Ruby (31 page)

Thirty-three years later, Celia knew that the food waiting in the refrigerator for Ephram would soon start to curl and lose its crisp. The mountains of his favorites sat in new Tupperware: fried
chicken and pork chops, okra with tomato and corn, fresh yeast rolls, collard greens, black-eyed peas with butter rice, potato salad, lemon meringue pie, sweet potato pie, blackberry cobbler and more. All made with a certainty that Ephram, hungry and guilty, would surely be home by sunset with his tail on a plate.

As she looked about the house the practical business of life without him began to unroll before her. Without the new bags coming home every day from the Piggly Wiggly, her larder would soon run low. And what was she to do? Walk the mile to P & K and tote her own bags home? Past the Rankins’ land and everyone wandering down to Bloom’s Juke come evening? Even paying some young man to do it would have proved shameful, as if she had no family, no relation who cared enough to tend to her needs. Where would she get her stamps? Who would post her letters? Who would accompany her to purchase her wigs in Newton and so much more?

Celia sat upon the plastic slipcovers on her mint velour sofa. It was not only the loss of him, but who had gained. Ruby Bell was not just a girl. Celia knew what she was and how she had become that way. Celia was one of the few women in Liberty who knew about the pit fires. Others whispered over white ashes, but she had been there. She had seen the thing one evening and seen the girl who took delight in sin and debauchery. That girl was Ruby Bell.

Celia felt her stomach grip and churn with fear for her boy. A hunger rose from her body, and she crept into the kitchen. Bowls upon bowls of a glistening Sunday repast waited. Celia ate. She gnawed chicken to the bone and scraped the cartilage. She gulped unchewed mouthfuls of perfectly seasoned okra, corn bread found near the back, rolls crammed too full in her mouth for her molars to bite down. She stuffed and stuffed until food
fell down her gown, pushing the handfuls almost to the back of her throat, so that her breath was labored and the food locked in her throat. Then she padded to the bathroom, knelt down on the pink shag throw rug. Her hands met her lips, her fingers white from pressing together. She let them part and slid two fingers into her throat. She pressed a secret button and up it all came in a gush. In a matter of seconds it was done. Her body shook like a train screeching to a stop. Then she was empty. After she washed her hands, she used the same two fingers to pull the lever on the toilet. She turned away as it all swirled down.

It had been years since Celia had prayed on the bathroom floor and her throat burned from the effort. At fourteen, after her mama left, it had somehow helped her to manage the business of living and raising Ephram and taking care of her daddy—but it had begun when she was twelve, the night Ruby dragged her daddy into hellfire, where he swam, and eventually drowned.

In those days, Celia trailed after her papa. She didn’t know why, except that he needed looking after. Her mama kept her eyes on Ephram and didn’t seem to care much about Celia, much less her own husband. Celia had noticed how she always looked down at the ground when he came into the room, or busied herself with the wash—any little thing to keep herself too high and proud for her daddy. Being educated like she was, she liked to lord it over him.

Everyone in the house had picked their partners. Ephram and her mama. The Reverend and his church. Celia was left alone, so she followed her daddy.

First she started walking behind him when he went to the church some off days to help the head of the Women’s Auxiliary tend to some chores. She made sure he didn’t see her; still she
would wait for him in the thicket of trees. She would take little things she imagined might come in handy. A tea cake wrapped in a napkin, if he found himself out somewhere hungry. A canteen with sweet water—she’d even measured the sugar in herself. Smelling salts, a toothpick, a pack of matches and sometimes a fresh pair of socks. She invented all types of instances when he might do something like step into a mud puddle on the way to a meeting with the Church Board, and she would show up out of nowhere to clean up his shoe and hand him the socks. He might faint from all of his work, and there she would be, with sweet water and reviving salts.

So one night, when she heard her daddy going out, Celia followed after him. Her mama and Ephram fast asleep, she had thrown on her waiting school dress and shoes, then walked out into the pines. She had known he did work out in the back woods, where some folks believed in conjure and went to a Godless woman named Ma Tante.

