The Book of Ruth (3 page)

He loved historical novels about lands so far away they didn’t seem like they belonged in the world. After supper he came to his chair in the living room with his round shiny bald head sticking up, and he sat breathing loudly while he read, until the snoring started. Sometimes he stayed there all night or until May shook him back into this time zone. She yelled at him for falling asleep before he built her a pie safe or mowed the lawn. She probably wasn’t crazy about sharing the cornhusk mattress with him, but she got hurt feelings when she realized he’d rather spend the night in an armchair than brush his back against the bristly curlers she put in her hair, to make her curls even tighter and stiffer.

I don’t have too many clear memories of Elmer. He stayed out of the way. He didn’t come into the house except for supper, to get yelled at, to read his books, and sleep. I could tell he wished he was something desirable, like a cow. When I picture him I see a looming shadow and then a bald shining head. After he left us, when I sat in my room missing his shape and the gleam of his head, and while I felt particularly angry at him, it occurred to me that if they were going to name a song after him it would be called “Silent Night.” That’s a perfect title for him.

There are just a few memories that come through in one entire piece, events with Elmer and me, together, the one day in March, when the lamb was born the year I turned eight. I used to lie on the floor out in the barn in a heap of straw, to see if the lambs liked me. I told them stories about my life. They climbed on top of me and poked around to see if they could find my milk supply. I let them paw me and gnaw on my fingers. There was a ewe rolling her eyes around one day and curling up her lips, looking back to her rear end with great agitation, as if she wanted an explanation from her hindquarters. I had seen a lamb born twice before, once when Elmer had to help it come. I understood the mystery taking place under my nose. I sat waiting and pretty soon, with a grunt from the mother, a little white head poked out of her. I loved seeing the quiet face—that lamb didn’t even know it was being born.

I waited for an hour. All I could see was the head, stuck, and its pink tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth. Something wasn’t right because the mother pawed at the ground and then lay down, dragging her rump right through the dirt. The infant head was getting all muddy. The tiny pink nostrils were going to get clogged with dirt, so I went over finally and said, “Easy, easy,” like Elmer did, tenderly, and I wiped off the nose. It was similar to the experience that Alice had in Wonderland: the lamb’s front hooves were sticking straight out under the head, and I could hear a small voice whispering, “Pull me.” I swear I heard the voice three times. I knew that lamb was having problems getting born. I knew I didn’t have a decade to decide whether to dance or to hobble. So I pulled the legs as hard as I could, with both my hands, and the mother gave a terrible groan and then splat, out came the whole wet lamb body, yellow like an egg yolk. It was all slimy, and sneezing. It shook its head as if it had a bug in its long wet ear. The mother naturally began to lick it and grunt, and snack on the afterbirth. She was glad to have the whole works out. I couldn’t believe the strength in my hands, what they did. I smelled the yellow color on my fingers. It smelled so raw and new I had to quick close my eyes and wonder.

I kept thinking how the mother didn’t put up a fight; she let the pain consume her, without the faintest understanding. She didn’t have any idea about her life, from one minute to the next. You could see how much having the baby killed her, the way her eyeballs rolled back into her head. Maybe she was watching the inside of her brain and seeing miles of green alfalfa and acres of trough filled with golden corn. She was awfully brave to merely scream and then lie still while a puny girl yanked at her lamb. I had to spit, to admire all that courage in the mother.

When Elmer appeared I whispered, “I helped it come.”

He said, “Well!” He grinned at me for lack of words and then bent down to examine the newborn. When he stood up he said, “Aren’t you a good little farmer?” I hugged my own ribs all the way to the house, while Elmer rested his hand on top of my head.

In the spring, when I heard all the frogs down in the marsh singing as if they had urgent thoughts they wanted to speak of, I sat at the table eating, and I had to blurt out how I wanted to know a frog, and know what they talked about down there in the murky water. They made such a racket and they were invisible. I said, “All those frogs singing night and day without stopping. What are they saying?”

May snapped at me. “You just eat, young lady. You get frogs out of your head.”

