A Virtuous Woman (Oprah's Book Club) (4 page)

And once I had been away from home a while, he figured I’d chime in with him when he was being so cruel about my family. He’d try and shame me into saying something ugly so I could lower myself, so he could lord that over me. And when I didn’t he found fault with everything I did. I remember the first time he called me a bitch. The only times I’d ever heard the word were on a school-bus, mean boys running down the teacher. Hearing him yell that at me made me almost sick to my stomach. Like most everything he was saying to me by then, it made me cry, and that got him even hotter with me. Know why he called me that? Because I said just because we were married didn’t mean he could do anything to me or with me that he pleased. No, I wasn’t a bitch. I was just a good country girl who’d married this man and bitten off way, way more than she could chew.

Somebody could say, “If she loved her family so much, why didn’t she run away and call someone to come get her?” I thought about it a hundred times a day, believe you me. Sometimes that was all I had to think about except how my body hurt. What would I have said? “Daddy, did you ever hear of
Tobacco Road?
Well, the situation I’m in is alot like that, only we’re moving from place to place
and I’m never sure where I am. So next summer when the migrants sit under our sycamore tree, don’t think of anyone else but me. Okay, daddy?” And the funny thing about all this is how one of my big ambitions had always been to travel, not just to the state parks and such my parents had taken us to, but to exciting places around the country, maybe some foreign places. I’ll tell you what, I travelled all right. Join a migrant crew, see the world! And I did. It was all foreign to me then, raggedy people, raggedy houses, children waiting at the ends of bean rows, scratching ringworms. I guess before I left with him I thought that wherever we pulled up to work a Sudie Bee would walk out under a cool tree and spread out ham sandwiches. That was a joke. I’d have come nearer thriving on John Woodrow’s love than the food we had.

I started to get an edge on me though, something I’d never had. Oh, I’d had such a funny idea about what it took to be a woman. Little did I know back when I stayed propped up by the kitchen counter watching Sudie Bee cut up a chicken or roll out dough that I’d become a woman heating up yesterday’s corned beef hash in a little tin house stuck in the middle of the kind of place my mama never liked to drive through.

Towards the end of the first winter with him he got on a wild loop about putting some money together and moving us to a town somewhere, being a family and so forth. He’d
talk about it all night long, and when I finally asked him how he intended to raise the money, since it took everything we made to live, he said I was going to call daddy and ask him for my third of the inheritance early.

I told him that was the craziest thing I’d ever heard, but that wasn’t what he wanted to hear from me, not after he’d spent all winter spending daddy’s money in that twisted up head of his. I told him what he should do is call his own family, that they might be ready to make up for the trouble they’d caused him, that they might be feeling bad about what they’d done. It made sense to me. I was ready to get out of that mess we were living in myself, and I thought I was just helping him find another way to get that done.

You should’ve seen how he blew up at me, saying how stupid I was and so forth. And then one thing led to another and I found out all I needed to know about John Woodrow and his lies and traps and how much trouble a girl can get into believing in the movies.

This was his situation. About the only truth he’d told me about his family was that they hated him as much as he hated them. That’s where the truth started and stopped both. And when he let it all out, he said he’d gone after his daddy with a butcher knife and missed, but he left and came back that night and burned every tobacco barn on the place to the ground. And it also came out that the farm was hardly big enough to support them, hardly
anything worth dividing among three children. He said he was sent up three years for arson and when he got out his family wouldn’t claim him, even had him put under a peace bond, which he broke when he stole his sister’s car and ran it up a telephone pole. That’s how he got the long scar by his knee, not in the high school football game he’d described to me the first night we slept together, which makes my skin crawl to even think about now.

About then is when I started smoking. He’d ridiculed me for not having any vices to speak of ever since we were married. He’d say, “I bet little Miss Vanderbilt don’t even take liquor in her mint julep.” I’d never even seen a mint julep, but I know he was picturing me sipping one on our long porch, long crinolined dress, Sudie Bee fanning and fetching for me, Lester down at the other end shining Paul and Jimmy’s shoes. That’s how his mind worked.

But see, before we were married no vices were more of a virtue, or so he made it seem. I think now I lit up that first cigarette because I was sick of listening to him, and I smoked the second one because I liked the way I felt after the first one. And all through that winter and on up until two months ago I smoked like a fiend. The reasons for doing it left but that never mattered. It’s funny how something I used so long ago to get me by, a way I had of coping with things, it’s just funny how it stayed with me to hurt me. And I let it, and ashamed as I am to say it, I’d
die for a cigarette right now, but that’s being taken care of. This would hurt my mama.

