Read Ruby Online

Authors: V. C. Andrews

Tags: #Horror

Ruby (9 page)

BOOK: Ruby
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Slowly, I retreated, following my footsteps back. Yes, I thought, the swamp was a beautiful place, filled with wonderful and interesting animal life, with fascinating vegetation, sometimes mysterious and still and sometimes a symphony of nature with its frogs croaking, its birds singing, its gators drumming water with their tails. But it could be a hard, cold place, too, wrought with death and danger, with poisonous snakes and spiders, with quicksand and sticky, sucking mud to draw the unsuspecting intruder down into the darkness beneath. It was a world in which the stronger fed on the weaker and into which men came to enjoy their power over natural things.
Today, I thought, it was like everywhere else on earth, and today, I hated being here.
By the time I returned, the showers had begun and Grandmere Catherine had begun to take in most of our handicraft goods. I hurried to help her with what remained. The rain fell harder and harder, so we had to rush as quickly as we could and we had no time to speak to each other until everything had been safely stored. Then Grandmere got us some towels to wipe our hair and faces. The rain pounded the tin roof and the wind whipped through the bayou. We ran around the house, closing the batten plank shutters.
"It's a real tosser," Grandmere cried. We heard the wind whistle through the cracks in our walls and saw brush and anything else that was loose and light being lifted and driven every which way over the road and lawn. The world outside became very dark. Thunder clapped and lightning scorched the sky. I could hear the cisterns overflowing as sheets of rain came off the roof and collected in the barrels. The drops fell so hard and thick, they bounced when they hit the steps or little walkway in front of the house. For a while it sounded like the tin roof would split. It was as if we had fallen into a drum. Finally, it subsided and just as quickly as it had developed into a heavy downpour, it became a slight drizzle. The sky lightened and moments later, a ray of sunlight threaded itself through the opening in the overcast and dropped a shaft of warm brightness over our home.
Grandmere Catherine took a deep breath of relief and shook her head.
"I never get used to those sudden cloudbursts," she said. "When I was a little girl, I used to crawl under my bed."
I smiled at her
"I can't imagine you as a little girl, Grandmere," I said.
"Well, I was, honey. I wasn't born this old with bones that creaked when I walked, you know." She pressed her hand against the small of her back and straightened up. "I think I'll make a cup of tea. I'd like something warm in my stomach. How about you?"
"All right, Grandmere," I said. I sat at the kitchen table while she put up the water. "Grandpere Jack is doing some guiding for hunters again. I just saw him in the swamp with two men. They shot a deer."
"He was one of the best at it," she said. "The rich Creoles were always after him when they came here to hunt, and none ever left empty-handed."
"It was a beautiful deer, Grandmere."
She nodded.
"And the thing is, they won't care about the meat; they just want a trophy."
She stared at me a moment. "What did you tell Paul?" she finally asked.
"That we shouldn't just be with each other, that we should see other people. I told him because I was an artist, I wanted to meet other people, but he didn't believe me. I'm not a good liar, Grandmere," I moaned.
"That's not a bad fault, Ruby."
"Yes, it is, Grandmere," I retorted quickly. "This is a world built on lies, lies and deceptions. The stronger and the more successful are good at it."
Grandmere Catherine shook her head sadly.
"It looks that way to you right now, Ruby honey, but don't give into the comfort of hating everything and everyone around you. Those you call stronger and successful might seem so to you, but they're not really happy, for there is a dark place in their hearts that they cannot deny and it makes their souls ache. In the end they are terrified because they know the darkness is what they will face forever."
"You've seen so much evil and so much sickness, Grandmere. How can you still feel hopeful?" I asked.
She smiled and sighed.
"It's when you stop feeling hopeful that the sickness and the evil wins over you and then what becomes of you? Never lose hope, Ruby. Never stop fighting for hope," she advised. "I know how much you're hurting now and how much poor Paul is suffering, too, but just like this sudden storm, it will end for you and the sun will be out again.
"I always dreamed," she said, coming over to sit beside me and stroke my hair, "that you would have the magical wedding, the one in the Cajun spider legend. Remember? The rich Frenchman imported those spiders from France for his daughter's wedding and released them into the oaks and pines where they wove their canopy of webs. Over them, he sprinkled gold and silver dust and then they had the candlelight wedding procession. The night glittered all around them, promising them a life of love and hope.
"Someday, you will marry a handsome man who could be a prince and you, too, will have a wedding in the stars," Grandmere promised. She kissed me and I threw my arms around her to bury my head in her soft shoulder. I cried and cried and she petted me and soothed me. "Cry honey," she said. "And like the summer rains turn to sunshine so will your tears."
"Oh, Grandmere," I moaned. "I don't know if I can."
"You can," she said. She lifted my chin and looked into my eyes, hers those dark, mesmerizing orbs that had seen evil spirits and visions of the future, "you can and you will," she predicted.
The teapot whistled. Grandmere wiped the tears from my cheeks and kissed me again, and then got up to pour us our cups.
Later that night, I sat by my window and looked up at the clearing sky and I wondered if Grandmere was right; I wondered if I would have a wedding in the stars. The glitter of gold and silver dust danced under my eyelids when I lay my head on the pillow, but just before I fell asleep, I saw Paul's wounded face once more and then I saw the marsh deer open its mouth to voice an unheard scream as it crumbled to the grass.

