Ruby (36 page)

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.

W
HEN 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.

T
HE ENTIRE
congregation stood in white at the southern shore of Marion Lake. The sound of Verde Rankin bludgeoning the hymn “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” filled the air. Ephram Jennings stood, the fourth in line, behind Chauncy’s drunken uncle, Mandy Petty’s seven-month-old son and a woman from Nacogdoches. Ephram was to be the last and final baptism of the day.

The choir blended in at the chorus,
“I sing because I’m happy!
I sing because I’m free!”
One or two angels’ voices rising above the pool of wispy notes of old women and the booming off-key singers cramming every note into God’s beleaguered ear. Verde was only one. Moss Percy’s wife, Clara, was another. Women for whom tone-deaf and well-meaning family members had mistaken volume for talent and praised them thusly, and so both Verde and Clara sang even louder, each trying to top the other.

Ephram did not look at them. He kept his eyes on his bare feet, stoic and silent. A hangnail on his left baby toe was red and swollen. He wondered what the muck at the bottom of the lake would do to it.

When Celia had first suggested, over pork chops, grits and scrambled eggs, that Ephram be reborn through baptism, he had said no. But she had nagged so, every day another drop, until, to spare himself years of erosion he had complied.

He was to be the slow-cooked pork roast of the evening. The rest were only yams and corn and okra. Chauncy’s uncle was the Tabasco sauce.

Ephram could not help but think of Ruby. She entered him like a taste at the back of his throat—the memory of his mama’s peach cobbler. Now, Ruby would be only a yellowed recipe to be hidden away, slipped into his shirt pocket. He would unfold her on the way to work or when he was sitting on his bed alone.

A few pines clung to the banks of the lake, dipping their branches into the murky green. Reeds rose and clustered as the sun dipped and painted the world a twilight blue. Ephram took in the whole of life around him, the hush of the forest, the slant of the sun hiding behind the pines. It was as if a banquet lay before him, but it became sawdust in his mouth.

The Pastor entered the water and walked until it rose to his
thighs. He spoke in a rich, low tone, stumbling only here and there. Chauncy’s uncle, all in white, was the first.

“B-Brothers and Sisters, Matthew chapter twenty-eight, verses nineteen to twenty, say: ‘G-g-go ye therefore, and teach all nations, b-b-aptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: T-t-t-teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo with you always, even unto the end of the world.’ Amen.”