Ruth Elder.
Ruth Elder.
Ruth Elder was bored.
How long was she supposed to stand up on this stage in a wool bathing suit with everyone ogling her? Well, not just her, but the twenty or so other girls with her, too.
She couldn’t see anything past the edge of the round, beaten platform, although she could feel just about a million eyes on her. The crowd grumbled to themselves, picking out their favorites and picking apart the features of the girls less fortunate.
“That one has a banana for a nose,” Ruth heard one onlooker say, and hoped she wasn’t the inspiration for the remark.
This is the silliest thing, she told herself. Why are any of these people here, anyway? She was surprised they didn’t cancel the contest altogether. She wanted to be out of there, her ear to the radio, getting as close as she could to the latest reports of Lindbergh and his flight to Paris.
Of course, she had been following the news stories of the flight since he had taken off the day before, and it was just the most exciting thing. It was as thrilling to Ruth as imagining getting in the cockpit and flying herself. She loved being in the air, the thrill of having no ties to the earth, nothing to keep her tethered. She understood Lindbergh’s desire to fly across the ocean: no experience on the ground could compare to gliding across clouds and seeing everything from above. No one else up there, just her and the steady buzz of the engine. Above, there were no strings to get herself tangled up in, no dishes to wash or laundry to boil and roll. Of course, she was fortunate: she’d only had to clean up after herself since she returned to Lakeland, Florida, last year and her husband, Lyle, stayed in Panama. She just could not take that jungle for one more blessed day. Relentless rain and puddles of muck everywhere. She told that to Lyle; she said, “Mister, I’ve taken just about enough of this place. If I don’t get outta here soon, I’m gonna go cuckoo! Right in front of your store, too!”
Lyle had some good sense sometimes, and he sent his young, beautiful wife back to Lakeland alone, with enough money to get a little place for herself and the promise that he’d come home just about whenever he could. He had managed a couple of trips back, but for Ruth, oh! Ruth was bored easily. She had been squirrelly since she was a girl, almost skittish. She could outrun any boy, and broke a horse in seconds flat right after Daddy said to leave that devil animal alone. After that, none of her girl cousins were allowed to play with her, their mothers claiming that Ruth was “too wild.”
And maybe that was true. She was a girl on the wrong side of the railroad tracks in Anniston, Alabama, a demarcation line that separated classes as well as color. What lived on one side stayed on that side, but Ruth didn’t mind. There was plenty of fun to be had on the side where she belonged, and she had no hesitations, especially when she entered high school and wasn’t a tomboy anymore, putting on lipstick, bringing up her hemlines an inch or two. She stopped playing basketball and learned how to drive Daddy’s car, sometimes sneaking off after dark with it. She would drive away just to sit and talk with some girlfriends and sometimes boys in a field behind Anniston High School and learn how to smoke cigarettes. Now and then the boys would take out a bottle of hooch and they’d share it. One time a boy tried to kiss her, and she socked him in the jaw. Made his lip bleed and his tooth wiggle. Ruth made her own decisions, not some poor skinny boy with a dirty neck who’d just left his spit on a nasty old bottle.
Mostly she just loved to drive. To hold the Model T’s steering wheel and pick her destination when she was old enough to decide on one. She loved being alone on the road, leaving her little life behind and believing that she had a new one just ahead of her. She wondered just how far she’d get from Alabama when she had the chance.
Then her oldest sister, Pherlie, got married, and all eyes turned to Ruth. Ruth paid it no mind until she spotted a blue teal Paterson touring car with slender running boards and two rows of red leather seats parked in the school lot. It belonged to Mr. Claude Moody, her English teacher. Ruth smiled to herself. She could go fast in that car; she could go far.
So Ruth did what she did best—she called her own shots—and a week after graduation she left one Sunday morning for a walk, picked up her suitcase she had stashed at a friend’s house, and drove off in the Paterson sitting next to Mr. Moody. But in several months, they headed for Clayton, population three hundred, with Ruth’s suitcase in the backseat of a used Model T, since the Paterson had been sold shortly after Claude lost his job and the couple started getting hungry.
