Cynthia Bond - Ruby

When he had first stepped foot in the door Ruby had seen him falter. Stumble over the black of his shoes. Then he had held his handkerchief near his nose, paused and looked about the house. Then he seemed to be methodically planning his attack.

Ruby watched him survey the five solid rooms: the kitchen, its black potbelly stove thick with grease, dried batter, bits of food and a pan holding stagnant water that had long since sprouted maggots. The wood pail was filled with rotted dewberries she had picked and forgotten. The counter, ripe with molded bread and peaches slick brown surrounded by swarming fruit flies. Ruby had not truly seen the house, but now, through Ephram’s eyes the filth and waste echoed.

He pushed the rounded oak table away from something crusted and black and noted the mound of leaves and bark on top. He made a left from the kitchen and walked into an empty living room that not one person had sat in since Neva died. Ruby knew it was unusually clean, as was the back bedroom he disappeared into. They did not belong to her.

Ruby had heard all three girls, Neva, Ruby’s mama, Charlotte and her aunt Girdie, had shared that room, slept some nights back to back like spoons, giggling like a waterfall.

Ephram went through the kitchen into the small bathroom and stumbled out, a bit of fear washing over him. Ruby knew that what he had seen might send him out of the door for good. Instead he stepped out onto the generous porch and walked down to the pump.

Before Neva died, Ruby’d heard that Papa Bell had started fitting the house for running water. He’d bought long iron tubes and loops of wire. He’d gotten as far as the bathroom. Then later, he had sold every last pipe for pennies on the dime.

Papa Bell would have liked him. He did not slip. Ruby had heard that her grandfather had built the steps a little slanted. “To keep out shaky, crooked folks,” he used to say. “Straight-minded folk can walk up any kind of stairs.”

Back when the house was young, Ruby had heard, often visitors ended up in the sugar snap peas just to the right of the porch.

When Ephram came back she watched as he turned left and walked into her room. It was the worst of them all, but it had been built square and spacious. The windows so wide they needed special panes of glass. It had been her Granddaddy’s, and for all the ghosts who had haunted her, Ruby often wished he would come. He never did. Perhaps, Ruby thought, he had no great desire to spend one more second on earth. Maybe he had finally found a bit of rest sitting beside Neva on a star, paying the world no mind.

Once Ephram had taken on the job, he began in earnest.

The supplies were meager but he improvised well and worked steadily. He’d bought a can of Comet at P & K and added that to the few things she’d bought when she first arrived. He’d swept the floors with an old mud-caked broom he’d found out back. He’d held it under the pump until the water ran clean, then made it through two rooms, sweeping all manner of things into a central pile when his sister had come to the door.

Her eyes had bulged, the vein on her temple had leapt and strained. Celia Jennings stood at Ruby’s door spitting like a raving lunatic, screaming down curses in the way of verses. So Ruby had started giggling, and then she started laughing. She hadn’t meant to, but when she peeked through the window and saw the froth collecting in the corner of Celia’s mouth, that Popeye-the-sailor-man hat bobbing on top of that ridiculous zebra wig, Ruby had stuffed her fist against her mouth and laughed until her eyes grew wet. Ephram tried to shush her with his eyes, which made her laugh harder.

Finally Ruby had gone to the door just to mess with the woman’s head. Let her see him choose her. He had. Of course he had.

After his sister left he appeared lost. He had wiped his hand over his face and paused before turning back to Ruby, rubbed his arms and shaken out his legs. He’d seemed beaten for a moment, then he’d apologized for the interruption, and he started cleaning again. She would be ready for him when he finished.

Now he was using Chauncy Rankin’s pail. Chauncy had filled it with water and doused her with it two nights ago in the backyard when he’d come with his brother.

Moss had left the Dove soap whittling into slime in a broken bowl. Ephram was reaching for that now to wash his hands.

In the beginning, when Ruby first moved to Liberty, there had been many visitors and they had been more industrious. It had been harvest time, corn gold and tall, cotton flying and catching on tree tops. The chinaberry tree had sprouted the yellow berries all of the birds loved to pluck. It had been sweet, hot fall when the first — a slanted, tall man with a small keloid scar on his upper lip — had wandered down the road. She was scrubbing the old stain on the porch at the time — the one she’d heard her Auntie Neva had left when she died. When the man asked if she was little Ruby Bell, she’d told him yes. He said he’d known her grandfather, and her mama and aunts, and had seen her go to church on Sundays. He said he’d heard she was back in town, and he’d come by to offer his help. The fact that he was a janitor by profession proved convenient and so he had gotten down on his hands and knees and taken over washing the stained porch. Ruby couldn’t remember his name — Jeffers, Jefferson, and didn’t want to be rude by asking again, but he was polite and said thank you when she offered him a glass of water. He worked at the Colored High School in Jasper, and said he had a special cream cleanser at work that could get that up. He almost bowed when he left. When he came back a week later, Ruby had been growling in a corner, her clothes stripped and balled in the center of the floor. He had led her to her bed and taken her, simply and politely. He’d left the cleanser on the nightstand when he exited.

Word travels fast along the Sabine when it comes to unmarried women who offer horizontal refreshments. Three others came shortly thereafter. A tall, seal-colored man with a pious expression who’d quoted the Bible during and after. A fat, yellow sloth of a man and an old dark grandfather with a creased face. But then the high school boys from Jasper had made their pilgrimage. They came in bunches and they came drunk. Sometimes they came mean. Sometimes they hit, and worse, sometimes they laughed. As time passed, as her skin seemed to sink tight about her bones and she lost every remnant of sanity, fewer came. As the house piled high with human waste and garbage only the diligent remained. Old-timers like Chauncy and Percy wiped here and there before doing their business, always taking her outside. Sometimes under the chinaberry tree with the old crow staring down on them, calling out, blaming. Sometimes they brought a rag, or a box of lye and a jar of bacon grease to mix for soap. Sometimes they brought food.

What she never articulated, not even in adjoining thoughts, like train cars linking for a journey that she never let herself take, was that, of late, she had enjoyed these visits. Had found her own reflection in their routine. There was no other mirror in the house. These men, and their eyes — wide, slitted, beetle black, hazel green, repentant, fearful, angry, joyous, wet with lust — saw her. Not her grace, nor her strength. Not the plow horse of her soul, but they saw something. They held someone. They ached for her legs to part, for her to receive them. For in that instant, before release, the world could have split in two and they would have continued. Pumping steadily. Furrows deepening. Sweat washing. All hypocrisy silenced. And while they might have gone out and found a better, saner, prettier girl with full breasts, in that instant, nothing else on earth would suffice and subsequently Ruby knew the only power she had ever known on earth.