The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  Four

  AUNT Sid told me that the whole town came to the funeral. There wasn’t a casket because the body of Willard Jenson was nowhere to be found. He had been blown up on an island in the Pacific, as brave a soldier, the reports said, as there had ever been. The news was full of accounts of the boys overpowering the yellow devils; the papers said that although the Americans were practically never defeated, when we did have to retreat a mile or two we always begged and pleaded for more Japs to kill. After the funeral the relatives went back to the home place and they had all the leftover food from Marion’s wedding: slabs of roast beef warmed up and potatoes made into hash browns. May wore the same dress she had worn at Marion’s wedding. She hadn’t shed one tear at the church. She sang out the hymns while everyone watched to see what she might do next. They were waiting for her knees to give out; they expected her to keel over and hit the hard pew and then everyone would swarm around her mopping off her cold brow. When the guests left she wrapped her wedding china in newspaper. We still have it in our attic. The teacups are preserved in memory of Willard.

  May figured the officials in the government who had the lists of dead people made a mistake. She told Sid she knew it was a simple mistake and that after the war was over Willard would come home. He was hiding under all the carnage so the enemy wouldn’t notice that he was alive. Once, she woke up in the middle of the night screaming. She had dreamed he was dead, and if it was true she knew that wherever she went she would always be a stranger in a foreign country.

  May lived at the home place for ten years after Willard died, until she was thirty-five. Her brothers survived the war, and of course Frank Bane never had to go. May couldn’t tolerate Marion. She insinuated, by gesture, that Frank wasn’t any better than a fop with the thick glasses he had to wear. She bet he could actually see perfectly, he just didn’t want to defend his God and his country. Marion and Frank moved to North Carolina. They couldn’t stand it in Honey Creek.

  It came to me, as a revelation, that May lived through all the history I learned about from Miss Daken. Not of course the Romans and their sewer systems, but to think that May was living and breathing while Nikolai Lenin rode through Russia on the train. If May was around then, it doesn’t seem so much like history; it seems like life itself, close and thumping. Still, she never spoke about islands in the Pacific or the European theater. While it was going on she couldn’t seem to see farther than the wash hanging out on the clothesline. In those days she didn’t have words for one single person. She did all the cooking for the hired men but she didn’t speak to them; she served and went straight back to the kitchen. They were such rough, ugly old men, and they always tried to catch her eye. She knew each one’s shoes by heart. She promised herself she would never look farther than their ankle bones. She washed and ironed and canned. She kept her hands flying while her mind probably said the same thing over and over: she whispered, “I don’t believe this is my life.” She watched her enormous hands become chapped and tough. They got so cold when she drove tractor, from the metal steering wheel and the wind cutting through her cloth gloves. She said all her sentences to herself. “Someday I’m going to leave here” was her favorite. But then she’d go up to her room and lie down on her bed and stretch her arms across wondering when her Willard was going to come back. She knew it wouldn’t be long now. She knew she’d wake one morning and there he’d be at the door, with a bandage over his burned-up heart. That old hole was just about healed, he’d tell her, while she tried to control the tick in her smile. She believed he’d come back because she couldn’t imagine him not in the world. He was probably walking the streets down in Argentina. He was in a park picking flowers that he was going to press and then send to her. There’s a stone for Willard over in the Honey Creek cemetery with nothing below. It says on the stone that he’s singing unto the Lord a new song and that May was his beloved wife.

  When May was thirty-five Elmer Grey started coming around by himself. He didn’t bring flowers or chocolates. Elmer had a rear end the size and shape of a tractor seat and fingers the thickness of a corn stalk. He had red hair all up and down his arms. Compared to her slim Willard, Elmer was more like a creature someone caught in a trap. Excepting his head, where there wasn’t one strand of hair. When he offered to marry May she didn’t look up at him. She said to herself, “I’m already married.” What occurred to her was the list of items he owned. She had a vision of the long low chicken sheds and his healthy milk cows with their heads bent to the ground eating grass from the lushest pasture in the township. His first wife had cancer and didn’t last beyond the third month.

