Ruby (28 page)

Peeking through the brush, Otha watched her husband point his long, firm arm like an arrow into the sky and say, “That man up there? That one on his Roman chair? With his snow whiskers and his icicle nose? That White man what breathe out frost when he speaks, with them froze blue eyes like a lake in winter? You got to know he already done picked out who he favor and it ain’t the likes of you. It ain’t nobody with a lick a color spread over they skin. Not them he seen fit to drag down into four hundred year of slavin’. Not my grandpa who died in them salt swamps of Florida. It ain’t your brother Tom got lynched over in Jasper, and dragged some twenty miles ’til they wasn’t nothing left of him to bury.”

The men started stamping. “Call it Brother Jennings.”

“You ain’t got to look far or wide to see whose ass he lean down and wipe anytime they ask him. God ain’t nothing but a butt boy for rich White men. He let them do whatever thing they want, then make they way as smooth as glass. But White man, he ain’t content with all that. He got to rule it all. God his mistress, but he wed to the Devil. How many times we find his workings in them woods? How much our blood he feed his soil, how many upside down crosses he be burning. They been courting the Devil since before Jesus walked the earth. And they doing it still. Back to the day Eve spawned them.”

The men pushed closer, their faces hungry for his words like dogs waiting to fetch.

Otha watched her husband’s eyes go black as he talked about Eve. He told the old story of how she alone baked evil in the bread of the world. Then he added, “Cuz who you think give birth to every nature of pestilence on this old planet earth? Locust and yellow fever—cotton blight and slavery—and when she took that bite of the apple, she open her legs and out come all of that, and worst of all—out come the White man!”

The Reverend looked at the two young initiates. “You just boys and just catching on to they curse. You got to know they born with it, but when they get they first blood it’s too late. One day you’ll find yourself wrapped up in knots for the want of a woman. You gone want her touch and she gone make sure you do by how she parade in front of you, but the second you reaches out she got to say no. Why? Cuz it’s the nature of woman to make you shamed of the desires she done give to you in the first place. Cuz she carry evil inside her like a disease she don’t never catch but can’t help but spread.

“So hard as it might be for y’all boys to understand, we got to get them early. Got to snatch they evil when we can still use it against any enemy what come to cut us down.

“Some folks say slavery and the whip make us crazy. Some say we got so twisted up with pain and hate so we do this here. But is that true, brothers?”

The men screamed out like someone held a knife to their throats.
“No! No Brother!”

“I say unto y’all, we as wise as Solomon and learn to use what we got, to take the reins of evil. We needs us some vessels to do just that!!!”

There was a pause in the crowd. Her heart pounding in her mouth, Otha watched as a giant of a man brought six little girls
into the center of the circle. They were crying. Weeping. Little crumpled girls who looked like they had been kept in a dark box, cramped, wincing in the light of the fire. Next she saw Papa Bell’s grandbaby, little Ruby so pretty, her face like a heart. She wasn’t dirty, but had on a pretty blue dress. A blue bow in her hair. Why!? What are they gonna do to that girl? Those girls?
What are they—?
Otha almost stood. Almost. But God or the Devil held her tight to where she crouched.

“And these little ones here?” A practiced treble rang in her husband’s voice as he preached hellfire. “Don’t be mistook by they age, like a rattler and they poison, they come of age they gonna bite us.”

The circle of men shouted out “Heya!” and “Speak it Brother, Speak it!”

Otha watched in horror as he pushed six crying girls forward.

A power surged through her husband so that he shook from head to toe, reached his hand into the heavens and screamed,
“And do you know how we take they evil?”

The men answered, “Yes! We do, Brother Jennings!”

“How we do it?!”

A man hollered like a hammer. “We teaches them!!!”

“What do we teach them?”

A flurry of voices screaming on top of each other:

“How to use they lust to please us—!”

“—so we can take—”

“—take they power back.”

“Yes, my Brothers! Take it back! And what Make They Power Stronger!?”

Obeah, the man who had poured the powder around the circle, answered. “The blood make it so.” Otha didn’t notice until
he spoke that the man had a butcher knife. That he was standing over the calf.

The Reverend said, his voice as flat as death, “Them gals is for y’all to do with as you please. Them that paid go first.”

Otha saw one of the girls run and try to break out of the circle, only to be grabbed hard and thrown back with the others, so she crumpled her body and stood still. One of the city men pulled her towards him and held her possessively, arms crossed over her chest.

