air from her own mouth an’ fire from her own belly. Marse Charles’ll know of it.”
Or was he speaking on the hidden shame? How could he know?
Rue stood up so fast the chair she’d perched in crashed to the ground.
“Marse Charles ain’t know nothin’ but what the inside of a grave look like,” she said. “And you gon’ know the same, soon enough.”
Ol’ Joel’s cheeks went hollow as he gasped out his shock, like the sunken-down face of a skull. Rue stepped back from his bedside and righted the chair and tried to right her breathing but there was nothing for it.
“I ain’t mean to say that,” Rue said. “I’m sorry.”
Ol’ Joel’s expression turned gleeful. He clapped his hands together like a child at play, spoke singsong as he made mud pies in the air. “I know about Bean.”
“Hush,” Rue said. If she could only soothe him. Get him to rest.
“Miss May Belle tol’ it to me.”
But Miss May Belle had not lived long enough to see Bean born. “Tol’ you what?”
“She say Bean’s eyes is the hole you dug to bury the baby in.”
Rue had never left a dying man or woman or child, not ever, not even when she herself was a child, kneeling beside deathbeds. She’d listened to every rasp and rattle and final godforsaken wheeze. But she could not listen to this. She fled.
Come the morning, Ol’ Joel was dead. She returned to his bedside at sun-up to find him still, silenced. Rue took up the chair she’d toppled over when she’d run. She sat herself down and let folks think she’d been sitting there all night.
* * *
—
Then Bean’s brother and sister both caught the sickness. The skin of their high-yellow cheeks became dotted with twin flushes of red.
Rue, afraid for Bean, afraid for them all, was sleepless. She spent most of her evenings visiting the sick—children and the elderly came down with it the quickest and fared the worst—and even when she was not needed she’d wake suddenly in the middle of the night, imagining that somebody had been pounding at her door, though nobody had.
Sarah had the same harried look as all the mamas in the town, a kind of sickness in itself, that worry, but at the mention of Bean a line creased deeply between her brows.
“Bean, he’s the onlyest one the sickness ain’t touched,” she said. And the suspicion was there in her voice. “These ’uns need you, now.”
Rue looked over the brother and sister who lay together in the same bed, fighting against each other in helpless writhes against the heat, but at least they were fighting. The boy’s ways for breathing seemed clear but the girl’s nose was blocked up; it dripped in a sad puddle onto her upper lip.
Rue drew out her pipette. It was only a bit of tin that she’d found and rolled and smoothed so it had no rough edges, and ever so gently she placed it into the girl’s one nostril and then the other, drawing the plugged-up business out of her with a careful inhale. The trick was to get it just far enough up the pipe to give the child ease of breath but not to draw so far as to have the snot end in her own mouth. It had happened once or twice, the sickness sitting thick on Rue’s tongue. It had so worried her each time that she’d taken to her roots and plants ’til she was dizzy with it, unsure if she was suffering more from the sickness or the cure.
The trick with the pipette was more a balm for the mamas’ nerves. They were given to panic when their babies gulped open-mouthed for air. The only cure she knew of was time. Either the babies would die or they wouldn’t, but that’s not what anybody wanted to hear, and so Rue knew better than to say so.
Rue insisted on looking over Bean before she left. She found him with Jonah behind the house. He was at the age of walking now, and he stood wobbly and