Ruby Dreams

                                     RUBY DREAMS

Incorporating annotated excerpts from a greater work (Brave Rivers That Dream of the Sea) concerning a Confederate exile in Mexico, and a broken hacienda wherein live Ruby and her father and an old American judge.

The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some more real substance in the invisible fabric.

                                                                            Sir Thomas Browne

There is a River in the midst of an Ocean

                                                                            Matthew Maury (1)

She is the seventh child. Of six sisters, all called Ruby, none saw the next. A boy died in spasm. There is a mill and a Mennonite tabernacle. She will remember such things out of time. How with her father she sat at the river landing and the nights are dark and full of shadows. And the father so close. He tells her tales of galleons and mermaids, and shows her the Pleiades which he says are the crystallised souls of her dead kin. They walk up Silver Street (1), and a transvestite leans low from a casement window and salutes them.

Then they are gone and heading for Texas. They follow the concave rim of the Gulf and linger in the cities of the coast. In Indianola Ruby sits in dark dramhouses, and seafaring men fuss over her while the father seeks loud oblivion in a tankard. Stories are told of hot lanes in Cayenne, of manatees, and St Elmo’s Fire- electric sheen in some old tropic night. The father is with his people in the borderlands of myth and memory.

They ride on to Mexico down that long attenuation. Way out in the Gulf the child sees the toy, the spinning top. Spinning and spiralling. The land darkened and the sea boiled. The weather went to the toy until there was no weather but the toy. Cloud and sky and water all sucked into that monstrous spinning top that turned whole hacienda houses into spars of weatherboard and, like some giant pipette, sucked too the trees from the land. It tore past them its epicentre miles to the south. But Ruby felt the suction in her veins and her glands and all the courses of her body. The night of its passing blood dropped from her for the first time.

The storm came in off the Gulf. Huge black clouds edged with blue moved sulkily across the sky. They hung there like a presentiment. Then the darkness was scored with lightning, a vast and cosmic notation. Then came the thunder. Then came the rain. And the lightning and the thunder and the rain made common play upon the earth and all that walked or crawled thereon. The father who was mending a barrel with a metal hoop welded to its girth fell amid this wet and lethal electricity and when Ruby found him his clothes were burnt rags and he was an inert thing.

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Ruby had known the Judge since she was a little girl though only in passing like a wandering sea captain who landed on her shore after months abroad. But now they were together in what enterprise was left for them, the daughter and the dear old friend, and she came to love him, though her love was adulterated with pity and exasperation and even a little contempt. He returned all those emotions save for the last, for contempt is a young person’s passion.

The father’s example and the War had given Ruby a taste for adventure, though the Judge was quick to observe that the only Americans who could have found the Civil War stimulating had spent the four years in Mexico. Of a night after his promenade he would sit by candlelight in the big leather fauteuil and read his book, and Ruby would sit watching him her eyes gleaming in the dark room and the Judge felt her presence and his mind drifted. Sometimes he looked at the page and failed to comprehend. Sometimes he watched her and it was as if some long lost Spanish Infanta was there with him. One night she asked him to read from the book which was some ancient Italian verse (1). And the two of them shared the exploits of the knights of old that roamed Europe. And one knight in particular became part of her. Tell me more about Bradamante, she whispered to him.

                           Civilisation spurns the leopard.

                            Was the leopard bold?

                            Deserts never rebuked her satin,

                            Ethiop her gold.

                            Tawny her customs,

                            She was conscious:

                            Spotted her dun gown.

                            This was the leopard’s nature, Signor-

                            Need a keeper frown?

                            Pity the pard that left her Asia.

                            Memories of palm

                            Cannot be stifled with narcotic

                            Nor suppressed with balm.

                                                                            Emily Dickinson

One night at the hacienda the Captain found Ruby waiting for him. She gave him supper of eggs and tortillas. She sat at the table as he ate and he asked her why she lived here amidst such barbarous things. She replied that she was sunk in perdition. He asked her why and how and she answered where. On the Staked Plains, a little girl alone with the Comanche. He stared at her. He tried to ask her something but she put her hand out as if it had the power to stop all those words and syllables, those aspirates and glottals, that might discharge from his mouth and assault her with their pryings into a sad and ancient past. Instead she took from the dresser a rosewood box scuffed at the corners. She opened it back on its hinge and took from it a tiny skull. Her proudest possession. The skull of blessed St James, of Santiago. The Captain stared numbly at the tiny bones. St James as a child, she said. Then she drank some more aguardiente and her eyes stopped focussing.