“But this one …” Her husband gently took hold of Ruby. He held her face and gave her a smile. “This one belong to me. Ain’t nobody else touch her. She a prize heifer, worth a-plenty. We send her out where she collect the White man’s power and bring it back to me so’s I can lead y’all.”

The drums began. The girls were all crying, sobbing uncontrollably. Ruby looked glazed and accepting.

Otha heard a sound, a high careening cry, she looked and saw that the knife had been plunged into the calf’s neck by Obeah. Its legs bucking, writhing, blood spurting on the white sheet.

She jumped, so that the branch broke that she rested upon. The Reverend peered in her direction and searched the dark of the woods. Otha watched little Ruby do the same. In a split second the child’s eyes saw her. The Reverend took a step towards the woods, and Otha tasted bile in the back of her throat. She watched the girl Ruby take her husband’s hand and turn him away from her. She saw her husband’s face twist into a jagged grin as he called out to the men. “Now don’t break ’em y’all! They for training! We gots to keep them whole!”

Penter Rankin ran up and threw an ale barrel full of white powder into the pit fire and the flames turned bright blue and
green. A wall of blue smoke filled the clearing. It rolled so high and thick it seemed to cover the sky, so that Otha could only see shapes and bits and pieces of men and girls. Arms pulled, dragged off. Pants … legs running. Screams. Screams of the children. The dying heifer calf moaning. Pain. Red on one face. A child’s cheek red. A man’s hands.

Otha was frozen. She wanted to run. Wanted to tell. But who would she tell? Where would she—where would she??? But she waited because, maybe, maybe one day she could tell God. He wasn’t listening now … But later, when the blue smoke was gone. When he could see into the fire. See what they were doing. She would tell the Father so he could set it straight.

Then, then she couldn’t wait—Otha lifted to go, to run, towards or away she did not know, but a hand slapped over her mouth. Another over her eyes. She fought, fought like life was a treasure that she would die to protect. Another set of hands held her down now. She tried to bite, and scream, she kicked into the hands holding her legs. She heard another scream pealing through the trees, a child was screaming louder, louder still. She managed to lift up, against the weight of hands—bodies. Someone punched her hard on the back of her head and she fell forward. In a second, a shock jerked through her, blocking all transmission, so that a jangle of images cut through her. She came to—minutes? hours? later, jerking on the dumb earth. They were still around her. Her hands were moving, moving against the carpet of dry needles, eating at the earth with her hands. Another jolt shot through her and scrambled the last of her reason. Time stopped and crushed in on itself, too too much for her tender spirit to fathom. Otha was shut down, and passed into unconsciousness.

She awoke the next morning while the sky was still gray. The sun was miles from the horizon. She leapt up and hit her shin against the log, reminding her of where she was. She had soiled herself. There were coals burning where the fire had been. They had—the men. The back of her head ached. They had—had someone hit her? They? Who? Something tilted inside her. She fell against the log. It was as if a scale had been tipped in the night. Something had happened, but she scratched in the ashes of her mind and could not remember a thing. Had there been a fire? Who stood before it? She had followed her husband? Or had she run from him? Little webs stretched before her eyes with spiders that devoured every thought before it could surface. Nothing remained of the night before so she walked in the dim gray pale of morning through the forest path; her reason snagged on a tree branch. She felt something tickling her thighs and saw that her hands were lacing again. She thought to stop them but they persisted against all signals to stop. So she walked home, opened her door. She scrubbed her privates with a soaped face cloth and climbed into her bed beside the Reverend, sleeping like death.

Easter morning found her awake under the three-star quilt she had made three falls ago, hands furious, her husband snoring beside her. She leapt out of bed and fell down again. Balance lost, the floor slanted until she slanted her head to meet the new angle and was able to walk that way. She put on her robe and fixed breakfast, glad to have something to occupy her hands; holding a spatula and flipping pancakes proved manageable. Keeping them busy was best so she cleaned while the household prepared for Easter Sunday. Otha looked at her husband and felt sick but she could not place where this feeling had been born. He chewed and swallowed and pulled back his chair and put on his hat. He always
went early so she found the tail of a voice in her throat and croaked out, “Good day.” He glared at her, but there was nothing unusual about that. She swept and scrubbed and told Ephram and Celia to go on without her, that she had plenty much to see to before the picnic. Ephram kept asking her what was wrong, what was wrong, until she was sharp with him and told him to go to service. Celia gave her her father’s glare. Long a disappointment to her fourteen-year-old daughter, this was nothing new either. Once they walked away, what was left of Otha died right there on the kitchen floor. She felt all that was familiar: the heart that beat for her children; the morning quiet of her garden; even the ever-present low note of sorrow that ran through her marriage; the lavender scent of her mother; her daddy … every memory, every bit of her retreating, retracting. She burrowed like a parasite into little pockets in her body, then she barricaded them from the inside, until there was nothing, until all that she had been ceased to be.

