Cynthia Bond - Ruby

The Reverend had taken to slipping out most nights. Otha assumed it was to see another woman — perhaps even, if Paula had been right, Miss Barbara, for which he surely would be killed. He had been betraying Otha for years with sisters of his own flock. She could always tell who by the way their eyes leapt and danced when the Reverend placed a hand on their arms or shoulders, by the sly cut of their smiles when they greeted her each Sunday. Otha expected and often found telltale signs on his person: a soiled handkerchief, the pungent scent of a woman, a stray pressed hair curling about a button or in his undergarments.

But Otha started finding other, more disturbing articles. She found a tiny Black doll with a pin through its neck in his breast pocket one evening. One night she found a small red velvet pouch filled with a smell so foul she almost regurgitated, another time some type of fang wrapped in sinew. She would come across bits of garlic tied to doorposts and small covered holes in her vegetable patch. When she dug into the earth with frightened hands she would always find a strange assortment of bones and nail clippings. But the last item she had found sent her into the piney woods in secret pursuit of her husband. It was the evening before Easter 1937. Ephram was only eight.

That afternoon, Otha had been going through the laundry basket. She had been unable to locate her good bottom sheet. The second best had been on the bed two days now and the Reverend was a stickler when it came to cleanliness, especially on a Sunday. She had searched high and low. It was not in the washroom, not on the bedroom shelves. The thing became a matter of pride for her, she simply could not have lost her single good bottom sheet. So she began looking in unusual places. She searched through the storm cellar, behind fig and peach preserves. Rising uneasiness caused her to ransack the attic and the smokehouse. Finally, balled in a gap of earth under the rotting wall of the unused outhouse, she found it. It was stiff with mud and something gooey dried hard like glue. It was not until Otha brought the sheet to her nose and smelled the low musk salt did she know it was blood. A chill circled her throat and grabbed her diaphragm. She smelled it again and knew that something had been killed there. She lay on the ground until her heart filled her brain with reason. Her hands were moving like air as she lay on the earth and it took her a moment to notice them. When she did she calmed them against her breast. She had been lacing. The movements always brought comfort. She stuffed the sheet back under the outhouse and went to find her children.

Celia, fourteen, was baking for her father, chocolate layer cake, his favorite. Celia was not a particularly inspired cook but she had an iron-hard will and determination to learn. Celia was fine. Then she went in search of Ephram. Her husband hated the boy with a deep, unruly passion. Otha feared the reason, but pushed it out of her head as quickly as it had come. She hunted in all of Ephram’s favorite spots until she found him feeding fish at Marion Lake. She tried to quiet her heart at the sight of him, little legs curled under him, his breath so smooth and steady. But a bubble of fear stole up from her chest and she could not stop herself from crying when he turned to look at her. A small cloud of worry knitted across his face so she reached out and smoothed it down. She sat beside him and stared out at the water.

“You all right, Mama?” her son asked.

She ran her hand over his small square head. His father had kept his hair clipped so close to the scalp that it felt a bit like a new peach. “There’s not even enough here for a part.”

She watched her son smile. It was an old joke but he kept a fresh grin for whenever she told it. Dragonflies darted by, their wings catching rainbows. They sat so quietly that they heard the lean of the grass and the nuzzling pines. They were quiet people, always had been. He was her stock, had her daddy’s brow and her mother’s grace. There was nothing of the Reverend in him, which made it easy to pull him near. She wanted to tell him about wolves in the world and a gut-wrenching kind of danger. Otha could feel it rushing past the trees towards her. Her heart sped in her chest. Her son’s eyes were so large and dark, his lashes so thick. He peered up at her and she leaned down and kissed him where the part should have been.

She didn’t know that her fingers were moving until Ephram looked down at them.

Their eyes met for a moment. She smiled and shrugged. Then he mashed his face into her, his spindly arms little spider things reaching to hold tighter. So she gathered him up in her lap like she had when he was a bitty thing, not the big boy he was now, and the two watched as evening crept in like a thief and stole the rest of day.

That night after the house was asleep the Reverend slipped out, but not before walking into his son’s room. Otha was behind him, feet padding softly on the floor. She peeked in and watched her husband leaning low over the sleeping boy, rumbling strange words while his hands swept the air over Ephram’s body. He left a red velvet pouch over the head of her son’s bed. She watched as he went to the trash receptacle, opened his handkerchief and gathered tiny crescents of the boy’s fingernails he had clipped after dinner. Then he started out. Otha ran like silent lightning and hid behind the closet door. He walked right by her and out of the house. She walked into Ephram’s room and ripped the velvet bag from his headboard. Her boy kept sleeping. She sped in bare feet out into the night. She heard a twig break in the distance and she followed. The moon naked and whole above as she tracked noises so quiet that they registered in her unconscious. In this way she walked in her white gown, her hand tight about the red velvet. Where was he taking her boy’s nails? Where? She felt the same danger rushing towards her like water. Like a flood rising as she crept after her husband. At one point he stopped and looked back. She ducked down and stopped breathing, then he was off again towards Marion Lake. She saw a glow in the distant clearing, a light flaring in the black thicket woods. Her husband was walking towards it with clippings from her son, and so she followed. As she got closer she could see the trees around it, some of the branches seemed to wave and move, until Otha got close enough to see that they were the raised arms of men, staring into the flames. They were waiting for something.

Otha crept closer, as quiet as the air. A wide pine ahead would hide her. She stopped and dropped to her belly, lifted by her elbows so she could see.

Her husband joined the group. The men dropped their arms and parted. He stood taller among them. Without moving a muscle they all seemed to bend down to him. Otha felt a flush of heat through her skin, as if she were standing in front of the pit fire as well.

From this distance Otha watched the men’s blurred images take shape and form. Jaws and noses assembled into familiar faces. Otha’s breath halted as she saw they were men she already knew. Friends — deacons from her husband’s congregation. Men she had shared hymn books with for years, who had worn their Sunday best as they carried the brass collection plates. Men with patient smiles and familes. What were they doing standing before these flames? Otha lifted herself a bit more to better see their expressions. Even at that distance there was something in their eyes that seemed to crackle with the flames. Something she had never seen on Sundays or at P & K or at town functions. It sent her heart into her throat and made it hard to swallow.

In the red gold of the flames, Otha saw two men bring out a speckled calf, white with red dots — it looked like the Simpkins heifer calf not more than six months old. Eyes tender as creatures are who are new to the earth. The calf was scared. A baritone in the church choir, Josua Perdy flapped open a white sheet with strange markings on it — a black circle and twisting lines — and spread it on the ground. She watched as Deacon Marcus, the man who always bought his wife a bouquet of flowers on Friday, slowly tipped the calf over — it fell with a loud thump and let out a high, lonely mewl. Like a frightened child. Like a — and they bound its feet with a red rope. Tight, too tight, crisscrossed its legs. The animal began crying, long moans rising above the flames. Otha didn’t know she was crying too, until she heard the soft drops on the leaves beneath her chin.