Conjure Women Page 29

  Rue felt the angry welt already rising in a perfect line across her face and she tasted blood boiling up in her mouth.

  “I don’t understand,” Rue said.

  “Oh, don’t you see?” Varina kept saying. “Don’t you see? Don’t you see?”

  Varina backed away. She was throwing down her clothes, all her pretty things. The net she’d put her hair up in snapped in its stretch and her curls came raining down on her bare freckled shoulders. She was tugging at her gloves, angry at each individual finger as she pulled. Varina was all come undone as the world around her was, and Rue, always behind, it seemed, always foolish, didn’t put it all together until Varina was all but naked in front of her save a thin white slip, see-through and gossamer. Still bent, cowering, Rue looked up and saw Varina’s belt, the one she’d made for the courses that had never come—just as the husband had never come—and in that instant of seeing it and remembering it, Rue watched it snap, all the little beads of nutmeg scattered across the floor like marbles, and some broke in half and spread their dust, and Varina began, again, to cry.

  Oh, Rue understood what she was seeing then and how right Miss May Belle had been, as she always was, for the belt had served its purpose and sent its message as good as any letter: Varina’s little belly was protruding, the skin already rounded out in a stretch of six months.

  PROMISE

  Miss Rue had been, all her life, a liar. Over the years, in slaverytime, wartime, in freedomtime, she’d lied and said, I know.

  When the mamas told her something was going wrong below, something they could not explain, I know, she’d say, to shush them. But she had never got to understand wrong from inside herself. She realized she had spent her life in kneeling, in peering in, in parting legs, touching skin, squeezing hands. In wiping brows and blood and bits of birth. In interpreting moans and sighs and vague descriptions of other folks’ pain.

  Ooh, Miss Rue, it’s like a fire, like a stabbing, like a burning, like a gunshot, like a tearing, feels like I’m dying.

  She always wanted to ask them, how you know what dying feel like if you never done it?

  I ain’t know nothin’.

  The thought rang through her as she woke in the middle of the night to the feeling from the inside that she didn’t have a name for other than wrong. The feeling persisted, grew, in the place at the bottom of her stomach, the warm round place she had been sending love feelings to for months now.

  Bruh Abel was asleep beside her and she hesitated one lonely second before waking him because waking him meant that the wrong was real.

  She shook him. He looked at her like he didn’t know her, and she understood then that she did not know him, she could not gasp out his name or make sense of his shape in her bed. She could only keep saying, “Something’s wrong.” He touched her hot, flushed skin and he looked angry, spitting mad, and that’s how she knew it was so much worse than wrong. Bruh Abel was never angry unless he was worried, and he was never worried unless the world was tore up, all hope come undone.

  “What am I s’posed to do?” he said as he climbed up out of bed. “You the one that’s s’posed to know.”

  He didn’t say what he’d decided when he decided it; he only scooped her up in his arms, cradle style. He lifted her from the bed. The sudden, hysterical thought came to her that he meant to baptize her again and certainly it hadn’t taken the first time, so why would it now?

  She hid her face in the hard-pulsing hollow of his neck and his shoulder. She could feel his shifting panicked muscles with her lips, taste his salty sweat. It did not calm her to know him scared for the first time.

  They walked awhile, him clutching her and her clutching herself. If she thought too hard she knew she’d break; if she thought too hard she’d lose what she was holding on to. She had to hold on.

  She had her face still buried and hid and she only knew they’d gone outside by the sudden cool whip of night air. He was carrying her fast, running near as best he could with the burden of her, and each step gave a bounce and each bounce disrupted the wrong that had worked its way up from her stomach and blossomed now in her chest.

  “Feels like I’m dyin’,” she told Bruh Abel’s neck. “We dyin’.”

  “Hush, girl.”

  Now she knew they were in Ma Doe’s house by the warm, by the smell. She’d made the old woman a new gris-gris charm only days before, stuffed with all her favorite stinks. Ma Doe, for all that she was a learned woman, had always believed in asafetida as a way of warding off haints and hate alike. Miss May Belle had made them for her, and Miss Rue did the same after. And lately Rue had been making them for everybody in town, a little faith to clutch at if they glimpsed whiteness in the woods. The smell when she’d packed the bags had nearly sickened her, but now, stretched out in the empty cabin, it seemed dull, a pathetic stink.

