by Howard Owen
“If it wasn’t for my fear of flying,” he says, waving away her words, “you could have been here in an airplane a long time ago.”
Up the steps to the cottage they go, Paul taking Ruth’s elbow. Naomi is waiting on the landing.
She is still an attractive woman. Three years haven’t changed that. She has retained her athlete’s body. Her hair is still dark and is pulled back so severely that her mother worries it might give her headaches, and she is suffering from a slight overdose of makeup and lipstick. But she is, at 52, still pretty. Ruth can still see, through it all, the little girl who once was her best companion.
Ruth and Naomi say hello and exchange a hug, skin barely touching skin. Ruth finds she is afraid of her own daughter, afraid of squeezing too hard and scaring her away.
Tran comes up with the children, Leigh and Stephen, who embrace their grandmother. Ruth looks around.
“Where are Thomas and Grace and Gary?”
“Oh, they couldn’t come,” Naomi says. “Thomas couldn’t get away from work, and Grace and Gary couldn’t miss classes.”
Ruth nods.
“Well, I’m glad you’re here,” she says to her daughter. “It’s been a long time.”
Naomi doesn’t reply, except for a look. She turns and goes back into the house, and the rest follow.
FIVE
When Ruth became aware that Harry was saving every letter, she wanted him to burn them all.
“I can’t bear to think of you or, God forbid, someone else reading all that nonsense I wrote when I was a girl,” she wrote.
He told her he would burn one of hers for every one she burned of his.
Sometimes now, she will go to the big black trunk and read one of the hundreds of pieces of paper that came to her over the years. And sometimes, Harry reads the ones Ruth wrote to him.
As much as anyone can, they relive their youth (and much of their adulthood), and they have come to understand what the letters did, and what they were.
“I feel as if I have met my soul mate,” Ruth wrote Harry the week after Thanksgiving that first year. “I know it cannot last. Don’t worry. You have been truthful with me, about your girl back in Richmond. I do not feel deceived.”
Harry fed a hunger Ruth had known for much of her young life, a hunger she had come to fear might be her natural state. In her world, it was considered sinful for a woman to want to devour life. She saw the way her grandmother and aunts and cousins laughed with their hands covering their faces, how they ate less and drank less than the men, how they deferred to them in conversation. And the boys she had dated would admit to no thoughts that transcended the literal, day-to-day business of living.
Harry Stein was the first boy or man with whom she could sit and talk about ideas and ambition.
“I feel as if I have been waiting all these 17 years for something to happen,” she wrote him, “for someone to come along and show me that there is more to the world, someone who isn’t afraid to ask why, or to take off his clothes and run into the waves head-first.”
Ruth knew, even at 17, that she had been spoiled by kind, overcompensating grandparents, aunts and uncles. At that time, their little lane was full of Crowders, and all of them, after her parents died, seemed to close ranks around the new orphan and try to ensure that she never had a reason to cry. But still there was a void.
When Harry told her that he had sometimes felt he was born at the wrong place or the wrong time, she wrote, “that was when I felt you and I were one. It seems, at times, as if I were some adopted baby they found in Kinlaw’s Hell and brought home. Even cousin Mercy, who’s my age exactly, doesn’t understand what I’m talking about sometimes. Mercy doesn’t see why anybody would want to move to a place where no one knew them. She says she would die if she had to do that.
“Sometimes, although I don’t even tell Mercy, I feel I’ll die if I can’t.”
Harry called her a child, on one of those chilly nights in the parlor. He said it light-heartedly, but she dug her nails into his wrist and told him, “I am as grown as you, maybe more, and you know it.”
Once, after she had been caught skipping school, she overheard her grandfather tell Charlotte that it was the Culbreth in her. But she knew that none of her mother’s family had ever been able even to get away from Turpentine Creek, where no house yet had indoor plumbing. Whatever was in her, she knew, it was more than a severe case of Culbreth.
The Crowders lived on the dead-end lane off Polk Avenue, which still connects at both ends to the main highway bisecting the town. It is now officially Main Street for its short promenade through Saraw but is still the Beach Road to most of the town’s residents.
