Ruby & Roland

by Faith Sullivan

  One day, standing at the stove, Dora said, “One time I wondered if it was you that Roland loved. Isn’t that strange? Your name doesn’t start with B.” She gave a little laugh and stirred the gravy. My pulse stumbled, but I was so hungry to hear his name spoken aloud that I welcomed her random thoughts.

  Beside me at the table, the ghost of Roland shook his head in wonderment.

  Yesterday, the mailbox at the Harvester post office held an unexpected letter from Professor Cromwell. The two and a half months after Roland’s funeral, culminating in the professor’s departure from Beardsley, had been vexatious and disheartening. I had finally told him the truth on the train, and as a result he’d stopped coming to the house or noticing me in the college halls. Now he had written, beginning with a breezy “The Pittsburgh laboratory is everything I could hope for, and I have settled in without a hitch.”

  But he went on to say, “Often I ponder your words on the train from Harvester to Beardsley. You said I was in love with Serena, not you. I was angry that you doubted my feelings, and bitter that you didn’t return them. I behaved badly and I regret that.

  “With the passage of years (can it be nine?) since Serena and Denton’s deaths, it grows less painful to look back on the good times we enjoyed. I confess that I loved them both, though in different ways, of course.”

  In what ways, Barrett?

  He went on: “It is freeing to acknowledge this. And as a man who was never meant to live out his years without a helpmeet, maybe I’m ready to begin the search for the woman who’ll have me.

  “On another topic, I do not and never will understand the romance of the agrarian life—the unremitting labor, the nauseating odors, the failed crops. Still, here we are! We’re quite different people.

  “I realized that I had lost you when I saw you in your setting—the two farms. It was clear then that you could never accept my proposal, though, foolishly, I had to pursue it. Nothing ventured …

  “Having said all this, I still hold, as I said on the train, that Roland Allen was an adolescent infatuation. You were only a girl. You will recover.”

  The letter smacked of male pride and of sadness too. I could be magnanimous. Except for Roland, I had all that I wanted.

  And though Roland was gone—the one I would lie with in dreams—his ghost came looking for me when I walked to the lake or sat smoking on the back stoop. Always I ran to him and always my embraces came away empty. I stored his visits in the tapestry bag with a shiny brass closing, and knew I would never leave this place so long as his shadow endured. At night, one side of the bed remained undisturbed, waiting.

  Odd to say, I often thought of Aunt. Though she had been unrepentant, she’d also been a soul in torment. I wished her peace in her Jesus marriage. We had both loved heedlessly. Did I deserve my happiness, I wondered in odd moments, immediately thrusting the thought away. I had no time for Jesuitical speculation. Too much work waited for me.

  In the chill of this April morning, from across the pasture, a huge Percheron named Montana came walking toward us, his pace leisurely, his head bobbing yes as he came. Legs splayed across the broad back of the horse, Roland yearned toward us, evanescing as Montana drew near the gate and offered his head to be petted.

  Emma reached out to the horse, asking Dora, “Where do things stand with the bank?” Only Emma could come right out like that, inquiring the way a sister would.

  “We’re pretty near square,” Dora told her. “Ruby paid off the tractor with some of her house money. She even bought a couple of decent chairs for the parlor.” She lifted her chin. “We’re looking civilized and solvent. That’s what Ruby says.”

  Emma nodded. “This is gonna work.” She caressed the horse’s ears. “It’s gonna work.”

  And it has worked, through these ensuing decades since my return. We are growing older, Dora and I—I’ll be forty-seven. Dora, still childlike, will be fifty. Our faces are seamed and spare.

  Across Cemetery Road, dear Emma is seventy-five and thriving, farming over seven hundred acres with the boys and a hired man. She drives a 1941 Buick that Henry purchased shortly before his death the day after Pearl Harbor.

  Because Emma is a widow with a farm to run and because farms are necessary to the war effort, Dan and Sol have hardship deferrals from military service. Though they can see the necessity, they’ve taken it hard not to fight the Axis. Sol says, “If we could get a couple more men out here to work, we could still go.”

  Barrett Cromwell has an important wartime appointment in the Roosevelt administration, something hush-hush. He never found a helpmeet: he remains married to his work.

