There were no invitations, no letters to mark the occasion of this birthday. Varina, who had so longed for visitors, could receive none, then, or for a full year after her mama’s death. In that season there was only brittle frost on trees and crepe black sheets over mirrors in the parlor, crippling Varina’s vanity. The white doctor had come too late and said after that it was the flu that took Missus. They’d sealed up her room right off just as tight as if it were the tomb in which she’d been interred. Afterward, the house girls gossiped, said Varina sometimes walked the hallways at night to stand in front of the door like she was still waiting on her mama to summon her in.
Marse Charles wore his grief as a tight black armband and nothing more. Folks said all his widower thoughts were of expansion. The whispers of the war coming to their doorstep might’ve had others making themselves smaller, less vulnerable to change, but that was not Marse Charles’s way, never had been. He was wanting more, another acre, another wife. He’d had made a mourning locket for Varina, woven gold from her mama’s brown hair, and Rue was yet to see her wear it.
Now Varina pulled back her skirts and her petticoats, which had been all hemmed black lest anyone spy her underthings and think her lost-mama grief was not full. She held her skirts close to her skin. Beneath the flurry of fabric Rue helped her secure the belt above her small freckled hips. The bloom of color looked like a scandal and Varina laughed in giddy delight, despite her mourning, as she smoothed down the many layers of black.
THE RAVAGING
“Now, Sister Rue, in Jesus’s name,” Bruh Abel said, “renounce the Devil.”
Rue’s redemption, when it came, didn’t feel the way she thought it might. She hadn’t pictured the way that folks wouldn’t look at her. They stared. They stared so hard she felt she could hear it, like a low contemptuous buzz, but when she picked out eyes from among the crowd at the river, they shifted and skittered away. They thought Bruh Abel safe to look at, it seemed—when they caught his eye, they smiled.
Rue pictured Bean, hoped thinking on him would give her strength. Bean was likely home with Jonah still boiling up with a fever, not made by nature or the displeasure of God but out of her own benevolence. She would not be ashamed of that, whatever this day brought.
Ma Doe was absent from the crowd also, though Rue hadn’t truly thought the old woman would be there. Sarah had come, bringing only her eldest boy, not Bean, with her. The boy stood between his mama’s legs and twisted his face into her skirts when Rue passed by, like he was scared of her, she who he had known his whole little life, she who had twisted his head and tugged him out on the end of Sarah’s meager, singing thrust. There were only a handful of other children there. Most were still weakened, she knew, from the sickness she was said to have cursed them with.
As she made the long, slow walk toward Bruh Abel, he looked at her with a certainty. He strutted forward, and the crowd parted for him as he approached Rue head-on.
“Renounce the Devil,” he said again.
“I do,” she said loud. Murmurs shivered up from the crowd. “I wish him gone. I do.”
Bruh Abel put his hand heavy on her head, as though it were an effort to do so, and he pushed her down, down, down ’til her knees and her legs and her hands were all in the dirt. Still she kept her eyes turned up to him.
“You only need tell him, ‘Leave me.’?”
“Leave me,” she repeated.
“Louder.”
“Leave me.” Her voice cracked. “Leave.”
“Louder for all to hear, Sister Rue.”
She felt a monstrous sorrow rise up in her like a swell. She looked away from Bruh Abel, down at her hands spread out in the dirt, and she began to sob. Tears dripped clean from her face to darken the ground