The Book of Ruth (7 page)

I’ve already described most of the main events that happened to me when we were a family, all together. I didn’t mention the one year my job was to bring the cows home from pasture. I had to make sure there were no cars coming, and scoot them across the road. I was a young girl wearing a plaid dress, hollering at the cows to come. I opened the gates and they followed me, not because of my personality; when they saw me they thought of corn. At supper Elmer put a hand on top of my head, those hands that were so heavy I felt he might take my head and crumple it up like a piece of paper. I think he was saying I was a good girl.

There were times in the fall when I had to go look for the cows. The dark would be coming, and as I walked through the pasture and up into the woods searching for them, from far away, if I stood and listened, I’d hear the sound of hooves shuffling through the leaves. It’d get closer and louder and louder until all the cows’ feet in the leaves sounded like water thundering over a dam. I loved standing, my cold knees knocking each other, listening. I heard that rush of leaves, and sometimes if I stood still and watched, I might see an owl flying between the trees. Its wide wings beat slow and quiet.

I didn’t ever tell about the owl and how you can’t hear them flying, even with their beating wings. They mean to go in silence. I didn’t say anything about the cows and the racket the leaves made. I stared at May and Elmer and Matt, when they weren’t looking, trying to figure out how I was going to explain that the nurse in the hospital made a mistake and I wasn’t their baby, that I belonged to my teacher, Miss Pin, and she was coming to fetch me instantly. I also tried to figure out why nobody liked me except Aunt Sid, the minister in church, and Elmer, though he never said. I made up a place in my brain that looked like a tropical jungle and that’s where I went when Elmer and May had their spats. They didn’t close their door. I pretended I didn’t know what their words meant. For the most part it was May shouting at the top of her lungs since Elmer, in her opinion, was the one who needed shaping up. He wasn’t big on using his vocal cords but he made use of the time by scratching behind his ears and getting them clean. I knew May didn’t have the life she wanted. I guessed what she needed was a nice pen pal who would write her to say what a great person she was.

I started paying close attention in school to the reading lesson, so I could understand Aunt Sid’s letters. Aunt Sid was the choir director of a world-class high school chorus, which she told me all about. She took her students to auditoriums around the country and had them sing in their maroon blazers. Naturally she always wore a corsage.

In third grade I brought Sid’s letters to school because of the teacher I mentioned, Miss Pin. Miss Pin made me sound out the syllables of all the words I didn’t know, and she explained what high school chorus singers do, and she showed me the color maroon. Miss Pin was tall and skinny, and she always wore high heels that made a clacking sound wherever she went. She had a large head surrounded by a ball of teased hair. By coincidence her shape was exactly like a pin. Every night I closed my eyes and first dreamed that I was going to marry her when I grew up. I loved her without reservation. She wore blue dresses—blue was her favorite color—and pink scarves bunched up at her throat, and she smelled like lotion made from roses. She had little blond hairs above her upper lip, which I was dying to touch.

I liked her with such urgency that I was scared to death in her presence. I had to be careful that I didn’t do something dumb, which meant I had to watch every move I made. When she smiled at me my heart galloped out of my body and did perky fox trot steps by her desk. I couldn’t figure out if my head was still on my shoulders, her smile got me so mixed up. Although Miss Pin had thirty other students to care for, I imagined that she was watching over me, in particular. In my dream I went up to her when she was fixing her head scarf to go home, and I said, “I love you, Miss Pin.” She always kneeled down and hugged me for a long time, rocking back and forth, and crooning. She had breasts just the size of cupcakes. I also worshiped her because she always asked, “Did you get a letter from Aunt Sid?” She called her “Aunt Sid” as if she knew her. My mail was a secret Miss Pin and I had, together.

One of my favorite letters from Aunt Sid that year, one Miss Pin helped me figure out, went like this:

I remember so well when I was a little girl in Honey Creek. Because I was the youngest, I was spoiled, and I used to steal up to the haymow with a good book and not come out all day long. When I got home at night, after supper, I had to do the dishes; they were stacked up from the whole day; thousands of plates, glasses, spoons, pots and pans. But this is a secret—you can’t tell anybody—my mother usually shooed me off to bed when no one was looking, even though dishes were my responsibility. She couldn’t bear to see me looking so tired.

