by Lewis Shiner
Meanwhile, school proved not so bad in the end, and less emotionally complicated than home had become. She quickly had the run of the place. Once the girls found out who her father was, they all wanted to be friends, and the boys—well, boys were always easy.
*
When she was 8, Ruth found a den of foxes near the creek. She tried to pick up one of the kits and the mother attacked her, biting her right hand and arm.
The foxes were gone by the time Ruth took her father to the den, so she had to have rabies shots in her stomach. On their first trip to the doctor her father said, “Let that be a lesson to you. The daddy fox would probably have tried to scare you off. Females don’t kid around. They’ll fight to the death to protect their family.”
“I wasn’t going to hurt them,” Ruth said. Bandages covered her entire hand and half her forearm, the wounds aching and stinging and itching all at the same time.
“I know that, honey. That mama fox was doing the only thing she knew how to do. You don’t want to blame her too much for that.”
*
She and her father remained close, and by sixth grade, when she was 11, he would come sometimes and cuddle with her at night in the room she shared with Orpha. He had many burdens to carry, like little Orpha, who caught every disease known to man and now had tuberculosis. Ruth’s mother slept in her own bedroom and was no longer a comfort to him. When Ruth worried at first that it was not her place to be so much like a wife to him, her father assured her that it was all right.
One morning in seventh grade she got up in the night to go to the bathroom and felt blood running sticky down her legs. If there had been blood there before, that memory was now cloudy and confusing. She lay awake the rest of the night in fear, a wad of toilet paper jammed in place, sure that God was punishing her for her evil thoughts toward Orpha.
Her father had raised her to be strong and independent and not to ask too many questions. On subjects like where babies came from and why men and women were kissing on television, he referred her to her mother. Her mother’s answer had always been, “There will be time enough for you to learn about that later on,” often followed by a reading assignment from scripture.
She was afraid to tell her father and afraid to do nothing, so she went to the school nurse with a story about having seen another girl with blood there. The nurse laughed at her and gave her a belt and a box of pads and a pamphlet with line drawings in it that she could take to her “friend.” Ruth threw the book away and bought her own pads in secret on her next trip to town.
She had barely gotten used to the idea of bleeding every month when there came a month that she didn’t. Then a second month, and she was sick to her stomach, so sick, so often, that it was hard to hide. If the bleeding was bad, this was far worse, and she knew she couldn’t talk to the nurse about this.
In the end, it was her father that she told. There came a night when she was barely able to choke her supper down, breathing through her mouth and moving the food around with her fork after her first few bites. As soon as she could, she asked to go and play, and her father had found her out by the swing set, throwing up.
He was angry at first, wanting to know why she hadn’t told him about the bleeding in the first place. That had made her cry and he’d hugged her then, promising that everything would be okay and warning her that she must never, ever say a word about it to anyone, or it would mean she didn’t love him anymore.
The next Saturday they’d gone to see a doctor in Smithfield, a stranger to Ruth, though her father seemed to know him well. She’d never seen anyone look at her father the way this doctor did, as if her father had brought a bad smell into the office on his shoe. The doctor put her to sleep there on the examining table, with her father holding her hand, and when she woke up she felt sore and empty. She was bleeding again, “spotting,” the doctor called it. He said it was normal, though it didn’t sound like he meant it.
Ruth saw from the way her father held himself that she was not to ask questions, so she didn’t.
After that things were very bad for a while. The operation had gotten infected, and the doctor wanted her to go to the hospital in Smithfield. Her father refused. She was in bed for three weeks, the first week with an IV drip in her arm and a catheter down below. The pain was unlike anything she had ever known, and it changed the way she saw the world. The world she had grown up in didn’t have room for that kind of pain in it, especially not for young girls whose fathers loved and protected them.
Eventually she was able to go to school again. She told the other girls she had come down with a flu that came from Pakistan and that no one had ever had before. She also had to go back to the doctor for a checkup, which terrified her, though her father told her if she didn’t go she might get sick again. That was when the doctor told her that everything was fine now, but that she would never be able to have children of her own.
She understood that this was God’s will. That was what her father said, when she told him on the drive home. She began to harden herself to the idea, to make herself strong and not care, the way her father had hardened his heart against Orpha’s illness. It was the end of the change in her that the pain had begun. And when her father didn’t come to her anymore in the night, she hardened her heart to that as well.
*
She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t known about the men in white robes. When she was very little her older sisters had tried to tell her they were ghosts. When she repeated the story to her father, he had spanked Esther and Naomi both. The visitors were men, her father explained to Ruth, and they were also like angels. Once a month they came together to find ways to do good in the world. She should feel safe and special because they were always around her, but she should never try to talk to them or interfere with them, because when the men wore their angel robes they were very powerful, and it was dangerous to get too close.
One night after midnight she had woken to the rustling outside and gotten up to watch the angel men through the upstairs window. They flowed toward the house through the fields and the trees, silent and swift. After they had all arrived, Ruth crept down the stairs to see them all together, only to find the house empty. After that she knew that they truly were angels.
