The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  She said almost under her breath as she left the room that it was something crazy adults did for fun, and I’d understand years from now.

  I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I came after her into the hall. I said, “You mean people do it for entertainment?”

  She snickered with her back to me. She tried to act serious as she turned around, but she said, Yeah, she guessed it was all just for fun. She didn’t look happy at all, maybe because she didn’t have one person who would let her get anywhere near them, or maybe because what she had told me was an enormous fabrication, meant to hide something sad. You can tell the ewes don’t like it when the ram curls his lip and rides around with his hooves sunk into their wool. They tolerate it with the patience of saints, but it isn’t the greatest experience for them. As soon as he’s off they act like nothing happened and wander back to the feeder.

  The idea slayed me: here I was on planet earth because May had one minute of fun. I didn’t mind so much the thought of my being a piece of dust. I liked the idea of floating around and then changing into a baby, in the dark, in secret, but I got gloomy when I thought maybe it was my choice that put me in May’s belly. I knew she was hiding the truth and really I had a little something to do with the scheme. It meant I made a dumb mistake. I closed my eyes, wishing I had the memory of what all my parts were before they became me. If I hadn’t been born I suspect nothing would have happened to us. If I was very smart I could have been Mrs. Crawford’s girl, Diane, and lived in a blue house, the color of eyeshadow.

  When I got gloomy, when I was ten years old, I sat on the ground with the hens pecking near my feet and I screwed up my face to try and remember the good occasions in my life. Just one thought in a day, to carry me beyond my dark feelings. My favorite memory—the one I went back to the most—happened the year July was so hot you sweated standing still. I was seven. Matt, my brother, and I, and May and Elmer were drinking black cows in the kitchen after supper. Elmer, scooping up refills, missed my glass, and this splat of ice cream landed on my head.

  It is crystal clear. We are a family, laughing our heads off, and I’m laughing too, because the ice cream feels cold dripping down my hot skin, and I’m making faces, twisting up my tongue to get the drops. Everyone’s howling at me and I’m cracking up because I know I’m funny. I have my eyes crossed. May doesn’t try to wipe off my head. The flesh on her bare arms is shaking and she has tears coming down her face. She can’t breathe. Elmer stands behind me with his hands on my shoulders, patting me. He has a deep laugh with spaces between, like he has to remind himself every few seconds what’s so funny. And the best part is Matt. He reaches out to touch my arm. Suddenly I’m a celebrity.

  I wished then, while it was happening, that we could have stayed there at the kitchen table for about five centuries. I could have stood it that long. I wanted to preserve the scene, just as fossils do, keeping rare animals so still in stone. It took me several years to figure out that on that July night we were actually experiencing the gladness some people feel every day, not just once in a summer. I saw how it was with other people, because I watched the children in church, running to their mothers after Sunday school. I saw it every Sunday, week after week, year after year. The mothers swept their children off their feet and kissed them on their cheeks, and both mother and child laughed. They didn’t need to say words because they had this gladness inside, just the same as if for a few minutes they all had a splat of ice cream dripping down into their mouths, and it’s the hottest day on earth.

  Two

  I ONLY had to annoy Matt because he was smart. “Delayed,” is how May described me to myself. Matt’s a year younger than I am, but he learned to talk first. He always told me what to do in whole sentences, pointing his finger at me. I couldn’t seem to make the words to say “Jump in the lake.” I couldn’t say words but I noticed that they were all over the place, in your ears, in front of your eyes. I watched Cheerios march across the cereal box. I loved how e’s looked, so squat and happy. I couldn’t say thoughts or insults but I wrote down letters on the walls. I saw the word bear and I wrote BEAR all over my room. I printed SILO in green crayon on my white dresser. Elmer practically made an exclamation when he came into my room one morning and there’s SILO on my dresser. As far as he knew I didn’t have the marbles to say dog. He laughed at me under his breath. I could see him knowing he should scold me, possibly with the shoehorn, but deciding against it. He went and got a wet washcloth to scrub the word off. He spoke one of his longer sentences. He said, “Don’t tell anyone our secret.” I nodded my head with all the sobriety I could muster, although I wanted to scream to the world, WE HAVE A SECRET!

