Harry & Ruth

by Howard Owen

  He had a late dinner at a state-run hamburger joint in Maryland, popped two more No-Doz, filled the car up with gas and headed back into the night. He drove through Richmond, where many of his family would be at one party or another, without slowing down, the clock in the old train station beside the interstate eyeing him at car level. Somewhere in Southside Virginia, 1976 began. As he crossed under a bridge near Emporia, a shotgun blast from overhead greeted the new year and gave him a free half-hour of adrenaline.

  He left the interstate sometime after 2 and realized he was exhausted. This was the longest drive he’d ever made in his life, and there was at least a three-hour stretch of mostly two-lane road between him and Ruth.

  At the exit, he pulled into a Texaco station that had shut down for the night. He parked the car and went to sleep sitting up behind the wheel. He knew that if he lay down he’d be out until some irate mechanic or state trooper woke him sometime after dawn.

  He did not even know he was asleep until he was awakened by the car horn after his forehead fell against it. He looked at his watch, its hands glowing in the dark like fox fire. 3:30.

  He found enough change to buy a Coke from the vending machine outside, then washed down two more No-Doz and drove the last two-and-a-half hours into Saraw with the driver’s-side window rolled halfway down to keep him awake. Two miles outside town, on the edge of Kinlaw’s Hell, he passed a blur in the road and was two hundred yards away when he realized that it was some farmer’s mule, solid as an oak tree, standing dead center on the white line, parallel to the side of the road. Two more feet, Harry thought, and I’m dead. He felt it was either a good sign or a bad one, but it surely was a sign.

  He tried to convince himself that it would soon be light, or that the mule would wander off the road on its own. But Harry, if not religious, was at least superstitious, and he knew it was no day to let good deeds go undone. He turned his car around, hating the idea of going anywhere except forward, and parked beside the animal, which was standing as still as a statue. The mule was not easy to shoo, but after 10 minutes of clapping his hands and throwing rocks and pine cones, Harry managed to get it off the road and past the ditch, temporarily out of harm’s way.

  Returning from his good deed, he found that his car wouldn’t start. The BMW, as stubborn as the mule in its refusal to obey Harry’s pleas and threats, had been ridden hard and was willing to go no farther. There was nothing to do except walk.

  It was not a bad morning for a walk, Harry conceded. After Long Island, it felt almost balmy with his heavy coat on; it was just chilly enough to clear his mind. He took the champagne from the cooler and finished his journey.

  He soon crossed the northern tip of Turpentine Creek and passed the optimistic city-limit sign—“Welcome to Saraw. A Town on the Move.” Here and there, a light, perhaps not yet doused from the night before, broke the darkness between Harry and the swamp. It was 7 by the time he reached the town itself. He had been there once in 33 years, and it occurred to him that, while his memories of Ruth were enduring, he had only the most vague sense of where, specifically, she lived. He remembered it was on the west side of the Beach Highway, and he knew it was north of the river. Saraw had not grown much, in spite of the sign, but it had grown enough to confuse Harry momentarily.

  Just when he thought he must have taken a wrong turn, somehow, or dreamed it all, he saw the church. The first light of the new year caught the tin of its steeple, in front of him and to his right, a Presbyterian beacon to guide Harry Stein.

  He climbed the church steps, lugging his champagne, to where everything began. There he sat and watched day seep down the pillars of the sanctuary, then cover the frosted ground. Finally he saw it illuminate the old Crowder place, Ruth’s house, not 200 yards away.

  He leaned back on the cold stone to rest for just a moment, to wait for full light and get his second wind.

  In his next moment of consciousness, she was there, over him like a dream. He thought he might have died, looking up at Ruth with pastel-bordered morning clouds scurrying past in the background.

  “Harry? Harry Stein? Is it you? Have you lost your mind?”

  Yes, yes, yes, he thought, I probably have.

  He told her, his mouth feeling as if it were full of cotton, what exactly had brought him to Saraw, what he meant to do, how happy he could make her if she would let him. He did not say it smoothly, but like a man who is about to find out how the rest of his life turns out, who needs food, sleep and the right answer, in reverse order.

