World, Come Open
One of his last nights in Radiance, he sat beside Ruby on the motel bed and opened a road atlas to the state of New Mexico. He pointed to a town. “There’s where I’ll become who I am.” The words were jagged and sharp, but she said nothing. Willette. A town in small print, it had no stars or boxes and was surrounded by a long, flat space of brown.
Two afternoons each week she met him at the Redbird, where they let rooms and never said a thing about who was who, though they knew everyone in a place so small. And who would not know her? Ruby the fiddle player’s daughter, and more it seemed. The woman at the motel desk had narrow black eyes that said what she thought. “You the one that reads cards?” And Ruby allowed it was true. She told lives and unhappinesses and how things could be good. “Dark wonders that better belong to God,” the woman said. She dropped the room key on the counter and turned away quick, her fear larger than any spell Ruby could ever have wrought.
The first time in that room, Ruby stood on the scatter rug just inside the door and couldn’t think what might happen if her feet went further. The walls were tongue and groove, and she said that to herself. Tongue and groove. Tongue and groove. Her own tongue clung to the slick top of her mouth. How hot it was. It was summer that first time, and the room was damp, its concrete floor and a fan the only cool, but she shivered as he spoke to her.
“Come here,” he said, but she stood another minute, looking.
The windows set high in the walls made the room like some cell for a saint or someone glad of their starving, and that was what she felt as she looked at him. Hunger. She wore loafers with coins in the toes and she kicked them off, stepped away from the scatter rug onto the bare floor. She unzipped her skirt, pulled the blouse over her head and felt her hair snag as she ripped it free. She felt how slight she was, though she could not have named where the slightness lay. Not slight in her body. Not even in her youngness, though she knew she was. Her fingers stroked the long muscles of his thighs, the pale flesh of his naked self, and he reached too. He took up her fingers and pulled them one by one through his lips, tasting her. Nothing lay between them but the sweat-slick of their own skin and how they fit against one another.
That was the dark wonder of those afternoons, how nothing else existed at all. Not the house she came from nor her cold-eyed mother, not his wife, not the thin cotton of the blankets he pulled over her, not the mountains beyond the room. Two hours were nothing, though she wanted them to be as large as more. She was the sum of everything he had known before her, and he was nothing of what she had ever dreamed of wanting.
She lay still and listened to the tick, tick of the clock beside their bed. Soon the weeks became months. Soon summer let go. By then she had taken the best of him and inside her was planted a life she had never dreamed.
The day he left, Ruby laid out her cards and drew the Tower. The earth catching fire. That was the way his hands had lain upon her body, like revelations from God. By then the earth itself was catching fire, burning away to slack. They could all hear it. Exploding sounds and the way, she later believed, the mountains cried.
The company-owned trailer at the end of Main Street had all its windows open, and tall spring grasses sprouted beside a crooked porch. They tossed things they’d never need right out into the yard, canning jars and milk crates, and under the porch a little dog hid itself, afraid.
The engine cranked and his truck pulled away, leaving everything changed. Her belly tipped and churned, though the child inside was nothing but a kernel, a child-to-be. She imagined a line from her belly to her future. The angle of the world had changed.
Winter came. At night, when Ruby dreamed, she dreamed a daughter’s face, a bud unfolding in snow. Esther stood on the porch and Ruby watched her. How thin she’d become, sick again, lowering herself against the porch swing’s cushions. You’re carrying a child, her mother said, and looked at her belly so hard Ruby flinched. Don’t you know, Esther said, a child will tear you open, now and then on from there?
She wore sweatshirts and stretched-out sweaters and cut the waistbands of her skirts to make them looser. She got up in the night and stood there, looking out at the empty road like she used to when her daddy was away making music. But now he stayed home. Sat out in the yard and played the fiddle and that sound. It was mournful. It held long and sad in the dark, and it settled at the middle of her and made her want.
Ruby could have married this one or that. The man who moved to Radiance and opened a store where they sold coal things. Candy statues like miners and their empty buckets. Could have laid herself down all over again in the wake of some passing others. Instead she dreamed girl babies not yet born. Dreamed one night of a woman standing in a doorway to a house she’d never seen, flashes of purple neon light splashed across some steps leading up. And all will be well, the woman said. But nothing was well or easy. She roiled with child, her navel a button to press for what was living inside.
Esther’s guinea egg had grown back and was rising to the surface of her skin, pushing itself out with pus and blood. She laid her hands flat against Ruby’s belly, held them there. If you tell such good fortunes, she said to Ruby, tell me mine. Ruby couldn’t stand it, how her mother’s hands felt cold as the winter earth.
The card she drew every time then. Six of swords. The women come together at a central point, carrying red roses of passion.
It’s him, isn’t it, her daddy said. That travelin’ man who took the mountains away and you too. And now look at you. Just look.
And she did look. Did nothing but look back, trying to remember the least sign. As if a sign was needed since, after all, he had told her the truth. What he thought about love. Love, he said from the start, ties you down. Ties you to things. A house. A car. A one-eyed cat or a driveway with trees and why would anyone want that? A life that could just about make you forget being alive. Tell me about her, Ruby said. Your wife. And he said, hush.
