THIRTEEN

There had been a long silence from Ruth late that fall, while Harry and Gloria were applying damage control to their marriage.

Harry thought it might be her way of ending their old friendship at last, although he could not see the end coming in her most recent letter, and he had read it over many times, taking it from his locked trunk at work to study it for clues and portents. There was nothing there except a straightforward account of a woman trying to raise a family on a withering farm while her husband slowly lost his mind.

The next letter he received from Saraw was postmarked Dec. 3, and it was not from Ruth, but rather from the only other resident of that town who knew his address.

Ruth had wondered once if things do get better. After reading Mercy’s letter, Harry could understand her doubt.

“Dear Mr. Stein,” it started, “I am writing for my cousin, Ruth Crowder Flood …”

At the end of the letter, Mercy allowed herself a rare uncharitable gesture:

“Mr. Stein, it is a terrible thing to say, but why couldn’t it have been Henry Flood instead?”

The house where Ruth Crowder Flood spent her married life looks solid enough now, as if a century of storms and hard times had bounced off it forever without leaving a scratch.

It is an illusion.

What is still known as the old Flood place, out of the family now in all except name, looks much as it did at sunset on Nov. 5, 1954. The exterior was barely damaged.

It was typical of farmhouses in the area. It had a screened-in porch facing east. Downstairs, there was a long hallway with kitchen, dining room, living room, bedroom, parlor and bathroom doors leading off it. Upstairs were two bedrooms and a plunder room.

Naomi was 11. She had her own room upstairs. Hank and Paul, who were 5 and 3, had the other one. The baby, Susanna Lee, was 14 months old, barely walking.

Susanna had been sleeping in the same room with Ruth and Henry, but Ruth decided it was time for her to move upstairs, too. They could have kept her in their room for another year, but Ruth had read that it was best to separate yourself from the child at night, to give it a sense of independence.

“Naomi and I slept in the same room, same bed, until she was 3,” Ruth would say later, “and it never seemed to be a problem. Why I put my faith in that book, I’ll never know.”

They had waited until Hank and Paul were 2 to move them upstairs.

Ruth had to accept, finally, that they moved Susanna out of their room at least in part because they wanted to.

The baby hardly ever cried, but she kept Henry awake at night, making little noises. He was a light sleeper who suffered terribly from insomnia, and when he was awake, Ruth felt she should be awake, too. If there was to be any peace, she thought, they would have to put Susanna in another room.

They could have left her downstairs, next door in the parlor, but Ruth thought the child needed to have someone in the same room with her, and besides, Naomi was a sound sleeper.

Naomi was not pleased when they put the crib in her room. She and her brothers adored Susanna, a chubby blonde dumpling who grinned and drooled and was never colicky, but she thought she was too old to share her bedroom with a 1-year-old.

After Naomi sulked for two days, though, she got used to Susanna’s presence, even let the child share her bed whenever a thunderstorm frightened her.

The plunder room was a catch-all, full of old clothes, old newspapers and magazines deemed to be worth keeping by someone at some time, decades of empty jars saved out of thrift and habit, and kerosene lamps.

When Hurricane Hazel had come through in October, saving its worst damage for areas west of Saraw, it knocked down power lines, disrupting electrical service for a week at the Floods’ and elsewhere. A tree fell against the side of the roof. Did all this trauma somehow change something inside the walls of the Crowder home? Did some thin piece of wiring somewhere disconnect, or almost disconnect, waiting until the middle of that dark November night to do its worst? Ruth still thinks about it, still wonders.

The fire started in the plunder room, sometime after 2 a.m.

Nothing was more frightening to the farm families in rural Pembroke County. Most of them remembered the prewar days when kerosene lanterns placed them always one false move from a fire that could only be fought, hopelessly, with water hand-pumped from a well. Even in 1954, the nearest fire department was in Newport. Afterward, the town of Saraw would buy its own water truck and start a volunteer company.

By the time Ruth and Henry were awakened, by smoke and heat and the distant crying and screaming of their children, it was almost too late. Twice Henry tried to climb the stairs in tar-black smoke, before it overcame him. Meanwhile, Ruth had run outside.

