Daren Dean

Mercury in Retrograde 4

Ruby

Ruby Phelps stood at her stove making fried chicken at six in the morning.

Russell and Lizzy Bowman ran a grocery store and gas station out on Route HH. The couple tried for years to have a baby, but without much luck. Ruby convinced Lizzy to start going to the Baptist Church with her where they prayed that God would give her a baby. The two women would pray clutching at one another's hands at the altar every Wednesday and twice on Sunday for about three months when Lizzy discovered she was pregnant. God had heard. Her whole body glowed like the renaissance pictures of saints. God's gift was born. A newspaper man from Jeff City came and wrote up a big article: MIRACLE BABY IN KINGDOM COUNTY! The story even ran in the Fulton paper which Ruby cutout and put it in her scrapbook.

Three months later, Russell and Lizzy Bowman's miracle baby died inexplicably in her crib. The Miracle baby, Mattie Quinn Bowman, was dead.

Ruby was all business. The chicken was cut up. She had nicked her thumb,

reminding her that Mama cut off the tip of a finger, once. Farm accidents happened. Even on dead farms where no work was done other than mowing the field out front which had become a twenty acre front yard. She could tell it tore Jesse up to let the fields lie fallow in back. He worked hard, farmed his whole life even as a boy because it was in his blood. When the government came along offering him a check not to farm it was like winning the lottery, but she knew it wasn't no good thing for a man in his forties not to work. He was too proud to go out and find another job. The government check hadn't made them rich anyway.

Jesse worked with his brothers building houses, roofing, even fixing foundations or pulling old barns back to plumb. There was no shame in working with his brothers for some reason she did not understand, nor did she ask him. Ruby watched him sleep at night, taking deep rasping breaths, while she worried and frittered the night away with anxiety. Even the shadows from trees on the bedroom wall frightened her, especially when he would stop breathing completely for ten to twenty seconds at a time.

"Maybe we should move into town," Ruby said to Jaelyn as she put the lid on the spitting pan of frying chicken. She looked at Jesse's big black lunchbox and had to stay her compulsion to fix a lunch to put inside it, even though she knew he would not be going to work today. Everyone would be at the Bowman's to give them giant dishes of cold mustard

potato salad, hams, green bean casserole, creamed corn and hominy, pecan and blueberry pies, and all crammed into Tupperware containers with the owner's names written over strips of tape on the bottom.

"You trying to convince me or daddy?" Jaelyn asked, as she poured milk into a tablespoon over her coffee and added a liberal amount of sugar.

"I feel so sorry for Lizzy," Ruby ignored Jaelyn. She had a smart mouth. It would get her in trouble someday. "I feel responsible." Ruby ignored the extra sugar on account of the depressing business at hand.

"Because God let her baby die - it's your fault?."

"I guess so."

"Oh, Mama," Jaelyn sighed and sipped at her coffee. "It ain't your fault. You always think it's God punishing you personally. It wasn't your baby that died. There ain't always no rhyme or reason to everything. Bad things happen sometimes. God doesn't listen to us. He don't even know we're alive."

"Is that how I raised you to believe?"

"No," Jaelyn said. "I think for myself."

"You think because you about to graduate from high school you know it all? Your old dumb Mama don't know nothing? That it?"

"I didn't say that Mama."

Ruby never failed to cry when the preacher told the story about Jesus dying on the cross. She identified with his pain, although she could not put it into words exactly. She felt other people's pain as if feeling it along with them would somehow lessen their experience of it. Perhaps it was the generalized sense of guilt she carried like a sack, no matter how much work she did she could not help feeling it was not enough. She did the household chores, she had her babies, she took care of her husband, she called on her neighbors when they were sick or ailing in some way, but still Ruby felt she did not do enough and deep down she wondered if anyone really loved her. The only thing she could think to do to keep from hearing a voice sing an accusation with the katydids of a night: Nobody loves you, nobody loves you, nobody loves you was to continue to do for others and keep moving. God could not condemn a body, not for eternity, if they were always working.

