The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  She didn’t talk any more. She slurped her joyjuice out of a bottle. I wasn’t sure I dreamed it or not, if the conversation was a hallucination from throwing up everything inside me, but I couldn’t forget the picture of May hating herself. I imagined her sticking her tongue out at herself in a mirror, and the mirror responding.

  I had a week off in July, and Ruby and I spent the seven days out on the beach in Stillwater. We took Justy and played in the sand, ate hot dogs and Cokes, stretched out on towels, ran in for swims. We rented an orange boat and rowed out to the middle of the lake. We hooked buckets of fish, but they were mostly bluegills flapping around. I told Ruby to throw them back. I felt so sorry for caught fish. I couldn’t help thinking that we were such different people compared to all those years ago when I saw Ruby out on this same lake, basking in the big old full moon. I couldn’t remember how we had traveled so far, to be together like we were, with a little boy named Justy.

  We were crazy about being out in the lake; we imagined that there wasn’t any such thing as land to keep us tied down. Ruby had his radio going and the sun beat down on us with every inch of its fierceness. I lay back and slept in the flames. I wanted that ball of fire to lick me up, blue bikini and all. Ruby sang along to the radio; Justy watched the water, holding on to his baby fishing pole Ruby bought him at Coast to Coast. He was a patient little fisherman, considering he never got a single bite. All we could hear was the water knocking the boat and the rock songs. All we felt was the heat piercing down through our skin, roasting away our thoughts until we lay there empty.

  When it got dark we roamed around town. We couldn’t imagine ever being cold again—we were almost feverish with our sunburns. We sat in the park by the river and Ruby sang slow songs to put Justy to sleep. We got ice cream cones and ate them one lick per minute. Sometimes we went over to Daisy’s and lay around in her yard, swatting at bugs. If the happily married couple was in bed we sat in the yard anyhow, not talking, watching the unlit house like we thought it might possibly burst into flames for our entertainment. We pretended we didn’t have an address, that we were gypsies and we spent our lives going from lake to lake catching fish, cooking them over a fire, and eating them with our own greasy hands. Even though we didn’t say a word on the subject, both Ruby and I knew we weren’t going to go home if we could help it. But there’d come a time when finally there wasn’t anything else to do; we’d have to drag into the kitchen, Ruby carrying Justy in his arms.

  May would be at the kitchen table shelling peas, not looking up at us. The kettle was always on the stove for blanching vegetables. The steam floated to the ceiling, right to where the plaster fell out about two years before, when May was canning pears. All the steam must loosen the ceiling bit by bit until it can’t help letting go and caving in. The room was filled with the smell of steam and dust and thousands of partially cooked peas. I wished they were jade beads because then we’d be rich and could move to Florida condominiums. Ruby always walked fast through the kitchen. You couldn’t see a body; it was a streak. I had never seen a person move so quickly. He must have forgotten that his leg hurt him. Of course May had to follow him into the living room so she could inspect Justin. She’d see his sunburn, the sight of which instantly transformed her from pea canner to best actress in a melodramatic role. She stood and gave us her oration on how you can get skin cancer from the sun. “Why do you do it?” she beseeched. “Why do you let him get exposed?” She stroked her front repeatedly, saying, “In a few years’ time moles will appear and they’ll get scabby and pretty soon with that disease your whole body is covered with brownish scabby sores.” She itched her face. “It pretty well eats you up.” She carried on as if Justy had three weeks to live. I was tired from the heat and the hot dogs. All I could say was, “Please, Ma, we’re going to bed now. Don’t say anything more now, OK?”

  But she had to discuss her age and her poor stiff fingers, and here she was doing all the canning while her daughter sat on the beach and got herself fried. Her apron was soaked down the front, with pea hulls stuck here and there like dewdrops gone moldy.

