A Virtuous Woman (Oprah's Book Club) (10 page)

Why couldn’t have somebody just as easily said he was mean, mean to the core, and then drove pure crazy with his mama all the time twisting what he was needing up with what she was needing, and then something clicked in that car and he let what was stove up come flying out? And as for what was on his mind when it clicked, I’d put my last dollar on it being Tiny Fran. You don’t have to be a smart town somebody to figure that out.

W
hen it rains it pours! Sometimes things happen and they pile up on you so fast you don’t know if you’ll ever settle back down, catch up again. All yesterday, all day yesterday all I did was think, and then I waited for Jack, waited for him twice to come home and spell me from all my thoughts. Then when he came in and we rested and ate it seemed like the whole long day started over. I had to wind back up again. I stay tired enough now as it is.

Somebody knocked on the front door about eight. Nobody ever comes to the front besides encyclopedia salesmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or lay witness missionaries from down at Ephesus Free Will Baptist, and I thought to myself, Which one is it tonight and how can we get rid of him? And we couldn’t pretend to be gone, not with all the lights
on and Jack’s game show blaring. He got up and peeked out of the front window and I had my fingers crossed for the salesman or the Jehovah’s Witnesses because they pretty much have to believe Jack when he says we just bought a whole set or just joined the church down the road, but the lay witness people know my husband has never warmed a pew at Ephesus Free Will, and neither have I. But Jack closed the curtain and said, “Hot damn, Ruby. It’s Cecil Spangler and he’s got his Bible with him.” I told him to have fun and that I’d be at the kitchen table cutting out June’s skirt, but he wasn’t listening to me. He was too busy thinking up what sort of game he wanted to play with Cecil.

See, Jack had rather worry and agitate Cecil Spangler than eat when he’s hungry. Whenever he sees him at the store or the stockyard or somewhere he always comes back home and runs back through how he chased Cecil round and round on some religious issue, like the virgin birth or the seven-day creation, and how Cecil wound up on the short end, embarrassed in front of a whole gang of men, them no doubt egging Jack on. And as many times as Jack’s come in the door saying, “I ran into old Saint Cecil today,” you’d think he would hide when he sees Jack coming, but there he was at our door last night, asking for it. Sometimes you have to wonder if he doesn’t enjoy being persecuted, thrive on it.

Cecil’s one of those people who’re constantly preoccupied with the church, sin in the world, their souls and everybody else’s. He’s even told people around here that his goal is to live like Jesus, walk where he walked. I remember one Saturday morning I was up at the store with Jack, he and the boys were showing me how to work the pinball game, and Cecil came right up to us and said Jesus would never have played any betting games or wasted hard-earned money on devilish amusement. Jack let his ball roll right through the little trap and he turned around and told Cecil, “Yeah, and I bet you Jesus didn’t have a satellite dish in his yard half the size of yours. And you owe me a quarter for that game, oh ye of all that faith.” Everybody in the store hooted. I wanted to tell Cecil he’d had it coming to him, but I suppose he knew, just like last night.

And last night wouldn’t have been different from any of those other times if Cecil had just not mentioned my illness. But he did, and what used to be a way for Jack to show off how sharp and quick he is turned mean and malicious, and my husband is not a mean man. Last night drained him. I hope it’s nothing we’ll ever again go through. Maybe the next time Cecil gets the urge to pray over poor old Ruby he’ll do it from a distance. He’d be crazy to come here and try it again.

While I’m on all this, I know how it would make perfectly
good sense for me to reach out to religion now. People prepare to meet their maker every day. You think of all the war movies with the priest going around in the infirmary, doing the last rites for the soldiers, all the forgiving and being forgiven. But see, my problem with all that is I don’t believe I had a maker. I don’t believe anybody did, not Jack, not even Cecil Spangler. It’s just not the way Jack and I think things are organized, if you can call everything that goes on organization. We’d just rather stay amazed at how it all happens, I mean this world bumping right along with no plan at all. I’m not exactly sure where I’ve gotten everything I think about this, certainly not from the way I was raised. I guess I’ve just been making things up along the way and accumulating what did me good, throwing out ideas that didn’t, and I bet you that’s not a far cry from the way this world works.

