Harry & Ruth (11 page)

That was in April of 1947. Three months later, after a letter in which Harry presumed to advise her against marrying the young war veteran to whom she had become engaged, she put her foot down.

“You seem to believe only what you want to believe,” she wrote. “Well, believe this, Harry Stein. I am going to marry Henry Bullock Flood on the eighth of September, in the living room of my grandmother's house, in Saraw, North Carolina. He is a fine man. He is the most courageous man I have ever known. He will be a good husband and a good father. I'm sorry, Harry, but it is time for strong words.”

Ruth had become somewhat exasperated with Harry Stein. She had put from her mind any thoughts of his ever returning, no matter how much he hinted of it. She knew she loved him, but she was a sensible woman. It was time to get on with her life, and she knew Henry Flood was the man with whom she was supposed to do that.

She is sometimes amazed these days, when she thinks back to those clear-eyed, certain times, at how much she “knew.”

“You dismiss my plans as if they were the dreams of a child,” she wrote. “I know he's 10 years older than I am. I know he's a farmer and I'll be a farmer's wife. I can do that, Harry. I can be a farmer's wife.”

Ruth was content, had made herself content, with the fact of living her life in Saraw, North Carolina. She was settling down with a man who did not care that she had a young daughter of somewhat-mysterious provenance, who was brave and hard-working and kind, a man who needed her.

“You have your life, Harry,” she concluded that letter. “Let me have mine …”

Harry's next letter begged forgiveness.

“If you truly love this man,” he wrote, “I am as happy for you as you are for yourself.” They both knew he was lying, but the thread between them had never seemed so fragile, and above all he didn't want to sever it.

She forgave him, and the letters continued.

When Ruth came back to Saraw, she went to work again at the mill, keeping the books for the company her grandfather had owned. She met Henry Flood in December of 1946, at a party given by some of her old high school classmates. She rarely went to parties, she said, but this night Jane and Charlotte insisted, told her they would take care of Naomi.

Her friends and her aunts had conspired to bring her and Henry together. He was not an unattractive man. He was six-foot-three, with curly hair that had been blond in 1942 and turned mostly gray somewhere in the Solomon Islands. He had a strong chin, the hint of a dimple, a long, patrician nose and piercing eyes.

If a soldier had managed to stay alive long enough in Europe or the Pacific, he probably had brought home some medals, the way Harry saw it. He had a few himself, earned just by being there. You kept your head down. You tried to look out for your men. You definitely looked out for yourself.

Henry Flood, though, was different.

He was a North Carolina country boy who joined the Marines two weeks after Pearl Harbor. He was already 26 years old, already running the family farm. He might not have been drafted for a long while, might have avoided combat.

He spent most of the war in the South Pacific. Ruth learned his stories mostly from newspaper clippings, his family, a war buddy who came through Saraw to visit, and then through relentless questioning of a man who was an uncooperative witness to more than he wanted to remember. She fell in love with the sweet, shy killer Henry Flood had become in his late 20s.

Twice, he had gone into caves to flush out Japanese soldiers who were somewhere within. He went in voluntarily when no one else was willing. He killed three enemy soldiers with a knife. Henry Flood was not afraid to get blood on his hands, wasn't afraid to feel flesh yield to steel.

He told Ruth that the big guns were so loud and were fired so close that his ears often bled. The headaches that would get worse were already bothering him when he came home in 1946. Ruth had to be careful not to make any loud noises around him. Once, at a cousin's birthday party after they had started seeing each other, a child popped a balloon and Henry dove and landed flat on the floor, face down, his large hands covering his ears and much of his head. In the quiet that settled on them, broken only by a child's question and a mother's whispered “hush,” Ruth helped Henry up and led him away.

He was injured three times, and he came home with so much shrapnel in his legs that the doctors in Newport called him “Scrap.” He would start a lifetime of pain medication at the VA hospital where they shipped him when they decided he'd done his share.

