Ruth was born in the Year of the Ox on a splintered farmhouse floor, the first July of the roaring 20s. She was adamant to keep the day a secret but the year, a proclamation. I met her the September after her 100th birthday and watched her last breath putter out 9 months later.
The nursing home or “SNF” (pronounced like it looks) was shaped like a three; backwards if you’re headed due South on Hickory, rightwise if you’re headed North towards Main. Year-round Christmas lights wound tightly on each beam of the front porch and switched on around the 6pm shift change for overnight staff. Along the perimeter of the property, someone had planted rose bushes decades before that were once delightful and now dead. On the contrary, their shrubby counterparts were thriving under each olive awning in a foot of last year’s damp leaves.
I encountered Ruth nestled in her shady spot along the right-side of the front doors on my first day. Her bedazzled wheelchair caught everyone’s eye immediately. No matter the weather, she wore a 2X white cotton turtleneck, her prized Green Bay Packers ball cap embellished with tacky Dollar General pins, and a seasonal fleece with pocket adornments. Her elastic shorts met her leg wraps at the base of her swollen knees, which were more or less inflamed depending upon the amount of sweets she snuck from the kitchen staff. Her pursed lips and squinty glare scanned me from scalp to sandal.
“Oh geezus Christmas! Now who’s this here? We got another new one, ‘er what?! This place just can’t hold onto any good help if it bit ‘em right in the keester!” she screeched.
I buckled down next to her spokes and slipped my mask below my chin and glasses above my forehead. I silently watched her shifty gray eyes search my face and return to my gaze. Her clenched jaw relaxed and fists loosened around a faded handkerchief. With a swift motion, I shoved the new mask back up under the bridge of the safety glasses and whispered, “My name is Sylvie. I’m the new Life Enrichment Coordinator but you can call me…Cap’n Funmaker!”
I tried to give her my slyest wink but ended up batting both eyes intermittently. Ruth sat staring back in confusion and a twinge of disgust, but only momentarily. After an instant she snapped up to grab ahold of my fingers.
“Ohhh yous better listen here once!” she hissed. “I’ve got exercise at 8:30am. My laundry comes in right after supper which needs foldin’, and the Packers are on at 6. And NO, I ain’t gonna wear no Godforsaken mask!! Now wheel me in, Cap’n Whoziwhatsit!!”
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There was nothing Ruth wouldn’t try once. Over 187 days, I wheeled her to every Euchre game, Yee-Haw sing-along, 8:30am exercise class, wackadoodle craft, or outdoor perch. She took to them all, like a luna moth to a streetlamp. Sometimes I would purposely be a minute or two late to get a good tongue lashing, the only way she knew how to love.
She was raised mere miles outside of what is now Sunderly, on a small dairy farm. Her father Patrick, was a fishing and hunting guide based out of Hayward, but would occasionally head North to Superior for rich sawyers. Her mother, Maggie, had grit and a fierce love for Jesus, but also knew how to take a strap to all 12 of her children. There was no mercy or Jesus in those lashings.
Her father returned like a sack of skin and bones after 6 months of working from lodge to lodge along the Namekagon and shores of Lake Superior. As years passed, he had a harder time facing the home he built, now containing a zoo full of children.
Ruth shared with me often and openly, but once the pandemic entered our building, a switch flipped. Within 24 hours, 3 of our 19 residents were running temperatures while shitting and vomiting truckloads of bile and blood. Within 36 hours, we’d lost our first; Trina, a 56 year-old Sunderly local.
Ruth and the other residents were required to stay in their 10X10 rooms for the foreseeable future and staff were to suit up in full PPE. Each time we exited or entered a new room, a complete outfit change was ordered. No questions asked.
At 8:29am, I stood outside Ruth’s room and began adding each layer of precaution from the carts. I looked up to see Ruth staring directly at me through her tortoiseshell spectacles.
“Yous got any paper with ya?” she asked.
“No, but I can go get some real quick,” I said.
“Oh ya, do that. Bring a pen too why donchya!” Ruth yelled, as I slipped out of the layers of plastic and bounded down the linoleum towards the Nurses’ station.
I smiled under my mask, wondering what Ruth was planning. I snagged all the supplies from a CNA’s desk and scurried back towards Ruth. Reapplying all garments was necessary for re-entry but this time I arrived with hope, paper, and a pen.
“Sit down ‘der,” she interrupted.
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The recliner I sat in was one her sister Darla gave her as a birthday gift last July. Any other day she would have complained raucously about the chair’s height and comfort. But today she rolled in, tucking her foot pedals between my ankles. She offered up the wheelchair’s tray table for a place to set my notepad.
Like clockwork, every pore on my body began dripping incessantly. Normally, I would remove some of my PPE, but it was too dangerous. Sweat started mixing with the heat of my eyes and my face shield fogged up with each breath. There was no way I was going to ruin this moment, no matter how uncomfortable I became.
