The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  And they take Ruby away. He’s as calm and quiet as the starfish we saw at the zoo, sleeping on the bottom of their watery cage, drowned for all I know.

  The next episode is murky. I can’t focus on the place or time, right after Ruby disappeared. Once he was gone, out of the house, I wondered why they didn’t set a match to it. The police stuffed me into their rescue car and we went roaring through town, past Trim ’N Tidy, past Town Lanes, the high school, the funeral parlor. I thought perhaps I was loaded; I felt like shouting to the cleaners; I wanted to wake up laughing but I couldn’t find my mouth to crack a smile. Then, when I came to, I was in the hospital in Humphrey. I could tell by the odor. The entire place smells like they’re trying to cover up the scent of bedpans and they aren’t doing such a successful job. I got the faint whiff of gravy, the kind they make out of dog chow, probably. The first thing I see is my Aunt Sid’s huge blond head looming over my face. When I see her, I think I say, “Hey, Aunt Sid, don’t cry.” My mouth isn’t moving so maybe she can’t understand me. I reach out to touch her face, but my hands don’t work either. “Don’t cry, Aunt Sid,” I keep whispering. “Tell me what’s the matter.”

  I hate watching people cry; you know how their lips get all quivery? She dabbed her pink eyelids. She couldn’t say anything so she patted my arm until I fell asleep again. I didn’t feel the pain. I figured I was in a tank of water, swimming around watching humans mope and cry because a cherry fell off the top of their pie.

  In those days I floated in and out of sleep, only I couldn’t tell which was sleep and which was waking. I dreamed of the smell of the hospital and when I woke up there that smell was, fresh as a daisy. They hooked me up to bottles of juice, a direct connection to Honey Creek, I thought, so I’d know the path home. They didn’t let anyone see me, except Aunt Sid. She was by my side constantly. I found out later that she missed her Christmas concert at the high school. She had to get a substitute to direct all her singing students.

  In daylight, each time I woke up, there was Aunt Sid. She read books to me. For the longest time I couldn’t understand any words, but I loved hearing her voice. I couldn’t concentrate on the story she was telling since her words gushed out in streams and then stopped dead at punctuation marks. Often she sang songs; she closed her eyes and sang all the songs she could think of, one after the next. I used to wake in the night, and when I saw she wasn’t with me I whined for the touch of her hand. The room was never pitch dark, because they always left the door wide open. In the night, through my sleep, sometimes I heard people running down the corridor. The footsteps were muffled, but I could hear the urgency in them; I sensed that someone had been stabbed or beaten or blinded. I could picture the whole story and I half felt like climbing out of bed and rushing down the hall with the party. In my sleep I was an extra-large nurse to the hurt people, with a plush bosom, and I sang lullabies softly, beautifully.

  I had concussions and fractures, wounds to my head. My neck was sprained and my hands and wrists were both broken, and then there was the shock. That’s where you feel as if someone’s taken a cudgel and delivered a stunning blow to your mind. My spleen was not terribly active—on the blink, I gathered from conversation. Aunt Sid and the doctors debated, in the hall, whether or not to take it out for good.

  When the fog lifted and our house came into focus, I’d quick stop and let my thoughts drift away from the scenery. I’d float away out the window and perch on a cloud. My body said to me, “Lie quietly and concentrate on food. Dream of steaks, cooked on a grill, and melon balls.” Sometimes my body had the intelligence of a high priestess, and sometimes it was awfully dumb—such as the time, back at the house, when I was beaten up, and I didn’t have Justin on my mind. I must have been a rotten mother, not to whisk him away so he wouldn’t witness our life. But for now, in my smart phase, I drank the milk shakes Aunt Sid brought me each day from the ice creamery. For a while I couldn’t open my mouth wider than the space of a straw. She didn’t tell me anything I didn’t want to hear. She pressed my arm and petted my cheek; she told me she loved me about every other minute. She said it wouldn’t be long now I was resting so well.

