The Book of Ruth (42 page)

I’m in the prison with him; I’m not scared this time. There isn’t a thing but a toilet in the corner and a cot covered with a brown blanket that needs darning. I’m telling him I’m sorry, repeatedly. He’s sitting on his cot saying, “Hey, baby, listen to this concert I composed for you, my sweet jungle kitten.” He turns on his radio and fetches his broken guitar and sings the song that goes, “If you leave me now, you’ll take away the biggest part of me, oh oh oh oh oh baby please don’t go.”

I didn’t say goodbye to Ruby when the policemen hauled us away. I didn’t say one word of farewell. Aunt Sid told me I wouldn’t see Ruby again and I wouldn’t go to the trial. She said, “It won’t do a bit of good, not for either one of you.” She gave me her earnest fairy godmother gaze I had begun to dislike and said, “You both need to start over fresh.” I almost laughed. How is Ruby supposed to start fresh when he’s looking at prison for life straight in the eye?

Ruby isn’t dead but I won’t see him again. It doesn’t make sense. I wonder, if I saw him on the street, would my knees lock, would I keel over? Or would I rush to him with those loving arms of mine? I can’t say. At times I feel sure one way, and then the next minute my body is shaking under the quilt. I sometimes think May was the lucky one, to have her Willard Jenson blown up into four million pieces. Ruby is living in the same state as I am, but there is no way for us to reach each other. There is no hope for our future. I ask myself how I’m supposed to think of a dead man who’s alive. And then I say to myself, It’s easy to kill. It’s easy to throw it all away. Pretend you’re on television hauling out the trash in an extra-heavy-duty plastic trash bag. If Ruby keeps beating people up, his lawyer and the prison guards, he isn’t ever going to see the light of day. I tell myself all this so rationally. I know I can’t think he’s in the world at all. I can’t hope as I do on occasion that he’ll come and find us and that we’ll sit on the couch with our new son admiring every inch of his flesh—that we’ll forget the old times because we’re all each other has, because we don’t have the courage to go on alone.

But the truth is, if Ruby ever gets out into the world he won’t find us. We’ll hide from him. It will be too late. We will be strangers, perhaps hateful strangers. I have to tell myself the words, although I’m not always positive of the meaning. I have to say the words so I learn what they mean. I don’t understand my heart; it’s confused with fear and pity, and maybe what they call love.

I heard Aunt Sid calling my name from upstairs yesterday. I heard my name when she sang it out so beautifully. It seemed brand-new. I got the urge to look it up in the dictionary she bought me. It’s black and enormous and filled with the presence of some sort of God. Ruth. Ruth. To say my name I have to shape my lips as if I’m going to kiss someone.
Ruth
means pity and compassion, so that figures. Half the time I can’t stop crying for Ruby, even though I know that what I’m supposed to do is throw him away, let him go. I believe the day will come when I’ll go out in the yard and toss up my hands and he’ll sail away. The winds will take him. Then I’ll tell Justin his father is dead and in heaven, that he’s happy for all time. I’ll tell him, if I can stomach the deceit.

We have our new counselor, Sue. Sherry came a few times and then handed over her file to Sue. De Kalb is too far for Sherry to drive once a week. Her devotion is limited to a ten-mile radius. She said she hoped she’d hear from me and I said, “Sure.”

Sue has long dark hair and bad skin and is so tall she has to duck coming in the door. She looks tense, probably stemming all the way back from her crazy childhood. I’m thinking about going into social work because all you have to do is say, “Tell me about your parents . . .
Oh!
That explains why you’re a wreck.” Then you look mournful and say, “Sorry, there’s no hope for you.”

Sue tells me Justy and I should never go back to the house in Honey Creek. And I nod at her and say, “OK,” but I don’t tell her that before I can throw it all away I have to go back once so I can see my life and say, “There it was. That was me.” I have to say goodbye to Honey Creek Ruth. I don’t think I’ll miss her too much—just a few parts, my favorite episodes, like that one night I did the seven and ten split down at Town Lanes and everyone went wild. They hugged me and yanked on my clothes.

Sue works on me with a plan in mind. She tries to get me to say that I wasn’t seeing clearly, that I took abuse greedily, that I have to change so I can protect myself, and that Ruby was a disturbed person all along. She goes about her work nervously, but gently. She makes me tell the story of our life together. She asks, while she pulls at a whisker on her chin, “Did you think it was strange the time Ruby threw the tomato juice against the wall, when he was irritated with your mother?”

And I say, “No, not real strange, all things considered.”

She says, “Did you ever think you should move away from your mother?” She actually wants to say, “Aren’t you an odd bird, full grown and still attached to the apron strings?”