  Since Matt talked like an expert he told me what I had to be when we played house. I was always the man in a black top hat. We found the hat squashed flat on the bottom of the trunk in May’s bedroom. I was the husband each time, and Matt got to be the bride. He wore a veil on his head, and May’s old white high heels. He stumbled over them, fell and bruised his knees. I didn’t offer him pity, although we were recently married. I could be the doctor making babies come, and the father, but Matt had to be the lady. When he served me tea in our plastic cups he bawled me out in a high voice. He told me I should hurry up and get back to my chores at the barn. He said there was mud, and other materials I won’t mention, on my boots. He reminded me that I was tracking it all over the clean carpet and for punishment I would have to vacuum.

  Matt had the words, but my gift was the strong muscles in my arms to put him flat on his face, and when I socked him I had joy in my heart, surging fresh into my vessels and knocking in the core, because I could see blood flowing out of his nose. There was a space where time stopped dead and I listened free to his terrible hurt sounds. It lasted until May made the room come alive with her body in it, yelling the pure strain of noise only she, and rabbits who are dying by the knife, are capable of. She was like sergeants on TV shows, frowning and whistling and pointing. She said she didn’t think my brain functioned. She shook her head and wondered why I was retarded. I didn’t pay attention to her when she discussed my intelligence. I was waiting to spring on Matt. I was watching for his weak points.

  The meanness that some people have in great quantities came to me early, because Matt became a prodigy. The minister says all of us have proud hearts, which helped me understand why I had to clench my fist and hit Matt’s knowing eyes. When he and I got into school, I couldn’t clobber him quite as easily. He grew taller than me in the space of six months so I had to think of other ways to make his body sting. He understood all math; he was perfect at numerals and digits. He knew about numbers you can’t even see on paper, and everyone at grade school said he was truly a phenomenon. I mentioned the circus or the zoo as an ideal spot for viewing him, but May suggested with her hand held high that I shut my flap. Every teacher discussed Matt’s brain in the teachers’ lounge. The smoke was always seeping up over the folded screen that obscured the doorway, and you could hear the murmur of the teachers’ voices as they ripped the youngsters’ personalities into twenty pieces. Arthur Crawford said you would die of emphysema instantly if you even set foot in the lounge.

  I tripped Matt coming up the road from the school bus and he cried a piercing cry that was out of proportion to the injury. Every now and then it struck me that his tears were the same material as any old human being’s, even people who didn’t have parabola shapes whizzing through their heads, but I didn’t stop capturing bees in paper cups and dumping them inside his sheets. He knew the bites he got were my fault.

  He never mentioned the stings to me. He went straight to May to tell. Naturally she petted him—she always wanted to stroke his silky hair that covered up where his quick thoughts were made. Sometimes, when I had to be in my room for the salt I put in Matt’s milk, the tacks in his brownie, I cried, because the real punishment was Matt never noticing I’m alive, like the numbers he’s always looking at breathe the air and I don’t.

  When I think about
little Matt I hardly see a person there. In my mind he’s a rising river filled with leeches; I have one small dry square to stand on, and finally I can barely keep my nose above water. I have to work exceptionally hard to conjure up each one of the features on his face. He had fat cheeks and thin blond hair and brown eyes the shape of pennies. His perfect teeth grew in like they were choir members filing sternly into their pews. He had stomachaches and head colds half the time. May loved nursing him. She’d come out of his room, softly closing the door behind her.

  Elmer read stacks of books about the Civil War, the Second World War, and the wars of ancient times. In rare moments, if he didn’t know you were crouching in bales of hay watching him do the chores, he mumbled poetry he had learned in high school, ennobling words about cohorts gleaming in purple and gold, and steeds with flaring nostrils, and the Angel of Death—not the stuff of his average argument with May.

