The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  I was always dreaming about being a princess when May said I should clean the chicken shed. Ruby and I were taken from the same mold, I’m sure of it. Except that Ruby was born lazier. He was born smiling at the thoughts in his head that no one could imagine, not even doctors with their brain scanners.

  Sherry went on in her kind, kind voice to tell me about the time in kindergarten when the teachers had the children put puzzles together so they could tell how smart everyone was going to be in life. Sherry had read Ruby’s top-secret school file to learn about his problems. Ruby didn’t want to do quizzes for intelligence. He sat and stared and grinned. He refused to look at the games. When he knew all the teachers were watching him he shoved the puzzles off the table and the pieces went flying. He wasn’t about to be a guinea pig. Sherry then explained the pattern at home for punishment: the father came in with his big stick and bashed Ruby over the head; the mother tried to rescue him and tell him he hadn’t done a single thing; and then the father slapped one or both of them to demonstrate that he knew right from wrong.

  I couldn’t help blurting out that Ruby had always been a glutton for accidents. “How so?” Sherry asked, cocking her head so that the blond cap that was her hair flopped over to one side.

  I told her about the time ten-year-old Ruby stuck a piece of macaroni up his nose and it practically killed him. His nose swelled up and took over his face. It sure was lucky, everyone at the hospital said, that he didn’t shove a navy bean up there, because at least the macaroni let him breathe through the hole. All of his nasal membranes got infected. They had to knock him out so they could fish up his nose and get at the noodle. Ruby wasn’t too crazy about doctors and hospitals. He felt like his nose was one of the seven wonders the way the staff wanted to look up it. He still breathes loudly—I think the macaroni made his sinuses get permanently out of whack.

  Sherry and I found ourselves laughing over Ruby’s macaroni nose, until we remembered everything else and then we shut up. I was about to show her the pictures of Ruby’s parents but I decided I’d keep them to myself. Ruby’s mother looks forlorn and nice. She has bleached blond hair floating around her head like it’s cotton candy. You can barely make out the roots. Her eyes are pale blue as if someone washed them out with bleach, and they’re not as wide as Ruby’s. She looks dead tired in the pictures, but you can tell she’s a good person; you can tell she’s so sorry for drowning her boy.

  Ruby told me once, when he was loaded and happy, that when he grew up his mother appreciated him all the time because he always helped her out. He hated to go to Longfellow elementary school because he was nothing but a troublemaker and he spent half his career in the principal’s office. Classmates teased him for reasons that are clear to me. They laughed because Ruby’s eyes were so far apart and dumb-looking, and because they turned their noses downwind and sniffed something different. Children have an advanced sense of smell and if your odor is off, they’ll punish you. Ruby wasn’t crazy about baths until he moved into our house and discovered the perfect combination: stewing in a hot tub and listening to the ball game. Perhaps the children thought the way he walked along the hall at Longfellow banging on each locker, with his pants falling down and his hair sticking up was queer and they couldn’t help taunting him He didn’t have good luck when he tried to behave like other people. Everyone knew that he got expelled from Sunday school for goosing all the boys and girls repeatedly. The Sunday school teacher said he was a little devil; that’s the exact person ministers don’t want to have in church. Ruby punched classmates whenever he got a chance, to get back at them for mocking him, and at home his father made him stick his head in a bucket and then he spanked him. It happened over and over, thousands of times. It doesn’t seem a mystery to me, that violence won’t cure violence. I suspect Mr. Dahl was a bale short of a full load.

  But when Ruby came home from Longfellow in the afternoons there was his mother with her soft wide waist. She always had her apron on, and she hugged him so his head hit her middle. He just wanted to go to sleep right there on her small pot belly. After school they did activities together. She baked cookies and he measured the ingredients. He probably ate half the batter, but his mother didn’t mind—that’s how she was. They went to the grocery store and Ruby fetched items for her, because she walked slowly. She got winded if she went at a normal pace. He brought everything she said back to the cart and she never yelled at him, not once, even when he couldn’t see that the pancake syrup was right in front of his face. He didn’t have to do anything all that difficult for her to say he was a smart boy, a good boy.

