Free The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton Page A

spend the entire afternoon sitting in a boiling room that smelled of old age. Her filmy eyes were hard to look at, and she blinked so slowly I had the urge to tell her to hurry up and finish. When I didn’t respond she said, “Well then, make yourself comfortable. Is the machine ready?”
    I switched it on, thinking I could sneak out of the house after a while, but I couldn’t help getting sucked into the book. It was called
Oliver Twist.
Miss Finch said, “I just adore Dickens, don’t you?” and again I said nothing. In the story there were evil people and exceptionally good ones also. I figured that must be like life, good and evil, otherwise people wouldn’t listen to blind tapes so hard. I wished I could meet Oliver Twist. I knew we’d have a million things to talk over. I pretended I had a cudgel and I beat up Bill Sikes and his little dog, too. Afterwards Nancy and Fagin and all the boys had a party to celebrate. Miss Finch said she meant to listen to new books as well as her old favorites, even the ones that pierced her heart, before she departed this world. After
Oliver Twist
we listened to a book about an artist named Picasso. I daydreamed through some parts, when they were talking about cubism, which I couldn’t figure out for the life of me, but I listened when the author, his mistress, talked about how the artist made her feel captive, and how she served him, and felt hollow. I listened when she told about sitting naked on the patio so he could look at her. Miss Finch often murmured that he wasn’t a very nice man, but mostly he made me feel small. He made me think about the strangeness of the world, and how very large it must be. I thought about Paris, France, a place full of buildings full of pictures, and I was stumped. Nothing I heard in the Picasso book related to Honey Creek, and yet I couldn’t help remembering the people, and how they were tied to each other.
    I got off the school bus every afternoon and went straight to Miss Finch’s house. There were a couple of people who took care of her, made her meals and gave her baths, and her son came home from his engineering job in the evening, but she was alone in the afternoons, and she got lonesome, you could tell. Her blind filmy eyes even looked excited when she figured I was in her room. She told me she had been a great reader all her life, that she gobbled books like candy, until her eyes went bad. “My deeah,” she said, “treasure your eyes and all that you behold.” I looked out the window and saw May in the distance cutting the lawn in her curlers and her apron. I thought I saw rocks being thrown up from under the machine; I saw her stop and lift something out of the grass, knowing it was probably a rabbit’s nest, or blind baby mice, which she would take inside and put in a warm oven and nurse with a doll’s bottle.
    At first I felt like I had to be prim around Miss Finch, sit up straight and pull up my socks, make sure I sat like a lady, but then it came to me that she couldn’t see one single thing. I stuck my tongue out at her as fast as I could. Nothing. Those eyes of hers were looking in two different directions. She didn’t care what I looked like or if I abused her until kingdom come. So I lay on the floor with my head on a pillow, like princesses get to, plus I sucked on the hard candies Miss Finch had by her bed. I tried to get candy out of the jar without Miss Finch hearing, but she always said, “Help yourself,” right when I had my greedy hands on the loot. Her ears were extra perked up.
    Sometimes I ran all the way from the school bus with my bag over my shoulder slapping my back. I couldn’t wait to hear the next chapter. I dreamed about the plots all day long without once touching down to real life. Once, we were listening to a book called
The Mill on the Floss,
and we were finally, after twenty reels, right near the end. I had a terrible feeling about Maggie, that her days were numbered, and that water was going