A Virtuous Woman (Oprah's Book Club) (9 page)

He told her, he said, “If you can’t find the energy to cook then I guess you can’t get fixed up to go out somewhere either. You just lay around here and we’ll tell you how good it was.” She told him to go on and leave her alone and she heaved herself up on one side and plopped over to get some sunshine on that big white stomach of hers. That was one woman that had no business in a bathing suit. But we all went in and left her out there baking and not more than fifteen minutes later here she comes, stomping across the sand dunes, scared to death she might miss a meal.

She walked right by us all on the porch, took Roland inside with her though. He had a earful to give her about June throwing sand on him, and when I heard it I thought, Bullshit! It was the other way around! We could hear him whining to her inside there and Ruby just tried to talk over
it, telling June how she ought to wear this or that pretty outfit to the restaurant.

Then we all went in, sat around talking, and Ruby said, “Where’s June?” I thought she was still out on the porch, but Ruby looked out the door and said, “No, she’s not on the porch.” Then we heard it, sounded like somebody was pure cutting somebody open back there, and then you heard Tiny Fran say, “June, you give that horn back to him right this damn minute,” and then you heard June say, “I had it first.” And then here comes June tearing down the hall with a plastic trumpet in her mouth, running I know straight for Ruby, and then here comes Roland behind her and he tackles her from the behind and there goes June. Tiny Fran came behind Roland and yelled at June, she said, “I told you to give that baby his horn!” That baby, and him two years older than her. But there June was face down and just gagging and gurgling and Ruby went and bent down beside her, turned her over and took and used her skirt to get the blood off her face. She told Burr to get some ice real quick, and then she looked in June’s mouth and said the blood probably made it look worse than it was but she ought to go to the emergency room anyway. Then Tiny Fran told Roland to go back in the bedroom and she got right next to Ruby, Ruby still wiping blood and trying to calm June down, and she said, “Move! Get your goddamn claws off her!” It came out roaring, scared Ruby so bad she
started shaking. I told her to shut her nasty mouth or I’d show her the back of my hand. She told me I was the one that needed to shut up, and then Ruby said we didn’t need a fight and all. Burr came in with the ice and told Tiny Fran to straighten up and go pull the car around, and when she did I and Burr laid June in the back seat and him and her and Roland took her to the hospital. I’d have said we wanted to go but I figured we weren’t family, and Ruby’d been made to feel in the way enough for one day.

Ruby went in a bedroom and laid across the bed. I stood in the door watching her. She told me to come on in and lay down, that the bed was cool and it was finally a breeze starting to blow in the window. I did, and then she told me to hold her real tight from the back. We laid there until way after it got dark, and she cried most of the time.

I knew Ruby. I knew she was crying for babies she wished had been born to us, ones I couldn’t give her. And as ignorant a man as I am, I knew what I was hearing. I knew the sound of Ruby crying for babies the way I know a robin’s call, the same way I know the sparrows’.

Ruby’d tell me she knew it was her fault, how it was more than likely something John Woodrow gave her that got in the way of us having a child. But I couldn’t believe it was her fault and not mine. See, usually if it was something wrong going on it was me that caused it. And it was. But the doctor said it just happens sometimes, and you can’t
lay blame. I said, “Well, fix it!” But he said it won’t no fix to it. I looked over and looked at Ruby. She said it was okay.

I thought about getting a orphan, like asking Ruth Hartley if we couldn’t take and raise one of the little girls she was bringing up, but when I saw how June was taking up with Ruby I decided to wait and see if she couldn’t fill in. She never did all the way but she did some. I really didn’t want to try out for a orphan. All Ruby would’ve needed would’ve been for the state to tell her I wasn’t right, not enough money or sense to trust a child with.

I sit here acting like if I and Ruby had had a child it’d have turned out like June, good, smart, but that’s an awful lot to pretend like what might would could’ve happened. I know everybody that wants a child sits around and thinks up a good boy or girl skipping rope, licking a ice cream cone. No, you’re going to get some bad. You just don’t want to be the one that gets stuck raising it.

Somebody bad like Roland, all he’s ever after is wanting to watch somebody suffer, like the way he made Ruby and her anniversary mule suffer. I remember when his mess finally caught up with him and they put him in the jail-house, I thought, They ought to do the same thing to him he did to the mule. You’ll never hear of such as what happened to Sugar Pete. I think of it now and say, Poor old mule.

