Ephram walked in and looked at Ruby. He poured an alchemy of oil, steam and well water into a pitcher and poured it over Ruby’s thick hair. It seemed to drink the water like desert sand. Ruby sighed.
He arranged his supplies on the sideboard: two large tins of Crown Royal hair dressing. Casey Farms peanut oil. Ginger root. White Rain Shampoo and Conditioner. Hair bands, small blue worlds attached to black elastic eights, like children wore to Sunday school. And a wide-toothed comb and scissors.
Her hair was hard in places like thick plastic. It had matted so that scabs had formed along the scalp, bled and dried into scars. Some of the hair had tangled into ropes, so dense, so solid that it would have been easier to shave her head and start fresh. As if she could read his thoughts she said, “It might be easier to cut it off.”
But she said it the way pretty women say things they know people will disagree with. He smiled at the weight of her pride. The roots of her belief in her beauty ran deep, had lasted through over a decade of drought. Maybe, he thought, the tips of her hair remembered.
Ephram had always thought of a woman’s hair as living testimony to her life, her memories. Celia kept hers twisted tight under bobby pins, bound by headscarves and wig nets. His mama had kept hers free and puffy, until, he’d heard, they had made her tie it back at Dearing. He’d silently watched women and the complexity of their hair all of his life. He knew that some memories were better cut out, amputated. He’d seen women freed that way. But his bones told him that Ruby needed her past to find her way home. So he spent the night tending to her hair.
He had no one to ask so he supposed. He started with soap. The first suds turned black. He rinsed her hair with a pitcher, pouring the water into a separate bucket to spare the clear moving warmth of the tub. Then he washed it again and again. By the seventh rinse, the water almost ran clear. It felt like heavy, black wet wool.
The hair started whispering to his fingers. It showed him where to part and what to leave alone. It told him to crush wild ginger and mix it with the peanut oil, to warm it, to slip into the tunnels beneath the tumult and work that concoction along her scalp with his fingertips. He suddenly realized that it had been speaking to him all day while he was cleaning, telling him what to buy, what it needed. It frightened him. He wondered if Supra hadn’t been right after all, that maybe devilment was catching. Maybe crazy was a cold you caught. But then the fear left him and he realized that the whole wide world had been talking to him for years, only he’d stuffed cotton into his ears, packed it tight until a rail thin storm of a woman had knocked it out with a kick to his head.
So he opened himself up and listened as it told him how to work the conditioner into each corded knot. How to aim not to free the bond, but be content with loosening it bit by bit. It led him to eventually comb the fringed edges, then helped him to work like a craftsman, extracting strands one, two, three at a time.
He kept the kettles on the stove so that the air stayed heavy and moist. He heated the water in Ruby’s bath as slow hours passed. He worked steadily, courteously. He worked in love.
Around two in the morning, he stepped onto the porch as Ruby emerged from the bath naked and golden, and lay herself under clean linen atop the mattress. Ephram covered her with another sheet, slipped a grocery bag under her head and continued working. She tumbled into a sleep so deep, that she forgot to be afraid.
White Rain and oil at the ready, Ephram combed and soaked, teasing out the stubborn fists. At about four in the morning, three-quarters was free. It twisted and curled and waved like a river set loose from a dam. Down her neck, across her shoulders and dripping past her angel blades. Then Ruby’s hair began to do more than guide Ephram’s hands, it began to guide his heart.
It spoke to him in feelings. Each strand holding a story, each knot an event. Trapped bundles of thought, released. Her youth lived at the ends of her hair. Her present life near her scalp. He was midway down her back when suddenly the words Where is my baby? seeped into his hands. He felt an empty hollow in his belly. His throat clenched tight. Then Where is my baby? Where … is … she! What happened? Then a scream, spreading like a grease fire, until it exploded. Where you put her body? Gone. Taken. Ephram parted her hair through his tears. He worked in fractions.
Exhausted, eyes red, Ephram freed a coiled spool of black. It seemed to bounce lightly between his fingers. He felt his skin soft as gardenia petals. The froth of silk against knees. Lips coated in thickly spread color. He heard the thump of music and felt the sway of his hips keeping perfect rhythm. A man’s firm hand, spinning him, skirt swirling, lifting. Then the eyes of men pausing, watching. He felt a confidence, a certainty in the power of beauty, as the music swelled and laughter bubbled from his throat.
He loosened another strand and felt the blue flame of life in his belly. His body yielding, accommodating, and like a sweet gum tree come autumn, filling with milk. He felt his torso stretch, making way for the building, spinning matter, until it was as heavy as a planet in his womb. Until a sixty-foot wave crashed into the thimble of his body and there the child was, like a damp feather upon his breast, weighted as a new world.
He reached a knot, too tight, too large, it tugged free in his hand. His face grew hot. A terror so strong it busted the wall of reason. Felt himself entered, torn, ripped, bleeding. Felt sweat slick, spit hurtling against his cheek. He felt himself gag, choke then accept. He felt what it was to be mute earth. A dull ache wound through his fingers until he tackled another mass.
As he held tight to Ruby’s hair, his palm itched and then was tickled, so he was forced to smile. Then laugh. Then gasp as his pelvis warmed like honey in the sun, as hot sticky waves swirled, as his entire body tightened, contracted, as a lightning rod of bittersweet ache buckled his flesh. Too, too sweet, embarrassingly so, like a roller coaster crashing to the dip, only to discover it had another hill to climb and dip, and climb and dip. Exploding again and again and again. When it ended he didn’t know how to fix his face. He wilted like a week-old rose. He released the reins of her hair. He looked up and saw the moon reaching in through the window. Ruby still sleeping and the caw of a lonely crow breaking up the silence.
So this is the life of woman, he thought, and kneeling beside the bed, head on the mattress he fell asleep.
Book Three Revelations
Chapter 14
Under the blackberry sky, the impartial moon shone on night phlox, evening primrose and lone houses with slanted steps. It also cast upon wolf cubs caught in traps, hidden bones long buried and burning crosses — with the same indifferent grace.
That night, the Dyboù stretched along a ridge of pines moving towards a glowing light in the distance. Dead pine needles shifted under his belly; above him the branches and needles shivered. He liked the way the old trees bowed and groaned, pushed by a stolid might.
When he reached the pit fire, he saw the men in the distance. Eyes on something they had just cast into the fire. It yowled. He smelled the thing being burned alive.
As he slid forward, he could taste the screams of the cat. See her black fur catching and her fangs, screeching, green eyes covered over, then eaten by the hungry flames. It took a while for her to stop fighting, then he gulped in the shaking spirit of the creature, still locked in its scorched body — barely alive. It disappeared inside of him forever. They could have burned something larger. But he had been hungry. It was enough.