Drowning Ruth

by Christina Schwarz

  I was Mathilda's maid of honor. I wished them all the happiness in the world. And then I applied to nursing school. As I had always wanted.

  Amanda peeled potatoes, dropping the finished ones into a pot of cold water so they wouldn't go gray.

  “Hungry,” Ruth said, coming to stand at her knee.

  “You should have eaten more of your breakfast, then, shouldn't you? I don't have time to be feeding you all day.”

  But when she'd done the peeling she spread a slice of bread with butter and pressed brown sugar thickly over that.

  “You sit right here and eat it, now,” she said, holding the sandwich over Ruth's head until the child scrambled onto a chair. “I don't want sugar and crumbs all over my nice clean floor.”

  “You didn't have to make such a big dinner today,” Rudy said as they sat down to pork chops and scalloped potatoes. “Carl's bound to be hungry. I could've waited.”

  “We have our big meal at noon here,” Amanda said. “He knows that.”

  “Well, for one night, I mean.”

  “I'm sure Carl wouldn't want us changing everything we do, just to suit him, Rudy.” Amanda put a piece of meat into her mouth and chewed it fiercely. “Do you have the wagon ready?”

  “Just about,” Rudy said, and he dug into his potatoes without further comment.

  When they'd finished, Rudy took the extra blankets out to the barn, and Amanda put bricks in the stove to heat. Then she called Ruth in from the yard, where the girl was tumbling in the snow, and half led her, half dragged her up the stairs to dress.

  How had the child gotten burrs in her hair in the middle of winter, Amanda marveled, as she gently picked apart Ruth's mats. Every few seconds, she couldn't resist bending close to rub her face against the girl's impossibly soft cheek, fiery red with the cold.

  And then she peeled off everything Ruth was wearing and started fresh. Clean underwear first, a cotton shirt with long sleeves, long wool stockings, three little petticoats, her best dress, and then a pinafore over that. Last night, just in time, she'd finished knitting a fancy sweater for Ruth to wear specially that afternoon. It had a cream-colored background and was studded with rosebuds of five different colors, each one a French knot. The whole thing had taken her months. She held it up now for Ruth to see.

  “Isn't it just gorgeous, Ruthie?”

  Ruth fingered a colored nub. “I like the blue ones,” she said.

  “See? They're flowers. Roses.”

  “Roses,” Ruth repeated.

  “Hold out your arm.”

  It was difficult to get the sweater on now that Ruth was so fattened with fabrics, but finally Amanda had wormed her in and she buttoned it up to the girl's chin. Ruth looked a little stiff, like a doll. “Oh, you angel!” Amanda exclaimed, giving her a squeeze.

  “Itchy.” Ruth pulled at the neck.

  “No, honey, you'll stretch it.”

  “No, itchy! It's itchy.” Ruth squirmed and stamped her foot. She began undoing the buttons.

  “Ruth, it is not itchy.” Amanda pulled the girl's fingers away from the buttons and redid the two Ruth had managed to unfasten. “Wait until you get outside. It'll be nice and warm then. You'll like it.”

  Ruth threw her head back and screamed to the ceiling. “No! Itchy!” She yanked at the collar, at the arms.

  Amanda grabbed hold of her wrist, and Ruth let her knees go limp. She hung from Amanda's hands, shaking her head wildly and kicking her heels against the floor.

  “Ruth Sapphira Neumann! Stand up! You mind me now!”

  The girl was light and compact, easy to maneuver despite her struggling. With one swift movement, Amanda drew her against her knee. She swung hard, but her hand bounced off the thick material covering Ruth's bottom. Ruth barely felt it, but the shock of being punished made her scream harder.

  “Be quiet!” Amanda shouted, louder than Ruth. “Be quiet!” And then, quite suddenly, she burst into tears herself. “Quiet.” She was weeping the words now. “Please be quiet.” Ruth looked at her with surprise. And then she, too, began to cry.

  Amanda sank to the floor beside Ruth and lifted her into her lap. She bent over her, so that Ruth fit like a snug bundle against her body, and tucked her cheek over the girl's head. “Oh, my baby,” she crooned, rocking. “My poor baby girl.”