  Naturally, after the first week they allowed the Rev in. He always looks big and sad. He isn’t a whole lot of consolation, to put it mildly. He couldn’t hold my hand and it stumped him for a minute. Finally he took my elbow and cradled it. All I heard was, “We shall not die but live.” I stared out the window when he talked to me. I didn’t want to hear the words. I didn’t want dead people looking down on me. I didn’t want to hear one thing about our heavenly father. I said to the Rev, “Beat it.” He left, just like that. I started saying “Beat it” to the nurses. It amused me, making people move away. If they weren’t in the middle of sticking needles in me they usually skittered down the hall soon after I said the magic words.

  There wasn’t anything to distinguish the days, the weeks, except sometimes we had mashed potatoes and fruit cocktail, and sometimes we didn’t. The fried chicken tasted worse than May’s, like it had been buried in the sand by a dog. The nurses carted me around part of each day, taking pictures of my body and stabbing me. I felt slightly closer to Jesus now, with my bloody hands. The doctors were either starving me or stuffing me, plus I had to contribute my specimens to the technicians so they could have the time of their life. I’m glad lab work isn’t my career. Dry cleaning is about three thousands steps up from lab work, in my estimation.

  When they weren’t carting me around I lay in bed and slept. I couldn’t stand to watch soap operas all day long. People got chased and killed, or they fell in love and then found out that their boyfriend was a criminal. For entertainment I stared at the ceiling planning some of the phrases I was going to say to the nurses when they got on my nerves. I died laughing when I was exceptionally creative. I thought of how to get the Rev angry. I was waiting to have a fight with him, after all the years of swallowing his lies. I could think of hundreds of lies he told me, not counting the time we got married and he blithely announced that we had achieved a glorious state.

  The nurses were directly outside my door at their station. I watched them gossiping about the boys they liked and the cranky old bags who buzzed them every five seconds. I glared at them. I didn’t have anything to look forward to except Aunt Sid’s daily visit. She told me how Justy was doing and she brought me selected news, such as the fact that Laverna’s black dog kicked off and the old men wanted to have the post office flag at half-mast. She brought little gifts of shampoo, soap, and perfume from Daisy, who had recently become a Mary Kay distributor. The Foote house was probably filled with boxes of free samples. Daisy and I are friends, but I wasn’t in the mood for her wisdom. I needed about fifty years to recover before I could stand the premier hairdresser of Stillwater. I kept watching for Ruby. I couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t at my bed, but I didn’t let myself wonder too hard. In the back of my cracked head I remembered it was something I didn’t want to know about. My orders were to keep perfectly still. The doctor was waiting for my internal organs to heal and it wouldn’t happen if they jiggled around.

  It was the week before Christmas and the Rev came to see me, as usual. I was on his circuit. He gets paid one thousand dollars to see all the invalids. He told me the people in church were praying for me. I said, “You know all them folks in your congregation calling each other to make their precious prayer circle?”

  He said, “Yes.”

  “Well,” I said, “they suck on dead goats. That prayer circle is only an excuse for gossip and don’t pretend you don’t know it.” I acted like I was Mrs. Crawford talking into the phone in her singsong voice. “‘Hello, Mrs. Baker? Did you know that Cassandra lost her ovary in the toilet and the highway crew found it floating down the river? Let’s get on the line to everyone and tell them all the details. And don’t forget to pray for her!’” I took my hand from my ear and said, “I don’t want their prayers. They stink to high heaven.”

  He said some prayer to m
e right then and there with his lids only half closed and fluttering, probably so he could check up on me. The prayer ended, “Whoever believes and lives in Jesus shall never die.” I said, right in his face, “Sure, yeah, leave me alone, go to hell, you big old fart.”

  When he left me, dazzled by my words, flapping fish rose before me, and I recognized them as my hands, and up from the floor sailed a bag of pecan balls, each one the size of an orange, and then a pair of yellow cat eyes, blind, and I cried out and thrashed. I was being murdered again. I saw May with her head on crooked, her disconnected veins hanging out of her neck. I saw us calmly eating at the table, Ruby saying “Pass them spuds,” and Justy asking for a cookie. Our conversation was so loud the phrases banged around knocking over the flower vases I had on the night stand. When I looked at the TV there were happy faces chewing on ears.

