The Book of Ruth

May wears a blue dress with white flowers to Willard’s funeral, a dress she’ll later wear to Ruth’s wedding, and which Ruth once discovered in the basement and tried on herself. Following Willard’s death, May closes herself off from the world, silently cooking for hired farmhands, one of whom, red-headed and stocky widower Elmer Grey, proposes marriage in the absence of ceremonious courtship. May, now 35, at first denies his proposal, but she eventually accepts out of sympathy for his first wife’s death from cancer.

Ruth cannot imagine May being happy with Elmer, commenting that she looks like she was standing in front of a firing squad in her wedding photo. Ruth was born when May was 38, and she wonders whether May’s not eating a satisfactory diet contributed to Ruth’s intellectual disability.

Ruth continues relating her enthusiastic correspondence with Miss Pinn, a teacher about whom Ruth has intimate, almost sexual, fantasies. Miss Pinn helps Ruth understand Aunt Sid’s letters, in which the latter claims that Ruth has a special place in her heart. Ruth vividly imagines this to be a physical place filled with pastries and flowers.

As the Christmas season approaches, Ruth first is smitten with the idea that Jesus is truly a savior, but she is soon disabused of the idea when she sees the baby Jesus being played by a female infant in the local church’s Christmas pageant.