Conjure Women Page 32

  But Jonah was leaning toward Rue, straining across the table, coming so close she thought he meant to kiss her. He said in her ear, “Miss Rue. You know ain’t none of ’em mine.” She pulled away from him like he’d scorched her. Busied herself on the other side of the room pretending she was gathering up healing things. More so she was gathering up her wits. None of them children were his?

  Rue tried to figure the times that Jonah had traveled away, count up the years that Bruh Abel had been amongst their town, and came up empty. There was no way of knowing, was there, for Bruh Abel had come like a thief in the night and made a fool of them, and of Rue most of all for thinking that her trickery was the only trickery that mattered.

  “Cold hands,” Jonah murmured when Rue brought herself back to him. He was smiling even with his teeth gritted and there was a fond haziness to his eyes. Dark eyes, she reminded herself, dark as any she’d seen, true black African eyes. But Jonah’s eyes had never been as dark as Bean’s.

  She’d heated a knife ’til it glowed the hot red she liked. She undid Jonah’s belt without asking him, pulled it free of his belt loops in a fluid tug and handed it back to him, said, “Bite down.”

  He looked like a warhorse with a bridle. She surveyed the wound again on his leg, like a general taking in the land and how it lay. She eyed his pant leg and didn’t hesitate.

  “I’ll be needing to cut the fabric away.”

  He didn’t hesitate either. “Go ’head,” he said and he didn’t even remove the belt from his mouth but balanced it on his thick bottom lip. She began cutting the pants up their damaged seam.

  The weak chambray pants tore away easy, worn-down as they already were. Next were his drawers, and she pulled them off fast to get over the pain of where they stuck to him in stitches of dried-up blood. He didn’t even wince as she ripped them full open.

  Rue couldn’t help herself, she looked away. Had to. Because there in his lap she saw the real horror. The real wound.

  Jonah’s thighs bore the same dark skin as the rest of his body, but as they crawled higher there was the menacing singular black of old burnt skin. And the horrid snaking pink where the skin had broken clear open, like looking into tore-up earth. Above his thighs there was nothing but that black puckering made darker here and there by flashes of more horrific white boils, nothing at all there to make him a man but a few curling dark hairs that had somehow had the audacity to grow in the landscape of pink angry scar tissue, of the black cracking pattern not even worth calling skin and the strange empty nothing between his legs. He was a ruin. Jonah was ruined.

  “Apologies, Miss Rue,” Jonah said in that same soft, gentle way he’d sometimes say good morning or good afternoon or remark on the coolness of the day. “Only I thought you knew a’ it.”

  Questions bubbled up with bile. “When this happen?”

  “Years and years,” he said but he didn’t need to answer, she could tell that. Of course she knew what a fresh scar looked like and this, some distant part of her mind impressed, had healed long ago and healed quite nicely despite itself.

  She still held up the knife, high up like she meant to stab him with it if he moved too sudden, and the gruesome thought came to her mind that maybe she ought to, the poor wretched man, not a man at all, and then she recalled when she’d had a similar thought, held a similar weapon aloft. She’d thought to snip away the life of little Bean when first she’d discovered the horror of him wrapped up beneath the black veil. Jonah’s son. No, not Jonah’s son at all.

  “Miss Rue?”

  “Why would I know a’ it?” She put the knife down. “How could I?”

  “ ’Cause Miss May Belle knew.”

  Rue took up the whiskey and sipped it and then gave it to him. He shook his head no but she pressed.

  “Yo’ mama knew,” he qualified, like she’d forgotten who Miss May Belle was, and, well, maybe she had. Her mama been dead and gone over five years.

  Then it must have happened years back in slaverytime. And Bean was soon to turn six, had been born into freedom. Into peace.

  “How’d she know?”

  “Well, ’course she knew.” His eyes looked past her like he was trying to remember it. “Miss May Belle was the one that done it.”

