mama had got her daddy after all, that first time? And Rue had followed some nine months after, just a tick mark on Marse Charles’s accounting book.
Freedom turned everything all over. Now a man was something you took because you wanted him. A baby something you might have for the sake of loving it.
Maybe Rue had let some of her confusion snake onto her face because Bruh Abel asked, “What you thinkin’ on?”
Rue could not say what she was thinkin’, which was how to be rid a’ you, so she answered instead “Bean.”
Bruh Abel perked up. “You layin’ some kinda conjure? Is that how it works? By thinkin’ on him?”
She cussed. “I’m worryin’ ’bout him.”
Bruh Abel settled himself down. “I heard you the one that named him.”
Rue shrugged. “I ain’t mean to. Just somethin’ I said, and Sarah repeated it to Jonah maybe and Jonah repeated it to somebody and it just got goin’ like that and there he was, Black-Eyed Bean.”
“Black-eyed peas what my mama called ’em where she from. Ain’t that somethin’?”
Rue had not altogether thought that Bruh Abel had a mama. Thought maybe he sprung up like some weed of his own volition.
“We come from the same people,” he went on, “but we come up with all different ways a’ sayin’ the same thing.”
He said it like they were sharing a joke. It lighted the dimple on his cheek. Rue shrugged, decided it was better to not look at him at all if he was going to try to be friendly. She suspected his friendliness for a trap.
Having him there in her cabin reminded Rue of the first time she’d seen him at the side of Miss May Belle’s bed, ministering.
He’d been there when Rue had not been. How much did he know of Miss May Belle? Of the townsfolk? Of Rue herself? Were there secrets Rue’s mama might have told him? Confessions of her deathbed? Fact was at her end Miss May Belle had trusted in him, and in his vials of holy water. He had that way about him, to get everybody’s trust. Whether he served poison or snake oil or whiskey water, why was it that they all of them were so ready to drink it up?
“You gon’ save Bean, won’t you?” It was the first thing she’d said without his prompting, and it got his attention right off.
He looked at her, somber. “I meant what I said. No harm is to come to him.”
“Then do somethin’.”
“That’s my intention. I’ll save yo’ soul and I’ll save him, also.”
Rue meant to save herself and might have said as much. But an idea flitted through her head, small at first, on moth wings, then larger still.
“Minister to Bean, Bruh Abel,” she said, “same as you did my mama. I ain’t never rightly thanked you for that. But when you came to her, folks saw that she was healed.”
Bruh Abel nodded like it was all his idea. “I mean to do the very same.”
Rue smiled at him and her smile was all poison.
* * *
—
The second day he made a soup, he told her a tale, and Rue devised a way to get herself out.
She set down a bottle of good strong brandy on the table between them, the kind she saved for sicknesses, and she put beside it a crystal glass, a pretty one, one she’d saved from her white folks’ house before the fire.
Didn’t matter, she knew, if a fish saw the hook so long as the bait was something they couldn’t help but hunger after.
“Go ’head, Bruh Abel.”
Rue tried to make herself sweet, the least like a witch that she could be, and she filled the glass up high and set it before him glinting amber in the firelight. She knew men had a myriad of weaknesses, but she only trusted herself to seduce him with the one.