A Virtuous Woman (Oprah's Book Club) (2 page)

If I could, I’d go back there and tell Big Daddy to lift her shoulders off of that bed and hold her and forget every last thing he’d always thought was best to say in times like these. See, he’d thought that bringing the things from home up close to her would make her feel better, as if she’d ever be back there, back on the beam. But she knew that those game hens scratching around in the yard were a whole life away from her. And he thought that by filling up that damp-smelling hospital room, and her mind, with all those things that we could all pretend everything would be fine, everything’s going to be just fine. But she was dying! And it’s not fair pretending. It’s a bigger cheat than having to die.

If you want to see a man afraid just put him in a room with a sick woman who was once strong. See, I know now that this world is built up on strong women, built up and
kept up by them too, them kneeling, stooping, pulling, bending, and rising up when they need to go and do what needs to get done. And when a man sees a woman like that sick and hurt, especially the kind of man who knows a woman’s strength but can’t confess it, when he sees her sick or hurt it terrifies him, like he’s witnessing a chunk of the universe coming loose and he knows he doesn’t have what it takes to stick it back together. And that man will feel guilty and foolish then too because he never made himself say what he always knew.

So a man, especially one like my grandfather, will see things coming apart and all he can do is rush to it, rush to it and hide the broken, chipped off, wrong piece. He’ll slip it under something to pretend, or hope to pretend, it’s not there, not one bit different from when a child hides a special toy he’s broken.

That’s all my grandfather was guilty of, fear, faith in his words, but that was a high crime in her eyes. That’s all Jack was guilty of that day, but I’ve lived with him a good while and I believe I understand him. Sometimes it might take an afternoon or evening of being here in this kitchen alone, thinking, but I can usually come to see his reasons through his ways. And half the job of finding peace is finding understanding. Don’t you believe it to be so?

R
uby was the first and last woman I ever loved, outside of my mama, not meaning it to sound like she was one bit like mama though. Mama was a tough, hard woman, skin like cat tongue. You didn’t run to be up next to her, if she’d have let you. It was her that’d say to come here, and she’d stand me between her knees and scrub the backs of my ears with a old rag and box lye soap, and she’d run a comb through my hair so hard I’d swear my head was bleeding. No, she wasn’t the hugging kind of mama. I imagine it was all the Indian in her made her like she was.

I don’t know how she and my daddy got up together. It wasn’t something they sat around our house and went over. I have to see him proposing to her something like, “You need to marry me.” And then he probably pulled her over up next to him and took her to a Holiness preacher for
him to marry them. My daddy always was a Holiness man, always trying to shove Jesus down I and mama’s throats. He drug me to church and tent revivals with him until I got too big to be beat into going. He’d start on mama on a Sunday morning and she’d walk outside and slam the door in his face talking, same thing every Sunday the sun rose.

She passed when I was fourteen, food poison. Turned out to be a bad piece of meat, but we thought first it was just the stomach flu. By the time daddy found out about the meat she was sick as a dog, just got sicker and sicker and couldn’t anybody do a damn thing about it. There I was a boy and watching her and wanting to ask daddy, “Where’s He now?”

It was something natural-born freakish about it, how the day she died it came the biggest snow we’d ever had, snow, then sleet, then snow on top of all of it. I remember carrying her out of the house and putting her in the wagon and the snow pure wanted to come up past I and daddy’s knees. Then it was like pulling teeth making that mare drag that wagon with the wheels not hardly turning. Daddy had to borrow the money to bury her, borrowed about as much as we were worth.

After she was gone I missed her, hard as she was, I did miss her. I’d close my eyes in the bed at night and think about her, about her being part Cherokee, high cheekbones, and I’d see her dressed like one, feathers, and she’d
be walking across a hot bed of coals, not flinching a bit, just like she used not to flinch when she’d scald a chicken, dip it in the cast-iron pot outside and it steaming, and pluck it faster than you could yell, “You better let it cool!” But she didn’t mean to let it cool. She’d pluck it and it’d be ready to go. But not Ruby. No, that wasn’t Ruby. She never even liked the dishwater over a certain degree and she always kept her a tube of lotion up on the windowsill over the sink.

