heat, and the clay walls made the outside world’s sounds come together muffled and wrong. It was a rough quarantine but a necessary one, she’d thought, to keep little Si from suffering the heavy air of the late summer heat, to keep him away from his brothers and sisters. Si was only three days old; still his heartbeat had that telltale tripping of a drumbeat out of time. Rue had heard its like before; she knew well what it meant. Stillborn babies happened more than she liked to think on, but the ones born alive who did not thrive were a more weighty kind of tragedy. It was the waiting for the next breath and the next and the last. It made her sick and sleepless every time, that helpless waiting.
Rue jumped as Si’s daddy came into the room. The sound of his steps had been swallowed up by the clay floor and her own overthinking. And now he stood close behind her. She felt him, watching her watching his son.
“It’s a hard thing, Miss Rue.”
“It is.” What else was there to give than that?
“Heard other babies round here been fallin’ sick also,” Si’s daddy said. The words sounded ominous and cruel and he’d meant for them to, laid out in the room, a threat against her healing power, and an implication.
His voice seemed too harsh to Rue, what with his sickly boy near. She didn’t much like the man. He was one of those come lately after the war from yonder knows where, dragging along his freedom in search of some woman he’d been separated from years back. Well, he’d found her, Si’s mama, and gave her four other healthy babies before this weak, wanting child had come. Now he stood with his whole weight blocking the doorway, and he seemed more put out than grieving. He seemed to be watching Rue, or so she thought. He was baiting her like she were an unruly creature. He said, “All these babies fallin’ ill. What you make of that, huh, Miss Rue? Is there a sickness come onto us?”
“Nothin’ of it to make,” Rue said. “Cooler seasons coming on is all.”
“Heard newborn children ain’t hardly thrivin’ this whole year. Not since you birthed that Bean.”
Suddenly Rue was full aware of just how large Si’s daddy was in the doorway, overflowing the close room with accusations against her, against Bean. She came aware of how fully Si’s daddy blocked her one escape from the room, standing squarely in the outside light.
She thought on Ol’ Joel’s wild accusation declaring that she herself had made Bean as a haint and a blight against them. Ol’ Joel had found willing ears for his conspiracy, and who better to fill up with lies than a daddy made empty by the shame of his weak son.
“And this one here, he won’t latch on the teat.” Si’s daddy had clearly decided Rue was guilty of every one of those wicked rumors.
“He needs rest,” she managed.
Si’s daddy shook his head. “We mean to see him baptized by Bruh Abel.”
Si gave off a cough then. Rue leaned over the child, cooing nonsense words as much to quiet him as to get out from under his daddy’s stare. The baby struggled to open his eyes, gave up on it, returned to uneasy sleep.
“I don’t think it’s wise to put him to the water,” Rue made herself say.
“Weren’t askin’ you if it were wise.”
Rue pulled back from the crib like it’d burnt her. No one had ever before turned away her healing.
Si’s daddy kept watching her and did not stop watching her as she moved around him toward the door.
“Keep him restin’,” she said. “It’s good to speak to him. Even a voice can soothe. I’ll be back in the evenin’ time.” She couldn’t keep away, not with a sickly child involved, and she hoped that later it would be the mama she’d find tending the boy—someone softer, sympathetic. Women tended to look more kindly on her, Rue knew. They understood the necessity of her work better than the daddies did.
She’d hoped