  Aunt Sid tried to tell May that something awful happens to every single person somewhere along the line, and that May shouldn’t squander her life weeping at Willard’s gravestone. “It’s a fact,” Aunt Sid said, reaching across the table to touch May’s sleeve, “that he isn’t ever coming back.”

  “Is that what they teach you at the conservatory?” May said without a moment’s hesitation. “Dead people don’t come back, could have fooled me. I’m glad you’re so smart after all the years in your short life.”

  She covered her face with her apron for a minute, as if the effort of being snide was taking its toll. “You’ll never know what it’s like, Sidney,” she said just before she raised her head. “Look at yourself. You look dried up, as if all your life is in your brain. I’d bet a million dollars there ain’t one man who knows you’re living. If I had the energy after waiting on all of you hand and foot I’d laugh for two hours straight in your face.”

  It was ten years since Willard’s death and May still had the habit of leaving the hall light on, in case he was looking for the place to come home. But whenever she saw Elmer she examined his wide strong back carefully, and since it didn’t much matter to her, when he asked her to get married the second time, she said, “Why not?” Perhaps there was something in her that made her sorry for him, the way he didn’t have hair growing on his head, and his wife had shrunk to nothing and then died in his bed.

  They got married in the courthouse in Freeport. May wore a beige suit and a string of pearls around her neck. In the blurry photos she looks like she’s standing in front of a firing squad. She’s squinting out to the hateful light. Probably by then her eyes weren’t any too big. They were getting narrower and narrower, on account of the way she looked at the world, as if everyone, even each animal in the barnyard, was set on making trouble for her. All the space around her seemed the same, and when she heard the red-winged blackbirds in March, she swore under her breath; she swore saying, “It’s that spring time, again.”

  What I can’t picture is May and Elmer coming home to the farm on their wedding night and walking up the stairs to the front bedroom. It makes my insides feel like jelly to think about it. I can’t see May taking off her suit and hanging it up as carefully as she can, and then removing her slip, and all that time Elmer is under the covers waiting for her. I don’t like to imagine such a thing. May must have told herself while she took her stockings off that anything was better than serving dinner to all the hired men. They looked at her like they were waiting for a chance to catch her on the dark stairway. They didn’t do anything but belch to say thank you after breakfast, dinner, and supper. May probably screwed up her eyes and pretended, despite the hair covering Elmer, that he had turned into her smooth and slim Willard. I have a feeling there wasn’t a minute of—joy—not for either one of them. Elmer wasn’t a prince to start with but May wasn’t going to be able to improve him much, if she shut her eyes and wished he were someone else.

  One thing I’ve acquired too late is the habit of stepping into other people’s skin. If I pretend to bore a painless hole in May’s shoulder and steal into her large frame, stretch myself out to actually fit, and then look out from her dark eyes, I can see things I’ve never noticed. I can feel May, not long after her second marriage, at home in the everyday world of her kitchen. She made a cake seven days a week, first thing in the morn
ing; she could iron exactly six shirts while it baked. She did all the dishes and made the frosting in the time it cooled. The day was divided up into half-hour segments, each segment time for a specific task. The cake, the shirts, the bed, the hens, the dusting, dinner. The dishes, the mending, the floors, the garden, supper. She planted her feet in front of the sink and scrubbed her copper-bottom pans once a week, her pride. They hung up on the wall, flat and orange, and she saw them as nothing but perfectly scrubbed pans.

  She liked to go to the orchard nearby and spend two dollars and fifty cents on a bushel of small red delicious apples. The basket wouldn’t budge on the way home, even with the sharp turns, because of her thoughtful planning: she went to the mill first, to get the flour, and she propped the fifty-pound sack against the apples so they wouldn’t spill.