On the front of the house, there was a tin roof over the porch, with a window above it. Naomi, awakened by the choking smoke, grabbed the baby and carried her through the suffocating blackness, holding her breath and putting her hand over Susanna’s mouth, to that window, closed since summer and stuck shut. It usually took Henry’s strong arms to open it again in the spring, but Naomi somehow got the window up. The smoke blew past her as if it were going up a chimney.

Hank and Paul were at her heels, hanging on to her gown. Naomi stood there, with the heat already singeing her, knowing what she had to do, working up her nerve. She heard her mother, below, screaming for them to jump. She couldn’t see Henry lying on the ground, left where Ruth had dragged him out through the porch and down the brick front steps. It was a cloudy, moonless night, lit only by flames.

From the lip of the tin roof to the ground was an 8-foot fall, and with the speed built up from sliding down the 30-degree pitch, it would not be an easy landing. Ruth and Naomi both knew that.

Still, there was no choice. Naomi could hear her mother’s voice below, instructing her.

She grabbed Hank first, forcing him through the opening, into the cold night air. She said later that she figured that if Hank went, Paul would follow. The force of a 5-year-old sliding off the roof almost knocked Ruth’s breath away when she tried to catch him. She had never in her life held on to anything so hard. She rolled Hank away from her, still crying and moaning, and waited for Paul.

Ruth could see nothing above her by this time. She had to depend on Naomi to tell her what she was doing.

“Here comes Paul, Momma,” Naomi screamed, and Ruth had to position herself by sound. Paul was making so much noise that it wasn’t hard to do. She caught him more easily than she had Hank, laid him gently to one side, with his brother.

By this time, Henry was on his hands and knees, trying to vomit and cough the smoke away.

Now just Naomi and Susanna were left. It had been easier to send the boys down; Susanna was whimpering quietly. Naomi would always remember that, and how the child clung to her legs. She picked her little sister up and pried her hands loose, then pushed her through the opening. Ruth could hear Naomi, through the smoke and noise, telling her to get ready for Susanna.

From the time Ruth awoke until it was all over was less than 5 minutes. All four of her children came down the roof in less than 60 seconds.

At the very moment when Naomi slid her baby sister down the tin roof, Henry righted himself and charged back into the house. Ruth was distracted for no more than a second, but when she strained to hear cloth against tin (for Susanna was now silent), she couldn’t.

There were hydrangea bushes all along the front of the porch, and a more kindly universe might have deposited Susanna in one of those, the miracle baby in next day’s paper, saved from death by soft green foliage, cooing for curious strangers.

From where Naomi slid her forward, the baby actually would have stood a good chance of landing either in shrubbery or Ruth’s arms. Perhaps Susanna made some panicky sideways movement as she slid.

She landed on the brick steps, with a solid thunk like an ax as it first strikes a stump. Sometimes, even now, Ruth will hear an approximation of that sound and have to stop, grab hard onto something or someone nearby, and close her eyes for an instant.

Susanna’s skull bore an indentation of the left side, a sharp right angle where it collided with the bricks.

Naomi, half sliding and half jumping, her nightgown smoking, suffered a dislocated shoulder and first-degree burns. There was no one to catch her. Ruth was already holding the body of her youngest, caressing her desperately, trying to wake her up.

Hank broke his arm. Henry, overcome by smoke inhalation, spent two days in the hospital, getting out just in time for Susanna’s funeral.

Over the years, Ruth has played it back in her mind thousands of times. She has never, will never be able to forget that almost inaudible sound that screams to her now, the one she didn’t hear in time—the sound of her baby sliding away from her.

Against all odds, the fire department from Newport, called by a neighbor, arrived in time to save the exterior of the house. Half the town’s adult male population showed up, and several of those were employed to keep Henry Flood from running back into the structure again, assuring him over and over that everyone was out.

When he learned about Susanna, he had to be restrained and then sedated. He cursed Ruth loudly and bitterly before they took him away to the hospital.

Ruth and her three living children stayed at her grandparents’ old house, where now only Charlotte and Jane lived, Matty having died in his sleep the previous year without ever getting to lay his hands on the rascal Randall Phelps. That first night, the four of them slept together on the bed of her childhood.

