The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  When we were home in the evenings he performed concerts up in our room. He turned on the radio and sang to me, his best girl. I liked the slow songs he sang too, the one called “If You Leave Me Now,” which he’d sing mournfully to me.

  My devotion to mother nature fails me when the temperature drops below zero. It was ten below for three weeks in a row that year, and our place isn’t all that cozy. There’s frost on the inside walls on winter mornings and it is almost impossible to step out of the warm spot you’ve worked so hard to make under the pile of thin wool blankets. We could see our breath in our bedroom; we could feel the wind sweeping across the fields, battering the house. The wind didn’t have any mercy for the likes of us. It didn’t care that we aren’t equipped with fur, and that May never turned the heat up far enough. She refused to waste the oil.

  Winter wasn’t May’s favorite time of year either. She always said that them bones of hers felt petrified. She sat in her chair in the kitchen some days, when it was the terrible cold, and she conducted to me. She told me precisely how much water to put in the hot cereal, how many seconds to stir the orange juice. She had to conduct from her chair on account of her fossilized bones. I sure wished May and Ruby’s mother could have met. They would have had a lot to discuss. They could have compared their dying bodies.

  Sometimes I felt so mixed up, being a wife and a daughter under the same roof. There was the Saturday when Ruby came in from work; he didn’t stop to take off his snowsuit; he said urgently, “Baby, I got to show you something. Come this way with me.”

  We went up to our room. He shut the door and said, “Close your eyes.” I could feel him tying an object around my waist, and when I looked there was a tail, a coon’s tail, hanging down behind me. Someone threw it out in the can truck. Ruby found it under a sack of newspapers. He stood grinning at me and he said, “Now you’re my jungle kitten.” He said I should take my clothes off except for the tail, so I did it, even in the cold. We were prancing around our bedroom, laughing so hard because I bit him, nipped at his flanks. That’s what jungle kittens do. I knew their behavior instinctively. I chased him over the bed, jumped down on the floor clawing gently at the backs of his hairy knees. I trapped him in the corner. He let me. He wanted me to purr right on his favorite organ. Did I light the fire! He threw his head back and roared. He was Jungle Tom, beating on his chest and coming after me, growling deep down in his throat. I couldn’t help screaming timid screams, so delicately. The noises made Ruby growl even more; finally he pinned me to the bed and forced my legs apart while I giggled and screeched.

  We did a repeat performance right away even though I knew May was down scrubbing carrots in the sink for her famous stew. Ruby and I lay in bed and I whispered to him that he was the best man I knew of in the universe, the way he could keep going two million times. Finally, when I cooled off, I went downstairs to give May a hand. She said, without looking up, “Well, well, well, if it ain’t the jungle kitten herself.”

  I stood still. I wished that moment wasn’t there. I wanted to rewind and have a miracle take place; I wanted to hear May say, “Hello there, angel. I’ve never seen you look so happy.”

  We sat down to supper. No one said one thing. I didn’t eat. I stared at my plate. I wanted to do something extreme to pay her for ruining our fun, to pay her for making us feel like slimy creatures who don’t have anything on their minds but mating dances. What did she wish for in a daughter—that I had been born without sensation? I wanted to wreck something special of hers, break it into pieces she would not be able to fit back together. Then I’d snip the phone cord so she couldn’t call Dee Dee. When I didn’t touch my potatoes May barked, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothin’,” I muttered.

  After that it wasn’t fun roughhousing with the tail. I hid it way in the back of the closet even though I was a star jungle kitten.

  As the winter months wore on, as it got muddier and damper without warming up, our tempers frayed. After a while there wasn’t anything left of our restraint. We’d had the cold for so long, and we were just waiting, waiting for our emotions to ignite. We were sitting at supper, silent like always, except for May’s griping. It was a rainy March night, and you couldn’t see anything but black and the glittering rain catching our lights. It was cold in the house because May was trying to get by without ordering another tank of oil. Our hands and noses were raw.