She was the father’s true inheritor; she took from him his ways and his tempers and his kindnesses too and his strange brooding sulks, for there was no law Salic in those parts, and this happened before the Judge arrived to pontificate on Merovingian practices.

Sometimes the Captain sat and watched Ruby as she went about her business, stirring and thumping the washing through the fundaments of a huge dented boiler, and then lifting it out sodden and stretched like noodles to be pressed through a mangle whose handle she turned as if it was the heaviest and stiffest thing on earth. Or else she got from out some drawer a collection of dirty cloths and some yellow polish that had to be softened like wax and applied this stuff to the portentous cutlery that was produced for old Southern Judges. Or she played with the children of the hacienda but not in a carefree way but as one distracted and tired, and who moreover seemed not to see the point of entertaining children who would have to learn that the world provided little entertainment unless one was taken by the prospect of the suffering of others, which many are, and was a harsh and cruel place to be spending one’s time in.

Those were the last days of honour. Maximilian (1) acted in ways quite contrary to his own interests skewed always by the perception of others, and perceptions of perceptions. Honour’s obverse is shame, and old men like the Judge played out shame’s requiem too. They rarely reflected. Reflection is for mirrors and Ruby sat in her darkened boudoir staring into mirrors where she found guilt and multiple identity. The long shut gates of Olympus were about to be revisited; new interpretations on old mythologies. The best stories have an infinity of meanings, correspondences, significance. Proteus dreams anew, fragmented visions, cubist nightmares. The Old World will at last subvert the New. The world of action will cease to hold, men will be fissured, the awareness of the act will split from the act, which will itself seek explanation and justification. Morality’s gaping fault lines will at last eradicate fault. Blame, the essential conduit between honour and shame, will pervert. Men who were always bestial and bloody will become more terrible yet as their acts become suffused with bogus credos and excoriating hatreds.

Ruby flitted in and out of parts, changing direction constantly. Or perhaps in truth these cameos were all hung together with sundry bits of string and rode the same carousel and were all thus obliged to return time and again, time without number or other reckoning. Carousels of memory and imagination, of sleep and dream and vision, circuses of deceit and self-deception and self-loathing, caged but never tamed leopards pacing forever the same dusty circles. The Captain loved her tales and the world for a while looked sunnier and the shadows were far away in distant valleys. Sometimes when his back was turned he heard a whippoorwill.

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When she was Bradamante Ruby travelled to the Valley of the Moon. Then Bradamante, the paragon girl warrior, who sat, still as a heron, on her charger in the morning mist faded and Ruby put away her fourteen foot lance. And after Bradamante she was the Rose of Sharon (1) and the Queen of Sheba. And after she was the Queen of Sheba she was Helen that had six husbands (Proteus’ best dream), and after she was Helen she was Cleopatra and she bathed in all the balsams from Herod’s groves. The Captain tried to follow her in her journeys but she turned from him and would not speak. The Judge tried to take The Captain’s part but Ruby said he just wanted to poke into fires that he reckoned would burn brighter for the poking. Besides, she had heard the Judge say that a man would weary of his hatreds, that a man should not hate, and that once he entered into peace with himself he found peace with others too. But Ruby knew that the Judge could talk like the Devil on a Friday, and reckoned he was incapable of hate because he was incapable of love, and that without love there was nothing, and that hatred was the inescapable and forever contradict of love. So she kept her own counsel and left the Judge’s where she found it.

                                     *****************

The Captain and Ruby left the hacienda. Ruby took her dresses and her mirrors and her ointments, her map of Bexar, her print of a desert orchid. She took the “skull of St James as a child” and quietly and alone she went out into the fields with it and buried it in the unmarked grave. Then she came in and perfunctorily embraced the Judge. Then she looked at her father as if she was debating on the appropriate gesture but none came to mind and she walked out of the room again.

There were no others after Cleopatra. Cleopatra stayed with Ruby, invaded and inhabited her, and the kohl and that she applied to her eyes was the kohl that Cleopatra had worn to seduce Mark Antony. The animals returned but the wolf was now a jackal, and the goat a feral cat whose hair bristled as it prowled the cemeteries of her mind. Caprice had finally turned into carapace. She found an agent to sell the spread and she retired to Indianola where she acquired a turtle farm and devoted herself to her reptiles and her dreams.