Now that I live in the city I miss all the smells; I miss the lilac grove in the spring and the carpet of violets on the front lawn. I love how you describe the country—keep writing your thoughts down. After all these years I still haven’t really been properly transplanted to the city and your letters make me homesick. Someday you will come to visit me in De Kalb and you’ll see the beautiful flowers I have in my yard. We’ll sit on my porch—just think of all the things we’ll have to talk about. You have a very special place in my heart, my dear, and I think of you every day.

That’s what she said, “You have a very special place in my heart, my dear . . .” I almost laughed out loud in front of Miss Pin when we read that sentence. I thought about what that special place must look like in Aunt Sid’s heart. I thought it must be a garden with all the kinds of flowers there are in the world, in every color. It would be a place where I could walk and smell the sweet air. I sat picturing the spot, where I could live if I wanted; I thought about it all day long sometimes. I sent her a photo Elmer took of me outside on the front steps. You can’t see my face because I’m holding a kitten up to the camera.

I also loved to think about the days when Aunt Sid and I would lounge and talk about our lives from start to finish. We’d sit at a table stocked with food; we wouldn’t leave; we’d sit there through day and night, nibbling at desserts. Not for one second were we going to have hunger pangs.

When she stopped to visit that year I was so happy to see her I stood in the hallway trembling, and then I ran out into the yard and hid up a tree. I wanted always to be on the verge of seeing her. She left me silver bracelets, four of them, that hit each other on my wrist and made me dizzy with their clanging. I wrote her and told her I never took the bracelets off. I said we were a great big happy family. I didn’t mention that when May got mad she grabbed the dish towel and with her red hands as fierce and large as lobsters she clawed at the towel and wrung it until her hands turned white. It made her feel better to strangle something. I always ended my letter with how happy we were.

Once, when we were in church, all of the little children had to go to the altar for the children’s story. It was three weeks before Christmas. The minister—May calls him the Rev—was there in the white robes and his rainbow belt, and he came down and sat with us on the steps going up to the pulpit.

He said, “What is it that makes this time of year so very very special, boys and girls?”

All of us started to think; we wanted to get it right. Susan Abendroth said it was cold and they had to have more blankets on the bed. One boy told about how every single person in his family got the flu. Cassandra Kate said that they went to see Santa at the shopping center. When I heard the word
Santa
I remembered, and I knew what the Rev wanted us to say. I raised my white arm covered with goose flesh and the Rev pointed at me. In a voice no louder than a speck I whispered, “Pretty soon the baby Jesus is going to be born.” I mentioned that he was our Savior, come to save all men, and make everyone love each other.

I don’t know how I knew all the information; they must have been priming us with the stories in Sunday school. The teachers had us waiting for so long, coloring flocks of sheep with their shepherds. I hit the jackpot with the Rev, make no mistake. I could see him wanting to say
bingo!
He came to my side and kissed my forehead. Then he put his hands on my shoulders and said that I was just right, that that’s what was truly going to happen to us. I kept saying the word
truly
to myself, and I thought that if I ever had an infant I’d name it Truly.

Then the Rev sat back down and read from the Bible. He read that a young woman would conceive and bear a son, and that he would eat curds and honey when he knew how to refuse the evil and choose the good. “And in that day,” the Rev said, “a man will keep alive a young cow and two sheep, and because of the abundance of milk which they give, he will eat curds and everyone that is left in the land will eat curds and honey.”

I wanted the baby Jesus to come in the worst way, with his curds and honey, choosing the good, refusing the evil. It seemed that surely he would come soon. I knew for fact that sheep did the job fairly quickly, but here the teachers had me confused; they said the baby didn’t have an earthly father, so I wondered out loud if it was like when the truck comes to the cow barn and the man gets out with his long syringe and then next thing you know the cows are fatter than a pig and groaning with every breath. My teacher started to laugh. Finally she said, “No, it wasn’t like that at all,” and there I was, left in the dark.

When I wrote Aunt Sid about how I was expecting Jesus to come, and how he was going to whistle for the fly which is at the sources of the streams, Honey Creek, no doubt, and for the bee which is in some other land, she wrote right back and asked did I know what the word
symbol
meant, or the word
myth?
She said the Jesus story was a celebration of life but that an actual flesh and blood child wasn’t going to appear. I knew she was a liar then, because the Rev had said to me, “truly.”

