The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  Once I asked Dee Dee what she thought about feeding Justy solid food and Dee Dee said May knew the best way, without a doubt.

  “My kids ain’t Grade A examples,” she said, shaking her head.

  She didn’t help me one single bit. Dee Dee wasn’t about to cross her best friend. It didn’t matter what I said—when I came in from chores I could see that May had fed Justy something fried and mashed. I could see the diapers he had spit up on in the clothes hamper.

  There was one night in June when Ruby didn’t come to bed, and finally at two in the morning I went downstairs. He was sitting in front of the TV, staring. His eyes grew so wide and stayed that way, when he watched shows. He was flipping through a book without even looking at the pages.

  “What are you up to, Ruby?” My tired voice sounded like there were barbs in my throat, catching the words before they came out.

  He didn’t take his eyes off the screen. After a minute he said, “You know last Sunday when the Rev was telling about the little boy?”

  “What little boy?” I asked, making no effort to disguise my irritation. I didn’t usually remember the Rev’s topics; there were only certain phrases which remained.

  “The boy who had the devil in him,” he said. “And his father wanted Jesus to come take it out. None of the disciples could do it but then Jesus arrived, and man, that devil got out fast. Jesus can get devils out easy. I just got to find that story in the Bible. I been searching all night but I can’t find it, I just can’t find it.”

  I kneeled down and made Ruby look at me. I said, “That’s nothing but a dumb story. Don’t think thoughts like that, Ruby—it ain’t the kind of thing to dwell on before bedtime. Come to sleep with me.”

  He didn’t pay attention. He said, “Baby, I’m watching this show, see, there’s this man, he can’t do nothin’ right, he’s in a boys’ school, you can tell he’s letting the devil come in. You watch, he’s gonna do somethin’—”

  “It’s a trashy movie, Ruby. Turn it off.”

  I didn’t have patience with late-night TV. I was so tired; why didn’t people sleep when they were supposed to? He didn’t want to leave his movie because he had to see how it worked out, who was going to get murdered.

  Ruby’s favorite program was the late-night rerun of Bewitched. He liked to see the characters wiggling their noses and then plates of candy would come over right by their sides. He had knots in his stomach, I know he did, staying up all night to watch programs that aren’t healthy. I know he wished he was married to someone like Samantha. He was always saying his belly killed him. I knew it was May driving him into the television. He didn’t ever stand up to her. He didn’t even call her names any more; he didn’t say that she was a thousand miles of fart. He cried into my slacks and wanted to live in TV land. Sometimes he was in his chair until the birds started to sing and then when he went to Trim ’N Tidy he wasn’t worth a hot dog. You’d see him in the chair by the register, sound asleep, with his mouth hanging open, drool slipping over the edge of his pouting lips All he really wanted to do was take Justy for walks, teach him a little something about Honey Creek, and the world.

  A few days after Ruby was trying to find the devil story in the Bible, he came home early from Trim ’N Tidy. Summer is a slow time of year, because people aren’t thinking about getting woolens clean when it’s ninety degrees in the shade. Ruby wanted to play with Justy first thing when he walked in the door, because fathers miss their sons desperately when they’re out in the work force. He couldn’t stand hearing that Justy was still down for his nap. When I told him, his face fell and he kicked the chair. He didn’t like the news so he tiptoed up to the baby’s room and tickled him gently trying to wake him up and of course Justy started to bawl.

  Next thing you know May is storming upstairs. She’s wearing a hot pink cotton dress from Goodwill, makes her look like a lipstick out of its tube.

  “You hear what you just did?” she yelled. “You’re making him cry. Don’t you ever use that brain of yours?”

  They stood at opposite ends of the crib and she hollered, “You woke him up! I bet that’s going to put him in a cheerful mood.”

  She didn’t mention that screaming and yelling might turn an infant into a deaf apple picker. She scooped up Justy and crooned at him. “Poor baby, poor little Justin, hush-a-bye, go back to sleep now, that’s my boy.”

