Ruby

by Cynthia Bond

  The walk had been a hard one. While his stitches had been removed two days before, he was still weak.

  Ephram stood over Ruby. He saw the narrow spokes of Ruby’s legs, the reed crook of her arms. She wept as if her entire body were the rising heaves and scratching sobs.

  There was nothing to say and so he just stood there, letting the soft of his eyes gently stroke her hair.

  She spoke to him, without turning, without moving her lips from the earth, “They all gone.”

  “Tell me—”

  “My babies. My babies … They gone.”

  Ephram felt the air leave his chest. He breathed in her sorrow, and knelt beside her.

  Her eyes leveled at him. “Get away from here.”

  Her words pushed him back like a fist.

  “Go on. Get.”

  “I ain’t, Ruby …”

  “What else you want?”

  “I want you.”

  “And what it gone cost?” Hot tears ran down her cheeks. “What I gotta pay to have you?”

  “They was wrong, Celia and them, they was worse than fools. But it weren’t me. You put a knife in me.” He lifted his shirt and showed the bandage looped about his right side. “And I’m yet here. Let me help you, baby. Let’s find your children.”

  She said it flat and deadpan, “I’ll do it again.”

  Ephram stood very still and looked at her. She was broken, more than broken—her eyes were empty, deathly.

  “No, you won’t, Ruby.”

  A cord snapped inside of Ruby. She threw buckshot and nails in Ephram’s direction. “What else you come to take? You got what was left of my mind. You bring them here to take my children. What else you want?”

  She slammed into him, scratching at his neck, grinding against him. Ephram tried to push her away but she hung on like a panther, face-to-face, yanking his hand between her legs.

  “You just a man! Can’t even admit that you came here to get your dick sucked.”

  Ephram pushed her back and held her at arm’s length. “Stop it!”

  “You hang-dog country motherfucker. I like to spit after you first kiss me.”

  Ephram broke through. “You kiss me, woman! Don’t let sorrow steal ’way truth. Don’t blaspheme who we is.”

  “You right. I kiss you. After I fucked Chauncy,” she lied.

  Ephram stood with his hands about her rib cage. A part of him froze.

  “You walk up right after we finish. Remember? How we—Chauncy and me—laughed at you. Lord, I needed a real man after being around your limp punk ass.”

  Ephram shot out, “You think I’m a fool? You think I don’t know what you been doing since you come to this town? What you doing now? You think I like it? Naw! Naw! But I know how life don’t teach you no different. Like a fox can’t stop chewing at his own leg after it been in a trap.”

  He watched her anger as it began shaking her center, breaking apart. “Ain’t no trap but the one you fixed for me. You dress it up with marriage, pancakes and maple syrup! Fix me up so you can bend me over! Act all deaconly and holy but I know what you come for! Even if you don’t! And you don’t! Can’t admit it now!”

  Ruby fell down onto the ground and lifted her dress. She spread her legs and pushed down her panties. “This what you want? Don’t be afraid to take it like Chauncy and all them other men you call friend. You only here for two reasons—cuz I’m a crazy cunt like your mama, and cuz you want to fuck me. I know you. I see you. Seen men like you since I was six.”

  “I ain’t none of them men.”

  She leapt up. “I ain’t nothing but a whore! I want your food, your money—that’s all. I can pretend like I want anything, even a moose in heat. Ain’t you been laughed at your whole fucking life? There’s good reason for it. You a servant to your own sister? Cuz you a coward and a fool.”

  Ephram started, “Ruby—you care for me. I feel it like an ax in my chest.”

  Ruby screamed the knot from her throat. “Why you think them flowers and blue napkins do shit for me? Why you think building me up like a queen what I need? Doing every little thing before I ask and never letting me give nothing back. That don’t make me no queen. That makes me a cripple. But you need to fuck broken. You need to love crazy. Right? Right?”

  “Ruby … I know what you doing. I know—”

  “What do you know?”

  “I know you love me.” He was gulping for air, sobs catching, then breaking free.

