Harry & Ruth

by Howard Owen

  She smoked half a pack of cigarettes and drank a little. Harry kept the scotches coming.

  “Do you always drink so much?” she finally asked him, as blunt as any Stein aunt at a family gathering.

  “Do you always smoke so much?” he asked back. They looked at each other and started laughing. They fed off each other’s laughter until the people at the nearest tables began giving them sideways glances of irritation. It occurred to Harry that it was the first time he had seen his eldest child either laugh or smile.

  “I asked you first,” she said when they had composed themselves, so he told her no one in Richmond, Virginia, could drink as much as Harry Stein without getting knee-walking drunk. And she told him no one in Denver, Colorado, could smoke as much as Naomi Crowder Ferrell without dying of lung cancer.

  They talked of Ruth more than anything else, she being their common bond. The only time the conversation drifted dangerously close to the Great Unspoken was when Naomi made a disparaging remark about how hard Ruth had driven her as a child.

  “If I have children,” she said, stubbing out a cigarette hard in the ashtray, “I swear to God I am not going to push them. I am going to let them have a real childhood.”

  Without thinking, sucker-punched by the scotch, Harry noted that Ruth had been trying to do the work of two parents.

  “And whose fault would that be?” Naomi said, registering what seemed to Harry very close to a sneer.

  There was nothing he could say.

  Naomi shook her head.

  “I’m sorry, Mister … Harry … Mister Dad, whoever the hell you are. You’ve told me how it happened. Mom’s told me how it happened. I don’t blame you, not really. It’s just that I’ve been pissed off about this for so long, just mad at the world. I’ve had this image of some worthless bum who left Mom and me to shift for ourselves. Then, when she told me about you, and about the money and all, it required some rethinking.

  “And then I meet you, and you’re not a monster or anything. But dammit, you should’ve been there. You really should’ve been there. I need to be angry at something.”

  By then, they had finished dinner and were having a couple of cognacs.

  He moved his chair so that he was sitting right beside her. He offered her his right arm.

  “Hit me,” he said.

  “Hit you? Why?”

  He took off his jacket.

  “Just hit me, right here on the arm, as hard as you can.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, you look like you need to hit something, and maybe I need to be hit.”

  He wasn’t sure she would do it, and when she did, he wasn’t prepared for the strength of a woman who had spent the majority of her life engaged in serious physical activity. The chairs in the Park Avenue restaurant were more stylish than sturdy, and Harry had, even by his standards, drunk a prodigious amount. When she punched him, it rocked him backward hard enough that he lost his balance, and then he was on the floor, scrambling to pick up his jacket while Naomi tried to help him up.

  They got the bill and paid it almost as quickly as the maitre d’ wanted them to and then staggered, weak with laughter, out the door.

  They walked for 20 blocks, in places where Harry figured they shouldn’t have been walking after dark. They agreed to be friends. They had dinner again the next night and then saw each other twice more the next six years. They would talk occasionally, though, office to office and then at her home after Grace was born. They wrote. They stayed in touch.

  They did not become best friends, nor did they become father and daughter in any traditional sense. It is appropriate to Harry that she calls him by his first name. Nowadays, they sometimes talk on the phone. He does get Father’s Day cards, and he does remember her birthday, but he always did.

  Tuesday afternoon, Harry goes to take his much-coveted afternoon nap. Paul and Tran are planning to drive the rest of them down the coast to Seaside, an instant-Victorian village on the Gulf east of Sugar Beach.

  Naomi claims she isn’t feeling well, though, and says she thinks she’ll pass. Harry can see that Ruth is disappointed. Maybe we shouldn’t go, either, she says to Paul. That hurricane is out there somewhere. Paul reminds her, though, that the Weather Channel has the storm pointing more toward Louisiana, maybe even Texas, and a good day out to sea even from there.

  “They can change course, and they can speed up,” she mutters. But he points out that the sun is shining. How bad can it be?

  Not wanting to be a poor guest, she goes along.