5
Who Is the Little Girl
If It's Not Me?
.
The weeks before summer and the end of the

school year took ages and ages to pass. I dreaded every day I attended school, for I knew that some time during the day, I would see Paul or he would see me. During the first few days following our terrible talk, he continued to glare at me furiously whenever he saw me. His once beautiful, soft blue eyes that had gazed upon me with love so many times before were now granite cold and full of scorn and contempt. The second time we approached each other in the corridor, I tried to speak to him.

"Paul," I said, "I'd like to talk to you, to just--"

He behaved as if he didn't hear me or he didn't see me and walked past me. I wanted him to know that I wasn't seeing another boy on the side. I felt dreadful and spent most of my school day with a heart that felt more like a lump of lead in my chest.

Time wasn't healing my wounds and the longer we went on not talking to each other, the harder and colder Paul seemed to become. I wished that I could simply rush up to him one day and gush the truth so he would understand why I said the things I had said to him at my house, but every time I decided I would do just that, Grand mere Catherine's heavy words returned: "Do you want to be the one who puts enmity in his heart and drives him to despise his own father?" She was right. In the end he would hate me more, I concluded. And so I kept my lips sealed and the truth buried beneath an ocean of secret tears.

Many times I had found myself furious with Grandmere Catherine or Grandpere Jack for not revealing the secrets in their hearts and keeping my family history a deep mystery, a mystery it should no longer have been for me at my age. Now, I was no better than they had been, keeping the truth from Paul, but there was nothing I could do about it. Worst of all, I had to stand by and watch him fall in love with someone else.

I always knew that Suzzette Daisy, a girl in my class, had a crush on Paul. She didn't wait long to pursue him, but ironically, when Paul first began spending more and more time with Suzzette Daisy, I felt a sense of relief. He would direct more of his energies toward caring for her and less toward hating me, I thought. From across the room, I watched him sit with her and eat his lunch and soon saw them holding hands when they walked through the school corridors. Of course, a part of me was jealous, a part of me raged over the injustice and cried when I saw them laughing and giggling together. Then I heard he had given her his class ring which she wore proudly on a gold chain, and I spent a night drenching my pillow in salty tears.

Most of the girls who had once been envious of Paul's affection for me now gloated. Marianne Bruster actually turned to me in the girls' room one June afternoon and blared, "I guess you don't think you're someone special anymore since you were dumped for Suzzette Daisy."