  Ruth was wearing a red jogger’s suit and large running shoes that made her look so capable and modern that Harry wondered if his dream wasn’t already beyond him. But she was still beautiful, backlit by the sun, some gray in her blonde hair, a few wrinkles but otherwise an amazing likeness of the young woman he had last seen in that train-station cafeteria in 1954. She had been on her morning walk, and the first thing she saw when she turned the corner onto the lane was Harry, laid out on the steps as if dead or drunk, a bottle of champagne sitting beside him.

  Harry Stein, his dice rolled, his cards played, his hash about to be settled, sat up and looked at his watch. 10:30.

  “Help me,” he said, because he could think of nothing else. He held out his right arm. She bent and took his hand, and he rose unsteadily to embrace her. They fit each other when they hugged, as they once had. And she still smelled like Ruth. Once, in Safe Harbor, he had spent two weeks with a woman who had no discernible charms other than the fact that she smelled like Ruth Crowder.

  Ruth had not expected this. She had spent December convincing herself that it was her self-imposed punishment to stay in the house of her childhood and grow old gracefully, dryly, if fate and the authorities allowed her to do even that much. She couldn’t allow herself to think of sinful extravagances such as Harry Stein. She was not allowed that, she told herself. She didn’t deserve that. Not if there was a God.

  But Harry looked so good to her, even in his unshaven, bleary-eyed, rumpled current state. When he held his arm up toward her, as if in supplication, she could not turn away.

  In Ruth’s arms, Harry started to cry, something he had not done even on the cold, bare nights after Gloria left. Ruth led him back to the house, where they began to talk. Harry chilled the champagne, and they drank it all at the kitchen table before noon, out of two coffee cups Ruth pulled from the dish drain, with the grandfather clock ticking the morning away down the hall, its bells the only thing to remind them that time had not stood completely still.

  They didn’t stop talking for a month, and even then, neither of them felt even mildly sated. Ruth noticed that she was constantly hoarse that January, but there was so much time to make up, so much to say. She had an irrational fear that she would awaken and find Harry gone, as if it had all been a dream, and she wanted as much of him as possible before that happened, in every way possible.

  At first, Ruth told Hank that Harry was an old friend, and Hank was kind enough not to ask any probing questions. But gradually, in a few days, the truth was too obvious to hide in even a large house.

  “Momma,” Hank said to her at breakfast one morning, before Harry came down and before he would officially move into Ruth’s room, “I think it’s time you and I had that talk. About the facts of life.”

  She tried to keep a straight face, but she couldn’t, and neither could Hank.

  “People are going to think you’re crazy, Momma,” he said, shaking his head, still smiling. “They’re going to run you out of the church.”

  So she told him who Harry Stein was. By the end of the week, she had told Paul as well.

  Ruth waited another week to tell Naomi that Harry had returned to the scene of the crime. When Naomi made a rare, unplanned trip from Denver to Saraw a few days later, Paul and Tran came down from Raleigh, and they were all together, asking questions at first awkwardly and then with the kind of frankness that Harry usually encountered when the Steins got together.

  “So,” Paul said when h
e was introduced, “we finally get to meet Randall Phelps.”

  While Naomi was there, Ruth and she went for a long walk one afternoon. When they came back, they both seemed to have been crying, but neither would talk about it afterward. The next morning, Naomi went back to Denver.

  Harry, once he returned, did make Ruth happy. These days, he is warmed by that thought. Weighed against the pain in which he has participated, he has made one person more or less permanently happy (two counting himself), even if it did take him 33 years.

  “Why didn’t you act more interested?” Harry asked Ruth once they had slowed down enough, in bed and out, to analyze things. “I almost didn’t come. I was so afraid.”

  She rolled over on her side and pulled the kimono over an exposed breast.

  “I don’t know,” she said after a pause. “I worried that nothing could beat what we had. You came to mean so much to me, Harry, and my experience with men in the day-after-day flesh and blood has not been so good. I thought maybe Harry Stein and I would both be better off if we kept going to bed with memories. And then, after Henry died … Well, let’s just say I thought everything was over.”

