“Now examine this,” he said. He was bending over a book, running his finger under the lines: “‘On Easter Sunday, April 3, 1516, he arrived on the tip of this continent.’ Do you know who this he was?” he demanded.
“Yeah, Christopher Columbus,” Ruby said.
“Ponce de Leon!” he screamed. “Ponce de Leon! You should know something about Florida,” he said. “Your husband is from Florida.”
“Yeah, he was born in Miami,” Ruby said. “He’s not from Tennessee.”
“Florida is not a noble state,” Mr. Jerger said, “but it is an important one.”
“It’s important alrighto,” Ruby said.
“Do you know who Ponce de Leon was?”
“He was the founder of Florida,” Ruby said brightly.
“He was a Spaniard,” Mr. Jerger said. “Do you know what he was looking for?”
“Florida,” Ruby said.
“Ponce de Leon was looking for the fountain of youth,” Mr. Jerger said, closing his eyes.
“Oh,” Ruby muttered.
“A certain spring,” Mr. Jerger went on, “whose water gave perpetual youth to those who drank it. In other words,” he said, “he was trying to be young always.”
“Did he find it?” Ruby asked.
Mr. Jerger paused with his eyes still closed. After a minute he said, “Do you think he found it? Do you think he found it? Do you think nobody else would have got to it if he had found it? Do you think there would be one person living on this earth who hadn’t drunk it?”
“I hadn’t thought,” Ruby said.
“Nobody thinks any more,” Mr. Jerger complained.
“I got to be going.”
“Yes, it’s been found,” Mr. Jerger said.
“Where at?” Ruby asked.
“I have drunk of it.”
“Where’d you have to go to?” she asked. She leaned a little closer and got a whiff of him that was like putting her nose under a buzzard’s wing.
“Into my heart,” he said, placing his hand over it.
“Oh.” Ruby moved back. “I gotta be going. I think my brother’s home.” She got over the door sill.
“Ask your husband if he knows what great birthday this is,” Mr. Jerger said, looking at her coyly.
“Yeah, I will.” She turned and waited until she heard his door click. She looked back to see that it was shut and then she blew out her breath and stood facing the dark remaining steep of steps. “God Almighty,” she commented. They got darker and steeper as you went up.
By the time she had climbed five steps her breath was gone. She continued up a few more, blowing. Then she stopped. There was a pain in her stomach. It was a pain like a piece of something pushing something else. She had felt it before, a few days ago. It was the one that frightened her most. She had thought the word cancer once and dropped it instantly because no horror like that was coming to her because it couldn’t. The word came back to her immediately with the pain but she slashed it in two with Madam Zoleeda. It will end in good fortune. She slashed it twice through and then again until there were only pieces of it that couldn’t be recognized. She was going to stop on the next floor—God, if she ever got up there—and talk to Laverne Watts. Laverne Watts was a third-floor resident, the secretary to a chiropodist, and an especial friend of hers.
She got up there, gasping and feeling as if her knees were full of fizz, and knocked on Laverne’s door with the butt of Hartley Gilfeet’s gun. She leaned on the door frame to rest and suddenly the floor around her dropped on both sides. The walls turned black and she felt herself reeling, without breath, in the middle of the air, terrified at the drop that was coming. She saw the door open a great distance away and Laverne, about four inches high, standing in it.
Laverne, a tall straw-haired girl, let out a great guffaw and slapped her side as if she had just opened the door on the most comical sight she had yet seen. “That gun!” she yelled. “That gun! That look!” She staggered back to the sofa and fell on it, her legs rising higher than her hips and falling down again helplessly with a thud.
The floor came up to where Ruby could see it and remained, dipping a little. With a terrible stare of concentration, she stepped down to get on it. She scrutinized a chair across the room and then headed for it, putting her feet carefully one before the other.
“You should be in a wild-west show!” Laverne Watts said. “You’re a howl!”
Ruby reached the chair and then edged herself onto it. “Shut up,” she said hoarsely.
Laverne sat forward, pointing at her, and then fell back on the sofa, shaking again.
