The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  Even though Ruby didn’t have a job he got welfare from the government and cash from his sister. He had the hardest time getting a job, because people knew his history. They weren’t willing to trust him one hundred percent. Ruby isn’t a smart manager with his money. Somehow it trickles through his fingers, even if he makes a conscious effort to hold it tight. He’s generous at times—I love that about him. He went out and bought a toaster oven for May after he was playing ball in the house, to make up to her.

  When she came home from work he had it on the table. He said, “Hey, Ma, I got a present for you.” Her ears perked up, but she pretended she didn’t care about a package with a shiny red ribbon around the middle.

  “Open it, Ma,” Ruby said. She also wasn’t sure she liked having him call her Ma. He was moving back and forth, swinging his arms. He wanted her to like the present an awful lot.

  She came to the table and untied the ribbon, and when she saw inside, how a person could bake a potato or heat leftovers, she said, “Well, ain’t that nice?” We could see her face stretched out wide in the stainless rim of the toaster. She turned the knobs, opened and shut the door, examined the plug. She didn’t have to know that it was on sale at Coast to Coast and that Ruby spent half his cash on it. She was friends with him that day. She thought he wasn’t so bad to have around after all.

  May suggested, since Ruby couldn’t find a job right off the bat, that he help Mr. Buddies. He rents our field land and lives across the way. He’s old and doesn’t have a strong back. May said that Ruby could take care of our chickens too, wipe the eggs and shovel the manure. Ruby said, “Sure,” like he always does, but he didn’t mean it. He was afraid to stick his hands under the hens, for fear they might bite his fingers down to the bone. There he was wearing his wedding ring on his hairy chest like the men in dirty magazines and he was scared to death of innocent hens. I told him, “Watch me—see the worst they do is give you a little peck, you don’t hardly feel it.” Still, he stood back from the laying boxes and stretched his arm out slowly, and naturally the hens scolded him. The fine silver hairs on his neck stood up. I started to laugh when he backed up into the post but when he turned to me, crouching and holding his head and crying, I ran to him and cradled him. I didn’t tell May that Ruby hated chickens’ sharp beaks and their toenails and their bald legs. I told her I would miss the chickens too much if Ruby did the chores.

  He worked with Mr. Buddies that fall we were first married. He helped fill the silo and he milked on weekends—that’s not counting the times he overslept. Tardiness really got Mr. Buddies heated up. He’d yell into the phone, “WHERE THE HELL IS RUBY?” I had to hold the receiver a mile away so my eardrums didn’t get shattered. Mr. Buddies also complained because Ruby played with the kitties when he was supposed to be washing down cows. He didn’t understand that Ruby was without the sense of time. Ruby loves to nap for one thing, but he also doesn’t go by the earth’s rhythm, sleeping by night and getting up with the morning. And it’s no deep secret that he drinks more than he should. I wanted to quiet Mr. Buddies down so I could explain my husband, but he always threatened Ruby before he offered him one last chance.

  There were mornings when Ruby couldn’t possibly get up to milk because he had worked in the basement all night long. He’d forget to go to bed. Of course then he had to sleep on the couch most of the day; that’s when May hit the ceiling. She yelled at him while he slept like a baby. She was perfecting her speech for the time when he would be awake and half listening. It wasn’t exactly just the rumor of his bad behavior that made people think twice about hiring Ruby. There was the mystery about him; it was something I love in him—wouldn’t most girls love a man who didn’t have time on his mind? “There ain’t anyone else in the world like Ruby,” Daisy had said about him months before.

  May said to me in the car on the way to work, in one whole breath, “No one’s going to hire Ruby because he’s lazier than animals in the zoo who don’t have to do nothin’ because their keeper comes in and throws big huge slabs of red meat at them.”

  “He ain’t lazy,” I said, and we left it at that.

  I didn’t care if Ruby worked or not. I wanted him to have a wonderful time being married, living together so happily. As long as we were getting along, what difference did it make? We were paying the bills pretty much, keeping warm and fed. We had borrowed money from Artie to help cover the wedding, but we were going to keep our promise and pay him back. I wanted Ruby to be so happy he’d never disappear for an afternoon after dinner.