  As for me, well, last week, while I walked down a row of young corn, I was seized by such happiness I had to stoop and pinch crumbs of black dirt between my fingers, tasting them in my mouth. The soil in St. Bridget County is, I’m told, among the most fertile in the world.

  Since I moved in with Dora, the two of us have been objects of speculation in Harvester. Early days, Emma set folks straight on the question of whether our relationship was a romantic one. That settled, people, women especially, wondered why we never sought marriage.

  “That’s hard work, that farming. Why’d a woman want to do all that heavy lifting and hauling? Donald tells me he’s seen ’em throwing those bales around like any man. You see the muscles they’ve got? I’m not sure it’s womanly.” Emma had heard this in Sue’s Beauty Parlor while she was having her hair permed.

  “Well, I don’t know,” Sue had said. “The money they make is theirs to do with, no man taking it or telling them it’s for the new Ford. Doesn’t sound so bad to me.” Some nodding of heads followed this.

  “Think they’ll ever move to town?” Town people assumed that this was the goal of every farmer.

  “No,” Sue said, “The dark one—the one with all the words—told me she’d never get the dirt out from under her fingernails.”

  Someone, Emma perhaps, said that my vocabulary was often remarked on. Was I trying to be high-hat, or was I some kind of genius? And if I was some kind of genius, what was I doing on the farm?

  I never passed up an opportunity to provide village entertainment, scattering “autodidact,” “je ne sais quoi,” and “ante-diluvian” in my path as I went. I’d have disappointed had I not.

  After a couple of decades, Dora and I have been accepted, I think, with a certain fondness as Harvester’s own lady eccentrics.

  Even now, Dora continues to tack addendum onto grace. Recently it was: “And thank you, God, for sending me a sister.”

  And we have been sisters, in ways that she’ll never know. But more obviously, as sisters, we have hung onto Roland’s farm through two depressions, even adding acreage. We’re thrifty. We kept the wagon and horses well into the thirties, then bought a secondhand Ford and a new tractor from old Kolchak when the one that killed Roland died. We still keep it as a kind of memorial. Each spring I drag out red paint and give it a fresh coat, singing the old forbidden words as I work.

  Dora is not, for the most part, a thinker, but to this day she ponders the identity of Roland’s lover. When we go to town on Saturdays, she tells me, she studies the women our age. The woman in the next booth at the Loon Cafe who dyes her hair, is she the one? Or the redhead behind the counter in Lundeen’s Dry Goods?

  In payment for my transgression and her endless speculation, I am the best of sisters to her. But in truth, I am no better when it comes to speculation. While some wrestle with the meaning of life or the existence of God, I wrestle with the meaning of Roland’s message: I live on hope. In bed at night or kneeling in the garden, I consider the words as they might have applied to the two of us. Did he imagine that I would return? Or was he planning to leave Dora when the debts were paid?

  Does everyone have a mystery they tease in this manner, after all hope of an answer is dead? What strange stubborn creatures we are, forever worrying a hangnail.

  If Roland’s ghost could talk, perhaps he’d explain. I live on hope. Bu
t as it is, he comes to me silent, a large black dog loping at his side. I open my arms to them.

  Leila Navidi

  FAITH SULLIVAN is the author of many novels, including Gardenias, The Cape Ann, What a Woman Must Do, and, most recently, Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse. A “demon gardener, flea marketer, and feeder of birds,” she is also an indefatigable champion of literary culture and her fellow writers, and has visited with hundreds of book clubs. Born and raised in southern Minnesota, she spent twenty-some years in New York and Los Angeles, but now lives in Minneapolis with her husband.

  Founded as a nonprofit organization in 1980, Milkweed Editions is an independent publisher. Our mission is to identify, nurture and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.

  We are aided in this mission by generous individuals who make a gift to underwrite books on our list. Special underwriting for Ruby & Roland was provided anonymously.

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  Interior design by Mary Austin Speaker

  Typeset in Bulmer

  Bulmer was designed by William Martin in 1792 for printing the Boydell Shakespeare folio edition. Bulmer is a late transitional typeface that offered a British response to the delicate Italian type work of the Italian and French type foundries of Bodoni and Didot.