Eventually, Ruth was sure, she’d fit in just fine in this tiny beehive of a town which didn’t even have a right side and a wrong side of the tracks that sliced through farmland, with a railroad that was never completed and stopped short just about a mile or so from the train station. There was just a dirt road leading to Clayton from a faraway highway, a road that got lonelier and lonelier the closer you got to the town.
When a traveling preacher found the tiny dot of Clayton on some map of Georgia, Ruth and Claude went down, just like everybody else did, and saw the young, wiry Reverend Huber Jenkins evangelize, proselytize, and charm the crowd into raising a little money for him. Ruth and Claude didn’t have much to put into the hat, but they could offer Reverend Jenkins a hot meal and a night on their sofa.
Reverend Jenkins, who was not much older than Claude, stayed for a week at the Moody house, spending his days talking to Ruth at the kitchen table and drinking burned coffee. After dark, the revivals started and the town came as if the sermons were the premiere of some fancy Hollywood movie. It was the social event of the year.
Ruth enjoyed his company. The truth was, Ruth enjoyed anybody’s company after her suffocating months in Clayton. She told him that she loved to drive and how, in Clayton, there was no long, smooth highway to rip down; there were just bumps and choking dust.
Let’s go for a ride, he said; let’s drive up the dirt road to the highway, maybe take a picnic lunch. Maybe, he said, that won’t make you feel quite so lonesome.
Ruth wrapped the last of the tomato pie for a picnic lunch, and on the highway Jenkins gave Ruth the wheel and sat back and watched the prettiest girl he had ever seen laugh and holler as the wind tossed her brown curls all up and around her head like she was floating in water. When they got hungry, Ruth pulled to the side of the road at the bottom of a hill. She had forgotten forks and plates, so she tore the tomato pie with her fingers, laughing. Jenkins took the pie and ate it with one hand, most of it crumbling down the preacher’s shirt, the other arm slung over his bent knee as he looked over the vista.
“Aren’t you lonely,” Ruth asked as she picked at her own pie, “being on the road, not knowing people in the towns you go to, not having anybody to talk to? Not having any people?”
Jenkins paused.
Whether at that moment Jenkins reached over and held Ruth’s face, kissed her, or simply gave her a smile is unknown except to the two of them. What the rancher from Clayton saw as he herded his cattle was Jenkins jumping up and scrambling into the trees, leaving Ruth sitting on the side of a highway with crumbs in her lap.
And no matter what she said, Claude didn’t believe her when she said it was just a drive, it was just tomato pie; after all, the preacher was packed up and gone by the time Claude even got home and word started trickling out into the street.
It wasn’t all terrible. Ruth’s mama was delighted to get her girl back and said so when Ruth stepped off the train. She got a job at a candy store and wore a pretty pink uniform with a cute little lace hat. At night she squeezed into the double bed with her sister Pauline and let her mind wander over bigger adventures and better things.
Ruth was visiting her aunt Susan in the Canal Zone when she sat across from Lyle Womack at a dinner party. He was nothing like Claude Moody, Ruth thought. Nothing. He was a good three inches taller, with dark brown hair waving from his forehead to the crown; dark, piercing eyes; and an impressive manner of politeness. He operated a store stocked with leather boots, canvas hats, and mosquito netting for the men working on the canal. The first thing he said to her was “Have you ever been up in a plane?”
Lyle traveled a lot for business, and when Ruth heard he’d been on a plane, her heart just about stopped. When he offered to take her for a ride, she felt as if she had been lifted right out of her skin and was floating, she got so dizzy. He drove them out to a small airplane hangar and held her hand as she steadily climbed into the seat behind the pilot. She jumped slightly in fright when the engine popped to a start and the propeller spun madly in front of them, then laughed. As the plane took off, she held her breath until the plane lifted into the air like a balloon. It was that easy. Ruth’s eyes widened as she stretched her neck to see out the cockpit window, and then it was true: she was soaring.
She didn’t elope this time; she didn’t have to. Mama and Daddy liked Lyle fine, although they weren’t too happy that her new husband was going to fly her off to a place to live that they couldn’t even get to. Ruth assured them she’d be home all the time, coming back with Lyle when he did business for the electric sign company he had started with his father. And they knew he’d take good care of her. He loved their girl; they could tell.