The other girls smiled and waited for me to respond.
"I never thought I was someone special, Marianne," I said. "But thank you for thinking so," I added.
For a moment she was dumbfounded. Her mouth opened and closed. I started past her, but she spun about, flinging her hair over her face, then tossing it back and whipping around to make it fan out in a circle as she grinned broadly at me.
"Well, that's just like you," she said, her hands on her hips, her head wagging from side to side as she spoke. "Just like you to be smart about it. I don't know where you come off being snotty," she continued, now building on her anger and frustration. "You're certainly no better than the rest of us."
"I never said I was, Marianne."
"If anything, you're worse. You're a bastard child. That's what you are," she accused. The others nodded. Encouraged, she reached out to seize my arm and continue. "Paul Tate finally has shown some sense. He belongs with someone like Suzzette and certainly not a low-class Cajun like a Landry," she concluded.
I pulled away and brushed at my tears as I rushed from the girls' room. It was true--everyone thought Paul belonged with someone like Suzzette Daisy and thought they were the perfect couple. She was a pretty girl with long, light brown hair and stately features, but more important, her father was a rich oil man. I was sure Paul's parents were overjoyed at his choice of a new girlfriend. He'd have no trouble getting the car and going to dances with Suzzette.
Yet despite his apparent happiness with his new girlfriend, I couldn't help but detect a wistful look in his eyes when he saw me occasionally and especially at church. Starting a relationship with Suzzette, and the passage of more time since our split-up, finally began to calm him. even thought he was close to speaking to me, but every time he seemed to be headed in that direction, something stopped him and turned him away again.
Finally, mercifully, the school year ended, and with it my daily contact with Paul, as slight as it had been. Outside of school he and I truly did live in two different worlds. He no longer had any reason to come my way. Of course, I still saw him at church on Sunday, but in the company of his parents and sisters, he especially wouldn't even look in my direction. Occasionally, I would hear what sounded like his motor scooter's engine and go running to my doorway to look out in anticipation and in the hope that I would see him pull into our drive just as he used to so many times before. But the sound either turned out to be someone else on a motorcycle or some old car passing by.
These were my days of darkness, days when I was so sad and tired that I had to fight to get out of bed each morning. Making everything seem worse and harder was the intensity with which the heat and the humidity greeted the bayou this particular summer. Everyday temperatures hovered near a hundred with humidity often only a degree or two less. Day after day the swamps were calm, still, not even the tiniest wisp of a breeze weaving its way up from the Gulf to give us any relief.
The heat took a great toll on Grandmere Catherine. More than ever, she was oppressed by the layers and layers of heavy humidity. I hated it when she had to walk somewhere to treat someone for a bad spider bite or a terrible headache. More often than not, she would return exhausted, drained, her dress drenched, her hair sticking to her forehead and her cheeks beet red; but these trips and the work she did resulted in some small income or some gifts of food for us and with the tourist trade dwindling down to practically nothing during the summer months, there wasn't much else.
Grandpere Jack wasn't any help. He stopped even his infrequent assistance. I heard he was hunting alligators with some men from New Orleans who wanted to sell the skins to make pocketbooks and wallets and whatever else city folk made out of the swamp creatures' hides. I didn't see him much, but whenever I did, he was usually floating by in his canoe or drifting in his dingy and guzzling some homemade cider or whiskey, satisfied to turn whatever money he had made from his gator hunting into another bottle or jug.
Late one afternoon, Grandmere Catherine returned from a treateur mission more exhausted than ever. She could barely speak. I had to rush out to help her up the stairs. She practically collapsed in her bed.
"Grandmere, your legs are trembling," I cried when helped her take off her moccasins. Her feet were blistered and swollen, especially her ankles.
"I'll be all right," she chanted. "I'll be all right. Just get me a cold cloth for my forehead, Ruby, honey."
I hurried to do so.
"I'll just lay here a while until my heart slows down," she told me, and forced a smile.
"Oh, Grandmere, you can't make these long trips anymore. It's too hot and you're too old to do it."
She shook her head.
"I must do it," she said. "It's why the good Lord put me here."
