by Joanna Scott
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 th
ink 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.
She followed the river a couple of miles until she reached the Route 36 bridge. She climbed up the sloping bank, slipping once on the wet grass, muddying her nice yellow dress. She started walking along the road, keeping just inside the gravel edge to avoid the sharp little stones.
A few cars sped right past her. She kept walking, minding her own business. But when she turned at the loud approach of a station wagon, the driver slowed and the children sitting in the back waved and called something to her. The car stopped a few yards ahead along the road.
She jogged up to the passenger door, which swung open before she reached it. A sullen, pimply boy sat in the passenger seat, and a man with a broad, sunburnt face and buzz-cut hair was at the wheel. The man leaned over the boy and said to Sally, “Need a lift?”
“Sure, thanks.”
“Go on,” the man said to the sullen boy, who dragged himself out the door without acknowledging Sally. She climbed into the seat while the boy squeezed himself into the back beside the other children.
The man started driving.
“Where you heading?”
“Rondo,” she said.
“Where’s that?”
“Downriver.”
The man had never heard of it. But of course there were lots of places he’d never heard of. He asked Sally if she’d heard of Sarabelle, where he was from. He knew a doctor there, if she wanted to see one.
“Why would I want that!” Her eyes blazed, and her voice was harsh.
“No, sorry, it’s just… if you had trouble, you know.…”
She assured him that she was fine, she’d just been walking to the bus, and wouldn’t you know, the heel on her shoe broke so she threw both shoes away. That’s all.
“You want to get the bus in Amity? I’ll take you to the station there.”
“That would be helpful.”
He drove along slowly, as if he meant to delay their arrival in Amity so he could hear something of her story and satisfy his curiosity. With each bump and dip in the road, the children in the back yelled joyously.
“Say,” the man asked after a while, “what’s your name?”
“Sally.”
“Just Sally?”
“Sally Angel,” she replied in a cold voice. She turned to watch a tractor plowing a field in the distance and didn’t speak again until the end of the drive, when, as she was stepping out of the car, she thanked the man for giving her a lift.
March 15, 2007
Scrappy changeling, there and not there, transforming herself with a snap of her fingers. Good-bye, hello. Dear Sally, I’m your namesake. Wait for me. You should listen to what I have to say. I have the advantage, after all, of living in your future. I know what’s in store for you. Of course, that makes it more difficult to be accurate in my description of the past and keep the facts compatible.
Ever since discovering that my grandmother’s grasp of this story was incomplete, I’ve made an effort to fill in the gaps. I’ve retraced her journey upriver and beyond, all the way back to Tauntonville. I’ve talked to members of our extended family, along with some of my grandmother’s old acquaintances, and I can say with confidence that my version, even if it’s not infallibly correct, is closer to the truth than hers. I admit, though, that I can’t always keep straight who told me what.
Girl, my grandmother would say to me when I was caught causing trouble: you sure are a Werner through and through. I used to think I heard in her voice a note of conspiracy, as if she were concluding, in light of my bad behavior, that I was obliged to repeat the mistakes she’d made. Over time I came to believe that she was only pretending to disapprove of me, and in reality she was secretly pleased with my antics.
In one picture from the late seventies, we’re standing facing each other on the terrace behind her house on Anchor Heights. I’m about five in the photo, and my grandmother Sally is still young enough to look spry. I’m holding up a bouquet, though not a bouquet of cultivated flowers from a garden. They’re weeds, unglamorous, aggravating stalks of dandelion and yellow rocket from the looks of them. Just weeds I must have plucked from the side of the road.
I only ever collected weeds — out of ignorance when I was little, and then as part of a game. Over the years, my grandmother and I engaged in a fierce competition involving weeds, each of us trying to outdo the other, gathering as many weeds as we could find in an hour. We’d rate our hauls at the end by counting the different stalks in each bundle. I usually won the contest. My grandmother managed to find the colorful weeds, but I’d collect more of them.
She kept a Golden Guide to weeds in her kitchen, and we took to drying and pressing examples of individual species, though we didn’t make much effort to keep track of our collection. Even to this day, I’ll pull an old book off my shelf and find in its pages an ancient sprig of pigweed or goosefoot.
