Sarah nodded and turned back to her door, in no hurry to return, it seemed, to what waited for her there. Rue watched her go, watched her slip into her home, haint-silent, like a ghost, and Rue could have gone on and done the same, but there was no man waiting on her and no crying child, or two, or three. So instead, by instinct, she turned the other way, the way of the wilderness, and started walking.
Rue knew that wide road made of dust better than any road in the world. She had walked it so many times she half-expected to see her own footsteps coming and going as she passed, from the slave quarters that were now their cabins, to the field that was now scorched land, to Marse Charles’s grand old plantation House, which was now in the final stage of its ruination, and yonder, to the old white church.
The pillar was how she knew she’d reached what was left of the House. Part of the column still stood, as it had stood with its twin years ago, in a stately portico announcing the door to Marse Charles’s mighty entranceway. Despite the ash, the pillar was nearly still white, and Rue stopped there as though knocking at the door of an old friend.
The foundation of the House remained enough to mark the ghost of the burned-down rooms and little more. In the very center of the entryway the old staircase made its way up five noble steps toward the sky, then dropped off in a crumble. Rue could, and did, walk straight through the ruin of the House. Her destination was not the House after all but the woods just beyond it.
Trees remember, Rue’s mama would say, and so it was. The trees behind the House remembered the war and its bitter end, that southward march of the Yankee soldiers and the destruction that was part of their style of victory.
Folks didn’t like to come out this far, not anymore. Cursed, they called it. Word was that Miss May Belle had hoodooed the whole of those woods, laid a curse with the strength of her love for her man and her sorrow at his dying, hanged from these very trees. For wasn’t it in those same woods that they’d hanged Miss May Belle’s man, lynched him and left him to swing? Miss May Belle’s grief had risen there like a flood. Ever since, their used-to-be plantation had existed in isolation, like something locked away and forgotten by time. Nobody came into their town unmolested, folks said, and nobody came out.
If you went looting, you were like to disturb the dead, wake the ghost of Marse Charles, or worse, call up the jealous ghost of Varina, his one redheaded daughter and Rue’s old playmate. Beautiful and scorned, they said of Varina, and robbed of her prime, she made a vengeful haint. Rue alone was not afeard—not of Varina, not of her spirit neither.
All that remained was dead earth, then dirt, then wild grass, peeking up from the ground in knots, and it was from this earth that Rue found her plunder, the herbs she used for healing.
She sat down heavy amongst the weeds as though she were one herself. She felt awful weary, but there was solace in the mud, in the dew, in the aroma the earth made when it sighed. Rue made a bowl of her skirt and let the plants she picked puddle in her lap: feverfew for tired blood, stems and leaves and seed of boneset, longwood chips to be mixed with brandy, berries of pokeweed to soothe breasts grown sore and stretched, and the head of a daisy, which she simply found pretty and stuck, on a whim, into the coils of her hair.
There was a clearing where the grass didn’t grow, and just past that was the only thing that stood tall in that Eden, save for the trees: a shed that had somehow kept all its four walls and the idea of a roof.
There, sat up with her back against the trunk of a tree, Rue stopped to think about Jonah, particularly his passing touch on her arm. She tried, with some difficulty, to remember the feeling of his fingers when he’d guided her into his house.
They had been rough when they’d closed on her elbow, as rough as the bark of a tree, and Rue loved his callouses, knew they were thick and well-earned. He’d go find work, when he could, on distant coastal islands, unloading at the docks, or handfishing in rivers. He’d be gone for long stretches of months when it was the season for it, and Rue longed after him when he was away, tried to imagine him there, on the banks of some other river, some river she could not know.
Maybe Rue could feel sorry for Jonah, this man with the calloused hands, or maybe she could feel what Sarah felt when he finally came home, for his woman must have felt some relief, and surely some desire. And thinking this, Rue ran her own hand up along the inside of her thigh. Her fingertips were rough from her work, certainly, but not quite so rough as a man’s. There was a swell in her of sharper loneliness, but also of satisfaction, because wasn’t she in her place, her conquered ground? And as she moved inside herself, all her roots and flowers scattered and fell, for a moment forgotten and reunited with the earth.
SLAVERYTIME
Folks said Rue’s mama knew everything the foxes knew. Weren’t they her eyes in the woods? Her familiars. How else to explain the uncanny way she figured out everything and everybody’s business all about the plantation?
The feral foxes owed their life to Miss May Belle as if she was their own mama, for word was they were not foxes at all but the departed souls of used-to-be human beings, and Miss May Belle had given the dead a kind of immortality by hiding them at the edge of Marse Charles’s land. In return they were her sharp eyes, her keen ears. Her survival.
Rue could not have said one way or another how far reaching Miss May Belle’s hoodoo reigned. To Rue her mama was always a mystery; in all things great and small, she showed her magic as mamas do, with their knowing. Miss May Belle had a way of anticipating what trouble Rue would find herself in before Rue had even devised the trouble itself.
Trouble usually meant Varina, who often rebelled against her white girlhood and needed always an accomplice to witness her rebellion. That long last summer before the war came upon them, while the white adults fretted and the black adults labored, Varina ran half wild and took Rue running with her.
One particular high noon, they would make their way, without even having to agree upon it aloud, to their usual place by the creek. They ran despite the weight of the heat, trying to catch the wind with their speed; and running behind her on the narrow path, Rue had the pleasure of watching a number of Varina’s ribbons come streaming off her curls and getting tangled up in high branches.
Varina reached the shed first and declared herself the winner in a race Rue hadn’t known they were having. Then Varina, her cheeks still spotted pink, lay herself down on the grass and in one inelegant swoop divested herself of her calico dress and tugged her lace bloomers down to her ankles so that she sat in only her frilled white chemise, bare-bottomed and unashamed.
She said, “This time you can be Miss May Belle.”
They had many fights about this very thing, who got to be the mama and who got to be the healing woman, so that most of their games ended in tears, and for a moment Rue hesitated, wondering what Varina was wanting from her to be so suddenly kind, allowing her to be Miss May Belle.