I waited until she fell asleep and then I left the house and poled our pirogue out to Grandpere's shack. All of the sadness and days of melancholy I had endured the past month and a half turned into anger and fury directed at Grandpere. He knew how hard it was for us during the summer months. Instead of drinking up his spare money every week, he should think about us and come around more often, I decided. I also decided not to discuss it with Grandmere Catherine, for she wouldn't want to admit I was right and she wouldn't want to ask him for a penny.
The swamp was different in the summer. Besides the waking of the hibernating alligators who had been sleeping with tails fattened with stores, there were dozens and dozens of snakes, clumps of them entwined together or slicing through the water like green and brown threads. Of course, there were clouds of mosquitos and other bugs, choruses of fat bullfrogs with gaping eyes and jiggling throats croaking and families of nutrias and muskrats scurrying about frantically, stopping only to eye me with suspicion. The insects and animals continually changed the swamp, their homes making it bulge in places it hadn't before, their webs linking plants and tree limbs. It made it all seem alive, like the swamp was one big animal itself, forming and reforming with each change of season.
I knew Grandmere Catherine would be upset that I was traveling alone through the swamp this later in the summer day, as well as being upset that I was going to see Grandpere Jack. But my anger had come to a head and sent me rushing out of the house to plod over the marsh and pole the pirogue faster than ever. Before long, I came around a turn and saw
Grandpere's shack straight ahead. But as I
approached, I slowed down because the racket coming from it was frightening.
I heard pans clanging, furniture cracking, Grandpere's howls and curses. A small chair came flying out the door and splashed in the swamp before it quickly sunk. A pot followed and then another. I stopped my canoe and waited. Moments later, Grandpere appeared on his galerie. He was stark naked, his hair wild, holding a bullwhip. Even at this distance, I could see his eyes were bloodshot. His body was streaked with dirt and mud and there were even long, thin scratches up his legs and down the small of his back.
He cracked the whip at something in the air before him and shouted before cracking it again. I soon understood he was imagining some kind of creature and I realized he was having a drunken fit. Grandmere Catherine had described one of them to me, but I had never seen it before. She said the alcohol soaked his brain so bad it gave him delusions and created nightmares, even in the daytime. On more than one occasion, he had one of these fits in the house and destroyed many of their good things.
"I used to have to run out and wait until he grew exhausted and fell asleep," she told me. "Otherwise, he might very well hurt me without realizing it."
Remembering those words, I backed my canoe into a small inlet so he wouldn't see me watching. He cracked the whip again and again and screamed so hard, the veins in his neck bulged. Then he caught the whip in some of his muskrat traps and got it so entangled, he couldn't pull it out. He interpreted this as the monster grabbing his whip. It put a new hysteria into him and he began to wail, waving his arms about him so quickly, he looked like a cross between a man and a spider from where I was watching. Finally, the exhaustion Grandmere Catherine described set in and he collapsed to the porch floor.
I waited a long moment. All was silent and remained so. Satisfied, he was unconscious, I poled myself up to the galerie and peered over the edge to see him twisted and asleep, oblivious to the mosquitos that feasted on his exposed skin.
I tied up the canoe and stepped onto the galerie. He looked barely alive, his chest heaving and falling with great effort. I knew I couldn't lift him and carry him into the house, so I went inside and found a blanket to put over him.
Then, I pulled in a deep fearful breath and nudged him, but his eyes didn't even flutter. He was already snoring. I went cold inside. All the hopes that had lit up were snuffed out by the sight and the stench rising off him. He smelled like he had taken a bath in his jugs of cheap whiskey.
"So much for coming to you for any help, Grandpere," I said furiously. "You are a disgrace." With him unconscious, I was able to vent my anger unchecked. "What kind of a man are you? How could you let us struggle and strain to keep alive and well? You know how tired Grandmere Catherine is. Don't you have any self-respect?
"I hate having Landry blood in me. I hate it!" I screamed, and pounded my fists against my hips. My voice echoed through the swamp. A heron flew off instantly and a dozen feet away, an alligator lifted its head from the water and gazed in my direction. "Stay here, stay in the swamp and guzzle your rotgut whiskey until you die. I don't care," I cried. The tears streaked down my cheeks, hot tears of anger and frustration. My heart pounded.
