It was such a good Saturday that Ruby has reserved what she is now thinking of as “her room” for another week. Ravi, the owner/operator of the Dew Drop Inn, is clearly pleased and even offers to take the surcharge for the Hitchhiker off the tab. For her part, the Hitchhiker has behaved impeccably.
After arranging for her busker’s license at the town hall—well before Cynthia Mann might drop into the selectperson’s office—Ruby heads to the Country Market to pick up a few groceries. The restaurants in Harmony Farms tend toward the overpriced.
Ruby is wandering the short aisles of the Country Market with a basket dangling from her arm; in it a box of cereal, a quart of two percent milk, a bag of kibble, and a small box of medium-size Milk-Bones. She’s been in here often enough that the little store has become familiar to her; she can find most everything, but she’s damned if the canned fruit isn’t eluding her. Once in a while, Ruby gets a hankering for the only kind of fruit she knew when she was a little girl in the convent orphanage. She remembers the giant no. 10 cans of Del Monte fruit cocktail or pears or, her favorite, the peaches. Soft, sweet, and thick with syrup. One would expect the canned peaches to be near the canned vegetables but they’re not. Elvin, the elderly proprietor of the market, is jawing with a couple of work pants–wearing, flannel-shirted locals sucking down paper cups of coffee from his limited—but cheap—coffee bar. One of them is Bull. They guffaw and all three of them end up coughing, laughing, coughing. Har har hack. Har har hack. “Shoulda seen the look on his face.” Ruby suspects that half of their stories end up with that phrase. After years of living among old carnies, she’s familiar with the dynamics of old men and their stories. Well, she won’t interrupt their confab, so she trots toward the single attended checkout station where a teenage girl in an uneven bob with fuchsia highlights stares blankly out into space and chews contemplatively on a wad of gum, punctuating her mastication with snaps every few seconds.
“Can you tell me where I can find the canned fruit?”
“Umm, like, over there.” The girl points at an end cap with canned pumpkin, well in advance of the season, and other pie fruits.
“No, like peach slices, in syrup.” Maybe, in this suburban Mecca, kids don’t eat canned fruit.
“Aisle four.” A short but well-endowed woman of a certain age, filling out the contours of a dark green uniform, comes up to Ruby. “Between the flour and the maple syrup. Don’t ask. Country Market is stocked with no rhyme or reason.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you Ruby?”
“I am.” Ruby is a little surprised to be identified. She’s dressed in jeans and a striped tee, not her caftan; her hair is tidy in a normal everyday twist. “Are you Polly?” No tricks, the woman does have a badge with her name, Polly Schaeffer, pinned to her ample chest. The Harmony Farms assistant animal control officer. “How’d you know me?”
“It’s my job to know every dog in town and yours is waiting for you very patiently outside. Process of elimination, you’re the only one with dog food in your basket. Plus, you do have that nice tag on her with your name and number.”
“Nice work.” Ruby can only admire Polly’s deductive powers as well as her delivery.
“Hey, ladies, how’re my two favorite girls?” Bull Harrison, aged adolescent.
Ruby and Polly share a look and Ruby knows that she’s got a new friend.
“Ruby reads dog minds.”
“Really?” Polly doesn’t look skeptical, she looks interested. “You’re an animal communicator?”
“So far only dogs, but yes. I guess that’s what you call what I do.”
“Can they tell you who their owners are if they’re lost?”
“Maybe not by name. But I get images, like with my pal out there. I know,” and Ruby air quotes the word, “that her former owner died. What she can’t tell me is if she ran away or if they dropped her off in the country figuring, as cute as she is, she’d find a new home.”
“Which, if you think about it, worked.” Polly laughs, a ringing laugh suitable for a woman with her dimensions.
Bull has wandered back to Elvin, a new cup of coffee in his meaty hand. He sets the cup on the top of the meat case, hitches up his pants. Goes back to gabbing with his cronies.
Polly catches Ruby’s eye. “I know, he’s a piece of work, but every town needs a Bull.”
“You ready to check out?” the gum snapper asks, and Ruby sets her purchases down on the counter along with her cloth carry bag. She won’t realize that she’s forgotten the peaches until she gets home.
Ruby has the dream again. The phantom woman touches her cheek, brushes aside her hair. She wakes, not in a cold sweat, but feeling as though she’s been nurtured.
There was nothing nurturing in Ruby’s early life. Food enough. Clothed adequately. Never cold. Untouched except for an occasional smack. Sitting up in bed, dawn’s rosy fingers heralded by a cardinal in the highest treetop, Ruby wonders for the millionth time why she was left with the nuns. Why she was unwanted. Most of the other girls in the place had some cursory knowledge of their parents, knew why they had been left in the care of the nuns. There was an assumed sinfulness about Ruby’s—Mary’s—genesis in that place. Child of sin. Bastard. Where the other toddlers were there because of some family tragedy, or inability to care for them, Mary Jones was tainted. The others in her infant group were eventually adopted out. But not Mary, who didn’t arrive with a name.
