by Cynthia Bond
This thing Chauncy had spoken of, like in Lem’s book—this deed. Ephram tried to push this new act away from the picture of Ruby he had hanging in his chest, the one with her rising like a wave out of a mud puddle. But it stayed like a scratch on polished wood, until she became all things in his mind. And being a simple man from East Texas, Ephram Jennings did what any man would do. He walked down to Marion Lake and had himself a sleep.
Chapter 7
Ruby sat on the soft earth under the chinaberry tree and let her fingers strum the soil. She looked down the turn in the road. The evening shadows had stretched across the pathway and it seemed to fade into the black tourmaline of the forest.
Ruby had felt something coming through the pines all day. She knew it was not the Dyboù, it was not Chauncy Rankin, nor his brother Percy. It was something salted sweet like pomade and sweat.
So she had spent the day waiting. She had pushed back her hair as best she could. Gone to the pump, pulled the handle with all of her might and splashed the cool well water on her hands, then wiped it across her face. Her fingers came back dripping black, so she rinsed her face again. That was the best she could do.
Then she had pulled up a chair, wiped off the kitchen table with her forearm and sat. That day, the house was not unkind. She was used to the smell—the low dank sugar of rotting things and waste. It was a kind of comfort. The cicadas had been singing, too loudly outside her door in anticipation.
When the morning heated into afternoon Ruby had walked across the road and retrieved a fallen long dogwood branch. Back inside, her fingers slowly began pulling the leaves and peeling off the thin little squares of bark, as if she were plucking a chicken. Ruby remembered her grandmother saying, before she died, that the dogwood had blood at the roots since it was used to crucify Jesus. Ruby figured that the scale of righteousness had long since broken, and one more little curse couldn’t do much harm.
By evening she had a mound of leaves and bark on the table. Some had fallen on the floor. A low hum had begun that had caused her fingers to tap on her legs. The little spirits in her belly shifted, causing an unsettled pressure on her diaphragm. Nausea spread to her stomach, wetting her mouth. She was grateful that today she did not regurgitate—but many days she did—and many days, in the tilt of her world, Ruby could not clean the waste and eventually it dried, hard as bark, into the floor.
She had gone to the door and pressed her forehead gently against the screen and looked into the cobalt sky. The sounds of twilight had called to her—the crickets and the whippoorwills and a few impatient owls, so she pushed out the front door and made it to the chinaberry tree.
Then as evening fell into night, Ruby knew nothing was coming. A rocking sadness filled her. The air was dead and the wind had stopped. Of all that happened in her grandfather’s small house over the years, the lonely had been the worst of it. Words unspoken for so long. Only the trees to listen.
But then again, there were her children. A little over a hundred now. Soon the midnight would come and the screaming, the pushing, the birthing of another soul. But now it was quiet.
Ruby felt the chinaberry’s roots twisting three feet under her hand. She rubbed until she could feel a small bit of tan root with her thumb. She was on a first-name basis with those roots. She felt them hollowing under her palms. It was those roots that had kept her alive. It was the roots that had saved her.
She remembered six years ago when she had made a clear decision to take two large bricks she had found near Rupert Shankle’s fence, bind them to her feet with willow branches and leap into the deepest part of Marion Lake. As strong as she was, as much as she loved her children, Ruby could not bear the weight of her days. Perhaps, she thought, if she left, she might pull them all with her, like the tail of a kite.
Before walking to Marion she had come to say good-bye to the chinaberry and the old crow when she felt the old roots whispering, telling her to dig her toes into the soil. She had pressed her thick eyelashes together, lid to lid, and concentrated. Suddenly she had felt her toes stretching, running wide along the topsoil. Her toes were thin, tendril roots that wrapped like yarn about stones and the abandoned roots of the nearby field of sugarcane. Her skin became reddish brown and hard, her body narrowed and stretched. She felt sweet sap thick within her. Her breasts and buttocks became gentle, knotted swells in the tree’s trunk. A thousand lavender flowers erupted from the edges of her fingers. They played a delicious melody that scented the wind and called striped bees and hummingbirds.