  I didn’t like Ruby waking Justy too much either, but it wasn’t worth rocking the boat. There were going to be other naps in Justy’s life. It even made me smile a little at first, that Ruby missed Justy so much he couldn’t wait to see him. It’s natural for parents to be that way. It doesn’t mean that Ruby wasn’t using his brain. But May had to be nearby, ready to strike if her master plan was in some way altered. She stayed upstairs, cradling Justin. He was all sweaty as a result of flailing his arms and screaming.

  Ruby walked downstairs. He had to stop every three steps because he was thinking to himself. He walked slowly into the kitchen. He stood in the middle of the room for a few minutes, listening to Justy, and then he reached into the dark cupboard. His hands found what they wanted. He held up one of May’s quarts of tomato juice—and slammed it against the wall. In our life together there were quite a few objects Ruby pounded into the wall. The jar shattered; the glass went into the darkest corners of the kitchen. All the juice gushed down, as if it were angry and flashing its temper.

  May came down with Justy in her arms. She stopped in her tracks when she saw me sweeping the glass away. She was dumbstruck at the mess. I could tell it was going to take her a few seconds to speak so I quickly said, “Be quiet,” with warning in my tone.

  She patted Justy harder than she should have while she muttered the phrases of hers. I used to think the one about cocks meant rooster until I learned better. The tomato drip marks were there for days. No one bothered to clean them up. Perhaps we were all afraid they were cursed.

  When Ruby came in for supper May had her speech prepared but I said, “If anyone says one single thing I’m going to clobber both of you.”

  I couldn’t stand the fighting. While we ate the clanking of our silverware filled the room and covered our silence. We had Justy in his baby seat on the table, so he could watch us and see how adults behaved.

  Ruby went to his counselor twice a month and Sherry said time and time again, “Ruby, you have to find a way to move out on your own, with your wife and son.” She said he had to get a full-time job that paid better, but he was slow, even down at Trim ’N Tidy. He wasn’t the world’s greatest employee. She probably told him he should set up a dentist’s office. She ignored the fact that he had problems on occasion. He drifted away sometimes: if he was writing up a bill for a customer he might all of a sudden stop and stare at the poinsettias in the window. Artie got them cheap after Christmas about seven years ago and never took them out. Ruby would say later in bed how the plants looked as huge as palm trees and he couldn’t stop staring at the leaves. It was the marijuana he smoked, and the pills he popped. Sherry told him he had to quit taking drugs and he always said, “Sure, OK, I will.” For a while he tried to get me to smoke a joint; he said, “Baby, it’s fun, you got to try it.”

  I had stopped smoking cigarettes because of Justy. I wasn’t about to start another habit. I wished Ruby could have refrained, but he said it helped him get through his day. I knew if it weren’t for me, Artie would have fired him first thing.

  Ruby said the poinsettias looked gigantic because he was wishing we could live in California. He told me you can have a house with the ocean in your back yard, and they grow pineapples and lemons in the parks—you can grab them off the vines and stuff them in your pockets. Girls, he said, don’t wear anything but bikinis and men don’t drive Fords, only 12-cylinder cars that shift like melting chocolate.

  It didn’t take any counselor to figure out that Ruby saw the world on a different scale from other people. Images in his extra-special imagination occurred to him with awful clarity. When he came h
ome from his sessions with Sherry he always told me what she said. I couldn’t help being infuriated with the big old smart counselor who lived in a brick mansion with her husband. He was a car salesman. She didn’t have any problems. All she had to do was tell everyone else how to act. How were we going to move out on our own, without May to baby-sit? And Ruby—with drugs it’s as if his brain was spinning into outer space. Matt, in his observatory, probably thought he was discovering another planet, Planet Matt. It’s fine for Sherry to say “Ruby, move away on your own,” but she didn’t know the details of the situation. I thought I was an expert on the drama seeing as I was stuck in the middle of hostilities, just like people all over the world on television news. I felt as if I had to be the anchor. If I could only try to be a good person and take care of my family, it was going to be OK. The Rev’s words came to me when I was confused: “Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted.” And of course, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Those sentences always made me feel that I could carry on, that someday I was going to get what I deserved.