  I screamed when I saw my neck cut off. I threw up at the sight of the stiff arteries sticking out of my body like telephone wires. Yellow ooze came trickling from May’s mouth; I screamed, screamed so that the nurses, three of them, carried me to the bathtub and sprayed cold water on me. I tried to claw them; I tried to kill them with my imaginary poker, but they pinned me down to locate my bulging veins. They rammed something into my mouth and stabbed me with a needle and then the room spun and I fell back, fully dead.

  Right after the Rev triggered my memory I got transferred to the hospital near Chicago. They have experts who can deliver babies even when the mothers are dead. Aunt Sid was responsible. They took me in an ambulance, although they didn’t bother to fire up the siren. It wasn’t an emergency. If I died on the way they probably figured it was no loss.

  Something very strange happened on Christmas Day, in the Chicago hospital. I woke up from tangled dreams, people shouting at me and I’m telling them, while I laugh uproariously, where to get off—and a tall blond man without a single blemish on his face was standing at the door. I knew I’d seen him before. He was wondering whether to come in. He was peering over at my roommate, who was always moaning. She wasn’t in the greatest health because of her soused liver, plus she was expecting.

  “Just like you, Matt,” I said to the bed rail. “You get here in the nick of time.”

  Matt wasn’t doing anything about peace on earth. He was studying meteors and comets until he was blue in the face. He was trying to figure out how often rocks crash into the planet and wipe out animals and people. I had only wondered once if Matt liked stars better than me, since he knew what was inside of them. The answer was perfectly clear.

  “How are all them numerals and digits in your big smart brain, Matt?” I asked. “You figured out how to make peace yet?”

  He didn’t say anything so I looked over to him. He was afraid of me; I saw that plainly in his eyes. I burst out laughing. He made me feel mighty, the way I scared him. He gave me the impression I could gore him with my sharp horns.

  Matt said quietly, decorously, having learned well from the Boston school of life, “I have some flowers for you.” He placed a vase of yellow daffodils on the table.

  “It ain’t the season for daffodils, Matt. But then you wouldn’t notice that. You’ve never seen flowers in the spring. You never noticed you were living in the world—you and Dr. Heck were always goosing each other in his office. I bet those daffodils cost you a bundle. Too bad you never sent us money. I know, I know, you were too busy figuring when meteors were going to wipe us out. That sure is a big job.”

  Matt didn’t comment. He looked helpless, staring at me, while sweat gathered above his upper lip to celebrate our reunion.

  “Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” I said. “I ain’t a beauty queen like before. I ain’t quite so gorgeous.”

  He was standing still. If I had had a gun I could have hit him easily, shot him right through the eyeballs. “Just go away,” I said. “I don’t want to see you.”

  I didn’t listen to him saying how sorry he was. I don’t know if it was an apology for his whole life or for the last ten minutes. I imagined he was on TV and I had nothing more than to turn the dial and he would be gone.

  He came back to see me despite my wizardry. I knew Aunt Sid made him. I never looked him in the face. He read books to me, but I didn’t listen to the words. I stared at one handle of the drawer, or the bathroom doorknob, or the rim of the barely visible toilet. I never said anything to Matt except how much I hated him, more than anyone I had ever known, or would know. I always spoke to him while I had my head in the pillow.

  I lay there day after day while he droned on. Right when it looked like I was well enough to be moved I’d catch an infection, or my blood pressure would soar to the top of the bulb. I must have been on the germ ward. I called the doctors names under my breath; too bad if they heard me. I lay in bed thinking seriously about all the ways there are to croak. There was always someone watching over me, or my roommate would start blabbing about scotch, and furthermore, I didn’t have one sharp razor blade, or even a tack. The only clear path to death was out the window. We were on the fifteenth floor and it was straight down to the sidewalk. Bingo, smashed on the sidewalk, bright and flat like a penny after the train.

