Cynthia Bond: Ruby

They didn’t notice the gracious pause he’d take after someone would finish a sentence, the way he’d give folks the chance to take air back into their lungs, before he’d fill the space up with his own breath and words.

They didn’t see the way his pupils got wide when his heart filled up with pride or love or hope.

But Ruby did.

When her life was only a building long scream that faded into night. Even then Ruby noticed Ephram.

IT WAS after the big Brownsville hurricane of ’67. After eighty-six-mile-an-hour winds crashed into Corpus Christi and rippled all the way east to Liberty Township. Splashing the edge of west Louisiana and flooding the banks of the Sabine. It was after the bending of trees, of branches arching to the floor of earth. After Marion Lake had swollen up and washed away Supra Rankin’s hen house, and Clancy Simkins’s daddy’s Buick, and the new cross for the Church of God in Christ.

Hurricane Beulah had come Ruby’s fourth year back in Liberty. It was then that she saw Ephram Jennings.

She had lain in the stagnant pools thick with mud and browning leaves. She had knelt before a cracked sugar maple tree and lain in the collecting waters, letting the thick fluid cover her like a bedtime blanket. She felt her skin melt and slip from her bones; her heart, spine and cranium dissolve like sugar cubes in warm coffee.

She had been muddy waters for three hours when Ephram found her. Her nose rising out of the puddle to inhale … and dipping back to release. Out and back. Out. Back. Rhythmic, like an old blues tune.

He did not scream. He did not leap over the tree. He did not scoop into her water center to set her free.

For Ephram did not see what anyone else passing down the road would see: a skinny dust brown woman with knotted hair lying back flat in a mud puddle. No. Ephram Jennings saw that Ruby had become the still water. He saw her liquid deep skin, her hair splayed like onyx river vines.

As rain began to fall upon her, Ephram saw her splash and swell and spill out of the small ravine. Ephram Jennings knew. That is when Ruby lifted her head like a rising wave and noticed Ephram. In that moment, the two knowings met.

They stared at each other under the ancient sky with the soft rain and the full wet earth. More than anything Ephram wanted to talk to her and tell her things he’d kept locked in the storehouse of his soul. He wanted to talk to her about the way Rupert Shankle’s melons split on the vine and how honeysuckle blossoms tasted like sunlight. He wanted to tell her that he had seen a part of the night sky resting in her eyes and that he knew it because it lived in him as well. He wanted to tell her about the knot corded about his heart and how he needed her help to loose the binding.

But at that moment Ruby closed her eyes, concentrated, and melted once again into the pool.

Ephram heard himself asking the strangest question, heard it before it left his berry lips. “Are you married?” But before it could lace through the air, he saw that she was once again water. And he couldn’t ask that of a puddle, no matter how perfect. So he tipped his hat, and made his way back down the road.

“EPHRAAAM! EPHRAM Jennings your breakfast is been ready!”

As he had nearly every morning of his life, Ephram heard his sister’s call.

“Yes Mama,” he replied.

Celia had raised him since March 28, 1937, when their mother had come naked to the In-His-Name Holiness Church Easter picnic. Ephram was eight, Celia fourteen. The thing he remembered was his sister running over to him covering his eyes. That next morning, their father, the Reverend Jennings, took their mother to Dearing State Mental — Colored Ward, then packed his own bags and began preaching on the road ten months out of twelve. Celia tended Ephram, cooked for him, cut his food, picked and ironed his shirts, blocked his hats, nursed him within an inch of his life when he came down with that joint ailment. She had paused only long enough to bury their father, the Reverend, when he turned up dead. Lynched a few days after Ephram’s thirteenth birthday. Ephram had curled up and lost himself in the folds of Celia’s apron where he stayed for the next thirty-two years.

“Ephram come in here boy!”

Ephram knew without looking that Celia was biting her inner cheek, a thing she did whenever a food item wasn’t eaten at the proper temperature. The colder it got the more furiously she would gnaw. Then he heard her sweeping with a vengeance. Each morning of his life Celia swept bad luck out of the kitchen door. Every evening she sprinkled table salt in the corners, and every morning she swept it out again, full of any evil the night air held. The sweeping stopped.

“I know you hear me!”

“Inaminute,” Ephram called as he smoothed the weathered brim of his hat once more and faced his sister’s mirror. This morning, this crisp, end-of-summer morning, Ephram did something he had not done in twenty years. He looked.

He had always straightened the crease in his slacks on Sunday, or picked bits of lint from his Deacon jacket. He had held a handkerchief filled with ice on his split chin and lip, the one winter in his life snow had slicked the front walk. He had combed and oiled his scalp and plucked out in-grown hairs. He had shaved and brushed his teeth and gargled with Listerine. But in twenty years, Ephram Jennings had not truly looked into a mirror.

His greatest surprise was that he was no longer young. He assessed the plum darkness under his eyes, the grooves along his full nose, the subtle weight of his cheeks. Ephram pressed a cool washcloth to his skin, then he practiced a smile. He had tried on five or six when Celia launched her final call.

As Ephram sat down to eat, his chair scraped against the butter flower tiles.

“Sorry.” Ephram managed.

“S’all right baby, just got to remember to pick it up instead of drag.”

“I will, Mama.”

“And remember not to leave your bad day cane out where folk can trip on it.”

“I’ll put it away after breakfast.”

“Don’t forget now.”

“I won’t, Mama.”

Celia swept the long hall as Ephram dipped buttery biscuits into syrup. She straightened a wood-framed photograph of the Reverend Jennings as Ephram cut into the chicken fried steak. He had gotten the cutlet on special at the Newton Piggly Wiggly, where he worked.

By way of apology Ephram said, “You fixed that cutlet up real nice, Mama.”

“That was a fair cut. Why don’t you get me some more when you go into Newton today.”

“I ain’t going in today Ma’am.”

“Oh. I thought maybe your sick friend was from Newton since you didn’t say who they was.”

“I’ll pick up more of them cutlets on Tuesday, Mama.”

Celia put Andy Williams — Songs of Faith on the phonograph while Ephram peppered his grits and four scrambled eggs. She finished sweeping salt from every corner of the house as “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” smoothed across the furniture. Ephram chewed slowly and glanced at Celia’s cake. Flaked white inside, the outside was all honey-gold. He imagined handing it to Ruby Bell and seeing something he had not witnessed in over thirty years — Ruby smiling.

Celia sailed into the room with her dustpan full of salt. “Well, if you ain’t going to Newton, do your friend stay out by Glister’s?”

“No.”

“Cuz Glister got six of my mason jars if you goin’ round that way.”

“I can’t today Mama.”

“I was going to make Supra Rankin some of my fig preserves for her husband’s great-uncle’s funeral on Monday if you was going that way … Lord knows it’s a shame that family don’t believe in getting they people preserved right. And how they think the man will keep fresh while they waitin’ on them Mississippi Rankins to get here I don’t know.”