by Lynn Pruett
Praise for Ruby River:
“Vivid with smells of Southern cooking and the strong backwoods flavor of Alabama … Lynn Pruett paints a searing description of the social and religious consequences suffered by a family when the restrictive conventions of small-town behavior are disobeyed. Through compassion, humor, and a keen sense of observation, Pruett reinforces the power of personal forgiveness over religious redemption… . Although Pruett’s setting is small-town life in Southern Alabama, her novel’s scope is wide and profound.”
—Ariel Vorhoff, The Double Dealer Redux
“Here’s a first novel in the grand tradition of southern women writers… . Pruett sees her native South through clear, unsentimental, but never malicious eyes. Even her most flawed characters have redeeming features. Even her most admirable characters are full of shortcomings … all of [them] are interesting enough for their own book.”
—Judy Tucker, Planet Weekly
“Lynn Pruett provides, by turns, a sensual, humorous, heart-breaking and uplifting look at life in a small Alabama town.”
—Dawn Mosher, The New Haven Advocate
“Engaging … The novel elicits compassion and righteous chagrin. Rage, malice, and carnal injustice are offset with moments of poignancy and delicious anticipation… . Pruett peels off the mask of fallacies to lay before us the naked face of hypocrisy and the soiled skin of religious pomposity … this story lingers long after the final page is turned.”
—Lynne Zielinski, The Huntsville Times (Alabama)
“Ruby River hosts a large rollicking cast of wild characters—lustful, tender, lovesick, and irrepressible. The plot is completely unpredictable, and Pruett is a smart, wily guide who proves that there’s nothing sleepy about this small southern town.”
—Julianna Baggott, author of Girl Talk
“A triumph … Ruby River treats us all to the avarice and treachery we could possible want in a gossipy, tradition-bound Southern town … each of Pruett’s characters is radiantly eclectic, full of little shockers to ensure things are complicated. Her writing is superb.”
—Lucie Macdonald, The Lexington Herald-Leader
“[A] complex and beautifully written novel … Lynn Pruett expertly guides the willing reader through the sticky, ion-charged Alabama swelter caused by drought before deluge.”
—Lorraine Lopez, Nashville Tennessean
“Snappy, smart writing, and memorable characters distinguish Pruett’s debut.”
—Kristine Huntley, Booklist
“Ruby River exposes that slippery tightrope of Southern life—everybody always teetering between sin and salvation. Lynn Pruett makes us laugh and love the struggle. Her Alabama characters entice and outrage—but more importantly, they endure… . Ruby River will keep you turning the pages and savoring sentences. It has the sensitivity and surprise of a truly fine piece of fiction.”
—Nanci Kincaid, author of Verbena and Balls: A Novel
“Lynn Pruett’s writing can break your heart and make you laugh within the same carefully structured sentence. This novel pulls off that nearly impossible feat of being both wonderfully poetic and wildly entertaining.”
—Silas House, author of A Parchment of Leaves
“Pruett writes evocatively, even poetically, of the South, fully drawing characters whose varied points of view are presented in chapters bearing their names. Her amusing descriptions offer lovely surprises and good reading… . Highly recommended.”
—Sheila Riley, Library Journal
RUBY
RIVER
Lynn Pruett
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2002 by Lynn Pruett
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
Lyrics to “Hi-De-Ho Baby Mine” written by Alton Delmore, copyright © 1963 by American Music, Inc., reprinted by permission of Sherry Bond and Debby Delmore.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following magazines
in which sections of this novel first appeared: Limestone: “Another Kiss”;
and The Louisville Review: “Breathing in Darkness.”
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pruett, Lynn.
Ruby River / Lynn Pruett.—1st ed.
p. cm.
e-Book ISBN 978-0-8021-9245-5
1. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Women—Alabama—Fiction. 3. Single
mothers—Fiction. 4. Truck stops—Fiction. 5. Alabama—Fiction. 6. Widows—Fiction.
7. Clergy—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.R585 R83 2002
813’.54—dc21 2002021579
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
www.groveatlantic.com
For my great-aunt
Frances Fricia Ross of Dexter, Kentucky,
lifelong reader and inspiration
Dip him in the river who loves water.
—William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
—the wild dark eyes like rubies in the fire.
—Thomas Rabbitt, Abandoned Country
I
THE LADIES OF THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY RESURRECTION
The ladies of the church often noted that Hattie Bohannon appeared taller than she really was. They regretted that she took a tan well and looked fashionable, while most women her age, raised on the class/color quotient, had shied from the sun to maintain their perch above the rising tide of social democracy. However, current fashion equated tans with health and youth. So these same women drove first to the tanning salon on the town square, where they burned for $15 an hour, and then trudged to a pink gym twice a week so they could jiggle in pastel sweatsuits, like fruit-and-butterscotch swirl puddings, in front of a huge mirror. They drew the line at the sauna. Diseases lurked there.
