3.
The talking bone wants you to know that this story really starts a generation ago, in a quiet Oregon town called Chinook.
It begins over forty years ago in the poorhouse outside town, where the wind bent the fields and there was an old metal merry-go-round
in the dirt by the barn. The merry-go-round was there because the poorhouse was a state-run institution where poor people
were sent, and sometimes those people came with children: small mute animals who did not speak. They rode the merry-go-round
and left the scent of their memory. It was a time when people suffered and did not speak.
Ruby’s mother was born at the poorhouse; she was born one of the small mute animals. She crawled from her own mother’s womb,
between flaccid, trembling legs and a blood-and-sweat-damp gingham dress, and she felt the world on her burning nostrils.
Everything must have smelled of blood. And feces, wiped away by the indifferent matron, who carried a pan of water from the
room, dotted with clots of blood and those doilies of crap spreading through the water. Ruby’s grandmother was silenced in
the sun. She applied the baby to her nipple and encouraged the sucking. She was used to having the life sucked out of her.
“What will you call her?” the matron asked.
“Desirée,” said the grandmother.
The matron nodded. She would add the name to the ledger.
In the fields below them, men in dusty trousers worked, framed by the nearby snowcapped mountains.
The men harvested worthless peas and tore weeds from the fields with bloody, calloused hands.
You must earn your supper, the rules of the poorhouse went, even if the work was pointless.
Everyone knew this: This was the punishment of life, of being poor.
Only the rich could be idle. Their money worked for them.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves—or maybe behind.