A Virtuous Ruby (7 page)

Adam shook his head. “You don’t need to speak, Mr. Travis. You need to remain calm or you will reinjure yourself.”

“Ruby, they don’t want you to do what you do. They keep me alive to tell you. Stop.”

“Take this.” Adam poured a sedative down his throat. The liquid made the man quiet down and fall asleep. Travis needed to rest so he could heal. Travis’s voice, coupled with what Lona and John said earlier, made him even more resolute. He had never been so sure of anything in his life. Ruby had to get out of that small horse town.

As soon as possible.

And he had to help her.

Somehow.

Chapter Six

When Adam and John helped Travis to the back room, he used his sterilized instruments to work over Travis, but the blood continued to froth and foam from the corner of his mouth. At first, Mags stayed in the small back room with him and Ruby, wiping the blood up, but each time Mags did so, her eyebrows met in the middle of her brown forehead, which wrinkled in worry and consternation.

“Mags, you might be more comfortable in the big room.” Adam adjusted the stiffened ragchest cast that he made for Travis to try to bring his cracked ribs together for them to heal.

“I want to stay. If- if-if something happens.”

Without him even uttering a word, Ruby, so much shorter than her younger sister, guided her from the room with authority and care.

Having Ruby with him was like having another pair of hands. He could accomplish so much more with such assistance. So just what did he want to accomplish in his practice? He hadn’t given it much thought before because his efforts had been so focused on his education. Strange, but he didn’t realize until he came to Winslow that he could actually help people.

How could this simple country woman have such poise? She was just a midwife who didn’t know proper procedure.

But she could be taught.

Adam turned his attention back to Travis and he could see that Travis had slipped into sleep. He was not in pain, which was good because he would not live very long. Travis would be his first death in this community and he didn’t want to be blamed for it. Maybe it would be better if he left for the steel mills opportunity he had been putting off in Pittsburgh, tending to the Negro workers there.

Ruby tip-toed into the room. “He not long for this world is he?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Big round tears slipped down her brown freckles. “It’s all my fault. That’s what people will say.”

“You didn’t attack him.”

“I had the meeting again. After I had been attacked before.”

“What do you think that your meetings will achieve?”

Her large brown eyes fixed on him. “My mother’s little brother, Arlo, he came here to live a few years ago. He needed a job and Daddy thought he could help on the farm. But he wasn’t too good with farm work.”

“Not everyone is.” Adam could well sympathize.

Her eyes grew pointed and pieced him. “There aren’t a lot of choices for a Negro man down here. So Uncle Arlo went to the mill. He could see how things were there. He said things weren’t right. Said if the men stood up and asked for more, Paul Winslow could make things better. That’s when the lynchings started. People didn’t know at first that Paul Winslow was behind it. Then…”

He went and stood next to her. “Yes?”

“I was attacked. By David after I was coming home from a delivery. He acted as if he was my friend, like always, but then he got mean and said things. I didn’t know him. I think he had some liquor or something.”

Adam touched her arm and a surge of feeling shot through him. “You don’t have to continue, Ruby, if you don’t want to.”

She took a deep calming breath and he pulled his arm away. He shouldn’t have touched her, but she seemed so upset. He wanted to take that upset away, just as when she thought something bad would happen to her son. “The attack, Uncle Arlo knew, was ’cause they were trying to come for him by getting me since I was helping him spread the word about organizing and making a NAACP chapter down here. He dared to go to Paul Winslow and say something to him. He was shot in the woods after he was coming home from working at the mill one day. I found his body.”

“That had to be hard.”

“It was hard that he never got the chance to say goodbye. He kept saying to us that the mill wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.” She turned her eyes to the bed where Travis lay. “He and Travis were friends. They were about the same age and Travis wanted to pay court to Mags, the first one of us somebody wanted the right way.”

A realization seemed to shadow across her pretty features and reshape them into pure sorrow. Her hands covered her face and she began to sob.

There was something in a doctor’s training about remaining calm. Stay apart from the situation. But the sight of her pretty face and rearranged freckles hurt him to his core and he slipped an arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry. I’ve tried to make him as comfortable as possible in these last hours. He shouldn’t linger long or be in pain.”

