Ruby River

by Lynn Pruett

  “Is the answer hunting done at night?”

  Paul smiled again, using his friendly I-gotcha voice. “Night hunting is a crime.”

  I nudged Paul. This was supposed to be a family event, not official business.

  “Get off the horse, sheriff,” Connie said. “Your badge is no good here.”

  “I think I need to find something else to drink, in the house,” said Paul, and he walked away from me. So there was going to be shit to get through. Everybody was tense. I volunteered to help Darla but she said the bonfire was done. Connie was off smoking behind the shed. Troy Clyde asked Darla what kind of starter fluid she was using and then argued that newspapers soaked in vegetable oil would never create enough combustion. I picked up two glasses of Mountain Dew and walked toward the house.

  When I reached the porch, I could see Mama and Paul through the living room window. Alternating sips, I drank from both glasses. I watched Paul and Mama argue. They were doing a dance but probably didn’t know it. Mama would pick up a newspaper article—our wedding announcement—read it, and drop it like a handkerchief on the coffee table. He’d scoop it up and follow as she turned the corner. She’d spin around, take it back, read it again, step away from him into the center of the room. Again and again, arguing all the while.

  Mama looked best when she argued. Her face seemed collected, all her features aimed at one purpose behind that blue stare I had not inherited. Only Connie’s eyes were as blue. Paul’s face was hard too, but his eyes didn’t have the usual reading-them-their-rights look. No, there were sparks. I put the glasses down on the porch rail and balled my hands into fists.

  Mama glanced at me in the window, ran to the front door, threw it open, and grabbed me in her arms. “Jessamine, I missed you,” she said.

  I stood stiff as a board. She hugged me very close. There was a barrier in my chest that was big and heavy, and my heart was on the other side of it. I could hear her words, understand them, but they could not reach my heart or unlock the fence around it. It was strange to have wanted this for so long and then not to be able to accept it.

  “Is Paul Dodd treating you well?” she asked, releasing me.

  I blushed and nodded.

  “Go in and get the cake,” she said. “It’s in the kitchen.”

  It was a yellow sheet cake with coconut icing, my favorite. I slid my hand under the cool glass serving tray and lifted it, the smells bringing back long-ago birthdays, when we were small and Daddy was here, laughing and relighting the candles as many times as we wished, until they burned down to nubs. Cigarette burns on the frosting, Mama had always said. Today we’d do that. For us and for Heather to know that part of our family history.

  I scrounged around for candles and found a box in the drawer with the rubber gloves and new sponges. How many? It didn’t matter. All of them. We’d need all of them to burn away the bad air, to get clean to the surface and start anew.

  We ate our fill and everyone was pleasant, although there was one more tense moment between Troy Clyde and Paul. Troy Clyde acted like he was the bull goose of our family, and it bothered him that my husband was both his age and the law.

  Troy Clyde asked me where I was working. My mouth was full of mashed potatoes so Paul answered.

  “I don’t know that I like my wife to be working,” he said. “It would keep her from getting the housework done.”

  Darla stuck her finger in her throat and mocked a gag.

  “I reckon you had the time to do the housework before you married. Where did all that time go?” Mama said, filling Heather’s cup with water.

  He glared at her. “Do you really want me to answer that?”

  She cracked her jaw and blushed. Troy Clyde slid around the table and clamped his arm around Mama’s waist.

  “Let me tell you something, sheriff. It’s a good thing you laid off my sister, because I was getting ready to take you on if you pushed her where she didn’t want to go.”

  “Shoot him, Mama,” whispered Connie in a not-whisper.

  Troy Clyde sighted Paul down his pointing finger. “I want you to know, sheriff, that having a working wife is like finding methane gas under your pasture. It’s an unknown fortune. Take it from one what knows. She don’t bother you about fixing the toilet or asking you why the paint is still peeling off the north side of the house or tell how the baby had diarrhea at the checkout counter. She don’t care if you watch ball games or go hunting. I think she likes hunting season so she can have some time by herself, and that’s okay by me. So if you want to look out for your future happiness, you will do every­thing in your power to keep that little lady employed.”