  What he loved to do was build birdhouses. He had a few tools and he made a place in the basement at Elmer’s old workbench. He was down there all day, all night sometimes, listening to the radio and building the houses. He was proud of them, even though on some houses the walls didn’t come together perfectly and the windows were slightly crooked. He sold them at the bookstore in Stillwater. The lady there didn’t mind displaying a few on the table. She had posters in her store about saving poor slaughtered animals, such as seals with mopey eyes and whales caught in black net’s. The birdhouses were three dollars each. Ruby carved details on the wood and made different rooms: bird kitchens and bird bathrooms and dens and game rooms and place to make music. There were always four or five stories. He made chimneys by gluing together pieces of gravel he found on the driveway When I first saw his houses, I was very impressed. I said “How do you know how to build?”

  “It’s nothin’,” Ruby said, running his hands over his hair. “I watched my Uncle Jake hammer and I learned how like that.” He snapped his fingers. “You ever seen all the babies one bird has in a batch?” he asked me. “They need space, all them birdies do.”

  He wished he could put electricity in the bedrooms. He guessed some of the babies were afraid of the dark during the long black nights. Purple martins were his favorite bird because in spring they actually used all the stories in his houses. You could see their beaks sticking out of the windows, upstairs and downstairs, aunts and sisters, cousins and grandparents. They looked like they cooperated pretty well. In the mornings, while I made my sandwich, Ruby sat in the kitchen and stared out to the yard, watching for the birds to come feed at their stations. He didn’t like squirrels too much. He always tore outside and flicked his arms in their direction. He made me move the feathers off the walk if a cat had eaten up most of a bird.

  I loved coming home and Ruby would be down the basement hammering and singing, or else he’d be in the Lazy Boy chair watching reruns and drinking a beer, maybe dabbing paint onto his houses. He liked to paint them different colors. He usually picked me up and swooped me around, and he always told me he missed me all day long. He’d say, “Baby, I thought you’d never get home.” He was always wanting to party, which meant going anywhere, even a drive in the car to park in a ditch. He’d say, “Where should we go tonight, to party?”

  There were certain places he didn’t show his face. He hated to run into people he wasn’t friends with, such as the owner of the gas station where he used to work. There were a few other people too. Some of his friendships didn’t have anything to them but storms brewing. I guess there were individuals who didn’t care to discover his good points.

  Sometimes we went bowling, like the old days, only May didn’t come along any more. Maybe she didn’t want to be seen with Ruby, even with the toaster oven. Maybe she couldn’t stand all the gutter balls and the way he pretended to play his guitar, looking so dumb when the ball rolled down the gutter, same as his last ten turns. I had to be sort of embarrassed for him in those moments, but he didn’t notice. He was usually smashed when he bowled. He said the balls looked like marbles to him; they kept shrinking as they rolled on down. He couldn’t see how a puny marble could knock down the giant pins, as tall as the water tower. When he was drunk items were slightly distorted for Ruby. Once he called out to me, just when he was about to take his turn; he said “Baby aren’t you glad my dick ain’t as big as those pins?” Daisy spit her drink all over the floor
and had to rush to the ladies’ room, and I wished, for the ten millionth time in my life for a small hole to open in the floor directly underneath me.

  Other nights we went to dances the firemen put on to raise money for their new trucks and waterproofs, and for children who had cancer. I didn’t do very well dancing the twist. I only waltz. Usually I sat and watched and if I felt brave I got up and walked around the building. I watched Ruby dance with Daisy. They were clowns together. I laughed too loudly at their antics. I knew they were probably only horsing around. They weren’t actually flirting. Daisy always ended up going off with a bearded fireman, the newest member. They usually wound up in a corner dancing so slowly you could barely stand to watch. If I got loaded I could dance—Ruby stroked my hindquarters to show me how to wiggle my hips.