I wrote Aunt Sid:

Dear Aunt Sid,

You should read that book,
The Bible,
because in there it tells about the baby Jesus, and about the people walking around in the dark and then seeing a great light. We have a teacher in Sunday School, she tells us how to pray and we draw pictures of Jesus, I always put his mother in too, Mary is her name. She’s going to have the baby in the stable, and when he learns how to eat curds and honey he’ll be all set. The Rev says he has the good news, the baby is coming any day, maybe you didn’t get the word yet over there in De Kalb. The Rev wears white robes with a rainbow belt and right above him in church is a giant cross of real gold I don’t know where they got the cross, I never seen ones like that in Coast to Coast. I just know the baby Jesus is coming to save all men. We sing alleluia in church.

Before she could write back it was Christmas Eve. In church they had a pageant, and they acted out the whole story. There in the creche was the postmistress’s baby. That baby was a girl, about three months old. Wouldn’t you know it, Laverna had to lift “Jesus” out of the straw because she started crying when the Wise Men came. Laverna had on a blue nightgown and I swear she forgot to take off the rubber thimble she wears on her thumb for sorting mail. Plus she has black hair. I’ve never seen pictures of the Virgin with black hair. She’s always a blonde. I couldn’t believe the way everyone in church tittered when the baby cried. It came upon me suddenly that Jesus was in the same league as the tooth fairy and the Easter rabbit, not to mention Santa himself. But with Jesus, for some mysterious reason, you had all the grownups kneeling down, praying to him. I was furious with the deacons and the Rev and the Sunday school teachers and the imaginary God who made the whole story unfold.

I kept getting madder and madder, all the way to Easter. First, they had us waiting for a baby. It was going to be in swaddling clothes, but all I could see was Laverna’s baby girl smelling like the mess she had in her pants and howling at the frankincense they stuck near her nose. Then, in an instant, they were talking about Jesus as if he’s a full-grown man. They didn’t spend time on the pranks he pulled as a youngster or the names of his teachers. A few Sundays later, that baby, who as far as I could see wasn’t even born yet, is riding a mule through the streets healing the sick people and everyone’s waving branches at him. All the Jewish people want him to wash their feet and cut their toenails down to the bone. His favorite place is leper colonies. Then, the next thing I knew, they’re killing him and sticking him up on a cross like the one we have in church. I wanted to get an old dish towel and strangle it when I heard they killed him. And if that isn’t enough they throw him in a cave, push a boulder across, and then he isn’t in there when they look. He’s in heaven. The whole thing sounded very dumb to me, but mostly I felt sad, because I was sure there was going to be a child who would come to me and make the world light. I was sure I would wake up to find jars of honey out on the doorstep.

I wrote Aunt Sid and told her that she was right after all, and that I was going to learn the word
symbol
so I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. Aunt Sid said that Jesus was an example to people and we should try to behave like him, but in her opinion he wasn’t divine. I asked Miss Pin what this divine business was about and she said the word meant heavenly. I still didn’t understand one bit of it, or why it had been invented in the first place. They said something at church about Jesus coming back in the near future, but I wasn’t going to believe it. May herself said a person shouldn’t put all the eggs in one basket. It’s possible that May was in her usual bad mood all the time, just as I was for months after Christmas, because Willard Jenson had been her savior, and she was banking on his saving powers lasting at least until the end of her life. Instead, he came down to her and made everything seem so dandy, and then poof, he’s gone. The world was instantly and permanently spoiled for her. She didn’t have one thing left except a couple of teacups that smash if you let go. She didn’t care if Hitler took over the world or the Japs invaded California. She wanted Willard back. Probably it was Willard’s death that taught May the lesson about having two baskets for the eggs. And it probably didn’t help her, living in Honey Creek forever, where everyone knows what you are. They won’t let you change even if you feel like it. People were always saying May’s first husband, the one she truly loved, got killed, and how sad it made her. There wasn’t a single person in the area who didn’t know her story. Maybe she couldn’t be happy even if she tried, because folks wouldn’t know her then. They might think she was haywire.