                                     *******************

The Judge moved up the Gulf to Galveston. He lived quietly if not soberly and he wrote as he had promised himself. But his chronicles may be unreliable. One day a dark-haired, greying stranger rode into Galveston to seek him out. She said her name was Ruby Madison and that she had been there once before as a child with her father. She was a handsome and friendly woman and people took to her but she did not stay long. She was seeking a man she said would now be old and had been a Judge and a dear man but had in his later years become over fond of his tipple and had formed strange fantasies of the world around him including herself. She believed him to be still in Galveston. He was; she was directed to the cemetery where he had been for the last two years. She got there as the sun sank over the graves and illumined the place in a strange light as if she was once again back in that old world that those men had created for her. She watched a gopher dart and stop and dart again between the graves as small animals do. The place was empty save for Ruby and the gopher and the dead.

She found his grave and read the epitaph

                                     JACOB TASKER 1813-1887

                                     Judge, Writer, Freethinker

                                                    RIP

He wrote that himself, she thought. She placed a little bundle of rue upon the grave.

She stayed in Galveston only to visit a publisher and obtain from him the galleys of the Judge’s work. She paid the man a small sum and was assured that there were no other copies of the work extant. The publisher said he had mixed feelings about the merit of the work and had been disinclined to print. Ruby went back to New Orleans where she then lived in an apartment on Bienville where there were traceries of leaves on the stucco front and a balcony where she sat in the evening and watched the people of the Vieux Carré. Across the way birdcages hung from the galleries. She would buy shrimps in the French Market and drink coffee. She smelt the molasses, and watched wisps of cotton floating off the bales on the levee, and she remembered how it had once been in the days of the filibusters. She talked to a Greek dwarf who became her guide to the City. Even Proteus’ dreams are old and bent now. Place d’Armes, Pontchartrain, the courthouse where Lola Montez had accused her manager of kicking her (she had to lift her skirts up and up and up in the courthouse because the Judge had to see her bruises. That’s judges for you Ruby thought.)

She read and reread the proofs. Perhaps he had indeed gone to Indianola, perhaps he really thought that poor woman, her face obliterated by the sea, was her. She made a will. She read and learned about the Indian tribes. She became obsessed by the Cherokee for they had always tried to help the white man and the white man had repaid that help with uprootings and killings and the Cherokee had had to leave their home and ride slow down a Trail of Tears to a place a thousand miles away so Ruby wept for the Cherokee. They were the only tribe that had women for chiefs. They had fought for the South in that old War that she had once played her part in and their chief, Stand Watie, who, like Shelby, had refused to surrender at Appomattox had fought with Shelby (and therefore with her Captain) at Pea Ridge.

Better the Cherokee had never tried to ape the white man for then at least he might have gained grudging respect like the Comanche and the Kiowa, but early in the Indian skirmishes the British were sending Cherokee slaves to the Caribbean, impregnating goods sold with smallpox, throwing them from their Georgia homes.

The Cherokees took with them their dreams and their conjurers, their alphabets (for these were literate Indians) and their vermilion. Ruby is dreaming with the Cherokee and a word crosses boundaries into other realms. Vermilion (1); she checks the publisher’s proofs. You’d have done better, Judge, to write about these people, this Cherokee nation, she is saying soft to herself, they really suffered. We jest made ourselves suffer.

She lived for many years. One evening she went down to the waterfront and was helped on board a steamer which was in town from St Louis and listened to a jazz band led by a man called Fate (2). She suffered a stroke and was taken to the Infirmary but died later that night. Her Negro servant who had been her sole companion for many years was seen in the courtyard behind her apartment lighting a small bonfire and consigning thereto a manuscript.

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There is the Brazos de Dios and the Trinidad, the Colorado and the San Antonio, on which stands the great city of Bexar. And the Medina beyond Bexar where the land grows arid, and the Frio where there are cedars, and the Nueces. And others too. And there is the Brave River itself. And they are all alone in their beginnings, and they trickle and meander in empty lands and thirsty places once only known to the Comanche and the Lipan and a few peripatetic friars. And they grow aware of their thirst and their separateness, and yearn to be one with the others and with all rivers everywhere. And at last they are; they dream together as they flow into the sea. But by then they have forgotten everything.

NOTES:

p2

1 Matthew Maury was a renowned American oceanographer but he had to leave the States for Mexico after the South’s surrender at Appomattox. He was referring to the Gulf Stream.

p3

1 The main street in Natchez Under in the state of Mississippi

p4

1 Probably Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso

p5

1 The “Emperor” Maximilian placed on the Mexican “throne” by Napoleon III. He was the cadet of Franz Joseph of Austria.

p6

1 The Rose of Sharon is essentially a flower not a person but see also Song of Solomon 2:1

p8

1 The opening sentence of the preface to Brave Rivers That dream of the Sea reads “Vermilion and macaw feathers are their stock in trade” (a reference to Comancheros)

2 Probably a reference to Fate Marable (1890-1947)