In An Arid Land (8 page)

I ain't got the time,
she would think,
ain't got time,
and she went on quickly as if turning from a condemned animal.

The dome of the courthouse in Karankawa appeared beyond the next hill.
Good,
she thought.
I'm getting close now.
The dull nub, shining in the morning mist, rose above the trees in jerky stages as if it were moving instead of Ruby. From somewhere in the near woods came the high whining gnarl of a chain saw and she realized that she'd been listening to it for several minutes without hearing it. The sound, pervasive and encompassing, grew louder, closer, with each step she took in the roadside dust.

She stopped listening, panting. Cocking her knee, pulling up her foot, she touched the shoe, a flat dusty white under her black hand. Her fingers left three distinct stripes.
I will wait,
she thought,
until I get there,
and the hair at the nape of her neck bristled as she sensed something coming up the road behind her. This time it was a bus. She glanced up just as its smoke-fouled wash rushed over her body and blew up her skirt. The bus crested the hill and descended, vanishing in a smoky glide toward Karankawa, and she wondered if it was the one that went on to Huntsville. She smoothed down her skirt and, clutching the white purse under her arm, she set out again, watching the dome rise and hearing the chain saw whine in the woods.

Cutting had been Joboy's job on the county crew, years ago when she was a girl, seventeen, eighteen, still tending house for her father. Joboy was her third man, much older than the others, and she had sometimes gone with him when he worked, waiting for him in the truck, listening to the men curse and joke and hearing the gnarling, the rising and falling scream of the saws from up in the boughs of the trees. Afterwards they would go to the Tiptop Inn and they would tap their feet to music, dance on the spongy-rotten floorboards, drink beers, laugh with each other.

Then her father died, laid in a grave beside her mother on a wooded hill, and Joboy stayed away for months. She lived for a while with her Aunt Octavine, who had never married, who had worked as a secretary at the Baptist church in Harristown for twenty-eight years and sang hymns in the bathtub every night, her voice high and squeaky like a squirrel's staccato bark. "Sing with me, Ruby," she would squeak. Finally Joboy came one day, scraping his feet against the porch slats and turning his hat in his hand.

"I got a place to stay and two-hundred dollars," he said. "And a pickup truck. And I got a bag of groceries."

Her aunt grunted from behind the screen door. "Get away, you." Then to Ruby: "He's a shifter, that's all. Better wait."

But Ruby said, "Let me get my things."

He said, "There's something you ought to know." His voice was serious, straightforward, and she paused. Octavine whispered, "Don't, Ruby," through the screen.

Joboy said, almost proclaimed, "I've got a daughter, a little one, going on eight." It rang like a confession.

Ruby stood still, watching him over her shoulder. She said, "So did my daddy." She glanced at her aunt, their faces only inches apart, separated by the mesh of wire. "I'll get my things." She slipped past Octavine to pack her bags and slipped past her again to leave. "Don't, Ruby," had come the whisper.

She walked on, her feet aching in the seldom-worn shoes. The road dipped sharply into a ravine and the dome of the courthouse in Karankawa fell away beyond the tree tops.

They had married, she and Joboyno church ceremony, no license, no ring, only vows exchanged in front of a preacher friend. They had all been together. That's when she had lived with Joboy and little Marcene, whom she did not like but had tried to love because she was Joboy's flesh and blood whose mother, he had said, was off in Houston. For two years they had stayed in a house in the woods not three miles from the house in which Ruby was born, and Joboy worked off and on, gone almost all the time chasing jobs, and she cooked and cleaned and swept and took care of Marcene, barely ten years younger than Ruby herself. It was mostly good, but not always.

"You ain't my Mama, you ain't," Marcene would say.

"Go on now, child, and do as I tell you."

"I won't."

They would separate, each pouting, until Joboy returned and Marcene would get to him first as he came into the yard and she would sound her arguments against Ruby and he would come in and glower. Other times, she didn't know why, she would take to herself in the bed for hours until he came to her.

"What you be wanting, woman?" he would say. "She's a child, why you act this way?"

"She ain't my child."

"She's our child."

"No, you know better."