  Paul leaves Harry the house key in case he wants to go for a walk along the beach. Fat chance, Harry thinks as he waves goodbye. He is dead on his feet; they are still backing out the driveway when he turns to head for the bedroom. Naomi is already inside, in her room.

  Harry is not yet asleep, lying on his back the way he can’t when he shares a bed with Ruth, because of his snoring, when he hears a tapping, so light he thinks at first he is dreaming it, and then he hears Naomi’s voice.

  He tells her to come in.

  He can see why she begged out of the trip to Seaside. She doesn’t look well at all.

  Harry swings his legs off the side of the bed, and she sits down at the other end.

  “Harry,” Naomi begins, “my shrink says I shouldn’t hold things in.”

  Suddenly, he is wide awake.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Naomi asks Harry if she can light up. He tells her secondhand smoke holds no fear for him these days. She goes looking for something to use as an ashtray and comes back with a seashell.

  When she has settled again on the foot of the bed, she says she isn’t telling him this because he is her father.

  “I guess,” she says, shrugging, “that I just need practice telling it to someone who isn’t a psychiatrist. And I don’t believe I could ever tell this to Thomas.”

  She puts her left hand around her right wrist and guides the cigarette toward the shell on the bedspread.

  Harry thinks he knows how this story ends, but he knows that Naomi needs to tell someone, and he is willing to be that someone.

  “When I was a little girl,” she begins, talking slowly and stopping to clear her throat, “I thought that if I worked hard enough and always made straight A’s and ate my vegetables and went to church every Sunday and never lost a swim meet, that everything would always be good. And I thought Momma would always be there to protect me, to make sure nothing bad happened. She said she and God would look after me.”

  “Well,” Harry says, “nobody can be there all the time.”

  Naomi shakes her head. He can feel the cold her smile transmits.

  “Let me tell you how I lost my faith, Harry.”

  The spring of 1957 was late in coming. There would be a deceptively warm spell, then it would turn rainy and cold, then warm, then cold again.

  It rained so much that the swamp rose all the way up to the railroad tracks. If the bed for the Sam and Willie line hadn’t been built four feet above the normal high-water point, a serendipitous levee, Kinlaw’s Hell would have spilled out all the way to Henry and Ruth’s front door, all the way past Jane and Charlotte’s house into the Beach Road.

  On the last Friday of April, some of the high school students downriver and along Turpentine Creek were cut off by flooding, so school was canceled. Since the elementary school to which Hank and Paul went was just for the town children, they were not spared.

  “But then, the day cleared off and it seemed as if the temperature rose 20 degrees,” Naomi says, looking out the window. “Mom had already gone to work, but she didn’t expect much business, with half of her customers bailing water from their houses, so it looked as if I had a day off. I didn’t get many of those, let me tell you.”

  Henry Flood was at loose ends that Friday, too. It was, as the expression went in Saraw, too wet to plow. There apparently wasn’t enough action at the pool hall or the store to sustain his interest, because he was back home by 11 that morning.

  “
I’m not sure he even meant for it to happen,” Naomi says. “He might have, but I doubt it. He never seemed to plan much of anything.”

  Naomi tried to stay out of his way. They didn’t have a television yet, but she had been given a record player for Christmas. She was in her room; she remembers she was listening to “Blue Suede Shoes.” He didn’t even bother to knock, simply walked in, the way he had always done. He had his tackle box with him.

  “Let’s go fishing,” he said. It was not a request. Naomi said she took the needle off as quickly and gently as she could. Henry, in his moods, was fond of breaking things.

  Naomi had been fishing with Henry a few times, but always either with her mother or with Hank and Paul. Henry knew the waters of Kinlaw’s Hell better than anyone else in or around Saraw, and the children never knew where he had taken them when they got there, but the fishing was always good.

  “And the times we went fishing were usually good times. He’d wake us up, cook pancakes for us, about the only time he ever cooked. He’d even bait our hooks for us when we got where we were going in that old boat of his. But this didn’t seem like one of those times. He didn’t seem all that jolly. Frankly, though, the jolly times made me more nervous than the rest; you knew what followed would be worse than normal, just to balance things out.”

