The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  “Ruby can’t control his emotions too great, oh no he can’t.” She spoke in her hushed tone; she spit out her t’s and her c’s. “Don’t they have places for people who can’t control theirselves? Maybe we better call the funny farm, I’d say it’s about time.”

  If I didn’t know there was blood and guts inside a person I’d say what’s down in May’s belly is a furnace making her words come out to sizzle people, to char them until there’s nothing left but smoldering ashes. Daisy always said I went to extremes when I exaggerated, but I have to say my impressions even if they aren’t true to science.

  May went on to tell the story of how Ruby strangled a chicken and then hung it out on the porch by the macramé plant holder he made down at the resource center in Stillwater, where Sherry works.

  Of course, he had to go strangle May’s favorite hen, the one which lays the best. She milked that part for all it was worth. She said “My Favorite Hen” about five times in a row. She stood ripping the skin off her second piece of chicken and then she said, “I went to look out the window and there was My Favorite Hen hanging by the neck on the porch.”

  She wasn’t having too much trouble consuming her favorite creature. Taking a bite for the road she marched to the sink to find her cigarettes. She put one between her lips and it dangled there like a wire hanging from a busted fixture.

  I stared at May and at Ruby, back and forth. I knew they expected me to say something. Ruby was watching the kitchen door with his mouth drooping open. All I did was pick up Justy, wipe his mustache, and take him into the living room. We played, seeing as I’m his mother. I made a fort out of chairs and blankets and then we went inside and sat. I escaped to Justy’s play world where the blankets caving in on your head is the worst thing that can happen. When I tucked him into bed I sang him a song I made up about a mother and son who drive away to Texas and pick fruit for the rest of their lives. I watched his eyelids get heavy, opening and closing. Every time they opened he looked into my face. He was learning it by heart, for future reference.

  When I came downstairs Ruby was watching TV. I stood in front of him and said, “How come you strangled the chicken, Ruby?”

  He clamped his jaw shut and stared without blinking, around my form, at a show with cops chasing down alleys. “She gets me riled up,” he finally whispered, avoiding my face. I sat down and waited. During the commercial he blurted that he had only wanted to take Justy out in the car to the store, but she wouldn’t let him. She said it wasn’t safe to drive with that leg of his. She said it wasn’t safe to drive with that brain of his, for that matter, and then she went down and threw the keys to both cars into the marsh.

  He closed his eyes and said, “I couldn’t help it, baby. I had to wreck somethin’.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to her,” I whispered, petting his hair. “She don’t know everything.”

  I said the first thing that came into my head because I had to think about the situation. Telling him not to pay attention to May is like saying, Pretend that wasp in your ear didn’t just bite you forty times. I was also confused because I secretly had to admit that May was probably right. It’s quite possible it wasn’t safe for Ruby to drive the way his vision wavers on occasion. Still, a person has got to know himself and figure out what’s right without someone else saying, Don’t breathe! Don’t eat! Wake up! Ruby said May should be the weed commissioner because she’d be a natural at getting people to hack out their thistles. She’d stab people with thorns if they let their wildflowers go to seed.

  I went into the kitchen and said to May, “How are we going to go anywhere if you threw the keys into the marsh?”

  “I’ve got spare sets,” she said, smirking at me.

  I had a fervent need to nip her flanks. We didn’t say anything more on the subject of car keys and strangled chickens.

  After that episode we settled back down to normal. I knew I had merely dreamed of going to Aunt Sid’s, or maybe seen a late-night movie about an aunt and her niece, lounging in chairs, eating orange marmalade and English muffins.

  When I think back to that fall of 1977, it seems as if our life went in slow motion. We were taking each step so carefully. It was one of those long autumns; it lasted for years. We woke up to the pale sun coming in over the blankets and we knew it was warm outside. We were being fooled. The ground we walked on was golden and dry, all the grasses dead. Nothing anywhere seemed to have juice.

