heard it clear, the screaming in the woods. It was a sharp, suffering scream, high-pitched and awful, roiling louder and then cut off abruptly. In the morning they saw what it had done. Strewn out on the muddied ground were all their baptismal whites in piles on the ground, muddied and ruined.
Already by midafternoon folks had built stories on top of other stories about the haint, so that in a matter of hours it was no longer a faceless spirit but one jealous of their glory, come to tear down the marks of their freedom-worship.
When anybody asked her straight out what it might have been that night in the woods, Rue put it to foxes. Their wilderness had a long history of foxes who were vicious, fearless, who came into town looking to tear up chicken pens and rabbit holes, just because they could. Foxes had that sort of cry that sounded like a woman in terror and, heard in echo, it could come out all wrong. But when folks started saying for themselves it was the haint, the drifting ghost some had half-seen in the woods, Rue did not immediately dispel them of the notion. A haint was an affliction she could deal with, or appear to leastwise. Something she could care to that Bruh Abel and his Bible could not.
Rue again met the preacher man in the square. This time he was on hands and knees alongside his flock, helping to pick up the ripped-down white clothing. She joined him in his stooping, though it vexed her to do so. Better, she figured, to seem to be just another knee-bent sinner in his estimation. Together they shook out a dusty bed cloth, held out opposite ends, and met at corners to fold it and fold it again. Bruh Abel set the neatly folded sheet down at the bottom step of somebody’s porch, then took a handkerchief to his forehead like he’d done a whole day’s labor.
“Thank you, Sister Rue.” His eyes flashed warily at her bound-up wrist. She’d fashioned a splint of tree limbs and twine, the loose ends of which rattled when she moved. “I can’t seem to disabuse yo’ people of their backwards superstitions. Tell me, why is that?”
Rue shrugged. “You newly come to these parts. We got a long history that ain’t easily laid to rest.”
“Even so,” Bruh Abel said, “the baptism of the baby Si will renew their faith.”
Rue frowned. It was not altogether what she had expected to hear. “You mean to go on with it after all this carryin’ on?” She gestured round the square where even now folks were discovering their washing in far-flung places. The white clothes had settled everywhere like an early frost foretelling winter.
Bruh Abel stood, brought himself up to his full height. Rue took a step back and cussed herself for it. Her wrist throbbed and maybe Bruh Abel sensed that, as any animal might sense another’s weak spot and prey upon it. He took her bandaged hand and held it gently between his larger, lighter two hands, as though he meant to pray the break away.
“Tomorrow mornin’ will see Si baptized,” Bruh Abel promised her.
“It ain’t right,” Rue said.
“It’s what the folks are needin’.” He turned over her hand, gently. “You can’t change faith, Sister Rue. And a haint can’t neither.”
* * *
—
In the end, neither Rue nor Bruh Abel was proved right. Si died that night. His body met the grave unwashed, unbaptized. Unsaved.
SLAVERYTIME
How long could a white girl keep sucking at her thumb? It was the year that Little Miss Varina would turn seven years old, and everywhere through the quarter the slaves gossiped on her outside of their master’s hearing. They had it in whispers she still behaved like a small child with a small child’s desperate habits. Yeah, they’d laughed about her, wondered at what it was that had made her so strange, and they came down on the fact that it had to be because her mama, the Missus, didn’t ever love her, not even for a minute.
“You don’t love on a baby enough they come up wrongly,” Miss May Belle told folks who’d asked for her wisdom