  “It’s my vacation, Ma”—I tried to sound firm like Daisy, but I knew I was whining. May put her red sore hands to her face; they were wet also, and crooked. There wasn’t anything in medicine that could ever straighten them out. Perhaps each time I looked at those hands I was having a little vision like Ruby has when he’s drunk. Perhaps in real life her hands were lily white and smooth, the way girls’ bodies are in fairy tales. Her hands didn’t do anything but make me feel wretched for the race of man, plus May on top of it. Sometimes it seemed as if they were wrecked up for that purpose. So I stayed with her, shelling peas until two in the morning, listening to the sound of jars clicking and water boiling, smelling peas, platters of peas both raw and blanched. It’s not an odor I like to call up. May and I didn’t speak for hours. We concentrated on getting the job done while we listened to all-night radio call-in programs, where people chew each other out for their strange opinions.

  After my vacation I hated to go back to work. At Trim ’N Tidy I was in a prison where they don’t ever let a person see the sunshine, and with the chemicals stealing down into my body, contaminating the red blood cells I felt as if I were being slowly murdered in secret.

  There were a few ideas I kept hashing over that summer, looking at the stained clothes, trying to keep my brain from going on the blink. I was hardly paying attention to spotting. I often thought about the words from the Rev’s own mouth. It had been back in the spring, after we all thawed out, that we started going to services regularly again, because May said it was important for Justy to go to church.

  It seemed to me that May was growing more and more concerned about religion as the months went by. I had never realized before that she had a religious streak. Perhaps her age made her think a little; perhaps she couldn’t help being slightly anxious about where she was going to end up when she passed. She probably hoped she might have a stab at heaven. She had the idea that the Congregationalists could give her a chance, and if she did good deeds, such as go to church every Sunday, even in summer, and make confections at Christmas time for the church needy basket, her chances would double.

  There were things the Rev said that made me feel better on occasion also. When I went to the service, I couldn’t help it, I came out feeling holy, as if something had rinsed over me, made me clean again. Even if I didn’t pay attention I glistened, putting in my time. Sometimes I had to think over the Rev’s words because he looked me right in the eye and spoke. Around Easter he kept shouting out, daring me to meet his gaze: “Yours is the body of Christ.” He lowered his voice and said, “We will actually feel the nails coming into our flesh as we approach Good Friday.”

  I never felt anything like that. I didn’t feel nails. I wanted to say, “Hey, Rev, I don’t have nails! Give me a break.” I couldn’t feel very sorry for Jesus and his poor bloody hands, because he lived one trillion years ago. He always made commands, like “Honor thy mother.” He sure could dish out advice easily: his mother was a saint.

  It wasn’t until I was at Trim ’N Tidy trying to get grape juice out of a white linen skirt that it came to me what the Rev meant when he talked about feeling the nails in our hands. He was actually trying to say, despite all the talk of God and Jesus, that there’s no one looking after us, that we are alone, and each of us singular. And still, all of us are miraculously the same in our aloneness, with our red blood cells streaming through our veins.

  May can list all the diseases that destroy the blood cells, but she wouldn’t go on to say that even Polish people and her colored egg customers and the Japs are subject to disease. The only blessed way there is, I realized, is for all of us to feel deeply with a wounded, or sick, or even dead person. What the Rev meant to say if he could ever have spoken plainly, without all the paraphernalia of the Gospel, was, “Each man’s struggle is mine.”

  If I were a minister I’d shout from the pulpit, “You, you puddle of
humans down there, we are all in the same mess.” I suppose I’d throw in a meek “Rejoice.” I’d say, “Here’s my theory: isn’t it nice even if I can’t always behave like I believe it?” The Rev was always trying to get us to be compassionate by telling us about the life of Jesus. I know if the Rev scrapped Jesus altogether I’d get the same point, how you have to feel with all your might for other people, how you have to go outside of yourself and take part in the world’s community. Even though Christians kill each other I finally understood that compassion was the main idea. I knew that salvation was only a carrot, and that in the end there was no such thing.

  Still, there were the times when I loved hearing the words from the Bible, for instance, the phrase about light: “For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord. Walk as children of light.” I thought to myself, I’m going to walk as a child of light, as if I don’t have bones and night doesn’t ever come. The words always soothed me, even if I knew there was no truth to them.

