Follow Me (2 page)

T
ouch 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.

She knew what her parents would have said if she’d asked them for permission to take a ride with Daniel. So she didn’t ask
them. She just snuck away from the picnic and met him on the dirt road behind the Jensons’ barn. She hiked up her skirt, swung
her leg over the seat, mounting the bike as if she were mounting the Jensons’ paint pony, and grabbed Daniel around the waist
as he gunned the engine.

It was great fun riding back behind the reservoir and along the road that crossed a lower ridge of Thistle Mountain. Daniel
made that bike go so fast that Sally’s hat went flying, and when she screamed he just went faster.

Faster along the mountain’s southern slope, faster along the zigzagging road, their bodies leaning together one way and then
the other, down along the dirt road behind the junkyard, down through Stockhams Woods, careening into a field Sally had never
seen before, bumping up and over a grassy mound at such high speed that the front wheel actually left the dirt road and they
seemed to float suspended in the air, then dropped abruptly, slowed, and finally rattled to a halt in the middle of nowhere.

Crazy, one-eyed Daniel — when did you get so wild? You who would only ever eat your potatoes mashed, never fried or boiled.
And always adding sugar to lemonade that was already sweet. You were changed by the war, along with the rest of the world.
Because of the war, people now knew what could happen. But as Father Ludwig of the Good Shepherd Calvary Church liked to say:
knoving eez nawt veezdom.

Daniel, lacking in
veezdom,
urged, “Come on, Sally.”

“Where to?”

“Let’s just have a walk around.”

They walked for a while along the path that grew narrower toward the end of the meadow, the brambles scratching Sally’s legs,
closing in, until the path faded to nothing, there was no dirt left to see, the sun was low in the sky, and it was time to
get back home. But Daniel wasn’t ready to go home. Daniel had a confession to make:
all this time —

“How long?”

“Forever.”

For forever, he’d guessed that Sally had special feelings for him. The way she looked at him. Her smile. Gee, when she smiled
at him, it was all he could do not to —

What was he trying to tell her?

Though she should have known better, she couldn’t help but grin. That was her habit. Grinning Sally, who by then had a reputation
for being able to charm all the youth of Tauntonville. As it turned out, she’d unintentionally charmed her cousin Daniel.

What a silly boy he was!

Such a darling girl — why, he absolutely had to kiss her!

He pressed so hard against her that she tripped and fell beneath him. She instinctively grabbed him as she went down, which
he seemed to take as proof that she wanted him just as much as he wanted her. And while he tickled her and made her shriek
with laughter, she did want him enough to tickle him back. His good eye sparkled; his bad eye stared at a skewed angle and
was veiled with a pearly film. What a strange and fascinating fellow! No matter that he was her cousin — that was part of
the fun of it. It felt right and natural to be misbehaving. That’s all they were doing. Misbehaving in the way that can’t
be helped when you’re young and full of life and out of your parents’ sight. Until Daniel went too far, and by the time Sally
realized what was happening, she couldn’t stop him.

Doesn’t it feel good, Sally? Doesn’t it, doesn’t it? He loved her and he couldn’t help loving her.

It was over just like that — an action too quickly completed to be undone. And though she could see from the look in his good
eye that her cousin was satisfied, all Sally could think to say in the cool bitterness that came with an understanding of
having failed to protect herself was “Don’t you ever do that to me again, Daniel Werner. Now take me home.”

She worked for the Jensons six months more, until her swollen belly was showing too much to be hidden by sweaters. Daniel,
eager to claim his cousin as his wife, made it known that he was the father, but Sally refused to have anything to do with
him. She must marry him, her parents told her. She’d rather die, she said. Daniel wrote to Sally, describing the joyful life
ahead for them together, in long, garbled letters, which she tore up without ever answering. At home, she worked as hard as
she could, shucking, lifting, hauling, boiling berries into jam, and praying that exhaustion would put an early end to her
trouble. She hissed at her mother’s admonitions and invited her father’s rage with her foul language, feeling with a secret
satisfaction the sting of his powerful hand against her ear and then the ringing that she hoped signaled a deeper pain. They
couldn’t make her marry Daniel Werner against her will. Oh, yes they could. Oh, no they couldn’t. Still her belly grew fatter
as the snow turned to rain. And then the day came when there was nothing left to do but run away.

Running, running, running up the jagged slope behind the rows of new corn, over the stone wall, through the woods and meadows.
Sting of nettles. Gray sky of dawn. Bark of a startled deer.
Don’t be afraid, it’s only me
. Running, running, running. Baby will have his bottle of warm milk by now and a clean soft diaper to replace the soiled one
she’d left on him.
Good-bye, baby.
He’d been alive a whole forty-eight hours, and she hadn’t bothered to give him a name yet. She would let her parents name
him. They’d name him Moses. No, they wouldn’t. They’d name him something shameful — Job or Ishmael or, worst of all, Sal —
so he’d never forget his shameful mother.