“Need ya to take sum’n down on your paper der. And fer Godsakes, make damn well sure it’s right clean. All yous with your degrees and cars, but ya can’t even git yer letters straight.” I smirked and clicked the pen in my gloved fingers to signal my readiness.
Ruth started off slow. At first it was hard to tell exactly what she wanted me to write down. There was an air of mystery to her voice that was hidden in previous month’s conversations. My pen etched each delicacy quickly so as to not miss a beat.
“I was the oldest, of course,” she began. “So, I lost more of myself with every new mouth that needed feedin’. I despised my Ma for havin’ more than she could handle. My Pa started cookin’ ‘shine as a way to make money on the off months. But the bastard drank it all away. When that Great Depression hit, he took up at the sawmill near MarshMiller Lake. You know that water, ‘er no?” I nodded, careful not to interrupt the flow. Ruth continued.
“He filled his days lumberin’ and would come home smellin’ like a priest in a whorehouse. My brothers followed suit. I was the only one of us kids that kept travelin’ the 3 miles to the school house in Sunderly. You bet yer ass I finished my high school degree. The rest of ‘em worked the stables and fields, and tended to the cattle all day. Of course, I helped when I wasn’t off learnin’. Don’t you think otherwise!” I nodded again.
She paused to drink some water with a loud gulp and picked a scab on her face. It was an anxious habit that created small craters along the hollows of her cheeks and jawline. I reached for her hand that was now speckled in dried blood and coaxed it down to her lap. She slapped my hand away and started up again with the story and the picking.
“After graduation, I got out as quick as I could and married the man I thought would be best. But the minute we were hitched he was sent off to fight the Krauts.”
Ruth paused again. Her cheeks flushed and she shifted her weight in the chair.
“The bastard never wrote me a single letter in the 3 years and 3 months he was gone. Church services were my only piece of mind and Minister Hagen knew this. He preyed on my virginity and loneliness, and threw me to the wolves when I became pregnant. Luckily, I stumbled into the arms of Astrid.
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My pen stopped as the day shift nurse walked in to check vital signs and blood sugar. Ruth looked defeated but also scoffed audibly at the new nurse for taking so long. I made sure to thank the nurse as she hurried out.
“My father mentioned Astrid once in a drunken stupor. I woke to hear him arrive home late and crash into the house. He was jabberin’ on with mostly mush-mouth but ‘Astrid’ rang out clear. I had heard her name under the breath of many men in Sunderly. She worked in the brothel outside of town a’ways and was known as the town witch; most likely ‘cause pregnant girls were no longer after a couple nights with her.” Ruth’s picking was incessant now.
“Astrid was my last resort. I found her shack a couple hundred yards outside of the brothel’s property line. I stood there with my hand above the rapper fer what seemed a hundred years. Mind you, Sylvie. By this time, I was edgin’ on my 24th week with that bastard child and I was just about at my limit. I was ready to die, even if it meant takin’ it with me.”
Ruth’s eyes became transfixed on something and she began speaking in hushed whispers, as though in a group huddle.
“Astrid saw me through the peephole and rushed me inside. She screamed at me fer comin’ during the day with a belly and no money. I cried but managed to get my name out. She looked at me like she’d seen the goddamn ghost of St. Christopher. No words were shared after that. She fed me the cups of Pennyroyal in silence and I lost the child in the early morning. She brought me back to life after pert near 3 days of bleedin’. I left before dawn with nothing to give but a book of poems I wrote.”
“Did you ever see her again?” I interjected.
“A decade or so later I saw an obituary for Astrid’s passin’. I couldn’t shake the feelin’ that I needed to revisit her shack. I was drawn by somethin’ fierce within that house. I went to that very room I almost died in and I found my book of poetry on top of a box wrapped in brown paper. I took the box but never opened it.”
Ruth saw me pull back in confusion and met my stare defensively.
“Child you know nothin’. GO, behind the pipes under the sink! Use my butter knife to wedge out the brick.”
After a few minutes of chiseling the mortar out from the left-hand side, I slid the cinder block behind the toilet and reached for the box. It was covered in a layer of white dust that turned the brown paper gray. It was easy enough to peel it away, revealing a small chest, a miniature treasure box that would fit in a child’s palm. I hesitated to lift the metal hook from it’s latch.
“Do it!” she seethed.
The latch slid easily from the brass eye and the lid flipped open to two filled glass vials lying horizontally along the bottom of the box. The note shoved in between read “Ruth” in cursive. I opted to hand the note to Ruth but she batted my hand away and pushed it back towards me.
“You, read it, please.” She sighed and picked up the vials to inspect them closer.
I unfurled the note and read,
“My Ruth
Here are our ashes, both mine and your daughter’s.
So that you may one day lay beside us.
Dust to dust,
Astrid.”
A Homegoing 