Ruby had felt it then. The audacious hope of rooted things. The innocent anticipation of the shooting stalks, the quivering stillness of the watching trees.
For the next weeks Ruby walked through the Big Thicket, becoming. The loose black clusters of muscadine grapes on the vine. The egg-shaped seeded maypop fruit. Pecan trees, horsemint, stones and mud puddles.
She felt the call of the red road and so she became that as well. She felt herself stretching from the dusty passageway that ran through Liberty, Texas, and her grandpapa’s five acres, to access roads, to paved yellow-lined promenades with streetlamps, to Burkeville, to Prairie View, to Katy, to Houston, to Austin, to Galveston and beyond, snaking along the Gulf of Mexico.
She could feel a pair of soft child shoes stepping five miles away in Newton County, ten miles down in Burkeville the thick, callused feet of cane field workers at dawn. Faintly she heard the skipping step of a man who still had the sweet ripe smell of a woman on his fingers. Far away the hushed step of two teenage braided cousins rustling skirts and practicing kissing each other against a shaded tree. She felt the rumble of diesel engines, and a hundred pairs of black rubber wheels barely touching asphalt.
Ruby remained red road long past the owl call of midnight. She slept with gravel for a twining mattress and woven cotton and starlight as her covering quilt.
She had slept and awakened on that same road for four mornings until dusk of the fifth day when Chauncy Rankin’s horse Millie almost kicked her in the head. She rose, covered in dust and straw, to the sound of his cursing crazy women left alone to get themselves killed. She turned to enter her yard as he slid from his worn saddle. But a part of her was still the road, still alive with men and machines and rabbits scurrying at its edges.
Chauncy grabbed the thin fabric about her waist. His angled brown chin tilted down as he studied her blank eyes. Her eyes still holding the road. He called her. He jostled her. He shook her. He turned his nose at the smell of her. Then Chauncy Rankin spit into her face. Her face remained vacant and still. He saw flecks of his saliva dot her dust-covered cheek. The thick fluid slid down her face, revealing feather brown skin. He took his shirt sleeve, licked the corner and began wiping. He then began patting dirt and grass from her dress, her arms, her buttocks, her stomach, her legs.
He peeled off her gray dress and rubbed at her nakedness, wiping her with the damp edge of the shirt. He felt himself rise in his stained trousers, tent the looseness by his zipper. He dragged her to the pump and cranked the handle until water poured, rust brown at first and then clear. He filled a bucket and doused her with it. Once, twice, three times. When she was sufficiently clean, he half carried, half dragged her to a ditch only three feet from the open road. His maroon face twisted above her as he globbed saliva into his palm, wetted his penis and crammed into her.
And yet to Ruby, her dress empty and flat two feet away, the small of her back scratching on a smattering of pebbles, her pelvis and ribs crushing under a sweating full weight, this was a mere irritation. Like an ant crawling on freshly baked corn bread before being flecked away.
Chauncy Rankin could not know that he was only a cinder in her wandering eye, much more preferable to what waited at the bottom of Marion Lake and the shadow in the woods. For Ruby, men were a slight discord that she waited to pass.
She simply kept her limbs numb and her eyes empty as she had since she was fifteen. Since she was twelve. Seven. Six. Five. When the first man had ripped the cotton of he
r panties, explaining that this is what happens to very bad little girls. When the first man had sun smiled, “Training time …”
When Chauncy Rankin finished he patted her head absently, then left, mumbling a stale warning about lying in roads that grown men had to travel. He climbed on the old horse and trotted down the road.
The road held him as it had the children and the cousins and the hundred spinning black wheels. It did not buck him, or open up and chew him to pieces. The betraying road held him in its open palms. It led him home. It led him to his bed. It would lead him back to her door whenever he cared.
RUBY LOOKED up at the moon high in the sky. The road was still empty and the pains were beginning, the labor that robbed her senses and ripped through her. A little girl, swimming in her body, waiting, gently, tiny hands open. With each birth, she lived the murder of that child. The snap of a neck. The rape of a tiny body. Beatings, bones cracking. Skull smashed against a speeding fist.