“Quit that!” Ruby yelled. “Quit that! I’m sick.”
Laverne got up and took two or three long strides across the room. She leaned down in front of Ruby and looked into her face with one eye shut as if she were squinting through a keyhole. “You are sort of purple,” she said.
“I’m damm sick,” Ruby glowered.
Laverne stood looking at her and after a second she folded her arms and very pointedly stuck her stomach out and began to sway back and forth. “Well, what’d you come in here with that gun for? Where’d you get it?” she asked.
“Sat on it,” Ruby muttered.
Laverne stood there, swaying with her stomach stuck out, and a very wise expression growing on her face. Ruby sat sprawled in the chair, looking at her feet. The room was getting still. She sat up and glared at her ankles. They were swollen! I’m not going to no doctor, she started, I’m not going to one. I’m not going. “Not going,” she began to mumble, “to no doctor, not...”
“How long you think you can hold off?” Laverne murmured and began to giggle.
“Are my ankles swollen?” Ruby asked.
“They look like they’ve always looked to me,” Laverne said, throwing herself down on the sofa again. “Kind of fat.” She lifted her own ankles up on the end pillow and turned them slightly. “How do you like these shoes?” she asked. They were a grasshopper green with very high thin heels.
“I think they’re swollen,” Ruby said. “When I was coming up that last flight of stairs I had the awfulest feeling, all over me like...”
“You ought to go on to the doctor.”
“I don’t need to go to no doctor,” Ruby muttered. “I can take care of myself. I haven’t done bad at it all this time.”
“Is Rufus at home?”
“I don’t know. I kept myself away from doctors all my life. I kept—why?”
“Why what?”
“Why, is Rufus at home?”
“Rufus is cute,” Laverne said. “I thought I’d ask him how he liked my shoes.”
Ruby sat up with a fierce look, very pink and purple. “Why Rufus?” she growled. “He ain’t but a baby.” Laverne was thirty years old. “He don’t care about women’s shoes.”
Laverne sat up and took off one of the shoes and peered inside it. “Nine B,” she said. “I bet he’d like what’s in it.”
“That Rufus ain’t but an enfant!” Ruby said. “He don’t have time to be looking at your feet. He ain’t got that kind of time.”
“Oh, he’s got plenty of time,” Laverne said.
“Yeah,” Ruby muttered and saw him again, waiting, with plenty of time, out nowhere before he was born, just waiting to make his mother that much deader.
“I believe your ankles are swollen,” Laverne said.
“Yeah,” Ruby said, twisting them. “Yeah. They feel tight sort of. I had the awfulest feeling when I got up those steps, like sort of out of breath all over, sort of tight all over, sort of—awful.”
“You ought to go on to the doctor.”
“No.”
“You ever been to one?”
“They carried me once when I was ten,” Ruby said, “but I got away. Three of them holding me didn’t do any good.”
“What was it that time?”
“What you looking at me that way for?” Ruby muttered.
“What way?”
“That way,” Ruby sai
d, “—swagging out that stomach of yours that way.”
“I just asked you what it was that time?”
“It was a boil. A nigger woman up the road told me what to do and I did it and it went away.” She sat slumped on the edge of the chair, staring in front of her as if she were remembering an easier time.
Laverne began to do a kind of comic dance up and down the room. She took two or three slow steps in one direction with her knees bent and then came back and kicked her leg slowly and painfully in the other. She began to sing in a loud guttural voice, rolling her eyes, “Put them all together, they spell MOTHER! MOTHER!” and stretching out her arms as if she were on the stage.
Ruby’s mouth opened wordlessly and her fierce expression vanished. For a half-second she was motionless; then she sprang from the chair. “Not me!” she shouted. “Not me!”
Laverne stopped and only watched her with the wise look.
“Not me!” Ruby shouted. “Oh no not me! Bill Hill takes care of that. Bill Hill takes care of that! Bill Hill’s been taking care of that for five years! That ain’t going to happen to me!”
