Harry & Ruth (29 page)

He weighs everything, again. He is relatively certain that Naomi needs to know what he knows. He is almost as sure that Ruth will not forgive him for telling.

Thirty years of Ruth's censure would be hard punishment, but Harry is thinking, this night, of a depressingly smaller number. He uses most of his strength to remove himself from the chair, then limps toward the deck.

He can smell the salt spray as he opens the door, just like at the ocean. Naomi doesn't seem surprised to see him, almost seems to have been expecting him. By his watch, it's almost 2:30.

“Couldn't sleep,” Harry explains.

“There's a lot of that going around.” She smiles, putting her cigarette on the lip of the ashtray. “Is the pain really bad?”

“Nah,” he lies. “It beats the alternative.”

She tells him he'll be around for another 20 years, and he lets it pass.

“Do you have insomnia a lot?” he asks, thinking to himself that it's late to be asking his daughter that.

“Just when I'm around Mom,” she says, taking another puff. “No, that's not right. I'm just being an asshole. Just all the time. I'm trying to stay off those damn sleeping pills, but there are nights when I just lie there, looking at those little green numbers flipping over. My mind'll hop from Gary to Grace to Thomas to Mom. On a really bad night, I'll even go back to Henry Flood. Guilt, anger, worry.

“You know what calms me down sometimes? God, I shouldn't be telling you this. But if you can't tell your old dad, who can you tell?” She smiles her usual way, her mouth twisted a little to the right, as if the act of smiling causes her pain. She stubs out her cigarette on the rail, hard. “What does it for me is this: I imagine that I'm at that cabin with him. When he reaches down to ‘help' me take my panties off, I grab the crowbar that was lying beside the cot. I'm sure that crowbar was there, Harry, that I haven't just invented it. And I hit him over the head with it, over and over again. He's begging me to stop, but I keep hitting him. I revel in his suffering.

“That works sometimes. Sometimes, though, I even turn that into angst. Why didn't I hit him? Why didn't I kill the bastard? Why didn't I try to escape? I was a good athlete, a good runner. Even if I hadn't killed him with the crowbar, I could have run into the woods, somewhere. Starving to death would have been better, dying of snakebite. Why …?”

Harry puts his hand to her lips, and she is silent, waiting.

“I have a story to tell you,” he says, “one that might help you get some sleep.”

Five years after what Harry thinks of as his redemption, he and Ruth went for a walk one day along the ancient railroad bed where the Sam and Willie once ran. The linear park that replaced it, largely the doing of State Senator Ruth Crowder Flood, is a perfect path for jogging, biking or just, as she describes it, putting one foot in front of the other.

They would go south, most days. The park picks up the Saraw, with its dark water and low-hanging moss, half a mile from the Crowder house.

Once in a while, though, for a change of pace, they would go north, where the old railbed is the boundary of Kinlaw's Hell. Here, the view is not quite so spectacular—bays and low-lying shrubs, tall, angular pine trees like underweight sentries guarding the swamp, loons mourning in the distance.

Sometimes, they walk late in the afternoon, especially in the summer, and occasionally they return home after dark. On those days, they never go north, where the Saraw Lights, once the ghosts of Ruth's doomed parents, have imitated late-20th century life and downsized. Now, people swear they see only one light, and the light they see is Henry Flood weaving around in the distance, trying to get home.

That morning, five years after his return, on one of their infrequent walks north, Harry looked over and saw the back of a house he had passed often on the highway—the old Flood place.

After Henry's death, Ruth gave the house and the land to Henry's younger sister in Laurinburg. The sister in turn sold it to a family named Hedgepeth, which soon moved onto the property five double-wide trailers housing almost every Hedgepeth in Pembroke County. Ruth had not set foot on the land since she moved out.

Harry had often wondered about the place where Ruth and Henry Flood lived, what it looked like on the inside, whether he could discern the scent of something that would tell him more about the years he missed. But Ruth always demurred, and Harry never pushed it.