Saraw in 1942 reminded Harry of some of the Virginia villages that he and his father passed through a decade earlier, when Harry was allowed to accompany him on business trips, places where the edges of the wilderness could be seen from any store or house.
Saraw, though, was rougher, more raw, more full of life. The previous summer, an alligator had been trapped within the town limits. The next spring, a bear would wander onto Polk Avenue, where one of Ruth’s uncles would shoot it. Everything smelled of fresh-cut lumber; the swamp water behind the Crowders’ home was reddish-brown. Of the four types of poisonous snakes found in the United States, all could be found within ten miles of the Crowders’ back door.
Between Ruth’s grandparents’ home and the swamp, serving as the boundary to Kinlaw’s Hell, was the Saraw and Wallace Railroad, the Sam and Willie. The right-of-way is still there, a flat rise above the Venus’s-flytraps, pitcher plants and standing water on the other side. The state has turned it into a linear park, and it is possible to walk it, along the swamp’s boundary, for 20 miles. The view changes little, and the copperheads are fond of its warm bare earth on cool days.
In 1942, though, the tracks were still there, and the train came and went once a day, six days a week. On Saturdays at the Crowders’, the background noise was the shifting and braking of the S&W’s only engine bullying flatcars of timber onto and off of sidetracks.
Saraw, in its unfinished state and on the edge of a wild world considerably larger and more powerful than itself, was fond of the supernatural.
There was rumored to be a creature deep in Kinlaw’s Hell that roared and squalled like a panther, and any number of men claimed they had seen its yellow eyes while following the rail bed home from the bootlegger’s down by the river late at night.
There was the Bolton house, downstream from the bridge, haunted by a man who murdered his wife and children with a butcher knife.
And there were the Saraw Lights.
Ruth showed them to Harry one November evening. She told her grandparents and the rest where she was taking him, and he could tell that they weren’t pleased, but to Harry’s amazement, they didn’t forbid it. There was a new moon, and she took along a lantern and a blanket. It had been particularly warm that day, and the ground was wet with dew.
They walked toward the swamp, and he helped her up the four-foot climb to the tracks. Gradually, his eyes adjusted to the dark.
“You’re not going to feed me to the tiger, are you?” he asked her.
“Panther.”
They walked along a few steps, and then she stopped and put the lantern out.
“All right,” she said. “Now look straight down the tracks. Just keep staring until you see it.”
He stared intently for a long minute.
“I can’t see a damn thing,” he told her. By then, he’d been outside long enough to make out the slightly darker outlines of distant pines.
“Keep looking. I can see them. You’re supposed to be the one with the great eyes.”
Finally, he did, too.
Two tiny, yellow-white points of light, far, far away, twinkled, faded, twinkled again. They seemed to move slightly from side to side. Harry had to hold his head at exactly the right angle, between blind spots, to keep them in his vision.
“That’s amazing. What is it, a ca
r?”
“There isn’t a road crossing for ten miles.”
“What, then?”
“Well,” she said after a pause, “there are a lot of people around here who’ll tell you that’s Theron and Belle Culbreth.”
There are several notable ghost lights in North Carolina, and the story tends to be approximately the same: a tragic accident, a lost soul trying to find its way home. In this case, the swamp gas or whatever other phenomenon caused the apparition was alleged to be the ghosts of Theron and Belle Crowder, trying to get back to Saraw.
People swore that the lights had never been there before 1928.
“Aren’t they coming from the wrong direction?” Harry asked.
“Hush,” Ruth said. “This isn’t something I show to just any boy.”
He was going to say something else when he noticed that her body, next to his, was shaking. She was crying silently.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and bent down to kiss her.
“I’m a lot better than I used to be about it,” she said, sniffling a little. “In grade school, they used to tease me. They said my momma and daddy were ghosts. Sometimes, I believed they were, too.
“One afternoon, Aunt Charlotte caught me half a mile down the track. I had packed a sandwich in a brown paper bag. I told her I was going to see my momma and daddy.”
