Ruby River

by Lynn Pruett

  I parked next to Jessamine’s VW on the square. She jumped out in the rain, opened the door, and slid next to Heather. She looked great: her makeup was done and her hair was very blond on the dark day. “Where are the boots?” she asked.

  I gave her Darla’s. “Shit,” she said. Then, “Oh, well.” She slid her stockinged feet into the army surplus boots, the kind of thing Darla loved, and told us to follow her. We ran in a pack of yellow raincoats up the gray slippery steps of the courthouse. Inside, it was cool and dark and carpeted. I followed Jessamine to the office of the Justice of the Peace.

  If I’d known she was getting married, I would have worn something other than my jean shorts and tube top, but—hey, what could I do? At least I was not a bride wearing combat boots to my own ­wedding.

  When it was determined that I was sixteen and could not sign as a witness, the sheriff called Heloise, his secretary, downstairs to stand up for them. She was what I expected: a wrinkly lady wearing lipstick in a red shade that was popular before guitars were electric, someone who’d swear the sheriff didn’t smoke even if she found his cigarettes in the coffee machine. Poor Jessamine, I thought. Where was she going in her new life?

  Towering above Jessamine and Paul, the Justice of the Peace asked for objections. I resisted the urge to shout the list of very reasonable objections that had appeared like the Ten Commandments in my head. Paul Dodd is a prick, for one. Mama would go to jail for murder, number two, probably on two counts. I looked at Heather and thought, Maybe three counts if she included me as well. Paul Dodd is so old. How could Jessamine do anything with him, like kiss that hard-ass mouth or let those wormy fingers anywhere close to—well.

  Jessamine’s dress was white, sleeveless, its sash light blue. Paul Dodd wore his khaki uniform, fresh-pressed, his boots blacked and shiny. It was like witnessing the wedding of a war bride. When he turned to kiss her, his gun butted her stomach and she flinched.

  Heather, who had spent the ceremony swaying from one foot to the other, said, “Your gun’s hurting her, Sheriff Paul.”

  He moved the holster around to his back. “Hold tight till I give my wife a wedding kiss.”

  He made an enormous smacking noise that caused me to blush.

  “Girls,” said Heloise to Heather and me, “look what I brought.” She opened a sack. Inside were tiny rice bags made of pink, yellow, green, and purple pastel net. She hurried us up the stairs and back to the entrance.

  We stepped through the groaning metal doors into the sunshine. Blinded and expecting rain, I didn’t notice the large crowd lining the courthouse sidewalk.

  “Move, please,” said Heloise, tugging on my arm. “The photographer needs a clear shot of Sheriff Dodd and his wife.”

  “What photographer?” I said. The sister of the bride wore a tube top and short shorts and carried a yellow raincoat. No wonder maniac football players can’t keep their hands to themselves.

  “The one from the Ledger. It’s not every day the Sheriff gets married.” Heloise pointed and flashed a grin at a man with a bazooka-type lens before pulling me out of the way. She hustled down the steps, insisting people take a rice bag.

  Catcalls came from the barred cell windows in the basement of the courthouse. I ignored them. Heather stayed up on the top step, where it was drier. I guess she was dressed fine enough for Heloise, but then, Heather always wore dresses. Most of the crowd on the steps were women wearing bold designs. The mix of diagonals and dots, stripes and florals, all in primary colors made me feel like I was on the Ferris wheel at night during a firecracker display. Then, like I’d been jerked to a stop, I realized they were Paul Dodd’s former women, witnessing their loss. They were the secretaries and the clerks, the saleswomen and the tellers, all of whom worked less than a minute from the sheriff’s office.

  Jessamine and Paul came out. Jessamine was so right in simple white and blue; she wasn’t trying too hard. She was just beautiful. But still, she should have gotten married in the church. After the ceremony, we should all be going to a fresh-mown field where long tables in red-checked tablecloths offered good country cooking.

  Jessamine and Paul Dodd ran through the rice to his patrol car. Jessamine, in her stocking feet, scooched inside the car, the red light rotating above her head.

  The courthouse clock chimed. Polka dots and stripes disappeared into the numerous glass doors reflecting the square. The siren screaming, Paul and Jessamine circled the courthouse three times.