  “What’s this?” she heard Ma Doe saying.

  Bruh Abel’s chest thumped with his every word. “The baby’s comin’.”

  “It isn’t yet time for the baby to come.”

  “Well, it’s comin’,” he said.

  The wrong unfurled in Ma Doe’s long silence.

  “You’d best find her help then.”

  Bruh Abel roared, swung them round so fast she thought he meant to throw her.

  “Don’t know of anybody here that can safely bring an early child but Miss Rue,” Ma Doe called after them.

  It jarred her to hear her own name, as if Miss Rue were some other person than the one there hanging in Bruh Abel’s arms and if that other person would only come, she could save them. Well, it didn’t look as if she were coming.

  There was that shock of the cold again and she opened her eyes to see the stars above her, swimming in trails of silver. Dizzy. She shut her eyes and the next thing she knew was the hay.

  It clung to her, that hay, in her hair and nightdress, on her fever-damp skin, stuck to her fingers when she tried, weak, to pick it off. Through the wooden grates of the borrowed merchant cart she could see the world rushing by her, blending all its colors. Up ahead was the broad stretch of Bruh Abel’s back. She squinted at a sweat stain on his nightshirt, a senseless expansive pattern that grew as he whipped the one tawny horse pulling them, urging it to go faster and faster, though there was everywhere the sound of its hooves beating the ground with a fury and the cart creaking after. She was all ashiver, felt the way lips felt with a hum passing through them.

  Finally the wagon stopped. Bruh Abel jumped down. He came round and plucked her from the hay. She wanted to scream when he gripped her waist. He didn’t know how to touch her with her stomach in the way, with the wrong big between them. Bruh Abel settled on clutching her in something like a hug.

  “It’s just a li’l ways down the road,” he said. She felt him pointing, his fingers bending against her back. “You gotta help me, girl.”

  She tried to walk but her legs felt as though they’d been replaced by double-pointed needles. They stuck to the ground, they stabbed up her hips.

  “Where we goin’?”

  “He’s gotta help you,” Bruh Abel said.

  She knew it was a white person’s home by the size of it, though she’d never before seen it in her life, never ventured out so far in all her days. It was opulent and it was devastated. Taller than Marse Charles’s House that she’d known in her youth, this one shared the familiar white balustrades but the whole thing was covered in creeping green, as if the land itself was tempted to consume it, a slow, methodical swallow.

  She saw right off why Bruh Abel had left the horse and cart at the path. As he led her closer, the grass of the grounds gave way to mud that gave way to swamp. The world sank as they moved forward; the house, the trees seemed to sit on the brackish water before them, floating. Bruh Abel drew her forward as best he could, saying sweet things, saying she’d be alright, they’d be alright. He was saying it t
oo convincingly for it to be true. Below them the ground made sucking sounds, and they stepped barefoot through the yard, bound together like some hideous four-legged creature, damned to struggle lifelong against itself.

  It was strange to enter through the front of a white person’s home without permission. Inside, the house was the kind of dark too tar black to see through, and Bruh Abel set her down on the floor. She rested her head on his calf, gripped the cracked wood beneath her hands as a particularly strong pang of wrongness ran through her. The bottom of her dress clung to her legs with wet and she could not think what that wet was but hoped that it was all swamp water. Above her, Bruh Abel fiddled with a book of matches and cussed, his hands too clumsy, cold and shriveled by damp.

  It gave Rue a queer kind of comfort to imagine that the house was like the one she’d known in her girlhood, and in the uneasy dark she could just see the entry to the parlor, the fine furnishings, the stairs swirling up to heaven, Varina descending the steps two at a time, as unladylike as she wanted to be when she thought no one was looking.

