Cynthia Bond - Ruby

Ruby kept her screen door unhooked most nights.

Ephram had found the white box of lye and was sprinkling it like powdered sugar on the swept floors.

Ruby said softly, “You good at that.”

“Thank you.” He let a smile tickle the edge of his lip.

Ruby looked down at her foot. It had involuntarily started to become the grain of the wood. She felt herself grow too hard, too stiff to move. Small splinters formed a fuzz along the toes. Ruby ardently shook her leg and foot back to flesh. Ephram politely looked down at the floor as Ruby asked, “Your sister teach you?”

“She did as a matter of fact.”

Now a familiar buzz started again, this time in her belly. The food smelled too strong, the cheese too bitter and orange. She couldn’t eat such a bright aching color. She put it down on her soiled mattress. She was still hungry so she bit into the bread, but it caught as she tried to swallow. She coughed it into her hand and rubbed the chewed mass into the mattress.

Ephram noted it, but only said, “How’s that coffee?”

Ruby picked it up and took another sip. The coffee stole down her tongue and secreted into pockets of her mouth before spilling down her throat. It was a friendly dull brown. Ruby chose not to answer his pushy question. Instead she took aim.

“Why you call her Mama?”

“Celia raised me.”

“Wonder how your real Mama would feel about it.”

It was Ephram’s turn to be quiet.

“And what’s all that you were talking about at the door … the ox in a ditch on a Sunday. What’s that all about?”

The buzzing grew louder. Her stomach turned in on itself and Ruby felt the food rising into her throat.

He glanced at her. “It’s a Bible verse, Book of Luke.”

“What’s it mean?”

The food spewed out of her mouth, covering the mattress, her throat raw. Ephram didn’t pause. He took her hand but the sound was louder. His touch hurt her skin. She yanked away and walked to the window.

Ephram took the broom and swept the vomit into a pail. Then went to dump it. He came back in with his jacket wetted.

Ruby was relieved. He was to now take what he’d come for. She knew he would clean her up, wipe her down. The world tilted back to normal. The sound stopped as she imagined Ephram — a lonely, docile man who jacked off behind his “Mama’s” bathroom door and hated his sin later. Ruby just stood there and waited.

He handed her his jacket and said, “Interesting you asked ’bout that ox. It’s what Jesus say to the Pharisee when they give him a hard time ’bout healing a man on the Sabbath. Jesus say, if your ox fall down in a pit, whatever the day, you’d fetch him out. If it’s important enough you got to do it.”

She nearly yanked the jacket from his outstretched hand. “So my house is an ox.”

“I’d say so.”

She began cleaning her face and mouth in a kind of shock.

Ephram dipped the broom into the pail of lye water and commenced to scrubbing the bed. Then with a simple ease, he moved back to the floors.

Ruby watched Ephram cleaning and could feel the old house stretching under his hands, sighing and adjusting itself to better meet his efforts. The broom all but fell apart as he worked, but he mopped on with the handle and the shredded nub until Ruby could see the tan of the floor. Then he tackled the ceiling with a found rag. Small cubbies of dust and web disappeared from the corners, carrying with them the carcasses of forty or fifty house-flies. The stilt legs of spiders flew to the floor.

Ruby watched as Ephram disturbed the coiled shadows of men and women lining the baseboards. The homeless dead had been using her place as a squat for the past nine years, fully grown spirits who were not Ruby’s kin. While they were a nuisance she had let them stay, no reason to refuse their entrance. They insulated the rooms and cushioned the alone.

Ephram began humming as he cleaned. Ruby gasped at his knowing. Perhaps a preacher’s son knew something about haints. Maybe it was the lavender rings around his pupils or a lucky coincidence. Ruby watched as his voice vibrated against their parasitic intrusion. He did not stand up or billow out his chest. He simply hummed and the treble of his voice said, “Get.” They yawned awake and slowly filed out her door.

Fuck , Ruby thought. He was more than she had imagined. This was not the man she had seen approach last night, the frightened man with only a puddle of life in his chest. Something had grown wide in him. It had a tide and a rhythm to it. Fuck . It smelled acrid and bitter, like the mattress. The scent was heavy in the room. Why was this man here? What did he come to take? Ruby’s eyes squinted tight to better see him. What right did he have to flip her home over like a flapjack?

Ruby almost barked, “Hey.”

He looked over.

“Hey.” She smoothed the cut of her voice to better fit her purpose.

He was starting to tackle the potbelly stove. Something sticky and tar black had cooked to the iron years ago.

“You ain’t got to do all that.”

“Yeah, I do.” He kept scrubbing.

“No, you don’t.” Ruby walked up to him. Once she was there, he turned to face her. She was close enough to smell his salt, and placed her hand over his. It burned yet she held it. She put her chin in the crook of his neck and slid her arm around his back. She tiptoed and pressed her groin ever so gently against his. Felt his lungs catch. Would he push into her with temerity? Or would he aim higher? Unzip his pants over the apple of her throat? A jaded anger rose from her gut. She wanted to swallow him whole and when he was properly trained she would release him.

The room creaked as the day brought warmth under her arms, between her legs. Ruby felt Ephram’s hands around her waist. He all but lifted her off him and half carried her to the lone chair in the place. He leaned over her, lips close. She could see the oil that had collected along the curves of his nose. She closed her eyes.

“We already got one ox in the ditch. Let’s leave it at that for now.”

Ruby blinked. In that instant she saw what he saw. Her rib cage loose with skin. The spirit of meanness poking out of her like nails. The corrugated filth of her hair. But more. The broken femur of her soul, reset without a proper splint. She could accept anything on earth from a man except his pity.

“Faggot,” she spat out, and ran from the house.

He caught up to her on the first step of the porch, his hand firm about her wrist.

She tugged against him, “Let me be.” But he did not. He held tight to her arm so she spit out: “You ain’t the only man I know.”

“I know that.”

“You just scared.”

In kindness he said: “Maybe.”

But Ruby knew that that was only partly true. Shame spread under her skin as she smelled the stench that rose from her dress, her scarecrow body. Blood caked in her thumbnail, sludge caught in the creases of her palms. And if that were not all Ruby was suddenly aware of the twisted knot of her features, the madness streaming out of her eyes.

For a moment Ruby grasped at the girl she had been, the one who had arrived in New York, fresh from Neches, scrubbed and eighteen. Haunting eyes, beauty mark painted by God, angled jaw, a tight sway in her hips. A dipping smile that men and women were drawn to, collided with one another to be near, handing over money and liquor and ready drugs. All that and more.

The year was 1950, when the town’s literati adorned themselves in token colorful accessories. Ruby had been a bright bangle on the arm of one of their esteemed patrons. But that came later; first Ruby had had to kneel at the city’s gate and decide what she would sacrifice for admittance. Her culpability had been an easy choice.