Ruby & Roland

by Faith Sullivan

  I had been reading about pantheism in Serena’s book of mythology, and I was nearly won to that way of looking at the world. Everything was God or gods. I thought I sensed that feeling in the Whitman as well. I would like to discuss this with someone, but with who? Or was it whom?

  There, in front of me, through trees now bare, I glimpsed Sioux Woman Lake, the surface gray and only a little ruffled by a nippy breeze that came and went and made me glad I’d worn an old suit jacket of Henry’s that hung by the back door. I pulled the collar up and dug my hands into the pockets.

  I had hoped to have this corner of the lake to myself, to sit remembering Serena and Denton. Wherever they were, I didn’t want to lose them, but someone was sitting on a fallen log, back from the shore, and beneath an oak still hanging onto its brown leaves. Around the lake, this between-seasons time was very quiet, most of the geese and ducks flown south, the fishermen packed up till it was time to auger a hole in the ice and fish through that. When the ice was sufficiently deep, icemen would saw huge chunks of it from one corner of the lake, loading it on a wagon and selling it to those who had fruit cellars dug in their yards and to stores and households for kitchen iceboxes.

  The crunch of the petering-out gravel as I neared the lake, caused the seated person to turn. “Ruby.” Roland Allen, his voice as smoky as the atmosphere.

  “Mr. Allen.”

  “Roland.” He rose, giving himself a little shake, as if he’d been harvesting dreams when I arrived.

  “Roland.” How wondrous to call the most beautiful man—maybe in the world—by his Christian name.

  “Have a seat,” he said, indicating the log. “I’ve been sitting here remembering this time of year back home.”

  “Was this your favorite season?”

  “I think maybe it was.”

  “Why was that?”

  He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Not sure. The quiet, maybe. Things winding down. What had been done, was done; what hadn’t would wait. Sort of like getting ready for bed.” He smiled briefly. “Not much of a reason, I guess.”

  “As good as any.”

  “What’s your favorite season?” he asked, as one does out of politeness. He peered out at the lake, still lost in thoughts of home, I surmised. Then, once more, he gave himself another little shake. “What’s yours? Your favorite season? No, wait, let me guess. Summer.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re warm and sunny, like summer.” He seemed to consider what he’d said. “I mean, well … yes, yes, that’s what I mean.”

  “Summer is my favorite season. Summer knows what it’s doing, what it’s about; it’s not wishy-washy. It’s bright and warm and full of color. I wish it could be summer all year long.” I pulled my skirt tight around my legs, protection against the skittery breeze. “I like to lie on the warm grass and look up at the trees and the sky and watch the birds. I like to smell the peonies and roses and mock orange. Sometimes I wish I could eat them!” I laughed at myself. “I’m crazy, don’t you think?”

  “No.” He looked sidelong at me. “I think you’re … wide awake. That’s how it sounds. Wide awake. And when I hear you talk, it makes me feel wide awake, like I’m only half awake most of the time.”

  “Wide awake.” I pondered that for a moment. “That’s a very nice thing to say.”

  “It’s true.”

  I saw him tremble. “You’re cold,” I said. “I’m chattering away, keeping you out in the chill. You should head home.”

  “No. This is the best I’ve felt all week, all month.”

  I hugged myself in a spasm of delight. “Emma said you came from Iowa. What was it like there, where you came from? I lived for a while with some folks in Salisbury. Did you live anywhere near there?”

  “You’d like the place I came from. Not near Salisbury, but on the Mississippi, a little burg called Lansing—pretty, on a hillside rising up from the river. There were big boats and barges that rode up and down the river. In warm weather, my dad took me out fishing after work. We fished till dark, my poor mother waiting supper.” He smiled. “She’s a patient woman.”

  “So your family didn’t farm?”

  “My dad’s a surveyor. When I came here was the first time I drove a plow horse or milked a cow.”

  “That must have been a shock.”

  He laughed. “‘Shock’ is the right word. But my uncle needed me. He was my dad’s only sibling. So it was important. Farming isn’t what I’d have chosen to do with my life, but I’ve learned a thing or two.”