She had, over the many years, released them one by one, night after night, her body twisting with pain. Ruby looked at the tiny graves dotting the hill. She had often thought of the small mounds at Ma Tante’s and wondered if the old woman had buried souls there as well. It was time. Ruby screamed with each contraction that ripped through her. Howled and saw a pillow smothering the child as she slept. She wailed and whipped the tall trees around her.
Chapter 8
The reaching pines knew that there were legions of spirits tromping through their woods, trapped in thick underbrush, bound beneath the crisscross of branches, in places on the other side of Marion, where sunlight never hit the earth. Some were haints still hanging from the tree they’d been lynched on. Some let the wind roll them like tumbleweeds from one side of the woods to the other. Some were angry and smelled of burned candles, like the rolling dank shadow haunting Bell land, swollen with such hate that it bent the new saplings aside when it passed. It shifted the cush of brown needles and leaves beneath it.
It was this one—Ruby’s Dyboù—who watched Ephram drop into sleep on the bank of Marion Lake.
Yes, the spirit had watched, had seen a thing drop from the man’s pocket as he walked from P & K, a gris-gris doll with a lodestone tied to its back. It smelled of the girl who hid ghosts in her belly. The Dyboù let out a groan, coughing up a swirl of dust, burying the doll before the fool could notice it missing. Then it had followed Ephram, slipping under each foot before it fell, shooting fingers of doubt and shame through the man’s arches, collecting in his testes.
It despised the man and his body still sparking with fireflies of hope, so it crushed the twinkling light between its fingers. Then sat across from him as he slept. Looked into the old, stupid face. Weak, it thought: Fool always been flesh weak.
The Dyboù contemplated Ephram for hours, watching drool steal down his chin. It scorned the fat back of his earlobes. Then it started looking for chinks in his spirit, little holes to jimmy and crack, until they were just wide enough to lean in and sip.
The biggest tear was near the heart, like a run in a woman’s stocking. The Dyboù’s tongue snaked, playfully poking its tip into the tear. Tasting. It wondered why innocence always tasted like peach cobbler. The ghost swallowed deeply. A shudder ran through Ephram’s sleeping body.
That is when the first crow landed. It fluttered down, its talons curling around a branch. Then came another. Another. A parade of black settled about the tree, cawing and purring under the stars. In the jubilation of call and response, the Dyboù thinned and stole away.
Ephram awoke. The first thing he saw was the white moon waving upon the black lake. Then he heard the soft clucking of crows lacing through the trees. He felt the pine on his back and an ache in his chest. The cake was still intact. He glanced at the tear in his slacks. He dabbed iodine on his knee, by moonlight, and began the slow process of threading the needle—just the way his mama had taught him.
Then he heard it. The midnight wailing.
It was high-pitched and long like a train whistle. It screamed through the air like a spinning knife. It cut into his pride and his resolve. He was running, cake in his hands. Past Rupert Shankle’s place. Past the spring oaks. When he reached Bell land he stopped. A silence stopped him.
He walked softly. He could feel the brittle crisp of the grass beneath his shoes. The place was a weed. The house, the well, the porch, the top of the chinaberry tree in the distance, everything on the place jutting and dry. His heart rang like a cowbell in his chest. Ephram stepped under the splintered porch awning and knocked. Silence. He knocked again. Silence. Again. Again. Again.
Tentatively, he circled the house. Nothing. No one. He peered into the blackness. He called out her name, a small plea under the weight of the sky.
Then he heard her scream.
Ephram ran towards the haunted sound, balancing the angel cake. Guided by moonlight, he made it over the rise. There he saw her clawing into the dry earth with her bare hands. He saw her jerk and rip at a solid root. He walked silently closer and saw that her thumb was cut and bleeding, her fingers raw.
She dug with a fury, a whipping wild might, and she wailed until the roots and the branches shook. In that second she looked directly at Ephram. She poured her anguish into the black of his eyes. “Jesus! My babies! Jesus Lord! Jesus Lord!”
He took it in and held it close.