But the rest of that winter with him and on into the spring I’d talk myself into calling home and then talk myself right back out of it, smoking one cigarette right after the other, chewing my fingernails to the quick. Then the hotter it got, the iller he seemed to get at me. I remember how grateful I felt when he started staying in town all night. Whenever we got to a new place he could sniff out a pool hall and be headed there before I was in the door good. And there I’d be, left over from this big mess of a dream I’d put together without seeing that there wasn’t any way it was going to turn out, and I was left there in it, with it.

Going to the Hoovers’ farm turned out to be the salvation although it sure didn’t look that way from the car window, all those tobacco fields hot and thick, and I said to myself driving by, If I have to work another day in this nasty, sticky heat I will surely die. I’d never seen it so hot.

Then no sooner than we got unpacked John Woodrow took off without a word. He stayed gone all night, and when he didn’t show up the next morning the crew chief said that made the third time and he was fired. And I thought, Well Ruby, you asked for it. Then he told me I was going to help in the house, and I should stay around in the yard and wait for the Hoover women to wake up
and come get me. I know he was thinking I’d look better at the big house than any of the others, and he probably also thought I looked like I didn’t have the gall to steal anything. That’s a high recommendation.

Frances Hoover called me inside a little later and told me she wanted this and that clean, and she said, “When I say clean I mean clean.” She said her daughter was getting married there that next week and she expected everything to be done just right. I started in the kitchen, and while I was mopping the pantry I heard her yell up the stairs, “Tiny Fran, you get your majesty’s self down here and help with this cleaning. I mean it, I’m not telling you again!” And then I heard somebody yell from the top of the stairs, “I already told you I’m sick!” Then Frances started again, “You get down here!” And they went back and forth yelling at each other until Frances popped her dust cloth on the banister and stomped up the stairs. The next thing I heard was skin being slapped. Tiny Fran came downstairs, the stairs were in the kitchen, and I could see she wasn’t the one who’d been slapped. She looked real pleased with herself, and all I could think was, My God! That girl just hit her mama! Then she went to the refrigerator and poured herself a big glass of chocolate milk, saw me standing by the pantry and said to me, “Hand me a box of soda crackers in there. I feel like shit this morning. And who the hell are you?” I told her my name and that I was
there to help her mama. When I got her the crackers she snatched them from me and said, “Well good, that woman needs all the help she can get.” I was just amazed. I didn’t know what I’d walked in on, that topsy-turvy house.

What a time I was to have with Tiny Fran! Everything she touched seemed to come out wrong, be it her fault or not, nothing worked out. But ever since we met that day at least she’s had somebody to blame. She lives in town now. I haven’t seen her in a long time, but I wouldn’t be half surprised to hear that when she drops an egg or burns the butter she screams out, “Damn you, Ruby Stokes!” I wouldn’t be surprised at all. She never came very far from where she was the day we met, mad at the whole world, settling her stomach with soda crackers and undoing all the good that was doing with a quart of chocolate milk, then sick again and frustrated and not understanding why.

I
’d be lying if I didn’t say how the reason I had to wait so long to get married is nobody would have me. And it’s not like I gave a crowd of women the opportunity to turn me down. I never asked a one. I never came close to asking. Until I met Ruby I suppose the sweetest thing I’d ever asked a woman to do for me was to hold a mule still while I hitched the plow to him.

I had the big mouth with Ruby though, going all into how I’d been waiting for the right one to come along, saving myself and so forth. She could’ve looked right in my face and said, “Bullshit. You were born a dried up skinny man and here you are expecting me to think you let a world of women pass you by, more plowboy than playboy.” But she didn’t laugh at me. All she said was she wanted somebody to take care of her, and if I promised to,
she’d marry me. I said then, I say now, “That’s the best thing in the world for me, for the both of us, best thing for anybody to do for somebody.” You hear tell of somebody saying how so-and-so made him feel like a real man, how so-and-so made somebody feel like a natural woman and so forth, it’s all the time on the television and the radio, you hear all about that and I can honestly say that before I married Ruby I’d felt like a boy on the outside looking in, but Ruby, when she loved me, I said, This is what it must feel like to be a man. Before then if somebody’d walked up to me and asked me right out who I was I’d have said, “A tenant, one of the boys the Hoovers use,” but now I’d say, “I’m the man that was married to Ruby.”

I was hauling manure to the garden the day I came across her sitting under the tree, and I thought how perfect a picture she’d make if she had a flower or some sewing, something womany in her hand besides a cigarette. So I went right up to her, running on pure gall or what must’ve already been love, and I spoke to her on her smoking. You’d think that with somebody, a stranger like her all of a sudden there one morning in the yard I’d been hauling manure across all my life, you’d think I’d be too bound up to breathe, much less speak. But I didn’t bind up. I leaped right in. I didn’t bind up hardly at all.