  He loved historical novels about lands so far away they didn’t seem like they belonged in the world. After supper he came to his chair in the living room with his round shiny bald head sticking up, and he sat breathing loudly while he read, until the snoring started. Sometimes he stayed there all night or until May shook him back into this time zone. She yelled at him for falling asleep before he built her a pie safe or mowed the lawn. She probably wasn’t crazy about sharing the cornhusk mattress with him, but she got hurt feelings when she realized he’d rather spend the night in an armchair than brush his back against the bristly curlers she put in her hair, to make her curls even tighter and stiffer.

  I don’t have too many clear memories of Elmer. He stayed out of the way. He didn’t come into the house except for supper, to get yelled at, to read his books, and sleep. I could tell he wished he was something desirable, like a cow. When I picture him I see a looming shadow and then a bald shining head. After he left us, when I sat in my room missing his shape and the gleam of his head, and while I felt particularly angry at him, it occurred to me that if they were going to name a song after him it would be called “Silent Night.” That’s a perfect title for him.

  There are just a few memories that come through in one entire piece, events with Elmer and me, together, the one day in March, when the lamb was born the year I turned eight. I used to lie on the floor out in the barn in a heap of straw, to see if the lambs liked me. I told them stories about my life. They climbed on top of me and poked around to see if they could find my milk supply. I let them paw me and gnaw on my fingers. There was a ewe rolling her eyes around one day and curling up her lips, looking back to her rear end with great agitation, as if she wanted an explanation from her hindquarters. I had seen a lamb born twice before, once when Elmer had to help it come. I understood the mystery taking place under my nose. I sat waiting and pretty soon, with a grunt from the mother, a little white head poked out of her. I loved seeing the quiet face—that lamb didn’t even know it was being born.

  I waited for an hour. All I could see was the head, stuck, and its pink tongue hanging out of the side of its mouth. Something wasn’t right because the mother pawed at the ground and then lay down, dragging her rump right through the dirt. The infant head was getting all muddy. The tiny pink nostrils were going to get clogged with dirt, so I went over finally and said, “Easy, easy,” like Elmer did, tenderly, and I wiped off the nose. It was similar to the experience that Alice had in Wonderland: the lamb’s front hooves were sticking straight out under the head, and I could hear a small voice whispering, “Pull me.” I swear I heard the voice three times. I knew that lamb was having problems getting born. I knew I didn’t have a decade to decide whether to dance or to hobble. So I pulled the legs as hard as I could, with both my hands, and the mother gave a terrible groan and then splat, out came the whole wet lamb body, yellow like an egg yolk. It was all slimy, and sneezing. It shook its head as if it had a bug in its long wet ear. The mother naturally began to lick it and grunt, and snack on the afterbirth. She was glad to have the whole works out. I couldn’t believe the strength in my hands, what they did. I smelled the yellow color on my fingers. It smelled so raw and new I had to quick close my eyes and wonder.

  I kept thinking how the mother didn’t put up a fight; she let the pain consume her, without the faintest understanding. She didn’t have any idea about her life, from one minute to the next. You could see how much having the baby killed her, the way her eyeballs rolled back into her head. Maybe she was watching the inside of her brain and seeing miles of green alfalfa and acres of trough filled with golden corn. She was awfully brave to merely scream and then lie still while a puny girl yanked at her lamb. I had to spit, to admire all that courage in the mother.

  When Elmer appeared I whispered, “I helped it come.”

  He said, “Well!” He grinned at me for lack of words and then bent down to examine the newborn. When he stood up he said, “Aren’t you a good little farmer?” I hugged my own ribs all the way to the house, while Elmer rested his hand on top of my head.

  In the spring, when I heard all the frogs down in the marsh singing as if they had urgent thoughts they wanted to speak of, I sat at the table eating, and I had to blurt out how I wanted to know a frog, and know what they talked about down there in the murky water. They made such a racket and they were invisible. I said, “All those frogs singing night and day without stopping. What are they saying?”

  May snapped at me. “You just eat, young lady. You get frogs out of your head.”

