by Joanna Scott
I shifted my gaze back to the gorge. I had no loose change in my pocket, so I couldn’t toss a coin into it as I like to do. But after a quick look around I found a gull feather beside one of the benches. I threw it into the air, but the wind blew it right back onto the bridge. I tried again, dropping it from the far side of the bridge this time, and watched as the feather flew skyward and spun in the wind. The barbs seemed to turn around the axis of the shaft that hovered magically, as though submerged in water, like a sprig of seaweed turning with the force of the current.
After a moment a strong gust blew the feather farther away from me, tugging it in one direction and then another and eventually dropping it onto the surface of the river.
The water level is low after a summer of drought, and the mossy sheen that’s usually visible toward the bottom of the gorge walls has long since dried up, leaving its dusty imprint behind. Only a thin thread of water streams down the cliff face of the falls. The gorge looks emptier than ever, too vast to fill up. It doesn’t seem possible that the river could have risen high enough to reach the embankment wall at the Beebee parking lot. But I’ve been reminded that what is hardest to explain can be easy to imagine — and this morning, even with the flurries blowing and the rocky borders of the riverbed peeking out through the shallow water at the bottom of the gorge, I imagined my father spinning in the river like that feather spun in the sky, propelled upward by the river’s back surge.
Until her death my grandmother maintained that a miracle caused the strange flood that saved my father’s life, and in her last months she became increasingly absorbed by the superstitions that supported this belief. It was the river angels who made the Tuskee flow backward that day, she said. God summoned them to do His will.
Psss, shhh, come here, my grandmother would say, motioning to me even if I was already sitting close to her bed. I want to tell you something, she’d say. The little angels in the river, they only pretend to be a legend. They are really very clever. Oh yes, sure, they know what’s what. They know what would happen to them if word got out. The race to catch them would be on. They’d be caught, they’d be sold, and yes, sure they’d disappear. They’d all disappear. She told me that I should never let anyone know that there were tiny angels in the river. It would be all right for me to write about them, she said, but I must give the impression that they don’t really exist.
In the last days of her life, I’d sit by my grandmother’s bed and listen to her speculate about the miracle that had saved my father’s life. Sometimes she’d speak matter-of-factly, as if she assumed it wouldn’t have occurred to me to doubt her. Other times she’d ramble, or speak with bemusement, as if she were recounting a dream. But she’d always end up acknowledging that there was much she didn’t know about the legendary creatures the native people called Tuskawali, and she left it up to me to find out what I could. She wanted me to trace their route from the source, to locate the spring that bubbled up from the aquifer on a slope in the Endless Mountains and to follow the creek as it spread through the meadow flats. I was supposed to look for the Tuskawali in the clear pools or basking on sun-warmed rocks. If I was persistent, I’d find them. Sure. I’d find them if they let me find them. My grandmother wanted me to study them and figure out how they survived beneath the winter ice. Maybe they hibernate in the mud, my grandmother suggested. Or maybe they swim out of the river, across the lake, east through the seaway, and into the Atlantic Ocean, and there they head south, journeying to some secret coral paradise. How long do they live? she wondered. Do they live for all eternity, like true angels? What do they do as the river picks up sewage and chemical waste? How do they protect themselves against pollution? Maybe some of them grow extra hands and legs, maybe they go blind as they make their journey down the Tuskee, or maybe they never even make it to the lake. Those poor creatures, my grandmother would say. What did they do to deserve us?
The truth is, I’ve never found any Tuskawali, though not for lack of trying. I may not ever know for certain why the river ran backward that day my father tried to drown himself. I really can’t verify that the river ran backward at all, since all I have to go on is my grandmother’s questionable account. My father himself doesn’t remember the flood. He doesn’t even remember falling from the bridge through the chasm of the gorge. From the moment when he slipped off the rail until less than a minute later, when he awoke in a puddle across from the brewery, he has no recollection.
I do know what happened to him subsequently, though. Since I first heard from him, I’ve probably come to know more about him than I would if he’d been there while I was growing up.
Now that I understand the reasons for his absence, I understand why it took him so long to get in touch. There was no question in his mind that he was sparing my mother and me more turmoil by staying out of our lives. Thanks to my grandmother, he was convinced that nothing would be gained by trying to repair the damage he’d done.
My grandmother hadn’t wanted to drive him away. She did her best to resist her initial suspicions about my father. Yet she couldn’t keep herself from following the trail of clues that led to the truth. And of course once she had proof, she was obligated to tell Abe who he really was.
When he fled the city of R, he left behind his own reckless ways. He moved to Michigan and then Illinois and took on new responsibilities that would distract him. While he worked at night as a bartender, he enrolled in education courses and earned his certification. He ended up marrying a woman from Evanston, and he taught in a middle school. For years he stayed focused on his life in Illinois, on his growing family and students and friends. But as he would eventually confide in me, Penelope Bliss isn’t easy to forget.
Long after he’d fled from my mother, he found himself reviving the same memories he’d tried to erase. He decided that he wasn’t to blame for becoming entangled in a doomed love affair. And why was he the one who had to run away? He tried to remember how he had met my mother in the first place, how one thing had led to another. He began writing to people he’d known in his childhood, friends and relatives he hadn’t contacted for years. He’d been out of touch for so long that he had difficulty tracking down addresses. The process was slow and often unproductive. Eventually he had some success, once he figured out the right questions to ask. And among the people who responded to his queries were two women from the town of Tauntonville, Pennsylvania, who had astonishing information to share.
