Jane tried not to laugh, but she simply couldn’t help herself. “Of course, Ruth, any one of these conchie cowards could get hisself gassed to death or blown to bits in his very own bed by the Luftwaffe on any night of the week. They’re dropping the most insidious bombs now. Some are timed not to go off until after the firemen and rescuers arrive! You can be just as dead here on the home front as you are in the trenches fighting for a cause. And then there’s this, lovie: the fact of what it is that you and I and Maggie and Carrie and Molly do sixty hours a week: we help make the instruments of war. In the end, any of these five conchies might woo — and who knows? — perhaps even win the hand of a girl what helps Britain do that very thing he’s supposed to be against!”
“Life is full of ironies,” Ruth sighed. “And delusions. We could all be dead tomorrow, you know. And yet we go to bed each night expecting that fate will be kind to us for one night more — that we’ll rise the next morning to gather ourselves together to take the six-thirty to the Filling Factory. Your brother passes out after his binges, assuming that he too will rise to drink another day. Life goes on — life beautiful, life ugly and unseemly, and most people can only follow the pattern of life most familiar to them and act upon the instincts that go along with it. But I am not ‘most people.’ I am not the instinctive creature you are, Jane. I fancy something different from my life, something that has nothing to do with the men I’ve told you about — something which I cannot put into words. There is something missing inside me, but I don’t know how to fill the void.”
“Friendship with the four of us ain’t enough for you, Ruth — at least for now?”
Ruth patted the top of Jane’s hand — sweetly, not condescendingly. “For the present, you’re all more than enough, but it can’t be that way forever.”
“I understand. I do, Ruth. I understand because sometimes I feel the same way — about the five of us, that is. That we’re all just circling and circling and waiting to land. But whilst I’m circling I can’t help wondering if there just might be some fine-looking bloke inside the Fatted Pig Tavern what might like to get to know me a little better, seeing’s how we’re all just passing the time.”
Ruth frowned. “Oh, I’m sure there is. I’m sure those five have already divided us all up like Christmas crackers.”
“Don’t talk about Christmas. It’s just going to make me hungry. I scrambled some powdered eggs this morning, but I couldn’t eat a bite. I detest powdered eggs, Ruth, I do.” Jane sighed. She looked out the show window past the items Lyle had hung there, which seemed to make sense only to him: a small (and broken) Wilkinson Sword lawn mower, several rusty tools and other largely unidentifiable metallic oddments, and a broken pushchair without tyres. “It would be just our luck if we all ended up missing the six-thirty by only a minute or two. Then We Five would have to wait a full hour until the straggler bus comes along. Of course, I know a good place to spend that hour.” Jane raised an eyebrow impishly.
“Jane Higgins, sometimes I think you’re no better than your ne’er-do-well brother.”
“That is absolutely the worst thing you’ve ever said about me!”
At that moment said brother rose, with a stretch and a groan, from his royal couch. He stumbled toward the front of the shop, blinking his eyes against the bright sunshine flooding in through the window and combing his fingers through his matted hair. Glancing at a clock on the wall — an antique Victorian clock diminished in value by its cracked glass cover — he declared, “It’s getting on for six thirty and you’re still here.”
“That’s right, Lyle, we’re still here,” replied Jane in a dull voice.
“Then you’ve missed your bus by my guess, and should have plenty of time to put on a pot of coffee.”
“There’s no coffee, Lyle,” said Jane, still without any show of exasperation. “There was none at the market. We are apparently in the middle of a coffee shortage.”
“Tea, then.”
Ruth eyed her friend, wondering how she would respond.
“I’m rather engaged, Lyle. Be a love and make tea for all three of us if you would.”
The novelty of this idea struck Jane’s brother as something quite intriguing. “I could certainly do that. But you’ll have to direct me to the proper cupboard.”
“Shall I tell you first where you’ll find the kitchen?”
“How can you be such a bloody lark so early in the morning?” he grumbled.
Ruth and Jane waited until he had left the room to collapse into hysterics.
Chapter Five
Bellevenue, Mississippi, February 1997
(from
Five Came Running,
by Mark Dunn)
Ruth heard a knock at the trailer door. She had been watching Katie Couric talking to a woman Ruth didn’t recognize. There was no sound coming out of the television because the volume knob had fallen off when she hit the set with the closet door. It was an old Sylvania portable black-and-white the Mobrys had given her when she moved into the trailer.
Ruth had been living with the now-retired minister and his younger sister since she was fourteen. Before this, she’d been housed in two different orphanages and then parked with six different foster families. The Mobrys, Ruth’s very last foster guardians (they couldn’t be called foster parents because they weren’t husband and wife), had been very kind to her, as had the congregation of the small non-denominational church the Reverend had shepherded. The Church of the Generous Spirit was unique among the Protestant churches of northern Mississippi. Not only had it been racially integrated from its inception — this in a part of the country in which integration, while the law of the land, wasn’t always the law of the heart — the church had an unusual take on Christ himself. For Reverend Mobry’s flock, Jesus was an unabashed, unapologetic liberal. Kind of like Hubert Humphrey, if Humphrey had been the son of God.
It was a small congregation, but a well-knit one, and in it Ruth had found the loving extended family she’d always wanted. She knew nothing of her blood family — only that her mother, a migrant worker thought to be from Appalachian Kentucky, had died in an automobile accident. The near-term baby she’d been carrying at the time was pulled from her corpse and saved, but circumstances — Ruth’s mother had no traceable relatives — required that Ruth make her entrance into the world as a ward of the state.
Ruth had now reached the age at which she was no longer a ward of the state.
And she was no longer the responsibility of the Mobrys. And though she was very fond of the brother and sister who had taken such good care of her for the last seven years, Ruth was ready to spread her wings. She’d been the first of We Five to notice the ad placed in the local paper by Lucky Aces Casino, which was about to open up in Tunica County, right on the Mississippi River. (The Mississippi state legislature was very specific in crafting the 1990 law that permitted gambling in the state: its casinos had to be docked either along the Mississippi River or on the Gulf of Mexico.) Lucky Aces needed cocktail waitresses, and Ruth thought this was something she and her friends could do.
By choice, Ruth had never gone to college, choosing instead to pursue a path of “self-education.” The term she used for herself, but which she never said aloud, since most people would think it had something to do with an interest in cars, was “autodidact.” Whenever Ruth wasn’t assisting Ms. Mobry around the parsonage (the house where the Mobrys lived was called the “parsonage,” though it was owned by the siblings free and clear) or helping out at the church, Ruth read. She’d set out at the age of fifteen to read from cover to cover every book at the Bellevenue Library, as well as all the hundreds of other books which she’d bought at garage sales and second-hand book stores throughout Desoto County. (Except, that is, for the bodice-ripper romances; these she got for Ms. Mobry. It was a secret passion of Lucille’s, which no one at the church was supposed to know about.)