Drowning Ruth

  “Look at this one,” Imogene said, stopping in front of the stone with the ship carved on it.

  “He was a sea captain,” Ruth said importantly. “He drowned like my mother.” In fact, she had no idea why Albert Morgan had a ship on his stone, but she didn't think he'd mind her making up a story about him. “And here are the ones from the war.” That part was true—Aunt Mandy had told her.

  “This is a baby.” Imogene read the dates on the stone in front of her, and they looked for more children, thinking what it would be like to be already under the ground forever, eaten by worms.

  “But their souls go to heaven,” Ruth said. “Aunt Mandy told me all children's souls go to heaven.”

  “Everyone knows that.”

  Ruth

  When we found my mother's stone with the thick green honeysuckle growing behind it, I was almost sorry I'd brought Imogene there. You shouldn't visit your dead mother just to impress your bored friend. I traced the letters in my mother's name, hoping she'd believe I'd come just to see her, hoping she'd forgive me.

  “That's funny,” Imogene said.

  “What is?”

  “She died on my birthday. November 27th. Same year, too.”

  We looked at each other. It was a strange idea, frightening somehow, as if for a moment the door between the world of the living and the world of the dead had blown open.

  “Maybe you're her, reincarnated,” I said for a joke to push the scariness away.

  “What's reincarnated?”

  I explained what Rudy had told me about a soul getting a new body when it died, about how you could have another life as a completely different person or even as a cat or a goldfinch, and about how a person living a long time ago could be born again as you. Not that Rudy and I really believed it, although after Rudy told me, I looked for my mother whenever an animal was born on the farm. None of them seemed to know me as I knew my mother would, and obviously neither did Imogene.

  As we walked back into town, we talked about what we'd be in later lives and what we might have been before.

  “I'm sure I must have been someone famous,” Imogene said. “At least once or twice. Maybe Pocahontas. Everyone says I must have Indian blood in me. My hair is so dark and both my parents are blond.”

  “That's not how it works. When you come back, you don't look anything like the person you were. It's not like you're related.” And then because I wished I hadn't shared my mother with her, I said, “What makes you think you were someone special, anyway? It's much more likely you were just ordinary. There are a lot more ordinary people than famous ones, you know.”

  I said it mean and I meant it mean and I waited for her to be angry, but Imogene was too sure of herself to let anything I said upset her.

  “Oh, I'm positive we were both famous,” she said. She stopped, grabbed my arm, turned me toward her, and stared at my face without blinking. “I know what you were,” she said finally. “You were a Chinese spy. Your eyes have that little slant and you're always so quiet, watching people. You know things, but you don't tell.” She smiled, pleased with her story.

  I didn't know anything, though. I only thought it seemed very strange that, while my mother and I were drowning, Imogene was being born.

  When Ruth opened the kitchen door, Amanda looked up from the brilliant red rhubarb stems she was dicing. “Where have you been all day? You knew the beans needed weeding and the potato plants are full of bugs and I bet you the birds ate a good dozen tomatoes.”

  Ruth sighed. She wished things would stop growing. That was another good thing about a store. Everything stayed steady, just as it was. “I'll do it now,” she said, turning to go back out.

  “You'll be eaten alive out there at this hour. There's a proper time for things.” In one hand Amanda held five rhubarb stalks together on the table; with the other, she wielded a long knife. “Anyway,” she said, slicing quickly through the crisp stalks, while she slid her fingers along just fast enough to escape the knife, “I already did it for you.”

  Ruth, ashamed of herself, looked at the floor. “Dad said I could go.”

  “Well, no use crying over spilt milk. Wash up and I'll give you a ruby.”

  Ruth worked the pump handle and began to wash her hands.

  “Maybe,” Amanda said quietly, “you'd like to bring Imogene over here.”

  “What?” Ruth pretended she couldn't make out the words over the squeak of the pump and the rush of water.

  Amanda dipped a piece of the rhubarb in sugar. “I said, why don't you bring Imogene over here?”

