“Travel by night. Follow the shine of ’em coins on the river surface,” Miss May Belle told Airey. Suddenly Rue could hear her mama’s voice impossibly clear, like it boomed from the river itself. “That shine’ll take you where you goin’. All the way to the North.”
They embraced there, one woman in the river and one woman out, and Airey who had become so thin looked frail in Rue’s mama’s arms, she seemed liable to disappear. But when Airey pulled away, her arms flew out with fearsome strength. As Rue watched, Airey seemed to dance, her bones twisting, reshaping beneath her skin; her pouting lips grew sharp and pointed and hardened and, by and by, her back arched and her frame narrowed, and Rue watched as Airey at last sprouted big, thick black wings.
* * *
—
Rue was still breathless in her bed when her mama returned some time later to the cabin. Miss May Belle crawled in quietly beside her, her body radiating warmth like a furnace. Now Rue was sleepless. She lay still the whole night trying to make sense of what she thought she’d seen. A woman become a bird. There was no sense to be made of it. It had to be dreaming.
The very first moment of sunup, Rue stole away, took herself to the river to see if she could make out any bits of silver in its bed. But the stream was calm and quiet, undisturbed, reflecting the orange haze of the new-day sky. Rue looked upward, like the answer might be there. Her eyes traveled the neighboring trees and there she did glimpse, only in the corner of her sights, a starling—its skin oil black and spotted dazzling white—as it took wing and departed from the ledge of a branch, the starling just then starting to soar.
FREEDOMTIME
Black-Eyed Bean was one year old the night his eerie crying woke the townsfolk, roused them to stir from their beds and whisper their growing suspicions about him aloud in the street. Staring down at the odd little child, Rue was just as staggered by his eyes as she always was, as the folks out there were.
“The water.” Beside the bathtub, Sarah spoke it low. “He got a fear a’ it.”
In the tub Bean thrashed as he’d thrashed beneath the black veil he’d been born in. Now his pumping little legs and arms managed to push round in a swirl the water that surrounded him as he howled.
“He ain’t normal,” Sarah muttered. “Screamin’ like he’s bein’ killed soon as I lay him down to bath.”
Jonah spoke up. “Miss Rue, ain’t the water too hot? I keep sayin’. That water be too hot.”
“Hush,” Sarah said back. “I gotta wash him, don’t I?”
Sarah was a sight, her hair in unkempt kinks beneath a roughly cut kerchief. The loose ends of the cotton were streamed through her orange curls like a shredded spider’s web. She looked up when Rue stepped forward. Her eyes said something to Rue her mouth couldn’t shape.
Rue knew Sarah was waiting for her to get down on her knees beside her and tend to Bean. But Rue couldn’t seem to bring herself to it. She felt all at once afraid that if she picked up Bean she’d be accepting some responsibility for him, when all she wanted was to get away from him and his eerie black eyes.
Rue knelt. She dipped her hand into the farthest corner of the tub, keeping clear of where she might touch Bean or the irregular pattern on his skin. “Wet a bit a’ cloth, wipe him down good ’til he grow older, ’til he get accustomed to bein’ put in the deeper water.”
Was it true what folks had been whispering—could Bean be something sinister amongst them, something dark come again? Rue pulled her hand away.
“It’s mighty strange,” Jonah said. He crossed the room in long strides to help Sarah to her feet, and even when she was steadied he remained, Rue saw, his big hand gentle on the curve of Sarah’s hip.
“I done him same as the others,” Sarah spoke up. “The other children ain’t never cried like that. They ain’t never had such a fear of water as this.” She shuddered. “Such a cry.”
Rue looked at those others, Sarah’s daughter and son. Like their brother, Bean, there wasn’t much to be found of Jonah in them. They shared their mama’s coloring, the orange-brown coils of her thick hair, and the fleshy fullness of her lips, the top slightly plumper than the bottom in them both. My babies, Rue’s mama would have called them. She’d called all the children hers. Rue couldn’t see them that way. When they were born, she handed the babies over to their mamas and she handed them over quick. Rue wanted no babies.
Sarah picked up Bean from the tub with a splash of bathwater. Curled up against his mama’s chest, perhaps soothed by having his head near her beating heart, Bean quieted.
“He’s surely different. But we all come different,” Rue said. “Ain’t no accountin’ for why we is the way we is.”
“That’s for God to know,” Jonah supplied, but Sarah wore a scowl, like Rue ought to know as well as God did what the matter was with Bean. The skin of his legs bore the faint blue interlocking pattern that was like the scales on the back of a creeping serpent, and from his warm, wet body, steam still rose in coils.
“Awful sorry to call for you in the middle a’ the night, Miss Rue,” Jonah said.
But it had been Bean that had called for her. Hadn’t she been pulled here by his strange cry?
Rue made her goodbyes, walked herself to the door. Stepping out, she fixed her face purposeful-like, ready to meet the waiting crowd, but there was no crowd now, only the dusty road and the moon that had found its way to shining. She felt unsettled in the bottom of her stomach where there began to be a small ache: fear.
She’d already started back for her own cabin when a hard grasp on her shoulder made her spin, but it was only Sarah waiting behind her, her arms free of children, her head now bare.
“Miss Rue, I got somethin’ to ask a’ you,” Sarah said.
She looked unearthly tired. The front of her thin linen nightdress was dark with wet from where she’d held Bean firm to her chest. Through the damp spot, Rue could make out the shadows of Sarah’s heavy breasts, still weighted, a year out, with milk.
“Only I was wonderin’,” Sarah spoke soft. “If you had somethin’ I could use. To keep myself, I mean, to keep from havin’ anotha conception. Secret-like.”
Rue knew secrets. She knew many a secret stretched out amongst the folks of that little town, some shameful, some devastating, some just too sad to shape into words. Rue kept them all and kept them well and so folks kept giving them to her, their secrets. And never mind that she knew she had some of her own to keep.
“You come and see me tomorrow mornin’,” Rue said, “and I’ll have what you needin’ at hand.”