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

roast beef, cut thin, because of the war effort. Wild daisies, wilting, stood in pots all over the house. There wasn’t anything alcoholic to drink except the wild stuff the men passed around out in the yard The guests sat on folding chairs in the dining room and wiped up the gravy with their bread.
    May had moved back home for the war, with her parents, because Willard Jenson’s father took over the farm. She didn’t want to live in the same house as her father-in-law. He was so stern, especially when there was weather coming that he didn’t like. He called her “young lady.” About the only thing he ever said to her, in an accusing voice, was, “Young lady, I don’t like the looks of the sky.”
    May came home, did the laundry, drove tractor, heaved milk cans, and pushed cow rumps from stanchion to pasture. She had to take out her wedding gifts, including the entire china dog collection from her senile aunts, to know that she hadn’t merely dreamed of her marriage. Her menstrual period stopped coming because she was lifting eighty-pound milk cans. There wasn’t one part of her body that felt alive.
    Aunt Sid says that Marion was the beautiful one in the family. She had a braid so thick you could hang or swing from it, and soft brown eyes almost as tender as a dead mouse’s in a trap, and small hands that hadn’t done one load of wash. Marion had gone to high school and knew Latin; she said words such as
declension,
and probably May looked up at her from the pile of laundry like she was cracked. The dress May wore for Marion’s wedding had large white flowers swirling around on a pale blue background. I found it up in the attic when I was in high school. I put it on in my bedroom, and thinking I was alone in the house, went down to May’s room to look in the mirror. I stood there admiring myself for a minute, before I realized that she was in bed, staring. I met her eyes in the mirror and I didn’t recognize them. Each one looked like a dull gray plug under the bath water. I didn’t say anything. I got out of there as fast as I could. I waited for my punishment but it never came, and I began to wonder if the dress had some kind of forgiving power.
    There’s a picture of May wearing the dress, after Marion’s ceremony. She looks like she read instructions in a book about how to make a smile and she was trying it out for the first time. Her little teeth didn’t make it into the photo. May had all her teeth pulled when she was forty-nine. I try not to look at her in the morning, when her mouth is empty. The size of her entire body is suddenly diminished without her jaw.
    After Marion and Frank Bane drove off for their honeymoon, May sat in the barn and closed her eyes. She stroked the two kittens without thinking they were animals. She imagined the hair on Willard’s head. She made a note about how Marion’s husband wasn’t half as good as Willard, especially with those two-foot glasses he had to wear. She noticed the sun going down, and for once she looked at the sky. She stopped and mentioned to herself how blue it was, how if you could reach up and taste the color of dusk you might turn into something shimmering and silver; you might be transformed into the moon itself.
    When the telegram came that night her heart turned to stone. She wouldn’t hear what her parents were telling her. They tried to explain but she blocked her ears. She walked out into the dark field, to the spot where so many years ago she had tied the rock to her ankle and told her sisters she was going to drown in Honey Creek.

Four
    AUNT Sid told me that the whole town came to the funeral. There wasn’t a casket because the body of Willard Jenson was nowhere to be found. He had been blown up on an island in the Pacific, as brave a soldier, the reports said, as there had ever been. The news was full of accounts of the boys overpowering the yellow devils; the papers said that although the Americans were practically never defeated, when