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Ruby Barlow turned off the radio as she heard the familiar fussing of her sister from down the hall. Quickly, she made her way to the pantry and retrieved the double-barrel shotgun from where it stood, day in and day out. Fitting two fresh shells into the barrels, she recalled the time she’d held an escaped convict at bay and felt her breath quicken. Will had been proud of her that day, Mack, too. In fact, she’d been the talk of the county. So long ago, she thought now.
She leaned the gun inside the pantry again and dropped two extra shells into her apron pocket. “Keep a close watch, Whitey,” she whispered to the dog at her side. “There’s escaped convicts on the run.”
The snow-white dog, looking to be a blend of spaniel and hound, was crippled with arthritis, but picking up on Ruby’s excitement, its eyes were bright with anticipation.
Hearing the sound of a car engine, she looked down the dirt track toward the county road and watched as a pickup drove past. She was expecting two people this day; her son Mack was driving in from the Texas Panhandle and Betty Winslow had a standing appointment for a permanent wave. Leaving the door ajar so Betty could walk in, she made it back into the kitchen just as her sister was getting seated at the table.
“Did you have a good rest, Sister?” she asked as she began setting up for Betty’s permanent. Her own hair, more white than brown now, stuck in clumps to her forehead. Damp marks shaped like half moons stained the cotton shirt beneath her arms. “Maybe if you cut those afternoon naps short, you’d sleep better at night.”
Sister’s response had a sting to it. “Don’t know how a body’s supposed to sleep with all that noise on the roof!”
Sister’s given name was Pearl Anderson, but she was known to everyone as Sister. She had made a good living as a seamstress until recent times. Places like Walmart had done away with her skill. A throwaway society didn’t care about clothes that lasted. Six years Ruby’s senior, Sister had never married and moved in with Ruby when Will Barlow died twenty-five years before. She still did piecework for locals, some mending too, and made enough to supplement her Social Security.
“Noise on the roof,” Ruby repeated, feeling weary. She held her voice level, reaching deep for patience. “Those raccoons must be at it again. I’ll have Mack trim some of those branches over the house so they can’t climb up there.”
Sister exhaled loudly. “If I told you once I told you a hundred times, it’s not coons!”
Taking a measured breath, Ruby said, “Well now, I spotted what looks to be coon droppings in the garden so I know they’re in the neighborhood—”
“Coons don’t talk English! You need to call that sheriff again.”
“Why you need to call the sheriff?” Betty Winslow walked into the kitchen, an anxious look on her face. “You seen those cons—”
“Coons,” Ruby said quickly, hitching her eyebrows at Betty. “Sister’s hearing coons on the roof.”
“Oh, coons,” Betty said, hitching her eyebrows, too.
“Mack’s due in today,” Ruby went on. “He’ll trim those low branches off. That’ll fix the problem.”
“Coons . . . don’t . . . talk . . . English—”
“C’mon Betty,” Ruby said, cutting short Sister’s reprimand. “I’m all set up.” She welcomed Betty’s intrusion on a conversation that had become a broken record.
As Betty sat down, she laid a zippered calico bag on the table with the name BARLOW stitched on the outside. “Brought your mail while I was at it. Nonny left a bag of persimmons, too.”
“Oh, that girl.” Ruby smiled as she examined the persimmons. “Nice and ripe. That hard freeze was just what they needed.”
“There’s something important inside the mailbag,” Betty went on. “Official looking. Might need to take a look at it—” She stopped suddenly, her eyebrows knit. “And there’s a postcard . . . addressed to your mama.”
Ruby’s jaws dropped. “My mama—” Pulling the postcard from the bag, she pitched it in the wastebasket, unread.
“Mama got mail?” Sister quickly retrieved the card. “Well, I swan. Her high school’s having a homecoming.” She made a clucking sound as she sat down again. “Someone needs to let them know she’s gone.”
“What’s that other one say?” Betty asked, pointing her chin at the envelope Ruby pulled from the pouch.
Ruby put her attention on the oversized envelope. She hated the way Betty stuck her nose into her business, but what could she do? Betty was a steady customer and these days, she needed every one of those she could get.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” she said, tearing open the envelope. “Just the renewal of my beautician’s license.” She handed the document to her sister. “Here, make yourself useful. Replace that old license on the wall there with this here new one.”
