up the bottle itself, winked at her, and drank from it straight. Bottle in hand, he went on cooking.
Bruh Abel cooked with the same flare with which he preached. He alternated between a whistle and a hum as he chopped up vegetables at her small table, made a broth in her only pot, rolled dough in the bowl she usually used to make a draught for colic.
Sitting on the sharp edge of her bed, Rue watched him, sipped at the glass she’d poured. She aimed to keep her wits about her as his slipped from him. Then when he was fast asleep she could steal into the woods. Fetch more poison leaves for Bean. Finish finally the idea she’d started.
Bruh Abel came over to her with the soup and coaxed her to taste his concoction, proffering an outstretched spoonful. She looked into his heavy-lidded eyes and smiled, took the spoon for herself, and tasted. It was hot, it was good.
“Where’d you learn all that?”
“From Queenie, where else? My mama.”
He told Rue about Queenie in a heavy slur. He called her Queenie ’cause everybody called her Queenie and everybody called her Queenie, he supposed, because she was the queen of her kitchen. Her master was a sea captain, though Bruh Abel in his overflowing enthusiasm made him sound something more like a pirate—thickly bearded, full gray eyes—and that sea captain had loved Queenie so much he’d had her likeness etched into the figurehead of his boat, down to every last quirk and birthmark. He’d made her a mermaid. The snaking curve of her back jutted her out over the sea, and the sea captain even had them sculpt in the two dimples on her back where her ass spread wide and became the scaled pattern of the bow. That ten-foot Queenie was made all of mahogany picked for its perfect match, the exact color of her skin.
“He weren’t a superstitious man and he’dda had her on the ship with him if he could, but his men weren’t gonna have none of that,” Bruh Abel told Rue in a hiccup. “Women on ships is sour luck.”
Rue had to wonder why the wood figure of a woman on a ship was good when a real, flesh woman on a ship was bad but she didn’t ask, just watched Bruh Abel tip back the bottle.
Queenie lived on the quay, Bruh Abel explained as he ladled out a bowl of soup, in a sea-battered cottage with her baker’s dozen of children, who had a way of being born nine months or thereabouts after the captain’s ship left her port. Bruh Abel had been the youngest of those and the petted favorite. Her boys she offered to the sea, her girls to other folks’ kitchens, but Bruh Abel, being her littlest, she kept close. He’d learned her cooking looking up from under her skirts.
Bruh Abel made his way to where Rue sat on the edge of the bed. He tasted his soup, made a noise of satisfaction, and tasted it again. He sat himself down on the bed too, his legs tangled in her sheet. Rue had to push up against the headboard to give his tall angular body room.
“The sea captain loved her and her way with food so much he done declared that when he died he’d free her and all us li’l ’uns with her. He died inside a year a’ writing the words. Folks says she killed him on purpose.”
Rue frowned. “Did she?”
Bruh Abel laughed so hard he spit out some of his soup. “Nah, just he loved her cookin’ so much he got to weighin’ half a ton and died from the strain of it.”
He handed her the bowl and Rue ate from it, sharply hungry and hungrier still with each bite. The salty broth floated with greens and sweet potatoes that must have come from Ma Doe’s garden, and a dark meat so smooth she could swallow it whole.
“Don’t you want any?” she asked him.
“Nah,” he said, smiling dreamily, “I got all I need right here.” He patted the brown bottle like a lover. Rue felt almost sorry for him.
* * *