  Hattie wriggled free of Troy Clyde’s grasp. “Time for cake.”

  I lit all thirty-six candles. My sisters and I bent over and blew them out. Then Darla lit them and then Connie. By then, they’d melted down and we began to tear up. We let Heather light the last round, which took a long time but we didn’t want it to end. Tears had streaked our faces. We watched each little light go out and waited for Mama.

  “Cigarette burns on the frosting,” she said.

  Heather looked at us, wondering why we were so sad. I hugged her to me and held her very close, and she hugged me back.

  Darla, who was shaking, went to the bonfire and lit it. It took awhile but slowly the paper caught and even more slowly Daddy’s barn wood. Heather sat on my lap a long time. Mama moved into the chair next to us as the sun set, oranges and blues and pinks beyond the dark mountain. Soon smoke curled into the picture, pale and present. And it did smell of tobacco, the best-smelling wood in the world. My daddy’s ghost hovering near, and yet he was going away, too. I felt him smiling.

  In the swirl of smoke, I reached out and touched Mama. We do share a daughter and a life, and I think—I really do believe—that she loves me.

  She said I ought to look into the community college and she might too; then we could go together. But I don’t know. I fought hard to be me and I don’t want to blur the lines again.

  But I can’t tell her no. She has come so far to reach me.

  DARLA BOHANNON

  Darla and Jewell Miller poked around under the hood of the Jetstar. They talked about compost heaps and Jewell’s new bookshelves as they changed the motor oil. Jewell tightened rings and replaced hoses. They cleaned their hands and then Darla drew the car keys from her pocket. She pressed them into her palm. They were light and thin, small as her pinky, colored silver and gold.

  Jewell climbed into the passenger seat. “I’m not used to being the passenger.”

  “You’ll learn,” Darla said.

  She took the old windy road. The car was exactly as wide as the blacktop. The trees leaned close, their branches holding back crowds of wild weeds. Leaves fell like ticker tape. The Jetstar eased through noisy swells that rose with vigor and ended with the gentle pattering of more brown and orange-flecked leaves.

  A space of sky appeared and a white cloud was reflected across the hood of the Jetstar. Darla pulled off near a fence post with only a single rusted wire curling around it. “This is where we need to put the marker for my father,” she said. “You can tell there used to be two posts and a gate. Daddy’d unhook the wire and drive the mule team through and go to work, and the dog would ride on the wagon with him.”

  Jewell nodded. “I remember this field.”

  They got out. Darla opened the trunk and wrestled a posthole digger out of it while Jewell pulled the smoky barn post from the backseat.

  Darla ran her hand over the post and got stuck by a splinter. “Shit.” The splinter was soft and broke, half embedded in her skin. She decided to leave it.

  They worked an hour twisting the digger into the soil, lifting it, and dislodging the red dirt into a nearby pile. They took a break and drank the grape juice Jewell had brought and bemoaned the lack of shade. When they began to dig again, sweat rings appeared on Darla’s T-shirt and on Jewell’s pale surgeon-style blouse.

  When the hole was deep enough, the
y dropped in the pole and heard its satisfying thud. Jewell fought to hold it upright while Darla packed the dirt tight around its base.

  “No one’s ever going to notice what a good job you’ve done,” said Jewell.

  “I’ll know about it,” said Darla.

  “You are your mother’s daughter,” said Jewell, and Darla blinked through sweat at the high praise.

  “Institutions crush people,” said Jewell. “The wise get out ­before they’re mashed.”

  Darla tamped the dirt high above ground level, “In case there’s a gusher,” she said, but really she was imprinting the ridges of the post on the memory of her fingers. The last touch. She stood and smelled rain in the air and carried the digger back to the car. She looked away to the pattering leaves, flipping their pale sides in the swelling wind. She’d let Jewell make her peace with her dad.

  The first raindrops plashed down fat on the hood of the Jetstar. Darla got in and reached across the seat and opened the door to let the bustling Jewell in. The old lady smelled damp, of sweat and dirt. “Tut-tut,” she said. “Looks like rain.”