Now, though, it was right there beside them. Harry could see small, ragged children playing next to the closest trailer. He asked Ruth if she wouldn't like to see what had been done with the place in which she had spent the majority of her adult life. She said she would rather not, in a tone that indicated that she would rather be in hell.

After that, Harry would push the issue every time they passed the house. It became a contest of wills.

Finally, one morning in the late spring of 1981, Ruth gave in.

That day, she stopped dead on the path, so suddenly that Harry was a few steps beyond her before he realized she wasn't with him.

“OK, Harry,” she said, “you want to see the damn farm? Let's go see the damn farm.”

He followed in cautious silence as they eased down the bank to a path through the weeds that led toward her former home.

Dogs of indecipherable pedigree barked their arrival at each mobile home they approached. It looked to Harry as if German shepherds and dachshunds, terriers and Labradors, chows and Chihuahuas had found a way to mate with each other. Ruth told them to hush, and they did. She waved a greeting to one young overweight mother who was hanging out her wash. The mother tried to speak with a clothespin in her mouth, then was distracted by her 2-year-old, who appeared to be trying to use his big-wheel to run over his baby sister, lying on an old Army blanket in the side yard.

They approached the main house from the back. Ruth walked up and knocked on the kitchen door, and a woman who appeared to Harry to be approximately 80 years old answered. She apologized for not having her teeth in yet. Ruth called her by her first name, Cora. She introduced Harry, then asked if they could wander around the farm so she could show him where she had once lived.

“Wonder all you like,” Cora said with a toothless smile Harry would just as soon have not seen. “Wonder away.”

Cora Hedgepeth turned to him.

“She's a good womern,” she said, barely intelligible without her dentures. “I always vote for her.”

Ruth thanked her for that and declined an invitation to see the inside of the house.

Walking across the yard, she said to Harry, “I don't think I'm up to that right now. Besides, I've got something else to show you.”

“How old is Cora Hedgepeth?” he asked when they were a polite distance from the house.

“She and I were in school together.”

“Well, I'd definitely advise you to keep the teeth. I never realized what a vital fashion accessory they were.”

He had hoped Ruth would smile at that. She didn't.

The farm was typical for the area. There was an abundance of outbuildings of various sizes and uses. An old “carhouse” was employed mainly to shelter the weathered remains of a 1965 Mustang that someone still thought he would restore someday. A chicken coop and the wire fence around its yard were leaning, decaying. A pair of tobacco barns, one listing badly, were used mostly to store old, never-to-be-used-again furniture. What once was a smokehouse lay in ruins, its boards now used for kindling. A safe distance from all the rotting wood stood rusted-out 50-gallon drums, in which trash was burned.

Ruth led them to a smaller building that stood, barely, beside the smokehouse's remains.

Its windows were clouded over with years of dirt and cobwebs, and there was a wooden latch on the one door, accessible by stepping up on a two-tiered arrangement of cinder blocks that had replaced the original pine steps. Next to the latch was a piece of metal where a lock once had been.

Ruth opened the door and Harry followed her inside, hesitantly. His deep dislike of spiders and snakes already was legendary around Saraw.

The room still held some of the previous night's cold. Unlike the other buildings, it had a concrete floor.

“This was Henry's workroom,” Ruth sighed, speaking at last. Her right hand was shaking slightly, and Harry began to finally realize how much it had taken to get her here.

After five years, it still housed most of the tools needed by a farmer who couldn't afford carpenters and handymen. It had the metallic, rusty smell of old nails and saws and rasps and a hundred other tools whose uses were inscrutable to Harry.

Two benches had been built into the walls, and a couple of chairs sat in the middle of the open area.

“Sit down, Harry,” Ruth said. He started to protest; the chairs didn't look as if they would hold an adult, and he was certain that the room could produce at least a couple of respectable chicken snakes. But Ruth sat, and he saw that he didn't have any choice.

“Look under there,” she said, nodding to a place where two rows of four drawers each were set back a few inches beneath one of the benches. “I thought they might have thrown that thing away.

“It was the third drawer down on the right-hand side. That's where I found it.”

