“How he doin’?” Rue stepped forward but their eyes on her felt as cool as the room did.
“He’ll be baptized, and in the care a’ Jesus, soon enough.” That was the mama, voice hitching. She was slight and soft-spoken, barely old enough to be called a woman, let alone a mama. She moved toward Rue, as if to block her from Si, and the light made visible a bruise at her jaw so garish Rue let out a hiss. Purple as bloomed larkspur the bruise ran down her neck, perfect in the shape of a handprint.
“What happened?” Rue asked, though wasn’t it clear? Si’s mama said nothing, and behind her her man towered. He picked up his dying son. Si was so little he took up not much more than the wide stretch of his daddy’s open palm.
“We mean to have the boy baptized,” Si’s daddy said.
Rue appealed to the mama. “I come to tell you again that you ought not to.”
“Ain’t it the Lord’s plan?” The bruise stretched with her speaking. Rue tried to catch her eye, to will some honesty between them, but the mama didn’t want to receive it. Rue pushed round her to look over Si.
She meant only to feel the baby’s forehead for fever, but Si’s daddy caught her by her outstretched wrist. He squeezed that wrist so hard Rue felt the burn of her skin splitting.
“Woman,” the daddy spat the word as a curse. “We don’t want none a yo’ devilment near our boy,” and threw Rue toward the door by her arm.
She caught herself, only just, on the edge of the crib with the same outstretched arm he’d mangled. There was a loud pop in her wrist, not so much heard as felt, and Rue curled around the throbbing pain. It shot through her arm like a lightning bolt and stayed throbbing, but she held her face and looked to Si’s mama.
Rue spoke with her jaw clenched like to crack her teeth. “Si needs lookin’ after.”
“Not by you,” the mama said in her soft nothing voice.
Rue turned her back on them, on Si, stumbled for the door, and as she fled, she thought she heard, though she could not be certain, Si’s daddy hock and spit in the path of her retreat, that old true method for dispelling a witch.
* * *
—
Rue put her broken wrist in the river and howled. The water was inky and cold and it eased the damaged limb as much as it pained her. Like a whetstone, the rushing current honed her senses to a wicked sharpness. She might have done better to go on home, to calm the swelling with a poultice of comfrey and to soothe her upset with a draught of brandy.
Instead, at the riverside Rue set her wrist with one slow, agonizing twist, tasted blood in her mouth but kept her eyes on her destination. In the distance over the treetops she could just see the bell tower of the old white church.
* * *
—
“It’s Rue,” her voice echoed. “You listenin’?”
She did not make her entrance quiet. What was there to fear? She walked down the center aisle, knowing she had an audience even if she couldn’t make out any movement in the shadowed corners of the church’s vaulted second story.
“That was a fool trick you done with the bell,” Rue called up to the haint. But she felt a certain guilt as well, as good as if she’d rung the bell her own damn self. Because she’d stayed away too long. Let this whole fool thing go on too long. But she had to go on with it, particularly now with Bean’s eyes on the back of her mind.
So Rue thought on what her mama might have done. What a haint might do. She cradled her aching wrist near her body, spun to see all the shadowed corners of the old church at once.