Drowning Ruth

by Christina Schwarz

  “Ruthie, what do you say?” he repeated, more sternly this time.

  Still she said nothing.

  “I'd like some milk, please,” he said.

  Ruth gave the table one smart rap with the bottom of her glass.

  “That's enough, Ruthie.” He set the pitcher back on the table and reached to take the glass out of her hands. It was impossible to say, really, what happened next. Did she drop it deliberately or only release her hold before his grip was firm? In any case, the glass hit the floor with a crash.

  Hilda came down to breakfast as he was sweeping up.

  “Ruth doesn't get anything today unless she asks for it properly, Hilda,” he said, dumping the shards into the wastebasket. “She knows how to talk.”

  “I understand,” Hilda answered, pouring coffee into her cup as if the kitchen were her own. She seemed almost pleased, Carl thought, at the chance to punish Ruth, and it made him think better of his words.

  “I don't mean you should starve her.”

  Hilda looked at him thoughtfully and took a sip of her coffee. “You let females walk all over you, Carl, you know that? Even this little thing here. You don't do her no favors, letting her have her way.”

  Her talking like that made him angry, but maybe she was right, about Ruth anyway. What did he know about raising a little girl? He worried about her, losing two mamas, no wonder she wasn't acting right, but what could he do about it? Hilda knew best, he thought, he hoped, as he hurried out to the barn.

  At noon Hilda made a cheese sandwich and held it out to Ruth on a plate. When the little girl reached for it, Hilda lifted it high. “What do we say?”

  Ruth began to whimper.

  “Crocodile tears won't get you nowhere with me, young lady.” Hilda took a bite out of the sandwich and chewed it deliberately as Ruth began to shriek.

  Hilda set the sandwich down and rummaged through a drawer. When she turned to face Ruth again, she was holding a wooden spoon. “I'll give you something to cry about.” She grabbed Ruth by the arm and landed three or four good smacks on Ruth's bottom.

  “That'll learn you.” She picked Ruth up around the waist, carried her upstairs, deposited her in her room and shut the door.

  Hilda made supper for them every night, usually boiled potatoes and some piece of meat, cooked until it had relinquished the very last of its juices.

  “She isn't even properly trained,” she complained, spreading mustard onto her potato with her knife.

  “What do you mean? Trained in what?” Carl usually kept his head down as they ate, so as not to have to watch her chew, but he looked up now, puzzled.

  “You know. Trained.”

  When Carl, still uncomprehending, shook his head, Hilda blushed and lowered her eyes. “You know. She wets herself.”

  It was such a relief to see Hilda looking that way, disconcerted, unformidable, that Carl laughed. And amazingly Hilda laughed too.

  “It's nothing to laugh at,” she protested, but she was still smiling. For a few brief moments they looked at each other, struck by the difference, but neither knew how to go on.

  “Well, what do we do about it?” Carl asked finally.

  “I guess I know how to train a child.”

  Hilda's training method consisted of not allowing Ruth to change her panties when she wet them. And, of course, that meant she wasn't allowed to sit down anywhere in the house.

  “You have to learn to live with your mistakes,” Hilda said.

  Ruth took to hiding her wet underthings and wearing nothing under her skirt for the rest of the day.

  “I'm sorry to have to tell you this, Carl,” Hilda said, meeting him at the back door the day she discovered Ruth's trick, “but a normal child, a decent child, doesn't run around naked. You can see she wasn't brung up right. It's no wonder the sister's in the nuthouse. And it makes you wonder about the mother, too. I'm sorry to say it, but it does.”

  She did not seem sorry to say it. She seemed pleased, triumphant. Carl was outraged. “You have no right to say such things about my wife or my wife's family. If that's the way you feel, you can go back to Tomahawk. I'll give you the money for your ticket.”

  Hilda seemed surprised by his anger. “And leave you alone with a child like this? I think I know my duty better than that.”

  She turned, then, abruptly, and went into the kitchen and busied herself among the pans. Carl put his jacket back on and took himself back out to the barn, although he had already decided he was through for the day, and began to soap Frenchie's bridle.

