Ruthie
THE ROOM WAS TOO SMALL FOR ALL THE PEOPLE IN IT. IT smelled slightly of
mould, the kind that comes with old houses, houses that hold happiness and grief in the walls. Houses where laughter has been absorbed into the cracks in the plaster and tears have washed the floors many times over. This one housed a family whose stories—the memories I had been denied—were captured in its scents. The bedroom had birthed the dreams of my brothers and banished their nightmares. I looked over to see a tiny man, his eyes dark and sunken, his skin loose and yellowed by jaundice. And as I looked at him, so small and ill, his eyes, milky with medication and exhaustion, tried to focus on me. Then he began to cry.
“Hello, Joe.” The words were carried to his ears on a sigh, heavy with anticipation and a little bit of dread. I had lost people, yes, but I had never been this close to death before. And I’d never been close to a brother, and yet here I was, one of the people standing in the doorway of the tiny room.
Mae took my hand and led me in, while Ben used a tissue to wipe the sweat from Joe’s face. Joe sputtered and turned away.
“Leave me be, Ben.” His voice was raspy and low. “Leave me be.”
He lifted his arm and took the tissue as I sat down at the edge of the bed. Joe winced and I stood, afraid I’d hurt him.
“Don’t worry, Ruthie. Everything hurts now. It’s no one’s fault; it’s just the way it is. I like having you sit there.” He lifted his hand again and pointed to the place I’d just vacated, inviting me to sit.
I sat softly, unsure of what I was supposed to say next. It was strange hearing someone else call me Ruthie. I’d said the name over and over again on my drive from Boston to Nova Scotia, whispered it, spoke it aloud, yelled it at one point. I’d even introduced myself as Ruthie when I stopped
at a diner in New Brunswick. It was starting to sound familiar, like it finally belonged to me.
“Ruthie? You okay?” Mae sat down on the end of the bed opposite me and beside Ben.
“Yes, sorry. I’ve just never been called Ruthie before.”
“You been called Ruthie many times, you just can’t remember. But don’t worry, we remember for you.”
“Yes. Sorry. You’re right, of course. I’m just feeling . . .”
“Overwhelmed,” Mae chipped in when I was quiet for too long.
“Yes, overwhelmed but so happy to be here. So very, very happy.”
“You just wait until Mom wakes from her nap. I hope the joy don’t kill her.”
Mae and Ben laughed, and Joe tried. I joined in, hoping some of my laughter would seep into the cracks of this house I’d been deprived of. I didn’t know if I belonged here, in this house, with these people. But then again, I didn’t know if I’d belonged in the house I was raised in. There was, of course, no way to know, and it was a waste of time thinking about it. But I did think about it anyway. I wondered how the story would have gone, had I not been sitting on that rock, had I not been so quiet and trusting. At the same time, I felt terrible thinking of it, for betraying the memory of my parents, for not telling my newfound family about Aunt June and Alice, about the love I did receive, no matter how different it was.
“Mae, would you grab Ruthie’s shoes?” Joe pointed to the closet.
Mae reached in and pulled down a tiny pair of boots. A sock doll hung over the tongue of one. A button eye was holding on by a single thread. Mae blew the dust away and handed them to me.
“Those were yours,” Ben said. “Mom wouldn’t let anyone throw them away.”
I ran my fingers over the leather, old and cracked. I found it hard to believe that I’d ever fit into something so small. Mae reached over and liberated the doll, straightened the hair made of yarn, old and frayed.
“They’ve been sitting on that shelf since you went missing. I took them down once to show them to Leah.” Joe was winded and closed his eyes to rest.
“Leah?”
“Leah is Joe’s girl. A good girl. Better than any of us, I bet,” Mae answered.
“She sure is,” Joe whispered, his eyes still closed. “You’ll get to meet her. She comes by all the time now.”
I wasn’t sure what I was meant to do with the boots or the doll. I set the boots beside me on the bed and, for reasons known only to a higher power, lifted the doll to my nose and breathed in deep. Five decades of sitting on a shelf in a place far removed from Maine had not diminished the scent of campfire and summer evenings. Maybe the doll only smelled of dust, but in that moment, it brought me back to a place where I belonged.