Harry knew he and Henry Flood had much in common, the way many men of a certain age did after the war. In 1947, they both walked and talked, lived and breathed in a world each thought, more than once, he would never see again. They were into their second and third lives. They came back to parades and adulation that was gone before they had a chance to grow tired of it. They had lived to see a world where all things were possible. They were part of the greatest fraternity in the greatest country on Earth.

And yet, Harry wondered sometimes if anything had changed, really. He went back to his life and Henry Flood went back to his. There were plenty of farm boys like Henry in Harry's unit, sergeants and corporals and privates who helped keep an Ivy League lieutenant alive. They had shared chores and food, fear and misery, enough so that it would seem they were bound together for life, blood and bloodied brothers.

But that wasn't how it was. If one of those bus drivers or cotton-mill workers who shared a bottle with him on VE Day had looked him up in Richmond, he knows he probably would have taken him out for a drink, but not to the same bars the other stockbrokers frequented. A sick child or an early appointment the next day would have made an overnight invitation improbable.

Harry sees, from this distance, that much of what men brought home from the war was just a worse version of what they carried over. He has no interest in watching the old movies: good-hearted guys working out their problems in a foxhole. Nine-tenths of the men Harry knew before the war and after were less admirable human beings in 1945 than they were in 1941.

Henry Flood was 10 years older, but Ruth was a very old 21 when they met. She was taken by his reserve and his good looks, but she also was touched by what she could only describe as need. She knew, in 1947, that she could cure the hunger inside this man she so admired and was learning to love.

They went to church picnics. Ruth had started going back to the church of her youth, where no one ever said anything to her any more about Naomi's murky nativity, although she was certain that some of them doubted the story her grandfather had planted four years earlier. They went to the beach; they took long boat trips back into Kinlaw's Hell, which Henry Flood knew like no one else, having grown up on the edge of it just half a mile north of Ruth's family. From the very first, she marveled over his knowledge of every turn in the vast, unmarked wilderness that had been his boyhood backyard.

He didn't ask her about Naomi's father for some time.

It occurred to Harry that Ruth might well be better off with her hometown hero, the boy from just up the road. When he urged her not to rush into anything, he was just trying to keep the door open.

One night, a month before the wedding, Harry went out for drinks after work and didn't get home until 9 o'clock. He had flirted some with a secretary, an agreeable brunette. He knew, for the price of some guilt and a little risk, he could arrange to have drinks and all that followed at her townhouse the next night, but he hadn't cheated on Gloria yet, not really. He arranged nothing; he went home.

That night, Gloria and he had the biggest fight they'd had yet. Gloria smelled the brunette's perfume, from where they'd brushed faces when she leaned over to whisper the punch line of a dirty joke in the booth they shared with four other people.

Her jealousy made Harry furious. He thought of how wicked he could be, he thought about the choice he'd made, alone and unappreciated. He thought about Ruth and Henry Flood.

He stomped up the stairs, and he thought of just packing his bags and leaving. He'd stop and call Ruth from the phone at the bar on Belmont and then head south. He'd breeze into Saraw, North Carolina, and Ruth would forget that Henry Flood ever existed.

Even as he thought it, though, his confidence collapsed. He did not doubt that Ruth loved Henry, although never, he was sure, the way they had loved each other. And, Ruth had her code. She kept promises.

At the top of the stairs, he looked across the hall. A sliver of light spotlighted Martin's cradle. He had his thumb in his mouth, and his eyes were wide open. He hadn't started to cry yet, and Harry picked him up before he did. It was as if he knew what his father was considering.

Harry held Martin, humming softly and rocking him back and forth in his arms. Gloria had followed, still full of argument, but when she saw her husband and son there, she walked over, without a word, and embraced Harry. It was as if the two adults were shielding their child from the outside world.

That was the night, they both were certain later, when Nancy was conceived.

By this time, Harry was sending Ruth $20 a month, faithfully slipping the money out of his account and mailing it to Mercy with a letter. Ruth told him more than once not to send it, but he wrote that it was not for her; it was for Naomi.

On Ruth's wedding day, Harry had white roses shipped to her home. Matty, by now on his last legs, so weakened by a bad heart that he was barely able to wander down to the diner, leaned over to sniff the flowers, which were a puzzle to everyone except Ruth, and muttered, “That damn Randall Phelps.”

