Harry & Ruth

by Howard Owen

  Ruth led them to a smaller building that stood, barely, beside the smokehouse’s remains.

  Its windows were clouded over with years of dirt and cobwebs, and there was a wooden latch on the one door, accessible by stepping up on a two-tiered arrangement of cinder blocks that had replaced the original pine steps. Next to the latch was a piece of metal where a lock once had been.

  Ruth opened the door and Harry followed her inside, hesitantly. His deep dislike of spiders and snakes already was legendary around Saraw.

  The room still held some of the previous night’s cold. Unlike the other buildings, it had a concrete floor.

  “This was Henry’s workroom,” Ruth sighed, speaking at last. Her right hand was shaking slightly, and Harry began to finally realize how much it had taken to get her here.

  After five years, it still housed most of the tools needed by a farmer who couldn’t afford carpenters and handymen. It had the metallic, rusty smell of old nails and saws and rasps and a hundred other tools whose uses were inscrutable to Harry.

  Two benches had been built into the walls, and a couple of chairs sat in the middle of the open area.

  “Sit down, Harry,” Ruth said. He started to protest; the chairs didn’t look as if they would hold an adult, and he was certain that the room could produce at least a couple of respectable chicken snakes. But Ruth sat, and he saw that he didn’t have any choice.

  “Look under there,” she said, nodding to a place where two rows of four drawers each were set back a few inches beneath one of the benches. “I thought they might have thrown that thing away.

  “It was the third drawer down on the right-hand side. That’s where I found it.”

  Harry pulled the drawer open slowly, uneasily, sure something live was inside. But the drawer was empty. It smelled of ancient wood and something he couldn’t place.

  “Oh, there’s nothing in there now. Nothing for more than five years now. I burned everything.”

  By 1975, Ruth and Henry Flood had come to an understanding. It was similar, she wrote in a letter that year, to the one reached by North and South Korea. He was 60; she was 50. Their marriage was now a truce broken only by a rare uprising. Henry appeared to Ruth to be more at peace than he had been in years, and if his disappearances into Kinlaw’s Hell increased in frequency, then maybe there was cause and effect. Whatever the cause, she was grateful.

  And, the legislature kept her busy most of the time she wasn’t running the grill, which she was more and more leaving in other hands of varying capability. In the winter and spring, she would be gone to Raleigh for weeks at a time, only returning on Saturdays and Sundays, when she could get away then.

  Everything else seemed to have fallen in place. Paul was graduated with a degree in computer engineering. Hank was becoming an excellent carpenter in a place where people knew him, made allowances for shortcomings and judged him on his work. Naomi had just given birth to her second healthy child.

  “I thought everything was fixed at last,” she said with a sigh that day in Henry Flood’s shed.

  Then, one Monday in mid-October, she came home early from the grill, sick with a low-grade flu. It was a teachers’ workday, and she saw children out everywhere playing in the Indian summer sunshine and wished she felt well enough to enjoy it. She promised herself to take more time off on account of nice weather.

  When she got home, she saw no sign of Henry. His truck was not parked in the driveway, but that was not unusual. Probably, she thought, he was using such a fine fall day to do some fishing in the swamp. She was in the bathroom, looking for the Pepto-Bismol, when a flash of movement out of the window caught her eye.

  The window faced Kinlaw’s Hell, and from it, she could see Henry out by the railroad tracks, pushing his boat onto the back of his truck. There was someone with him.

  When he was through, he and the other person, younger and smaller, got into the truck, and he drove it up into the back yard.

  The other person got out, and Ruth saw that it was a girl named Angela Spooner, whose family lived three driveways north.

  “Angela was about 12 then,” Ruth said, looking over at Harry. “She was a bright-eyed girl, thin and mischievous, with long dark hair and beautiful skin. I saw Henry lean over to say something to her, and then he did something strange. He slapped her on the butt, not like you would slap a bad child, but like you might slap a girlfriend. A playful slap.

