Ruby's War

by Johanna Winard

  ‘That’s enough,’ Jenny roared, snapping the lid of the sewing-box closed. ‘It’s you as took this money. You must have encouraged him, been too friendly. Thinkin’ you’re an equal, because you played the piano for ’em … and then come home crying saying you’d been attacked … Makin’ us feel …’

  ‘He’s old enough to kn-n-know … An educated m-m-man,’ Johnny spluttered. ‘Not fit to wipe that … that child’s shoes. And neither are y-y-you.’

  After Ruby had left Con on that previous afternoon he had walked back to the squat little hut. He’d sat for a while, the sensation of her fierce kisses on his mouth and her promises to escape with him chasing through his brain. When she’d been in his arms he’d believed it was possible, but now what had happened at the camp, and the picture of Bo’s rigid body on a gurney, pushed the dream away. He got up – felt in his empty pockets for a cigarette – and told himself that in his position Bo wouldn’t have hesitated. Bo wouldn’t have lost his nerve, but he wasn’t Bo: he hadn’t even been brave enough to tell Henry that his friend was dead. The memory hurt. He wandered outside. The hut was on the edge of Bardley’s fields, and Con sat down disconsolately among the strong, new grass, hoping that Johnny would remember to bring him some more cigarettes. When a skylark rose suddenly in front of him, he watched the valiant little bird’s almost vertical climb. As he sat back on his heels, the creature rose higher, before hovering, a fixed point far above his head. The tiny bird’s song filled the late-afternoon sky, and then it tumbled, parachuting to the ground, leaving behind it a pure moment of silence. Kneeling in the empty field, Con felt his chest fill with the bird’s defiant song, as though the display had been just for him.

  When Johnny arrived, there were no cigarettes or any books for him to read.

  ‘I’ve heard the old girl with the books is off somewhere,’ he said. ‘Gone visiting and the place is shut up.’

  Johnny gave him half the cigarettes he had left from his last packet and told him that – with luck – the priest would be back that day, or the next day at the latest. When he left, Con settled down, looking at the clear night sky through the hut door. He didn’t mind the isolation; but he missed having something to read, something that would help him chase away the images of Bo that had begun to appear at the edge of his vision. Instead, he thought of Ruby, trying to recreate the moment when she’d been in his arms, but as his eyes closed, all he could recall was her moving away through the long shafts of sunlight.

  The next time he woke, he could hear voices; the sun was up, and as he peered through the gaps in the hut’s side, he could see three fishermen walking by, leaving a trail of cigarette smoke that taunted him. He got up and went out into the sunny morning. The grass on the riverbank was damp, but underneath the trees the earth was soft and dry. Con settled back against a tree and ran through a selection of imaginary books and possible daydreams. Since he was a little boy, he’d always lived inside his head. He didn’t know if everyone did this, but he’d often found that life on the outside wasn’t as good as in dreams and books. He closed his eyes again. In his dream, Ruby was walking towards him through the fields. As her dress moved, he could see her form from waist to hipline and the freckles, a sprinkling of gold dust, on her arms. He wasn’t sure how long he’d slept, but when he opened his eyes, she was kneeling on the ground next to him shaking his shoulder.

  ‘You should be more careful,’ she said. ‘I could have been anybody.’

  Her hair was unpinned and rumpled, tumbling around her shoulders. Her eyes shone and a single teardrop had escaped on to a pale lash.

  ‘Is everything okay?’

  She studied the ground in front of her and then shook her head. ‘It’s … One of the family has died, and everything was upset and … I overslept and then everybody was there. I was going to make them think I’d gone to work … Have my breakfast and slip out with some clothes in my basket … Then Jenny started falling out with everybody, so I’ve just come as I am. I’ve not brought you any …’

  ‘I’ve plenty of food. Johnny brought me some … Have you eaten?’

  ‘No. The row started before I got a chance to have anything. I am a bit hungry.’

  She sat down on the riverbank, and when Con disappeared inside the hut, Ruby splashed her face and hair with water from the river. She was trying to press out the worst of the crumples from her lavender dress, when Con came back carrying a basket with bread, cheese and beer. He sat down next to her, wedging the bottles of beer into the mud and stones, and she told him about Joe’s death.

