by Rule, Jane;
“Listen to this one, Mr. Weedman,” she called to his back. “Or this one?”
He turned and looked down at her.
“There’s probably one,” she persisted.
He picked up the melon she had just tested, lifted it over his head, and let it drop to the ground. It split open, its flesh a pale, unsatisfactory pink, most of the seeds still white. He glared at her, then picked up a second melon and dropped it. Along the row of melons, he stooped, lifted, and smashed until the whole crop lay broken, not one ready to eat. Then he turned and left her in the melon patch to take in the lesson of challenging his authority.
“He’s a wicked old man,” her mother said, nearly as grief-stricken over the melons as Ruth was.
“I made him do it,” Ruth had to say.
“You’re just a child!” her mother contradicted. “He did it for spite.”
Her father said, when he heard what had happened, “It’s just you touched him in his pride, Ruthie.”
Now they were stringing the magic wire up the side of the shack, and Mrs. Weedman was watching them, a handkerchief pressed to her mouth as it mostly was these days, held there like a bandage on a wound, but no scab could ever form to shut in the tears.
“You’re a good man,” she was saying to Ruth’s father, over and over again.
Ruth could tell it embarrassed him, but he was used to that. Though Ruth often wished, when she was sent there, that it would be Mrs. Weedman who received whatever it was Ruth had to deliver, Mrs. Weedman’s gratitude was nearly as uncomfortable as old Mr. Weedman’s anger. “A lot of times it’s like that,” her father explained, “with two people, maybe a man and his wife, maybe even a couple of brothers: what one has too much of the other has too little, and, since there’s no way to shuffle them together, you have to do the mixing up in your own head. Mrs. Weedman doesn’t thank you too much because she’s thanking for both. Mr. Weedman doesn’t thank you too little. He’s making up for her embarrassing the life out of you.”
There were only two rooms in the shack, one with the stove where they ate and sat, one with the bed where they slept. Ruth hesitated by the stove, not wanting to follow her father into the bedroom, where the first light was to be installed.
“Morning, Pete,” he was saying. “We’ve got a little surprise for you.”
He went on talking cheerfully like that, stringing the wire up the inside wall and along the ceiling, and then he was asking Mrs. Weedman just where over the bed she wanted it.
“Now, we’ll just be a few minutes turning the power back on,” he explained.
He found Ruth in the kitchen, took her hand, and they raced back to their own house, the new wire marking the familiar way.
“Don’t you want to come down to see it go on?” he asked Ruth’s mother.
She was busy at the new sewing machine he had bought her, half nervous and half pleased about how it worked, and she snapped at him, “If I’m ever going to figure this darned thing out, I can’t go chasing after every electric light you string up all over the neighborhood.”
So only Ruth went back with him to witness the miracle, and this time she knew she’d have to go right into the dark bedroom.
“Now you watch his face when I turn it on,” her father instructed her as they were about to go back into the shack.
In the dim natural light, she could just make out the old man, lying among rumpled bedclothes, strong of the smell of his stale body.
“Now!” her father said, and he pulled the little chain on the bulb that hung over the bed.
The room exploded into light, and there old Mr. Weedman lay, staring up at it, his eyes blank.
“He couldn’t wait,” Mrs. Weedman said, her voice carried on a shaking sigh. “He’s so sorry. He just couldn’t wait.”
Her father on the walk back home was as silent as Mr. Weedman had ever been.
“What’s the matter?” her mother asked.
“I think,” Ruth said timidly, “I think Mr. Weedman’s dead.”
They went on paying for the little electricity Mrs. Weedman used even after Ruth’s father was dead. But when Ruth’s mother married again, her new husband said, “What the hell is this?” about the wire that led down to the Weedman shack.
“I never knew how to take it down,” her mother confessed, “and I didn’t want to call the authorities because I wasn’t sure it was legal. He was always doing crazy things like that, trying to be kind, mind you, but he actually killed the old man. It was just too much for him.”
“I’m going to pull the shade,” Ruth said, getting up from beside Clara’s bed and going to the window, but even as she gentled the room into shadows, she felt that stepfather shaking and shaking her and shouting, “You’re going to see the light about this if I have to shake the daylights out of you.” Against her tantrum of protest, the wire had come down.
“A minister came to visit me yesterday afternoon,” Clara said, “from the United Church. He said it was better to pray than to brood. I told him neither would hatch many eggs at my age.”
“Clara,” Ruth said, shaking her head in amusement.
“I do brood, of course, but I resented him. I told him I had only one thing left to do and that was to learn to cherish my mistakes.”
“What did he say to that?”
“He thought I was talking about forgiveness. Tiresome man. I’ve been spoiled. I haven’t had to deal with very many tiresome people. I don’t think he’ll come back.”
“Mavis wondered when you might like to see any of them.”
