The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  The doctor came into the room right after the Rev’s departure. He was as thin as a pencil. You could see the knob in his throat go up and down when he swallowed. He was so thin you could understand how his body worked, if you squinted at his transparent flesh. He said, “I have good news for you, little lady.” He always called me that. This time I said, “What, little man with the pencil neck?”

  He looked startled. I didn’t care. I was sick of people calling me names that weren’t mine.

  “Your baby is going to be just fine if you take it easy for the next few months, ah”—he looked on my chart—“Mrs. Dahl. Your blood pressure is down, the placenta is functioning normally, your infections are cleared up.”

  They thought the baby was hurt. They thought they were going to have to fish it out, but he isn’t hurt at all, far as they can tell. It’s a boy, he told me.

  I kept saying to myself, “It’s a boy. I get another chance.” I knew right then that I had to calmly figure out what had happened. I had an enormous task before me. I had to learn about myself before my baby boy was born so I could start fresh, so I could teach him how a person can have a strong mind, a kind heart. Somehow, I knew, I was going to have to come up with strength and kindness in myself. So much of me was set on bearing poison as my offering to every spot on earth. There was a terrible black cloud in my soul, directly under the heart. Somehow I had to fill that terrible dark space with gold. How was I to start when the only thoughts I had were about people thrusting sharp objects of all kinds into each other? I hoped against all hope that the Rev would bring a wand on one of his visits, wave it around while he chanted, do some real magic.

  The only fact I knew for sure was that someday it would be up to me to tell a long story to both my boys. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a personality transformation simply because I knew about the baby. I didn’t presto turn into Esther bringing baskets of food from Bleak House to all the sick dirty people. I told Matt I hoped a meteor shower landed on his doorstep first thing when he got back to Boston. He was awfully tired of the insults I kept dishing out. I bet he was glad to leave my bedside. The worst I used on a person was the F-word. I told the physical therapist, Sandra, to keep her fucking mitts off my wrists. She told me I had serious problems, which was no news to me. When Dr. Pencil Neck was doing one of his internal exams on me, sticking rubber gloves places that aren’t usually for public inspection, I almost asked him if he used a dildo on his wife. I didn’t though; I had brakes working somewhere.

  The morning after Matt left—right when the nurse came in smiling and I wanted to bash her teeth in for being happy—I had to stop eating my cereal. I was remembering something. I felt the kick. I felt my boy. He was saying, “I know you. I know all your secrets.” His body alive in me kept saying, “You can’t hide a thing from me. I know who you really are.”

  I had to stop and feel my stomach. The nurse was so surprised that I didn’t have abuse for her. I lay there staring, my hands moving over the bulge of my belly. My boy was part of me, feeding on my sadnesses, remembering back to the old joys. He knew what it was like to have made love and to lie in bed afterwards, like a beautiful stricken deer. And what came to me were words from the Bible: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God?”

  I heard the phrases and I wanted all of me to call out in a song, a song that doesn’t have words, a song that almost doesn’t have noise. A lot of people take a short cut and call that feeling of song love. They just call it that because there isn’t a way to describe it. But the word love doesn’t describe the half of it. It doesn’t do anything to bring to mind the song we all want so desperately to sing.

  Twenty-two

  I GOT out of the hospital in the middle of January. There wasn’t anything but filthy snow piled on the sidewalks. They say I have to stay in bed and be quiet, because of the baby. I have toxemia, which the doctor said could kill both of us, if I’m not careful. I looked up the word toxemia and found it used to mean arrow poison, which made perfect sense. I knew I’d been hit by something large and quiet. I have to hold out until the month of May, when he’s due. I’m supposed to lie on my left side and take it all slow and easy. Slow and easy; I can’t even remember how to walk straight.

  I stay in Aunt Sid’s living room. She has the green carpet that looks, with poor vision, like a field of spring wheat, incandescent and fluid. The place would be living hell for a cow. She rented a hospital bed for me that moves up and down, dances the jig. And she has stocked the room with blind tapes and books and records. She has to be at school all day so she can’t perform the great operas for my benefit. I’m by myself in a sea of green grass and spoken words.

  At night Aunt Sid teaches me how to type. I have a table that fits over the bed and she sits at my side. It probably isn’t all that different from teaching someone to play the piano. I get into trouble if I don’t practice. Aunt Sid can tell when I slough off. I can’t type too long since my wrists aren’t very strong—my stiff fingers punch the keys as if they’d never curled themselves into a bowling ball’s three holes. I’m also working at knitting a baby sweater and booties, from a pattern and blue yarn Dee Dee sent me. I feel like Miss Finch must have, sitting up primly in bed, looking down upon the room. I pretend that I’m not helpless, and that I have pride. If I crane my neck I can see the house, across the street, where Justy goes during the day. There are other children to play with, a sandbox in the yard, and the woman who teaches them to count and put their jackets on.

  Matt calls up every week. I’m nice to him over the phone, with my fingers crossed for the lies. He always asks, “So how are you feeling?” And I say exuberantly, “Great!” Then we don’t either of us say a thing.

