Drowning Ruth Part 11

Carl drove more nails in, sealed the top of the shutter, then the bottom. Shadows of round young leaves splattered against the sunny wall. Three sides of the house were closed. The job was nearly finished.

Here, now, with the cozy house before him, the memory of his wife and baby girl snug inside, he was ashamed of his once fierce desperation to show Mathilda he did not belong to her, not the way she thought. She might have her island, her house, her father's farm, her child, but she didn't have him. Even so, he would never have thought of really leaving her, but going to war wasn't leaving. A man was supposed to be a soldier. A man was supposed to do his duty. And then when he returned, her father would have to stop shaking his head, and things would be different. She would a she would what? What did he want from her?

She had screamed and fallen to the ground when he told her he'd not taken his exemption for dependents.

"You've denied Ruth?" she said. "You've denied me?"

No, he hadn't done that, had he? That wasn't what he'd meant. He'd only meant not to make excuses, not to weasel out like a coward. It wasn't as if Mattie and Ruth truly depended on him.

She'd ordered him to go back, to tell them it had been a mistake. She had pounded the floor with her fist in an agony of emotion; she had sworn that he would die, that she would die without him. Then she'd told him coldly that he would be sorry. Then she'd announced that she and Ruth would go along, would stay outside his camp, would take a steamer all the way to France. And then she had simply cried.

He was sorry, but also relieved. He wanted to take it back and tell her that she had no reason to cry, but he also felt calm in the knowledge that it was too late. There was nothing he could do. All he could offer her was: "I'll be back. You'll see. I'll be back before you know it." He tried to raise her face to kiss her.

"I may not be here then," she said, looking at him with hatred.

Carl's hammer slipped from his fingers and fell to the ground. Until this very moment, he'd forgotten those words. But she hadn't meant them. He knew that. She'd only said them in anger. He bent to retrieve the hammer and wiped the dirt out of the claw. He pounded five nails into the cover Joe was holding over the last window in the final wall.

"Mama!" The scream was coming from inside the house, now completely boarded shut.

"Ruth!" How had he forgotten her? Carl thought, running for the door. Joe began to pry open the cover they had just nailed in place.

"Here I am, Ruth!" Carl threw the door open and a swatch of sunlight ran down the middle of the dark house. "Here I am!"

He found her, finally, under the bed in the back room that had been his and Mathilda's. "It's all right, sweetheart. Everything's all right," he said. "We didn't know you were still in here. That's all. Don't worry. Everything will be all right."

Unlike Mathilda, Ruth believed those words. She let him comfort her, as he walked through the dim house, checking window locks and closing doors. Back outside, he gently pried her arms loose and lowered her to the ground. In one hand she clutched a green sack, cinched with a leather thong. "Where'd you get this?"

Mathilda had s.n.a.t.c.hed the bag when he'd brought it home for Ruth. "Marbles for a baby? Are you crazy? She'll choke." The thought horrified him, and she softened when she saw the look on his face. "It's all right, Carl. We'll save them for her. She'll love them when she gets older." And she addeda"he remembered this now with a pang for her kindnessa""I always loved marbles. Ruth is a lucky girl." Then she tied the thong extra tight and deposited the sack in the bottom of the toy chest.

Joe, Carl and Ruth came quietly up the path to the farmhouse, but before they reached the door the screen snapped open and smacked against the wall. Amanda stalked across the porch, grabbed Ruth by the shoulders and drew her against her skirts.

"h.e.l.lo, Joseph," she said, nodding curtly at him. "You'll stay to dinner, won't you?" Without waiting for his answer, she looked down at Ruth and shook her lightly. "Where have you been? You're a mess." She did not look at Carl. She slid the ribbons from the ends of the child's braids, raked her fingers through her hair and then began to rebraid tightly.

"We went to the watera"ouch, it hurtsa"and it got dark." "Run along and show Mr. Tully where to wash up for dinner," Amanda said, giving her a little push between the shoulder blades toward the house.

The voices rose over the squeaking of the pump handle and the rush of water in the sink.

"a the lake! To the lake! How could you do such a thing?"

"What's wrong with taking her there? That's what I'd like to know. For crying out loud, she was born there."

"You have no right to go there now."

"What do you mean I have no right? It's my house, isn't it?"

