Conjure Women Page 6

  Didn’t the man ever sleep? For he looked always ready to come amongst them. Rue squinted to see which house he had come from, where he had been fed and bedded for the night. There was always some or another of the womenfolk after having him stay with her family, taste this and that bit of cooking.

  “The bell,” folks were telling him now. “Ain’t heard it ring in an age.”

  It had rung harshly only once and then again weakly like somebody, or something, had only the strength or the daring to ring it but the one time and no strength to stop the clapper from coming round the second time and giving out one more hollow knell.

  Bruh Abel looked at Rue. His expression was one of benevolent amusement, like he’d figured out the lesson but was ready to let them struggle over learning it.

  “What y’all think that clanging was, Sister Rue? You know this here town better’n I.”

  Rue kept her face hard. “There’s an old fall-down church way out what used to belong to our marse.”

  “Is that right?” Bruh Abel said. “Maybe I oughta take up preachin’ there?”

  “You wouldn’t want to,” Rue said in a rush. “The ol’ church just about come to its collapse durin’ the war. More like than not that sound we heard was the old bell fallin’ over, breathin’ its last.”

  “Just as well,” Bruh Abel said. Did he wink or was it a sparkle of starlight? “Me myself, I prefer to pray with nothin’ but sky between me and the Almighty.”

  He shepherded the townsfolk over to their homes, easing their worries. Rue didn’t follow after but kept her sights on the east horizon where she knew the white church stood just as strong and sure as it ever had. She feared the ringing would sound again. But all was as silent as silent got.

  * * *

  —

  When all the good folks of the world were sleeping, Rue crept out of her cabin. She had not been out in the woods for some days. She’d stayed away too long. Now she felt she’d grown arrogant in things kept hidden, grown too proud and sure. Bruh Abel’s coming had stoked a fear in her. Ma Doe’s warning about secrets clanged. She had let him catch wind a’ her alright. But she wouldn’t allow him to discover the precious thing she kept hid.

  She had feared she’d become lax on her sojourns, forgot to make certain that no one saw her coming and no one saw her going when she made these clandestine trips of miles to the old white folks’ church with a brimming basket of secret provisions in tow.

  In slaverytime, the black folks had been taken to that church like a marching army, driven there by their Missus especially, who seemed to think on it as her Lord-ordained duty to save her black folks’ souls on the one day a week her husband wasn’t breaking their bodies.

  There was a rectory there meant to house a minister Marse Charles had never been able to entice to stay, no sir, not out there in the heat and the solitude of their vast land, not amongst his slaves, who outnumbered his white family something like one hundred to one. Marse Charles had ousted all his white neighbors over time, bought up their land, and made himself an island in the center of a wilderness sea so impenetrable few would brave it, even, or especially, a man of God. Marse Charles hadn’t cared much for religion anyhow except to pay a minister every now and then to make the trip out of a Sunday to say, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling,” and then be gone again. Eventually, the South had fallen in surrender and all those white folks were busied with a different manner of praying.

  Now Rue’s lone penance was an irregular one, and it had naught to do with God. But times like these when the townsfolk got to gossiping, when an unrest settled around Rue skin-close as clinging vine, she had to go and look at the church, even if she couldn’t always bring herself to go all the way inside. It was enough to know that the woods and the church were undisturbed, the double doors still shut like she’d left them last. Rue would set down the burden of her basket, stand on the steps, and breathe in the still of the wood and know that all was calm and right, and then she would journey back to the town.

  It was Ol’ Joel who caught Rue this night as she made her way back home. He grabbed her at the last half mile where the trees grouped so thick that even the river lost its way. He seized her by the arm and squeezed, his grip surprisingly sure. He squinted at her as the crickets chirped their alarm. There was a sour smell about him stronger than his usual rotgut stink.

  She took in his shriveled frame, the way his body seemed to tremor with impatience beneath his nightclothes, a thin shirt with the buttons mismatched in their holes. And he was leaning again, on that old lacquer cane. Had the river brought it back? Spat it up like something distasteful? Or had the whole scene been bunkum, with Bruh Abel brandishing a smartly painted stick?

