voice held that steely finality she used to end her lessons. “They’ve asked me to not allow you in here any longer whilst the children are near.”
“You tol’ ’em I could help their babies, ain’t you?” Her voice was rising. “You tol’ em that ain’t none a’ that foolishness is true?”
Ma Doe shrugged. “I felt I hadn’t the right to tell them anythin’.” She touched a hand to the pouch of asafetida that she wore just under her collar, perhaps without even realizing. “I find in my old age I haven’t got any more strength for lyin’.”
Rue felt something awful building up inside of her chest, something like a sob. “It ain’t a lie.”
Ma Doe’s nimble fingers were unsteady as she pulled a key from a chain of many at her waist. She put it to the desk drawer, turned the key in the lock with a sharp clink that sounded loud in the empty schoolroom, like bullet to chamber. “I haven’t yet sent a reply to our Northern relation. I don’t know that I will.”
“Why not?”
“Nigh on two years we’ve been tellin’ lies about Miss Varina. One lie to the auntie, another to the townspeople. Our own people.” Ma Doe bowed her head as if it was too heavy suddenly for her to hold on her neck.
“Ain’t nobody the wiser,” Rue said.
“Don’t you sometimes think, Miss Rue, that the Lord has been takin’ his good time to punish us? That the best contrived punishment is the one that you near forgot you deserved?”
“This ain’t to do with us, Ma, or with Varina neither,” Rue said, and she gestured at the empty air like their haint was right there with them. “It’s a simple sickness. It’ll pass. You best send that letter.”
Ma Doe relented. But Rue couldn’t help it: She thought of Bean and the day he was born, the moment she first saw him swathed in a caul as black as a blood-soaked blanket, like something she’d seen before. Another ill omen. A wrong come again. Rue knew why she had thought about killing Bean in that moment. But she had not. The past was the past.
Now she wanted Bean to live. Jonah already seemed stronger than he had on the night she’d touched his skin. Sarah had complained of a sudden bout of sweating, but there was little that could put her down, and anyway the sickness seemed to flutter more easily past grown folks and instead settled its grip on children.
But soon there was only Bean, untouched.
* * *
—
That night Rue didn’t sleep. She felt she ought to be crying. But she could not make tears or didn’t trust herself to. At any moment she feared she’d have to get up and answer another accusation. The pounding of death again at her door.
The longer the night stretched the longer her fear did. She thought on Bean, on the sideways glances folks would give him when they saw him playing in Sarah’s yard. He played alone. Rolling a ball or a hoop from one end of the narrow garden to the other, then rolling it back again in the same little rut. He’d always been a solitary sort of child, but now the other mamas wouldn’t let their babies play anywhere near him. Like he was the pestilence himself. It ought to have been the other way around. Their children carried the sickness; he thrived. And because he did thrive and showed no signs of sickening, Rue figured they were both of them in an even worse kind of danger.
Rue tried to clear her head, to think on how to avert their envy of Bean’s vitality, all their loathing after his very life. She couldn’t count on Sarah to protect Bean, even if he was her child. She had two other children to worry about after all. Would Sarah sacrifice the one to shield the two? Rue didn’t know. She was not a mama herself.
What she was was a healing woman, and she found herself thinking on how to heal Bean from an affliction he did not have.