He'd say, "You better get used to it, gal," and he always left in the morning. He started staying away for days at a time, and at home there was only Marcene. Then Joboy came in that night sweating the powerful odor of fright and confusion. He packed a paper sack with some clothes. He said at the door, "I'll be gone awhile." She heard "armed robbery" a few days later and the next time and the last time she saw him was at the courthouse.

The gray-green dome was in full view now and houses lined the road, the outskirts of town. A dog bounded snarling up to a fence. A voice from within the house behind called, "Hey, there!" and the dog stopped, slobbering, eyeing her as she walked.

Joboy had worn blue faded overalls with numbers on the breast pocket the day of the trial. She remembered the judge saying, "I hereby sentence you to five years incarceration at the State Penitentiary in Huntsville," and the bash of the wooden hammer and then a deep, chilling silence. Joboy had looked back at her with his pretty, dark eyes, so frightened and far away.

She was in town. The chain saw had gone quiet, but she glimpsed the glass doors of the courthouse, like big silver eyeglasses watching her. There were stores and restaurants around the square, and she lingered. Televisions flashed at the Western Auto. Big-cushioned couches beckoned at Sal's Furniture Store. Frilly summer dresses graced handsome mannequins at Lilly's Boutique, where a young white woman was pinning up the hem of a yellow frock in the display window. Ruby paused, looking in. She often imagined herself living in the city with a closetful of Holiday Fashions like the ones she had seen in the catalogues, and maybe a car and maybe one of those little apartments she'd heard about that had carpets and a garbage disposal. And Joboy'd have a job doing construction he could do all sorts of things and they'd have their own bedroom furniture. She wanted to go inside the store, but the woman in the window glanced up at her with a face that told her not to. Ain't got time, anyway.

She walked around the courthouse. The granite building loomed above her with its round-topped windows and high eaves, and she remembered the day she had gone inside. Joboy, his elbow in the grip of a deputy, had come to the rail in the courtroom before they led him away. She could smell him, oily and sweaty, and his overalls didn't fit him at all. He kissed her on the cheek, his lips rough and quivering, and he leaned into her ear: "She be yours now, take care. She's yours." That was three years ago next month and she had memorized the letter.

20 February 1972

Dear Ruby

I am getting out early on good behavior. May 16. Come here to the gate wait for me do not

come inside and then we will stay the night in town before going back. Don't bring Marcene.

Joboy

The letter, already yellowing and ripped from two months of handling, lay neatly folded in the purse under her arm. It was only the second letter she had received in the time he had been away while she and Marcene lived in the little room off the kitchen at the Livermores', and she had not seen him, never going to visit. His first letter had said not to.
This is no site for you and most important not for Marcene. Stay away.

So she worked for the Livermores almost thirty months now wearing the tight-fitting maid's uniform that Mrs. Livermore had bought her and putting away the "good money" she got each month in the white purse. She kept her wages in a separate compartment of the purse from the "little extra" that Mr. Livermore slipped into her pocket on his "special occasions."

She carried $800, enough to get away. She would have to convince Joboy, make him see that they should get away, to the city, any city. But the Livermores had promised to give Joboy a job on the ranch when he got out. Joboy liked ranch work and, except for the lying and the worry and the sweat of that old man as he pawed her, it wasn't a bad life with the Livermores. They had given her work and a place to stay with Marcene when she had had no place else to go; and they had given her the day and the night off to go to Huntsville and bring Joboy back.

Ruby went up the block to the bus station. The man at the ticket window said she had missed the first bus; it would be forty minutes. She paid and took a seat beside a woman with a suitcase and a small boy who ogled her with cheerful blue eyes. She smiled at the boy and then took out her handkerchief, a lavender color with maroon piping. Propping her right foot on the edge of the bench, she wiped off the dust that had turned the shoe gray. Then she bent low and wiped the left one.

II

"Hurry, Marcene," Ruby had said that morning. Her voice butted against the bathroom door. "I'm late and you got to stay with Mrs. Livermore today." The girl said nothing. She'd been quiet for two solid days. Ruby knocked on the door. "Hurry, girl. Mr. Livermore's waiting on me."

