Drowning Ruth (20 page)

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 “God, oh, God, oh, God.”

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.

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 shore. 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 shocked—the two of them there like that, without a stitch 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 solid—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.

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 space between their thighs, cradling their dinner pails. In the cluster 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 god. 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 mass 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.