The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  There wasn’t anyone to take care of Ruby now. He was an adult, full-fledged. He found a place that looked just like a pigsty. It cost fifty dollars a month because it wasn’t too much bigger than a closet. If Ruby had pizza for supper, say, and didn’t finish, there it would be three weeks later still on the counter, only you couldn’t tell it was a pizza because it looked like where the ants lived. Now that he was an adult he began wrecking other people’s possessions. He walked into the house down by the river and broke the locks on the rooms where the landlords had all the heirlooms stored. He smashed the bureaus; he took a knife and slashed the upholstery that was from the time of George Washington. The landlords weren’t thrilled about the ruins.

  He got loaded and drove around bashing into people’s cars. He didn’t even have a license, plus he stole a junker down at the gas station. He shoplifted from stores without trying to act like a burglar. He walked into the drugstore, picked up a couple of watches from the counter, and then swaggered out, holding on to the loot. Anyone could see him. And when they came chasing after him he socked people and kicked them. Sherry said, “He knew he needed help desperately, and this was the way he could count on attention. His deviance was a scream for help.”

  I said, “Sure,” and stared directly at her until she had to avert her eyes.

  Ruby went crazy on drugs one night, waited outside the Sears store, and beat up his former boss. The old man had to go to the hospital for concussion. Ruby should have gone to jail but the boss was best friends with Mr. Dahl. They settled it out of court. Ruby had to see a counselor and report to an officer. He never liked to discuss it with me, because he was ashamed. He bragged about it sometimes, if he was with Daisy. They talked about the thousands of times they fooled police. Ruby even boasted to Daisy that he had been in jail: he said there was a huge room filled with chairs and then up in front sat a TV. He said the guard was the one who decided what channel they could watch, so all they got to see was Outdoor World and Wild Kingdom, while they wolfed down their coffee cake. He was daydreaming about prison—Sherry herself said he had a clear record.

  Daisy and Ruby met down at the police station. They clowned around while they were waiting to see their officers. Occasionally they bumped into each other at the resource center, where Ruby had his appointments with God Almighty Sherry. I remember once, before we were married, when we almost ran over Herself at the grocery store. She chatted and laughed with Ruby, asked him how he was doing that day. You could tell he was one of her favorite victims. I walked down the aisle so I wouldn’t tip the sacks of flour on her head. I didn’t want to be responsible for knocking her out cold.

  When I met Ruby he had long since had dates with Hazel, the old bag he learned on, and Hazel’s cousin, Isabel. They were both available for several young boys. They liked fresh ones best since they’re juicier. Ruby didn’t have any friends except the old ladies and his counselor, and Daisy talked to him now and then. They slapped each other five on the street. She’ll talk with anything that wears jockey shorts. When I met Ruby he wasn’t seeing his officer any more. He had exemplary behavior, if you don’t count the alcohol he drank for recreation and the stunts he pulled when he was under the influence. Sherry made him go to night classes to learn skills such as power mechanics. He hated the class; he almost chopped off his thumb on the band saw. Still, Sherry always told him what a marvelous job he did with his fingers. I had to face the fact that she had attractions for him besides the black licorice on her desk; I could tell he worshiped her He loved her when she said he was making fantastic progress. Sometimes he went to the Catholic Church for mass. He sat in the back and prayed for his mother. He went over her whole body in his mind calling upon the good Lord to come on down with his vacuum and do a job on her lungs.

  Ruby still went to see Sherry after we were married. He was addicted to her loving gaze. She gave him suggestions about exactly how to run his life. I know Ruby, more than Sherry does, even if I don’t know every single detail of his past life. I know that in the bottom of his soul all he wants to do is be a gentle person, a good boy. He wants friends to tell him what a sensational job he’s doing. I know, because I’m married to him.

