The Loves of Ruby Dee

by Curtiss Ann Matlock

  He led the way through the house at a rapid pace. The soles of their boots echoed on the wood floor, and Sally’s toenails went pitter-patter. Except for a worn rose-patterned rug beneath the dining room table, the floors were bare, and in need of polishing.

  Through the downstairs hallway he pointed out his father’s room. With a quick glance, Ruby Dee saw a massive, dark old bedstead with a messy, unmade bed, a jumbled nightstand and a dingy window shade crookedly pulled halfway down.

  “Where is your daddy?”

  He gestured. “He’s in his shop—out back.”

  “He can get around pretty good, then?”

  “His knees are stiff—the right one’s almost locked in place—but he can get anywhere he wants to go. He still drives a pickup truck, mostly just around here, because he doesn’t have a license anymore. It’s automatic, and we’ve had it fixed with hand brakes, so it’s easier for him. We got him a wheelchair back last winter, but he just uses it to roll things around in his shop.”

  “What does he do in his shop?”

  “Leatherwork—halters, saddles, things like that.” He paused at the stairs for Ruby Dee to go up ahead of him. She noticed, too, that he stepped back—he seemed to keep at least three or four feet from her, as if he didn’t like breathing anyone else’s air.

  The room that was to be hers was at the top of the stairs. Like the rest of the house, it was ugly, but not without hope—the hope being a southfacing window that looked out over the backyard, barns and pastures. She could see out to the east and west a little, too—red sandstone buttes and rolling grassland.

  She would have to share the upstairs bathroom. “We’re not really set up for live-in help,” Will Starr said. “But one shelf in the bathroom closet will be yours."

  Ruby Dee caught a glimpse of a big, claw-footed tub, and then Will Starr was already heading back downstairs, saying, “You won’t be expected to do anything with mine and Lonnie’s rooms. We can keep them.”

  She imagined the men would rather not have her poking around their rooms. She could understand that, but she offered to change their bed sheets.

  “Well, that’s fine, if you want,” he said. “But you don’t need to do any more."

  Actually, his tone said: everything else is off limits.

  Back downstairs again, he paused in the kitchen. “Is there anything special that you need?” He was really cool now.

  “Well, I’d like to have a nice place to park my trailer. It’s not convenient to use permanent—it needs electric and water and sewer hookup, you know—but I’d like to be able to go to it on my days off.”

  He said, “The east side of the tractor barn ought to do. There’s a cottonwood there for shade.” He paused. “Will you be startin’ right away, or would you want a night to get yourself settled?”

  “I’m here, so I might as well start.”

  He nodded. “I’ll leave you to look around on your own. And I’ll send someone up to help you bring your things in.” He stepped into his office and came back with his hat. Holding it in his hand, he said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t go to a lot of trouble bringin’ in just everything.”

  His steely blue eyes were straight on hers for a brief moment. And then he was out the door, closing it softly behind him.

  Well, Ruby Dee thought, as she watched his wide shoulders disappear from sight.

  Chapter 5

  Sweat was tickling the back of Will’s neck when he got out of the house. And the house was air-conditioned.

  It seemed like the gal raised the temperature of a room the instant she entered it, bringing her swinging earrings and throaty voice and way of walking that was like an evening wave rolling up on the beach in the middle of summer.

  Will had the feeling that he’d just set off going ninety miles an hour down a dead-end road. Even though a man knew what was going to happen at the end, he still didn’t stop, or even let up. It was just something he had to do. He was of the same mind as Lonnie: he wanted Ruby Dee D’Angelo in the house. And he sure wanted a few decent meals and the old man looked after, he thought angrily.

  He strode across the backyard and headed up toward the horse barn. He slowed a bit when he passed the old man’s shop. The door was closed, and no sound came from inside, but Will knew his father was in there. He couldn’t have been anywhere else, because his old Chevy pickup sat parked only a few feet away.

  Will kept on going. He had to consider everything for a few minutes, before he faced the old man.