In this photo of the two of us, I’m proud to be showing off my winning weeds, and my grandmother is proud to acknowledge her defeat. There’s something wily in her expression. It took me years to realize that I won our games because she wanted me to win.
Weeds might be infesting, unattractive plants, out of place everywhere they spread, but the way they adapt to the most adverse conditions — well, it’s something, my grandmother liked to say whenever I told her about a patch of weeds I’d found growing in an unlikely place around the city, in a sidewalk crack, between bricks on an outside wall at the mall, in the middle of the Wegmans parking lot.
More than something, she’d add.
My mother was standing at the kitchen counter flipping through a magazine when her water broke. My grandmother, slouched in her chair, had surrendered to the lulling glow of the TV and was singing in a whispery voice to Lawrence Welk’s orchestra.
Ay-yah. Hmmm, most any afternoon at five…
Mama, it’s time.
We’ll be so glad…
It’s time!
It’s a familiar scenario: a suitcase already packed, a doctor on call, a pregnant woman saying, It’s time. What’s missing is the jittery husband standing ready to transport his wife to the hospital. In this story my grandmother is the one who’s ready. She’d been the one who packed the suitcase. And she’d been sleeping with the car keys on her bedside stand, along with a flashlight and a battery-powered clock radio in the unlikely event that a storm blew down the electrical lines and she had to orient herself in the dark.
There was no storm that night. There was a rising moon casting a silver light, turning the contrails of a cumulus mass into streams of melted iron. There was a warm breeze rattling the cones that had fallen from the pines onto the driveway. And there was my grandmother, standing with the suitcase in her hand, urging her daughter, my mother, to hurry, hurry, hurry.
My grandmother and mother would often laugh about what followed: the rush to the car, the wild drive to the hospital with my grandmother blasting the horn as she ran through every red light. My grandmother parked the Chevette half on the sidewalk in front of the emergency entrance and swept my mother through the open doors, shouting for a doctor, the violence of her voice causing a temporary stir among the medical staff, though what the nurses found as they gath
ered around was my pregnant mother resting her folded arms on the ridge of her swollen belly, calmly surveying a fire-hazard notice on the wall while she let out a leisurely burp.
As punishment for causing unnecessary havoc, my grandmother was directed to a bench and given a dozen forms to fill out before any help would be offered.
Name, date, address, policy number, patient history, reason for visit. Name, date, address, policy number, emergency contact. Name, date, policy number, home phone, work phone. Name, date…
Like as not, folks won’t be noticed until they generate a folder stuffed with unnecessary forms, my grandmother would grumble. You’d think life begins and ends on paper.
Only after she’d finished signing her name on the last sheet was my grandmother taken to the waiting room and my mother officially admitted to the hospital. Irked at being left alone, my grandmother ignored the No Smoking sign and lit a cigarette. In the story she tells about that night, no one came to tell her to put her cigarette out. She didn’t wait long after finishing the first one to light another.
Meanwhile, I wasn’t making my entrance easy for my mother. I’d accomplished a full somersault during my last week of gestation and was presenting breech, as if to demonstrate my reluctance. And though my mother’s contractions intensified, by the time of her first exam in the maternity ward her cervix had hardly dilated.
She was given a shot of morphine to relax her. The drug relaxed me as well, causing me to loosen my grip, and I began slipping into this world, though my resistance continued to slow the process, so what should have progressed quickly from that point took ten hours, along with ten Lucky Strikes and the remaining fluid in my grandmother’s lighter.
Ass-first I descended through the squeeze of the canal. Ass-first in what my grandmother Sally would cite as my first great act of disrespect.
Craziness mirroring craziness. You and me, Grandma. I knew there was something I wouldn’t want to face, so I turned my back and tried to hang on to the center, gripped my mother the way I’d grip the branch of a tree high above the ground. And then, helpless to gravity, feeling my hands weaken, the weakness spreading numbness up my wrists. Centimeter by centimeter, letting go. One Lucky Strike after another.