  I reached the low point on New Year’s Day. It was Justin’s birthday. I hadn’t seen him since I handed him over to Mrs. Peterson. I didn’t have anything but cuss words streaming through my brains. Everyone probably thought I was an unsuitable mother and that I’d tear into my son if they brought him up. I didn’t tell anyone what I had discovered about foul language, that cuss words are unbearably boring after a while, that they wear you out for good. Everyone I saw, except for Aunt Sid, I told off without a bit of pleasure. I couldn’t stand being in the hospital because someone had tried to murder me. Why had it taken me so long to learn that there isn’t such a thing as justice? Or perhaps I had somehow committed a crime and I deserved what had happened. Whenever I thought about such questions there was a banging in my head, as if someone were inside with a large stone knocking at my skull. The nurses watched me because they thought I was the number-one criminal of the year. I told them to bring me sharp objects so I could stab my heart to death. I figured when they had their heads turned at the nurses’ station down the hall I could fly out of bed and crash through the window. It wouldn’t take long. I told them all about how I was going to bleed on the sidewalk and people would have to step over me on their way to work. There’d be bloodstains on their crocodile shoes.

  Some of the nurses said so innocently, “Now why would you want to do that?”

  I didn’t want to go into the details. It was such a long story. I always said, “None of your business, Patsy.” I called every nurse Patsy. I got too tired learning their names.

  Other nurses mocked me. They said, “Just let us know when you’re going to leap, we’ll come and watch.”

  There wasn’t anything I could say to people like that, except a string of dirty words. I always figured I’d better wait for lunch though, before I jumped. My stomach was grumbling. I was starved.

  In January the Rev came to see me all the way from Honey Creek. I was so lonesome and stiff. I couldn’t stand books any more, or television. I hated the nurses, and the way they breezed into the room cheerfully. I hated the physical therapist who made me do exercises with my hands. They were still in partial casts. I was in such a bad mood that I’m sure it wasn’t exactly a treat for Aunt Sid to visit me, but somehow she spoke to me as if I was a pleasant person. I was sick to death of my own rotten company, but I didn’t know how to suddenly start smiling and gesturing. I would have broken the scale if they could measure hate. I hated me more than I hated any of the nurses; I hated myself almost more than I hated Matt. I was so bored with hate—the word hurts your mouth if you say it ten times in a row.

  When the Rev came in January he took my gauze-covered hand and he said his prayers. I stared at the grease he puts in his hair to smush it down. His hair is yellowy in the few places that aren’t gray. He said, “My dear, our kingdom on earth is not complet
e.”

  It was the only sentence that hit me, out of the whole long jumbled prayer: “Our kingdom on earth is not complete.” He squinched up his eyes while he was saying we get our reward in heaven, his favorite place. I couldn’t stand his voice so I said, “Listen here, Rev, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, our kingdom not being complete. Don’t you have one marble knocking around in your theological head? Do they have plaster casts up in heaven? I never heard them mentioned in your big black book there. My hands are going to be cured in no time and don’t tell me Jesus could do it. For your information, Jesus is a crackpot.”

  The Rev stared. I loved every minute of his dumb gaze. I said, “You ever heard them little frogs screwing their heads off down in the marsh in spring?”

  He didn’t say anything; he looked without blinking his eyes, a mannerism that was familiar. “Huh?” I said. “You ever heard the racket? Don’t tell me anything about the resurrection. Go down to the stinky marsh in spring and listen, and you’ll hear what’s come to life, what’s reborn. They aren’t any bigger than a quarter. They was dead before, them frogs was, all winter, and there they are come to get some satisfaction. They call out the words Urgent, Urgent.”

  “Well, yes,” he said, like an idiot.

  “Don’t tell me our kingdom ain’t complete. Don’t be one of them big fat greedy assholes, Rev. If those chubby knees of yours can hold your weight, kneel down sometime in early spring and sniff a bloodroot. Just because you can’t take it all in with your senses doesn’t mean the earth is half-baked. It’s ideal, if you don’t count the humans.”

  He said he was glad to see I felt better and that everyone had me in their thoughts at home. He beamed up a few words to our merciful father. When the nurse announced that it was time for my checkup he kissed my cheek. I couldn’t help sneering when his lips touched. He might have heard me say “Yuck.” Probably at the moment he was thanking God for making mouths. No doubt he was making plans to go to the men’s room, clean out his flabby ears, see if he heard all my words correctly.