The Book of Ruth (6 page)

May had moved back home for the war, with her parents, because Willard Jenson’s father took over the farm. She didn’t want to live in the same house as her father-in-law. He was so stern, especially when there was weather coming that he didn’t like. He called her “young lady.” About the only thing he ever said to her, in an accusing voice, was, “Young lady, I don’t like the looks of the sky.”

May came home, did the laundry, drove tractor, heaved milk cans, and pushed cow rumps from stanchion to pasture. She had to take out her wedding gifts, including the entire china dog collection from her senile aunts, to know that she hadn’t merely dreamed of her marriage. Her menstrual period stopped coming because she was lifting eighty-pound milk cans. There wasn’t one part of her body that felt alive.

Aunt Sid says that Marion was the beautiful one in the family. She had a braid so thick you could hang or swing from it, and soft brown eyes almost as tender as a dead mouse’s in a trap, and small hands that hadn’t done one load of wash. Marion had gone to high school and knew Latin; she said words such as
declension,
and probably May looked up at her from the pile of laundry like she was cracked. The dress May wore for Marion’s wedding had large white flowers swirling around on a pale blue background. I found it up in the attic when I was in high school. I put it on in my bedroom, and thinking I was alone in the house, went down to May’s room to look in the mirror. I stood there admiring myself for a minute, before I realized that she was in bed, staring. I met her eyes in the mirror and I didn’t recognize them. Each one looked like a dull gray plug under the bath water. I didn’t say anything. I got out of there as fast as I could. I waited for my punishment but it never came, and I began to wonder if the dress had some kind of forgiving power.

There’s a picture of May wearing the dress, after Marion’s ceremony. She looks like she read instructions in a book about how to make a smile and she was trying it out for the first time. Her little teeth didn’t make it into the photo. May had all her teeth pulled when she was forty-nine. I try not to look at her in the morning, when her mouth is empty. The size of her entire body is suddenly diminished without her jaw.

After Marion and Frank Bane drove off for their honeymoon, May sat in the barn and closed her eyes. She stroked the two kittens without thinking they were animals. She imagined the hair on Willard’s head. She made a note about how Marion’s husband wasn’t half as good as Willard, especially with those two-foot glasses he had to wear. She noticed the sun going down, and for once she looked at the sky. She stopped and mentioned to herself how blue it was, how if you could reach up and taste the color of dusk you might turn into something shimmering and silver; you might be transformed into the moon itself.

When the telegram came that night her heart turned to stone. She wouldn’t hear what her parents were telling her. They tried to explain but she blocked her ears. She walked out into the dark field, to the spot where so many years ago she had tied the rock to her ankle and told her sisters she was going to drown in Honey Creek.

AUNT
Sid told me that the whole town came to the funeral. There wasn’t a casket because the body of Willard Jenson was nowhere to be found. He had been blown up on an island in the Pacific, as brave a soldier, the reports said, as there had ever been. The news was full of accounts of the boys overpowering the yellow devils; the papers said that although the Americans were practically never defeated, when we did have to retreat a mile or two we always begged and pleaded for more Japs to kill. After the funeral the relatives went back to the home place and they had all the leftover food from Marion’s wedding: slabs of roast beef warmed up and potatoes made into hash browns. May wore the same dress she had worn at Marion’s wedding. She hadn’t shed one tear at the church. She sang out the hymns while everyone watched to see what she might do next. They were waiting for her knees to give out; they expected her to keel over and hit the hard pew and then everyone would swarm around her mopping off her cold brow. When the guests left she wrapped her wedding china in newspaper. We still have it in our attic. The teacups are preserved in memory of Willard.

May figured the officials in the government who had the lists of dead people made a mistake. She told Sid she knew it was a simple mistake and that after the war was over Willard would come home. He was hiding under all the carnage so the enemy wouldn’t notice that he was alive. Once, she woke up in the middle of the night screaming. She had dreamed he was dead, and if it was true she knew that wherever she went she would always be a stranger in a foreign country.