  “And then the girl turned suddenly, and she saw me there in the window. The look on her face, Harry. My God, the look on her face. It was part bewilderment, part shame, part blame. And the blame part included me.

  “She walked away, toward her mother’s house. The way she looked had reminded me of something, and it troubled me the rest of the day. When it hit me, I was in bed with him that night. He was already asleep. I had to tiptoe to the bathroom, where I threw up.”

  Ruth paused for a few seconds, and Harry thought she might not be willing or able to go on. She seemed short of breath. Finally, she spoke again.

  “One of Henry’s good points, or so I thought, was that he would, when he was in the mood, take kids hunting or fishing. Even after Hank and Paul were grown, he would befriend children from the neighborhood. Sometimes he’d take several of them for a hike into the swamp. Sometimes he’d take a couple in his boat, sometimes just one.

  “Sometimes he’d take girls. Sometimes he’d take boys. Nobody thought anything about it. Everybody fishes around Saraw.”

  Ruth said she waited for Henry to go into the swamp again, which he did two days later. This time, he went alone, and she went hunting.

  She knew he considered the shed to be his private territory. It was the only outbuilding that had a key.

  He didn’t know, though, and never did, that Ruth had a key, too.

  “It never set well with me to be locked out of anything,” Ruth said. “One night, I had to come get him at the pool hall when he had gotten out of control. He’d hit one of the Morrissett boys with a cue stick. Well, he wouldn’t listen to me, wouldn’t calm down, and so I had him locked up.

  “They gave me his keys so I could take the truck home. The next morning, before I came to get him out, I went by the hardware store and had them make a duplicate of one key.

  “It tickled me, to tell you the truth, that I had the key to Henry’s little one-man boys’ club, but I never thought I would use it. It just made me feel good to know I had it in my purse.

  “That day, though, it felt like fate to me, having had that key made.”

  As soon as Henry Flood was out of sight, she went to the shed and unlocked it. It took her less than 10 minutes to find what she was looking for.

  “It had a lock on it, too, and the same key fit that. It was the only drawer that was locked.”

  Ruth didn’t give Harry many details about the pictures. They had been the cheap, instant-camera type. They were all of girls, mostly very young, most of them with few or no clothes on.

  At least six girls had been photographed, and she recognized five of them. The pictures must have been taken over a period of many years, because at least one of the girls was, by then, 32 years old.

  Listening to Harry’s story, Naomi has gone through a couple of cigarettes. For two minutes, she has barely moved, and her unblinking eyes seem now to be fixed on some spot behind him.

  The story is taking its toll on the teller, too. The pain medication has kicked in hard, and Harry is aware that he is starting to slur his words slightly.

  When he tells Naomi about Ruth recognizing the girls in the photographs, she shakes her head from side to side, over and over. Harry jumps at the sound of the sliding glass door opening behind him.

  “You told him all this,” Naomi says.

  “Yes,” Ruth answers.

  “Anyone else?”

  “You know better than that.”

  Ruth is giving Harry the kind of look he imagines Jesus must have given Judas. She shakes her head and sighs.

  “I think I
’d better take over from here, Harry. You’ve done enough damage for one night, and you look like you could use a break.”

  He hopes he hears a drop of forgiveness in her voice, but what the hell, he thinks. Pancreatic cancer is never having to say you’re sorry.

  “You’ll thank me for this someday.”

  She looks at him just for an instant, whispers “maybe,” and turns back to Naomi, who is sitting forward, elbows on her knees, face hidden by her hands.

  Ruth sits beside her. She puts one arm and then the other around her daughter, enveloping her. Naomi tries to get away, but Ruth won’t let go, hanging on with the ferocity of a mother who sees her child trapped beneath an automobile and lifts the entire car on love and adrenaline. She’s angry to be forced into this and she’s damned if she’s going to leave it half done. There is no tentativeness in Ruth’s actions, no escape for Naomi. It is all done so quietly that no one else in the house is aware they’re even awake.

