where she’d come from and how she must look, her skin flush, her dress dotted with nighttime mud and stains of grass. Madness, that’s what they were seeing. Her gone mad. The witch they had been whispering after.
Rue tried to smile at Jonah but he wouldn’t let her. His face was set.
He asked, “Where you come from?”
Rue didn’t know what to say. “I was out there,” she answered as if she’d descended with the fog.
Behind Jonah, Beulah’s man made a noise of disgust in his throat, shared a glance with Si’s daddy, who nodded at some unsaid thing. Rue wanted to smack the cradled wood from out of their hands. “It’s true then,” Si’s daddy muttered.
“What’s true?”
But they would not say more.
“Jonah. What’s true?” Rue stepped forward that she might speak to only him but in the same moment he backed away, evading, as if to be touched by her was to know some plague.
“What Ol’ Joel said before he passed.” Jonah hesitated. “That you out conjurin’ with somebody in them woods.”
“You know ain’t none of it true,” Rue said. But she herself did not know it to be fully a lie. “Let me by now, let me see to the sick child.”
Before her the four men were a barricade, and at any moment they could turn against her. In her eyes the sticks they bore were no longer kindling but menacing switches. She felt herself shrinking.
“Please let me by.”
“We takin’ care of him. He’ll survive it,” Red Jack said with finality. He stuck a bit of tobacco in his mouth, gnashed at it with a purpose.
Rue took a step back.
“Go on then,” she said. “Don’t waste yo’ precious time threatenin’ me. Go see to the sick boy.”
They went. They moved toward the cabin that plumed still more black smoke. She knew that they thought they could do what she could not, those men with bundles of sticks cradled in their arms thinking the work of carrying kindling was as precious as carrying a newborn.
“Jonah, wait,” she said. She feared he would ignore her.
Yet, he stopped on the porch and waved the others on into the cabin before he turned back toward her. His expression seemed as shut to her as a locked door.
“Jonah, what’s happened?” She meant to ask What’s changed? but couldn’t. It cut too close to what she was feeling. “Is somethin’ the matter with yo’ li’l ’uns? Is Bean took sick?”
It was the wrong thing to ask. “Why you worryin’ so much after Bean?”
“I tol’ you I’d take care of him,” Rue said and tried not to think of her deception, or her plan of false poison, lest it show on her face.
“Folks keep tryna tell me you workin’ devilment.” He looked about like he feared he would be heard. Or worse, like he feared he would be seen with her. “They wanna run you outta town. They say Bean’s the only one that ain’t took sick. That it must be your doin’. If you don’t loose yo’ hold over Bean they plan to leave him out in the woods for the foxes to eat.”
To hear it said pained her, but she’d known all along that that’s what this all was tipping toward. Ma Doe had warned her of it; even Bruh Abel in his way had suggested trouble would come from Bean. And to Bean also.
“Bean’s just a child,” Rue spat. “Yo’ child.”
Jonah flinched. She’d struck where she’d meant to.
He led her away from the main road, closer to the edge of the woods where no one was likely to pass and hear them.
“Sarah say he was born dead but that you brung him back from the dead. Is that true, Miss Rue?”
“He was born different,” she said slowly, as if she were trying to remember. But of course she had never stopped fearing that exact thing, that Bean was a curse come back from the past, to be visited upon her alone. A shame she