“Well old Bill Hill just slipped up about four or five months ago, my friend,” Laverne said. “Just slipped up...”
“I don’t reckon you know anything about it, you ain’t even married, you ain’t even...”
“I bet it’s not one, I bet it’s two,” Laverne said. “You better go on to the doctor and find out how many it is.”
“It is not!” Ruby shrilled. She thought she was so smart! She didn’t know a sick woman when she saw one, all she could do was look at her feet and shoe em to Rufus, shoe em to Rufus and he was an enfant and she was thirty-four years old. “Rufus is an enfant!” she wailed.
“That will make two!” Laverne said.
“You shut up talking like that!” Ruby shouted. “You shut up this minute. I ain’t going to have any baby!”
“Ha ha,” Laverne said.
“I don’t know how you think you know so much,” Ruby said, “single as you are. If I was so single I wouldn’t go around telling married people what their business is.”
“Not just your ankles,” Laverne said, “you’re swollen all over.”
“I ain’t going to stay here and be insulted,” Ruby said and walked carefully to the door, keeping herself erect and not looking down at her stomach the way she wanted to.
“Well I hope all of you feel better tomorrow,” Laverne said.
“I think my heart will be better tomorrow,” Ruby said. “But I hope we will be moving soon. I can’t climb these steps with this heart trouble and,” she added with a dignified glare, “Rufus don’t care nothing about your big feet.”
“You better put that gun up,” Laverne said, “before you shoot somebody.”
Ruby slammed the door shut and looked down at herself quickly. She was big there but she had always had a kind of big stomach. She did not stick out there different from the way she did any place else. It was natural when you took on some weight to take it on in the middle and Bill Hill didn’t mind her being fat, he was just more happy and didn’t know why. She saw Bill Hill’s long happy face, grinning at her from the eyes downward in a way he had as if his look got happier as it neared his teeth. He would never slip up. She rubbed her hand across her skirt and felt the tightness of it but hadn’t she felt that before? She had. It was the skirt—she had on the tight one that she didn’t wear often, she had... she didn’t have on the tight skirt. She had on the loose one. But it wasn’t very loose. But that didn’t make any difference, she was just fat.
She put her fingers on her stomach and pushed down and then took them off quickly. She began walking toward the stairs, slowly, as if the floor were going to move under her. She began the steps. The pain came back at once. It came back with the first step. “No,” she whimpered, “no.” It was just a little feeling, just a little feeling like a piece of her inside rolling over but it made her breath tighten in her throat. Nothing in her was supposed to roll over. “Just one step,” she whispered, “just one step and it did it.” It couldn’t be cancer. Madam Zoleeda said it would end in good fortune. She began crying and saying, “Just one step and it did it,” and going on up them absently as if she thought she were standing still. On the sixth one, she sat down suddenly, her hand slipping weakly down the banister spoke onto the floor.
“Noooo,” she said and leaned her round red face between the two nearest poles. She looked down into the stairwell and gave a long hollow wail that widened and echoed as it went down. The stair cavern was dark green and mole-colored and the wail sounded at the very bottom like a voice answering her. She gasped and shut her eyes. No. No. It couldn’t be any baby. She was not going to have something waiting in her to make her deader, she was not. Bill Hill couldn’t have slipped up. He said it was guaranteed and it had worked all this time and it could not be that, it could not. She shuddered and held her hand tightly over her mouth. She felt her face drawn puckered: two born dead one died the first year and one run under like a dried yellow apple no she was only thirty-four years old, she was old. Madam Zoleeda said it would end in no drying up. Madam Zoleeda said oh but it will end in a stroke of good fortune! Moving. She had said it would end in a stroke of good moving.
She felt herself getting calmer. She felt herself, after a minute, getting almost calm and thought she got upset too easy; heck, it was gas. Madam Zoleeda hadn’t been wrong about anything yet, she knew more than...