I caught my breath and stared at him. He moaned, but he didn't open his eyes. Disgusted, I got back into the pirogue and started to pole myself home, feeling more despondent and defeated than ever.
With the tourist trade nearly nonexistent and school over, I had more time to do my artwork. Grandmere Catherine was the first to notice that my pictures were remarkably different. Usually in a melancholy mood when I began, I tended now to use darker colors and depict the swamp world at either twilight or at night with the pale white light of a half moon or full moon penetrating twisted sycamores and cypress limbs. Animals stared out with luminous eyes and snakes coiled their bodies, poised to strike and kill any intruders. The water was inky, the Spanish moss dangling over it like a net left there to ensnare the unwary traveler. Even the spiderwebs that I used to make sparkle like jewels now appeared more like the traps they were intended to be. The swamp was an eerie, dismal, and depressing place and if I did include my mysterious father in the picture, he had a face masked with shadows.
"I don't think most people would like that picture, Ruby," Grandmere told me one day as she stood behind me and watched me visualize another nightmare. "It's not the kind of picture that will make them feel good, the kind they're going to want to hang up in their living rooms and sitting rooms in New Orleans."
"It's how I feel, what I see right now, Grandmere. I can't help it," I told her.
She shook her head sadly and sighed before retreating to her oak rocker. I found she spent more and more time sitting and falling asleep in it. Even on cloudy days when it was a bit cooler outside, she no longer took her pleasure walks along the canals. She didn't care to go find wild flowers, nor would she visit her friends as much as she used to visit them. Invitations to lunch went unaccepted. She made her excuses, claimed she had to do this or that, but usually ended up falling asleep in a chair or on the sofa.
When she didn't know I was watching, I caught her taking deep breaths and pressing her palm against her bosom. Any exertion, washing clothes or the floors, polishing furniture, and even cooking exhausted her. She had to take frequent rests in between and battle to catch her breath.
But when I asked her about it, she was always ready with an excuse. She was tired from staying up too late the night before; she had a bit of lumbago, she got up too fast, anything and everything but her owning up to the truth--that she hadn't been well for quite some time now.
Finally, on the third Sunday in August, I rose and dressed and went down, surprised I was up and ready before her, especially on a church day. When she finally appeared, she looked pale and very old, as old as Rip van Winkle after his extended sleep. She cringed a bit when she walked and held her hand against her side.
"I don't know what's come over me," she declared. "I haven't overslept like this for years."
"Maybe you can't cure yourself, Grandmere. Maybe your herbs and potions don't work on you and you should see a town doctor," I suggested.
"Nonsense. I just haven't found the right formula yet, but I'm on the right track. be back to myself in a day or two," she swore, but two days went by and she didn't improve an iota. One minute she would be talking to me and the next, she would be fast asleep in her chair, her mouth wide open, her chest heaving as if it were a struggle to breathe.
Only two events got her up and about with the old energy she used to exhibit. The first was when Grandpere Jack came to the house and actually asked us for money. I was sitting with Grandmere on the galerie after our dinner, grateful for the little coolness the twilight brought to the bayou. Her head grew heavier and heavier on her shoulders until her chin'rested on her chest, but the moment Grandpere Jack's footsteps could be heard, her head snapped up. She narrowed her eyes into slits of suspicion.
"What's he coming here for?" she demanded, staring into the darkness out of which he emerged like some ghostly apparition from the swamp: his long hair bouncing on the back of his neck, his face sallow with his grimy gray beard thicker than usual, and his clothes so creased and dirty, he looked like he had been rolling around in them for days. His boots were so thick with mud, it looked caked around his feet and ankles.
"Don't you come any closer," Grandmere snapped. "We just had our dinner and the stink will turn our stomachs."
"Aw, woman," he said, but he stopped about a half-dozen yards from the galefie. He took off his hat and held it in his hands. Fishhooks dangled from the brim. "I come here on a mission of mercy," he said.
"Mercy? Mercy for who?" Grandmere demanded.

BOOK: Ruby
8.34Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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