“Look how it started, you already cleaning on a Sabbath.”
“Luke chapter fourteen. ‘The ox was in the ditch,’ Ceal.”
“You twistin’ the Bible already; besides church done started.”
“You go on then. I’ll see you directly.”
“When?”
“When I get there Ceal.” He sounded harder, the softness gone. The nasty thing was standing behind him now.
“Go on,” It said. “Go on home to your mama.”
Celia saw her Ephram turn to the creature and get soft like saltwater taffy. Get soft and sweet and whisper, “But I don’t want to go nowhere Ruby.”
Celia backed away into the front yard. She conjured with gospel — the one thing that never failed to bring Ephram in line. “ ‘… though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow!’ ” Celia pointed to the sky and continued, “ ‘Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.’ Isaiah 1:18.”
The thing got quiet. Ephram stared dumbly at Celia from the open doorway. Celia felt an electric power building within her, guiding her words. “Ephram, you best to remember Leviticus chapter twenty-six, verse twenty-one: ‘And if ye walk and will not hearken unto me; I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins. I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle.’ ”
Celia lifted both of her arms high to the heavens to finish the job. She had chosen the perfect passage. Ephram blinked as if he were about to weep. Celia held out the grocery bag with his Sunday suit. She would instruct him to change behind P & K after she delivered the final words. He would enter In-His-Name on Celia’s right arm and they would give testimony together today. About Leviticus. About family and the blood of Jesus. Celia felt her eyes wet with joy as she charged dramatically: “ ‘And if ye will not be reformed by me then will I punish you yet seven times for your sins.’ ”
Celia stood smiling with the outstretched bag.
Ephram shut the door and went inside.
Celia staggered back, slipped on a stone and nearly fell over. She could not breathe, not in nor out, as if a great and mighty wall had crashed into her. She paused for a moment, then ran wildly in shame for home.
She got as far as Marion Lake when she stopped dead, a smile sliding across her teeth. Celia very methodically took off her brooch and placed it in her purse, then rested the purse on the side of the road.
Then Celia threw herself to the ground. Hard. Using one hand to secure her hat and wig, she thrashed herself against the cracked clay. Ripped at her collar … some, but not enough for impropriety. She tore at the lace along the sleeves and inadvertently bloodied her ankle. When she stood she was covered in dust, her brunette skin ashy with scrapes and dirt. Then she reached into her purse, retrieved the brooch and pinned it close to her heart.
When Celia turned onto the church road she had a mission, a holy war she would not only fight, but win. She practiced the first words she would utter upon entering the gate. Upon opening the door to a seated congregation. Upon the singular note of awe she would conjure from the crowd.
She mouthed the words, “I just had a fight with the Devil—” The rest, Celia knew, would spring forth from her mouth like a deep well gushing in the desert. “I just had a fight with the Devil,” she practiced, “and I needs your help to win.”
Chapter 11
The man’s flag was still waving, but it was filthy as hell. Ruby sat on the bed and ate the third tea cake Ephram had given her that morning. He’d also brought her head cheese, which she had promptly ignored.
Little charges flashed through her body, then settled. She sipped coffee that he had valiantly prepared on the hearth with a small kettle he’d bought from P & K. The bitter smell connected, then exploded. She hadn’t had a cup of coffee in ten years. And she loved coffee, loved it like air. The fire he’d made danced in the warmth of the day, flecks of blue and gold. He was still cleaning. It had been two hours and he had not stopped to sit, that is, if there had been a clean inch to sit on.
When he had first stepped foot in the door Ruby had seen him falter. Stumble over the black of his shoes. Then he had held his handkerchief near his nose, paused and looked about the house. Then he seemed to be methodically planning his attack.
Ruby watched him survey the five solid rooms: the kitchen, its black potbelly stove thick with grease, dried batter, bits of food and a pan holding stagnant water that had long since sprouted maggots. The wood pail was filled with rotted dewberries she had picked and forgotten. The counter, ripe with molded bread and peaches slick brown surrounded by swarming fruit flies. Ruby had not truly seen the house, but now, through Ephram’s eyes the filth and waste echoed.
He pushed the rounded oak table away from something crusted and black and noted the mound of leaves and bark on top. He made a left from the kitchen and walked into an empty living room that not one person had sat in since Neva died. Ruby knew it was unusually clean, as was the back bedroom he disappeared into. They did not belong to her.
Ruby had heard all three girls, Neva, Ruby’s mama, Charlotte and her aunt Girdie, had shared that room, slept some nights back to back like spoons, giggling like a waterfall.
Ephram went through the kitchen into the small bathroom and stumbled out, a bit of fear washing over him. Ruby knew that what he had seen might send him out of the door for good. Instead he stepped out onto the generous porch and walked down to the pump.
Before Neva died, Ruby’d heard that Papa Bell had started fitting the house for running water. He’d bought long iron tubes and loops of wire. He’d gotten as far as the bathroom. Then later, he had sold every last pipe for pennies on the dime.
Papa Bell would have liked him. He did not slip. Ruby had heard that her grandfather had built the steps a little slanted. “To keep out shaky, crooked folks,” he used to say. “Straight-minded folk can walk up any kind of stairs.”
Back when the house was young, Ruby had heard, often visitors ended up in the sugar snap peas just to the right of the porch.
When Ephram came back she watched as he turned left and walked into her room. It was the worst of them all, but it had been built square and spacious. The windows so wide they needed special panes of glass. It had been her Granddaddy’s, and for all the ghosts who had haunted her, Ruby often wished he would come. He never did. Perhaps, Ruby thought, he had no great desire to spend one more second on earth. Maybe he had finally found a bit of rest sitting beside Neva on a star, paying the world no mind.
Once Ephram had taken on the job, he began in earnest.
The supplies were meager but he improvised well and worked steadily. He’d bought a can of Comet at P & K and added that to the few things she’d bought when she first arrived. He’d swept the floors with an old mud-caked broom he’d found out back. He’d held it under the pump until the water ran clean, then made it through two rooms, sweeping all manner of things into a central pile when his sister had come to the door.
Her eyes had bulged, the vein on her temple had leapt and strained. Celia Jennings stood at Ruby’s door spitting like a raving lunatic, screaming down curses in the way of verses. So Ruby had started giggling, and then she started laughing. She hadn’t meant to, but when she peeked through the window and saw the froth collecting in the corner of Celia’s mouth, that Popeye-the-sailor-man hat bobbing on top of that ridiculous zebra wig, Ruby had stuffed her fist against her mouth and laughed until her eyes grew wet. Ephram tried to shush her with his eyes, which made her laugh harder.
Finally Ruby had gone to the door just to mess with the woman’s head. Let her see him choose her. He had. Of course he had.