The Book of Ruth

by Jane Hamilton

  All best,

  Matthew

  I went into the living room and bashed the typewriter off the table for starters. It fell with a dull thud but I couldn’t see if it was broken because of the tears stinging my eyes. I couldn’t believe that Matt and Aunt Sid were in cahoots. I had been betrayed and shamed, exposed and humiliated. To celebrate I picked up an indigo glass vase, a prize possession I hoped, and threw it at Aunt Sid’s baby grand. The flowers and shattered glass stayed on top and the water dripped down on the keyboard. Then I paced back and forth, making my plans. First I would pack my bags, march to Sid’s school, waltz into her choir room and in front of everyone shout, “Shove hair up your ass!” I shouted the words louder and louder, practicing, and then I opened the front door and yelled to the street. For a moment the plan gave me a great deal of satisfaction.

  Everyone who knew me realized my life was going to end in catastrophe—they called it the very name—and they didn’t do anything to warn me. They stood by watching me choose the wrong way. They watched me parade naked, humiliated, without so much as rapping my shoulder. I rehearsed the choir room scene countless times, bringing up all of May’s favorite one-line insults. I knew the student singers would rise to their feet and cheer me on, and then they would scramble down from the risers and help me claw at their conductor. And then suddenly the vision rose before me of my giving birth right in the gutter, with Justy sitting several yards away, staring into the traffic.

  After I cried on the sofa and beat on stiff pillows I told myself to get control. I tried to think of places to go. I racked my brain but all I could come up with was the Footes’ small house where I’d have to share a room with Randall. I ruled out Artie and the Rev. I tried to imagine sitting down to supper with Mr. and Mrs. Rev, and living through a half-hour sermon while the steaming food got cold. I tried to reasonably tell myself that it is a free country and Sid can like any idiot she wants to. Of course I didn’t have the sense to remember my faith in good people, like Aunt Sid, helping the desperate, or in my resolve to calmly solve the riddles.

  I spent all day alternately crying and cursing—and I spent a fair amount of time cleaning up the mess on the piano—until I finally fell asleep on the carpet. I dreamed of myself ducking out from the mushroom cloud over Illinois and running a long way in search of clean air.

  When Aunt Sid got home from school I didn’t act too aloof. She went into her office to write her lesson plan when I didn’t answer her greeting. I could hear her humming a song her students were to sing. Before my nerve failed I shouted, “Hey, Aunt Sid, could you come in here for a minute?” I could feel the beads of sweat trickling down my chest and I had to close my eyes because everything looked scarlet. I found myself panting like Sid’s collie.

  “First of all,” I said as businesslike as I could, when she stuck her head into the room, “who is Henry Higgins?”

  Aunt Sid cocked her head and furrowed her brow. She looked at me like she knew my dander was up about a million feet. She explained how he took Eliza Doolittle and made her into a princess.

  “Fine,” I whispered, taking a deep breath. “I’m ready to hear about Ruby now,” I said, looking straight into her eyes.

  For such a long time I didn’t want to know. I imagined him in certain places, such as California, where there are palm trees, olive trees, the ocean waves bringing in glittering rocks. I imagined him cruising along the coast in a new blue hot rod. I knew he would have such a great time. But I couldn’t carry on with the delusions forever. It was time to hear the real story.

  Aunt Sid stroked my wet cheek with her hand and then she said, “He’s in prison, waiting for his trial. It’s coming up this week.”

  “So what’s he up to?” I asked. “You seen him lately?”

  She looked into my eyes with such kindness. I didn’t want to watch her gazing at me like that. She talked about how he had punched someone in the nose and taken swats at the guards. In prison, managers aren’t terribly tolerant of roughhousing.

  I shoved my knitting project aside so she could sit on the bed. She showed me some of the articles about him. I demanded to see the newspapers. The reporters wrote that Ruby had confessed right away. He said to the police right out, “I killed her.” They said that Ruby believed the demon was in May and that she was trying to put it in Justy. Ruby told the police he was set on beating that old devil out of May, so it wouldn’t spread. He talked about the devil obsessively in jail, how it can get into people and make them wicked. He strummed his imaginary guitar and sang songs to ward off unwelcome powers.