  “Okay, baby,” Ruth says, “like that man on the radio says, now for the rest of the story. Wouldn’t you like to know how Henry Flood spent his last day?”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Ruth Crowder Flood had never dispatched anything larger or more sentient than a chicken.

  And after she did what she did, she would play it over in her head a thousand times.

  “It just seemed easier, Harry,” she said, that day in the shed. “Easier on those girls, although they’d have to be the judge of that. Easier on our sons, easier even on Henry. And I admit it: easier on me, too. Justice or revenge, I don’t know. I regret a lot, but God help me, I don’t regret killing Henry Flood.”

  After Charlotte and Jane died, Ruth employed a maid to come in every other week and hired an ancient black man to mow the grass and take care of the yard work. She kept the electricity turned on.

  The aunts had left the house and most of their money to Ruth. Roy McGinnis advised her to sell the place. He told her it never would be worth the expense required to bring it up to late-20th century standards. The tin roof needed replacing, there was substantial termite damage, it still had oil heat and was cooled by two window air-conditioners. It needed aluminum siding over the old, paint-thirsty wood.

  “Well,” Ruth told him, “it might not be worth it to you, but it’s worth it to me.”

  Occasionally, she would go over to her childhood home. Sometimes, she would just sit on the porch and rock. Sometimes, she would rummage through the plunder rooms, perusing the postcards, magazines, letters, jars, clothes, toys and other detritus that had settled there over a century.

  She didn’t like throwing things away, not even the arsenal of medicines covering every shelf of the bathroom cabinet.

  Jane had suffered angina attacks for years. Her condition grew progressively worse, and she had died of a heart attack in mid-July. Charlotte had a stroke and died during the night a week later.

  In their latter years, Ruth sometimes would fill the aunts’ prescriptions. One day, the pharmacist had noticed the digoxin had disappeared faster than it was supposed to. He had warned Ruth that the same thing that was good for the heart in small doses could kill in larger ones.

  Ruth found that Jane had simply spilled some of the pills, and she didn’t think of it again until after she decided to kill Henry.

  She remembered what the pharmacist had said two years before, and she remembered seeing the digoxin, sitting on an overfull shelf in the aunts’ bathroom cabinet, within the last month.

  She went to the main library in Newport, where she was less likely to be recognized. On the way home, she stopped by the aunts’ house and took the nearly-full bottle of digoxin.

  Henry Flood went into the swamp to hunt or fish every few days, deep into the fall. He could stand the cold; even in December sometimes he would stay overnight.

  His drinking had increased over the years, and by 1975 he was in the strict habit of taking two fifths of Jim Beam with him into the swamp, summer or winter. He would throw the cap away when he unsealed the bottle, because by that time Henry Flood seldom dealt in bourbon units of less than a fifth.

  His “traveling bourbon” he kept stored in the basement, lined up like soldiers at attention along the wall. To Ruth’s knowledge, he always took the bottles on the left, sliding the rest over to take their places. He kept half-gallons of a more expensive brand upstairs for daily use, never mixing that with the Jim Beam in the basement. He would sometimes drink four fifths a week. Usually, Ruth didn’t mind. Henry tended, in his last year, to get more mellow after a few drinks. Without liquor, he became fidgety and more combustible.

  It took Ruth three weeks to put her plan in motion.

  Henry had gone into town to shoot pool and tell war stories that November Monday morning. Ruth stayed home, calling the manager at the grill and telling her she would be there sometime before noon. Hank had already left for his carpentry shop near the old mill.

  Ruth unlocked her private trunk, with 33 years of letters inside, and took out the little pharmaceutical bottle. She went to the basement shelf and removed the second fifth of Jim Beam from the left. She opened it, tearing the seal as little as possible.

  “What I was counting on,” she told Harry, “was that Henry wouldn’t notice a little thing like a broken seal when he got to that second bottle. I thought I knew Henry Flood rather well by then, even after what I had found out, and I believed that, somewhere deep in Kinlaw’s Hell, he was not going to ponder long about the seal on that second fifth of bourbon when the first bottle ran out. If it was bourbon, he was going to drink it.”

