Follow Me

by Joanna Scott

  Copyright © 2009 by Joanna Scott

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: April 2009

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  “Easy to Love,” by James Longenbach. Reprinted with permission.

  “Walk with Me,” by Oliver Haslegrave. Reprinted with permission.

  Map © 2009 Jeffrey L. Ward

  Acknowledgments: Special thanks to the Vermont Studio Workshop, the Santa Maddalena Foundation, the Center at High Falls in Rochester, New York, and Ruth Rosenberg-Naparsteck for her lively history of a river, Runnin’ Crazy.

  For their invaluable input, I’m indebted to Maureen Howard, Lori Precious, Steve Erikson, Geri Thoma, Reagan Arthur, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, and to the three who fill our house with songs: Jim, Kathryn, and Alice.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-07237-3

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  November 6, 2006

  Sally Werner

  March 15, 2007

  Sally Angel

  May 3, 2007

  Sally Mole

  June 14, 2007

  Sally Bliss

  November 6, 2007

  Dear Sally

  January 16, 2008

  Sally Werner

  March 21, 2008

  About the Author

  Also by Joanna Scott

  Everybody Loves Somebody

  Liberation

  Tourmaline

  Make Believe

  The Manikin

  Various Antidotes

  Arrogance

  The Closest Possible Union

  Fading, My Parmacheene Belle

  In memory of Walter Lee Scott, 1922–2007

  Come with me, and we will go

  Where the rocks of coral grow;

  Follow, follow, follow me.

  Anne Hunter, from “A Mermaid’s Song”

  November 6, 2006

  One and two and three and —

  That’s about how long my father had to contemplate his life, to catch one last hungry glimpse of a sky that was likely the same steel gray as this morning’s sky, to hear the river spilling down the cliff face of the Upper Falls, to see the spool of foam, tinged red from chemical waste, unraveling with the northward pull of the current, to note the strata of limestone and shale in the sheer walls below the ruins of Boxman’s Mill, to feel his arms grappling helplessly, his legs buckling, his torso twisting away from the water while he anticipated his absence from the world and thought about my mother and abruptly and completely regretted his decision to jump.

  My father was a mystery to me when I was growing up, though not because he threw himself from the pedestrian bridge six months before I was born. Here’s the thing — he didn’t die that day. He survived his plunge into the icy Tuskee, and as soon as he’d dried out and recovered his senses, he packed his bags and left town.

  You might say he was lucky. But really, a man who’d concluded that the only release from his torment was to escape life altogether would have needed more than luck.

  And so in November of 1974, on a day much like today, in the wake of a rainstorm, he climbed over the rail of the bridge and jumped, and as he fell he had enough time to acknowledge that if he’d had the wherewithal to consider other options he could have spared himself from the impending impact, which he must have felt in anticipation, with horrible, vivid clarity, before he experienced it as a distinct physical sensation, his body shattering the surface of the river right at the moment when he was probably condemning himself for being such a stupid fucking idiot, and wasn’t it just so fucking typical for him to realize this too late!

  Under ordinary conditions, the story would have ended with my father’s death. But something extraordinary happened that morning, and Abe Boyle was saved from an outcome that should have been inevitable. As I imagine it, no sooner had he slipped beneath the surface of the Tuskee than from the depths came a soft rumble, and the river, already swollen from the rain, abruptly smoothed out in response. The refuse stopped its spinning rush; the wind died down. A vacuum of silence sucked in all noise, and the gallons of water that a moment before had been plunging over the falls seemed to hover in the air, hesitating, uncertain. For an instant that was too short and too long to be measured by conventional time, all motion in the gorge ceased.

  And out of that infinite stillness came my father’s reprieve. Though I can’t fully explain what happened next, I do know that heavy rainfall contributed to problems created by a rickety wooden cofferdam. A portion of the barrier had collapsed, and storm debris had been collecting over several days, clogging the spillway. The previous night an additional two inches of rain had fallen, causing the city’s sewers to overflow, and a dense sludge pasted the debris into a full obstruction, blocking the surging river entirely. The water had nowhere to go except back into the gorge.

  Ripples spread across the surface, gathering into a forceful swell. There was a great splashing noise of liquid washing against a confined space. Water began foaming and boiling, and that portion of the Tuskee reversed its direction. The current sloshed southward even as the river toppled over the falls with renewed force, and the gorge began to fill like a stopped-up sink.

  I can only guess that my father, if he was still conscious, assumed he had already died and was descending through a vile, viscous fluid into hell. Or else he spent that brief moment stunned into a complete oblivion, thinking and feeling nothing.

  Across from the brewery, in the lower parking lot of the Beebee Electric plant, a few employees heard an unusual roar echoing through the gorge. They approached the embankment and through the mist watched the river surging back into the stone channel. When it appeared that the water would keep rising, they prepared to flee. Some of them had even started to run when a wave crashed over the wall and spread across the parking lot. At the same moment, the debris blocking the opening must have been dislodged by the shifting pressure, for the river formed a liquid funnel in the gorge, gulping back the surge, and the water level fell.