  WARTIME

  May 1864

  I know the real story, Miss May Belle says.

  “The fox didn’t kill ’em chickens” is what I told Marse Charles, but he too fool to listen.

  “You don’t know a damned thing, May Belle,” he tells me.

  The slaughter of the chickens on the edge of Marse Charles’s property is the first crime of the promised war that I have seen with my own two eyes. A small bit of violence done by some scheming soldier-boys, picking at the edges of King Cotton.

  Marse’ll shrug it off as a nothing crime, blame it on a fox at best, or a colored at worst. He don’t know what I know.

  A wise mouth nibbles before it bites down whole. Ain’t the worst still yet to come?

  * * *

  —

  I only knew of them dead chickens because I went to see my man, to meet him behind the shed, to kiss his lips in secret.

  He got there before me, like he do. I seen him standing in the clearing and it made my belly do that wishful thing, that mournful tumble. I just about ran to him, ’cause walking wouldn’t’ve got me to him fast enough.

  “May.” He said my name when I got near, said it like it was a warning, and that’s when I knew there was something awful to know.

  First thing I did was look him over. Can’t help habit. Awful, in my mind, is always borne by the body. I was looking for a new lashing scar, a cut, a burn, a bruise. A loss. He caught on to what I was after and shook his head. Not the body then. The head?

  He took up my hand and pulled me over the whole way to the shed by the creek. We had to step out of the safe thick of the wood to cut through the clearing, and I felt like we were stark naked there, like anyone could see us and know what we were about. He stopped me at the door and pushed it open and so I looked in.

  I couldn’t see rightly ’til my eyes could catch up, but it didn’t matter—my nose got to it first. There’s no mistaking the smell of dead things, not when you’ve known it as often as I have, like a oft-worn cologne. When I could see right I put it together fast. There were all the chickens, and they’d been slaughtered. Splayed-out innards and feathers made all red. Their heads were gone. Their clutch of eggs had all been smashed, the fertilized and unfertilized alike so’s that the dead headless hens lay in a mess with all the possible outcomes of their purpose. Blood and yolk and blood and chicks not yet chicks, pink and small and all dead too.

  “Marse Charles’ll be sore,” I said first.

  My man shook his head. There was something I was not getting at quick enough, but he wasn’t going to say it for me. That’s his way. He don’t ever press a thing. He lead you where you need to go then let you make up your own mind, horse to water.

  “It’s a message,” I said, building up the thought as I spoke it. “Somebody got somethin’ to say and this is how they sayin’ it.”

  “More’n that.”

  “Yes, it’s a message and it’s punishment also.”

  We’ve heard tell of the abolitionist folks, Northerners who ain’t just angry for their own sake, but on behalf of colored folk. If not heard them straight out then heard echoes of theirs, reverberating. But they’d spoken for themselves now, here, and spoken right out loud.

  “More’n that too,” my man had to say. He was leading me away from the shed, but I still had my eye on it, and even when I couldn’t rightly see into it I still saw the no-sense slaughter behind the blink of my eye. That little meaningless massacre, them headless chickens, they had me shaken as much as any violence I’ve ever seen, and I seen just about every kind. Only what was the point of it?

&n
bsp; “Tell me plain.” In the shade of the trees I touched his face. He leaned his long body up against a tree and looked at me in his way, considering.

  “Them Northerner soldiers ain’t saints. They ain’t want nothin’ more than to be right. This their way of winnin’. They wanna make you hurt. Yo’ marse and li’l mistress and slavefolk too. They wanna make you go hungry.”

  I laughed, looked up at the fecund green of the wood, yonder, persimmon and mulberry and Chickasaw plum in blossom. The eucalyptus hanging down and tickling at the top of my man’s head. He swat at it like it was a bother.

  “We hardly livin’ on chicken offal alone out here,” I said. “Why you suddenly got so much hate for some Blues you ain’t even met?”