  And even though I didn’t believe in the Jesus stories I liked to entertain the notion that a large bearded man up in the sky pointed at objects and then poof, they disappeared, or where there was nothing he put a plant with fully ripe red berries growing in clusters.

  When May and Ruby and Justy and I went to church, people smiled at us and it made me feel like we belonged to something good, together. May was on the committee that arranged for refreshments after church, and I signed up for the Human Concerns committee. Their mission was to find stoves and pots and pans for poor people, and when women got divorced—say, if their husbands were beating them—the committee helped them through the hard time and made sure they had a place to live. I didn’t do much to serve. Once I brought some canned tomatoes May and I did up, for a person who didn’t have any food.

  It must have been the church routines, the songs, the committees, the people smiling at us, that kept us rooted to the ground. Justy kept us anchored too, since he needed us all the time. Still, it was lucky our heads didn’t float away. Mine was so full of thoughts, trying to be a child of light, and Ruby’s and May’s were not exactly at sea level, with the pills they consumed. Our kitchen counter could have been mistaken for a pharmacy. May gobbled pills to help her sleep, pills for her arthritis, pills for her headaches, and Ruby took medicine to stop his leg hurting, and aspirin for his sinuses. He could think of thousands of defects in his body that could be comforted by medication. If a person wanted to die all you’d have to do is walk into our kitchen, swallow one capsule from each bottle, and bingo, you’d be dead. There were nights when I dreamed that I was just about to take advantage of that opportunity.

  I always hate the month of August. Stars shoot through the sky down to the horizon, dead, and weeds demand every inch of the garden. Even if you try to wipe out the quack grass, the velvet leaf, the pigweed, they go berserk anyway and take over. There isn’t one thing you can do to stop the growth—it’s their last chance for life. I always have bad dreams in August. The youngsters from town are prowling in empty barns, making love and stealing. There are thunderstorms, lightning cracking right outside the window, and Justy’s crying, he’s so scared. I used to get up in the night and walk through the house, closing all the windows so the water wouldn’t come in and wreck the carpet, and then I’d go out on the front porch to watch the rain pelting the green grasses. There were times when I didn’t care about the fierceness of the storms. I stood in my bare feet and my nightgown, feeling the rain and the wind lashing me, feeling how death comes to every single thing.

  Then September came and nature dried out, as usual. The tomato vines lost the juice in them and all you could see in the garden was the red rotten tomatoes, sitting there like electronic eyes. That was last fall, about three million years ago, to be exact. Except sometimes I wake up and I think I’m right back there, in September. I imagine we’re all asleep upstairs and there’s one cricket in the floorboard, trying to keep the song going.

  Last fall it was cold and still through October. It rained at night and the world shone by morning. The colors lasted forever; the trees didn’t want to let go. But the leaves weren’t brilliant like sometimes—they hung dank and dull until a final wind took them. We all sensed the dangerous weather coming on, another winter caged inside, the car not starting. We could hear May bawling me out for acting cold. We remembered how we found the dog in the snow, its golden fur shimmering around its bony rib cage. Most of all we remembered Ruby and May and Justy inside together, for a whole season of storms that never let up.

  Twenty

  I WROTE to Aunt Sid at the end of October. I mentioned that I didn’t like the thought of winter coming. I said I guessed I wasn’t a kid any more, because cold didn’t mean fun; cold suggested a ferocious, merciless nature. I told her that we stayed inside for months last year, and Justy couldn’t help being naughty.

  Sometimes, everything we stumble upon or see can be taken for a warning, when actually there is nothing to it. Artie and I had a stone come flying through our windshield once on the way to work. I thought to myself, This isn’t a positive omen, and I braced myself for disaster. Nothing happened, not one single thing, although I did get a sliver at lunch. It came out easily. Then there’s the other occasions when a warning comes in loud and clear, and we don’t hear it.