  I learned to stay quiet at meals because I usually said sentences of astounding dumbness. May looked at me like I was a stranger, Elmer didn’t say anything, perhaps to avoid getting the cold stare that suggests you’re a lunatic, and Matt ate delicately and then went straight to his room, leaving piles of food on his plate. May would have loved to feed him with tweezers. She made a sport of seeing he got enough nourishment; she stood over him watching him put the smallest bit of tuna casserole into his mouth and she waited until he screwed up his face. She scrutinized his plate afterwards, to see if she could figure out exactly how many peas he had eaten. If I couldn’t help mentioning that it made me sad to see the geese flying south in the fall, how there was something inside of me that felt like cracking, May said, “God for Daniel, ain’t you gloomy! You make me want to dig a hole and stick my nose right down in it.”

  I kept my observations swirling around in my head. Occasionally I spoke with the chickens, and in the spring and summer I planted and tended and talked with carrots and lettuce. They were my special vegetables. I was in charge of them. I spent whole afternoons in the dirt, making my patch of ground flawless. I even cleared the worms away, before I found out that all the tunnels they make give air, and probably other molecules I don’t know about yet, to the plants.

  I started out in the hole, in school, because of my impression that I was a miracle of stupidity, and because I was afraid of my teacher. Her name was Mrs. Ida Homer and she wore cushiony shoes like nurses’, only hers were red, and you could smell stale cigarettes and coffee on her breath. She had thick flabby ears that looked like nice soft pillows decorated with little tiny white hairs. I longed to rest my head on them. Her eyes were gold and I was sure from the first moment I saw her that they were hollow inside. I tried to hold her hand once when we were filing down the hall but she shook me off. I never tried again. I knew even then that she wasn’t very fond of children. Her ears were her best feature. Plus her husband’s name was Beau. I never saw him but I couldn’t help picturing him as an oversized red frilly ribbon you could tack on a birthday present.

  Mrs. Ida Homer made me stand in the wastebasket because I wrote on my desk and poked my neighbor, and because I did not follow directions. Instead of drawing pictures, I put words all over the sheets of paper. I loved the shape of letters in a word like shampoo. I got into trouble for coloring outside of the lines when we were drawing turkeys for Thanksgiving, and I forgot to put hands on May the time we drew our families. Her hands were just the things I didn’t want to think about. Mrs. Ida Homer sa
id I didn’t do my coloring right. She said I had to stay in for recess to get the colors inside the lines of the turkey.

  I waited for the words she was going to say when I did something wrong; one of these days she was going to tell me that I had to stand in the wastebasket for the next eight grades. I suspected that all the teachers in the whole school were exactly like Mrs. Ida Homer, and I tried to imagine seven more years and then high school with ladies who would watch Arthur Crawford stick a clothespin on the back of my arm so it pinched, and then give me the punishment.

  Matt caught up with me in school by the time I was in third grade. He skipped second. He had absolutely no use for that grade. May wanted him to go directly to college, but the counselors said then he wouldn’t fit into society. Matt and I weren’t in the same class ever; he didn’t have to have Mrs. Ida Homer back in first grade. She might have been able to make him feel slightly lacking for a minute or two. He had a math book he did on his own since his brain was at least in junior high. He was leaving his body behind; his head was going to get larger and larger and his arms would shrink to the size and weight of long deflated party balloons, the black ones. His feet would become webbed to support the weight of his calculations. I imagined the president of the U.S. asking Matt for advice. My brother wouldn’t be able to see over the desk in that oval office they always speak of, and he’d have to pluck out bee stingers from his hands, which I was responsible for, while he recited figures.

  Matt was destined to come home with gold stars pasted on his papers. I didn’t have anything to show because I dropped my work in the trash before I got on the bus. I couldn’t concentrate on one thing except how everyone said I was ugliest in the class. If boys and girls touched me they thought they were poisoned. Diane Crawford had a special potion in her desk; she said it could cure people if they by accident got too close to me.