"You wouldn't know anything about it, Carl. You weren't there. You left her."

"Oh, that again a"

"Yes, that again. If you hadn't left your wife and child, Mattie never a"

Ruth stood in one corner of the doorway, pressed against the screen.

"Hey, Ruthie, where'd this come from?" Joe lifted the sack Ruth had dropped in the toolbox. "Do you know what I think is in here, Ruthie?" He tossed the sack up and down, catching it in one hand. "I think these are marbles. How about you and me play a game of marbles before dinner, Ruthie? C'mon." When she didn't move, he went to her, peeled her gently off the screen and drew her into the room. "Do you know how to play marbles, Ruthie? Here, I'll show you."

She was interested in the colors of the little clay and gla.s.s b.a.l.l.s and in their cool smoothness. She wanted to study them, to line them up, maybe to watch them roll, to rub them between her palms, but she tried to hold her fingers the way he showed her, tried to bend her thumb right. Finally he let her just roll them, aim and roll them, so that sometimes they knocked against each other with a satisfying click.

Ruth We walked where Aunt Mandy and I always walk, and then when it came time for let's turn around, better get home, got to get the supper on the table, we didn't stop. We kept going where I didn't know the path went and then there were blue s.p.a.ces between the trunks and under the branches, and then the water. I remembered the water, a sky on the ground, where you fall and fall and fall and fall. We were at heaven and I was afraid, because that's where you go when you die.

The water was lumpy, with ripply skin. We went on it in a boat and the sh.o.r.e didn't look anything like the place where we had been standing, even though I knew we had been standing right there.

And then the boat b.u.mped on another sh.o.r.e.

"Do you remember this, Ruth?" he asked. "We lived here when you were a tiny baby, Mama and you and I."

"I can't remember when I was a baby," I told him. "I think I was a good baby. I think I didn't cry."

"All babies cry, Ruth."

"No, I didn't."

I knew the smell inside the house: wet wood and mittens and the green smell of the water. It was the smell where my mama was.

I looked for her. I looked in the secret s.p.a.ces, under the red blanket, under the beds and in drawers, where her smell was so strong, I thought she must be standing behind me, but she wasn't. I found a mouse house made of scarf and paper, but I didn't find her. Still, I knew Aunt Mandy was wrong. Here was where we should be waiting. Here was where she would come back.

In the kitchen, I looked in the cupboards. I found a bowl, a cup, and a frying pan, with cottony nests of spider's eggs in the bottom. I stood on a chair to look where the pencils were. I remembered her sharpening with the knifea""There you go, Ruthie. Keep it on the paper. That's a girl."

Then half the sun that lay on the kitchen floor disappeared. That was when the pounding started. Pound, pound, pound. Quiet. Pound, pound, pound. The other half of the sun was gone then too.

In the other rooms there still was light, so I went to the room with the chest where my toys lived.

There were leaves in the chest and sticks and snail sh.e.l.ls and rocks that had been green and red and blue and yellow under the water, but they'd all turned brown in the chest. "Look, here's a pretty one," she said. She was good at finding the pretty ones and she gave them all to me.

The pounding came again. Pound, pound, pound. Quiet. Pound, pound, pound. Quiet.

Mama's skates were in the chest. I felt the soft inside where her feet went in, but I remembered about the shiny part. "Never touch," she said. She put wooden sticks over the silver.

The little green sack was in the chest. "For when you're older," she said. Five is older.

There were stones in the sack. You could tell by how heavy it was, by how it clicked and clacked when you moved it. They were pretty ones, I bet. The string was tight. She could have got it undone or even Aunt Mandy, but I couldn't.

I took the sack to Mama's room and sat on the green rug beside the bed where we said, "Now I lay me down to sleep." I used my teeth. I have good teeth. One of them is gray from when I fell down the stairs, but it works just like the white ones. The string was leather. It tasted nice and felt good in my mouth. I worked on it. I'm a good worker, that's what Aunt Mandy says. I worked on it until I got it loose.

The stones inside were pretty. Some of them were soft red-brown, like flowerpots, but the best ones were jewels, colors like stick candy. All of them were perfectly round. They rolled when I set them on the floor. They rolled into the grooves of the braid on the rug and two of them, a lemon and a cinnamon, rolled under the bed.

