Patterns of Swallows (11 page)

There was another similar verse
that she always associated with that one.

Whosoever hateth his brother
is a murderer: and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding
in him.

Sometimes, these verses would
keep Ruth awake at night for hours. Had she ever said, "Thou
fool"? And what did it mean to say, "Raca"? Had she
ever done it?

Then she'd be tormented by the
words, "Raca," or, "Thou fool," repeating
themselves over and over inside her brain, try to stop them as she
might, until she wanted to scream. Could a person go to hell just
for thinking the words?

One particular night, lying
awake, thinking those same old thoughts she had no more strength to
fight, she gave in to the fatal fascination. She repeated the words
aloud, whispering them into the darkness. "Raca," she spat
out. If she was going to say it, she might as well say it with some
feeling. No sense being hung for a lamb. "Thou fool," she
hissed. Then she waited, but felt nothing. Was this what it felt
like to be one of the damned? It felt like nothing. She didn't even
feel fear.

What was hell like? She tried
to visualize it, burning forever. Maybe the flames weren't like real
flames, the kind that caused her to pull her hand back quickly when
putting wood into the cook stove. Maybe hell's flames didn't hurt
like that. She hoped not. Guess she'd find out now.

Then a ray of
hope broke through the darkness. She'd said the words, but she
hadn't said them
to
anyone, after all. Wasn't the damning deed in saying the words
to
someone? That was an easier one to avoid. That was manageable. If
she never said, "Thou fool," or "Raca"
to
anyone, and she was fairly certain she hadn't, maybe she could still
be all right.

*
* *

Joshua Bella confessed his love
to Ruth the summer they were eleven. From that time on, he became
repellent to her.

The Starkes and the Bellas were
the Chavinski's nearest neighbours who had children. It was only
natural that the children who were the same age should play together.
Ruth and Wynnie saw each other nearly every day that summer.

That summer they were obsessed
with treasure maps. They played pirate treasure endlessly, taking
turns depositing some little trinket (usually a cheap necklace of
painted, wooden beads belonging to Wynnie) in a metal box and hiding
the box in some out-of-the-way spot. Sometimes it involved digging
holes and burying the treasure; sometimes just finding the most
unlikely place one could find – which gave the seeker more of a
challenge with no freshly-turned earth as a clue. Then the hider
would draw a treasure map for the seeker and delight in making the
map as deceptive as possible while still accurate within reason. If
the treasure remained undiscovered by the seeker, the seeker always
laid blame on the map and sought recourse to the decision of a third
party as to the accuracy of the map.

The third party was always
Joshua Bella. Wynnie never would let him play treasure maps with her
and Ruth. Ruth thought they should let him play with them (before
the confession, that is), but Wynnie was adamant. Still, Joshua was
always just ... there ... hanging around the two girls in spite of
everything Wynnie did to get rid of him. He had a sort of sixth
sense that allowed him to find them at any given moment of the day
(though, of course, the girls were predictable. After chores were
done for the day, they were almost always either at the Starke place
or the Chavinski farm.)

Ruth
tolerated his constant presence reasonably well, but she had to admit
to herself that it annoyed her. The way he was always just
there!
Always just on the outskirts of their play, watching hopefully,
trying to include himself in it when they'd let him, taking the
proverbial mile if Wynnie gave him an inch. Always with the same
hopeful, sad, brown eyes and the same hopeful, goofy smile on his
hopeful, sad, goofy face! It was enough to drive a person to
distraction just to have an uninvited third party always
there
!
Especially one that always looked so sadly, goofily, hopeful!

But he was useful when it came
to the matter of settling disputes though his impartiality was
questionable. Even Ruth had to admit that her case usually won. (It
didn't matter, of course. Whatever Joshua's decision, both sides
continued to argue their suits out of court until the matter was
eventually forgotten; a new hiding place found and a new map drawn.)

The confession came about in
this way:

"You always take her side,"
Wynnie accused after one particularly blatant instance of biased
judgment. "Is that because you love her?" she demanded in
a whiny sing-song.

Joshua said nothing and looked
down but not quickly enough to hide the blush that reddened his
unprepossessing face, making it homelier than ever.

"You do!" Wynnie said,
exulting in her discovery. "You love Ruth! You do, don't you?"

Joshua said nothing. His
honesty was too much a part of his character to disown the truth
about anything, however painful.

"You lo-ove Ruth, you
lo-ove Ruth," Wynnie chanted. "You do, don't you? Answer
me, or I'll keep asking you until you do."

"Yes," Joshua said
with his head down and his face fiery.

Ruth had been unable to help
witnessing the drama and unable to stop its outcome. There was
nothing she could have said or done that wouldn't have made it worse.

It would have been all right if
it had ended there. She could have lived with knowing the truth if
the truth hadn't intruded itself upon her by requiring decision on
her part.

But that day, when Wynnie was
called in for supper, Joshua asked to walk Ruth home. With the truth
already opened wide by Wynnie and nothing further to lose, Joshua
laid his heart at Ruth's feet and asked if she felt the same way.

"We're too young to even
talk about such things," Ruth told him primly, hoping to escape
through evasion.

"But when we're older, I'll
still love you. Will you love me back then?"

"You can't possibly know
what you'll do when you're grown up."

"Yes, I do. I do know
that. I'll love you till I die."

It
was just like Joshua Bella to say something so absurd. People didn't
say things like that. Maybe in books, but certainly not in real
life. It just wasn't
done
.
But that was Joshua all over.