  “So what if I love you? I’m the fucking fool for it. You got the kind of love that keeps me from rising. That make me take my eye from my children, make me lose my children. One of us got to die we stay together … by my hand. You want that? So you get from here before I kill you. I see you on my land again, I’ll kill you.”

  Ephram took one step back, then two. The knife had hurt less. He turned and stumbled, then he began to run. He ran past P & K, and past the whole congregation of men on the porch. He felt every eye on him, judging and laughing at him. He ran collecting shame and self-hate like pollen on a daisy hill. He ran all the way to Celia’s house, where he stepped in the door, walked past Celia, straight to his bedroom and lay down on the chenille spread.

  Celia stood just outside his door, her hand soft on the wood. Ephram was safe. All that she had done was to keep him safe from the pit fires of life. Safe from the haints killing souls in the woods. From the Devil, who walked the earth. Safe from Ruby, who had dragged her papa to hell, who had cut her brother—her boy—and nearly killed him. Ruby Bell, whom he would learn to love a little less every day … every day he was with her.

  Celia said calm as a still sea, “I done made your favorite, Ephram, fried pork chops, greens and corn bread with a pinch of sugar—just the way you like it.”

  In less than ten minutes Ephram would wash his hands. He would dry them on Celia’s dress towel, with the pink ribbon stitched on. He would sit at her table and eat every scrap of her food along with the yellow cake with chocolate frosting she had made just that morning. He would hand her his plate and let her wash every dish and clean every sign of life from the kitchen. Then he would bathe and dress for bed and read marked passages in his well-used Bible.

  Once he had done all of these things, Celia came in and sat beside him on the bed.

  “How you feeling, boy?”

  It felt as if a stone had set upon his chest. All he could manage was, “I ain’t no boy, Celia.”

  “I know that Ephram.”

  She placed her hand on his forehead to make sure he didn’t have a fever.

  “Let me see your dressing.”

  “Not now.”

  “Doctor say we got to change it every day.”

  He looked straight at her, “Not today, Celia.”

  She backed away and stood.

  “I go to Jasper tomorrow, get me some more of that gauze and iodine. And that special grease they be rubbing on your scar.”

  Ephram said nothing. He simply set his Bible down and turned out his light.

  Celia almost said, Glad you home, but decided to let well enough alone. But she thought it so loud, Ephram heard it anyway.

  She slipped out of the door as Ephram lay atop his bedspread, too tired to crawl under the covers. He turned to his side, ready to bide the years until he slipped into grateful oblivion.

  Chapter 23

  Ruby no longer wandered through the piney woods. Instead she hunted, searched, ripping away branches until her fingers scraped and bled. She knew their souls were still alive. She heard them on the wind at times like flutes, until they faded around a bend in the trees. Ruby felt them—held, bound like a spider’s feast.

  Ruby called to them as she walked until her voice became sandpaper. She returned home each night to eat the bread, fruit and beef jerky Miss P left her during the week. Not to satisfy any hunger. There was no hunger. There was no pain nor joy. She ate to keep walking. She ate to sustain her breath. She ate so that she could find her babies before it was too late.

 
So when Chauncy came looking for her early one Saturday morning, she picked up the shovel Ephram had brought and hit him upside the head. Hard, so that he fell out cold in her front yard. When Ruby came back that evening, fingers bloody, he was still there in a heap on the ground. As she stuffed food into her mouth he came to, stumbled home, weaving and leaning in the dim evening.

  He came back the next day with a nasty lump on the side of his head and a package of mean stowed in his gut. This time when Ruby swung the shovel Chauncy caught it and threw it to the ground so hard it broke in two. The tail end of a shadow flapped behind him, which is how she knew the Dyboù was living inside of the man like a dead rat poisoning a well.

  Ruby felt a fear spread hot in her belly. Still she asked with the weight of a stone, “Where are my children?”

  Chauncy and the Dyboù walked slowly towards her.

  Ruby stood like a tall pine. “Where my children?”

  His hands were taut, his arms like springs. “Woman, you too crazy to live, God knows.”

  Ruby grabbed one of the large stones and hurled it at him, hitting him on the dimple he loved so much. He swooped down and picked it right up.

