by Joanna Scott
She’d planned to stay with her uncle and his family, who lived just a few blocks from the bus station. When she found out that Sally was alone in Tuskee, without a place to stay, she declared that her aunt and uncle would have an extra bed for her. At first Sally resisted. She was ready to use what was left of the money from Mrs. Mellow on a hotel room while she decided what to do with herself. But Penny just looped her arm around Sally’s elbow and pulled her along, promising her she’d have a hot bath and a good meal before the day was over.
The Campbells’ house was an overfilled red saltbox at the end of a lane. With seven children, three dogs, and innumerable cats, the family was too big for the house, or, as Mrs. Campbell would complain, the house was too small for the family. But it was ample enough for anyone who needed a place to stay. Mrs. Campbell met them at the front door and gave Sally a hug just as crushing as the one she gave her own niece, welcoming her as if she were another relative and had been missing for years. Yes, here Sally was, saved from whatever terrible fate she would have suffered if she’d stayed on that Northway bus. She’d been on her way to Rondo, Penny explained. Rondo? Mrs. Campbell had never heard of Rondo. No one had heard of Rondo. No matter. Sally was in Tuskee now, where anyone in need would never be denied a helping hand.
“I hope you’re planning on staying for a long while,” Penny said as they followed Mrs. Campbell into the house.
Why not? She had nowhere better to go. And about that bath — she wouldn’t mind one, if indeed there was hot water to spare.
Almost before she knew what was happening to her, Sally found herself being treated like another member of a family in a household so crowded and wild that no one could keep track of how many people truly lived there. There wasn’t a quiet corner to be found. Children shouted and banged on the upright piano, dogs barked, cats ran skittering across the kitchen table, and the telephone rang. The telephone was always ringing at the Campbell house. Mr. Campbell was Tuskee’s favorite plumber, and he had more work than he could handle. Basements were flooded and sinks were clogged all over the city; every problem was more dire than any other problem. But as soon as the people got to chatting with Mr. Campbell on the phone, they’d forget their urgency, and by the end of the call they’d be saying that they hoped Mr. Campbell would come by whenever he had the time to spare.
It seemed to Sally that Mr. Campbell was home an awful lot for a plumber who had customers waiting. He wandered quietly from room to room, stopping to survey each scene, his face lit up with happy puzzlement. The children would race past him and sometimes bump against him, bouncing off and then rushing on their way. Sally wondered if he was as confused as she was about the family. She found it hard to be sure who was a Campbell and who was a guest. The fact that they all were clothed and fed amazed her. Somehow Mrs. Campbell managed to put food on the table every evening, big platters of pork or chicken and boiled vegetables for the family and any guests around to grab in passing. The first evening she was there, Sally followed Penny’s cue, helping herself to the food, eating with her fingers while she was standing, nibbling on a chicken leg while across from her a small boy hunched over a corncob, the dogs jumped and barked, two girls fought over the last drop of milk in the bottle, and the telephone rang and fell silent and rang again.
And always in the middle of the pandemonium was Mrs. Campbell, who remained as impossibly serene as her husband, though evidently less baffled by the liveliness of her big family. While Mr. Campbell was a wispy man, drifting aimlessly through the crowded rooms, Mrs. Campbell was a large and solid woman. Just by hovering in one place for more than a few seconds, she provided a steady center around which all activity swirled.
There were more children than beds available in the house, but that didn’t stop the Campbells from having guests. The pair of black-haired twin boys slept in the backyard in a tent. And since the Campbell girls were in the habit of adding to their numbers with friends, they couldn’t fit in the small bedroom and instead had a slumber party in the living room. There were too many girls for Sally to keep track of their names. That first night there were ten of them, including Sally and Penny, and they sprawled across blankets piled on the floor, lay head to head in a star-shaped pattern. For a while they traded gossip, then jokes that got bawdier as the hour grew late, and then they started to sing. It turned out that Penny could play any tune by ear on the piano, and she played the Campbells’ upright in accompaniment while the girls kept singing late into the night.
