Drowning Ruth

by Christina Schwarz

  Mathilda turned away from him, reaching for one of the books she kept piled near their bed. “You have to understand,” she said. “He's had Frenchie all her life. He knows what's best for her.” The hand she put on his shoulder then to comfort him stung. “There's a lot you can learn from him, you know, if you give him a chance.”

  But Carl knew Mr. Starkey wasn't trying to teach him about horses.

  Carl and Joe finished covering the porch windows and started down the south side of the house. Joe talked off and on about the Almanac's predictions for that summer's weather, about the new variety of cow corn he'd planted, about the way the fish seemed to have moved from the west side of Taylor's Bay to the east that spring.

  By February, the tiny girl Carl had married was transformed into a woman whose every footfall pounded through the house. She bossed him, demanding that he rearrange the furniture, repair a windowframe that allowed a draft, sand a rough spot on the floorboards. Every morning she gave him a list of things to bring back from the farmhouse or from town: blankets and pillows, soap and crackers, knitting needles of various sizes, rugs and books and bottles and wood and wood and wood, always more wood for the stove, until she'd built a stockpile big enough to last three years. He pulled the stuff in a sled over the ice, which looked, under a glaze of snow, as soft and black as the skin of a plum.

  There was very little work to do on the farm. In the mornings Carl cut ice on Taylor's Bay and dragged it up Glacier Road to the icehouse. On clear afternoons Mathilda wanted to skate.

  “It won't be perfect again for years,” she'd said. “I can't let a chance like this go by.”

  And when he'd protested that she couldn't risk falling because of the baby, she'd scoffed. “I'm not going to fall, Carl. I know what I'm doing.”

  He hadn't known how to stop her and, after all, she turned out to be right. She skated carefully, easing her ungainly weight from one leg to the other. He could see why she liked it—on the ice, she could move as gracefully as ever. And if, occasionally, she needed to grip his arm to steady herself, well, he was there, wasn't he? He'd make sure nothing happened to her.

  But later, he hadn't been there. Carl remembered Amanda's impatient words: “She probably thought it was a fine night for skating and fell through. That would be just like her.” Maybe it was true. Maybe Mathilda had been reckless, had gone out skating late in the night because she couldn't sleep and the ice seemed perfect. Maybe that was the end of the story and there was nothing to blame but the treacherous ice.

  Ruth had arrived with the slush of spring. She was light, buoyant even, and yet when the midwife first shifted the tiny bundle into his arms he felt as if he might drop her, so heavy was she with helplessness, with the need to be protected at all costs. He knew he could not let her fall, ever, in any way. He braced himself proudly to bear that enormous weight, but the moment she opened her blue-gray eyes he felt the first gentle bite of doubt. He was overcome with weakness in his arms, and such a weakness in his legs that he had to sit down.

  Mathilda was always asking him to feed the stove. The windows must not be opened. The door must be shut promptly. The house was stifling. He felt sorry for the baby, swaddled so tightly in all those blankets, only her pink face showing. What if she was frightened? What if she was too hot? How would they know?

  One night in the third week of Ruth's life, Mathilda didn't awaken when the baby began to cry. Carl edged out of the bed, happy to let his exhausted wife sleep. He lifted his daughter from her bed and for a minute or so she quietly gummed his shoulder. When she began to whimper, he carried her out of the bedroom and into the front room, his feet freezing on the cold floorboards. He sat and rocked her as her whimpers turned to cries, stood and swayed with her as her cries became howls. He swooped her up and down, his hand firmly cradling her soft skull and weak neck. He jiggled her very gently and danced with her and held her tight against his neck and still she cried, screamed to the limit of every breath as if there were nothing in her but anguish.

  “Stop that! What are you doing to her?” Mathilda set her candle on the table, plucked Ruth from his arms and put her on her breast. The baby didn't stop crying instantly, but soon enough, and Carl was relieved, although also a little angry with her. Was that all Ruth cared about? Something he couldn't give her? Disgusted then with himself for resenting an infant, he solicitously wrapped a blanket around his wife's shoulders and settled a pillow under her elbow.