  He fully intended to find Wildcat and tell him to go help Miss D’Angelo move in. Then he remembered it was Sunday, and Wildcat Burns was in Harney with Charlene Legget, the widow he had married last year. Wildcat and Charlene were no doubt watching old movies on the VCR. Charlene’s having a VCR and knowing how to work it were the main reasons Wildcat had finally, at the age of fifty-two, given up being a bachelor and living in the small cottage there on the ranch.

  That left Lonnie to help Miss D’Angelo, and Will didn’t like that at all. It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that if you gave Lonnie ten minutes with a woman, he’d at least have her kicking off her shoes and anticipating more. In Lonnie’s defense, he couldn’t seem to help himself. He was as addicted to loving women as some men were to alcohol. And most women were like hothouse flower buds when they saw him, swelling up and spreading open.

  Lonnie was at his horse trailer, a fancy, three-horse slant-loader, with tack room and sleeping quarters. He had paid for the rig from his winnings on the rodeo circuit a few years back. He was best as a calf roper, but he could compete in every event. He’d been to the finals in Las Vegas four times and had won a champion buckle twice. Yes, he was good at riding in the rodeo, but in Will’s opinion what Lonnie was best at was the rodeo life, which kept him moving from one place to another, and one woman to another.

  He already had the trailer hooked to his big white dually pickup. He was stowing things in the sleeping quarters, pitching things in; Lonnie never had been too neat. In order for him to use the bed, he’d have to find it first.

  Ignoring Will, he went about his business. Lonnie always did that after an argument, acting like he was alone in the world. It irritated Will considerably.

  “You’re not wastin’ any time,” Will said.

  ‘‘You were the one who told me to go."

  Will didn’t want to get further into an argument, so he let that pass. He said, “If you got a minute, you could go on down and help Miss D’Angelo haul her things into the house.”

  He’d meant to get a jump out of Lonnie, and he did. Lonnie stopped, and his head came swiveling around. “You mean she’s stayin’?”

  “She’s hired on,” Will said. “I doubt we can really call it stayin’.”

  He and Lonnie looked at each other.

  Will said, “What about you—are you stayin’?” He figured Lonnie would, yet he had a niggling doubt, enough to make him hold his breath.

  Lonnie averted his eyes to the rope in his hands. “Yes...guess I might. At least long enough to get a breakfast or two.” Then a grin split his face.

  He gave Will a shove, and Will shoved him back. Lonnie sobered. “What’s the old man got to say?”

  “I haven’t told him yet. Maybe you’d like to do it."

  Lonnie just shot him a look. “I’d better not keep the lady waitin’. We don’t want her to change her mind before we get a good meal.” He slammed the trailer door and strode away.

  Watching him, Will felt a strange envy...of Lonnie’s youth, of his easy nature, of the time he was going to spend with the gal. Uncomfortable with the feeling, he turned from it.

  He patted his pockets, by habit looking for a cigarette. He’d wanted one badly back at the house, but the one left in his dirty shirt had been all broken up and damp.

  Will didn’t keep any cigarettes in the house, tempting and within easy reach. He kept a couple of packs in his pickup truck, and each morning he put the four cigarettes he allowed himself for
the day into his shirt pocket.

  He went to his pickup, shook four from a pack, tucked one between his lips and stuck the rest in his shirt pocket. He figured he deserved an extra ration.

  Squinting, Will gazed out at the land. It rolled away in all directions, rising in flat planes of grass and dipping into small canyons of rocks and trees. Then there was the wide blue sky, which was an equal part of the land; it nurtured the land, and the land nurtured it. The grass was ripening and burning up underneath the sun, and the pond down beneath the cottonwoods was drying now, too, all normal for midsummer in that part of the country.

  He thought how this land had once supported buffalo and the Comanche, and how the old man had worked it longer than Will had been alive.

  The old man.

  Will had never deliberately and openly gone against the old man’s wishes. Anytime in the past when he had needed to accomplish something that his father disagreed with, Will had either been able to figure out how to get the old man to accept it, to the point where he even took credit for the idea, or he’d managed to get it done on the sly, so that the old man never found out. That wasn’t exactly honorable, Will thought, but neither was he deliberately contradicting the old man.

