The smaller of two islands
The smaller of two islands
Eyes of a foundling
Cloudbanks of white clover
V.
A man once wrote a book about a lemon skin,
But I say
Nothing gets written.
Joys are creatures.
There are no books in the soul, only eyes
Meeting at the kitchen window at sunrise.
I make the coffee, and the rabbit watches me.
I rattle cups in the little basin, and he watches.
Something has driven all the predators from the sky.
From two islands,
You could make a city.
I know mine.
In all his life, a man loves only one
And he does not choose it.
Mine is two islands, and I live on the smaller one.
“Make music,” the rabbit says.
I cannot.
“Make the hawk’s wings fold forever.”
I cannot.
I can only tell you, although you are past hearing,
Christ’s embrace of the woodlands hereabouts
Drove God out of the trees.
VI. THE VISION OF SAINT EUSTACE
In the antlers of a stag,
Christ on a cross-tree …
Have I one, if only one,
Conversion left in me?
My city is too far.
Islands are impossible
Because of empire, because of torturers,
Because not even drunkenness or prayer
Takes me the very little way
From murder to white clover.
God was driven out of the trees,
Taking shelter in a stag.
Not far, in the parched grass, one rabbit fleeing one dog
Leaps.
Sally Werner
Joanna Scott
TOUCH YOUR FINGERTIP AGAINST 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 gentle series of plateaus, 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 against 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 and back again, 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, deepening glacial moraines, 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 story 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 finally, when they were full grown, 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 being left 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 fire in Southampton harbor, and one sailed off course, disappearing into the frozen waters 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 at the time and found no impurities beyond a slightly elevated level of phosphorus. And as for the handful of eyewitnesses who had returned to England alive, their reports were all dismissed as hoaxes.
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 the 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 night 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 Liggett’s 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 spring water 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 fifth grade. Miss Krumbaldorf with her narrow shoulders and string-blonde 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 Shep
herd 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 Turnersville in the Peterkin Valley. Shortly after their arrival, they joined a 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 Bible study group. Sally was their first daughter and their second child of seven. Somehow they managed to grow corn and winter wheat 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. Thirty years later, he’d still be working for the same company, along with his two brothers. 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 August 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 only 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, swinging her leg up and 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 mount so fast 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 back home. Daniel had a confession to make: all this time—
“What time?”
“Forever.”
For forever, he’d known 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 Turnersville. 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 laugher, 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 bring herself to try to 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 really did love her, 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 pregnancy was showing too much to be hidden by sweaters. Daniel, desperate 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 him. At home, she worked as hard as she could, shucking, lifting, hauling, boiling berries into jam, and hoping 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. Goodbye, 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.
Running, running, running, because that’s what a girl does who has left her baby in a basket on top of the kitchen table, like a pile of fresh-baked biscuits. And all the while listening for the sound of voices filling the empty air, calling her to come back.
Sally!
O Lord our governor, whose glory is in all the world.
Where’s Sally?
Has anyone seen our wretched Sally?
Look what she forgot to take along with her!
And who’s surprised?
Almighty and everlasting God, from whom cometh every good and perfect gift.
Laura, check the attic. Loden, check the cellar. Clem, ride over to the Jenson place, see what they know. Tru, watch Willy. And the baby.
Sally isn’t here.
Sally’s gone away.
Bad Sally. Doomed Sally. The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.
Give unto us the increase of faith, despite—
A mouth of cursing, deceit, and fraud. Tush, she said with vanity, I shall never be cast down. And look what happened.
Where’s Sally?
Sally’s gone away.
Is that her name carried on the wind? Shhh, says the breeze moving through the meadow. Don’t speak. The world will watch in silence as she runs, the sky empty of consolation. No one is calling. They’ve already given up on her.
But still she runs. Running, running, running. How many lives start over this way, by putting one foot in front of the other?
Bad Sally will come to a bad end—that’s what they’d been saying ever since her cousin taught her about love. While other Turnersville girls her age were finishing their schooling and looking forward to marriage, she was—
—running, running, running.
Not from sin, not from judgment, not from responsibility, not from her brothers and sisters, her parents, her newborn son, or the judgment of the Lord.
Dear Cousin, I’m running, running, running away just to break your goddamn heart. Such is the letter Sally Werner would have written, if she’d had a pen and paper.
Fifty Contemporary Writers Page 38