  “You were just hungry, weren't you?” Mathilda crooned to her baby's feathery scalp. “Daddy didn't understand.”

  She seemed pleased, he thought, to be able to do what he could not.

  “Put more wood in the stove, Carl,” Mathilda said. “It's freezing in here.” He filled the stove, and then he left them, mother and daughter, together and went alone to bed.

  Carl drove more nails in, sealed the top of the shutter, then the bottom. Shadows of round young leaves splattered against the sunny wall. Three sides of the house were closed. The job was nearly finished.

  Here, now, with the cozy house before him, the memory of his wife and baby girl snug inside, he was ashamed of his once fierce desperation to show Mathilda he did not belong to her, not the way she thought. She might have her island, her house, her father's farm, her child, but she didn't have him. Even so, he would never have thought of really leaving her, but going to war wasn't leaving. A man was supposed to be a soldier. A man was supposed to do his duty. And then when he returned, her father would have to stop shaking his head, and things would be different. She would … she would what? What did he want from her?

  She had screamed and fallen to the ground when he told her he'd not taken his exemption for dependents.

  “You've denied Ruth?” she said. “You've denied me?”

  No, he hadn't done that, had he? That wasn't what he'd meant. He'd only meant not to make excuses, not to weasel out like a coward. It wasn't as if Mattie and Ruth truly depended on him.

  She'd ordered him to go back, to tell them it had been a mistake. She had pounded the floor with her fist in an agony of emotion; she had sworn that he would die, that she would die without him. Then she'd told him coldly that he would be sorry. Then she'd announced that she and Ruth would go along, would stay outside his camp, would take a steamer all the way to France. And then she had simply cried.

  He was sorry, but also relieved. He wanted to take it back and tell her that she had no reason to cry, but he also felt calm in the knowledge that it was too late. There was nothing he could do. All he could offer her was: “I'll be back. You'll see. I'll be back before you know it.” He tried to raise her face to kiss her.

  “I may not be here then,” she said, looking at him with hatred.

  Carl's hammer slipped from his fingers and fell to the ground. Until this very moment, he'd forgotten those words. But she hadn't meant them. He knew that. She'd only said them in anger. He bent to retrieve the hammer and wiped the dirt out of the claw. He pounded five nails into the cover Joe was holding over the last window in the final wall.

  “Mama!” The scream was coming from inside the house, now completely boarded shut.

  “Ruth!” How had he forgotten her? Carl thought, running for the door. Joe began to pry open the cover they had just nailed in place.

  “Here I am, Ruth!” Carl threw the door open and a swatch of sunlight ran down the middle of the dark house. “Here I am!”

  He found her, finally, under the bed in the back room that had been his and Mathilda's. “It's all right, sweetheart. Everything's all right,” he said. “We didn't know you were still in here. That's all. Don't worry. Everything will be all right.”

  Unlike Mathilda, Ruth believed those words. She let him comfort her, as he walked through the dim house, checking window locks and closing doors. Back outside, he gently pried her arms loose and lowered her to the ground. In one hand she clutched a green sack, cinched with a leather thong. “Where'd you get this?”

  Mathilda had snatched the bag when
he'd brought it home for Ruth. “Marbles for a baby? Are you crazy? She'll choke.” The thought horrified him, and she softened when she saw the look on his face. “It's all right, Carl. We'll save them for her. She'll love them when she gets older.” And she added—he remembered this now with a pang for her kindness—“I always loved marbles. Ruth is a lucky girl.” Then she tied the thong extra tight and deposited the sack in the bottom of the toy chest.

  Joe, Carl and Ruth came quietly up the path to the farmhouse, but before they reached the door the screen snapped open and smacked against the wall. Amanda stalked across the porch, grabbed Ruth by the shoulders and drew her against her skirts.

  “Hello, Joseph,” she said, nodding curtly at him. “You'll stay to dinner, won't you?” Without waiting for his answer, she looked down at Ruth and shook her lightly. “Where have you been? You're a mess.” She did not look at Carl. She slid the ribbons from the ends of the child's braids, raked her fingers through her hair and then began to rebraid tightly.