  She probably was already angry, before she got in the door, thinking about Elmer. She knew he would be sitting in the recliner chair with the stuffing coming out, doing nothing, reading a history book about the Civil War at three in the afternoon. He deserved a rest in the afternoon, he had told her once, and she scowled and then laughed. She had grown up knowing that nobody deserved anything, most of all rest. He might have looked up at her from his comfortable chair, without seeing, and mumbled something about how bad the shocks were on the covered wagons that took the wounded soldiers from Gettysburg. She knew nothing would have made him happier than a whole basket of apples set by the chair so he could eat when he pleased but she took them into the kitchen.

  I imagine her making clove apples. She sat in the kitchen poking the cloves into the apples and hurting herself, and also feeling sick on the sweet smell of the spice. She turned an entire bushel of red delicious apples into clove apples in three short days, and hung them all from black strings in Elmer’s closet, where he had nothing but a checkered suit, one white shirt, and a brown silk smoking jacket his first wife gave him for a wedding present. She hung two hundred clove apples up and down the sides of the closet. Neither of them ever mentioned it. She sometimes mentioned, showing off her red chapped hands at dinner, how the hands indicate how much a person works. They cannot lie. Hers were stung by cloves. But it was her face that reflected the bitterness of being trapped in a world of half-hour segments of time, not one second of which sparked in her thought of the Civil War or the splendor of the Assyrian coming down like a wolf on the fold.

  May was thirty-eight years old when I was born. She probably thought I was going to be retarded since she was over the hill. I wonder if she enjoyed carrying me. I wonder if she ate liver and spinach and drank a quart of milk a day, like they tell you you must. Sometimes, the way I get so tired, I suspect May never ate the right food. I feel like I don’t have all the ingredients a person is supposed to have.

  I’ve already described most of the main events that happened to me when we were a family, all together. I didn’t mention the one year my job was to bring the cows home from pasture. I had to make sure there were no cars coming, and scoot them across the road. I was a young girl wearing a plaid dress, hollering at the cows to come. I opened the gates and they followed me, not because of my personality; when they saw me they thought of corn. At supper Elmer put a hand on top of my head, those hands that were so heavy I felt he might take my head and crumple it up like a piece of paper. I think he was saying I was a good girl.

  There were times in the fall when I had to go look for the cows. The dark would be coming, and as I walked through the pasture and up into the woods searching for them, from far away, if I stood and listened, I’d hear the sound of hooves shuffling through the leaves. It’d get closer and louder and louder until all the cows’ feet in the leaves sounded like water thundering over a dam. I loved standing, my cold knees knocking each other, listening. I heard that rush of leaves, and sometimes if I stood still and watched, I might see an owl flying between the trees. Its wide wings beat slow and quiet.

  I didn’t ever tell about the owl and how you can’t hear them flying, even with their beating wings. They mean to go in silence. I didn’t say anything about the cows and the racket the leaves made. I stared at May and Elmer and Matt, when they weren’t looking, trying to figure out how I was going to explain that the nurse in the hospital made a mistake and I wasn’t their baby, that I belonged to my teacher, Miss Pin, and she was coming to fetch me instantly. I also tried to figure out why nobody liked me except Aunt Sid, the minister in church, and Elmer, though he never said. I made up a place in my brain that looked like a tropical jungle and that’s where I went when Elmer and May had their spats. They didn’t close their door. I pretended I didn’t know what their words meant. For the most part it was May shouting at the top of her lungs since Elmer, in her opinion, was the one who needed shaping up. He wasn’t big on using his vocal cords but he made use of the time by scratching behind his ears and getting them clean. I knew May didn’t have the life she wanted. I guessed what she needed was a nice pen pal who would write her to say what a great person she was.

  I started paying close attention in school to the reading lesson, so I could understand Aunt Sid’s letters. Aunt Sid was the choir director of a world-class high school chorus, which she told me all about. She took her students to auditoriums around the country and had them sing in their maroon blazers. Naturally she always wore a corsage.

