any comfort. But there was only Rue to give it to her, and it was the threadbare sort. Varina had been raised to have a hundred black souls at her call. Rue alone must have felt like a pathetic disservice.
“That white man you came in here with. Was he a soldier?”
So Varina had seen. “Bruh Abel? He weren’t white. He’s colored, Miss Varina. Just real pale.”
Varina rocked on the heels of her bare feet like she wished to run but had no place to go. Rue hadn’t seen her mistress so agitated in an age, not since the early months of her hiding. Then Varina had prowled the rectory, fitful and crying, or euphoric in turns, and there had been only the one way to soothe her then, one awful way. Rue had made the white doctor’s medicine last as long as she could. It was all she’d thought to grab from the house before it burned, a small supply, and she mixed it with wine or thinned it with water to ration it and still Varina had screamed in her agony that she was dying.
Those draughts of laudanum had run dry finally and Rue could not get hold of more. She had broke Varina of the awful addiction the long, hard way, like breaking down a wild stallion by receiving a hundred kicks to the face. The hundred and first time Varina came away clean; the only stain the poppy had left on her were the dreams. The nightmares.
“I can’t sleep, Rue,” Varina said now, recalling an old complaint. “I see the soldiers comin’ for me.”
“Ain’t I say I’d keep you safe, Miss Varina?”
But her mistress seemed not to hear her, was trapped in a danger of her own imagining, and in her mind that danger was still marching toward her, as it had been three years past. Rue let her keep her nightmares. Let her think they were still real.
“When will this goddamn war be at an end?” Varina moaned.
“By God’s grace, any day now.”
* * *
—
Rue held her body still when she heard the knock at her cabin door, though she’d heard so many knocks before and more urgent ones to be sure. This one, if she could presume so much from simple knocking, sounded resigned. Rue took her time crossing the small room and opening the door. Took her time in saying, “Sarah. What’s the trouble?” because she knew what the trouble was.
Sarah was weary-looking, likely from taking care of her family in the way all the women in town had grown tired on their kinfolks’ behalf. If there was a sickness in the town, every woman was made weak by it, whether she had the symptoms or not. Worrying was a disease for women, and it came as a chronic ailment. By the time Rue opened the door to her, Sarah had rested her arm up on the doorway, her head cradled weak on her forearm.
“Bean,” she said, lifting her eyes but not her head. “He’s sicker now.”
They walked in the same purposeful stride, matching their steps unconsciously, side by side. Rue had the sense they were in some kind of race where the winner had to be the first to arrive and the last to lose their composure.
The night long ago that Bean’s strange crying had come to her bloomed in Rue’s mind. She recollected how the sound, the peculiarity of it, had yanked her from a sleep with no dreams. Rue had forgotten the exact quality of the sound. She could recall only how horrifying it was, how it had set Bean apart before this trouble had even begun. She could recall only wanting to keep him quiet, like the cry would speak something she didn’t want heard.
Rue let Sarah lead her inside. Jonah was there, sitting on the floor of the front room with the little girl in his lap, the little boy around his shoulders. They looked healthy, and Rue was glad to see it. They played on him like he was a tree, and Jonah was just as immobile as one, to be sure. He watched her cross the room behind Sarah, not saying