  When he was in high school he didn’t tear around wrecking things too much. He stayed close by and helped his mother in the back yard. Or he went over to the neighbor, Uncle Jake, and learned how to build birdhouses. Jake wasn’t actually his uncle, but that’s what the sisters, Nancy and Sally Jane, called him when they were youngsters. Uncle Jake didn’t talk a lot but he showed Ruby how to hammer and saw, drive nails into boards. I think Ruby was scared of him because he grumbled at mistakes and made sour comments into his beard. But Ruby liked doing crafts with his hands; he liked to see all the tools hung up neatly on the board, and Uncle Jake yelled at him outright, except the time Ruby hocked his best wrench. Uncle Jake was so old he couldn’t help being annoyed with young boys. I didn’t find out until much later, until Sherry came to me, that it was Ruby who discovered Uncle Jake shot dead in his tool shed, and that Ruby didn’t tell anyone for two weeks. Finally he told his girlfriend Hazel and she came to look at what was left, and then she called the police. Sherry said that years later, when Ruby was in her office telling her about Uncle Jake, he ate the whole bowl of black licorice while he paced.

  All through school there were classmates who called Ruby a wimp for grocery shopping and doing laundry with his mother, but he couldn’t care less. He continued to show them, by beating them up in private. Ruby was the class bully without one single friend to help him in the battle. It was Ruby, solo, against five or ten boys. I imagine he only had the afternoons to look forward to, when his mother sat on the lawn chair and told Ruby where to rake. She did it gently, plus she always raved about how strong he was. She couldn’t believe the strength in his body. She loved looking at his back when he didn’t have a shirt on. Sometimes, they went fishing down at the river together. They caught bass and brought them home for supper. He didn’t like the skinning part. He let his mother take the guts out and chop off the heads. He didn’t like to watch her, but he did mention that he was going to skin some of the boys at school and toss their brains in the garbage. She petted his hair and told him “Shhh.” They were both true sports enthusiasts. They made popcorn and watched baseball because his mother was also a Cubs fan. They liked rooting for the team they knew wasn’t going to win.

  Don’t ask me where Ruby’s father was in all this, besides being nearby with the billyclub. Ruby didn’t ever talk about him. He didn’t speak of his strong points. I have an image of Mr. Dahl in my head, however, from snapshots I’ve seen and now own. He is short with a belly made from beer and ham. There’s a picture of him putting up screens on the back porch. He either just had a losing fight with someone or putting up screens is his idea of the afterlife in hell. He isn’t a fat man, if you don’t count his pot and his wide flabby cheeks and his lips. Those lips look like an African’s lips, where there’s so much meat they wear sticks through them for decorations. He’s a real charmer, the kind of person you cross the street a block away to avoid.

  Sherry tried to explain away Mr. Dahl. She said, “There’s a lot of disappointment and anger there. Ruby’s the only son and he simply doesn’t have the kind of behaviors Mr. Dahl expects and demands.”

  I stared at the wall and thought of Mr. Dahl in the snapshot I have of him, when he was in the Marines. He’s saluting and he has a grin on his face. I wished, while I listened to Sherry’s words wash over me, that Mr. Dahl had never left his boat, that he had stayed in his bunk following orders forever. He
never gave Ruby enough chances. He’s the kind of person you could imagine biting the heads off of game birds.

  It is probably worse for a father when he has a son that doesn’t amount to much. It doesn’t seem as important if the daughter is dumb. Perhaps it did make Mr. Dahl mad after a while, the way Ruby stared and smiled—because sometimes, if you didn’t know better, you’d think there was nothing going on inside that brain of Ruby’s; it’s as if he was a round shiny glass ball. You have to take the time to look beyond his expressions. He’s got hundreds of ideas inside him, rushing around in different directions. All the thoughts in his skull are having traffic jams. He had to hide behind his face with his father because he didn’t have any wits in that man’s presence. Sometimes I can laugh, in a sinister way, when I wonder what would have happened if May and Mr. Dahl had married each other. It would be like a cat fight every night, I wager. Fur flying and the sound of death in the air until one of them is far up a tree licking its wounds, waiting for the next round.