I learned to stay quiet at meals because I usually said sentences of astounding dumbness. May looked at me like I was a stranger, Elmer didn’t say anything, perhaps to avoid getting the cold stare that suggests you’re a lunatic, and Matt ate delicately and then went straight to his room, leaving piles of food on his plate. May would have loved to feed him with tweezers. She made a sport of seeing he got enough nourishment; she stood over him watching him put the smallest bit of tuna casserole into his mouth and she waited until he screwed up his face. She scrutinized his plate afterwards, to see if she could figure out exactly how many peas he had eaten. If I couldn’t help mentioning that it made me sad to see the geese flying south in the fall, how there was something inside of me that felt like cracking, May said, “God for Daniel, ain’t you gloomy! You make me want to dig a hole and stick my nose right down in it.”

I kept my observations swirling around in my head. Occasionally I spoke with the chickens, and in the spring and summer I planted and tended and talked with carrots and lettuce. They were my special vegetables. I was in charge of them. I spent whole afternoons in the dirt, making my patch of ground flawless. I even cleared the worms away, before I found out that all the tunnels they make give air, and probably other molecules I don’t know about yet, to the plants.

I started out in the hole, in school, because of my impression that I was a miracle of stupidity, and because I was afraid of my teacher. Her name was Mrs. Ida Homer and she wore cushiony shoes like nurses’, only hers were red, and you could smell stale cigarettes and coffee on her breath. She had thick flabby ears that looked like nice soft pillows decorated with little tiny white hairs. I longed to rest my head on them. Her eyes were gold and I was sure from the first moment I saw her that they were hollow inside. I tried to hold her hand once when we were filing down the hall but she shook me off. I never tried again. I knew even then that she wasn’t very fond of children. Her ears were her best feature. Plus her husband’s name was Beau. I never saw him but I couldn’t help picturing him as an oversized red frilly ribbon you could tack on a birthday present.

Mrs. Ida Homer made me stand in the wastebasket because I wrote on my desk and poked my neighbor, and because I did not follow directions. Instead of drawing pictures, I put words all over the sheets of paper. I loved the shape of letters in a word like
shampoo.
I got into trouble for coloring outside of the lines when we were drawing turkeys for Thanksgiving, and I forgot to put hands on May the time we drew our families. Her hands were just the things I didn’t want to think about. Mrs. Ida Homer said I didn’t do my coloring right. She said I had to stay in for recess to get the colors inside the lines of the turkey.

I waited for the words she was going to say when I did something wrong; one of these days she was going to tell me that I had to stand in the wastebasket for the next eight grades. I suspected that all the teachers in the whole school were exactly like Mrs. Ida Homer, and I tried to imagine seven more years and then high school with ladies who would watch Arthur Crawford stick a clothespin on the back of my arm so it pinched, and then give me the punishment.

Matt caught up with me in school by the time I was in third grade. He skipped second. He had absolutely no use for that grade. May wanted him to go directly to college, but the counselors said then he wouldn’t fit into society. Matt and I weren’t in the same class ever; he didn’t have to have Mrs. Ida Homer back in first grade. She might have been able to make him feel slightly lacking for a minute or two. He had a math book he did on his own since his brain was at least in junior high. He was leaving his body behind; his head was going to get larger and larger and his arms would shrink to the size and weight of long deflated party balloons, the black ones. His feet would become webbed to support the weight of his calculations. I imagined the president of the U.S. asking Matt for advice. My brother wouldn’t be able to see over the desk in that oval office they always speak of, and he’d have to pluck out bee stingers from his hands, which I was responsible for, while he recited figures.

Matt was destined to come home with gold stars pasted on his papers. I didn’t have anything to show because I dropped my work in the trash before I got on the bus. I couldn’t concentrate on one thing except how everyone said I was ugliest in the class. If boys and girls touched me they thought they were poisoned. Diane Crawford had a special potion in her desk; she said it could cure people if they by accident got too close to me.

