Conjure Women Page 28

  “Not her.” Bean squeezed Rue’s hand. “The other lady. With the pretty red hair.”

  “How you come to know her? You follow me?”

  Bean shrugged. Of course. He followed Rue everywhere ’til she’d shoo him off, tell him to find somewhere else to play. The other children were averse to his strangeness, all the things that made him different. Or was it that they remembered the Ravaging, when they had sickened and some had died and Bean had lived and died and lived on? Who would want to play with a miracle?

  “Her name is Auntie V. I go there when I don’t wanna be seen.”

  He told it like a riddle and Rue might’ve hoped he was speaking on an imaginary friend as children sometimes did, made real enough because they believed in them. But Rue knew he knew her, Varina. Easy as he’d told Rue about it, he might tell somebody else.

  The tent still glowed as Rue and Bean neared it. There were voices within, joyous. Had they given up their search for Bean as soon as that? Or rather had they given up searching in favor of praying? Rue could’ve spat.

  She took him home, or leastwise, to the place where he was born, to the very bed in fact, and there was Sarah, wide awake. Her eyes were rheumy; the weakness that had caused her swoon had only worsened while Rue had been gone, and Sarah didn’t seem even to know her boy had been missing the whole of the evening.

  “Don’t worry,” Rue said, touching Sarah’s fever-warm skin. “I’ll keep watch over Bean ’til you get yo’ strength up.”

  And she would, if only to keep him from telling things better kept hidden.

  * * *

  —

  Rue did as she promised, kept Bean close after the day he’d disappeared as a godmama might. Black women always had been good for caring on each other’s children, even since slaverytime, a point of pride that. As Sarah’s condition worsened, Rue took on Bean, especially as it became clear that even the most reverently charitable of the newly come folks would not keep him long in their houses. There was something eerie, they whispered, about his eyes. Not even the color but just the way he stared like he could see past things and through things and into things that weren’t quite there.

  Did he see his mama’s sickness? Seven months along now and Sarah could hardly walk the length of her own room without some hand-holding. Persistent, Rue made her walk the little bit that she could. Sarah’s growing baby sat low like a stone at the bottom of her belly and seemed just as strange and still. When Rue would check on Sarah, Bean insisted on following. The whole visit he’d stare at his bedbound mama, not at all upset, but like her sickness, her decline fascinated him.

  “What’s doin’?”

  Rue steeped mint leaves in the bottom of a cup, the water still bubbling at the boil. Bean followed close, nearly underfoot as Rue brought the drink over to his mama.

  “She weak is all. Carryin’ the new baby.”

  Bean wrapped an arm around Rue’s leg. Birth, sickness, death, and resurrection, it had all happened in those two slim, dark rooms of the cabin, Rue reminded herself. Was it a wonder that Bean saw things in the shadows, when all over, every cabin in that plantation, there were so many shadows to see?

  “It’s a girl this time, I’m thinkin’.” Sarah’s voice showed the weakness Rue had warned against. She wasn’t doing enough eating. Holding nothing down.

  “What make you say so?”

  Sarah shook her head just a little. No answer then, just a feeling. “What you think fo’ yours?”

  Rue hid her grin by blowing the steam off Sarah’s tea. She was supposed to say she just wanted one come healthy, fingers and toes. Ain’t that what the mamas always said? “Girl maybe? Tryna think up good names.”

  Sarah breathed a laugh. “Bruh Abel’s liable to pick a page out the Bible.”

  Rue shook her head. “Think I’ll pick somethin’ I ain’t heard no one have before. What you thinkin’ for yours?”

  “S’pose I’ll ’llow you to tell me when she comes out.”

  It was the closest they’d ever come to talking on it, the way Black-Eyed Bean had got named. No other thing had stuck to him. In the beginning Sarah had tried. Called him by his true name, Jordan. But folks that saw him had whispered in horror “Black-Eyed Bean” around him so often he’d got to thinking that was what he was called. He would answer to no other thing but Bean. Would just sit in the same mute fascination that froze his face now.