  All through high school Ruby’s mother dreaded the phone ringing. It was sure to be someone’s mother saying that Ruby gave the son a bloody lip, or his teacher calling to say she was going to have to fail him for the fifth time. Ruby simply is not a scholar—that’s why he was bored to death by every subject. He fell asleep when the teacher taught him about Hitler. It didn’t bother him that two million people were gassed a day in Germany. He never even heard of that country. He liked building wood houses and watching sports; he liked to be sick and watch TV from his bed.

  Both Sherry and I knew the story of Ruby scooping ice cream in high school at the Dairy Queen. The job didn’t last too long. He couldn’t remember how to make banana splits. He told customers Dairy Queen was all out of bananas—the truck didn’t bring in a load yet. The boss heard him telling the story about how the bananas went rotten in the back room; there were bugs eating them—you couldn’t see any bananas for the black beetles. He grabbed Ruby by the collar and shoved him against the ice cream machine. Mr. Dahl didn’t have kind words when Ruby came home without his uniform.

  When Ruby finally graduated from Stillwater High, long before I went there, his mother called around to find him a job. She couldn’t help doing dirty work for him because she was afraid of what would happen to him. She probably felt like he was a cat who didn’t have claws, couldn’t defend himself.

  First, Ruby worked down at Sears with his father in the shipping room. I didn’t have to guess too long to find out how that episode turned out. They had to tell him every step, every other day, and sometimes he got it wrong. His father stood over him with his pitchfork planted firmly on the floor and naturally Ruby’s face twitched and his hands went stiff. He knew he was going to make a mistake any minute.

  One night in bed when he was in a rare mood for thinking about the past, he said to me, “This is a secret, OK, baby?”

  “I won’t tell,” I whispered.

  “I wet my pants down there in the shipping department. My father could tell, he sniffed it out. I was scared because I screwed up an order royal. I sent a whole box of ladies’ slips to the bank manager, instead of drapes. I was sure all the men at Sears was going to come in a row to slit my throat.”

  I told him it didn’t matter. I said I would have done worse than wet my pants. He felt my face in the dark, like Miss Finch used to. His hands were saying that I was beautiful and that together we could make a path through a whole state of thorns and poisonous berries.

  Sherry told me that Ruby ditched work at Sears, and he messed up the invoices when he was there, and that finally he went to his mother and cried while he banged his head against the kitchen door. He said he wasn’t going to work any more. Most certainly his mother stroked his hair and said, “It’s OK, Ruby, we’ll find you something else.” For several months he didn’t do anything. I know how he spent his time because although I am not a social worker I know Ruby and his hobbies. I have a clear picture of him sitting around the house, listening to the radio and singing along with rock musicians. Ruby’s gift is his sweet high voice, almost as high as a girl’s. It sounds awfully pretty, and he can sing any song you say. I wished Aunt Sid had heard him sing. He could figure out songs on the piano down in the church basement and no one ever taught him how. Probably his musical genius is one more reason Ruby’s father thought he was cracked—and to top it off Ruby spent whatever money he earned on records. He sang along with his favorite groups, pretending he was the lead singer, bending his knees and making faces into the mike. He danced around in the living room strumming his fake guitar. It was the one without strings that he garbage picked. He was the drummer, the singer, and the guitar player simultaneously. With the music he was set free from all the ideas people had about him; with the records on Ruby sang himself into a dream state where he was number one on the charts.

  However, finally Ruby’s mother told him, when he was slouching on the sofa doing nothing, “Ruby, I’m not always going to be here to take care of you. You have to get a job. You can’t sit home for the rest of your life and dance around the living room.”