  All the psychiatrists were having a field day with Ruby. He wasn’t schizo like the madmen in the movies who think they’re three hundred different people rolled into one. The paper said he had “paranoid personality tendencies,” that he perhaps had a “disassociate reaction at the time of the slaying.” I crumpled up the paper when I read that part—so many words without saying a thing. I don’t think there was anything seriously wrong with Ruby’s brain. I have my opinion; I only lived with him for four years. Naturally he behaved in a haywire fashion at times. He got ideas into his head and was damned before he got rid of them. He took drugs which made him see all kinds of exaggerations. But I know reporters mainly want to find a juicy story. They don’t care about Ruby’s strong points. They don’t know the details that could drive a person to grab a hatchet, shoot a pistol.

  Aunt Sid said that at the trial the lawyer would try to get Ruby off without too much punishment. She reiterated that he was a very sick person. The lawyer was going to convince the jury that he was out of his mind when he got going with the poker. She said that even if the lawyer won, Ruby would have to go to a hospital for mental cases. She said, “Whatever happens, he won’t be free to walk down the street. He won’t go free.”

  She thought she was giving me comfort. For once in her life she didn’t have me completely figured out. I could see the rest of Ruby’s life before me. They’d stuff him in a hospital where he’d have to do jigsaw puzzles all day long, and walk on burned-out lawns with high fences caging him in. I kept hearing Aunt Sid’s words: “He won’t be free. They won’t let him free.”

  I told her I needed rest. She kissed my forehead and said, “Call if you want me.”

  I nodded with closed eyes until I heard the door shut.

  I had to say his name over and over. The jewel. Ruby. My Ruby. I saw us playing jungle kitten and jungle tom; I saw him flipping a pancake so exuberantly, and then I saw his whole body turning black, limb by limb, in the dank prison cell. Only his eyes were blue, staring at me. I hid under the covers from the image. I cowered and shivered.

  I hear his songs in the night, coming through the window. I wake up suddenly to the tune “You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful, and You’re Mine,” and I have to look to see if he’s out on the lawn, calling for me to come join him. It’s where I belong. I never see anyone on the street, but the singing keeps on.

  After Aunt Sid broke the news to me I lay still. I moaned softly for a few hours. I wept for days, in private, stopping only to shiver now and again, and cover my head with the blanket. There wasn’t one thing I could see or hear that cheered me. Everywhere I looked I saw Ruby huddling against an unpainted wall. Sometimes he didn’t have anything in his hands and he was whimpering pitifully without wiping his face; other times he skulked in the corner polishing a knife, watching it catch in the bare light bulb. Sometimes I think I made all the tears there are to make and I don’t cry any more for what he had to do, but then a whole new batch comes in. There are mornings when I sit in bed, alone in the house, and I sink under the covers in peace. There is no end to the stream. I want only to escape from the living room and the suffocating heat and the green carpet I swear is growing and is some morning going to be over my head, each blade brutally sharp. I want to find him, stick my head through the bars and say, “I’ll trade places with you, Ruby. You go free.”

  I’m in the prison with him; I’m not scared this time. The
re isn’t a thing but a toilet in the corner and a cot covered with a brown blanket that needs darning. I’m telling him I’m sorry, repeatedly. He’s sitting on his cot saying, “Hey, baby, listen to this concert I composed for you, my sweet jungle kitten.” He turns on his radio and fetches his broken guitar and sings the song that goes, “If you leave me now, you’ll take away the biggest part of me, oh oh oh oh oh baby please don’t go.”

  I didn’t say goodbye to Ruby when the policemen hauled us away. I didn’t say one word of farewell. Aunt Sid told me I wouldn’t see Ruby again and I wouldn’t go to the trial. She said, “It won’t do a bit of good, not for either one of you.” She gave me her earnest fairy godmother gaze I had begun to dislike and said, “You both need to start over fresh.” I almost laughed. How is Ruby supposed to start fresh when he’s looking at prison for life straight in the eye?

