Ruby (17 page)

Celia lost track of speaking for a moment. Then a noise between a yelp and a cry stabbed up from Celia’s throat. “NO! Ephram, you comin’ with me now.”

Ephram bent his head, scraped at his chin with his hand. “Mama, I’ma stay here for a bit longer.” He tried to put his hand on Celia’s shoulder. She pushed him off.

“Your soul in jeopardy boy.”

“Ceal ain’t nothing in jeopardy—I swear.”

“Look how it started, you already cleaning on a Sabbath.”

“Luke chapter fourteen. ‘The ox was in the ditch,’ Ceal.”

“You twistin’ the Bible already; besides church done started.”

“You go on then. I’ll see you directly.”

“When?”

“When I get there Ceal.” He sounded harder, the softness gone. The nasty thing was standing behind him now.

“Go on,” It said. “Go on home to your mama.”

Celia saw her Ephram turn to the creature and get soft like
saltwater taffy. Get soft and sweet and whisper, “But I don’t
want
to go nowhere Ruby.”

Celia backed away into the front yard. She conjured with gospel—the one thing that never failed to bring Ephram in line. “ ‘… though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow!’ ” Celia pointed to the sky and continued, “ ‘Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.’ Isaiah 1:18.”

The thing got quiet. Ephram stared dumbly at Celia from the open doorway. Celia felt an electric power building within her, guiding her words. “Ephram, you best to remember Leviticus chapter twenty-six, verse twenty-one: ‘And if ye walk and will not hearken unto me; I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins. I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle.’ ”

Celia lifted both of her arms high to the heavens to finish the job. She had chosen the perfect passage. Ephram blinked as if he were about to weep. Celia held out the grocery bag with his Sunday suit. She would instruct him to change behind P & K after she delivered the final words. He would enter In-His-Name on Celia’s right arm and they would give testimony together today. About Leviticus. About family and the blood of Jesus. Celia felt her eyes wet with joy as she charged dramatically: “ ‘And if ye will not be reformed by me then will I punish you yet seven times for your sins.’ ”

Celia stood smiling with the outstretched bag.

Ephram shut the door and went inside.

Celia staggered back, slipped on a stone and nearly fell over. She could not breathe, not in nor out, as if a great and mighty wall had crashed into her. She paused for a moment, then ran wildly in shame for home.

She got as far as Marion Lake when she stopped dead, a smile sliding across her teeth. Celia very methodically took off her brooch and placed it in her purse, then rested the purse on the side of the road.

Then Celia threw herself to the ground. Hard. Using one hand to secure her hat and wig, she thrashed herself against the cracked clay. Ripped at her collar … some, but not enough for impropriety. She tore at the lace along the sleeves and inadvertently bloodied her ankle. When she stood she was covered in dust, her brunette skin ashy with scrapes and dirt. Then she reached into her purse, retrieved the brooch and pinned it close to her heart.

When Celia turned onto the church road she had a mission, a holy war she would not only fight, but win. She practiced the first words she would utter upon entering the gate. Upon opening the door to a seated congregation. Upon the singular note of awe she would conjure from the crowd.

She mouthed the words, “I just had a fight with the Devil—” The rest, Celia knew, would spring forth from her mouth like a deep well gushing in the desert. “I just had a fight with the Devil,” she practiced, “and I needs your help to win.”

T
he man’s flag was still waving, but it was filthy as hell. Ruby sat on the bed and ate the third tea cake Ephram had given her that morning. He’d also brought her head cheese, which she had promptly ignored.

Little charges flashed through her body, then settled. She sipped coffee that he had valiantly prepared on the hearth with a small kettle he’d bought from P & K. The bitter smell connected, then exploded. She hadn’t had a cup of coffee in ten years. And she loved coffee, loved it like air. The fire he’d made danced in the warmth of the day, flecks of blue and gold. He was still cleaning. It had been two hours and he had not stopped to sit, that is, if there had been a clean inch to sit on.

When he had first stepped foot in the door Ruby had seen him falter. Stumble over the black of his shoes. Then he had held his handkerchief near his nose, paused and looked about the house. Then he seemed to be methodically planning his attack.

