Rue could go on and on putting off Varina’s demands, could keep on telling the woman that it was not safe for her to venture beyond the confines of the old church. But she looked at Varina now and there was some of that old defiance starting to crackle on Varina’s face, there and gone, fast like lightning.
In their hide-and-seek game, Varina kept herself well hid in the distant church, far off from the plantation. The old routes to the church had been cut off by a particularly bad swell of the river that made the woods look all turned around if a body wasn’t over-familiar with traversing them.
Varina made her home in the rectory. On braver days she ghosted through the empty church aisles or up in the vaulted second story where the corpse bell swung through dust and gleaming spider webs.
Those first hard months after the fire destroyed her home, Miss Varina had near wasted away in her bedroll, her mind gone, fogged over with fear and sorrow and shame. Every shadow was sin or a Northern soldier in a war she didn’t know was ending. Without Rue, Varina might have died, or lost her senses altogether. Might have hurt herself, in some final brutal way, just to be free of the torment of her own memories.
But Varina had gradually healed. And Rue knew that one of these days she was going to reclaim that old hunger. Then she wasn’t going to stay satisfied eating up the simple lies that Rue kept on feeding her.
Rue’s ears pricked up to some sound outside. Was that the crack of twigs beneath a quick approach? She stood from the bench. Tried to listen. There again, motion.
Varina stilled. “Rue?”
“Go.” Rue took up her lantern, moved as swiftly as she could, and slipped her way out through the double doors. Shut them behind her, hard.
Bruh Abel was there in the field of the church. His eyes were arrowhead sharp in the rocking light of her lantern.
“There you are, Miss Rue.” His breath smelled of brandy, but his voice was steady when he spoke. Exacting. Sober.
“You ain’t drunk,” Rue said.
“I poured out the brandy, boiled it up into the stew, while you wasn’t lookin’.” He seemed pleased with himself. “I wanted to know what it is you hide in these woods. What you ain’t want me to see.”
Rue glanced behind her, tried to make it look like she wasn’t looking for anything. But she was looking, up at the high windows of the church and into the bellhouse, but there was no movement there, just the chill of a disused building, frozen in time.
Bruh Abel was wanting an answer. She had to give him something, she thought, one secret to keep another.
“Go on and look then.”
He stepped through the doorway of the church. He took Rue’s lantern from her, held it high and set it to swinging, and the shadow his body cast stretched out long and sinister over the empty room.
Rue followed close behind him, struggling in his wake to see over his shoulder. She tried to see it through his eyes, the cracked church pews and the broke-down altar and the second story that looked about ready to collapse. She tried to read the shadows for a hint of white movement.
Where had Varina hid herself?
“What is this place?” he asked. It was like his preacher voice knew it was a church house and felt at home—it echoed sharply taking up the whole of the room, made Rue’s heart scud in terror.
“Nothin’ but where we used to get made to worship,” she told him. “Forced to worship.”
“And you stay comin’ here?” Bruh Abel illuminated one sharp corner. In it was a rocking chair. There was a handkerchief draped across the seat with a half-finished bit of embroidery, lily of the valley, in neat green stitch, the flowers not bloomed in yet.
“Folks don’t come here no more. Can’t, I s’pose,” Rue said quick. “But I do. For quiet-like.”