  Ruth held out the back of her hand so Amanda could balance the rhubarb on her finger, like the jewel in a ring. It was their joke from some long-ago time of childish misunderstandings.

  “Wouldn't it be fun, all three of us here together? Don't you like being here with me?”

  “Yes,” Ruth said, but the truth was she did and she didn't. As she chewed her rhubarb, she felt Amanda's love, insidious and irresistible, press around her in the hot kitchen, and she pursed her lips and squinted her eyes at the mix of sour and sweet. For the first time, she realized that she liked Imogene partly because her friend had nothing to do with Amanda.

  Carl sat on the floor in one of the bedrooms of the island house, drawers pulled from the dresser spread out around him. An oblong of light fell across the floor from between the boards he'd pried off the window. He'd been through all of these drawers and the cupboards and the interstices between the walls and under the floorboards many times before. For months now he'd been rowing out to the island—sometimes once a week, sometimes every day, to look.

  It was like riding a ferris wheel. One day he would be relaxed, untroubled, sure that Amanda's story was true—she and Mathilda had lived on the island because they loved it there, because Mathilda wanted to be in the house she'd shared with him. And then the doubts would begin and the uncertainties would build, until at last he would have to drop whatever he was doing and hurry singlemindedly to the house to search for clues of something else.

  He tried to stay away. What if you find something, he said to himself, then what? Nothing good can come of it. Concentrate on your work. But he neglected the farm, thinking of one more spot he hadn't checked, vividly imagining the white edge of a folded love letter or the golden glint of a keepsake ring. Some man had seduced his wife. Carl had suspected it now for more than six months. He had merely to find the evidence.

  He'd discovered only one clue. He pulled the silver knife out of his pocket, as he did several times a day now, and examined it. It was a good knife, expensive, not something casually left behind by someone building the house. Besides, he knew everyone who had worked on the house and none of their initials matched these: C.J.O. This had belonged to some other man.

  So what if it had, he told himself and told himself and told himself. It might mean nothing. It probably meant nothing. But then how to explain Amanda's reaction when he showed the knife to her?

  He played over and over in his mind the morning he'd run across in his sock drawer the knife he'd picked up years before when he and Joe and Ruth had been to the island together. He'd laid it on the table at breakfast, asking Amanda if she knew who owned it, thinking he ought to return a valuable object like that. She'd grabbed it up, turned it over, and then immediately pushed it back at him.

  “I don't know. How should I know? The junk that collects! You should see the stuff I found behind the icebox last week.” She'd picked up his plate before he'd finished his breakfast and scraped the last few bites of egg into the slop bucket, muttering, “I can't be held responsible for every odd pocketknife that turns up in a drawer.”

  At the time, it didn't even occur to Carl that Amanda's behavior might have anything to do with Mathilda. In the first place, his sister-in-law was always high strung and quick to take offense, so her reaction hardly seemed unusual. And in the second place, he'd nearly forgotten about his wife. At least, he'd packed her away somehow. He was ashamed to admit it, but when h
e thought of her lately, it seemed almost as if she'd been married to some other man, a friend he'd once known well but had long since lost track of. He missed her with a sense of nostalgia, in much the same way he missed his own youth, and even when he tried, he couldn't find a trace of the unbearable agony and black despair that had once overwhelmed him. He was sorry for Mathilda because she'd lost so much of life, and he was sorry for Ruth that she couldn't know her mother. But for a long time now he'd forgotten to feel sorry for himself.

  But then he'd heard Mathilda's voice. He heard it first in the barn, just a snatch, a word or two, or maybe not even an entire word but a piece of a word and an inflection, a note that was so unmistakably familiar that he said “Mathilda” aloud without thinking and looked toward the hayloft, certain she must be sitting there, yellow straw tangled in her dark hair, her feet swinging as she smiled down at him. Of course, she wasn't. Of course, she'd not come back to life. Still, he knew she was there somewhere. He strained to hear more, but the voice was gone, drowned out by Ruth calling the geese to their supper.