  I liked Ruby to tell me about his mother, only the stories got him choked up. She passed away from pneumonia the year before we were married. The infection seeped into her brain and she died without one memory. She didn’t remember that she had a son named Ruby. She stared at her husband with no expression on her face and then died with her eyes open. Ruby and Sherry told me the facts and I figure it’s my job to fill in the details as vividly as I can. Even if I’ve elaborated a little I’d say it gets to the heart of the matter.

  When Sherry left me for the last time she said, “We carry Ruby with us, don’t we?” I had to look at her, and I realized, for a split second, that she felt the burden of it. I didn’t answer her, but I have to admit I felt just a little of my weight lift. If I ever see her again I might just say thank you.

  Thirteen

  THE times in bed, when Ruby told me scenes from his life, were secret for us. They didn’t happen that often because he didn’t want to think about the past too much. He didn’t crack jokes when he was telling the stories. He was dead serious. There’s a place in Ruby that’s about as sterling as the heart of the most blessed saint who ever lived on earth. I see the place as a pouch, filled with all the ingredients that could make a person behave perfectly.

  Every now and then though, he did do something haywire. Never mind about the time the police found him in the marsh, drunk and covered with mud. They shone their beam on him and he thought it was an angel. Nothing I said to him for weeks afterwards convinced him that the police had brought him home. He insisted on angels.

  There were other incidents which made May suggest the loony bin out loud. She knew the exact words to wound me. May and Ruby and I used to go together to the orchard nearby to get our apples. They have hundreds of varieties and May knows every single apple, because she’s been going there for forty years. It’s the strangest place to visit in the fall. You can smell the windfall apples on the ground, rotting into sweet mush, and up in the trees on ladders are people from the deaf school. It isn’t far from Stillwater. You can’t hear anything but animal sounds in the orchard—it’s the hired deaf people speaking to each other in grunts and groans from the middle of trees. I wondered what they were talking about in their language while their swift hands moved to pick the apples. Maybe they were calling out joyfully without even knowing it. Maybe they had music in their heads, sounds they invented that were as lovely as waves coming to shore, or birds making their way South. Their sounds were trapped inside the small space of their heads, never to reach their own ears.

  In the winter, when we went for apples, with only the memory of harvest smells and sounds, May and Ruby had to argue over what variety to get, and they made the man give out samples. That’s when I wished I didn’t have ears in working order. May spat the skins into her hand and automatically hated the ones Ruby wanted, and then they bickered over who should pay. I remember one time in particular when Ruby said, “I’ll take ten pounds of Ida Red apples”—they were his favorites—and May said, “Ida Reds don’t cook up good for my pies; I like saucy pies.”

  So Ruby looked at the ground and told the man, “OK, five pounds Ida Reds, five pounds saucy cooker,” and he whispered to me, “Baby, you’re a saucy cooker.”

  He elbowed me in the ribs so affectionately. If May hadn’t been there I would have giggled into my hands.

  “I’m not paying,” May said, going into her song and dance. “I’m alone now,” she explained. “I’m just one person and you two are two people, see, so you should pay.”

  May apparently had the idea that Ruby was a heart surgeon or president of the company. But actually she was mocking him, in her own style, on account of the way he could put away a twelve-pack of beer and sit still for so long in front of the TV. She was making him understand how low he was, not being able
to pay the food bill for his family. She knew he didn’t have any money; she knew she was picking a fight. I looked at the ground the entire time pretending I was a regular person who might well say, “Now ain’t they the dumbest people you’ve ever seen?” May always ended up paying. She was the only one who had the cash and we knew it from the start.

  She kept saying that she was alone, but it wasn’t so. It was Ruby and May and myself, all together. It was something we had to face up to.

  When we came home from the orchard May seemed to be in a particularly bad mood. She talked about how we never got the kind of apples she liked, and Ruby had already eaten half of the cookers, and look who paid for them too, and she was working her life away down at Trim ’N Tidy, and I don’t want to remember all the things that irritated her; she could go on and on in an endless stream about how nothing was right for her. I always stared at one object, except sometimes my eyes would land on her red twisted lobster hands and they’d get me in my weak spot. They were hideous. I could see that time did a job on those knuckles of hers.