Harry pulled the drawer open slowly, uneasily, sure something live was inside. But the drawer was empty. It smelled of ancient wood and something he couldn't place.

“Oh, there's nothing in there now. Nothing for more than five years now. I burned everything.”

By 1975, Ruth and Henry Flood had come to an understanding. It was similar, she wrote in a letter that year, to the one reached by North and South Korea. He was 60; she was 50. Their marriage was now a truce broken only by a rare uprising. Henry appeared to Ruth to be more at peace than he had been in years, and if his disappearances into Kinlaw's Hell increased in frequency, then maybe there was cause and effect. Whatever the cause, she was grateful.

And, the legislature kept her busy most of the time she wasn't running the grill, which she was more and more leaving in other hands of varying capability. In the winter and spring, she would be gone to Raleigh for weeks at a time, only returning on Saturdays and Sundays, when she could get away then.

Everything else seemed to have fallen in place. Paul was graduated with a degree in computer engineering. Hank was becoming an excellent carpenter in a place where people knew him, made allowances for shortcomings and judged him on his work. Naomi had just given birth to her second healthy child.

“I thought everything was fixed at last,” she said with a sigh that day in Henry Flood's shed.

Then, one Monday in mid-October, she came home early from the grill, sick with a low-grade flu. It was a teachers' workday, and she saw children out everywhere playing in the Indian summer sunshine and wished she felt well enough to enjoy it. She promised herself to take more time off on account of nice weather.

When she got home, she saw no sign of Henry. His truck was not parked in the driveway, but that was not unusual. Probably, she thought, he was using such a fine fall day to do some fishing in the swamp. She was in the bathroom, looking for the Pepto-Bismol, when a flash of movement out of the window caught her eye.

The window faced Kinlaw's Hell, and from it, she could see Henry out by the railroad tracks, pushing his boat onto the back of his truck. There was someone with him.

When he was through, he and the other person, younger and smaller, got into the truck, and he drove it up into the back yard.

The other person got out, and Ruth saw that it was a girl named Angela Spooner, whose family lived three driveways north.

“Angela was about 12 then,” Ruth said, looking over at Harry. “She was a bright-eyed girl, thin and mischievous, with long dark hair and beautiful skin. I saw Henry lean over to say something to her, and then he did something strange. He slapped her on the butt, not like you would slap a bad child, but like you might slap a girlfriend. A playful slap.

“And then the girl turned suddenly, and she saw me there in the window. The look on her face, Harry. My God, the look on her face. It was part bewilderment, part shame, part blame. And the blame part included me.

“She walked away, toward her mother's house. The way she looked had reminded me of something, and it troubled me the rest of the day. When it hit me, I was in bed with him that night. He was already asleep. I had to tiptoe to the bathroom, where I threw up.”

Ruth paused for a few seconds, and Harry thought she might not be willing or able to go on. She seemed short of breath. Finally, she spoke again.

“One of Henry's good points, or so I thought, was that he would, when he was in the mood, take kids hunting or fishing. Even after Hank and Paul were grown, he would befriend children from the neighborhood. Sometimes he'd take several of them for a hike into the swamp. Sometimes he'd take a couple in his boat, sometimes just one.

“Sometimes he'd take girls. Sometimes he'd take boys. Nobody thought anything about it. Everybody fishes around Saraw.”

Ruth said she waited for Henry to go into the swamp again, which he did two days later. This time, he went alone, and she went hunting.

She knew he considered the shed to be his private territory. It was the only outbuilding that had a key.

He didn't know, though, and never did, that Ruth had a key, too.

“It never set well with me to be locked out of anything,” Ruth said. “One night, I had to come get him at the pool hall when he had gotten out of control. He'd hit one of the Morrissett boys with a cue stick. Well, he wouldn't listen to me, wouldn't calm down, and so I had him locked up.

“They gave me his keys so I could take the truck home. The next morning, before I came to get him out, I went by the hardware store and had them make a duplicate of one key.

“It tickled me, to tell you the truth, that I had the key to Henry's little one-man boys' club, but I never thought I would use it. It just made me feel good to know I had it in my purse.