Inside, Sister Eleanor sang her psalms. Holding my fate. When Sister Eleanor stopped singing I went inside and closed the screen door quietly behind me. “I’m back.”
I found her in the side room where she did her work. She sat upright in a hard chair digitizing records for the Library of Congress. She didn’t turn or talk or slow down her work. She had the gift of being single-minded.
I walked over and stood behind her shoulders, rubbing the palms of my healing hands together. When they were warmed up I slowly placed them on top of her head. The wimple was between my hands and her bald head, of course, but plain fabric couldn’t stop the miracle of healing.
Type type type, she continued, then paused. Type … type, stop.
“Girl, what in heaven’s name are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I said. “But I don’t see how you can really do nothing. Nobody can. If I did absolutely nothing I’d be dead.” Then I stopped short wondering if she was afraid her cancer would kill her.
“Stop that babbling,” she said. “If there’s one thing I’ve been trying to teach you, it is only speak when you have something to say.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean to—”
“Is somebody else in control of that mouth?”
She was right; my mouth was mine alone.
“Now I will ask you again, what in heaven’s name are you doing putting your hands on my head—”
“Healing?” I asked. Even though it was the answer, I felt safer saying it as a question.
Aunt Eleanor turned her head and looked at me like I had broken into her house. She stared me down until I squirmed.
Finally she asked, forming each word slowly, “Have you been snooping in my personal things?”
My mind tumbled down into itself.
“I’m sorry. I was sitting in the pantry when I saw you at the sink. I saw your bald head. Then I saw your cancer books.”
“And you didn’t think to ask me, directly?”
The thought had never crossed my mind.
“Don’t you feel safe yet, Ruby Clyde … Henderson?” And when she said my last name, I knew I was caught.
She stood up abruptly and I shrank away.
Was my life in Paradise over?
She reached out and took my shoulders firmly in her hands and waited. I couldn’t look away. Time passed and soon our breathing matched one another. Inhale, exhale, and again, slowly. I was so tired of holding on to life all by myself.
“It seems,” she finally said, “that we’ve both been keeping secrets.”
I felt it before I heard it. She would keep me.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“Ruby Clyde, I grew up looking at your mother. You look exactly like Barbara did at twelve years old.”
Barbara? I wasn’t used to hearing Mother called “Barbara.” Mean Grandmother always called her “Babe.” The Catfish called her “Babe.” Everybody called her “Babe.” “Barbara” sounded so … grownup.
Eleanor kept on. “Even if your friend Angie hadn’t told Frank, I would have known the instant I laid eyes on you.”
I was too relieved to be cross with Angie for telling my secret. “And you didn’t hate me?” The shame of causing their strangeness flooded over me.
“How could I hate you, child, I only just met you.”
I was so wrong about everything. All that wasted time but I had nothing to fear. She didn’t blame me. She wouldn’t send me to an orphanage. Eleanor was family and Paradise Ranch was home to me and Bunny. I hung my head and whispered, “You must think I’m stupid.”
“Far from it, Ruby Clyde. Every day I have admired your courage and I have waited patiently for you to trust me. I couldn’t just tell you to trust me. You had to find it yourself.”
And the astonishing thing is that she was absolutely right. Trust had snuck up on me. For the first time in my life, I trusted an adult. It is weird to get something that you need so badly and didn’t even know was missing.
That spastic muscle let go—the one that had gripped my heart when I woke up at the Hot Springs campsite. I could breathe again. My lungs were like dusty closets suddenly open to the sun. Home. I was so relieved that I almost fainted. And for a brief moment, I forgot that Eleanor Rose had cancer.
TWENTY
As it turned out, Sister Eleanor had been going down to Austin to take care of my mother, her sister. So, all that time I’d been too afraid to tell her who I was, imagining that waiting was all that Mother needed, was not wasted. Eleanor Rose had been taking care of things without me. That was the oddest feeling, having someone like her in charge.