  Was it meant to be a slight, what Sarah had said about Rue naming her baby? A curse? Rue could not say. Sarah had shut her eyes, grown tired maybe from that little bit of jawing, her tea gone untouched. From the other side of his mama’s chair Bean was watching her sleeping, examining the rise and fall of her chest, unaware or uncaring that they’d been speaking on his origins.

  * * *

  —

  Bruh Abel dreamed of other tents, a sky-wide spread of tents as lofty as a field of clouds. “Can’t you just see it?”

  Rue shrugged. “Not really.”

  “Girl, you ain’t got no imagination.”

  It tired her out just to watch him moving through the wide, empty space inside his tent. The area seemed so much larger without all the worshipping bodies who’d just left it, and Bruh Abel moved like a little boy at play in it, going from stillness to sudden motion in unpredictable bursts like summer rain.

  “When the baby come,” he said, “we can go south first. Follow the warm in winter.”

  The life Bruh Abel dreamed of sounded to Rue like the exhausting up-and-down movement of migrating birds. In search of what? Everything he said lately began with When the baby come and ended in a kingdom of revival tents stretched the whole way from north to south. Rue couldn’t begin to see how they might get from here to there, what sacrifices might hammock in between. There was Bean to think of. And Ma Doe’s health. There was Varina most of all, whose existence was every day threatened by Bruh Abel’s growing flock. Their trepidation about the wilderness beyond the revival tent could only so long be fueled by secondhand stories of haints.

  Bruh Abel wanted to preach, he said. He wanted her to heal. Lately Rue had no stomach for healing. There was growing a sudden fear in her, a distaste of touching other folks’ sickness. When the baby came, her sweet little girl as she’d lately been thinking of her, Rue didn’t wish to lay hands on any skin but hers.

  Still, something was coming. There was no denying that same something that had Bruh Abel spreading his wings hawk-wide and her doing the exact opposite, pulling up twigs around herself for a nest. Was it always like this? she wondered. Being with child had sent her into a hoarding up of love, like she’d got word that a hard frost was coming to befall everything, love being nourishment. Love being hope.

  Bruh Abel jumped up onto the bench in front of her. Stood on it straddled and carefree like it were a log he was balancing down a creek.

  “When we get down there,” Bruh Abel was saying, from above. “When the baby come, we’ll get ourselves good and married. What y’all think a’ that?”

  She made him no answer, for in the corner of her vision a ghost flickered. “Get down,” she said.

  Behind him through the thick of the tent she saw the black outline of the people on the other side, running. The sound of their panic came through the tent skin in muffled singular chaos. Outside someone had let out a high, feral scream. Bruh Abel jumped down from his perch. Came to wrap his arms around her, protecting her. Them.

  The shadows of the crowd loomed long and large as their outlines came across the tent. They were coming closer, a few startled sweating men, Red Jack and Charlie amongst them, a few others Rue didn’t know. Bruh Abel hid her behind him.

  “What’s happened?”

  “We need yo’ help,” Charlie said, and Rue saw that he carried a curled-up body on his back, something as still as a carcass. He laid it down gentle in the grassy aisle and the men stepped back as if
afraid to approach it. It looked like an overgrown black crow, spilling everywhere its feathers. It was only as it unfurled itself in a slow jerking fit that Rue realized what it was they’d brought her. It was a woman, and one she knew: Airey.

  * * *

  —

  Oil wouldn’t budge it, water neither. When Rue put either to Airey’s sore, ruined skin, the woman would begin to wail and thrash. They couldn’t even move her but left her down in the center of the church tent where Charlie had placed her, and as Rue worked she had amassed an audience of disturbed onlookers, all of them whispering about the haints in the woods.

  “Who done this?”

  “You seen ’em?”

  “White faces.”

  “Monstrous.”

  “Come to kill us all.”

  Rue found she couldn’t focus with their chittering. Her fingers kept sticking in the tar that covered Airey head to foot. It was still warm. Rue tried to get at the root of a black feather and instead set Airey to caterwauling.