I’d always have to think of my mama whenever Ruby made a pie, which was every Sunday morning until she got so weak she couldn’t hardly crawl out of the bed. She’d always hold that pie up on one hand and turn it round and round very slow and put a crimp in the crust with a butter knife. Mama would’ve been put off by Ruby’s pies, too much, too good. She wouldn’t have said a word though if she’d walked in on Ruby crimping one. She’d have just gazed at that pie and walked out. Sometimes now, even with me being as old a man as I am, sometimes I want to ask mama why she couldn’t ever have made I and daddy just one pie, just a plain one. But I just guess a hard woman like my mama didn’t think about dessert. That’s all okay now. I lived a long time with a soft woman and her soft way of doing things. I excuse the pies I didn’t have because I was satisfied by Ruby’s so many times.

I know people generally think if you act like Ruby, do
like she used to and all, I know they think you bound to’ve had it easy all along, not like mama, not like a man either that walks around with his fists up all the time because he knows he’d better. But think that about Ruby and be dead wrong.

Burr’s ex-wife, Tiny Fran, despised Ruby for carrying herself like she was somebody, and I said to Burr one time, I said, “You know, it shows a bad weakness in a woman when all she can do is find fault, be ridiculing.” And all he was able to do was say, “I know it. Tiny Fran’s hard on everybody but herself and Roland.” Roland’s her old jailbird boy.

But see, the thing about Ruby is, her mama and daddy might’ve been able to give her a nice, easy road to go down when she was little, but the minute she could she lit out of there and hit a skid, big skid named John Woodrow. Now I just have to shake my head at how it didn’t kill her, that taking that wide turn off that easy road.

He’s the one that showed her how to smoke, damn his soul. Sometimes I’ve wished I’d been the one to kill him. Lord God, I think of them married together and I see that little shack he had her in, and then I see buzzards flying round and round the chimney, waiting to swoop down and take what’d be left of them when the way they were living finished with them. And then I see me, the biggest buzzard of them all, circling too, circling Ruby, waiting.

I think about it and think how it’s odd how it all lined up for me, all that grief and misery lining up into something so good. There her husband was about dead, then dead, and there I was, ready, willing, more than willing to hop in his spot and have her for my own. Everybody encouraged me. They all said, “You ought not to let that girl slip away out from under you, not with you a good man and needing a wife.” Everybody, Burr, everybody at the store, they all said how if I played my cards right I might could have her. And I did, and I never regretted it, not even now with her powder smell and her cooking smell and the way she could talk to me, not even with all that gone, gone buried with her in the grave. All I hate is being back to being by myself.

Ruby got left out here by herself, mama and daddy on the other end of the state and she too ashamed to go back home. I told her long as she was here she might as well stay, and she did. All the whole time I was hoping it wasn’t showing through how I meant not just to stay but to stay with me, marry me.

To tell the truth, I’d have to say I thought I’d bust before I got to her house that night to tell her that old sorry John Woodrow was dead. See, I’d been the one to tell her he’d been hurt, cut, and I said to myself, Carrying her the news of him dying, being there with a shoulder and so forth, this’ll be good, timely, this ought to get me in good.

Think what you will! Shock, shock! I don’t give a damn. If I gave a damn I would’ve kept it to myself. I had to do what I had to do. See, a man like me does what he needs to do more often than he wants to, and I saw Ruby and I had to have her, needed her. She was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen in my life, sitting under Lonnie Hoover’s big pecan tree that morning like a prize, and the thought of me going long as I had without one made me think, started me to think that I might could try for this girl. You get to be forty out here and you think about things like chances and prizes passed by, dried up, you drying up and passing without somebody to love and love you back.

She wasn’t but twenty then, and me forty, and it was almost five months from the day I met her that I married her. I know what it sounds like, like a old lecher got him a child-bride when her first husband wasn’t even cold yet. Go ahead and think it. It just shows how much you don’t know me, or Ruby.

But Lord, did she evermore have one sorry time with John Woodrow. It embarrassed her to tell me all how she lived, like I’d judge her for it and think less of her. No, Ruby! I loved you more!