  ‘I can go back after,’ she said. ‘I’ll get some things. We can’t go until it’s dark, anyway.’

  Con had settled the bottles in the shallow water, and when he turned around to hand her some bread and cheese, he noticed for the first time that she was wearing the same dress, and she wasn’t wearing lipstick. He could see there was a delicate pattern of blue veins on her eyelids, and the shadows under her eyes were almost the same shade of lavender as her dress. He encouraged her to eat and then he took her hand, and they walked along by the river. At first Con felt a new unease between them and he wondered if she was regretting her promise to come with him, but then she found a blackbird’s nest and showed him how to put a leaf over the baby birds’ beaks so that they would open their mouths. The squirming chicks and their insistent little beaks made them both smile, and they sauntered on, as easy and happy together as they’d been before, with only the sound of the bumblebees and birds for company. When she slipped off her shoes and waded in the river he followed, and then they rambled back, Ruby collecting wild flowers along the way, until they reached the place where he’d left the bottles of beer cooling in the reeds. They sat for a while watching the bobbing moorhens, hoping to spot their nests on the opposite bank, and listening to the coots squabbling. Ruby had the flowers she’d collected in her lap and began making the daisies into a chain.

  ‘Oh look,’ she said, glancing up from her work. ‘Look, dragonflies.’

  As though to order, the creatures lifted gracefully up, allowing their wings to glisten in the clear light.

  ‘That green,’ she said, ‘it’s just the colour of one of my mother’s dresses. I’ll have to go back, before we go tonight. I’ll need at least two of them. I could get a job playing in a pub. Bert won’t let me play there, ’cos he says I’m not old enough, but in Liverpool …’

  ‘Have you said anything to Henry? I’ve been thinking. I need to talk to him. Johnny said the priest would be back and … Well, Liverpool. He might not want you to come.’

  ‘You can’t go on your own. You don’t know the way.’

  ‘If the priest doesn’t come, it might be better, if instead of us … It might be better if I go with Henry. He could get me on a train. A goods train, going to the city or the docks. He works on the railway. He’d know how to do it.’

  ‘No. You’ll need me to help you. You might not get a job, not at first. I’ve got another idea. You gave me the idea, you and Mrs Bland. I’ll be able to earn money. Wait there. Close your eyes. Don’t turn round, until I say.’

  Ruby ran off in the direction of the trees. Con could hear her moving around, rustling the leaves. He fished the second bottle of beer out of the stream and waited.

  ‘Are you ready?’ she called. ‘You can turn round now.’

  It was as though a beautiful painting had come to life. The soft green shadows caressed her naked back, and her long red hair, sweeping down almost to the swell of her buttocks, was patterned with golden coins of light. Ruby – her dress rolled down to her hips – wearing nothing else but her crown of daisies, gazed at him over the curve of her naked shoulder. He stood up, overturning the half-empty bottle on the grass, but before he could speak, she slipped away among the sun-flecked leaves.

  ‘There’ll be theatres in Liverpool,’ she called. ‘They’ll pay good money. Mum would do it, when we were short. I thought about the picture on Mrs Bland’s wall,’ she said, reappearing in the lavender dre
ss, the daisy crown askew on her rumpled hair. ‘You know the one by the door? You said Ophelia looked like me, but that would be no good ’cos they’d have to have some kind of tank to float me in. So in this one, I’m Titania, Queen of the Fairies. Did you guess? I think it’s a famous picture. My dad had postcards with the picture on. It gave me the idea for doing other paintings. Venus is one I thought of. Mum and some of the other girls did statues from history; I could do paintings.’

  ‘You are beautiful,’ Con said, his voice shaking. ‘But you can’t …’

  ‘It always pulls them in. The takings were always good. That’s why they used to do it, when the money went down, and it always worked.’

  ‘You can’t. Men ….’

