boy, arranged the flowers in a neat wreath around the head of that boy’s casket, and started in on the third. There was always something more to do, and had that not been what she’d wanted? To be needed just like this?
* * *
—
By the time the wake came, Rue was already a full day sleepless. Sitting up with the dead had always brought haints to the back of her tired eyes. She’d not seen so many bodies buried as others had on the plantation during slavery times. She was young then, and those last years before the war had been a relatively robust time if not an easy one. Black folks young and old still died, sure, died in numbers—of overwork and over-tiring, of having lived too old or having been born too young, of hunger or fever, of sorrow or neglect, but just as many new healthy babies were being born at Marse Charles’s behest, and if there was birthing happening or liable to happen, it was that vigil Rue and her mama were tasked to keep. Naught to do for dead bodies once they’d been cleaned, no promise there and no profit made on mourning.
Still, Rue knew how a sitting-up went as well as anyone, and she had always liked those nights in a sad kind of way for the simple honesty of them, just singing and wailing and reflecting in long stretches of impenetrable quiet ’til it was time to lay the body, and the saved up sorrow, to a final rest.
But this day it seemed none of them could raise the exuberance that had harbored them in tragedy so many times before. Their sitting-up was no sitting-up at all but a march of stations, the crowd moving in a stunned roulette amongst the three houses to look in at a child for a spell and then to move on to the next with promises to come back round in an hour or so. They passed each other in the square, mourners with solemn candles, crisscrossing their lights to keen at one another’s doorstep.
What singing there was came low and listless. It was orphan Sarah who’d been the loudest, strongest singer amongst them in all the time that Rue had been alive, as though the girl could be possessed by the full-limbed spirit of grief on the behalf of others. But now that little girl was a grown woman, and a mama besides, and she sat black-veiled with both her two living children in her lap, perched at the far end of the mismatched chairs they’d hastily assembled in the front room of her home. Sarah kept that single vigil for Bean, not singing or weeping or anything but just struck still, same as her dead son, there in his open coffin. Any tune her visitors took up, even those songs laden with love for the Lord and his wisdom, seemed to taper off into thin scraps of nothing without Sarah’s voice.
A fine red oak casket held Bean, the brass handles of which winked yellow in the low candlelight. He wore a little white calico sleep gown, the ends sewn up like a sack. His head was lofted on a white pillow, and all around him was a hedgerow growth of flowers as though he were a doll someone had left out in the yard for weeds to grow up and around.
Folks came and went as the night darkened, but after one respectful circuit Rue stayed with Bean. The men, Rue noticed, came the latest, stayed as long as they were able, which was not long at all. It reminded Rue of the birthing rooms, the anxious daddies with no stomach for the pushing or the hollering or the waiting on the water to boil.
They’d come back to carry the casket, she knew, just as they’d show up when the babies were born, washed, and snipped.
Rue had always been quietly proud of her own endurance for suffering. Being surrounded by the mamas’ grief-stained faces seemed to her to be the first in a receiving line of self-inflicted punishments she might bestow upon herself.
* * *
—
Bruh Abel came along to Bean’s wake round midnight with some of the other men. Bean’s daddy, Jonah, was mute amongst