the moment she was put into the ground when they’d hear the church bells ringing out her years.
“Forty?” Red Jack had asked, wide-eyed.
“Yea, forty,” Ma Doe had told him, exasperated, and then she’d had to call on Rue, who wasn’t strong enough to pull on the bell’s thick cord to set it ringing—but she was good at keeping count. Rue had never had cause for reading, but she’d learned her figures, had to learn them well when keeping labor time for the mamas.
Rue and Red Jack crawled up in the church bell tower like thieving mice, unseen by the mourners just then pouring out from the lower levels behind the fine, heavy coffin. Red Jack was fast and agile with his climbing. Rue was slow and clumsy and had to be helped up the last few rungs. She brushed away his helping hands when she got to the top and tucked herself in the farthest corner from him.
From above they could see clearly the white mourners retreat up to the graveyard, trailing behind the coffin like black ants bearing a prize back to their hill. Rue was nervous. If they timed the bells wrong they’d surely be whupped. You didn’t get between folks and their mourning. She told Red Jack as much, but he just shrugged.
“I been whupped before,” he said, which was surely true and maybe explained why he was so damned slow. He seemed excited by the pull cord for the heavy brass bell. He kept running his hands over the knots in anticipation.
“Why’d you do what you done on Christmas night?” she asked. She’d never quite shook off the taste of that whiskey kiss. For days after it had come to her, swirled into her nose like it was fresh, a kiss just laid.
Red Jack shrugged again. Rue hoped his head would fall plum off with the movement. “Miss Varina said to, ain’t she?”
“That all?” Rue didn’t want her voice to give out or to give away her true feelings. He’d only been obeying Varina.
“Sure, I thought it might be nice to kiss you.” He let go of the cord. Crossed over to her, hopping the dangerous place where the floor of the tower was opened for the ladder.
“You alright, Rue,” he said. “When you ain’t frownin’ at every damned thing.”
He kissed her again. She tried to decide if she liked it at all. It was warm and strange. Her teeth got in the way.
She let his lips go. The mourners were all on the hill.
“One,” she said and Red Jack leaped back to his position and began to toll. “Two,” she said.
Forty years resounded off the corpse bell loud enough to give Rue a headache. She watched Red Jack, who partway through the counting had felt it necessary to undo his shirt. His back muscles worked as he pulled, and when he was done he used his bundled shirt to wipe the sweat from his brow and then from each tuft in the red-brown coils of hair in his armpits.
“Forty,” Rue said and then, “Don’t never kiss me again. Iff’n you do I’ll put a goopher on you, fix it so yo’ lips turn black-blue and fall right off one night in yo’ sleep.”
Red Jack let her precede him down the ladder and through the empty church where the bell’s last echoes still pealed. He held the double doors open for her and let her leave before him down the way.
He said, “Uh, thank you, Rue. For the countin’,” and he didn’t say one more word to her for years after that but hello and goodbye and ain’t the weather fine.
* * *
—
The belt for Varina was done. It clicked nutmeg shells when Rue gave it over to her. Still swathed deep black in heavy mourning, Varina looked pale and suspect but she took it anyway.
“I ain’t yet bled, Rue,” she said. She held the belt with its dark seeds and bright red ribbon around the tapered black waist of her mourning gown.
“I know, but I wanted to give you somethin’. Figure you still a