Bent Road

Chapter 29

Celia takes Reesa’s coat from the hook near the back door, hands it to Jonathon and steps aside as Reesa walks by. She fills the small hallway leading from the kitchen to the back porch, fills it with her size and with a sweet yeasty smell from the cinnamon rolls she mixed up that morning, intending to take them to the Robisons after the funeral. Now someone else will have to bake and deliver them to Mary Robison. Reesa says nothing as she sets her suitcase at Jonathon’s feet and extends one arm so he can help her on with her coat.

“I’m sure the road home will be fine, Mrs. Scott,” Jonathon says to Reesa. “Plows have had plenty of time to do their work.”

Reesa makes a grunting sound and, after buttoning her top two buttons, she walks out onto the porch, leaving her suitcase for Jonathon to carry.

“She made her bed,” Celia says to Jonathon. “Now she’s got to sleep in it and try to make it again in the morning.”

Jonathon shakes his head, signaling that he doesn’t understand.

“Just a saying my mother liked to use.” Celia swallows, something she does when she feels guilt. “And we have to think of them now, Ruth and the baby. They’re most important.”

Jonathon nods.

“You’ll see to it that the house is warm before you leave her?”

He nods again. “Sure thing.”

“Thank you, Jonathon,” Celia says, reaching up to hug him. “And I know Arthur thanks you, too.”

Overhead, footsteps pound across the roof. Arthur and Daniel climbed up there almost the instant they got home from the funeral to shovel more snow.

“He always goes to work when he’s feeling bad. We’ll have the cleanest roof in the county before this all settles.” Celia hands Jonathon his coat. “You drive careful and come back for dinner.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll see Mrs. Scott home safe. Safe and sound.”

Hearing the screened door open, Daniel stops shoveling and looks over the edge of the house. Behind him, Dad continues to scrape his shovel across the black roof.

“Grandma’s leaving,” Daniel says, slapping his leather gloves together. He looks over the edge again, the wind sweeping up and catching him in the face. He squints into the white sunlight bouncing off the snow below. “Jonathon’s taking her.”

Dad nods, lifts his shovel and begins to chip away at a patch of ice.

“Jonathon’s carrying a suitcase,” Daniel says.

Specks of ice sparkle as they fly off the end of Dad’s shovel.

“Grandma’s going home.”

Jonathon’s truck chokes a few times, rumbles, and then slowly starts down the driveway. Daniel watches, waiting for the truck to disappear, because once it’s gone, he has to tell Dad. He has to tell because the weight of it is too much. Maybe a man could carry it around, but not Daniel. At the top of the hill leading toward Grandma’s house, the truck fishtails.

“Dad,” Daniel says. “I hit Ian Bucher. I hit him in the nose.”

Dad stops hammering the ice.

“At school. In the cafeteria. I hit him.”

Dad leans on his shovel. “You have good reason?”

Just like that. The weight of it is gone.

“Yes, sir. He said Aunt Eve was murdered. He said she was bloodied up between the legs and killed like Julianne Robison.”

Dad nods, and lining up his shovel to take another whack at the ice, he says, “Bloody nose between friends never hurt anyone. But you be mindful of Ian’s size. The boy can’t help his size.”

Daniel nods. “Sir,” he says, and Dad stops again but doesn’t meet Daniel’s eyes. “I’m sorry Aunt Eve died. I’m sorry that happened.”

Dad nods. “Yep,” he says. “Me too, son.”

Ruth sits on the edge of her bed, tulle draped across her lap and a small box of pearl beads on the nightstand to her left. She glances up when Elaine and Celia walk into the room, then continues trying to thread her needle.

“There’s no hurry with that,” Elaine says, sitting opposite Ruth on the other bed.

Ruth pulls the white thread through the eye of the needle. “The light’s good today,” she says. “Especially in here. We don’t always have such good light.”

Celia sits next to Ruth, lowering herself slowly and scooting close enough to drape part of the tulle over her own lap. “It is good,” she says of the sunlight shining through the window. “This is beautiful work, Ruth. Did you see, Elaine? She’s started to bead the pearl flowers.” Celia lifts one edge of the veil so Elaine can see it, then lets it fall across her lap again. “Elaine, would you excuse us?”

“Certainly,” Elaine says, standing. “It’s beautiful work, Aunt Ruth. Beautiful.” And she walks out of the room, leaving Celia and Ruth alone.

“Reesa is gone,” Celia says, running her fingers along the veil’s scalloped edge.

Ruth nods.

“She took her things. Jonathon is seeing her home.” Celia pauses. “She’ll be fine. Hardheaded as she is, she’ll be fine.”

“Why do you suppose we did this? Why so much hiding?”

“People get used to things,” Celia says. “Without even realizing. We get used to the way things are.” She reaches for the box of beads, plucks out one of the smooth, oval pearls between two fingers and passes it to Ruth. “Too afraid of the truth, I guess.”

Ruth lays her hands in her lap and closes her eyes. Deep inside, Elisabeth shifts and flutters.

