Follow Me (10 page)

“That was fine singing, Sally Werner!” someone said to her as she brushed past.

“Oh, young lady, you have talent!”

“Sally,” said Georgie, giving her a hug, enveloping her in the satin folds of her dress. “My friend Sally!”

“That took some guts,” said Erna, handing her a glass of champagne.

Everyone was praising her, even surly old Swill, who raised his glass to her and said, “You brought down the house!” He might
as well have said,
You’re part of the family now, and you can’t go on hating me forever
. That motley Jackson family — they were ready to take in any stray that made it over the top of Thistle Mountain. But where
was Uncle Mason? Sally wanted to hear directly from him that she’d done fine. Better than fine. Everyone looked happy because
Sally Werner had sung for them. She hadn’t known she could sing like that. Or if she’d known, she hadn’t known what an audience
would think of her. But they all thought she was special, all of them except Mason Jackson. Why hadn’t he sought her out to
congratulate her? What was taking him so long?

With the champagne and the dancing and the music, she soon forgot about Uncle Mason. She was swept into a blur of motion and
felt herself snug in the arms of men she didn’t even know, men who called her “doll” and turned her in circles. She felt as
though she were getting married, too, and had finally earned the right to fall in love.

Finally, after hours of dancing, she had to stop and rest. She retreated to a back corner of the dance floor, where tables
were set up and guests were still gnawing on cold corn and chicken. She didn’t want to be noticed right then — she didn’t
want to be asked to dance until she’d gotten her breath back — so she stepped behind a stack of plates. She touched her hand
to her face to feel the warmth of her cheek. She realized she was hungry and scooped up a handful of sugared almonds. Chewing
absentmindedly, she let her thoughts wander. And that’s when she heard someone nearby say her name.

“Sally Werner.”

She turned toward the voice. But the woman wasn’t talking to her. The woman was sitting at a small table in front of the banquet
table, with her back to Sally as she leaned toward the fat woman — Swill’s wife — who was seated next to her.

The woman, whom Sally didn’t recognize, spat out the next word as if she’d just discovered the rotten taste of it in her last
bite of chicken. The word was “slut,” or at least that’s what Sally thought she heard.

“Dear little Sally” — it was Swill’s wife speaking now. “She’s a good girl.”

“Then you don’t know?”

“What’s there to know?”

“The girl… with her own cousin!”

The voice faded behind the rise in the music and then came out forcefully. Her own cousin. Sally pressed closer to the table
to hear better.

“And birthed a monster.”

Did she really say
monster?
But Sally’s baby wasn’t a monster. Sally had seen enough of him to know that he was an ordinary baby with ten fingers and
ten toes. He had come out pink and mewling and then promptly fallen asleep when she’d laid him in the basket. Those words,
though —
slut
and
cousin
and
monster
— a stranger was using those words to tell her story. The story of Sally Werner. Wretched Sally Werner.

“My husband works with her brother,” the woman said, her voice suddenly as clear as a bell. “Her own family won’t have anything
to do with her. Go up to Tauntonville yourself. You’ll hear what they say about her there. Frankly, they all think she’s dead.
There’s a rumor that maybe she drowned herself in the river. But they’ll be hearing otherwise soon as I get home. And won’t
they be disappointed.”

Sally Werner wasn’t dead. She was only desperate. Desperate to get out of there.

Run, Sally!

She backed away, knocking against a chair and freezing. Everyone was staring at her. No, no one was staring at her. She wasn’t
there. She didn’t exist.

She moved the chair to the side and kept backing up for a dozen or so steps, then turned and fled from the tent and across
the lawn and around to the front of the Cadmus Party House.

Fuzzy, motionless trees around her. Champagne bubbles bursting in her head. Sandal heels sinking into mud.

Dragging, stumbling, running.

How dare you raise your voice in song after leaving your baby to rot on the kitchen table! Daughter of Sodom! Run as fast
as you can, but you won’t run faster than the devil. Feel the heat of his breath on your neck. He’s there with you, wherever
you go. You slut.

