“Girl, you ain’t got no imagination.”
It tired her out just to watch him moving through the wide, empty space inside his tent. The area seemed so much larger without all the worshipping bodies who’d just left it, and Bruh Abel moved like a little boy at play in it, going from stillness to sudden motion in unpredictable bursts like summer rain.
“When the baby come,” he said, “we can go south first. Follow the warm in winter.”
The life Bruh Abel dreamed of sounded to Rue like the exhausting up-and-down movement of migrating birds. In search of what? Everything he said lately began with When the baby come and ended in a kingdom of revival tents stretched the whole way from north to south. Rue couldn’t begin to see how they might get from here to there, what sacrifices might hammock in between. There was Bean to think of. And Ma Doe’s health. There was Varina most of all, whose existence was every day threatened by Bruh Abel’s growing flock. Their trepidation about the wilderness beyond the revival tent could only so long be fueled by secondhand stories of haints.
Bruh Abel wanted to preach, he said. He wanted her to heal. Lately Rue had no stomach for healing. There was growing a sudden fear in her, a distaste of touching other folks’ sickness. When the baby came, her sweet little girl as she’d lately been thinking of her, Rue didn’t wish to lay hands on any skin but hers.
Still, something was coming. There was no denying that same something that had Bruh Abel spreading his wings hawk-wide and her doing the exact opposite, pulling up twigs around herself for a nest. Was it always like this? she wondered. Being with child had sent her into a hoarding up of love, like she’d got word that a hard frost was coming to befall everything, love being nourishment. Love being hope.
Bruh Abel jumped up onto the bench in front of her. Stood on it straddled and carefree like it were a log he was balancing down a creek.
“When we get down there,” Bruh Abel was saying, from above. “When the baby come, we’ll get ourselves good and married. What y’all think a’ that?”
She made him no answer, for in the corner of her vision a ghost flickered. “Get down,” she said.
Behind him through the thick of the tent she saw the black outline of the people on the other side, running. The sound of their panic came through the tent skin in muffled singular chaos. Outside someone had let out a high, feral scream. Bruh Abel jumped down from his perch. Came to wrap his arms around her, protecting her. Them.
The shadows of the crowd loomed long and large as their outlines came across the tent. They were coming closer, a few startled sweating men, Red Jack and Charlie amongst them, a few others Rue didn’t know. Bruh Abel hid her behind him.
“What’s happened?”
“We need yo’ help,” Charlie said, and Rue saw that he carried a curled-up body on his back, something as still as a carcass. He laid it down gentle in the grassy aisle and the men stepped back as if afraid to approach it. It looked like an overgrown black crow, spilling everywhere its feathers. It was only as it unfurled itself in a slow jerking fit that Rue realized what it was they’d brought her. It was a woman, and one she knew: Airey.
* * *
—
Oil wouldn’t budge it, water neither. When Rue put either to Airey’s sore, ruined skin, the woman would begin to wail and thrash. They couldn’t even move her but left her down in the center of the church tent where Charlie had placed her, and as Rue worked she had amassed an audience of disturbed onlookers, all of them whispering about the haints in the woods.
“Who done this?”
“You seen ’em?”
“White faces.”
“Monstrous.”
“Come to kill us all.”
Rue found she couldn’t focus with their chittering. Her fingers kept sticking in the tar that covered Airey head to foot. It was still warm. Rue tried to get at the root