Cynthia Bond - Ruby

As he stepped onto the road Chauncy whistled and said, “Like collecting brimstone in hell. Man hit the jackpot.”

Gubber spit. “Waste a good cake, you asked me.”

The men gathered close like old hens for one last scratch of sundown gossip — then scattered, each to his own dinner table to fill their bellies with the steaming, spiced handiwork of women.

FOR EPHRAM Jennings the game had been a kind of water torture of the mind. He remembered a picture book that Charlie and Lem passed around at Bloom’s some Saturday nights, of women doing all manner of things. It made him both ashamed and excited. Naked and twisting, mouths open, kneeling, waists bent, bodies like feed bags, fit to each man’s liking. Then he put Ruby’s face on each of those mind pictures and lost the fight against embarrassment, Devil lust and jealousy. And worst of all, fear. He knew in the moment that he could never, even in his dreams, fill the well of Chauncy Rankin’s voice, the gait of his stride, or the practiced slide of his touch.

So a hope that had lived in Ephram for thirty-five years against odds even Job couldn’t fathom died. Right there on the steps of P & K. With the sun yawning towards night and eleven grown men laughing around him.

It wasn’t that Ephram hadn’t sampled some bit of life for himself. When he turned sixteen K.O. had lied to Celia about a Young Men’s Bible Conference, and instead dragged Gubber and him down to Fair Street in Beaumont. He’d said it was something a boy’s daddy ought to do, but since neither boy had one, he had taken on the job.

The woman had been banana pudding yellow and as fat as a prize hog, with a pink corset pushing and shoving her flesh into place, but her face was smooth and sweet as a child’s doll, and her top lip had been painted into two little red triangles. She’d smelled like sweat, ammonia and Tootsie Pops. He’d fumbled and tumbled until her impatient hand guided him to her soft center. The release had been magnificent. Almost as great as the shame that followed.

Many years later there had been Gubber’s cousin, Baby Girl, fast, young and shaped like trouble. His one true girlfriend. She never removed her panties but let him do whatever was possible with the benefit of loose elastic around her full, plump legs. He spent every dime he made on her, until they were discovered behind P & K, where Celia had followed him. She yanked them apart so hard and fast, Baby’s panties, at long last, fell to the ground. After a night of demons being prayed from his flesh by Celia and ten good church members, that was the end of that.

Ephram walked farther into the piney woods and felt a low ebb tickling his joints, his knees. As he crossed the clearing Ruby’s gris-gris slipped to the ground and was covered by a puff of dust.

This thing Chauncy had spoken of, like in Lem’s book — this deed. Ephram tried to push this new act away from the picture of Ruby he had hanging in his chest, the one with her rising like a wave out of a mud puddle. But it stayed like a scratch on polished wood, until she became all things in his mind. And being a simple man from East Texas, Ephram Jennings did what any man would do. He walked down to Marion Lake and had himself a sleep.

Ruby sat on the soft earth under the chinaberry tree and let her fingers strum the soil. She looked down the turn in the road. The evening shadows had stretched across the pathway and it seemed to fade into the black tourmaline of the forest.

Ruby had felt something coming through the pines all day. She knew it was not the Dyboù, it was not Chauncy Rankin, nor his brother Percy. It was something salted sweet like pomade and sweat.

So she had spent the day waiting. She had pushed back her hair as best she could. Gone to the pump, pulled the handle with all of her might and splashed the cool well water on her hands, then wiped it across her face. Her fingers came back dripping black, so she rinsed her face again. That was the best she could do.

Then she had pulled up a chair, wiped off the kitchen table with her forearm and sat. That day, the house was not unkind. She was used to the smell — the low dank sugar of rotting things and waste. It was a kind of comfort. The cicadas had been singing, too loudly outside her door in anticipation.

When the morning heated into afternoon Ruby had walked across the road and retrieved a fallen long dogwood branch. Back inside, her fingers slowly began pulling the leaves and peeling off the thin little squares of bark, as if she were plucking a chicken. Ruby remembered her grandmother saying, before she died, that the dogwood had blood at the roots since it was used to crucify Jesus. Ruby figured that the scale of righteousness had long since broken, and one more little curse couldn’t do much harm.

By evening she had a mound of leaves and bark on the table. Some had fallen on the floor. A low hum had begun that had caused her fingers to tap on her legs. The little spirits in her belly shifted, causing an unsettled pressure on her diaphragm. Nausea spread to her stomach, wetting her mouth. She was grateful that today she did not regurgitate — but many days she did — and many days, in the tilt of her world, Ruby could not clean the waste and eventually it dried, hard as bark, into the floor.

She had gone to the door and pressed her forehead gently against the screen and looked into the cobalt sky. The sounds of twilight had called to her — the crickets and the whippoorwills and a few impatient owls, so she pushed out the front door and made it to the chinaberry tree.

Then as evening fell into night, Ruby knew nothing was coming. A rocking sadness filled her. The air was dead and the wind had stopped. Of all that happened in her grandfather’s small house over the years, the lonely had been the worst of it. Words unspoken for so long. Only the trees to listen.

But then again, there were her children. A little over a hundred now. Soon the midnight would come and the screaming, the pushing, the birthing of another soul. But now it was quiet.

Ruby felt the chinaberry’s roots twisting three feet under her hand. She rubbed until she could feel a small bit of tan root with her thumb. She was on a first-name basis with those roots. She felt them hollowing under her palms. It was those roots that had kept her alive. It was the roots that had saved her.

She remembered six years ago when she had made a clear decision to take two large bricks she had found near Rupert Shankle’s fence, bind them to her feet with willow branches and leap into the deepest part of Marion Lake. As strong as she was, as much as she loved her children, Ruby could not bear the weight of her days. Perhaps, she thought, if she left, she might pull them all with her, like the tail of a kite.

Before walking to Marion she had come to say good-bye to the chinaberry and the old crow when she felt the old roots whispering, telling her to dig her toes into the soil. She had pressed her thick eyelashes together, lid to lid, and concentrated. Suddenly she had felt her toes stretching, running wide along the topsoil. Her toes were thin, tendril roots that wrapped like yarn about stones and the abandoned roots of the nearby field of sugarcane. Her skin became reddish brown and hard, her body narrowed and stretched. She felt sweet sap thick within her. Her breasts and buttocks became gentle, knotted swells in the tree’s trunk. A thousand lavender flowers erupted from the edges of her fingers. They played a delicious melody that scented the wind and called striped bees and hummingbirds.

Ruby had felt it then. The audacious hope of rooted things. The innocent anticipation of the shooting stalks, the quivering stillness of the watching trees.