crested up the graveyard hill, illuminated full for their audience in the big moonlight.
They laid him down in his plot slow. At the head of the grave they were meant to place his belongings so he wouldn’t come out again, a hungry spirit jealous after their own belongings. But he’d come to them with nothing but the twisted collar on his neck, and so that’s what they left there to mark his rest. It bloomed from the ground, rusted and bent and broken, as good as any bit of stone bearing words could be. Better.
They formed up in a final circle for him and took up singing. Rue felt strange to be part of it, to hook her arms in with folks who’d paid her little mind before. But there was a warmth there that she liked and the song they gave was easy to learn, looping through them as it did, the words simple and sharp and real. Rue thought even that the white faces could learn the song if they chose to journey up the hill, but they didn’t join and they didn’t sing, only watched from the black shadow of the trees as on the graveyard hill the singing rose and rose.
“Wonder where is my brother gone?” a voice would lament.
And then another would come from the night. “He is gone to the wilderness,” and another would join: “He ain’t comin’ no more.”
“Where is my brother gone?”
“He gone to wilderness, ain’t comin’ no more.”
“Wonder where will I lie down?” Rue asked when the circle of the song came round on her. Her voice felt thin but she made it hold. “Wonder where will I lie down?”
THE RAVAGING
On the third day of Bruh Abel’s watch, he took Rue walking. They moved through the town square on a gray rain-slicked afternoon, and though no one came out of doors, Rue knew that all of them were watching through windows as the preacher man and healing woman passed.
“They ready to forgive you,” Bruh Abel said.
“Are they?”
“They will want to witness yo’ redemption.” Already he was planning it, like a show. “You need only to admit yo’ wrongdoing.”
Rue did not feel like she had committed wrongdoing that needed admitting, not yet anyway, but she walked beside Bruh Abel just the same, going where he led her, up the steep hill to where the town cemetery sat veiled in mist.
At the peak of the hill, they stopped to look down on the town below. They watched as a line of black smoke plumed from behind a cabin. The sickness wasn’t gone.
“You broke my mama’s spell,” Rue told him.
He looked at her confused.
“Folks say before she died she laid a curse on the town, made it so’s no one could come in an’ no one could come out. But you come in and you come out easy. How’s that?”
“Maybe I’m magic too,” Bruh Abel said, “and don’t even know it myself.”
He spoke of magic with that amused expression that lit up his crooked dimple.
“C’mon,” he said, and he took her over to her mama’s grave. He knelt beside it. “She was a good ’un, yo’ Miss May Belle. Glad I knew her the time I did.”
Rue stayed standing, didn’t speak. At the end she’d felt her mama hadn’t been really happy with her. She’d always felt that, throughout her life, she’d gone up and down on the bobbing tide of Miss May Belle’s esteem. That last year her mama hadn’t been proud of her for choosing to hide away Varina. Wanted no part in it. Cussed Rue for a fool and worse.
It was like Bruh Abel was picking thoughts from her mind when he said, “My mama wasn’t so kind always.”
“Yo’ Queenie?” Rue had rather liked the fanciful tales Bruh Abel had told of his mama, though she didn’t half-believe them. “Thought that you was her favorite.”
Bruh Abel rocked on his haunches. “Favorites come and go,” he said. “First thing she did when the captain gave us our freedom? She turnt round and sold me right