May lived at the home place for ten years after Willard died, until she was thirty-five. Her brothers survived the war, and of course Frank Bane never had to go. May couldn’t tolerate Marion. She insinuated, by gesture, that Frank wasn’t any better than a fop with the thick glasses he had to wear. She bet he could actually see perfectly, he just didn’t want to defend his God and his country. Marion and Frank moved to North Carolina. They couldn’t stand it in Honey Creek.

It came to me, as a revelation, that May lived through all the history I learned about from Miss Daken. Not of course the Romans and their sewer systems, but to think that May was living and breathing while Nikolai Lenin rode through Russia on the train. If May was around then, it doesn’t seem so much like history; it seems like life itself, close and thumping. Still, she never spoke about islands in the Pacific or the European theater. While it was going on she couldn’t seem to see farther than the wash hanging out on the clothesline. In those days she didn’t have words for one single person. She did all the cooking for the hired men but she didn’t speak to them; she served and went straight back to the kitchen. They were such rough, ugly old men, and they always tried to catch her eye. She knew each one’s shoes by heart. She promised herself she would never look farther than their ankle bones. She washed and ironed and canned. She kept her hands flying while her mind probably said the same thing over and over: she whispered, “I don’t believe this is my life.” She watched her enormous hands become chapped and tough. They got so cold when she drove tractor, from the metal steering wheel and the wind cutting through her cloth gloves. She said all her sentences to herself. “Someday I’m going to leave here” was her favorite. But then she’d go up to her room and lie down on her bed and stretch her arms across wondering when her Willard was going to come back. She knew it wouldn’t be long now. She knew she’d wake one morning and there he’d be at the door, with a bandage over his burned-up heart. That old hole was just about healed, he’d tell her, while she tried to control the tick in her smile. She believed he’d come back because she couldn’t imagine him not in the world. He was probably walking the streets down in Argentina. He was in a park picking flowers that he was going to press and then send to her. There’s a stone for Willard over in the Honey Creek cemetery with nothing below. It says on the stone that he’s singing unto the Lord a new song and that May was his beloved wife.

When May was thirty-five Elmer Grey started coming around by himself. He didn’t bring flowers or chocolates. Elmer had a rear end the size and shape of a tractor seat and fingers the thickness of a corn stalk. He had red hair all up and down his arms. Compared to her slim Willard, Elmer was more like a creature someone caught in a trap. Excepting his head, where there wasn’t one strand of hair. When he offered to marry May she didn’t look up at him. She said to herself, “I’m already married.” What occurred to her was the list of items he owned. She had a vision of the long low chicken sheds and his healthy milk cows with their heads bent to the ground eating grass from the lushest pasture in the township. His first wife had cancer and didn’t last beyond the third month.

Aunt Sid tried to tell May that something awful happens to every single person somewhere along the line, and that May shouldn’t squander her life weeping at Willard’s gravestone. “It’s a fact,” Aunt Sid said, reaching across the table to touch May’s sleeve, “that he isn’t ever coming back.”

“Is that what they teach you at the conservatory?” May said without a moment’s hesitation. “Dead people don’t come back, could have fooled me. I’m glad you’re so smart after all the years in your short life.”

She covered her face with her apron for a minute, as if the effort of being snide was taking its toll. “You’ll never know what it’s like, Sidney,” she said just before she raised her head. “Look at yourself. You look dried up, as if all your life is in your brain. I’d bet a million dollars there ain’t one man who knows you’re living. If I had the energy after waiting on all of you hand and foot I’d laugh for two hours straight in your face.”

It was ten years since Willard’s death and May still had the habit of leaving the hall light on, in case he was looking for the place to come home. But whenever she saw Elmer she examined his wide strong back carefully, and since it didn’t much matter to her, when he asked her to get married the second time, she said, “Why not?” Perhaps there was something in her that made her sorry for him, the way he didn’t have hair growing on his head, and his wife had shrunk to nothing and then died in his bed.