Ruby had hung two framed documents on the wall as someone would hang college degrees as proof of proficiency. One was her state beautician’s license. The other was a yellowed fragment that read, Oklahoma Law: Females are forbidden from doing their own hair without being licensed by the state. Many years ago, she’d ripped the page from a magazine she found at the nursing home while visiting a friend. Lots of people dropped off magazines at the home. An attorney must have donated that particular one, she’d decided, probably one of those rich shysters who deducted donations of useless magazines off his income tax. Though Ruby considered herself as devout a Christian as the next, she felt no guilt in lifting the page. She told herself that someone whose heart was in the right place wouldn’t take magazines to an old folk’s home. Anyone with a grain of sense would know that old people’s eyes were the first thing to go. Then it was their ears. And then, their minds. No, she’d decided, she was meant to find that magazine. A higher order had put it there. The Lord worked in mysterious ways.
“I’m done past useful,” Sister said, making no effort to retrieve the outdated license from the wall.
Ruby sighed. There were days lately when she found her sister especially vexing. It looked like today was going to be one of those days.
“Don’t talk nonsense,” she urged, retrieving the framed certificate from the wall. “We need to show people we’re legal. Besides, you forget I’m giving you a perm right after I finish up with Betty? Help me out here. Slip the back off this frame, put the new license on top of the old one.”
“Oh, all right, but you ask me, it’s a waste of time. Nobody’s gonna come out here to make sure two old crows like us are doing things legal.”
Ruby sighed again. As Sister fussed with the frame, she began to shampoo Betty’s bleached-out hair, noting the woman was in bad need of a tint.
“When can you color this stuff again?” Betty asked as if reading Ruby’s mind. “I’m thinking of going a lighter shade of blonde for the holidays. Maybe that rosy platinum color. What do you call it? You know, the one you put on Tootsie Turner’s hair?”
Lord help, Ruby thought, catching her breath. Tootsie would have a fit if she used Fawn Beige on someone else. Fawn Beige was her color.
Being a beautician required a good deal of diplomacy and Ruby was good at it. She couldn’t recall the last time she had ruffled a customer’s feathers. Recently, however, her patience had been taxed to the limit and she hoped she had enough left to appease Betty.
“Let me give some thought to the color, Betty. The right color.” She wrapped a towel around Betty’s head and walked her to the kitchen table. “Fawn Beige is all wrong for your complexion.”
“Oh?” Betty picked up a hand mirror and studied her coloring. “Maybe a henna rinse then. I always wanted to be a redhead. You know, like Lucille Ball. Might as well do it today—”
“Two weeks,” Ruby said, shutting down Betty’s cinematic fantasies. “Have to wait two weeks after a perm before putting on color. It’s a chemical thing.” When Betty opened her mouth to protest again, Ruby pointed to the new license that Sister was working on. “They wouldn’t have sent me that certificate, Betty Winslow, I didn’t know what I was talking about.”
Betty went silent, but within minutes found a new can of worms to kick over. “Oh, did I tell you I stopped to see your daddy on my way out? I think he’s taken a liking to the home.”
“Why, no such thing—” Ruby’s back stiffened to a rod. “He hates that place and I hate like everything I put him away like that. I’ve been thinking about bringing him back home, just like he did when he took his sister Ida out of Vinita.”
“Ida was crazy as a bedbug,” Sister said, not looking up from her framing job. “That’s why they put her there.”
Ruby stiffened again. “No such thing,” she repeated with emphasis. “Ida would just get withdrawn from time to time, what they call depressed these days. But other than that, not a thing wrong with her. Show me a body that doesn’t get depressed from time to time.”
“Well now,” Betty said, sounding conciliatory. “All I was supposing is maybe that’s why your daddy gets detached now and then.”
“Detached . . .” There was a pause in Ruby’s eyes. “Well, Pa’s always been a quiet man. No supposing to it, that’s just his way.”
“Since the war,” Sister said, nodding in agreement.
“What?” Ruby turned to look at Sister.
“I said, Pa’s been that way . . . since . . . the . . . war,” Sister said, voice elevating.
“And the way he keeps falling down.” Betty made clucking noises.
Sister duplicated the clucking. “That’s not good. Bones get brittle, older we get.”
“It’s called osteoporosis,” Betty went on. “Course, it’s worse for women than men. In any case, don’t think that would account for him being . . . detached.”
Ruby backed away from the table feeling as though she were listening to a conversation between strangers on a city bus, not two women she’d known all her life. “Well now, I thought that through.” She spoke loudly, as if calling out to someone that was outdistancing her. “All he needed was a walker, that’s all they’ve done for him at that home, give him a walker.”
