Woodsqueer by Gretchen Legler

Author:Gretchen Legler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Trinity University Press

Her Tenderness

Ruth could seem like a tough cookie. She was broad in the shoulders and thin in the hips, muscular, with a face that was both handsome and sweet. She’d worked in the trades much of her life, elbow to elbow with hard-hatted, tobacco-spitting men on worksites. She looked good in Carhartts, with a hammer and a measuring tape hanging from the loops on her canvas pants, a pencil tucked behind her ear. She was strong enough in body to carry whatever needed to be carried, swing a hammer and control a jackhammer, and strong enough in spirit and careful enough in word to handle harassment and earn the respect of her misogynist workmates, maybe even alter the perspectives of some of them. She once told me about a confrontation with a workmate who offered an unending string of grotesque expletives whenever he was around her. To amuse herself, she’d silently count how many times “fuck” was said in one sentence. Instead of telling her workmate that his speech was offensive to her, she asked, in a way that invited him to be candid, if there was some reason he was irritated by her presence. “Yeah,” he said, “I like to have a place to go where I can just be who I am, where I can spit if I want to and wear the same dirty shirt all week, and having women on the worksite changes that.” She told him she could totally understand where he was coming from. Their conversation didn’t change his behavior all that much, but it created a sense of trust, she said.

Throughout the tumultuous course of my affair with M., Ruth had been a rock—honest, full of integrity, sometimes furious, but never blaming or insulting or shaming. Her equanimity and steadfastness shocked me, in fact. Even amid the turmoil, she was constant—she held a space for possibility. “I want to fight for this relationship,” she said. “I want you, but I also want you to be happy and have what you need. You have to make up your mind. I’ve been where you are. I know how it can be.” But she wasn’t going to wait around much longer, she said; what I was doing was making her miserable, like a knife to her heart every day.

She always seemed so tough and resilient, so I was surprised to be reminded of what a soft and tender person she was, how easily wounded. Sometimes I would forget this and tell her things or show her things that were too hard for her, and it would make me feel cruel. It’s not lost on me now that my lying to her, my having an affair with another woman, was also incredibly cruel, but I didn’t understand that then.

We’d had trouble on the farm with creatures getting into our henhouse. It was hard to determine at first whether it was a weasel or a racoon. Over time, clues began to point to the latter. One morning I

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