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Oklahoma Pride
By Carolyn Harris
Ruby always wore ruby red lipstick, gardenia perfume and Maybelline eye-brow pencil. She’d plucked her brows to straighten them when she was fourteen–a mistake she’d regret for the rest of her life she told me.
I was about ten when I lived next door to Ruby and I thought she was the prettiest woman I’d ever seen–when her face wasn’t all smashed in from Lester’s fist. She had long dark hair and wasn’t much taller than me. Probably not much older either, now that I think about it. She just seemed older because she’d almost had a baby. Lester knocked her around one night in one of his drunken moods–that’s how she lost the Almost Baby. "Never get in the family way until you find a good guy that won’t kick you around–and never ever pluck your eyebrows," she warned me.
Lester was what you call an Outside Angel–Inside Devil. He might have been a devil outside too, but the sawmill didn’t let anybody get drunk and fight on company property. On payday, after the bar closed, things got pretty noisy in those misery boxes up and down Dead Pine Lane. Not at our house. Dad didn’t drink much–just a little Dago Red. When he wasn’t pulling greenchain, he fixed things out in the garage. Just sipped that Dago Red and worked on our battered old Ford. He bragged he could fix about anything.
I spied on Ruby and Lester–which wasn’t hard to do since I could have thrown a marble right out my bedroom window and dropped it in their bed if both windows were open. I could see her lucky panther she kept on the dresser and her grannie’s walking stick. Ruby didn’t have much, just that lucky panther–slick and black with a clock in his belly, her grannie’s walking stick, and her Oklahoma pride. Never lose your pride, she’d tell me, as she ran her finger along the panther’s smooth back and curved tail then twisted the little brass knob to catch the five minutes that disappeared each day.
I got so I hated payday–I knew that was the night I’d hear Ruby getting hurt again. That Oklahoma pride could pull the shades just before the bars closed, but nothing could stop his bellowing and her whimpers.
The last time I saw Ruby, I knew something was wrong. "I love you," she whispered, as she gave me her gardenia perfume then hugged me. The shades were down long before Lester got home. I remember squeezing my knees to my belly and jamming the pillow around my ears so I wouldn’t have to listen.
Three days later, the timekeeper came to Ruby’s house to see if Lester’d slipped out on his tag at the company store. "She tied him in the sheets like a damn mummy and beat the living hell out of him. The poor son-of-a-bitch will probably live," I heard my dad say.
Ruby didn’t leave with much–just that lucky panther and her Oklahoma pride. Her grannie’s walking stick was in so many pieces, even my dad couldn’t have fixed it.
I still have that bottle of gardenia perfume. The perfume’s gone, but if I breathe deep enough, I can still smell that Oklahoma pride.
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