It was one weekend I and Ruby left here and went to the mountains to visit Jimmy and his wife and her other brother, Paul. Before we left I went over yonder and asked Burr if he’d look after things around here, feed up, keep the mail picked up, and he said he would so I said we’d go on then. We went and had a good time, and when we got home the first thing I and Ruby did was to go out to the pony barn and check on her mule. I’d just given it to her for a anniversary because she’d said she wanted something to ride on along beside me when I’d take a pony down the path, something slow she felt like wouldn’t get out from under her. So I got her a mule, and she was tickled.

But that Sunday morning late we walked out to the pony barn and went under the shelter and I had to holler, “Don’t look, Ruby! Stay back!” But she looked in, looked up at him swinging, all swoll, and she just had to sit down on the feedbox and cry. I felt like I pure had to hit somebody. I said, “I know who did it! He can’t hide! Goddamn you, Roland Stanley!”

Ruby told me I ought not to swear at Roland like that unless I knew for sure he was the one did it. She wanted to know how I didn’t know it wasn’t some of the Mexican boys Luther Snipes had picking cucumbers.

I said to her, “Ruby, you don’t know people like I do.” I said, “Mexicans would’ve drove up out here drunk, took Sugar Pete for a little ride up and down the path, put her
back, and wouldn’t have left a thing to tell it by but beer bottles.” I told her a mean wild-ass boy like Roland that ought to know better is the kind that’ll hang a mule.

Then she wanted to know what we ought to do next, and I told her just to go on back to the house and let me take care of it. And I did. I went right across the field to Burr’s house and went right on in the door, and I told them all sitting around the supper table, I said, “Your goddamn boy hung my mule.” Tiny Fran almost swallowed her tongue. I told her to shut up before she said anything, and then I said, “You heard me. Your boy hung my mule, and I want to know where he is so I can kill the sonofabitch.” I went on and told them I knew it was him on account of how I’d walked up on him and two of the Snipes boys teasing Sugar Pete about a week before, talking about how stupid she looked, poking at her, and how I told them I’d get my pistol out if they didn’t get on back down the road. Tiny Fran wanted to try to say something again and Burr told her just to stay out of it, that it was I and his business.

Then Burr got up from the table and said to go with him back to the living room and we’d talk about it. Then he told me he felt like the whole thing was part-way his fault for how he’d sent Roland over to my house to feed up in his place that Saturday evening. They’d called a grange meeting he had to go to. And then he said it wasn’t a doubt in his mind that Roland was the ringleader, that it was
pure evil and had his name all over it. I know Burr felt real bad. He said he’d try and make it right.

We went on back in the kitchen and Tiny Fran was slamming dishes in the sink, and Burr went over to the china closet and got me a hundred-dollar bill out of a little pitcher. He told me to take it and buy Ruby another mule. He even said he’d take me to the stockyard on sale day to help me find a good one. But before that bill hit my hand Tiny Fran swung around from the sink and yelled out, “I was saving that money for a dishwasher!” Burr just went on and put the money in my hand, and listen to me, he said, “Woman, you’ve got two perfectly good dishwashers, the right hand and the left one.” She said a few choice words and headed out the door. I had to laugh although I hated to in the middle of this about Sugar Pete. June got up from the table and said she was going to see Ruby, and Burr said to go on and see her.

I look back on it now and feature myself slamming Tiny Fran back in a chair just like she was slamming those dishes, and I tell her, “Listen here, you knew when you had him he was a goddamn monster. You bound to! A mama ought to know! If I was you I’d have been punching him in the goddamn mouth everytime he opened it to speak the past sixteen years. Leastways he shouldn’t have been out, mean as he is, out around in somebody’s business. If I had a rattlesnake I’d keep him locked up in a
glass box where folks can tap and tap all they want to and not have to worry about getting bit, same thing with your little bastard.”

I bought another mule with Burr’s money. We called him Sugar Pete after the first one. He had a strong back and a nice curve to him and eyes Ruby said looked full of sense. When we unloaded him out of the trailer I led him up under the kitchen window just like I’d led the first Sugar Pete and I hollered, “Ruby!” And she came to the window and looked and then came on out the door, taking off her apron and saying, “Look at this!” I put her up on him and led her up and down the path a time or two. He was real easy to just have been bought. We had a good time with him, but to tell the truth, you couldn’t hardly look at him and not think of the first Sugar Pete. And after Ruby died I couldn’t hardly bear to look at him. I sold him to a boy up the road here. You hate to do it but you have to.