They had the blanket around them. Harry’s right arm rested on her shoulder, and he could feel the warm curve of her right breast. To this point, they had only petted. She always stopped him, and he always let her. Harry had known several girls since the first time, when he was 15 and, on a dare, paid for the services of a black woman of some notoriety who took him for half-price, “since you’s such a baby.” For months he lived in fear of his penis falling off.
He didn’t try very hard with Ruth, certainly not as hard as he wanted to. It was wrong enough, he knew already, that he was trying at all, that he didn’t just do the clean, cold thing he couldn’t bring himself to do. It was doubly wrong at this instant. Nonetheless, he did try.
This time, she didn’t stop him. And Harry didn’t stop himself.
They set the blanket out on the grass beside the tracks, and they lay upon it. After all the unsnapping and unzipping that preceded such surreptitious sex in 1942, after a certain amount of stroking on his part and permission on hers, he rolled over on top of her.
Ruth’s head was actually resting on one of the rails as they drove into each other with missionary zeal. Harry was prepared and careful; he always tried to be. It was, he didn’t understand until afterward, the first time he had had sex with a girl he loved. Gloria Tannebaum was saving herself.
The thing he remembers most now: Ruth kept watching him, training her hazel eyes right on him, and even though there wasn’t a moon, they were shining. When they rolled back in her head and he could only see the whites of them, it was the most erotic thing he had ever witnessed to that point. If he had cared not a whit for her, the lust she invoked at that moment would have been enough.
What Ruth remembers most: She had never before had an orgasm, didn’t even know what one was. She was afraid that she was having a seizure, or a stroke like the one that had crippled her Uncle Carter the month before. She feared she would die there in shame, with her head resting on one of the rails of the Saraw and Wallace Railroad and her underpants around her ankles. She had been with only one other boy.
All through November and into the winter they would slip away whenever they could, making love in a cheap boarding house near the beach, in Harry’s car, even once in Ruth’s own bedroom, still smelling of powdery childhood. More than the sex, they both remembered, through all the years, the kissing, how it went on for hours as they lay there in the dark with the radio on.
One unusually warm early December day, a year and a day after Pearl Harbor, they went for a picnic in Kinlaw’s Hell. Harry rowed the little boat wherever Ruth told him to and hoped she remembered the way home. The Spanish moss slapped against his face; there was just enough black water underneath to keep them afloat. In addition to the bears and ghosts, Ruth had shown Harry the plants in Kinlaw’s Hell that eat insects. He knew he could live there his entire life and not know which channel was a dead end and which one led to a creek. Even Ruth was sure of only a few of the watery paths, and she was careful not to stray.
Ruth said she liked the swamp better in the winter, even as cold as it got, because there weren’t any spiders and snakes around.
She found a hummock out in the middle that was dry and no more than three feet above the water around it, and that’s where they spread their blanket and had their picnic, with each other for dessert. It was there that Ruth told Harry that she loved him, and he told her that he loved her, too. He’d known this almost from the beginning, but he resisted saying it until she did, because he had nothing to offer, and because he was afraid.
He had returned to Richmond once on leave since he’d met Ruth. He and Gloria spent as much time as they could in the three days they had, and it was more apparent than ever that both the Steins and the Tannebaums were amenable to a quick and very non-traditional wedding before Harry shipped out, which probably would happen in late January or early February.
With Gloria, in the setting where they had first danced together and first kissed, among their old friends, in the well-to-do homes of their comfortable neighborhood, he saw Ruth Crowder almost as an illusion, other-worldly as the Saraw Lights, something that had briefly startled and confused him but was seen more clearly in the harsh daylight of Richmond’s brick reality.
Harry cared deeply for Gloria Tannebaum, who had gone to Mount Holyoke while he was at Princeton. They were seen as special in their community, among the few to achieve such a lofty academic berth in the larger world. They had known each other all their lives but never dated until they were accidentally thrown together at a college mixer. Afterward, there had been no good reason not to follow the smooth path to where they were now, their friends and families nodding with approval from the wings.