  When Aunt Sid heard me finish off a conversation, when I was saying, “Don’t bother calling me again,” she came in and sat on the side of the bed. She picked up my stupid hands and said, “You can’t blame him forever.”

  I was still in awe of her, so I wasn’t about to tell her I could blame anyone I wanted to.

  “Matt is your family,” she said. “He’s trying so hard.”

  I thought to myself, Since when is family an asset? I’m better off without.

  “Let him help you,” she said, brushing the stray blond hairs out of her eyes.

  I nodded and thought of the sound of his voice, a voice so soft you imagine you’re breathing in cheap perfume. I mumbled something to Aunt Sid, about how I’d just love to hear his story, when he comes to kneel at my bedside once again.

  The first time I saw Justy I was in bed in Aunt Sid’s living room. He came through the door holding her hand. She had prepared me by saying he hadn’t had an easy couple of months. Why not simply say his life had been ruined irrevocably? While I was in the hospital in Humprey he was shuttled between Dee Dee’s and Daisy’s. I heard that Matt had tried to befriend him, without success. Justin’s mind was probably on one area: a dim basement, a red light, flesh spattering the wall. Everything looked to him like a dark maze, all probable outlets ending in a corner with his favorite character vomiting blood. His third birthday was January first. No one remembered to celebrate.

  Aunt Sid and Justin were standing in the light of the hall, the French doors thrown open, without moving. Justy looked down at the blinding green rug; of course I could see his stunning eyelashes veiling his eyes. I held out my arms to him, unable to utter a sound. I had dreamed that at our first meeting we spoke in television language, caressing each other, saying simple sentences, and healing each other within five minutes. But when I woke I knew I was going to have to rely on my own invention. This one time I wasn’t going to borrow from daytime TV, or May, or Sid. I wasn’t even going to try to steal from Charles Dickens. If that old true word, father of us all, was out there in creation in the beginning, surely it will be there at the end, and all the while in between.

  Justin would not loo
k up until I finally whispered his name. “Justy,” I whispered again, and he turned into Aunt Sid’s skirt. All I could do was stretch my arms his way and try to call his name across the months of separation.

  Aunt Sid kneeled down and picked him up. It was then that I remembered the stuffed lamb she had bought for me to give him. I held it out while Aunt Sid walked over. He kept his eye on the soft wool and the curly horns. He took it from me and then Aunt Sid set him down. He stood by the bed and I petted him, his thin brown hair.

  He didn’t say anything to me for a couple of days. He didn’t talk to anyone. He sat quietly in a little rocking chair, rocking back and forth. When he tired of that he lay on the floor pushing a truck back and forth, noiselessly. At night he screamed in bed. I’d hear Aunt Sid’s bare feet slapping down the hall to his room, and her song about clay and wattles. She sang, “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree . . .” I could hear him describing the big turtle that was eating him in his dream. I lay in my bed, in the dim living room, a pink glow coming through the curtains from the street light, and I could see Justy’s turtle down to the orange markings on the shell and the yellow eyes that never blink.

  Now and then he stands by the window in the late afternoon, staring at the street, with no expression on his face, but I imagine I know what is passing through his mind. I know in those moments that there is a huge dark place in his soul too, and maybe I can’t ever heal it, or make him see any possible joy around us, but I’m beginning to understand my task. Like the Rev says, “We have to hold fast to that which is good.” I know I have to do that as hard as I can for Justy, when I myself come to the place where I can choose the good and refuse the evil.

  Aunt Sid has a small children’s book of proverbs, and I was reading them one day. I turned to the page where it says, “Come riddle me, riddle me, riddle me. None are so blind as they who won’t see.” I couldn’t get past the page. Even after I closed the book I heard the words, “Come riddle me. Even the blind will see.” Is it possible that even I could see and understand? I thought to myself. The words leaped up to me, a challenge. I began, in the damned black mood I was in, to dare everyone, Ruby and May, the dead and the living, to continue spinning their riddles, and then watch me make sense of the tangles. “Just don’t put no time limit on me,” I whispered. And then I said out loud, “Come riddle me some more, all of you.”

  Of course the Rev is continually yanking me by his short rope. He gives me his advice over the phone: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not into thine own understanding.”

  I smile and let him rattle on, because he doesn’t know the riddles are before him. They are the riddles of human nature, and not the simple ways of God. The Rev merely closes his eyes and trusts when he runs smack into a thorn bush. I have given up on speech with the Rev; there is no use explaining that you have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help. My trust, even down in that dark place I carry, is that some person will come running. And then finally the way through grief is grieving. There is nothing like lying down to bawl and choke, and then rolling over so the tears can drip out of your ears and settling in for a long sleep. Although I like some of the words in the Bible, I’m not ready for religion yet. Who knows, perhaps when I’m older it will come to me in a white flash. Nothing is impossible. I’m sure Jesus has good points too, and I wouldn’t rule out the fact that my vision just isn’t broad enough to recognize them.