The door opened. Marcene stood there, looking, pouting. Ruby glanced over Marcene's head and saw herself in the mirror: the glaze of still-sleepy eyes, the rough morning face and the odd slant of the brow, the hair cleaving to one side of her head.

"Are you through, girl?"

Marcene squeezed by Ruby and threw herself onto the bed. "Why I got to stay with that old lady for?"

"You know why. I'm getting your daddy today."

"Why I can't go?"

"You know that too. Now quit your surliness and get dressed."

Marcene's lips pouted. Ruby stepped into the bathroom and closed the door. There had been a boy lately. Ruby had seen them together, getting off the school bus, laughing, touching, talking in the long minutes in the light dust that swirled up and remained after the bus chugged away. And she had come home bruised one day, a swell under her eye, saying that she had had a fight with a girl. But there was the boy, tall, lanky and pretty, like Joboy, and Ruby had told her to wait.

"There's lots and lots of time."

Then Marcene: "Wait for what?" Going real surly: "What-chu mean?"

Then Ruby: "Just wait, please, you'll know soon enough," but thinking,
Should I tell her now, is now the time?

Ruby thought,
I can't today, and what would I tell her?
She washed her face, combed her hair, sprayed cologne on the long line of her neck. The slip was pearly white against her skin.

Three knocks banged through the outer door the bedroom door muffled, snappy, the hand of Mrs. Livermore. "Come on, now, Ruby." The old woman's voice pierced the door like the clash of pots and pans in a sink. "Mr. Livermore can't wait all morning."

The door opened. Marcene yanked the bed covers up to her neck and let out a sharp squeal. Mrs. Livermore, her dark dyed hair sticking to her forehead in curls, walked through the room as if inspecting it for something. "Good morning, Dear," she said to Marcene. "Aren't you cute. You little ones are always so cute in the morning." Marcene gave Ruby a puckish, closed-lip smile.

"I'll be right there," Ruby said.

"Hurry," said Mrs. Livermore, marching out to the kitchen.

"Close the door," Ruby whispered. She went back to the bathroom, brushed her teeth, but could see in the mirror that the door was still open. "I said close that door." She strode out of the bathroom, flung the door shut. "Listen to me, girl."

Marcene's little tongue shot out of her mouth and disappeared again. "I don't got to listen to nothing you say.

Ruby stood still, shaking her head at Marcene. "I ain't got time for this. I just ain't got time." She took her Sunday dress from the bedstead and slipped it over her head, shimmied into it. "Now you mind Mrs. Livermore today or you really be in for it. Hear me?" Marcene's lips pouted. "Hear me?" The girl nodded.

Ruby stepped into her shoes and collected her purse from the closet. She took out a five-dollar bill for Marcene. The girl looked at the bill as if it were dirty. "That's not to spend, you hear. It's just in case. In case something happens and you need a little. Keep it and give it back to me tomorrow." Marcene threw the bill to the floor. Ruby picked it up. "Take it." She shook the bill. "Take it, I said." Marcene took it. "Now get dressed, and be sure to press your nice one for your daddy tomorrow."

Marcene got up and went to the closet, took down her dress, threw it on the bed. Ruby watched the girl's naked body, legs slender, little nubs where breasts would soon form, and she briefly glimpsed her future as a woman.
There is pain and blood, gal,
she thought,
and it's the same for all of us.

"Look, child," she said. "It be only one more day and he'll be home. Things will be better, I promise."

Marcene, calmer, standing still above the dress on the bed, glared straight back at her. Staring at each other, they each waited. And then, like a cat springing for a lizard, the girl moved, letting out a tiny sound, and in two strides was before Ruby, her arms around the soft waist, her face pressed against the jutting bone of Ruby's shoulder. She clung, her breaths coming in raspy whimpers, nearly cries. "Ruby," she said. "Ruby."

The woman hugged the girl's neck and lay her cheek against the pillow of hair. She smelled the sweet-sour morning odor of the slender body and felt the pressure of ten little fingers in her back. She heard, "Ruby," cry-like and distant. She held her. They swayed gently, and Ruby thought,
Yes, this is the way it is. There is pain and blood and the future and the worry and it is always the same.
But she said, "Now now, child." Cooing now. "He'll be home tomorrow and things'll be better, I promise."