The Book of Ruth (2 page)

When I grew up I heard about the wars we were having with other people, on television. We watched some of the battles. I knew we were safe from machine gun fire in Honey Creek, where there hadn’t ever been wars, if you don’t count the Indians. There was only the one Mexican family who lived in the trailer home, and even though they had ten children they were too disorganized to cause trouble outside of their own family. Without putting words to it I recognized the beauty of war; I realized that it was entirely in keeping with ordinary human nature.

It wasn’t until I was ten that I realized our family must be the ones with the wrung-out hearts, and that other people’s faces shone with a sadness for us. I was ten when my father climbed into the Ford one morning, in the dark. I heard his black boots crunch on the gravel. He was too scared to start the engine so he rolled down the driveway with his foot on the clutch. Goodbye to Illinois, he probably said to himself, because he had lived up here near Honey Creek all his life. I threw off my blankets and ran downstairs and down the road in my nightgown, shouting at him to come back. We learned later that he drove to Texas, to his brother’s grapefruit ranch. He lived in a tin shed next to his brother’s house and spent his days picking grapefruits the size of my own head. I thought about him at night, reading his paperback books by the light of a smoking kerosene lamp; I couldn’t stand the thought of him being happier there but I had enough sense to know it was true.

Soon after he left we sat in church on Sunday and I could see how sorry people felt for me. I could hear their whisperings about the latest tragedy. I could tell by their faces and their eyes that we were new and strange. They came past us in church, filing out, and I knew suddenly they were the kind of people who would pet me, like I was an animal that didn’t have a single chance to survive. The young Mr. Snodgrass bent down to me while May was in the ladies’ room and he told me that I was going to be a big strong pretty girl one of these days, and I appreciated his words. But I could tell from the scowl on his wife’s face that he was lying. I had heard Aunt Sid telling May she looked pinched once, and I wanted to ask Mr. Snodgrass, right then and there, if I was pinched too. When I got home I took out the mirror to examine my new and strange looks. My eyes are squinched together; they’re small and gray and they don’t open all the way wide. My mouth isn’t too much better off. It’s tight like a closed drawstring laundry bag. There’s nothing special about my nose: it’s small and sits on my face like someone set it down and forgot to come back for it. My hair, my best feature, is nothing more than tight brown curls stuck to my head like I’d taken glue to them, but at least there’s room for improvement. When Daisy does my hair over it looks shiny and fluffy, like a soufflé cooked up to perfection. May is very much the same, except she’s older and uglier and heavier than I am, and she has a wart by her nose. She has wrinkles too, like she went and slept face down on an oven rack. Sometimes I see her standing by the door, in plain view. She’s so clear and radiant she hurts my eyes.

After Elmer disappeared into the wild blue yonder—I always liked the sound of “wild blue yonder,” it was somewhere I wanted to go—after he left, May reminded us that Daddy rolled away because we made him. When we asked her, “Is he coming back?” she said, “You made him go with all that fighting you do.”

I used to listen to May like she was about one hundred miles away and the only thing I could hear was her thin voice trailing off on the other side of a mountain.

Sometimes, when I played, I pretended I was actually a regular person. I sat out in the yard with the hens, calling each one by their full first names. I gave them confirmation names like the Catholic girls had, such as Prudence Grace and Mary Ellen Maria. They loved me for bringing their mashed corn. I kept wondering why I wasn’t a hen or a bug. Even back then I wondered how I got where I was: did I choose to be May’s baby girl, or was I like pieces of dust floating around in the wind and then landing any which way? I said to May, “How come I’m your baby girl?” She cocked her head like she was asking herself if I was ready to hear the news. Then she sat me down on her bed and asked me if I recalled how the ram had to do his business in the fall.

I said, “Sure.”

I had only seen it about a million times. The ram curls his upper lip and snorts around; he can’t help it. I knew how it was with animals but I didn’t think the process translated over to people.

She said it did, that we had pretty much the same equipment as animals.

I stared at the floor. I was trying to imagine. I had never seen men, say in the grocery store, simply walking up to ladies, with their lips quivering, and then climbing on top of them. I couldn’t remember seeing that kind of behavior so I asked, “But how does it happen with people?”