Though she didn’t sing along, Sally enjoyed listening. She thought it odd and wonderful that the parents didn’t march downstairs and tell them to be quiet. It seemed a house where expectations weren’t bolstered with any rules. As she drifted off to sleep, she remembered the story Penny had told her about the horse named Nestor and the word he’d said in a dream: tomorrow. It was a good word, she decided, a hopeful and useful word. Now it was Sally’s turn to look forward to tomorrow, something she hadn’t allowed herself to do for months.
After just one day of searching, Penny found a job as a salesgirl at a shoe store — not the most lucrative kind of work, she acknowledged, but it was a good way to begin meeting people. Watching her get dressed early the next morning and set off for the store, Sally was surprised to feel a shade of envy. And while she wasn’t quite prepared to make a decision about her future, she did head out to the corner newsstand, where she bought the local paper so she could check the classifieds.
She kept herself busy that day by getting her bearings, tracing the grid of streets downtown, noting the different stores and municipal buildings, and then heading farther out along the river, past the industrial section into the suburban neighborhoods, where tidy brick houses were shaded by flowering magnolias and fat, lazy dogs lounged on the front walks. As she passed an elementary school, a bell rang, summoning the children on the playground; a girl high on a swing leaped off, landed in a nimble crouch, and ran to join the line forming at the door. Sally was amused to feel herself resist a sudden urge to take the girl’s place on the swing. A few blocks farther on, she stopped in a bakery and bought a molasses cookie, which was still deliciously warm from the oven. She ate it as she walked along.
Everything she experienced that day reinforced her conviction that this river city was ideal. While she hadn’t traveled that far in terms of miles from the Woolworth’s in Fenton, where she’d left Benny Patterson at the counter, she’d come far enough.
She bought the Tuskee Chronicle three days in a row but found no suitable listings. By the end of the week, she made it known to the Campbells that she was willing to take most anything that came along. And when what came along was a full-time clerking job at Potter’s Hardware on Mead Street, located around the corner from the bus station and just a couple of blocks from Penny’s shoe store, Sally didn’t hesitate. At seventy-five cents an hour, it was a start.
The owner of the hardware store, Mr. Potter, was a good friend of the Campbells. He hired Sally to take the place of his former helper, Arnie Bly, who had worked for him twenty-three years before being felled by a tumor in his gut. Arnie Bly had died back in the winter, but only now was Mr. Potter getting around to replacing him. He made Sally swear that she was too healthy ever to fall ill before he agreed to hire her. He didn’t ask about her experience and didn’t seem to mind that she knew next to nothing about hardware supplies. He was happy to teach her.
Mr. Potter had a face that changed as the daylight changed, from a ruddy morning glow to a placid shine to a dusky fatigue by five o’clock. He spoke slowly and precisely, almost as if he thought Sally wasn’t completely fluent in English. He kept on talking even after he’d told her everything he thought she needed to know about the store. She hadn’t been working there long before he began trusting her with the details of his life. She learned that his wife was busy helping their daughter take care of her young children; his son was a schoolteacher; he had two brothers in Tuskee; and he proudly claimed among his ancestors a Seneca queen, a Portuguese
fisherman, and a Scottish thief who’d been exiled for his crimes back in the 1700s.
Mr. Potter was unfazed by Sally’s inexperience. Like everyone else she’d met since she’d stepped from the bus, he didn’t worry about falling behind. There were more than enough hours in the day for the people who lived here. Even when they were in a hurry, they had a carefree way of showing it. Though they made sure that in the end, nothing was neglected, they carried on their affairs as if there were no world beyond the borders of Tuskee and therefore no pressing need to produce more than the residents themselves could generate. They didn’t worry that they’d disappoint strangers with higher standards than their own, and they didn’t worry that strangers would disappoint them. They just pitied all those who passed through on the bus without stopping.