  After we ate supper and May’s pies weren’t saucy enough, because of the Ida Red apples she had to use, Ruby walked into Honey Creek. I assumed he was going to fetch Randall so they could watch a movie about men pricking animals, their favorite subject. I wished he was down the basement trying to make warped boards fit snugly together but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I didn’t know what happened to him until the phone rang.

  I remember hearing the sirens but I didn’t think anything of it. The rescue squad went roaring into town and I said my usual line to myself, “I’m glad it isn’t coming for me; knock on wood.”

  With Ruby, ideas are born instantly: he’s walking along in the dark holding on to the railing, watching for ducks, and the next thing he’s over the bridge, screaming down to the water. It’s only about three feet deep and a jump of twenty. He didn’t plan to leap from the bridge, but something must have whispered to him. The scheme appealed to the crawdad he’s had buried in him since before birth. When the rescue squad chased down the road it was to fish Ruby out of the water, for the second time in his life. Jonathan Baker was tampering with the pay phone there on the corner so he saw Ruby jump. Although it was December the river wasn’t quite frozen over yet. Still, it was cold enough for the fish to shutdown, too stiff to move from the hard mud bottom. Paramedics had to wear special suits to get Ruby, to protect their bodies. They dragged him out, slapped his face, wrapped him up. He was limp and filthy. When the hospital called me I started to cry. I didn’t know what they were saying; I heard only that Ruby was there, room 209. It was an accident, they said. They told me he was shivering so fiercely he bumped his head on the bed rail and fainted.

  May tried to pat me when I stood up in the living room blabbering about how I had to go to the hospital. I didn’t make any sense. I mentioned the words “cold river water” and “Ruby” and then I burst into tears. I guess I cried constantly in those days. She turned the TV down and led me into the kitchen, sat me down and made me drink cocoa, as if I were the one with the chill.

  “Ruby is going to be fine,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  She didn’t even know the story. She made me repeat the doctor’s speech as clearly as I could. When she heard the news she said, “Don’t cry, angel”—she hadn’t called me that in about twenty years. “He’ll be OK,” she said gently, in the voice she reserved for Dee Dee.

  Then she drove me to the hospital. I was sobbing the whole time but she talked a blue streak about nothing special—how we were running out of jelly already, we better put hay around the basement windows, everyone said it was going to be record cold this winter, she couldn’t remember how many mice we had caught in the past week, but the cats were cheerful about the quantity. She kept on talking. She dropped me off before she parked so I could rush up to his room.

  There he was all wrapped up in blankets, his lips purple, his face cut. He was covered with bruises and was suffering from shock. He lost hundreds of degrees from his body. It’s a miracle he didn’t break his neck off or turn into an ice cube. He managed to grin; I cried even harder because his lips were the brown color of a mummy’s. He said he didn’t know what made him do it. All he knew was for a few seconds he felt pretty spectacular, like Clark Kent does in every single emergency, and then splat he hit the water.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” I whimpered, and he grinned at me even wider, saying, “Baby, I’ll listen to you, I’ll do whatever you say.”

  Every now and then Ruby did something exceptional, as I said, but he’s my husband and there are qualities I love in him. I didn’t tell anyone at work about the river escapade.

  When he got out two days later May paid the hospital bill. Sherry was going to wangle Medical Assistance for us, but still I hated to see May at the desk paying for Ruby to jump in the river, on account of I knew in my bones that it was going to be fuel for her later.

