by Joanna Scott
“He’s better than just fine,” Sally said.
“And your little one? Tell me about him.”
So Sally told Georgie everything, beginning with the ride on Daniel Werner’s motorcycle and the uncertain weeks that followed, her flat belly growing rounder, her prayers to God unheeded, the scorn of her relatives and neighbors, the birth of her son in the same bed where her mother had given birth to her, and ending with the day she ran away from home.
“It must have been something, leaving your baby behind like that,” Georgie said finally. “I can’t nearly imagine.”
“It was” — Sally searched for a word — “unspeakable.” It struck her as soon as she said it that she’d chosen the wrong word. But she couldn’t think of another word that would do.
Georgie knew better than to say you poor girl to Sally. But her sad eyes conveyed her pity, and this time Sally didn’t mind.
“Won’t they ever come looking for you?” Georgie asked.
I’m as good as dead, Sally wanted to say. I’m a squashed bug. I’m a fish floating belly up. I’m curdled milk. I’m a rotten apple. I’m — she searched for one more comparison — the girl in the moon, even as she said one word aloud. “No.”
“And you don’t ever want to see your baby again?”
“Of course I do. But he won’t ever want to see me.”
“That’s not right.”
“He’s a Werner. I tell you, if you’re a Werner you don’t know how to forgive. Every mistake is given a number and carved in stone. That’s the stone they put as your grave marker.”
“I can’t imagine. All the women I’ve talked to over the years, all the stories I’ve heard tell… I’ve never heard a story like yours, Sally Werner. You’ve sure been through it. I knew when I saw you you’d been through something. But now you just stick around here for a while, and you can figure out how to manage.”
Sure, she’d stick around. Just to be in a place where she could say what she’d been through, to talk about it all… she’d felt comforted by the sound of her voice as she’d spoken of her unspeakable troubles. The conversation was like a light that went off gradually, fading from bright to a soft darkness over several hours.
It was long after midnight when she lay down on the bed in Georgie’s spare room. For the first time in months, she began feeling hopeful. Georgie’s sympathy had given her an idea, just a vague one, but enough to build on. She’d keep house for old Mason Jackson, who’d promised her a good wage, and somehow she would learn to manage. She’d do more than manage. With the money she earned, she’d have the freedom to choose how to live the rest of her life.
DAUGHTER OF SATAN! Babylon’s whore! You foul embodiment of human filth! I tell you to kneel and pray for forgiveness. But there is no forgiveness. You are here, forever here, under my command. Now scrub the toilet! Sweep the porch! Milk the cows! Slaughter the pig! Pave the road! Brick the chimney! Raise the barn. Burn it down, and raise it again. Burn it down! Raise it again. Burn it down, down, down…
Burn what down? Her reeling thoughts were stuck on the cows that needed milking. Those cows with their full udders. Where were the cows? Uncle Mason didn’t have cows. He didn’t even have a barn. Or did he have a barn hidden somewhere in the house? Were the cows in the house?
Hurry, hurry, there was work to do. If she fell behind with one task, then she’d fall behind with everything. The cows? Where were the cows?
Running, running, running, to find the barn with the cows. But the hallway was endless, and every door was locked. Running, running, running, the sensation of slime latching onto the back of her leg, and —
Dear Lord in heaven —
It was only a dream.
Only. In reality, Uncle Mason would never have spoken to her like that.
Good morning to me.
Get up, lazybones. Get up and do something.
But there was nothing that needed doing.
Sunday morning, snow falling soundlessly into the shallow river, the house full of the good smell of frying bacon. Uncle Mason was rattling around the kitchen, making breakfast. Sally sat up in bed and pressed her hands against her face to feel the warmth left over from sleep.
Life waiting to be lived.
G-g-girlie. Was she up?
She’d be out in a minute. She had to get dressed.