  It was turning into a beautiful day. The last of the clouds were scudding away. The high water across the tracks shone like a big ocean studded with trees. There was always water there, but except for the creeks that spider-webbed through it, it usually was hidden by all the tangled underbrush.

  Naomi got a sweater to wear over her dress. Something felt wrong, and she considered running in the other direction, toward the temporary safety of the Fairweather Grill, but what was she going to say? What had Henry done?

  She helped him get the boat onto the bed of his ancient pickup truck, and then got in as he backed it to the edge of the tracks, from where they could slide the boat out and be right on the levee. He made sure the poles and tackle box were in, along with some banana sandwiches, a Pepsi for her and a fifth of bourbon for him.

  Henry Flood had lived on the farm his whole life. He was alleged to have once taken his jonboat all the way across to the East Branch of the Campbell River, more than 20 miles from Saraw. The East Branch has no creeks leading off it that can be found on a map, but Henry got there, by water. He had to call a drinking buddy from a country store to come get him and the boat, because not even Henry Flood could find his way back across the swamp with the sun going down.

  In the years leading up to end of 1975, Henry would spend more and more nights haunting Kinlaw’s Hell.

  He would stay out all night sometimes, possum hunting, spotlighting deer, doing whatever he wished to do. He claimed to have gotten close enough to the Saraw Lights to see Theron and Belle Crowder swinging their lanterns, although almost no one really believed that. He swore he had seen, more than once, a cat deep in the swamp that was far too big to be a wildcat.

  Once he shot and killed a bear that weighed more than he did and somehow managed to get it into the boat and back to Saraw.

  Henry Flood knew the swamp he’d grown up beside better than anybody in the world, better than he knew anything or anyone else.

  Naomi pauses from her story to light another cigarette. Harry gets up to open a window.

  “Sorry,” she says, “but I don’t think I can do this without my nicotine delivery system.”

  By the time they got into the swamp, she told Harry, it was half past noon. Naomi took off her sweater and folded it, very neatly, in the back of the boat. She soon lost count of how many rights and lefts, half-rights and half-lefts they took, how many sweet bays and loblollies they turned at. The swamp closed around them.

  “It was just the kind of spring day we had all been waiting for,” Naomi says. “And once we got away from the house and on the water, he didn’t seem threatening. He would point out a hawk or a blue heron, or a water moccasin sunning itself. He seemed almost normal. I actually felt safe.”

  They’d been in there about an hour, and it was getting almost hot. The big trees that reached straight up to the sun knocked off the breeze without providing much shade.

  “Now,” Henry Flood said to her, and she realized he hadn’t spoken in quite some time, “I’m going to show you something, and you’ve got to promise not to tell anybody else about it.”

  Naomi promised. Only one of them knew how to get out of Kinlaw’s Hell.

  Henry steered the boat hard to the right, where there seemed to be no exit to the little branch they were on, only leaves and Spanish moss.

  “Watch your head,” he told her, and then they were through the bushes and into another stream, one so tight that Naomi wondered how it could possibly lead anywhere.

  But it eventually widened. They went along this new stream for what Naomi estimates now to be 200 yards, twisting and turning, riding the slow, tea-colored current for the most part. Then they came to a split, and Henry went left. They went a few more yards, through a thicket of undergrowth 10 feet high, and then, with one last turn, they were there.

  Henry told her he had figured out years before that the hidden opening they had gone through earlier was the dividing line between what fed into the Saraw River and what fed into the Campbell, which joined the Saraw downriver at Newport. It wasn’t a clear divide, of course, but he said that you could put a leaf down on the west side of that thicket and it would wind up floating down the Campbell River, while on the other side, the side they came in on, it would end up in the Saraw.

  “Doesn’t make any difference anyhow,” he laughed. “They both wind up in the Atlantic Ocean. Everything winds up at the same place anyhow.”

