Ruby River

by Lynn Pruett

  But who would come work at a place where there was perceived prostitution? No one, she thought. I can hire no one. It would be Gert and herself and Rudy the night cook.

  I can quit this business. She watched the lights of heaven clear and unblinking above her. I can. I can sell the truck stop and walk away. Oakley left, my mother, my father. I can too. Maybe there is virtue in change.

  Why should I be the one who must live by the rules? The good mother, the celibate widow, the one who overcame the new business odds? Did I make the truck-stop world? Or was I merely the support, the tent pole holding up the sky? I’d rather lie here on the ground and see the sky stretch out by itself. It’s doing fine without me.

  She sat up and inhaled air thick as a warm wrap. Her heart beat a little faster. How embraced she felt by the humidity as she stood up and stepped through the grasses. How pretty the black sky was, the white trunks of sycamores, the shadowy outlines of water oaks. When she got to the river, she slid down the bank and stood at the edge of the dock, took off her shoes, then lowered herself into the cool water. She ducked below the surface and came up doing the breast stroke. The river held her, a natural element of love.

  REVEREND MARTIN PETERSON

  After a series of gnashingly unsatisfactory prayers, Martin acknowledged his bared soul. He’d seek out the prostitute, sin, and afterwards rededicate his life at the river baptism, which would require standing in deep water, a perfect penance. If Stelle learned of his transgression, she could exhibit forgiveness, and become a pillar of tolerance. Maybe then she would gather him in her arms again, triggering renewed love as had happened with the Reynoldses.

  When he left the house that evening, Stelle called out, “Have a good time,” before dipping her paintbrush in a pot of ochre. He drove the long way to Bigbees and pulled onto the shoulder to stare at the bar’s sign, a bare-breasted neon woman with winking eyes and flowing hair, the same silhouette truckers affixed to their mud flaps.

  He grew suddenly furious with Stelle. Have a good time. Is this what she meant? Take your needs somewhere else. Where were the words of God now? He could not believe Paul and Jesus, that celibacy was the true way to spiritual attainment, even among married people. Martin was shocked at the distorted face the rearview ­mirror showed of him in the light of the blinking woman: now her shirt was on, now it was not. “I was not born to be celibate,” he said calmly to the God of darkness and temptation. “I was born a man with a man’s needs.”

  Out of the night, in the beam of his headlights, a woman appeared. Hippy in a short jean skirt and a skin-tight shirt, she approached, swinging a large bag on a strap, until one headlight was completely blocked out by her body. A young woman with a mass of brown hair and a pleasant if narrow face. She smiled and knocked on his window. He hesitated. What if she poked a gun in his face? She’d kidnap him and away they’d go. She was young and forceful and he’d be—not dead, but oh, so alive.

  “Need some help?” the young woman said. Her breasts practically asked the question. He recognized Ash Lee.

  His voice abandoned him. He swabbed his face with a Kleenex.

  “Oh, it’s you, Reverend Peterson. Thank God.” Without asking she slid around the car and got into the passenger seat.

  Martin swallowed. Was this a gift from God?

  “I think it’s safe to park here on the highway,” she said. “Unless some dumb trucker rear-ends us. That sign is an awful distraction.” She frowned as if in distaste.

  He nodded at the sign. “Do you work there?”

  “I’m a waitress, there, yeah, sometimes.” She twirled a bracelet of glass beads as if getting up nerve to make her next move. “Reverend, can somebody’s soul get clean after it’s been dirty?”

  “Yes.” His very thought.

  “How does one get clean?”

  “By prayer. By asking the Lord for forgiveness. Forsaking unclean ways. By penitence,” he croaked. These were not the words he wanted. They bound him like a life jacket.

  “Can you pray right to God?”

  “You have a personal relationship with God.”

  She went pale. “A personal relationship?”

  “He knows who you are. When you address Him, He hears you and answers you.” Martin blew his nose and surreptitiously dabbed his eyes again.

  “Wow. This is cool.” She leaned back in the seat. “I just ask and He forgives me?”

  “There is also penitence and forsaking your wanton ways.”

