to return to her own cabin and collect her troubled thoughts, but there, just past the doorway, was Bruh Abel. The good book was gripped in his right hand, like at any moment he’d be called to fight something off with its heavy binding, its flock of pages.
He smiled when she neared. Did he smile that bright trickster smile for everybody? Why was it that no one else seemed able to figure him for what he was?
“Sister Rue,” he said. She balked. She was nobody’s sister, and if she had a quicker wit or a whittled tongue she would have said so.
“Miss Rue,” she corrected.
He barreled on forward like she hadn’t spoke, said, “I was hopin’ I’d cross yo’ way.”
Rue was aware that from a distance folks were watching them. She didn’t have to turn this time to sense Si’s daddy’s approach from behind. He didn’t bother to invent a pretense to look on this moment—when the healing woman and the preacher man were stood toe to toe.
Rue had to make herself speak up. “If it’s about li’l Si, I tol’ his daddy already. Y’all will only make him weaker if you take him to the water.”
Bruh Abel’s smile widened. His face was near pretty, up close, she had to admit. He had a spray of freckles on his nose from the sun, and even the way he looked down on her had an air of respectability for all that it made Rue wary. She squared her shoulders. He was a foot taller than her, easy, but not so broad as Si’s daddy, and even if he was laughing at her she felt she’d sparked something in him that wasn’t all the way saintly.
“Now, you may know better than I, Miss Rue. After all, the gift of healin’ was put in yo’ hands.” If Bruh Abel was bothered by the gathering audience he didn’t show it. He kept his focus on Rue. “But I’m only lookin’ to ease the way for our li’l Si should the Lord see right to recall him to heaven.”
“Our Si?” She was surprised by the bitter flavor of her own venom. “It’s my thinkin’ that our Si ought to have the easiest path to heaven, seein’ as he’s nary a week old. Baptism? Ain’t no sense in it.”
“Ain’t no sense in salvation?”
Rue managed to still her tongue before she said more. Here she was, handing him the rope to hang her, with everybody looking on. She took a step back. “I only mean that I hope to give Si every chance at seein’ another day, good Lord willin’.”
Seemed Bruh Abel could use patience like a weapon. He paused to mull over what she’d said in what looked like pious consideration.
He spoke at last. “Lord willin’ an’ if the creek don’t rise, we’ll all see another day, Miss Rue.”
She shook at the old nonsense saying, took it as her leave to go. It had been a favorite of Miss May Belle’s when she’d been alive, and Bruh Abel surely knew it. The two had talked together, right up ’til the very end.
“Oh, Miss Rue,” Bruh Abel called after her. His voice was teasing, lilting. “I ain’t even get round to sayin’ why I’d been lookin’ to speak with you.”
She’d made a mistake by walking away from him; now he had to yell to her to carry across the distance. Surely everybody for miles was listening. She turned to him, and her face felt hot.
“Only I was wantin’ to ask you formally to come down from outta the woods and join our worship, Sister Rue.”
So he had seen her that day at the riverbank. And he’d waited ’til now to slip the knot. She walked on, feeling dismissed and not liking it the least bit, not with all those folks watching and counting it as a retreat.
* * *
—
Rue returned that night to see Si as she promised she would, found his mama and daddy both in the chill room hovering over their sleeping baby like new parents over any ordinary newborn. But in his crib Si was still,