  The second time Carl heard Mathilda's voice he was placing a salt lick near the spring. This time it was much more distinct. It was singing “Lavender's Blue” and seemed to be coming from among a clump of cattails. Although he knew it was only a memory, somehow released with intense clarity within his head, although he knew there would be nothing to see but air, he couldn't help but follow the sound, his feet sinking with every step into the rich, inky, marsh soil. Gingerly, he parted the stiff stalks of the cattails and their sharp leaves to find the singer looking at him.

  “Hello, Daddy. Look at all the mallow I've got for Aunt Amanda.”

  Carl lost his footing and slipped to his knees. After that, it seemed that almost everything Ruth did reminded him of Mathilda—the way she raised her eyebrows when she talked, the way she held her head as she studied her lessons, the way she sat with her legs tucked underneath her, the way she splayed her fingers wide when making an emphatic point. He wanted to grab her hands and squeeze those fingers together. Instead, he frowned and looked away.

  That was when he took the knife back out of his sock drawer again. Turning the silver over and over in his hands, trying the blade against the ball of his thumb for sharpness, he found himself puzzling over Hilda's implications years before. Why would two young women choose to live alone on an island? Why did they stay on through the fall?

  Rudy was no help. Carl cornered him one evening in the tack room.

  “I tried to get them girls to come home, Carl,” Rudy said, rubbing hard on the bridle he was oiling. “I rowed out there. I told her, ‘You girls better come on back now. It's gettin' cold.' ”

  “What do you mean, you told her? Who did you tell?”

  “Well …” Rudy stared at the bit as if trying to see an image of the past in the shiny metal. “It was Mattie I guess I told. I never saw Amanda much, or just to wave to, up on the porch. I don't see what's the difference. What one did the other did, this kind of thing.”

  “This kind of thing? You mean they'd done this before?”

  “Not like this, not living there. But when they were younger, that's where they'd go—a beeline for that island whenever Mrs. Starkey got on them about something at the house. We had one helluva time finding 'em, me and Mr. Starkey, before we caught on. Of course, he'd give 'em hell for runnin' away, especially Manda. You know, she was older, she shoulda known better, that kinda thing. But he liked it, too, the way they stuck together. ‘I never had a brother,' he said to me, and I knew what he meant.”

  Carl was impatient with this sort of reminiscence. “But this time, Rudy, when they were living there, what did Mattie say when you told her it was time to move back to the farm?”

  “Och, you know how Mattie was, Carl. Not even Mr. Starkey could get her to do anything she didn't want to do. ‘No, Rudy, we like it here,' that's what she said. And she and the little one did look good and healthy. In fact, I'd say she'd gained a little, rounded out some, so I knew nothing was wrong. Now if I'd of talked to Amanda, it might have been different. She's a good girl. She'll do what you say. But you know how Mattie was. She went and put her hands on her hips and shook that pretty head. She wouldn't hardly let me get out of the boat.” Rudy clucked his tongue and turned at last to hang the bridle on its hook.

  Weak old man, Carl thought, letting a couple of girls tell him what to do. But he knew, in Rudy's place, he would have done the same.

  When Rudy turned back to face him, there were tears in his eyes. “I know what I shoulda done, Carl—I've thought of it plenty of times before—I should of grabbed Ruthie. If I'da took Ruthie back before the ice come in, then they'd of come after her and none a this would of happened. I shoulda thought of that, I tell myself. Every day, I tell myself.”

  “It's all right, Rudy,” Carl said, putting a comforting hand on the old man's shoulder. Amanda was right. No use crying over what couldn't be changed.

  She wouldn't let him get out of the boat. That's what stood out to Carl when he thought about this conversation later. Why not? Why not give him a cup of coffee, a piece of kuchen? What were they doing on that island, Carl wondered, that they didn't want Rudy to see?

  For a week or so it baffled him. He couldn't think of any explanation that made sense. And then he remembered Madame Poker.

