Cynthia Bond - Ruby

One year later, in the summer of 1941, the boys had seen Sarah Geoffrey’s visiting cousin Lily take off her bra for Percy Rankin in the Geoffreys’ blue barn. Percy had told them to hide up there and for 5 cents each, he’d show them what big titties looked like. Gubber had been thirteen and Ephram twelve and they had stopped moving, even to breathe, as the lipsticked girl slipped off her blouse and unbuttoned her bra. It wasn’t the way Percy squeezed her breasts or the way she laid down on fresh sweet hay with her panties around her ankles that Ephram remembered most, or the way Percy moved over her and she pushed up to meet him. It was the way her breasts fell out of her bra, the way they spilled like sugar cookie dough onto the flat of her stomach.

He and Gubber snuck into the same dry barn early Sunday mornings before Gubber attended the Piggly Service. There, as dust floated in slatted sunbeams, the boys would “play Lily,” they called it. Gubber laying carefully on the same golden hay, Ephram over him, hands running the length of Gubber’s body. They kissed, Ephram’s full lips to Gubber’s warm mouth. Discovering the use and need of strength in pleasure.

That was the year, the moment in Ephram’s young life, when he’d felt a tickling desire, a wish for the things that other men hold dear, that called forth secret winks of approval on Saturday nights. He had wished for a straight-haired, light-skinned woman to love him. He had wished for height and a loud, echoing voice. A mist green Lincoln Continental Cabriolet. He wished for Sarah Geoffrey to giggle high and sweet at him like she did with Percy’s brother Charles. For friends to crowd about him and reel out their laughter over a pint of whiskey and a smoke.

But even then there were things more dear to him, and their dearness made him different. He loved the smell of honeysuckle, so much he’d wear it in his ear when he slept at night. He’d watch a spider weaving its web for hours at a time. He loved the way Gubber kind of gurgled when he laughed. He enjoyed lying on his back with his friend in the evening and painting big dreams against the starry sky. Moving up north. Joining the merchant marines and sailing to Alaska. Playing baseball in the Negro Leagues.

None of which had set well with Ephram’s father, the Reverend Jennings, who followed his son to that barn loft one early Saturday morning, and after the shock of seeing the two boys kissing on the hay, beat Ephram to within an inch of his life. He busted his lip, cracked two ribs and sent his last two baby teeth, the right upper canine and the molar beside it, down his gullet.

Ephram had taken it in silence and shame, accepting each kick and punch with only enough shielding to save his father from a jail cell or worse. Gubber had heroically remained until the Reverend snarled that he would kill them both if he didn’t “GET!” The Reverend Jennings had dragged Ephram home and thrown him on the hall rug for Celia to tend to. “No hospital this time” was all he said. In fact that was all the Reverend would ever say on the subject. He also never looked directly at his son again.

One year later the Reverend found a small parish in Farrsville where the minister was ailing and he lived in and preached there three weeks out of four. Although Reverend Jennings had strictly forbidden it, Ephram snuck into the woods and met up with his friend Gubber most days. It was autumn, hot yet morning cool. They were heading to Marion Lake for a dip. It had been so hot of late that they’d planned to swim in the cool water until supper, so they’d run through the woods, trees making stepping-stones of sunlight ahead of them on their path. They’d leapt from sun patch to sun patch, laughing if they touched shadows, when Ephram felt a sudden shade across his body. He looked up and saw the Reverend standing high above him. He threw his hands up to block a blow. A flash of sun stole off his daddy’s face, the Reverend so high, mouth so wide that Ephram lowered his hands, opened his mouth to say what he was doing there. Then he saw the rope. Then saw his daddy turn in the air. Gubber peed down his leg. A cloud passed in front of the sun. There was blood on the floor of leaves beneath his daddy’s feet. One of his shoes was flung off way over there. His bare sock had a hole. All turning two feet above the earth. The sound of Gubber crying thick snot and water. The way his daddy’s head was like a crooked balloon, lips screaming, eyes dead but wide and asking Ephram something so he heard, “What, Daddy?” croak out of his throat. There wasn’t a sound of water or frog or bird; death had drawn her chalk circle here and not a thing could breathe. Black flies covered his daddy’s mouth like a blanket until Ephram saw the severed thing stuffed there.

Ephram wished he were a dog. Somebody’s good dog with a mighty growl and bark. If he were, he would snarl and burrow his nose into the dirt, howl into the earth until it trembled on its axis. But he was only a boy so he buried that scream like an ax in his gut, where it remained to this day.

From far away Ephram felt Gubber’s hands pulling, then hitting, then screaming something, then running. Then silence and him and his daddy staring into the holes of each other’s eyes until another scream, this time it sounded like a sow at butcher time, then it was only Celia wailing, and more hands pulling at him. Hands finally strong enough to pull his body away, but not the rest of him.

They laid his daddy to rest at the Piggly Service. The Rankins’ cousin presided. By the time Ephram turned fifteen, he and Gubber were barely speaking to one another. Ephram watched Gubber swell and grow and strain against the fence of clothing, only to build a bigger fence, only to strain, again and again. Gubber wouldn’t look at Ephram if they passed in school or at P & K, and worse, when circumstance threw them together, Ephram became the perfect foil for Gubber, a soft, weakened thing to point out when collective fangs were bared. The fact that he accomplished this with a chain of rebukes and thick jokes, and that those actions had done more harm to Gubber Samuels than himself, was not lost on Ephram. He’d watched Gubber swallow his kindness and shit it out until all that remained was the waste of a good man.

GUBBER BREATHED in the last of his cigarette and crushed it with his boots. He rose and pointed himself west, towards the Samuels’s farm.

He spat out, “Watch your ass,” then walked down the red road. Ephram sat and watched Gubber’s back until it disappeared over the rise between a pair of pines.

Ephram lifted himself from the stump. His bones felt cold and ached just a bit at the joints. Celia would be rising right about now, drawing the water for his bath, then stopping herself. He felt a sudden longing for her grits and eggs made just how he liked them. For her coffee with a pinch of chicory and the psalm they would choose to read aloud every Sunday evening after dinner. They’d missed 124 last evening, which was one of his favorites. The road seemed to nudge him homeward. He took a step. Then two. Then he was walking, just to see if she was making out all right. Maybe he would knock on the door to say hello, or perhaps sit down over breakfast and talk it out with her.

A smattering of pine nuts rained down to his left. Ephram turned and saw the Bell graveyard, over the rise. And just that quick he knew that if he kept walking that’s where his feet were carrying him. Into that grave of a house, that death of a life. Ephram saw his body cold and still, laid out on Celia’s kitchen table waiting for the undertaker from Jasper to tote him off. He looked much as he did now, a fringe more gray along his temples. Then the picture was gone and he was left with the morning. She had unfurled herself fully and was waving her bright flag across the sky. He turned himself around and walked into Ruby’s door.