Thinking about dying, I’m not half as worried or depressed over it as I bet Cecil would be if he were in my shoes, thinking he’s bound to be headed one way and then having that doubt come in, you know it’s bound to, and nip at all that confidence. What I mostly feel is a sadness over knowing I won’t ever be physically here again, here in my house, at my table, with Jack. But Cecil and I do see eye-to-eye on one thing, leaving here is nowhere near the end.

See, I believe that when I die my spirit and my body,
tired and worn out as it’ll be, will separate, slip apart, and my spirit will live and see all and know all it couldn’t before, and it won’t matter what becomes of the body. The spirit can and will go and do as it can and will. I get more comfort out of believing my parents and grandparents are with me that way, rather than that they’re somewhere I can’t get to until I’m dead, when I won’t need to feel them the way I’ve needed to lately.

Jack believes this too, and he says it like this, that the soul will come aloose and fly off and “do anything it damn well pleases.” He says, like I do, that the body was made to give out. We talked about all that before we were married, times I’d cook supper for him and we’d sit out on the steps in the night air. And we kept on talking about our living and dying until I got sick. I guess it was easier for Jack to face the idea of dying when the real thing wasn’t living in the same house with him.

But back on last night. Cecil came in, settled in, and I heard him say, “Where’s the wife?” I had a mouthful of pins, and before I could get them out, Jack answered for me. I stuck my head out of the kitchen door and waved at him.

Then Jack asked Cecil what sort of burden he had weighing on his heart. He said, “Seems like you’ve always got some burden or other weighing on you. Just spit it out.”

Cecil said, “Well, I do. I’ve come here tonight with a
heavy, heavy heart. You see, we down at Ephesus know what a terrible time you and Ruby must be going through, her finding out what she did and all, and the preacher and the whole membership just wanted me to come down here tonight and try once again to extend the right hand of Christian fellowship and let you know that it’s never too late to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior.” He got every last bit of that out and I don’t believe I heard him take a breath. And at first what he said about me finding out what I did didn’t hit me, but then I realized he was talking about the cancer, and I could almost feel something shooting straight through me.

I listened for Jack to come back at that, but he was quiet, I know planning exactly how much rope he intended to give Cecil. Then he said, “Oh, you did, did you? Well then why don’t you just go right ahead. See, you’ve got to kind of sweeten the pot a little bit if you expect me to let my wife to jump in it.” You could hear the sarcasm in it, at least I did, but Cecil was too pleased and too eager to hear anything other than that this heathen couple might finally be ready to be won. Maybe a better woman than me would’ve gotten up and gone in there and found a way to get Cecil out of the house, but whatever it was that’d struck me when he mentioned my illness had me bolted down. I just could not find it in me to stop what I knew was coming.

Didn’t Cecil think this was a little odd? I guess not. He just said he’d be more than willing to share the good news, and he started with the “In my Father’s house there are many mansions” psalm. I thought, Of all the poems in that Bible, surely you could’ve found a less depressing one. But when he’d finished Jack said, “You read real good!” Then I thought, Well, Ruby, at least you can laugh.

Cecil thanked Jack, not offended at all, and then proceeded to explain the verse, going all into the streets of silver and gold, eternal jubilation and so forth. Then he said, “Yes, and ‘I’ve got a mansion just over the hilltop, in that bright land where we’ll never grow old,’ and if you and your wife just say the word you can have that too.” I couldn’t help but think of all those shows Jack has watched about no-money-down real estate. All Jack said was, “That sounds just too good to be true!” I had to get those pins out of my mouth before I swallowed one laughing.

Then Cecil said the damned had an awful destiny, none of the specially prepared mansions and what-not. And Jack told him he’d like to hear all he had on hell, seeing as how he’d been told to go there so much. I didn’t hear Cecil laugh. Either he didn’t think it was funny or he was so caught up in what he was saying that he didn’t catch it. But Jack went on to say he thought hell always sounded a mite bit trumped up, all the red devils, fire and brimstone and
so forth, and he wanted Cecil to straighten everything out for him. I’d never heard anything like it. But he jumped right in Jack’s trap and told him, “Hell? It’s worse than anything you could ever imagine. There’s no place like hell.” I couldn’t help but see that old devil clicking those cloven hooves. And then Cecil went on and on about all the screaming agony, suckling babies being torn from their mothers, all that torture and it thousands and thousands of degrees and all of it lasting forever. Then Jack asked him if they might would let him stoke a furnace. I had to stop cutting out again and laugh out loud. But Cecil didn’t hear me. He didn’t seem to have heard Jack. And the saddest part of all this was knowing he was actually believing everything he was saying just as if he’d been there and was now back to tell about it. It was like Jack was asking Cecil to recommend somewhere for us to go on vacation and Cecil was explaining all the reasons we ought to pick somewhere like Disneyland over New York City.