Jesse sat down in his chair at the formica table with a cigarette hanging out of one side of his mouth unlit. His black hair stood mussed from sleep. He gave Jaelyn a look until she opened the kitchen cabinet, found the old shaving cup he liked, and filled it with coffee. He immediately gulped some of the hot liquid as if his mouth were too calloused to feel the heat. Ruby buttered some toast with a smear of grape jam on it making a sound like running an emery board across her nails. She sat the toast on a little plate in front of him.

"Did you hear they're letting Scofield out?" Jesse asked, running his hand across his prickly face. "After the way he done Bobby Lee and all."

"Stay away from that boy, please Jesse," Ruby went around behind him and massaged his shoulders. "He's wild and it don't mean nothing to him to do hurt people. He don't have nothing of his own. People like that boy just don't think like regular folks."

"I ain't hunting him," Jesse said. "But if he comes out to my place . . ." he allowed the undisclosed threat to hang in the air.

"Uncle Bobby always . . ." Jaelyn began, but then ran to her bedroom.

Ruby noticed Jesse's deer rifle leaning in the corner near the front door as she was walking around to the sink. She and Jesse exchanged look but he only nodded grimly with a certain heaviness. Bad luck always seemed to come in threes and this was number one for this go-round. She spread out a couple of paper towels across one of her nice serving dishes and used a fork to stab the pieces of chicken out of the pan and onto the paper towels.

"I made deviled eggs too," Ruby said, but Jesse was no longer listening.

Jesse's eyes were on the floor. He was staring holes into the linoleum he and Bobby laid down together.

She wondered what he was thinking and hoped he wasn't planning on confronting Troy Scofield. He played with his lighter, opening and closing the lid. Under normal circumstances she would get after him and tell him not to smoke in the house but she turned back to the stove instead. As long as she had known Jesse he had always been kind to her compared to what other women said about their husbands, but he did have a temper. A woman in St. Louis told him he looked like a young Robert Mitchum not long after they first married.

"It ain't me you got to worry about, honey," Jesse said. "Cyrus is the one who won't sit for it. Cyrus was always more like a daddy to us boys than a brother being the oldest and all. You know how he is. He won't put up with the law letting that boy out."

"Just don't let Cyrus get you into something," Ruby wiped her hands on a dish towel. "You're the one with the family."

"What a way to go," Jesse said. "Deer hunting. That wouldn't be all bad. Who knows how long he was out there on the ground. Overnight at least. In the snow. The doctor said he was dead and all and didn't feel no pain, but that's what they always say."

Ruby had heard it all before. He liked to make this speech so she let him and even added her usual comments: "It goes back to the fight with that Scofield. His heart condition just got worse after that."

"He might still be alive today if it weren't for that," Jesse nodded gravely in agreement. "That Troy Scofield is a chickenshit."

"The doctors told him to quit smoking, drinking, and to take his high blood pressure medicine," Ruby added. "It should serve as a lesson to someone else I know to take better care of himself."

Without a word Jesse pushed himself up out of the chair and buttoned his jeans. She could see he had no intention of going to the visitation with her unless she haranqued him. She was too tired for all that but she felt obligated to do it, make him do the right thing. He sat at the little chair next to the furnace where, in wintertime, the orange flames danced warmly in the paned hearth. There was a Folger's can on the hardwood floor between the chair and the stovefurnace where Jesse sometimes sat chewing and spitting at night.

"I ain't going," Jesse said.

"Did I say anything?"

"You were fixing too."

"I know," Ruby said. "It would just be nice is all."

"I ain't going," he said more emphatically now as he slid down the chair back. "They're your friends. I don't know what to say to them. What do you say to people that lost their baby?"

"They ain't people," Ruby said, hands on hips. "It's Russ and Lizzy."

"I'm telling you right now . . . I ain't going."

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March 4, 2010