Drowning Ruth Part 12

Miss Crawley turned from the series of l's she'd been admiring on the board. "Who is talking? I will have no talking while I am talking. Do you understand that, pupils?" She turned back to the board. "Now the l should not be confused with the i, which comes only to the halfway point and, of course, has the dot. Now I do not want to see any more of those large, scribbled dots above your i's. There is no need to make a rat's nest. What is called for here is simply the touching of pencil to paper. Like this." She made a series of small taps with the chalk across the top of her row of letters. Some of them did not show up. "You see?" she said. Ahead of Imogene, Bert shrugged his acquiescence to her suggestion, just as Miss Crawley turned, smiling, to the cla.s.s. Her smile dropped from her face. "Bert, you are driving me pret' near to the end of my rope. Do you have something to share with the rest of the cla.s.s?"

The plan played out just as Imogene had intended. She let Bert choose his own partner, Otto Schmidt, and then told him to pick a partner for her as well. He scanned the group of onlookers, rapidly dividing the good players from those who could hardly balance a marble between finger and thumb. And then he saw Ruth, standing perhaps just a little bit closer than she ordinarily would, chewing a hangnail and looking down at her shoes, apparently hoping to be part of the group without being noticed. Imogene's heart jumped a little as she saw his eyes squint with triumphant glee.

"There, she's your partner. Ruth the Tooth. Let's play."

The blue aggie lay trapped in the bag at first, and Imogene had trouble concentrating on the game because of it. Even without meaning to, she made several poor shots right at the start and sacrificed an apricot cat's-eye, one of her favorites, to the greasy pouch. Ruth bungled every shot admirably, just as Imogene had instructed. She seemed unable to keep the shooter from slipping out of her hand and kept catching her heel in the hem of her skirt when she tried to kneel. At last their performance encouraged Bert's maliciousness to get the better of his caution and he produced the blue marble. "Ain't she pretty?" he observed, shining the orb on his yellowed shirtfront. "What will you give me to put this one in the game?"

"A nickel," Imogene said promptly.

"You ain't got a nickel."

"I have, too."

"Show me then."

"I can get one."

"Ha! Fifty years from now! No, I'm thinking I should get something better than that to risk this beauty."

Imogene seethed. The marble meant nothing to him. This was pure meanness. "Well, what do you want then?"

"I want"a"he looked around and licked his narrow lipsa""I want the black tooth." He stared at Ruth.

Somebody snorted a laugh. Somebody else made a retching sound and was rewarded with a wash of giggles. Imogene looked at Ruth. For a minute she hesitated, seeing out of the corner of her eye the blue marble glowing with hope in Bert's hand.

Then she said, "Forget it. That's ridiculous." She reached to pick up her remaining marbles from the circle.

"Wait," Ruth said, "I'll do it. See, it's ready for pulling anyway." She parted her lips to move the tooth back and forth with her tongue.

"You shouldn't," Imogene said. "It's not right."

"It's my tooth," Ruth said, "I can do what I want with it." And then she smiled at Imogene, as broadly and brilliantly as she had smiled from the culvert. "Let's play."

"Tooth first," Bert said. But just then Miss Crawley came into the yard, ringing the bell. "After school," Bert said and dropped the blue marble into his bag and drew the drawstring tight.

When they were finally released into the September afternoon, a gray layer of cloud had thickened the smell of manure to a pungent miasma. Ruth was among the last out of the building and the children who had gathered several yards from the door had begun to punch each other lightly about the arms and kick each other a little about the ankles by the time she appeared. They quieted immediately and watched as she drew from her dress pocket a piece of string she had stolen from the supply cabinet while Miss Crawley's attention was focused on the third grade's times tables. Tying it on the little tooth was difficult; it slipped off several times before she was satisfied that it was secure, but at last she declared herself ready and walked over to the school's toolshed, the string dangling from her mouth.

"Ain't you afraid it's going to hurt?" a small girl asked at her elbow.

"Not too much. I worked it during arithmetic," Ruth answered as she opened the shed door. She had to kneel to tie the string around the handle. "Now who's going to slam this?" she asked, looking at Imogene.