Her breakfast was ready, a breakfast of eggs and bacon and buttered biscuits piled on a plate for Sally to find when she came into the kitchen. She’d dressed herself in the sweater and skirt Georgie had packed in a duffel for her. The sweater was the color of the deep red of a peach close to the pit and made of a wool almost as fine as cashmere, and the skirt was navy, a stiff corduroy hanging at knee length — a modern cut, if not exactly stylish.
Ten days had passed since she’d arrived at Uncle Mason’s. In those ten days, it was all Sally could do to give the impression that she was useful. A house so sparsely furnished and pristine, with simple, functional chairs and tables and gleaming wood floors, hardly needed a housekeeper, and there were times when she kept herself busy by sweeping a room she’d already swept clean.
Uncle Mason had worked for thirty-five years at the cement factory. But his real love was wood, and he’d made all his own furniture — the chairs and tables, the lamp stands and chests and bedposts. He’d even built a model of a three-mast whaling ship, the Charles P. Morgan, which graced the mantel. He’d made most everything except an old Gabler player piano. Shoved against the back wall of the sitting room, it seemed to be trying to shrink into the shadows. Sally had never heard any music in the house, and she wondered why Mason Jackson bothered to keep a player piano that was never played.
A segment of the shallow river was visible through the back door, and while she ate her breakfast Sally watched the water between two yellow willow saplings, watched the snowflakes shimmer in a light that seemed to come from nowhere before they folded into the ripples of the surface.
“You l-l-like it here?” Uncle Mason asked as he stood at the sink and rinsed off the frying pan.
“I like it here fine.” She hadn’t meant the statement to come out as flat as it did. “I mean, I really do like it here,” she said, making an effort to sound enthusiastic. “I don’t know what I would have done…”
“M-m-maybe in the spring we can get you over to Amity for some typing classes.”
“Why do I need to know how to type?”
“It’s a g-good skill for a g-girl to know, that’s all.”
She thought she could sense what he was implying: she needed a marketable skill for later, when Uncle Mason wasn’t around.
“I guess,” she said with a shrug.
She helped him dry the dishes and then watched as he got down to his work of whittling. He was whittling a cane for Swill’s wife, who was having trouble with her hip, he’d said.
It was Sunday, and Sally had nothing to do. On other days of the week she cooked simple fare for their supper — chicken stew, Welsh rarebit, fried eggs. But on Sundays, Mason Jackson made it clear that she was supposed to fill the hours doing whatever she chose.
The problem was, she couldn’t decide what to choose to occupy herself. She wanted to get out and have some fun. But from what she’d seen so far, there wasn’t much fun to be had in Fishkill Notch. And it was snowing. What was there to do in the snow when she didn’t even have proper boots?
She picked up an old movie magazine Georgie had given her. She’d already read everything in it, so she just paged through looking at the pictures. Uncle Mason’s whittling knife made a sound that reminded her of her younger brothers when they slurped soup. He didn’t say much while he worked. He never said much.
Was that a bird? Sally asked after a long while, motioning to the feathery lines he’d carved along the head of the cane.
It was a swan.
Oh.
She noticed for the first time that he was left-handed. She found herself staring at the hand that held the knife and the dull gold band on his
ring finger. She wondered what had happened to his wife, though she decided it would have been impolite to ask. But he guessed that she was hiding her curiosity, and he asked abruptly, “What are you staring at?” without looking up.
“Nothing.”
“M-my ring?”
“No. Well, yes. You had a wife?”
“I did.”
“She passed away?”
“She left.”
“Oh.”
He kept working, shaping the swan, peeling off curls of wood. Sally decided he preferred to be finished with the conversation, so she stood up and went to her room.
Shortly before noon he called to her, “I’ll b-b-be seeing you.” He was heading to his brother’s house for the afternoon.
“Sure,” she called back through her closed door. “Bye-bye.”
“Help yourself to wh-whatever you can find. I’ll bring b-b-back some ham for s-supper.”
“Thanks.”
