Ruby River

by Lynn Pruett

  THE LADIES OF THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY RESURRECTION

  They’d been had. They looked terrible on TV. Stelle appeared marvelous and talked of walking the right path. She hadn’t walked. She had ridden. How stupid did she think they were? It was too hot to go to church this evening. The aerobics teacher had started it all with those talks of the benefits of walking. Yes. And then the business of hydration. Yes. And the importance of a variety of exercises. Yes. No more workouts for them. But there was guilt. It was a habit. They went to the evening service.

  Jewell Miller smiled at Hattie’s victory but she felt a twinge, like a loose tooth hanging by a thread, only it was hanging somewhere in her midsection, close to the ribs. She always rooted for the little guy and especially for the little gal, but Hattie Bohannon was not little. She towered over Jewell. Ha! The thread snapped. Jewell had something Hattie wanted very badly. She still had some power.

  RICHARD REYNOLDS

  The night after the protest, Richard and Ann lay under a cotton sheet, listening to the air conditioner purr. They’d gone to church, though Ann had chosen to sit in the back and had not touched him the whole time. It was as if he were a leper in his own house. The men at church had kept their distance since his confession as well, though business was continuing as if he was still in the Wheel of Gratitude. He’d given Baker Thomas the planks he’d wanted at discount and had floated the idea of investing in a slaughterhouse past his father, who owned a good head of beef. Business was as usual, but what he missed was more important.

  Seated in the pew, it had been difficult to listen to the minister chortle over the ladies’ march on the truck stop without being aware of the hard set of Ann’s eyes. Her breath had grown fast as the minister gloated in detail about the women and children eating all the free ice cream, taking what was given by the Lord. In His service, they had been hungry and thirsty, and the Lord had provided them with nourishment when their own hands were empty.

  As he lay listening for Ann’s breath, which he could not hear, he felt a deep pang. It was a dance, a lullaby, sweetness he had been seeking, not raucous sex. But he had misjudged everything. He had let a young girl fall in love with him and then betrayed her with a confession that turned her into something she was not. Something he was not. But for Ann it was better that Jessamine was a prostitute—because there could not have been love.

  He lay still. The sheet was moving almost imperceptibly with her breath, a gentle rise and fall across his belly. That small motion connected them. He quieted his thoughts and became aware of all the places the sheet brushed his body. His knees and ankles felt the breath of the sheet. It was so soft and mild a touching. Soon his privates welcomed the gentle caress. He thought of rose petals, pale pink ones, and Ann’s puckered lips when they’d first kissed and of the promises she had given him.

  He wanted to show Ann he loved her. He knew their journey would be hot and difficult, but somewhere on the horizon was a lush jungle paradise. He touched her shoulder, his hand cupping the bones in an exact fit. Ann turned, receiving his touch. Her body was strangely new to him. It was not as firm as Jessamine’s and it lacked that insane, he now thought, jackrabbit anxiety. He ran his hands down her hips, feeling her softness as if for the first time. He placed his hand on the scar. It was hard and pebbly. He tenderly massaged it with his fingertips and, surprising himself, kissed it, then ran his tongue along it as if it were still a breast. And then he turned his attention to the remaining breast. Its nipple was raised. Something rose inside him. Joy.

  III

  DARLA BOHANNON

  Darla stayed home from school. Classes were a joke these days, wasted in planning the prom, and who wanted to go to that anyway? She wasn’t going to dress up like a soap-opera star and let some guy with pimples try to unsnap her bra. Mama had just sighed and said, “Senioritis?” Darla was waitressing instead, picking up extra money from Gee and Haw, who gave her fifty cents every time she asked a local who they’d voted for in the primary.

  The morning passed quickly. At lunchtime, Jewell Miller came in and ordered a large plate of fish and fries. Carrying the food, Darla sashayed between the crowded tables, in and out of high-decibel conversations, and tripped over Jewell’s carry-along stool. The fish and fries slid toward the edge of the plate. Her left hand blocked them and got greasy and burnt. She expected Jewell to chew her out. The old woman never took any slop.