  How dare she, he thought, say such things about Mathilda, about her family? She was only a jealous spinster, trying to cause trouble for another woman, a happy woman, a woman who'd had a husband who loved her. He rubbed the bridle hard, until the rag he was using slipped and the friction of his fingers against the leather burned his skin. Why couldn't a woman just drown? People drowned all the time, that's what Amanda had said. Amanda, who couldn't tie her own shoes now. But that had nothing to do with it, he assured himself. Of course people drowned. It didn't mean there was something wrong, something to be wondered about.

  The doubt gnawed at him, though. Doubt about what, exactly, he couldn't say. If only he could speak to Mathilda, just for a few minutes. If only he could see her, then, he thought, he would know; he would be reassured. But his memory of her had continued to soften around the edges. Sometimes he was disturbed to realize that he was remembering not her but the way she'd posed for a photograph he'd studied the day before. And so … and so … perhaps Hilda, while not knowing anything for certain—how could she know anything for certain?—sensed something that he was too dull to perceive.

  Ruth began to smash things. She poked at the flowerpots on the porch railing with a stick until they crashed on the slates below. She pushed the milk pitcher off the table. She dropped her Grandmother Starkey's collection of Mexican glass animals one by one onto the hearthstone. She tore pages out of books and ripped the stereograph pictures in two. She sawed the edge of the kitchen table with a butter knife.

  “Horrible, horrible child!” Although Hilda came as fast as she could the moment she heard a bang or a crash, she was seldom quick enough to get a good grip on Ruth, who scuttled away, half running, half sliding down the stairs into the cellar, where she crouched in the space under the laundry sink, pressed tightly against the wall, next to the bleach and the lye. The fingers flailed before her, clawing for a hold on her scalp and then slapping about wildly in frustration. Hilda did not go easily to her knees. She bent before the cupboard, one hand clutching the sink for support, the other groping blindly in the dark recesses. Her breasts and her legs, planted wide, blocked escape with a wall of flowered yellow.

  Finally she rearranged her weight and shoved her shoulder in more deeply to extend her reach, until she could grab a bit of Ruth's skirt or a handful of her hair. Then she'd drag her, howling, out and up the stairs to the drawer with the wooden spoon.

  When Carl came in, Hilda met him at the door with a paper sack of broken pieces so often that he began to wonder what fragile thing could possibly be left in the house to destroy. The only variation to this pattern came on a wet afternoon, when for a moment Hilda's hand, groping for Ruth beneath the sink, paused in midair. That day Ruth bit, relishing the living flesh between her teeth, the slightly salty tang of the skin. For a shimmering half moment the house was silent. Hilda stared at her hand in surprise, and then she screamed like a peacock. She held out her bandaged hand as soon as Carl reached the porch.

  “You better know,” she said, “you're raising a wild animal.” Carl felt guilty. He tried to make it up to Hilda by being extra polite himself, by not interfering in the way she treated Ruth, by moving her things into the best bedroom. What would they do if she left them?

  Carl stood just inside the door of the common room at St. Michael's, wishing his sister-in-law would pull herself together. Amanda had moved her chair, turning her back on the room, so that she could stare into the woods where
the snow clung stubbornly, refusing to give way to the spring. She had been in the sanatorium for nearly a year.

  Her hands were busy, the fingers of one working at the thumb of the other, a habit he'd noticed lately. He could see that someone had encouraged her to dress herself—the policy when a patient was well enough—for her skirt was twisted and her blouse misbut-toned. Her hair, curly, and inclined to wildness, a quality he had once thought rather nice, looked, well, like a lunatic's. “Amanda?” he said, and she jumped, separating her hands and letting her arms hang limply at her sides.

  She turned to him and nodded gravely. “Hello, Carl. And how've you been keeping yourself?”

  “Oh, fine, fine,” he said, seating himself on the neighboring chair and reaching over to squeeze her hand. She allowed him to do this but did not return his gentle pressure.

  “Don't you want to fix yourself up a little?” he asked.

  Amanda touched her bodice and her hair as if surprised to learn that she was not completely presentable.

