The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  When they were dry May brought the loads in. She starched and ironed everything: the underwear, the trousers, the sheets, the shirts, the bedspreads. She wasn’t done until past supper because she had to clean out the washing pots, fold up the clothes, sew on the buttons. She had to scrub the laundry room floor. She didn’t need to be nagged or chided, because it’s her nature to be tidy. I’ve seen pictures of the poor primitive jungle people cleaning their clothes in a river and it seems to me that May wasn’t too much better off with the washboard, the wringer, and the clothesline. May must have been glad that someone dreamed up washers and driers. She stepped on Elmer’s neck until he bought her one of each. Actually, that’s not quite a true story. She did put the pressure on though, and wouldn’t you know it, he came through right before Mother’s Day, when I was eight years old.

  May only went to high school part time because she had to stay home and help with all the babies and the farm work. There wasn’t rest; there wasn’t one person who could sit around and be lazy. One of May’s jobs was to draw the cows in the herd. She drew the way the black and white went on the cows so they’d know who was who by looking at the pictures. I can hardly believe that she drew, pencil in hand, but Sid says it’s so. Perhaps she loved the job, sitting on the barn gate, trying to make a likeness. She was probably so tired of her parents having babies that she herself could have invented the operation they have now where they tie up ladies’ tubes. There’s a photo with May and her littlest sister, that’s Aunt Sid. May has Sid on her lap, and how Aunt Sid tells it is May pinched her when they were supposed to be smiling for the picture.

  The best thing May could do when she was a youngster, besides laundry and drawing cows, was dance. She went to several dances a year at the church. She could waltz and polka like an expert, and learn new dances just by watching for a few minutes. She was tall and thin and she had hands the size of lobsters, but she knew how to move her bulk. The men couldn’t toss her up in the air without straining themselves, but she was light in their arms and led them without their knowing it.

  Maybe she was pretty. In the pictures I’ve seen of her she squints at me through the faded paper with eyes that make me nervous. She’s fourteen and she glares out to the world as if she can already tell what’s going to happen to her. Her eyes are narrow and dark. Maybe in the moment of the picture she can see me all grown up, and Ruby, and the scenes in our kitchen. She can see baby Justy asking for the pecan balls.

  In the old days she had a thin curving mouth that stretched a long way across her face. She had a whole slew of little white teeth inside. I imagine her walking out into the night with her red pruny laundry hands all the while wondering when her real life was going to start. She prayed that someday she wouldn’t have to lift one single pail, or stand in a muddy cow yard with cows staring out as if their eyes weren’t connected to a brain. She said to herself, standing in the mud with a bucket of feed, “Someday I’m going to find a man who doesn’t know one thing about seed corn, and I’ll follow him away and never come back to Honey Creek.”

  Maybe she was exactly like me when she was young. I have to stop and stare, thinking about it: how strange if we really once had the same thoughts. Could May have gone out into the night to watch stars, wondering about the cold and hot planets in the universe, and about God and angels? It doesn’t seem possible, but then the idea isn’t exactly real to me that May was ever a young girl. I have to get my mind working pretty hard to conjure her up young. Maybe she looked at the glittering points of light shining down on her from out of the darkness and there was a sensation she had never felt before in her heart; it was getting larger and heavier by the minute, and she thought perhaps she was going to burst open. At sixteen she wanted something desperately, only she couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. She knew there were so many enormous things yet to come in her life, and she cried for she hardly knew what: boys marching to war, and the hired man across town who got his arm cut off by a threshing machine. She sat on a stump in the sheep yard, and moaned, rocking back and forth, and finally she put her head into her lap. I like to believe May felt how utterly sad and small we are, and that some of the friendly sheep came and put their noses in her ear, as if it’s ear wax they love to smell more than anything. They probably stood there sniffing her, and she cried, sticking her hands into their wool, down into their pink skin. She smelled her hands when she got into the house and discovered that the sheep had a good odor, that the lanolin from the wool made her hands feel greasy and nice. I like to think that she sat at the kitchen table drinking cocoa, reviewing the night in her mind and thinking that it perhaps wasn’t all so awful now that she had the warmth in her stomach and the smell on her hands.