  “We went to the water—ouch, it hurts—and it got dark.” “Run along and show Mr. Tully where to wash up for dinner,” Amanda said, giving her a little push between the shoulder blades toward the house.

  The voices rose over the squeaking of the pump handle and the rush of water in the sink.

  “… the lake! To the lake! How could you do such a thing?”

  “What's wrong with taking her there? That's what I'd like to know. For crying out loud, she was born there.”

  “You have no right to go there now.”

  “What do you mean I have no right? It's my house, isn't it?”

  “You wouldn't know anything about it, Carl. You weren't there. You left her.”

  “Oh, that again …”

  “Yes, that again. If you hadn't left your wife and child, Mattie never …”

  Ruth stood in one corner of the doorway, pressed against the screen.

  “Hey, Ruthie, where'd this come from?” Joe lifted the sack Ruth had dropped in the toolbox. “Do you know what I think is in here, Ruthie?” He tossed the sack up and down, catching it in one hand. “I think these are marbles. How about you and me play a game of marbles before dinner, Ruthie? C'mon.” When she didn't move, he went to her, peeled her gently off the screen and drew her into the room. “Do you know how to play marbles, Ruthie? Here, I'll show you.”

  She was interested in the colors of the little clay and glass balls and in their cool smoothness. She wanted to study them, to line them up, maybe to watch them roll, to rub them between her palms, but she tried to hold her fingers the way he showed her, tried to bend her thumb right. Finally he let her just roll them, aim and roll them, so that sometimes they knocked against each other with a satisfying click.

  Ruth

  We walked where Aunt Mandy and I always walk, and then when it came time for let's turn around, better get home, got to get the supper on the table, we didn't stop. We kept going where I didn't know the path went and then there were blue spaces between the trunks and under the branches, and then the water. I remembered the water, a sky on the ground, where you fall and fall and fall and fall. We were at heaven and I was afraid, because that's where you go when you die.

  The water was lumpy, with ripply skin. We went on it in a boat and the shore didn't look anything like the place where we had been standing, even though I knew we had been standing right there.

  And then the boat bumped on another shore.

  “Do you remember this, Ruth?” he asked. “We lived here when you were a tiny baby, Mama and you and I.”

  “I can't remember when I was a baby,” I told him. “I think I was a good baby. I think I didn't cry.”

  “All babies cry, Ruth.”

  “No, I didn't.”

  I knew the smell inside the house: wet wood and mittens and the green smell of the water. It was the smell where my mama was.

  I looked for her. I looked in the secret spaces, under the red blanket, under the beds and in drawers, where her smell was so strong, I thought she must be standing behind me, but she wasn't. I found a mouse house made of scarf and paper, but I didn't find her. Still, I knew Aunt Mandy was wrong. Here was where we should be waiting. Here was where she would come back.

  In the kitchen, I looked in the cupboards. I found a bowl, a cup, and a frying pan, with cottony nests of spider's eggs in the bottom. I stood on a chair to look where the pencils were. I remembered her sharpening with the knife—“There you go, Ruthie. Keep it on the paper. That's a girl.”

  Then half the sun that lay on the kitchen floor disappeared. That was when the pounding started. Pound, pound, pound. Quiet. Pound, pound, pound. The other half of the sun was gone then too.

  In the other rooms there still was light, so I went to the room with the chest where my toys lived.

  There were leaves in the chest and sticks and snail shells and rocks that had been green and red and blue and yellow under the water, but they'd all turned brown in the chest. “Look, here's a pretty one,” she said. She was good at finding the pretty ones and she gave them all to me.

  The pounding came again. Pound, pound, pound. Quiet. Pound, pound, pound. Quiet.

  Mama's skates were in the chest. I felt the soft inside where her feet went in, but I remembered about the shiny part. “Never touch,” she said. She put wooden sticks over the silver.

  The little green sack was in the chest. “For when you're older,” she said. Five is older.

  There were stones in the sack. You could tell by how heavy it was, by how it clicked and clacked when you moved it. They were pretty ones, I bet. The string was tight. She could have got it undone or even Aunt Mandy, but I couldn't.