Imogene hesitated. The thought of yanking that tooth out of Ruth's gum made her feel sick. But Ruth continued to look at her steadily. Finally Imogene took a deep breath and grabbed the door. "You ready?"

"Ready."

Imogene inhaled again and held her breath. Ruth's eyes were still wide upon her, but Imogene squinted her own eyes until they were nearly closed. Then she slammed the door as hard as she could into its frame.

The blood was everywhere. It seemed to be spurting in all directions, running out of Ruth's mouth and all over her dress. Without thinking, Imogene produced her handkerchief and pushed it into Ruth's right hand. As Ruth looked blankly down at it, a few drops of blood seeped from between the fingers of the hand that she was holding to her lips and stained the white cloth red. She glanced in alarm at Imogene, who looked slightly disgusted.

"Use it," Imogene said impatiently, and Ruth stuffed the handkerchief into the raw s.p.a.ce.

The tooth dangled from the door handle, pearly gray and red where it had yanked free. Ruth untied it and then polished it with a clean corner of the hanky. "Here," she said, handing it to Bert, "let's play."

Winning the marble was easy. One quick flick of Ruth's shooter and it was out of the circle, out of the game, and no one was much interested after that.

Imogene felt in her chest an overwhelming desire to run home as quickly as she could and sit beside her mother on the long, low sofa in the front room. But she gritted her teeth and walked beside Ruth, for their way lay in the same direction. As they walked, Ruth pressed her tongue into the newly empty s.p.a.ce and Imogene rolled and rolled the blue marble between her fingers in her pocket. It felt heavy and tainted. She drew it out, half expecting its color to be blotted, but the blue glowed on, indifferent to the blood that had been spilled in its winning.

"Here, let's see once." Ruth held out her hand.

Imogene hesitated a moment and then put the aggie in the center of Ruth's palm. Ruth plucked it out between the thumb and index finger of her left hand and turned toward the sun. She held the marble in front of one eye while she shut the other. "Look, you can see right in there."

"Give it here," Imogene said, and Ruth pa.s.sed the globe back to her.

Ruth was right; you could see into it. Imogene studied the layers of deeper blue that ran through it and a small cloud of lighter color that drifted near one edge.

"I'm going to keep this forever," Imogene said. "Feel how smooth." She held it against Ruth's cheek and rolled it slowly upward with her palm.

They walked on, stopping now and again to look into the marble from a new angle, handing it back and forth, blinking as the sun filled their eyes.

"My mother says your mother is dead," Imogene said. She glanced at Ruth out of the corner of her eye, not knowing how the other girl would respond. Did you cry when someone mentioned your dead mother?

But Ruth was busy polishing the marble on the hem of her dress and hardly seemed to care. "Yes."

Emboldened, Imogene pursued the issue. It was interesting, after all. She couldn't think of anyone else she knew who didn't have a mother. "How did she die?"

"She drowned."

"In the lake?"

"Of course. Where else would a person drown?"

"There's other water than Nagawaukee Lake, you know."

"Well, that's where she drowned, anyway. In Nagawaukee Lake."

Imogene had the marble back again and she rubbed it between her palms before asking an even more daring question. "Did you see when it happened?"

Ruth thought about this for a moment. "I guess so," she said finally. "I drowned too."

"That's stupid. If you drowned, you'd be dead."

"Sometimes you die, sometimes you don't. That must be how it is with drowning."

Ruth said this with such authority that Imogene felt her own position as the one who knew the most, who was most interesting, who would clearly be the one to say which answer was right and which game was played and for how long, slipping. "My mother found me in the garden, like in the Green Fairy book," she countered.

"Really?" Ruth seemed suitably impressed, and Imogene felt generous again.

"You sure are going to look better when that tooth comes in," she said.

Not knowing what to say to this, Ruth threw the marble up and caught it.

Imogene gasped. "Don't lose it."

"Don't worry," Ruth said, tossing it up once more to prove she could. When she caught it, she handed it back to Imogene, who slipped it into her pocket.

They had reached Imogene's turnoff. "Well," she said, "I guess I'll be seeing you tomorrow."

"Wait a minute." Ruth reached into her pocket. "Here." She held out the gory handkerchief.