  So Ruby found employment at the Zephyr gas station pumping gas. His neighbor, Mr. Wallace, owned it. He was willing to give Ruby a chance and Ruby came through—he was a pretty good gas pumper. He wiped up the car windows and performed responsible tasks such as making change. The fact about Ruby is that he can do jobs if he wants to, if you can teach him as patiently as possible. He gets so frustrated when he does something wrong; he rips up sheets of paper and grinds his teeth. I bet he could do a lot more capable jobs than people think, if they could only give him chances. Employers don’t understand that Ruby is so proud he’s afraid to try. He hates it when people laugh at him for messing up—that’s not counting bowling. He didn’t care about his gutter balls, probably because whenever he bowled he was smashed. If I had once said, “Ruby, here’s how you bowl,” or said he was a dumb bowler, he would never have set foot in Town Lanes again. He has this big proud scared heart.

  Ruby never explained the next chapter in his life. Again, Sherry had to fill me in on the details. She told me that she had asked him to draw pictures, and then they’d talk about his portraits. He never drew his father, if you don’t count the one with King Kong devouring a few children. Ruby always came up with the same picture: himself in the foreground nursing his beautiful golden-haired mother. All her life she had asthma, plus she smoked constantly. Maybe when she lit up, the delicious cigarettes took her mind off her Marine husband and how he turned purple with his rages if the storm windows weren’t washed properly. The whole neighborhood could hear him if a piece of dust landed on the kitchen table and it didn’t get cleaned up instantly. Cigarettes took her mind off the fact that he didn’t have one soft spot. She couldn’t breathe half the day and night and she wasn’t going to go to a doctor because they always told her she had to quit smoking. She tried but she didn’t have any will power in that department. Smoking brought her peace of mind for a few seconds at a time.

  She hacked so often she wore herself out. She’d get attacks, and all you could do was stand and stare at her twisting and hacking and spitting. Her problem wasn’t anything aspirin could solve and she was allergic to drugs doctors wanted to prescribe. And because Ruby thought parents, for example, Mr. Dahl, were permanent, it was a shock for him when she gasped for breath hysterically one morning. She was stuck halfway out of bed. Medics had to rush in with oxygen for her and then they removed her to the hospital.

  When the attack occurred they made her quit smoking, no ifs, ands, or buts. She wasn’t going to ever take a drag again, period. By the time Ruby was working at the Zephyr gas station she had to stay at home, close to the tanks of oxygen they had for her, in case she felt the urge to go blue. Ruby could not fail to notice her habit of inhaling as if she had twelve tin cans tied together down in her throat. A person could always tell where she was in the house by following the noise of her constricted breaths. She got cross because her nerves were on edge wi
thout nicotine, plus she felt absolutely rotten. She didn’t have such a nice sweet character any more. Her daughters had moved away, Ruby was at work, her husband drank alcohol at night to settle his fat stomach. She watched TV for ten hours straight. Television doesn’t do one thing to make a person happy: first you begin to think you’re straight out of a soap opera, where people are either thoroughly wicked or absolutely pure, and then your head turns to Jell-O. Mr. Dahl did the best he could, probably, to take care of Ruby’s mother, considering his personality. He worked overtime to pay for the nurse who checked up on his wife twice a week.

  Sherry said that finally Nancy, Ruby’s sister, came up from Florida and she convinced her parents that they should move down South with her, to the sunshine that makes old bones feel better, to the air that is free of dust and pollen. They were going to walk along the ocean and breathe the brisk salt air. Mr. Dahl arranged a transfer with Sears and then they packed up the house and moved to Florida. There wasn’t extra room at Nancy’s place for Ruby, and besides, Mr. Dahl told Ruby he was grown now; it was high time he got out on his own. His mother hardly resembled her old self. She no longer commented on her fine boy, Ruby, who filled Mrs. Carson’s brand-new Buick with regular gasoline when her car required lead-free Mrs Dahl could hardly walk let alone breathe. She couldn’t make any more nice rules She told Ruby they’d send him the money to fly down next winter and then she’d find him a job but he knew there wasn’t a place for him there. He could tell it in the way his father stared blankly when she said “Sweetheart we’ll send you money, I promise.” Ruby was no dumbbell. He cried uncontrollably when they loaded her into the car. They had to lift her in and bend her legs for her, as if she were a stiff corpse already. He prayed, for the first time in his life, while they put pillows around her. He wished she’d come walking back to him, singing country and western—she’d have that much extra breath to sing songs.