Celia thought,
That is where he must be walking, to minister to the heathens
, who, she had heard, prayed to something other than Jesus. She was well practiced at walking silently behind him, and he never turned once, but walked proudly through the trees until he reached a glowing fire surrounded by men.

Celia watched her daddy smile big and set the men at ease. Some Celia knew and she was shocked to learn that they were heathens and would therefore be left behind during the rapture. She was too far away to hear him, but she watched her daddy speaking in earnest, trying to save their souls from purgatory, and sure enough, they were listening—each and every one. They nodded and Celia knew that come Sunday they would be in Marion Lake, being baptized by her father.

Then something strange happened. The flames seemed to grow larger and the wind picked up, then came little girls. Celia figured they had been sent there to bring their daddies home, until she saw Ruby Bell, who didn’t have a daddy at all—at least not one who would show his face.

When Ruby stepped out her daddy stared at her and all of his words just fell to the wayside. Celia could tell something was wrong with her daddy. The other girls started crying—but not Ruby, who stood still as anything. Celia wanted to know what was behind that fire, what was hiding out in those woods she couldn’t see. The men started shuffling too. Without her daddy’s words to stop them, they started pounding on some kind of drum and moving their lips all at the same time.

Then Celia watched a type of bedevilment take hold of her daddy. He started swaying with the drums, started moving his mouth with the other men. Celia began praying for him. She pressed her hands tight together and called on Jesus, and the Father. It didn’t help.

It seemed like her daddy, the one she poured coffee for every morning, because her mother was too slow about it—it seemed like he was gone, and this man, looking dead-eyed at Ruby, was all that was left. She wished she had brought something to help him, but nothing in her little bag would help, not even the salts.

So she began whispering her daddy’s favorite, Psalm 23, into the quiet night while tears slid down her face.

It seemed to Celia like something made her daddy hand off each child to men she had never seen, picking up a tiny wrist and laying it in a grown man’s hand.

“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters.”

Celia felt a fist of anger and sorrow ball up in her throat.

“He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.”

It seemed—it seemed to Celia like he was giving those girls away, like you would if somebody won a raffle at a Fair.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me …”

What would make him do such a thing? What force? What—then Celia looked at Ruby Bell, who seemed to be just smiling through it all. Other girls crying, being led off like they had gotten a new master. Ruby Bell hadn’t been passed to anybody. Who hadn’t shed not one tear.

Then Celia watched in the smoke and black night, as Ruby turned to her daddy, and seemed to will him to her. He marched towards her like a puppet, and when he reached her, seemed to hug her near, hug her close, closer than he had ever held his own daughter. Then something happened that Celia did not understand—how they stayed that way too long, too close. How they seemed to be swaying with the beat of the evil drums … and how her papa never danced, but now, somehow, Ruby’s head rocking, her daddy’s hips shifting, he was doing just that. A kind of dancing. Were his pants brown? She had been sure that they were black when he walked in there, but now, were they the same color of his skin? What—what had happened to his pants?

Celia let out a scream that began in her belly as she turned crashing through the branches. She pounded the earth all the way home and slammed the door to her room. She shook in bed until morning, knowing, knowing, knowing that her father was a good man—that God had singled him out early to do his work, to rattle the Devil’s cage. She knew that old Satan had to work hard. Very
hard. Very hard with such a good man. Must have hammered his spike long and hard to find the key to his undoing. It had to be hidden where her papa would never think to look. Inside of a child.

From that day onward, Celia never, ever followed her daddy again. Instead, Celia watched Ruby. Watched her coming back from that White lady in Neches, acting better than everybody. Watched her sparking that Wilkins girl like she would have a man, with nobody saying a thing about it. Watched her move on up to New York City where her kind of evil banded together, and later she’d watched her slide across town filled with demons, begging bread and sympathy from Miss P, and drawing good men from their wives’ beds. Now she was trying to steal her Ephram, as she had her father. She saw Ruby as a red beacon washing over Liberty. For some reason Celia had seen fit to let that live untampered. She regretted that now. First, she would try to cleanse Ruby’s soul. If that did not work, Celia would get ahold of the Sheriff and put that girl somewhere she could only tempt lunatics and those who minded them, down in Dearing.