The elderberry was in full bloom by early June 1942. Ruth’s father, Robert Scott, was due to plant his soybean, and Ruth woke, thinking it would be a fine morning to make elderberry jam. Before the day turned hot, she decided to wake Eve so they could walk a quarter mile down the road to the ditch where the plants grew best. The exercise would do Eve good, maybe chase away the blue mood she had been carrying around for a few months. Whether it was a touch of dropsy or a lingering flu, the elderberries would clear it right up. Mother always cooked with too much salt, and the summer heat could make a person swell and feel out of sorts. That’s all that troubled her-too much salt and humidity. That’s all it was. After a day of fresh air, Eve would get her color back and feel like finishing the blue satin trim on her latest dress. Mary Robison said she could sell it if Eve would finish it, said she could sell all the dresses she and Eve had made together, but Eve never wanted to part with them. Until now. Now she said that once she felt well enough to stitch on the blue satin trim, she’d sell it and the rest, too.

Ruth stood at Eve’s door and tapped on it, leaning forward to listen. “You up?” she whispered, even though the rest of the house was already awake.

Eve was always the last to get out of bed on the weekends, leading Mother to lecture her about laziness being an engraved invitation from the devil. Ruth tapped again, this time hard enough to push open the door that was not latched. She peeked through the crack, and seeing Eve’s bed made, she walked downstairs.

At the bottom step, Ruth remembers that the air chilled, but it couldn’t have. It had been June. Still, a shiver had slipped up her spine to the base of her neck. A pot boiled over in the kitchen, a heavy, rolling boil. Water hissed on a hot burner. Placing one foot flat on the wooden floor, holding tight to the banister, Ruth listened. Boiled eggs, probably, for Father to take along to the fields. He was quite precise-half a dozen eggs, fourteen minutes at a heavy boil, and Mother poked small holes in the large end of each one so they wouldn’t crack. Father wouldn’t eat a cracked egg.

Ruth walked across the living room, taking long slow steps because she knew something was wrong, and stopped inside the kitchen. She stood looking at the white, foamy water spill over the sides of Mother’s cast-iron pot, and without turning down the flame or sliding the pot to a cool burner, she walked on toward the back porch.

At the top of the stairs leading down to the gravel drive, Ruth looked east, toward the patch where yesterday she had spotted the finest elderberries. She couldn’t see them from the house, but Eve would know the spot. It was the same every year. The berries had a special liking for the odd stretch of ditch where Bent Road took a hard curve. Passing cars kicked up dust there. Maybe that’s what the plants liked so well. It was the same stretch of road where the wind swept over the rolling hills, down into the valley, and where the barbed-wire fence scooped up all the tumbleweeds. She and Eve would have a nice bunch in no time at all, and they could pick some of the flowers, too, and dry them on the back porch for tea. If the jam wasn’t enough, a nice tea with honey and sugar would definitely fight off whatever bug had slowed Eve down over the past several weeks. Ruth walked down the stairs one at a time and across the drive toward Bent Road.

“Ruth,” Arthur said.

Only yesterday, it seemed, he had had a smooth, fresh voice that sometimes he sang with in the bath. Now, suddenly his words came from deep inside his chest and rattled like Father’s.

“Ruth,” he said again.

Ruth stopped in the middle of the gravel drive. Knowing they were there, she had been trying not to look. It was where Eve always went for privacy. She said a young woman needed quiet, even if it was in an old shed. Ruth turned. Arthur stood outside the small building. His arms hung at his sides, the Virgin Mary dangling from his left hand. Next to him, Mother kneeled inside the doorway. She shook her head as she fumbled with her apron strings, untying them and pulling off her apron. She passed it inside the shed. A hand reached for it, Father’s hand, bloodied. Mother began to rock on her haunches. Back and forth. Back and forth. She breathed out a low, rumbling moan.

“She’s gone, Ruthie,” Arthur said, dropping the Virgin Mary.

Mother fell backward and scrambled for the two hands that broke off the statue and settled in the soft, dry dirt. She picked up each tiny hand and the rest of the Virgin Mary and started to slide them all into her apron pocket, but it was with Father now.

“She’s gone,” Arthur said.

The ditch was only a ten-minute walk. The elderberries were in full bloom. They’d have plenty for a dozen or more jars, and Eve would feel fit again, fit and fine.

Ruth squints into the fading light, picks up a pearl bead but doesn’t thread it onto her needle.

“Arthur thinks he did it,” she says. “All this time, did you know?”

Sitting next to Ruth on the bed, Celia shakes her head but doesn’t answer.

“He was about Daniel’s age. When Eve died. Just Daniel’s age.”

Celia nods this time and holds a handkerchief to her nose.

“Everyone thought a crazy man killed her,” Ruth says. “Everyone in town. That’s what Father told them. I always assumed Arthur believed the same, but he never did. Even standing there in that shed, wiping up all her blood, he knew the truth. Mother knew, too. After Eve died, after we found her, I told Mother that I thought Eve had done it to herself, trying not to be pregnant. I told her about wedge root and blind staggers, told her that I was sure someone had hurt Eve, hurt her badly, but she’d never tell who. Mother said the truth didn’t matter once a person was dead.”

Ruth lifts her face into the sunlight spilling through the window. “Worst of all, we never told Ray. He was a good man back then. Really, he was. Why did we do that to him? We were so cruel.”

“It wouldn’t have brought her back,” Celia says, her voice cracking at the end. “You were young, all of you. So young.” Clearing her throat and taking out another bead, she says, “Let’s get to work. We’re going to lose this nice light soon.”

“We wasted so many years,” Ruth says, hooking the bead on the tip of her needle.

“It’ll be better now,” Celia says. “Now that everyone knows.”

Ruth takes a stitch, securing the bead. “Yes,” she says. “Better.”