I ain’t forgive, Miss Rue, that he aimed to diminish other black folk through use a’ me.”
Bruh Abel pulled himself up by her hips. Rue bristled but did not pull away. His truth had his body shivering, nothing eloquent about him now. Just another mama-less child.
“I’ve been wantin’ you to know that,” he said. “Didn’t know how to tell it but in a story. Figure you’d understand. I don’t care for what folks are expectin’ a’ Bean, lookin’ the way he does. Layin’ they burdens at his feet. Seems to me they should ’llow him to be a boy, not just an evil or a spectacle.”
“You mean to go to him now?” Rue asked. “To pray over him the way you done my mama?”
“Just this minute,” Bruh Abel said.
“Before all to see?” Rue pressed.
“I swear it.”
Rue kissed Bruh Abel. A brief pressing of her lips to his in which neither of them moved or even breathed, the better to feel. She wound her hands down his body and lingered at his taut chest, and then at the waist of his belt, and then at his pocket, where she swapped the vial of holy water he kept there for her own plugged-up vial of poison.
When she pulled back, she was almost reluctant to leave him. It was like peeling away from a place that she belonged.
“Go on then, Bruh Abel,” she said. “With my blessin’.”
He moved her hair and kissed her again, easy, like he’d always had the right.
* * *
—
Rue waited and imagined. She was not to be seen when Bruh Abel led Bean out amongst the townspeople to be healed through prayer and singing and drinking holy water. So she had to picture it, and sit and wait, alone.
Her cabin seemed overlarge now that it was hers alone again and empty of Bruh Abel. His watch was over. He had the truth of her, or so he thought. He’d gotten the witch to promise that she would admit before everybody her misdeeds. It was to be done in the harsh light of the next day’s dawn. Now he was free to minister to her changeling, to free Bean of her hold.
Bruh Abel had no sense of how well his freeing would go. He didn’t know that his praying was laced, that by daybreak Bean would have the froth and the fever that had wracked the other children. Just enough sickness to silence all suspicions.
Rue had to imagine too, Varina in the old white church, imagine how she must have sat for hours in the prison she had put herself in, ’til she could be certain it was safe to return to the rectory. Rue had cautioned Varina over and over that she must never be seen, and if she were to be seen she must do everything she rightly could to appear like she was dead, only an apparition in the eyeblink of any superstitious gaze. Seemed Varina had took Rue’s warnings to heart.
So Rue kept on, waiting, sat by the warm of her fire as the things she had laid unfurled. She pulled from her pocket the bottle of holy water she had stolen from Bruh Abel, replaced with her own more potent liquid. Rue pulled up the cork stopper and at the fireplace she overturned the vial and let the whiskey-water out. It hissed and sizzled where it met the heat but the fire kept on burning.
* * *
—
When the sickness came, they needed her, Jonah and Sarah did. They had to believe Rue had been absolved by Bruh Abel’s word, because he said so. She was the only one with enough knowledge to tell them what had befallen their youngest son. They sent Bruh Abel to fetch her and he led her to their door, hovering behind her, like he was still suspect of her power for all that he had vouchsafed her coming redemption.
The poison had worked quicker even than Rue had figured. In his bed, Bean twisted and sweated against an inferno fever. They had called on her for help though they had not trusted her. What else could