Under the bed was where to go the day the noises were scary. "Go to your room," Mama said, but I didn't want to go. They were angry. They scolded me. "Go away now, Ruthie," they said. But I went under the bed in the dark and low. Aunt Mandy bent down. "Here, now. See? Shush, now, Aunt Mandy's got candy." I didn't want candy. I wanted to stay, but Mama said no. "Go to your room. There's nothing to be scared of." But I could see that wasn't true.

Under the bed is a good place to hide when you hear the screaming, when you hear the breathing, when you hear the "G.o.d, oh, G.o.d, oh, G.o.d."

In the dark and low, on the now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep, I shush and suck and suck. I suck my candy sharp as a needle. I lay me down to sleep and then I wake. Still there are the noises. They won't stop making the noises. I hold my hands over my ears, but still they won't stop. Back and forth go Mama's shoes. Back and forth, until I'm tired, until the baby cries, and then it's quiet.

I put the stones in the bag and then there was the pounding, right over my head. And then all the light went away. It was dark as night, dark as the water when I couldn't get up.

"Mama!" I screamed. "Mama!" I found where she was. But she wasn't there.

And then he came. He lifted me up and carried me into the sun and back to the water where I didn't cry. I'm sure I didn't cry.

Amanda Once Mattie and Ruth and I had settled on the island, whenever I wasn't sleeping like a dead woman, I was a virtual whirlwind, I'll say that for myself. All through that April and May and into June, I pushed my trouble out of my mind and put the island in order. I tilled the garden and planted the seeds along the rows Ruth and I lined up with string. I made out the grocery lists and collected the deliveries from the locker, even the chunks of ice for the icebox. They were heavy, but I dragged them up the hill on a blanket. I washed Ruth's pinafores and combed her hair and taught her how to count to twenty and saw that she kept her shoes on and stayed well back from the water. Mostly, I watched while she played her endless games to make sure that the stones and twigs stayed out of her eyes, her dolls stayed decently dressed and her face stayed reasonably clean.

Mathilda did all these things, too, of course, but she did them less seriously and with less zeal. She was always wandering off to write a letter to Carl or to stick her nose in one of the books with which she'd weighted our sled. Now that the weather was warm, often she'd let Ruthie play right at the edge of the water while she read, and I worried that she wouldn't notice the difference between the plop of Ruth's pebbles and the splash of the child herself falling in.

One night, when the moon was so bright that it made a ghostly day, I awoke to the sound of splashing and Ruth's squeals. Terrified, I rushed down to the sh.o.r.e. Mathilda was holding Ruth by the arms and spinning her around as fast as she could, dragging the little girl through the water, while the moonlight licked the waves around them like a flame.

"Stop that! Stop that right now!" I stamped my foot.

Mathilda stopped spinning and turned to face me, drawing Ruth against her body as she did so, her arms wrapped around the child's middle, so that Ruth's feet dangled, dripping over the water. Ruth wasn't big enough, though, to cover Mathilda's nakedness. I was shockeda"the two of them there like that, without a st.i.tch on, where anyone could see. I couldn't think where to put my eyes. I turned and hurried back to the house and felt my way down the dark hall to my room.

I lay on my bed, my hands pressed one over the other on my chest to calm my racing heart. Then I let my hands slide down. I let myself feel through the thin cotton of my nightgown the part that had begun to swell like bread dough. I tried, as I had for weeks now, to push it down, but it was solida"it would not budge. And then, inside of me, it fluttered.

"Stand still. These are sticking together." Amanda was trying to rat Ruth's hair around a handful of burrs. "Good. Just like a witch." She cackled to make it a game, and Ruth giggled. "And now a little of this on your cheeks." Gently, she smeared rouge on Ruth's soft skin. "Not too much. Now you remember what we practiced?"

Ruth nodded.

"All right, under the covers and close your eyes, and remember, not a word, no matter what he asks you."

Amanda was keeping Ruth out of school as long as possible. No one had argued with her that first year after she'd been released from St. Michael's. Ruth was only five, after all, and what with the months of not speaking and the toilet accidents, she hardly seemed ready for kindergarten. The next year, though, had been more difficult. She'd had to remind Carl that he knew nothing about children, that he could not imagine the trauma Ruth had suffered at losing her mother, that she was teaching the child more than any school would have. The last part, at least, was true. Ruth, although she wasn't a wizard with arithmetic as Amanda had been, could already add and subtract, and although she hated the cruel Struwwelpeter, she could read every word about him. She could identify trees by their leaves, and birds by their calls, and could point out at least four constellations. She understood that blue and yellow made green, knew how to differentiate a Guernsey from a Jersey and had raised a lamb whose mother had died of distemper.