  Past that last turn was the cabin. It had been made out of pine, hauled in a few pieces at a time, whatever a boat would carry, or hewn from the trees in the swamp itself. It looked as if it had been there for decades. It had a tin roof and wood weathered to gray. There were no windows. In front was a small wooden deck that didn’t look as old as the rest.

  It sat on the highest piece of ground Naomi had seen since they entered the swamp. Otherwise, the high water would have been up to the front door. The land a few feet around it had been cleared.

  “He must have built it when he was a boy,” Naomi tells Harry. “It must have taken him years. Maybe his parents or his brother knew something about it, but they were gone by then. And to my knowledge, no one in my family, not even Mom, had ever seen it. At least she never mentioned it to me, and I certainly never mentioned it to her. I suppose he maintained it over the years. Inside, I remember it had a couple of wooden ladder-back chairs, a rug made from a deer’s hide, and not much else. The rear wall was the most amazing thing; it was stacked halfway up with empty liquor bottles. And there was a camera sitting on a little table next to the bottles.

  “The bed was in the back.”

  For two minutes Naomi says nothing; it seems longer to Harry. He can hear the gulls screeching outside over hum of the air conditioning.

  “Naomi?”

  She shakes her head as if she’s trying to clear cobwebs.

  “Sorry,” she says, and continues.

  Henry Flood dragged the chairs out to the deck. He took out the sandwiches and sipped bourbon while his stepdaughter drank her soft drink, now warm from the trip.

  “Then, just out of nowhere, he turned to me and said he bet that a pretty girl like me had lots of boyfriends. But I knew it was coming, Harry. I knew it.

  “He was sitting on my left, and he put his right hand down beside my bottom, not two inches away. I swear I could feel the heat from it.

  “At that time, I had kissed one boy, a boy named Kenny Painter. We had gotten together at a school dance and slipped outside with one of my friends and one of his. I suppose, the world being fair and somebody watching out for the bad guys, I would have graduated to French kissing pretty soon, maybe light petting the next year. I might have let somebody get to third base
by my senior year, maybe gone all the way before I got to college. Maybe met some dark, handsome Italian boy in Rome and given my virginity to him.

  “But Henry Flood saved me the anxiety and hassle of all that. He did a couple of things to me that afternoon that I didn’t let Thomas do until we had been married awhile.”

  “Naomi, I’m sorry.” Harry puts his hand on the bed near where his daughter is sitting and realizes the inappropriateness of this just as she jumps.

  “Nobody’s fault,” she shrugs. If her anger were electricity, Harry thinks, they could light the whole house with it. “But I wish somebody, some damn body, God, my mother, somebody, had been there. I know they weren’t; I know I can’t change it now. But I can still hate it, still mourn it. I can do that, can’t I, Harry?”

  He nods.

  Henry Flood had stood up quickly and scooped Naomi into his arms, carrying her inside the cabin. He made it quite clear that there was no other human being for miles.

  “No use calling for help,” he had whispered into her ear. “And I don’t want to hear no crying, neither.”

  “You know the worst thing?” Naomi says, staring straight ahead as the ash grows on her cigarette. “I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, even scream. And as athletic as I was, he could hold both my wrists in one of his. He seemed to enjoy the terror, the control. I believe he was acting out of spite and anger a lot more than any lust for my pitiful 13-year-old body.

  “He made me take off all my clothes and fold them neatly on the chair, so I wouldn’t come back looking like I’d just been raped, I suppose. I begged him to have mercy, and it just seemed to make him more excited. He had on these old coveralls, and he was out of those and his undershorts before I could blink. He didn’t even bother to take off his shirt or socks. Very romantic, huh?

  “I had never seen a man’s penis hard like that before. You can’t imagine, Harry, how scared I was. I was trying not to cry, because I was afraid he might beat me or even kill me. He put his hand over my mouth to muffle me. They’d never even find my body, was what I was thinking. Never, before or since, have I ever felt half as helpless. I actually did faint once, and when I came to, he was still inside me.”