watched with those wide black eyes of his as his daddy worked. Jonah was carving up the carcass of a wild pig for their supper. He had it hoisted up on a wood frame, swinging by its neck, tongue out and listless.
She observed them for a while, daddy and son, recollecting two years back. After Bean’s birth she had spied Jonah cutting firewood, wet with sweat as he was now. Then she had shoved into Jonah’s arms the black caul from which Bean had slithered and told Jonah to burn the sheets. For luck, she’d said. Now the whole of the town stunk of burning sheets, and behind each house great plumes of dark smoke would rise like a silent signal for a grief that had gotten so bad that they no longer had the words for it. The thinking was to get rid of the sheets as marks of their dead, but the sickness, Rue feared, was well beyond being burnt up.
Jonah put a long, neat slit down the belly of the barrow hog he’d strung up. He began to peel back the skin, buried his hands deep into its belly to tug away its innards.
“It’s a bad year, sho’ ’nuff.” He spoke round a grunt of effort. The pig’s intestines slopped downward. “Folks is down on they knees, prayin’. We needin’ you to help us, Miss Rue.”
Bean reached for her. “Up,” he was saying. “Up, up.” He raised his arms in that easy gesture of children, and Rue wanted to hold him as much as he wanted to be held. When she hefted him up, he was a nice weight in her arms, and that close he smelled sweet to her, healthy, even over the sickly smell of the hog Jonah was butchering.
“I can’t answer all a’ them prayers,” Rue said.
“?’Course not,” Jonah said.
Rue wanted to thank him for that, his comforting lie. She knew what folks were saying. They’d lost faith in her, even feared her, some of them. She juggled Bean in her arms and reached out, touched the swell of Jonah’s upper arm, the only place the pig blood hadn’t reached. It was supposed to be a loving gesture, but she pulled sharply away before she could give it. She hardly had to get near him to realize: His skin was near to burning.
It would pass in him, wouldn’t it? It had to, a man so strong and grown. Even if he had the sickness it would not ravage him like it might his children, but something about the power of it, to weaken even Jonah, made Rue feel weak herself. She told Jonah he better lay himself down for a rest, and she pulled Bean tight into her arms and hid her face in the softness of his baby hairs to rest there awhile herself.
* * *
—
Beulah, who had been among the first to lose her baby, was the worst.
“He gone,” Rue told her. The woman had begun to wail as if the scream had been building and building in her, saved ’til just this moment.
Beulah collapsed like her legs were of no use and Rue went down with her as an instinct, afraid she’d smack her head against the ground. Beulah did the opposite. She reared her head back as she screamed those two words: Your fault. She smashed forward, catching the edge of Rue’s jaw. Rue felt her mouth filling up with a rush of blood—she didn’t have a second to worry or to spit—because Beulah was hitting her with her fists now, punching at her shoulders in time with the repeated hollow syllables of her son’s name. She was saying it over and over, and saying, “You done this! You and that Bean. This y’all curse.”
Beulah’s man came out of nowhere to pull Beulah away. He did it easily, put his arms around her waist and picked her up like she was a child, and she weakened and wept against him, the whole shape of her fitting to his chest.
* * *
—
Rue heard it all over then in every corner of the used-to-be plantation, what folks were saying. They wanted help. But not from her. Bruh Abel. Send