Cynthia Bond - Ruby

The rest of the day was a blur of women and glimpses of Ephram sobbing. Her memory spitting out a dragonfly, in the form of her husband standing beside some girls, but why was he there and he wasn’t really there but why did the girls turn into blue smoke? When she mentioned the girl in the forest he had begun beating her in earnest but even that felt distant, except she needed to see Ephram and tell him something about his bed, perhaps to take a red thing from there, but what, she could not fathom. And then she was too weak to stop someone from hurting her boy, and a pain ripped through her soul as she was torn from him, ripped like a spider from its web, and she was hit so hard the buckboard raced to her head and held it all the way to hell.

The sleeves they wrapped around her were too tight around her lungs so that she couldn’t breathe in deep enough to sustain consciousness. She kept waking up gasping for air and then passing out again. Finally an angry White woman did something with buckles and she was able to stay awake, and then she wished she hadn’t. She found that she was wearing a diaper and that it had been soiled more than once. She was in a room with four other Colored women all wrapped similarly. When she arrived the Reverend had taken her into a room and told a White woman that she had tried to throw her children down the well and had then run naked to the Easter picnic, that she was crazy and that he loved her but what could he do. The White woman had put her hand on her Black husband and patted his back then she had shoved Otha into another room, getting the little jacket over her bruised body. When she cried for her son the woman had pushed her hard against the wall.

By evening Otha’s reason was slowly returning. She was terrified for her children. At the end of a week she began to smell again. She didn’t realize that sense had been lost until she was assaulted by the stench of urine, waste and collective human sweat. She was moved into a great room with ten women and men strapped to beds. A very angry man said that her ribs were broken and she was wrapped up and left there where she developed sores on her ankles and skin burns on her vagina and buttocks from urine soaking and laying so close to her skin for so many days. After a month she was moved to a cell where human decency had long been forgotten. Twelve women shared a filthy room with a tin bucket for relieving themselves. Some women were strapped to their beds. Some screamed all day and wept. One woman played with her private parts until nurses slapped her hands with a ruler. When they were out of sight she would begin again. In spite of this Otha held fast to what was left of her sanity. She did it for one reason. Her son, Ephram. Besides the yawning pain of missing him she was terrified for him as well. She called out at night to speak about her children until two men came in and tied her to her bed with a leather strap over her mouth. Two days later a man came in to talk with her. They took the strap from her mouth then. She had not had water or food for two days. This man did not seem angry. He was a young White man, so young in fact that his face didn’t look as if it would take a beard. He called Otha “Mrs. Jennings” and asked her how she was feeling, so of course she felt tears pushing against her eyes, she told him that she was very concerned about her son and daughter. She did not dare mention pit fires and young naked girls, not in the heart of this beast of a place, but she did tell the man that her husband beat the children in such a way that she was frightened for their very lives. The young man nodded and looked at a piece of paper in front of him. He said that he thought it would be best if she stayed with them for a while longer.

When she insisted that it would not be all right, that she was feeling much better and that the incident that had taken place was a thing of the past, that she was perfectly normal, he simply looked down at her hands and shook his head with a short little nod. Otha followed his gaze and saw that her hands were lacing. It was then that she realized they had been lacing since she arrived and had not stopped, not for one single moment. The young, young man said, “There, there,” when she kept crying. He signaled for help as her cries intensified and left as they were strapping her in, telling her that he would be back to see her in a month. He lied.

Three months later when he returned Otha was barely human. She sat in a corner and laced the air around her. Every day or so someone would come by and tell her to stop. She thought to herself that she would have stopped by now if it was such a simple matter, but because they didn’t realize this she often let a smile break onto her dull face. This always seemed to anger them and they would tell her to stop again and again, then drag her to a room somewhere to try some new horror on her body. They shoved her in ice water for so long that she contracted a fever when she got out that turned into pneumonia, which would have killed her if the janitor hadn’t gotten one of the orderlies to take her to the hospital room. Another month in a bed while some flurry of strength kept her breathing until she was returned to the shared room. Next they wheeled her into a small tiled cell and shoved sour rubber into her mouth and exploded rockets in her brain. She forgot to use the facilities for two days, after which they sent her back to the ice water, for a shorter vigil this time.

When the young man reappeared he told her his name was Dr. Glass. He was wearing spectacles this time, which Otha suspected were more to make him look older than for any true ophthalmologic need. He did not apologize for his two month delay except to say that they had been very busy in this section of the hospital. Otha took every ounce of strength from not only her body, but from any God in the stars to keep her hands still. She managed it for five whole minutes. When they began again he glanced at them as if he had not been aware of their stillness. She talked about her children again. He nodded and said that they were going to try a new approach, that he would see her in a few days.

Days. The next day Otha’s blood was taken and she was moved to a small room with only one other woman. She was given better food and the light was dimmed when it was time to sleep. She was given a larger room to walk around in at midday to keep her blood flowing. Then she was injected with something at the end of the second day that sent her into convulsions on the floor. The next day Dr. Glass arrived, looked at her chart and made some notations. That evening they gave her the injection again and she spasmed, but to a lesser degree than the day before. Dr. Glass saw her every other day and brought other men in to see her as well. Sometime during the third week her face and hands had swollen and puffed out. Her joints began to ache and the veins in her right and left arms collapsed, so they gave her the injection in her left thigh. Shortly after he left, swirls of rainbow light spun before Otha’s eyes. The walls seemed to breathe, then sweat black ink, which became oiled branches that crowded all of the air.

When Dr. Glass came back an hour and a half later, his head was a balloon floating above his body. When Otha asked why she was seeing such things, he told her that she was very brave and that she would be better soon. They gave the injections every evening thereafter until one night around three in the morning the Devil came to visit Otha while she worked.

He tapped on the door and then walked straight through it. His image fluttered in and out for a moment, like fighting through static to find a station on a radio. When he took form, he was holding a United States Postal Service bag, with a canvas strap that crossed his heart. Otha still dreamt in lace and eggshell silk, in top stitching and embroidered edges, and so the Devil’s face was a patchwork quilt, with scraps of fabric from years of collecting and saving and sewing. There was a cotton bird print where his left eye should be and a zebra wool over his right. He smiled a thin swatch of teal and black check, and slipped two envelopes between her moving palms. In this new room no one tried to stop Otha’s hands; they flew, long and dark, over her plum face, spinning lace webs over her head.