  Next Ruby pitched a gray rock onto Chauncy’s broad chest. It tore his shirt. He—they—roared towards her and she took off running, but screaming, blasting, “Where my children!”

  She sprinted like a wild deer through the piney woods. He was a bulldozer, tearing away branches and kicking away low brush. Ruby turned back and saw the rock still tight in his hand.

  Ruby leapt ahead. The forest pushed her along ahead of the man—the men—who chased her. They meant more than to take her, to push her down, they meant to steal her soul even if they had to kill her to do it.

  Her lungs were aflame and sweat poured between her shoulder blades and breasts. The world was the rising smell of mud and pine, the dank salt of her body and the sweet cologne that Chauncy Rankin must have bathed in, getting closer.

  As she approached a circle of pines, she spied a thick branch. She swooped it up as she ran.

  Chauncy reached her just shy of the clearing. His arm caught her wrist and flung her to the ground behind a low line of briar bushes. A trickle of blood mixed with sweat and began winding down his nose, catching the crease in his lips. The Dyboù reaching, corpulent, stretching through Chauncy, inches away from her as if he wanted her to know. In that moment, Ruby saw him, truly saw him. The Dyboù—the man who had taken her to the pit fire, who had sold her to Miss Barbara, who had branded her with his hate—now glowered above her. The Reverend—he was the Dyboù who had taken her children.

  She reached for the dead branch but felt only pine needles and dirt, so she used her legs. She connected with the kneecap. Chauncy staggered back then fell on her, crushing her. The Reverend was dead-eyed, grinding her down. She bit him on his jaw and drew blood, then fought from beneath him.

  The spirit and the man hopped up, face twisted almost beyond recognition, and they lunged towards her and punched her right temple. Hard. The world warbled into slow motion. As she dropped back, they hit her again across her jaw, hit her like she was a man, and she fell to the empty earth.

  But what Chauncy could not know, what the Reverend could never fathom, is that they would never be strong enough to fell a mother in search of her children.

  Something bolted through her body, from the earth, from the roots of the trees, from the sun slanting into the clearing. She reached again and felt the thick handle of the branch. The trees were spinning into black, but some force kicked it through the wind and it landed like a boulder, crashing into Chauncy’s right shoulder.

  Chauncy screamed, loud. He then fell back, clutching his arm. It sloped at an odd, loose angle as he yelled like a boy whose mama had taken a switch to him. The Dyboù—the Reverend—jolted out of his body as Chauncy whimpered and whined. The Reverend spinning into the black of the trees, and Chauncy was running away from the clearing, away from her.

  Ruby lay down her head on the soft earth. It was only then that she knew. She listened with her whole being. She no longer felt her children in the wind. She had only felt an empty, gaping hole when she looked into the Dyboù’s eyes. He had been bloated and fat. The silence in the trees was deafening. She realized she had known the moment she had seen that they were missing. That is how Ruby knew she had lost. She wept. She had lost them to the ether. Tanny. Her own baby. All of the murdered, twisted, broken children of Liberty. Gone. Every last one of them.

  The forest swirled as Ruby passed into the starry night.

  WHEN SHE awakened Ruby could not remember anything but the weight of her head on the clearing floor. An alarm ringing through the cotton. Her heart exploding with pain. Loss. She could barely move. Clay and a smattering of stones lined the exploding pain of her cheek. Her left eye was hot and swollen shut. Her right creaked open and through the grog of sleep, Ruby saw where she was for the first time. The clearing. She had run straight to the clearing like a child coming home. The alarm grew louder.

  Ruby tried to rise—she had to lift her head, but a blackness fell like down upon her. And that quickly, she was six again. The last thing she remembered was drinking a bitter cup of milk the Reverend had given her on their picnic. She had felt her eyes heavy and she hadn’t been able to feel her mouth. She had awakened in front of a giant pit fire, like the one Mr. Rankin used for barbecue on Easter. She was small, too small and limp on hard dirt. Heat and air pressed down on her and she felt her mouth open. She was embarrassed at the drool that soaked into the ground.

