They went everywhere together, Carlos and Ruby.
Friends said you never saw one without the other.
Carlos was a barber, known for crew cuts so sharp they’d just about cut your hand if you patted ’em.
Ruby washed his barber towels, rinsing the witch hazel and talcum powder out of them for nearly fifty years.
At home on their Carolina farm, Carlos grew corn, tomatoes, and beans; Ruby canned and froze and cooked.
They did everything together. Maybe that’s why the people who loved them seemed strangely comforted by the sight of their matching mahogany coffins beneath the funeral tent.
After sixty-five years of marriage, Carlos, eighty-eight, and Ruby, eighty-two, did the unthinkable: they died of natural causes on the same day.
Carlos had been feeling poorly for a while, just age mostly. But he’d felt well enough to eat fried shad at the Supper House last Saturday night with Ruby at his side, doing all the talking as usual.
The next day, they’d had the whole family over for Sunday dinner just as they did every other week. Children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and hangers-on knew where to go for a fine meal and some storytelling.
No one knew, as they sipped tea on the front porch for the millioneth time joking about the “courting swang” Ruby had bought the first year they were married, that two days later, the tidy little farmhouse would be filled with tearful friends bearing cakes, casseroles, and condolences.
Tuesday morning, Carlos had some kind of spell, maybe a stroke, but more likely his hardworking body just gave out.
Ruby rode with her brother to the hospital. Trailing the ambulance, she was terrified. You don’t live with a man sixty-five years and not wonder how you’ll survive if he goes first.
Ruby couldn’t let Carlos be apart from her in illness. He’d been the same way when she’d had a near-fatal heart attack ten years ago. With Carlos at her side, she recovered, and in just a few months was walking three miles a day, quilting, and baking pineapple cakes for the neighbors.
So Ruby willed her brother to drive faster, faster. They were stopped for speeding, but Ruby’s ashen face told the highway patrolman the whole story. The excitement of the morning was too much for her. Just as they pulled in sight of the hospital, Ruby had a massive heart attack.
Carlos was in Room 1 of the hospital’s intensive care unit. Within minutes, Ruby was in Room 3. Nurses swore that as Carlos improved, Ruby did, too. As he failed, so did Ruby.
Family came quickly, keeping a vigil outside both rooms.
The grandchildren remembered the pony Carlos had bought for them and how, one by one, he’d lead them around his pasture, never leaving them alone for fear something would happen.
The cousins recalled how Ruby was crazy about traveling and trying new things, how she’d shamed a grown nephew into riding Space Mountain at Disney World.
Carlos and Ruby never regained consciousness, though some speculated that Ruby felt the life leave Carlos Tuesday morning. They believe that, on some level, she knew it was time for her to go, too.
He died at dawn; she died at dusk.
On Friday, hundreds of mourners filled Shiloh Baptist Church. Many had left their fields on a perfect planting day to pay respects. The coffin lids, open until just before the service was to begin, were lowered with soft, matching “thwumps” and two preachers spoke for nearly an hour about these “two choice servants.”
At the cemetery, their voices carried on a swift, hot breeze: “the best thing that could happen,” “meant to be,” “together in heaven,” “a special blessing.”
Back at the homeplace, mourners seemed unwilling to leave Ruby and Carlos’s house, balancing paper plates of field peas, macaroni and cheese, and sliced ham on their laps, and bragging of Carlos’s fine garden, Ruby’s quilts and dolls, Carlos’s gourds…
Jane Rich said her daddy had hung gourds in the trees on the Sunday before he died; already birds had made nests in them just as he’d hoped.
On an afternoon that seemed to be filled with strange blessings and signs and wonders, Jane stopped pouring a glass of Sun Drop for a friend when she caught sight of her mother’s beloved amaryllis.
In the time it had taken to bury both her parents, twin flowers had bloomed on the plain green stalk.
“One for Daddy and one for Mama,” she said softly.