Chapter 5
The crow caught a cross current and gained altitude as the man grew small and then vanished behind a rise in the earth. She tilted with the curve of the horizon. The sun warmed her hollow bones, her blackest feathers holding its heat. She flew over thatches of land, gold, green, brown, following the red river road until she reached the town square. Far below she saw a knot of men crowded onto the store’s steps, the women fanning their faces and looking on, headscarves tied. A woman chasing three boys off with a broom. She saw the different roofs, black tar, shingled, wood. She flew on. More farms. Wide, wild pines spearing the clouds. Pockets of green. Bony fences leaning into the road or boxing in pigs, chickens, cows. A woman in white hanging white sheets out to dry. A berry cobbler set out to cool. A red melon split on an outdoor table, children gathering around it like flies. The crow saw two men plodding home, carrying empty pails. Smoke from the mill in the distance. She flew past Marion Lake and the tangle of woods beneath, a wealth of beetles, grasshoppers and other legged insects, until she finally reached Bell land. The dried grass and empty hard field. Figs and apricots wormy on the earth. Gravestones littering the hillside. The house with holes poked through the roof. Rain and sun cutting them larger each day until now the foot of the girl’s bed was in view. She was asleep on her belly, her black soles facing the sky. The crow landed outside of her window, feathers light with ruffled wind. She spread her wings and cawed.
Inside the old house Ruby was sleeping, which was rare. Ruby did not sleep — much. For her mind tangled like a fine gold chain, knotted, she was certain, beyond all repair. Still she tried each day to trace the links, only to lose them again and again.
Ruby had lost much more than that. She had lost the 562 dollars she had brought to Liberty, tucked inside the change pocket of her Etienne Aigner purse. A week later, the purse had gone missing. Then, inexplicably, four pairs of capri pants, six madras blouses, three shirtwaist dresses. Most of her shoes, including her favorite pair of Beth Levine red stiletto pumps. Her hot comb, her Royal Crown hair oil, her lipstick, makeup bag, and the suitcases they had all come in.
She began losing time as well. It folded in on itself so that hours passed in minutes, weeks in days. She would start walking, eyes on the road, and suddenly find herself eight miles away, outside of Newton; or in a ditch; or once, chin high in Marion Lake, water filling her mouth, coughing, rasping.
Sometimes Ruby would wake on the forest floor — her clothes hiked above her waist, the sour milk scent of a man on her thighs. Her ribs aching with each inhalation, plum bruises on her face. The burning scrapes on her back made her cry out when she tried to stand. Still she would lift herself, smooth her dress and walk back to her Granddaddy’s land.
She lost the rising curve of her shape. Already thin, she wasted to a sliver, her clavicles like handrails. The plump in her calves and thighs disappeared. Her breasts drew close to her chest. Her wrists withered to blades of grass, bones knobby and hard under her skin.
Impervious to her monthly blood as it dried in fresh smears down her legs, until the loss of weight caused her womb to stop its monthly orbit.
More than all of this, Ruby had lost her train ticket home to Manhattan. She had lost New York.
She remembered wearing black stockings clipped into place, red lipstick and hair hot-combed and slick. The parties and whispers in her ear about so-and-so and what he painted, what he wrote, who he slept with and the heady rush of the drinking, clinking crowd.
She’d remember the telegram from Maggie, pulling her trump card and calling Ruby home.
Ruby remembered the crush of a dark Manhattan penthouse loft, flooded with women in black tights and false lashes, a few Chanels and Ceil Chapmans in the crowd like lights on a Christmas tree. The men in skinny slacks and ties, or leather jackets with pony caps. The room was filled with a gray cloud of smoke where people appeared then floated away. There were the magnet men who walked with headlines fluttering over their heads, who carried a circle of human bodies, tight to their arms, their voices. Who waited with ready laughter and deference. Then there were the falling men, who had slumped out of the limelight, who sat with a glass resting on their crotch, a stringy female threaded through their arms and Ruby gliding through it all. One of four brown faces who were not famous — each a footnote in the Bohemian Guide to Entertaining.
That she looked like Dorothy Dandridge was the compliment most often paid her. Makeup like Sophia Loren, heels adding two and a half to her five eight so that she looked down when she was introduced to the poet Gregory Corso and the painter Robert Motherwell. Quite far when she spoke briefly to James Baldwin — about Texas and little Liberty and the victory of Brown over Topeka’s Board of Education. He told her she was beautiful in that pure way that only gay men can, and peeled generously away only when the hostess, Mrs. Gladdington, called for him.
And for a moment after, she had become a magnet, as if mere proximity had gifted her with the power of attraction, and a circle had orbited her, until they realized she was not an author, a famous man’s girlfriend or a singer — only a pretty Negro girl who worked for the hostess, and all had drifted away. Still from across the room, she caught a supportive, conspiratorial wink from James Baldwin and felt, for a moment, seen and known by sparkling brilliance.
In a second she was back in Liberty. Ruby looked down at the browning mattress and could feel his crinkled grin fading. Her dresser mirror in Manhattan, her bras, panties, stockings, cigarettes, the bottle of Chanel 19, her English-French dictionary, for the trip she was to have taken with Mrs. Gladdington. Gone.
But for all that Ruby had lost, there were many things she had found.
A rising growl that rumbled out of her belly. Drool that wetted her lips and slid down the angle of her jaw. A jerking, rhythmic contortion of her face. Because these often happened without her permission and in view of the town, Ruby found what it was to no longer be seen as human.
She discovered that she could hammer her pride so wafer thin that she could accept alms like a beggar.
Then, one late afternoon, Ruby found a new pitted terror, as she sat on her bed watching dust swim in the light. She heard the slow creak of the screen door, a flutter of sparrows outside. She listened as a cup of water on the kitchen table turned over, and a thin cascading splash, like a man urinating, poured onto the floor. Ruby waited — it would not be the first time someone had come unannounced. But instead of a man, she saw a weighted, umber thickness slide into the room.
It shifted, moving along the floorboards. It darkened the corners, adding mass to the shadows. Ruby whispered, softly to herself, that there was nothing there, just the coming evening. Still her skin tingled hot, her mouth dry as it crossed the space between them and pressed against her, flattening her dress against her chest, her legs.
Ruby did not know why she sat on the bed, then lay down, but the old curtains ruffled towards the window frame, not away. Then something fell upon her chest. The scent of a dead candle filled her, making it hard to breathe. When the mattress sank deeper, Ruby thought to scream, but whatever lay upon her whispered the creaks and groans of the house into her ear, it smoothed and relaxed her until she felt a soft pressure upon her groin. To her fogged surprise, her body responded, a swelling excitement that ebbed through her thin frame. Ruby felt compelled to turn onto her stomach and push her pelvis into a mattress spring just under the padding. The bed seemed to roll under her, its legs grating, rubbing on the floor. Ruby knew this was a Dyboù—what Ma Tante had spoken of so long ago. A heat pulsed around her, then entered her. The house seemed to shake.