grown used to the tent, probably never would like it, and liked less the fervor that folks felt for Bruh Abel. The way Bean paraded down the aisle at the end of each service like some kind of finale.

  “You comin’, Rue?”

  Rubbing at the small, hard peak of her belly, she said, “If you want me.”

  Sarah had set herself up singing, formed a little choir who wound their music around the shape of Bruh Abel’s sermonizing. Charlie Blacksmith was forging horseshoes by the dozen for weary travelers come at the end of their long journey from there to here. Dinah made big quilts stuffed thick with Spanish moss, a dollar a piece for any one of her woven stories. Li’l Sylvia sold ashcakes, honey sweet, a secret recipe passed down from her mama. Ma Doe had spread her schoolhouse between two cabins, employed the knowledge of newcomer women with Northern book-learning, and everywhere the children were beginning to scratch out their letters and numbers too, easy as if they’d always known them. They had all grown prosperous, as Bruh Abel had always said they would. Sarah’s choir sung on the subject of prosperity this day. They stood on three-tiered risers, wore long gowns in baptism white. They bellowed it—Sarah, as always chief among them and tallest, proclaiming “This is the day the Lord has made.”

  Bruh Abel strutted over to the choir in step to the enabling mhmm-ing of his audience. Rue watched as he caught eyes with Sarah, the choirmaster of her own creation. Was there a wink passed there that Sarah caught and received as a signal to start singing? He looked up at her on the riser like she was the only one he was talking to, a whisper for her ear: “What y’all go out to the wilderness to see? This here a prophet.”

  The choir burst into praising ol’ John the Divine. It was a good old-fashioned, foot-stomping tune, like to get you picking cotton faster. But just as Bruh Abel stepped away from her, Sarah’s knees began to buckle and sway, and the choir, thinking she’d been took by the spirit, sang louder. Rue watched as Sarah drew in breath but no sound came out. She crumpled and fell, hitting against each tier on the way down.

  * * *

  —

  Sarah was pregnant.

  “You needa rest up,” Rue told her. In the new world that they’d made, maybe a black woman could afford a little rest for her own sake. “Stay in bed.”

  Bruh Abel carried Sarah all the way to that bed and laid her down in it.

  “When’s Jonah due back?” he asked and propped her pillow. Rue looked on, wary.

  Sarah, still faint, could barely shake her head without making herself dizzy. “Inside a month or so. But just as soon as that he’ll be off again.”

  “He’s a good man,” Bruh Abel offered.

  “You go on back, tell ’em Sarah’s just fine,” Rue told him. Bruh Abel turned to her, seemed to see her and her belly for the first time.

  “You right. I oughta leave womenfolk to womenfolk.”

  Bruh Abel kissed Rue’s hand and took himself out. She could see in the set of his retreating shoulders that he was already re-forming himself, shape-shifting back into the preacher returning to his tent to talk of a miracle. “Let us pray for Sister Sarah,” Rue could already hear him saying.

  “You pregnant,” Sarah said.

  Her warm brown eyes looked on Rue, sharper than they had cause to be. Womenfolk to womenfolk indeed. Rue laid her hand on the slight stretch beneath her own oversized dress.

  “Folks talkin’,” Sarah explained.

  “They always do.” She sat herself down on the edge of Sarah’s bed, her legs already aching. “I ain’t even as far along as you is. How come you ain’t say nothin’?”

  “How come you ain’t?”

  They were both of them just passing through that strange twilight where the new feeling stirring in their bodies was pushing past simple sickness and weakness and aches and pains into being a real idea, a person, a possibility. But to say so aloud seemed over-proud, like fate itself might wend in, overhear, and intervene.

  Sarah sighed. “You’d think I’d know by now, how to go about bein’ with child. It don’t get no easier.”

  “You just havin’ a rough go is all. Some babies is just more difficult than others. You take it slow, like I say, you be alright.”

  “You too,” Sarah said, easy. “Think ours will come at round the same season. Like twins. What you think?”

  “That’d be nice.” Rue almost meant it too.

  * * *

  —

  Bean had disappeared again. They’d forgotten him in the confusion and by the time Rue got herself back to the tent no one could say where the little wonder had got to, only that he’d vanished. Into thin air, they were saying. Like he Raptured.

  “Now, now.” Even Bruh Abel wouldn’t allow that type of gossip to start up. “Most likely the boy just wander off.”

