mamas—well, she’d heard all nature of things in her long life and she thought she had heard every last thing there was to hear ’til she heard that.
“Who is he?”
“Don’t know.”
“How’d you know he’s dead?”
“He ain’t movin’ none.”
“How long’s he been there?”
“?’Least as long as right now.”
Ma Doe had a baby on either hip and one swathed up on her back, and she was in no type of place to go running off into the wood on Red Jack’s half-clear declaration, but she had a sense that something dread had come to them and she knew Red Jack didn’t have it in him to lie. If he said there was a dead man in the wood, then there was.
She sent Red Jack to fetch Charlie and Ol’ Joel and take them to the place where the dead man lay. He did just that, and the two men and one boy came back to her, hats in hand.
“Sure ’nough he is a dead man,” said Ol’ Joel.
“Can’t make no sense a’ who he is or where he come from,” said Charlie.
“Runaway,” said Ma Doe, who had wisdom of such things.
Ol’ Joel was for telling Marse Charles, as he always was for telling Marse Charles. Charlie, who thought himself wise because he’d been allowed to apprentice at the side of a white blacksmith, commented on the iron collar. One of the long, cruel bars was bent enough to allow the man to lie, his head propped up awkward as if on a pillow of air. But at a touch the whole thing was rusted, weak. Perhaps he’d come up through the water, from the river, risen.
It was Red Jack that came to the solution, which was as simple as saying, “Miss May Belle oughta know.”
Ma Doe sent Charlie and Ol’ Joel to fetch the dead man. Standing in the doorway, draped in her orphan babies, she watched as they carried him through the crossways center of the plantation. Ol’ Joel with his bad knees took the legs, Charlie held the head and shoulders, and as they passed her by Ma Doe couldn’t help but to say how young the dead man was, how he was surely just fresh from his first shave and how sad, how very very sad, was the world.
* * *
—
Rue was not there when they brought the dead man into their home. Ma Doe had had the sense to tell Red Jack to run ahead, to warn Miss May Belle of what was coming her way, and in turn Miss May Belle had sent Rue on a fool’s errand—go pick some sassafras from down the road a ways, as if there wasn’t sassafras sprouting up all over the place, but Rue went.
Sassafras, Rue knew, liked gaps, dwelled in drops of light where the soil was moist but not too wet, and like all good things, it came wrapped in bad. It had a way of tangling itself with poison vines, trying to hide. But Rue’s hands were small and already well practiced, and she picked the two apart and came back to her mama with only the good, a whole mess of sassafras sprouting out from her arms like she was herself a garden.
They’d put the dead man on the table, drawn the curtains, hid the sun. His raised head was turned at attention, like he’d been startled by the opening door, and though his eyes were half-closed, his blue-lined lips were partways open as if he was making ready a greeting.
“Who’s that, Mama?”
“Nobody know.”
Nobody did know. His yellow-brown skin could have been anybody’s yellow-brown skin, as could his shorn black hair, as could his broad nose, his calloused fingers, his flat, bloodied feet. He was young enough to be any mama’s son and old enough to be any baby’s daddy. The lash marks on his shoulders could come from any overseer’s licks, and it was only the iron around his neck that made him the least bit remarkable. Sure as a brand, it meant he was trouble. It meant he had run away and been brought