  “What if I hadn’t come, though? What if we had missed this?”

  Ruth frowned.

  “If you hadn’t come down, I wouldn’t have known what I was missing. If you had stayed up there, in my dreams, we would have always wondered, but we would have survived. If you don’t know what you’re missing, you don’t miss it.”

  “Speak for yourself,” he said, as he pulled her body on top of his.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  This time, in Harry’s old, old dream, Sergeant Stevens’ face has been replaced by that of grinning Henry Flood. When he awakes, breathing hard, he has kicked the sheets off his side of the bed.

  The wind isn’t howling or shaking the windows, but he can hear it now. Something has changed.

  Harry’s pain, his semi-constant companion, is back, and he wonders if its absence won’t presage something worse.

  He slips out of bed as quietly as he can, goes to the bathroom to relieve himself and take more pain medicine, avoiding the mirror, then shuffles into the living area. By the various small illuminations—microwave clock, VCR, a night light by the kitchen counter—he can soon make his way to the room’s most comfortable chair.

  He is settling into it when he sees one more small light, from the tip of a cigarette on the deck.

  With the wind up, Harry knows it is bound to be chilly outside, and he wants to stay where he is, hunkered down and quiet as a mouse, hiding from the pain.

  He weighs everything, again. He is relatively certain that Naomi needs to know what he knows. He is almost as sure that Ruth will not forgive him for telling.

  Thirty years of Ruth’s censure would be hard punishment, but Harry is thinking, this night, of a depressingly smaller number. He uses most of his strength to remove himself from the chair, then limps toward the deck.

  He can smell the salt spray as he opens the door, just like at the ocean. Naomi doesn’t seem surprised to see him, almost seems to have been expecting him. By his watch, it’s almost 2:30.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Harry explains.

  “There’s a lot of that going around.” She smiles, putting her cigarette on the lip of the ashtray. “Is the pain really bad?”

  “Nah,” he lies. “It beats the alternative.”

  She tells him he’ll be around for another 20 years, and he lets it pass.

  “Do you have insomnia a lot?” he asks, thinking to himself that it’s late to be asking his daughter that.

  “Just when I’m around Mom,” she says, taking another puff. “No, that’s not right. I’m just being an asshole. Just all the time. I’m trying to stay off those damn sleeping pills, but there are nights when I just lie there, looking at those little green numbers flipping over. My mind’ll hop from Gary to Grace to Thomas to Mom. On a really bad night, I’ll even go back to Henry Flood. Guilt, anger, worry.

  “You know what calms me down sometimes? God, I shouldn’t be telling you this. But if you can’t tell your old dad, who can you tell?” She smiles her usual way, her mouth twisted a little to the right, as if the act of smiling causes her pain. She stubs out her cigarette on the rail, hard. “What does it for me is this: I imagine that I’m at that cabin with him. When he reaches down to ‘help’ me take my panties off, I grab the crowbar that was lying beside the cot. I’m sure that crowbar was there, Harry, that I haven’t just invented it. And I hit him over the head with it, over and over again. He’s begging me to stop, but I keep hitting him. I revel in his suffering.

  “That works sometimes. Sometimes, though, I even turn that into angst. Why didn’t I hit him? Why didn’t I kill the bastard? Why didn’t I try to escape? I was a good athlete, a good runner. Even if I hadn’t killed him with the crowbar, I could have run into the woods, somewhere. Starving to death would have been better, dying of snakebite. Why …?”

  Harry puts his hand to her lips, and she is silent, waiting.

  “I have a story to tell you,” he says, “one that might help you get some sleep.”

  Five years after what Harry thinks of as his redemption, he and Ruth went for a walk one day along the ancient railroad bed where the Sam and Willie once ran. The linear park that replaced it, largely the doing of State Senator Ruth Crowder Flood, is a perfect path for jogging, biking or just, as she describes it, putting one foot in front of the other.