  She got up from the table to get some more soup and she noticed a few spots of red paint on the floor. She stooped down to examine the spots. She said, as if she was surprised, “Ruby, I do believe you spilled some paint from the birdhouses of yours on the floor.”

  Ruby didn’t say anything. It wasn’t a big deal to him. He was picking dead skin off his hands very carefully. She came to the table and leaned over. She said, “You listening to me, Mr. Jungle Tomcat?”

  We both had to look up into her narrow eyes. She spoke low and distinct. She said, “You clean up that paint right now or I’m kicking you out of here. All you do is build them birdhouses like a moron. That’s about the biggest laugh I ever thought of, a grown man building houses for the little birdies, now ain’t that sweet?”

  He sat for a minute hearing her special tones. After only a minute or two of delayed reaction he sprang from the table, picked up two of his houses in his wide spread hands and threw them expertly, like his curve balls, against the wall. They busted apart. They aren’t made to survive a blast. He whacked the others down on the floor. I stood still in the middle of the floor. I couldn’t make sense of the wood splinters exploding in the air, May’s smirk, saliva and tears making Ruby’s face shiny, as if someone went and shellacked it. I thought that if I stood still maybe it all would stop.

  After the houses were ruined and there was the near silence, the ringing from past noise, Ruby ran out of the house. I had to follow him. I ran down the porch stairs calling out into the rain, “Ruubeeeee, Ruuuuuubeeeeee, come back.”

  He didn’t answer. I found him close by, in the middle of the yard, standing in the mud. He stooped so he could cry on my shoulder. He was his own rainstorm, and I held him and stroked his wet hair. He loved the houses and he went and wrecked them. No one had ever told him before that they were stupid. Everyone—that’s Dee Dee and I—always said they were extremely beautiful. He wept. It was so cold his tears were the consistency of slush.

  “Baby,” he whimpered, “I just got to take a walk.”

  I held him up and we started off down the road. We had nothing on but our sweaters and pants, already soaked. It was dark and misty. The cars came slowly out of nowhere and splashed us at the side of the road. I didn’t ask where we were going. We must have walked halfway to Stillwater, holding hands, not saying a word.

  When we came to the house it was all lit up. I knew, by the sixth sense, when Ruby turned up the drive, that it was where Hazel lived, with her cousin, Isabel, and whoever else happened to be around. Every single light was on. Ruby walked right into the house, without knocking.

  Hazel and Isabel were in the kitchen, playing gin rummy. They must have been at it for a while because there were lots of empty bottles around. Their kitchen was spacious but all they had was a small white linoleum table against the wall and two yellow kitchen chairs with the stuffing coming out. There were bottles everywhere and empty shelves, as if they never had the occasion to eat or cook in the room. When Hazel bothered to look up she said, “Well, if it ain’t the newlyweds!” Then she looked at us more carefully and said, “Hey, Izzy, do you think it’s Halloween? Don’t them two look like they’re dressed up as drowned rats?” She laughed at her joke and then got serious. “Do we have any candy?”

  Isabel was quiet. She was young and blond and had a waist the size of a signpost. She was bored by everything, even jokes.

  Ruby pulled up a stool and helped himself to an open beer while I stood, waiting again for the scene to evaporate. I was convinced that if I stood long enough it would just go away.

  After a long ti
me listening to the two slap their cards and shuffle and deal, and listening to Ruby guzzle and burp, Hazel looked up again and said, “I bet Mrs. Dahl would love to see the zoo.”

  “No, she don’t,” Ruby said, but Hazel had me by the hand. She took me down the basement and turned the light on, and I saw the snake cages on one wall and the mice cages on the other. “We’ll get one of the constrictors for you to hold, sweetheart,” she said to me, smiling so that her smooth face wrinkled up. While she fiddled with the latch she said, “I bet Ruby’s told you all about me, all about our magic times down here.”