“I think Ben and I will go get dinner started, leave you two here for a bit to get reacquainted.” Mae stood and motioned for Ben to follow.
As he passed by, he knelt and grabbed me into a hug. “I knew it was you. In Boston. At the protest. I knew it was you.” Despite his age, Ben was still a strong man, and his hug was solid, like it could hold the world.
“I’m sorry that I didn’t know it was you.” I could feel the tears before they started to fall, the heat of them burning my insides, pushing the lump in my throat up and out of my eyes.
“None of this was your fault. You got nothing to be sorry for, Ruthie.
Nothing.” Ben stood and walked out behind Mae.
Logic told me that he was right, but logic didn’t really have a place in a situation like mine. I could have cried when Mother placed me in the back seat of that car. I could have run. I could have remembered. But I didn’t do any of those things. I had allowed myself to become Norma. Now, I wanted to be Ruthie. I clung to the doll.
“I dreamed about you. I couldn’t see your face, but I could hear you laughing.” Joe started to cough, and the effort of it wracked his entire body. I got a tissue and wiped away the spittle. Joe started to cry again.
“I hate that this is the way you are going to remember me. I hate it that you and my Leah will only ever know the sick Joe, the dying Joe.” He took a deep breath. “I wasn’t an angel—don’t let them tell you that after I’m gone. I ruined myself all by myself, but I just wish we could have known each other when I wasn’t like this. Before I got mad at the world.”
“I do, too. I don’t know why this happened to us, but I would like to get to know you now, hear your stories.” I pulled on the thread and the doll’s eye snapped back into place.
“And I would like to hear yours. You look like you have a nice life. At least there’s that. You were taken care of.” Joe’s eyelids started to flutter, and his breathing became slow. I watched him fall asleep. I reached across
and took his hand, so cold and thin. I held it that way until my back started to cramp and I had to let go. I placed it gently back on the bed and snuck out of the room, careful not to wake him. I closed the door quietly and headed down the hall. I could hear voices in the living room.
“Here, Mom, your tea. Ruthie is sitting with Joe a bit and then she’ll be out to see you,” Ben said.
I don’t know why, but I ducked into the bathroom. I locked the door and sat down on the toilet lid. It was plastic and it dented under my weight. Guilt, willed to me by my mother, began to surface, but I pushed it back, washed my face with cold water and headed to the living room.
My mother was small but not in the way Joe was. She was small with age, not sickness. When she saw me, she set her tea on the stand beside her chair.
“I prayed for you.” She extended her hands toward me, and I walked over and took them. “I prayed you would come home to us. Your father would have been so happy to see you.” She didn’t cry, but her deep-brown eyes glistened.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Ruthie,” she said, “what on earth have you got to be sorry for?” “I don’t know. I just feel that it’s the right thing to say.”
She started laughing. “Well, I will not accept an apology that’s not needed. Now give me a big hug, a hug worth fifty years of hugs.”
I bent down and hugged her, taking in her smell. It wasn’t woodsmoke and potatoes, but baby powder and rose shampoo, and it was the smell of my mother.
“I did remember you,” I told her as I took a seat on the ottoman, facing her. “But I thought I’d made it all up, that you were a dream. I dreamt about you and even wrote about you in my journals. My mother—I mean Lenore, my mother Lenore—she told me I was dreaming. That none of it was true.”
My mother, the woman who had given birth to me, who had known me and loved me longer than anyone on earth, smiled and dabbed a few tears as they made their way down her cheek.
“I own a little place on a lake in Maine, not far from the berry fields, actually.” I paused to take a breath, to remember fully so she would know I’d loved her all this time. It was something she deserved. “And when I’m out there, standing with my feet in the water, staring at the moon, I can
smell you, I can hear your voice. And all these years, it’s confused me but also offered a strange sort of comfort.”
“I’m happy that you held on to something. It must have been so hard on you. I’m so sorry.” She started to cry harder.
“None of this is our fault,” I said, trying to comfort her.
She tried to smile. “I’m sad your dad never got to know you were okay. He was a good man. But I guess we’ll all be together someday in the great beyond, and he and Charlie will sure be happy to see you.”
