The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  In second grade I had a dress with blue and yellow violets covering the fabric. I liked it very much at first, especially because it featured a braided yellow straw belt with a blue leather buckle. The instant Missy Baker saw it she said that the dress used to be her sister’s and that it got in the Goodwill box by mistake. Then she changed her story and told everyone that I stole the dress from her house. She said she knew she had heard someone in the laundry room the week before. Therefore I told May I despised the dress. I rolled on the floor kicking, trying to rip it with my bare hands. I sobbed that I wasn’t going to wear the dress one more time, even if she smacked me all over my body. May is a saver, like everyone else I know. She fished the dress out of the garbage. She calmly stated that it was in excellent condition, and she laid it out for me to wear again the next day. Every time I wore it Missy Baker said her sister wanted it back, and she was going to personally come to rip it off of me. I’d have to be in school sitting at my desk bare naked.

  On the playground a few girls along with Diane Crawford and Missy Baker told me they’d be my best friend if I obeyed them. They took me out behind the hedges and said I had to close my eyes and stand still. I could feel hands lifting up my dress and pulling my underpants down. I could feel people squatting on the ground, staring up at the way I was made. They looked while I shut my eyes tight. I was going to have so many best friends.

  When the bell rang to come in there wasn’t anyone around me. My underpants sat at my ankles. I knew all the girls were swarming around Diane’s desk, getting the potion to purify themselves. After third grade my fame ceased and no one paid any attention to me because Elizabeth Remenchik moved in. She not only came from somewhere near Poland, and had a club foot, but she was also cross-eyed and had to wear thick glasses. When you looked at her eyes you felt as if you were looking way down through the ice on a lake and watching two slow fish trying to keep alive through the winter.

  What I waited for were the letters from May’s sister, my Aunt Sid. Sid and May weren’t the best of friends because they had always squabbled, and because May never forgot past injuries. There were all sorts of occasions for mistrust, one of the latest being the time the family divided up the spoils from the home farm. May thought Sidney was extra-greedy and grabbing more than her share, taking antiques that were valuable and leaving behind the riffraff for May. Never mind that Sid was responsible for shipping Aunt Marion’s portion down to North Carolina. Aunt Sid had learned over the years to ignore May even when May came behind her nipping at her heels like a yapping dog the size of a peanut. Finally, as the last dresser was loaded into the truck, Sid turned on May, told her in a normal speaking voice that she was a sorry excuse for a sister and that she had never been reasonable. Sid quickly got in the car before May could scratch her eyes out.

  Soon after the grab Sid came over to make amends. May didn’t serve cookies like you’re supposed to for guests, even though it was clear Sidney came with her arms loaded down with olive branches, not to mention proof: she had photos of Aunt Marion’s living room that showed where the valuable antiques were located. May said nothing. She averted her eyes from the salt water taffy box, and the basket full of extra-fancy red delicious apples. She mumbled something about requiring charity from no one, and left the room.

  I was alone with Aunt Sid. She took a present from her bag and handed it to me. I didn’t care about the gift. I wanted nothing but blond hair exactly like hers, sweeping back over her head into a long bun held together with tortoise-shell hairpins. She had brown eyes and lips that were a color I never saw on anyone but Aunt Sid. I had to stare at her mouth, at her moist lips, continuously. Finally she showed me the tube of lipstick in her purse; it said “Coral” on it. She stretched out her hand for me to come closer. I never forgot how her lips parted and she cocked her head and smiled without fear. Although I looked like May, Sid seemed sure I wouldn’t tear her nylons with my fingernails or sink my teeth into her thigh. I took her hand and went to her side, without one thought in my head. I couldn’t hear what she was saying into my ear because my heart was singing like a frog—a frog calling to her partner down in the marsh, singing through layers of mud. I hung on to her skirt until she left. I watched her drive away. I watched her even after her car disappeared into a cloud of dust and exhaust.

