Bruh Abel kissed Rue’s hand and took himself out. She could see in the set of his retreating shoulders that he was already re-forming himself, shape-shifting back into the preacher returning to his tent to talk of a miracle. “Let us pray for Sister Sarah,” Rue could already hear him saying.
“You pregnant,” Sarah said.
Her warm brown eyes looked on Rue, sharper than they had cause to be. Womenfolk to womenfolk indeed. Rue laid her hand on the slight stretch beneath her own oversized dress.
“Folks talkin’,” Sarah explained.
“They always do.” She sat herself down on the edge of Sarah’s bed, her legs already aching. “I ain’t even as far along as you is. How come you ain’t say nothin’?”
“How come you ain’t?”
They were both of them just passing through that strange twilight where the new feeling stirring in their bodies was pushing past simple sickness and weakness and aches and pains into being a real idea, a person, a possibility. But to say so aloud seemed over-proud, like fate itself might wend in, overhear, and intervene.
Sarah sighed. “You’d think I’d know by now, how to go about bein’ with child. It don’t get no easier.”
“You just havin’ a rough go is all. Some babies is just more difficult than others. You take it slow, like I say, you be alright.”
“You too,” Sarah said, easy. “Think ours will come at round the same season. Like twins. What you think?”
“That’d be nice.” Rue almost meant it too.
* * *
—
Bean had disappeared again. They’d forgotten him in the confusion and by the time Rue got herself back to the tent no one could say where the little wonder had got to, only that he’d vanished. Into thin air, they were saying. Like he Raptured.
“Now, now.” Even Bruh Abel wouldn’t allow that type of gossip to start up. “Most likely the boy just wander off.”
“He upset about his mama,” Rue said, though she didn’t think that was altogether true. She had the notion Sarah and Bean would never warm to each other, as mama and son ought to. Rue recalled what Sarah had told her the night of Bean’s short death: He don’t belong to me.
To whom did he belong then? They got up a search party. Folks went through cabins, looked in outhouses and amongst the tall, prosperous wheat in the field, but Rue went straight into the thick of the black woods, not knowing why, but just knowing.
It was coming on dusk, but Rue’s eyes were sharp. She was just beyond the sickle-bend of the river when she first saw it, black and shining amongst the roots of a hedge of thorns: one black marble. The next one was blue and not so far from the first. Then a green marble led Rue away from the river and brought her to a grouping of three more scattered along a disused footpath.
Now Rue had strayed so far that she could no longer hear folks’ cries of “Bean!”—could hear only her own urgent footfalls and the insistent hum of sunset insects. The night was their time but hers also. One more marble, there, at the end of the path.
Rue turned on her heel when she heard the low growl behind her. Slinking, the gray fox stepped out from behind a tree, its eyes glowing. Something was grasped in the fox’s jaw, caught in its pointed teeth. It looked to be a bit of black and green fabric.
Her stomach lurched. She’d never known a fox to attack a human child, only livestock, hens and rabbits and smaller prey. But a mama fox might do anything to defend her babies, and Bean was only such a little boy, so na?ve and curious.
The sound of a gunshot came, so close and so loud that Rue thought the bullet must’ve tore through her own body. But before her the fox jerked and fell in a splash of blood. The shot was true, so neatly through the spine it had near severed the fox’s head.
Stunned but unhurt, Rue shivered. She shrunk down to her knees