The Sabbathday River

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Nelson Erroll was in his seat, leaning forward, each muscled forearm planted atop a stack of papers. His hair had a glint of gold thin over the glint of skin, downgrading to silver with age. The clench of her lungs was noted and promptly, responsibly, ignored. He looked up and frowned.

  “Naomi? Can you give me a minute?”

  She could hear her own breath. She thought she might breathe fire.

  Nelson harrumphed into the phone. He hung up.

  “Naomi? What can I do—”

  She placed the baby on the table before him. She hated to let it out of her arms. She couldn’t take it back now, undiscover it, or silence whatever din its existence was going to unleash. It would never be only hers again either, which at that particular moment seemed almost the worst thing of all.

  “I found her,” Naomi said calmly. “I was jogging, up above Nate’s Landing. On the path. I found her in the river.” Nelson was blankly still; his face and body, even the papery softness around his eyes, gave no pulse of movement. He merely, sluggishly, turned one wrist, so that a single blue vein was etched against the white. His vacancy made her smile, ridiculously, but then she felt her body break into sobs. The white doll in the icy currents, the weightless infant over her shoulder, the famine child in its dark communal grave. For the first time, Naomi conjured the hand that had lifted the weapon and brought it down, tearing flesh from flesh and death from life, and so, for the first time, she wept with bitterness and rage.

  Chapter 3

  What We Don’t Know We Know

  “YOU MOVED THE BODY.”

  “It wasn’t a body,” Naomi said stiffly. “It was a baby.”

  “It was a baby. By the time you got to it, it was a body. And you moved the body.”

  Naomi let out a ragged sigh. She barely knew what time it was anymore. The Indian summer on the other side of the small window and the long hours in the cinder-block bunker had wrenched her internal clock out of whack. The man was called Robert Charter, and despite the charged and frenetic talk that had swirled about them all afternoon, these were the first words he’d directed to her in private.

  “Look, I’m very tired. It’s been a rough day and I’d like to go home, if you don’t mind.”

  “But I do mind.” Charter took the seat on the other side of the institutionally nondescript table. “That is, I’d prefer your hanging on a little bit longer. We haven’t had much of a chance to talk.”

  She focused on him. He was angular and lean, with gray hair trained in a kind of arched wave over the top of his head from one ear to another, and his cheeks were ruddy. She had only known him a few hours, Naomi thought, but their interlocked glares already had the creak and drone of ingrained adversity. “I don’t see what I can add to what I’ve already said,” she told him carefully. “I mean I don’t know anything. I only found her, you know.”

  He remained silent. He held his palms together atop the legal pad in a position of vaguely contortionist prayer. Naomi blinked. It occurred to her to wonder where Nelson had got to. He’d been right behind her when they’d returned from the river, where the little knot of men had huddled, murmuring officially as she stood forlornly on the bank. He’d been behind her in the reception area a few moments before, taking her elbow and offering coffee. But now there was no coffee and she was alone with this Charter, the district attorney up from Peytonville, and the room was small—barely big enough for the two of them and the table and the extra chairs, empty and left at odd angles. The interrogation room, she understood, somewhat belatedly. She was being interrogated.

  “Am I being interrogated?” Naomi sat up in her chair. “I mean, what the hell’s going on here? I can’t just hang out here forever. I have a …” What? Naomi thought. A child? A life? A limited capacity for horror? Something more important to do? She hated the fact that he was waiting for her to go on. Then, when she couldn’t, he began again.

  “You aren’t from Goddard, is that right?”

  “Only for the past nine years,” she said stiffly.

  “And your home therefore is …” He lifted his pen.

  Like the punch line it was, she gave it a pause: “I grew up in New York City.” This meant, in New Hampshire dialect, I am a Jew. “My husband and I came as VISTA workers in ‘76.”

  “VISTA workers,” he pondered, writing.

  “Domestic Peace Corps.”

  He glared, briefly. “Digging wells? Schools for the little children? Something like that?”

  Yes, Naomi wanted to say.

  “Of course not,” she said.

  “I wasn’t aware that we were considered quite that backward.”

  But you were, she thought.

  “My husband ran a maple sugar co-op,” Naomi said pleasantly. “I worked with women who were quilting and making crafts. After our term was up we decided to stay on.”

  He nodded. “Do the … homesteading-in-the-wilderness routine, yes?”

  “Yes,” she said, not giving him the satisfaction.

