The cut was more a pressure than a pain, and Rue sat up a little to watch the flourishing of the pen in Varina’s hand. She held it delicately by its dark varnish hilt and wrote something Rue of course could not read. She recognized the V though, it was the one letter that Varina had ever taught her, over and over, again and again, in the dirt of their childhood.
“Now,” Varina said when the cutting was done, “we got the same birthmark.” The baby inside of Rue was cradled in her flesh and blood. It drew up its arms through the wound propelled by instinct, its small fists grabbing already, climbing already, as though it were drawing itself up through the branches of a tree.
Varina pulled the baby out of Rue’s belly. It was so small its body fit entirely on the length of her two hands. She sawed through the cord, back and forth with quick tree-felling motions. All the while the baby cried, and Rue felt she knew the sound so well it was as if she’d made it herself. Her Posy, finally come.
Varina held out the little loving thing, and Rue brought her daughter to her chest.
“I wanna show Bruh Abel what we done.”
Varina looked over her shoulder into the woods. “He’s a-comin’. I hear him.” Rue heard nothing except for the crying of her own baby girl, a heaven-sent sound. How simple and strange it was, to ache and love at once.
“What we gonna do with all of this?” Varina asked. She puzzled over the gash she’d made in Rue’s belly, the spew of her innards, the bag that had held her baby and the shriveling snakelike cord that had nourished it. Varina had her thumb in her mouth, sucked at the filigreed tip of her glove, heedless of the blood darkening the lace.
Rue didn’t much care about what Varina meant to do. She wanted to touch her skin to Posy’s skin, how perfect and dark it was. She was secretly pleased that it was more like hers than Bruh Abel’s. If only he’d come along and see what they’d made.
Varina drew the ribbon out from her hair, carefully pulling it through the more menacing snarls in her curls. When it was fully free she set to work stitching Rue closed with it, building an intricate series of knots end over end through the loose pools of Rue’s skin. “There now,” Varina kept saying, pleased with herself. “There now.”
Posy’s cries had quieted to a self-comforting whimper. She had big brown eyes that took an interest in Rue’s face. She knows me, Rue thrilled herself in thinking.
“There now.”
The drape of moth-eaten leaves parted like double doors and Rue, fool she was, expecting Bruh Abel and expecting him to be pleased, held up her Posy. Presented her. But it was the fox that came.
“Varina?”
Varina was too busy making her knots.
“Not me,” Rue said. “Don’t be worryin’ about me. Help Posy.”
The fox drew forward slow with the leisure of a predator. Hungry but not hungered. It trained its eyes on them. If she ran, it would run after. She could not run, she was still weak, she was laid open, she had her baby girl in her arms and Varina had tied her down with her wealth of red ribbon. Still she tried, Lord how she tried and tried, to run from this, to break free.
Rue saw the bunching muscles of the fox’s hind legs, felt the coiling of time before the pounce. She waited ’til the very last moment to shut her eyes. She held Posy close as long as they would let her. And even when she could no longer feel her, she listened for her. As long as she could. She cradled her baby’s cry ’til the very end. Such lovely, lovely crying.
WARTIME
Varina’s pregnancy was a blight. She wished it gone. Had wished it gone for months and months before anyone had even noticed—her widening or her wishing.