  HATTIE BOHANNON

  A charred circle in the middle of the old wooden bridge slowed Hattie’s purposeful gait. The burnt planks were coated with carbon silk that some mild winter wind would pry away. In these woods, abandoned buildings mysteriously burned, sacrifices, she supposed, to saints or the perversity of pyromaniacs. She thumped the bridge. It was still solid. Come spring, only a shadowy patch would remain of the burning.

  She walked on, shifting her backpack to scratch her shoulder blade.

  Under the influence of the gray sky, shocks of dead grass became a brilliant orange sea in the field on her right. Soon she passed the rise of an old cemetery. As children, she and Troy Clyde had joined hands and run shrieking past it all the way to the bridge. Brown cords of Virginia creeper lashed the five angular headstones, each pointing heavenward, to the earth. The cemetery looked forlorn.

  Hattie cut through two fields and a stand of pines. Majestic and green, the pines seemed an artificial bright spot against the pale hues of the rest of the landscape. She realized, though, that the pines had been managed and would soon be harvested for timber. Next year, oval stumps would peer like rain puddles from this field. Hattie tramped on. She came upon the hackberry tree alone in a fallow field. Brown leaves still hung from its branches, making it harder to read the names carved in the bark. Troy Clyde’s name was the lowest, but it was beyond her reach. Birds probably nested among the first letters carved on the tree, now hidden in curled leaves eighty feet from the ground.

  She shaded her eyes. Troy Clyde + Viola + Mary + Martha ­began a long list. At least Troy Clyde hadn’t x-ed any girl out. Instead, he’d carved a huge heart that encompassed all their names, Troy filling one hump and Clyde the other. Above the heart, she spotted her father’s name and her mother’s initials, scraped out in a moment of passion, perhaps when they moved into the house. Names of cousins and people she’d heard of disappeared up into the branches and the glare of the white sky. She walked to the back of the tree, where her name appeared twice. She’d scratched it there when she was eight, missed the bus to school, and spent an agonizing day in the woods, hoping Mr. Hiler wouldn’t look up from his corn and see her.

  Oakley had hiked to this tree the night before they got engaged and set about adding their names to history. The awkward stripes spelling out Hattie Annabelle Dameron Bohannon started large, about ten inches high, and sloped down to a respectable four by the end of her name. She took Oakley’s old penknife out of her backpack and cut his name and the date into the tree at chest level. Although twenty feet separated their names, she felt they were connected, a feeling that got stronger as she struggled with all the curved lines in OAKLEY and BOHANNON. Her hands puffed and raw, she blew the splinters away from his marker.

  The sky was unchanged. She could not judge the time but had an impulse to hurry away. The ground sloped gently up through what used to be a tobacco field but now was dotted with the smooth fingers of young dogwoods. Spindly pines, their needles appearing wet as a young chick’s feathers, advanced from the woods, dragging lines of rattan and honeysuckle with them. Hattie followed the path, an old wagon road, cluttered with beetle-dead trees and wooden carcasses from last year’s ice storm. She climbed higher into the sphere of the hardwoods, the leafless, gray, serrated maples, oaks, hickory, and sourwood. Layers of leaves lapped over her ankles, her motion a shush-shush.

  If it hadn’t been almost winter, she might have missed it. In the spring her mother’s native azaleas and hydrangeas would have lit the old yard, now a tumble of bushes and brambles and upstart magnolias. The chimneys, victim to high winds, lay in heaps of brick secured by poison ivy. In a way, it was a relief not to find anything memorable in the vines. A stranger would have thought it just another lumpy hedge in the forest. She climbed over the bricks and foundation stones, pausing when rock clinked rock and gave off a false metallic ring. Hacking through briers, she found the slate floor, cracked into slabs, like a natural outcropping. Then she knew where the kitchen had been and where her father most likely remained. She was an hour ripping back vines before she had a clear patch of dirt. It was strange to stand in a place so empty of human life and remember her impressive home and see only broken slabs and twisted weeds, as if she had invented her whole childhood and the people in it.