  “And your work is …”

  Satisfying, thank you, she wanted to say, but she also wanted to get out of here. “I helped found a collective business in Goddard, called Flourish. We sell handmade goods, by catalogue mostly. Quilts and samplers. Also hooked rugs.”

  Charter smiled a disingenuous smile. “And your husband is still teaching the natives how to make maple sugar.”

  “My husband lives in upstate New York. Woodstock. You know,” she said affably, “like the concert? I’m not sure what he’s doing, but I doubt it involves maple sugar.”

  “Ah,” Charter said. “You are divorced.”

  “We were divorced several months ago.” He was writing again. Naomi eyed the brassy wedding ring, thick around his thin finger, the dark cracked leather of a watchband.

  “Children?”

  She said no. “Mr … . Charter?”

  “Hm?” He finished his note and looked up.

  “Do you have the time?”

  “Why?” he said, his voice even. “Are you late?”

  “I might be. That’s why I want to know what time it is.”

  “Mrs. Roth,” he said heavily, “why don’t we move ahead. If we finish everything in the next little while, I see no reason why you can’t be home in time for dinner.”

  “Dinner? Mr. Charter, I understand that you’ve got a big problem here, but I don’t know anything. I just went out jogging this morning, and that’s all. I brought the baby here, I went back and showed you where I found her, and this ends my entire possible contribution to solving your problem. Now please, I’m very upset about all this and I’d like to get out of here.”

  “Why are you so upset?” Charter said. “I mean, if you are, as you seem to suggest, merely in the role of the good and responsible citizen, then why are you so upset?”

  She stopped, abruptly dumb, and noted with scientific detachment the heat climbing steadily to her face. “I am upset,” she said with care, “because it is upsetting. That’s all. Stabbed infants might be commonplace in your line of work, but I’ve never seen one before. It’s …” She groped. “It’s upsetting. All right?” To his silence she added, “After all, she was somebody’s child, right?”

  Slowly, he leaned forward, resting weight on his forearms. “Was she your child?”

  Breath failed her. She shook her head wildly.

  “You see why I must at least wonder.”

  “I … absolutely not. I’m …”

  Incapable. Unthinkable. “How could you even suggest that I—”

  “I did not suggest.” He shrugged. “I merely inquired. If the answer is no, then it is no,” he said. “You don’t have to take it so personally. Unless,” he added, “it is personal.” Naomi shook her head again. “Now, you found the body. This is what you tell us and I happen to believe you.”

  “Fine,” she sputtered. “Thanks for that.”

  “But look at it from my perspective for a minute. And ask yourself why it should be you who found this body,
and not someone else.”

  “Well”—she said carefully—“because I was there. It might have been someone else.”

  “But it wasn’t someone else, Mrs. Roth. It was you. Now, by your own account, you moved the body, which—if I may say so—was an extraordinarily stupid thing for such an obviously intelligent woman to have done. And once the body is moved, its relation to the place where you say it was found must necessarily be subjected to some doubt. So what do we have in the end? We have the fact of the body and we have your account of its discovery. Now,” he mused, taking in Naomi’s horror-struck expression without comment, “Sheriff Erroll knows you, Mrs. Roth, but what if Sheriff Erroll hadn’t been at the desk down the hall”—he gestured with his thin wrist—“when you brought that baby in this morning? What if it had been some person you don’t know, and who didn’t know you?”

  Amazed, she felt herself nod. “Yes?”

  “Well, like me, for example. What if you’d come scurrying in this morning with that body in your arms, and it was me, for example. I wouldn’t have seen my neighbor Naomi coming through the door, would I?”

  “I … I guess …”

  “Can I tell you what I’d have seen?” He didn’t pause. “I’d have seen a woman of obviously fertile years bringing in the body of a murdered newborn infant. A body, I should add, that’s wrapped up in the very kind of product that this woman’s company offers for sale. And the woman’s upset, too. ‘Hysterical,’ somebody called her. Took a good half hour to get her to calm down and make sense.” He frowned, then flipped back a few pages on his legal pad and appeared to study the writing. “Yes, half an hour.” Charter looked up at Naomi and shrugged. “That’s what my notes say, anyway.”

  “Mr. Charter.” Naomi’s voice was steely. “I don’t think I should have to defend my response. Yes, I was upset. I’m still upset. But the rest of this is bullshit. Christ, do I look to you like I’ve just given birth?”