"How about washing it?" Imogene said, leaning a little away from the thing. Ruth looked at the handkerchief and nodded, as if noticing for the first time that it was soiled, and then began to fold it carefully. Imogene, watching, amended her words. "You can keep it."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course, I've got plenty. So long, then."

Imogene walked on a few steps toward her house and then turned back. Ruth was still standing in the road, watching her. "Ruth!" Imogene called. "You want this?" She drew the marble out of her pocket and held it up.

"No. It's yours. See you tomorrow."

Imogene waved and half ran, half skipped with her delight in her treasure all the way home. Ruth, on the other hand, was in no hurry. Had Imogene looked again, she would have seen Ruth turn and start back toward the school. She walked with her chin very high, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, as if she were balancing something on her head. By the time she reached the playground the sun had begun to set in crimson streaks and the manure had mellowed in the cool of the evening so that it now just seasoned the air with a hint of organic richness.

She returned to the culverts and chose again the one in which Imogene had found her that morning. This time, however, she took a running start and tried to hurl herself on top of the concrete cylinder. On the first try, she didn't jump high enough to reach the summit and slipped back to earth, grazing her elbow slightly on the way down. On the second try, her footing was off and she veered away at the last moment. On the third try, she ran so fast that she could not keep track of her steps, planted her feet hard in the dust about a foot from the tunnel and flew into the air, spinning her body as she went so that she landed smack, sitting nearly at the top. She had only to grip hard with her thighs and wriggle her way upward and she was there.

Inching up as she pressed against the concrete had pulled her dress tight across her throat and she leaned first to the left and then to the right to loosen it. Then she crossed her ankles, one over the other. Despite the overcast afternoon, the concrete had soaked in enough sunlight to warm the backs of her legs. For a moment she leaned back until her body draped over the curving tunnel and looked at the playground upside down. If she concentrated very hard, she could almost believe that the trees and honeysuckle hung from a green sky and that the orange and red rivers of the sunset flooded over a periwinkle ground, but soon the blood throbbed in her head and her skinned elbow began to sting. She sat up, spit a little on her fingers, and rubbed the sore spot with the pink saliva.

Ruth smoothed her skirt neatly over her knees and then drew the lace-trimmed handkerchief from her pocket and smoothed it over the skirt. It was a little stiff where the blood had dried, but she was able to press it fairly flat. Delicately, she pinched the lace edges between her first two fingers and thumbs and set the crown on her head. Sitting tall upon her throne, she gazed at the empty playground rolling out before her.

Chapter Nine.

It had worked out all right. They had made do. That was what Amanda could hardly get over every morning when she woke to the sound of Carl's chair sc.r.a.ping on the wooden floor as he got dressed to go out to the milking. He never could keep from moving that chair, she thought fondly. It was almost as if he wanted her to know he was up and their day was beginning.

There had been that year or two of wondering who would stay and how exactly things would be arranged, but somehow they'd settled into a family at last, the various tasks of life divided comfortably among them, and the days now turned like a wheel with three spokes. So that even though Carl had been distracted lately, Amanda and Ruth simply shifted themselves to accommodate his moods.

Joe had begun to visit regularly, ever since the day Carl invited him to dinner, and on Friday nights he escorted Amanda to the pictures and a fish fry. They felt an affection for one another based on their old love and sustained by avoiding personal conversation. If he'd hoped for something more, he never hinted at it, except to ask occasionally if Amanda would go out on a Sat.u.r.day. She never would. Sat.u.r.day was the night she and Carl listened to their programs on the radio.

All this would have been enough, really, more than enough, but then Ruth had found Imogene too.

The first time Ruth mentioned Imogene, the night she'd come home with blood smeared on her cheeks, Amanda had felt her own blood drain away. She was tempted. She could feel the retort coming to her tonguea""There's no Imogene. You can't know an Imo-gene." But, of course, there was and Ruth did.

"You've ruined this dress," Amanda had said instead, pulling the garment a little too roughly over the girl's head. "I doubt I'll be able to get this out."

"Imogene says the fairies brought her." Ruth's voice was m.u.f.fled by the fabric over her mouth.

Amanda bent over the pump to hide her face. "That's just a story, Ruth," she said.

