Ruby's Gift

RUBY'S GIFT / Margaret Kaufman RUBY, WHO WAS MARRIED to Mother's Uncle Bubba, stood in her stocking feet five foot ten inches, with masses of red hair and a pompadour that increased her stature to six feet when she sucked in her stomach, squared her shoulders and leveled her chin at the world. Her world was a small one, but it had all the ingredients needed for love and glory and backbiting and the like. Bubba, the youngest of the great-uncles, owned a store Uptown. We didn't call it Downtown. The small town in Arkansas that we visited each summer didn't have a Downtown. There was Uptown, Colored Town and the Rest of Town, which stopped someplace near the cemetery at the edge of town. Everything beyond that was called Country or Down River. Ruby came from Down River. She wasn't Country. We didn't know exactly what she was, but she fascinated us. As we were only summer visitors, we never got to see her in her coat with the fox collar. Indeed, after the afternoon of the scandalous behavior I was never to see her again, but the fact that Ruby owned such a brave coat, with Uttle beady eyes staring out from where it hung in the cedar closet, the mere fact of ownership, put her up a notch in our estimation. We had never been Down River ourselves. We thought, however, that it must be a dark and mysterious place, filled with peril and catfish, like the ditch that ran along the edge ofour grandmother's property. Since it was off-limits, the ditch and the surrounding ravine held terror for us, and consequently drew us like a dull wet magnet, each morning after breakfast, to its edge. A double rail of black and rusted iron had been driven into the sidewalk to keep people from falling in. We were doubtless the ones the managers of the telephone company had in mind when they drove the rail. They owned the ditch and they owned the rail, but we owned the time. Every morning my cousin and I would settle ourselves on the rim of the sidewalk, stick our bare feet underneath the railing, and pitch bits of cement from where the concrete was crumbling down into the opaque brown water, in hopes of making a fish jump, or of rousing a snake. One morning, to our great satisfaction, we were successful. The pebble-rippled ditch lay some thirty feet beneath our outstretched toes, and from it emerged a king snake, slithering over a log and through the dense green leaves up toward Miz Lillian's back yard. We went screaming over to the neighbors', knocking breathlessly on the 240 · The Missouri Review back door until the maid, Hattie, came around to see what was the matter. "Snake, snake," we shouted, "coming out of the ditch into the yard, Hattie!" Against all odds, sure enough, when Hattie had fetched Walter, Miz Lillian's twelve-year-old son, and when Walter had whistled next door for Joe boy, our fourteen-year-old uncle, and when we all marched back of the garden to investigate, there was the snake, lying as big as you please, next to the circular flower bed that was the centerpiece of Lillian's garden. The bed held zinnias as big as your hand, salvia, and blue ageratum ordered direct from the Burpee's catalogue. The snake lay near the flowers, sunning, resting itself after its exit from the ditch. Walter and Joe Boy took down an ax from Mr. Danforth's garage, and they cut the arrogant snake in two and then in three, and part of it wiggled and jerked in the grass though severed from its head, until finally it went limp while we watched, fascinated by its demise. The grass had gone dry beneath our toes as the sun got hotter. Our throats were dry too, and suddenly anxious now that the deed was done, we wished that our mothers would come out of the front room where they sat behind Venetian blinds and tried to stay cool, sipping Coca Colas with our grandmother. "We've...