Ruby turns her book over in her hands. What’s it like? To know you won’t get
all the years you should?
I don’t feel so short changed when I’m with you, he wants to say but his voice
breaks at short and the sentence fractures.
They kiss only that one time. It is clumsy. He shuts his eyes and leans in, but
something shifts and Ruby is not where he expects her to be. Their teeth clash.
When he opens his eyes, she is looking off to her left, smiling slightly, smelling
of mud, and the thousand tiny blonde hairs on her upper lip catch the light.
***
The second-to-last time Tom and Ruby are together, on the last Tuesday of
October, 1929, everything is strange. The hose leaks, Ruby is upset, a curtain
has fallen somehow between them.
Go back, Ruby says. It’s probably noon already. You’ll be late. But she sounds
as if she’s speaking to him through a tunnel. Freckles flow and bloom across
her face. The light goes out of the marsh.
On the long path through the pitch pines it begins to rain. Tom makes it to the
butcher’s and back home with the basket and the ground veal, but when he
opens the door to Mother’s parlour the curtains blow inward. The chairs leave
their places and come scraping toward him. The daylight thins to a pair of
beams, waving back and forth and Mr. Weems passes in front of his eyes, but
Tom hears no footsteps, no voices: only an internal rushing and the wet
metronome of his exhalations. Suddenly he’s a diver staring through a thick,
foggy window into a world of immense pressure. He’s walking around on the
bottom of the sea. Mother’s lips say, Haven’t I given enough? Lord God, haven’t
I tried? Then she’s gone.
In something deeper than a dream Tom walks the salt roads a thousand feet
beneath the house. At first it’s all darkness, but after what might be a minute or
a day or a year, he sees little flashes of green light out there in distant galleries,
hundreds of feet away. Each flash initiates a chain reaction of further flashes
beyond it, so that when he turns in a slow circle he can perceive great flowing
signals of light in all directions, tunnels of green arcing out into the blackness—
each flash glowing for only a moment before fading, but in that moment
repeating everything that came before, everything that will come next.
***
He wakes to a deflated world. The newspapers are full of suicides; the price of
gas has tripled. The miners whisper that the saltworks are in trouble.
Quart milk bottles sell for a dollar apiece. There’s no butter, hardly any meat.
Fruit becomes a memory. Most nights Mother serves only cabbage and soda
bread. And salt.
99