| Ruby River (novel excerpt) ©
2002, Lynn Pruett and Atlantic Monthly Press. Reprinted by permission.
All rights reserved. |
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| [Lynn Pruett is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and the University of Alabama, where she received her MFA in Creative Writing. She has published work in American Voice, Southern Exposure, Black Warrior Review, and Telling Stories, an anthology. She currently teaches fiction at the University of Kentucky in Lexington and is a founding member of KaBooM, the Kentucky Book Mafia. I have known Lynn since 1986 and have enjoyed getting together with her and spouse David Miller (see Agora 27:4) and their three boys in Tuscaloosa, Lexington, and Washington, DC. Out just since September, Ruby River has been warmly reviewed and is due for a second printing in March.—J.K.]
s clearly as Hattie saw the home, she saw her father on the upstairs porch, fist raised, a flow of hot words aimed at Heaven for sending droughts and bad market prices and cold weather down on him personally, a sight so familiar she could never think of going off to school without recalling it. She'd imagined her friends' mothers sending them out the door with a kiss on the forehead, an admonition to be good, a habit she'd created for her own girls. But she and Troy Clyde and her little sister Lucy were used to seeing their father wave his fist in the air, talking at God. Since God never struck Daddy with lightning, she had wondered about His existence. It was the main topic of their conversation on the walk to school. Why didn't He answer? was always the thought that occurred to Hattie. One day in early winter, the year she was fifteen, as she trudged home from school up the mountain, Hattie sensed something was happening at the house. There was, all through the woods, the steady unseasonal sound of locusts gnawing through leaves and a soft rushing undercurrent that was neither rain nor the river. A film of smoke rolled down to greet her. She ran over ice-crusted leaves, past a mule train hauling barrels of water up the path. Her house glowed from the inside. The ice on the leaves in the yard had melted into a glassy brown lake that reflected the brilliant shoots of color dancing inside the windows. She watched the first bucket of water tossed onto the fire. It made a pitiful psst.
At once, she felt powerless, and a calm detachment took over. She became absorbed in watching the house and fire work in accord to complete their task of destruction. The house sighed; the fire kept its voice to a throaty whisper. It moved as if stroking the posts and walls, as if the black crust it left were a new coat of paint. The house acquiesced; the muslin curtains in the living room, sibilant couriers of flame, gently stretched to place red-tipped wisps on the windowsills, the pine floors, the lace tablecloth, the woolen slipcovers. The fire swirled with the leisure of a connoisseur, examining everything in its path, touching, peeling back wallpaper, leaving powder-smudged kisses, wrapping the railings in gray blankets. It was a friendly blaze until it reached the slate hall floor, where it was forced to leap like a tiger to the staircase. Then it stripped and blistered the steps, scorching a tunnel up to the second floor. It consumed, its tongue hot, hungry; the banister snapped like a matchstick. The second floor blazed hotter than poppy, shuddering in the instant before the shotgun-blast explosion hurtled glass. Searing red and yellow arrows hissed out in the brown lake, which grew deeper and wider as the men tried to keep the fire from spreading. Acrid smoked jetted out of the blackening window crosses, draping Hattie in a cloud. She ran to the back of the house and threw herself on the slick black ground. A voice the timbre of fire made her open her eyes to search the flames. Black against the brilliance of orange heat, her father roared, his hair white and wild. His familiar ire reached a pitch stronger than the raging red tongues feeding around him as he yelled, “These pipes will never freeze again!” In the glimpses Hattie had of him through the forest of yellow and orange waves, she saw him shoot blue flames from a blowtorch at a teetering maze of pipes, now free of plaster and lath. His internal rage now consumed him and her home. A chill came up from the icy leaves. She felt the cold fingers of death around her heart and a cold pain in her head and chest, as if they were turning to ice too.
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