“But . . . what about those night spells?” Betty said, frowning. “Would you call them depression?”
Ruby paused again, trying to gather her thoughts. “Don’t know what you’d call those, Betty, and those people at the home don’t either. So I don’t see any reason to leave him there.”
“Still and all, I’d give it some more thought.” Betty used the corner of her towel to funnel her voice away from Sister. “Sometimes things get passed on in the genes, and now that Sister’s having night spells, too—”
“What’s that you said?” Sister said, bristling. “You don’t want me to hear your tittle-tattle, just say so and I’ll leave the room!”
As the words blasted from Sister’s mouth, Ruby knew she’d had enough. “It is time you left the room, Sister. Go watch TV or take a nap. Better yet, work on mailbags.”
“But I’m not done with this license—”
“I’ll finish it later. Christmas is gonna be here before we know it, and you know how folks look forward to getting a new mailbag every year. Besides which, Nonny pays us good money to make those bags and we got lots to go. C’mon, I’ll help you get set up.”
“Guess I might as well,” Sister mumbled. “Almost time for my doctor show anyway.” She pushed her chair away from the table. “Can’t see as good as I used to, stitches show it, too. Everything’s wearing out at the same time.”
Ruby was overcome with guilt as she escorted Sister from the room. What’s come over me? she thought. I’m known for having the patience of Job. Many have told me so.
“Your embroidery’s still beautiful, Sister,” she said, feeling contrite. “And your hearing might be going but your hand’s still steady. Last time you was in, the doctor said you were healthy as a horse—”
“Like these young doctors know anything. I think maybe I caught sleep deprivation.”
“Wha—what? Where do you come up with these things?”
“On the TV! Most illnesses these days aren’t in the bones, they’re in the head.” Sister tapped her forehead. “That’s why people can’t sleep—though it doesn’t help when people are walking around on the roof either.”
Ruby’s shoulders slumped. Wordlessly, she turned on the television and clicked through channels until she found one that satisfied her sister. Making her way back to the kitchen, she began twisting Betty’s hair around plastic curlers. As the sound of the television went up several decibels, she let out a long sigh.
“What would we do without the TV,” Betty said, talking over the blare. “I just can’t stand to miss my favorite programs. Sounds like Sister’s much the same way.”
“Yeah, well,” Ruby mumbled. “I’m afraid Sister’s watching a program all her own these days.”
Her family’s business a sore spot, Ruby put her mind on other matters. “I heard on the radio, those escaped convicts are still loose. Report said nobody was killed though.”
“That’s right, on both accounts. I called Luther on my mobile phone on the way here. They’re setting up roadblocks and bringing in the dogs. Said the cons are leaving a trail a fool could follow. Must be city boys. Country boys would know how to cover their tracks.”
“No . . .” Ruby’s voice faded, sounding distant. “They’re just running scared. Don’t matter if you’re a city boy or country boy when you’re scared. They’ll bring them back covered in chiggers and ticks, give them a hot bath, add another year to their sentence and that’ll be that. Things will go back to being dull as dishwater around here.”
Swiveling, Betty looked up at her. “Why, that don’t sound like you, Ruby. You having a bad day?”
“Course not.” Ruby smoothed her hair from her face. “Just a lot on my mind, what with Daddy and all.” The plastic curlers clicked as her hands wound Betty’s hair around each one. Neat, symmetrical rows began to march across the woman’s head.
As Ruby finished up, she frowned suddenly. “Pa still making noises about Bill and Jack?” she asked. “When you saw him today, I mean.”
“Mentions it every time I go in.” Betty paused as Ruby slipped a plastic cap over her head. “He’s really got his shorts in a bundle this time, don’t he? Think Mack will be able to talk any sense to him?”
With the mention of her son’s name, Ruby’s spirits lifted. “You can take it to the bank. Those two were always thick as thieves. Anyone can do it, Mack can.”
“Thank Heaven for small blessings.” Betty took a seat under a hairdryer in the corner. “Buried next to Bill and Jack—where’d he get such an idea. He wouldn’t know any different if you buried him at the Hugh Low Cemetery. Once he’s dead, you can put him anywhere you want.”
Ruby’s mouth dropped open. “I can not! He had a legal paper drawn up.”
“You’re not seriously considering—”
“The law’s the law, Betty Winslow. I had Nonny Folsom check into it for me. It’s as legal as it can be.”
“You could just tear that paper up. Who’s to know?”