All she could think to do was to follow her running legs up Marsh Lane to Main Street to Brindle Street to the dirt road that
led to Mason Jackson’s house, the only home she knew.

Running, running, running.

The quiet of aloneness was a hard pressure, the weight of air squeezing against her ears. Deep fathoms of an empty room. Nothing
in the process of change, no one to observe that Sally had entered the room, no one to hear her breathing, the silence beyond
her only partially relieved by the distant gurgling headwaters of the Tuskee.

Sally felt a sharp cramp in her gut as she stood there in Mason Jackson’s living room, staring at that wood, gulping the scene
as though it could cool her parched throat. But there was no comfort in the hard surfaces around her. The furniture looked
only temporarily motionless rather than inanimate, hanging fire, suspicious rather than blank. Strange how the emptiness was
divided by the hard lines of the straight-backed chairs pushed up against the wooden table, the stiff-cushioned sofa, the
rocking chair, the floorboards that gleamed with every possible tint of brown. Here in the domain of a whittler, wood offered
itself as the reason for everything, conveying the truth that the natural world was made to be cut up, shaped, and turned
into a place of refuge.

Not Sally Werner’s refuge.

She’d done what she’d done, no getting around it. She was like the beat-up old player piano, an oddity, a mistake that couldn’t
be corrected, the one item in the room that didn’t fit in. And oh the lies it told. Pump the pedals, and it fools you into
thinking that you’re a star.

Sally Werner Sally Werner Sally Werner.

Nineteen-year-old Sally Werner, who had grown up to nourish the seed sown by her cousin and gone on to birth a monster.

Don’t matter what side of the mountain you hail from. You’re going to hear about Sally Werner sooner or later. That slut.
Satan’s paramour revealed in all her infamy.

Everywhere she went, she was who she was. Even standing there in a quiet house: she was the girl the others preferred dead.
Too bad for them, she was alive enough to sing at a wedding.

You sure brought down the house, Sally Werner. And now you’re standing in the rubble of Mason Jackson’s modest life, having
made a wreck of things. See how everything you touch falls apart.

The ceiling caves in.

The floor collapses.

And the walls come

tumbling,

tumbling,

tumbling

down.

She slipped out of her borrowed sandals and left them in the middle of the floor before moving toward the kitchen, each step
tentative in her effort to be nonexistent. Though the truck wasn’t in the driveway and there was no one else in the house,
she couldn’t bear the thought of being heard. Tiptoe, tiptoe, one bare foot after the other. Mason Jackson’s housekeeper.
What did he need with a live-in housekeeper anyway? People in Fishkill Notch might have thought it odd or at least questionable
if they weren’t convinced that Mason Jackson did only what was proper. He was too innately honest ever to invite doubt. People
liked knowing that he was there, in his house built on the gravelly wedge where the creeks converged and became a river. Mason
Jackson gave the world something to admire: an old man who could take any piece of wood in the world and make it functional,
permanent, and appealing all at the same time. Working, scraping away peels of wood in his clean, quiet house. The piano sitting
in the shadows, pretending to be useless, finished with its life of music.

The soft, shushing sound of running water.

Uncle Mason’s housekeeper moving as soundlessly as a fish.

And then, shit, bumping a toe against the hard leg of a kitchen chair. Damn that chair.

Won’t you listen to that foul mouth.

Shush, said the water.

Soundless exhalation of thick air.

Soundless ascent, as Mason Jackson’s housekeeper climbed onto that damn chair and reached for the box on top of the high shelf.
Soundless effort, as she lifted it down carefully, holding the box against her chest as she would have held something far
more fragile.

She set the box on the table and gently opened the lid, breathing in that good smell of money and wood and pipe smoke all
mixed together. How much money? Ten plus twenty, thirty plus ten, sixty plus twenty plus ten plus — no, wait, she’d counted
wrong. She had to start over. Twenty plus ten. Ten plus twenty.

As time passed, the sum increased. And as the sum increased, so did her anxiousness. She wouldn’t be alone forever. Mason
Jackson would be coming home at any minute, and he’d wonder what his housekeeper was doing with the box that held his savings,
the fruit of a long life of hard work. Ten plus twenty plus thirty.