It would be six months before they could move back into part of their damaged home, and Ruth didn’t want to go back at all. Always afterward, she was aware of an acrid underscent no amount of cleaning could erase. Henry, though, insisted. It was the only home he had ever had, he said. And there was no way that he could get along with Ruth’s aunts. For most of the six months, he slept in a tent in the old farmhouse’s front yard. He turned down many offers of shelter, saying he preferred the outdoors.

From Mercy’s letter, Harry knew only the bare essentials: Ruth had lost her youngest daughter in a fire. Ruth needed him.

He could have called her aunts’ home, but he hesitated, even then, to break what he had come to regard as a spell.

Instead, he called Mercy.

She didn’t seem surprised to hear from him.

“She has given up, Mr. Stein,” she said, and he told her to call him Harry. “Ruth Crowder Flood has more life in her than anyone I know, but she’s just quit. She acts like the boys and Naomi aren’t even there.”

And so, almost 12 years after he had watched Ruth Crowder shrink from his vision on the Newport depot platform, Harry Stein made hurried, furtive plans to return, if briefly.

He told Gloria he had to go down to North Carolina the next day, to Newport for God’s sake, to check out the viability of an up-and-coming company that was making cheap furniture out of the local pine. He told her he would be back late that evening.

The trip down was a blur of self-doubt, plans of action routed by restlessness and nerves. There had been an unwritten but understood contract between Harry and Ruth: They would live the rest of their mutual life secretly, on paper. What if the Ruth who waited at the Saraw station couldn’t match the one he remembered? What if he didn’t match her memories? He almost left the train at Rocky Mount, prepared to catch the next one back north.

As the Saraw platform grew larger, Harry could make out individual people. He studied every woman there, trying to find her.

He got off the train with no Ruth in sight. Then, he felt a tap on his shoulder and spun around. For a second, he thought it was her, more drab and washed-out than he remembered.

It was Mercy.

“Come with me,” was all she said, taking his arm and hustling him into the station itself, then through a side door into a poorly-lighted, dingy train-station cafeteria.

At first, he didn’t see her. He looked to Mercy for guidance, then followed her eyes to the back corner, where a lone woman sat stiffly in one of the uncomfortable wooden chairs and stared straight ahead, out one of the windows opening on to the platform. Harry knew that, if she was actually looking, she had already seen the 1954 version of Harry Stein. This knowledge might have been all that kept him from running out the door.

Ruth had not aged much, outwardly. Even in her despair, she was as beautiful to Harry as she had been the day he left her there. He didn’t see any way a woman could look that good and want to die.

Mercy nudged him forward, and then he was standing directly in front of her, blocking her unblinking view.

Ruth looked up. He could see the dark circles under her eyes.

“Hello, Harry,” she said. She tried to smile, but her eyes, already red, teared up, and then they were crying together. Harry hoped Mercy was right about no one from Saraw being there; they were far from inconspicuous.

“You haven’t lost much, Harry,” she said, motioning for him to sit. “It’s a wonder you don’t have to carry a stick around Richmond to beat them off you.”

He told her she hadn’t lost much either, then colored as he realized how it sounded.

“It’s OK,” she said, patting his hand. “The way everyone tiptoes around me, whispering outside doors like I can’t hear … Sometimes, I wish they’d just say, ‘Look, you lost your child. Now get ahold of yourself.’”

To make matters worse, Ruth told him before their brief visit was over, her husband didn’t seem to have the will or desire to say anything at all, except to blame everyone, himself included, for Susanna’s death. After the funeral, he came to Charlotte and Jane’s, where she and the children were. He said not a word that day, and by nightfall he had gathered what belongings he could salvage and moved into his tent.

Two hours was all the time Harry Stein had before another Atlantic Coast Line train would take him back to Richmond. He could have stayed overnight, cooking up some excuse, enlisting an ally to deceive Gloria, but he knew it was better this way. They had talked, had reconnected with each other instantly. They had promised to try to look out for each other, to be each other’s friend, for as long as they lived, speaking the words as solemnly as a wedding vow. What was left to say?