“Who left you?” The Hitchhiker is standing with her feet on the edge of the bed, her spaniel eyes focused on Ruby’s. The question is loud and clear. Ruby has been the one asking questions of dogs; this new development, of being questioned, is a little frightening.
To say, I don’t know in answer is wrong. So Ruby tells the dog, in plain English, “My mother.”
“Find her.”
Perhaps she dreamed the dog’s question and her own answering of it. Ruby wakes again, the red dawn giving way to a rainy day. She pushes aside the bedclothes and reaches for her laptop. She types in the convent name, Sacred Heart Convent and School for Girls, and the little town in Ottawa. Closes her eyes and prays without knowing if she hopes it still exists or has burned to the ground.
Monsignor LaPierre resembled nothing so much as a cannonball, a spherical form dressed in black. Folds of pink flesh cascaded over the band of his clerical collar. His smooth pink cheeks suggested a boyish lack of beard. Tussocks of gray blond hair were interspersed with the shiny pink of his scalp, a sparsely planted wheat field. Someone who had not met him might have thought he looked jolly. Benign. A roly-poly doll in a black suit.
“Mary Jones, please stand before me.” The priest was sitting in a soft chair. His legs, encased in the dull fabric of his trousers, were widespread to accommodate his belly. His short plump fingers gripped the arms of the chair.
She hesitated. She had never been this close to him in his street clothes, only at Mass, where his bulk was shrouded in the cassock and chasuble of his priestly authority, where his sausage fingers placed the Host on her tongue.
“I said to come here.” He was breathing in truncated bursts. Puffed from the action of moving from desk to chair.
Mary took a slow step toward him. A soft hum began to tease, more sense than sound. The hum was fluid as it rose and fell with each step. The closer she got to him, the more intense the sound until she was sure he must have heard it too. Images: A man. Pain. Thin wrists gripped, crossed like a martyr’s. The hum became a high-pitched squeal and yet the priest did not flinch. His pale blue eyes did not move from hers.
“I haven’t got all day.”
“He hurt you.” The words could not be contained.
The Monsignor pushed back into his chair. “What did you say?”
“I’m sorry.”
“What did you say?” The priest pushed himself awkwardly out of his chair. Took one step and grabbed Mary’s chin. “Tell me.” His puffing breath is foul with the smell of unclean dentures.
“He hurt you. That’s all I know. You were a boy.”
“No one knows. Not even my confessor.” Fat snail trails of tears leak from the corners of his eyes. His pink cheeks are florid, wobble with anguish. Anger. Disbelief. “You are a witch.” With the hand not gripping Mary’s chin, he vigorously crossed himself.
“No. I’m not. I just feel things. I mean no harm.” Mary wrenched her chin out of his hand. “I won’t do it again.”
Monsignor LaPierre stepped away, leaned heavily against the edge of his mahogany desk. “You will have to be isolated.”
“I’m not sick.”
“Kept away from the others, from everyone. Until I can pray upon this affliction. Beg for an answer.”
Mary Jones stood where she was. Her fingers clutched at the pleats of her school uniform. For a fourteen-year-old girl, isolation was frightening. The companionship of her classmates, three or four friends in particular, was the only thing that made life worth living. “Please, Sir, don’t lock me away.”
“I don’t know if you have the devil in you, or if you are adept at discovering secrets, but you cannot be allowed to mingle with the others.”
“May I go?”
“Tell Sister Clothilde that you will be in the unused sick room until further notice.” He had his back to her, the tight broadcloth outlining the ridges of fat of his back. The great secret and determiner of his life was evident in the dark purple shimmer of the grim aura that surrounded him. She knew that she looked upon a man at once broken by an event in his youth and made by it.
In the hallway, Mary Jones looked at the bleeding heart of the wooden Christ and touched its foot. She was sorry for frightening people with this unwanted gift, but she wouldn’t accept that it was something from a malevolent source. She couldn’t see that it was anything other than God given and she just needed to learn how to use it. She wished that she could see into her own future, but all she could envision was the low metal bed of the unused sickroom, the dusty curtains blocking the sun through never-opened windows. The legend was that if your fingers touched the statue’s foot and the wood felt warm, you would get an answer to your prayer. Mary Jones opened her hand, laid her whole palm across the instep of the sandaled foot. When she had touched Sister Anne, and then Sister Gertrude, it had been like she was touching flame. The wooden foot felt only like wood—smooth, neither warm nor cool. She lifted her hand to the Sacred Heart where it protruded from the cavern of the opened chest. The heart is where the power is. If it burns me, I will know that I am evil. Mary Jones placed her right hand on the carving. Please help me. There was no burning, no heat. And yet, one word seemed to come through her fingers from the carved heart and straight into hers. Go.
It had only taken a few keystrokes to discover that the Sacred Heart Convent and School for Girls hadn’t burned down. The orphanage was long gone, and a token number of nuns remained to teach at the Parochial school. Featured on its barebones website was the statue that had brought Ruby Heartwood into existence.