  Bruh Abel’s match caught, illuminated the truth as he stretched away from her for a candle set by the door. The flame took and bobbed bigger on the wick of the wasting-away stub of wax and before them a stretch of empty beds was revealed. This was no ordinary home then. This was something like she’d never seen. The rows of beds stretched as far as her eyes would let her see, blocks of white packed even closer together than the tightest of slave quarters, tattered curtains hung on rods between them, made a meal of by moths. There was no one in those beds, though they were made up like they were waiting for someone. Me, she thought. Us, she thought again. Bruh Abel lifted her, laid her on the first bed they came to, where she let herself curl up around the pain.

  The rough mattress gave up a sigh of dust, and it was with just the barest of strength that she managed to move her head away from a stiff dark stain that she only recognized as old, old blood after long minutes of staring.

  There were hurried steps and then a voice that echoed. “No flame,” it said, harried. “Please, no flame.”

  Bruh Abel put out the candle he had lit just as Rue strained to see who’d spoke. She could only make out the glaring white of his face, the anxious flapping of his mouth surrounded by a mass of dark hair, a beard that shaped the hollows of his face into something like a skull. “No flame,” he kept saying, and when the dark blanketed them again she had to imagine the rest of him. His manner of speaking called to her memory the marching-up-north army that had tramped through their woods years back, as disorganized and forceful as locusts.

  Bruh Abel, all dark save for the pale linen of his nightshirt, stepped between her and the white man. He matched the whisper tone of his words, and she could not make out what was passing between them any more than she could make out their expressions. They were making a deal she feared, an arrangement, perhaps a sale.

  Bruh Abel stepped away and she saw the white man’s hand coming at her in the dark. She feared she would die if he touched her. She reared back from him fast and slammed herself backward into the metal head of the bed. It rained down rust on her face. His hand when he reached her only settled around her wrist. His fingers, shifting along her skin, were cool and coarse.

  “Help me hold her now.”

  She did not want to be held, not even by Bruh Abel, maybe especially not by him, not then when it seemed like it was all going wrong, inside and out. He laid his hands on her shoulders and she tried to shrug him away. She fought him to the rhythm of her pain, like the wrong was music and her fists beat the drums.

  The white man brought back with him a sweet smell so weighty she thought she’d be crushed by it. She tried to draw away. Bruh Abel wouldn’t let her and then her body wouldn’t let her. She could only lie there, gasping, as the white man laid a sheet, white as a cloud, over her mouth and nose, over her eyes completely. It was the softest thing she’d ever felt, that sheet, and he pressed it to her face and she figured he meant to kill her with it. Her eyes searched but all she saw was the white, and the scent it bore coiled down into her, and she knew it had to be true that something so sweet must mask something full evil. Surely beneath it there was brimstone. The white cloud scudded across Rue’s eyes, spread across her sky, disintegrated. In another place, another time, back when she was a child at play, she might have looked up into the wide-open sky and dreamed.

  * * *

  —

  In that memory place, the trees dripped down water, though Rue couldn’t remember the last time it had rained. The bed of grass beneath her was weighted with dew. It drenched her back, it greened her dress, but she didn’t mind because she was the mama. And Varina was the conjure woman.

  “Rue,” said the cheeky little redheaded child, “it’s time.”

  Varina was on her knees above her, smiling. Her hair was falling loose of the careful braid Ma Doe had put it in that morning, the red ribbon unspooling slow, without Varina even noticing.

  “Look here, Rue.”

  Varina held up a knife, something like a saw with jagged teeth, the sharpness of each tooth inconsistent with the next, as if it had been used to cut something irregular and never sharpened after. It was the wood handle that made Rue’s stomach buckle. It was varnished dark and looked strange in Varina’s hands, which were delicately covered in her lady lace gloves, so dainty her pink skin shone through the gaps of white. The knife’s wood varnish was dark, Rue knew, so the blood wouldn’t tell.

  “Won’t it hurt?”

  “This time, yes,” Varina conceded. The knife bit down. “But I know better’n anybody. These’ll harden so the next time and the next time it won’t hurt quite so bad.”

  “Ain’t gonna be no next time. This here’s my last.”

  Varina gave her a knowing smile.