Surrounded by such contentment, Sally didn’t take long to begin settling into her new life. Her routines found their shapes, their simple contours. She had finally landed in a place where she truly was welcome. Though she couldn’t yet know for sure, so far it seemed that there was nothing these people wouldn’t forgive. No one blamed her for the rash actions of her youth; no one whispered about her behind her back. And with every day that passed, she felt less afraid of her own potential for making a wreck of things. It wasn’t that she was unaware of the long-term consequences of her earlier indulgences. She understood that some consequences couldn’t be left behind by boarding a bus. But this time around, her future wouldn’t be something she just stumbled upon by mistake.
The first mistake she meant to avoid was overstaying her visit at the Campbells’. As much as she liked it there and as kind as they were to her, she didn’t want them thinking she was taking advantage of their hospitality. If she really intended to remain in Tuskee, she couldn’t begin by living off handouts from a couple who had a huge family to support. So when she learned that the apartment above Mr. Potter’s hardware store was empty, she asked if she could rent it. Mr. Potter insisted that she live there for free.
The rooms had been vacant since Arnie Bly had died, and the furnishings were meager — a tattered sitting chair, a pinewood table stained with coffee rings, a foldout cot for a bed. Mr. Potter was apologetic about the conditions, but Sally was grateful to him. And she wasn’t given a chance to feel lonely. Penny came over the first night with a bag of groceries and made a spiced meat loaf, waking up the sleepy, dank rooms with the spitting noise of onions frying in oil.
She waited until she had supper on the table and they’d taken the first taste before beginning to tell Sally about the people she’d met that day.
There was the old woman who’d come into the store that morning carrying her little white poodle in her purse. While she browsed for shoes, she fed the poodle tiny peppermints.
And there was the bank executive who insisted on buying size-ten galoshes to cover his size-twelve shoes.
And the little boy who had names for each of his toes — Fiji and Samson and Mr. Doodlepuss and…
“I couldn’t believe it. Right when I was fitting that boy with loafers, some feller came riding down North River on a donkey. He stopped in to buy boot laces.”
“Really?”
“It’s true!”
It was also true, Penny said, that the mayor’s wife had webbed feet. And six pairs of women’s pumps, size nine, on sale, were bought by Father Macklehose, the priest at St. Bernadette’s.
“He likes a three-inch heel.”
Oh, how Sally laughed at Penny’s stories. She would keep begging her friend to stop so she could take another bite of her delicious meat loaf before it got cold. And while she was savoring the food, Penny would begin another story.
Life was promising to be comfortable for Sally Mole, who had learned not to take comfort for granted. Late the first night, lying awake in the darkness above Mr. Potter’s hardware store, she thought about the people she missed most: Mole, her sister Trudy, her son, Uncle Mason and Georgie, and even Gladdy Toffit. As she drifted off to sleep, they all got mixed up in her mind, the dead with the living, and she wondered if she would ever see any of them again.
By the end of her third week in Tuskee, Sally had opened her first savings account at the local bank. She’d stocked the cupboards of her kitchen with canned soups and rice, crackers and cookies. She’d purchased a new pair of saddle shoes from the clearance rack at Penny’s store. She’d been to the Immaculate Word Church on Hewitt Avenue twice for their Sunday service. She’d made biscuits and brought them to the Campbells in thanks for their kindness. She’d learned her way around the downtown streets. She’d come to understand the difference between a ripsaw and a crosscut saw, between tongs and pincers and pliers. She could answer most any question that a customer put to her.
She wasn’t working because she was expected to work. For the first time in her life, she was working steadily, if slowly, toward a goal. She’d calculated that every dollar she tucked into the cash register would come back to her in the amount of a nickel. And a nickel plus a nickel plus a nickel would eventually add up to a substantial amount.