  He shook loose my searching hand. Is it so wrong that I was wanting him right there? Not even a stone’s throw away from the awful stink of death and I was still wanting him, wanting him more because of it. The whole length of his body was warm and alive, so broad and strong he was making the tree trunk behind him seem weak. As I snaked my arms around him, my fingers touched the wretched grouping of scars on his back. Can he even feel me there anymore? That I don’t know.

  “May.” He undid the knot of my hands. “Marse John takin’ me with him when he go to enlist. Said doin’ so will make me free.”

  Now something in me come loose. I sat myself down hard. I beat at the earth. I pulled up grass in rough fistfuls like there was some answer to be found buried underneath if only I could get at it. My man took me in his arms and shushed me with kisses come too late to be comfort.

  We sat together in the grass longer than we should have. We were watching the creek babble. That thin offshoot of the river was what divided Marse Charles’s land of plenty from Marse John’s small lot, and in the high heat of noon when everything was lazy, a smart slave might steal away for a quarter of an hour. That quarter hour was ours for lovemaking, but instead he let me weep softly and we let the chickens fester. He’d be wanted back there soon to take up his toil in the field. He’s Marse John’s favorite, a workhorse he call him.

  “When he joinin’ up?” I stirred up the strength to finally ask it. Marse Charles and Marse John had been jawing on it but we never thought they’d really go, old as they were. But the war’s been growing desperate, running low on bodies.

  “Soon” is all my man could give.

  I nodded, knowing neither of us was deserving of knowing what time we had left.

  “Marse John, he say the day we leave he will see rightly to give me my freedom.”

  “Marse John been danglin’ freedom so long, sayin’ it easy as passin’ wind to him.”

  “Stinks as bad too.”

  I had to laugh through my melancholy at the surprise of something so wicked coming from his careful mouth. But there’s a loyalty there, beneath the toil and the sweat and beneath the scars growing ever outward. My man ever as sweet as a kicked dog, returning and returning ’til that last kick kill him. Marse John is God to him, and how could he not be? I never seen the face of the Lord but I have seen a white master decide who suffers and who don’t. I’ve seen that every goddamn day.

  We could run. I thought of it while looking at the creek then, though I’ve thought of it so many times it’s as constant as a heartbeat. But we don’t. We never do. I thought of my girl and I can’t say what my man thought of that kept him from running, but I’m sure there’s something of that too.

  I done a cruel thing to him by having Rue, I know it. I could’ve stopped her coming, like I’d done before and done since, every time I feel a stirring in my stomach or a pausing to my courses. But that was some years ago and now I don’t have that worry. Now I’m a woman where nothing’s gonna grow, perhaps before my time, but who can say how many years I’ve got really? Enough.

  I can only say something came over me like loneliness and when I first felt my girl, when she was nothing to me but a corn seed, I knew her even then and a sudden thought come to me: I swear in the shape of my long dead mama, that he and I could die and leave nothing of our love. So I done it without asking. I let one baby grow warm in my belly. And now I can’t ever leave her.

  “I mean to have my freedom on paper.” My man’s promise cut off my thoughts. “And when I do,” he said, “I’ll come back and make you somethin’ you ain’t never been.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “A wife.”

  I’m struck altogether silent by the thought of that.

  When our time was done we both felt it in our bones. We retreated from each other, him going his way me going mine. No goodbye. Every word, all the time, might as well be goodbye.

  “Promise me somethin’?” I asked.

  My man nodded. He don’t even know what I’m fixing to say, but already he nodded.

  “Promise me if ever they let you get a musket in yo’ hand you shoot yo’ Marse John. That’s freedom.”

  I could deserve to die just for saying it. I expected my man to cuss at me for being so foolish. But he didn’t. He nodded just once, then he disappeared into the woods like he was part of it, so easy that even I couldn’t keep track of him.

