“Quit that,” she said in the midst of her sleep. She was trying to stay angry at him.
“Can’t,” he said. He was cupping her breasts now in his hands like water he was bringing to his mouth to drink. “These gon’ heavy. Like to break yo’ back.”
She hadn’t quite noticed that. She hadn’t been letting herself notice a lot of things. But there it was: the tightening of the click-clack beads Miss May Belle had taught her to wear, and just earlier that white woman’s telling grin. Rue’s brimming senses, her full breasts teeming with promise, spreading longways and sideways across her chest, her body making ready, making room.
Rue pulled Bruh Abel’s head away from her flesh-full nipples.
“That ain’t for you no more.”
“What?”
“Them is for the baby now.”
She watched for what seemed like hours but was only one small moment as Bruh Abel caught on to her meaning, his gray eyes going just the littlest bit wide, his lips parting in wonderment. And then the whole of his face brightened with revelation, with delight, and only then was it real, because it was real for him, the whole idea, a quickening of her heart.
“You sure?”
She laughed. “I make my name on being sure when a woman’s got with child.”
“Yeah, you do, but it’s different when it’s you, ain’t it?”
“Lord.” It was so different.
He pulled away from her, drawing back his weight, suddenly careful. He inspected her naked body now like he’d never seen a woman before in the whole of his life. It was sort of wonderful, even just to shock him, to make Bruh Abel, of all people, care-filled and new.
* * *
—
On Friday, early morning, the white woman came back, and Rue had to see to her, like it or not. She had the vial ready, one of Bruh Abel’s empty jars, cork stopped on whiskey and water. The white woman had made herself at home again.
“I done made you three cures,” Rue told her.
Her baby looked well, Rue had to admit. He was smallish, but boys she’d found were often smallish ’til they all of a sudden grew into men. She hoped she herself would have a girl.
Rue didn’t know what she would say, even as she cast a handful of emptied walnut shells across the open floor, shells upon which the white woman was singularly transfixed, believing without even being told that those cast shells had the power of divination simply because they’d been cast by Rue’s black hand in the close mystical quarters of a fall-down plantation house in the woods.
Next Rue brought out the necklace she’d made. It was a simple bleach-boiled bone wrapped in rough twine. The white woman tied it around her neck quick and eager. The little hooking bone sat primly on the top of her low-slung cleavage, the twine already irritating her neck, splotches of red forming.
“What is it?”
Rue struggled. “It a coon’s penis, Missus.”
The white woman nodded reverently, her baby cooed. “What it for?”
“Keep yo’ husband virile.”
“?’Course.”
Lastly Rue handed her the vial, held out her hand, and waited for payment. It came, one silver coin in her palm, that simple.
“It’ll work?”
“It’ll work,” Rue lied. “This one won’t be took from you.”
The white woman showed again her habit, bending over and kissing on her baby’s head, breathing that scalp in greedily, like that was where all the air in the world was coming from.
“Thank you, Miss Conjure,” the white woman said. Rue did not correct her.
* * *
—
When the woman had gone Rue went walking, past the crowds, past the tent poles, past the graveyard and the creek. The knot on the tree faced north, that was how she always found it, occluded as it was by a thick matting of moss. Making sure that no one had followed, she slipped her two coins—one coin from the easy work she’d done, the other spirited out of Bean’s