Bent Road (31 page)

Dad nods, lifts his shovel and begins to chip away at a patch of ice.

“Jonathon’s carrying a suitcase,” Daniel says.

Specks of ice sparkle as they fly off the end of Dad’s shovel.

“Grandma’s going home.”

Jonathon’s truck chokes a few times, rumbles, and then slowly starts down the driveway. Daniel watches, waiting for the truck to disappear, because once it’s gone, he has to tell Dad. He has to tell because the weight of it is too much. Maybe a man could carry it around, but not Daniel. At the top of the hill leading toward Grandma’s house, the truck fishtails.

“Dad,” Daniel says. “I hit Ian Bucher. I hit him in the nose.”

Dad stops hammering the ice.

“At school. In the cafeteria. I hit him.”

Dad leans on his shovel. “You have good reason?”

Just like that. The weight of it is gone.

“Yes, sir. He said Aunt Eve was murdered. He said she was bloodied up between the legs and killed like Julianne Robison.”

Dad nods, and lining up his shovel to take another whack at the ice, he says, “Bloody nose between friends never hurt anyone. But you be mindful of Ian’s size. The boy can’t help his size.”

Daniel nods. “Sir,” he says, and Dad stops again but doesn’t meet Daniel’s eyes. “I’m sorry Aunt Eve died. I’m sorry that happened.”

Dad nods. “Yep,” he says. “Me too, son.”

 

R
uth sits on the edge of her bed, tulle draped across her lap and a small box of pearl beads on the nightstand to her left. She glances up when Elaine and Celia walk into the room, then continues trying to thread her needle.

“There’s no hurry with that,” Elaine says, sitting opposite Ruth on the other bed.

Ruth pulls the white thread through the eye of the needle. “The light’s good today,” she says. “Especially in here. We don’t always have such good light.”

Celia sits next to Ruth, lowering herself slowly and scooting close enough to drape part of the tulle over her own lap. “It is good,” she says of the sunlight shining through the window. “This is beautiful work, Ruth. Did you see, Elaine? She’s started to bead the pearl flowers.” Celia lifts one edge of the veil so Elaine can see it, then lets it fall across her lap again. “Elaine, would you excuse us?”

“Certainly,” Elaine says, standing. “It’s beautiful work, Aunt Ruth. Beautiful.” And she walks out of the room, leaving Celia and Ruth alone.

“Reesa is gone,” Celia says, running her fingers along the veil’s scalloped edge.

Ruth nods.

“She took her things. Jonathon is seeing her home.” Celia pauses. “She’ll be fine. Hardheaded as she is, she’ll be fine.”

“Why do you suppose we did this? Why so much hiding?”

“People get used to things,” Celia says. “Without even realizing. We get used to the way things are.” She reaches for the box of beads, plucks out one of the smooth, oval pearls between two fingers and passes it to Ruth. “Too afraid of the truth, I guess.”

Ruth lays her hands in her lap and closes her eyes. Deep inside, Elisabeth shifts and flutters.

 

T
he elderberry was in full bloom by early June 1942. Ruth’s father, Robert Scott, was due to plant his soybean, and Ruth woke, thinking it would be a fine morning to make elderberry jam. Before the day turned hot, she decided to wake Eve so they could walk a quarter mile down the road to the ditch where the plants grew best. The exercise would do Eve good, maybe chase away the blue mood she had been carrying around for a few months. Whether it was a touch of dropsy or a lingering flu, the elderberries would clear it right up. Mother always cooked with too much salt, and the summer heat could make a person swell and feel out of sorts. That’s all that troubled her—too much salt and humidity. That’s all it was. After a day of fresh air, Eve would get her color back and feel like finishing the blue satin trim on her latest dress. Mary Robison said she could sell it if Eve would finish it, said she could sell all the dresses she and Eve had made together, but Eve never wanted to part with them. Until now. Now she said that once she felt well enough to stitch on the blue satin trim, she’d sell it and the rest, too.

Ruth stood at Eve’s door and tapped on it, leaning forward to listen. “You up?” she whispered, even though the rest of the house was already awake.