  Heather chased tumbling bits of pink net while I gathered up the pastel ribbons scattered across the steps. These seemed so sad a memento of a wedding, just ribbon and net. Maybe I could make a picture frame out of them—or a G-string. Shouts from the underground prisoners kept coming at me.

  “All right!” I yelled in the direction of the barred window. I marched over to the basement panes and let out a torrent of the ugliest words I had ever strung together.

  V

  GERT GEURIN

  God answered our prayers for rain with a mighty downpour that lasted the whole week after Jessamine got married. It could have been Miz Bohannon crying, is what I thought, when I heard the news of the wedding: all them tears from Heaven. Red mud washed up on every­body’s shoes. We looked like we’d walked through blood, all of us beings in Maridoches.

  The downpour kept the sensible at home. Only travelers and truckers sloshed into the truck stop. Even the old fools, Gee and Haw, knew enough to stay out of the rain. In the weeks following, God rearranged the weather patterns of the earth, prayer is so mighty. Ever’ afternoon in July, it rained short and sweet, like He’d moved the tropics to the mountains. There was no heat relief from the rain of July, but the ornery Alabama crops revived. Thank the good great Lord. He got me some fleshy produce to work my culinary wonders on.

  As usual, God’s way was a mystery to me, as far as how things were working out. I was mighty pleased that Jessamine was touched by the Spirit and joined the church. I had completed my mission with her. Even though she absconded with the sheriff right afterwards, at least she was saved.

  Now the hussy, Ash Lee, though, she was still unredeemed, and I fixed my eye upon her. It took me awhile to catch her because I was frantically trying to plan a fish fry. Kenny Ranford told Miz Bohannon she needed an event to surge sales, since hers had dipped after the protest. She explained that most businesses don’t last out two years so this summer was real important to our survival. That was troubling my mind when Ash Lee come in one night to eat—breakfast at 11 P.M. I said to her, “You’re not in the family way, are you?”

  She had plumped out some in her legs and arms and face, since she’d been scarfing down my cooking.

  “No, I need some more film,” she said, eating french fries with her fingers.

  “I haven’t seen a picture at all,” I said. “Why you be needing more film?”

  She shifted her eyes to the two pieces of fried chicken on her plate as if deciding whether I’d snatch the food back when her answer came. “I tried the camera out on some truckers, just to practice for when a church man came, and”—she slurped her Coke—“they liked the pictures so much, they bought them from me. And soon, they all wanted a picture of me on ’em, so I made some money and ran out of film.”

  “That is not what that camera is for!” I shouted. Something of mine used for smut and profit. I would trash that camera’s eye when I got it back.

  “I need more film,” she said. “Those men in that church book, I seen them before. They’ll get the itch sooner than later.”

  “Well,” I said, “you know you could just come to church with me. Jessamine Bohannon was saved.”

  Ash Lee said, “Saved from what? Not heartache, that’s for sure.” The chicken crunched in her teeth and she swallowed noisily. “I wasn’t surprised she run off with the sheriff, seeing how they was carrying on up at Bigbees awhile back.”

  “The sheriff and Jessamine? You lie.”

  “Naw,” said Ash Lee. “She got drunk and was dirty dancing h
im, and he made me drive her home. I ain’t surprised they run off, I’m just surprised he married her. He ain’t the marrying kind.”

  “Shows what you know,” I said.

  “To each his own,” she said. “I’m moving to Tuscaloosa myself.”

  “What in tarnation for?” I said, but I was happy with this bit of news. The Lord would move her away from here and Miz Bohannon could hold her head high without worrying that someone would cast rotten tomatoes at it.

  “Kyle wants me to get an apartment.”

  “Don’t let that sod think he’s going to make money off your labor,” I said, suddenly fearing that scads of college boys would be seeking her out. Poor child would suffer pestilence and disease. I had to move fast to bring her into the fold.

  “No,” she said angrily, “to be his girlfriend. He wants a house with columns and skylights, something bigger and finer than a Jim Walter home. Ain’t nobody down there gonna know who I am.”

  “When is this going to come about? He’s already left for fall practice,” I said.

  “I’m saving my money and he’s saving his. He sold his car, the Gran Torino; now he’s driving the loaner, a black convertible. I’m moving down at Christmas.”

  So I had a few more months to work God’s word on her. She’d have a new bright beginning. Tuscaloosa was her glory road.