  “Like what?”

  “Soil, good soil, is mystical. Don’t laugh. Think about it, Ruby—you put a seed in the ground and, if you get some rain, the next thing you know, something green is pushing up, and I mean pushing up, like it can’t wait to get to the sun, like it would grow right through the soles of your boots, if you didn’t move on. It’s magic. Right there, before your eyes.”

  “Magic.” When you stopped to think about it, he was absolutely right. And I did stop to think about it. We were quiet for several minutes.

  Then I asked, “What had you wanted to be when you grew up?”

  “Well, I’d been a pretty good student in high school,” he said, glancing at me to see if I thought he was bragging. “My teachers started saying I should go to college, that I might even get a scholarship. I got excited about that. Nobody I knew had gone to college. It sounded, I don’t know … full of possibilities, like I could make something of myself, something my folks would be proud of. I started thinking about what I’d like to do.

  “I thought I might be a teacher. Maybe a history teacher. I liked history in school. Especially ancient history, you know, the Greeks and Egyptians. I wanted to know how they accomplished the things they did.

  “Alexander the Great! Think of it, Ruby. He conquered most of the known world. What a man—to have so many follow him into unknown places, places where unimaginable monsters might have been waiting. I wonder why, why did he do it? Curiosity? Power?”

  “Maybe he didn’t have a choice,” I said. “Maybe he just had to go there and didn’t know why.” Without thinking, I blurted, “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he looked like you.”

  Color rose up his neck and face. My cheeks burned. Quickly, I went on, unsure of pronunciation, but needing to put what I’d said behind us, “Wasn’t Alexander tutored by Aristotle?”

  Roland looked surprised. “You know a lot.”

  “Not as much as I’d like.”

  “That’s how I feel. There’s so much to know.” He rose, heading toward the water, kicking stones. I wondered what he was feeling—regret, longing, bitterness? After a couple of minutes, he turned, shrugging, a chiding gesture that said, Don’t go down that road. That sorrowful old road.

  He smiled, and I wanted to hold him, sharing his sorrow.

  • • •

  Darling Serena, I whispered into my pillow, I do not know myself. I do not understand these feelings. Do you hear me? Do you recognize the child you left behind? Or am I some new person neither you nor I could have foreseen? And will you help me find my way forward?

  The following day, winter was upon us. The previous day’s lowering sky should have been a portent.

  The large meals continued, and the men’s hearts were still wedded to desserts, so pies, cakes, pumpkin bread, or gingerbread were always on the menu. Frequently dessert was sauce, “sass” as Emma called it, with a slice of pound cake. Applesauce was popular, ground cherry sauce not so much. Bread pudding and Indian pudding were great favorites.

  During the long winter evenings, the five of us often dealt out cards at the kitchen table. Sometimes it was whist, but more often it was rummy so we could all play. One evening, I ventured to ask Dennis where he’d be going to college after the next year’s harvest.

  “University of Minnesota. Where my dad went,” he said without enthusiasm.

  Just the idea of attending a university thrilled me, and I thought of Roland and
his loss. I could hardly credit that Dennis was indifferent. Venturing further, I asked, “Where would you like to go?”

  “Anyplace, as long as it’s far away.” He reddened. “I mean, you know, back east or out west. I … I’d like to see something before I go to work at the paper.”

  He was still embarrassed, afraid something he’d said might reflect on the Schoonovers and this place, so I asked, “What do you want to study?”

  “What I’d really like to study is agronomy.” I must have looked mystified. “It’s about farming. New ways of doing it, new crops, scientific, you know.” He glanced at Henry. “Mr. Schoonover follows all that. He gets these books and pamphlets.” He stopped short as if he might be treading where he oughtn’t. But Henry was nodding and his eyes were crinkled.

  Something about Dennis hadn’t caught up with eighteen or nineteen; something unsure was still back there at fourteen. But he was a good-looking boy, tanned and muscled from farm work. There ought to be more strut to him, I thought. More swagger. More eighteen or nineteen in him.

