Still, when the time came for bearing down—the women praying with their cussing and cussing with their praying—it was in the way they looked up at her, weepy eyes filled with worship, that kept her door open. Like apples, babies came in seasons, and Rue would always tell herself in the lull, Not next year. Next year I be done.
Bean had been born in one such lull, Sarah being the fertile kind. The “Her man gotta do no more than look at her” kind, like Rue’s mama used to say of the women who could show up twice in a year with their bellies making tents of their dresses.
It was easy going year after year with Sarah. She was still young, twenty-and-some, and already she’d made two babies who had been born after no more than the usual struggle. Still she stayed smooth and sweet, and her breasts remained like two fat fruits just shy of ripe.
“He’s a’comin’,” Rue had said, laying her open palm on Sarah’s restless belly. How Rue knew even before the crown of him started pushing through that Bean would be a boy she could not account for, not in words. There was just her knowing.
Rue had rolled her rough-hewn sleeves on up—just about everything she wore and ate and owned was a gift from those mamas who had no other way to pay—and she had knelt the way she had knelt near a hundred times now, though her knees did ache for it despite her youth. Rue was nearabouts twenty also if her old master’s accounting was to be believed, not much younger than Sarah, though every day Rue felt more worn, like she were living out each one of her years double, aging out of time.
They’d grown up together, true, through slaverytime, wartime, freedomtime, but Sarah had kept herself young, and even here, at her most vulnerable hour, the sweat sitting on her skin had the audacity to glisten. In every way they were opposites—that was clear enough as Rue laid her thick dark fingers on Sarah’s thin thighs and parted them.
“Lord. Miss Rue.” Sarah sighed, praying to them both.
Rue had to love and hate equally being called Miss. She was every time reminded that she’d earned the title—and the respect of it—only after her own mama’s dying.
Rue’s mama, called Miss May Belle, had gotten the kind of sickness that could not be seen and for that reason could not be cured. Its origins were in heartache for her man, Rue’s daddy, who some said ran himself crazy for lust of a white woman.
Well, let folks have their stories. The only truth was he’d been hanged, strung from a tree just outside the town, his dangling toes making circles in the dirt as his body spun on the rope. And Rue had hardly known him.
She’d been under Miss May Belle’s tutelage the whole of her life. From her Rue had learned one true thing, that all birthing was performance. Mamas were made to believe that a bit of pepper by their bed would ward off evil spirits, but it was only meant to cause them to sneeze if what was required was a good last push to get the baby out. Rue learned to tell women to blow into a bottle or to chew on some chicory or to squat over a pot of boiling water to make their babies strong, to make the birthing easy, to protect them in that most crucial hour.
Bean’s mama was easy. Birthing came as natural to Sarah as it did to animals who need only to pause and squat and be off again.
Rue knew that she ought to be glad of that, but she wasn’t. Sarah was silk, free to slip from one type of wanting to another. Rue was rough, coarse linen, starched in her life. Freedom had come after the war for all black folks. All excepting Rue, she felt, for she was born to healing and stuck to it for life. And stuck to this place. Her own doing that, a secret curse of her own making.
“Lord Jesus,” Sarah had crooned as she’d labored. She’d gripped the bedsheets near to ripping. “Get me through this ’un. I swear, Miss Rue, this here’s my last.”
Rue knew sure as she knew the sun would rise that Sarah would come up pregnant again soon enough. Weren’t men drawn to her like flies to shit?
And it was on that thought, potent as a curse, that she realized something between Sarah’s legs was going wrong.
Rue nearly drew away in shock. A black mass came out, all in a forceful gush. The coal-dark sack squirmed in Rue’s hands. The blood that surrounded it was a red made more ominous by the darkness it covered. Through that black sheath Rue could make out the small surprise of a pale face, the mouth working soundlessly, nothing like suckling but more like an old man chewing on the words of a curse.
It wasn’t unusual for babies to come still wearing the veil. “It means good luck,” Rue would be quick to tell the mamas when they saw the extra skin wrapped around their baby’s heads, looking as final as a shroud. In a moment she could wipe it away, and the healthy wail would fight back the unsaid fright in the mama’s eyes that from her womb had come something unexpected, something unnatural.
Bean made Rue’s heart jump in absolute horror of him. She felt then that she knew him for what he was, a secret retribution for a long-ago crime, the punishment she had been dreading.
He was fighting, his arms moving inside that black wrapping like he was swimming, or more like drowning. She had never seen a baby so fully encased in the caul.
Rue forced herself to draw up the scissors she’d heated in preparation to cut the cord; she held them near the baby’s mouth. Sarah had not moved at all from her position braced against the sheets.
“He come dead?” Sarah said, straining to hear the telltale cry.
Rue might’ve said yes. The black thing curling and quivering in her palms stayed gasping. It could not break through the veil without her intervention. She might’ve left it to struggle or smother in its own black sheet.
“Oh, Miss Rue,” Sarah started moaning, squinting her eyes hard to get a look at the bundle. “Don’t say he dead.”
A snip. That’s all it took, and Rue did it. A snip beneath the little nose and then slowly, like peeling back the skin of a strange fruit, she shucked Bean of his dark veil and revealed him to the world. He began, finally, to cry.
“He alright,” Rue heard herself saying. But was he? Was she?
Divested now of the veil that was like his second skin, his true coloring showed, lighter even than his mama was. There was no warmth to the color, only a pallid white. The baby’s skin was peculiar dry too, near scaled, dry as though no loving had ever touched him. Rue had the urge to do more than rub him the way she did to warm life into all the new babies. She had, instead, the urge to scrub the strange skin clean off.
The eyes were the next shock, for when they blinked open they were full black, edged thinly in egg-boil white. The baby’s eyes were the same glossy black as the veil-like husk that had held him. He rolled them slow and looked up at Rue as if he could see clearly through to every thought she had in her head.
When she’d sucked the blood from his nose and had him clean as she could get him she tied off the cord. Her practiced hands shook with the force of her nerves as she hurried to lay this strange baby by his mama’s side and wipe off the stain he’d left on her hands.