What disturbed them even more about Hattie Bohannon was her ease in handling orphanhood, widowhood, and de facto single parenthood. Hattie had no breakdowns or depressions or weight gains or drug dependencies. Equally disturbing was her smooth clear skin that hinted of expensive treatments, old Atlanta, and inner peace. There was no Christian way not to admire her.
She was friendly and moral—the kind of woman you could trust with your husband—but come to think of it, that was a little peculiar. Did she think she was too good for their husbands? Impossible. She was from Brentone, the resort town on the other side of the mountain, where questionable things went on. Northerners vacationed there, demanding foods with foreign names. They spent the evenings splashing nude (it was reported) in the natural springs. As a girl, Hattie Dameron had waitressed at the resort and snagged Oakley Bohannon, a man twice her age, for a husband.
In truth, the Resurrection ladies claimed they rarely thought of her, except on the few occasions when they emerged from aerobics, sapped and glowing, and spotted her coming from the bank, dry in a cotton print dress, another transaction mastered and satisfaction reflected in her calm smile. That woman could flatter a pair of ove
ralls, they’d think, and wonder what they were doing wrong—not that they’d be caught dead in overalls.
They watched her new truck-stop venture with more attention. Even went up there and ate and were surprised that the grubs—truckers—it was designed for had not made the place grubby. It was okay for a cheap meal, say on a Wednesday night before church, but not the place to go for a nice dinner out.
This gossip that clogged the telephone wires at the Maridoches exchange drove Jewell Miller, telephone operator and police dispatcher, veteran of World War II, absolutely mad. Was this the democracy she had fought for in the Women’s Army Corps? Was this why she had lost her left leg below the knee? More than once she’d misconnected parties only to have the conversations flow smoothly into one another without a pause for subject-verb agreement.
HATTIE BOHANNON
In the blue light of the dawn, Hattie Bohannon held her hand out to feel the air. She stood in shadow on her porch and leaned over the rail, testing the darkness. In it she smelled heat, the tips of summer’s fingers creeping into the valley. From now on, whatever drifted into Maridoches would wallow there until football season began.
Hattie licked her lips. It would be her truck stop’s first summer. Fifty yards below her house it gleamed, an island of light in the Ruby River Valley. She had created a world bigger than the dark mountains outlined across the highway, a world as vast as the brightening sky. Seeds planted in distant soils, in arid climates and in cold ones, grew into vegetables and grains, were harvested, packed, and sent in cool trucks to her address, where they nourished thousands of customers, who, in her mind’s eye, became a sea of different-colored bill caps bent over Coca-Colas. Mississippi catfish slinking along muddy river bottoms, Iowa beef grazing dumbly near corrugated steel sheds, Florida oranges fluorescent against their green foliage, crisp apples from Delaware, Kentucky raspberries so lusciously red she always wanted to plunge her hands into the containers. Her heart beat with awe at the world she had spun around her.
She tested the cup of coffee cooling on the rail. Mornings like this made her miss Oakley. The big sign over his former fields, Bohannon’s, would have pleased him. But this was not his world anymore. She’d razed his tobacco barn to make room for the truck stop. The dark wood had heaved and groaned before collapsing into the sweetest-smelling lumber she’d ever known. She was glad he’d been in Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., the last four years, spared the upheaval of the interstate. But he’d always imagined coming back home. She sighed. A year after his death, his body was stuck in beaurocratic limbo. The good people at Walter Reed had lost his remains. She drained her coffee and went inside to rouse her daughters.
When she came out, dressed in her uniform, ready to lead her parade of girls to work, she saw a tractor trailer, sporting a logo of vegetables doing the can-can, park behind the truck stop. Hattie leapt off the porch and ran down the driveway past the bank of wild roses, scattering gravel, until her sneakers smacked the flat blacktop parking lot. As the truck’s accordion back door squealed open, she picked up her pace. She flung herself across the delivery entrance. Her breath was hot.
A trucker in wide-hipped jeans backed toward her, balancing a box in his arms.
“Open that box,” she said. A broom leaned against the wall, just out of reach.
He swung around and stepped toward her. Two drops of sweat peered, like the eyes of a field mouse, out of his mustache. She didn’t recognize him—probably an independent, gotten cheap. His box of Florida Sun-Ripened Tomatoes rested in his arms just inches from her nose. Flattened against the closed door, she looked beyond him into the yawning trailer full of gassed vegetables. Once he got the box into the truck stop, she had to accept this delivery.
“Open it.” A small crowd, witnesses, had come out of the restaurant. She pushed the box back at him.
He staggered. “Lady, I’m not going to unload every tomato by hand.”
“Open the box.”
The box slid down to the shimmering pavement. He ripped the cardboard and, with a grin, raised a pink tomato above his head. The crowd booed. He hitched his pants, paused, hitched them again, then strutted toward the loaded dolly.
“Don’t unload another one of those things.” Hattie picked up the broom and stepped into the lot. She tossed the firm tomato high above the truck, a pink ball brilliant against the blue sky. As it fell, she swung. A solid hit on the broom straw. The tomato careened off the shiny truck, barely missing the trucker’s head, and landed in the parking lot.