  I received another letter from Professor Cromwell. He was still at work on his automobile invention. “I’ve applied for a patent,” he wrote, “and I have other notions I’m playing with. I do enjoy testing and inventing. Am I a bit mad, little Ruby?”

  He said that he had stopped by my great-aunt’s. Aunt Bertha had apparently warmed to him, as he wrote that she’d begun having the girl make tea on his visits. Well, he was presentable and respectable, not the bohemian-gypsy sort of person she’d said my parents were.

  And he described running into my old neighbor Mrs. Bullfinch, she of “Whispering Hope.” Mrs. Bullfinch was eager to hear more about my new life, he said. Though I’d written her, she had questions. Did I have a beau? After all, I was fifteen or thereabouts. And, if I were to marry, might she be asked to sing? She’d be only too happy to take the long train ride for such an occasion.

  “I think she is coloring her hair,” Professor Cromwell wrote further, “though it is unkind to mention it, and it may not be true. Serena once described her as ‘quite dear, but fighting age with a Spartan will.’”

  In a recent letter, I had tried to draw a true picture of the farm and its people, describing everyone’s hard work and their entertainments. “Dear Emma is plainspoken and kind, Henry taciturn and of goodwill.” I made a pass at describing Roland and Dora, though I’d never actually seen Dora.

  “If you could imagine the statue of David coming to life, Professor Cromwell, you could perhaps imagine Roland Allen. He is sad, it is true, but to tell the truth, I’ve always thought that the statue of David looked a little sad.”

  Now he wrote suggesting that I make a point of getting to know Dora. “For how can you know the man if you don’t know the wife?”

  Of my previous letter, he wrote, “All those books of Serena’s that you have been reading have given you a fair gift with the pen. You should be studying in a college. I am sure that the Schoonovers are all that you say, but I worry that your mind isn’t being challenged on the farm. It is my dearest wish that one day you’ll return to Beardsley.”

  Finally, he wrote, “I’m enclosing five dollars, hoping that you will buy yourself a treat. An Oklahoma oil company asked me to run a test for them for which they paid handsomely, so do not imagine that you are depriving me of anything by accepting this small gift. I like to think that in a very minor way I am standing in for Serena and Denton.”

  Five dollars!

  “Dear Professor Cromwell,” I wrote immediately. “I send a wagonload of thanks for your generous gift. With your five dollars I shall have a photograph taken, so that you may see the healthy, hearty girl being nurtured in this rather amazing place.

  “I do think that you underestimate all that a farm—even a garden—can teach of seed and maturity; soil and blight; wind and weather; dreams and doubts. For me, this farm is an endless source of wonderment. I am learning so much here. You have no idea.”

  • • •

  In my next letter to Mrs. Bullfinch, I wrote, “I don’t have a beau, and I haven’t been on the lookout for one. I want to be everything Serena wanted me to be: kind and educated. She used to tell me not to marry before I was twenty, so there’d be time for education. Of course, along the path life has taken me, I may not have the opportunity for college, so I read Serena’s books and study the dictionary. I confess, I also use Roget’s Thesaurus in order to write more intelligently. As you might imagine, I don’t want to sound ignorant when I write to Professor Cromwell. He is so brilliant and kind.

  “In any case, there aren’t many opportunities or candidates for beaux around here. Dennis, the younger of the two hired men, is leaving for college next fall, and the other, Jake, must be fifty if he’s a day. Moses, the hired man across the road, is even older.”

  I wrote of Serena and Denton and when I did, I had to lay the pen down to dab my eyes. Time hadn’t yet softened the edges of grief. Even so, I wanted to discuss them with someone who, like the professor, had known them and would join me in keeping them alive.

  “Remember how Serena and I made May baskets and left one by your door? When you heard us knock, you came running out and gave us each a hug. We left one at Aunt’s, but she didn’t come running.

  “I am reading Elinor Glyn’s Halcyone, a book Henry found at the Water and Power Company when he was in town. There’s a reading shelf where people leave books they no longer want. Unlike Beardsley, Harvester doesn’t yet have a regular lending library.”