  “Well … I suppose,” she faltered. “I … well, I have no mirror, you know,” she said accusingly.

  “I can be a help to you, then,” Carl said softly. “The buttons aren't right,” he began, reaching a hesitant finger toward her, first at a place toward the middle of her stomach where the fabric was skewed, and then, thinking better of that, touching the stray corner of cloth that jutted too high around her neck.

  “They've hidden my slippers again, as you can see,” she said, holding her stocking feet out to prove it.

  Seeing her long, thin feet and skinny ankles stuck out like that seemed almost worse, more embarrassingly intimate, than seeing the sliver of camisole through her misbuttoned blouse. While Carl cast his eyes down and searched under the chairs for her slippers, Amanda discreetly redid her buttons.

  “That's better,” he said, settling her cardigan over her shoulders. He wished he could smooth her hair a little while he stood there behind her, but he wasn't brave enough to touch it. And anyway, what would he do? He had no idea how women did what they did to their hair.

  “Well, I don't want to keep you now,” she said when he'd finished.

  “Oh, you're not keeping me at all.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs comfortably. It was nice to be there, away from Ruth not talking and Hilda talking so much. He could see why she wanted to stay.

  “I know you've got to be getting home,” she said, more firmly this time.

  So he sighed and rose from his chair. He told her that he would be back the next day, unless he had to wait for the farrier, in which case he would come the next. When he was gone, she tipped her head back against the chair, so that the tears that filled her eyes would not spill over.

  Amanda

  I told you to go back, Mattie. I told you that. I told you. Why won't you ever mind me?

  You were trouble from the day you were born. You don't remember it, but I do. All that crying and crying in the night, so much crying that Mama and Papa couldn't stand it—they put your cradle in with me. You don't remember, but I sang to you. I rubbed your back. I lifted you up and bounced you on my lap. I brought you into my bed and tucked your head under my chin, but still you couldn't rest. I fell asleep to your wailing, and it raged like a storm through my dreams. You wouldn't remember that.

  And then that first summer you got quiet, so quiet, like a doll lying there in your crib, and fierce red spots bloomed all over your body. Papa made up the daybed for me in the back room downstairs. He forbade me to go upstairs where you and Mama were for fear of contagion, I know now, although I didn't then.

  I tried to keep to a regular schedule, tried to wash my face and my teeth when I got up in the morning and before I went to bed at night. I wandered around the yard and the barn all day or laid my paper dolls out on the floor. Sometimes the hired girl remembered to make me a sandwich. Otherwise, at dinnertime I stood on a stool to reach the crackers down from the cupboard. I dipped the broken ones, the ones nobody would miss, in a jar of blackberry jam. Morning, noon, and night, I could hear Mama crooning beside your cradle.

  One afternoon I must have fallen asleep because the hot sun slanting across my face woke me. My hair stuck in the jam smeared across my cheek. I felt exhausted, hot and hungry. And something was wrong. I could hear nothing, no sound at all from the room overhead.

  I made my way up the stairs, one silent step at a time, ready to run down the moment I heard Mama's shoes on the landing or Papa's hand at the door. At the top of the stairs, I could see into the bedroom where you lay, all alone and still. I went in. I laid my hand on your tiny brow. It was as hot as a loaf right out of the oven.

  And then Mama came at me. “Don't touch her! Don't you touch her! Get out of here this instant!”

  I hardly recognized her, her hair flying every way, her shirtwaist stained, not the neat, pretty Mama I knew. I snatched my hand away and ran out of the room, down the stairs, out the back door. I ran across the yard and into the woods. The brambles clawed my skin, but I clamped my teeth together and did not cry. The slim branches slapped against my cheeks, but I ran on. I ran until I came to the edge of the lake. The water was flat and green. It lay like a smooth path from where I stood to a burst of trees and rocks at its middle, the island. Out there, the sun fell full on lush leaves, so that the place glowed.