They got married in the courthouse in Freeport. May wore a beige suit and a string of pearls around her neck. In the blurry photos she looks like she’s standing in front of a firing squad. She’s squinting out to the hateful light. Probably by then her eyes weren’t any too big. They were getting narrower and narrower, on account of the way she looked at the world, as if everyone, even each animal in the barnyard, was set on making trouble for her. All the space around her seemed the same, and when she heard the red-winged blackbirds in March, she swore under her breath; she swore saying, “It’s that spring time, again.”

What I can’t picture is May and Elmer coming home to the farm on their wedding night and walking up the stairs to the front bedroom. It makes my insides feel like jelly to think about it. I can’t see May taking off her suit and hanging it up as carefully as she can, and then removing her slip, and all that time Elmer is under the covers waiting for her. I don’t like to imagine such a thing. May must have told herself while she took her stockings off that anything was better than serving dinner to all the hired men. They looked at her like they were waiting for a chance to catch her on the dark stairway. They didn’t do anything but belch to say thank you after breakfast, dinner, and supper. May probably screwed up her eyes and pretended, despite the hair covering Elmer, that he had turned into her smooth and slim Willard. I have a feeling there wasn’t a minute of—joy—not for either one of them. Elmer wasn’t a prince to start with but May wasn’t going to be able to improve him much, if she shut her eyes and wished he were someone else.

One thing I’ve acquired too late is the habit of stepping into other people’s skin. If I pretend to bore a painless hole in May’s shoulder and steal into her large frame, stretch myself out to actually fit, and then look out from her dark eyes, I can see things I’ve never noticed. I can feel May, not long after her second marriage, at home in the everyday world of her kitchen. She made a cake seven days a week, first thing in the morning; she could iron exactly six shirts while it baked. She did all the dishes and made the frosting in the time it cooled. The day was divided up into half-hour segments, each segment time for a specific task. The cake, the shirts, the bed, the hens, the dusting, dinner. The dishes, the mending, the floors, the garden, supper. She planted her feet in front of the sink and scrubbed her copper-bottom pans once a week, her pride. They hung up on the wall, flat and orange, and she saw them as nothing but perfectly scrubbed pans.

She liked to go to the orchard nearby and spend two dollars and fifty cents on a bushel of small red delicious apples. The basket wouldn’t budge on the way home, even with the sharp turns, because of her thoughtful planning: she went to the mill first, to get the flour, and she propped the fifty-pound sack against the apples so they wouldn’t spill.

She probably was already angry, before she got in the door, thinking about Elmer. She knew he would be sitting in the recliner chair with the stuffing coming out, doing nothing, reading a history book about the Civil War at three in the afternoon. He deserved a rest in the afternoon, he had told her once, and she scowled and then laughed. She had grown up knowing that nobody deserved anything, most of all rest. He might have looked up at her from his comfortable chair, without seeing, and mumbled something about how bad the shocks were on the covered wagons that took the wounded soldiers from Gettysburg. She knew nothing would have made him happier than a whole basket of apples set by the chair so he could eat when he pleased but she took them into the kitchen.

I imagine her making clove apples. She sat in the kitchen poking the cloves into the apples and hurting herself, and also feeling sick on the sweet smell of the spice. She turned an entire bushel of red delicious apples into clove apples in three short days, and hung them all from black strings in Elmer’s closet, where he had nothing but a checkered suit, one white shirt, and a brown silk smoking jacket his first wife gave him for a wedding present. She hung two hundred clove apples up and down the sides of the closet. Neither of them ever mentioned it. She sometimes mentioned, showing off her red chapped hands at dinner, how the hands indicate how much a person works. They cannot lie. Hers were stung by cloves. But it was her face that reflected the bitterness of being trapped in a world of half-hour segments of time, not one second of which sparked in her thought of the Civil War or the splendor of the Assyrian coming down like a wolf on the fold.

May was thirty-eight years old when I was born. She probably thought I was going to be retarded since she was over the hill. I wonder if she enjoyed carrying me. I wonder if she ate liver and spinach and drank a quart of milk a day, like they tell you you must. Sometimes, the way I get so tired, I suspect May never ate the right food. I feel like I don’t have all the ingredients a person is supposed to have.