  I whispered, “No.”

  She laughed and said, “You mean he don’t brag about the time he nipped my boob so bad I was a living blood bath?” She had a puckered look come over her for a split second and then she turned to the snake and crooned, “Come on, honey bun.”

  I took the thing in both my hands, wondering when I was going to wake up. “Take it to Ruby,” she said. “He loves my pets.”

  I carried the python up while it slowly wrapped around my arm. It was four feet long and as big around as Isabel’s waist. I didn’t mind it so much. It hadn’t asked to be Hazel’s snake.

  When I came up into the light of the kitchen Ruby took one look at me and put the whiskey bottle down. He retched into his sleeve and was gone out the door. If I’d had my wits about me I would have thanked Hazel for making him leave, but as soon as I could unwind the creature from my arm I set him on the table and followed Ruby.

  I caught up with him near home. He had his pocket-size pancake syrup jug full of liquor and we drank as we walked along. I had hundreds of questions I wanted to ask him, such as “Why did we go there?” but I was afraid to ask him. I was afraid Ruby would say, “They are my best friends.” I knew that a person always got the urge to see their best friend when they found themselves in trouble.

  For a while we sat with the hens. Ruby finally said, “I like birds better than people.” He took a drink and said, “I bet angels look like doves, white ones.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  We sat out there drinking and singing “Sunshine on My Shoulders,” and other songs by Ruby’s favorite composer, John Denver. Every now and then Ruby would start daydreaming about how he was going to climb mountains with John Denver, the tallest mountains, and all you’d have to do is take one little step off the top and you’d be in heaven.

  I didn’t correct him; I didn’t say if he stepped off years later someone would find a skeleton in the darkest valley, and they’d know it was Ruby by his black front tooth.

  It took me a long time to get up my nerve but when I finally got it I blurted, “How come you bit Hazel?”

  Ruby laughed one of his genuine laughs, not the big ha-ha’s that mean he’s nervous. He said, “She took me down to her zoo one day, calls out, ‘Who wants to be lunch?’ Then she grabs a mousie from a cage and beats it with a ruler in the wastebasket.” He looked like he was going to be sick again. “She made me watch the snake eat it up.

  “Baby,” he whispered, “she deserved to be bit. If she hadn’t squirmed so much I would have swallowed her whole.”

  We didn’t say anything more. We slumped down and lay still.

  Finally, we climbed the back steps clutching each other, stiff and shivering. The whiskey was long gone and the old horse blanket I’d found in the barn was soaked from our wet skins. After May went to work in the morning I called up Artie and told him I was sick as a dead pig. It was not a lie. Ruby and I were both feverish. We lay in bed throwing wads of Kleenex on the floor. We didn’t do anything but lie there side by side, throwing off the covers one minute and the next huddling under them, all the while trying to breathe.

  When May came home in the evening she was prepared to be huffy and prim. She was probably dying to know where we’d been all night, but she wasn’t about to ask. We could hear her walking around downstairs, looking for us so she could show us her aloof personality. Finally she heaved upstairs. She came and stood by our door. She could not figure out what was going on. When she peered in and saw us on our bed I started sneezing and moaning. It was a good show. My head felt like a bowl full of hot applesauce. I couldn’t breathe; I felt as if I was going to suffocate from all my clogged byways. Ruby wasn’t any better off, plus he had to vomit now and then in a bucket, side effects of the whiskey.

  “Don’t stand there staring, Ma,” I snorted. “Look what you’ve done to us, chasing us out of the house.” I started to cry. I said, “I think you better apologize to my husband Ruby.”

  Of course May never says she’s sorry but she did make us chicken soup. She brought us Cokes. She felt halfway responsible, I know she did, for the fact that we were so miserable. She could hear our sniffles and our whimpering. She must have actually felt guilty because she took the next day off. She waited on us hand and toe. In between some of the shows she watched on TV she put trays of orange juice outside our door. We could come and fetch some whenever we were thirsty. And when I came down for lunch she made me stick the thermometer in my mouth. After she read it she shook it out so vigorously I doubted her advanced age. She could have been a head nurse easily. We never mentioned the scene in our kitchen. We put it away, inside ourselves. But those birdhouses were the last Ruby ever made in his whole life, as far as I know.

