In front of the little cross Rue bent her head and mumbled words like prayer, and anybody that might’ve spied her at it would think she was caught up in sorrow.
Rue moved on to sit at her mama’s grave. Miss May Belle’s body had been laid down in a most mighty plot, because Miss May Belle had dictated what it ought to look like. The planning of it was the only thing that had made her smile from deep inside the swamp of her sickbed. She’d chosen for herself pot marigolds in the yellow and orange of a slow-burning fire, and now, two years since she’d been gone, the things grew wild, threatened to spill over onto other graves, eat up the white folks’ monolith headstones. For certain she’d meant it that way, and it fell to Rue to beat the plants back.
Rue pulled up an armful of her mama’s weeds before they could come to seed. She swam in the musky scent. Whatever else her mama had intended, the marigold plant made for a fine base for a number of tinctures, a thousand kinds of healing. Might they be the first ingredient in a cure to heal the town’s sick children?
It was only on her way out that Rue allowed herself to look at the newest grave, freshly dug, a small plot suited for an infant child: Baby Si.
Though she knew who was laid in that child grave, strangely she thought first of Bean and shivered. But that was wrong, and foolish besides; this grave was not his. She would not believe that Bean was some omen, nor some dead child come again. Rue was determined not to believe it. How else to go on and convince the town of the same, before their hate of Bean turned to some desperate, dangerous action against him?
Rue finally drew the strength to go back into the town proper, and even there she slowed to force a smile and talk a little with folks. Yet now they hurried past her, as though afraid to linger in her company, and the little children she came upon at the roadside declined the posy of marigold she offered them like she held out a bloom of poison.
Bruh Abel passed her, aloud wished her blessings, and whispered in her ear. “Soothe them away from this foolishness about the haint. They’ll listen to you, Sister Rue. In matters of superstition,” the preacher man said, “yours is the voice they hear.”
Rue soothed them by bidding them to take a broom about with them to sweep away footsteps they left in their wake, so that the haint could not follow them home.
“You can be known by a footprint as sure as a face,” she told Dinah, who began to sweep her pathway in earnest, her baby on her back. Dinah had got to feeling particularly fixed upon, seeing as she’d seamstressed so many of those fine white clothes that had been torn down.
“Will that haint try an’ take out my eyes, Miss Rue?” Dinah asked as she moved the dust in swirls behind her. On her back her baby still looked sickly. Looked worse. “I can’t see my stitches. My eyes, they burn in my head.”
“How long this been going on?”
“Well, now. Started up round the time folks started wanting to see Bean washed.”
“Boil some mullein leaves in whiskey,” Rue said, unsettled. “And rub it on the back a’ yo’ neck and the soles a’ yo’ feet, and any spirit will lose the scent a’ you. Do it every morning, every night. Do it three mornings, three nights.”
Dinah said that she would, and she would too, Rue reckoned. The cure would do nothing for a haunting, but it would keep Dinah off her sewing for a time and the smell of the leaves might cut through her baby’s sniffling.
* * *
—
Sometimes Rue dreamed of Miss May Belle, and she dreamed of her on that next night before she got herself out of bed at the hour of the midnight moon.
Rue had nightmared a memory: Miss May Belle standing before her with a bloodied sheet bundled in her arms.