She turned to look back at Sarah, who stood and pulled herself and her baby into the bed. Mama and child settled in, looked safe and small.
“I think her name is Posy.”
“Posy,” Sarah said.
Outside, the town was a mess of toppled houses, of scorched grass and bitter smells, the work of the white-hooded demons.
“Miss Rue,” folks said as she passed. Their voices were rough from smoke and from grief. “Them that left with Bruh Abel? You think they got away safe?”
“?’Course,” Miss Rue told folks, and they were appeased. “I gave them a charm, best that I got, to see them safely north. Root a’ High John the Conqueror.”
She walked on, through the town square, out from what had used to be the plantation up to the clearing where the House had stood and fallen, where the tent had stood and fallen also. Now there was nothing there to mark either, no words on a grave, just the lone thing the white devils had left standing to say that they had come and gone, burning itself out to black: two planks of tall wood formed perfect in the shape of a cross.
GILEAD
1929
Rue walks. If she doesn’t keep walking the pain catches up on her, settles round the low of her stomach and burns. The thing is, there isn’t much place to walk in the hospital room. She amuses herself by fitting her bare feet full in the tiles, avoiding the sharp black lines delineating the edges. The tile is cold beneath her feet, unyielding beneath her uncut toenails, and it takes only ten of those tile steps lengthwise to take her from one side of the room to the other, and then she has to turn round and start back again. But it takes only these next ten steps for her to grow nearly so weary that she can’t stand. And she has a notion that soon it will take less, and less still.
One day, today, whatever day it may be, a doctor comes. He is not the first doctor, let’s say he is the third, who seeks to cure what can’t be cured. Now the first doctor said, “Miss Rue, we will try to cut it from you, to cut your body clear of it.” And he took her to a place he called a theater where they watched from above what was done to her. That doctor, a small mustached man who spoke in a voice like her old master, made an incision where an incision had been already made, tried to take something out of her that had been put in long ago, a curse, she liked to think of it. A bitter taste in her mouth. But it grew again and bigger. The affliction would not leave her.
Then came the second doctor, big and ruddy and from the North, though the country was one borderless place now, or so they told her. That doctor came and said to her, “Miss Rue, we will try a course of poisoning.” But her sin-sick soul worsened while the affliction fed on the poison they put to her and multiplied.
Now the third doctor comes to her. There’s no door to her room but he knocks politely at her doorframe.
“Miss Rue,” says he.
She stops in her walking, paused on the sixth and seventh tile, turns to him and squints to see him better. She is twice forty now and failing. He is a white blur at her threshold.
“Come in,” she gets to say, and there’s power in that at least.
Up close he’s as handsome as any doctor she’s seen. The freckles on his nose make him appear boyish; the slicked-back brown of his hair suggests a root that would coil if it had half the chance. He’s carrying a chart he doesn’t need to read from, but he puts on thick-paned glasses anyway and it’s through that glass that she notices his eyes, big and all glossy black as spilt oil. He looks at Rue then like he knows her. Looks at her like he knows.
But quickly he fiddles with the heavy folio in his hands, flutters open the pages to their well-worn center, and the moment’s broken. He clears his throat to speak. He has a lovely voice, she notices, like music to be heard. “Miss Rue, how are you feelin’ this mornin’?”
They always start off that way, the doctors, like someone has told them they ought to. Rue nods to him politely, the way she’d nod to any white man asking her something. But inside she does wonder.
“Alright, thank you,” says she.
“Any advanced discomfort? Any pain?”
There is always pain, but you don’t tell a man that nor a white man besides. “No, suh.”
He sighs, shuts his papers. “I think we’ll try a different course today if you don’t mind, Miss Rue.”
She does mind, very much, their cold metal and their bright lights in her eyes, their nods and their note-taking. She can’t figure why they don’t know what she knows. There is no help for it. She’s dying.
“What course is that, suh?”
He smiles, as bright a smile as any balm.
“Well, Miss Rue,” says he, “I thought we’d go walkin’.”