  After a while she sniffed and sat up. The sweater had twisted. She straightened it and refastened the buttons that had come undone.

  “Come on, let's wash our faces.” Ruth stood near the basin while Amanda wiped a cold washcloth first over Ruth's face and then over her own.

  “And now I'll have to do your hair again.” Amanda lifted Ruth so that she stood on the chair in front of the vanity. There they were in the mirror, eyes swollen, hair tangled, not at all the sweet picture Amanda had envisioned earlier. For the second time in twenty minutes, she worked a brush through Ruth's snarls.

  “Do you want a bow?” It was taking a chance, asking, because Ruth had to wear one. Really, the whole outfit would be ruined if she didn't wear a bow. The blue one, of course, it would have to be the blue one. But Amanda felt sure Ruth would want it. She held it on top of Ruth's head for the girl to see. Perfect. “Now doesn't that look pretty?”

  “No.”

  Grimly, Amanda slid the pins under the ribbon anyway, securing it to Ruth's fine, dark hair.

  “Run in your room now and play while I get ready,” she said, lifting her down from the chair. To her great relief, Ruth did.

  His leg would heal, and then he would go, Amanda reminded herself, as she pulled the brush through her hair. He might promise to send money. Ruth would probably get a card now and again. And then, after a year or so, the cards would stop coming. He would have a new life somewhere, and she and Ruth would have theirs, right here where they belonged.

  Chapter Three

  From the train, Carl could see them waiting on the freezing platform, Amanda holding a little girl, his little girl it had to be, on her hip. When he stood in the doorway of the car, Amanda pointed and bent her head to the girl's ear. The girl raised a mittened hand and waved vaguely. Her eyes were on a dog with a red collar far down the platform. She might have been waving at anyone.

  He could walk only slowly, using two canes. It took a long time to make his way to them, step after faltering, unsteady step, along the platform that threatened to slide out from under him, against an icy wind that did its best to beat him back. Amanda set Ruth down, but the girl didn't run to meet him. The two of them stood like stones, waiting for him to come to them.

  “Say hello to your daddy. Can you give your daddy a kiss?” Amanda gave Ruth a little push with her palm against the back of the child's head, but Ruth shook the hand off and stepped behind her aunt's skirt.

  “My daddy is far away.”

  “Never mind, Carl,” Amanda said. “You know how children are.”

  He didn't though. He had no idea.

  In the street, Rudy was holding the horse. He shook Carl's hand and helped him into the wagon. He's relieved, Carl thought, to have another man here, and he closed his eyes for a moment under the weight of that responsibility.

  Rudy lifted Ruth and was about to swing her up and over the wagon's side to settle her in beside Carl, when Amanda stopped him with a hand on his arm.

  “Ruthie wants to sit up front with me,” she said.

  She mounted to the seat and turned, holding her arms out for her girl, and then, with a lurch they were off.

  The train blew its whistle, as the wagon was turning onto the road out of town. Carl watched the cars heave themselves away from the platform, gather speed, and finally slip smoothly away, carrying men on to St. Paul and Sioux Falls and Pocatello and Spokane. He lay back on his bed of hay and blankets and stared straight up at the dizzying pattern of branches against the darkening sky, so that he wouldn't have to witness the familiar route to the Starkey farm and think how different his homecoming might have been. Rudy looked back at him once or twice.

  “The
trip's worn him out,” he said to Amanda. “Give him a couple of days. He'll be better.”

  “Up and about in no time,” Amanda said.

  Amanda

  It was obvious right from the start that he wasn't going to be able to take care of Ruth. She didn't take to him, for one thing. I could see that right off. And he made no effort, no effort at all. He was just as I'd expected.

  Mathilda and Carl married in December, only six months after they'd met, a strange time for a wedding, people said with knowing smiles, and they were right, although they knew nothing. It never would have happened so fast if our father had been himself, if our mother had not been ill. Rumors sprang up like prairie fires, but I beat them down. People ought to have known by then that Mattie was a good girl, only impatient.

