Cynthia Bond - Ruby

“He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.”

It seemed — it seemed to Celia like he was giving those girls away, like you would if somebody won a raffle at a Fair.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me …”

What would make him do such a thing? What force? What — then Celia looked at Ruby Bell, who seemed to be just smiling through it all. Other girls crying, being led off like they had gotten a new master. Ruby Bell hadn’t been passed to anybody. Who hadn’t shed not one tear.

Then Celia watched in the smoke and black night, as Ruby turned to her daddy, and seemed to will him to her. He marched towards her like a puppet, and when he reached her, seemed to hug her near, hug her close, closer than he had ever held his own daughter. Then something happened that Celia did not understand — how they stayed that way too long, too close. How they seemed to be swaying with the beat of the evil drums … and how her papa never danced, but now, somehow, Ruby’s head rocking, her daddy’s hips shifting, he was doing just that. A kind of dancing. Were his pants brown? She had been sure that they were black when he walked in there, but now, were they the same color of his skin? What — what had happened to his pants?

Celia let out a scream that began in her belly as she turned crashing through the branches. She pounded the earth all the way home and slammed the door to her room. She shook in bed until morning, knowing, knowing, knowing that her father was a good man — that God had singled him out early to do his work, to rattle the Devil’s cage. She knew that old Satan had to work hard. Very hard. Very hard with such a good man. Must have hammered his spike long and hard to find the key to his undoing. It had to be hidden where her papa would never think to look. Inside of a child.

From that day onward, Celia never, ever followed her daddy again. Instead, Celia watched Ruby. Watched her coming back from that White lady in Neches, acting better than everybody. Watched her sparking that Wilkins girl like she would have a man, with nobody saying a thing about it. Watched her move on up to New York City where her kind of evil banded together, and later she’d watched her slide across town filled with demons, begging bread and sympathy from Miss P, and drawing good men from their wives’ beds. Now she was trying to steal her Ephram, as she had her father. She saw Ruby as a red beacon washing over Liberty. For some reason Celia had seen fit to let that live untampered. She regretted that now. First, she would try to cleanse Ruby’s soul. If that did not work, Celia would get ahold of the Sheriff and put that girl somewhere she could only tempt lunatics and those who minded them, down in Dearing.

The pines had been watching men and their fire circles since they were saplings. For nearly two hundred years they had seen upside down crosses glowing red in the dark, long before men in white sheets ever rode the horizon.

Dark cloaks donned, secret chants and the pealing screams that followed. The slaves of these men had hidden in the shadows and witnessed the unthinkable. When morning came, the tall trees watched the men, brown and black, scrubbing blood from the knives of their masters in the cool river and kicking dirt over stiff maroon soil, cleaning quartered animals missing hearts and heads. The great pines had stooped in sorrow when they saw these slaves learning in the thick brush, the source of the White man’s might, then mingling their own ancient homeland rites, magic and shadow secrets with the new, until they began gathering about their own fires and driving their desires into the roots of the world.

The Dyboù had been walking through the same piney woods for the past thirty-seven years. He was earthbound. His soul had been stitched to the land with a curse made moments before his destruction. It had been spit over his body as he lay bleeding, and then cemented as the bones in his neck snapped one at a time like dry twigs. Then the circle had gathered around him, crying, some wailing, just as the Apostles and the whore Mary had wept over Jesus.

But those were the thoughts he’d had while breathing. In death it had become much simpler. Jesus was a fluff of tobacco smoke. God was a figment of distilled whiskey. The name his mother had given him, Omar Jennings, and the name he had forged, the Reverend Jennings, both were dust in the crack of his shoes.

He had gathered at the pit fires since he was thirteen, nearly seventy-five years before. Then later, as a man, leading the circle, fear and awe freshly painted on every man as they looked upon him.

But first he had been a boy and the whole of his life had been spent sleeping in the corner of a one-room dirt cabin. His daddy had been too useless to feed all twelve of them so Omar had taken to stealing chickens before he turned six. He brought them home to his mama, beaming, and she would slap him to the ground for thieving. But when she served that chicken plucked, cleaned and fried, her eyes would land soft over his features. It was the one moment of joy he remembered in all of his young life.

His daddy drunk up any two pennies his mama found to rub together, then got mean and limp, eyes blood red with raw hate piercing through. He was too lazy to stand up and beat a boy, but if one happened to be wandering too close to his spider hands he would snatch arm, leg, hand and start beating with whatever was handy — broom, stick, frying pan, hammer. He would say his son’s name with heat and spit, “Omar, Omar … you a low-down piece of donkey shit.” Or “Omar, you the asshole of a maggot.”

If it bothered Omar Jennings as a boy, he had no recollection of that fact. Certainly he could recall the physical pain of the beatings. The hiding his face from his friends. His arm in a sling. He even remembered getting on his knees in church, with a hollow nothing for his efforts.

So when the old man was killed after passing out near Master Gibbs’s cotton fields with his pipe burning too close to the twenty-pound gas tank, Omar wasn’t particularly troubled. Even later, when he heard how they found his father, writhing on the earth, every stitch of clothes and skin seared right off his muscle, Omar took the news in stride.

A week after his daddy died Omar Jennings, feeling far older than his twelve years, put the other children to work. The girls to Miss Sybil the laundress, the boys collecting scraps at the mill. He organized and planned and collected all the money from his siblings and put it in his mama’s apron come every Friday night. Now she didn’t slap him. Instead, with the children out playing where she had sent them, she took his hand and guided it under her skirt. Told him when he held it back that he had grown plenty big, that he was the man of the house now and had to perform certain duties. How the first time they rutted, she ate him whole in the dim of that shack, on the pallet where she and his daddy had slept, on top of the dirt he had watched her sweep. How his mama worked against Omar’s fear for the first ten minutes and then, to his young shame, in spite of it for the next hour. Availing herself of his embarrassed reflexes like a bear waits for salmon. Until, exhausted and spent, she nudged him from her mat as the girls stumbled in, complaining about the dark.

That whole next week Omar kept his eyes tight on the floor whenever his mama was near, pulling up a root, specializing on a pebble. But by the time Friday found its way back to his doorstep, the steel his papa had beat into him held Omar in good stead. When she spread her apron out for his collections, he slapped her hard across the face and took her by force instead, pushing and beating until they were the two of them beasts in the night, thrashing like hooked fish on the dry, hot floor.