Cynthia Bond - Ruby

The little spirit paused at the small precipice. She looked at Ruby. She wanted Ruby to remember, so Ruby saw it all. Her old room, after a man had left, before another entered. Ruby remembered how she had felt, full of hopeful life. The morning sickness had stopped. Now, at eight months, her girl was strong within her, in spite of the fact that Ruby had never seen a doctor. It was as if the child knew she would have to build and grow without a kind or knowing hand. Ruby’s child was the strongest part of her, until one night Ruby was knocked down by a crushing punch into her gut by a john, who paid a little extra. Always a little extra. Ruby curling, holding, protecting as he kicked with a brown boot. Again and again. Then acted out a rape, a brutal rape of a soon-to-be-mother, which is what he had come for. One day after he left, the contractions came. The ripping unbearable pain. No hospital. Nothing. Pushing, screaming, with not a single soft eye upon her. Still her baby fighting, then slipping out of her. Someone caught her child and dropped her onto Ruby as if the infant were soiled laundry. Ruby saw the top of the baby’s head, wet, red dotted with white. Little hands … ten little chubby miracles. The child was crying, laying upon her. Crying. Then coughing. Coughing as if she had swallowed Marion Lake. Hands taking her away. Ruby reaching out. Her baby coughing so hard. Then soft. Then little gasps of air. Then she was quiet in another person’s arms. Until the silence grew heavy with meaning.

The only words Ruby heard were, “She dead.” Which is how Ruby knew she was a girl.

On the rise of the hill, under the sky, the little spirit turned away from Ruby. She seemed satisfied. Her mama had not forgotten her. She lay herself down and let herself be covered with earth.

Ruby kept her hand upon the mound for a long time. She let out a sigh. It was safer there — the womb or the earth. The womb or the earth. Ruby realized sitting next to all of her children that the soil was both. The world would hold them.

Ruby knew they would still leap and play. She would still visit them come sundown, have them lean up and listen to bedtime stories. Even play hopscotch and freeze tag during the day. But at night they would sleep in their graves. At night they would be safe. She bent down and kissed the kind earth and went towards the warmth of the house.

When Ruby walked through the doorway the first thing she noticed was that the house smelled of cedar.

There were two kettles of water boiling and a huge tin tub full of bathwater on the floor. Ephram stood in the center of the kitchen, washed and wearing a pair of overalls two sizes too big.

The house was clean. A few furtive stains remained in the grooves of the floor, but the walls, the baseboards, the window frames, all of the wood seemed to glow like bronze. The belly of the stove was alive with flames. The six kerosene lamps threw saffron rays onto the walls. A full plate of chicken and potato salad sat on the sideboard. The steam rising from the bath and the kettles was doing something magical and luminous with the light. Crickets and owls harmonized in the blackness outside.

There was a clean sheet folded near the tub.

Ephram motioned towards it. “I’ll be outside drawing plenty water. You eat your fill, then get in that water, have yourself a good soap, then drape that sheet over the tub. I’ll be in directly.” And he stepped into the night. Ruby did just that. The food, though seasoned a little heavily with judgment, went down just fine.

The water was almost too warm against her skin and its waves held her. She looked and found the Dove soap on the floor. The white turned tan where it touched her skin. She washed her face. Her neck. The water was just right now, so warm under her arms and between her thighs, her long, long legs, her breasts, her cocoa nipples, her belly. She dunked her hair under its surface and brought it out steaming, stretched the sheet over the tub and softly called to him.

Ephram walked in and looked at Ruby. He poured an alchemy of oil, steam and well water into a pitcher and poured it over Ruby’s thick hair. It seemed to drink the water like desert sand. Ruby sighed.

He arranged his supplies on the sideboard: two large tins of Crown Royal hair dressing. Casey Farms peanut oil. Ginger root. White Rain Shampoo and Conditioner. Hair bands, small blue worlds attached to black elastic eights, like children wore to Sunday school. And a wide-toothed comb and scissors.

Her hair was hard in places like thick plastic. It had matted so that scabs had formed along the scalp, bled and dried into scars. Some of the hair had tangled into ropes, so dense, so solid that it would have been easier to shave her head and start fresh. As if she could read his thoughts she said, “It might be easier to cut it off.”

But she said it the way pretty women say things they know people will disagree with. He smiled at the weight of her pride. The roots of her belief in her beauty ran deep, had lasted through over a decade of drought. Maybe, he thought, the tips of her hair remembered.

Ephram had always thought of a woman’s hair as living testimony to her life, her memories. Celia kept hers twisted tight under bobby pins, bound by headscarves and wig nets. His mama had kept hers free and puffy, until, he’d heard, they had made her tie it back at Dearing. He’d silently watched women and the complexity of their hair all of his life. He knew that some memories were better cut out, amputated. He’d seen women freed that way. But his bones told him that Ruby needed her past to find her way home. So he spent the night tending to her hair.

He had no one to ask so he supposed. He started with soap. The first suds turned black. He rinsed her hair with a pitcher, pouring the water into a separate bucket to spare the clear moving warmth of the tub. Then he washed it again and again. By the seventh rinse, the water almost ran clear. It felt like heavy, black wet wool.

The hair started whispering to his fingers. It showed him where to part and what to leave alone. It told him to crush wild ginger and mix it with the peanut oil, to warm it, to slip into the tunnels beneath the tumult and work that concoction along her scalp with his fingertips. He suddenly realized that it had been speaking to him all day while he was cleaning, telling him what to buy, what it needed. It frightened him. He wondered if Supra hadn’t been right after all, that maybe devilment was catching. Maybe crazy was a cold you caught. But then the fear left him and he realized that the whole wide world had been talking to him for years, only he’d stuffed cotton into his ears, packed it tight until a rail thin storm of a woman had knocked it out with a kick to his head.

So he opened himself up and listened as it told him how to work the conditioner into each corded knot. How to aim not to free the bond, but be content with loosening it bit by bit. It led him to eventually comb the fringed edges, then helped him to work like a craftsman, extracting strands one, two, three at a time.

He kept the kettles on the stove so that the air stayed heavy and moist. He heated the water in Ruby’s bath as slow hours passed. He worked steadily, courteously. He worked in love.

Around two in the morning, he stepped onto the porch as Ruby emerged from the bath naked and golden, and lay herself under clean linen atop the mattress. Ephram covered her with another sheet, slipped a grocery bag under her head and continued working. She tumbled into a sleep so deep, that she forgot to be afraid.

White Rain and oil at the ready, Ephram combed and soaked, teasing out the stubborn fists. At about four in the morning, three-quarters was free. It twisted and curled and waved like a river set loose from a dam. Down her neck, across her shoulders and dripping past her angel blades. Then Ruby’s hair began to do more than guide Ephram’s hands, it began to guide his heart.