  The present was a music box that was intended for jewels. It played “Oh, How Lovely Is the Evening.” After Sid was gone May came back into the living room. Her face was puffy. I knew she never cried so I figured she must have gotten stung by several hornets.

  “What’s that box?” she asked.

  “Nothin’,” I said, trying to hide it under my dress.

  “Give it here,” she said, grabbing it from my arms.

  She turned it over in her hands, lifted the lid, and heard the song. She bent down and stared at the metal pegs striking the keys for several minutes, completely absorbed by the machinery.

  “It’s mine,” I said in a voice hoarse from the frogs chanting in my chest cavity.

  She laid it on the table without saying a word and went to stare out the window. It seems to me that later in the day she smacked me out of the blue. She must have felt that she bungled her chance to make peace with her sister and she was so mad at herself she came at me with her zinging hand. I learned the lesson about justice fairly early on: if the rulers of the kingdom aren’t fairminded, then there simply isn’t any such thing as fairness or just deserts. I’m not going to tell you how many times in the following weeks I set out for De Kalb, where Aunt Sid lived, before my stomach led me back to the hearth fires. I won’t tell you about my dreams starring Aunt Sid, who adopts me, and I happen to look exactly like Shirley Temple.

  In the third grade I actually started to know Aunt Sid. We were supposed to write to a pen pal. All the girls in my class picked their best friend, who sat across the aisle from them. I didn’t understand the logic of writing someone within reach, so I chose Aunt Sid, who lived forty miles away. We were to write one letter a week to practice our penmanship. We were to ask our parents for stamps, if we wanted to write someone beyond the classroom. I took stamps from Elmer’s table, where he paid the bills. I could not believe the miracle of the U.S. postal system: Aunt Sid wrote me back each time, and since it was my task to bring the mail up from the box at the road after school, May never knew of our regular communications.

  At first Aunt Sid told me about her childhood, and she wondered if it was still the same there in Honey Creek. She guessed it probably was. She said if she remembered hard enough she would know how it was to be me. She hadn’t lived in Honey Creek since she was eighteen, at which time she figured out what was good for her and made a beeline to the teacher’s college in Evanston. If you have talents you can get away from Honey Creek fairly easily, but if you don’t have anything exceptional to show for yourself you might as well forget it, no questions asked. Once, she told me that I shouldn’t use “gonna” in my letters, that the words were actually “going to.” I instantly wanted to shape up. My teachers had spent plenty of red ink and cross words correcting me, but I didn’t see any use trying to please people such as Mrs. Ida Homer. Aunt Sid was different. I longed to understand what was correct, for her eyes alone; I wanted to write everything as precisely as the Queen might, transcribing from her gold-bound grammar rule book.

  It didn’t take a high-voltage brain to figure out the best uses for May’s harsh talk, that her tools were particularly well suited to describing the varieties of barnyard manure. I didn’t want to talk the way May talked but it was everywhere around me. With my hands clamped over my ears I still kept hearing the F-word.

  Even after third grade Aunt Sid wrote me once a week. I couldn’t understand why she wanted to, but I always wrote her back before the smell of her wore off her heavy beige stationery. I made up stories about how May went to the Sears store in Stillwater and bought me one hundred dresses all in different colors, and girls at school wanted to have clothes just like mine but their pare
nts couldn’t pay for so many dresses. I wrote her about how I wished I could be a bloodroot flower—the jewels that come in the spring at the edge of the woods. They are white and clean and in the evening they close up tight as if they’re a hand holding something secret in their fist. If you wait too long to find them, all their petals are on the ground and there’s nothing but a naked stem. I told Sid she should call me names such as Diane or Missy. They were such beautiful names. To my surprise, Aunt Sid wrote saying that it was nice to own lots of dresses, but she’d rather have a letter from me than have a new outfit, or the sight of a bloodroot. She said things I knew couldn’t possibly be true.