“What kind of place is this where a man can’t even come to a friend’s house to hear about improving himself?”

That was the question wasn’t it? “Ruby, I haven’t been here very long, but it seems to me that you have some choices. You don’t have to stay here. You can go somewhere else. There can be other places where Solomon might have a better chance in life, better educational opportunities. These terrible murders, and your circumstance, it’s a way to control you so you don’t disrupt things.”

Ruby took her hands from her face. “What other place? We were born here. Our Daddy has farmed this land. It’s his. He’s one of the most prosperous Negro farmers in Becker County. Where we going to go that’s better than that?”

He had no answer for her.

“Something has to be done here. Change got to happen. Paul Winslow is your daddy. Maybe you can do something to help.”

“I don’t know him that well. And frankly, after some of the things I’ve seen and heard, I don’t know if I want to.”

She stiffened and he slipped his hold off of her shoulder.

“God brought you here to help us. We need help and you, his Negro son, you can talk to him, make him see.”

“I’m a doctor, Ruby. I treat people’s bodily injuries, not their work circumstances.”

She lowered her hands to her sides and went to the other side of the bed. “I thought you would say that.” She moved to her knees next to Travis and grasped his hand. “Trav. I’m sorry. I didn’t think they would go for you. They should have gone for me, and they didn’t. I’m sorry.”

His presence was a sudden interruption into a conversation that he had no part of, but then she clasped her hands together and prayed in a firm, sure voice: “Dear God. Please help us. You give me this boy to raise. Help me to raise him right in your ways. Help me to provide for him, so he could get a good education. Help me to make this a better world for him here in Winslow. Please. And help bring Travis into your arms. Peacefully.”

She lowered her head onto Travis’s arm and cried some more. As uncomfortable as her outburst made him, Adam’s job was to stay and tend to Travis. The man’s breath began to slow. It seemed as if Ruby was going to get her wish. Even though Travis had been sleeping very peacefully, suddenly his body jerked and went limp. Adam went to him and pressed the points of his body where his pulse should have been, checking for signs of life. Nothing. “I’m sorry, Ruby. He’s gone.”

“I’ll go get Mags.” Ruby sprang up and wiped at her face.

As she left, Adam pulled one of the bedsheets up onto Travis’s body. Ruby and Mags came into the already cramped back room crying, leaning on one another and Adam stepped back. His function here as a doctor was done, but seeing the death of this Negro man was sobering. How could someone be gone on the basis of what someone else had said? Too much time had passed, too many things had happened. Something had to change.

And then the idea came to him. Ruby could change. She could be educated and learn how to be clean and come away from midwifery.

He needed a nurse. She could help him.

If she wanted to.

She and her sister were so distraught now, they probably wouldn’t even know or understand what he proposed. Still, he was a light, literally and had to be that for her. Again, a shadow passed in his mind. He had been so distant from God for so long, but was his hand in this? Was this why he had come to Winslow? To make his father understand?

Travis had no family. He had worked to get one, though. The poor man had been paying such hard court to her sister in the past year, when he thought Mags might marry him. Would Mags have married him? Ruby looked over at Mags being surrounded by family, as she sobbed.

Mags was too young to get married, she had insisted. She needed to finish high school by correspondence, just like she was trying to do.

But had she any right to interfere in Mags’s life? She made her come with her to tell the mill workers about the meetings, just so Mags would get a glimpse of Travis, or was it the other way around?

A cold feeling came over Ruby.

Had she engineered Travis’s death so he wouldn’t or couldn’t marry Mags?

Since no one was ever going to marry her. Ever.

Ruby folded her hands and went down on her knees in front of Travis’s freshly washed body. The heavy blows of her father’s hammer rang out as he constructed a quick casket for poor Travis, after Lona had washed him. In Winslow, these tasks fell to certain ones in the Negro community, since the undertaker in town was for the whites. They would hold a small funeral for him tomorrow as the sun set, with wake and funeral all in one day. A body wouldn’t hold long in hot, humid June Georgia weather.

The doctor was out with her father, helping him to build the casket. What kind of purpose would he be able to serve? Did he know anything about carpentry? As Ruby shifted from Travis, she looked out the back door to the barn. She could see that Adam was helping. Amazing.