  But for the most part, May had the unhappiness to begin with. She was always a long-sufferer—and to top it off the worst happened. She found someone she had been waiting for, all her miserable twenty-one years. Suddenly there was a man bringing her clumps of violets in his dirty hands. He had acres of black hair that grew like grass on top of his head, like it’s the Great Plains up there, and eyes the color of forget-me-nots. Aunt Sid said the general opinion of the church ladies was that his piercing blue eyes could get the man a job in the ministry. He came across town through the fields and asked so cordially if he could see May. Then he went down to the basement and sat on the edge of a rickety white chair while she plunged material into the copper tubs. He sat and talked to May, looking right at her. He told her about things and places she had never heard of before, or thought she didn’t care to know. He had been away at college for a few years; he had even seen New York City. The whole place is sidewalks, he told her. “There ain’t nothin’ but cement for a hundred miles.”

  She didn’t want to see cities any more: one hundred miles of cement didn’t sound so glamorous. As far as she was concerned he was the world itself. It had come to her doorstep.

  May bent down to sort a clump of laundry, old black rags, and when she stood up he was looking at her. She found herself staring into those sensational blue eyes and when she looked down she didn’t have more breath left inside of her. There was an absence of something there in her stomach, as if all her organs had turned to fish and swum away. Aunt Sid knows about May’s romancing because she was little at the time. She used to hide in closets and spy on everyone. She told me about how Willard Jenson used to get up from the white chair and take May’s waist and waltz with her all through the piles of laundry, scattering them over the floor, and how May laughed with her head on his shoulder. She laughed until there were tears trickling into her mouth.

  Willard Jenson was a Honey Creek man who knew May from church, knew her to nod and say hello. He had probably seen her at the dances they had. He knew she could create the illusion of lightness. He probably liked the way she did laundry too; he admired her neat and tidy methods. I bet he could smell all the clean clothes even in his sleep. I bet he dreamed of May folding diapers and sheets and denim men’s clothes, just his size.

  May, with that hard place she has in her which says absolutely no one is going to tell her one thing, ran off into the night with Willard Jenson, on more than one occasion. Aunt Sid didn’t speak about how they must have stood against the barn, with May’s blouse unbuttoned, her breasts rising and falling, so white in the moonlight, against Willard’s dirty hands. May could see the color of his eyes, even in the dark of the haymow.

  Just before the whole town exploded with how sinful the two young people were, they saved themselves by getting married. “It’s a miracle,” the church ladies said under their breath, “that her belly is as flat as an iron.” They wondered if there was a baby hid somewhere in a dresser drawer or stashed amongst the bulrushes. I have my theory: I don’t think they went all the way. May doesn’t seem the type, somehow. Aunt Sid described May’s lacy wedding dress, and I didn’t interrupt her even though I knew the dress from memory. It’s the same one I wore at my wedding, shortened and tucked up. May had a garland of white roses in her
curly hair, and bright red lipstick on her mouth. Her eyes were huge, because she didn’t have an ounce of fat on her face, due to the way true love affected her appetite. She gazed at Willard Jenson with his patch of hair on his head, fertilized by the good Lord to make it grow double time, and she knew that this day was one of rescue and mercy. She had the feeling that all her years and years of doubting love were over.

  They moved into Willard’s house, on the other side of town, by Abendroth’s farm, the one with the fake deer nuzzling the flamingos, and the Blessed Virgin Mary birdbath. Willard had some of Honey Creek running through his land. Sometimes it comes to me, the name Honey Creek, and I think about what the two words mean. A creek filled with honey, all gold, not even one bee remaining. Thick honey oozing on through the fields. Honey Creek doesn’t resemble anything of the sort. It isn’t gold. Indians probably named it. It’s black in the springtime, from the mud and the farmers’ chemicals rushing along the bottom, until it broadens up where the mill used to be. There’s an antique store in the building now; it’s off the main road so it doesn’t do a bit of business. Right down under the store the creek settles into a deep blue pond. All the dogs in town pack and sometimes they end up swimming there in the summer, except the Labrador retriever at the post office, tied up on a two-foot string.