  Suddenly aware of a chill setting in after hard exercise on a cold day, she took a small collapsible spade from her pack. The top layers of dirt were black with decayed leaves, the kind of soil that would have made her father a successful farmer. Several inches of obstinate dirt yielded to grainy red clay streaked with black ash. She stirred the clay and ash together until the shovel clanged against something metal. She rooted out a flaky piece of rusted pipe. It crumbled under the blows of her shovel. When she had a brownish mix of iron, clay, and ash, she scooped it into a pound coffee can she’d brought.

  Hattie carried the can in one hand, a box with Oakley’s remains in the other, to the granite ledge jutting above the swirling river, glad she came before ice crusted its edges. The drop was fifty feet. Across the river, rock cliffs loomed as monuments. She had planned no ceremony, and the chill in her bones made her act quickly. The coffee can, her father, fell straight into the river. Its white spray disappeared into the lead-colored water. Hattie hoped the can settled on the bottom of the riverbed in cool depths undisturbed by the fast current. Given the blankness of Oakley’s hospital room, Hattie wished the woods were bursting in fall reds and yellows, and that he could float away on Indian blue breezes, but shades of black and gray would have to do. She opened the box and took out the pretty white urn, trailing roses from spout to bottom. He had loved wild roses, even when they took over fences and sprawled into lanes. She should plant wild roses around his fence post and let them roam across the whole field. She might start some to edge the tomato fields.

  Hattie opened the urn. She lay flat on the ledge and shook the urn hard. The gray ash fell like dust swept off the porch. She faced the urn’s mouth into the wind for it to take the last bits of Oakley and let him sail and swirl all over the lands he loved. Still, some ash clung to the insides. Hattie did not want to take the urn home and wash it out in the sink. Clean, the urn would bring a quarter at a garage sale. She scolded herself for thinking such a thing at this moment but realized that Oakley would have gotten a kick out of it. She was a businesswoman. She had loved him as best she knew how. The urn was light in her hand, a little too light. She scraped up some stones and added them for ballast. She threw the urn in a magnificent slow arc. It spun, a pink and white pinwheel, across the sky and the river before smashing against the granite wall on the other bank.

  EPILOGUE

  REVEREND MARTIN PETERSON

  He was born with a hole in his heart. When the wind blew he could feel it gush deep in his chest, a sound like green hush. If he was working the water on a Sunday morning, always a Sunday morning, he heard the wind
play as a harp, the ripples on the slow river like the notes in his heart.

  Townsfolk thought he was crazy. But he kept the channels clear of dead trees, errant logs, trash, even automobiles that shot like divining rods off the Lotus Mill Bridge or through Horseshoe Bend high above the river. There were never survivors. The townsfolk, in times of such waste, were grateful for his madness—his doggedness in locating the remains, going at times for weeks on end, poking among the cottonmouths, prodding slippery rocks into underwater avalanche, sometimes firing gunpowder to get a stubborn body to rise. It took persistence and often a clear day of radiant sunlit circles lying on the surface to draw the body up after its spirit had already split the seam in the sky.

  It was a Friday, three days of working the water and no sign of the girl he hoped to find. Blue shadows draped the bank and lay a thin hem at the water’s edge. He’d rescued a kitten on Tuesday, a marmalade bone-thin scratcher that had been put on the river in a Styrofoam cooler. The kitten sat at the bow, hitting the water to catch its own reflection.

  What he knew of the girl was this. She was slim, which made it difficult to find her. A small body could lodge in a crevice of shale or a cage of brambles or snag on a root. As days passed, she’d bloat and perhaps float free. He’d left the young man’s sports car embedded in the bank. The boy’s heavy body had hit dry land and scattered and been gathered, but the frail girl had flown from the car, the impact of air enough to dislodge her from the passenger seat of the convertible. He wondered perhaps if she had jumped.

  He steered the boat to a cool cave marked by a ghostly sycamore. The kitten batted at tendrils of leaves hanging at the cave’s entrance. A half pint of Old Grand Dad floated on its side. He rescued it and unscrewed the lid, put a drop on his tongue. The seal had held. He took a long draft.