  Rue loosed herself from Ol’ Joel’s hold.

  “Miss May Belle, where you think you comin’ from at this hour?”

  “It’s Rue,” she corrected.

  Ol’ Joel waved that fact away. “You best stay clear a’ patrolmen. It’s after curfew.”

  “No, suh.” Rue spoke in slow, gentle rolls like she was calming a spooked horse. “Ain’t no curfew no more. Remember? Ain’t no slavery no more. War’s been over and we been freed.”

  Ol’ Joel scratched at his hair, a meager snowcap that looked alarmingly bright next to his blue-black skin. He was old, folks said, so old he dreamed of Africa, woke some nights and thought that he was there again. Was this one of them nights? Rue took him by the elbow and tried to guide him home with her. In the morning he’d be back to himself, sharp-minded as a laid trap and just as likely to bite. But the sun would dip low again and so would his senses. It was a madness that reminded Rue so much of her mama’s final demise that she could hardly wait to be away from him.

  “I know what you been doin’, May Belle. Don’t you deny it.”

  Rue patted his elbow and sighed. “Been doin’?”

  “I seen you with her.”

  “With who?”

  “That haint in the woods.”

  Rue halted at the gravel road, stopped at the head of the cross that started the old slave quarters that were slave quarters no more. She could turn around now. No one would have seen her with him. She could lead the old fool back into the tangle of woods. Turn him round ’til he worked himself lost. She could make the trees swallow him up if she needed to.

  “Ain’t no haint in no woods,” Rue spat.

  “I seen you with her.” Ol’ Joel tried to free his arm from the crook of her elbow. She wouldn’t let him. She had a hold of him and he was curling in on himself, his lips flapping, his voice rising near to a holler. “I seen you walkin’ through the trees with her, visiting her, whispering with her. I seen you summoning her. The haint. The ghost.”

  “Stop that. You ain’t talkin’ sense.” Or he was talking too much sense for her to stomach.

  “You a witch, same like yo’ mama was,” he said, and Rue did not know if he was accusing her mama or her grandmama. He’d got his generations, his healing women, all tangled.

  “Y’all alright? I heard hollerin’.”

  Rue was more relieved to see Jonah then than she could say. He came up the path to them quickly, threw her a knowing look as he steadied Ol’ Joel. Jonah’s broad, sure frame towered over Rue and the sunken old man both.

  “Marse Charles’ll hear of it,” Ol’ Joel kept on. “Just you wait, now, Marse Charles’ll see to ya.”

  Rue looked to Jonah but it seemed neither of them would correct Ol’ Joel, would tell him that Marse Charles was long dead. If Ol’ Joel could not recollect his own liberation then he was locked in a different kind of hell from which there was no emancipation. Rue would pity him if he hadn’t made her so afraid with his accusations.

  “I’ll take him home, Miss Rue,” Jonah said. “Thank you fo’ findin’ him.”

  Rue nodded, tried to come up with more, some easy e
xplanation should Jonah ask just how Rue had found him so far from her own home, so very late at night. But Jonah was preoccupied with the care of Ol’ Joel, who struggled against him too—whose hoarse voice took up a cry again: “She turnt yo’ baby evil, Jonah. He a devil, ain’t no flesh a’ yours. She made him in the woods from river water, from clay. I seen her.”

  Bean. He was speaking on Bean.

  “I seen her.”

  But Jonah shushed him, led him away, and still the old man raved ’til he got so far out of earshot that Rue couldn’t make out what he was muttering, couldn’t account for which things were lies and which things were truths so that all of it began to feel, not like words, but like a danger rising up all around her.

  SLAVERYTIME

  May 1861

  Miss May Belle says: Marse Charles comes to me talking about War.

  He don’t knock. He walks straight into my cabin in the very middle of the day, something he ain’t ever hardly do no more. I’m warned of his coming before I even see him ’cause outside the slave quarter goes allover hush except for the trumpeted-up sounds of slaves attending to hard work. The repeated greeting comes out like blackstrap molasses, bitter as it is sweet, “Good afternoon, Marse Charles,” and it ripples all the way to my doorstep. But the wave of fawning gives me time to sugar up my countenance so I’m smiling like I ain’t got a thing to hide when my marse comes charging into my cabin.

