What she could assemble would be crude, only the plants that thrived in the wet that could live in the ever-present shade cast by the shed. But they were there to be found and she picked them.
Back in the shed Bruh Abel’s gaze followed her as she moved about. Rue stood on the tips of her toes to examine the shelves that hung by halves on the wall. Feeling in the darkness, Rue found his Bible and beside it the bottle of liquor with nothing but a puddle left at the bottom. She pulled it down. It would have to do.
“You lookin’ like Miss May Belle,” Bruh Abel said. “I used to pray with her, you know, before she passed.”
Rue knelt on the ground. “She was foolish for believin’ in you too.”
She bashed the bottom of the bottle against the thistle she had collected. The poison she’d gathered for Bean was still in her basket, waiting. She thought about it and beat harder. She kept bashing ’til the job was done.
“Hey now, with that racket.”
“See these here thorns?” she held up the battered stems to him. “They set out to prick you. Y’all can swallow ’em whole if you like, and bleed. Or y’all can do it my way. I’m curin’ you like you was askin’. Unless you was hopin’ to wake up with the devil on yo’ back in the mornin’.”
Bruh Abel smirked. “And look, here I ain’t got nothin’ to pay you with.”
Rue said, “Don’t come into town tomorrow.”
He looked away, perhaps ashamed as he should be. He swirled the handful of seeds she had given him. They were smooth and as black as Bean’s eyes, and free of nettles.
“But iff’n you do come,” Rue went on, “then come as their preacher man. Don’t show them yo’ doubt or yo’ fear neither; they got enough a’ their own. You can’t save them babies what’s meant to die. And I can’t neither.”
Rue thought of her mama, saw her there, same as she had in the shadows of the cabin. Bruh Abel’s kind of faith hadn’t kept Miss May Belle from dying any more than Rue’s healing had. But it had made the difference in her last few hours that he’d sat at her bedside. He had made her dying easier. Rue had never thanked him for that.
“If you gon’ be a liar, Bruh Abel,” Rue said, “then be a useful one.”
* * *
—
When Rue walked back home she was looking for the sunrise but there was none to be had, only the gradual receding of the black night in favor of the hard glow of day. The morning was gray all over with a fog that came up heavy from the river and hung low, made it hard to see anything clearly through the thick of the woods and made her think of Bruh Abel’s eyes, that same kind of unknowable gray.
She was nearly halfway up her own porch when she saw the billow of smoke, moving only the way smoke can move, distinguishing itself from the sedentary thick of the fog to say Someone has died here.
It came from the house nearest to hers where a family of three was living, a mama and her two boys, the daddy long ago gone, took up his freedom and left with it. Had one of them boys died? Rue changed course. In the pocket of her dress she held her pipette and she pulled it out, something like a talisman, hoping there was a child left alive that might need her. But when she came upon the house, there, blocking her way, were Red Jack and Jonah and Si’s daddy and Beulah’s man, their arms full of kindling to stoke the fire of the sickbed sheets.
“Both boys?” Rue asked it to Jonah but he didn’t answer.
“The eldest passed,” said Red Jack. “The younger one’s caught it. He sweatin’ fierce.”
Rue meant to pass them, but they did not move for her. Those four men held bundles of wood in their arms and their eyes moved near as one to look her up and down. She’d forgotten