  But Jewell merely smiled as she shook out her paper napkin and laid it on her lap.

  “Do you need anything else?” Darla congratulated herself for remembering to ask. She’d been forgetting.

  “This fish looks very crispy. Often when I come in the food is undercooked.” She crunched a triangle of fish between two fingers. “Often I get that waitress over there.” She nodded her head in Connie’s direction and continued without lowering her voice. “She’s usually hungover. A shame for such a young girl, but since her mother owns the place… .” She waved her fork in a small circle as if to say Ta-ta.

  “That’s my sister.” So this is what Connie and Mama meant when they said Jewell was a crank, Darla thought, as she cleared the next table and pocketed three quarters sitting in a pool of melted ice. Darla spied on Jewell because she was fascinated by her life. During World War II, Jewell had gone to Europe as a code cracker. It was easy for Darla to imagine the old woman, now intent on her fish, her hands neatly splitting the crust and checking the white meat for bones, steaming open an envelope and deciphering chicken scratches scrawled in a foreign language. But it was hard to imagine that the old face had ever captivated her father. There were deep lines across her forehead and her cheeks fell sharply from her large round cheekbones. Jewell and Daddy had dated way back in the 1940s. One story he had enjoyed telling about Jewell was hearing her holler from the passenger seat as his car zoomed down Raider’s Hill after the brakes gave out. He said he’d laughed the whole way while he steered them toward the grassiest grade of the bank so that they slipped gently, like a kiss, into the murmuring creek.

  Darla had seen the old road and marveled how any car could have come down the sandstone banks without catapulting into a wreck. But she believed Daddy had done it because he’d said so, and he said Jewell had been with him. Darla longed to ask Jewell about it and more. Was it true she had refused to muster out after the war when the government wanted an all-male army again? Was it true she fought them so well all they could do was transfer her to out-of-the way places like Alaska, Guam, and Ghana? Darla wiped the table clean, trying to get her nerve up. Was it true she had left Maridoches and knew secrets of the world?

  When Darla’s break came, she walked down the hall toward her mother’s office. Her hair was matted with sweat against her neck. No matter how much she tried to rehearse giving her mother the news about joining up, she always broke fresh sweat. Her voice in her mind became tinny and thin. The door was not shut and she could hear them talking, her mother and Paul Dodd.

  A surge of anger pushed her forward. She’d march in and butt him out of the way. Just as she reached for the doorknob, she heard her mother say, “Darla,” and him laugh loudly—“Darla!”—as if Mama was a silly goose. She paused outside the door, listening hard.

  “I knew you were overreacting,” he said. “She took off for fun. Kids do it all the time.”

  “She is not given to that kind of fun,” said Mama. “And neither am I.”

  He laughed again. “Oh, I think I know what kind of fun you like.”

  Darla felt shame over something unnamed but she could not walk away from the door. Smite him dead, Mama, she thought. Smite the jerk to kingdom come.

  “I am not inclined to have that kind of fun again until the damned Army returns my husband’s ashes,” said Mama.

  “That’s a mighty tall order to lay on a man who’s not in the Armed Forces,” said Paul Dodd.

  “Let’s see how tall a man you are,” she said.

  Relief slid over Darla as she sneaked up the hall to the kitchen. She watched
Gert hammering cube steaks and imagined giving her mother Daddy’s remains at the same time she announced her news. Back in the dining room she bussed a few tables and picked up a two-dollar tip left by Jewell Miller, the one person in Maridoches who could help her.

  That evening, Darla practically ran Jewell over with the VW as the older woman emerged from her apartment complex and disappeared into a thicket. Darla leapt from the car and followed her. Briars snagged her sweatpants. She tripped into a grassy field, where a barely perceptible path headed downhill. Huffing sounds encouraged her descent. She saw a straw hat ahead. “Hey, hey, Jewell Miller, wait for me!”

  “I will not wait. If you want to talk to me, come along.” The hat sank to a lower level.