  I got her more film for the church men. “Why those truckers want a picture of you?” I asked her, her with her buck teeth and that clacking blue bracelet.

  “In my bidness, you ain’t got to be pretty, just open-minded,” said Ash Lee.

  DARLA BOHANNON

  In June it was too dry to burn Daddy’s barn wood. The grass might catch and the house and the truck stop and even the side of the mountain. Then in July it rained every day, soaking the boards so they’d need to air. It never got to where we could burn them and that is what Mama wanted, the way we should pay our last respects: with a bonfire at night, the air tobacco-tinged because Daddy was. We could cry in the dark and no one would be embarrassed, especially not Mama. We could sing and tell stories about Daddy and drink Mountain Dew in his honor. That was what I had planned and Mama approved, but the sky did not cooperate.

  Heather and I tested the boards every day. “Damp or crisp?” I asked her.

  We carried the crisp ones into the shed and repiled the damp ones, turning the darkest to the sun. I told Heather about fire-curing tobacco in Daddy’s barn. How I sat with him when I was her age and kept the low fire going in a trench, while above us the tobacco sticks heavy with leaves cured in the rafters. I showed Heather how to squat flat-footed like Daddy and I used to as we sipped thermoses of ice water and tended the fire. He’ll always be with you whenever you smell this odor, I told her, lifting a board to her nose.

  My fingers came away black on the tips and I was reminded of Jewell Miller and the ashes. I breathed out slowly, thinking as I held the old board that she missed Daddy terribly or else she wouldn’t have gone crazy trying to keep him. I tried to hate her but I kept seeing her as pathetic. If she hadn’t made me taste the ashes, I would be in the Army right now. I felt like Daddy was there with me. I knew he would want me to treat Jewell right.

  From watching this family I’ve learned that love is a lot like the Ruby River—sometimes it runs straight and true but sometimes it shoots out in a new direction, and when it does you best just ride it. That’s what Daddy always said, “You best just ride it.”

  I couldn’t ask Jewell to our family memorial service. So I picked out several crisp planks and thought she could make a new bookcase from them. I’d take them to her apartment. She’d have a memento too.

  When finally the rains stopped coming every afternoon, it was August. The wood dried out, but there was the still problem of ­inviting Jessamine and Sheriff Dodd to Daddy’s ceremony, which Mama could not do. It seemed Daddy would always be with us, waiting for a proper acknowledgment, stuck in a purgatory of our minds and memories.

  HATTIE BOHANNON

  Troy Clyde sat at a stool at the truck-stop counter, reading the newspaper, waiting on the rain to quit. Hattie manned the cash register.

  “If you keep that anger all wrought up inside you, ain’t no room for nothing else,” said Troy Clyde. “I learned that a long time ago, with Darryl’s mama. It was like I had a iron lung instead of a heart, heavy it was, like to dragged me under the ground. It was like I was walking with my ankles just breaking the soil, and every next step I’d sink back under again. Heaviness didn’t suit me, and it don’t suit you neither.”

  She looked at him, her eyes wild and blue. “I like feeling angry.”

  He turned back to his reading material. “You know what makes me angry,” he said, “it’s this newspaper. Every time I read it I start to sneeze.” He balled it up. “They’re using a different kind of ink, even though they’ll deny it when you call them up to complain about it.”

  “Nice try,” said Hattie, as she took the wad from him. “I already saw their picture.” She smoothed out the crushed photo of Jessamine and Paul descending the courthouse steps, Heather behind them, floating, it appeared, like a small cupid. “How can he just up and marry her, of all the women in Maridoches!”

  “He married her ’cause he couldn’t have you and she’s the closest thing.”

  “She’s not the closest thing.” Hattie balled the paper up and tossed it into the trash can behind the counter. “She’s not like me at all.”

  “Well, I was talking about him,” said Troy Clyde. “Remember back when I was all hot-to-trot with Maybelline McCormack and she dumped me, and then I ran to her sister Jodine and married her up real quick? If it weren’t for Cher and Greg Allman beating us out by one day, me and Jodine would have had the shortest marriage on record. ’Course, me and Jodine got twins out of it; Cher and Greg Allman only got one little’un. Anyway, Jodine was the closest thing to Maybelline, but she wasn’t Maybelline.”