  ‘You can’t see them,’ Ruby said, her excitement fading, ‘they can’t get near … touch … My dad would wait for her. You could …’

  ‘No. It’s not … It’s not what you should be doing … It’s taking advantage of …’

  ‘I’m being taken advantage of now,’ she said, looking up at him and shading her eyes. ‘“Exploited”, Mrs Bland calls it. At least this is … artistic and … Why is it worse than working in a hot, mucky factory?’ she asked, pulling off her daisy crown. ‘We’ll need money, a place. When the war’s over we might want to travel.’

  ‘No. We couldn’t. We couldn’t live in the world as it is. It’s a dream,’ Con said, kissing the top of her head. ‘Ruby, honey, running away wouldn’t solve anything. I can’t go. I don’t come from here, Ruby. I’m going to wait for the priest, like Johnny said. O’Donal’s okay. If they take me back and … I want to go back to my own country. When the war’s over, there’ll be a battle over there. The trouble here, now, it will carry on. Some of the white GIs will take that fear back home. They see the way it is over here, and they’re afraid that the black soldiers will go home and, because of the way they’ve been treated here, they’ll start looking, questioning the way things are in their own country. They’re afraid we’ll want more, and someone’s got to be there to stand up and say what’s right and what really happened here.’

  ‘We can go back together.’

  ‘We can’t. I can’t have a white girlfriend. There’d be no sort of life for us there: friends, family, jobs. There’d be nothing for us. There’d be no place for you. A white woman with a black man is hated more than the black man himself. If you love someone, you’d want to protect her from that.’

  ‘Then stay here. The folk here don’t think like that.’

  ‘They’ll learn to think of me as inferior. Plenty of folks are willing to teach them, and it would never be my country.’

  ‘When Bo came back from Liverpool, he said … The couple you met. He wants to stay with Sadie, I know. Bo wouldn’t …’

  ‘Bo’s dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s dead, Ruby. The MPs killed him. I’m sorry, I should have told you. That morning, after we fought back, when Henry asked about Bo, I couldn’t tell him. I should have, I know. It’s felt real strange. When I’ve been sitting in the hut on my own, and when I’m walking out here with you, the camp and what happened there isn’t real. But now I’ve got to go back.’

  Con lifted up her chin and stroked her face, tracing the long pale curve of her lips.

  ‘I thought you’d want to stay,’ she said. ‘That we’d be like Sadie and Bo.’

  ‘I need to go back.’

  ‘They’ll send you to prison. Or kill you.’

  ‘No. Not if the priest comes with me and explains, and I admit I lied about my age. Johnny reckons—’

  ‘He might be wrong.’

  Con stroked her cheek, but as he bent his head to feel the warmth of her hair on his skin, he heard the sharp metallic click of a rifle.

  ‘Run,’ he whispered, pushing her away from him. ‘Run, and don’t look back. Run!’

  Hal had only seen one lynching; it was 1926 in Mississippi, and then he hadn’t seen the whole of it. He was fourteen and working on his Uncle George’s farm. By the time he’d got there, the guy had been beaten up pretty bad. He’d lost an eye and an ear. They’d got a rope, and as the body went up in the air and danced, the crowd cheered. He was young, strong, not more than seventeen or eighteen, but he’d died quick and spoilt half the fun. It disappointed a lot of the folk who’d come for the show; they’d started cursing and throwing empty liquor bottles at the body. When they’d got bored of that, the corpse was brought down and the rope cut in small pieces and sold for five dollars each. His Uncle George said it was a tradition, and as it was his first lynching, he’d bought him a piece for luck. Then the boys and some of the men kicked the body around for a bit, until it wasn’t clear that it had ever been a man. In the end, all that was left were lumps of black flesh in the dirt for the crows and the dogs to nibble on.

  As soon as he’d heard that they were sending black troops to England, he knew it was asking for trouble. He’d been right. He’d tried to warn the locals. At first, when Sadie avoided him, he’d thought it was because she was sore at him for not writing like he’d promised, but then he saw her in town with the dead black guy. It made him real sore, but he and his buddies had some good times uptown, hunting out black GIs and making sure they knew their place. When he’d found out one of the dead guy’s buddies was still on the loose, Hal was sure he knew where to look and persuaded one of the MP patrols to let him come with them. He’d told them he knew where the guy was likely to be, and he’d been right.

