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Ruby, when she loved me, I said, This is what it must feel like to be a man. Before then if somebody’d walked up to me and asked me right out who I was I’d have said, “A tenant, one of the boys the Hoovers use,” but now I’d say, “I’m the man that was married to Ruby.”
    I was hauling manure to the garden the day I came across her sitting under the tree, and I thought how perfect a picture she’d make if she had a flower or some sewing, something womany in her hand besides a cigarette. So I went right up to her, running on pure gall or what must’ve already been love, and I spoke to her on her smoking. You’d think that with somebody, a stranger like her all of a sudden there one morning in the yard I’d been hauling manure across all my life, you’d think I’d be too bound up to breathe, much less speak. But I didn’t bind up. I leaped right in. I didn’t bind up hardly at all.
    And when she talked to me it was none of this twisting and twirling of the hair and this and that kind of eyebatting. No, I’d ask her a question and she’d answer it. She’d ask me one and I’d answer it back. See, that’s a time being skinny and not good-looking will do you some good. If I’d been real smooth it might’ve triggered her to act like a woman will around somebody real smooth, twirling the hair and what-not. But me being like I was, am, let me get a foot in the door. So she just talked to me like she knew I didn’t mean her harm, not out there in the yard, not ever. I thought talking to her, I thought, This is the kind of woman I could get along with. Ruby, you’re my kind of woman!
    But while we were talking there, I started looking at her hard and I said to myself, This woman, look at her skin, she’s not one of these that pull up with the migrant crews. It was like the feeling you get when you see a car with out-of-state tags pull up at the store, and somebody gets out and everybody in there has to stop and examine them. So I looked at her good and listened to her, listened to her lie to me, and thought how she was the kind of woman, girl really, that some tough somebody’d love to chew up and spit out. After she told me how she was married and had a husband and his name was John Woodrow and all, I said, Well, I ought to tell her what I heard, I ought to. So I did. It liked to’ve shocked her. Then I said, Well, you told her, the least thing you can do is offer to help her out. So I told her where all I lived and to come on if she needed something.She acted like she would. Then about that time I heard Tiny Fran stick her head out and yell at her, “Come on in here and find where you laid the soda crackers yesterday. I’m sick as a dog this morning.” I thought to myself, Just like Tiny Fran to be yelling her old sorry business out the back door. And I said, I sure hope it doesn’t take this girl long to get Tiny Fran’s number. You always needed her number to handle her, to try to anyway. I didn’t know back then that handling Tiny Fran was something Ruby’d have to do more often than she’d have liked to. But now I think I can look back to that first day with Ruby and feel like it was the whole start of many more things than that. Sometimes I feel like everything started with Ruby.

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    I got things sufficiently clean for Frances. All day she kept after Tiny Fran to help me but she kept telling her mama things like scrubbing floors wasn’t in her job description. I worked around her most of the day. Sometimes it seemed like she intentionally put herself in my way so I’d have to say, “Excuse me.” I thought she might be pregnant but I wasn’t sure, not then. She was already a large girl so it was difficult to tell exactly.
    But I worked all day there and went home after Frances ran her inspection and said I should come back the next day and do the upstairs. So I went on and when I got to that little place we were staying in, I still can’t believe this, but when I got there I saw