It was Orpha who spoiled the mystery, and so much else, on a Tuesday in the summer of 1953.
Orpha had learned to make her weakness her strength. Gaunt and pale as she was, no one was willing to punish her, to make her keep to the limits the other girls had to honor. She always whined one more question after being told “That’s enough,” always took up the toy she’d been told not to touch, always unwrapped the piece of candy she’d been told she couldn’t have, and did it all with a pathetic defiance, daring anyone to add to her already overwhelming misery.
The day Orpha found the staircase, Ruth was 13 and Orpha nearly 8. Their mother had gone to a church meeting, as she did more and more frequently. Their father was in the tractor shed, tinkering with one of his projects. Naomi had married and left home the year before, and Esther was with her girlfriends in town.
Ruth came in the kitchen to find Orpha standing over a bright red stain in the middle of the tile floor, a box of Rit dye open in the sink. Orpha looked up with a vacant expression, her eye sockets as black as a raccoon’s, her cheeks hollow and her jaw sagging open.
“Oh my Lord,” Ruth said. “Daddy is going to kill you.”
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. Help me clean this up.”
“That’s Rit dye. That’s not going to come up. What were you doing?”
“I wanted a red shirt. I wanted something pretty.”
Ruth opened the broom closet and got out the mop and bucket. She started to fill the bucket at the sink. “What about vinegar? Would vinegar take it up?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s some in the closet,” Ruth said. “Go look.”
As soon as Ruth started to swab the floor, the dye turned the strands of mop red as w
ell. Though it had all been Orpha’s fault to start with, now Ruth had gone and ruined the mop as well. When her father came in he would be too angry to control himself, she knew. Yet nothing would happen to poor little Orpha; nothing ever happened to poor little Orpha.
When she looked up, Orpha had emptied the entire closet onto the kitchen floor. The box of Tide was now sitting in the edge of the puddle of red dye, soaking it up into the box. Ruth moved the box and brought the stain with it onto a new part of the floor. She began to swing the mop with furious energy, and watched with horror as the dye spattered onto the wood of the lower cabinets. She ran to get a sponge to wipe the cabinets, and now the dye was on her sneakers and she was tracking it across the floor.
“Orpha!” she yelled, and eight years of frustration, jealousy, and anger went into it.
She looked up, then, and saw Orpha standing in a doorway that had never been there before, a doorway inside the closet. Orpha had turned at the sound of Ruth’s scream and in the process lost her balance. Her perpetual look of suffering and world-weariness was gone, and in its place Ruth saw shock and horror.
For the rest of her life, Ruth would go over that moment in slow motion, trying to piece the truth out of the disjointed images. When she rushed at Orpha, had she done it with fists raised and murder in her heart, willing Orpha to go backward over that threshold of darkness? Or had she stretched her fingers out trying to save her, and been too late?
She stopped when Orpha fell, that much she was sure of. And she turned and ran for her father, her voice screaming and her insides freezing cold.
*
Ruth waited in the kitchen as her father raced down the stairs, then came up carrying Orpha’s broken body in his arms. He stopped to shut the door after him, though, the inner door, the one that led to the stairs.
“Call the doctor,” he said, very quietly. “Then put everything in the pantry and close it up.”
“It was Orpha spilled the dye,” Ruth said fiercely, stubbornly. “I was only trying to clean it up.”
“This is very important,” her father said, and looked at her in a way she understood, a way that meant that this was one of their secrets. “If anyone asks, she fell down the other stairs. Do you understand? She was upstairs, and she lost her balance and fell down the big stairs.”
“Yes, Daddy,” Ruth said, and she was warm inside again and not afraid any more. “I understand.”
The ambulance took Orpha to the new Johnston Memorial Hospital in Smithfield to set her broken leg and X-ray her skull, then her father brought her home again. “If she wakes up,” her father said, “she might be okay. But she has a concussion, and for somebody as weak as she is, well, it’s not good.”
It took Orpha two days to die. Ruth’s mother sat by Orpha’s bedside in perfect stillness, not so much as holding Orpha’s hand, not reading, not praying, just sitting. Once Ruth was there when her father walked in, and her mother gave him a look she might give a piece of gristle before she scraped it into the garbage.
Ruth prayed continuously those two days for Orpha to wake up and be better. Mostly she did it in her mother’s room, where she had moved for the duration; sometimes she did it beside Orpha’s bed. Her mother ignored her, and, in the end, so did God. Ruth understood that she was being punished, and that God was not obliged to answer the prayers of sinners.
The day after Orpha died, which was two days before the funeral, some men came and put down a new floor in the kitchen. The men moved the refrigerator out into the dining room on a long extension cord, and for two days the neighbors brought them food and they ate it off paper plates. It was a terrible time; even so, Ruth’s father let her know with a wink or a squeeze of her shoulder that he was counting on her, and she thought that if her father had forgiven her, then surely God would have to as well.