Then Jack told him he wanted more detail, and I thought to myself, Cecil is absolutely too deep into this to dig himself out and it’s going to take Jack and a stick of dynamite to blow him up out of that hell he’s created. And that’s what it took. But first Cecil went on and gave Jack all the extra details he wanted, even down to whores and whore-mongers grinding and sliding all over each other, men with men and women with women, sordid and repulsive, and
all of it very unnatural. Then I heard Jack yell out, “I know it! I read all about it!” And Cecil told him he was glad he’d struck a chord, how everything he’d been talking about was all there in black and white in the greatest book ever written. He said he was glad something from that book had stuck with him. Then Jack was about screaming trying to get Cecil to tune in and listen hard. He yelled out, “Yes, all this has done rung a bell! And you’re not lying about it being the good book. We about wore it out at the store looking at it, cover came off.” He kept on and on about how much he enjoyed it and how glad he was that Cecil had read the same thing, and then he told him he’d been under the impression that the story had taken place in Paris, France, not hell. And he said, “That fellow did the ungodliest things with a whole roomful of folks!”

I couldn’t stand just listening, not seeing this, so I got up and stood in the kitchen door. Neither one of them noticed me. Poor Cecil was about to explode. He whacked that Bible on his leg and yelled out, “You cannot blaspheme the Holy Word! You cannot make a mockery of God’s Word!” Jack played dumb and told him, “Well, I was just trying to show you how you’re not the only one with good reading tastes.”

Then Cecil said, “All I came here to do tonight was to show you how the Word might lead you, save you from your sins.” He said God’s Word was the message of salvation
and he thought that might offer us some hope in these last hours. I was absolutely appalled.

Jack changed. All that sarcasm came right to the surface and he said, “I’ll tell you something. They say the meek will inherit the earth, but I think you and the whole Free Wheeling Baptist bunch of you will be caught a day late and a dollar short because a meek man wouldn’t have the gall it took to come down here tonight knowing about Ruby, and that’s none of your business anyway. And I’ll tell you another thing. I know the word, and the word is leave, get the hell out of my house before I get my pistol out.”

Cecil’d seen me in the door by then. It looked like the same thing that’d shot through me earlier was now going through him, and he said, “Ruby, I’m sorry as I can be if anybody misunderstood me.”

I told him it was between Jack and him, but I did think the best thing to do would be for him to leave right then. And then Jack hopped right in and said, “Misunderstood? Misundertook is more like it. Now get the hell out of my house.” And Cecil did. He left without another word.

Jack looked like he’d lost the war, not won it, shaky, red-faced. I told him to come in the kitchen and I’d fix him a bowl of ice cream or something, but he said he had something to take care of outside first. I knew where he was going, and it’s so seldom he takes a drink with me sick that I just let him go.

He came on back in when I was about asleep, and he crawled in the bed beside me, all his clothes still on. I know he was afraid he’d fall down undressing in the dark. I backed up into him and let him hold me, and I could smell his breath just as sweet and thick as it could be. Then he kissed my hair and said, “ ’Night, ’night, Ruby. See you in the morning.”

Oh, Cecil and all his heaven talk, he just doesn’t know. I have what I need back there stirring now, about to call out any second and ask me if I saved him any coffee.

I
’m finally at the point, past the point, where I can say this and mean it and not have to worry over somebody saying to eat my hat. I’m sick of being by myself, sick of myself, sick all the way around of looking around and not seeing a damn thing but the four walls and my old ugly self looking back out of dirty, smeared up mirrors. Ruby’d be ashamed. This place looks like the pigs slept in it, and I walk around all day looking like the witches rode me all night, raggedy, messy. I know it but I haven’t been able to do anything about it. You just can’t expect a man to take and do without a woman when he’s done with one long as I did.