Ruby (6 page)

Inside, the walls leaned towards the two.
“Rompre le lien! Rompre le lien!”
Ma Tante snarled. Ruby looked up as Ma Tante lifted the knife and brought it down hard, halving a pomegranate on the floor beside them.

Ephram grabbed at his hand, the pain cutting like nails. Maggie was up in a flash, wheeling back her foot then
pop
into Ephram’s cheek. Ephram lay still, moon eyes walled, then fluttering, then soft and still. Head tilted into the mud.

The juice dribbled down the part and into Ruby’s hair. Ma Tante tore open a glut of seeds and squeezed the fruit until a crown of red streamed down the young girl’s face.

Maggie walked back to the porch as the wind brought another blanket of feathery rain. The sky sweetened and thinned as sunlight sprinkled through. She took note of the fact that Ephram was still breathing.

Ruby held the juice against her tongue and the roof of her mouth while the old woman smoothed it into her skin, still clucking words from a fold in the black of time:
“Tumulong potrebno … Duboko haja Gu-semerera esivanemad … O-negai shimasu. min faDlik Apsaugoti savo … en smeken Era berean seo Faoi deara …”

Maggie lit a new cigarette from her porch vantage. Bent but still intact.

“There, there, child … there, there …” Ma Tante hoisted Ruby upon her lap. Ruby looked into her yolk eyes. “I don’ mean no harm.”

Outside, Ma Tante’s yellow cat found its way from under the house, hopped onto Maggie’s thighs and purred into her chest. Maggie petted the cat, blew out smoke and pretended not to shake.

Ma Tante petted Ruby’s head. “I try to make it harder fo’ them to steal your soul’s purse. They’s things that happen out in them woods under the blood moon. Nights when a child like you need to stay behind locked doors. But it’s too late for that, ain’t it?”

Ruby nodded yes.

“They already dragged you out to they pit fire, ain’t they?”

Ruby nodded again.

“Already cracked open your spirit like a walnut and try to stuff they rot in there. Dat’s why them spirits pester you so. They like openings and you a sieve. You got to know they two kinds of spirits—haints is like leeches, hang on, but can’t swallow you whole. Dyboù something different. Ain’t content with nothing but snuffing out all you is—smell like a burned out candle when it come.

“I try to suck the poison of the pit fire out. I try. Girl, you got to fly off next time they take you down there. Don’t hold fort in your body, surrender it so you can come back when they done. I’m afraid they’ll whittle you down to nothing if you keep on fightin’ ’em. Won’t be nothing left of you.” She motioned towards the door. “You tell her?”

Ruby shook her head no.

“Good. Don’t. She too stiff a tree to take that weight.”

Ruby let her long neck soften and bend. Let her lungs push air out and sat there empty, until nature nudged her to breathe in.

Ma Tante rubbed Ruby’s back, lifting only an ounce of the weight in her chest—but it was something. “Lawd, Lawd. Man and magic wasn’t never meant to go together. Dey got to rule ovah things. And magic be the ocean say you ride my wave. But when you know man be content to ride nothing ’thout breakin it first?”

She petted Ruby’s head. “Child, they’s a rainbow of doings in this here world, but man, he only see the black and the white of it. Do good work with his right, and the Devil work with his left. Stay way from that left hand as much as you able.” Ma Tante spit into her apron and wiped Ruby’s skin clean like a mother cat.

“Me? I am not long here, you see that, yes? I take in too many people sin when I was young and didn’t know where to put them
down. So my nails and eyes yellow like piss in the sun. Some things you cannot be fix. Some can. Too early to tell how it turn for you.” Ma Tante wrapped Ruby in a furry blanket.

She rocked her like a baby against her chest until Ruby had fallen into sleep, then set her gently on the daybed and opened the front door.

Ma Tante looked onto the porch through the screen. “Maggie, help dat boy up and quick.”

Maggie rose and walked to where Ephram lay, surrounded by flashing stars. “Get up.” Maggie puffed and reached her hand under the crook of his shoulder. Ephram wobbled up, leaning against Maggie. Ma Tante supervised from the porch. The rain had started again. Harder than before. The crows were complaining in the trees as Maggie sat Ephram down on the steps. For Ephram, the world was dizzy with lights and the sound of waves.

“Come in boy.” Ma Tante waved him in. “N’, Margaret, you best sit out there ’til you can think to act right.” Maggie flicked her cigarette into the rain. Got up to leave and turned around.