  In third grade I brought Sid’s letters to school because of the teacher I mentioned, Miss Pin. Miss Pin made me sound out the syllables of all the words I didn’t know, and she explained what high school chorus singers do, and she showed me the color maroon. Miss Pin was tall and skinny, and she always wore high heels that made a clacking sound wherever she went. She had a large head surrounded by a ball of teased hair. By coincidence her shape was exactly like a pin. Every night I closed my eyes and first dreamed that I was going to marry her when I grew up. I loved her without reservation. She wore blue dresses—blue was her favorite color—and pink scarves bunched up at her throat, and she smelled like lotion made from roses. She had little blond hairs above her upper lip, which I was dying to touch.

  I liked her with such urgency that I was scared to death in her presence. I had to be careful that I didn’t do something dumb, which meant I had to watch every move I made. When she smiled at me my heart galloped out of my body and did perky fox trot steps by her desk. I couldn’t figure out if my head was still on my shoulders, her smile got me so mixed up. Although Miss Pin had thirty other students to care for, I imagined that she was watching over me, in particular. In my dream I went up to her when she was fixing her head scarf to go home, and I said, “I love you, Miss Pin.” She always kneeled down and hugged me for a long time, rocking back and forth, and crooning. She had breasts just the size of cupcakes. I also worshiped her because she always asked, “Did you get a letter from Aunt Sid?” She called her “Aunt Sid” as if she knew her. My mail was a secret Miss Pin and I had, together.

  One of my favorite letters from Aunt Sid that year, one Miss Pin helped me figure out, went like this:

  I remember so well when I was a little girl in Honey Creek. Because I was the youngest, I was spoiled, and I used to steal up to the haymow with a good book and not come out all day long. When I got home at night, after supper, I had to do the dishes; they were stacked up from the whole day; thousands of plates, glasses, spoons, pots and pans. But this is a secret—you can’t tell anybody—my mother usually shooed me off to bed when no one was looking, even though dishes were my responsibility. She couldn’t bear to see me looking so tired.

  Now that I live in the city I miss all the smells; I miss the lilac grove in the spring and the carpet of violets on the front lawn. I love how you describe the country—keep writing your thoughts down. After all these years I still haven’t really been properly transplanted to the city and your letters make me homesick. Someday you will come to visit me in De Kalb and you’ll see the beautiful flowers I have in my yard. We’ll sit on my porch—just think of all the things we’ll have to talk about. You have a very spe
cial place in my heart, my dear, and I think of you every day.

  That’s what she said, “You have a very special place in my heart, my dear . . .” I almost laughed out loud in front of Miss Pin when we read that sentence. I thought about what that special place must look like in Aunt Sid’s heart. I thought it must be a garden with all the kinds of flowers there are in the world, in every color. It would be a place where I could walk and smell the sweet air. I sat picturing the spot, where I could live if I wanted; I thought about it all day long sometimes. I sent her a photo Elmer took of me outside on the front steps. You can’t see my face because I’m holding a kitten up to the camera.

  I also loved to think about the days when Aunt Sid and I would lounge and talk about our lives from start to finish. We’d sit at a table stocked with food; we wouldn’t leave; we’d sit there through day and night, nibbling at desserts. Not for one second were we going to have hunger pangs.

  When she stopped to visit that year I was so happy to see her I stood in the hallway trembling, and then I ran out into the yard and hid up a tree. I wanted always to be on the verge of seeing her. She left me silver bracelets, four of them, that hit each other on my wrist and made me dizzy with their clanging. I wrote her and told her I never took the bracelets off. I said we were a great big happy family. I didn’t mention that when May got mad she grabbed the dish towel and with her red hands as fierce and large as lobsters she clawed at the towel and wrung it until her hands turned white. It made her feel better to strangle something. I always ended my letter with how happy we were.

  Once, when we were in church, all of the little children had to go to the altar for the children’s story. It was three weeks before Christmas. The minister—May calls him the Rev—was there in the white robes and his rainbow belt, and he came down and sat with us on the steps going up to the pulpit.