If you look at a map of our great country – the United States of liberty and justice for all who can pay – you will not find Ruby.
Somewhere in the middle of hopelessness sits a small reservation called Pine Ridge. There, alcoholism runs rampant through the streets, tearing victims away from everything they thought they knew. It leaves them lying, oblivious to reality, in the middle of a deserted alley where they wait for shame, who makes her rounds when the sun rises over this tiny little town. There, suicide wraps its dark, forsaken fingers around the necks of teens desperate for a form of escape. If love is a sea, these kids are lost in the sand. The leaves will turn from green to gray but the sorrow of this town is fifty shades of our throats are hoarse from yelling for help, so let me drown my blood in alcohol while you pretend you can’t see. It is in this worn out, broken town that you will find Ruby.
The drive to Pine Ridge was as long as their history; it went on for centuries. The middle of hopelessness is many miles from the comfortable bubble of never wondering whether the muscle in my chest will still be sending rivers of red throughout my body when the moon sinks back into the horizon. Fourteen hours on the road to nowhere. Fourteen hours on the road to Ruby.
The heat is spectacular, burning images of red onto the portions of my skin where my fingers could not reach. Two sunsets ago I had arrived somewhere in the middle of hopelessness, my heart aching for each and every pair of feet that could not run away from this disaster of a town. Today I was on the roof of a shed, pounding shingles into the framework that would keep the sun from burning all the memories that would ever take place within those four walls.
Hours upon hours did my hammer strike nails into shingles. Hours upon hours were my shoulders hunched over, the tendons and fibers stretched to the point I swore was the breaking. I gave myself fifteen minutes to stretch out tightened limbs and pour some water down the dry and dusty landscape that was my throat. Down the shaky ladder, across the dirt path, into the house of Ruby.
Ruby’s eyes are the color of the determination to overcome. Her skin is paper thin and it clings to her bones, giving away the fact that she only eats what the government provides. This elderly woman is stronger than every man I have ever encountered, yet she can barely bend her waist enough to reach the weeds that infest the earth she strives so hard to preserve. So this is what strength looks like. It looks like 5’ 3’’ with second hand clothes and lines etched into her delicate skin that can only come from a kind of sorrow that I cannot fathom into existence.
“Welcome to my mansion.” she says as I cross the brick red doorframe.
“ Hi Ruby,” I reply and sit in the rickety chair across from hers. She peers at me over the golden frames of her spectacles. I imagine the fifty years she has seen through those round pieces of glass. I imagine the destruction she has watched overthrow her community bit by bit, until this invisible reservation is on its hands and knees, being crushed by the ignorance of those who have always had enough.
“Thank you for helping me,” she says in a voice as rich as the velvet she can’t afford. It sounds as though she’s lived a hundred lifetimes, fought a thousand battles, lost a million dreams. “I’m turning that shed into a safe place for teenage mothers who are in trouble. And that garden you weeded yesterday? That garden feeds a fourth of this community,” she adds proudly. Respect bubbles up inside my chest, pushing itself through all the curves and corners of flesh that make up a body, the heart and the mind that make up a person.
The fifteen minutes I have given myself to stretch out these aching limbs of mine have
long since passed. Ruby’s story had entranced me, enchanted me. Her words had curled themselves around my legs, had encircled my wrists, had anchored me to the chair while she painted a picture of every hue and every emotion there was to be felt. However, my legs wearily carried me through the brick red doorframe, across the dirt path, up the shaky ladder, and back onto the roof of a safe house, somewhere in the middle of hopefulness.
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