Eve was always the last to get out of bed on the weekends, leading Mother to lecture her about laziness being an engraved invitation from the devil. Ruth tapped again, this time hard enough to push open the door that was not latched. She peeked through the crack, and seeing Eve’s bed made, she walked downstairs.

At the bottom step, Ruth remembers that the air chilled, but it couldn’t have. It had been June. Still, a shiver had slipped up her spine to the base of her neck. A pot boiled over in the kitchen, a heavy, rolling boil. Water hissed on a hot burner. Placing one foot flat on the wooden floor, holding tight to the banister, Ruth listened. Boiled eggs, probably, for Father to take along to the fields. He was quite precise—half a dozen eggs, fourteen minutes at a heavy boil, and Mother poked small holes in the large end of each one so they wouldn’t crack. Father wouldn’t eat a cracked egg.

Ruth walked across the living room, taking long slow steps because she knew something was wrong, and stopped inside the kitchen. She stood looking at the white, foamy water spill over the sides of Mother’s cast-iron pot, and without turning down the flame or sliding the pot to a cool burner, she walked on toward the back porch.

At the top of the stairs leading down to the gravel drive, Ruth looked east, toward the patch where yesterday she had spotted the finest elderberries. She couldn’t see them from the house, but Eve would know the spot. It was the same every year. The berries had a special liking for the odd stretch of ditch where Bent Road took a hard curve. Passing cars kicked up dust there. Maybe that’s what the plants liked so well. It was the same stretch of road where the wind swept over the rolling hills, down into the valley, and where the barbed-wire fence scooped up all the tumbleweeds. She and Eve would have a nice bunch in no time at all, and they could pick some of the flowers, too, and dry them on the back porch for tea. If the jam wasn’t enough, a nice tea with honey and sugar would definitely fight off whatever bug had slowed Eve down over the past several weeks. Ruth walked down the stairs one at a time and across the drive toward Bent Road.

“Ruth,” Arthur said.

Only yesterday, it seemed, he had had a smooth, fresh voice that sometimes he sang with in the bath. Now, suddenly his words came from deep inside his chest and rattled like Father’s.

“Ruth,” he said again.

Ruth stopped in the middle of the gravel drive. Knowing they were there, she had been trying not to look. It was where Eve always went for privacy. She said a young woman needed quiet, even if it was in an old shed. Ruth turned. Arthur stood outside the small building. His arms hung at his sides, the Virgin Mary dangling from his left hand. Next to him, Mother kneeled inside the doorway. She shook her head as she fumbled with her apron strings, untying them and pulling off her apron. She passed it inside the shed. A hand reached for it, Father’s hand, bloodied. Mother began to rock on her haunches. Back and forth. Back and forth. She breathed out a low, rumbling moan.

“She’s gone, Ruthie,” Arthur said, dropping the Virgin Mary.

Mother fell backward and scrambled for the two hands that broke off the statue and settled in the soft, dry dirt. She picked up each tiny hand and the rest of the Virgin Mary and started to slide them all into her apron pocket, but it was with Father now.

“She’s gone,” Arthur said.

The ditch was only a ten-minute walk. The elderberries were in full bloom. They’d have plenty for a dozen or more jars, and Eve would feel fit again, fit and fine.

R
uth squints into the fading light, picks up a pearl bead but doesn’t thread it onto her needle.

“Arthur thinks he did it,” she says. “All this time, did you know?”

Sitting next to Ruth on the bed, Celia shakes her head but doesn’t answer.

“He was about Daniel’s age. When Eve died. Just Daniel’s age.”

Celia nods this time and holds a handkerchief to her nose.

“Everyone thought a crazy man killed her,” Ruth says. “Everyone in town. That’s what Father told them. I always assumed Arthur believed the same, but he never did. Even standing there in that shed, wiping up all her blood, he knew the truth. Mother knew, too. After Eve died, after we found her, I told Mother that I thought Eve had done it to herself, trying not to be pregnant. I told her about wedge root and blind staggers, told her that I was sure someone had hurt Eve, hurt her badly, but she’d never tell who. Mother said the truth didn’t matter once a person was dead.”