The first morning we went down to see Mother, Eleanor got real bossy about my clothes. “Put on the khaki skort, please.” She crossed her arms over her chest and blocked my exit at the base of the stairs.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because, how you dress matters,” said the same woman who was standing there covered from head to toe in fabric. “Go!” She pointed one long arm up toward my bedroom and waited. I turned slowly and plop plop plopped back up the stairs, the very same stairs I had practically skipped down because I was so excited about going to see my mother.
Aunt Eleanor followed me, saying to hurry up, it was an hour drive to town. So I scrambled into the khaki skort, stretched into a fresh blue blouse with stupid buttons, then stepped back into my cowboy boots. I thought she was going to protest, but I stuck out my chin and defied her. She shrugged.
“The hair is not negotiable,” she said, and snatched up a brush and ran it through my hair.
“Ouch!” I pulled away. But she kept at it until every hair was stuck to my head.
She reached to clip a bow in my hair but I said no, no, no. “Bows are not negotiable. I’m a cowboy hat kind of girl.”
“Fine,” she said. “Wear the hat if you must, but the guns stay here.”
“I need my—” I began, but she cut me off with that hand chop she used to shut me up fast.
“They have no sense of humor about guns in the courthouse, toys or not.”
During the drive I asked her about her cancer. It was blunt, I know, but since we were all about shedding secrets I needed to know. And I worried about who would take care of me if something happened to her. After all, feeling safe and secure at Paradise Ranch was a brand-new feeling and I didn’t want to lose it.
“Are you going to die?” I asked.
“Sure I am,” she said. “We all are.”
“No, I mean…”
“I know what you mean, Ruby Clyde. And the answer is—I do not know. I’ve had surgery and chemotherapy and radiation. I’ve responded well but I’m not cancer free yet. These things take time.”
More of that time thing, I thought.
I was about worn out with everything taking time, but I wasn’t on the committee that set up this crazy world. Sometimes you just have to believe what you need to believe. Right then, she was well enough to take care of me and my mother, and that was that.
When we got to town, Aunt Eleanor knew where to go. She drove her blue van into a parking lot downtown. We entered through a gate that lifted all by itself. After taking a ticket she drove around and around to about the third floor before she found an empty place large enough for her van. Some of the spots we passed were marked COMPACT but those weren’t for us.
As she turned off the ignition, I imagined seeing Mother in a few short minutes.
“Is Mother okay?” I asked.
“Well, she’s in jail…” she said, and I felt foolish.
We walked out of the parking lot, across the street, and into a tall shiny building with at least ten floors.
“This is a jail?” I thought jails were big castles with armed guards in watch towers. Not a big swanky building in town with people coming and going wearing suits and high-heel shoes.
“The jail is over there.” She pointed to another building, which wasn’t as fancy, but it didn’t look like a jail either.
&nbs
p; “Why aren’t we going there? I want to see Mother.” I skidded back on the heels of my boots.
“Ruby Clyde,” she said. “We don’t have time for this. Joe Brewer is your mother’s lawyer. He is waiting for us. He is taking us to see your mother. It’s the only way both of us can see Barbara. He has gotten special permission from the sheriff for us to have a face-to-face visit.”
She dragged me a little bit until I heeled along beside her.
“And mind your manners,” she said. “Joe Brewer is a court-appointed defender and he is doing everything humanly possible to help us.”
I’d never heard of a court-appointed defender before. It sounded like a comic book hero. I later found out that in Austin, the court-appointed defenders are regular attorneys who are paid by the court to represent people who can’t afford an attorney. A court-appointed defender fights for the criminals, or in Mother’s case, the innocent people accused of crimes. Then the lawyers trying to put them in jail for breaking the law are called prosecutor, district attorney, or assistant district attorney.
