By evening she had a mound of leaves and bark on the table. Some had fallen on the floor. A low hum had begun that had caused her fingers to tap on her legs. The little spirits in her belly shifted, causing an unsettled pressure on her diaphragm. Nausea spread to her stomach, wetting her mouth. She was grateful that today she did not regurgitate — but many days she did — and many days, in the tilt of her world, Ruby could not clean the waste and eventually it dried, hard as bark, into the floor.
She had gone to the door and pressed her forehead gently against the screen and looked into the cobalt sky. The sounds of twilight had called to her — the crickets and the whippoorwills and a few impatient owls, so she pushed out the front door and made it to the chinaberry tree.
Then as evening fell into night, Ruby knew nothing was coming. A rocking sadness filled her. The air was dead and the wind had stopped. Of all that happened in her grandfather’s small house over the years, the lonely had been the worst of it. Words unspoken for so long. Only the trees to listen.
But then again, there were her children. A little over a hundred now. Soon the midnight would come and the screaming, the pushing, the birthing of another soul. But now it was quiet.
Ruby felt the chinaberry’s roots twisting three feet under her hand. She rubbed until she could feel a small bit of tan root with her thumb. She was on a first-name basis with those roots. She felt them hollowing under her palms. It was those roots that had kept her alive. It was the roots that had saved her.
She remembered six years ago when she had made a clear decision to take two large bricks she had found near Rupert Shankle’s fence, bind them to her feet with willow branches and leap into the deepest part of Marion Lake. As strong as she was, as much as she loved her children, Ruby could not bear the weight of her days. Perhaps, she thought, if she left, she might pull them all with her, like the tail of a kite.
Before walking to Marion she had come to say good-bye to the chinaberry and the old crow when she felt the old roots whispering, telling her to dig her toes into the soil. She had pressed her thick eyelashes together, lid to lid, and concentrated. Suddenly she had felt her toes stretching, running wide along the topsoil. Her toes were thin, tendril roots that wrapped like yarn about stones and the abandoned roots of the nearby field of sugarcane. Her skin became reddish brown and hard, her body narrowed and stretched. She felt sweet sap thick within her. Her breasts and buttocks became gentle, knotted swells in the tree’s trunk. A thousand lavender flowers erupted from the edges of her fingers. They played a delicious melody that scented the wind and called striped bees and hummingbirds.
Ruby had felt it then. The audacious hope of rooted things. The innocent anticipation of the shooting stalks, the quivering stillness of the watching trees.
For the next weeks Ruby walked through the Big Thicket, becoming. The loose black clusters of muscadine grapes on the vine. The egg-shaped seeded maypop fruit. Pecan trees, horsemint, stones and mud puddles.
She felt the call of the red road and so she became that as well. She felt herself stretching from the dusty passageway that ran through Liberty, Texas, and her grandpapa’s five acres, to access roads, to paved yellow-lined promenades with streetlamps, to Burkeville, to Prairie View, to Katy, to Houston, to Austin, to Galveston and beyond, snaking along the Gulf of Mexico.
She could feel a pair of soft child shoes stepping five miles away in Newton County, ten miles down in Burkeville the thick, callused feet of cane field workers at dawn. Faintly she heard the skipping step of a man who still had the sweet ripe smell of a woman on his fingers. Far away the hushed step of two teenage braided cousins rustling skirts and practicing kissing each other against a shaded tree. She felt the rumble of diesel engines, and a hundred pairs of black rubber wheels barely touching asphalt.
Ruby remained red road long past the owl call of midnight. She slept with gravel for a twining mattress and woven cotton and starlight as her covering quilt.
She had slept and awakened on that same road for four mornings until dusk of the fifth day when Chauncy Rankin’s horse Millie almost kicked her in the head. She rose, covered in dust and straw, to the sound of his cursing crazy women left alone to get themselves killed. She turned to enter her yard as he slid from his worn saddle. But a part of her was still the road, still alive with men and machines and rabbits scurrying at its edges.
Chauncy grabbed the thin fabric about her waist. His angled brown chin tilted down as he studied her blank eyes. Her eyes still holding the road. He called her. He jostled her. He shook her. He turned his nose at the smell of her. Then Chauncy Rankin spit into her face. Her face remained vacant and still. He saw flecks of his saliva dot her dust-covered cheek. The thick fluid slid down her face, revealing feather brown skin. He took his shirt sleeve, licked the corner and began wiping. He then began patting dirt and grass from her dress, her arms, her buttocks, her stomach, her legs.
He peeled off her gray dress and rubbed at her nakedness, wiping her with the damp edge of the shirt. He felt himself rise in his stained trousers, tent the looseness by his zipper. He dragged her to the pump and cranked the handle until water poured, rust brown at first and then clear. He filled a bucket and doused her with it. Once, twice, three times. When she was sufficiently clean, he half carried, half dragged her to a ditch only three feet from the open road. His maroon face twisted above her as he globbed saliva into his palm, wetted his penis and crammed into her.
And yet to Ruby, her dress empty and flat two feet away, the small of her back scratching on a smattering of pebbles, her pelvis and ribs crushing under a sweating full weight, this was a mere irritation. Like an ant crawling on freshly baked corn bread before being flecked away.
Chauncy Rankin could not know that he was only a cinder in her wandering eye, much more preferable to what waited at the bottom of Marion Lake and the shadow in the woods. For Ruby, men were a slight discord that she waited to pass.
She simply kept her limbs numb and her eyes empty as she had since she was fifteen. Since she was twelve. Seven. Six. Five. When the first man had ripped the cotton of her panties, explaining that this is what happens to very bad little girls. When the first man had sun smiled, “Training time …”
When Chauncy Rankin finished he patted her head absently, then left, mumbling a stale warning about lying in roads that grown men had to travel. He climbed on the old horse and trotted down the road.
The road held him as it had the children and the cousins and the hundred spinning black wheels. It did not buck him, or open up and chew him to pieces. The betraying road held him in its open palms. It led him home. It led him to his bed. It would lead him back to her door whenever he cared.
RUBY LOOKED up at the moon high in the sky. The road was still empty and the pains were beginning, the labor that robbed her senses and ripped through her. A little girl, swimming in her body, waiting, gently, tiny hands open. With each birth, she lived the murder of that child. The snap of a neck. The rape of a tiny body. Beatings, bones cracking. Skull smashed against a speeding fist.
She had, over the many years, released them one by one, night after night, her body twisting with pain. Ruby looked at the tiny graves dotting the hill. She had often thought of the small mounds at Ma Tante’s and wondered if the old woman had buried souls there as well. It was time. Ruby screamed with each contraction that ripped through her. Howled and saw a pillow smothering the child as she slept. She wailed and whipped the tall trees around her.
Chapter 8