if they knew where to look. There was profit in runaway corpses. Even dead, his white folks might string him up in the center of their cotton field as a warning to the others, a scarecrow to watch rot while they worked. His white folks might conspire to have him cut up, each limb and ligament worth a silver dollar from some white doctor curious on how a black body differed from his own.
The dead man, therefore, had to be prepared, and quickly, for the homegoing. Charlie Blacksmith came through to Miss May Belle’s cabin. He sent a storm of sparks into the air, but he did it—the collar and its serpentine spikes fell away, and beneath it the dead man’s neck appeared, seeming small and vulnerable. When they pulled it away, the collar, once sinister, fell to pieces like so many petals. What power it had had was gone from it now, left to bits of rust and iron.
* * *
—
Rue and Miss May Belle had to sleep with the man; there was no better place to put him than where he already was, stretched out on their supper table. The proposition didn’t seem to bother Miss May Belle much, who long ago had lost her discomfort with life and death, with other folks’ bodies, if she’d ever had any discomfort to begin with. She slept deeply through the night that he was with them. Rue lay awake beside her mama in fear and in wonder both. Across the room she could not see the dead man clearly, but she could make out his bulk and the shape of him, and beneath the lighter color of the quilt, she could make out perfectly the pale white bottoms of his feet, which caught the moonlight.
Miss May Belle was as boisterous sleeping as she was awake. Her breath came in gusting stutters, a force, for certain, but so rhythmic that Rue most often found it soothing. But there was no comfort this night, and so awake, Rue listened and counted each of her mama’s breaths as a way to keep time ’til it felt safe to move, whenever that might be. When she did get up she did so without telling herself she would. She was just suddenly in motion, quick but quiet to sit up and sweep the sheet from her legs and then stand so that the bed would shift slowly with her spare weight and not disturb her mama, who stayed snoring.
Rue crept across the room. She ghosted her way across the wooden floor until she reached him. The dead man waited, his head tilted toward her.
She held her hand to his open mouth, not so close as to touch his lips, but close enough to feel air. There was none to be felt and, emboldened, she hovered her hand down lower and lower still. The quilt was thin, a pattern of interlocking scenes, each block bearing little stitches of activity. Faceless black men and women—made women by the bell of their skirts—danced here and tended harvest there and bore black wings up to white misshaped stars. Rue dared. She pulled back the thickly bordered corner of the quilt and followed the taut V of the dead man’s waist. She saw the dark coiled hairs surrounding the mass of flesh there, long but unmenacing. It was what made him a man, she knew; it stuck close to his left thigh, dead too. A wrongness roiled in the pit of her belly. Rue dropped the quilt back down.
Across the room Miss May Belle’s breathing came steady, slower than the rhythm of Rue’s nervous heartbeat. Rue slipped one foot toward the bed, another, another. She froze when she saw them, the knowing bare whites of her mama’s eyes. Watching.
“You done, girl?”
Rue could scarcely remember how to nod.
“A’ight. Come on back to bed now.”
Rue did as her mama said.
* * *
—
The suit they found him the next morning fit as best it could, being something borrowed and not meant to be returned. It was a dusky gray, and folks said he looked ready for his wedding day. Wed to death, some of the older women were saying, wed to Jesus. But no one could