And how could he imagine that
she might love him back? Didn't he know how people saw him? Not
that it would have mattered to Ruth how other people saw him. But
she had to admit that she could see why other people saw him the way
they saw him, and whatever it was about Joshua that made people see
him that way, it had the same effect on her, even if she tried not to
let it.

But, no, Joshua probably didn't
see himself the way others saw him. He didn't see what he did wrong.
It was part of what put him at the bottom of the heap socially. He
never knew the kinds of things that a person should or shouldn't say
or do. He was able to see the results of his blunders without
understanding the causes behind the results. In ways, he was too
much smarter than other people, and in other ways, he was dumber.
Poor little Joshua Bella!

"Do you think you might
ever feel that way about me?" he persisted.

"I don't feel that way
about you at all. I never will. Not in a million years," Ruth
said. What else could she say? There was no other way to end this.
But the look in the brown eyes that wouldn't look directly at her was
painful in the extreme. She'd never seen those eyes without hope in
them before. And the unfairness of it all made her angry at Joshua.
Why should she have to feel his pain? Why should she have been put
in a position where she had to cause his pain? She hadn't asked for
such a thing at all. Why couldn't he just have kept his mouth shut
and left well enough alone?

And when Joshua refused to
retreat gracefully but continued to seek out the girls' company day
after day, Ruth's ire at his pain and her own role in it began to
make her cruel to him. His constant, hopeful presence had annoyed
her before. Now it sickened her.

*
* *

Just as it enters the Arrowhead
valley from the north, the Arrow River drops into a deep gorge the
locals call "the canyon" (for obvious reasons). The canyon
cuts the Arrowhead valley in two. The Chavinskis, the Starkes, and
the Bellas all lived on the east side of it while Arrowhead proper
was on the west. Vehicle traffic could cross the canyon only by
means of canyon bridge, but for intrepid foot traffic, the train
trestle was a tempting short cut.

Ruth and Wynnie were both
strictly forbidden to play on or near the train trestle. A man had
died on it a few years back. Well, it was hard to say where he had
died, but it was certainly because he was on the trestle that he had
died. Hearsay had it that he must have been well liquored-up not to
have heard the train coming in time to get to one side of the trestle
or the other. All that was known from the one witness, the train
driver, was that just before the train reached him, he threw himself
over the edge of the trestle into the river, possibly in a futile
attempt to escape certain death by train. But to fall from the
trestle was almost just as certain death.

Though Ruth and Wynnie had never
been liquored-up in their lives and the trestle wasn't exceptionally
dangerous for the sober, their mothers didn't see it in quite the
same light as the girls, and the trestle was forbidden territory.

One of them had spied a cave –
a real, live cave (though it was more just a small hole in the dirt,
they discovered when they went in to explore it) – in the
cliff wall of the canyon just on the other side of the trestle. But
getting there required crossing the trestle.

"My
mom just told me I wasn't supposed to
play
on the trestle. She didn't say I couldn't go across it at all,"
Wynnie rationalized in an attempt to get Ruth to come and explore the
cave with her.

"Well,"
Ruth concentrated, trying to remember exactly what her mother's words
had been. Hadn't she been warned against
playing
on the trestle, too? Crossing it wasn't playing on it, surely.

And imagine! A real cave to
bury pirate treasure in. Maybe there was even real pirate treasure
already buried in it. Maybe pirates had come down the Arrow River
and found the cave and used it to hide their treasure.

They had to see inside that
cave. And she couldn't let Wynnie go alone. That much was plain.

As usual, Joshua showed up right
at the crucial moment when the girls had almost convinced themselves
they were home-free for the day. He tagged along a few paces behind
the girls.

They followed the tracks till
they got to the trestle, but there Joshua balked. His fear of
heights was well-known to the girls.

"Good! We'll have to play
here all the time," Wynnie whispered to Ruth. "He won't go
on the trestle. I knew he wouldn't."

"Ruth," Joshua called.
"I don't think you should go. What if a train comes?"

They ignored him. They were
already on the trestle and half-way across.

"I'm just waiting here for
you, then," he shouted.

"Let him wait. Let's just
take our time. Maybe he'll be gone by the time we get back,"
Wynnie said.

On the other side of the canyon,
there was a sort of a path leading from the cliff's edge down to the
cave. It wasn't much of a climb down. The cave was near the top.
Neither Ruth nor Wynnie were afraid of heights in the least. Ruth
revelled in them. She stood for a moment near the edge of the cliff
– very near it. She held out her arms and imagined what it
would be like to be a bird; to throw herself into the air to let the
wind catch her up and away. What perfect freedom that would be!

Wynnie had already started down
the trail to the cave.

This part was much more
dangerous than the trestle, and Ruth knew it. Erosion was stealing
pieces of the cliffs constantly. The dirt was loose on the trail,
and it was very narrow and very close to nothing but wide, open space
and a long drop to the water. She enjoyed heights within reason;
this wasn't within reason. But Wynnie was fearless and almost at the
cave. Ruth concentrated on setting her feet down carefully and not
looking past them to the long fall she'd take if she misstepped.

The cave was a disappointment as
far as caves go. It didn't lead anywhere. Plainly no pirates had
used it for their treasure. There would have been no place to hide
it if they had. All they found were some cigarette butts and a few
beer bottles. There wasn't much to do in the cave, so they soon
headed up the trail, scrambling on hands and knees (going up was much
easier than going down, Ruth discovered). When they got to the other
side of the trestle, Joshua wasn't there.