Who was this man who knew so much about doctoring and didn’t want to help out his fellow Negroes? A Moses and didn’t know it.

Moses had his own troubles too. Maybe it was the same for the doctor.

Soon, her father came out of the barn carrying the casket and the men laid Travis in the hastily-constructed casket with care. Lona had put a white cloth on the dining room table and they lifted the casket onto some sawhorses. People started to come and lay their food offerings on the table, which had been pushed into another corner with the davenport and the chairs.

And the moment came that Ruby dreaded the most.

She had no reason to encounter the pastor of First Water Christian Church ever since it had become known in the community that she was going to have a baby. She had not been to church. Now he was going to have to come here.

And here he was. Reverend Charles Dodge big as well as tall, but not as tall as the doctor. Where had that come from? He used his imposing figure to make it known and understood that he was a very important somebody in this small community. Ruby wouldn’t have minded that so much if only he didn’t use his power to make her feel worse.

Her mother was all too keen to help the minister in. She had not been able to see to her duties as the church superintendent because of Ruby’s shame. “Come on in, Reverend. Some folks brought a parson bird and I know you’re fond of chicken.”

Ruby stood next to the door where Solomon slept in her parents’ room so that no one should disturb him. He wasn’t anyone’s business anyway.

“Thank you, Sister Bledsoe. It was a shame to hear from Bob about poor Travis.” He stood next to where Mags sat in a chair, staring off into space with hot tears streaming down, leaving white tracks of salt on her brown face. “He was a good man.”

“He was. Good to the church, the community and for God.”

“A shame.” Reverend Dodge intoned, so that the family and the arriving families could hear, “If he would have been in the mind to stay at home and not cause trouble here in the town, he would still be alive with us today.”

The room fell silent.

Was everyone looking at her?

Yes.

Where was the doctor?

She would look for him. Solomon would be fine.

Keeping her eyes and countenance downcast, she walked out of the front door around the side of the house and stood under the window to hear Solomon if he cried. Maybe it would be better to hide from people as they arrived to give their condolences. Maybe that was what Mags would want. Where would she go to give her sister some peace?

She felt a familiar hand on her shoulder, urging her back to the edge of the porch. Mags slid her long, graceful body next to Ruby’s. Ruby’s short legs swung, but Mags’s narrow feet were firmly placed on the ground. Naturally, Ruby slid an arm around Mags’s shoulder and hugged her hard. “I’m so sorry, Mags. Please forgive me.”

Mags laid her head on top of Ruby’s. “What for?”

“Like Reverend Dodge said. If he hadn’t been trying to make things better in the mill with me, he wouldn’t be dead. He would be alive and you could get married.”

A tear fell on her face from above. “That’s the problem. I did poor Travis wrong.”

“What you mean?”

“He was older than me, and I just…well, I didn’t want to be married yet.”

Ruby gripped her sister’s hand as she looked at her. “You what?”

“I’m only sixteen. I want to go to high school. Like you. Travis wouldn’t have wanted that for me and I…well, I liked him well enough.”

Ruby embraced her sister. “I thought you was mad at me. For killing him. With all of my activities.”

“That’s what Uncle Arlo was trying to do. Him and Trav were friends and they was going to make things better. Now they both dead.”

“Hard to believe isn’t it.”

“They both dead and you, you got hurt. Ruby, please, don’t do nothing no more, okay?”

“Mags, what you saying?”

“I’m saying, you got to stop this. Things won’t change in that mill. Paul Winslow going to have things there the way they going to be.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know. I’m going down in the morning and take up Travis’s job.”

“No. Please, Mags. Don’t do that.” Ruby’s heart thudded hard.

“Someone will be applying for that job after the funeral. I’ll go in the morning, so Paul Winslow will see I’m serious.”

“I don’t want any of you down in that mill.”

Mags’ smile crawled across her face, but her eyes were sad. “One of us was bound to be in there after a time, Ruby. There’s too many of us. Might as well be me.”

“What about high school?”

“You keep studying and share with me what you know at night. I’ll get there. Just like you been doing. And with both of us doing, then maybe Net and Em and Delie won’t have to go in that mill. But now, somebody got to. I’ma do it. For Travis.”