I wasn’t a believer, but one thing my two mothers had in common, aside from their love of me, was their belief in a loving God. For them, these women who’d suffered so much, I acquiesced.
“There’s another soul waiting for us. I had a girl. A tiny, beautiful baby girl. She didn’t make it into this world, but she will be there with us in the next,” I said.
She leaned forward in her chair and took my hands. “What was her name?”
“Sarah.”
“Sarah,” she whispered, placing her forehead on my forehead. I’d never felt as loved as I did just then. “We will put her name in the family Bible, beside yours.”
It was after my first Saturday dinner with my family when my mother asked me to go to church with her. “I would love to introduce you to Father Michael.”
I was sitting on the ottoman, facing her. It was a habit I’d picked up quickly, a way to take in the mother I hadn’t known, a way to see her eyes when they were happy and understand her frown when something upset her. “I’d love to.” I wasn’t lying. While I’d never liked church as a child,
this was different. I wanted to do something that meant so much to her.
The next morning, I dressed in the best clothes I’d packed and picked my mother up for church.
“No one else is coming?” I asked as she sat in the passenger seat of the
car.
“No, I told them to stay home. I want you all to myself today.” She
reached over and clasped my hand, and I let her hold it until she was ready to let go.
The church was a solid structure made of wood and freshly painted. A group of people were lined up outside, waiting to shake hands with the
priest. Most moved aside and let us go ahead. There were awkward glances, and I knew that the small town had been talking about my return. When I caught their eyes, they smiled shyly and turned away.
“Father Michael, this is my daughter Ruthie.”
He took my hands in his. “Well, the good Lord has brought you home. I’m so happy to see you here with your mother. She has never stopped talking about you and remembering you. I feel like I know the little girl you once were just through her stories.”
I wanted to pull my hands back, but I didn’t want to be rude. They were getting sweaty, but the look of joy on my mother’s face meant I let him hold on a little bit longer. Finally, he let go, and we walked into the church. The interior was dark with wood and deep-blue stained glass. It was cooler than it was outside, and it smelled of incense, old bread and stale grape juice mixed with the perfumes favoured by the elderly. The service was long and unfamiliar, but I liked sitting there with her, her hand in mine, listening to her aged voice quiver when she sang, seeing her nod and smile when something in the service pleased her.
“Let’s go for lunch. My treat.” She was radiant in her mauve pantsuit and matching lipstick, fresh from the word of God.
“Okay, where are we going? Remember that I don’t know my way around. You’re the navigator.”
“That’s not a problem. Just turn left and keep going until we see the water. Up over the mountain.” I pulled out and waved to the bystanders apparently still intrigued by my presence among them.
As we drove out of town, she seemed to come alive with stories. As we passed farmhouses and open fields, she told me all about the Ruthie I had been.
“I remember your birth, you know. All these years later, I remember it like it was yesterday. You were just a small thing, all covered in gunk, but you had a full head of thick black hair. I swear I could’ve braided it the moment you were born.” She laughed at her own joke as we made our way up the side of the mountain until the land flattened out again and the trees that lined the road gave way to more farms and open fields.
“Even though you were a December baby, I had you right under the tree where generations of Indian babies have been welcomed into this world. It was cold, but we had a fire going and lots of tea. You took a while, but you were worth it. My last baby and the last born under that tree. Your dad
cleaned you up with heated water scented with pine needles. You smelled just like Christmas.”
“Funny.” “What’s funny?”
“I’ve always celebrated by birthday on August 23. That was the day my mother, Lenore, said I was born.”
She was quiet for a while, looking out the window, watching the world go by.
“That was the day you went missing. One of the worst days of my life.
Makes sense she would choose that day, I guess.”
In front of me, the land started to slope down toward the water. The blue of the bay was a backdrop to the green of the land. We came to a sharp corner and turned right, following the shoreline. Ahead of us, I could see the top of a lighthouse, painted with thick black and white horizontal stripes. A few cars were parked along the road, and people were sitting at picnic tables, eating out of cardboard dishes.