Aunt Eleanor rushed me into an elevator just as the doors were closing. “Eight please,” she said to a perfect stranger just because he was standing closer to the buttons. Once we were off the elevator the big wooden doors were right there. I thought we should knock but Aunt Eleanor walked right in. That seemed rude to me, but she did it.
The front room of the lawyer’s office was fancy, with artwork on the walls, three chairs, a sofa, a hundred magazines, and a large desk with a lady on the telephone, if you can call it that. It was a wire thing that wrapped around her head and hovered in front of her mouth. She punched a few buttons to send the call along and said into her microphone, “Sister Eleanor is here.”
I perched on the edge of a chair and said, “Hey, she knows you. You didn’t tell her your name but she called you Sister Eleanor.”
“I told you, Ruby Clyde, that how you dress matters. When I walk around in this habit people remember me. It’s all they see. They see this outfit and they call me Sister Eleanor. It could be Sister Joan bringing you in here but they wouldn’t know it. They would call her Sister Eleanor. I’ll tell you a secret. If you ever want to rob a bank, wear a big red wig, the wig will be all they will remember when they try to describe you.”
I believed she was right about everything, but not about getting mixed up with Sister Joan. Nobody would forget Sister Joan’s big caterpillar eyebrows.
Just then a man walked out. “Sister Eleanor,” he said, sticking out his hand. He wore a stiff white shirt collar and a necktie so tight I couldn’t stop staring at it. His face was wide and friendly, wise—like a tall version of that little Yoda thing from Star Wars. He turned to me and said, “Hello, young lady,” and shook my hand too. I liked that already. “I am Joe Brewer. You must be Ruby Clyde Henderson.”
Joe Brewer led us down a hall, past a library and a room where people were screaming at each other. He took us into an office with a glass door, which he closed. I sat down right next to his desk and leaned in to talk quietly. “Is it true you are going to take me to see my mother, right now in a minute?”
He smiled. “Yes, right now in a minute, but first I thought you might have some questions.” He tilted his head and waited.
Questions, I thought. I had so many questions they were leaking out my ears.
My questions spilled out. “What’s a lawyer? How did you get to be one? And what do you do that we can’t do ourselves?”
He didn’t smile. But I could tell he wanted to. The corners of his lips tipped up, then he made them stop. “I’ll answer those important questions one at a time.”
He proceeded to tell me that a lawyer was a person who studied the law. He had graduated from college, gone to three years of law school, and practiced law for ten years.
I wondered about a man who practiced anything for ten years. Had he never gotten good enough to just do it?
It was like he read my mind because he let himself smile and said, “Practice is working at the job of law. Which brings me to what I can do that you cannot. I am licensed to go into court to represent your mother. You cannot do that. I am trained to handle all of the paperwork and procedures before trial. I also know the law, which is vast and confusing to untrained people. And I know exactly how to behave in court. Court is a formal and solemn place. It is a place where we try to determine the truth. Justice and truth.”
“That’s all fine and good,” I said. “But why does Mother even need to go to court? What is her crime?”
“Armed robbery,” he said simply, and let that settle.
“But, she didn’t—” I started.
“Let him finish, Ruby Clyde,” Aunt Eleanor said sharply and I settled down.
“Your mother has been arraigned where she entered a plea of not guilty, and was indicted by the grand jury who heard from the owner of the Okay Corral Gas and Food Mart. She has a right to go to trial sometime within the next 180 days. At trial, the district attorney will try to prove to a jury that your mother committed armed robbery with her boyfriend. After that I will present her side of the story. I will attempt to show that she is innocent of the charges. Then the jury will render their verdict. Guilty or not guilty.”
“Will you win?” I asked.
“I can’t make any promises but I am very good at my job. I can promise to do my best.”
I didn’t want his best. I wanted truth and justice for my mother. But he seemed the only path to get there.
I said, “But it was all the Catfish, what’s happening to him?”
“The Catfish?” He tilted his head again.