  Toward the end of my letter, I described Roland to Mrs. Bullfinch. “If you had the opportunity to visit an observatory and look through a telescope, and if you found a star that was brighter than the rest, that would be Roland.”

  “I want to have my picture taken,” I told Emma after breakfast one Saturday morning. “Does anyone in Harvester take pictures for money?”

  “Mr. Sonnenberg does,” she said.

  “Do you know how much he charges?” I asked. “I have five dollars. Would that cover it, do you think?”

  “Five dollars!” she said, surprised.

  “A friend of Serena and Denton’s sent it.”

  “Five dollars’ll probably cover it and then some,” she said, adding, “wear yer best dress. I’ll help with your hair.”

  Later, as I sat on an extravagant, Egyptian-looking chair—the arms extending into carved Pharaoh’s heads—beside a huge brass pot planted with a substantial palm, Mr. Sonnenberg asked, “You don’t have a plain, dark dress you could wear?”

  “No, sir, this is my best,” I explained, smoothing the skirt of my grass-green dress.

  And so it was that I sent a small portrait of myself—Minnesota farm girl, a hired one at that, set down a stone’s throw from the Nile—to Professor Cromwell and Mrs. Bullfinch, holding one picture back as a present for Emma and Henry and another for the future.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Halcyone, the girl in the book I was reading, was serene, graceful, intellectual, and beautiful. Did I mention enchanting and kind? Those too. She read Greek, French, and Italian. I was growing less fond of her.

  But how exotic, to read Greek! Given half a chance, I thought I could be, like Roland, quite fond of Greece. I was delighted by the gods and goddesses, nymphs, and satyrs I found in S.A. Scull’s Greek Mythology Systematized, another of Serena’s library.

  However, playing Parcheesi Royal Game of India around the kitchen table was the exotic height to which life soared that late winter of 1915. Jake had sent away for it from a catalog in the outhouse. Whichever catalog came—Montgomery Ward or Sears and Roebuck—it always ended up in the outhouse, its pages used for wiping. If the weather wasn’t too hot or too cold, you could while away ten minutes or more poring through them. But if you stayed longer, Emma knocked on the door yelling, “Either pee or get off the pot!”

  The Parcheesi board was colorful and, yes, exotic—merely to look at it was a pleasure. The game was played with dice and little wooden pieces that you
moved around the board. Imagining that red was my lucky color, I usually chose that piece, but I rarely won. I didn’t mind losing. I had the notion that the more I lost at Parcheesi, the more I would win at something else. I expect everyone plays these little win/lose games in their heads, trying to beat fate.

  One particular evening, as we were choosing our game pieces, Dennis asked me, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”

  I bridled. “When I grow up! I’m fifteen and a half years old. Plenty of girls my age are married and having babies. And besides, what makes you think I won’t be right here with Emma and Henry ‘when I grow up’?”

  His ears reddened. “Not sure. Nothing against Emma and Henry.” He looked down at the dice in his hand. “You read a lot. You sound like somebody who might be a schoolteacher, that’s all.”

  I was mollified. “My mother was a schoolteacher,” I told him. “She was like Halcyone in my book. Cultured and kind and beautiful.”

  He grinned, a sort of secret grin, as if he thought I might be exaggerating.

  “I have a picture of her, of her and Denton, if you don’t believe me. I’ll get it and you can see for yourself.” I climbed the stairs two at a time.

  Returning, out of breath, I handed Dennis the tintype and settled myself at the table once more. The rolling of dice had awaited my return.

  Dennis took the picture and studied it, nodding. “They’re a beautiful couple.” He handed it around for the others to see. Dennis was guileless and as transparent as a piece of glass. When he was wrong or mistaken, he admitted it without hesitation or embarrassment.

  “You look just like your mama,” Emma told me. “Though maybe you got your daddy’s chin.”

  As the fragile brass frame was passed to them, Jake said, “Very nice,” and Henry murmured, “Good-looking people.”

  On the back porch, Teddy growled, a low-down-in-the-throat announcement. We heard him rise from his rug and start for the screen door, his claws scritching on the linoleum.