  I assume they wrote about the murder all over Illinois. They did for weeks after in the Stillwater paper. The old men down at the P.O. in Honey Creek are still hashing out the details while Laverna tries to sort the mail. Journalists are no doubt writing about it across the U.S., but the only thing they say in the papers is our names, that May was my mother, and Ruby killed her. They don’t say the real reasons, or any of the pity in it. To make it sound normal they probably say Ruby shot her in the head with a pistol. Once, while I was still in the hospital, I was feeling ready. I had been thinking about the question for a while, and finally I spoke out. I said, “Aunt Sid, tell me what happened to Ma. Don’t spare me.”

  She sat down and took a breath, as if she had been waiting for me to ask and had her speech prepared. She told me that May was dead in the basement when the police found her. I could have told her that, because we heard the rattle. What I wanted to know was whether they burned her, or buried her, and if she sat up and complained when they were embalming her. Aunt Sid said Mrs. Peterson had called her up and she drove to Honey Creek at breakneck speed. She described the funeral service for May. They had purple irises up front in our church and somber organ music droning throughout. The place was packed with people who wanted to pray for dead souls and watch the end of a drama. Matt flew in. That sure was considerate of him. Too bad May couldn’t know that he came especially to pay his first and final respects. The Rev talked about her good works and the valley of death, the usual speech. He said she was smiling at the Lord, she was at his feet. That doesn’t sound to me like a particular vacation spot. Then they wheeled the gray metal casket with peach satin inside down the aisle. They buried her next to Willard Jenson’s stone. Because the ground wasn’t frozen yet they tucked her in without any complications. I found it hard to believe May didn’t beg the angels to freeze the world, at least give the gravediggers some trouble, and the family extra expense.

  I didn’t go to May’s funeral but I know what they did to her face. Undertakers are masterful with dead people; they’re able to unpinch a face for the ceremony in her honor. Under the lid of the closed casket she probably did look halfway joyful, like she wanted to send a postcard to her family saying, “Having a great time, too bad you can’t be here with me.”

  I nodded at all of Aunt Sid’s descriptions. Even if you want to you can’t go on forever talking about someone who’s dead, who has no earthly future. There just is not that much to say. I told her I was ready to change the subject so she left me by myself. I tried to think of May under the ground. Perhaps it’s all the bodies in the cemetery that make the maples along the road turn brilliant colors in the fall. I can see May making some old tree turn bright red. That’s a perfect job for her dead body.

  In the night I wake up, my heart’s racing, and I’m convinced I’m May getting shattered. After I calm myself, take deep breaths, wipe my face off, bite my hand, I have to wonder what her thoughts are, in those minutes when her life is giving out. She knows it’s the end; there isn’t a doubt in her mind. What are her thoughts in the last moment? Is she thinking she’s going to meet up with Willard Jenson, that they’ll have a night of dancing through piles of laundry? Are her numerous days flashing by, like half-dead people say happens? Is she watching for the Lord’s bare feet to peep from under his robe? I feel her flesh and blood beaten to the quick and I know then that there are no thoughts. She is crushed and finished, nothing left but terror.

  One day, when I was bored to the point of near-death, I went into Aunt Sid’s office. I didn’t mean any harm. I was rummaging around, looking for my letters to her. Instead, in a drawer, I found an envelope with handwriting I’d only ever seen on discarded paper covered with formulas, and the occasional postcard. The letter lay in my hand, jeering at me. “Matthew Grey,” it said on the return address. I couldn’t believe Aunt Sid and Matt were correspondents. I socked the desk with my hand and nearly reopened my wounds.

  There wasn’t anything to do but open the letter. It was dated right after my wedding, October 1974.

  Dear Aunt Sidney,

  Thank you for your letter. I also enjoyed talking with you at Ruth’s wedding. You ask me questions about the family which I’m afraid I can’t answer. I don’t know much about them and their situation. It is always strange, going home, facing people and a place with which I have nothing in common. I won’t bore you with the difficulties of my childhood, but to be honest my main preoccupation was
trying to figure out who was worse, my mother or my sister. Which one to avoid more strenuously. I must have realized early on that my inquiring mind differentiated me from them, and would lead me away from their household. Ruth tormented me continually in the form of physical abuse and my mother seemed to adore me in a sickening, clutching fashion. I don’t think of them much now; I’m thankful I’ve been able to make family out here.

  I agree with you about Ruth’s marriage. To me it seems catastrophic. Maybe that’s too strong a word, but it seems to me that it can lead to nothing but unhappiness, at the very least. I also can’t imagine how it will be with them, living with my mother. Slow death, for all of them, I would think. You ask me what we can do to make life easier, better for Ruth. I honestly can think of nothing, from my distance. That she missed out on a way of life which I was lucky enough to come by is unfortunate, but I don’t know how to make amends now. I don’t think she was forced to marry the man; she seems to feel something for him. Although I didn’t speak with him much, he certainly didn’t inspire confidence. I don’t know Ruth either, so maybe I’m wrong and they’ll be perfectly happy. Don’t worry about my thinking you’re meddling—you are probably concerned about them with good reason. Still, I know of nothing we can do, short of kidnapping Ruth and finding a Henry Higgins to educate her.

  My work goes well. I’m temporarily sidetracked for the moment, helping some people work on simulating a comet. My close friend, Will, is planning a trip to Chicago in January and I hope to come with him. I’d enjoy talking with you again very much, and will at least give you a call.