“I ain’t leavin’ ’thout Ruby.”

“Then I guess you ain’t leavin’.”

Maggie huffed as Ephram stumbled alongside Ma Tante into the house.

R
UBY WOKE
up to the smell of cocoa. Her face sticky with dried juice and the old woman’s spit, her cheek swollen from where she’d been slapped. Miss Barbara would be mad about that. So would her grandmother. Ruby peeked out from the moldy-smelling daybed. She would fake sleep a little while longer. Ruby couldn’t get a proper look at the boy from where she lay but she
saw Ma Tante rattling around, her skirt swishing against the floor like a broom. She was fiddling with something on the table—Ruby hoped she wasn’t slipping the bones out of a live bird, as Maggie had seen her do, or cutting a hex out of a horny toad. After what she had seen, Ruby didn’t doubt a word Maggie had said. Those yellow eyes had seen the thing Ruby hid, even from herself. And when two people see a thing, for better or worse, it becomes real. Ruby felt that knowing smooth over her like tree sap and fill in a little of the ache.

The boy Ephram fidgeted in a chair. The light caught his face and Ruby saw him, eye purple and swollen shut. Two fat lips. Nose busted for sure. Cotton balls stuffed up in it. Hand bandaged. He sat like he’d wet himself in front of class. Shamed like that.
Damn Maggie
.

“Hot chocolate, y’all share,” Ruby heard Ma Tante say to Ephram. Ruby could smell the sweet bitter before it reached her and she pretended to wake.

Ma Tante set the cup down on a side table and wiped Ruby clean with a wet towel.

Then she handed the cup over to Ruby and turned to Ephram, “Come on over here, son.” Ephram carefully lifted himself onto the far end of the bed and sat there quiet. Ruby caught the tail end of his silence and let it settle across her lap. She sipped the hot cocoa. There was a knock on the door.

“You ain’t ready yet,” Ma Tante called and Ruby could hear Maggie stomp across the porch and sit hard. Ruby handed the cup to Ephram.

He waited, then took hold of the handle with his good hand. “Thank you.”

“Maggie give me this,” Ruby said after a pause and pulled a silver thimble from her dress pocket. “From P & K. She got that five finger discount.”

“Hmmm.”

“She do that for me sometime. Steal me treasure. She ain’t always like that, how she were with you. She get jealous is all … that, and she ain’t too fond of your daddy, the Reverend.”

He was quiet in a way that seemed to say that he understood very well how someone might come to dislike his papa.

Ruby took in the wreck of his face up close. Bits where Maggie’s knuckles had busted the skin on his cheek wide open. His limp right hand swollen and wrapped like a splint.

Damn
.

Ruby felt the lonely before it came. Knew that for all she’d have to face when she left this tiny shack, the lonely would be the worst of it. She knew too that it was the thing each of them shared, only it was waiting for them in different places. For Ruby it was a room at Miss Barbara’s. For Maggie it was the minute after Ruby said good-bye. And for Ephram, it was right here, right now. She felt how the lonely never left him, not even sitting beside her.

Her throat squeezed until her lashes got wet. But she never cried, not since moving away. Not since she’d gotten her room at Miss Barbara’s. She swallowed it down.

He looked right at her. “I’m fine.”

“It hurt?”

“Little bit,” he lied.

He handed the chocolate back to Ruby and she slid in close to take it.

“Who look after you?” Ruby asked.

“My sister Celia—who look after you?”

“Mama’s up in New York City. She’s gonna send for me next month she misses me so bad. But ’til next month and since my grandmama got all that work to do—this White lady up in Neches take me in.”

“You working for her?”

“Sometime.”

“What you do?”

“Stuff. Pick up after folk. Take care of her other children too. But she sends me to school and such. She gone a lot. Own a couple a’ shops in Lufkin and Newton.”

“What kind?”

“Miss Barbara Brides.”

“Miss Barbara’s Bridal Necessities?”

“Think so.”

“There is where my mama usta work!”

“Naw! What did she do?”

“Stitching hems and such. And she a lace-maker too. She real good at it.”

“Miss Barbara be there?”

“Sometime. Usta be.”

“Your mama worked with her? Ain’t that something. Was she—nice to work for?”

“Miss Barbara was nice enough, I ’spose. She give me candy sometime. Do she you?”

“Oh yes.”

“What she give you?”