  “What’s penitence?”

  “It’s an unpleasant task you do to make up for your sins.”

  “Like giving a blow job,” said Ash Lee. “I’ve been doing penitence and sin at the same time. Thanks, Reverend. You’ve made my day.” She opened the car door and bounded away into the darkness.

  Martin’s teeth were grinding. Free blathering advice. That’s all she wanted from him. He honked the horn and Ash Lee turned around. He waved for her to come back and she did. This time there would be no mistaking his desire. “Get in,” he said. “I have some business for you.”

  She stood outside the open passenger door, light flooding the front seat.

  “Hang on, “ she said, as he unzipped his fly and freed his twitching penis. “I have to put something on that.” She opened her big purse and, quick as a snake’s flickering tongue, snapped a picture of him. Ash Lee disappeared in the flash of light, a large red cloud hovering where she’d been.

  Martin spent the night in the church. He lay on the carpet and felt the stiffness of the concrete floor it covered. It was chilly and bad for his bones. He had finally called Stelle and told her he was working on his sermon. Now that the men’s Sunday school class had lost faith, he needed to get his message exactly right, he’d said. But in his heart, he knew he’d never be exactly right again.

  Light had just begun to color the stained-glass windows when he heard the door of the sanctuary slam shut. He sat up as Gert Geurin, sweaty in a flowered dress, bore down upon him. He had no stomach for anything she had in mind this morning. He needed a day of fasting from the congregation, from humanity. He needed to prostrate himself on his dock and lie without sunscreen from now until dusk, making of his pale skin a hair shirt, each breath a knife of pain.

  Gert sat in the first pew as if waiting for the Call to Worship.

  “It’s not Sunday, Gert,” he said kindly.

  “I know what day it is, Reverend. This is an urgent matter. Come over by me and hear me out,” she said.

  Martin stretched as he rose and felt a twinge in his back. He joined Gert in the pew and smelled Lily of the Valley wafting off her person.

  “I feel my presence here is the Divine Will incarnate. You have no idea how long I have harbored this pain in my breast.”

  “Have you been to a doctor?” said Martin, hoping to ward off an impending confession. He recognized the religious bent seeping from her like ink from an octopus.

  Gert twisted her hands in her lap. “Reverend Peterson, this is a pain no earthly doctor can cure.”

  Martin waited as she opened her purse and sank one hand inside it.

  “My time has come to confess to another victim of fleshly ­desire. I am glad it was you.”

  Martin started. Had she been having a version of the same torrid dream he’d been having, the one of her naked in the snow? Women had flirted with him before but he’d recognized it as a misplaced need to love an authority figure. It happened to all ­preachers and teachers, through no fault or virtue of their own. “Gert, I am not the victim of fleshly desire. I am the victim of a conspiracy. There’s that family at the truck stop operating under your very considerable nose that is trying to ruin me. Those women!” he said. “Remember the passage that warns of wolves in sheep’s clothing?”

  “Oh, Reverend Peterson, that is the good God’s truth. I thought he was just a lamb with soft brown curls, but behind that handsome dimpled face, inside that perfectly sculpted human anatomy, lurked the rage and desire of a wolf!” Her fingers sank into
Martin’s arm.

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Oh, Reverend Peterson. It shames me so. But I must go on.” She loosened her fingers and placed her hands, folded, on her lap. Her voice grew high-pitched, as if she were a witch narrating a child’s puppet show. “I was very young when I married Floyd Geurin. I’d just graduated high school, and Floyd was so sick.”

  “And much older, I believe,” Martin said, before he could stop himself.

  “I know there’s them that wonder why I married a man sicker than my grandfather and older, too. But I had met him through the youth group and he was lively and smart; it was after our engagement that he began his decline. We were in love, and I mean in the pure holy sense, unlike what passes for love these days.” She cast her eyes at him. “It was the warmest feeling I had when I was with him. After the wedding, someone had to put his right leg in the car for him because he’d lost all feeling in it standing up during the ceremony. I can remember that because a look of shock traveled from one face to another down the whole row of well-wishers. Instead of saying those funny honeymoon things, they all just stared. He never got use of that leg back.”