Clara sighed. “When they want to come.”
Her face in this softer light looked very much more still at the mercy of life, and, where Hal might have ranted at her being worn out further by the very people he’d just freed her from, Ruth was glad.
“I won’t tell them not to,” Ruth confessed.
Clara closed her eyes, perhaps dosed, perhaps simply waited through a passage of pain. She had disciplined herself long since to keep her face from communicating the difference between rest and patience.
You’ve always made yourself comfortable in ways that surprise me. Who else would try to cherish mistakes? I understand that there’s no forgiveness, but I can only bear it if there’s no cause and effect either. If I hadn’t unhooked those years ago and then kept unhooking them, I couldn’t have survived the guilt. Cherish the mistakes? My father didn’t kill old Weedman; there was no mistake.
“If she weren’t so stubborn, if she’d just learn not to go into the poison oak, she’d save us all grief,” her mother said, addressing the back of her father’s head, her voice raised to be heard over Ruth’s crying.
He was unwrapping the gauze from around her thighs, having to use quick, sharp tugs where the bandaging was stuck to the draining blisters.
“She doesn’t do it on purpose,” he said quietly.
“I was only picking huckleberries,” Ruth said, sullen against her mother’s lack of sympathy.
“What neither of you will ever learn is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It doesn’t matter why you do it; if you do it, you get poison oak.”
“Dad doesn’t even get poison oak,” Ruth said.
“And you remember: no swimming until it’s all healed, not even wading, or it will spread even worse.”
“Try not to cry. Try not to scratch,” her father said gently when he’d finished putting on clean bandages. “Do the best you can.”
He gave her a small bottle of perfume, a glass bottle in the shape of a man, whose black top hat unscrewed, to help conceal the awful smell of the sulphur salve.
Everything bad that happened was according to her mother a mistake, according to her father an accident. Her mother was always angry and full of ideas for further punishments to underline the lesson. Her father was sorry and wanted to lessen the pain.
The road was being lowered that summer along the cliff face right across from their favorite swimming hole. Two days a week no one was allowed on
the river bar, and the old, higher road was closed for blasting. Ruth and her mother would sit on the screen porch, cutting up the early apples for making applesauce, bracing themselves for the next blast. Then in the evening when her father came home, they would walk down to the river to see what had happened, a new large boulder snagged against a tree trunk, a whole tree, its roots tangling in the air, half submerged in the river. Sometimes there were small torn manzanita bushes even on their side of the river.
“It’s a mess now,” her father said, “but it’s going to make that stretch of the road much safer.”
“If people would just slow down, there wouldn’t be any need,” her mother said.
“Can’t go backwards about that,” her father said. “The world’s going to go faster and faster.”
Despite herself, Ruth’s imagination went with her mother’s. She saw the great freight trucks rounding the cliff edge, floating out into the air, and buckling in a slow-motion fall into the river. She had seen it happen once when she was out alone fishing, her small catch strung by its gills to hang on a stripped willow branch, lying beside her on the rocks. It was hard to believe even when she was nearly rocked off her feet by the impact and felt the rain of spray as the truck disappeared under the water in the deep hole below the riffle. Two other cars had stopped at the edge of the cliff. A man was shouting. Another was climbing down the cliff face.
“You’ll never get him out,” the one at the top was calling. “I’ll get the police.”
Ruth did not stay to watch. She ran home to tell her mother. An hour later, when she went to find her fish, there instead was a snake, swollen with her catch, inching itself off into the willows. The river did not even swell over the place where the truck had gone in.
“They got him out,” her father confirmed that night, “but not in time. Take a couple of days to round up the equipment to pull that truck out.”
At the café, they said he’d come through maybe forty-five miles an hour, but someone else said his brakes had failed, and Ruth’s father favored that story though he wasn’t prepared to argue about it.
“Fate’s a fool’s answer,” her mother said.
Her father’s eyes rested in the far distance.
Ruth tried not to scratch, and she tried not to cry. She tried to stay away from the river even on safe days, but the heat in the valley was intense, up to 110 one day even in the shade of the fig trees. By three in the afternoon, there was almost always a relieving breeze along the river, which could cool her bubbling rash even under the bandages and carry the smell of it away from her. When she felt that comfort, she could see no real harm in letting the water cool her feet, but even the familiar shallows had been altered by the blasting. She turned her ankle in an unexpected pothole and fell in. The jolt of guilt was followed immediately by such deep relief from the itching that she lay in the water, sleepy with pleasure, floating downstream in the gentle current. Then, as she felt the strength of the water increase where it narrowed to the riffle, she guided herself toward shore, for she was forbidden to ride the riffle even when she didn’t have poison oak. On shore she looked at her water-soaked bandages and knew they would take longer to dry than her shorts and shirt. She climbed to the top of a large rock, exposing herself to the sun and the wind, and watched an occasional car pass over the high road on the other side of the river, imagining that she was a log, marooned up here by the spring floods or blasted here by the road crew, as happy an accident as her birth which gave her the river and the great trees, no need ever to drive the long road to get here. Sometimes one of the truck drivers, familiar with the area, spotted her and honked, but, if she was a log, she didn’t wave. She lay on the rock until her bandages were dry, the sun down behind redwood mountain, and then she ran home with a new fear about being late to greet her father.
