After his sister left he appeared lost. He had wiped his hand over his face and paused before turning back to Ruby, rubbed his arms and shaken out his legs. He’d seemed beaten for a moment, then he’d apologized for the interruption, and he started cleaning again. She would be ready for him when he finished.
Now he was using Chauncy Rankin’s pail. Chauncy had filled it with water and doused her with it two nights ago in the backyard when he’d come with his brother.
Moss had left the Dove soap whittling into slime in a broken bowl. Ephram was reaching for that now to wash his hands.
In the beginning, when Ruby first moved to Liberty, there had been many visitors and they had been more industrious. It had been harvest time, corn gold and tall, cotton flying and catching on tree tops. The chinaberry tree had sprouted the yellow berries all of the birds loved to pluck. It had been sweet, hot fall when the first — a slanted, tall man with a small keloid scar on his upper lip — had wandered down the road. She was scrubbing the old stain on the porch at the time — the one she’d heard her Auntie Neva had left when she died. When the man asked if she was little Ruby Bell, she’d told him yes. He said he’d known her grandfather, and her mama and aunts, and had seen her go to church on Sundays. He said he’d heard she was back in town, and he’d come by to offer his help. The fact that he was a janitor by profession proved convenient and so he had gotten down on his hands and knees and taken over washing the stained porch. Ruby couldn’t remember his name — Jeffers, Jefferson, and didn’t want to be rude by asking again, but he was polite and said thank you when she offered him a glass of water. He worked at the Colored High School in Jasper, and said he had a special cream cleanser at work that could get that up. He almost bowed when he left. When he came back a week later, Ruby had been growling in a corner, her clothes stripped and balled in the center of the floor. He had led her to her bed and taken her, simply and politely. He’d left the cleanser on the nightstand when he exited.
Word travels fast along the Sabine when it comes to unmarried women who offer horizontal refreshments. Three others came shortly thereafter. A tall, seal-colored man with a pious expression who’d quoted the Bible during and after. A fat, yellow sloth of a man and an old dark grandfather with a creased face. But then the high school boys from Jasper had made their pilgrimage. They came in bunches and they came drunk. Sometimes they came mean. Sometimes they hit, and worse, sometimes they laughed. As time passed, as her skin seemed to sink tight about her bones and she lost every remnant of sanity, fewer came. As the house piled high with human waste and garbage only the diligent remained. Old-timers like Chauncy and Percy wiped here and there before doing their business, always taking her outside. Sometimes under the chinaberry tree with the old crow staring down on them, calling out, blaming. Sometimes they brought a rag, or a box of lye and a jar of bacon grease to mix for soap. Sometimes they brought food.
What she never articulated, not even in adjoining thoughts, like train cars linking for a journey that she never let herself take, was that, of late, she had enjoyed these visits. Had found her own reflection in their routine. There was no other mirror in the house. These men, and their eyes — wide, slitted, beetle black, hazel green, repentant, fearful, angry, joyous, wet with lust — saw her. Not her grace, nor her strength. Not the plow horse of her soul, but they saw something. They held someone. They ached for her legs to part, for her to receive them. For in that instant, before release, the world could have split in two and they would have continued. Pumping steadily. Furrows deepening. Sweat washing. All hypocrisy silenced. And while they might have gone out and found a better, saner, prettier girl with full breasts, in that instant, nothing else on earth would suffice and subsequently Ruby knew the only power she had ever known on earth.
Ruby kept her screen door unhooked most nights.
Ephram had found the white box of lye and was sprinkling it like powdered sugar on the swept floors.
Ruby said softly, “You good at that.”
“Thank you.” He let a smile tickle the edge of his lip.
Ruby looked down at her foot. It had involuntarily started to become the grain of the wood. She felt herself grow too hard, too stiff to move. Small splinters formed a fuzz along the toes. Ruby ardently shook her leg and foot back to flesh. Ephram politely looked down at the floor as Ruby asked, “Your sister teach you?”
“She did as a matter of fact.”
Now a familiar buzz started again, this time in her belly. The food smelled too strong, the cheese too bitter and orange. She couldn’t eat such a bright aching color. She put it down on her soiled mattress. She was still hungry so she bit into the bread, but it caught as she tried to swallow. She coughed it into her hand and rubbed the chewed mass into the mattress.
Ephram noted it, but only said, “How’s that coffee?”
Ruby picked it up and took another sip. The coffee stole down her tongue and secreted into pockets of her mouth before spilling down her throat. It was a friendly dull brown. Ruby chose not to answer his pushy question. Instead she took aim.
“Why you call her Mama?”
“Celia raised me.”
“Wonder how your real Mama would feel about it.”
It was Ephram’s turn to be quiet.
“And what’s all that you were talking about at the door … the ox in a ditch on a Sunday. What’s that all about?”
The buzzing grew louder. Her stomach turned in on itself and Ruby felt the food rising into her throat.
He glanced at her. “It’s a Bible verse, Book of Luke.”
“What’s it mean?”
The food spewed out of her mouth, covering the mattress, her throat raw. Ephram didn’t pause. He took her hand but the sound was louder. His touch hurt her skin. She yanked away and walked to the window.
Ephram took the broom and swept the vomit into a pail. Then went to dump it. He came back in with his jacket wetted.
Ruby was relieved. He was to now take what he’d come for. She knew he would clean her up, wipe her down. The world tilted back to normal. The sound stopped as she imagined Ephram — a lonely, docile man who jacked off behind his “Mama’s” bathroom door and hated his sin later. Ruby just stood there and waited.
He handed her his jacket and said, “Interesting you asked ’bout that ox. It’s what Jesus say to the Pharisee when they give him a hard time ’bout healing a man on the Sabbath. Jesus say, if your ox fall down in a pit, whatever the day, you’d fetch him out. If it’s important enough you got to do it.”
She nearly yanked the jacket from his outstretched hand. “So my house is an ox.”
“I’d say so.”
She began cleaning her face and mouth in a kind of shock.
Ephram dipped the broom into the pail of lye water and commenced to scrubbing the bed. Then with a simple ease, he moved back to the floors.
Ruby watched Ephram cleaning and could feel the old house stretching under his hands, sighing and adjusting itself to better meet his efforts. The broom all but fell apart as he worked, but he mopped on with the handle and the shredded nub until Ruby could see the tan of the floor. Then he tackled the ceiling with a found rag. Small cubbies of dust and web disappeared from the corners, carrying with them the carcasses of forty or fifty house-flies. The stilt legs of spiders flew to the floor.
Ruby watched as Ephram disturbed the coiled shadows of men and women lining the baseboards. The homeless dead had been using her place as a squat for the past nine years, fully grown spirits who were not Ruby’s kin. While they were a nuisance she had let them stay, no reason to refuse their entrance. They insulated the rooms and cushioned the alone.