Harry’s father had been a salesman before he took a chance and started his own clothing store, then branched out, starting two more men’s clothiers in Richmond and one each in Lynchburg and Charlottesville. He became comfortable enough to send his son to an Ivy League school. Harry does not remember ever wanting to go to Princeton, except that it was his father’s dream. Old Harry wanted him to be a lawyer.
Max Tannebaum was a lawyer already, a generation ahead of the Steins, but he was not as well off as Old Harry.
When Harry got back to Camp Warren, he resolved to see Ruth one more time, to do the brave, hard thing and end it. Even before he saw her face, he knew he couldn’t. She was standing there at the train station, looking the wrong way, at soldiers exiting the next car. Just the tilt of her head, the way she stood on tiptoes so as not to miss anyone, the cut of her hair and the memory of the way it had smelled when he kissed her goodbye before he left—these alone were enough to stop him, to convince him that no matter how real Gloria Tannebaum was, this was more real. He called her name and she ran into his arms, and he never told her goodbye until he had to.
Sometimes, Harry can’t help but look back.
If he had married Ruth, his parents and the Tannebaums would’ve gotten over it; he’s sure of that now. Gloria would have married some other nice Jewish boy who would have become a lawyer like her father. They would have lived happily ever after, all of them.
It didn’t seem that easy in 1942, though. It was much easier to go with the majority vote.
All Harry could think of was his third cousin, Stuart Schapiro, who was nine years older. He fell in love with a gentile girl from Petersburg, and they dated for nine years before his parents would let them marry. There was always a Stuart Schapiro argument at family gatherings, with a younger cousin taking Stuart’s case, in absentia, and an older aunt or uncle screaming that such a thing could never be allowed to happen.
Harry could rationalize by telling himse
lf, truthfully, that the Crowders would not be popping any buttons over Ruth marrying a Jew, either. But he knew in his heart that Ruth had a way with her family, that she did what she made up her mind to do, that her surrogate parents never seemed to put their feet completely down when it came to Ruth.
Ruth writes her willfulness off to the conditions of her childhood. She might not have turned out better if her parents had lived, but she knows it would have been different.
The day they drowned, she remembers her grandfather coming back home, and then his brothers Harwood and Fred helping him out of the truck and walking him up to the front steps the way they sometimes had to when they all had been drinking. The front yard was full of felled trees and broken limbs.
When he got inside, he blurted it out, as if he had to say it quickly or not at all: “Theron and Belle are gone.” Ruth’s grandmother fell back into her chair and began screaming. Ruth asked “Gone where?” and it was up to her Aunt Charlotte to take her into the back sitting room and explain, although it only became clear to her gradually, in terrible flashes large and small—seeing their salvaged but unreal faces at the funeral home, waiting for her mother to come read her a story, the realization that there were two less Crowders walking to their church the next Sunday. Gradually, two steps forward, one step back, the pain came, then receded and hardened.
She slept with her grandparents for two years after that, before they finally got her back to her own room. They bought her a pony. They humored her so much, buying her any candy or treat she wanted, that she was plump for the first and only time in her life when she started school.
When Harry first met them, T.D.’s sister Goldie was well into her 60s, recently widowed, and Charlotte and Jane were in their mid-40s. Charlotte had never married. Jane’s husband had died in 1921, of the flu. Neither was as attractive as Ruth, but they were both pretty, pleasant women. Jane told her, when she was 7 or 8, that there was only one man out there for every woman, and she had lost hers.
The Crowder house’s other resident was Uncle Matty. Uncle Matty was T.D.’s brother, eight years his junior. He was in his mid-60s when Harry met him, but his simple nature made him seem younger. He was an accomplished furniture-maker, he was dependable, and he was as loyal as a German shepherd. Since he was six feet, six inches tall and had T.D.’s dark, dangerous looks, he could be an imposing figure to those who didn’t know him, but he would never harm anyone unless he felt he or his family was threatened.