  A hot fear rose in her throat and she threw up her chicken lunch, her body pushing, gagging. Someone’s hands were on her, large and lifting her, dragging her to the brush. The last of it heaved from her belly onto a small briar patch. The clearing pushed up and tilted. Feet stomping. Drums. Crackling. Fire. They moved her to the heat but she was shaking. Unable to move but shaking from some awful knowing. Someone held her up, petted her head. Fire too close to her skin. Skin hot like Crisco in a pan. Hot like frying chicken. Through warped air Ruby saw the men. More skin than she had ever seen. Something was coming. A terror wrapped around her throat as she saw the dark low fur on each man and private secrets that she knew she should not see.

  Hands picked her up. She could barely lift her head to look around. There were white fuzzy circles around the fire, the stars that spun up when her head fell back and the moon. Like a nightmare, like the hell Jesus talked about, the hands were not connected to arms, nor bodies. They were large and lifting her too high. Words, all said together like a Bible verse, but it was not a verse. They reached her, rolling inside, like her grandmother kneading dough. Someone was taking off her dress. Her hands were too weak. There was no fight in her arms. Her tongue too thick to speak so she screamed. It came out as a croak.

  She thought about Maggie and what she would do, who she would fight. She tried to find an ember in the ice of her body, but she wasn’t like Maggie, she was a scaredy-cat. She was more scared than could fit into her body. Something was cutting her in half, in four parts. She started bucking, convulsions moving through the dead weight of her body. Then she heard a warm voice, deep, familiar, family-like. Gentle. His voice entered with the other words, but it seemed to hold her. It had sugar stirred in like sweet tea. It stroked her, seemed to anchor her, so in the empty she grabbed ahold.

  It was a trick. His words carved out Maggie’s face and Papa Bell’s corncob pipe. They gutted the carnival she had seen when she was six. They sliced out blackberry cobbler and warm milk with honey and the thin skin on top. Then they bound her hands with a damp red strip of fabric and poured her onto the ground, crying, crying as the men circled her. She could not catch her breath. They came closer. She could not breathe. She felt some horror rising ready to crash and flatten her. Their hands like lightning jerking back and forth. So fast like a race. Like a dark blanket falling. She still could not move, yet a part of her was running. Climbing a tree. The Reverend’s voice yanked her back hard into
the earth of her body as something hot was spit onto her. Again. Again. Slipping wet down her body. Slick like white poison, like warm glue on her skin. Again and again. Her neck, her back, her belly until the men almost growled over her. Then they were rubbing their sticky hate into her body, into every corner, her legs and arms, her chest, her toes, her privates, pushing their fingers into her mouth. The Reverend kneeling over her, chanting, strange garbled words that felt like a rope wrapping around and around her, binding her to him.

  The thought of death smoked around her. Of dying like a snail poured over with salt, like a black bird Maggie had found—stiff and hard. She knew that if he let her live, if her heart kept beating, that any life she lived, any road she took, would always lead her back to them—back to him. Like a rotted seed taking root, burrowing through her belly, her gut, his eyes whispered that she was their thing now. They owned her.

  The Reverend unwrapped the red cloth, petted her hair then slipped something round like baby aspirin onto her tongue. Then he closed her mouth and stroked her throat until she swallowed. He put a satchel under her head, and threw a rough blanket over her. Ruby watched sideways as the men became human again. As they put on their clothes and began to chat about early harvest and the size of a catfish Sorrell Wilkins had caught. Now that they had faces, she saw that some were men she knew. Men who walked to church on Sunday and sat and played checkers at P & K. Mr. Rankin and Mr. Simpkins. Daddies with four or six children, with little babies at home learning how to crawl. Men who worked at Grueber’s Saw Mill, or waited on the bus to Newton. She felt so small. Like a bunny falling to sleep in a circle of wolves. But she saw before she drifted away that the wolves were also normal men, which made it the most horrible of all. A man with a smile and a soda pop for his daughters, with a tub of melons at the church picnic, with a handkerchief to give out if you had a runny nose—that man could eat you whole before you could say “boo.” Those men were a part of the wheel of the world and helped it turn. The same wheel that Ruby knew would crush her every time she rose up to fight. Even a finger. Even a thought.