  “He upset about his mama,” Rue said, though she didn’t think that was altogether true. She had the notion Sarah and Bean would never warm to each other, as mama and son ought to. Rue recalled what Sarah had told her the night of Bean’s short death: He don’t belong to me.

  To whom did he belong then? They got up a search party. Folks went through cabins, looked in outhouses and amongst the tall, prosperous wheat in the field, but Rue went straight into the thick of the black woods, not knowing why, but just knowing.

  It was coming on dusk, but Rue’s eyes were sharp. She was just beyond the sickle-bend of the river when she first saw it, black and shining amongst the roots of a hedge of thorns: one black marble. The next one was blue and not so far from the first. Then a green marble led Rue away from the river and brought her to a grouping of three more scattered along a disused footpath.

  Now Rue had strayed so far that she could no longer hear folks’ cries of “Bean!”—could hear only her own urgent footfalls and the insistent hum of sunset insects. The night was their time but hers also. One more marble, there, at the end of the path.

  Rue turned on her heel when she heard the low growl behind her. Slinking, the gray fox stepped out from behind a tree, its eyes glowing. Something was grasped in the fox’s jaw, caught in its pointed teeth. It looked to be a bit of black and green fabric.

  Her stomach lurched. She’d never known a fox to attack a human child, only livestock, hens and rabbits and smaller prey. But a mama fox might do anything to defend her babies, and Bean was only such a little boy, so naïve and curious.

  The sound of a gunshot came, so close and so loud that Rue thought the bullet must’ve tore through her own body. But before her the fox jerked and fell in a splash of blood. The shot was true, so neatly through the spine it had near severed the fox’s head.

  Stunned but unhurt, Rue shivered. She shrunk down to her knees beside the fox, and from the trees a white man stepped down, heavy-footed over twigs and leaves. His shotgun still bloomed smoke and he whistled as he approached, impressed.

  “Damn,” he said, delighted. “That thing near got you.”

  Rue wouldn’t look up or meet his eyes, not even when he crouched down to inspect his kill.

  “Foxes is wild in this part a’ the country,” he was saying. “Like I ain’t never seen. Distemper most like.”

  “Please, suh.” Rue’s voice came out in a warble, child-thin, like it had been in slaverytime when every white man was sir. “I’m lookin’ for a li’l boy. He lost.”

  The man stood and Rue took it as permission to do the same. Her stomach ached. The dead fox lay between their feet and Rue couldn’t stop watching the man’s cooling gun.

  “Figured somebody done run him off,” he grunted. “That boy sick or s
omethin’? Eyes ain’t right.”

  Rue didn’t know how to answer so she didn’t. The man whistled again, this time like he was calling a dog.

  At the sound a white woman waddled down from the same direction he’d come. She was less sure on her feet over the vines, for she had a drooling baby on her hip. And she led Bean by the hand. Rue knew her at once.

  “Miss Conjure, ain’t it?” the white woman asked.

  Rue was surprised when Bean ran straight over to her, hugged at her waist. He smiled up at Rue, didn’t seem bothered at all by the white folks or the gun or the dead fox’s unhinged neck.

  “Found him wanderin’ the woods,” the woman said. “He belong to yer missus?”

  Rue blinked. So they thought Bean was white? And Rue his good nurse? She felt something rise in her throat, maybe bile or bitter laughter.

  “Yes. Thank you fo’ findin’ him,” she said and scooped him up in her arms. Bean was heavy in a pleasant way, and his warmth calmed the thud of her heart. “I best take him on home before his mama get to missin’ him.”

  “You oughta keep better care a’ him, girl,” the white man said.

  Rue wondered if under his bloodstained overalls the white man was wearing the coon penis charm she’d made for his wife.

  With Bean in her arms, she walked backward a ways before she felt safe turning away from them: the man, his wife, their thriving baby, the lifeless fox. Rue broke into near a run, best she could with Bean cuddled over her shoulder.

  When they came close to home Rue stirred the boy, set him down to walk on his own.

  “Where was you runnin’ to?” she asked him.

  “Wasn’t runnin’. Wantin’ to see my friend.”

  “Which friend is that?” But at the bottom of her belly Rue felt she already knew.

  “The lady”—he yawned—“that lives in the woods.”

  “The lady what found you?”