Ruby (21 page)

Righteous fell in step on Ruby’s left flank. “Yes we sho’ been meaning to do that. How
are
you doing girl?”

Verde looked about the house. “I see you been doing some cleaning.”

Ruby’s lip was twitching, her eyes full and wild. Her body began to shake then, began to topple. Supra caught her before she slipped to the ground.

Ephram took Ruby’s elbow, eased her away from Supra and said, “I’d like to thank you ladies for stoppin’ by today to visit with Ruby but as y’all can see she awfully busy—”

Supra shot back under her breath, “You already done enough busy-making last night, ain’t you?”

Tressie pelted him with disgust. “We’ll take it from here, Ephram.”

Righteous spit out softly, “Ain’t you got a home to go to?”

The shame caught Ephram by surprise and made his tongue grow thick in his throat.

Then Supra set Ruby’s potato salad down on the sideboard. The other women followed suit. She took Ruby’s hands in her
own and started, “Ruby, I knew your mama and I called your grandmama my friend so I hope you know I’m speaking from my heart when I say this. The Devil got ahold of you and he’s just like a tar baby, anyplace you touch him he stick, and if you tries to unloose him with your own hand you just gonna get more twisted and stuck.”

“Amen,” Righteous whispered.

Supra looked hard at Ephram. “And them who come up to that tar baby with good deeds on they lips but sin in they heart gone git stuck just the same.”

Ephram saw Ruby try to say something with her eyes but Supra rolled right over it. “Now mores the shame we ain’t been out here sooner, but livin’ in a world of sin you get tired of fighting fires with thimbles and just start tending to your own backyard, your own good family. But when my friend Celia break down and cry her heart out in church, well then we talk to the Pastor and he agreed to meet us down to the lake.”

Tressie’s girlish face cut through with concern. “We would greatly appreciate your company to the lake for a baptism. Wash your spirit clean in the blood of the Lamb.”

Verde grumbled under her handkerchief, “Washing her ass clean be a start.”

Righteous piped in, “We got three deacons and our new Church Mother Celia waiting down there as well. She don’t bear no grudge for nobody for nothing. That’s just how she be.”

Tressie added, her face somber, “They praying down there while we come up here to get you. If we ain’t down there directly, they might just come up here and take you.”

Ephram broke in, “Ruby—she’s not going nowhere.”

The women promptly ignored him.

“Celia say that the Devil been content with your soul, but now,” Righteous shook her full face in concern, her skin as smooth as a river stone. “He’s interested in pulling the rest of Liberty, one by one, down into hell and can’t nobody let that happen. She say when he can grab hold a good man like Ephram Jennings, then ain’t none of us safe.”

Supra pulled Ruby towards the door. “Come on now, child, it ain’t a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”

Ruby found herself, felt Ephram’s eyes strong against her, yanked her hand out of Supra’s. The woman’s fingers were like ice. Ruby felt the whole of her arm growing into one long icicle. In a moment she knew she would smash her fist into the woman. In a moment she knew she would scream.

Ephram quickly swallowed the silencing shame into his gut where it belonged. “I’m sorry but y’all got to leave.”

Supra took a stand. “I wasn’t talking to you Ephram Jennings. You sound like you been batter-dipped and fried in wrongfulness. I was talking to this poor bedeviled child.”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Rankin,” Ephram managed, “but it took y’all eleven years to get here, another day or two won’t make no difference.”

“How long it take you?” she shot back.

He looked at Ruby. She let him catch her eye. “Too long.” A calm washed over her and the ice melted.

Verde whined through her kerchief, “Mama, can we just go? You can cut the funk up in this place with a knife.”

Supra then put her hand on Ruby’s face. “Child, your mama might of fallen from grace but that don’t mean you got to follow. You got to choose right, else evil win every time.”

Verde started stacking the Tupperware tubs against her chest.

Supra glowered at Verde. She turned to Ruby and said deathly quiet, “Folks ain’t going to leave this thing to buckle the weave of the town. You come to us or we come to you, but we gone have your salvation come Sunday.” Then between gritted teeth to Verde, “Leave them things.”

Ruby finally spoke. She turned to Verde and said, “Leave everything but the cod peas.”