  Carl was nothing special, though, as far as I could see. He took Mathilda to all the dances, and I have to admit he was a stylish dancer, but he couldn't say two words unless the subject was horses, and he didn't have a penny saved. “You don't get married for a dance partner,” I told Mattie, but my sister was rash and stubborn. She wouldn't take advice from me. What did I know about why people got married?

  My mother was too ill to manage the ceremony, so I helped her into her pink bed jacket, and she waited, propped against the pillows, for the newly married couple to come to her.

  “Look at these flowers Carl gave me Mama,” Mathilda said, pushing the sheaf of forced lilies so close under our mother's nose that she drew her head back in alarm. “Isn't he something to get flowers like these in December?” She held the lilies before her, her elbow crooked gracefully to support their heads, posing as the bride. “Amanda,” she said to me, “run down and get a vase.”

  Mama tried to say something. She clenched and unclenched the fingers of her good hand and worked her mouth around some incoherent syllables. Finally she stretched her hand toward us. I took it.

  “What is it, Mama? What do you want?”

  But she shook her head and pulled her hand away. She reached for Carl. She meant for him to take her hand.

  “Run down and get a vase, Amanda,” Mathilda said again. “I want to leave the flowers in here for Mama.”

  On my way out of the room, I paused at the door to look back. What a pretty picture they made. Mathilda had passed the lilies to Carl, and he stood holding them for her, while he told my father how Frenchie had favored her right foreleg on the trip from town. Beside him, Mathilda, with the ringlets I'd spent hours curling with hot irons that morning falling around her face, bent to arrange her own silk scarf around our mother's throat. Apparently I hadn't dressed her warmly enough.

  I can't explain what happened next. I'm usually so careful, you see, especially with Mama's crystal. She was enormously proud of those pieces—the eleven goblets, the water pitcher, and the vase with its fluted edge. She very seldom used them. And how I wish I hadn't thought to use the vase that day, but it seemed so perfect for this special occasion.

  I planted the feet of the stool firmly, so that all four were steady, and up I climbed, until I stood on the top, and even then I had to stretch, go up on my toes a little, reach with my fingers. I had the vase securely in my hands. I know I did. But then, somehow, it was gone. I was holding nothing and with a crash that makes me sick even to think of it now, the vase hit the floor.

  They came running then, Mathilda and Carl and our father down the stairs, Rudy from the kitchen, and I stood above them on the stool and stared at my faithless fingers. I hoped, I think, that there would be blood, that I would have some hurt to excuse what I'd done, but there was none, only the points of glass spread across the floor.

  Carl began to pick up the pieces, asking if we had any glue, and Mathilda bent to help him. But I went to get the broom and pushed them aside. It was ruined. And the sooner we all realized that, the better.

  From his bed, Carl watched through the kitchen doorway as Ruth ate her bacon and turnips. He spoke once, asking her in a false, jovial voice if she liked turnips. He'd never liked them himself, he explained, going on too long, listening to his own voice as if to a stranger's. Ruth didn't answer. Instead, she turned onto her stomach and slithered down from her chair, crossed the room and shut the door between them.

  “This house is so noisy,” she said.

  Amanda scolded Ruth and hurried to open the door again, but it was funny, hearing her own words in the little girl's mouth like that. She had to smile.

  “Say good night to your daddy, Ruth,” Amanda said when the table was cleared. And when the child did not, as they both knew she wouldn't, Carl saw Amanda smile again with satisfaction, although she lowered her head to hide it.

  He listened to Ruth's steady little footfalls, two to a stair, and then to the creaks of the floorboards, the shrieks of the bureau drawers, and then he heard sobbing, a sound surprisingly different from the thin, penetrating cry he remembered rising from Ruth when she was an infant. Poor thing, with no mother to comfort her, afraid of the dark, he thought at first, but the irritating sound went on, and he pulled the pillow tight around his ears. Why didn't Amanda do something to stop it? And then he realized that Ruth was not crying at all, but laughing.

  “Again,” she shouted. “Again!”