  The cottage was empty when they’d arrived, but an old woman in one of the cottages on the lane knew where they should look.

  ‘You’ll not find him in there,’ she’d called over her hedge, ‘if it’s that black soldier you’re looking for. He’s off with the younger one, Ruby; no more than sixteen, she is. No better than they should be, either of them. The older one set her hat at my lad, but I saw her off. Then these black soldiers arrived. They’d not been here five minutes when I caught the younger one, young Ruby, with two of them. Henry, him who lives in the white cottage, Mr Barton, she’s his son’s child. Will, Will Barton he is. He’s another one as is no good. Went off playing the piano in bars and picked up with a singer. That’s Pearl, her mother, so you can’t be surprised, really. Well, I went round this day, and she was coming down the stairs as bold as brass with two of ’em. They said something about coming to collect a cake, but it was clear what was goin’ on. This one you’re looking for, they say it was him as was with her, Ruby, in the doctor’s garden, and when this young man tried to chase them off, he knocked him out cold, and then they took his wallet. I’m glad they’ve all been locked up in that camp. You should keep ’em there for good. Decent women can’t go out. Try up the river. He’s started calling for her, and they go off up there. She took my dog out the other day and brought her back wet through, so I reckon you might find them along the bank somewhere.’

  He’d thanked the old woman, smiled politely and patted the dog. Then, as the rest of the guys were climbing over the stone wall and heading down towards the water, he took the rope from the jeep, just in case.

  Ruby tried to make her legs go faster. When she reached the wall and scrambled over, the lane was empty. At first she thought about running across the fields to Bardley’s farm for help, but then decided to head for the cottage. At least Sadie was there, and if Granddad was still with Maud, she could go and get him and send Sadie to the farm.

  Just after the little stone bridge, the road kinked slightly and she could see the MPs’ jeep drawn up outside the cottages. She couldn’t understand what had happened: if they’d come to the cottage, why hadn’t Granddad and Sadie tried to stop them or warned Con? The front door was locked, and no face came to the window when she called Sadie’s name. The back door was bolted, but she banged on it anyway. Then her legs crumpled, folding under her, and she sat on the flags by the door. In the empty yard, the air around her rang with the screeching of the wagons’ wheels from the shunting yards, followed by the clattering of points. Thes
e familiar sounds masked the chink of the front gate opening and the thud of boots on the brick path.

  At first, Sergeant Mayfield thought the barefoot girl in the yard was hurt, but when Ruby got him to understand that it was Con who was in danger, he took her with him to the front of the cottage where Captain O’Donal was waiting in a jeep. Ruby was still explaining about the GIs and begging them to follow her back to the river, when Granddad arrived with Johnny and Father O’Flynn. Granddad knew a quick way to get from the farm track down to the hut, and they sped off leaving her behind.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It was later, when Granddad came up to her room and showed her the photo of Bo wearing the zoot suit he’d been so proud of, that Ruby realised Captain O’Donal and Sergeant Mayfield hadn’t been looking for Con; the reason for their visit had been to see Sadie. Ruby curled up on her bed, and Granddad sat in the old cane chair and promised he’d stayed until he was sure Con was safe. When they heard the back door open, and Sadie called out that she’d been to Lou’s to borrow a pattern for a kiddie’s dress, Granddad told her to stay in her room. Ruby listened to his footsteps moving slowly down the stairs, and when Sadie began to scream, she covered her ears.

  The next day Sadie didn’t come out of her room. Ruby had asked Jenny if she could go and sit with her, but she’d shaken her head and picked up her sewing. Granddad hadn’t looked up, but sat in his chair, hands clasped, staring into the pale flames of the smoky fire, refusing to tell her anything, except that Con was safe and that he’d been put in Captain O’Donal’s jeep and taken to the hospital.

  As if in sympathy, the warm sunny weather was replaced by unrelenting rain. In the evening, Ruby sat in her room staring out over the dripping garden. She wanted to see Con, but Granddad said that he was under arrest and he wouldn’t be allowed to see anyone. Then the next morning, after Granddad and Jenny had left for work, she found Sadie sitting in the living room. She went to hug her but no warm cheek met hers.