He made her live in one falling-down place right after the other, migrant houses, trailers, places he scrounged up for them to rent. And half the time he wouldn’t work. They’d have to depend on what she could go out and do
and bring in. That’s sorriness. A woman, especially one built small like Ruby, has about as much business picking cucumbers as a child does. I told her when we got married, I said, “If you want to get a job working, then for God’s sakes let’s find you something to do in the cool inside.” But she just wanted to stay here and run the house. Ruby loved to run a house. It took her a while to get in the track, but I didn’t care. I liked just watching her moving around the kitchen.

But on back. Ruby said one day she came in from the field and found John Woodrow laid up with some old young greasy gal and there was a baby greasy as his mama crawling around on the floor. I asked her what she did and she said she took and left and went and bought a pistol from a man and came back aiming to shoot him. I thought, Lord God! I featured Ruby going up to somebody buying a pistol and it scared me to death.

But she never got the chance to shoot him. I’ve got the pistol now. I use it to blow cans off the top of the trash barrel. A few years ago I joined the NRA. People don’t want to believe I’ve got my card but I’ve got one. Ruby took and had plastic put on it because she said I was going to wear it out taking it out of my wallet so much.

Seems like I’m always having to take something out and show somebody the truth about something they don’t want to believe. I guess if you have on a new suit or drive
a new car or live in town you might could get somebody to believe you. But Ruby always said that my talking loud wouldn’t make people listen to me any better than if I talked regular. She said people will usually decide by looking at you if they think what you have to say’s worth a hoot. And she told me you can’t change that because you can’t change people and that’s that and you have to just go on and do the best you can with it. I think that’s a damn shame in this world.

I
’ve never told Jack this. I wouldn’t spoil his time for anything in the world, but every single time I hear that gun go off all I can think of is John Woodrow. I know if Jack had any idea that was happening, especially now with me sick, I know he’d sell the gun or even give it away. I can see him out the kitchen window, just on the edge of the pines, taking aim. He couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, but that’s never seemed to bother him.

He really latched onto that pistol. At first, I didn’t think anything of it, but lately when he goes out there, it’s all I can do to keep from running out and grabbing it and pitching it into the woods and daring him to go in and find it. Then I get upset and he comes back in, looks at me and says, “What’s the matter with you, Ruby?” And what do I say? I say, “I just missed you, that’s all.” Well, it may not
be the whole truth, but it gets us by. Then he’ll kiss me. He doesn’t make light of tears anymore.

But talk about truth, what truth did I ever have with John Woodrow? None. I don’t believe he ever spoke a word of truth to me, except maybe when he thought a dash of the truth might get him what he wanted.

Why’d I marry him? I think part of the reason is that I didn’t have enough sense to say no, plain and simple. I’m not saying I was ignorant. I knew the difference between right and wrong, but it was a vague sort of knowing, and it didn’t occur to me that what I was doing that second, the second it took to tell John Woodrow I’d marry him, was terribly wrong, the kind of wrong that can ruin your life. Deep down though, I must have suspected something wasn’t quite right, or why would I have waited until my father and brothers were working in the farthest field before I packed my bags?

I’d rehearsed the question all through my childhood, and I’d dreamed of it coming but I just didn’t know when I could expect it. All I knew for sure was that somehow I became available at sixteen. And I said, One day a man’s going to come along and say the kindest things to me and buy me things and then he’ll say something on the order of “Come live with me and be my love.” I had the two of us on my long porch, moon shining through the trees and so forth.

And who was the first one to come along and pay me a bit of attention but John Woodrow? I was eighteen, just graduated from high school. I’d planned to enter a Presbyterian college the next fall and study piano. It was about the only thing I knew how to do. But John Woodrow was twenty-six, and not a thing going for him but his looks. I might could say he had brains working for him, but he put his smarts to such a bad use that I wouldn’t feel right calling him intelligent. He’s the only person I’ve ever known, except maybe Roland Stanley, who’d lie when telling the truth would do him more good. Now can you call that smart? And what about me? He lied to me and I ate up every word that came out of his mouth. Oh, he was a hoodlum through and through, and there I was, lonesome, bored to tears, and there was my family, my mama and daddy and two big brothers, loving me like I was a big baby doll.