worse, was this the way her mama had felt in that final year of her hate-filled grief, hanging fruit that spun from the eaves? Rue sat upright to catch her breath, to feel the cool earth against her hands, which she had planted firm against the ground. She was not Miss May Belle. She did not rush headfirst into madness, sorrow, or wanting. She did not spit curses. She had to think. She waited.
The woods were almost quiet as she listened to the beating of her own heart and tried to breathe away that coil of fear. In the distance she saw the trees and heard something give a mournful hoot from high amongst the leaves but that something did not show itself. The creek beat quiet against the pebbles of the bank, rushing down a ways to the place it opened to the river and then, she supposed, somewhere beyond that, to the sea.
She stood and approached the cabin by the creek. Heard from within it the telltale sounds of a scurrying animal. A fox?
The door to the shed almost didn’t move. The bottoms of the wood had burrowed themselves deep in the mud, and Rue put all her strength into one forceful tug.
Inside she found him, not a fox but a man. She near toppled over at the sight of him. He lay on his back fully on the ground, his legs splayed unnaturally, his fingers laced over his chest in the way she’d lately been arranging the dead. She would have thought him dead if not for the slight rising and falling of those pale fingers with his chest, and then he confirmed himself alive by giving off a grunt of a snore.
He was white. Had to be—the pale hands, the ease with which he slept out in the open. And what she could make out of his face in the shadow was the sandy color of wheat. She had not seen a white man in years. Not since the war, at its fiery end. If she stepped away slowly she would not wake him, but already her hand on the door was rattling with fear and if she had to walk backward the way she had come, she was certain she would fall.
Then Rue saw that his face was not his face but was a hat made of straw, one she’d lost, she realized, some months back. The clothes he wore were in the shape of a crumpled suit separated from its jacket. Then a flood of knowing came on to her so fiercely that she cried out. It was Bruh Abel. Come back.
His whole body jerked at the sound as though his sleeping had been only surface deep and he sat up without pulling away the hat, which tumbled into his lap. Bruh Abel’s gray eyes quirked into a squint and he looked right at Rue in bafflement.
Was he ill? He had that glassy gaze in the brief blinking open of his eyes that she had seen over and over in the town. He leaned all the way forward, his head rolling in a tilt on his chest.
Rue crept closer. After some unsureness she picked a safe place on the inside of his wrist. His body felt warm beneath her hand and there was a slickness to his skin made of clammy sweat.
“Rue,” he said in a husky hiccup and she knew then, from the smell that wafted out with her name, that he was not sick. He was drunk. She dropped his hand.
She didn’t like the strength of the liquor smell that was suddenly all around her. It smelled to her of danger.
He said, “Don’t go, Rue.” It was the lack of “Sister” before it that made her stop a moment, one leg over him, the other still trapped against the shed wall.
“If ya go I might die.”
Rue had heard of a man that had died that way, a white man who had drunk himself quite on purpose to his death when the Yankees took his little mulatto children away to freedom.
“Gimme a cure,” Bruh Abel said and stuck his arms straight up. Rue feared he was grabbing at her, but