  She crushed the digoxin, everything in the nearly-full bottle, into powder on a paper plate. Then, she poured the fifth of bourbon into an empty Mason jar and put the powder in with it. She mixed it. Then she strained the bourbon back into the original Jim Beam bottle and sealed it. It took her less than 20 minutes.

  Two days later, Henry pushed his chair back from the breakfast table and went to get his shotgun and shells.

  When Ruth left for work, he was still in the basement. She resisted the urge to go home at lunch that day and see if her plan was working. When she returned at her normal time, just after 6, Hank was upstairs in his room. Henry’s truck was gone; she was sure that it would be at the end of the rut road next to the old railroad bed, and that Henry and his boat were by then somewhere deep in Kinlaw’s Hell.

  She went into the basement, afraid he had taken the bottles, afraid he hadn’t. On the wall, where 10 fifths of Jim Beam had sat two days earlier, there were eight now. None of the eight had a broken seal. That evening, she couldn’t get a song out of her head that they had sung when she was a child: “Ten little, nine little, eight little Indians …”

  “Do you know what worried me the most?” she asked Harry, sitting down again in the shed. “I was afraid he had some pictures of those girls out there in that cabin. I was afraid they’d find the cabin when they found him, and that everyone would know anyhow.

  “I know I should have been more afraid of getting caught, but that didn’t worry me. I didn’t really think, then, about how bad it would have been if they had done an autopsy.”

  She knew, though, that she had left stones unturned.

  “Those were the longest eight days of my life,” she said. “All day Thursday, I expected to see a police car come driving up to the grill to arrest me. The more I thought about it, the more obvious that broken seal on the bourbon bottle seemed to me. It would jump out at him out there in the swamp. He’d take it back into town and have it analyzed, and that would be that.

  “Then, when neither he nor the police had showed up by Friday morning, I started dropping hints that I was worried, that he didn’t usually stay out two days this time of year, and so on.

  “By Friday afternoon, I had gone by the house one last time, and then I called the police and told them Henry Flood was missing in Kinlaw’s Hell. And for the next six days, I worried about what they might discover when they found his body, about whether a pol
ice officer could just look at somebody and tell that they had been poisoned, about whether he’d be at the cabin and what else would be there.”

  By the fall of 1975, the trees around Henry Flood’s cabin in the swamp had grown high enough to form a canopy and make it all but invisible from the air, the way Henry wanted it. This worked neither for nor against him, because he would have been long dead even if they had found the cabin first thing on Friday.

  It took them six days. Two swampers freelancing for the sheriff’s department saw the buzzards circling, and they eventually found the nearly-invisible opening that led them through to Henry Flood’s cabin.

  Henry had managed to open the cabin door. He was lying there, half in and half out. A nearly-empty bottle of bourbon lay on the ground. It appeared to have fallen from his hand and rolled onto the dirt, where most of it had spilled, staining the white sand. The rats had found him even before the buzzards.

  The sheriff and most of his deputies found their way to Henry Flood’s cabin, mostly to marvel at what one man had built, by himself, hidden so deep in Kinlaw’s Hell that only a dead man’s body could give it away. Even after they got there, some of them got lost trying to canoe out and had to be rescued by helicopter.

  Nobody seemed very interested in going back to the cabin to dust for fingerprints or look for evidence. Anyone who knew Henry Flood knew he had drunk enough to kill 10 men, that it was only a matter of time until something caught up with him.

  “Do you know the most peculiar thing we saw there?” the sheriff had asked Ruth, who told Harry she stopped breathing at that point. She had already told the sheriff she had no desire to see Henry’s cabin, either before or after he died. “He had saved all these empty bourbon bottles. He had ’em stacked up along one wall, about eight rows high. He had almost filled up the entire wall with empty Jim Beam bottles. Can you imagine such a thing?”