  I wandered along the shore, catching my breath, keeping my eye on the island. Had I known how, I would have thrown myself into the water and swum to it. And then I came upon a boat, a small wooden rowboat, its robin's-egg blue paint nearly rubbed away. Its bow rested in the mud. Its stern floated free, so that even I, with my puny strength, could pry it loose from the shore.

  I climbed in, picked up one of the oars, and used it as a pole to push myself into the deep water. And then I paddled away, away, to my island.

  That was the first time I escaped to that place. I believed everything would be all right there, you see. I thought so then. I thought so later. But later I was wrong.

  “Well, Carl, how was she?” Hilda asked, passing him a bowl of pickled beets.

  Carl shook his head. “Not so good, I think.”

  Hilda nodded. She took a large bite from her buttered bread and then, with exaggerated daintiness, dabbed the crumbs from her lips with a corner of her napkin and smoothed some stray hairs behind her ear. Carl noticed for the first time a coquettish tilt to her head, and he cleared his throat nervously.

  “Ruthie's behaving better, I noticed,” he said.

  “Oh, Ruth and I get along good nowadays, don't we, Ruth?” Hilda reached to pat Ruth's head with a stiff hand, but Ruth ducked her touch. “She's a good little helper,” Hilda went on, pretending she'd only meant to retrieve a few peas that had rolled from the girl's plate onto the oilcloth. “I wouldn't be surprised if she's beginning to think I'm her mama.”

  She gave Carl a sort of dreamy smile that made him push his chair from the table and gulp the remainder of his coffee standing up. “Gotta take a ride into town. Running out of …” but he was out the door before he'd finished the sentence.

  Ruth had stopped breaking things after the night she dropped a pocket watch over the railing at the top of the stairs.

  “This was my papa's,” her father had said to her, stroking the shattered face with his thumb, and then he covered his own face with his hands until Ruth was frightened and climbed onto his knee to pull those hands away.

  She watched Hilda often now, quietly shadowing her at a distance of about five feet and copying her walk, the angle of her head, the weary gesture she used to push the hair off her forehead with the back of her hand. That afternoon she sat on the rug in Hilda's room, observing Hilda at her simple toilet.

  “A little attention to appearance can make a big difference,” Hilda said, eying Ruth's reflection in her mirror, while she patted cream on her flat cheeks with her fingertips. “Here,” she said, taking from a drawer the corset she wore only on Sundays under her church clothes, “are your hands clean? F
eel this.”

  Ruth ran one careful finger along the edge.

  “Real Belgian lace,” Hilda said. “See how fine it is? That's the highest quality you can buy.

  “And this here is to make your face nice,” she explained, taking a tiny pot of rouge and a red lipstick from the back of a drawer.

  Once she'd shown the effect to Ruth and examined it herself in the mirror, she carefully wiped all traces of paint away before leaving the room.

  “I invited some ladies,” Carl said that evening as he stomped his feet on the back porch.

  Hilda, standing guard to be sure he shed his muddy boots, narrowed her eyes and tried to peer behind him, as if she expected half a dozen women to be clustered on the lawn. “What are you talking about?”

  “I thought you might be lonely way out here, so I invited some ladies over to the house next week,” he said, as casually as he could manage. Avoiding her look, he turned to hang his jacket neatly on its hook. “Kind of a party, I guess.”

  “Carl, you didn't!” She blocked his way into the kitchen, her hands on her hips.

  “What? Did I do something wrong? Wouldn't you like to have a little company?”

  “I run all over kingdom come after that child. I break my back over the housework every day. And now you want me to have a party!”

  “I just thought you'd like, you know, to see some people. Your mother had the ladies over every Thursday, I remember.”

  “Wednesday. And what do you expect me to do with these people I hardly know?”

  “I don't know what ladies do.” Carl shrugged. “Play cards, I guess. Drink coffee. Eat cake.”

  “Cake! You want me to bake? And there ain't hardly three matching cups in this house.”

  “Well,” Carl said, slipping past her, “all right. I'll tell them tomorrow never mind coming.”

  “And then they'll think I can't manage company. No, the damage is done.” She sighed heavily and returned to the stove where she vigorously stirred with a wooden spoon a substance that had begun to explode in angry bubbles.