  What I knew for fact, even then, was that Matt would steal away. I could think only of Matt when I saw a shooting star out of the corner of my eye; always, when I turned to look, it was gone, and I had to imagine a trail left behind the blaze. Teachers had the habit of calling up to take Matt to special classes, show him off. They took him to Chicago, to a museum where he saw a gray submarine. He told me it shot torpedoes through the water. I was afraid, for as far back as I can think, that Matt, with his smartness, would order the sub to come wipe us off the earth, and what’s left would be a pile of chicken feathers on the ground.

  Three

  I’D LIKE to tell you that May told her story to me, but I can’t. Everything I know about her I learned from firsthand experience and from Aunt Sid. When I picture May I first have to wonder about the very day she was born. It was the early morning of a dark rainy March day, according to the legend my Aunt Sid grew up with. There was a flood and handfuls of dead worms floated around the yard. Perhaps May got the idea that that’s what it all was going to be like, so she never noticed the sun shining, unless it was beating down on her and making her unbearably hot. I love when I’m outside, feeling the sun on my skin. The grass, and the cats on the porch, and myself, all thirsting after the warmth, and finding it, make me know that there’s something mighty about our planet and the whole works out there in the universe. May doesn’t have curiosity about sunshine or the very first crocus flowers that come in the spring. Sometimes when there’s still snow on the ground, we see purple petals bursting through the white flakes. They have the urge and the will to see the light. But neither heaven nor earth moves May to thought; she says nature is around just because.

  Maybe there was a bad omen on her birthday somewhere, and no one paid attention, like on the worst day of my life I saw a whole slew of birds on a telephone wire, hanging upside down by their feet. They were murdered by the current. They were still and so black, hanging and hanging. It spooked me, but I didn’t think it was a warning. I’m not exactly superstitious, but if there’s a lurking power I’d like it to know that my eyes are now open and watching.

  May was the first baby, out of eight. The second child, Richard, was born deaf. My guess is after all the others starting coming, one after the next, including the boy who couldn’t hear and who sat and smiled while everyone pitied him, she turned a little sour on the entire race of man. She fell to the floor, actually hurting herself, and no one ran right to her side to pick her up, or if she banged her head against the wall the hired girls said, “Knock it off,” even if they noticed the blood. People were too busy to soothe her scraped knees and her sore head.

  When the third child, Marion, came, May was sent away for two months to the great-aunts’ house in Stillwater. My grandmother, with the deaf boy and a newborn, couldn’t handle little May. The two aunts were proper ladies with dusty velvet couches in rooms with warped floors, and shelves full of china dogs children weren’t supposed to touch. May couldn’t examine a thing in the house for two months because the aunts were forever screeching “STOP!” They expected her to sit still and never get dirty, and to like to eat stale bread softened by milk, and overcooked peas.

  I can imagine wrinkled old Aunt Margaret hovering over May, explaining where she got the china Afghans, the three of them, with rabbit fur coats, all strung together with a golden chain. Her breath was probably like the smell of goats when they are panting and giving birth. She stood close, smacking her thick lips, exhaling into the air that was meant for May to breathe in. And she laughed at everything May said or did in her nervous high-pitched laugh. She laughed before May had finished the sentence. Sid says Aunt Margaret had a flat face, like a pug dog, flat and smashed, and eyes that were too small for her drooping sockets. I can picture May three years old, living away from her parents, waiting, night after night, on her cot in Florence’s and Margaret’s parlor. After they kissed her with their oily lips and turned out the light, May would have stared at the china mother collie on the top shelf, who she was sure some night was going to come to life, take her neck in its strong white teeth, and bring her home.

