Cynthia Bond: Ruby

Outside Maggie rounded back against Ephram. She held the nap of his hair and hit his jaw with all of her might. Ephram began speaking in tongues. Strange words muttered into the gray world. Maggie paused for a moment. Leaned in. Pam! Ephram hit her face. He was on top of her. He crashed into her head. Her neck. The mud. Maggie had rolled away just in time. He heard a hairline snap as his fingers crashed into stone.

Inside, the walls leaned towards the two. “Rompre le lien! Rompre le lien!” Ma Tante snarled. Ruby looked up as Ma Tante lifted the knife and brought it down hard, halving a pomegranate on the floor beside them.

Ephram grabbed at his hand, the pain cutting like nails. Maggie was up in a flash, wheeling back her foot then pop into Ephram’s cheek. Ephram lay still, moon eyes walled, then fluttering, then soft and still. Head tilted into the mud.

The juice dribbled down the part and into Ruby’s hair. Ma Tante tore open a glut of seeds and squeezed the fruit until a crown of red streamed down the young girl’s face.

Maggie walked back to the porch as the wind brought another blanket of feathery rain. The sky sweetened and thinned as sunlight sprinkled through. She took note of the fact that Ephram was still breathing.

Ruby held the juice against her tongue and the roof of her mouth while the old woman smoothed it into her skin, still clucking words from a fold in the black of time: “Tumulong potrebno … Duboko haja Gu-semerera esivanemad … O-negai shimasu. min faDlik Apsaugoti savo … en smeken Era berean seo Faoi deara …”

Maggie lit a new cigarette from her porch vantage. Bent but still intact.

“There, there, child … there, there …” Ma Tante hoisted Ruby upon her lap. Ruby looked into her yolk eyes. “I don’ mean no harm.”

Outside, Ma Tante’s yellow cat found its way from under the house, hopped onto Maggie’s thighs and purred into her chest. Maggie petted the cat, blew out smoke and pretended not to shake.

Ma Tante petted Ruby’s head. “I try to make it harder fo’ them to steal your soul’s purse. They’s things that happen out in them woods under the blood moon. Nights when a child like you need to stay behind locked doors. But it’s too late for that, ain’t it?”

Ruby nodded yes.

“They already dragged you out to they pit fire, ain’t they?”

Ruby nodded again.

“Already cracked open your spirit like a walnut and try to stuff they rot in there. Dat’s why them spirits pester you so. They like openings and you a sieve. You got to know they two kinds of spirits — haints is like leeches, hang on, but can’t swallow you whole. Dyboù something different. Ain’t content with nothing but snuffing out all you is — smell like a burned out candle when it come.

“I try to suck the poison of the pit fire out. I try. Girl, you got to fly off next time they take you down there. Don’t hold fort in your body, surrender it so you can come back when they done. I’m afraid they’ll whittle you down to nothing if you keep on fightin’ ’em. Won’t be nothing left of you.” She motioned towards the door. “You tell her?”

Ruby shook her head no.

“Good. Don’t. She too stiff a tree to take that weight.”

Ruby let her long neck soften and bend. Let her lungs push air out and sat there empty, until nature nudged her to breathe in.

Ma Tante rubbed Ruby’s back, lifting only an ounce of the weight in her chest — but it was something. “Lawd, Lawd. Man and magic wasn’t never meant to go together. Dey got to rule ovah things. And magic be the ocean say you ride my wave. But when you know man be content to ride nothing ’thout breakin it first?”

She petted Ruby’s head. “Child, they’s a rainbow of doings in this here world, but man, he only see the black and the white of it. Do good work with his right, and the Devil work with his left. Stay way from that left hand as much as you able.” Ma Tante spit into her apron and wiped Ruby’s skin clean like a mother cat.

“Me? I am not long here, you see that, yes? I take in too many people sin when I was young and didn’t know where to put them down. So my nails and eyes yellow like piss in the sun. Some things you cannot be fix. Some can. Too early to tell how it turn for you.” Ma Tante wrapped Ruby in a furry blanket.

She rocked her like a baby against her chest until Ruby had fallen into sleep, then set her gently on the daybed and opened the front door.

Ma Tante looked onto the porch through the screen. “Maggie, help dat boy up and quick.”

Maggie rose and walked to where Ephram lay, surrounded by flashing stars. “Get up.” Maggie puffed and reached her hand under the crook of his shoulder. Ephram wobbled up, leaning against Maggie. Ma Tante supervised from the porch. The rain had started again. Harder than before. The crows were complaining in the trees as Maggie sat Ephram down on the steps. For Ephram, the world was dizzy with lights and the sound of waves.

“Come in boy.” Ma Tante waved him in. “N’, Margaret, you best sit out there ’til you can think to act right.” Maggie flicked her cigarette into the rain. Got up to leave and turned around.

“I ain’t leavin’ ’thout Ruby.”

“Then I guess you ain’t leavin’.”

Maggie huffed as Ephram stumbled alongside Ma Tante into the house.

RUBY WOKE up to the smell of cocoa. Her face sticky with dried juice and the old woman’s spit, her cheek swollen from where she’d been slapped. Miss Barbara would be mad about that. So would her grandmother. Ruby peeked out from the moldy-smelling daybed. She would fake sleep a little while longer. Ruby couldn’t get a proper look at the boy from where she lay but she saw Ma Tante rattling around, her skirt swishing against the floor like a broom. She was fiddling with something on the table — Ruby hoped she wasn’t slipping the bones out of a live bird, as Maggie had seen her do, or cutting a hex out of a horny toad. After what she had seen, Ruby didn’t doubt a word Maggie had said. Those yellow eyes had seen the thing Ruby hid, even from herself. And when two people see a thing, for better or worse, it becomes real. Ruby felt that knowing smooth over her like tree sap and fill in a little of the ache.

The boy Ephram fidgeted in a chair. The light caught his face and Ruby saw him, eye purple and swollen shut. Two fat lips. Nose busted for sure. Cotton balls stuffed up in it. Hand bandaged. He sat like he’d wet himself in front of class. Shamed like that. Damn Maggie .

“Hot chocolate, y’all share,” Ruby heard Ma Tante say to Ephram. Ruby could smell the sweet bitter before it reached her and she pretended to wake.

Ma Tante set the cup down on a side table and wiped Ruby clean with a wet towel.

Then she handed the cup over to Ruby and turned to Ephram, “Come on over here, son.” Ephram carefully lifted himself onto the far end of the bed and sat there quiet. Ruby caught the tail end of his silence and let it settle across her lap. She sipped the hot cocoa. There was a knock on the door.

“You ain’t ready yet,” Ma Tante called and Ruby could hear Maggie stomp across the porch and sit hard. Ruby handed the cup to Ephram.

He waited, then took hold of the handle with his good hand. “Thank you.”

“Maggie give me this,” Ruby said after a pause and pulled a silver thimble from her dress pocket. “From P & K. She got that five finger discount.”

“Hmmm.”

“She do that for me sometime. Steal me treasure. She ain’t always like that, how she were with you. She get jealous is all … that, and she ain’t too fond of your daddy, the Reverend.”

He was quiet in a way that seemed to say that he understood very well how someone might come to dislike his papa.