  “Are you saying Jessamine will be back?” This thought panicked her. There could be no reconciliation, no homecoming. “I am afraid the next time I see Paul Dodd, I will pound his head until his neck collapses and then grind his bones under the tires of an eighteen-wheeler,” she said. Her eyes were far away and her voice was distant too.

  “Lord, sister,” said Troy Clyde, “you need a man for a whipping boy more’n ever. I better just light out till another day comes.”

  “Don’t go,” she said. “Troy Clyde, don’t go.”

  “You want me to take care of the sheriff for you?”

  “No,” she said. “No. I want you to take care of me.”

  “All right,” said Troy Clyde, “but I’m going to get some pancakes.”

  A few truck drivers came up and paid their bills. She didn’t even notice them—what they were wearing, which state their accents had come from.

  Troy Clyde came out of the kitchen with a stack of pancakes tall as a top hat. “Pays to know the cook,” he said, as he took out his hunting knife and sliced the stack into quarters. Strands of syrup as long as spaghetti noodles oozed down the sides. “What you need is a hobby,” said Troy Clyde. “Or something to take your mind off yourself, like fishing.”

  “How does sitting in a boat for hours take your mind off yourself?” she said.

  “Well, go out on my raft and just float along under the sky, then,” said Troy Clyde. “It’s what I do when I’m in the doghouse. I seen a cloud rotate once. Now that is a rare sight, rarer than a comet that comes around every eighty-five years.”

  “Troy Clyde, watching clouds do flips will not help me in the least.”

  “Well, you ought to do something for that briny tongue.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll stay home.”

  “Just don’t wallow in it.”

  “I don’t wallow.”

  “That’s my girl.” Troy Clyde punched her shoulder as he left, an empty pool of syrup on his plate.

  She did not understand how, when she needed sleep more than anything else, she could
not do it. Her nights were a torment of displaced rage and ridiculousness. It was utterly peculiar to be herself, to follow the turns of her mind.

  Try as she might, she could not keep her thoughts off Jessamine and Paul cavorting through the night hours of their honeymoon week while she roamed her dark kitchen. She opened the refrigerator, its light a shock to her mole eyes. Maybe she should bake them a cake. Aha, it was her Betty Crocker personality tonight, thought Hattie, powerless to combat it. They hadn’t had any kind of real celebration, thought Betty/Hattie. She counted her eggs. Tomorrow she would arrive at their kitchen door, bearing a flat yellow cake spread with shaved coconut and white icing, and Jessamine, already awake, would say, “It’s just the thing. Our cupboard was bare. We needed something to go with our coffee.” Little bluebirds would tweet. Then Paul would come in, buck naked, see Hattie, and flee from the room. Hattie shut the refrigerator door.

  When her eyes readjusted to the dark, she spied the old cutting board, a wedding present from Oakley’s mother. Hattie ran her hands across its rough surface. Now it was more a cradle than a board, with one corner curving upward, a testament to its age. It was heavy, a two-foot slab of hickory one inch thick. All her friends and aunts and female cousins had given her heavy things for wedding presents—an iron skillet, a butcher knife, a meat tenderizer—no lace doilies or tablecloths or embroidered napkins, nothing to make her kitchen pretty. She figured that out later when tales of marital strife echoed about the mountain. Ruth Hiler brained Ezra with her rolling pin after he traded her Singer sewing machine for a tractor wheel. Hattie had never had to do that with Oakley, but a strong clobber on the head was what Paul Dodd needed.

  Good. Molly Hatchett had replaced Betty Crocker. This felt more like it. She hefted the cutting board. A useful wedding present with a tradition. It was better than a cake that would crust over and make bird food. A light rain pattered against the window. Perhaps this was the end of the strange summer weather. Hattie opened the back door and sniffed, a wash of oak and pine. The rain came down heavy. Hattie thought of the stuffed moose head she’d seen lashed to a Trukbox in the back of a pickup as she’d left work. Now the trophy would be pelted with rain, riding on to West Georgia, defiance prickling his antlers. Behind the truck Hattie imagined a man driving a car, its windshield wipers whipping through sheets of water, then a bolt of lightning illuminating the outraged moose head, the terror of its godlike face driving the poor soul off the cliff into the Chatta­hoochee River. It was nice to be inside when it rained.