“Best fish and chips around. Comes right off the wharf.” She pointed to where a few fishing boats were tied up and bouncing on the waves. The air was cooler here than in the Valley, and the smell of creosote and sea water mixed with fried fish filled my nose. We ordered our lunch through a window cut out of the side of the lighthouse. A plaque told me that it was still a functioning lighthouse but also a takeout restaurant and a post office. For just a moment, I thought of Mark and how he would have found this charming. We found a picnic table with an umbrella and sat down to eat.
“Tell me about my father. If it’s okay.”
“Oh, it’s more than okay. I could talk about him forever.” She took a bite of her fish and smiled at me. “Good, right?”
I had to admit it was delicious.
“I met your dad in town. He was visiting his sister Lindy before she married and moved down the line. He was on holiday from the Indian school, and I was with my father. He was a carpenter who got hired to build houses. Even though he was Indian, people hired him. His work spoke for itself. Lindy and my dad knew each other. I don’t know how, but they did, so we went over for some deer stew, your aunt Lindy’s specialty, and there was your father. He was so handsome and tall. I couldn’t stop looking at him. I was fifteen years old and instantly in love. He told me later that the moment I walked into Lindy’s kitchen, he knew he was going to marry me.”
She had some tartar sauce on her chin, and I reached across the table and wiped it off. She smiled the way a mother smiles at a well-behaved child.
“He had to go back to that school for one more year, but we wrote letters. I tried to keep them, but the bugs got at them, and they turned to dust. But I remember some of the stuff he wrote. He was smart, too. He left the Indian school when he turned sixteen, and came and asked my dad if he could marry me. Got himself a job at the mill before he dared. Wanted to show that he was a man up to the task of being a husband.”
My fish and chips were getting cold. I was too interested in the story to focus on my food. Behind us, the tide was going out.
“Lindy taught me to sew, and I did that for a while until Ben came along.” She was happy telling me these stories, and I wanted to remember them.
When we finished our meal and had ice cream cones in our hands, we sat on a bench and watched the water retreat and the seagulls fight for discarded hot dog buns and potato chips.
“Were they good to you? This other family?” she asked, between licks of vanilla ice cream.
“Yes, they loved in their own way. I was taken care of.”
“Good.” She paused. “Maybe someday I can forgive them.”
That night, back at my motel room, after I had scribbled everything she’d said down and my hand was aching, I called Aunt June. I had asked her to come on this trip with me, but she said it wasn’t her place. She said she’d like to hear about it when I had the time.
“Hey, Aunt June.”
“Hey, Norma, sweetheart.” She waited for me to speak.
“They are so lovely, Aunt June.” I started to cry again. “I’m just a messy ball of tears. I don’t think I’m going to have many left if I keep this up.” I sniffed into the phone.
“Let them flow, Norma—or—”
“Norma, Aunt June. Just call me Norma.”
“Let those tears flow. Alice always said that holding in tears is like holding in pee—it’s gonna hurt eventually, so you might as well let them go as soon as you feel them.”
“Did Alice really say that?” I laughed.
“Well, she could have. You’d listen to wisdom if you thought it came from Alice.”
“I listen to you, too, Aunt June.” “Tell me about them, then.”
I told her everything, a complete playback of the last few days, complete with tears and laughs and the sadness of Joe’s condition. I told her about the boots and the doll that now sat propped up against a pillow in my motel room, about my real birthday. I told her about the brown eyes of my mother, the wisdom of my sister, Mae, and the quiet strength of my brother Ben. I told her I was something called Mi’kmaw, and Ben and Mae promised to teach me what that meant. I told her that my brown skin and dark eyes were not an anomaly in that house. Aunt June hmmed and exclaimed at the right places, sighed and laughed when she was supposed to. It was almost midnight, and my body was worn out by the time I was ready to hang up the phone.
“I love you, Aunt June.”
“I love you, too. Sweet dreams.”
DESPITE THE LATE night, I got up with the sun. I made a cup of coffee in the little motel coffee maker and headed back to the house. Mae met me at the door.
“Come on in. Want to help make breakfast?”
Only Mae was awake, and the house was quiet. She handed me a couple of potatoes.
“First words you need to know in Mi’kmaw are tapatat and pitewey.
Potato and tea.” She laughed and handed me a peeler.
I repeated the words until I was sure I would remember them. “You speak . . .”