  He sits hisself right down in the center of my bed, says, “It’s to be war, May Belle. Do you know what that means?”

  I ain’t say nothing, ain’t know what to say. I’m sweating. It’s one of them blazes-hot days that drag long, never-ending, what with tending to my work round the plantation. The sick and the soul tired, the overworked and the underfed. War, my marse is saying, and nervous sweat drips down my spine like lazy sap off a sycamore. Is he asking if I know the meaning of the word?

  “Where’s that girl a’ yours?” Marse Charles looks round my little home like the cramp of it displeases him. I smile so that he keeps his eyes on me instead of picking out anything that might be amiss. But I don’t like him asking after Rue and I know I can’t answer the truth, which is that my Rue’s like as not off mischiefing with Varina, his white daughter.

  “Rue ain’t here, suh,” I tell him. “I sent her to look over Homer.”

  “Who?”

  “Field hand what fell over in the heat yesterday.”

  “He malingerin’?”

  “No, suh,” I say. “Homer done fell over onto his threshin’ knife.”

  Marse Charles grunts. “You teachin’ yo’ girl yo’ knowledge?”

  “Sure am,” I say, and that much is the truth. Ain’t that the deal I have with my marse? He keeps my child in his ownership and I make her worth the owning. Marse Charles has far sights. Already he’s thinking when I’m dead and gone he’d like to have another healing woman trained up. I can’t fault him that, or fault Rue neither. Ain’t every woman’s daughter made from the death of the mama, somehow or another?

  “War,” Marse Charles mutters.

  So we back on that? I shift from foot to foot impatient to have him outta here but not fool enough to let him know it. I do not wish Rue to be witness to this visit. My child may be knowledged in healing, but she don’t know nothing of the ills of the world, and I intend to keep it that way long as I’m alive and able.

  Marse Charles unbuttons his shirtsleeves at the wrists, rolls the cuffs up; he’s mad enough to near rip the good fabric.

  “This bastard Lincoln, he’s took the reins and now he’s smartin’ at the loss of us Southern states,” he says. “As well he might, seein’ as we make all a’ America’s worth on our goddamned backs. Now we Southerners are seein’ our own way, son of a bitch won’t let us go free.”

  Marse Charles leans his big body back. My thin mattress in its creaky wood frame shifts noisily beneath him. He works at the worn leather of his belt, struggles to reach the buckle under the paunch of his belly. When we was both of us young and his stake was new, Marse Charles was lean, strong. Ambitious. Now he’s the most prosperous landowner for miles and miles. His fields spread; his body do too.

  “It’s an ungodly business, Belle. I’ve just had a letter from an associate who witnessed the siege. He’s thinkin’ on sellin’ his slaves all away. Better that, he’s sayin’, than the Northern hounds descendin’ to take his property away by brute force. Cussed coward.” Marse Charles punches his meaty fist into his empty hand. “I sure ain’t of the same mind.”

  I’m glad to hear it. Every soul sold away feels to me like flayed skin ripped off the flesh. I keep my face peaceable.

  “But if it is to be war,” Marse Charles goes on, “changes gotta be made round here.”

  “How you mean, suh?” I don’t much care at all about his gossip of war. Ain’t I fighting little battles every day just keepin’ his slaves alive on his behalf?

  But I gotta keep talking. Keep his attention on me and no place else.

  “You let me know who ain’t pullin’ his weight, May Belle. If there’s a hunkerin’ down to be done, that’ll be where I start sellin’, you hear?”

  “Yes, suh,” I say. It’s a sick power, but it’s a power, ain’t it? Who stays? Who goes? Keep his eyes on me.

  Now that Marse Charles has mastered his belt buckle, he shucks off his pants. Leaves them to fall in the shape of him on my floor.

  “Come here, May Belle,” he say.

  I kneel between his legs, keep my eyes on him, only on him. Can he tell I’m afraid? Scent my fear?

