Ruby’s mouth opened wordlessly and her fierce expression vanished. For a half-second she was motionless; then she sprang from the chair. “Not me!” she shouted. “Not me!”
Laverne stopped and only watched her with the wise look.
“Not me!” Ruby shouted. “Oh no not me! Bill Hill takes care of that. Bill Hill takes care of that! Bill Hill’s been taking care of that for five years! That ain’t going to happen to me!”
“Well old Bill Hill just slipped up about four or five months ago, my friend,” Laverne said. “Just slipped up…”
“I don’t reckon you know anything about it, you ain’t even married, you ain’t even…”
“I bet it’s not one, I bet it’s two,” Laverne said. “You better go on to the doctor and find out how many it is.”
“It is not!” Ruby shrilled. She thought she was so smart! She didn’t know a sick woman when she saw one, all she could do was look at her feet and shoe em to Rufus, shoe em to Rufus and he was an enfant and she was thirty-four years old. “Rufus is an enfant!” she wailed.
“That will make two!” Laverne said.
“You shut up talking like that!” Ruby shouted. “You shut up this minute. I ain’t going to have any baby!”
“Ha ha,” Laverne said.
“I don’t know how you think you know so much,” Ruby said, “single as you are. If I was so single I wouldn’t go around telling married people what their business is.”
“Not just your ankles,” Laverne said, “you’re swollen all over.”
“I ain’t going to stay here and be insulted,” Ruby said and walked carefully to the door, keeping herself erect and not looking down at her stomach the way she wanted to.
“Well I hope
“I think my heart will be better tomorrow,” Ruby said. “But I hope we will be moving soon. I can’t climb these steps with this heart trouble and,” she added with a dignified glare, “Rufus don’t care nothing about your big feet.”
“You better put that gun up,” Laverne said, “before you shoot somebody.”
Ruby slammed the door shut and looked down at herself quickly. She was big there but she had always had a kind of big stomach. She did not stick out there different from the way she did any place else. It was natural when you took on some weight to take it on in the middle and Bill Hill didn’t mind her being fat, he was just more happy and didn’t know why. She saw Bill Hill’s long happy face, grinning at her from the eyes downward in a way he had as if his look got happier as it neared his teeth. He would never slip up. She rubbed her hand across her skirt and felt the tightness of it but hadn’t she felt that before? She had. It was the skirt—she had on the tight one that she didn’t wear often, she had… she didn’t have on the tight skirt. She had on the loose one. But it wasn’t very loose. But that didn’t make any difference, she was just fat.
She put her fingers on her stomach and pushed down and then took them off quickly. She began walking toward the stairs, slowly, as if the floor were going to move under her. She began the steps. The pain came back at once. It came back with the first step. “No,” she whimpered, “no.” It was just a little feeling, just a little feeling like a piece of her inside rolling over but it made her breath tighten in her throat. Nothing in her was supposed to roll over. “Just one step,” she whispered, “just one step and it did it.” It couldn’t be cancer. Madam Zoleeda said it would end in good fortune. She began crying and saying, “Just one step and it did it,” and going on up them absently as if she thought she were standing still. On the sixth one, she sat down suddenly, her hand slipping weakly down the banister spoke onto the floor.
“Noooo,” she said and leaned her round red face between the two nearest poles. She looked down into the stairwell and gave a long hollow wail that widened and echoed as it went down. The stair cavern was dark green and mole-colored and the wail sounded at the very bottom like a voice answering her. She gasped and shut her eyes. No. No. It couldn’t be any baby. She was not going to have something waiting in her to make her deader, she was not. Bill Hill couldn’t have slipped up. He said it was guaranteed and it had worked all this time and it could not be that, it could not. She shuddered and held her hand tightly over her mouth. She felt her face drawn puckered: two born dead one died the first year and one run under like a dried yellow apple no she was only thirty-four years old, she was old. Madam Zoleeda said it would end in no drying up. Madam Zoleeda said oh but it will end in a stroke of good fortune! Moving. She had said it would end in a stroke of good moving.
She felt herself getting calmer. She felt herself, after a minute, getting almost calm and thought she got upset too easy; heck, it was gas. Madam Zoleeda hadn’t been wrong about anything yet, she knew more than…
She jumped: there was a bang at the bottom of the stairwell and a rumble rattling up the steps, shaking them even up where she was. She looked through the banister poles and saw Hartley Gilfeet, with two pistols leveled, galloping up the stairs and heard a voice pierce down from the floor over her, “You Hartley, shut up that racket! You’re shaking the house!” But he came on, thundering louder as he rounded the bend on the first floor and streaked up the hall. She saw Mr. Jerger’s door fly open and him spring with clawed fingers and grasp a flying piece of shirt that whirled and shot off again with a high-pitched, “Leggo, you old goat teacher!” and came on nearer until the stairs rumbled directly under her and a charging chipmunk face crashed into her and rocketed through her head, smaller and smaller into a whirl of dark.
She sat on the step, clutching the banister spoke while the breath came back into her a thimbleful at a time and the stairs stopped seesawing. She opened her eyes and gazed down into the dark hole, down to the very bottom where she had started up so long ago. “Good Fortune,” she said in a hollow voice that echoed along all the levels of the cavern, “Baby.”
“Good Fortune, Baby,” the three echoes leered.
Then she recognized the feeling again, a little roll. It was as if it were not in her stomach. It was as if it were out nowhere in nothing, out nowhere, resting and waiting, with plenty of time.
A TEMPLE OF THE HOLY GHOST
ALL WEEK END the two girls were calling each other Temple One and Temple Two, shaking with laughter and getting so red and hot that they were positively ugly, particularly Joanne who had spots on her face anyway. They came in the brown convent uniforms they had to wear at Mount St. Scholastica but as soon as they opened their suitcases, they took off the uniforms and put on red skirts and loud blouses. They put on lipstick and their Sunday shoes and walked around in the high heels all over the house, always passing the long mirror in the hall slowly to get a look at their legs. None of their ways were lost on the child. If only one of them had come, that one would have played with her, but since there were two of them, she was out of it
