coloring, the orange-brown coils of her thick hair, and the fleshy fullness of her lips, the top slightly plumper than the bottom in them both. My babies, Rue’s mama would have called them. She’d called all the children hers. Rue couldn’t see them that way. When they were born, she handed the babies over to their mamas and she handed them over quick. Rue wanted no babies.
Sarah picked up Bean from the tub with a splash of bathwater. Curled up against his mama’s chest, perhaps soothed by having his head near her beating heart, Bean quieted.
“He’s surely different. But we all come different,” Rue said. “Ain’t no accountin’ for why we is the way we is.”
“That’s for God to know,” Jonah supplied, but Sarah wore a scowl, like Rue ought to know as well as God did what the matter was with Bean. The skin of his legs bore the faint blue interlocking pattern that was like the scales on the back of a creeping serpent, and from his warm, wet body, steam still rose in coils.
“Awful sorry to call for you in the middle a’ the night, Miss Rue,” Jonah said.
But it had been Bean that had called for her. Hadn’t she been pulled here by his strange cry?
Rue made her goodbyes, walked herself to the door. Stepping out, she fixed her face purposeful-like, ready to meet the waiting crowd, but there was no crowd now, only the dusty road and the moon that had found its way to shining. She felt unsettled in the bottom of her stomach where there began to be a small ache: fear.
She’d already started back for her own cabin when a hard grasp on her shoulder made her spin, but it was only Sarah waiting behind her, her arms free of children, her head now bare.
“Miss Rue, I got somethin’ to ask a’ you,” Sarah said.
She looked unearthly tired. The front of her thin linen nightdress was dark with wet from where she’d held Bean firm to her chest. Through the damp spot, Rue could make out the shadows of Sarah’s heavy breasts, still weighted, a year out, with milk.
“Only I was wonderin’,” Sarah spoke soft. “If you had somethin’ I could use. To keep myself, I mean, to keep from havin’ anotha conception. Secret-like.”
Rue knew secrets. She knew many a secret stretched out amongst the folks of that little town, some shameful, some devastating, some just too sad to shape into words. Rue kept them all and kept them well and so folks kept giving them to her, their secrets. And never mind that she knew she had some of her own to keep.
“You come and see me tomorrow mornin’,” Rue said, “and I’ll have what you needin’ at hand.”
Sarah nodded and turned back to her door, in no hurry to return, it seemed, to what waited for her there. Rue watched her go, watched her slip into her home, haint-silent, like a ghost, and Rue could have gone on and done the same, but there was no man waiting on her and no crying child, or two, or three. So instead, by instinct, she turned the other way, the way of the wilderness, and started walking.
Rue knew that wide road made of dust better than any road in the world. She had walked it so many times she half-expected to see her own footsteps coming and going as she passed, from the slave quarters that were now their cabins, to the field that was now scorched land, to Marse Charles’s grand old plantation House, which was now in the final stage of its ruination, and yonder, to the old white church.
The pillar was how she knew she’d reached what was left of the House. Part of the column still stood, as it had stood with its twin years ago, in a stately portico announcing the door to Marse Charles’s mighty entranceway. Despite the ash, the pillar was nearly still white, and Rue stopped there as though knocking at the door of an old friend.
The foundation of the House remained enough to mark the ghost of the burned-down rooms and little more. In the very center