I don’t know how to answer the question. I didn’t know how to tell her that May and I were the same: ugly and mean and down with our luck. I stare at the ground and then she knows to change the subject.

Perhaps Ruby was sick. I’m sure I wasn’t a perfect specimen either. I know we had some great times together; I’m positive about that fact. But I’m working on truly seeing, I really am. It’s about the only thing a person can promise.

I know, certainly, that there’s nothing to the Rev’s guarantee that the meek are going to inherit the earth. No one inherits one single thing. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about. We’re only passers-by, and all you can do is love what you have in your life. A person has to fight the meanness that sometimes comes with you when you’re born, sometimes grows if you aren’t in lucky surroundings. It’s our challenge to fend it off, leave it behind us choking and gasping for breath in the mud. It’s our task to seek out something with truth for us, no matter if there is a hundred-mile obstacle course in the way, or a ramshackle old farmhouse that binds and binds. The Bible is right on one score: it doesn’t do one bit of good to render evil for evil. I don’t mention these ideas of mine to Sue. I keep the thoughts to myself.

I looked up
truth
the other day also. The word has a lot to do with seeing clearly, and with things that are honest and beautiful. Perhaps I should change my name to Ruth Truth. The combination of pity and compassion with honesty and beauty would be a real knockout. People might not see me come into a room but they’d feel like there was something unusual in the air—I have a lot of fantasy dreams, I guess, because I’m by myself so much. I’m not bored too often, though. I have my entire life to think about. I have the ghosts to order away from my room. Ruth Truth. It has a nice ring to it.

I got a letter from Daisy and she said she’s running for Mrs. Illinois. She looks so great in a bathing suit; I just know she’s going to win. I laughed my head off when I read about it, our Daisy. She’ll probably win the Mrs. America contest, which follows after the state pageant. Dee Dee wrote to tell me that Randall came in fourth in the pie-eating race at the church’s winter carnival, proof that he’s not as big a glutton as was supposed. I also got a letter from Diane Crawford. She must have heard about the trouble. She’s married to an aluminum siding salesman who belongs to the Mafia. She sent a small box along with the letter. Inside the parcel was the heirloom pin that I lost years ago at the spelling bee. She said she had seen where it fell on the floor during the fire alarm, and she picked it up and kept it. She said it was a terribly mean thing to do, and she apologized. She hoped I’d forgive her. The pin was something I didn’t want to look at. I told Aunt Sid to permanently remove it from my sight. When I opened the box I had to burst into tears. There were so many gifts coming to me late.

But the strangest part—it always makes me stop crying, as if someone’s come and slapped me—is the fact that I don’t have May. I stare at Aunt Sid’s white walls, dumbstruck by a vision: I’m walking down the street and May isn’t telling me where to go. I won’t come home to her shelling five million peas. It’s the craziest notion that ever came to me, that someday May would actually die. Sometimes I hear her on the porch fiddling with the lock. I’m waiting for her to yell at me. She’s going to tell me to stop looking so sad.

What I know is Ruby did it for me. I’m not sure of a lot of things so far, but I know Ruby did the job for me. I don’t believe in heaven or hell, or the flat gray space in between. It’s all right for Justy, but not for me. We shall die, period. May’s not watching me from heaven, if that’s where she made it. I say that to myself over and over; I keep telling her, when I hear her on the porch—I call out, “
You are dead and gone.
” I tell her, “
Beat it!
” I turn up the radio extra loud so I won’t hear her feet stamping on the mat and her cigarette hacks.

Aunt Sid tells me how we’re going to live. She says I’ll have my baby and we’ll be a family, eating breakfast out on the porch, with English muffins and orange marmalade, and she’ll teach me what I need to know. She says, “Ruth, you are smart. Do you have any idea how smart you are? You can go to college and study whatever you choose.”

“There’s no way at this stage a teacher could show me long division,” I tell her, and she says, “Nonsense.”

I whisper, when she goes to make more coffee, that I want to be like Charles Dickens and write about all the good and strange people. I know I’ll stay here for a while, but there’ll come a time when I take my children and strike out. I don’t know how or when, but I know I can’t simply adopt another mother. Sometime I’m going to try my wings, see if they’re strong enough. And perhaps I will write a fiction book about my life when I’m through with this, make up the end so Ruby and I go on a cruise to follow in Miss Finch’s footsteps, and May marries the Rev after his wife kicks.

When Aunt Sid describes our future I want to run and hide. When it comes down to it, I don’t know if I’ll be able to walk out the front door. I don’t know if I’ll be able to walk into the college rooms with tall windows and everyone writing notes, learning tragedy from paperback books. Without May I’m empty. In my bones I’m so scared, but the mystery is in my heart—that’s where I have the gumption.