beneath her in fat circles that made strange patterns as they wetted the dirt—looked like stars set out on a sky below, and all the while she ground out the words, “Leave me.”
The ground shook when folks started up their foot stomping to the rhythm of Bruh Abel’s words raining down: “Cast off your wicked ways. Don’t let them demons have no more hold on you.”
She wanted it, salvation, not in the sense she’d always known—as a promise of hereafter eternity. Instead, she wanted salvation in the here and the now, for herself and for Bean, or a glimpse of it at least, a place she might feel safe and rest her head at last. Bruh Abel was beside her, his warm hand on her face.
“Out. Anything not of You,” he said, “out.”
In the far-off distance she felt her throat constrict and release and cry out. Her tongue flickered out words of no clear form, desperate sounds articulating something kin to wanting, kin to ravening. She seemed able to observe her own body in its flawed entirety from afar.
Then all at once the euphoria left her—a sudden depletion, like the moment after a passing gust of wind when still air seems strange and inexplicable. Someone lifted her at her armpits and set her on her feet. She swayed but stayed standing.
“Was it the spirit a’ Jesus what come to you?”
“Yes,” she said. “The Holy Ghost entered me.”
All around her people were staring and murmuring, holding out their hands to touch her. She turned to Bruh Abel, who was now some distance away from her, though he hadn’t moved at all. It was the crowd that had rushed in. Over their heads he was puzzling her out again, a slow eyeing from top to bottom and back up.
“Tongues is a sign for unbelievers.” If he was speaking for the crowd or just for her she couldn’t figure, but either way it sounded like something he’d snatched whole cloth from some other preacher’s mouth. “Prophecy is for believers.”
“In Jesus’s name,” she mumbled. That was what folks kept saying, wasn’t it?
“What He say, Miss Rue?”
“He say, I be His. I be healed.”
* * *
—
After, Rue took herself over to the old church. She walked the long way to be certain she was not followed, stood outside in the well-trod path, that rut made over time from years on top of years of folks going back and forth in search of worship. For Rue, faith had always flickered in and out of her consciousness like a flame on a candlewick, sometimes resilient against wind, other times extinguished easy in a sibilant hiss. She could not account for what she had felt that afternoon in the town center, any more than she could account for why Bean hadn’t caught the ailing naturally while others had.
After the walk of several miles Rue was glad to push through the double doors and shut them tight behind her. The air was heavy with dancing dust motes like loosed cotton bolls. Rue sat herself down in the front row of the church where she had not been allowed to sit. It still felt wrong, after all those years, to break the white man’s nonsense rules. Up above, the floorboards creaked.
“You listenin’?” she asked, staring straight at the pulpit. If anyone else were to come across her they would have thought she was arguing with God. Either way there was no answer.
“Varina,” Rue called out, and her voice bounced through the vaulted ceiling and seemed to return to her tenfold.
There, a groan of wood, and summoned, Varina came out of her hiding place, behind the rectory door. She looked wan, skeletal.
“You didn’t come back,” Varina said.
Rue sighed. “I’m sorry, Miss Varina.”
“You ought not leave me for so long.” Her voice came at a warble, and Rue looked at her proper and saw fear there. “You really ought not leave me.”
“Ain’t I always come back?” It was like speaking to a child, but that’s just what Varina looked like now, one startled from a nightmare, looking for