In Panama, all she saw was rain. She had tried her hardest, but she felt trapped inside her house day after day in the muddy, mosquito-infested Canal Zone. Lyle had more and more business in Florida, so it was a good place for Ruth to live so that Lyle could spend as much time there as possible.
She rented a little white cottage with frilly curtains in Lakeland, Florida, answered a newspaper ad for a receptionist at a dentist’s office and was hired on the spot, due to her engaging, perfectly proportioned smile. Lyle flew in at least twice a month to stay for a weekend and sometimes longer. Ruth was happier anywhere but Panama—and Clayton. He landed at a little strip called Official Dixie Highway Garage, which was simply a small airplane hangar and a runway. It was there, waiting for Lyle to arrive, that she saw the owner of the garage, George Haldeman, hop into a small plane on the passenger side, and a young man Ruth didn’t recognize scramble into the pilot’s seat. In the echoing quiet of the hangar, Ruth couldn’t help but overhear George giving instructions to the fellow on how to start the engine. Within a minute or two the airplane was chugging down the runway, and before Ruth could blink, it was lifting into the air. She felt her excitement build into a powerful flutter in her stomach as she watched Lyle’s plane head down the runway ten minutes later, and then she walked right over to George Haldeman to ask him if he would teach her how to fly.
Ruth had been taking flying lessons with George for several months when she saw the beauty contest advertised in the paper; it was a stunt to promote some sort of hot dog or soap, but who cared? The prize was fifty dollars for first place, and that would pay for a lot of time in the air. To Ruth, it was almost as if she had met her very own spirit up there; she’d never had such moments of exhilaration and excitement anywhere else. She had found a bubble of remarkable happiness. When she wrote to Lyle that she was thinking of learning how to fly, he couldn’t have been more thrilled, and said that once she got her license, she’d be able to fly over and visit him, and that was bully, wasn’t it?
She had been spending most of her weekends with George, learning to read the instruments, practicing takeoffs and landings, and mostly just gliding above Lakeland in tranquil silence. Her biggest accomplishment was a weekend when Lyle was home and she was feeling a bit stifled, not being able to head out to Dixie’s, when he suggested that he’d like to see her fly a plane herself.
With Lyle sitting behind her and George next to her, she took off without issue, a fine, smooth lift into the air and up into the horizon like a bullet. She turned around to see her husband beaming and smiling at her, and that made her giggle. He patted her on the shoulder while George suggested that she show off some of the barnstorming tricks he had taught her. Ruth laughed, then dove the plane lower, lower, until it was one hundred feet off the ground. She pulled the steering column toward her quickly and shot the plane up. It was the kind of dip that would push a stomach into the throat of any passenger not expecting it, and was sure to produce terrified gasps. If Lyle was frightened, he didn’t show it, and kept the smile on his face until they landed back at Dixie’s—his stomach very much still in his throat.
On the night that Lindbergh landed in Paris, the seconds passed tediously for Ruth. Each contestant took one last walk and spin before the judges with her best smile, best side, best everything. She strutted up toward the front of the stage, her left hand on her hip, her right swinging confidently. She gave herself a little bounce in her step, and in front of the judges she stopped and dipped her shoulder the tiniest bit, then winked.
When the first-place winner was announced, Ruth was surprised and delighted. She put her best shining smile on as the bulbs of the cameras popped and flashed and she accepted the cheap little crown and an armful of flowers from the master of ceremonies.
“May I present our first-place winner, Miss Sudsy Soap, Ruth Elder!” the master of ceremonies barked into the microphone. “What will you do with your prize money?”
“Well,” Ruth said as she stood on her toes to reach the microphone stand, “Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris a little while ago, the first man to fly across the Atlantic. I’m going to use my prize money to become the first woman to fly across it!”
The crowd erupted into deafening cheers, applause, and whistles, some of them—most of them, in fact—not sure of what they had just heard. But the pretty little girl in the bathing suit with the tiara on her head had just mentioned Charles Lindbergh, and, well, that was good enough for all of them.