  The cut was more a pressure than a pain, and Rue sat up a little to watch the flourishing of the pen in Varina’s hand. She held it delicately by its dark varnish hilt and wrote something Rue of course could not read. She recognized the V though, it was the one letter that Varina had ever taught her, over and over, again and again, in the dirt of their childhood.

  “Now,” Varina said when the cutting was done, “we got the same birthmark.” The baby inside of Rue was cradled in her flesh and blood. It drew up its arms through the wound propelled by instinct, its small fists grabbing already, climbing already, as though it were drawing itself up through the branches of a tree.

  Varina pulled the baby out of Rue’s belly. It was so small its body fit entirely on the length of her two hands. She sawed through the cord, back and forth with quick tree-felling motions. All the while the baby cried, and Rue felt she knew the sound so well it was as if she’d made it herself. Her Posy, finally come.

  Varina held out the little loving thing, and Rue brought her daughter to her chest.

  “I wanna show Bruh Abel what we done.”

  Varina looked over her shoulder into the woods. “He’s a-comin’. I hear him.” Rue heard nothing except for the crying of her own baby girl, a heaven-sent sound. How simple and strange it was, to ache and love at once.

  “What we gonna do with all of this?” Varina asked. She puzzled over the gash she’d made in Rue’s belly, the spew of her innards, the bag that had held her baby and the shriveling snakelike cord that had nourished it. Varina had her thumb in her mouth, sucked at the filigreed tip of her glove, heedless of the blood darkening the lace.

  Rue didn’t much care about what Varina meant to do. She wanted to touch her skin to Posy’s skin, how perfect and dark it was. She was secretly pleased that it was more like hers than Bruh Abel’s. If only he’d come along and see what they’d made.

  Varina drew the ribbon out from her hair, carefully pulling it through the more menacing snarls in her curls. When it was fully free she set to work stitching Rue closed with it, building an intricate series of knots end ov
er end through the loose pools of Rue’s skin. “There now,” Varina kept saying, pleased with herself. “There now.”

  Posy’s cries had quieted to a self-comforting whimper. She had big brown eyes that took an interest in Rue’s face. She knows me, Rue thrilled herself in thinking.

  “There now.”

  The drape of moth-eaten leaves parted like double doors and Rue, fool she was, expecting Bruh Abel and expecting him to be pleased, held up her Posy. Presented her. But it was the fox that came.

  “Varina?”

  Varina was too busy making her knots.

  “Not me,” Rue said. “Don’t be worryin’ about me. Help Posy.”

  The fox drew forward slow with the leisure of a predator. Hungry but not hungered. It trained its eyes on them. If she ran, it would run after. She could not run, she was still weak, she was laid open, she had her baby girl in her arms and Varina had tied her down with her wealth of red ribbon. Still she tried, Lord how she tried and tried, to run from this, to break free.

  Rue saw the bunching muscles of the fox’s hind legs, felt the coiling of time before the pounce. She waited ’til the very last moment to shut her eyes. She held Posy close as long as they would let her. And even when she could no longer feel her, she listened for her. As long as she could. She cradled her baby’s cry ’til the very end. Such lovely, lovely crying.

  WARTIME

  Varina’s pregnancy was a blight. She wished it gone. Had wished it gone for months and months before anyone had even noticed—her widening or her wishing.

  “How long this been goin’ on?”

  She could not name the precise moment she knew that it had happened, that it was happening. Only that after her daddy’s jubilee, every day her nightmares thickened, and her sleep thinned, and she woke one morning to find her mouth filling up with a volley of saliva like a flood so acrid and awful that she spat it out in her bare hands. Outside a cock crowed the morning into being and she, frantic, disentangled her legs from the covers that stuck to her like fetters, and there in the dipping valley in her mattress, between her legs, was a spot of red followed after by a darker, browner line, the whole stain fine and thin as a scripted point of exclamation. Her body heaved. She was sick onto herself and she called, high and shrill, for the housegirl Sarah, who did not come for long horrid minutes in which she shivered in the wet of her own vomit. Her body had betrayed her.