  It had hardly been a village, that place he'd stumbled on with McKinley and Sims one gray afternoon. A few dirty huts. An empty pigsty. A church without a steeple, one wall blown in. It couldn't have been much to look at before the war and now it was just a jumble of abandoned stone.

  Or not quite abandoned. Henny Sims came running from behind one of the houses, buttoning his pants.

  “There's a man in there! Jesus, at least I think it's a man.”

  Just then an old woman appeared at the door, her back bent so far she had to crane her neck to look up at them, her gray hair standing around her head like a halo. She spoke French and McKinley translated.

  “He's mine,” she said. “You can't have him. I'm keeping him. He's mine.” And then she lifted what Carl had taken to be a cane but was in fact a poker, and held it in both hands, point toward them, as if it could keep the three armed men at bay.

  The Americans looked at each other and Sims shrugged. “He's not much anyway,” he said, “from what I could see. I think he's missing an ear, at least.”

  “Let's let the fellow be,” Carl said, eager to get away from the place.

  “All right by me,” McKinley agreed. “Anybody desperate enough to live with that oughta be allowed to desert.”

  No one could be more unlike the crone than Mathilda, but Carl suddenly realized that she and Amanda and that old woman had all been up to the same thing. Although while poor Madame Poker was hiding a Frenchman, pushed by years of war to the brink of insanity and perhaps beyond, Mathilda and Amanda were harboring a plain old American shirker, a man who would let others, like Carl himself, go off and do the dirty work for him, risk their lives while he lazed about letting two women take care of him.

  Carl made a fist around the silver pocketknife and slammed it hard against the table. They'd been hiding a shirker. A shirker whose initials were C.J.O.

  It was an impossible leap and at the same time a simple step from the notion of a strange man hidden in the island house to the certainty that that shirker had loved Mathilda. Had she loved him back? Of course not. She had been kind to him, misguidedly thinking she was doing right, perhaps even hoping that someone would do the same for Carl if necessary. Of course she hadn't loved him.

  But the thought itched and stung. Love made you do things, Amanda had said, and then you were sorry. What did she mean? He worried the idea, tugging at it like a hangnail little by little, until he drew blood, until he had to find out one way or another, until he found himself again in the island house, prying up the floorboards, opening the windowframes, rummaging through every drawer, searching for the evidence.

  Finally, the force that had pro
pelled Carl all afternoon began at last to ebb, and he fitted the drawers he'd spread around the bedroom back into the dresser. He felt spent, suddenly calm, knowing that he was wasting his time, that all had been innocent on the island, that there had only been an accident, an unlucky accident, one cold November night. He felt foolish now, as he always did after one of these episodes, and he glanced over his shoulder, superstitiously sensing that someone might be watching—Mathilda, maybe—and laughing at his frenzy. He left the house and rowed slowly back across the water, resting on his oars from time to time to let the fresh afternoon wind dry his skin. Poor Mattie, to have lost all these years and years of glorious summer days.

  “Elbows off the table, Ruth,” Amanda said, passing a plate of white bread to the girl. “How many times do I need to tell you?”

  Carl kept his eyes on his plate. He knew that he ought to correct Ruth more often, not leave it all to Amanda, but he hadn't even noticed the girl's elbows. “This ham is excellent,” he said.

  “I'm glad you like it. I knew you'd need a good meal after those ditches.”

  Carl shifted in his seat. “As a matter of fact, I didn't do the digging. Pass the potatoes, Ruth. We watered the new trees in the orchard today.”

  Amanda's knife made a sharp click as she set it on the edge of her plate. “I thought I explained the importance of those ditches, Carl.” She tapped her index finger on the table top. “My father always made sure the ditches were clean the first week of June, and we're already into the third week now. What if we get a big rain? That field will be standing in water.”

  “But what if we don't? Those saplings are just drying up out there.”

  “Carl, you have to think ahead on a farm. You can't just be running from one emergency to another. You'll never get anywhere that way.”