He did not come home.
Her father lay broken, hurled to the ground by a god with a scar slashed across his face. But old Weedman was dead. God had the face of a falling tree.
“I did not kill my father,” Ruth said, aloud but alone in the dark, and she knew even though she was only eight years old that she had to believe it.
“I didn’t really ever want to marry,” Clara said without opening her eyes. “It wasn’t pride so much. I didn’t really want to. Did you?”
“I guess I did,” Ruth said.
“I don’t think I ever have done anything—anything really important—I didn’t want to do.”
Even now?
“Except perhaps leave you when Hal came back from the war.”
“That didn’t last long, did it?” Ruth asked, smiling.
“Nearly three years. Do you remember that awful woman, my landlady? ‘Clara Wheeler, it’s a mistake to come between your son and his wife.’”
“And you said, ‘I don’t come between. I come before and after. He says he doesn’t want her. I do.’”
“Was I as outspoken as that?”
“Yes, you were, and she said, ‘It’s unnatural!’, and then and there we had to find another place to live.”
It should have been a horror story: a couple of women with a two-year-old child aren’t priority tenants even without the perennial housing shortage of a city like Vancouver, and Ruth was young and proud and angry enough to refuse to take money from Hal in those days. Clara had a clerking job at the Bay. Ruth found a job as a waitress in the evening. They were only a month in a damp basement flat before they found rooms at the top of a house in West Point Grey with a little balcony overlooking the water and the mountains, a garden they could share, where they stayed comfortably until after Ruth’s accident when she bought the house.
“I don’t think I ever really believed in ‘natural life,’” Clara said.
I did. I believed it after she was born. Did you ever know I didn’t want her? A baby. But she didn’t have my face. She looked like Hal. I wanted to call her Clara, but you said, no, she must have a name of her own, for a life of her own. I dreamed last night we had forgotten her.
“Prayer!” Clara said with a snort.
“My mother prayed,” Ruth said. “She prayed for reward for the good and punishment for the wicked.”
“Exactly,” Clara said.
“She knew who they were, too.”
“Is it a blessing the world’s never been in anyone’s hands?”
“Blessing?”
“We aren’t cursed anyway,” Clara said quietly.
Clara, Clara, this won’t do. I need to take you home, wherever that turns out to be, so that we can stay among the living as long as there are any. Neither of us can live among the dead. We can’t even call them by name.
Ruth was late to meet her child coming home from nursery school. She got to Fourth Avenue just as the light turned red and saw her daughter skipping toward the corner on the other side of the street. Ruth wanted to call out to her, to warn her, but she stopped obediently at the light and waited next to a tall man in a gray overcoat. When the light changed, the child took his hand. He looked down at her, startled, and then smiled. She did not acknowledge him, rode his hand across the street as if it were a bus strap, and released it when she was safely on the curb.
“Thank you,” Ruth said.
The man nodded shyly and turned away.
“I’m sorry I was late,” Ruth said.
“You mustn’t be afraid for me,” the child answered, skipping again.
How could you teach a child like that that the world was not really arranged for the protection of children? To be told over and over again by her mother that it was essentially a hostile place hadn’t stopped Ruth from finding out for herself. So she never did say, “Don’t trust strangers,” and that hand-riding child turned into a hitchhiking adolescent, for whom Ruth and Clara did try not to be afraid. But inadvertently Ruth had taught her to be afraid for them. She had just had her tenth birthday when Ruth lost her arm, and always after that there was a trace of anxiety in the child’s homecoming, as if she needed to count her
mother’s remaining fingers and toes before she was reassured that everything was all right. She was anxiously concerned, even irritable about Clara’s first sufferings with arthritis, wanting her to try every cure from medicine to magic. She was a little mother to them both, and perhaps that had been the omen of her life running backwards: child as mother to the woman, a women’s liberation slogan she would have approved, like Gladys, only there had been something wistful in her own child’s face, as if she could have so easily been happy if only other people would be, too. She was too easily touched, too quickly compassionate, but Ruth never said to her either, “You’ve got to be tough.”
All the fear Ruth tried never to have, all the teaching of platitudes, all the anger had come leaking out of her only in the last two years, too late and as useless as they had been when she had held them inside her whole self not so much as an act of will or faith as a way of loving who the child was.
