of a black feather and instead set Airey to caterwauling.
“What you need?” Bruh Abel asked, kneeling beside Rue. He secreted a hand at her back and rubbed where he knew it often ached her when she was bent working like this.
“A clean new knife.”
Bruh Abel asked Charlie to fetch it, but Charlie refused to leave Airey’s side, kept pacing and smacking at his chest and saying, “I’m the one that done this to her. Told her to come down here. Told her her home was safe again.”
Airey’s home was not safe. In halting fevered confusion, she’d whispered about the monsters she’d encountered as she’d approached the town, a woman traveling foolishly alone on the road to a fabled land of Promise. She’d made the long journey back from the North, the reverse of the one she’d fled through, this one in leisure on a train and then a steamboat, but after that there was no sure way to get to their isolated strip of land except on foot, so that’s what she had done, with a little money in her pocket and a lot of determination. She had wanted to come and see where her folks were buried, maybe buy them up a headstone so that no one would forget their names.
The ill spirits had come up on her from behind she said, and by the time she’d heard their horses’ hoofbeats, their mangy vicious dogs barking, there was no point in running, no safe place anywhere, and she’d crumpled to the ground.
“Who was they?”
“Devils,” Airey kept saying, writhing in the dirt. “They must have been devils.”
They were masked. Airey could identify only the grim black of their cut-out eyeholes, bearing down on her from the white of their full-body robes. Hid beneath those sheets was surely something much more horrible, something so heinous it couldn’t even be bared. Still, Airey fought as their cold, white hands had ripped off her clothes. As they poured the hot tar. As they dumped the feathers. She was still fighting.
Bean was the one that brought Rue the knife. He came quick, his chest still panting from the run he’d taken to her cabin and back, swift on his little stick legs. He’d picked just the type she needed, one good and sharp.
“What you mean to do?” Bruh Abel asked.
“Ain’t no way I can see but to cut it from her. Just slice as close as I can, try not to get too much of her own skin.” Rue whispered to him. “But dammit, she won’t be still.”
“I can help,” Bruh Abel said. He got down on his knees beside Airey, careless of his own white robe, which straight away picked up mud and grass and tar and some of Airey’s blood as he drew close to her and clutched her fighting hands.
Airey had never met him but she stilled and looked right at him, like she knew him and was trying to puzzle out where from.
“You ain’t alone in them woods anymore, Sister Airey,” he said. “And I got to tell you, you weren’t never alone.”
“They hurt me so bad,” Airey croaked out. “They say they only gon’ leave me alive to be a message to the rest a y’all.”
Bruh Abel drew nearer to her, his expression placid but determined. Rue placed the knife a hair breadth shy of skin, beginning at Airey’s arm, which beneath the black tar was white-speckled still, just as it had been long ago, with the force of Miss May Belle’s curse.
“Oh, you a message, alright,” Bruh Abel said. “One heard loud and clear.”
Airey’s whole body tensed like she was about to bolt.
“You a message, sister, that any devil can be fled from, can be survived no matter how pervasive. You beautiful as an angel, girl. You just sprout wings of faith and fly.”
She relaxed, breathed in his words, kissed his hands to her mouth, and began to cry. And hearing his words, seeing through his eyes to his vision in the clouds, Rue, slowly, carefully, was able to make the first slice, and the first of the feathers came