  At other times we went to the theater in Stillwater that’s devoted to dirty pictures. People come from all around to watch. Ruby always wanted to try the moves the actors made on the screen. He wanted to see me suck on my own nipples but my breasts weren’t big enough for that kind of behavior. He joked and said we would get all our friends together and make a chain but I didn’t laugh too hard. After about two or three of those movies they all seemed exactly the same. I made excuses whenever he said he wanted to go and after a while he didn’t ask me. If he was gone when I came home I could be pretty sure he and Randall were at the movies.

  I wrote Aunt Sid to say how happy we were. It took me hours to compose the letter. I mentioned at the end that it was a little strange living with May also, because I could tell she wasn’t crazy about Ruby and his curve balls. I didn’t describe how he tracked in the second week we were married. May had just shampooed the carpet. There were black footprints going straight for the television. When she came in the room and saw the muddy path she screamed her damnations. Ruby stood fixed in his spot, staring at her display. He was still, like a bug stunned by the hot light. He didn’t like to get yelled at, Ruby didn’t. He wanted to please May. He wanted her to say he was good at sitting around all day with his feet up. She hauled out the Hoover and gave him a demonstration while he was still in staring mood. She slowed down and lowered her voice, and when she pushed the handle in his direction she smiled. She looked like she was coaxing a wild animal to eat poison. She asked him if he wanted her old apron the black one with the torn white rickrack. She laid it on the chair for him to use if he wanted to. When she left the room he sat on it and passed gas. At that point I quickly turned on the machine and cleaned the mess. After I finished I handed the thing to Ruby so he could at least turn it off. I could hear May on the phone with Dee Dee while he wrapped the cord up. She said she had the worst headache. She said life was going rotten for her. When I heard May describe her life my blood clotted and came up my throat. I didn’t know what to do, standing stiff in front of the vacuum and my husband and the traces of his dirty feet. I didn’t know how I was going to fix May’s rotten life. Ruby went right down the basement and made about fifty birdhouses. He made another purple one for the back yard.

  At supper May said, “Birds don’t like purple.”

  Ruby didn’t say anything. After a few minutes he looked up at the salt shaker. There were tears in his eyes when he whispered, “How do you know? You ain’t a bird.”

  While we ate supper we didn’t talk much. We worked at getting that food down our throats.

  Aunt Sid wrote me right back and said she liked seeing me so much at the wedding. She said I had astonished her, that she wasn’t prepared to see a woman marching down the aisle. She said we would meet soon, she was sure we would; we’d have so many things to talk over! Aunt Sid never used exclamation points, and I was suspicious of that one, the first she had ever used on me. It was as if she had to pretend to be cheerful. I had such an odd sensation about Aunt Sid, now that I was married. I guess I didn’t feel too much like my old self. I was a new person, only I didn’t know myself well enough to say Hi. I didn’t know exactly how I was supposed to act in front of people. Actually, we were all stumbling around trying to figure out how to act. May was probably mixed up too. There’s a good chance she didn’t know if she was still supposed to be the mother, bawling children out if they wrecked up her house but if she wasn’t the mother who was she then? She didn’t have any answers.

  There was some good news right after we were married: I got promoted at Trim ’N Tidy. Dry cleaning isn’t exactly my life’s passion, but Artie was teaching me how fabrics behaved, training me to be skilled and do a fine job. I learned how to be a spotter, the job that takes the most intelligence in dry cleaning. My job comes after the clothes are first inspected, and after they have been thrown in a machine with chemicals. They come out and then I look them over and find problem stains. If there are trick spots I take more chemicals and I do what’s called tamping the fabric. You just kind of beat at the cloth with a brush and then you flush it with a special steam air gun. I didn’t mind looking at people’s stains trying to figure out what they had for dinner identifying the puzzling spot! I tried to guess who owned the gigantic sweaters. There’s plenty of fat people in Honey Creek and Stillwater, weaned on chips and cola. A spotter has to be smart and pay attention to the fabrics and dyes because you can ruin the clothes easily with chemicals. Customers are not pleased when their goods come back covered with holes. Artie told me I did fantastic work, that I listened carefully and learned quickly. He hiked up my pay. I could tell May didn’t like my being a spotter when she was only a finisher. I think she saw me, her daughter, the married spotter, and I think she felt quiet and near death. She imagined that there was nothing left for her.

