the dead babies back. It would not bring Bean back.
They had chosen just three boys to serve as the symbols for all the other babies they’d lost since the sickness took hold. “The Ravaging” they called it amongst themselves, as though the illness was a swarm of locusts, a collective doom fallen on a mutual harvest, a force so great it could not be attributed to one man, or one woman neither. Give Him the glory, Rue thought darkly as she gathered death’s flowers. She was careful what ones she picked, steering wholly clear of the type that grew in the graveyard, particularly wary of the pot marigolds that grew thick as head hair around her mama’s stone. She didn’t wish to call up the spirit of Miss May Belle, not on this occasion, as she made to decorate Bean’s small body with no more special favor than she paid the other two child bodies she had been charged with. Preparing them in her cabin, she set Bean out as the one on the far left instead of the one in the center for that same reason; he was not a Christ, just some third criminal hung on a lesser cross.
Rue wept. Hard and heavy ’til she thought her body would be wrung completely dry of all its water. She was glad folks had let her alone in her work preparing the bodies so she could afford the right to cry. She was glad especially that Bruh Abel was scarce. If he suspected that she had made him her vessel, he did not show it. He did not slow down, but moved from house to house, ministering to folks, praying.
What did Bruh Abel ask for, Rue wondered, when he talked to that God of his? And did He ever give a good answer back?
Bean’s body was small and waxen and fully white. With his eyes closed he was just as harmless as any child could be in sleep. His russet hair grew in tight at the root of his head, but the longer locks weighed themselves down into fine loose ringlets. Rue cut them neat and short with the thought that she’d give a piece to Sarah. But she wouldn’t, for Sarah could not be trusted to weep on it as well as Rue would. No, Rue would keep the lock for herself, in the depths of her pockets.
Set in the corner was her small metal tub and she tugged it out to the center of the room in three sharp pulls, the bottom scraping at her floor in sickening squeals. When she lifted him Bean was light. She set him down inside the empty tub like a baby into a crib.
She covered him waist to knees with a washcloth but she left his face clear, didn’t mask him as she sometimes did with bodies she feared might stare back at her. No, she wanted to look on him, to look upon what she had done.
She poured cold water from out of clay pots, cascaded it over the still planes of his body. First the right then the left. He’d once screamed when water touched him. It’d woken him once before. She turned him slightly to clean along his legs, his behind. Rue’s hands shook through the whole of the scrubbing.
She added camphor to the water. The deliberate perfume, that flavor of hidden death, left her choking. She had to stop and gasp in acrid breaths that made her weak, cracked inhales that cut straight through her. She was sick in her guilt. There was a sharp pain in the bottom of her stomach that grew and had her suddenly bent double, spitting up yellow-tinged sorrow right there on the floor. She thought of how her mama had used to rub her back when she was a sick child, a strange rhythmic motion she didn’t know the point of. Rue felt it then in the small of her back, that up-and-down love rubbing, even though she was alone with only the dead for companions.
“Bean?” His hands hung limp from the tub.
Rue stood. She wiped at her mouth and her eyes. Dried Bean’s body and drew him up again in her arms. She finished all the preparations, washed the body of the middle