“It’ll happen when someone pushes you down on the bed and lifts up your skirt,” May said, laughing. When she saw my scared eyes she said, “I’m teasing you, angel-face, I’m only teasing.”

She said almost under her breath as she left the room that it was something crazy adults did for fun, and I’d understand years from now.

I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I came after her into the hall. I said, “You mean people do it for entertainment?”

She snickered with her back to me. She tried to act serious as she turned around, but she said, Yeah, she guessed it was all just for fun. She didn’t look happy at all, maybe because she didn’t have one person who would let her get anywhere near them, or maybe because what she had told me was an enormous fabrication, meant to hide something sad. You can tell the ewes don’t like it when the ram curls his lip and rides around with his hooves sunk into their wool. They tolerate it with the patience of saints, but it isn’t the greatest experience for them. As soon as he’s off they act like nothing happened and wander back to the feeder.

The idea slayed me: here I was on planet earth because May had one minute of fun. I didn’t mind so much the thought of my being a piece of dust. I liked the idea of floating around and then changing into a baby, in the dark, in secret, but I got gloomy when I thought maybe it was my choice that put me in May’s belly. I knew she was hiding the truth and really I had a little something to do with the scheme. It meant I made a dumb mistake. I closed my eyes, wishing I had the memory of what all my parts were before they became me. If I hadn’t been born I suspect nothing would have happened to us. If I was very smart I could have been Mrs. Crawford’s girl, Diane, and lived in a blue house, the color of eyeshadow.

When I got gloomy, when I was ten years old, I sat on the ground with the hens pecking near my feet and I screwed up my face to try and remember the good occasions in my life. Just one thought in a day, to carry me beyond my dark feelings. My favorite memory—the one I went back to the most—happened the year July was so hot you sweated standing still. I was seven. Matt, my brother, and I, and May and Elmer were drinking black cows in the kitchen after supper. Elmer, scooping up refills, missed my glass, and this splat of ice cream landed on my head.

It is crystal clear. We are a family, laughing our heads off, and I’m laughing too, because the ice cream feels cold dripping down my hot skin, and I’m making faces, twisting up my tongue to get the drops. Everyone’s howling at me and I’m cracking up because I know I’m funny. I have my eyes crossed. May doesn’t try to wipe off my head. The flesh on her bare arms is shaking and she has tears coming down her face. She can’t breathe. Elmer stands behind me with his hands on my shoulders, patting me. He has a deep laugh with spaces between, like he has to remind himself every few seconds what’s so funny. And the best part is Matt. He reaches out to touch my arm. Suddenly I’m a celebrity.

I wished then, while it was happening, that we could have stayed there at the kitchen table for about five centuries. I could have stood it that long. I wanted to preserve the scene, just as fossils do, keeping rare animals so still in stone. It took me several years to figure out that on that July night we were actually experiencing the gladness some people feel every day, not just once in a summer. I saw how it was with other people, because I watched the children in church, running to their mothers after Sunday school. I saw it every Sunday, week after week, year after year. The mothers swept their children off their feet and kissed them on their cheeks, and both mother and child laughed. They didn’t need to say words because they had this gladness inside, just the same as if for a few minutes they all had a splat of ice cream dripping down into their mouths, and it’s the hottest day on earth.

I
ONLY
had to annoy Matt because he was smart. “Delayed,” is how May described me to myself. Matt’s a year younger than I am, but he learned to talk first. He always told me what to do in whole sentences, pointing his finger at me. I couldn’t seem to make the words to say “Jump in the lake.” I couldn’t say words but I noticed that they were all over the place, in your ears, in front of your eyes. I watched
Cheerios
march across the cereal box. I loved how
e
’s looked, so squat and happy. I couldn’t say thoughts or insults but I wrote down letters on the walls. I saw the word
bear
and I wrote
BEAR
all over my room. I printed
SILO
in green crayon on my white dresser. Elmer practically made an exclamation when he came into my room one morning and there’s
SILO
on my dresser. As far as he knew I didn’t have the marbles to say
dog.
He laughed at me under his breath. I could see him knowing he should scold me, possibly with the shoehorn, but deciding against it. He went and got a wet washcloth to scrub the word off. He spoke one of his longer sentences. He said, “Don’t tell anyone our secret.” I nodded my head with all the sobriety I could muster, although I wanted to scream to the world,
WE HAVE A SECRET!

