Harry & Ruth Read Free Page B

one—provided it was important enough. With the trivial ones, they have proved themselves, even at this late date, to be completely untrustworthy.
    The party for Ruth’s 70th birthday, meant to be a surprise, had no chance whatsoever of remaining one. Her younger son, Paul, must have known that when he enlisted Hank’s aid in luring her down to Florida under the guise of an ordinary week at the beach. It took Ruth all of five minutes to worm the truth from Hank. But she still agreed, somewhat hesitantly, to go.
    â€œPaul,” she wrote to her younger son, “thank you for thinking of me, but I just don’t like surprises. I have never gained much pleasure from them.”
    Three weeks after they met, Harry told Ruth about failing to get into law school, and about his lukewarm plans to try again after the war. He told her not to tell anyone else. Three weeks later, he stopped at the small general store in Saraw, beside the river, to buy cigarettes. The store owner, a man who (Harry thought) didn’t even know his name, said, in his most conspiratorial tone, “Don’t worry, son. You’ll get into that lawyers’ college next time for sure.”
    With the important and central mysteries, though, such as the story of Belle and Theron Crowder and The One in ’28, information was not so easily obtained. Some of this reticence might have grown from an inability or unwillingness to deal with trouble and heartache, a fear of the uncomfortable. Or it might have had its seeds in the belief that knowledge is power, that if you know the old, old stories and no one else does, you have something of value, something not to be given away to every meddlesome stranger.
    Once, when Harry expressed his theories on Crowder secrets in a letter, Ruth wrote him back that all it was, was good manners. Sometimes, though, it was maddening to her as well. What would the South be, she asked Harry once in another letter, without its idiosyncracies? He wrote back: Sane.
    Harry did, though, before the spring of 1943 took him away, hear most of the story of Belle and Theron and the One in ’28.
    Theron Crowder IV was a handsome man. He had a brooding, unflinching, angular look, even in the wedding picture, not hungry-seeming like some underfed tenant farmer but more the haughty, high-cheekboned look of the country patrician, king of an undemanding hill. He was the last of three children, born in 1902 into what passed for a well-to-do family in a small North Carolina town. His father owned the lumber mill and turpentine works that were the only reason the Saraw and Wallace Railroad, all 34 miles of it, was built. Timber was shipped from the forests farther inland to the mill. Lumber and supplies went back up the same way, or down the Saraw River, before it silted over. Young Theron’s father, whom everyone called T.D., was a stubborn man when Harry knew him. In his prime, before The One in ’28, his inflexibility was his strength.
    Theron IV had two older sisters, Charlotte and Jane, and it is still accepted dogma among older Saraw residents who remember the stories that he was “spoiled rotten.” (Harry has a theory: There are approximately six times as many boys whose siblings are all older sisters as there are girls with all older brothers, or at least there were at that time and in that place. The husbands made their wives keep having babies until they either died or produced something on which a Roman numeral could be hung.)
    The Crowders were the only family in Saraw living in a brick house. They wanted their son to marry well, and so Theron IV’s acceptable gene pool in the town of his birth was limited. Because he was warned not to, and because of how he was, he fell in love with Belle Culbreth. In the surviving photographs, she could be Ruth’s twin.
    Belle was the best-looking girl in town. She was the youngest of nine children who lived with their mother and occasional men