  When May did come home to the farm, she walked through each room and nothing looked as she had remembered it. The furniture was in different places, without a doubt, and she hadn’t recalled the constant sharp ache in her stomach. She wanted to squeeze the baby’s hands while it sucked at her mother. It rolled its eyes around and stuck out its tongue every which way. Everyone said it was beautiful, which made May suspect she didn’t know the correct definition of the word. She couldn’t stand to watch it feed. She looked at it in a basket with a pink satin ribbon strung through the wicker and she poked its cheeks as hard as she could. Her mother slapped her face, back and forth—May couldn’t believe how things had changed. She knew she was better than the puking baby and her brother with broken ears, but no one saw her worth. She knew she could get them to see, even though as the months went by her mother was forever saying, “Why can’t you be nice like Marion?” I know from experience that that comparison doesn’t engender love and kindness. It makes you want to go up to your closet and practice biting people’s heads off.

  When Richard was six they took him to the deaf school in Humphrey. He had no way of understanding why they were leaving him, or if they were ever coming back. May knew that her parents might leave her next, on the stone doorstep of a yellow brick building, with a leather valise. And when they turned to get in the car she planned to sink her teeth into their ankles and stay there fastened, for the rest of their lives.

  Two of May’s brothers are already dead, and the rest of the siblings are spread out over the country. I’ve never met any of them, except Aunt Sid, since they don’t go out of their way to visit Honey Creek. May used to tell her sisters she was going to kill herself. She’d show them the noose, or the knife; she called it a dagger. She terrified the little sisters. They didn’t know what to do, or who to tell. She’d get a rock and start tying it to her ankle, saying she was going to walk into Honey Creek and drown, and they’d beg her not to. She’d say slowly “Well maybe I won’t today; maybe I won’t if you treat me good.” She made them fetch things for her, and she got their best toys. She was rough and careless and the toys were usually wrecked when she returned the pieces. She was the sort who saved all her Christmas candy until April and then took it out and ate it in front of everyone. She sat at the center of a circle of candy, noisily sucking her peppermint stick.

  We go by the farmhouse there on Orchard Road sometimes, where May grew up. It’s falling apart, sinking into the ground. The shutters dangle by threads like loose teeth. When May’s parents got too old to keep the farm up they sold it. None of the boy children were interested in carrying it on. Will moved to California for his asthma, worked in a factory that made ceramic hands which served as soap dishes, and drank himself to death. Thomas went over to France in World War II and he never came back. He married somebody French and bought a hardware store. I remember when Aunt Sid told me about the hardware store and how it cracked me up, thinking of French people needing wrenches and nails. Then there was Samuel, who passed away of meningitis when he was fifteen. May didn’t ever mention him. She probably couldn’t stand him until the minute he died. That’s when he became the brother who loved her the best and never did one thing to aggravate her. Richard, the deaf brother, works fo
r a newspaper solely for deaf people.

  When we drive past the old farmhouse it gives me the chills, seeing it die inch by inch. No one loves it, and I can’t help thinking about all the lint floating aimlessly, from clothes washed years before, and the ghosts sitting in wing chairs telling the family secrets. I don’t believe in ghosts on most days, but sometimes it seems like there has to be something left over. We can’t just die, bam the lights are out, can we? It’s strange to think of a house filled up with a whole cast of characters, with all their shoes and hairbrushes and plates of food, and then there it is empty and quiet, insects chewing away at the wood, as if none of the past mattered.

  In the old days laundry was May’s job. She got all the clothes together on Sunday night and soaked them in the copper tubs, and then on Monday she boiled water on the wood stove in the basement. First she scrubbed linens and the delicate white items and all the underclothes, and then she worked at the rougher things, ending up with the men’s coveralls. I’m sure that’s how her huge hands got wrinkled and red, going in and out of the tubs with the water so hot. She wrung everything through the wringer; she stood there grinding the crank, watching the shirt buttons pop off as they went through. She went back and forth to the clothesline where the sheets flapped in the wind at her, almost as if they were saying “Nyah, nyah” behind her back. They were trying to tell her that if they got loose they’d flap away and never come back. I imagine May stood at the line holding one end of a sheet that couldn’t keep still, and I bet she wished she could be free and high spirited. I wonder if she took whiffs of the clothes, if she noticed that they smelled like they were dancing partners with grass and dew and sunshine.