Verde greedily eyed the cobbler and the chicken, then her mother, who nodded yes. Verde fumed out of the house with the cod peas, followed by Righteous, Tressie and finally Supra.

When the door closed Ruby looked at Ephram. She breathed out, let the floorboards steady her and managed, “I always did hate cod peas.”

“They never did one thing for my salvation neither.”

Ephram put on a smile, so Ruby found hers and dusted it off. They looked straight at each other long enough for her grin to settle.

Then Ruby pulled away from Ephram, from Papa Bell’s house, and walked into the pines. She found the narrow pathway she had taken so many times as a child, all the way to the far side of Wilkins land, where they buried their kin, even after they had all moved to Beaumont. All but Maggie. Ruby saw the grave in the distance, flecked with thin, curling willow leaves. She wished Maggie had a headstone. She deserved at least that, with something sweet and secret etched on the front—but the sisters had built the cross nice and sturdy. Ruby knelt there for a time, her hand flat upon the soil. Then she lay down not three yards away, near a waving cluster of jonquils. She had come there for answers, but since she wasn’t sure of the questions, she breathed in the
sweetness—then erupted into a hundred little yellow blossoms and slept the afternoon into evening.

T
HE REST
of the day the road in front of Bell land had more business than it had in years. Ephram walked the road exactly four times, once to borrow a bath tin and a change of clothes from Rupert Shankle, once to find a trim of fallen cedar to chop into cooking wood, twice to buy things on credit at P & K. He’d already used up the ten dollars he’d won from Gubber and he wasn’t yet ready to face Celia for his wallet. He cursed himself for having forgotten the lamp oil the second time. Both times he walked past the crowd at P & K in silence, each time causing a stir as he left.

Then there were the children who’d been in church that morning when Sister Jennings—now Mother Jennings—had told the congregation that the Devil was living out on Bell land. Never having seen the Devil in person, about six of them perched on the fence across the road from the Bell house and waited for him to show his face.

About twenty other people found themselves wandering the back road to Bell land that day to see if Ephram would fall down and start foaming the evil out of his mouth. Instead they watched a lone man clean and tote and haul. But it was still more than enough. It wasn’t just the exhibition of sin that Celia Jennings had painted so beautifully during testimony that morning, it was the pure, unadulterated, juicy, unholy spectacle of the thing. The scarecrow crazy whore of Liberty had taken up with the township’s mule of a deacon. It was the best piece of gossip the town had had to chew on in twenty-three years.

Chauncy Rankin and his brother drove by slowly as evening
gave way to night on the way to their uncle’s wake. They parked just up the road and watched the glow of the house. Chauncy wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him to clean the gal and the place up proper so that he and Percy could have her on tap whenever they got the itch. He quietly cursed Ephram Jennings, and realized he hadn’t, in all the years he’d known him, given the man his due.

Evening found Ruby leaving Maggie’s grave. The perfume of tiny cream flowers still drifting from her pores. Then she made her way through the silent, watching pines. When she reached her home its windows shone with amber light. The water pump held moon light.

Ruby imagined Ephram inside and felt a gentle hand upon her heart. But her children were calling to her, so she went to the chinaberry and knelt. Their voices rose like music from the earth, violas and flutes, weaving into one song. Then she felt the many small ghosts who were still hidden in her body. The ones she had yet to give birth to. They turned and shifted within her. Ruby looked at the last whispers of dark blue evening and felt compelled to dig not only one grave, but another and another. Then she waited for the pain, the pushing to begin—seeing yet another murder.

Suddenly each child, still roaming her body, looked towards the small graves of sifted earth. Something was different. They moved in unison. Ruby knew it was time. They did not tear through her as they had every night for years. Instead each one simply floated from her belly, soft as a puff of talcum powder. It was not a birth, but a gentle exodus.

The last to leave was her own baby. The one who had followed her from New York, who had come to her on the train platform.

Her own child. The sweet baby girl she never named. The child Ruby had at Miss Barbara’s when she was fourteen. When, pregnant and round, men still took her body gently, or sometimes with an amazing brutality, in spite of, and at times because of her condition.

Ruby looked up. It seemed that there were more stars peeking above her, moving into position, the Dipper and the Southern Cross.