  In the autumn mornings before work I let Justy help me with the dishes. It drove May crazy because he got water on the floor and it took me longer to get the job done and then we had to scramble to get to the cleaners. I had a chair for him to stand on so he could play in the rinse water. He had plastic boats he could sink while I washed the oatmeal pot. He was fascinated by water. He watched the drops flow through his fingers and he splashed me. One morning he had a cup he was dipping into the basin and then spilling out, and he got the idea to be a clown. He said, “Look, Mommy,” and then he dumped the water out on his head. There he was standing with water dripping down his face, down his neck, onto the new shirt May had bought for him. He hadn’t bargained for that swamped feeling in his ears.

  “That surprised you, didn’t it?” I said, trying not to laugh at him. He was speechless.

  May came in right then; of course I held my breath. I knew she was going to be furious. Usually when her one and only grandson is wet and cold she gets agitated. She moves like a pigeon that’s trapped in the attic. I stood frozen, waiting for her to yell at me, but wouldn’t you know it, she started to laugh. She covered her mouth, the way a schoolgirl might. She giggled at Justy as he spluttered, registering shock in slow motion. He did look awfully confused and cute. She kneeled down and gave him a big hug and when he broke into a howl she grabbed her dish towel and rubbed his head vigorously, as if she were performing a life-saving technique on a person who can’t catch his breath.

  It was my turn to stare goggle-eyed. Last time I had Justy at the sink with me, and he was all wet, only two days before, she told me I wasn’t fit to take care of a child. She was so mad I thought I saw her little gray curls starting to smoke. She spoke of pneumonia and strep throat resulting from babies playing in dishwater.

  “Let’s you and me go upstairs and get some dry clothes on, sweetie face,” May said, and then they were gone.

  I walked over to the cemetery in a daze, trying to think about how to predict certain events. There wasn’t any formula, not with May. There is a section in the cemetery under the blue spruce trees that’s devoted to May’s family. I stood by her parents’ stones, and the marker for her little brother who died so young. I tried to imagine the dead people under the earth. There wasn’t a living trace of my ancestors, if you don’t count my own flesh, and the dried grass nourished by their bones. I didn’t hear a thing as I watched the still gravestones, the printing washed away, the dates faded.

  Without thinking about it, Ruby and I took care. We were fairly relaxed when May was at work, two days out of the week. The rest of the time we were stick people, moving stiffly and quietly, trying not to get May riled. However, when w
e went to church we were a family. We put on our best manners. All the neighbors thought we were a miracle of happiness.

  In October Ruby and I didn’t celebrate our fourth anniversary, because he was acting sick again with his leg. It was over a year since the pickup had bumped him, but he liked to lie on the couch and have people bring him drinks on a silver tray. When he didn’t want to work, when he wanted me to feel sorry for him, his leg hurt him desperately. I was dead tired of the game.

  The day before Halloween Ruby’s Sherry called him up and said that there was an apartment she knew about, cheap. The first floor of a house in Stillwater would be free to rent in December. An old couple lived upstairs with a little gray poodle named Smoky. The price was seventy-five dollars a month, and we would be responsible for mowing the lawn, shoveling the snow, and checking to see that the elderly people hadn’t kicked the bucket in the night. Sherry said they were nice people who didn’t have the strength to keep up the rickety house. She was probably thinking the situation would give Ruby some focus, that shoveling would make him feel like Superman.

  I knew right then, when she mentioned the apartment, that I couldn’t take another winter in the same house as May; that fact came clear to me. There was no logic to our fights any more. We were squabbling out of habit. Sherry’s call was perfect timing. I had to think that perhaps somebody was watching out for us after all.

  Still, it isn’t easy to make changes, even for the better. There’s something stubborn in me that doesn’t want to budge. If I thought too hard about moving, my skin went prickly. I had never lived in the city before. I had to wonder what it would be like, not to be able to walk out and see the constellations so clearly, or smell the fresh-mown hay, or see nothing but darkness on the horizon. I wasn’t positive I was going to like living next to hundreds of people on the same street. And I wondered how Ruby and I would be, just ourselves—we hadn’t ever been on our own and I couldn’t predict if our personalities would change, if I’d become a carbon copy of May hounding him for spilling his milk and tossing Justy I had lived in the same place my entire life. I didn’t know if I could wash in a bathroom where you didn’t need a hammer to turn on the hot water.