A few minutes later she heard his truck sputtering, stalling, revving again, and then clattering along the drive. She came out of her room in time to watch through the living room window as he turned onto the road and disappeared.
Leaving Sally behind to do whatever. Fixing a cheese sandwich, then eating it, kept her occupied for a short time. She smoked a cigarette and practiced blowing smoke rings. She smoked another cigarette. And then she searched among the piano scrolls for music she might want to hear.
While she was looking through the box she found the publisher’s brochure, which included lyrics to the songs. It wasn’t easy figuring out how to thread the first scroll onto the take-up spool, but she managed it finally. She pumped the pedals and played a song called “Blue Sky Blues,” listened to it once, then played it again, singing along.
Sun don’t care,
blue sky won’t mind,
this aching heart you left behind.
Nothing left of rainy-day love
but a secret memory…
She played the song over and over, singing it with more confidence each time, with more of what Sally liked to think could be called pizzazz. She sang it for the boy she loved, whoever that was — any good-looking boy who treated her with respect and wasn’t Daniel Werner. She sang it on the stage of a smoky nightclub. She growled it into a microphone in front of an audience of hundreds.
She paged through the brochure to another song — “Boomerang Girl” — and put the scroll in the piano. It was a song about a lover who keeps leaving and coming back —
She flies away and out of sight,
she’s gone as far as I can see,
and then she’s flying right back to me!
— and Sally sang it in a way she liked to think would sneak up on listeners, making them realize there was a reason they were paying attention.
High-flying girl coming right back,
boomerang right back,
right back to me!
She sang the few songs she knew without needing to read the lyrics: “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me” and “My Darling Clementine” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” She sang for hours in the empty house, pumping the pedals of that old player piano and singing as though she were trying to be heard across the mountain in Tauntonville. She imagined someone saying to her in appreciation: Sweetheart, you sing like there’s no tomorrow.
But there was tomorrow, and by then the scrolls would be packed away in their box, the lid to the piano closed, Uncle Mason fixed in his chair whittling a stick’s knob into a swan while Sally swept the floor around him, sweeping up wood shavings as they fell because that was virtually all that needed doing.
High-flying girl singing like a nightingale under a blue sky on a summer day. Oh, heartache. Oh, my darling Clementine. Humming life away. Strange life, trading one family for another. Uncle Mason better than any uncle she ever had, kinder, more generous, and he didn’t have a son named Daniel. Georgie as good as a sister. Swill standing off to the side when he came to pick up his brother to go hunting, eyeing her suspiciously. His gun in the bed of his truck.
I wouldn’t ever shoot a doe.
Swill an enemy for life. And if he was ever in danger of softening his attitude toward Sally, back at his house there was an invalid wife whispering in his ear, telling him about all the bad things a bad girl will do. Even though she’d never met Sally. So what? She didn’t have to meet Sally to know what she was like. All bad girls were the same.
Hiss.
“Where’s Sally?”
“She’s out b-b-back in the garden.”
No, she wasn’t. She was in her room with the door open a crack, but Swill and Mason didn’t know that.
“Mason, listen, I’ve been thinking.”
“Mmm?”
Silence.
“Wh-what have you been thinking? Eh, Swill?”
“You still keep your savings in that box?”
“Mmm.”
“You keep it hidden, don’t you?”
“I k-keep it where I’ve always kept it, t-t-top of the shelf there.”
“Right there in the open.”
“It’s no p-p-place anyone would look.”
“You can see it if you stand on a chair, can’t you?”
“Who will be st-standing on a chair here?”
“Doesn’t the girl ever clean up the cobwebs? Doesn’t she dust up there?”
“Why, I suppose.”
“And someday she’ll see that box and wonder what’s inside.”
“Th-th-that’s enough, Swill.”
“I’m just trying to watch out for you. You got your whole life savings —”
“I d-d-d-don’t w-w-w-want to hear it!”