When she looked at herself in the mirror of the medicine cabinet in her bathroom, she looked at a new Sally. She wasn’t the same used-up girl who couldn’t keep out of trouble. Not that trouble wouldn’t come after her. No, she wasn’t such a fool that she thought nothing would go wrong ever again. Sure, things would go wrong. There would be challenges. She even had a hunch about the kind of challenge she’d have to deal with next. But in her reflection she saw someone who was unrecognizable simply because she’d learned to be hopeful.
Hopefulness wasn’t just a mood for her; it was the logical conclusion she’d reached based on the evidence around her in Tuskee. The way people nodded and smiled at her along the street — why, they treated her as though they’d been saving a place for her at their dinner tables. And the sights she saw just walking around the block: spikes of velvety red snapdragons in the gardens, willows dripping green, and a drawbridge yawning open above the river. It was all so simply beautiful, as close to paradise as she expected to come.
It would have been pure paradise if she hadn’t been bothered by that distracting little hunch she had. That one particular notion. By the middle of July, with her period two weeks overdue, her suspicion was getting stronger, the details coming into sharper focus every day. And as the substance of her hunch solidified, she felt herself preparing to despair. She had tempted fate in order to give herself a second chance and make up for her earlier negligence. But something so inevitable could never be used as recompense for something she’d already done. It didn’t occur to her that she might give herself the moral freedom to change her mind and start looking for a way out of her predicament. All she could do was start preparing to spend the rest of her life dealing with the consequences of her recklessness.
But at least she’d made it to Tuskee. Everyone who settled in Tuskee prospered, and she could do the same. She didn’t have to give up hope just because she’d have more responsibility than she’d planned for. Yes, she could be happy here. If she kept saying it to herself, she’d believe it. Yes, yes, yes, she could be happy here.
She celebrated her twenty-second birthday by writing a letter to her family, addressed to her parents. She volunteered little information about herself, though she did include her return address. She wrote that she hoped everyone in the family was in good health. She promised to visit soon and enclosed a twenty-dollar bill, which she specified was to be saved for her son.
Though she would never receive a reply from her parents, she would keep sending money through the years. Eventually it would add up to thousands and would equal exactly the money she deposited in the bank at regular intervals. From that first installment, she aimed to divide her earnings fair and square, with half of it going to her lost son and the other half saved for her second child, the one growing inside her — a last, unexpected gift from Benny Patterson.
The swath of park that ran along the east bank of the river was mostly a wide, unkemp
t lawn where boys played football and people brought picnics. Dandelion cotton carpeted the grass. Gnats gathered in thick, suffocating clouds. From the distance could be heard the steady clanging of the trip-hammers inside the Dyson Tool Company across the river. The grate of the Ferry Street Bridge creaked beneath the wheels of passing cars and buses. And the river, clearer here, without the film of cement dust or sewage, bubbled and splashed against the shore on its way north.
At one end of the park was a small railed platform, just wide enough for a plank bench that had been gouged over the years with hearts and initials. During her lunch break, Sally would sit there and watch Dyson workers loading crates on a barge, and she’d listen through the city’s noise for the music of the river. Sometimes she’d hum quietly, so quietly that her voice would be inaudible even to her own ears.But she could feel the melody inside her. And when a smoky column of minnows gathered below the platform, she imagined that they were waiting for her to sing.
Left and right, day and night… no stoppin’ once we start.
It was soothing to sit there, humming to herself and rehearsing words of songs she’d sung long ago, in her other life. She would have liked to sing so loudly that the minnows would be able to hear her above the rushing water. Sure, they’d be grateful to her for giving them something to listen to besides the river. She’d make them forget about fishing nets and pike jaws and winter ice. That’s what music can do — make you forget the dangers. This song or that, crooned for an audience of fish. Dozens of little fish, maybe even hundreds.
It’s simple to wish,
And simple to dream.
Mmm-hmmm.
Is Sally here?
Who?
Sally Werner.
Who?
Sally Angel.
Who?
Sally Mole, Mole, Mole!