  Amanda was upstairs a long while. He had almost fallen asleep by the time she came down and began to wash the dishes.

  “I shouldn't have let her get so wound up,” she said. “She's just like Mathilda that way, never wanting to go to sleep.”

  Carl didn't remember that about Mathilda. He remembered watching her dream in the early mornings, the way she burrowed into the blankets, so that only the top of her head stuck out, the way she flung her arm around him and held him tight without knowing she did so. But Amanda was probably right. She'd lived with her sister for almost twenty years, whereas he'd only been her husband for three, and for more than one of those they'd not even been in the same country.

  Amanda moved expertly about her kitchen, washing her dishes, putting things away, and Carl was reminded that he didn't know where things belonged.

  “Maybe Ruth and I should move back out to the island,” he suggested.

  “That's hardly practical.”

  “I guess you're right.”

  Amanda shook out her dishcloth with a snap. “We'll have you on your feet in no time.”

  “Sure,” he said, making an effort to sound hearty, to behave as if everything would be just fine very soon. “I'll be ready to work by planting.”

  Amanda blew out the lamp and the kitchen went black.

  “We'll see,” she said from the darkness.

  He listened to her steps, heavy on the stairs, and the floor creaking in her room, and finally even the mattress taking her in. And then he could hear only the wind worrying the shingles and the windowpanes.

  Amanda

  After Mathilda and Carl were married, I had to sleep in the small room off the kitchen. All winter I could hear their whispering and laughing in the night. I could hear their bed moving.

  Then they needed a house all to themselves, a house on my island, that's what Mathilda proposed. All spring and summer they worked on it, but every day they rowed back to the farm, Carl to help my father and Mathilda to visit our mother, who was much recovered by then, and to help do the chores around the house. There was no longer any need for me at all. The university had accepted my application to nursing school, and I began to pack my trunk.

  I was certainly something the day I waited on the platform in my new hat, the whole family there to see me off. They gave me presents—a silver pen from my parents, a red moroccan leather notebook from Mathilda and a bluebird house from Carl, which surprised me, because I did like birds, but you wouldn't think a boy would notice something like that. I thanked him, of course. I admired the fine workmanship and the cunning shingles set in the roof, the little shutters around the entrance, that made it look like a real house. But how did he think I'd be able to carry such a thing all the way to Madison? Where did he expect me t
o put it when I got there? I wouldn't have any split-rail fence to hang it on. I'd be lucky if I had a window to call my own.

  “I'll keep it for you,” Mathilda said.

  They stood on the platform as the train pulled away, all of them waving but my sister, whose hands were full.

  I'm not blaming them, a married couple needs a place to live, after all. Still, if they'd not built their house on my island, Mathilda would not have drowned. If you look at it one way, it's as simple as that.

  Carl didn't dream of Mathilda often, although he tried. He thought about her when he lay in bed, trying to make her appear in his sleep. Sometimes he thought about the day they'd met, how he'd taken her on the roller coaster and how she'd loved it. She wanted to ride again and again, and he'd thanked God that he had enough money to treat her over and over. He'd discovered after the first ride that he disliked the roller coaster himself—the sudden drops made him feel sick to his stomach—but it was worth it to have her clinging to his arm, to listen to her happy screams, to feel her smooth hair against his face. He would have ridden with her all afternoon had her sister, waiting grimly at the bottom, their picnic basket over her arm, not finally grown impatient.

  “Enough's enough. You always have to go too far,” Amanda had said and, wrapping her fingers tightly around Mathilda's wrist, she dragged her off, almost before he was able to say goodbye. When Mathilda turned to wave at him with her free hand before the crowd closed behind them, he congratulated himself for having the foresight an hour earlier to have asked her where she lived.

  That was what he thought about before he fell asleep, but his dreams, as usual, wouldn't be steered. They took him far from Mathilda, back to France where the gray smoke mingled with the gray fog, into the foxhole where he had been resting with Sims and McKinley, two fellows from his squad, before a blast tossed him, limbs twisted in every direction, onto the half-frozen mud like a sack of potatoes. He remembered leaving the ground but not returning to it.