Ruby watched him survey the five solid rooms: the kitchen, its black potbelly stove thick with grease, dried batter, bits of food and a pan holding stagnant water that had long since sprouted maggots. The wood pail was filled with rotted dewberries she had picked and forgotten. The counter, ripe with molded bread and peaches slick brown surrounded by swarming fruit flies. Ruby
had not truly seen the house, but now, through Ephram’s eyes the filth and waste echoed.

He pushed the rounded oak table away from something crusted and black and noted the mound of leaves and bark on top. He made a left from the kitchen and walked into an empty living room that not one person had sat in since Neva died. Ruby knew it was unusually clean, as was the back bedroom he disappeared into. They did not belong to her.

Ruby had heard all three girls, Neva, Ruby’s mama, Charlotte and her aunt Girdie, had shared that room, slept some nights back to back like spoons, giggling like a waterfall.

Ephram went through the kitchen into the small bathroom and stumbled out, a bit of fear washing over him. Ruby knew that what he had seen might send him out of the door for good. Instead he stepped out onto the generous porch and walked down to the pump.

Before Neva died, Ruby’d heard that Papa Bell had started fitting the house for running water. He’d bought long iron tubes and loops of wire. He’d gotten as far as the bathroom. Then later, he had sold every last pipe for pennies on the dime.

Papa Bell would have liked him. He did not slip. Ruby had heard that her grandfather had built the steps a little slanted. “To keep out shaky, crooked folks,” he used to say. “Straight-minded folk can walk up any kind of stairs.”

Back when the house was young, Ruby had heard, often visitors ended up in the sugar snap peas just to the right of the porch.

When Ephram came back she watched as he turned left and walked into her room. It was the worst of them all, but it had been built square and spacious. The windows so wide they needed special panes of glass. It had been her Granddaddy’s, and
for all the ghosts who had haunted her, Ruby often wished he would come. He never did. Perhaps, Ruby thought, he had no great desire to spend one more second on earth. Maybe he had finally found a bit of rest sitting beside Neva on a star, paying the world no mind.

Once Ephram had taken on the job, he began in earnest.

The supplies were meager but he improvised well and worked steadily. He’d bought a can of Comet at P & K and added that to the few things she’d bought when she first arrived. He’d swept the floors with an old mud-caked broom he’d found out back. He’d held it under the pump until the water ran clean, then made it through two rooms, sweeping all manner of things into a central pile when his sister had come to the door.

Her eyes had bulged, the vein on her temple had leapt and strained. Celia Jennings stood at Ruby’s door spitting like a raving lunatic, screaming down curses in the way of verses. So Ruby had started giggling, and then she started laughing. She hadn’t meant to, but when she peeked through the window and saw the froth collecting in the corner of Celia’s mouth, that Popeye-the-sailor-man hat bobbing on top of that ridiculous zebra wig, Ruby had stuffed her fist against her mouth and laughed until her eyes grew wet. Ephram tried to shush her with his eyes, which made her laugh harder.

Finally Ruby had gone to the door just to mess with the woman’s head. Let her see him choose her. He had. Of course he had.

After his sister left he appeared lost. He had wiped his hand over his face and paused before turning back to Ruby, rubbed his arms and shaken out his legs. He’d seemed beaten for a moment, then he’d apologized for the interruption, and he started cleaning again. She would be ready for him when he finished.

Now he was using Chauncy Rankin’s pail. Chauncy had filled it with water and doused her with it two nights ago in the backyard when he’d come with his brother.

Moss had left the Dove soap whittling into slime in a broken bowl. Ephram was reaching for that now to wash his hands.