“Mi’kmaw? Nope. No one around here does anymore. Mom and Dad used to, but I think it faded from her the older she got. Never taught it to us. We used to know some of the swear words, but even those have been lost to me. Me and Ben are trying, but it’s hard. But everyone knows tapatat and pitewey.” She laughed again. “You can learn with us.”
“I’d like that.” I looked down at my hands, wet with potato starch, and continued to peel. “Mae . . .” I paused, trying to think of the right words. “Do you think it’s weird I never knew, or even suspected, that I was Indian? Should it be something a person just knows?”
“Well, there’s a loaded question for this early in the morning.” We both laughed. “No. White folks been trying to take the Indian out of us for centuries. Makes sense you wouldn’t remember. But now that you know, you gotta let people know. You gotta try to feel it. Can’t let the bastards win. Gotta reclaim what was taken away. We all gotta. And it starts with knowing that pitewey means ‘tea.’”
They laughed a lot, this family of mine. Even when the conversation was serious, they laughed. It was so new to me, all this emotion just out in the open.
Mae made tea while I peeled enough potatoes for all of us, cutting them small for hash browns. Homemade bread sat in the middle of the table, and Mae fried bacon. I made a plate and was about to take it down the hall to Joe, when Ben came around the corner carrying him.
“I want to eat at the table, like a family,” Joe said.
Ben placed him beside me. When everyone was seated, my mother said grace. My other mother, despite her dedication to the church, had never made us say grace. This was new to me. It was a short verse, and then the clatter of a family eating together filled my ears. Ben helped Joe, who was having difficulty getting the food to stay on his fork. It was such a tender thing to watch, a man feeding his brother, wiping his chin when bacon grease dripped.
“Hello?” The front door closed and a young woman, in her late twenties, if I were to guess, walked into the kitchen. She bent down and kissed Joe on the top of the head.
“Morning, Dad. Morning, Kiju.” She kissed my mother on the head. “Aunt Mae, Uncle Ben.” She looked quickly to me before taking a piece of bacon off Mae’s plate and popping it in her mouth. “You must be my aunt Ruthie.” She reached across the table to shake my hand.
“And you must be Leah.” “Guilty.”
Ben moved over, and Leah sat by Joe, taking the fork and picking up where Ben left off, stabbing a hash brown and feeding her father. Joe swallowed hard and took a sip of tea.
“You and Leah are kinda in a similar situation. We just met a couple months ago. Lots of catching up to do and not a lot of time to do it.” Joe tried to laugh, but it came out as a cough. When he got his breath back, he said, “No one finds my death funny except me, I guess.”
ON A COOL and cloudy morning about a week and a half into my stay, Joe and Mom were napping, Ben and Mae had gone shopping, and I was alone for the first time in the house where I spent my first years. I examined the photo of the family. The little girl that was me was squinting into the sun, and handsome Charlie had a smile so big you couldn’t help but feel joy in looking at it. I found the photo I had sent them, the one with the frown Aunt June thought was adorable. Someone had placed it in an album among the photos of Ben, Mae, Charlie and Joe. There I was, pasted in and behind plastic, like I had never been absent. I was on the verge of tears when the door opened, and Leah walked in. We hadn’t been alone yet, the two of us. But we were both so new to Joe that both of us ached for more time.
“They abandon you?” She laid her jacket on the back of a chair.
“No, shopping and napping. Your dad is asleep, but I’m sure he would want you to wake him.”
“No, let him sleep. I think it’s the only time he gets relief from the pain.”
Leah sat down beside me and started telling me about the photos. She told me all about her childhood weekends spent here with her grandparents. She told me about my father, who was quiet but strong, tall even in old age. He’d taken her hunting, taught her how to make rabbit snares out of twigs, how to play the fiddle. She missed him. I did as well, but not in the same way. She’d had more than two decades with him, and I only had photos. She told me about her mother, Cora.
“They’re still married. Did you know that?” “I didn’t.”
“Yup. He disappeared for so long, and when postcards came, they were from all over the place. They found him once when he was out West, but he wouldn’t come home. Then by the time they found out he was in Maine, Kiju decided it was best to leave him be.”
“Why wouldn’t he come back for you?”