  I took the sack to Mama's room and sat on the green rug beside the bed where we said, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” I used my teeth. I have good teeth. One of them is gray from when I fell down the stairs, but it works just like the white ones. The string was leather. It tasted nice and felt good in my mouth. I worked on it. I'm a good worker, that's what Aunt Mandy says. I worked on it until I got it loose.

  The stones inside were pretty. Some of them were soft red-brown, like flowerpots, but the best ones were jewels, colors like stick candy. All of them were perfectly round. They rolled when I set them on the floor. They rolled into the grooves of the braid on the rug and two of them, a lemon and a cinnamon, rolled under the bed.

  Under the bed was where to go the day the noises were scary. “Go to your room,” Mama said, but I didn't want to go. They were angry. They scolded me. “Go away now, Ruthie,” they said. But I went under the bed in the dark and low. Aunt Mandy bent down. “Here, now. See? Shush, now, Aunt Mandy's got candy.” I didn't want candy. I wanted to stay, but Mama said no. “Go to your room. There's nothing to be scared of.” But I could see that wasn't true.

  Under the bed is a good place to hide when you hear the screaming, when you hear the breathing, when you hear the “God, oh, God, oh, God.”

  In the dark and low, on the now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep, I shush and suck and suck. I suck my candy sharp as a needle. I lay me down to sleep and then I wake. Still there are the noises. They won't stop making the noises. I hold my hands over my ears, but still they won't stop. Back and forth go Mama's shoes. Back and forth, until I'm tired, until the baby cries, and then it's quiet.

  I put the stones in the bag and then there was the pounding, right over my head. And then all the light went away. It was dark as night, dark as the water when I couldn't get up.

  “Mama!” I screamed. “Mama!” I found where she was. But she wasn't there.

  And then he came. He lifted me up and carried me into the sun and back to the water where I didn't cry. I'm sure I didn't cry.

  Amanda

  Once Mattie and Ruth and I had settled on the island, whenever I wasn't sleeping like a dead woman, I was a virtual whirlwind, I'll say that for myself. All through that April and May and into June, I pushed my trouble out of my mind and put the island in order. I tilled the garden and planted the see
ds along the rows Ruth and I lined up with string. I made out the grocery lists and collected the deliveries from the locker, even the chunks of ice for the icebox. They were heavy, but I dragged them up the hill on a blanket. I washed Ruth's pinafores and combed her hair and taught her how to count to twenty and saw that she kept her shoes on and stayed well back from the water. Mostly, I watched while she played her endless games to make sure that the stones and twigs stayed out of her eyes, her dolls stayed decently dressed and her face stayed reasonably clean.

  Mathilda did all these things, too, of course, but she did them less seriously and with less zeal. She was always wandering off to write a letter to Carl or to stick her nose in one of the books with which she'd weighted our sled. Now that the weather was warm, often she'd let Ruthie play right at the edge of the water while she read, and I worried that she wouldn't notice the difference between the plop of Ruth's pebbles and the splash of the child herself falling in.

  One night, when the moon was so bright that it made a ghostly day, I awoke to the sound of splashing and Ruth's squeals. Terrified, I rushed down to the shore. Mathilda was holding Ruth by the arms and spinning her around as fast as she could, dragging the little girl through the water, while the moonlight licked the waves around them like a flame.

  “Stop that! Stop that right now!” I stamped my foot.

  Mathilda stopped spinning and turned to face me, drawing Ruth against her body as she did so, her arms wrapped around the child's middle, so that Ruth's feet dangled, dripping over the water. Ruth wasn't big enough, though, to cover Mathilda's nakedness. I was shocked—the two of them there like that, without a stitch on, where anyone could see. I couldn't think where to put my eyes. I turned and hurried back to the house and felt my way down the dark hall to my room.

  I lay on my bed, my hands pressed one over the other on my chest to calm my racing heart. Then I let my hands slide down. I let myself feel through the thin cotton of my nightgown the part that had begun to swell like bread dough. I tried, as I had for weeks now, to push it down, but it was solid—it would not budge. And then, inside of me, it fluttered.