Leastways neither I don’t have to look at Roland. I hope they threw away the damn key. I know Stella Morgan wasn’t a Ivory Girl, but she didn’t deserve what he did to her. People won’t say much about it, never did, but I guarantee if it’d been a black boy that did it the KKK and the Rights of White People nuts would’ve been out here marching and raising all grades of hell up and down the highway. It’s not that Burr tried to cover it up or protect Roland from it being publicized. He wouldn’t even pay for
him a lawyer. One of Tiny Fran’s gripes was that if they’d got him somebody down here from New York City he’d have gone free. I wanted to tell her, “Bullshit. Perry Mason working Delia Street and Paul Drake overtime couldn’t have defended that boy.” And the stupidest part of it all was he raped Stella Morgan while he was on probation for something he’d done almost as disgusting.

Listen and tell me if you don’t hear something that won’t turn your stomach. Roland was eighteen years old, about to get out of school, and Burr sent him to the FCX to get something and instead of going and doing what he was supposed to do he went and did something else. He went in the nice new big department store downtown and got a pair of scissors and had himself a little party, cut the crotches out from between the legs of some nice ladies’ drawers.

Burr was in a state of shock when the sheriff called and said what he had Roland locked up for. I was ashamed to tell Ruby. Then all they did was make him see a doctor, and then the doctor said Roland wasn’t so messed up he couldn’t live amongst the rest of us, so they put him on probation and told him to do so many hours of community service.

You want to hear Roland’s idea of serving the community? He got a date with Stella when she was living at Ruth’s, and he got her shut up in Burr’s car and near about
beat the life out of her. Ellen, one of the girls that stayed up at Ruth’s with her, told Ruby how late one night they heard something sounded like all hell breaking loose in front of the house, then a car door slamming, then tires squalling, and Ellen said she got to the front door and looked out and saw Burr’s car tearing up down the highway. She said she thought, Where’s Stella? Then she thought, That sorry Roland Stanley. She said she could see Stella, looking like something off a monster movie with that full moon hitting her beat-up face, trying to pull herself up off the ditchbank. Her and Ruth took her to town, and soon as they got her checked in the emergency room she got hold of the sheriff and told about seeing Burr’s taillights.

And to top the whole thing off, he went and did the one thing it couldn’t anybody forgive him for, if you could ever excuse him for Stella. He left her there at Ruth’s and went right on home and went to bed. He didn’t even wipe the blood off the car seat, didn’t even lock himself up in his room. No, he just crawled in the bed and covered his head, wearing his pajamas, like he was daring somebody to come in and accuse him, like he was a goddamn Boy Scout or something. I think if he’d have run just a little ways people wouldn’t despise him as much as they do. See, him playing big man with the law was too big a insult to people out here. He ought to’ve run some. But he let the sheriff walk right in his room and get him, won’t no
chasing or catching to it, and Tiny Fran standing in the yard boo-hooing the whole damn time.

She tried her best to spread the blame for what became of him deep and wide, her standing in the middle of it all pronouncing judgment on everybody but herself. I and Ruby always knew she was thinking if she let him do anything he pleased then he’d grow up right, grow up and give her more attention than her daddy did and Burr did and anybody else did that had to associate with her. I used to see the boy come home from elementary school, get his milk bottle off the table and pour him a big old bottle full of chocolate milk and lay down in front of the cartoons and suck on it until suppertime. Burr told me for every milk bottle he threw in the trash Tiny Fran’d bring two more in the house. He said he finally told her he was washing his hands of it.

Even after all was said and done and Roland was locked up, she still went around saying modern society had to take some of the blame for what happened to him. Burr said she’d picked that talk up from Roland’s lawyer, and he thought about as much of it as I did. I told him, I said, “Roland wasn’t part of society to begin with.” I went on and said, “Unless society came out past Flat Rock Crossroads, kept on past Booker T. High School, hung two rights, a left, turned in on Milk Farm Road and found Roland plowing a tobacco field, jerked him off the tractor, warped
him and set him back up there without anybody riding by and noticing, blame can’t be laid on society.” And I told Burr too I think folks in town in general try to think too goddamn much.