“Them gumballs mostly.”

“I like those. She mostly give me Tootsie Rolls.”

“I like them.”

“Yeah, they real good.”

They sat quiet for a minute. Then Ruby added, “But, if you see her, don’t tell her I said nothing ’bout her. She don’t like being in people’s mouths. She say it uncouth.”

“I won’t. Promise.”

“Thanks.”

M
A
T
ANTE
walked to the front door and swung it open. “Come on.” Maggie walked in like a scolded puppy. She watched Ruby and Ephram lean against each other on the edge of the bed for a moment. She looked to Ma Tante, busy pulling the black drapes from the windows, then slowly sauntered over to the bed, hoisted herself up and tickled Ruby in her side. Ruby laughed.

“What y’all doing?”

“Talking.” Ruby said, “He know Miss Barbara. Say his mama usta work for her.”

Maggie loosely put her arm around Ruby’s shoulder, drawing her away from Ephram in one easy move. “Now ain’t that something.”

Ephram looked away and saw that the sky had turned a soot black. Ma Tante lit a kerosene lamp and walked over to the three of them and scooted them from the bed like chicks.

“Y’all got to leave. I got me a paying customer comin’.” She took the empty cup from Ephram. “Open yo’ right hand to the sky.” And all three turned their right hands up.

Ma Tante looked down at the three of them. Stupid as dirt before God blowed across it to make up some humans. Dumb as dishwater, light on suds. Three ignorant children with grown up sorrow living inside they eyes. They wasn’t worth her time. Didn’t know why she’d wasted so precious much of it.

Ma Tante sighed and felt suddenly old. Her whole life a drop
of water in a pool. Make a little wave and then fade away to nothing. The eyes were still looking up at her. Palms raised. So she answered them.

“Ain’t nobody ever gone answer you cries. You can fill a well with tears, and all you gonna get is drowned. You sit there long enough and the crazy man find you. You weep too long, your heart ache so, the flesh slip off your bones and your soul got to find a new home. You wait on answers ’til the scaredy-cat curl up in your belly and use your liver for a pin cushion. And that’s just how you die. Ascared and waiting. And death find your ghost wailing for help. In this life, if someone promise you aid, they a lie. If someone offer they hand, check five time ten to see where they hide the bill. You ain’t nobody but alone. And God come to those with the fight to find It. Ain’t nothing easy. Not for the likes of you.”

The sky groaned outside. The storm was not over. In fact, it had not yet begun.

Useless, Ma Tante thought. To give them the gris-gris she’d made. What difference could it make? Didn’t have the juice time would have fed them. She’d made them up quick when she’d smelt the children coming through the rain. Couldn’t stop nothing. Still, it was a sin not to paddle your boat, even in a lake of fire.

So, into each hand Ma Tante put a teeny Black doll with red cross eyes. No bigger than a child’s pinkie.

“Don’t peek,” she warned.

The doll with the crow’s wishbone stitched to its heart she gave to the boy. The one with a woman’s silver ring sewn about its waist she handed to Maggie, and the third—the one with the oval lodestone tied on its back—was for Ruby.

After a beat she pointed to both Ephram and Maggie and said, “You two. Trade. Don’t look just trade.”

And Maggie gave over her secret and Ephram did the same.

“Me make a mistake sometime. Rare. But sometime.”

There was a knock on the door.

Ma Tante hissed, “Get!” as she opened the back door and pushed the three into the night.

The oak, pine and maple trees heard the heavy thud of the witch’s door and took note.

They watched three children pause, then, one by one peek into the hole of their palm. The piney woods heard a growling scream,
“I said get!”
Then watched the children bolt out of the yard stumbling. The tall lanky girl jerked ahead. Ruby stayed at the gate with Ephram. He whispered something into her ear, something so soft that even the smallest saplings could not catch. Then she answered, “I already got me a walk home Ephram Jennings and a beau.” She turned to go, then spun about and gave the boy a kiss on his left cheek. The old trees watched as she ran away from him and into their arms. The dark boy stood still as the rain washed his scalp clean. He stood staring after the girl for a very long time. Then, with a crack of thunder he jumped and ran through the woods, to the lake, and grabbed a rusting red wagon. It squeaked double time as he ran all the way home. The old forest caught every tinny creak, only to echo them back some thirty years later, to an old house perched on the edge of the great wood, to a man sleeping inside, curled in the sun like a kitten.