“He didn’t know about me for a long time. And my mom wanted it that way, and Kiju said that he was a lost soul, and lost souls have to find their own way home.”
I reached over and took her hand.
“I think he holds back sometimes when we talk. I think he’s afraid he’ll say something that will make me go away. I can’t seem to convince him that I’m here for as long as he is.”
I SEEMED TO fit in so quickly, almost like I’d never been lost to them and them to me. Soon, I was taking my shift with Joe, sleeping in the bed across from him, listening to his breathing, difficult and shallow, getting him water when his mouth was dry, making sure he had the right medications at the right time. He fought it, saying it wasn’t my burden to bear, but helping him felt right to me.
The sun was coming up one morning and I was lying there, looking up at the ceiling, watching the dust dance on a sunbeam, when Joe cleared his throat.
“I think we should go for a drive,” he said.
I sat up, leaning on my elbow and facing him. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. Wouldn’t it be painful for you?”
“I don’t care about that anymore. I’d rather be moving, be living in the short time I have left. I know my time is coming up any day now. So, let’s go for a drive.”
Later that morning, after much debate, Ben strapped Joe into the passenger seat of his car, with pillows all around him to keep him as comfortable as possible, and we set off. Mae and I sat in the back, and Ben drove. Leah stayed with her grandmother, waving to us from the front step as we made our way down the long gravel driveway.
“You good, Joe?” Mae asked, placing her hand on his shoulder. Joe breathed hard. “I’m good.”
He was lying, but I’d come to understand that there was no arguing with a dying man.
We drove all day down some of the very same roads I had taken with Mark so many years before. Some looked familiar and others were new. After lunch, we stopped by the side of a dirt road where the ruins of a small house reached up out of its foundation. The tendrils of a lovely vine had wrapped themselves around empty door frames and broken glass. The lawn was overgrown with wildflowers and tall grass. It was sad but beautiful at the same time.
“This was Aunt Lindy’s place. She’s been gone a long time now, but she could make the best deer stew.” Joe pressed the button to roll down his window, taking a deep breath, almost like he could smell Aunt Lindy’s kitchen. “She was Dad’s sister. The trail to our grandfather’s hunting camp is not far, but we can’t find it anymore.”
They were all quiet, lost in memories I didn’t have. But I stayed quiet, too, and in my own way, grieved their loss.
“She was a big woman. My God, she was big,” Ben said. “And full of love,” Joe chimed in.
“Full of stew and bread, more like it. But love, too, Joe. I agree.” Mae laughed a little.
“When she hugged, we were always afraid she was going to smother us. You were just a small thing, Ruthie. We were all scared that one day, her bosom just might swallow you whole.” Joe began to laugh, a raspy, deep laugh. Then Mae’s shoulders started to shake. Her mouth pursed, trying to hold in a laugh, but it burst open. Then Ben joined. Laughing, like yawning, is infectious, and I had no choice but to join in, too. Soon, we’d shed so many tears that it was hard to see. Mae slumped over, holding on to her belly.
“Stoooop.” She tried to stop laughing, but each time she caught her breath, she’d look at Ben and the laughing would start all over again.
“I gotta pee,” I managed to say between gasping breaths.
I had to pee alongside the road while my sister held her jacket up to hide me from the boys, the laughter still echoing off the trees.
“I peed on my shoes,” I yelled, which only made Mae laugh even more. When we got back into the car, the boys had calmed down, but after one look from Joe to Ben, it started all over again. We sat in that car and laughed so long that we forgot exactly what we were laughing at. It wasn’t
until Joe began to cough that we were able to settle down. “Thank you,” I said.
“For what?” Mae looked over at me.
“I don’t think I have ever laughed that hard in my life.”
We drove home the long way, up over North Mountain and along the waters of the Bay of Fundy. The clouds turned pink and purple in the setting sun. A cotton candy sunset, Mae called it. We rolled down the windows and let the cool, salty air wash our faces until our cheeks turned pink. We drove until the sky turned dark blue and then black, until the stars shone brightly above us. Then we stopped in a field, and Ben helped Joe out of the car. In the middle of the field, in the place where I was from, with the people I’d somehow always loved but never knew, we lay on a blanket and watched the stars crawl across the sky.