  It did not seem right to deliberately contradict the old man, who was not only his father but owner of this ranch, with eighty-five years of living under his belt, and as such deserving of a certain amount of respect.

  But this time there seemed no way Will could work the old man around to agreeing to Miss D’Angelo. And there certainly was no way of hiding her.

  The memory of finding the old man in his shop, draped across his stitching bench, played across Will’s mind. The man he had thought too tough ever to die had suffered a stroke. Small and with little noticeable effects, what that stroke had amounted to was an announcement that the old man was reaching his twilight, and no one on God’s green earth could put a stop to it.

  The old man was clinging to the reins, but the horse was out from under him and racing away. The smart thing would be to let go of those reins and let that ornery horse go on, but the old man was a lot more stubborn than he was smart, always had been.

  Refusing to admit he needed help, he took his medicine twice or not at all, and he lied about it, too. Though his eyesight was failing, he continued to drive the rutted roads and trails—no amount of finagling on Will’s part had been able to put a stop to it—and he took his rifle out when he drove around the ranch. He’d shot one of Joe Allen’s herd dogs, mistaking it for a coyote.

  He ate greasy eggs and burnt ham that he cooked himself when Will couldn’t get to doing it, and twice he had almost set the kitchen on fire because he’d forgotten to turn off the stove. He insisted on eating Snickers bars and Twinkie cakes and drinking whiskey, too, even though doing so made his blood sugar rise high enough to ring bells. Once he fell in the tub and had to stay there half the day, before Will came to find him. Worse, lately there were times when the old man got confused, forgetting exactly where and who he was.

  It scared the living daylights out of Will to think his daddy might be losing his mind.

  Will threw the remainder of his cigarette onto the ground and stepped on it. Reluctantly, he started off toward the shop. His stomach twisted as tightly as a knotted rope as he imagined the old man’s reaction when he was told the woman was staying.

  Oh, geez, Will hoped the old man didn’t keel over dead.

  * * * *

  As he approached the shop, Will saw Lonnie and Miss D’Angelo messing around at her car again— Lonnie with his hat pushed back and giving the gal his most charming smile. One thing was certain, Will thought, things were definitely going to change a bit around here. The thought was fuel to the smoldering fire inside him.

  He knocked on the door, only because he thought it polite, not because he expected the old man to answer. The old man never answered a knock.

  “Dad?”

  Turning the cracked black enamel knob, Will opened the door and stepped inside. He blinked, his eyes adjusting. Light sliced across the room from the west window, illuminating sparkling dust dancing in the stuffy air. The heavy, familiar scents of dried-out lumber, tanned hides and oil enveloped him.

  The shop, which had been salvaged from a two-room shack, was lined with saddles in various stages of dilapidation, leather hides and strips, old stirrups and the wood of broken saddle trees. Will had always wondered why the old man kept broken trees. But he’d never asked.

  A workbench stretched across the rear of the shop, illuminated by a rusty fluorescent light fixture suspended by nylon cord. Tools were set neatly in niches on the wall behind it. A number of them were well over a hundred years old, having belonged to Will’s great-grandfather, who had been a saddle-maker of some repute down in Texas.

  Will’s gaze first touched the amber pint bottle of whiskey on the workbench, and his stomach got one notch tighter. Then he looked at his dad, who leaned heavily on his cane over at the west window.

  The old man turned his head slowly and sent Will a glare that would have felled a man not familiar with it.

  Hardy Starr had prominent, high cheekbones, a big beak of a nose and eyes that glittered like diamond arrow points from behind gold wire glasses. He’d been a powerful man, stocky, and he was some still, though shrunken by the years and horse wrecks. He still had a thick head of silver hair. His hair was reassuring to Will, since it was a good indication that he himself wasn’t likely to go bald either.

  Will wasn’t thinking that right now, though. He was thinking of just what he could say to bring his dad around to acceptance. He could say how tired he was of eating burnt toast and cold sandwiches and never having clean underwear, all practical points.