  Martin turned his face to the stained-glass picture of the Sermon on the Mount. The details of Gert’s honeymoon embarrassed him, nothing more. He was relieved. Maybe his humiliating en­counter with Ash Lee had driven all the perverse images from his mind.

  Gert continued. “He took to his bed as soon as we got in the door. Then the doctor come out and fixed up a nose tube so he could get oxygen, and I took care of him. The thing was, I didn’t mind. I really was happy.” Fat tears brimmed in Gert’s eyes. She dabbed them with her handkerchief. “Floyd’s youngest boy, James, came home from the University down in Tuscaloosa for a holiday. He was a nice boy but real impatient with Floyd. It hurt him to see his daddy lying all day under a white sheet. Or I thought it did.” She gulped and took a deep breath.

  “I don’t remember a James Geurin.”

  “Oh, I wish I didn’t!” She sniffed, then held her head high.

  Martin wished her a failure of nerve.

  “One night I was taking my shower, a real hot one to open my pores and let the impurities out. My skin was as red as the devil. I put on a white filmy nightgown someone had given me for married life. It was all pleats and had large loose arms, kind of like angels wear. I felt very pretty and took to admiring myself in it, even though I knew pride is a vice. I reasoned it would be nice for Floyd to prepare him for sights in the afterlife.”

  Martin licked his lips and kept his gaze on the carpet.

  Gert jostled his arm. “You must hear this, Reverend Peterson, you must.”

  Martin nodded, his teeth pressed against each other as hard as he could manage.

  “I had finished brushing my hair out—shiny and gold it was then, before it salt and peppered—and I turned to find James standing in the bathroom door, wearing a bathrobe, open.” Gert shook. “I couldn’t look at his face for shame and instead found myself looking at this snake that rose up to greet me. I don’t know what happened. He—he touched my breasts.” The word came out bray-yests and sent Gert into convulsive tears.

  “I hardly think a little fingering is a major crime.” Martin said, and winced, recalling how he desired just a little touch from Ash Lee. “But any mingling of flesh is a transgression,” he decided.

  “Oh, Reverend Peterson. I can’t go on.”

  “That’s fine, Gert. I’m sure that all is forgiven,” he said; he found this experience excruciating, now that he harbored guilt. “We shall pray and you will be baptized in the river.”

  “Since when do you presume to speak for the Lord?”

  Martin lost his voice. The great question he’d been struggling with since spring. He could not presume to speak for the Lord now, even if no one but Ash Lee ever knew of their encounter. He would know that he was insincere, flawed with sin. He could no longer mask his pain. He wanted to throttle this woman.

  But Gert’s voice flowed steadily, with no modulation. “I found myself prone on my very own bed. The wind blew in from the open window and the long curtains shook in the strength of the breeze. But I was not alone. James was scenting me with English Leather. He worshiped my feet with his tongue, then my knees, my thighs. He rose as the wind blew chills across my naked body. We cleaved and cleaved again and again. I was resisting. I moved my head away from his hot mouth and I spied Floyd’s cot just six feet from my bed. Floyd’s head was half sunk in the downy white pillow and his blue eye shocked wide open.”

  Gert swallowed as Martin shivered. She had seen the eye of God, the judgment in the cold blue eye. Martin had seen nothing but a flash of blinding light.

  “At that point, a pain pierced my heart and I stopped struggling. Every inch of me was burning with pleasure and shame at the same time. And the better I felt the worse it was, and vice versa. I struggled long into the night, and finally the golden rays of the sun touched my bed and opened my eyes that had been shut in shame. I was an instrument that night but I still am not sure exactly who was doing the playing, if it was God or the Devil himself.”

  Martin’s mouth hung open. “How could you?” he sputtered, although the question sounded more like desire for advice than moral indignation.

  “For years I have puzzled that myself.”

  “What did Floyd say?”

  “Floyd never said another word until he died two months later. I believe that I have been punished with knowledge for forty years because Floyd had an attack and never saw another thing in this world. I wrote James and told him never to come back. And he didn’t even come to the funeral.” Her voice was wistful. “Reverend Peterson, will I be forgiven?”