Gee Sullivan, a regular customer who was half deaf, hollered, “It ain’t even split.”
“Hit another one, Hattie, to make sure,” said Haw, Gee’s twin.
She rested the broom against the wall and waved the customers away. “I got business to take care of.” Not a bad swing for a forty-two-year-old, she thought. She yelled to the trucker, who shoved the box with his foot. “I won’t buy shoddy produce. This is the third shipment in a row of substandard vegetables. Tell Mr. Ranford I wouldn’t take them.”
“I’ll save him some trouble. This is the last delivery you’ll see for a while,” said the trucker.
Hattie turned on her heel and strode into her restaurant, where the steady sound of silverware and the intermittent flutter of napkins was all the applause she needed. The place was clean and comfortable. She conceded one small aisle to the right of the cashier for chips, candy, cigarettes, and cold drinks. A red arrow glued to the cash register directed customers down the long counter that swept into a curve, opening up a large room lined with padded booths and private phones, the preference of truckers and travelers. In the center of the room, beneath a shower of country songs, round tables spun with local romance.
The decor did not look like it belonged in a truck stop. Hattie refused the deer heads, stuffed fish, and presidents’ portraits suggested by Kenny Ranford’s salesman. She believed people wanted to eat in comfort without something dead looking at them. She painted the walls sky blue, chose dark blue seat covers, and placed seasonal flowers in thin juice glasses on the tables.
Weaving through the breakfast crowd, Hattie smiled as she recalled her interview with Kenny Ranford two years ago. He’d said, “You are doing this truck-stop thing because you have no other way to make a living. You are a desperate woman.”
Desperate as Hank Aaron, she thought. Desperate as Babe Ruth. In her office, she opened the ledger to the savings account and felt a quick rush of pleasure. The balance always gave her a lift, not that she had extravagant plans for the profits she made. Only to send Heather, who was seven, to college when the time came. The other girls, Connie at sixteen, Darla, eighteen, and Jessamine, twenty-one, were too old to benefit from a savings plan. They thought she ought to get a new car. She had no use for a new car. True, Oakley’s Jetstar 88 was an antique, having passed its twentieth birthday. But it was a large steel machine and it gave her a tremendous sense of security as she drove on the highway. Let those expensive toys cruise by but they’d better not hit her. The Jetstar would squash them flat. No, she’d tell her girls, I don’t need a new car. This one is in prime condition. No sense replacing steel with fiberglass. Kenny Ranford wanted her to be a showy success. He’d cook up something like a gold Cadillac with a vanity plate proclaiming eats.
She picked up the mail, half sorted. A pink envelope from North Carolina topped the stack. Inside was a matchbook. Printed in red and black letters, its cover read: FULL-COLOR PHOTOS OF BEAUTIFUL MODELS ON ADHESIVE-BACKED DECALS. Its small print said, Apply to automobile dash or locker door or carry in wallet. She unfolded the matchbook. A naked woman stretched diagonally across the yellow one-by-one inch square. Her glow-in-the-dark red mouth was open, her eyes shut, one hand on a bent knee, the other cupping her thigh underneath her very white buttocks. She was wearing short black heels. The photo was out of focus. Dixie Nudes, indeed.
Hattie threw it in the trash. She was amazed by the amount of creativity that went into the advertisement of condoms. Scented
ones she could not fathom. If you had to scent the condom, you shouldn’t be near the man who needed it. Naturally, Kenny Ranford had told her nothing about the disgusting machines that could junk up her rest rooms if she let them. Instead, he delighted in annoying her and began their conversations with his private secret of success. “I offer truck-stop franchises to single mothers. Divorced women. I do not mean the women with gold bracelets on their arms and booze on their breath. I mean women who fall into bed every night and sing hallelujah for the soft cushion of their pillows.”
She thought of Kenny’s saying on nights when she found the softness of the pillow too oppressively nonhuman. Then she’d get furious. If the Veterans Administration returned Oakley’s body, she could forge a new social life. With, perhaps, the sheriff? She flushed. He was due at ten o’clock with his squad for breakfast.
“I am not desperate,” she announced to herself. Adversity was an old defeated friend, and Hattie, who believed she operated best under duress, looked forward to beating the business odds in the same foolish perverse way she had looked forward to the labor and delivery of her first child.
JESSAMINE BOHANNON
The red-orange soup puckered then popped loud kisses as I bent over the cauldron, a two-gallon can of kidney beans digging into my hip. If I hurried the simmer, I could add cayenne before Gert, the day cook, returned with the meat for her special spaghetti sauce. Even though I was the kitchen manager at the truck stop, she and I fought all the time over the recipes. Gert thought there were three food groups: sugar, salt, and oil. If I cooked up a vegetable, she slipped a slab of bacon into the pot. I preferred food to taste like itself.
I tipped the can and stirred. The beans settled like silt. Strips of jalapeños, seeds intact, and sliced red onions bobbed in the thickening stew. I picked up the pepper sauce and shook it into the pot. That would give truckers a wake-up call before they hit the road.
Gert said that’s not our job. They got drugs for that.