The little spirit paused at the small precipice. She looked at Ruby. She wanted Ruby to remember, so Ruby saw it all. Her old room, after a man had left, before another entered. Ruby remembered how she had felt, full of hopeful life. The morning sickness had stopped. Now, at eight months, her girl was strong within her, in spite of the fact that Ruby had never seen a doctor. It was as if the child knew she would have to build and grow without a kind or knowing hand. Ruby’s child was the strongest part of her, until one night Ruby was knocked down by a crushing punch into her gut by a john, who paid a little extra. Always a little extra. Ruby curling, holding, protecting as he kicked with a brown boot. Again and again. Then acted out a rape, a brutal rape of a soon-to-be-mother, which is what he had come for. One day after he left, the contractions came. The ripping unbearable pain. No hospital. Nothing. Pushing, screaming, with not a single soft eye upon her. Still her baby fighting, then slipping out of her. Someone caught her child and dropped her onto Ruby as if the infant were soiled laundry. Ruby saw the top of the baby’s head, wet, red dotted with white. Little hands … ten little chubby miracles. The child was crying, laying upon her. Crying. Then coughing. Coughing as if she had swallowed Marion Lake. Hands taking her away. Ruby reaching out. Her baby coughing so hard. Then
soft. Then little gasps of air. Then she was quiet in another person’s arms. Until the silence grew heavy with meaning.

The only words Ruby heard were, “She dead.” Which is how Ruby knew she was a girl.

On the rise of the hill, under the sky, the little spirit turned away from Ruby. She seemed satisfied. Her mama had not forgotten her. She lay herself down and let herself be covered with earth.

Ruby kept her hand upon the mound for a long time. She let out a sigh. It was safer there—the womb or the earth. The womb or the earth. Ruby realized sitting next to all of her children that the soil was both. The world would hold them.

Ruby knew they would still leap and play. She would still visit them come sundown, have them lean up and listen to bedtime stories. Even play hopscotch and freeze tag during the day. But at night they would sleep in their graves. At night they would be safe. She bent down and kissed the kind earth and went towards the warmth of the house.

When Ruby walked through the doorway the first thing she noticed was that the house smelled of cedar.

There were two kettles of water boiling and a huge tin tub full of bathwater on the floor. Ephram stood in the center of the kitchen, washed and wearing a pair of overalls two sizes too big.

The house was clean. A few furtive stains remained in the grooves of the floor, but the walls, the baseboards, the window frames, all of the wood seemed to glow like bronze. The belly of the stove was alive with flames. The six kerosene lamps threw saffron rays onto the walls. A full plate of chicken and potato salad sat on the sideboard. The steam rising from the bath and the kettles was doing something magical and luminous with the light. Crickets and owls harmonized in the blackness outside.

There was a clean sheet folded near the tub.

Ephram motioned towards it. “I’ll be outside drawing plenty water. You eat your fill, then get in that water, have yourself a good soap, then drape that sheet over the tub. I’ll be in directly.” And he stepped into the night. Ruby did just that. The food, though seasoned a little heavily with judgment, went down just fine.

The water was almost too warm against her skin and its waves held her. She looked and found the Dove soap on the floor. The white turned tan where it touched her skin. She washed her face. Her neck. The water was just right now, so warm under her arms and between her thighs, her long, long legs, her breasts, her cocoa nipples, her belly. She dunked her hair under its surface and brought it out steaming, stretched the sheet over the tub and softly called to him.

Ephram walked in and looked at Ruby. He poured an alchemy of oil, steam and well water into a pitcher and poured it over Ruby’s thick hair. It seemed to drink the water like desert sand. Ruby sighed.

He arranged his supplies on the sideboard: two large tins of Crown Royal hair dressing. Casey Farms peanut oil. Ginger root. White Rain Shampoo and Conditioner. Hair bands, small blue worlds attached to black elastic eights, like children wore to Sunday school. And a wide-toothed comb and scissors.

Her hair was hard in places like thick plastic. It had matted so that scabs had formed along the scalp, bled and dried into scars. Some of the hair had tangled into ropes, so dense, so solid that it would have been easier to shave her head and start fresh. As if she could read his thoughts she said, “It might be easier to cut it off.”