“Mama? Is it Varina?” Rue asked her dream-mama. “Is she alright?”
Miss May Belle wouldn’t answer, only held out the black bundle.
“The shame,” her mama called it. She said, “Bury the shame in the river and let us be rid a’ it.”
But there was no sure way to be rid of shame, no conjure to be rid of guilt. Even if the bundle never rose again it still flooded around Rue, the shame did. It rose in the mind, in her dreams and then in her waking, and in the face of every slowly sickening child she could not save.
She woke feeling as though Miss May Belle were truly there, standing over her. There was nothing for it but to get up and out of the cabin. She gulped the cool night air to clear her nightmare, like clarity was breath. She had to think. She had to act to save herself.
While others slept Rue walked a long lone circle round the plantation to weave a protection spell. A sprinkling of black pepper here and there on the long, sweeping trails folks had left with their brooms to dispel the hungry foxes that were said to be Miss May Belle’s familiars—her eyes where her eyes could not see. Rue did not wish to be seen.
Then Rue went way out past the burnt-up edges of the plantation where most folks were afeared to go, on to the old church, a basket filled with fruit and biscuits and a bloom of fiery marigolds tucked under her arm.
The double doors of the church were shut against the night, but there was a slight, silent rocking up there at the top of the small bell tower. Its rope swung with a motion more forceful than could be accounted for by the wind alone. At the doorstep she laid down the basket and left, returned to her cabin, careful to see that she had not been followed or observed. There she waited, sleepless, for morning.
* * *
—
It was the day that Bean was to be baptized and so folks hardly paid much mind to the other news: Dinah’s baby girl had died in the night.
“I called for you,” Dinah said when Rue came to confirm what was already cold and clear. The little baby’s body was wrapped up in the fine linen Dinah had seamstressed herself. “You wasn’t home.”
Rue had missed the knock at her door. It had come when she’d been out, tending to haints, and in that little time Dinah’s baby had sickened and died.
In folks’ fervent enthusiasm for Bruh Abel they did not pay much mind to one more quiet tragedy that had moved through the town while they slept. But Rue was altogether haunted by this new-come illness, by its stealth and its power.
* * *
—
Bean was to be washed in the eyes of the Lord at midday.
The townsfolk passed by Rue’s cabin on the way to the river, and inside Rue pretended at grinding pokeweed berries for longer than was needed. She burst the black skin of the berries in her agitation, freed the red juice and still continued to pound and pound. Errant flecks of red stained the front of her dress and still she pounded as though she could work herself to the kind of exhaustion they’d all felt in slavery times, a complete utter exhaustion too great to leave room for rage. She felt rage at herself for allowing Bean to dredge up that old secret shame inside of her. The past was made up of bloody losses she could not change, while here, now, real living babies might suffer and die.
Yet Rue’s rage grew, not only at herself but also at Bruh Abel and his false spectacle ’til finally she marched on out to the bright morning. Still she took the long way round, came upon them at the river from the height of the trees.
They were all in white. Bean, Jonah, and Sarah with their elder boy and their only girl. Someone had made them all little white caps that gave them the closest approximation they had ever had to a unified family resemblance. Bruh Abel, for