The world, Sally considered, was divided into those who thought she’d amount to nothing and those who thought she’d amount to something. Between Swill and Mason. One who said she was a thief just waiting for an opportunity. One who trusted her alone in his house.
Here living this strange life inside an old man’s house. La, la, la. Sharp lines of unupholstered furniture. Vague, sweet smell of wood everywhere. Like cinnamon mixed with pine sap and dry leaves. Uncle Mason’s trust in her as constant as the sound of the river. He was right — she’d never steal his money. Never, never! She wasn’t a thief. He paid a good wage, like he’d promised — twenty-five dollars a week, plus room and board. He had never put a grimy paw on her, never touched her inappropriately and never would. He wanted only to enjoy the sense that he was helping her get by — and more. That spring he paid for typing lessons and drove her to Amity, to the secretarial school above the Fat Cat Diner, three times a week for a month.
The qick bown fox. The quick brown foz. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog, at ten words per minute, then sixteen, then twenty-three, then thirty-two, then fifty-one words per minute, with no mistakes.
What a fortunate girl. When she no longer worked for Uncle Mason, she’d have a skill to offer and would be able to find a job. A girl who could type would never be without a job. And since she didn’t plan to profit by thievery…
She was shocked just by the idea of it. There wasn’t a thieving bone in her body. No, she wasn’t a thief.
Say it again.
She wasn’t a thief.
Since she wasn’t a thief, she told herself that it wouldn’t do any harm, would it, to climb on a chair on a Sunday afternoon when Mason was at Swill’s? She had to dust those cobwebs in the corner, after all, up there above the shelf. It sure was dusty up there. She’d never thought to get up that high, not until she’d heard Mason and Swill talking about the box. And there it was, a nice, dark, shellacked oak box, there on top of the highest of the built-in shelves in the kitchen, above the shelf of canned vegetables.
It wouldn’t do any harm, would it, to lift the box down and set it on the kitchen table and lift the tiny latch? It wasn’t even locked, after all. The hinges creaked slightly. The wind preceding a spring storm rattled the windowpanes. Sally was hardly breathing as she lifted th
e lid. And then she forgot to breathe entirely, so baffled was she by the money — thick stacks of bills in denominations of ten and twenty, secured with rubber bands.
She’d expected to find money in the box. But not stacks of money — enough money to last a lifetime; money that smelled like fresh-cut grass, pipe smoke, and sanded wood, all at once; so much money that if she tucked a whole stack of bills in her pocket, it probably wouldn’t be missed.
What a terrible thought. She almost apologized aloud. She wanted also, weirdly, to laugh, for she was conscious of the possibility that the whole thing was a trap set out for her, which she’d sprung, and she was being watched, the effect of the joke measured by spying eyes. Aha! Caught red-handed! Young ladies shouldn’t pry into the affairs of old men. Who said that? Who said what?
Hurry up and close the box.
She closed the box.
Now put it back where you found it.
She put it back.
Now get off the chair.
She got off the chair.
Now breathe, Sally Werner.
She breathed.
She lived at Mason Jackson’s house for a little more than two years, from the fall of 1947 to the spring of 1950, much as a niece might live with her elderly uncle for a time. She didn’t manage to save much of her wages, as generous as Mason was. She spent the money thoughtlessly, buying straw hats she’d wear only once, going out to the Saturday matinees in Amity to see the same movies over again, getting fancy hairdos at Erna’s Beauty Parlor on Main Street. Erna knew how to do a beehive before Sally had even seen a beehive in the magazines. She dyed Sally’s red hair a silky blond. She could tame Sally’s waves or curl them into corkscrews, and she and the other ladies there always had something interesting to say.
Though she was grateful to have shelter and secure work, Sally couldn’t help but long for more out of life than she was getting. Her chores didn’t come close to filling up the week. On Sunday afternoons, when everything in town was closed and people were home with their families, she stayed in, singing along with the player piano. But singing didn’t keep her from growing restless.
