leastwise, to the place where he was born, to the very bed in fact, and there was Sarah, wide awake. Her eyes were rheumy; the weakness that had caused her swoon had only worsened while Rue had been gone, and Sarah didn’t seem even to know her boy had been missing the whole of the evening.
“Don’t worry,” Rue said, touching Sarah’s fever-warm skin. “I’ll keep watch over Bean ’til you get yo’ strength up.”
And she would, if only to keep him from telling things better kept hidden.
* * *
—
Rue did as she promised, kept Bean close after the day he’d disappeared as a godmama might. Black women always had been good for caring on each other’s children, even since slaverytime, a point of pride that. As Sarah’s condition worsened, Rue took on Bean, especially as it became clear that even the most reverently charitable of the newly come folks would not keep him long in their houses. There was something eerie, they whispered, about his eyes. Not even the color but just the way he stared like he could see past things and through things and into things that weren’t quite there.
Did he see his mama’s sickness? Seven months along now and Sarah could hardly walk the length of her own room without some hand-holding. Persistent, Rue made her walk the little bit that she could. Sarah’s growing baby sat low like a stone at the bottom of her belly and seemed just as strange and still. When Rue would check on Sarah, Bean insisted on following. The whole visit he’d stare at his bedbound mama, not at all upset, but like her sickness, her decline fascinated him.
“What’s doin’?”
Rue steeped mint leaves in the bottom of a cup, the water still bubbling at the boil. Bean followed close, nearly underfoot as Rue brought the drink over to his mama.
“She weak is all. Carryin’ the new baby.”
Bean wrapped an arm around Rue’s leg. Birth, sickness, death, and resurrection, it had all happened in those two slim, dark rooms of the cabin, Rue reminded herself. Was it a wonder that Bean saw things in the shadows, when all over, every cabin in that plantation, there were so many shadows to see?
“It’s a girl this time, I’m thinkin’.” Sarah’s voice showed the weakness Rue had warned against. She wasn’t doing enough eating. Holding nothing down.
“What make you say so?”
Sarah shook her head just a little. No answer then, just a feeling. “What you think fo’ yours?”
Rue hid her grin by blowing the steam off Sarah’s tea. She was supposed to say she just wanted one come healthy, fingers and toes. Ain’t that what the mamas always said? “Girl maybe? Tryna think up good names.”
Sarah breathed a laugh. “Bruh Abel’s liable to pick a page out the Bible.”
Rue shook her head. “Think I’ll pick somethin’ I ain’t heard no one have before. What you thinkin’ for yours?”
“S’pose I’ll ’llow you to tell me when she comes out.”
It was the closest they’d ever come to talking on it, the way Black-Eyed Bean had got named. No other thing had stuck to him. In the beginning Sarah had tried. Called him by his true name, Jordan. But folks that saw him had whispered in horror “Black-Eyed Bean” around him so often he’d got to thinking that was what he was called. He would answer to no other thing but Bean. Would just sit in the same mute fascination that froze his face now.
Was it meant to be a slight, what Sarah had said about Rue naming her baby? A curse? Rue could not say. Sarah had shut her eyes, grown tired maybe from that little bit of jawing, her tea gone untouched. From the other side of his mama’s chair Bean was watching her sleeping, examining the rise and fall of her chest, unaware or uncaring that they’d been speaking on his origins.
* * *
—
Bruh Abel dreamed of other tents, a sky-wide spread of tents as lofty as a field of clouds. “Can’t you just see it?”
Rue shrugged. “Not really.”