by Victor Allen
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Jean stood with her mother, holding her hand. On the opposite side, her mother held her father’s hand. He had the look of a man who is utterly worn out and beaten. His red eyes stared bleakly at some unseen mystery in the distance and his shoulders humped like stalwart boulders that had finally been rounded by eternal rains. Jean was amazed at the flowers. Red, white, and green islands of color surrounded the casket beneath the brisk March skies. She would have never believed Ruby had that many friends.
The minister finished up his terse eulogy and Jean’s father hitched his breath a little, but had otherwise held up better than Jean would have expected. He had cared even more for Ruby after everyone else had turned against her.
After the funeral, at the home where she and Ruby had shared good times and bad, Jean threaded her way through the milling knots of people towards her father. The mourners stuffed their faces and whooped it up as if they were at a New Orleans Jazz band send-off. Jean thought it sordid. Her father sat on a sofa, alone, looking thoughtfully through a notebook. He didn’t seem to mind the solitude, but Jean wasn’t sure he should be alone.
“I’m sorry, dad. Truly. You can’t let it eat you up. You’ll just get lower and lower until there’s nothing left of you.” Then, as gently as she could, she said, “there are still people that need you.”
Her father raised his eyes. Charlie Rogers, 57 years old, battered and bruised, tried gamely to smile.
“I’ll be fine, Jean. I know Ruby wasn’t a saint, but she didn’t have horns, either. I did love her. Your mother, she loved her at one time and nobody could blame her when she stopped, but I never did. And you….”
Jean tensed, afraid her father was going to say something that would draw out the hot resentments and jaundice like an ingot of molten steel, leaving her naked to its burning faces.
“Are you surprised? Your old dad isn’t blind. I know you and Ruby didn’t care for each other, but it wasn’t always that way. There aren’t many secrets in the family. Your mother, she has her old love letters that she thinks I don’t know about hidden away in her hope chest, and I’ve got my fifty dollars of mad money stuck in my wallet that she thinks I don’t know that she knows about.
“I don’t think you’re sorry Ruby is dead, but I don’t harbor any resentment for that. You’ve got a right. But you and Ruby weren’t always so far apart.”
Jean held her silence. There were secrets in the family, the biggest one, one that was kept religiously hidden from her father, was the botched D and C Ruby had undergone at age sixteen. She had hemorrhaged and had a close call with exsanguination. That caused the scarring that made her barren. Her feminine wiles had been in full glory, crowned by the flaming red hair, and she had initially seduced Don Duke, a sad sack kid of sixteen, into being the patsy and ponying up the seven hundred bucks for the abortion. Only by the grace of God had their mother been home to take the emergency phone call from the clinic. Once Ruby was squared away, a confession was extracted. The baby’s father was Jack Young, her mother’s brother; Ruby’s uncle. How they had ever managed to keep that a secret was a miracle, but it seemed to have held.
Once the crisis had passed, Ruby had dumped Don without fanfare or ceremony. The next day, he had taken his father’s car and drove it headlong into the quarry at the edge of town, barreling through the flimsy, wooden barricades and tumbling down to his cold death below. Ruby had never blinked.
Ruby’s cruelty had started early on. Once, when Jean was eight and Ruby ten, they had been coming home from the corner store, walking across the dewy, green field where all the kids played their football and baseball games. It was twilight of a summer’s evening, with everything purples and shadows. An eight or ten week old kitten had wandered into their path, mewing sorrowfully and staring up with its liquid eyes.
Jean had mentioned that she had learned in school that day that cats always landed on their feet.
“Really,” Ruby had said. Her eyes had been a little too keen in the chancy light. She had picked up the tiny kitten and flung it straight up into the air, a good fifteen or twenty feet. The cat twisted and turned before landing on the ground with a tiny thud.
“Ruby,” Jean had cried. “What are you doing?”
Ruby had ignored her, hurrying to where the kitten had fallen, running like a cat pouncing on a mouse. Again and again she flung the cat in the air, its tiny screams and struggles waning until it had finally fallen on a manhole cover with the soft bonk of flesh-covered bone on metal, mercifully dead. Jean would never forget the glazed eyes of the kitten, the blood running from one tiny nostril.
Jean had been in tears, unable to stop Ruby, who was two years older and forty pounds heavier.
“I’m going to tell,” Jean had cried, unable to grasp Ruby’s the insensate cruelty.
“You go on and tell,” Ruby had told her. “What happened to that cat could happen to you.”
It had happened again as a teenager. Ruby had a brown pit bull she named Machine. He was a good dog, the polar opposite of Ruby. Jean had a ring-necked Lorry, an expensive bird which she kept in a locked cage. Ruby constantly made fun of Jean for her choice of pet. It didn’t escape her notice the way Ruby would coldly eye the bird like a butcher measuring up the hog for Easter dinner. Jean had come home from school one day to find the cage door open, the bird gone, and blood and feathers trailing from the cage to Machine’s bed. The cage door had been securely latched. Jean had made sure of it. No way of proving it, but Jean knew what had happened. Ruby had fed her pet bird to her dog. Since that day, Jean had vowed never to have another pet.
Thinking of all that, Jean tamped down her anger and said: “I don’t know, dad. I don’t think Ruby and me were ever on the same page. But she’s gone now, and we can’t make up.”
“Ruby cared for you, Jean. She never showed it because I don’t think she knew how, but I did hear the two of you sometimes, talking late into the night, eating whipped cream and pop tarts, giggling about lipstick, mascara and teenage boys. Maybe she got so used to getting what she wanted that she decided not to share herself. But you and she weren’t always so far apart.”