  May and Willard Jenson had Brown Swiss milk cows and several thousand barn cats, and Willard did threshing in the fall for neighbors. They weren’t going to get rich but they had enough; they didn’t have to eat dandelion greens and shoot woodchucks for dinner. Aunt Sid tells the story of May’s birthday, the time Willard bought her a radio. May shook her head and said, “I don’t believe it,” about ten times. After Sidney left they probably went upstairs to bed. May folded her legs around Willard’s scrawny hips, the famous bones that stuck up sharp enough to cleave watermelons. May didn’t care about getting cut in half. She screamed joyfully, hoping her whole family on the other side of town could hear.

  Being married made her fairly kind and charitable toward animals and other people. She stroked the cats and kissed them on their foreheads. She wanted to have a baby, even after washing thousands of diapers every other day of her life. If I erase each one of May’s wrinkles and the wart, I see her in the morning, in a wooden bed with four posters, stretching and yawning, remembering the night, closing her eyes to go back to sleep as if she thinks she’s the bank president’s wife. She’s wearing a plain cotton nightgown and I imagine her pretty. She’s waking up and feeling over to Willard’s side, although he’s been out three hours already milking and she thinks how nothing could ever take away her happiness. She feels as full as a big old cow pond where cows come to drink all summer, and it never dries up, because it’s fed through the earth by an eternal spring.

  She gets up and makes breakfast for her husband. She says the word over and over to herself, “husband.” When she goes home to all her sisters she tells them, not about Willard, but about “my husband.” She says, “My husband got up at two in the morning because a calf was born.” Or, “Did you see my husband in town yesterday?” She asks them about “my husband,” as if all of a sudden he doesn’t have a name; what’s good about him is he belongs to her.

  I’m not sure whether to be glad or sorry for May, that she was so happy with Willard, that she felt like a spring-fed cow pond. May never thought too much about religion back then, probably, but being married, she knew exactly what she wanted to find in the afterlife. She didn’t even care that she wasn’t off with some man from Peoria who wore suits and sold hairbrushes door to door. She had the bug that afflicts every part of you, especially your reason. It makes you dream of babies crying out for you in the night.

  Aunt Sid says that Willard was a fine upstanding human being, that it wasn’t a mystery why May thought he had been sent to her express from God Almighty. On the day after their marriage May burned his toast for breakfast and he said burned toast was just fine, in fact he liked it better charred. So May burned his toast every single day afterwards, and he choked it down with a smile on his face. Aunt Sid told me that finally she felt easy with May; I imagine that they could now chat about underwear without May saying Sid’s stunk worse than anyone’s in the world since the beginning of time. And she probably loaded Sid up with pure corn; she said, “Sidney, someday a man will come along and make you as happy as Willard is making me right now.” If someone said that to me right at the moment I wouldn’t know whether to laugh and choke on the bile caught in my throat, or cry. I suspect I’d burst out crying.

  The year was 1941 and Pearl Harbor gave President Roosevelt the chance he’d been dying for. War was declared and Willard Jenson got the call. He didn’t have ailments that could get him out of it. They were hoping the Japanese would quick get mashed to a black pulp so the men from Honey Creek wouldn’t have to fight in major battles, but the president said, in his voice that sounded like he was so far away and lonesome, that we had to make the world safe for democracy. Miss Daken, my history teacher, told us about the greatest lines from the speeches, and then we watched a movie that ended with the mushroom cloud. Willard Jenson had to go down to the South for training camp. There must be letters somewhere in May’s things, love letters between them, words that can’t describe half of all the yearning in their loins. Someday I’ll find the packets all strung up with rotten ribbon and I’ll be able to know her a little better. I’ve seen shows on television about the war. All I can picture is May standing at the depot waving a white handkerchief at Willard. He’s on the train; they just kissed so long it almost pulled away without him. They are like the lovers on a TV show, except we don’t have a train depot in Honey Creek or Stillwater.

