It wasn’t unusual for babies to come still wearing the veil. “It means good luck,” Rue would be quick to tell the mamas when they saw the extra skin wrapped around their baby’s heads, looking as final as a shroud. In a moment she could wipe it away, and the healthy wail would fight back the unsaid fright in the mama’s eyes that from her womb had come something unexpected, something unnatural.
Bean made Rue’s heart jump in absolute horror of him. She felt then that she knew him for what he was, a secret retribution for a long-ago crime, the punishment she had been dreading.
He was fighting, his arms moving inside that black wrapping like he was swimming, or more like drowning. She had never seen a baby so fully encased in the caul.
Rue forced herself to draw up the scissors she’d heated in preparation to cut the cord; she held them near the baby’s mouth. Sarah had not moved at all from her position braced against the sheets.
“He come dead?” Sarah said, straining to hear the telltale cry.
Rue might’ve said yes. The black thing curling and quivering in her palms stayed gasping. It could not break through the veil without her intervention. She might’ve left it to struggle or smother in its own black sheet.
“Oh, Miss Rue,” Sarah started moaning, squinting her eyes hard to get a look at the bundle. “Don’t say he dead.”
A snip. That’s all it took, and Rue did it. A snip beneath the little nose and then slowly, like peeling back the skin of a strange fruit, she shucked Bean of his dark veil and revealed him to the world. He began, finally, to cry.
“He alright,” Rue heard herself saying. But was he? Was she?
Divested now of the veil that was like his second skin, his true coloring showed, lighter even than his mama was. There was no warmth to the color, only a pallid white. The baby’s skin was peculiar dry too, near scaled, dry as though no loving had ever touched him. Rue had the urge to do more than rub him the way she did to warm life into all the new babies. She had, instead, the urge to scrub the strange skin clean off.
The eyes were the next shock, for when they blinked open they were full black, edged thinly in egg-boil white. The baby’s eyes were the same glossy black as the veil-like husk that had held him. He rolled them slow and looked up at Rue as if he could see clearly through to every thought she had in her head.
When she’d sucked the blood from his nose and had him clean as she could get him she tied off the cord. Her practiced hands shook with the force of her nerves as she hurried to lay this strange baby by his mama’s side and wipe off the stain he’d left on her hands.
Sarah looked at the child. She did not move to give him her breast. Instead she pulled the dirtied sheets around herself, and when Rue came to press on the stretched skin of her belly to check that nothing had been left in the womb, Sarah would not let her near. She wanted only to stare at her baby, not with that new-mama affection but in the very same way you’d stare at a snake you’d woken up to find coiled beside you in your bed.
“He’s a big ’un,” Rue said, to say something.
“Them eyes?”
“Like little black-eyed beans, ain’t they?” Rue said. She wished she could snap back those words soon as they left her lips. She should have pretended that everything was as it ought to be. Her mama, Miss May Belle, had she been living, might have had the words of reassurance, might have made the baby a miracle, for she had that way about her that Rue had never learned or inherited.
Sarah still would not take the baby up. His crying grew more shrill in the silence, like an accusation, and Rue felt she had to go on talking.