Ruby puffed up like an adder. “Destroy my daddy’s dying wish? Why, I’d never be able to live with myself, I did that.”
“Well, that’s what I’d do, it was me.”
Starting the hairdryer, Ruby sighed. Turning on the radio, she listened closely for an update on the prison break. It was just as Betty had reported. The convicts were still on the loose but the law was closing in. Sighing again, she glanced out the window toward the crossroads, hoping to see Mack’s car. But the road was quiet.
Becoming aware of an ache in her hands, she noticed the setting lotion had roughened them to an angry red. She reached for a jar on the counter, and as she massaged balm into the chemical-burned skin, she whispered, “Yeah, well, I’m not you, Betty Winslow.”
*****
The kitchen smelled of permanent wave lotion and pinto beans. A misty glow filled the room as heat from chemicals and the boiling pot on the stove steamed the evening air. The room’s only light fixture barely made a dent in the darkness. Pink- and blue-plastic curlers clinked as Ruby unwound them from Sister’s hair.
“How’s it look?” Sister ran thin fingers through the damp white curls on her head.
“Nice and soft, just the way you like it. Let’s dry you quick and set it tomorrow. Right now, it’s bedtime.”
“I won’t be able to sleep. I know I won’t.”
“Yes, you will.” Ruby handed her sister a juice glass. “I fixed you a toddy, just the way you like it. Three fingers, straight up. You’ll sleep good tonight.”
“Oh.” Sister sniffed the contents of the glass. “Thought we was out of blackberry brandy.”
“I had Betty pick up another case when she drove up to Muskogee last week.”
“Muskogee— Why don’t you go into town and buy it yourself? Nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of people drink for their health. Brandy’s medicinal, red wine, too. I saw it on the TV.”
Ruby debated responding at all. She’d had this conversation with Sister many times before. Medicinal or not, hardcore types would stop frequenting her beauty shop if they knew a drop of alcohol was in the house. They were in my shoes, she thought, they’d buy it by the boxcar.
“I’m a little tied down here in case you hadn’t noticed,” Ruby said, resorting to her stock response. “Besides, Betty doesn’t work for a living and it’s not out of her way to bring it out when she gets her hair done.” She set the timer on the hairdryer for fifteen minutes and turned it on HIGH, shutting down any further comment from Sister.
Busying herself, Ruby cleaned the kitchen. By the time she finished, Sister had finished her brandy and was nodding. Ruby led her to the bedroom and helped her into a nightgown.
“You going to bed now?” Sister asked. “If you’re a mind, you can crawl in next to me. Be nice if you were here, in case those people climb back up on the roof again.”
Ruby forced a smile. “Can’t tonight. Mack’s due in, remember? He’s running late and I’m a little worried so I’m gonna wait up.” She pulled the covers over Sister as if tucking in a child.
Hurrying back to the kitchen, Ruby retrieved the shotgun from the pantry and made her way to the front room. Propping the shotgun against the arm of a rocker, she went to the door to let Whitey out for his evening constitutional. She paused, taking in the crisp fall air, heavy and raucous with the hum of insects, and smiled.
“I’m half a mind to sit out here with you, Whitey,” she murmured. Instead, she closed the door on the old dog and eased into the chair. Picking up a brightly-colored cloth bag from a stack lying on the side table, she checked for the next name on a list and began to sew.
She rocked slowly as she stitched and listened closely to night sounds. She heard a dry limb scrape across the roof once and hoped it did not wake Sister. Between her father and sister, she hadn’t gotten a full night’s sleep in a year or better and she let the thought enter her mind that maybe there was something to what Betty had said about genes. She pushed the thought aside and willed herself to wind down, but the conversations of the day still roiled her mind. It was sometime later that she began to murmur a quiet prayer.
“Now Lord, you know I’m as anxious as the next to cross over to Beulah Land . . .” She paused to listen to noise on the roof, decided it was the tree limb again, then resumed her prayer. “And you know I don’t ask for much, but I’m right content with this life I got, at least for the time being. Besides which, there’s those depending on me.” She paused again, sighing deeply. “But Lord when my time does come, please let me leave this earth with all my faculties intact. I don’t mean to sound critical, but you might want to rethink this gene business. I know you place a lot of importance on who begat who, but to my thinking, there’s some of those genes we could just as well leave go with the ashes and the dust.”
Finishing with a quick “Amen,” she checked the clock on the wall and frowned. Time had passed more quickly than she’d supposed, and she began to wonder what stretch of highway her son was on and why he was running so late.