  After Willard went overseas, Marion, May’s sister, became engaged to Frank Bane. The couple kissed in the pantry and when May bumped into them she backed out, staring. Marion never mentioned the war. Frank Bane wore thick glasses, and once when they got knocked off by a cow’s tail he was found crawling around in the straw. He couldn’t go to war because his eyes were too weak. They signed him up to work in a gun factory.

  On Marion’s wedding day May helped her get dressed. She put the flowers in her sister’s hair, never jabbed her with a pin, although she wasn’t thinking about anything except the barbed wire you find near trenches. May made lame jokes about wedding nights and how you walk crooked the next day. Every week there was news about how some boy got shot dead over in the Pacific. For the wedding reception there were biscuits and slabs of roast beef, cut thin, because of the war effort. Wild daisies, wilting, stood in pots all over the house. There wasn’t anything alcoholic to drink except the wild stuff the men passed around out in the yard The guests sat on folding chairs in the dining room and wiped up the gravy with their bread.

  May had moved back home for the war, with her parents, because Willard Jenson’s father took over the farm. She didn’t want to live in the same house as her father-in-law. He was so stern, especially when there was weather coming that he didn’t like. He called her “young lady.” About the only thing he ever said to her, in an accusing voice, was, “Young lady, I don’t like the looks of the sky.”

  May came home, did the laundry, drove tractor, heaved milk cans, and pushed cow rumps from stanchion to pasture. She had to take out her wedding gifts, including the entire china dog collection from her senile aunts, to know that she hadn’t merely dreamed of her marriage. Her menstrual period stopped coming because she was lifting eighty-pound milk cans. There wasn’t one part of her body that felt alive.

  Aunt Sid says that Marion was the beautiful one in the family. She had a braid so thick you could hang or swing from it, and soft brown eyes almost as tender as a dead mouse’s in a trap, and small hands that hadn’t done one load of wash. Marion had gone to high school and knew Latin; she said words such as declension, and probably May looked up at her from the pile of laundry like she was cracked. The dress May wore for Marion’s wedding had large white flowers swirling around on a pale blue background. I found it
up in the attic when I was in high school. I put it on in my bedroom, and thinking I was alone in the house, went down to May’s room to look in the mirror. I stood there admiring myself for a minute, before I realized that she was in bed, staring. I met her eyes in the mirror and I didn’t recognize them. Each one looked like a dull gray plug under the bath water. I didn’t say anything. I got out of there as fast as I could. I waited for my punishment but it never came, and I began to wonder if the dress had some kind of forgiving power.

  There’s a picture of May wearing the dress, after Marion’s ceremony. She looks like she read instructions in a book about how to make a smile and she was trying it out for the first time. Her little teeth didn’t make it into the photo. May had all her teeth pulled when she was forty-nine. I try not to look at her in the morning, when her mouth is empty. The size of her entire body is suddenly diminished without her jaw.

  After Marion and Frank Bane drove off for their honeymoon, May sat in the barn and closed her eyes. She stroked the two kittens without thinking they were animals. She imagined the hair on Willard’s head. She made a note about how Marion’s husband wasn’t half as good as Willard, especially with those two-foot glasses he had to wear. She noticed the sun going down, and for once she looked at the sky. She stopped and mentioned to herself how blue it was, how if you could reach up and taste the color of dusk you might turn into something shimmering and silver; you might be transformed into the moon itself.

  When the telegram came that night her heart turned to stone. She wouldn’t hear what her parents were telling her. They tried to explain but she blocked her ears. She walked out into the dark field, to the spot where so many years ago she had tied the rock to her ankle and told her sisters she was going to drown in Honey Creek.