Cynthia Bond - Ruby

“I can’t say I’ll be there Gubber. Maybe. Maybe not.”

“I ain’t say no more. Only, you best think long and hard else your next step might lead you off a goddamn cliff.”

Ephram watched Gubber struggle up from the stump then sit back down with a thud. “Damn. Need me a minute, all that walkin’ only to turn round and walk right back. I gots to catch my breath.” And he pulled a pack of Newports out of his pocket, lit one and sucked it into his lungs.

A school of swallows took flight from a tall pine, their complaints little pinpricks in the stretch of dawn. Both men looked up and watched them freckle the sky. Ephram thought about a wide-toothed comb inside the house, furry with black hair. Gubber thought to spit. But he did it in such a lazy, will-less way that it clung in streaks to his cheek. It seemed an effort even to wipe. He waited until he brought the cigarette back to his lips to give a halfhearted try. Ephram fought the urge to take out his handkerchief and hand it to him. It was hard for him to remember sometimes the boy Gubber had been, but sitting close to him on the stump, Ephram could yet see him peeking through.

Gubber Samuels’s snaggle-toothed grin, stretching full, pride bursting. Gubber, the skinny, yellow boy that he’d learned to pee standing up with. Ephram had been five, Gubber six. Ephram’s mama and Gubber’s grandmama had taught both boys to pee-pee like girls to avoid sprinkles on their new indoor toilets. So one day Ephram and Gubber had ventured into the woods near the lake, aimed away from their fallen trousers and peed and peed and peed until they could not muster another drop. Then they’d run to the well and filled the dipper so many times their bellies sloshed when they moved, and they’d waited eagerly to try their aim again.

Ephram remembered it clearly because later that same year, in June of 1934, the two boys had watched as water and mud swoll up and swallowed the Reverend Jennings’s new church. It was meant to be the star of Liberty, with twenty new pews, red velvet carpet in the aisles, brass handles on the front door and a stained glass window gotten half price because the White First Baptist in Jasper thought Jesus had mistakenly been crafted with a harelip. Reverend Jennings had gotten him for a song. After the storm Ephram and Gubber sat perched on the fallen steeple and watched the Reverend kick at the mud, cursing the hurricane until he slipped and fell face down right on top of the harelip Jesus. Split it clean in two. The boys held in their laughter until he’d started crying, big, ugly sobs. Then Ephram started crying too, at the sight of his daddy weeping, which is when the Reverend leapt up and slapped him off the steeple.

Easter of ’37 when Ephram’s mama had walked over the hill as God had made her, Gubber was the only person at the picnic who had the wherewithal to pay Ephram any mind, walking up to him, while all the women were running to put a tablecloth over Otha’s sin, and patting his friend Ephram on the back.

The next day Ephram’s daddy beat his mama for one whole hour before dragging her screaming and begging to Dearing State Mental Hospital. Wouldn’t even let her say good-bye to her son. Beat Ephram with a hair brush when he tried to defy him and come out anyway. His mama clawing at her own face until the Reverend stopped and punched her. Gubber was waiting in the tall grass through it all. He crept up to Ephram’s window to find his friend’s face under the pillow, fat from crying, his body sore, his spirit broken. He climbed into Ephram’s locked room and offered him a piece of sugarcane. The two boys sucked and gnawed in silence while the Reverend drove an unconscious Otha all the way to Dearing.

After that Gubber tended to the splinter that had lodged itself in Ephram’s heart. Not by any direct thing, but by just knowing it was there and acting like it wasn’t, both boys could pretend that life had unfurled itself in a different way. Together they found that they could ignore the pelting looks and questions directed at Ephram. Gubber Samuels knew something about hard looks too, because of his walled eye and the shenanigans with his own mama, who’d had four children by four different papas and hadn’t stayed around long enough to raise a one of them. Over the next few years the boys knitted their unique brands of forgetfulness into a shield against the folks of Liberty.

They decided that Gubber’s dancing free eye was a good thing. It meant that he could see not only what was right in front of him, but the whole of the sky and stars at a glance. They whispered into freshly dug wells to stay cool and not grab any small children. They reminded crooked saplings to straighten up their act.

That shield gave them a new boldness so they ran wild up and down Liberty Township, adding unflattering letters to lovers’ names carved into tree trunks, swimming and splashing in Marion Lake, snatching Sarah Geoffrey’s drawers from the line and taking turns smelling them. They stole so many of Clem Rankin’s peaches that the man was forced to shoot buckshot at them or go broke at harvest. They hid brilliantly from the seven rowdy Rankin boys, standing up to them only when a church elder was present.

In 1939, the boys watched with the rest of their neighbors as thousands of White soldiers pitched tents in the woods and on the embankments of Liberty Township and Shankleville — the only Colored towns in the vicinity. Watched as they tromped through the woods in full battle regalia, with what they later learned were M1 Garand rifles high on their backs. Ephram and Gubber secretly and courageously moved the red or yellow cotton ties marking the boundaries for the battalion’s army maneuvers. They hid as soldiers, wearing faded yellow or red armbands, crept closer, and held in their terrified giggles as the soldiers stopped, checked, then double-checked their maps. Kicked a tuft of grass, whispered, then turned back cussing. Two years before Pearl Harbor and the one year after, over ten thousand men came to occupy that little corner of the piney woods, camped in tents, some not twenty yards from Black folks’ back doors. Like any occupied town in the world, mothers and fathers kept their daughters locked indoors and their fighting-age boys out of sight. More than one girl had run home in tears, clothes torn; more than one boy had become the butt of regimented, orchestrated cruelty. K.O.’s older brother Taylor had been found shot to death. His daddy went to the Funeral Home in Jasper to dig the army-issue bullet out of his boy himself when no one else would do it. Taylor’s mama walked all the way into Newton to show the Sheriff, who’d taken the bullet, looked her in the eye, said he’d investigate. He had then promptly thrown it in the trash receptacle.

In 1940, Mussolini decided to join Hitler against France and Britain, France surrendered to Germany, Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City and Ephram Jennings almost died from eating a persimmon. Ephram and Gubber had been plastering the bright orange fruit across their faces, into their mouths, until one of the seeds lodged itself in Ephram’s nose. Gubber tried to fish it out and managed to jam it in so deep that blood began to spurt. Gubber ran screaming into his house. With the Reverend preaching out of town, Gubber’s daddy had to drive Ephram, Celia and Gubber the forty-three miles to the Leesville County Hospital, the only medical facility in a hundred miles with a Colored wing. He lost so much blood on the way the intern said it was a miracle he was still living. Apparently the persimmon seed had punctured the “lower dorsal artery” and Ephram could have easily bled to death. They took a special pair of tweezers and, with great pain, retrieved the seed. The inside of Ephram’s left nostril needed twelve stitches. He remained in the hospital for one night, until word got through to the Reverend, after which he promptly yanked Ephram out of the hospital bed so that he could convalesce at home.