Carl was fairly easy to persuade, but Amanda knew Ruth's precocity wouldn't impress the school board. When that body sent someone to the house to investigate, she pretended that Ruth was ill, and even staged a convincing epilectic fit.

"Perhaps you'd better wait in the front room, Mr. Schmidt," Amanda said calmly, as Ruth, her tongue lolling from her lips, began to jerk and then to bark.

It'd worked wonderfully the first time, but this year Carl, who'd left a pair of pliers in his room, came home to find the school board member on the davenport.

"It's very sad about your daughter," Mr. Schmidt said. "I'd hoped she'd be better this year."

When she heard Carl running up the stairs, Amanda realized there was nothing more that she could do. Ruth would have to go to school.

Part Two.

Chapter Eight.

It was a morning ripe with the smell of manure, an odor acrid when it first penetrated the nostrils, but compelling and pleasant like a good cheese the longer it clung to the air. The school and its playground were bordered by fields, all freshly spread and drying in the warm September wind. On a hillock at the west end of the playground twelve girls had settled, most with their legs crossed Indian style, skirts pushed to the ground in the s.p.a.ce between their thighs, cradling their dinner pails. In the cl.u.s.ter was the entire female enrollment of Lakeridge School with the exception of Ruth Neumann, who always ate her lunch alone.

A few who had finished eating leaned back on locked elbows, tilting their chins to catch the last of the year's sun. At the crown of the hill sat Imogene Lindgren, her knees crooked together, legs angling off to one side in imitation of older girls. At eight and three quarters, Imogene already gave clear indications that she was to become a woman, and although none of her girlfriends, nor even Imogene herself, could have defined this quality, they all studied her carefully, as if she were one step ahead in the game.

For the boys, too, Imogene was mesmerizing and, almost without knowing they did so, two or three would always be circling and circling, making tentative forays toward her and then drawing quickly back or veering off toward one of her retinue, a safer target.

"Watch this, watch this," one demanded, darting up and poking her in the shoulder with the tip of his finger. Then he rolled his eyelid until it was inside out and glistening red above the eyeball, turning his head this way and that to give the widest audience a chance to admire.

Delighted shrieks and groans rose up. Several girls, giggling, threw their hands over their faces and one, who had been seated on the slope of the hill, tumbled over sideways. Imogene was not beyond this sort of pleasure, but she knew better than to express it and instead rolled her own eyes in disgust and put the last bite of her ham sandwich into her mouth.

A small knot of boys, seeing that an emissary had paved their way, then approached. Imogene watched them out of the corner of her eye as she finished her pickles, neatly folded the waxed paper that had kept the sandwich from soaking in brine and wiped her fingers on the clean white handkerchief that her mother had edged in lace. Among the younger children, the popular game of the last few weeks had been a version of hide-and-go-seek and tag, boys against the girls. It was understood that whoever was caught might have to submit to a kiss or reveal a glimpse of underpants, although the unwilling on either side could, without too much difficulty, delay this prize until the bell rang to rescue them.

Leaving their pails in a row by the school wall, the girls went off to find hiding places in the count of one hundred. By forty, Imo-gene had observed with increasing dissatisfaction that each bush and corner on the playground had been inhabited so often that it was marked by a telltale path of trampled dust. By fifty, she gave up looking for a place where she couldn't be found, and instead ran to the three concrete culverts that had been left over from a drainage project and were now abandoned in one corner of the playground like a ruined shrine to some forgotten G.o.d. This sort of hiding place was more to her liking anyway, since from one of the tunnels she could leap out easily and turn the tables, becoming the aggressor.

On sixty, she crawled into the first tunnel and immediately scrambled out, horrified by the crooked, unbroken trails of ants that covered its floor. The second tunnel, as it turned out, was already inhabited, but Imogene crouched at the entrance for a moment, peering in.

