Cynthia Bond - Ruby

Tressie’s girlish face cut through with concern. “We would greatly appreciate your company to the lake for a baptism. Wash your spirit clean in the blood of the Lamb.”

Verde grumbled under her handkerchief, “Washing her ass clean be a start.”

Righteous piped in, “We got three deacons and our new Church Mother Celia waiting down there as well. She don’t bear no grudge for nobody for nothing. That’s just how she be.”

Tressie added, her face somber, “They praying down there while we come up here to get you. If we ain’t down there directly, they might just come up here and take you.”

Ephram broke in, “Ruby — she’s not going nowhere.”

The women promptly ignored him.

“Celia say that the Devil been content with your soul, but now,” Righteous shook her full face in concern, her skin as smooth as a river stone. “He’s interested in pulling the rest of Liberty, one by one, down into hell and can’t nobody let that happen. She say when he can grab hold a good man like Ephram Jennings, then ain’t none of us safe.”

Supra pulled Ruby towards the door. “Come on now, child, it ain’t a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.”

Ruby found herself, felt Ephram’s eyes strong against her, yanked her hand out of Supra’s. The woman’s fingers were like ice. Ruby felt the whole of her arm growing into one long icicle. In a moment she knew she would smash her fist into the woman. In a moment she knew she would scream.

Ephram quickly swallowed the silencing shame into his gut where it belonged. “I’m sorry but y’all got to leave.”

Supra took a stand. “I wasn’t talking to you Ephram Jennings. You sound like you been batter-dipped and fried in wrongfulness. I was talking to this poor bedeviled child.”

“Excuse me, Mrs. Rankin,” Ephram managed, “but it took y’all eleven years to get here, another day or two won’t make no difference.”

“How long it take you?” she shot back.

He looked at Ruby. She let him catch her eye. “Too long.” A calm washed over her and the ice melted.

Verde whined through her kerchief, “Mama, can we just go? You can cut the funk up in this place with a knife.”

Supra then put her hand on Ruby’s face. “Child, your mama might of fallen from grace but that don’t mean you got to follow. You got to choose right, else evil win every time.”

Verde started stacking the Tupperware tubs against her chest.

Supra glowered at Verde. She turned to Ruby and said deathly quiet, “Folks ain’t going to leave this thing to buckle the weave of the town. You come to us or we come to you, but we gone have your salvation come Sunday.” Then between gritted teeth to Verde, “Leave them things.”

Ruby finally spoke. She turned to Verde and said, “Leave everything but the cod peas.”

Verde greedily eyed the cobbler and the chicken, then her mother, who nodded yes. Verde fumed out of the house with the cod peas, followed by Righteous, Tressie and finally Supra.

When the door closed Ruby looked at Ephram. She breathed out, let the floorboards steady her and managed, “I always did hate cod peas.”

“They never did one thing for my salvation neither.”

Ephram put on a smile, so Ruby found hers and dusted it off. They looked straight at each other long enough for her grin to settle.

Then Ruby pulled away from Ephram, from Papa Bell’s house, and walked into the pines. She found the narrow pathway she had taken so many times as a child, all the way to the far side of Wilkins land, where they buried their kin, even after they had all moved to Beaumont. All but Maggie. Ruby saw the grave in the distance, flecked with thin, curling willow leaves. She wished Maggie had a headstone. She deserved at least that, with something sweet and secret etched on the front — but the sisters had built the cross nice and sturdy. Ruby knelt there for a time, her hand flat upon the soil. Then she lay down not three yards away, near a waving cluster of jonquils. She had come there for answers, but since she wasn’t sure of the questions, she breathed in the sweetness — then erupted into a hundred little yellow blossoms and slept the afternoon into evening.

THE REST of the day the road in front of Bell land had more business than it had in years. Ephram walked the road exactly four times, once to borrow a bath tin and a change of clothes from Rupert Shankle, once to find a trim of fallen cedar to chop into cooking wood, twice to buy things on credit at P & K. He’d already used up the ten dollars he’d won from Gubber and he wasn’t yet ready to face Celia for his wallet. He cursed himself for having forgotten the lamp oil the second time. Both times he walked past the crowd at P & K in silence, each time causing a stir as he left.

Then there were the children who’d been in church that morning when Sister Jennings — now Mother Jennings — had told the congregation that the Devil was living out on Bell land. Never having seen the Devil in person, about six of them perched on the fence across the road from the Bell house and waited for him to show his face.

About twenty other people found themselves wandering the back road to Bell land that day to see if Ephram would fall down and start foaming the evil out of his mouth. Instead they watched a lone man clean and tote and haul. But it was still more than enough. It wasn’t just the exhibition of sin that Celia Jennings had painted so beautifully during testimony that morning, it was the pure, unadulterated, juicy, unholy spectacle of the thing. The scarecrow crazy whore of Liberty had taken up with the township’s mule of a deacon. It was the best piece of gossip the town had had to chew on in twenty-three years.

Chauncy Rankin and his brother drove by slowly as evening gave way to night on the way to their uncle’s wake. They parked just up the road and watched the glow of the house. Chauncy wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him to clean the gal and the place up proper so that he and Percy could have her on tap whenever they got the itch. He quietly cursed Ephram Jennings, and realized he hadn’t, in all the years he’d known him, given the man his due.

Evening found Ruby leaving Maggie’s grave. The perfume of tiny cream flowers still drifting from her pores. Then she made her way through the silent, watching pines. When she reached her home its windows shone with amber light. The water pump held moon light.

Ruby imagined Ephram inside and felt a gentle hand upon her heart. But her children were calling to her, so she went to the chinaberry and knelt. Their voices rose like music from the earth, violas and flutes, weaving into one song. Then she felt the many small ghosts who were still hidden in her body. The ones she had yet to give birth to. They turned and shifted within her. Ruby looked at the last whispers of dark blue evening and felt compelled to dig not only one grave, but another and another. Then she waited for the pain, the pushing to begin — seeing yet another murder.

Suddenly each child, still roaming her body, looked towards the small graves of sifted earth. Something was different. They moved in unison. Ruby knew it was time. They did not tear through her as they had every night for years. Instead each one simply floated from her belly, soft as a puff of talcum powder. It was not a birth, but a gentle exodus.

The last to leave was her own baby. The one who had followed her from New York, who had come to her on the train platform.

Her own child. The sweet baby girl she never named. The child Ruby had at Miss Barbara’s when she was fourteen. When, pregnant and round, men still took her body gently, or sometimes with an amazing brutality, in spite of, and at times because of her condition.

Ruby looked up. It seemed that there were more stars peeking above her, moving into position, the Dipper and the Southern Cross.