Ruth lifts her face into the sunlight spilling through the window. “Worst of all, we never told Ray. He was a good man back then. Really, he was. Why did we do that to him? We were so cruel.”

“It wouldn’t have brought her back,” Celia says, her voice cracking at the end. “You were young, all of you. So young.” Clearing her throat and taking out another bead, she says, “Let’s get to work. We’re going to lose this nice light soon.”

“We wasted so many years,” Ruth says, hooking the bead on the tip of her needle.

“It’ll be better now,” Celia says. “Now that everyone knows.”

Ruth takes a stitch, securing the bead. “Yes,” she says. “Better.”

Letting the powdered sugar frosting drip from the tip of the fork, Evie is sure Julianne would have liked these cinnamon rolls. When she was alive, she must have liked extra icing, too. But she’s been buried underground for a whole day now, and she won’t be eating these rolls or anything else.

Evie should be in school instead of sitting on the counter and stirring the icing for Mrs. Robison’s rolls, but after Julianne’s funeral and all the trouble with Uncle Ray, Mama said Evie and Daniel would stay home until Monday. Mama is afraid to let Evie out of the house ever since Uncle Ray brought her home. She’s been to school only once since Jonathon and Daniel found Julianne dead in Mr. Brewster’s house, and when Evie told Mama that she still got to sit in Julianne’s desk, Mama cleared her throat and said that was enough of school for a while.

The only bad thing about missing school, Evie thinks as she stirs the powdered sugar and milk with a fork, is that the kids in her class will think she’s scared to sit in Julianne’s desk now that Julianne is rotted away and buried underground. But Evie isn’t scared. She picked that desk, even after Miss Olson mixed them all up, because she wanted it especially for her own, and she told every kid at recess that she wasn’t afraid one bit. They told Evie that she’d be next, that whoever killed Julianne, and everyone knew it was either Jack Mayer or her own Uncle Ray, would kill Evie, too. Evie put her hands on her hips and told every kid that she didn’t care at all if she was next. That shut them up. That shut them up good and tight.

“Icing’s done,” Evie calls out, thinking that Aunt Eve would have liked the icing, too, but, like Julianne, she’s dead. All the way dead. “I made extra.”

Behind her, Aunt Ruth opens the oven a crack. “Rolls are too,” she says.

She smiles at Evie, but Evie doesn’t smile back. Grandma Reesa made those rolls. Yesterday, she mixed up the dough and punched it down twice when it rose up too high. Then Grandma had to go away because she made Aunt Ruth cry, and now Aunt Ruth is baking the rolls that chilled overnight in the refrigerator and she’s acting like she made them all the way from scratch. Aunt Eve is gone, too, and Uncle Ray thinks it was Aunt Ruth’s fault. Now only Aunt Ruth is left, even though she packed up two suitcases.

“They smell good, don’t they?” Aunt Ruth says, slipping on two oven mitts and pulling the pan out of the oven as Mama walks into the kitchen. “Would you like to come with me and your dad to take them to the Robisons?”

Mama takes a few steps toward the oven. “It’s so cold outside, Ruth. And icy. You let Arthur and me take the rolls over.”

“Grandma made those,” Evie says, folding tinfoil around the edges of the bowl filled with white icing.

Mama and Aunt Ruth look at each other the way they did when Evie wore Aunt Eve’s dress to school.

“Yes,” Aunt Ruth says. “Grandma makes the best cinnamon rolls. I can never get the dough so nice.” Aunt Ruth sets the hot pan on the table in front of Evie’s spot on the counter. Thick sugary steam rises up. “We’ll tell Mrs. Robison that Grandma made these.”

“Please, Ruth. Let us take the rolls. You need your rest. You and Elisabeth.”

“I should go,” Ruth says, wrapping her belly with both hands. “I really need to pay my respects.”

“Cinnamon rolls won’t make them feel better,” Evie says.

“Yes, Evie,” Mama says, pressing her lips together in a way that means Evie should stop talking. “You’re probably right about that.”