  “For adultery, enticement, exhibitionism, lust, perversity!” he shouted. “There is no way that you will ever be forgiven. Lust of the flesh despoils the spirit. You will flame in Hell for eternity, and Floyd will look down upon you with his blue eye and laugh. I am not surprised that you were drawn to work in a house of prostitution and that you have continued to work there under the evil influence of that Bohannon harlot and the harlots who work for hire there. That Ash Lee.” Spittle flew from his mouth and hit her face.

  “You hypocrite!” Gert spit back.

  He saw the photograph in her hand as she turned and fled.

  Now the news would be out. Stelle would know his transgression, and he expected she’d ring his death knell in the service of the Lord. It was too late, all too late. He tried to pray but nothing came to him. If I don’t believe, I cannot be redeemed. There was only one thing left to do. He had his body to give. If that is what the Lord demanded, then that is what he would give in exchange for his everlasting soul. When the river baptism came, he would offer himself up, and she, the self-righteous old bitch Gert Geurin, would have a much worse crime to torment her. To her grave she would take his last breath.

  GERT GEURIN

  There was nothing I could do but leave that picture in the mail slot of Stelle’s office as I fled that damaged church. I had gone to Reverend Peterson with my soul in my hand. I had offered it to him as a way of allowing himself to confess to me. I shared, but he did not redeem himself. He is not worthy of God’s name.

  I should be washed in the Lamb’s blood, my suffering brought to peace. Instead I feared condemnation, and yet, as I drove away, my voice gave way to songs, verses I invented. I sang recipes to the tune of “We Gather Together.” Was this new prayer?

  Soon I felt better. I did not need Reverend Peterson to confess to. I could talk right to God, and so I did all the way back to my house. We got it resolved, there on the highway, me and God. Reverend Peterson had been my challenge, but I had not succumbed to his passion of misinterpretation. I had confessed in church. I would take baptism and come clean.

  Then I went to work, still humming, and Miz Bohannon had a smile on her face, the first in a long time, and she brung up Jessamine and what a relief, she was surprised to say, it was to have her out of the house. In
her home there was more laughter now.

  HATTIE BOHANNON

  The next morning I went to work. I thought I’d be sad looking at the kitchen or upset sitting at my desk wondering how many more days I’d be filing papers. But I didn’t have any of those feelings. Instead I thought of Jessamine and wondered how she was doing.

  I pictured her in Paul’s small yellow house with the blue-checked curtains, surrounded by squirrels and pine trees, the graying yellow ­linoleum in the kitchen, the peppy pink tile in the guest room, the thin plasterboard walls. I wondered if Paul had fixed the hole near the closet. At first the house seemed nice with its dark wood floors and bamboo curtains in the large front window. But the closer you looked, the more flimsy it was. The window frames were stained to a sticky finish, and none of the shades worked. The cabinets were large and painted off-white but there was no cloak closet, and the bathroom closets fit awkwardly into corners and smelled of cedar-stained plywood. But then, had I ever imagined a future for Jessamine? No, not really. My oldest daughter seemed ageless, cutting pies in the kitchen. I’d pictured new stainless steel mixers, a gleaming new Hobart, a silent garbage disposal, and always Jessamine cutting pies and Gert rolling biscuit dough.

  But that vision was not our future. Jessamine had absconded, altering the picture. I remembered Jessamine’s cry as she fled this room. That’s what this room held for me now, that breach between us: not the first month I recorded a profit, not my numerous business coups, but Jessamine’s cry. It was losing Heather that made her cry out. We had both lost daughters in that moment.

  Her desire to mother her own baby: I never saw it before. I saw only that I was sparing her grief and shame and hard work and a diminished future. I never understood her loss of love, the joy in caring for a sweet young child, of claiming it as yours. It was no wonder she was desperate for something of her own—Paul Dodd, who had temporarily been “mine.” A great sadness infiltrated my breath. I wanted to touch her, my daughter, and hold her again, and tell her she was perfect the way she was.