Saliva spewed from the knot of her mouth and she spread her legs and pushed absolutely nothing into the shallow grave of earth. But Ruby knew that she had just released the hidden soul of one of the murdered children. Ephram saw and felt a gush of warmth against the cuffs of his slacks, his ankles. Somehow a tiny slant of light grew brighter upon that soil.
Ephram watched Ruby bury and consecrate with her tears.
“There, there,” she whispered like wind, “you safe now. The womb or the earth. The womb or the earth. Only two places children be safe.” Ruby patted the mound of soil, her body gulping air and releasing it tattered. Ephram looked and saw dozens of small graves. The branches of the chinaberry cast shadows that stretched like arms over the hill.
“There, there …” she whispered again. Her red eyes finding him. Ephram knew that he had seen the breaking of the storm. He looked at the hem of her gray dress. How a corner had been ripped away and a clean fold of blue lay across her thighs.
He wanted to tell her it was the color of a robin’s egg. He wanted to take her in his arms. He wanted to tell her about how Celia’s cake was best with iced milk. He wanted—Ephram caught his breath. He wanted. Had held wanting at bay for the stretch and girth of his life.
So Ephram reached out for the first time since his mama left him. He reached out to smooth down Ruby’s dress.
She laid on down, hiked up her skirt and waited. The quicker he began, the quicker he would end. And he had brought what looked like cake, which was more than most, more than all. So when he pulled her up and lifted her injured hand she bared her teeth and glared, because if he didn’t want to take her body, then he must want something more vile.
When he took out the bottle of iodine, she snarled and then she kicked him. Hard. Kicked the waiting moon cake. Kicked his lips and nose so that blood trickled down his chin. Then she crouched and waited.
The cake in ruins about his feet, Ephram felt a lump rise in his throat and then he began to sob. Soft little whimpers like a child. She looked at him. Then she caught the jagged tear of her breath. Her lungs calmed and she leaned over and let her hand pat his back. Gentle like burping a baby. She said, “There, there.” They stayed like that for a little while in the dark, until she reached over and grabbed a handful of cake from the ground.
She chewed and she gave him a soft nod.
So he gave her one right back.
Ruby ventured, “You know, you’ve got to stop letting yourself be beat on by women.”
“I know,” Ephram replied.
The night shifted her horizon and contemplated the kindling of dawn. Ruby and Ephram sat in silence and ate
the most amazing white lay angel cake, made theirs with bits of dirt and grass, while the piney woods watched from the shadows.
Book Two
Two Bits
Chapter 9
Celia Jennings had not slept in her bed. She had fallen asleep at the kitchen table waiting for Ephram, and awakened at four o’clock in the morning alone, still sitting upright. She had not leaned, or even slumped, onto the polished wooden table. Had not let saliva trickle onto the grain. She was stiff even in sleep, clean in slumber.
Celia had been fourteen when her mother had shamed her entire family by walking up to the Easter Day picnic naked. Ephram was only eight, but the stain still spread over each and every one of them. It was the burden God had decided to fit upon their shoulders. That and their mother having a new home from that day forward—Dearing State Mental. The fact that their daddy, the Reverend Jennings, was politely asked to leave his own church was yet another weight to bear. He took to preaching on the road ten months out of twelve, in even smaller, dingier churches along the Sabine.
The first day the Reverend folded up his tobacco pouch, grabbed his bag and left, Celia started cleaning. She cleaned the smokehouse and the attic and all the jars in the root cellar, the lard-oil lamps and the grandfather clock. She cleaned the parlor and the water closet, scoured the cookstove and scooped its ashes, bleached the walls, the cabinets, and between the tines of every fork. She made Ephram help her drag out all three mattresses, one feather, two barley straw, and then she beat them into submission. She then scrubbed every floor with lye soap and water until her fingers withered and burned. She pumped water into three large tins and a kettle. Lit a pit fire. Took a washboard to seven sets of sheets, ten towels and a house full of clothes. Rinsed them in the second tin, boiled them in the kettle, with the last tin for bluing whites, then hung them all out to dry. When she finished, two weeks had passed.