  It was a difficult winter, not only because Ruby looked like a washed-up fish, but because Daisy went way down to Peoria to the beauty college there. It wasn’t any fun to bowl without Daisy, so I retired from my favorite sport. And she never wrote letters, so I felt as if I’d lost a friend. I still wrote Aunt Sid on occasion. I told her it was a new sensation, getting promoted at Trim ’N Tidy, because I was a spotter now, but May was only a finisher. I tried to act puny around May when we were at work because I knew it grated on her nerves, to see me doing such a hotshot job. I was always excluding small truths from Aunt Sid—for instance, I didn’t say that acting puny probably made me feel kind of puny too. Being a newlywed and acting small all day long was bound to make my brain feel two quarts low. I didn’t know if I could kiss Ruby in front of May when we came home from work. I wanted to, but I felt shy. I always stood in the door smiling at him like a fool.

  Aunt Sid was still asking me what books I liked. She didn’t seem to get the picture. How was I supposed to read books when I was trying to be a good spotter, and then when I came home I had to feed the chickens and wash the dishes? I had to learn how to be Mrs. Ruby Dahl. I didn’t have time or spunk to go outside and sit and stare at the world. The young girl I had been was gone.

  My favorite time, that first year of our marriage, was Christmas Eve. Matt didn’t come home, of course, but Dee Dee and Daisy came over and we had a celebration. There were the five of us—Randall was along too, but he doesn’t count. He sat on the sofa stuffing potato chips in his mouth, watching Love Boat.

  We all got smashed and Ruby began leading us in song. We were singing Christmas carols in the kitchen while Ruby stood on the stool conducting like Aunt Sid. I pinned a fake rose to his shirt and it drooped. Daisy quietly stripped to “Silent Night.” We howled at the sight of her taking off her sweater inch by inch. She got as far down as her long underwear but you could see through to her hot pink bikinis. I guess stripping is her idea of heavenly peace. May had her mouth open so wide when she laughed it looked like it might get stuck and never close. She was royally corked. After a while Ruby turned on the radio and we danced around. I thought I was delirious when I saw that Ruby and May were dancing. They were doing the polka and the fox trot, with May as instructor. They were a perfect match for a couple, out there on the kitchen floor. Ruby bent his knees and stuck out his hind end so he’d be the same height, so they could skim along the linoleum. May’s lids were at half-mast. You couldn’t see anything but the whites of her eyes. When Ruby stood tall she rested her head on his shoulder; she about fell asleep in his drunk arms. She didn’t notice if they bashed into chairs. Finally he dumped her off on the sofa and she curled right up and went out.

  The next day, Christmas morning, when we all looked as if we were afflicted with the same terrible disease which made your skin turn gray, your eyes go bloodshot, and your lips dry up, I told her that she had danced with Ruby. She said I was crazy. She didn’t remember one minute of it. I wanted to shake her so she’d have the pleasure of remembering her best party self
. I wanted her to remember that everyone in the room had been her friend.

  It was January when Ruby got a part-time job down at the can truck that sits outside of the grocery store in Stillwater. It’s open twice a month for three hours on Saturdays. It’s the place for cans and dead batteries and newspapers. Ruby weighed all the recycled stuff and paid the customers. Being the Can Man was the ideal job for Ruby. One of the check-out girls lent him her little tiny TV set and he sat in the truck and watched his favorite shows if no one came. Right after he started I asked May for some of my paycheck money. She said, “What for?”

  I mumbled, “I need to buy Ruby something.” I didn’t care if we ran short at the end of the month.

  She waited for me to elaborate. I held out as long as I could and then I spit it out—“A winter suit, for work.”

  The next day she come home and inside her Goodwill bag was an enormous brown snowmobile suit. She said, “Go get him, see if it fits.” I couldn’t find him anywhere, but later when he came in and tried it on he said to the mirror, “Hey, it’s me, Yogi the Bear.” He scratched his head and made his teeth buck and then grinned at himself. He liked the two zippers up and down the front, which he explained were for pissing in the snow without having to take the whole works off. He liked the can truck and his special suit. He’d say to me when he came in the kitchen door, “Baby, it’s me, your sugar, the Can Man.”