She had already told him that she was not going to divorce Henry Flood. And he knew that, despite the bruises, he was not going to leave Gloria and his children. Henry loved her, in his way, Ruth said, and he needed her desperately. He was her husband.

She showed Harry some recent photographs of Naomi and told him how proud he should be of her.

Harry said he had no right to be proud, and she let him off the hook, the way she always had, telling him he was doing what he could.

“Someday, I’d like to meet her.”

Ruth thought about it for a few seconds.

“Yes,” she said at last, “I’d like that, too, someday. Right now, though, Naomi thinks her father is some man named Randall Phelps, who died in Germany. I’d like her to be a little older before she finds out about Harry Stein.”

Harry imparted no timeless wisdom to Ruth to get her up off her spiritual sickbed and walking among the living again. All he did was talk with her a little, like the old friends they had already become, like the lovers they had been and, in some world parallel to their everyday lives, still were. They held hands while they talked, and when he embraced her, that scent came back, that same sweet smell that was her rather than her perfume, something he had always associated with autumn and the ocean.

He wanted so much for her to ask him to stay. He wanted so much to say that he would.

But that wasn’t even on the table. She couldn’t. He couldn’t.

They talked about old times, about new times. Ruth had managed to be as well-read as anyone Harry knew, despite not yet having taken one college course. In a farmhouse full of the needs of children and a half-crazed husband, on the edge of a desolate swamp, she found time to educate herself.

Harry had known friends who went away for six months and came back as different people, but he and Ruth never missed a beat.

He told her that he loved her, although he had sworn to himself that he wouldn’t do that. What if she didn’t respond in kind? But she did. He made her promise that she would somehow get over Susanna, and she promised that she would, somehow.

“If you don’t get better,” he said, leaning down to kiss her forehead, “I’ll just have to keep coming down here.”

Tell me to keep coming down here, he willed her to say. Tell me to keep coming. But she said nothing, just held tightly to him, and the moment passed.

Ruth did, though, allow him to see Naomi.

Her elementary school let out at 3. If Harry would take a later train back to Richmond, he could be there, parked across the street, when she exited. So he rented a car at the station and drove inland, to Saraw.

He waited alone. Ruth had to return, and it would have been unwise for her to be sitting in Saraw, in a strange man’s car. Their leaving was hurried, and neither of them could find a fitting punctuation for their visit.

Harry had a photograph of Naomi that was less than a year old. She reminded him of his sister Freda at that age.

When she did finally emerge from the old wooden school building, he had to restrain himself. What he wanted was to rush out of his car, run up to her and tell her he was her daddy. But he had promised Ruth he would not do that.

What he saw, even from a distance, disturbed him a little, though. He had assumed that Naomi would be surrounded by friends, as would befit the girl who wins all the swimming championships, the girl who saved her brothers from the fire. He had figured that she would be smiling.

But she wasn’t smiling, and she left to walk home by herself. She didn’t look sure to Harry, not the way he would have wanted a kid of his to look at 11.

She was a pretty girl, tall and thin with dark hair and the great tan that bespoke the Southern sun and the Stein genes. But she didn’t seem confident. He wondered if she would have been more confident if her father hadn’t caught a train long ago.

Before he returned to Newport and then to Richmond, he couldn’t resist taking a slow drive down the street, past the church and then right by the old house where they had been so happy for a while, Ruth’s past and present home.

As he eased along the dead-end lane, amazed that he could still find what he needed in Saraw, North Carolina, he saw a woman standing at the open front door. It was Ruth, waiting for Naomi, leaning against the doorframe, her arms folded. The afternoon sun reflected off her hair and made it shine back, golden. She and Harry made eye contact across the long front yard, and he almost stopped. But then he saw her shake her head, fiercely, and he kept going.

At the end of the lane he turned around. When he came back by the Crowder house, Ruth was still there, and Harry could see Naomi approaching, a block away.

So much of my life, he thought. Right here.

He looked left once more, and Ruth Crowder Flood, standing a little back, out of sight of anyone but him, seemed to blow a kiss.

When he passed Naomi, she lifted her eyes briefly to his, and then lowered them again as she walked on to her waiting mother.