  Ruby said, in the middle of the hottest July night, “Baby, do you think there’s devils in the world getting inside of people?”

  I was asleep. I said, “I don’t know about any of that, Ruby. Don’t ask me about devils. I don’t like to think about them.”

  I could hear him tossing the rest of the night. I was so tired I could hardly comfort him, but I knew he was worried about demons and how they take over a human heart.

  There were the good times that summer, particularly when Daisy came home after she got her beautician’s license. She had a real strange haircut. It was short, as usual, but it was cut to points in front of her ears and then in back it came sharp to the nape of her neck. There was something pointy to the way she looked, as if she were an instrument that could cleave rocks to exact specifications. When she came to our house she had pajamas for Justy with a painting of a basset hound on the shirt. She looked at him, picked him up, and shouted, “Hey, everybody, this is my godson.”

  Then she said he needed a haircut, which cracked us up because Justy didn’t have any hair at that stage. She said to me, “I’m going to do a job on you right now, just like I promised all them years ago when I first knew you. I don’t break promises, that ain’t in my nature.”

  She took her smart leather scissor case out of her purse and sat me down on the kitchen stool. Everyone stood around and watched her do her craft. It was a free show. Daisy said now that she had a college degree she knew what was best for me and my shape. I have quite a bit of curly hair, which looks like a hedgerow people can’t see over. My expert hairdresser thinned it, cut it, and wrapped each strand around an electric stick. Some of the curls unwound a little, so my head became soft and fluffy. Then she put black mud on my face. I loved her firm touch on my cheeks and eyelids, and every now and then her fingers swept across my lips. After she washed the mud off she put colors on my eyelids, “earth tones,” she told me, brown and rust, and some shiny red lipgloss on my mouth. She took me upstairs to the mirror we have in our room. I couldn’t find myself in the looking glass. I could not believe I was the girl. I resembled marine fish with big puckered lips opening and closing right up close to the window of their tank.

  “Finally you look like you belong in this century,” Daisy said. “I always knew we could turn you into something.”

  Ruby stared blankly at me and then he said, “Baby, you and me are gonna start a rock band. You look just like a drummer should.”

  We sat around that night on the steps and ate pretzels. Daisy told us about Peoria and the girls she worked with. None of them were too crazy about her, because she was the number-one star hair stylist. She explained how she was going to fly out to Los Angeles in a little while, after she got some experience. She held Justy the whole time. He had to stare at her—he was your average hot-blooded male already. He was fascinated by those extraterrestrial eyes of hers, plus her large breasts did not pass unnoticed. He patted them so tenderly.

  There were a few times that summer when Ruby and I were on our own, without May. On the weekends we took Justy down to the lake in Stillwater, where I first met Ruby. On hot days we took the baby’s clothes off and played with him in the water. I had a hand-me-down bikini from Daisy. It was light blue and it didn’t fit me. I always felt as if everyone was looking at my body, the way the bottoms hung on me, like extra skin. We lay on the beach from nine o’clock in the morning until it got cold and dark, and then we came home cooked. We got so tired from all the sunshine. May said how lazy we were, to spend the whole day on our backsides, but we were too sleepy to notice her scolding us. We were too hot, too thirsty, too tired, that summer, to think what a strange family we made, May and Ruby and Justy and me.

  Seventeen

  ON Justy’s first birthday we had a party for him. When he was in bed our big family, Dee Dee, Randall, and Daisy, came over. Everyone except me played poker. I didn’t feel like celebrating. I wanted to think about the year gone by. I wanted to get the time back right after Justy was born and I stayed at home with him. By some trick I had yet to invent I would command myself and Ruby to sit still on the couch with our newborn, singing our songs, parting each other’s knees. We would turn to stone in that attitude. At the birthday party Randall watched TV. He never tried to brag any more. He didn’t seem to be anything more than an enormous husk made from old yellowing paper To my surprise he wasn’t eating anything that night. I wondered if he was about to keel over and die from starvation, or if he had lately discovered that food didn’t really make him feel happy at all I put a bowl of peanuts by him and waited until he gave me a feeble smile and dug in.