  They would go south, most days. The park picks up the Saraw, with its dark water and low-hanging moss, half a mile from the Crowder house.

  Once in a while, though, for a change of pace, they would go north, where the old railbed is the boundary of Kinlaw’s Hell. Here, the view is not quite so spectacular—bays and low-lying shrubs, tall, angular pine trees like underweight sentries guarding the swamp, loons mourning in the distance.

  Sometimes, they walk late in the afternoon, especially in the summer, and occasionally they return home after dark. On those days, they never go north, where the Saraw Lights, once the ghosts of Ruth’s doomed parents, have imitated late-20th century life and downsized. Now, people swear they see only one light, and the light they see is Henry Flood weaving around in the distance, trying to get home.

  That morning, five years after his return, on one of their infrequent walks north, Harry looked over and saw the back of a house he had passed often on the highway—the old Flood place.

  After Henry’s death, Ruth gave the house and the land to Henry’s younger sister in Laurinburg. The sister in turn sold it to a family named Hedgepeth, which soon moved onto the property five double-wide trailers housing almost every Hedgepeth in Pembroke County. Ruth had not set foot on the land since she moved out.

  Harry had often wondered about the place where Ruth and Henry Flood lived, what it looked like on the inside, whether he could discern the scent of something that would tell him more about the years he missed. But Ruth always demurred, and Harry never pushed it.

  Now, though, it was right there beside them. Harry could see small, ragged children playing next to the closest trailer. He asked Ruth if she wouldn’t like to see what had been done with the place in which she had spent the majority of her adult life. She said she would rather not, in a tone that indicated that she would rather be in hell.

  After that, Harry would push the issue every time they passed the house. It became a contest of wills.

  Finally, one morning in the late spring of 1981, Ruth gave in.

  That day, she stopped dead on the path, so suddenly that Harry was a few steps beyond her before he realized she wasn’t with him.

  “OK, Harry,” she said, “you want to see the damn farm? Let’s go see the damn farm.”

  He followed in cautious silence as they eased down the bank to a path through the weeds that led toward her former home.

  Dogs of indecipherable pedigree barked their arrival at each mobile home they approached. It looked to Harry as if German shepherds and da
chshunds, terriers and Labradors, chows and Chihuahuas had found a way to mate with each other. Ruth told them to hush, and they did. She waved a greeting to one young overweight mother who was hanging out her wash. The mother tried to speak with a clothespin in her mouth, then was distracted by her 2-year-old, who appeared to be trying to use his big-wheel to run over his baby sister, lying on an old Army blanket in the side yard.

  They approached the main house from the back. Ruth walked up and knocked on the kitchen door, and a woman who appeared to Harry to be approximately 80 years old answered. She apologized for not having her teeth in yet. Ruth called her by her first name, Cora. She introduced Harry, then asked if they could wander around the farm so she could show him where she had once lived.

  “Wonder all you like,” Cora said with a toothless smile Harry would just as soon have not seen. “Wonder away.”

  Cora Hedgepeth turned to him.

  “She’s a good womern,” she said, barely intelligible without her dentures. “I always vote for her.”

  Ruth thanked her for that and declined an invitation to see the inside of the house.

  Walking across the yard, she said to Harry, “I don’t think I’m up to that right now. Besides, I’ve got something else to show you.”

  “How old is Cora Hedgepeth?” he asked when they were a polite distance from the house.

  “She and I were in school together.”

  “Well, I’d definitely advise you to keep the teeth. I never realized what a vital fashion accessory they were.”

  He had hoped Ruth would smile at that. She didn’t.

  The farm was typical for the area. There was an abundance of outbuildings of various sizes and uses. An old “carhouse” was employed mainly to shelter the weathered remains of a 1965 Mustang that someone still thought he would restore someday. A chicken coop and the wire fence around its yard were leaning, decaying. A pair of tobacco barns, one listing badly, were used mostly to store old, never-to-be-used-again furniture. What once was a smokehouse lay in ruins, its boards now used for kindling. A safe distance from all the rotting wood stood rusted-out 50-gallon drums, in which trash was burned.