Quick, Sally Werner! Someone was coming!

No one was coming. No one was ever coming. Each time she’d opened the box, she’d thought she’d heard the sound of Uncle Mason
coming home. And each time, she’d been wrong.

Still, she knew that a theft should happen fast, without delay. She told herself to take what she needed and get out of there.
But how much did she truly need? Enough to pay for a bus ticket to a destination so far away that disgrace couldn’t follow
her. Enough so she wouldn’t go hungry. And wouldn’t it be something if with a portion of the money in Mason Jackson’s box,
she could make amends and bring the child she’d left behind back into her life? If she started all over again, she would like
to start with him, the boy she hadn’t bothered to name. How much would it cost to give him a name? To buy his affection? All
she could do to figure out what a new life with her son would cost was to count the money slowly, as though caution would
clarify the future: ten plus twenty plus thirty —

“T-t-take it all.”

She froze, condemned to remain for all eternity in that same position, standing at the table, bent over the open box, forever
and ever. End of story. Time would go on without offering her the cleansing experience of change. She would remain the fine-hewn
statue carved by the knife of Mason Jackson’s sharp-edged voice as he stood behind her in the entranceway to the kitchen.
Today would become tomorrow. A thousand years dating from that moment in May 1950, a wanderer would enter the empty house
and find her there…

“I mean it. T-t-t-t-take it all.”

What could she do? Being who she was and what he’d made her — both at once, in wooden form. She was helpless. The crime was
permanent.

“N-n-no,” she whispered, her voice a mirror.

“I w-w-w-want you to have it.”

Wooden creature, caught red-handed, stealing an honest old man’s life savings. Her fingernails had been painted a smoky red
by Erna earlier in the week. Red-tipped hands of a girl in a yellow silk dress. Her hair, auburn again, plaited and bound
with a ribbon.

Nineteen years old, and no one had ever told her she was beautiful.

For a moment she closed her eyes and with a great effort of imagination pictured what Uncle Mason saw: the image of her guilt
a fixture that would always be there. She felt his disappointment in her. She felt that he would maintain a strength of love
for her, despite her crime. This was so puzzling, so unexpected and disorienting, that she opened her eyes and turned her
head to look at him. With that effort she came to life, twisting back into motion, into time. She met his gaze, saw in him
a gentle little man who had an ability to forgive her — an ability that right then seemed no less than magical.

And in the next instant that magical apparition of Mason Jackson was gone, having slipped away abruptly, vanishing, leaving
her standing there wondering what to do, with her red-tipped hands still in the box that held his life savings.

She could call out to him. And then what?

She could close the box and go to her room. And then what?

He wanted her to take the money. He’d said as much. He’d given her permission and made it clear that he wouldn’t hold her
responsible for stealing. Why he wanted her to take it didn’t make any sense. Or she convinced herself that it didn’t make
sense because it helped her avoid the truth. Really, it made too much sense. But in the panic that returned to her as she
grabbed the bundles of bills, she wouldn’t let herself think clearly enough to understand that she was capable right then
of understanding more than she would have thought possible.

She didn’t allow herself to think of what Mason Jackson had been through over the course of his long, hard life. She didn’t
consider the gold band on his finger. She didn’t let the ring call to mind what Georgie had told her about the wife who’d
left Mason after their little girl had fallen through the ice of the Tuskee. She didn’t think about the little girl. She didn’t
think about the frigid water flowing below the ice. She didn’t stop to remember how one day three years earlier Swill and
Mason had lifted her by her elbows out of the cold creek. All these thoughts could have come to her vividly right then, yet
she didn’t let them. She was too busy stuffing the money into an empty paper bag, frantic to get out of there.

She’d have to use two bags if she was going to take all the money. But she wasn’t going to take all the money. She wasn’t
so cruel that she’d leave him with nothing. She’d leave at least half of it behind — her parting gift and her only way of
apologizing to the man who had been so kind to her.

And then, watch how she runs out of the house in her bare feet, running away from this chapter of her life, running along
the path that fishermen had made in the swamp grass.