In time, Ruth’s curiosity overcame her fear and took her down the hidden stairs. The room she found at the bottom was a disappointment; both for its emptiness and for the answer it gave to the riddle of the disappearing angels.
*
To her surprise, Ruth became beautiful, far more so than Esther or Naomi ever had been. She “blossomed early,” which was her mother’s way of referring to her breasts, fully formed at age 14, and to her narrow waist and shapely hips. A body and a face like Ruth’s were a curse, her mother said, a constant invitation to lasciviousness. The high-necked sweaters and long skirts her mother forced her to wear failed to help; the boys stared at her as if they could see clear through them.
Ruth had no interest in the boys at South Johnston High anyway, not even the boys who played basketball or football, the Trojans. Ruth never understood why they would name their sports teams after a brand of French letters, and it put her off the whole idea. None of these boys began to compare to her father, and the few dates she went on ended in a chaste kiss on the cheek.
*
She was in her senior year when Greg Vaughan came to live with them, taking over Esther and Naomi’s bedroom. Greg was a year younger than Orpha had been when she died. Where Orpha was weak and sickly, Greg was already as hard and self-contained as the old men who sat by the river in downtown Smithfield, pretending to fish but really just staring down the day in silent defiance. Ruth’s heart went out to this little boy who had never known a father, whose mother was now dead, who nevertheless refused to ask for anything, who accepted the smallest kindness only with difficulty, who would have slept under the porch with the dogs and never complained.
The dogs took to Greg immediately, all the animals did, and the way he treated them, with such plain affection and dignity, spoke highly of him in Ruth’s eyes. The first Christmas that he was with them, Christmas of 1958, she used her own money to buy him an AKC Certified German Shepherd pup from a breeder in Raleigh. She would never forget the way he looked at her when he realized what she’d done, the pure, strong love that shone out of his face the way it sometimes still shone from her father’s.
Greg had a hard time at school. He didn’t like being inside all day, he told her, though clearly more was at stake. Despite her attempts to help with his homework, his grades were never good. He came home with bruises and cuts, refusing to say how the fights had started.
She had a notion it might have to do with an argument she’d overheard between her parents. Ruth was in the hall when she heard her mother in her father’s bedroom, a rare event by that time.
“How long do you mean to keep your bastard here living with us?” she asked him. Her voice was quiet and hard.
“Language, Regina.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my language. It’s in the Bible. Deuteronomy, Chapter 23: ‘A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord.’ ”
“He’s just a boy, Regina. He had nothing to say about the circumstances of his birth.”
“No, you had the say over that.”
“He’s got nowhere else to go. We can afford to feed another mouth. We could feed more mouths than his. And should, if we really listened to that Book you’re always quoting.”
“What am I to make of that? Am I to be grateful you didn’t force me to take in his harlot of a mother as well? How many more bastards have you sown across the county, black and white?”
“That’s enough, Regina. The boy stays. That’s final.”
Ruth barely made it to her room before she heard the crisp cadence of her mother’s heels descending the stairs. A few seconds later her car pulled away with a spurt of gravel.
I have a brother, Ruth thought. She held this new secret tight inside her, her childhood wish come true.
*
Esther and Naomi had both left home as soon as they graduated high school, Naomi marrying a gawky boy with glasses who couldn’t believe his luck, Esther winning a scholarship to a teacher’s college in Kansas that no one knew she’d applied for.
Ruth was not about to run away. She was torn, though, between a
desire to spend the rest of her life on the farm and the hope of finding a man of her own, a man like her father, but less inclined to harlots. She persuaded her father to send her to Meredith College, a girl’s school with an impeccable reputation.
She made good grades, and still found time to meet the cream of Raleigh society and report back to her father on Sunday afternoon. Meredith, he decided, was not such a bad investment after all. On one occasion he had Ruth tell the daughter of a former Raleigh millionaire, now strapped for cash, to have her father get in touch. On another, he was able to help the owner of a large sausage factory in Columbus County deal with his labor problems. It was her father’s love of sports that made Ruth approach radio personality Randy Fogg. Though she found him personally repellant, she convinced Fogg to come to the farm for her father’s sake.
In what seemed an act of impossible daring, she learned to play contract bridge. Her mother believed playing cards were engraved invitations to Hell, conceived in witchcraft and propagated by confidence men, idlers, and fools. Ruth was fascinated by the coded communications between the players and the speed with which she was able to master the strategy. She refused to play for money, and quickly discovered duplicate bridge, which removed the factor of luck.
Her second rebellion was a ballroom dancing class—once she’d made sure that her mother would not find out. The men at the Friday night dances were more than willing to help her with her moves. These were far better-looking men than the Trojans from high school, with sleek cars, spicy colognes, and Brooks Brothers suits they bought on trips to New York. On more than one occasion she’d been tempted to let one of them have what he wanted so badly, just to see what it might be like, knowing there was no danger of getting pregnant. Still she held out, knowing she was waiting for something, not knowing exactly for what.
Robert proved to be the answer.