tossed them over her shoulder not caring where the stems and leaves and heads landed or who they hit, not caring when one landed smack in Bruh Abel’s face—he’d come to join her kneeling on the ground. Once the casket was cleared of its bouquet she could feel for the little boy’s neck and yes, there, there was the slow but steady streaming thrum she’d been looking for. In the red oak casket below Bean opened wide his black eyes and looked around, blinking away the dust of death.
* * *
—
Bruh Abel said, “I told ’em all it was a miracle.”
Rue nodded. “It was.”
They were walking from Jonah and Sarah’s cabin where everybody had gathered at that sitting-up that ended like none they’d ever seen before. Rue had been the one to pluck Bean wholly from his casket. When she’d buried her face into his good clean skin, he’d wriggled in her hug and said that he was very hungry. He had fallen asleep again a few moments later, clutching a heel of bread someone had fetched. It bore only a few tiny nibbles when he fell into a doze, but his sleep was light, his breathing even. He fussed when Rue handed him over to Sarah but he did not wake again as he was carried off to the bed, safely draped on his mama’s shoulder. Even then folks had tried to follow after him, an unsure parade, ’til Jonah had intervened, thanked them and shooed them all from his home.
“Bean,” he said, “he need his rest.” It was a funny thing to say after all that time he’d spent sleeping.
No one else slept. The town was alit with curiosity, and they just about hummed with questions they couldn’t give voice to other than to say how good was God and hallelujah.
How long, Rue wondered, ’til they’d get their minds around to asking other things? Eventually they’d have to close the other boys’ coffins over their still faces. Those boys hadn’t woken, hadn’t stirred, and with morning approaching no one had moved to put them in the ground. No one could say the words.
Going through the quarter, Rue and Bruh Abel let others linger behind or go ahead of them so that they walked side by side now as if by chance.
“Is it a miracle?” Bruh Abel asked. It was the first time she’d ever heard his voice ring with doubt, and she found she didn’t like it.
“I wished it,” she answered.
The lines on his forehead wrinkled at that.
“I prayed,” she said instead.
“We ought to look after him,” Bruh Abel said, and Rue could see his mind grinding down each thought. “Ain’t Bean goin’ to need us more now?”
“He got us,” Rue said. She found she ached inside for leaving Bean with Jonah and Sarah. They never had known what to make of him. Would know even less now that he was “a miracle.”
Bruh Abel was following her, she realized after a time, or else letting himself be led straight to her home at the far end of the town, past where all the good folks lived, close and huddled together.
“Come on in,” she said at her door. “We can talk on it.” The memory of Bean’s black eyes opening up and seeking hers.
Inside they did not talk at all but stood facing each other. Bruh Abel hovered near the shut door like he was trying to build up a good reason to run through it. Rue stood tensed with her hip hitched up on her table, feeling she’d fall without the aid of something solid.
Bruh Abel chuckled at some joke that didn’t need speaking and then his laughter grew and Rue joined him in laughing, shook her head like it might loose the shock. It didn’t.
The laughing made her belly hurt. Rue crossed the room to Bruh Abel, tired of their being on separate ends of the same thing.
It was some strange affirmation from somewhere that flooded through her mind then. Want, it said, and you shall receive. She put her hands on the sides of Bruh Abel’s face because