Ruth Neumann was a mess, as usual. Her fine hair had pulled halfway out of her braid on one side, so that it bulged in a snarled ma.s.s over her ear, and the hem of her skirt was coming down. She was so blatantly odd that she'd been a scapegoat almost from the first week she appeared in school four years before. Even Imogene had occasionally joined her schoolmates when they felt particularly mean in taunting Ruth, usually about her upper right incisor, which was dead at the root and rotted to the gray of pencil lead, a baby tooth that clung to her gum although the girl was eleven. Many a dull lesson had been whiled away by sketching a face with a wide grin, shading in the appropriate tooth, labeling the modified drawing "Ruth" and, when the teacher's back was turned, holding up the ingenious creation for general viewing.

Ruth rarely seemed even to notice or would quietly look at the perpetrators and those who laughed, not with reproach, but with curiosity, as if she saw something unnatural in their faces. This experience was at first disturbing but ultimately boring and eventually only those who could find no other means of maintaining their status punctured her solitude.

In the culvert, Ruth was simply sitting, examining the pocked surface of the concrete and enjoying its coolness through the thin cotton of her skirt. Whenever her body warmed an area, she shifted to another cool spot. A few lines of ants marched around her, but she didn't seem to mind. From time to time she shot a clay marble from the small handful in her pocket through the tunnel with just enough force so that it rolled to the edge but did not fall over.

Imogene was not only queen of the second and third grades but also marble champion of the entire school, or at least she and everyone else believed she was. But here is what she saw when she looked into the tunnel: a blue mib, very slightly lopsided, rolling slowly, slowly, slowly to the edge of the tunnel where it gently nicked a brown mib and then lay still. In other words, she saw a marble shooter who could beat her.

This didn't upset her. Imogene appreciated skill, especially if she could make use of it. She duck-walked into the culvert's entrance, blocking most of the light. Ruth glanced up at her but didn't move.

"What are you doing there?" Imogene asked.

Ruth didn't answer, but she looked down at her hand and rolled another marble, slowly, slowly, slowly, to the edge of the concrete tunnel.

Offended, Imogene forgot her attempt at condescension. "Look, you're shooting marbles," she said, slapping one palm against the tunnel floor. "I can see you're shooting marbles. Why don't you just say so?"

"If you can see I'm shooting marbles, why do you want me to say so?" Ruth said to the cool concrete beside her hand. And then she squinted up at Imogene, dark against the hard, bright blue of the sky and smiled, showing her black tooth full to the world.

Imogene's fingers stung where they'd hit the concrete. She narrowed her eyes for a moment, hesitating, and then she let her anger evaporate. Forgetting about her hiding place, oblivious to the ants, Imogene crawled into the tunnel beside Ruth and explained her excellent plan.

Imogene coveted an aggie as blue as the sky at noon. This marble had somehow come to be in the clutches of Bert Weiss, at eight already a swaggering, self-satisfied boy, who picked his nose often and in public. Imogene wanted that marble for herself, but she'd also become convinced that she had a duty to free it from the fat, greasy sack of marbles that Bert kept in his desk.

So far she'd gone about her quest in the wrong way, as it turned out. She'd practiced for months and pumped an older boy she knew, already in seventh grade and tired of marbles, for his secrets: a lick of saliva on the finger for certain shots, shoulders positioned a particular way for others. Her skirts had become permanently brownish at the hems and across the front from squatting and kneeling in the dirt to shoot. She had become good, then better and better, collecting many other children's prize marbles along the way, until her own supple cowhide marble bag was stuffed nearly full. In these early games, the blue marble had appeared often among the brown mibs and the green and red and yellow crystals and the rainbow swirlies and the cat's-eyes, but Bert, ever vigilant for opportunities to thwart another's pleasure, began to notice Imogene's interest in that particular sphere, and when her aim improved he pulled it out of the game.

Pulled it out of the game. Just like that. Just like that it was gone, dropped into the limp gray bag, and he tugged the drawstring tight, squeezing out the fresh air, as she watched. He would not take it out again.

But now she had a plan.

"Hey, Bert," she whispered to the greased hair in front of her the next day, as Miss Crawley began her scratchy litany about the letters that go above the line and the letters that go below the line in cursive script, "marbles today at recess, got it?"

"Nah, marbles is for kids," Bert said into his shoulder.

"No, I've got a good idea. We'll play teams."