Rue said, “Bean was born with a caul. A veil like. Heard tell it’s lucky, means he got the Sight.”
“Sarah say you jealous a’ her,” Jonah went on. “That you made Bean as a curse on her. That you was gon’ give her a poison to stop havin’ more babies.”
Rue felt horror stab through her, sharp as a dagger.
“Sarah say maybe you put somethin’ evil in Bean when he was born. That you hid evidence of it. Somethin’ sinister.”
“I didn’t.”
Jonah looked ill. “I burnt them sheets he was born in like you said. Was it conjure, Miss Rue, what you tol’ me to do?”
“No, no. It was only what Miss May Belle used to do.”
“Folks seen you go out into the woods at night. They say you go to practice yo’ witchery.” Jonah was looking at her like he was afraid of her. She could not bear it.
“What about that night I saw you with Ol’ Joel?” Jonah said. “Did he have it figured? Is that why he died?
“Where’d you go last night, Miss Rue?” He asked it like he was desperate for her to come up with a good lie, an explanation that would make the danger pass. But she didn’t have one ready. Her head was full of secrets. Her basket was full of poison.
“Folks say you nigh on twenty but you won’t take no man. Is it true you got a lover in the woods?” Jonah asked it like it was the worst of her sins. “That you conceived Bean there to lay in Sarah’s stomach? Is that the truth of his black eyes? Why he don’t cry when you hold him?”
By now Jonah’s chest was heaving with the tumble of accusations, more passion than Rue had ever seen from him in all the years she’d known him, and suddenly she resented it, her anger coming on her like a hot brand, the realization that’d he’d never looked on her ’til now and that this was how it was going to be.
“?‘Folks say,’?” she mimicked. “What do you say, Jonah? You believe it? If I am a witch maybe you ought not to cross me.”
Jonah took a reeling step back, good as if she’d slapped him. “I don’t want no harm to come to the children.”
“Neither do I,” said Miss Rue. “You go on and tell folks I never did none of those things they say. I ain’t much more than a woman that knows some things, things anybody could know if they wanted to. Ain’t no devil in the woods, Jonah. Ain’t no lover.”
* * *
—
When Bruh Abel came amongst them, she heard it: the simple commotion of him, that thing she’d told him to stir up. Hope. By the way folks were carrying on, you would have thought Jesus had finally come, that or the white doctor with his shining black bag of medicine vials, but it was just Bruh Abel and his prayers, as though hope was better than healing. They were all of them out of their houses—the healthy, the living, the left behind—and then they were praying and then they were singing something mournful.
She tried to picture Bruh Abel coming out from the accursed woods, his timing perfect. They could have no sense of how he’d spent his night, or his months away from the town. He existed to them only when he came down from the trees, as seasonal as falling fruit. But she knew.
Rue was bent at the table with pestle, with mortar, grinding down the green leaves with their little black raindrop pattern, a sign she’d learned to avoid, a sign for poison. She ground the leaves down as fine as she could and finer still and swore to herself it was the right thing to do to save Bean and herself. Never mind the right thing to do, it was the only thing, and that mattered more. She would make him sick for a short time. A spell.
THE RAVAGING
Folks would not trust the healing woman to heal. All her days, Rue had been a healing woman, and that