“Don’t touch nothin’,” Bruh Abel told her, and Rue did as she was told.
Rue stood beside him as he looked over the sick boy.
“He’s sweatin’ out somethin’ awful,” Bruh Abel said. Rue could see that. Could see the way the boy was succumbing to the fever. Like he was being cooked alive.
“Y’all need to cool him.” Rue turned to the mama and daddy. Jonah eyed her with suspicion but seemed to be thinking on the whole situation, deciding. Sarah’s expression was drawn, like she’d gone away and left her body behind.
In the bed Bean reared up. The black in his eyes seemed to have spread. He spoke. Not sentences, not even words, just the harsh sounds of a muddy guttural language, hard tongue pangs on the back of his teeth.
“Take him to the river,” Rue said.
Sarah and Rue followed behind the men as they went ahead. Bean, slung over Bruh Abel’s shoulder, was a limp weight in his arms, looking back at them through half lids, an uncanny stare like an accusation.
“The cold water outta help cool his burnin’,” Rue told them.
“You know he afraid a’ the water,” Sarah said.
Bean fought them. As Bruh Abel and Jonah both walked into the deep of the river, the little boy between them thrashed and hollered. They had to hold him in it, beneath the water made icy with night. But he did soon calm, maybe shocked by it into an eerie still. On the bank, Rue’s heart ached for what she’d done to him. But she’d had to. Every wrong she’d ever done, she’d done to protect others. Bean. Varina. The whole of the town and every soul in it.
“Folks won’t come after him no more at least. They can’t say he ain’t suffered.” Sarah spoke the words of the thing that Rue had been hoping after, but to see it there before them enacted, it seemed a cruel means, hardly worth its end.
“I love him,” Sarah said. They watched Bruh Abel and Jonah drag themselves out of the river, Bean hanging limp between them. “You may not think it, but I do. I love him the way anyone loves any child, because they a child. It’s not like he mine. It’s like he came outta me but he ain’t hardly touched me.”
In the silver of the light Sarah looked pale, resigned, like the haint of someone Rue used to know. “You’ll know when you got one a yo’ own what it’s like,” Sarah said. “That Bean, he don’t belong to me. I can’t say who he was meant for.”
They took the boy back home, dripping, to shiver in his bed.
WARTIME
1861
Varina never did bleed. Varina had been their pacer for all those years, the girl and then the woman by whom they, her black servants, might set the clocks of their own bodies, for they had no better way of knowing their own age besides looking and guessing at their reflections in the glass they were scrubbing or in the water pails they were fetching. Then all at once Varina, who was always first, fell behind, came up dry.
Sarah bled, and then Beulah that same spring that they counted as their thirteenth year. Then Rue bled in the rainy season, the last of a crop of girls turned to women in the course of one evening, now elevated in value by the promise of their multitudes.
Varina came to Miss May Belle’s cabin each time she heard that one of the black girls had become a woman. She pestered, sniffed it out of them, like a beast for the blood, and when she caught the scent she’d come knocking at Miss May Belle’s door.
“Girl, ain’t nothin’ wrong with you,” Miss May Belle would say. “It’ll happen when it has cause to happen.”
It was Rue that set Varina on wanting to bleed. They were where they should not have been, up in the lofted gallery of the little church, which, every Sunday, creaked and buckled under the weight of the black congregation. It seemed so much smaller, Rue realized, absent of that press of bodies.