  “Mrs. Roth”—Charter grinned—“I’m hardly qualified to answer that on medical grounds, and I wouldn’t think of offending you with inappropriate comments about your appearance.”

  In her fury, she flushed. At thirty-five, Naomi was not a slender woman.

  “Let me understand this, please,” Naomi said, pulling herself together somewhat. “Am I being asked to prove that I am not the mother of that baby out there?” She pointed vaguely at the door to the interrogation room, though she knew that the baby’s body was gone, taken to Peytonville by the medical examiner.

  His white brows raised, as if he had just heard a compelling suggestion, one to be given weighty consideration. “It seems to me that it would be helpful to establish that, yes.”

  “Well then,” Naomi said caustically, “I suggest you call my gynecologist. He saw me three weeks ago, for a pap smear. If I was pregnant at the time, neither one of us noticed.” She gave him the name and he wrote it down.

  “Fine,” Charter said, nodding. “Thank you.”

  “And this concludes our conversation?”

  The man sat back in his chair, studying her. There was the smallest ridge of a scar, she noticed now, tracing a faint half circle from the corner of his left eye, the size of a dime. Fingernail? Front tooth?

  “It’s a small town,” Charter observed.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s a small town, Goddard.”

  “Yes.” She was snide. “And yet there are those who love it.”

  “A dead baby turns up in a small town, somebody knows whose baby it is.”

  “And hence who murdered it, you mean. You naturally suspect the mother.”

  “I would like to know who the mother is,” he corrected her, his voice tight.

  “So that you can charge her with murder,” Naomi said. “I understand.”

  “So that I can be very much closer than I am now to knowing who should be charged with murder. Surely you see that.” He sat up a little, then sighed. “Mrs. Roth, someone who lives here was pregnant and gave birth, but has no baby. Do you know that person?”

  “Oh, I see,” Naomi sneered. “If it wasn’t me, then I must know who did it.”

  “You might know.” He was intent.

  “Well, I don’t,” she said, getting to her feet. He didn’t move to stop her and she made for the door.

  “Mrs. Roth,” Charter said. He was still in his seat. “May I tell you one thing before you leave?”

  Naomi paused, her hand on the doorknob. At least he had said she was leaving. She nodded.

  “I had a murder once. At a mall down near Winnipesaukee. The victim left her job at Sears and got hacked to death in the parking lot, the week before Christmas. One of the busiest shopping days of the year, and nobody saw a damned thing. Isn’t that crazy?”

  Perplexed, Naomi nodded.

  “We went to an automatic teller machine in the middle of the parking lot and we got the name of a lady who made a transaction at the time of the murder, but when we contacted her she said she hadn’t seen a thing. Knew about the murder, of course. Everyone did, it was all over the papers. And this lady even knew that she’d been in the parking lot at the time of the crime. Felt terrible about it, but couldn’t give us any information.” He paused, Naomi shifted. “Still, this lady knew we had nothing, and she wanted to help. So she agreed to be hypnotized, though naturally she didn’t believe in such hooey. And do you know what, Mrs. Roth?”

  Irresistibly engaged, Naomi spoke: “What?”

  “This lady, she saw the whole thing. It was all back there, in her head somewhere: a man got out of his car, pushed the victim into her car, assaulted her, stabbed her. We got a description: clothes, height, features. Even got two digits off the guy’s license plate. We arrested him within a week.”

  Despite herself, Naomi shook her head. “That’s incredible.”

  “Sure it is. But you see my point, Mrs. Roth. This lady, she thought she knew nothing, but she saw it all. She knew, Mrs. Roth.” He paused, fixing her with his disconcerting gaze. “I think you know, too. Think about it for me, will you? Somebody in this small town was pregnant and had a child, Mrs. Roth, but now she has no child.” Then he smiled, getting to his feet and actually extending his hand. “I’ll just bet you know her.”