Carl wasn't interested in fairies either. He put one hand on Ruth's forehead, the other on her chin, and tilted her head back to study her gums.

"Here," he said, wetting his handkerchief with the contents of a bottle he kept behind the flour bin. "This'll make it better."

Ruth frowned at the taste, but she held her jaw steady and let her father minister to her.

It wasn't accurate, of course, to say that Ruth had found Imo-gene. Imogene had been there all along, as Amanda well knew, for after she was released from St. Michael's she often went into the bait shop to a.s.sure herself that the child was showing no signs of the inauspicious way she'd come into the world. Although she understood the safety of her secret depended upon holding herself as far as possible from the girl, she couldn't seem to help drawing near.

Mary Louise would push Imogene forward for Amanda to admire, but at the same time would hold tight to her shoulder. "Hasn't she grown? Genie, you know Miss Starkey. Say how do you do."

But Imogene would hang back, as if in obedience to a message she felt through her mother's fingers.

When Ruth started school, Amanda found herself in town more often. She was in the shop one day in March when Imogene was feeling weak and dizzy, and she was the first to realize that the girl had scarlet fever. She insisted that she be quarantined along with the Lindgrens, although the doctor might have been persuaded to let her go home.

"We can't risk infecting Ruth," she declared, brushing aside Mary Louise's protestations. "Besides, Imogene needs me. I haven't forgotten my training."

Imogene's illness scared Amanda so much that she could hardly catch her breath when she thought of what might happen, but once the real danger had pa.s.sed, she wished her recovery would go on forever. She cut paper dolls for the little girl, not just the kind that stood stiff and simple, joined at the hands like a fence, but also shapes that resembled real women, who could model clothes Amanda cut from the catalogs. Ruth had never been interested in the just-looking, the just-laying-out of paper dolls, but Imogene loved it.

"Look!" Imogene announced to her mother one evening, swatting aside the pillow slip Mary Louise was mending and climbing onto her lap with a sheet of paper in her hands. Amanda had drawn whiskers on the girl's face and colored the tip of her nose black. "Miss Starkey taught me to write my numbers."

"Those are beautiful, darling," Mary Louise said, but that night she had a talk with Amanda. "I'm taking Genie back to the shop with me tomorrow. It isn't fair, our keeping you from Ruth and Carl like this, and I think she's well enough now. I mean, thanks to you, she's completely recovered. I don't know what we would've done without you, Mandy. I was so worried. But everything's all right now, isn't it?"

So Imogene went off the next morning with her hand in her mother's, and Amanda went back to the farm. She didn't stop visiting, though, and Mary Louise was always pleased to show her daughter off. "Amanda, you should hear the way Imogene can do her sums. What's five plus seven, Genie?" And later, "What's five times seven, Genie?" And later still, "What's five times seven plus seventy-five minus fifty-seven," until the numbers were so quick and complicated that only Amanda and Imogene knew the answers.

As Imogene got older, it would have been natural for Amanda to encourage a friendship between the girls, but she did not. Something alarmed her about Imogene, something that made her feel it was too risky to bring them together. She'd noticed it one Sunday morning, when she'd stood across the street, watching the family emerge from church, Imogene riding on her father's shoulders. The girl looked exactly like Mathilda.

"That'll be fifteen cents, please," Imogene said in her most grownup voice. She'd hoisted herself onto a stool behind the counter in her mother's bait shop, so that she could reach the register.

"Arthur, have you got a nickel?" the man asked the boy who stood beside him. "I'll pay you back when we get home."

"That's all right," the boy said. "You gave it to me in the first place." His hair fell forward over his gla.s.ses as he reached into his pocket.

"My son and I are thinking of starting a tour boat company at Nagawaukee Beach," the man said. "If there was a boat that drove around the lake, would you girls ride on it?"

"Dad," Arthur said. He shuffled his feet in embarra.s.sment and looked at the floor.

"Nagawaukee Beach is too far," Ruth said.

"But it would stop for you anywhere around the lake and bring you back again."

"Just going around in a circle?" Imogene said.

"A big circle, all the way around the lake. And it would be a nice boat, two decks and a mahogany rail. Red velvet seat cushions. Or maybe a nautical stripe."

"I like the red," Imogene said. "Would there be food?"