  But when the old man hit him with that glare, he ended up saying, “I hired the woman.”

  The old man went up like a flare. “Well, I ain’t havin’ it,” he said flatly and as firmly as setting his words in stone.

  Will took hold of himself and tried to back up and sound reasonable. “Dad...don’t condemn this woman by what she looks like. She’s highly qualified and experienced, and she was taught by Maggie Parsons. Give her a chance. She says she can make a real good apple pie.” With a sinking feeling, he knew nothing he could say would make a difference.

  The old man limped forward, smacking his cane hard on the wooden floor.

  “I don’t care if she’s the queen of Sheba,” he said.

  “The queen of Sheba” was an expression Will had heard from the old man all his life. It grated on his nerves.

  The old man jutted his face at Will. “I put up with them others you paraded through here, but by God, I ain’t puttin’ up with this one—or any other ones you bring in, either. We’re callin’ a halt to this whole biz-ness. It’s my house and my ranch, and I still say what goes on here!”

  With the old man’s words, the fraying rope inside Will burned clean through.

  “Yeah,” he said, “it’s your house and your ranch. You sure as hell never let anyone forget that—never mind that I’ve lived here and worked side by side with you for forty-two years. Never mind that it’s me”—he jabbed his chest and flung his hand in the direction of the house—”that’s fixed windows and wiring and reroofed that damn house...me that’s built this whole place into what it is after you just about lost it! And after all that, if you can’t consider me an equal owner, I imagine I can just hit the road and go find myself someplace that’s my own."

  The words, so long held inside, came bursting out, hot and hard.

  The old man’s face turned red as watermelon flesh. Even before Will finished, he was yelling, “Just go ahead! B’God, I don’t need you here runnin’ my life. No! There won’t come a day when I need anyone here tellin’ me how to live! I don’t need any of...Go on, get!”

  The old man came at him in a fury. “You get on. Just like yer mama did.... just like that no-’count brother of yers always does. Run on outta here! I don’t need any of ya!”
/>   And then the old man swung his cane.

  Will saw it coming but was so stunned that all he could do was make a half turn. The blow caught him on the shoulder, with enough force to knock him off balance and into the wall and utility hooks hanging on it. His cheek felt a sharp pain. He saw the cane go up in the air, and all he knew then was that he had to get hold of it.

  “Dad! Dad, stop it!”

  He caught the cane in midair. For several seconds he and the old man struggled for control of the knobby stick. Will jerked hard. The cane came free in his hand, and the old man stumbled backward, flailing his arms. One hand clawed at the corner of the glass-fronted cabinet, but then his veined hand slipped away, and he spun over to the wall.

  There came a loud crack, and the old man went down with a plop and a sharp cry of pain.

  Will, gasping for breath, stood there staring in horror and thinking that he just might have killed his own father.

  Chapter 6

  Lonnie Starr lifted Miss Edna’s urn out of the front seat of the Galaxie. “The sun’s got this thing hot—what is it?” he asked, turning it in his hand.

  “Miss Edna’s urn,” Ruby Dee told him as she reached for the cardboard box containing her most precious possessions.

  “You mean ‘urn,’ as in a dead person’s ashes?”

  She supposed he would be surprised. A lot of people would be.

  “Uh-huh. Please don’t drop it. Can you hold this bag, too?”

  “You carry a dead person’s ashes around with you?” He looked from the urn to her.

  Putting a hand on her hip, she said, “I don’t take it to the grocery store with me, if that’s what you mean. I had it in the car with me to keep safe for the trip.” She tilted the small box, showing him. “I like to keep all my precious things with me—Miss Edna’s Bible, my favorite pictures...my nursing license. My Webster’s dictionary isn’t really valuable, but I can’t do without it. I’d rather keep these things in the car with me, because the camper could come unhooked and turn over or go into a ditch or something, and all my stuff would fly out. Clothes and linens and dishes can be replaced, but these things can’t.”