meant waiting her whole life on sickness. On some calamity to befall others so that she could come in and stop it. But for all the calamity amongst the children, Black-Eyed Bean had shown no signs of sickening.
Rue could not wait any longer for Bean to prove that he was an ordinary boy capable of ordinary illness. It might never happen. All the while other children would fall sick around them, fall sicker, die.
Rue was resolved to go on with her scheme. She had set aside her hesitation over serving Bean a treatment of poison. No power in hesitation—Miss May Belle had taught Rue that in her every action.
Rue commenced to cook the sickness up in her kitchen. She had no food to prepare there anyhow. The goodwill of the townsfolk had fed her before but that goodwill was gone, dwindling with every child she hadn’t saved, with every whisper made against her that the pestilence that had befallen their babies was because of her and Bean.
Stooped at her fireplace, Rue tended to a swinging pot filled with the black dotted leaves she’d gathered and their rolling seeds. Poison. She refused to call it otherwise. She had to have a clear mind on what she was doing, on why she was doing it. No sugar, no dose of molasses syrup to ease the going. Poison, plain, simple. If Bean showed the same sickness as the other children for a spell—and Rue could make it so—then no one could think him special. Nobody could think him favored as some witch’s creation, or by some conjure of protection that she had given him, nor could they go on believing that he was leeching away the vitality of the other children for his own benefit.
She’d fallen asleep with Jonah’s threats inside her head and she woke that morning terrified. At her front door there came a scratching.
They come to burn me up, Rue feared.
She pulled the pot from where it hung; the metal handle burned her skin. Still she clutched tight to it. They couldn’t find her out. She had to get rid of the poison before she was caught at doing precisely what they’d accused her of all along. Cooking up sickness. They’d kill her for it.
Rue tossed the simmering poison to the ground, stashed the heated pot amongst cool ones on a high shelf just as Bruh Abel barreled through, rocked the door on its hinges. He held in his arms bundles of vegetables. He wasn’t in his suit but a pair of overalls too large and clean for working in, the shirt too small. Looking at her from the doorway he sucked wind through his teeth the way her mama might’ve if she weren’t so long ago dead, so long past drawing breath, angry or otherwise.
No time to hesitate. Rue ground away her secret, crushed the leaves away with her boot heel.
“Why you here?”
“Christian charity,” he said.
He set down the food on the table, and the spread rolled out wide enough to make Rue’s stomach growl. She didn’t move out from her corner, hid her burnt hand behind her back.
“Unless, you already got supper goin’.” He glanced at her spitting fire and above it the empty place her cooking pot was meant to hang.
“No,” she said too loud.
“Figured that.” Bruh Abel looked down like he was embarrassed, or pretending to be leastwise. “Folks loaded me up with all they had when they saw me. In thanks for my comin’ and all. You was right. It brightened ’em to see me come.”
“I knew it would.” She wasn’t going to let herself get jealous for it, not now. She realized that Bruh Abel had the power to ease the suspicion amongst the townspeople. But he could just as easily stoke it if he had a mind to.
It came to Rue then that folks all had been waiting on his healing, same as they had once waited on her, and on Miss May Belle before her. Likewise they would wait on his assessment of the state of things. If he pronounced she was accursed, then she was accursed and Bean along with her. What