  “What you need?” Bruh Abel asked, kneeling beside Rue. He secreted a hand at her back and rubbed where he knew it often ached her when she was bent working like this.

  “A clean new knife.”

  Bruh Abel asked Charlie to fetch it, but Charlie refused to leave Airey’s side, kept pacing and smacking at his chest and saying, “I’m the one that done this to her. Told her to come down here. Told her her home was safe again.”

  Airey’s home was not safe. In halting fevered confusion, she’d whispered about the monsters she’d encountered as she’d approached the town, a woman traveling foolishly alone on the road to a fabled land of Promise. She’d made the long journey back from the North, the reverse of the one she’d fled through, this one in leisure on a train and then a steamboat, but after that there was no sure way to get to their isolated strip of land except on foot, so that’s what she had done, with a little money in her pocket and a lot of determination. She had wanted to come and see where her folks were buried, maybe buy them up a headstone so that no one would forget their names.

  The ill spirits had come up on her from behind she said, and by the time she’d heard their horses’ hoofbeats, their mangy vicious dogs barking, there was no point in running, no safe place anywhere, and she’d crumpled to the ground.

  “Who was they?”

  “Devils,” Airey kept saying, writhing in the dirt. “They must have been devils.”

  They were masked. Airey could identify only the grim black of their cut-out eyeholes, bearing down on her from the white of their full-body robes. Hid beneath those sheets was surely something much more horrible, something so heinous it couldn’t even be bared. Still, Airey fought as their cold, white hands had ripped off her clothes. As they poured the hot tar. As they dumped the feathers. She was still fighting.

  Bean was the one that brought Rue the knife. He came quick, his chest still panting from the run he’d taken to her cabin and back, swift on his little stick legs. He’d picked just the type she needed, one good and sharp.

  “What you mean to do?” Bruh Abel asked.

  “Ain’t no way I can see but to cut it from her. Just slice as close as I can, try not to get too much of her own skin.” Rue whispered to him. “But dammit, she won’t be still.”

  “I can help,” Bruh Abel said. He got down on his knees beside Airey, careless of his own white robe, which straight away picked up mud and grass and tar and some of Airey’s blood as he drew close to her and clutched her fighting hands.

  Airey had never met him but she stilled and looked right at him, like she knew him and was trying to puzzle out where from.

  “You ain’t alone in them woods anymore, Sister Airey,” he said. “And I got to tell you, you weren’t never alone.”

  “They hurt me so bad,” Airey croaked out. “They say they only gon’ leave me alive to be a message to the rest a y’all.”

  Bruh Abel drew nearer to her, his expression placid but determined. Rue placed the knife a hair breadth shy of skin, beginning at Airey’s arm, which beneath the black tar was white-speckled still, just as it had been long ago, with the force of Miss May Belle’s curse.

  “Oh, you a message, alright,” Bruh Abel said. “One heard loud and clear.”

  Airey’s whole body tensed like she was about to bolt.

  “You a message, sister, that any devil can be fled from, can be survived no matter how pervasive. You beautiful as an angel, girl. You just sprout wings of faith and fly.”

  She relaxed, breathed in his words, kissed his hands to her mouth, and began to cry. And hearing his words, seeing through his eyes to his vision in the clouds, Rue, slowly, carefully, was able to make the first slice, and the first of the feathers came free.

  WARTIME

  Miss Varina’s betrothed was soon to arrive. They waited. Every one of Marse Charles’s colored slaves stood in the yard of the House, assembled in the same manner they’d listened to the exploding cannonballs in the distance weeks earlier, a gathered awkward collection of black folks and their two white owners. But unlike that war-torn morning, this noontime was hot and quiet, a stillness punctuated now and then by heat-drunk flies and one or the other of the slaves fidgeting, quelling the urge to swat.