  Chapter 4

  The Sabbathday Affair

  NAOMI’S HUSBAND, DANIEL, HAD BUILT THEIR house in a frenzy of late-summer machismo one year after their arrival in Goddard. The land was cheap, a gift really, from a dairy farmer whose sister—sweet and voiceless, probably retarded—attended Naomi’s quilting afternoons at the First Methodist Church in Goddard. There wasn’t much to the lot. It consisted of a grove of maples that sank in a triangular wedge to terminate in a brook strewn with stones, and the nominal sale price of one hundred dollars included a verbal right of way for the farmer’s herd. But Daniel was living his dream of loving the land, and he simply refused to accept the possibility that the land would not love him back. The house he built was designed—so he told the bemused native farmers and an optimistic Naomi—not by the dictates of fashion, or even of architectural history and precedent, but by the demands of its natural surroundings. Hence its high peaked roof—less an A-line than an inverted V-line, she had always thought, with skylights near the apex that ended up impacted by leaves each November—and the steep driveway down from Goddard Falls Road; this ran alongside a creek which iced it over in winter and bogged it down in muck during mud season each spring. A lone wire that ferried down electricity from the wider world got snagged and interfered with by branches when the wind blew through the White Mountains. In the White Mountains, the wind blew a lot.

  They had not been particularly savvy about local demographics at that time—it all looked poor to them, after all—but it was soon clear to Naomi that they had both saved and condemned themselves by settling where they had, halfway between two communities. Aspiring Goddard, which boasted no industry apart from that of selling its most glorious homes to people who lived in them two months out of the year
, had an ingrained arrogance on the subject of Goddard Falls. And Goddard Falls was easily vilified, after all. Poor Goddard Falls, with no town center to speak of, but a dilapidated general store, and no school of its own (the town ferried its kids down the road to the Goddard schools, where they formed a de facto underclass), where the farmhouses were left to rot, the roofs to sway in, the unused barns to crumble. And so, halfway between them—almost exactly halfway on the odometer between the Goddard municipal center and the Goddard Falls general store—she and Daniel had unwittingly established their postures of noncommittal and declared their roles as border guards, negotiators, ambassadors of each community to the other.

  By the time she began to think of expanding her women’s craft circle into a real business, Naomi was far better versed in the lay of the land. Most of Flourish’s workers came from Goddard Falls, where generations of thrift had determined the absolute necessity of reusing textiles and few of the women had to be taught. Their homes, on the rare occasions when Naomi was invited inside, were cushioned by rugs braided from their former skirts or hooked from husbands’ worn-out jackets. On their beds were slung quilts made from blocks of old blankets, or pieced together from their children’s long-ago dresses, and in their closets and attics, plastic bags bulged with fabric awaiting reincarnation into something useful. On the kitchen wall of the sisters Ina and Janelle Hodge, Naomi had long ago seen a rug, hooked out of frayed wool, which seemed to declare the creed: Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, Do without.

  From this—who would have thought?—had come a real business. Even she, raised to revere the almost spiritual integrity of “native” crafts, had been mildly stunned. Because, she now saw, it had begun with that same mindless gesture of support for the women that she had been primed to make in her VISTA training sessions. Find out what the women are doing, the brief went, and instill the belief that the work has value. The work of women—the sewing bees and quilting circles and nights hooking rugs before winter fires—has value. They hadn’t really believed it any more than she, Naomi thought now, but they had come anyway—out of curiosity about her, and to relieve their individual isolation. They had met in the church in Goddard, in the basement with its fake wood paneling and temperamental coffee machine, for afternoons that stretched on into darkness, well past the point dictated by arthritic wrists and knuckles, until they were disbanded by somebody’s husband’s suspicious phone call or the acrid honk of a car sent to pick up a wife or mother and take her back home, where she belonged. They had taught one another, passing on the patterns nobody used anymore, their melodic names—Sugarloaf and Drunkard’s Path—spoken like passwords to a secret society. They had brought their daughters and sisters, and the circle grew and pulled apart: two days a week, then three, then a separate group for quilters and one for hookers. And over time the older ones assumed more and more a posture of respected supervision and sat with their gnarled hands in their lap, lending weight to a decision about thread or passing comment on the twist a younger hand made as it hooked wool through a length of burlap. And so Naomi had done what everyone—her education and her values, her family and even her husband—had asked her to do. She had made from nothing a community of women. She had infused with pride the activities which had only before been busywork—women’s work. She had driven the breath of her will into those moribund crafts, even as they had been set to accompany an older generation to the grave, and from her breath a living tradition grew. And so she watched with some degree of bafflement as the thing seemed to slip beyond her aegis. A meeting time was changed, and no one told her. Everyone had somebody’s new phone number except Naomi. Between her and them there was a prism of formality, even as she sat among them, ardently hooking or sewing, her hands hopelessly flustered, her role as catalyst dormant.