  Artie always came to pick me up for work and we drove past the cemetery in Honey Creek where all the maples turned rust-colored for one minute, and the next thing the smart trees did was let go, and there were thousands of leaves to rake. Sometimes I took Justy to the cemetery after work. We shuffled through the leaves; we threw piles in the air and watched them float down to earth. I wished I could talk to trees, seems as if they know so much. I wished I could turn a beautiful color and then let go of myself, just let it go.

  When I look back on it, I realize that we were all quiet that fall. We were looking into ourselves and kindling our flames. We were tending our fires.

  Then, all of a sudden, in the space of Halloween morning, the sky turned cloudy, and the air changed from warm to bitter cold so that when we went outside our nostrils stung and tears dripped from our eyes. The harsh winds were here. We sniffed the air with the knowledge of the woodchuck there in our noses, giving us faith in a cold dark winter. I wished I had a hole in the ground that I could crawl into without leaving any trace.

  Ruby didn’t go to work because his leg was still giving him trouble. He was getting a tire around his middle from watching TV and drinking beer. He didn’t shave. He no longer looked like a cute jungle tom. He did some work around the house now and then. He oiled the doors so they wouldn’t squeak at night and scare him, and he took care of the hens when he felt like it—they didn’t spook him any more. He went into the henhouse and screamed and clapped his hands and the hens all flew into a corner. When May wondered why egg production was down I shrugged my shoulders. Ruby was also working on a needlepoint rug. Dee Dee bought him a kit because she knows how much he likes to use his hands, and how capable he is. It was a picture of a sailboat against a deep blue background. He was loaded when he sewed the sail so it didn’t match up with the rest of the boat. Dee Dee ripped it out in her spare time. It was going to be a bath mat. Ruby sat and watched TV, making his rug. We were all hoping his leg would feel better fairly soon, before we went bankrupt.

  Often he played with Justy on the floor and they turned into two rambunctious house pets. I grinned, watching my boys. They wrestled and rolled around, both of them howling, and then Ruby chased Justy up and down the stairs. Justy squealed, running on his fat legs out the kitchen door, covering his face, thinking we couldn’t see him. Ruby would growl, “Where’d that midget go?” He’d bang open the door and sniff and roar and then Justy had to shriek with the pleasure and terror of it. May disapproved of roughhouse. She said Justy was going to be traumatized. She said the screams hurt her ears, not that she should be considered, but she didn’t like to see Justy so upset. Ruby and Justy learned to play while she was at work. They had some good laughs. They were the men of the family, sharing the joke. It was May and I who disciplined Justy. Ruby left the room whenever Justy started to act up or require a firm hand. Ruby liked only to roll around on the floor and make Justy tremble.

  I still went to Trim ’N Tidy half time—could have fooled me; it seemed as if I was there night and day, looking at soiled garments. Artie had to bring sweaters back to me, showing me that I’d missed an enormous stain. He’d say, “You all right?” and I always said, “I’m sorry, I can’t figure out what’s the matter with me.” I laughed a good hearty fake laugh and added, “I need a new brain or something. I can feel mine giving out.”

  And Artie always said, “You take it easy.”

  “Sure, Artie, I’ll take it easy.”

  I kept hearing the words “Take it easy” and tried to figure out how a person did it.

>   I probably wasn’t paying enough attention to spotting because I was dreaming about taking Justy away with me in a car. I don’t even know how to drive. I couldn’t help picturing Justy and me alone: I’m carrying a suitcase full of the money I stole, heading for a place where you can wear T-shirts night and day, winter and summer.

  I wrote Aunt Sid to tell her the morning on her porch was fuel to me—I dreamed with my eyes open about eating English muffins and telling true stories to each other.

  Now that Justy was going on two years old, getting his nose into every drawer and cabinet, walking and talking, there were a lot more decisions to make about what was best for him. When he was an infant it had been diapers and food, but now he had thoughts of his own. He was a person, full-fledged, not only a sweet baby you wanted to kiss and admire. We squabbled about what was best for him twenty-four hours a day, Ruby and May and me.