In second grade I had a dress with blue and yellow violets covering the fabric. I liked it very much at first, especially because it featured a braided yellow straw belt with a blue leather buckle. The instant Missy Baker saw it she said that the dress used to be her sister’s and that it got in the Goodwill box by mistake. Then she changed her story and told everyone that I stole the dress from her house. She said she knew she had heard someone in the laundry room the week before. Therefore I told May I despised the dress. I rolled on the floor kicking, trying to rip it with my bare hands. I sobbed that I wasn’t going to wear the dress one more time, even if she smacked me all over my body. May is a saver, like everyone else I know. She fished the dress out of the garbage. She calmly stated that it was in excellent condition, and she laid it out for me to wear again the next day. Every time I wore it Missy Baker said her sister wanted it back, and she was going to personally come to rip it off of me. I’d have to be in school sitting at my desk bare naked.

On the playground a few girls along with Diane Crawford and Missy Baker told me they’d be my best friend if I obeyed them. They took me out behind the hedges and said I had to close my eyes and stand still. I could feel hands lifting up my dress and pulling my underpants down. I could feel people squatting on the ground, staring up at the way I was made. They looked while I shut my eyes tight. I was going to have so many best friends.

When the bell rang to come in there wasn’t anyone around me. My underpants sat at my ankles. I knew all the girls were swarming around Diane’s desk, getting the potion to purify themselves. After third grade my fame ceased and no one paid any attention to me because Elizabeth Remenchik moved in. She not only came from somewhere near Poland, and had a club foot, but she was also cross-eyed and had to wear thick glasses. When you looked at her eyes you felt as if you were looking way down through the ice on a lake and watching two slow fish trying to keep alive through the winter.

What I waited for were the letters from May’s sister, my Aunt Sid. Sid and May weren’t the best of friends because they had always squabbled, and because May never forgot past injuries. There were all sorts of occasions for mistrust, one of the latest being the time the family divided up the spoils from the home farm. May thought Sidney was extra-greedy and grabbing more than her share, taking antiques that were valuable and leaving behind the riffraff for May. Never mind that Sid was responsible for shipping Aunt Marion’s portion down to North Carolina. Aunt Sid had learned over the years to ignore May even when May came behind her nipping at her heels like a yapping dog the size of a peanut. Finally, as the last dresser was loaded into the truck, Sid turned on May, told her in a normal speaking voice that she was a sorry excuse for a sister and that she had never been reasonable. Sid quickly got in the car before May could scratch her eyes out.

Soon after the grab Sid came over to make amends. May didn’t serve cookies like you’re supposed to for guests, even though it was clear Sidney came with her arms loaded down with olive branches, not to mention proof: she had photos of Aunt Marion’s living room that showed where the valuable antiques were located. May said nothing. She averted her eyes from the salt water taffy box, and the basket full of extra-fancy red delicious apples. She mumbled something about requiring charity from no one, and left the room.

I was alone with Aunt Sid. She took a present from her bag and handed it to me. I didn’t care about the gift. I wanted nothing but blond hair exactly like hers, sweeping back over her head into a long bun held together with tortoise-shell hairpins. She had brown eyes and lips that were a color I never saw on anyone but Aunt Sid. I had to stare at her mouth, at her moist lips, continuously. Finally she showed me the tube of lipstick in her purse; it said “Coral” on it. She stretched out her hand for me to come closer. I never forgot how her lips parted and she cocked her head and smiled without fear. Although I looked like May, Sid seemed sure I wouldn’t tear her nylons with my fingernails or sink my teeth into her thigh. I took her hand and went to her side, without one thought in my head. I couldn’t hear what she was saying into my ear because my heart was singing like a frog—a frog calling to her partner down in the marsh, singing through layers of mud. I hung on to her skirt until she left. I watched her drive away. I watched her even after her car disappeared into a cloud of dust and exhaust.

The present was a music box that was intended for jewels. It played “Oh, How Lovely Is the Evening.” After Sid was gone May came back into the living room. Her face was puffy. I knew she never cried so I figured she must have gotten stung by several hornets.

“What’s that box?” she asked.

“Nothin’,” I said, trying to hide it under my dress.