As the child grew inside her, she wanted the flight of birds in a blue, blue sky. Wanted desire like honey on a spoon. Wanted water on the corner of a rag to chew, but that was later on. The child wanted too. Made her want the taste of clay or blood. Kicked so hard inside, Ruby woke up shouting a word she never remembered as hard as she tried. The word felt like flight. Felt like unweight. Felt like nothing at all.
On the day the baby was born, everything tasted of rust. The hours ticked by with gray sheets of rain, the window glass bowing in, out, each time she breathed. Esther was so thin by then she was a taut wire standing by the bed, and Ruby did not know which of them held up who. Her mother’s hands pushed against her stomach and Ruby called upon the Lord. The Lord, Esther said between the knives of hurting, the Lord had nothing to do with it. And for this you loved, her daddy said. He peered in the doorway, his eyes like steel.
Her whole self tore open, and she saw herself reaching inside the tear. The world was a card that turned into an open palm. The world was a tower, a lightning bolt cutting through the cloth that is the heavens. The world smelled like blood, alive and red. The world became a revelation, a before and after. A dream of what had never been but might, and in that dream she reached across the far space of the room. She reached into the far space inside herself and felt other hands there, her daughter’s hands, her child waiting to come alive.
Ruby dreamed about gods. A god of pomp and circumstance, a god of thrones and angels. But as time passed, the dreams shifted. God became a woman, not Mary, neither the mother of Jesus nor Mary Magdalene nor anything in between. In her dreams, God was a woman with hands that had worked hard, thin hands, strong and sure of themselves. As she gave birth, Ruby’s hands became songs. Her fingers became slender strings stretching across some sky paler blue than heaven. She reached up and plucked the strings, and the sound was pure as it had never been before. Pure as slivers of glass. And thus Ruby was born on the same day as her own flesh was born. Mother bore daughter and daughter was born, both of them seeking the same roads out.
Her daughter was a way and a light all its own, and she named her after that. A name that sounded like miracles. Miracelle. The name was a way and means, and the child was so beautiful Ruby wanted to lick her clean, but she held her instead. Washed her in a kitchen pan. Remember this, Esther said. There are only so many ways to baptize in this world.
Then it was spring, and they took Miracelle to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Heavenly Mountains. How Ruby’s heart ached when they lowered her daughter into the waters of faith. Above them, sheered-back hills held them all like sore, crucified palms. The god Esther loved was so big he seemed to cover the sky. Faith was consolation, her mother said that day, but Ruby wondered who was consoled, and how.
In town, Esther had made up stories that stilled rumors about Ruby and her daughter. Soldier husband dead, although there was no war. Husband working in Detroit and how he never came back again. At home there was the Bible, with underlined verses about good women, how they rose up at the break of day. At night her daddy sat on the porch and fiddled hymns about thorny crowns and glassy seas before they all went to sleep.
That fall, Esther fainted, the guinea egg full to bursting, her face white as a plate. Faith was miracles and deeds. It was giving in, giving way, lying down for it and saying nothing. It was the laying on of hands, but when Ruby stood by her bed with cool things, with rags and apple slices and her own cool fingers, Esther pushed her away. You and your hands, she said, see what they have wrought. And Ruby remembered like it was new again the day she was born. How Esther held her and imagined palms that had no lines at all. What to do with a child with no lifeline?
A scent rose in the rooms. The scent was of Esther’s decay and, Ruby feared, her own. Praise the Lord for the miracles He has wrought, Esther said as she turned her face to the wall.
Praise was memory, of that much she was sure. That time she stood in the garden and put ripe tomatoes in baby’s small hands. Or the time Miracelle’s hair in sunlight had threads of gold. She remembered it, again and again. The way his mouth tasted of tobacco and all salty. The way he’d pulled the long threads of her fingers through his lips, savoring the taste of desire and naming it her. And this child that was his, was she not the reward of such praise? All those afternoons of want and want, and here was the celebration, the hymn of rejoicing. The face, looking up. The child, saying her first words. Too much time was passing, and how quick, how quick. The flame of desire, a red ember flaming down, and Ruby longed to catch it before it disappeared.
In town on the street a man said to her, “No telling what a woman like you might do.” Ruby allowed this was true.
What she did not say was that now when she thought of God, she thought of the power of her own hands. She laid her hands out flat and reached and reached. What would happen if her hands blossomed into pathways, ways out, highways she could follow to places she could now only imagine?
She began to think of the world that way, as a possibility. Go with me, little girl, she said as she reached to touch her daughter’s hair, made her laugh. So she began to plan it. The dresses inside the suitcase. The tiny folds of socks and blankets and baby things. What to take and what to leave behind. Her tarot cards in a box in a drawer, left behind, a future she might come back to if she ever came home again.
Take after him and don’t you ever come back, her daddy said.
The night before she left, she sat on the floor in the corner of the room and cried for it. The girl she had been. The self she had never been and still wanted. She saw herself beside him in the far reaches of those afternoons, how she had named it, the thing between them. Love. It was for that she would give up everything.