  Darla slid down the muddy path into trees, as if she were a slalom skier supposed to bang into the lane markers, not skirt them. When she arrived at flat land, Jewell was not in sight. If the wind would quit, Jewell’s footsteps could be heard. Darla rested. Nothing. She jogged ahead on leaves as crunchy as breakfast cereal. There—the hat moved among a copse of leatherwoods. Darla circled a ganglia of branches and spied Jewell, close now, marching forward, a carved walking stick hacking a path out for her one-speed body.

  “Hey!” Darla jumped in front of her, then ducked to avoid the swinging stick. She fell hard on her knees in cracked mud. Jewell kept walking. “Hey, I want to talk to you.”

  “I will not slow down, so come on.” She disappeared behind some white hairy grass.

  Darla jogged beside her. “I’m Darla Bohannon.”

  “I know who you are. Your mother just beat the minister at his game. Body versus spirit. Ice cream versus moral superiority. It was not a surprise to me. Your mother’s body always wins.”

  “I know about my mother,” Darla muttered, and pushed back the thought of Sheriff Dodd teasing Mama in the office. “Will you tell me about my father?” she called as she fell behind. Jewell’s path took her between twin loblolly pines.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know if he’s dead.”

  “Your mother can tell you that.” Jewell’s gait became jerky.

  “I mean, I think he’s alive.” A small hill appeared and disappeared without changing Jewell’s breathing. Darla’s lungs stretched toward her lower ribs.

  “Why do you believe such a fool thing as that?”

  “Because we’ve never gotten his body from the VA.”

  “What?” Jewell wheeled around sharply, decapitating a dozen cattails.

  For a second, she thought she’d stopped Jewell, but only a second as the old woman paced away back up the path they’d come. She limped visibly but moved fast.

  “Mama got a telegram when he died, but they never sent him back to us.”

  “In the Army, mix-ups are not uncommon.” Jewell cocked her head as she passed the loblollies. A tight chin strap secured the hat to her head. “Your father had a drinking problem.”

  “What?” Darla crossed her arms over her forehead and prepared for the leatherwood assault. Maybe Jewell was as crazy as Mama said.

  “Your father would have been a fine man if he hadn’t liked his liquor.” She slashed a path through a rhododendron hedge. “But you seem to have a bit of discipline and determination in your soul.”

  “I don’t remember Daddy drinking.”

  “The closet kind are the most dishonest.”

  The briary path loomed ahead. Without losing a stride, Jewell snapped her collapsible walking cane down to a height of six inches and hung it on her belt. Quick as a monkey, she leapt from branches to stones and roots until she disappeared up the hill. Darla caught up with her in the parking lot.

  Breathing hard, Jewell rested on the stairs. She rolled up her pant leg and removed a hard rubber disk and three cotton pads shaped like half-moons. Darla remembered the amputated leg and felt her own knees buckle.

  “I never slow down when I’m out walking. Never. Rain or ice. I never give up. In the very cold winter, I do it barefoot.”

  “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “It hurts with an intense pain that you have never ever felt.”

  “Then why do it?”

  “Because I am strong. I can take it.” She flexed her artificial shoe. “Your father and I used to roam these hills back when I had two whole legs. No man loved the lands of Maridoches more than he did. Actually, that’s why he and I split up.” Jewell wiped sweat from her forehead. “But you can’t be too young to know about sex.”

  Darla shook her head, impressed with her self-control.

  “Quite frankly, I would not grovel in the mud. Your mother, however, had no qualms about using the forest floor as a bed. Which was your father’s style.”

  Her entire body blushed for Mama. She could feel her toes grow hot. Jewell was crazy, a crazy liar. The dried mud on Darla’s clothes weighed against her skin, smelling of truth she tried to deny. She drove home in a blur of browned pines and pale grasses. When she got home, the sheriff was on the porch. She didn’t even say hello.

  CONNIE BOHANNON

  “So, sheriff, what’s eating you?” I say, as a way of taking his order. He’s alone, without his squad, and I already know he wants country-fried steak and greens with vinegar and bitter tea.

  He looks at me carefully—like, Can he trust me?—and I stand there as blank and friendly as I can look. “Did your mother truly love your daddy?”