  He partway lowers his drawers, just enough so that they choke at his thighs, and I can’t say if the flush that flames his cheek is from bashfulness or exertion. Or shame.

  Two weeks back a canker bloomed up like fire, red and angry, on the tip of his prick. Now it’s given over to a blotchy red rash, like I told him it would. Marse Charles come to me too late with the symptoms of this sickness to nip it early. He delayed over the choice: me or the white doctor a county over. But the white doctor’s a relation of Missus’s. And Marse Charles told me that he could not live with the guilt if his wife was to hear of his ailment. More like, he can’t live with her exiling him from her bed once and for all.

  “The rash is clearin’ up some,” I tell him, and it is too. It ain’t too proud to say the truth. I do good work.

  “I’ve heard passin’ talk ’bout the mercury cure,” Marse Charles says. “Men say after a few rounds, this dang sickness gets all the way cleared.”

  I suck wind through my teeth. “Sure, suh. Can’t be sick if the cure done killed you.”

  He chuckles, rubs my head like I’m his best dog. I help to get him back into his pants so he don’t go bending over. Eyes on me. Only on me.

  “You stay takin’ the rabbit root,” I tell him. I’ve got his cure ground down to a fine powder and always at the ready, thank the Lord, so it’s enough to give him a pouch with one hand and guide him out the door with the other.

  “Y’all will keep all I’ve said to yo’self, Belle?” He says it to me sweetly, as if I’m a good friend doing him an easy favor, instead of a bit of good property without even the right to say no when it comes to touching his pockmarked pricker.

  “ ’Course I’ll keep it hush,” I say, and it’s a lie. There’s a number of his favorite house girls that I’ve already warned after. Little use a warning is. I keep the rabbit root at the ready for them also.

  But it ain’t his sores he’s speaking on.

  “No sense worryin’ the lot of ’em with talk a’ battles and warrin’.” Marse Charles inclines his head in the general direction of his fields, like to encompass the whole of his three-hundred-odd slaves. “They’ll be afeared over nothin’, get wrong ideas in their heads. They can’t understand, they’re like children. Not you though, Belle,” he says fondly. “You about the smartest nig
ra I ever did meet.”

  He bangs out of my cabin, satisfied. I stand alone, shaking for long minutes, ’til I’m sure he ain’t comin’ back.

  “He gone,” I say at the bed. “You can come on out now.”

  My man slides his body out from beneath the wooden bed frame in slow inches ’til he’s all the way clear. I try to help him up, but he refuses my hand. It’s afternoon and he’s meant to be in his own marse’s field, working to death and whistling with the glee of it. And I’ve kept him too long already. But at least I kept him safe.

  “You hear what my marse say?” I try to put some cheer to it. “War. The Northern hounds is comin’ for the Southern foxes.”

  My man shrugs off dirt and dust, says, “Iff’n the hounds do come, May, you best be sure you ain’t turnt to a fox yo’self by then.”

  “What’s that s’posed to mean?” I bark. But I know exactly what he means. He’s told me and told me, my man has, that he won’t abide my spying on Marse Charles’s behalf. But how else am I to keep the things I love protected? I reach out to kiss him, but he slams out the door too, albeit a sight quieter than Marse Charles just done.

  Now I’m truly alone, but I don’t suffer for it. My Rue-baby’ll be back any minute now. Safe. Near me another day. Marse Charles won’t cross me. And that makes anything I see or say or sell well worth the loss.

  You can lose a hundred battles, ’long as you stay winning the war.

  FREEDOMTIME

  Rue saw Bruh Abel for what he was, a thief in the night. The thing he meant to use to snare folks was Black-Eyed Bean, the child that many had begun to whisper was the herald of some dark despair. Bruh Abel promised to baptize Bean before everybody and in the eyes of the Lord. To save him. A spectacle.

  The baptism would mark the culmination of Bruh Abel’s seasonal appearance in the town, and amongst folks it held a rising anticipation like the peak festivity of a fervent holiday. It was all anybody wanted to talk about. The baptism of Black-Eyed Bean. The day he would be washed clean. Saved.