back and made an example and shackled. Then he had run again.
There was a quilt for his nakedness, though it seemed small on him and only covered his lower half: his raw knees to the crescent of his belly button, shrouded. Rue looked long at the quilt then up to her mama, who stood behind the stretch of the dead man the way other mamas might stand behind a supper they’d cooked.
“He ain’t died of no pestilence, leastwise. Wouldn’t let them have brung him here if he had. Nah, body’s strong, wiry-like, sure, but strong.”
Miss May Belle touched the taut skin over his calves, thick as tree trunks. She moved to the top of the body, past various scars and scratches, a short life’s worth of hurts and healing. His eyes, not all closed, were hooded, so she opened one of his lids all the way for him and looked in.
“No yellowin’. No cloudin’. Nah. He just die scared.” She let the eye slip back to half-shut. “See how he look afraid?”
Rue could not tell what afraid looked like on a dead man. What did he have left to fear for?
“But, Mama,” she said. She was still frozen in the doorway with all her flowers. “Who is he?”
“Nobody know,” said Miss May Belle, but that didn’t stop folks from trying to figure it. They came through the cabin one after another to look at him, the dead man, to confirm his strangeness and to make hollow suggestions about from where he’d come.
“Young buck,” said Ol’ Joel. “They like ’em like that down south way. Strong, they is, but got no sense. Disobedience is his name if it’s anything.”
“He got some Injun in him,” said Beulah, who’d seen Indian in her red-skinned daddy and so saw it everywhere. The dead man’s ears, she said, were like arrowheads; he could hear danger and that’s how he’d run so far, for so long.
Opal, who knew a whole mess of men, was known to know them intimately, could not make sense of him.
“I ain’t never come ’cross him,” she said, as if she’d come across every man since Adam. She swept her hand over the peak of his pointed cheekbone. “Woulda like to known him, though. Face like that, surely he was somethin’ good to somebody.”
Seemed the dead man was something to everybody. They kept coming to look him over, though it was clear no one could name him. Even folks from the neighboring plantation came by if they could get the leave, not even to speak, just to stare. They put the pennies on his eyes after a while, to respectfully weigh down the lids. They all agreed there was something shiver-stirring in the pureness of those half-mooned whites. White as they knew cotton to be, white as they’d heard snow could be.
“It’s foul luck to spend the pennies off a’ dead folks’ eyes,” Miss May Belle warned the children that came to peek, “so don’t you dare go an’ think it.”
Rue did not think of it. What she did think was how strange his stillness was, this dead man, with his muscles still poised as if at any moment were he to hear the hounds barking or the guns firing or the footsteps of white men’s boots on wooded ground, he could take off. He could run again. Rue sensed it in him, and it sent a sort of thrill through her she as yet had never known. She had never before been so close to a man, dead or alive, and it was his potential to run that thrilled her. Women, she realized then, were not built that way. Women were for crouching, for becoming heavy-bellied, for bearing down and pushing close to the earth, that different sort of running, that sedentary sort of endurance.
* * *
—
They all of them conspired to keep the dead man hid from Marse Charles. It was a dangerous folly, they knew, but a risk worth taking to bear the dead man home. He had the look of every runaway sketch hanging from any tree in the county, but still someone might come to claim him