She jumped: there was a bang at the bottom of the stairwell and a rumble rattling up the steps, shaking them even up where she was. She looked through the banister poles and saw Hartley Gilfeet, with two pistols leveled, galloping up the stairs and heard a voice pierce down from the floor over her, “You Hartley, shut up that racket! You’re shaking the house!” But he came on, thundering louder as he rounded the bend on the first floor and streaked up the hall. She saw Mr. Jerger’s door fly open and him spring with clawed fingers and grasp a flying piece of shirt that whirled and shot off again with a high-pitched, “Leggo, you old goat teacher!” and came on nearer until the stairs rumbled directly under her and a charging chipmunk face crashed into her and rocketed through her head, smaller and smaller into a whirl of dark.
She sat on the step, clutching the banister spoke while the breath came back into her a thimbleful at a time and the stairs stopped seesawing. She opened her eyes and gazed down into the dark hole, down to the very bottom where she had started up so long ago. “Good Fortune,” she said in a hollow voice that echoed along all the levels of the cavern, “Baby.”
“Good Fortune, Baby,” the three echoes leered.
Then she recognized the feeling again, a little roll. It was as if it were not in her stomach. It was as if it were out nowhere in nothing, out nowhere, resting and waiting, with plenty of time.
A Temple of the Holy Ghost
All weekend the two girls were calling each other Temple One and Temple Two, shaking with laughter and getting so red and hot that they were positively ugly, particularly Joanne who had spots on her face anyway. They came in the brown convent uniforms they had to wear at Mount St. Scholastica but as soon as they opened their suitcases, they took off the uniforms and put on red skirts and loud blouses. They put on lipstick and their Sunday shoes and walked around in the high heels all over the house, always passing the long mirror in the hall slowly to get a look at their legs. None of their ways were lost on the child. If only one of them had come, that one would have played with her, but since there were two of them, she was out of it and watched them suspiciously from a distance.
They were fourteen—two years older than she was—but neither of them was bright, which was why they had been sent to the convent. If they had gone to a regular school, they wouldn’t have done anything but think about boys; at the convent the sisters, her mother said, would keep a grip on their necks. The child decided, after observing them for a few hours, that they were practically morons and she was glad to think that they were only seco
nd cousins and she couldn’t have inherited any of their stupidity. Susan called herself Suzan. She was very skinny but she had a pretty pointed face and red hair. Joanne had yellow hair that was naturally curly but she talked through her nose and when she laughed, she turned purple in patches. Neither one of them could say an intelligent thing and all their sentences began, “You know this boy I know well one time he...”
They were to stay all weekend and her mother said she didn’t see how she would entertain them since she didn’t know any boys their age. At this, the child, struck suddenly with genius, shouted, “There’s Cheat! Get Cheat to come! Ask Miss Kirby to get Cheat to come show them around!” and she nearly choked on the food she had in her mouth. She doubled over laughing and hit the table with her fist and looked at the two bewildered girls while water started in her eyes and rolled down her fat cheeks and the braces she had in her mouth glared like tin. She had never thought of anything so funny before.
Her mother laughed in a guarded way and Miss Kirby blushed and carried her fork delicately to her mouth with one pea on it. She was a long-faced blonde schoolteacher who boarded with them and Mr. Cheatam was her admirer, a rich old farmer who arrived every Saturday afternoon in a fifteen-year-old baby-blue Pontiac powdered with red clay dust and black inside with Negroes that he charged ten cents apiece to bring into town on Saturday afternoons. After he dumped them he came to see Miss Kirby, always bringing a little gift—a bag of boiled peanuts or a watermelon or a stalk of sugar cane and once a wholesale box of Baby Ruth candy bars. He was bald-headed except for a little fringe of rust-colored hair and his face was nearly the same color as the unpaved roads and washed like them with ruts and gullys. He wore a pale green shirt with a thin black stripe in it and blue galluses and his trousers cut across a protruding stomach that he pressed tenderly from time to time with his big flat thumb. All his teeth were backed with gold and he would roll his eyes at Miss Kirby in an impish way and say “Haw haw,” sitting in their porch swing with his legs spread apart and his hightopped shoes pointing in opposite directions on the floor.