The Book of Ruth Read Online Free PDF Page B

her birthday somewhere, and no one paid attention, like on the worst day of my life I saw a whole slew of birds on a telephone wire, hanging upside down by their feet. They were murdered by the current. They were still and so black, hanging and hanging. It spooked me, but I didn’t think it was a warning. I’m not exactly superstitious, but if there’s a lurking power I’d like it to know that my eyes are now open and watching.
    May was the first baby, out of eight. The second child, Richard, was born deaf. My guess is after all the others starting coming, one after the next, including the boy who couldn’t hear and who sat and smiled while everyone pitied him, she turned a little sour on the entire race of man. She fell to the floor, actually hurting herself, and no one ran right to her side to pick her up, or if she banged her head against the wall the hired girls said, “Knock it off,” even if they noticed the blood. People were too busy to soothe her scraped knees and her sore head.
    When the third child, Marion, came, May was sent away for two months to the great-aunts’ house in Stillwater. My grandmother, with the deaf boy and a newborn, couldn’t handle little May. The two aunts were proper ladies with dusty velvet couches in rooms with warped floors, and shelves full of china dogs children weren’t supposed to touch. May couldn’t examine a thing in the house for two months because the aunts were forever screeching “ STOP !” They expected her to sit still and never get dirty, and to like to eat stale bread softened by milk, and overcooked peas.
    I can imagine wrinkled old Aunt Margaret hovering over May, explaining where she got the china Afghans, the three of them, with rabbit fur coats, all strung together with a golden chain. Her breath was probably like the smell of goats when they are panting and giving birth. She stood close, smacking her thick lips, exhaling into the air that was meant for May to breathe in. And she laughed at everything May said or did in her nervous high-pitched laugh. She laughed before May had finished the sentence. Sid says Aunt Margaret had a flat face, like a pug dog, flat and smashed, and eyes that were too small for her drooping sockets. I can picture May three years old, living away from her parents, waiting, night after night, on her cot in Florence’s and Margaret’s parlor. After they kissed her with their oily lips and turned out the light, May would have stared at the china mother collie on the top shelf, who she was sure some night was going to come to life, take her neck in its strong white teeth, and bring her home.
    When May did come home to the farm, she walked through each room and nothing looked as she had remembered it. The furniture was in different places, without a doubt, and she hadn’t recalled the constant sharp ache in her stomach. She wanted to squeeze the baby’s hands while it sucked at her mother. It rolled its eyes around and stuck out its tongue every which way. Everyone said it was beautiful, which made May suspect she didn’t know the correct definition of the word. She couldn’t stand to watch it feed. She looked at it in a basket with a pink satin ribbon strung through the wicker and she poked its cheeks as hard as she could. Her mother slapped her face, back and forth—May couldn’t believe how things had changed. She knew she was better than the puking baby and her brother with broken ears, but no one saw her worth. She knew she could get them to see, even though as the months went by her mother was forever saying, “Why can’t you be nice like Marion?” I know from experience that that comparison doesn’t engender love and kindness. It makes you want to go up to your closet and practice biting people’s heads off.
    When Richard was six they took him to the deaf school in Humphrey. He had no way of understanding why they were leaving him, or if they were ever coming back. May knew that her parents might leave her next, on