  “He’s not warm enough in that sweater!” “It’s his nap time.” “Don’t let him suck on his finger!” “Get him off that stool, he’s going to kill himself!”—it didn’t matter what it was because we all had different ideas. May and I did not want him to have sugar. We didn’t want his teeth to be rotten like Ruby’s. But Ruby didn’t care. He wanted to make Justy happy and a piece of gum could do it. Justy was like a pesty cat, rubbing against your legs, always begging for something to eat. He knew Ruby carried sticks of gum in his pockets, that he was always very available. Justy would eat Double Bubble, chewing it with his front teeth, and then he’d swallow it. I couldn’t bear to think of the gum sticking to the inside of my boy, but Ruby wouldn’t listen to me because May was always yelling at him about the sweets. Ruby thought I was on May’s side. He saw it as a team sport: May and me against Ruby and Justy. To Ruby’s way of thinking May and I were the strongest team, beating up the unshaven and the young. He probably figured, in his dream state, that he was going to show us a sensational upset one of these days. Then he could sneak gum to Justy any old time.

  The first day it snowed in early December the weatherman didn’t spare us. We woke up to a foot of snow doing nothing but sitting on the ground, here to stay. I asked myself three things when I saw the bitter scene out my window: How am I going to get out of here with Justy? How am I going to get away from this chill? Where can I steal some money from?

  We could all feel how cold it was to be—already there were icicles poised like daggers from the roof. The winds blew across the field freezing the inside of your nostrils only minutes after you stepped outside. It was dangerous to venture two feet from the kitchen door.

  I remember nothing about Christmas, except that Ruby bought Justy a sled and May said Justy was going to kill himself on it. She hated hazardous toys; she said, Didn’t Ruby know better?

  I had to ask myself, Wait a minute, isn’t that kind of regular for a father to buy his boy a sled? I was mixed up; I couldn’t begin to answer the question.

  There were weeks when Justy couldn’t go outside. He went for almost the entire month of January without feeling fresh air. Ruby wouldn’t go out either and being cooped up made both of them squirrelly. They were restless: you could hear it in Justy’s whine; you could see it in the furious way Ruby tossed things around the house. He stood at the window tapping his foot, not hearing a word I said. The one time we tried going outside, as a family, was a failure. I bundled Justy up and he ran out into the bright day so eagerly, as if he were greeting the cold, making it feel welcome. He ran straight for something brown lying in the snow. When I got to him I saw that it was a golden dog, frozen up. Its fur shimmered in the sunshine and flapped in the wind. It was frozen in a running position.

  Justy touched it. He didn’t understand about dying yet. He wanted it to get up and play with him. He was crazy about puppies. I said, “Let’s leave it, OK?”

  It had starved. Its eyes were wide open, staring at the tongue glued to the snow.

  “Get in here!” May yelled from the porch. “You’re all going to get frost bit. Don’t touch that mangy dog, Justin,” she commanded, like it was going to come to life and bite his cold fingers off and then lie back down dead.

  “Come on, Justy, let’s skate on the marsh,” is what Ruby said, and they headed for the ice.

  I stood in the middle, stuck, growing quieter and quieter, saying to myself, When is the big event going to happen that will get me out of here?

  During the winter, when we were shivering and coughing in our bed all night, Ruby treated me as his own thing, if he felt like it. I didn’t want to get so close but he said he, Mr. Magic Fingers, could make a dried-up creek bed gush. Besides, he said, I was his wife and there were certain things I had to do. He said that it was the law, that the police were going to catch up with me if I didn’t behave right. I’d leave my body behind and with my mind and my heart I’d go sit on the porch at Aunt Sid’s, with the warm buns and your choice of three jams.

  There were other times when out of the cold night I had terrible dreams. I dreamed I got caught in a tremendous mousetrap, as large as a car. It didn’t kill me so I flailed around. There was no one willing to let me out. Even Aunt Sid stood up so she could see me from her porch. She watched my neck breaking, and clapped as I got closer to death. I must have been crying because Ruby rolled over and started singing that old song, “Hush, Little Baby.” That’s how he could be.