T
he pines had been watching men and their fire circles since they were saplings. For nearly two hundred years they had seen upside down crosses glowing red in the dark, long before men in white sheets ever rode the horizon.

Dark cloaks donned, secret chants and the pealing screams that followed. The slaves of these men had hidden in the shadows and witnessed the unthinkable. When morning came, the tall trees watched the men, brown and black, scrubbing blood from the knives of their masters in the cool river and kicking dirt over stiff maroon soil, cleaning quartered animals missing hearts and heads. The great pines had stooped in sorrow when they saw these slaves learning in the thick brush, the source of the White man’s might, then mingling their own ancient homeland rites, magic and shadow secrets with the new, until they began gathering about their own fires and driving their desires into the roots of the world.

The Dyboù had been walking through the same piney woods for the past thirty-seven years. He was earthbound. His soul had been stitched to the land with a curse made moments before his destruction. It had been spit over his body as he lay bleeding, and then cemented as the bones in his neck snapped one at a time like
dry twigs. Then the circle had gathered around him, crying, some wailing, just as the Apostles and the whore Mary had wept over Jesus.

But those were the thoughts he’d had while breathing. In death it had become much simpler. Jesus was a fluff of tobacco smoke. God was a figment of distilled whiskey. The name his mother had given him, Omar Jennings, and the name he had forged, the Reverend Jennings, both were dust in the crack of his shoes.

He had gathered at the pit fires since he was thirteen, nearly seventy-five years before. Then later, as a man, leading the circle, fear and awe freshly painted on every man as they looked upon him.

But first he had been a boy and the whole of his life had been spent sleeping in the corner of a one-room dirt cabin. His daddy had been too useless to feed all twelve of them so Omar had taken to stealing chickens before he turned six. He brought them home to his mama, beaming, and she would slap him to the ground for thieving. But when she served that chicken plucked, cleaned and fried, her eyes would land soft over his features. It was the one moment of joy he remembered in all of his young life.

His daddy drunk up any two pennies his mama found to rub together, then got mean and limp, eyes blood red with raw hate piercing through. He was too lazy to stand up and beat a boy, but if one happened to be wandering too close to his spider hands he would snatch arm, leg, hand and start beating with whatever was handy—broom, stick, frying pan, hammer. He would say his son’s name with heat and spit, “Omar, Omar … you a low-down piece of donkey shit.” Or “Omar, you the asshole of a maggot.”

If it bothered Omar Jennings as a boy, he had no recollection of that fact. Certainly he could recall the physical pain of the
beatings. The hiding his face from his friends. His arm in a sling. He even remembered getting on his knees in church, with a hollow nothing for his efforts.

So when the old man was killed after passing out near Master Gibbs’s cotton fields with his pipe burning too close to the twenty-pound gas tank, Omar wasn’t particularly troubled. Even later, when he heard how they found his father, writhing on the earth, every stitch of clothes and skin seared right off his muscle, Omar took the news in stride.

A week after his daddy died Omar Jennings, feeling far older than his twelve years, put the other children to work. The girls to Miss Sybil the laundress, the boys collecting scraps at the mill. He organized and planned and collected all the money from his siblings and put it in his mama’s apron come every Friday night. Now she didn’t slap him. Instead, with the children out playing where she had sent them, she took his hand and guided it under her skirt. Told him when he held it back that he had grown plenty big, that he was the man of the house now and had to perform certain duties. How the first time they rutted, she ate him whole in the dim of that shack, on the pallet where she and his daddy had slept, on top of the dirt he had watched her sweep. How his mama worked against Omar’s fear for the first ten minutes and then, to his young shame, in spite of it for the next hour. Availing herself of his embarrassed reflexes like a bear waits for salmon. Until, exhausted and spent, she nudged him from her mat as the girls stumbled in, complaining about the dark.