The Book of Ruth Read Online Free PDF

college in Evanston. If you have talents you can get away from Honey Creek fairly easily, but if you don’t have anything exceptional to show for yourself you might as well forget it, no questions asked. Once, she told me that I shouldn’t use “gonna” in my letters, that the words were actually “going to.” I instantly wanted to shape up. My teachers had spent plenty of red ink and cross words correcting me, but I didn’t see any use trying to please people such as Mrs. Ida Homer. Aunt Sid was different. I longed to understand what was correct, for her eyes alone; I wanted to write everything as precisely as the Queen might, transcribing from her gold-bound grammar rule book.
    It didn’t take a high-voltage brain to figure out the best uses for May’s harsh talk, that her tools were particularly well suited to describing the varieties of barnyard manure. I didn’t want to talk the way May talked but it was everywhere around me. With my hands clamped over my ears I still kept hearing the F-word.
    Even after third grade Aunt Sid wrote me once a week. I couldn’t understand why she wanted to, but I always wrote her back before the smell of her wore off her heavy beige stationery. I made up stories about how May went to the Sears store in Stillwater and bought me one hundred dresses all in different colors, and girls at school wanted to have clothes just like mine but their parents couldn’t pay for so many dresses. I wrote her about how I wished I could be a bloodroot flower—the jewels that come in the spring at the edge of the woods. They are white and clean and in the evening they close up tight as if they’re a hand holding something secret in their fist. If you wait too long to find them, all their petals are on the ground and there’s nothing but a naked stem. I told Sid she should call me names such as Diane or Missy. They were such beautiful names. To my surprise, Aunt Sid wrote saying that it was nice to own lots of dresses, but she’d rather have a letter from me than have a new outfit, or the sight of a bloodroot. She said things I knew couldn’t possibly be true.
    What I knew for fact, even then, was that Matt would steal away. I could think only of Matt when I saw a shooting star out of the corner of my eye; always, when I turned to look, it was gone, and I had to imagine a trail left behind the blaze. Teachers had the habit of calling up to take Matt to special classes, show him off. They took him to Chicago, to a museum where he saw a gray submarine. He told me it shot torpedoes through the water. I was afraid, for as far back as I can think, that Matt, with his smartness, would order the sub to come wipe us off the earth, and what’s left would be a pile of chicken feathers on the ground.

Three
    I’ D LIKE to tell you that May told her story to me, but I can’t. Everything I know about her I learned from firsthand experience and from Aunt Sid. When I picture May I first have to wonder about the very day she was born. It was the early morning of a dark rainy March day, according to the legend my Aunt Sid grew up with. There was a flood and handfuls of dead worms floated around the yard. Perhaps May got the idea that that’s what it all was going to be like, so she never noticed the sun shining, unless it was beating down on her and making her unbearably hot. I love when I’m outside, feeling the sun on my skin. The grass, and the cats on the porch, and myself, all thirsting after the warmth, and finding it, make me know that there’s something mighty about our planet and the whole works out there in the universe. May doesn’t have curiosity about sunshine or the very first crocus flowers that come in the spring. Sometimes when there’s still snow on the ground, we see purple petals bursting through the white flakes. They have the urge and the will to see the light. But neither heaven nor earth moves May to thought; she says nature is around just because.
    Maybe there was a bad omen on