  One night, toward the end of January, we were eating supper. Our bodies were covered with goose flesh, even underneath our jackets, because May was still skimping on the oil. We watched our breath coming out of our mouths. The adults sat in silence. May had the oven door open, but it didn’t do any good. Justy cried hysterically, at a pitch that pierced the eardrums. May tried to get him to shut up but she didn’t have the magic touch. I didn’t say anything because all I could do was huddle in my chair, rub my shoulders, and blow on my hands.

  “Don’t look so damn froze up!” May shouted at me out of the blue. “You always look like you got ten thousand miseries. Stop looking so cold.”

  I laughed under my breath. I laughed louder and louder. I couldn’t quit. I howled until tears rolled down my cheeks. Ruby and May stared at me. They thought they might as well roll me down the basement stairs and put me in the pickle barrel, add some salt, and close the lid. I laughed all night long. Don’t ask me what Ruby and May did downstairs. Perhaps they had an ice carnival. I ran to our bedroom and laughed face down on my bed, heaving and snorting, and then I cried out loud. I guess I cried myself to sleep. Ruby and I both had our ways of retreating, leaving our bodies in the house. In both our minds we walked out the door going separate routes. We were heading for the place where the climate never changes, it’s always warm and still, flooded with light.

  Nineteen

  ON the first warm day in April Daisy had us over for a barbecue. Don’t imagine that we were prancing around in tube tops and hotpants. We were all wearing coats and mittens, in addition to long underwear, I’d wager. Still, we could party outside at least, listen to the robins chirping halfheartedly. We ate a pile of chicken at the picnic table, and potato chips. There was no limit to our salt consumption. We gobbled chips and pickles and then washed the food down with beer. As it got dark Daisy and her good Bill started building a bonfire. They fed the flames with twigs and branches. We gathered around it, staring into the heat while Dee Dee and Daisy told stories about derelicts, and about customers who get their hair cut. Daisy explained how you can tell where every person in Stillwater gets their hair done. Stella’s gives all the girls bowl cuts but at Hair Village they come out looking like Olympic skaters! Daisy bet money she could stand on the street and say where each passing person got their hair cut; she was that positive. I didn’t listen carefully. I held Justy close, smelled his skin, felt him leaning into me, and it seemed that all the evil stored up in me from the winter seeped into the fire and burned. I saw my sins turning into red-hot embers. My sins were all the occasions I said to myself, I have to get out of here, I’m going to steal a suitcase of cash�
�and other thoughts too wicked to mention. I looked across the fire to my husband Ruby and clearly saw his strengths again. I couldn’t help loving his blue eyes staring back at me, saying I’m such a perfect mother, holding our boy. I thought for sure I’d never have another unkind idea again—I was feeling awfully pure and stupid. When Justy fell asleep I put him inside on Daisy’s bed. We all drank buckets of alcohol and got wasted. If you consume intoxicants every now and then it cleans out your spirit, guaranteed. I ran around the yard shouting and jumping, prancing and falling to the ground, a complete stranger to myself.

  At about three in the morning, when I was standing over the toilet, sorry for every drop I had swallowed, I heard May in the kitchen talking with Dee Dee. They were both looped out of their skulls. I wasn’t trying to hear but the voices came to me anyhow.

  “Dee Dee?” May said. “You ever hate yourself so much you could slit your own throat?”

  Dee Dee cracked up. She thought May was telling jokes. “Millions of times, every day,” she answered. She got up to do a little dance of death. I could hear her wide feet smacking the floor.

  “Serious, though,” May said. “Sometimes I pray to God to let me be born again, give me another chance to do good. Sometimes I think he’s given me the chance, and I’ve changed, and other times I just ain’t sure. I pray that he won’t take me before I’ve healed something.” She started to cry, I swear. She sputtered, “I’ve screwed up so much around me. I figure Justy is my last stab at making a child turn out halfway decent.”

  Dee Dee was still twirling slowly. She said in a sleepy voice, “What about that smart-ass son of yours—Time magazine—ain’t that famous enough for you?”

  May didn’t like to bring up Matt, even when she was loaded. The mere sound of his name hurt her feelings.