  May and I came home at night and I did the chores with Ruby trailing behind like a good old dog. May always made the meal. We all had tasks we were responsible for in our household. When I came in with the eggs we sat right down to supper and usually we ate in silence, working on chewing and swallowing, getting nourished. May isn’t the greatest chef on earth, but I was used to her food because I had eaten it every day of my life. She made three pans of meat loaf stretched with ground soybeans, which lasted for a week, and then the next week we ate macaroni and cheese for as long as possible, and occasionally she butchered a chicken, which meant eating the entire bird: liver, gizzard, necks, heart. Of course we always had something special for Sunday noon, a good day to be alive if eating was something a person enjoyed. We usually had a roast and mashed potatoes and Jell-O or fruit salad, and cake. And then back to Mondays, and May’s habit of making enough goulash for two million people, so it would last for eternity. This was her way of being The Cook. She was always so tired at the end of the day. She didn’t want to spend each night over the boiling pot. There were TV shows she wanted to watch; there were her sore feet she wanted to elevate.

  May and I could tell Ruby didn’t savor her menus. He wasn’t crazy about onions and watered-down stew. He called out “jackpot” once, when he hit a piece of meat. He was used to eating hamburgers and fish sandwiches at McDonald’s. He ate five a day when he was a bachelor. French fries were his idea of food, which is why his complexion was the color of asphalt. If Ruby hit something distasteful in May’s casserole, such as a tough piece of eggplant, he spit it out in his napkin, for all to see and hear. I practically wanted to take him aside and scold him, not to mention regurgitate, because I knew how insulted May felt. She’s sensitive about her cooking. But May, perhaps because her brand-new life was going downhill, apparently said to herself, Why bother? She started to make the suppers worse and worse. Her favorite slogan was “Give people their money’s worth.”

  When she washed the dishes she’d say to Ruby, “I always save the dishwater for soup stock. It cooks up so wonderful.”

  He couldn’t figure out if she was joking or not. He stood still in the middle of the floor staring at her while she poured the gray dishwater into a half-gallon container. He never blinked, watching the crumbs swirl around in the jar.

  The first two weeks in December May served split-pea soup without reli
ef. Seemed like there wasn’t any ham in it, if you don’t count the gristle. The soup was green and loosey-goosey, and Ruby figured she went out to the chicken shed and scraped up what the sick chickens made. I didn’t like to think about such unpleasantness, but I had to agree with him. One night, after what seemed like three years of split-pea soup, Ruby pushed his chair out when May stuck the bowl of chicken loosey-goosey in front of him, and he made a long noise that suggested trouble forthcoming from deep in his gut. May was waiting for it, you could just tell. She stood over him and said so sweetly, “You think you’re awful smart, sitting around all day long, waiting for me to serve you—you cook, see how it suits you, Mr. Fancy Pants, see if it changes your attitude.” She smiled long and nice. He didn’t know where to look.

  He got up and went out that night, without me. He drove the lemon Daisy dumped in our yard into town and bought a hamburger. Louise from the cleaners said later that she saw him at the Stillwater Cafe, sitting all by himself with two burgers and a pile of fries. She said she could hear the juke box just by looking at the quaking windows. Ruby knows where the switch is to turn it way up.

  When he got home at midnight I was in bed. I couldn’t figure out what else to do, except try to dream of Mr. Darcy. I saw Mr. Darcy eating french fries, Mr. Darcy whacking on birdhouses, Mr. Darcy rubbing up against tree trunks. I was terrified that Ruby was gone for good. We hadn’t been married two months yet. What would I tell everybody? He crawled over me as if I was an irritating stump. When he got comfortable he said, “Baby, here I am. It’s Mr. Chef Boy-R-Dee.”

  I managed to laugh while Ruby talked about how he was going to go out and shoot a deer for May. He talked about wrapping the tail up in banana peel and coating it with chocolate. Sometimes I think my calling is the stage. I could be an actress with convincing fake smiles. I hugged Ruby, because we were still a couple. I was so thankful.