There was no more sound from either of them, and in the stretched-out silence Rue opened up her eyes.
Jonah. Rue almost didn’t recognize him, couldn’t reconcile his work-darkened skin, his shorn-short hair, or the new scar that wormed its way down from his brow line to the corner of his eye, looking like a fishing hook beneath the skin. He couldn’t be real. He didn’t belong inside the dank, dust-thick church that no one was meant to recollect existed.
“Easy, easy,” he said. He didn’t want her getting up, but she couldn’t think on her back. Her head stewed and swirled. Far behind him Varina stood stock-still in a different aisle of the pews.
“What you doin’ here, Jonah?”
“Just come through now. Back from workin’.” He hefted up a haversack at his feet to prove it, half-filled with his traveling possessions. He handed Rue a canteen from its depth, but she felt too ill to drink. He wouldn’t say more ’til she did. Rue took a few sputtering sips that made her feel sicker.
“Ran into Miss”—Jonah glanced back at her—“Varina at the side a’ the river.”
“I couldn’t find my way to the quarters with the river up. Isn’t that silly?” Varina’s voice had gone high and tight in a way Rue hadn’t heard in years. Her company voice.
“She said you was in need a’ help. So I come runnin’,” Jonah finished.
“I’m alright,” Rue said, but she didn’t feel alright.
“Take yo’ time,” Jonah said. Whether he meant in moving or explaining she couldn’t figure.
Varina, never good at silences, moved to fill it. She walked around one whole bench only to settle in the next aisle, eyeing Jonah, skittish the whole time.
“Is it alright, Rue? I didn’t know what to do. I thought you’d died and if you died—” She cut herself short at some horror.
“It alright, Miss Varina. Thank you.”
But now that Varina had got going she couldn’t seem to stop. “I knew it wasn’t safe for me to be seen. But he said he ain’t a soldier. I wasn’t sure. Don’t the North have nigger soldiers?”
Jonah seemed to flinch. “I ain’t a soldier, no ma’am,” he said. He wouldn’t look at Varina, knew more than well enough not to, but he did stare goggle-eyed at Rue. “I let her know that I’m on the side a’ the South.”
“Thank you.” Rue could only get herself to whisper it.
* * *
—
Jonah walked her back like he was escorting her on a promenade, a firm hand on her arm, another on her back. Maybe he feared she’d fall, but to Rue it felt like he feared she’d take off running. He was wanting answers.
“Miss Varina ain’t even recognize you,” Rue said, tried to make a joke of it. Jonah wasn’t laughing.
“We wasn’t long acquainted,” he said. “When she come runnin’ up to me I ain’t know what to think. When I figured who she was, though, I did wonder if I hadn’t lost all my senses, seein’ for myself a woman what’s supposed to be dead. Then I remembered Ol’ Joel, all ’em crazy mutterin’s he made through the town.”
“Folks that have glimpsed her, they tell themselves she a haint.”
The hand Jonah had on her back swatted dismissively, resettled at her hip. “I ain’t believe in all that. I saw her, first thing I thought was she just a white woman run mad. We walked back to the church an’ she kept on askin’ after news from the war. Wasn’t ’til she say her name that I recollect that she was Marse Charles’s daughter, aged over five years since last I knew her. If there is haints in this world, they don’t grow old.”
Did Varina look so old? Rue couldn’t tell. For her the five-odd years had passed on Varina’s face gradually. To catch her aging, to really see her youth lost, it was like trying to catch the moon moving across the sky at night.
A mile on, the tent reared its white head up over the treetops. “I heard about this here tent, but I ain’t half