  But the people in the Beebee parking lot didn’t notice the spillover trickling away through cracks and crevices in the wall. They didn’t see that the Tuskee River was flowing steadily and reliably north again, toward Canton Point and the lake. Rather, their stares were fixed on the body of the sputtering, blue-faced, waterlogged man who had been deposited in a puddle on the pavement.

  For reasons I’ll go on to explain, I was thinking about this story earlier this morning. I was wondering if I should go ahead and write it down, tell the whole of it from start to finish. Would anyone believe me if I claimed to be telling the truth?

  I felt too muddled to head directly to work, so I took a detour through the city. I parked my car in the lot beside the ruins of Boxman’s Mill and walked partway across the pedestrian bridge. The air was damp, the sky overcast. Far below, the river looked as glassy and flat as a pond. I stood there for a long while, watching gulls circling between the walls of the gorge. When I heard the electric chimes of St. Stephen’s ringing the hour, I decided to leave. But first I dug into my purse, found a penny, and tossed it ove
r the rail. As it fell, I counted aloud: one and two and three and —

  Between the bottle of vodka he’d polished off the night before he jumped from the bridge and the engulfing shock of the frigid water, my father would remember little of his actual ordeal. Most of my information comes from my grandmother. She was the one who first told me what happened that day. She described the unfolding scene in the gorge in impossible detail, as if she’d been there and had watched it herself.

  After being spit out by the river onto the lower parking lot of the Beebee plant, my father, with no broken bones or obvious injuries, was helped to his feet. A blanket appeared out of nowhere and was draped over his shoulders. Clamping his shivering lips closed, shaking his aching head, he vowed silently to get on with his life and prove himself worthy.

  He couldn’t bring himself to contact my mother, and she never came close to guessing why he disappeared so abruptly. All she knew was that Abe Boyle went away without even saying good-bye, leaving her alone, brokenhearted, and pregnant with me.

  My grandmother Sally Werner blamed herself for the turmoil that culminated that day in the gorge. Everything, she thought, was her fault. And yet she was convinced that none of it could have been prevented.

  She entrusted me with her version of this story late in her life. In fact, it’s a long story when all the pieces are added together, and it begins many years before my father jumped from the pedestrian bridge, when my grandmother was young and set out to follow the Tuskee River north. She confided in me because she wanted me to understand, as she put it, how one thing led to another. But I had to promise never to repeat what she told me to anyone.

  She would be furious to hear that I’m about to break my promise. I’d like to hope, though, that by the end she would forgive me.

  Sally Werner

  Touch your fingertip to a bubble. Feel the pop of cold. Cold, clear water squeezed from subterranean stone. Water seeping into the spring, filling the basin, spilling over the mossy slate ledge, flowing with a persistence peculiar to rivers, tumbling across a wide plateau, over a hillock, and down, down, down, for two hundred and sixty curving miles to the lake.

  Here at the source of the Tuskee. Look around. Balance on your knees upon the stone rim, cup the water in your hands, and drink.

  Splish splash. Brrr. Drip, drip, drip. See the different paw prints pressed in rich mud. Fat muskrat scooting away, wood sparrow bathing in the shallows, carcasses of yesterday’s mayflies spinning with the flow. Slugs and worms, snakes and frogs, hidden in the muck.

  Gurgling source of life. Good, plain water bubbling up out of the earth, widening into a lazy meadow stream, gathering depth and momentum along its descent. Clear current stirring silt into a dusky brown, stirring brown into a frothy yellow, eroding stone, cascading over precipices, carving ravines, powering turbines and generators, filling irrigation ditches, flowing past fields and houses, picking up sewage and chemical waste and runoff from the roads, ripening with a thick luminescence before spilling out into the lake.

  Help me!

  What was that?

  Roar of the falls. Splashing shoals. Raindrops piercing the surface on a cold autumn day. A single spot of foam traveling along the water’s surface, disappearing between ripples, sliding forward, splitting and converging in serpentines.

  There it goes, there and there.

  Have you ever heard the legend of the Tuskawali? They were little creatures said to have the faces and hair of humans and the spotted bodies of tadpoles. Hatched deep inside the earth, they squirmed from the molten center, through cracks in the sediment, up into the aquifer, and eventually they emerged with the fresh water into the spring and swam downriver in search of mates. The natives believed them to be the sacred incarnations of fate, begot in the underworld for the sole purpose of multiplying possibility in the world. Their goodwill could be cultivated simply by leaving them alone.

  The early explorers at first dismissed the natives’ accounts of the Tuskawali as superstition. Then they saw several of the minute creatures circling in the clear water of the spring, gliding just below the surface. They saw dappled clouds of Tuskawali swimming at the edge of the meadow, where the stream deepened before descending down the mountain. They even saw one stretched on a rock, soaking in the sun. The creatures were too swift to catch with bare hands, so the men used sieves and fine-woven nets, scooping up the Tuskawali by the dozens. They dumped the tiny captives into bottles filled with river water, packed them in crates, and carried them east, to be loaded onto ships and sent back to England.