And when she talked to me it was none of this twisting and twirling of the hair and this and that kind of eye
batting. No, I’d ask her a question and she’d answer it. She’d ask me one and I’d answer it back. See, that’s a time being skinny and not good-looking will do you some good. If I’d been real smooth it might’ve triggered her to act like a woman will around somebody real smooth, twirling the hair and what-not. But me being like I was, am, let me get a foot in the door. So she just talked to me like she knew I didn’t mean her harm, not out there in the yard, not ever. I thought talking to her, I thought, This is the kind of woman I could get along with. Ruby, you’re my kind of woman!

But while we were talking there, I started looking at her hard and I said to myself, This woman, look at her skin, she’s not one of these that pull up with the migrant crews. It was like the feeling you get when you see a car with out-of-state tags pull up at the store, and somebody gets out and everybody in there has to stop and examine them. So I looked at her good and listened to her, listened to her lie to me, and thought how she was the kind of woman, girl really, that some tough somebody’d love to chew up and spit out. After she told me how she was married and had a husband and his name was John Woodrow and all, I said, Well, I ought to tell her what I heard, I ought to. So I did. It liked to’ve shocked her. Then I said, Well, you told her, the least thing you can do is offer to help her out. So I told her where all I lived and to come on if she needed something.
She acted like she would. Then about that time I heard Tiny Fran stick her head out and yell at her, “Come on in here and find where you laid the soda crackers yesterday. I’m sick as a dog this morning.” I thought to myself, Just like Tiny Fran to be yelling her old sorry business out the back door. And I said, I sure hope it doesn’t take this girl long to get Tiny Fran’s number. You always needed her number to handle her, to try to anyway. I didn’t know back then that handling Tiny Fran was something Ruby’d have to do more often than she’d have liked to. But now I think I can look back to that first day with Ruby and feel like it was the whole start of many more things than that. Sometimes I feel like everything started with Ruby.

I
got things sufficiently clean for Frances. All day she kept after Tiny Fran to help me but she kept telling her mama things like scrubbing floors wasn’t in her job description. I worked around her most of the day. Sometimes it seemed like she intentionally put herself in my way so I’d have to say, “Excuse me.” I thought she might be pregnant but I wasn’t sure, not then. She was already a large girl so it was difficult to tell exactly.

But I worked all day there and went home after Frances ran her inspection and said I should come back the next day and do the upstairs. So I went on and when I got to that little place we were staying in, I still can’t believe this, but when I got there I saw something that stopped me absolutely stone still.

John Woodrow was there, yes he was surely back, just
lying there on the cot, lying there propped up on a pillow, smoking a cigarette, and some girl not more than sixteen was prancing up and down in front of him, wearing my nice underwear, modeling for him, wearing those things I’d carried around with me all that time wrapped up in the tissue paper they’d come in, the nice things he’d tried to tear off me on our honeymoon. I’d washed those things and folded them back up and packed them away at the bottom of my bag where I didn’t think he’d find them and ruin them. And there she was with them on. And that’s not the half of it. She had a little baby crawling around on the floor, trying to keep up with her, with a diaper on I could smell from the door. I felt sick to my stomach. He saw me and she saw me and they were both so drunk, or in his case so sorry and so drunk, that they didn’t even rush to cover up. He called out, “Ruby!” But not like he’d been caught, like he wanted me to come on in and join his party. I’d never been so disgusted in my life. I slammed the door and ran out and sat down on the edge of the wheat field. I remember how the wheat felt good to me, sad and angry as I was. And I sat there and said, What am I going to do about this? I wanted to kill him. To tell the truth, that’s exactly what I wanted to do. But I knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d taken a life, even a life as worthless as John Woodrow’s. But I said, You can hurt him. You don’t have to kill him but you can surely
make him miserable. Migrant people got cut, shot all the time, well, not all the time, but certainly enough for me to think if I shot John Woodrow in the leg or something that I’d not be called to answer for it the way I would be if we weren’t on the migrant circuit. And I thought if I played my cards right, provoked a fight with him, let some other people along that long row of shacks hear it, I thought if I pushed him far enough he’d explode and try to hurt me and I’d defend myself. Then I’d have no choice but to pack up and go back home. So I bought a pistol from a man and went back to that little shack bound and determined to do some damage to old John Woodrow. And I wasn’t afraid as you’d think I’d be, having only been around guns when I used to go skeet shooting with my brothers. I was only afraid he’d get it away from me before I could use it and that’d be all she wrote.