  “Sure,” I say, without thinking. I’d never considered it before.

  “She’s still hung up on him. It interferes with her present life.”

  “That surprises me,” I say, considering how public she’d gotten in the past year. Before Daddy went away, she stayed at home taking care of us. “She’s happy now. Happy to be seeing you. It’s the only thing she’s happy about.” I think awhile longer. “Maybe you’re a little scary.”

  He laughed. “Evidently I am. But seriously, she has asked me, in not so many words, to help get the ashes returned. Then she’ll have to decide if the past or the future matters the most.”

  I fell silent thinking of the ashes out there somewhere in the world. And Mama, as she waited for them to come, keeping Sheriff Dodd at arm’s length, holding the future away. I wondered how Sheriff Dodd could find those ashes when Mama couldn’t. It seemed an impossible task she had laid on him. But that is Mama, in love with the impossible.

  DARLA BOHANNON

  On the third day she skipped school, Darla came down from her room and went outside when her mother called her. She’d felt strange for a long time now, as if her secret was a kicking baby in her stomach, eager to be born. Somehow she figured Mama knew what she’d done. Mama was in the front yard, hanging laundry on a clothesline that Sheriff Dodd had strung up to screen the house from the truck stop. As if the ladies of the church could be stopped by white sheets.

  Darla picked up a pin and clamped it on a corner of Mama’s bedspread. Sheriff Dodd was mowing the grass. Their conversation proceeded in fits and starts depending on his proximity.

  Mama secured the other end. “Jake Hiler called to see if I wanted to run an ad in the yearbook. I know you despise him, but did you see the paper this morning?”

  Darla shook her head.

  “Where our ad used to be is a big blank square. Somebody paid for that and it’s intentional, as if I’ve been wiped out of existence. And the Bible quotes under the other ads were all pointed at women: The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children: Lamentation 4:10. And Give not thy strength unto women, nor thy ways to that which destroyeth kings, from Proverbs.”

  “Jake Hiler doesn’t let girls run on his track team,” said Darla.

  “I need all the local advertising I can get.” Dodd’s lawn mower followed an elliptical path around the line, with three small jags to the right for Hattie, Darla, and the laundry basket.

  “Don’t get grass on my sheets!” Mama yelled.

  Darla pulled the clothespin from her mouth and attached a pair of pale blue boxer shorts,
her pajamas, to the line. It was strange to listen to Mama and not get all uptight about the truck stop or even Coach Hiler. “I don’t care about track anymore,” she said, startling herself with the truth of her statement. “I joined the Army.”

  “You are not joining the Army.” Mama flapped the pillowcase she’d dropped. “The Army took Oakley, and he’s still not back.”

  “Jewell Miller came home.”

  “With half a leg.” Mama viciously pinned the pillowcase.

  “That was wartime and it hasn’t slowed her down. I’ve been running with her and she’s fast.”

  “Jewell Miller runs?”

  “No, she doesn’t run. She walks an eight-minute mile, which is a lot faster than most two-legged people can run.” Darla flopped white socks across the empty line like she was slapping paint on a fence. Mama followed, sticking a pin in the middle of each sock.

  “In the Army, you get to travel and do stuff like spying. Daddy said one time Jewell carried electric wires in her suitcase rolled up like hair curlers. She told the French inspector she wanted to look like Betty Grable and he tried to pinch her but he let her pass. They used the wires to set up a wireless in Normandy to get messages from London. Jewell got seasick on the English Channel.”

  “How fascinating,” Mama said. “But, Darla, you have a problem with authority, and in the Army if you don’t respect authority you earn nothing but grief.”

  “In the Army there’s discipline, and I think that’s a virtue.” She reached into the basket and was mortified to find her white hip-hugger underwear on top of the pile. She bunched them up and stuck the wet ball in her pocket. Next were Connie’s bikinis, which she squished into the other pocket. She blushed, knowing Sheriff Dodd was within feet of their undergarments.

  “Jewell has really been filling your head with bunk, hasn’t she?” They were on the third and final cord of the clothesline.