  Everyone else was concentrating on their poker cards so I went upstairs to look at Justy sleeping. There were so many things I wished for him. I hoped that he would never know that evil groups existed in other countries, sneaking and prowling in the mountains and then killing the poor people. I hoped that he would grow up blind to all our shortcomings and that he would understand and forgive my poisoned thoughts.

  It seemed both like seconds ago and one thousand years before that Ruby and I were playing cards in the labor room, and now here was our boy, one year old. The days had melted into each other: twelve months of May and Ruby and me, watching Justy in his baby seat, watching Justy rise up on his haunches—all the gray space I tried not to think about, where we were squabbling with each other. Often one day was no different than the next, except for the outside temperature. I didn’t have time to look around and see the seasons, since I was either going to Trim ’N Tidy or washing heaps of soiled diapers. When a girl is a teen and when she first gets married she thinks having a baby is going to be a real treat all the time, but it isn’t true. For the first year you’re so tired the world spins around in front of your face, you feel dizzy, and the sunshine hurts your eyes. I kept saying to myself, every five minutes, “I guess this is what life is; it makes a person so tired.”

  The summer Justy was one and a half I had a brainstorm. I said to Ruby, “How about you and me going on a vacation somewhere?” I asked Artie if we could take our week in August and he said, “Sure, no problem.” Then I went to May and blurted out that we, meaning Ruby and I, were going to go on a holiday in August, if she could watch Justin. She looked up in disbelief, as if I had just announced that we were moving to Texas to pick grapefruits.

  Ruby and I needed time alone desperately. The trip was something Sherry suggested—she’s not always full of hot air. It was Sherry who insisted we get away. She told Ruby that we needed privacy, and that we must take the time to get to know each other. I knew Ruby well enough, but what we needed, I said to myself, was a vacation from the bristles of everyday life.

  “It’s only going to be one short week, Ma,” I said quickly, after I wrapped up the agenda. I had the time broken up into half-day units on paper so she would know when to take Justin to Aunt Daisy’s and when she had to be at the cleaners. It was Ar
tie who had suggested that I make a chart. There was even a night out for May in my plan. Daisy had promised she would watch Justy so May wouldn’t get an overdose.

  “When we come back, you can take a trip,” I said to May. “It’s healthy to get away. It’s good for a person.”

  I didn’t have any experience with vacations but Sherry said you return refreshed. She said you realize how wonderful home is if you can get away now and then. I didn’t think I could ever call Honey Creek wonderful, after no matter how long an absence, but I was willing to give it a try.

  May snorted. She said, “I’ll go on a cruise by myself, won’t that be dandy? I’ll send you the bill from the Love Boat. Can’t you picture it, an old lady getting sick into the swimming pool in the middle of the ocean? No thanks, that don’t sound like my idea of a party.”

  “Ma,” I pleaded, “at least you and Dee Dee could go to Rockford for a day of shopping, anything, just to get away.”

  Sometimes she acted as if taking Justy was a burden she didn’t deserve so late in life. She said, “Go, leave me alone, see what I care”—and she heaved a sigh.

  What surprised me was how May coped now that Justy was in one of his impossible stages. He was all motion but he didn’t have any coordination. He moved like a drunkard. He wanted to get into everything and if you weren’t watching he demolished the house in no time flat. I went around and moved the breakable knickknacks to the top shelves so there weren’t valuable objects he could ruin, but it was May who performed continual miracles: she never once lost her patience with him. He was discovering he had his own will, and if he banged on the table with his spoon, so you couldn’t tolerate the noise, to get a rise out of us, May, with perfect calm, would gently lift him down so he wouldn’t do it any more. He’d bang on the floor instead where it didn’t make such a racket or dent the table. She was a genius sometimes, I swear. I was not prepared for her control, because of the way she used to rant around in my younger days. I had fully expected that she would be an older, meaner version of herself, but all the traces of her former days had vanished.