The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page A

over to herself, “husband.” When she goes home to all her sisters she tells them, not about Willard, but about “my husband.” She says, “My husband got up at two in the morning because a calf was born.” Or, “Did you see my husband in town yesterday?” She asks them about “my husband,” as if all of a sudden he doesn’t have a name; what’s good about him is he belongs to her.
     
    I’m not sure whether to be glad or sorry for May, that she was so happy with Willard, that she felt like a spring-fed cow pond. May never thought too much about religion back then, probably, but being married, she knew exactly what she wanted to find in the afterlife. She didn’t even care that she wasn’t off with some man from Peoria who wore suits and sold hairbrushes door to door. She had the bug that afflicts every part of you, especially your reason. It makes you dream of babies crying out for you in the night.
    Aunt Sid says that Willard was a fine upstanding human being, that it wasn’t a mystery why May thought he had been sent to her express from God Almighty. On the day after their marriage May burned his toast for breakfast and he said burned toast was just fine, in fact he liked it better charred. So May burned his toast every single day afterwards, and he choked it down with a smile on his face. Aunt Sid told me that finally she felt easy with May; I imagine that they could now chat about underwear without May saying Sid’s stunk worse than anyone’s in the world since the beginning of time. And she probably loaded Sid up with pure corn; she said, “Sidney, someday a man will come along and make you as happy as Willard is making me right now.” If someone said that to me right at the moment I wouldn’t know whether to laugh and choke on the bile caught in my throat, or cry. I suspect I’d burst out crying.
    The year was 1941 and Pearl Harbor gave President Roosevelt the chance he’d been dying for. War was declared and Willard Jenson got the call. He didn’t have ailments that could get him out of it. They were hoping the Japanese would quick get mashed to a black pulp so the men from Honey Creek wouldn’t have to fight in major battles, but the president said, in his voice that sounded like he was so far away and lonesome, that we had to make the world safe for democracy. Miss Daken, my history teacher, told us about the greatest lines from the speeches, and then we watched a movie that ended with the mushroom cloud. Willard Jenson had to go down to the South for training camp. There must be letters somewhere in May’s things, love letters between them, words that can’t describe half of all the yearning in their loins. Someday I’ll find the packets all strung up with rotten ribbon and I’ll be able to know her a little better. I’ve seen shows on television about the war. All I can picture is May standing at the depot waving a white handkerchief at Willard. He’s on the train; they just kissed so long it almost pulled away without him. They are like the lovers on a TV show, except we don’t have a train depot in Honey Creek or Stillwater.
    After Willard went overseas, Marion, May’s sister, became engaged to Frank Bane. The couple kissed in the pantry and when May bumped into them she backed out, staring. Marion never mentioned the war. Frank Bane wore thick glasses, and once when they got knocked off by a cow’s tail he was found crawling around in the straw. He couldn’t go to war because his eyes were too weak. They signed him up to work in a gun factory.
    On Marion’s wedding day May helped her get dressed. She put the flowers in her sister’s hair, never jabbed her with a pin, although she wasn’t thinking about anything except the barbed wire you find near trenches. May made lame jokes about wedding nights and how you walk crooked the next day. Every week there was news about how some boy got shot dead over in the Pacific. For the wedding reception there were biscuits and slabs of