would it take, she wondered, for him to pronounce them otherwise?
Rue crossed the room, blowing at her burnt hand. She tried to lead Bruh Abel to the door, but he stood still in the middle of her home.
“It was good a’ you to come,” she finally said.
“I ain’t leavin’,” he said. “I’m stayin’ here.”
“What you mean you stayin’?”
“You one a’ my flock now,” he told her. “I stay amongst my own and administer after they needs. There’s somethin’ asunder in yo’ home, Miss Rue. Right here is where I’m needed. So right here is where I’m stayin’.”
The air all around them smelled sweet with the poison she’d been cooking. No way he couldn’t smell it.
“I’m to watch,” Bruh Abel said, walking the length of her supper table. He began sorting through the food, busying his hands on leeks and squashes and sweet potatoes. “Three days. On the third day I ought to know the truth a’ the matter.”
“So you set yo’self up as the judge and the jury a’ my trial?” And the executioner, Rue thought, and she clipped her mouth shut, suddenly afraid. “Is that why you come?”
“If I ain’t come, they aimed to run you off, or worse.” Bruh Abel’s expression was more honest than she’d ever seen it. “They tol’ me to come to you, the townsfolk did. They begged it. Do you know what they sayin’ ’bout you, Miss Rue?”
She hadn’t for one moment stopped thinking on Jonah’s accusations. Knowing him like she did she didn’t doubt that Jonah had softened the threat, only repeated half the hateful accusations he’d heard, too cowardly or too cautious to give voice to the worst of it.
“I ain’t come to hurt you,” Bruh Abel said. “I mean only to bring reason to the matter. I come to settle things before it’s all gone too far. They all of ’em convinced that Bean’s yo familiar. That he’s workin’ as yo’ spirit to steal life from the li’l ’uns. They say it must be that Bean come from the Devil. What kinda preacher would I be if I ain’t confront the Devil?”
“You ain’t no real kinda preacher.”
Rue’s venom seemed to surprise him. Well, she had surprised her own self. She sat down heavy on her bed, her face hid in her hands, her poison crushed up in the dirt under her feet.
“Last night you saw my weakness for drink, it’s true,” Bruh Abel said after a time. “Just ’cause I’m a preacher man don’t mean I can’t sometimes lose faith. Just ’cause you a healin’ woman don’t mean you can’t sometimes fall ill.”
He came round the table to her and Rue did not back down. He laid his hand on her head like he was feeling for fever.
“Are you sufferin’ some sickness, Miss Rue? I mean to find it and flush it out.”
* * *
—
They passed the evening and late into the night like two strangers, man and woman in too small of a home.
Despite his swagger before a crowd, Bruh Abel was not altogether comfortable in the presence of one person, that one person being Rue, who was watching him from the corner of her home, distrustful.
Seemed Bruh Abel didn’t want to be hated. He kept trying to talk at her. All the while her mind stayed hopping about, figuring at some way out. She’d play along at sweetness if she had to. For Bean’s sake. And her own.
It brought Rue to mind of slaverytime when Marse Charles had took it upon himself to pick a man slave and woman slave to couple together for no other reason than that he liked the look of them and figured them for good stock. Sometimes they wouldn’t hardly have the hour to get acquainted before Miss May Belle was sent in to scent the sheets, check between the woman slave’s legs for blood if she were a virgin, leastwise for slick if she was not. As a child Rue had always figured if she were to ever get a man, that would be how it went. Hadn’t that been how her