  Ruby isn’t dead but I won’t see him again. It doesn’t make sense. I wonder, if I saw him on the street, would my knees lock, would I keel over? Or would I rush to him with those loving arms of mine? I can’t say. At times I feel sure one way, and then the next minute my body is shaking under the quilt. I sometimes think May was the lucky one, to have her Willard Jenson blown up into four million pieces. Ruby is living in the same state as I am, but there is no way for us to reach each other. There is no hope for our future. I ask myself how I’m supposed to think of a dead man who’s alive. And then I say to myself, It’s easy to kill. It’s easy to throw it all away. Pretend you’re on television hauling out the trash in an extra-heavy-duty plastic trash bag. If Ruby keeps beating people up, his lawyer and the prison guards, he isn’t ever going to see the light of day. I tell myself all this so rationally. I know I can’t think he’s in the world at all. I can’t hope as I do on occasion that he’ll come and find us and that we’ll sit on the couch with our new son admiring every inch of his flesh—that we’ll forget the old times because we’re all each other has, because we don’t have the courage to go on alone.

  But the truth is, if Ruby ever gets out into the world he won’t find us. We’ll hide from him. It will be too late. We will be strangers, perhaps hateful strangers. I have to tell myself the words, although I’m not always positive of the meaning. I have to say the words so I learn what they mean. I don’t understand my heart; it’s confused with fear and pity, and maybe what they call love.

  I heard Aunt Sid calling my name from upstairs yesterday. I heard my name when she sang it out so beautifully. It seemed brand-new. I got the urge to look it up in the dictionary she bought me. It’s black and enormous and filled with the presence of some sort of God. Ruth. Ruth. To say my name I have to shape my lips as if I’m going to kiss someone. Ruth means pity and compassion, so that figures. Half the time I can’t stop crying for Ruby, even though I know that what I’m supposed to do is throw him away, let him go. I believe the day will come when I’ll go out in the yard and toss up my hands and he’ll sail away. The winds will take him. Then I’ll tell Justin his father is dead and in heaven, that he’s happy for all time. I’ll tell him, if I can stomach the deceit.

  We have our new counselor, Sue. Sherry came a few times and then handed over her file to Sue. De Kalb is too far for Sherry to drive once a week. Her devotion is limited to a ten-mile radius. She said she hoped she’d hear from me and I said, “Sure.”

  Sue has long dark hair and bad skin and is so tall she has to duck coming in the door. She looks tense, probably stemming all the way back from her crazy childhood. I’m thinking about going into social work because all you have to do is say, “Tell me about your parents . . . Oh! That explains why you’re a wreck.” Then you look mournful and say, “Sorry, there’s no hope for you.”

  Sue tells me Justy and I should never go back to the house in Honey Creek. And I nod at her and say, “OK,” but I don’t tell her that before I can throw it all away I have to go back once so I can see my life and say, “There it was. That was me.” I have to say goodbye to Honey Creek Ruth. I don’t think I’ll miss her too much—just a few parts, my favorite episodes, like that one night I did the seven and ten split down at Town Lanes and everyone went wild. They hugged me and yanked on my clothes.

  Sue works on me with a plan in mind. She tries to get me to say that I wasn’t seeing clearly, that I took abuse greedily, that I have to change so I can protect myself, and that Ruby was a disturbed person all along. She goes about her work nervously, but gently. She makes me tell the story of our life together. She asks, while she pulls at a whisker on her chin, “Did you think it was strange the time Ruby threw the tomato juice against the wall, when he was irritated with your mother?”

  And I say, “No, not real strange, all things considered.”

  She says, “Did you ever think you should move away from your mother?” She actually wants to say, “Aren’t you an odd bird, full grown and still attached to the apron strings?”

  I don’t know how to answer the question. I didn’t know how to tell her that May and I were the same: ugly and mean and down with our luck. I stare at the ground and then she knows to change the subject.

  Perhaps Ruby was sick. I’m sure I wasn’t a perfect specimen either. I know we had some great times together; I’m positive about that fact. But I’m working on truly seeing, I really am. It’s about the only thing a person can promise.