“Carl,” I spat. “The no-count boyfriend who dragged me out of bed while I was asleep and tried to take us to Hollywood.”
Mr. Joe Brewer listened and nodded slowly, thinking. I didn’t ever remember being listened to so completely, so when he asked me to tell him my story, I told him how I went to sleep at home and woke up at the campsite, how we rode the Duck boats in Hot Springs. I must say he looked right amazed when I told him about freeing Bunny the Pig from the IQ Zoo. I meant to tell him the whole entire story, every bit of it, but I choked on Gus Luna and his gun. I felt complicit—Wordly Wizard!—by not protesting, and I had even encouraged the Catfish to use that gun in the rescue operation. I skipped some of that part and went on to the robbery at the Okay Corral. His eyes softened when I told him about being in the middle of all that shooting and thinking they were going to catch me and put me in the orphanage. But then like an angel from God, Angie had appeared.
“You’re very brave,” he said.
“It’s all the Catfish’s fault.” My chest was tight with fury. “He’s the one and only criminal.”
“And that is what I will try to prove in court. The Cat … Carl—you’ve got me calling him the Catfish—will have a separate trial. The evidence against him is strong. I don’t think any attorney could get him off. He’s going to stand trial alone. And for what it’s worth, your mother wants nothing further to do with him.”
“That’s the best news I’ve ever heard,” I said.
Finally, Joe Brewer looked at his watch and said, “Okay, are you ready to go see your mother?”
“Am I?” I yelled.
“I take that as a yes.” He stood up and straightened his tie. Aunt Eleanor smoothed her habit, and out we went.
TWENTY-ONE
We walked along the busy downtown street and crossed at the light to the big building where they kept people waiting for trial. It was attached to the court building, Mr. Joe Brewer said. And we would have to go through security.
“You left your guns at home?” He was teasing me but I didn’t see the joke. And I wondered how he knew I had cap guns and had, in fact, left them at home. Then I realized I had on my empty holsters.
Joe Brewer got to walk right through security, everybody in the building knew him. He was famous or something.
Eleanor and I had to stop and walk through a big Xerox machine. It’d beep if
you had car keys or guns. If you got beeped, the guard yelled, “Wand,” and another one pulled you to the side and ran a wand all around your body looking for weapons and bombs. If you were carrying anything suspicious, you had to run it through another machine that could see right through things. One lady had all kinds of stuff in her purse. You could see it all in reverse shadows on the little TV screen: pens, lipstick, pacifier, notepad, sandwich, pill bottle. It all looked like skeleton bones.
When it came time for me to walk through the machine, I balked. I didn’t want people seeing right through me. I didn’t want them seeing my bones. But Aunt Eleanor, who had walked through first, reached back, grabbed my arm, and dragged me through. With that, I made it just fine. They didn’t even pull me over and wand me.
Then we were allowed inside. Joe Brewer clipped on a plastic tag that said ATTORNEY. Mine and Aunt Eleanor’s said VISITOR.
The thought of seeing my mother again made me shaky all over. Walking down the hall, I braced myself. My cowboy hat hung down my back; I licked my hands and flattened my hair off my forehead, even flatter than when Aunt Eleanor had yanked at the tangles.
When we got into that visiting room Eleanor looked back and forth between the guard and the door. “Does that door really need to be locked? I mean, we are not the criminals, now are we?”
“Har, har,” the guard said.
It was horribly hot in the jail. There was a soapy smell too, like the body odor of people who work in car washes on hot summer days.
Suddenly keys jangled at the door and it opened. Mother stepped inside. I looked down at my boots and then slowly raised my face to look at her. Her eyes did that thing I love. She opened her arms and I fell into them.
“Oh, baby,” she said. “You’re safe.”
I nodded my head into her chest. She didn’t smell like Mother, she smelled like car wash.
“Are you happy?” she asked. “Eleanor says your pig is happy on the ranch.”
Almost Paradise Page 8