  * * *

  —

  White folks won’t say they scared in our hearing but they show it in their actions. Marse Charles one day gets himself three new slaves just like that. We been as we were for so long I forget what it’s like to change. See, Marse Charles proud that he don’t need to buy new when he got me to make sure all his nigras putting out babies every season and that all his old black folks stay living and living and living whether they want to or not.

  The new souls come to me in a wagon from somewhere, fit with hay for easy cleaning and chains for binding. A woman, a girl, and a boy about to be a man, and I’m bid to look them over for sickness and for louse bites or for some reason why Marse Charles might be able to barter after the price of them even though the sale is already done, the goods delivered this one hot day with nary any word of the bodies to be added to the expanding plantation.

  The woman and girl are ordinary, two sisters, dark and heavy and good for the field. I take them inside, bid the boy to wait a spell. Up close they smell sweet, almost sickeningly so, and I guess rightly that their used-to-be master had them work at sugar kettles making molasses. I try to smile at them because I know they scared, and as I feel through their hair looking for nits I tell them to come to me if they find themselves bothered by a man, any man, if they need a remedy. Next I inspect the full of their bodies, my hands moving on Marse Charles’s behalf, seeking out defects, roaming gentle but persistent inside the slick wet of their low-down fear. The older one I can tell has the kind of chest that’s known a child, that’s grown engorged by wasted milk. I don’t ask her where the baby gone. They both clean and worth their price, and I’m glad at least they have one another, that rare threadbare gift you might pass off as benevolence.

  I send them on their ways. Their new home is a cabin of single women, three to a bed, and I don’t feel guilty that I don’t offer them a place in my own bed. I’ve earned the whole of my greed.

  Next the boy. The boy is near a man, and as men and boys often do he’s thinking how to look at me, mama or whore or both, and when I meet his eyes he holds on to my gaze a moment then looks down and that’s how it’s going to be between us. I cross to him and feel the strength of his arms. I do it not like a master but like a mama. Lifelong hunger’s done battle with years of hard work on his body, and I can tell he’s just escaped thin by growing into lean.

  “What they call you?”

  He don’t answer me at first and I think, Lord, don’t tell me he slow. But finally he look up and give me his name, and you can see the smart in his eyes. Nah, he ain’t slow. He too smart for his own good, and I don’t have to wonder too long what Marse Charles was thinking when he brought this young cock to our hen house. I only have to think—why now?
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  “Y’all come from the same place?”

  “Yes’m. We from Marse Avis Payne’s place,” he say. “Out west a ways. ’Bout five days’ ride it took us.”

  He was paying attention then. And he know his directions.

  “How’d Marse Charles come to get you?”

  “Marse Payne dead in the war. We parcel of a forfeiture.”

  A good deal then. Marse Charles lucky, always has been, rubbing on me for luck.

  I ask the boy, “You got people back there?”

  Now he’s turning his face back into that fool-stone and I suppose I can’t blame him for it. He don’t know me; far as he’s concerned I could be the master’s right hand. I hope fiercely that I ain’t.

  “Mama?” It’s my girl at the door.

  When my girl come in I have it figured all out, just from her look. This boy was bought for breeding. See, she’s eyeing him like she someone who ain’t never tasted food and he’s the dish being brought into a feast. But my girl is shy and given over to thinking on things too hard. That child is so like her daddy and she don’t even know it.

  “Rue-baby,” I say to her. “This Jonah.”

  * * *

  —

  After I sent Jonah on his way to the men’s cabin Rue takes me aside and says to me that thing that all mamas long to hear and horror after, too: “Mama, I need yo’ help.”

  I done forgot the way to the old white folks’ church. I ain’t been there in so long and the last time I was took there it was through nightfall and I was being dragged, clawing and grasping at the root of trees as I went. I don’t wanna go out that way, not at all, but Rue says there’s something I need to see, something she can’t speak aloud no how, so I bundle up my fear like a sack of spikes and sling it over my shoulder and follow her through them miles.