Ruth had her own bank account and stocks, something that Henry accepted at first without complaint. The same Ruth who didn't give up her baby refused to surrender that little piece of independence, even for love. Henry Flood would learn the magnitude of her strength a little at a time. It would take him a lifetime to learn all of it.

For years after she moved back to Saraw, Ruth never touched a cent of the money Harry sent her, and she added much of her own, after she was able. Occasionally, Henry would try to get control of Ruth's account or her stock portfolio, or at least find out how much money she had in them, but Roy McGinnis, an old friend who had known her since high school, made sure he never knew, no matter how much he threatened.

The wedding was large. Ruth had many friends, Henry was a war hero, and it was something of an oddity in Saraw to attend a ceremony in which the bride's daughter was the flower girl. Ruth thought the main sadness she would feel would be over moving out of the only true home she had ever known. Her grandmother had passed away just two weeks before the wedding, and the knowledge that Ruth would be only half a mile away did not seem to ease Charlotte's and Jane's anguish.

“I wish we had never set you up with that Henry Flood,” Charlotte told Ruth at the wedding, her face red and raw from crying. “Now he's stolen you away from us.”

The morning of the wedding, Ruth did something she really couldn't explain. She picked two petals from one of Harry's roses and kept them in her left hand. She carried them to the church, set them aside while she dressed, then picked them up again. She had them as she walked down the aisle, her left hand in a light fist. When she held that hand up to receive Henry Flood's ring, the wilted petals fell lightly and unseen to the carpeted church floor. The ache that hit her made her hesitate, a slight bump in an otherwise seamless event. She found her place again and didn't think about Harry Stein again for most of the day.

The farm to which Ruth and Naomi moved had more history than promise.

“As soon as the loan comes through from the bank,” she wrote Harry in early 1948, “I am sure we will be more secure financially. Henry has such great plans for the future.” Most of the letters Ruth sent in those days dealt more with the future, the if and when of it, than with the present.

They raised tobacco, along with corn and soybeans. Henry had inherited 120 acres from his father. His mother, after his father's death, had moved in with one of Henry's sisters in Laurinburg. A tenant family, living in a wooden shotgun shack out back beside the railroad line, did much of the hard work.

Henry and Ruth had hogs and chickens and a pair of mules that wouldn't be replaced with a tractor for many years.

Ruth had grown up in approximately the same world as Henry Flood, but she knew little about farming. She had not correctly gauged the difficulty in switching from town life to the cooking-canning-cleaning existence that awaited her at Henry Flood's. It was harder, she soon knew, than her years as a single working mother.

At first, Ruth kept her job at the sawmill office. She made relatively good money there, and she could still get most of her work done at home, although Henry already was complaining about the quality of her cooking and housekeeping.

But when she became pregnant with Hank in 1948, and the morning sickness hit her harder than it had with Naomi, she had to quit and devote what energy she had left to helping Henry keep the farm afloat.

It wasn't all work. They would go on picnics, to places only Henry knew. On long winter days when there wasn't so much to do around the farm, just repairs and preparation, sometimes they would talk for hours on end. Henry was a book, although not easily opened, when it came to the natural life of Kinlaw's Hell, and Ruth loved to hear him when he got carried away describing the swamp's beauty and mysteries. Sometimes, he would have a bad day, when the headaches would squeeze him so hard that he couldn't get out of bed. And there were a few nights when his screaming would scare Naomi in the next room, and Ruth would have to soothe them both. Mostly, though, she was optimistic.

“Harry,” she wrote when she had quit her job and was seven months pregnant with Hank, “this is all I ask of life: a good man, a wonderful little girl, another child on the way, a clean, comfortable home with enough space that you can hardly see the next house beyond the line of pine trees that bounds our property. I work harder than I have ever worked in my life, but Naomi is with me until school starts for her next fall, and there is always time for talking and reading and listening to the radio in the evening. I hope your life brings you such peace.”