  Invariably, the Tuskawali died either during the journey to the coast or on board the ships. The men hoped to bring home the strange carcasses, if nothing else, as proof of their existence. But the bodies floating belly up inside the bottles disintegrated into a silt that within minutes became transparent. And then, of the twelve ships that transported the bottles, two went down in North Atlantic storms, four were sunk by Spanish frigates off the Azores, four others lost their cargo to a fire in Southampton Harbor, and one sailed off course, disappearing into the icy oblivion of the Arctic. Only a few bottles actually made it into the hands of scientists at the Royal Society, who tested the water with all the means available to them and found no impurities beyond a slightly elevated level of phosphorus.

  The Tuskee River flows north across the state border, through the Southern Tier and up into Canton Lake. Its source is on the edge of a cornfield in the highlands of the Endless Mountains, the spring where the Tuskawali were said to have come out of the earth. After the natives were driven from the region and before tractors made the high slopes accessible to farmers, the forest undergrowth grew so dense and the outflow so thick with swamp grass that the exact location of the spring was forgotten — until the day in 1947 when a sixteen-year-old girl left her newborn infant on the kitchen table of her parents’ home and ran away.

  Splish splash, halluah, halluah. Where was she? Oh, buddy, weren’t they in trouble now.

  If only she had a buddy.

  Or a blanket to keep her warm.

  Or soap. She’d give her little toe for a bar of perfumed soap. And for such a sacrifice she deserved a piece of milk chocolate as well, along with a guarantee that she’d never again go through what she’d just been through.

  But with water, this good, fresh, pure springwater bubbling like happiness, she’d do all right. She didn’t need nobody. Anybody, rather. She knew her grammar well enough to get by. The cock’s crow came with dawn. Until she went to work for the Jensons, she’d had Miss Krumbaldorf for three-quarters of seventh grade. Miss Krumbaldorf with her narrow shoulders and string-blond hair and freckled nose: she was perfect and devoted herself to teaching students everything they needed to know so that when the time came, they could decide how best to make use of their God-given talents.

  Was it because of Miss Krumbaldorf that Sally made the irreversible decision to leave her newborn son for her family to raise and run away from the world? If only the world weren’t so darn big. Everywhere you go, there it is.

  And just when you think you’ve had enough, you find a quiet place where the clear, cold water comes bubbling out of the earth. That’s nice. And look at all the wild strawberries peeking out from behind their leafy curtains — enough to fill two buckets!

  The afternoon sun offering a healing warmth. A wood thrush piping its three-note trill. If she weren’t so all alone at this, the second beginning of her life, she’d have to consider herself blessed.

  The first documented reference to Sally Werner is her birth certificate issued by the Peterkin county clerk in August of 1930. Her name appears once more on a list of children who in their twelfth year were welcomed as full members of the Good Shepherd Calvary Church, having been successfully baptized in the Spirit. But there are no surviving photographs of Sally as a child. She’s absent from the family albums. Of her siblings, only her sister Trudy would ever look for her after she left home.

  Her parents, German immigrants from
the village of Utilspur in the Black Forest, settled near the father’s brother on the outskirts of Tauntonville in the Peterkin Valley. Shortly after their arrival, they joined the local Baptist church, and their devotion to their newfound faith quickly became the center of their lives. The father, Dietrich Werner, was appointed an elder, while the mother, Gertrude, led the women’s Bible study group. Sally was their first daughter and their second child of seven. Somehow they managed to grow corn and hay on their forty acres of stony land. They kept a small herd of dairy cows, and they sold Gertrude’s homemade jam at a roadside stand.

  An outbreak of polio in 1939 would take the life of their youngest daughter, Anna, and leave another daughter, Trudy, dependent upon a leg brace for the rest of her life. Dietrich and Gertrude Werner interpreted this loss as God’s angry call for a show of stronger faith. And as anti-German sentiment spread with the escalation of the war abroad, they felt an increasing need to prove themselves patriotic Americans. They stopped speaking German even between themselves, and they spent less time running the farm and more time with their religious duties in town. They hardly noticed as their crop yield steadily decreased.

  To help support the family, the oldest son, Loden, went to work for the local lumber company when he was fourteen. At the age of twelve, Sally was sent to the neighboring farm to help with housework and care for the young Jenson twins. For the next four years she was paid with room and board and a weekly allotment of sausages, which she brought home to her parents on Sunday mornings before church.

  It was during a church picnic one mild October day when her older cousin Daniel offered her a ride on his new motorcycle. He was twenty-three. He’d come back from the war blind in one eye. Though he’d been a timid boy, slight and pale, who had always kept out of the way at family gatherings, as a wounded veteran he’d gained a special status among his relatives, and he was allowed to follow his own set of rules. He’d started smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and drinking from bottles tucked in paper sacks. He worked part-time as a clerk in a grocery store. No one knew how he came up with the money to buy a motorcycle. He was the type to keep his thoughts to himself, and Sally, who’d been watching him with interest from a distance, sizing him up and trying to get a better look at his damaged eye, was surprised when he offered her a ride.