In the beginning, when Ruby first moved to Liberty, there had been many visitors and they had been more industrious. It had been harvest time, corn gold and tall, cotton flying and catching on tree tops. The chinaberry tree had sprouted the yellow berries all of the birds loved to pluck. It had been sweet, hot fall when the first—a slanted, tall man with a small keloid scar on his upper lip—had wandered down the road. She was scrubbing the old stain on the porch at the time—the one she’d heard her Auntie Neva had left when she died. When the man asked if she was little Ruby Bell, she’d told him yes. He said he’d known her grandfather, and her mama and aunts, and had seen her go to church on Sundays. He said he’d heard she was back in town, and he’d come by to offer his help. The fact that he was a janitor by profession proved convenient and so he had gotten down on his hands and knees and taken over washing the stained porch. Ruby couldn’t remember his name—Jeffers, Jefferson, and didn’t want to be rude by asking again, but he was polite and said thank you when she offered him a glass of water. He worked at the Colored High School in Jasper, and said he had a special cream cleanser at work that could get that up. He almost bowed when he left. When he came back a week later, Ruby had been growling in a corner, her clothes stripped and balled in the center of the floor. He had led her to her bed and taken her, simply and politely. He’d left the cleanser on the nightstand when he exited.

Word travels fast along the Sabine when it comes to unmarried women who offer horizontal refreshments. Three others came shortly thereafter. A tall, seal-colored man with a pious expression who’d quoted the Bible during and after. A fat, yellow sloth of a man and an old dark grandfather with a creased face. But then the high school boys from Jasper had made their pilgrimage. They came in bunches and they came drunk. Sometimes they came mean. Sometimes they hit, and worse, sometimes they laughed. As time passed, as her skin seemed to sink tight about her bones and she lost every remnant of sanity, fewer came. As the house piled high with human waste and garbage only the diligent remained. Old-timers like Chauncy and Percy wiped here and there before doing their business, always taking her outside. Sometimes under the chinaberry tree with the old crow staring down on them, calling out, blaming. Sometimes they brought a rag, or a box of lye and a jar of bacon grease to mix for soap. Sometimes they brought food.

What she never articulated, not even in adjoining thoughts, like train cars linking for a journey that she never let herself take, was that, of late, she had enjoyed these visits. Had found her own reflection in their routine. There was no other mirror in the house. These men, and their eyes—wide, slitted, beetle black, hazel green, repentant, fearful, angry, joyous, wet with lust—saw her. Not her grace, nor her strength. Not the plow horse of her soul, but they saw something. They held someone. They ached for her legs to part, for her to receive them. For in that instant, before release, the world could have split in two and they would have continued. Pumping steadily. Furrows deepening. Sweat washing. All hypocrisy silenced. And while they might have gone out and
found a better, saner, prettier girl with full breasts, in that instant, nothing else on earth would suffice and subsequently Ruby knew the only power she had ever known on earth.

Ruby kept her screen door unhooked most nights.

Ephram had found the white box of lye and was sprinkling it like powdered sugar on the swept floors.

Ruby said softly, “You good at that.”

“Thank you.” He let a smile tickle the edge of his lip.

Ruby looked down at her foot. It had involuntarily started to become the grain of the wood. She felt herself grow too hard, too stiff to move. Small splinters formed a fuzz along the toes. Ruby ardently shook her leg and foot back to flesh. Ephram politely looked down at the floor as Ruby asked, “Your sister teach you?”

“She did as a matter of fact.”

Now a familiar buzz started again, this time in her belly. The food smelled too strong, the cheese too bitter and orange. She couldn’t eat such a bright aching color. She put it down on her soiled mattress. She was still hungry so she bit into the bread, but it caught as she tried to swallow. She coughed it into her hand and rubbed the chewed mass into the mattress.

Ephram noted it, but only said, “How’s that coffee?”

Ruby picked it up and took another sip. The coffee stole down her tongue and secreted into pockets of her mouth before spilling down her throat. It was a friendly dull brown. Ruby chose not to answer his pushy question. Instead she took aim.

“Why you call her Mama?”

“Celia raised me.”

“Wonder how your real Mama would feel about it.”

It was Ephram’s turn to be quiet.

“And what’s all that you were talking about at the door … the ox in a ditch on a Sunday. What’s that all about?”

The buzzing grew louder. Her stomach turned in on itself and Ruby felt the food rising into her throat.

He glanced at her. “It’s a Bible verse, Book of Luke.”

“What’s it mean?”

The food spewed out of her mouth, covering the mattress, her throat raw. Ephram didn’t pause. He took her hand but the sound was louder. His touch hurt her skin. She yanked away and walked to the window.

Ephram took the broom and swept the vomit into a pail. Then went to dump it. He came back in with his jacket wetted.