thick bottom lip. She began cutting the pants up their damaged seam.
The weak chambray pants tore away easy, worn-down as they already were. Next were his drawers, and she pulled them off fast to get over the pain of where they stuck to him in stitches of dried-up blood. He didn’t even wince as she ripped them full open.
Rue couldn’t help herself, she looked away. Had to. Because there in his lap she saw the real horror. The real wound.
Jonah’s thighs bore the same dark skin as the rest of his body, but as they crawled higher there was the menacing singular black of old burnt skin. And the horrid snaking pink where the skin had broken clear open, like looking into tore-up earth. Above his thighs there was nothing but that black puckering made darker here and there by flashes of more horrific white boils, nothing at all there to make him a man but a few curling dark hairs that had somehow had the audacity to grow in the landscape of pink angry scar tissue, of the black cracking pattern not even worth calling skin and the strange empty nothing between his legs. He was a ruin. Jonah was ruined.
“Apologies, Miss Rue,” Jonah said in that same soft, gentle way he’d sometimes say good morning or good afternoon or remark on the coolness of the day. “Only I thought you knew a’ it.”
Questions bubbled up with bile. “When this happen?”
“Years and years,” he said but he didn’t need to answer, she could tell that. Of course she knew what a fresh scar looked like and this, some distant part of her mind impressed, had healed long ago and healed quite nicely despite itself.
She still held up the knife, high up like she meant to stab him with it if he moved too sudden, and the gruesome thought came to her mind that maybe she ought to, the poor wretched man, not a man at all, and then she recalled when she’d had a similar thought, held a similar weapon aloft. She’d thought to snip away the life of little Bean when first she’d discovered the horror of him wrapped up beneath the black veil. Jonah’s son. No, not Jonah’s son at all.
“Miss Rue?”
“Why would I know a’ it?” She put the knife down. “How could I?”
“?’Cause Miss May Belle knew.”
Rue took up the whiskey and sipped it and then gave it to him. He shook his head no but she pressed.
“Yo’ mama knew,” he qualified, like she’d forgotten who Miss May Belle was, and, well, maybe she had. Her mama been dead and gone over five years.
Then it must have happened years back in slaverytime. And Bean was soon to turn six, had been born into freedom. Into peace.
“How’d she know?”
“Well, ’course she knew.” His eyes looked past her like he was trying to remember it. “Miss May Belle was the one that done it.”
WARTIME
May 1864
I know the real story, Miss May Belle says.
“The fox didn’t kill ’em chickens” is what I told Marse Charles, but he too fool to listen.
“You don’t know a damned thing, May Belle,” he tells me.
The slaughter of the chickens on the edge of Marse Charles’s property is the first crime of the promised war that I have seen with my own two eyes. A small bit of violence done by some scheming soldier-boys, picking at the edges of King Cotton.
Marse’ll shrug it off as a nothing crime, blame it on a fox at best, or a colored at worst. He don’t know what I know.
A wise mouth nibbles before it bites down whole. Ain’t the worst still yet to come?
* * *
—
I only knew of them dead chickens because I went to see my man, to meet him behind the shed, to kiss his lips in secret.
He got there before me, like he do. I seen him standing in the clearing and it made my belly do that wishful thing, that mournful tumble. I just about ran to him,