  Varina waited on the veranda, which offered no shade at this time of day. Rue stood beside her holding up a white lace parasol, her arms aching. Varina was not satisfied. Halfway through their waiting she’d sent Sarah into the house to run and bring to her a small white hand fan. Now Varina was working herself into a sweaty anxiousness with that fan, flapping it about her flushed face, her madness burning hotter than the sun could. Marse Charles hovered in the doorway, looked like he’d like to snatch that fan straight out of his daughter’s hand.

  Because of their gathered stillness they heard the carriage rumbling up through the gravel road from a great distance, but they could not see it at all through the thick of the trees, and so they were left to stand there in anticipation, listening to the horses’ hooves beating the ground and the strain of the wagon rolling over craggy land. The assembled slaves had long, strange minutes to imagine their new master inside, perhaps sitting with his head in his hand and his hat in his lap and his leg across his knee, his foot tapping in nervous but eager anticipation, deep in thoughts of his new bride. Would she look like her photograph, hair tugged back tight, and center parted, cheeks pinked? Would her voice be soft and sweet when they sang at the piano at night? Would she make him lots of children, boys preferably but a girl too that they might name after his mama? Would she love him for all the rest of her God-given days, and his?

  When the wagon turned the corner, it was obvious it was empty. There was only a sad, thin-looking black man at its helm, old as creation, with a straw hat and a bad limp. He said nothing but disembarked and hobbled his way over to them, looking sorry about the time it took him to cross those few yards.

  “Got a letter here for the mistress a’ this house?”

  Varina stepped forward through the crowd of her slaves and took the letter as if the paper alone was a badge of shame that ought not see the light of day. She unfolded the letter at its crisp lines. The envelope bore an emblem of the Confederate army, and after she’d read the letter, her lips moving furiously, her gloved finger slipping and shaking over the handwritten lines, she dropped it to the ground and let the wind take it and none of them knew whether to go after it—so they didn’t, just watched the emblem swirl away. The old negro messenger was watching even with his eyes downcast. Perhaps he’d been told to report back on her reaction; perhaps he was only waiting to have his pass marked, his old bones being unsure of how and where to move without being dismissed.

  Varina’s low keening was explanation enough. It was a sound like a sick cow might make. She turned and fled into the house, and Marse Charles did not follow her but sighed as though this was an eventuality he’d been w
ise enough to see coming.

  “Go and see to her.”

  Rue didn’t know if he had meant her. She was the only slave on the veranda. She tried to look out at the crowd for her mama, but if Miss May Belle was there she was just another black sweating body, waiting and tense.

  “Go on,” Marse Charles hollered and Rue went, taking the stairs through the house two at a time with the aid of the folded-up parasol as a cane, all the faster to propel her.

  She found Varina in her room, panting and yowling and ripping off her clothes like she couldn’t get them away from herself fast enough.

  “Miss?” Rue didn’t know how to calm her. “Is he died in the war?”

  “Better he was dead,” Varina moaned. “Better we all were dead.”

  Rue tried to approach her, but she cussed and swung away. Varina rampaged to her vanity table and swiped at the contents on top; her perfumes and hair things and jewelry all clattered to the ground. She raised her gloved hand and slapped at the mirror, and Rue braced herself for a shattering that didn’t come. The mirror held and, enraged even further by that futile gesture, Varina stumbled back into the center of the room, headed, it seemed, for her doll collection. They were looking on her calmly with their rictus smiles.

  Rue didn’t know why she moved to defend them. They were only dolls. But it flashed in her mind that she had always loathed the stupid things and if anyone was going to destroy them it ought to be her. She stepped in front of Varina’s path and tried to soothe her.

  “I don’t understand what’s happened.”

  “He ain’t comin’. Ain’t never comin’. Only sent the letter as a courtesy.” Varina cracked out a sharp laugh. “A courtesy to tell me the engagement’s broken. He’s found himself a better girl. One who ain’t touched. Ain’t ruined.”

  At that one word, ruined, Varina ripped the parasol from Rue’s hands and swung it once and hard across Rue’s face.