Some new thing emerged that thought to lift her form and walk her into the bedroom. This new thing took off her robe and proceeded to get dressed. It tied her shoes and put on her hat. It decided that it would be best, if she could not stop her hands from lacing, to carry the lacing tat and pretend to work on it whenever someone glanced in her direction. This new being never considered not walking to the picnic because it lived under the sway of the Reverend’s moods. He would already be livid that she had not come to the church. Why had she not come to the church? No, the floor had had to be cleaned and the breakfast dishes washed and so she couldn’t go but she had wanted to, she would tell the Reverend when she saw him. She would explain to him very clearly, very slowly, so that she would make sure she was saying the words correctly because something was tilting her thoughts
as well, mixing up the correct sequence. She was planning exactly what she would say as she walked over the hill, which is why the first scream was such a surprise. A little bug of memory collided with the web of her mind again. A child somewhere was screaming bloody murder, but it was devoured just as the Reverend punched her in the face.

The rest of the day was a blur of women and glimpses of Ephram sobbing. Her memory spitting out a dragonfly, in the form of her husband standing beside some girls, but why was he there and he wasn’t really there but why did the girls turn into blue smoke? When she mentioned the girl in the forest he had begun beating her in earnest but even that felt distant, except she needed to see Ephram and tell him something about his bed, perhaps to take a red thing from there, but what, she could not fathom. And then she was too weak to stop someone from hurting her boy, and a pain ripped through her soul as she was torn from him, ripped like a spider from its web, and she was hit so hard the buckboard raced to her head and held it all the way to hell.

The sleeves they wrapped around her were too tight around her lungs so that she couldn’t breathe in deep enough to sustain consciousness. She kept waking up gasping for air and then passing out again. Finally an angry White woman did something with buckles and she was able to stay awake, and then she wished she hadn’t. She found that she was wearing a diaper and that it had been soiled more than once. She was in a room with four other Colored women all wrapped similarly. When she arrived the Reverend had taken her into a room and told a White woman that she had tried to throw her children down the well and had then run naked to the Easter picnic, that she was crazy and that he loved her but what could he do. The White woman had put
her hand on her Black husband and patted his back then she had shoved Otha into another room, getting the little jacket over her bruised body. When she cried for her son the woman had pushed her hard against the wall.

By evening Otha’s reason was slowly returning. She was terrified for her children. At the end of a week she began to smell again. She didn’t realize that sense had been lost until she was assaulted by the stench of urine, waste and collective human sweat. She was moved into a great room with ten women and men strapped to beds. A very angry man said that her ribs were broken and she was wrapped up and left there where she developed sores on her ankles and skin burns on her vagina and buttocks from urine soaking and laying so close to her skin for so many days. After a month she was moved to a cell where human decency had long been forgotten. Twelve women shared a filthy room with a tin bucket for relieving themselves. Some women were strapped to their beds. Some screamed all day and wept. One woman played with her private parts until nurses slapped her hands with a ruler. When they were out of sight she would begin again. In spite of this Otha held fast to what was left of her sanity. She did it for one reason. Her son, Ephram. Besides the yawning pain of missing him she was terrified for him as well. She called out at night to speak about her children until two men came in and tied her to her bed with a leather strap over her mouth. Two days later a man came in to talk with her. They took the strap from her mouth then. She had not had water or food for two days. This man did not seem angry. He was a young White man, so young in fact that his face didn’t look as if it would take a beard. He called Otha “Mrs. Jennings” and asked her how she was feeling, so of course she felt tears pushing against her eyes, she told him that she
was very concerned about her son and daughter. She did not dare mention pit fires and young naked girls, not in the heart of this beast of a place, but she did tell the man that her husband beat the children in such a way that she was frightened for their very lives. The young man nodded and looked at a piece of paper in front of him. He said that he thought it would be best if she stayed with them for a while longer.