Since Matt talked like an expert he told me what I had to be when we played house. I was always the man in a black top hat. We found the hat squashed flat on the bottom of the trunk in May’s bedroom. I was the husband each time, and Matt got to be the bride. He wore a veil on his head, and May’s old white high heels. He stumbled over them, fell and bruised his knees. I didn’t offer him pity, although we were recently married. I could be the doctor making babies come, and the father, but Matt had to be the lady. When he served me tea in our plastic cups he bawled me out in a high voice. He told me I should hurry up and get back to my chores at the barn. He said there was mud, and other materials I won’t mention, on my boots. He reminded me that I was tracking it all over the clean carpet and for punishment I would have to vacuum.

Matt had the words, but my gift was the strong muscles in my arms to put him flat on his face, and when I socked him I had joy in my heart, surging fresh into my vessels and knocking in the core, because I could see blood flowing out of his nose. There was a space where time stopped dead and I listened free to his terrible hurt sounds. It lasted until May made the room come alive with her body in it, yelling the pure strain of noise only she, and rabbits who are dying by the knife, are capable of. She was like sergeants on TV shows, frowning and whistling and pointing. She said she didn’t think my brain functioned. She shook her head and wondered why I was retarded. I didn’t pay attention to her when she discussed my intelligence. I was waiting to spring on Matt. I was watching for his weak points.

The meanness that some people have in great quantities came to me early, because Matt became a prodigy. The minister says all of us have proud hearts, which helped me understand why I had to clench my fist and hit Matt’s knowing eyes. When he and I got into school, I couldn’t clobber him quite as easily. He grew taller than me in the space of six months so I had to think of other ways to make his body sting. He understood all math; he was perfect at numerals and digits. He knew about numbers you can’t even see on paper, and everyone at grade school said he was truly a phenomenon. I mentioned the circus or the zoo as an ideal spot for viewing him, but May suggested with her hand held high that I shut my flap. Every teacher discussed Matt’s brain in the teachers’ lounge. The smoke was always seeping up over the folded screen that obscured the doorway, and you could hear the murmur of the teachers’ voices as they ripped the youngsters’ personalities into twenty pieces. Arthur Crawford said you would die of emphysema instantly if you even set foot in the lounge.

I tripped Matt coming up the road from the school bus and he cried a piercing cry that was out of proportion to the injury. Every now and then it struck me that his tears were the same material as any old human being’s, even people who didn’t have parabola shapes whizzing through their heads, but I didn’t stop capturing bees in paper cups and dumping them inside his sheets. He knew the bites he got were my fault.

He never mentioned the stings to me. He went straight to May to tell. Naturally she petted him—she always wanted to stroke his silky hair that covered up where his quick thoughts were made. Sometimes, when I had to be in my room for the salt I put in Matt’s milk, the tacks in his brownie, I cried, because the real punishment was Matt never noticing I’m alive, like the numbers he’s always looking at breathe the air and I don’t.

When I think about little Matt I hardly see a person there. In my mind he’s a rising river filled with leeches; I have one small dry square to stand on, and finally I can barely keep my nose above water. I have to work exceptionally hard to conjure up each one of the features on his face. He had fat cheeks and thin blond hair and brown eyes the shape of pennies. His perfect teeth grew in like they were choir members filing sternly into their pews. He had stomachaches and head colds half the time. May loved nursing him. She’d come out of his room, softly closing the door behind her.

Elmer read stacks of books about the Civil War, the Second World War, and the wars of ancient times. In rare moments, if he didn’t know you were crouching in bales of hay watching him do the chores, he mumbled poetry he had learned in high school, ennobling words about cohorts gleaming in purple and gold, and steeds with flaring nostrils, and the Angel of Death—not the stuff of his average argument with May.