  It wasn’t too long after our sickness that I found out. We were going along, having our silent suppers, but it wasn’t like we were at the end of our ropes any more. We were tired and quiet. We were sick to death of winter and our fighting. I was at Trim ’N Tidy one day, watching the stains go by me, the dirt and grease speckling the clothes, and a wave came over me. There wasn’t any way my breakfast was going to remain in my stomach. I started staggering around the back room. Artie came to me, grabbed my elbow, and said, “What’s the matter, sweetie?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and then for no reason I sat down and cried, again, for about the billionth time that year. It seemed to me that I was weeping for the race of man, for everyone who had ever lived through adolescence and marriage and then died. I went into the restroom, just in time, and of course after the vomiting I had to cry some more, leaning over the sink. Artie demanded that I call the doctor at the clinic. He stood next to me while I explained over the phone that I couldn’t hold anything down in my stomach, and he made me ask if it was food poisoning on account of sharing Louise’s old hard-boiled Easter eggs.

  The doctor asked me some questions and then he said, “It sounds to me like what you have is a baby, Mrs. Dahl.”

  “No,” I said. “No.” I turned away from Artie and whispered into the receiver, “I’ve only been married six months.”

  “That’s about how long it takes,” he said.

  For some reason it never occurred to me that it was a baby inside making me sick, because all the time I had been trying to keep track of May and Ruby. That was an enormous job. I didn’t think of anything else but our relationships together. Also, expert Ruby said I wouldn’t get pregnant if I washed myself off very carefully.

  Artie must have guessed because he slowly backed off from the phone and left me alone.

  A few days later I had an appointment at the clinic. Louise had to go to town so she drove me in during lunch. They took blood and wished me luck. I couldn’t wait for the nurses to tell me the news—I suspended myself for three days like I was a hung garment in the closet. I didn’t think of one single thing except the baby inside me. I knew it was there; I knew absolutely that’s why I felt so sad one minute and then the next like I was a rocket going straight up to the sword of Orion, one of my favorite places. I didn’t tell anyone about the possibility. Finally they called me at work and said the test was accurate: I was going to have a baby.

  Naturally, I instantly sat down and bawled. I was thinking about the night our baby probably came to life, when we were both loaded up to our eyeballs. I wondered if that meant it was going to be born drunk, if it would come out without the capacity to imagine and remember. It was
Artie who came to me again, and I couldn’t help telling him. He seemed to know everything. He said that most new mothers worried that their babies were going to come out mooing like a cow or squawking like a chicken. I suddenly loved him so much, not only because he was short with a little round head and hair so thin it looked like a cloud traveling over his skull, but because he patted my hand and said, “Don’t worry.” He looked me in the eye and said, “No more liquor, no more smokes.” Then he laughed and said, “Why ain’t I in the medical profession?”

  I nodded my head and said he could be my doctor any old day.

  I swear it had been raining solid through March and now into April. Perhaps it was just my spirit. The fields were so muddy they beckoned me each day to sink in and wait for the day when I could sprout along with the plants, start a whole new life. But the afternoon I found out and Artie said I shouldn’t worry, the sun appeared, there was steam pouring off the fields, and the air was warm. I couldn’t believe my luck.

  I came home, went straight into the living room and announced, “Ruby, we are going to celebrate,” and he said, “Great, baby,” without asking what it was for. He didn’t care, as long as he could be giddy and party. I told May matter-of-factly that we were taking the car. I didn’t give her a chance to come out of shock and say, “No you don’t.”

  We went to Audrey’s and when we were seated I said, “Ruby, I’m not supposed to drink beer.”