  I know, certainly, that there’s nothing to the Rev’s guarantee that the meek are going to inherit the earth. No one inherits one single thing. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about. We’re only passers-by, and all you can do is love what you have in your life. A person has to fight the meanness that sometimes comes with you when you’re born, sometimes grows if you aren’t in lucky surroundings. It’s our challenge to fend it off, leave it behind us choking and gasping for breath in the mud. It’s our task to seek out something with truth for us, no matter if there is a hundred-mile obstacle course in the way, or a ramshackle old farmhouse that binds and binds. The Bible is right on one score: it doesn’t do one bit of good to render evil for evil. I don’t mention these ideas of mine to Sue. I keep the thoughts to myself.

  I looked up truth the other day also. The word has a lot to do with seeing clearly, and with things that are honest and beautiful. Perhaps I should change my name to Ruth Truth. The combination of pity and compassion with honesty and beauty would be a real knockout. People might not see me come into a room but they’d feel like there was something unusual in the air—I have a lot of fantasy dreams, I guess, because I’m by myself so much. I’m not bored too often, though. I have my entire life to think about. I have the ghosts to order away from my room. Ruth Truth. It has a nice ring to it.

  I got a letter from Daisy and she said she’s running for Mrs. Illinois. She looks so great in a bathing suit; I just know she’s going to win. I laughed my head off when I read about it, our Daisy. She’ll probably win the Mrs. America contest, which follows after the state pageant. Dee Dee wrote to tell me that Randall came in fourth in the pie-eating race at the church’s winter carnival, proof that he’s not as big a glutton as was supposed. I also got a letter from Diane Crawford. She must have heard about the trouble. She’s married to an aluminum siding salesman who belongs to the Mafia. She sent a small box along with the letter. Inside the parcel was the heirloom pin that I lost years ago at the spelling bee. She said she had seen where it fell on the floor during the fire alarm, and she picked it up and kept it. She said it was a terribly mean thing to do, and she apologized. She hoped I’d forgive her. The pin was something I didn’t want to look at. I told Aunt Sid to permanently remove it from my sight. When I opened the box I had to burst into tears. There were so many gifts coming to me late.

  But the strangest part—it always makes me stop crying, as if someone’s come and slapped me—is the fact that I don’t have May. I stare at Aunt Sid’s white walls, dumbstruck by a vision: I’m walking down the street and May isn’t telling me where to go. I won’t come home to her shelling five million peas. It’s the craziest notion
that ever came to me, that someday May would actually die. Sometimes I hear her on the porch fiddling with the lock. I’m waiting for her to yell at me. She’s going to tell me to stop looking so sad.

  What I know is Ruby did it for me. I’m not sure of a lot of things so far, but I know Ruby did the job for me. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, or the flat gray space in between. It’s all right for Justy, but not for me. We shall die, period. May’s not watching me from heaven, if that’s where she made it. I say that to myself over and over; I keep telling her, when I hear her on the porch—I call out, “You are dead and gone.” I tell her, “Beat it!” I turn up the radio extra loud so I won’t hear her feet stamping on the mat and her cigarette hacks.

  Aunt Sid tells me how we’re going to live. She says I’ll have my baby and we’ll be a family, eating breakfast out on the porch, with English muffins and orange marmalade, and she’ll teach me what I need to know. She says, “Ruth, you are smart. Do you have any idea how smart you are? You can go to college and study whatever you choose.”

  “There’s no way at this stage a teacher could show me long division,” I tell her, and she says, “Nonsense.”

  I whisper, when she goes to make more coffee, that I want to be like Charles Dickens and write about all the good and strange people. I know I’ll stay here for a while, but there’ll come a time when I take my children and strike out. I don’t know how or when, but I know I can’t simply adopt another mother. Sometime I’m going to try my wings, see if they’re strong enough. And perhaps I will write a fiction book about my life when I’m through with this, make up the end so Ruby and I go on a cruise to follow in Miss Finch’s footsteps, and May marries the Rev after his wife kicks.