After my grandmother’s death, he considered getting in touch with me directly, but he kept talking himself out of it. And as he became increasingly active in local protests against the war, he hardly had time to think about personal matters. Then one October day in 2005, he came away discouraged from a lunchtime peace rally. Nothing he’d said had an impact. He’d been heckled and then ignored. The few students listening to his speech knew as well as he did that the war would go on regardless of anyone’s attempt to stop it.
He taught his afternoon classes with extra vigor, as if to prove to the world that he had a purpose, but at the end of the day he felt more dispirited than ever. He decided to skip the faculty meeting after school and instead shut himself in his classroom. With nothing else to do, he pulled out the tape recorder he kept in his desk drawer and started talking to me.
I was thirty-one years old — old enough to be skeptical. I couldn’t help but assume, upon opening the box of cassettes, that I’d been targeted for an elaborate hoax.
Dear Sally
Hello from outer space. This is Abraham Boyle attempting to establish contact. Wait, don’t throw this tape away yet, please keep listening, for I think that what I have to say will interest you. You don’t even know me, not yet. But you will if you keep listening. So, um, what can I offer by way of introduction? Let’s see. I teach science in a middle school. I was married for twenty-two years. My wife and I divorced in 1999. The kids shuttled between our homes, but now the kids are grown. What else? I would be a vegetarian but can’t resist a cheeseburger from time to t
ime. Uh, I like to read, yeah, I’d read more if I had more free time, but what with preparing lesson plans and grading tests, well, you know, when I do open a book I like to return to old favorites. I’ve read Great Expectations twice all the way through. Have you read it? Play for me, Pip, play. Another favorite of mine is The Descent of Man. Now have you ever read that cover to cover? All animals feel wonder, and some feel curiosity, that’s what Darwin said, that’s what excited him. To prove it, to prove that animals feel wonder and curiosity, he put a stuffed snake in the monkey house at the zoo. What a mind he had, always turning… the way I see it, he turned by the force of logic toward the unexpected. Gee, well, it would be nice to sit and talk with you about books. Or about the weather. Or about this goddamn war and the shits who duped us into it. Oh, don’t get me started. I spent my lunch break at a rally and, you know, huh, hardly anyone showed up. My students baked cookies and painted peace signs on them with icing. Listen, I’m taking a bite… of peace. Mmm. You must think I’m a kook. I am a kook. But you wouldn’t exist if I didn’t exist and that’s a fact. So anyway, why am I contacting you out of the blue? Maybe I haven’t contacted you. Maybe you’ll never receive these tapes. I found an address for you in the phone book, but for all I know I’m contacting another Sally Bliss who is not my daughter. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that some kind soul will forward your mail. Or maybe not. Maybe you don’t ever want to hear from me. I don’t blame you. But if you’ll just be patient, I might convince you to change your mind about me. Are you listening? Here I am: Abraham Boyle, your delinquent dad. How do you do? I understand why you wouldn’t be ready to meet me in person. I wanted to pick up the phone and call, but I was worried you’d hang up on me. I could have sent an e-mail or a letter, I know, but I wanted to talk to you. So this is a way of talking to you. What? Okay, just sign it out, hey, sign it out, please! That was one of my students borrowing a calculator. Between you and me, I’m skipping a faculty meeting right now. Any excuse, you know. What was I saying? Um, I apologize for my mistakes. I’m a bungler by nature. Earlier today, I was demonstrating an experiment, I was using a carrot, a cork, and a sugar solution, and I knocked over the beaker, knocked it right over, of course it broke. You’d think I’d be more careful than that, seeing as I’ve done the same demonstration for twenty-five years. Twenty-five years plus five. In that time you grew up, went to college, and then what? I don’t know. Maybe you’ll tell me about yourself someday. You were still cooking inside your mother when I left town. I’m sorry you had to spend your childhood without me. You have every right to blame me for all that’s wrong in the world. But, ah, let me take this opportunity to explain why I did what I did. It’s hard to decide where to begin. Well, no it’s not. A story should begin at the beginning, so that’s where I’ll begin. It will take some time to get to the point, but bear with me. I have a lot of material to cover. Here we go, then. I’m fifty-eight, or thereabouts. It could be that I’m fifty-seven, depending on the month of my birth. As you can see, I don’t really know much about my beginning. I don’t have my original birth certificate. I don’t… I don’t know my precise birthday, though for most of my life I’ve celebrated it on the ninth of September, that’s what I put down on forms. September 9, 1947, a good date, as it turned out, because during Vietnam, men with this birthday were issued a draft number that was never called. So even though I don’t know the exact day when I was born, it’s a good thing I always put September 9 on forms instead of, say, September 5. September 5 was not a lucky day to be born when it came to the draft. Of course, maybe I really was born on September 5. Or not. Maybe I was born in August, for all I know. What do I know? Um… as you can see, I’m not very good with words. They’re like, like, like flies just sitting on the counter, and then they take off before I can swat them. Well, it’s later than I thought. The overhead light above my desk is flickering. The orbital electrons, as we say, are in an excited state. By the way, I teach at Vergonia Middle School in Vergonia, Illinois, in case you’re interested. I have two daughters, Marcia and Tracy. Plus you. I’m going to explain everything, I promise. Believe me, I have lots to say about how you came about, but it’s late, I have to go, I have a stack of papers to grade. I hope what you’ve heard so far serves as an, um, adequate introduction and that you keep listening. And you’d better not tell your mother that I’ve contacted you just yet. She wouldn’t approve. Maybe later, when I’m done with my story, maybe then you can say something to your mother about me. But not yet.
Dear Sally, hello again, it’s your favorite Martian. How are you? I’m sorry I’m not even giving you a chance to respond. I admit I’m nervous that you wouldn’t want to respond. So I’ll just keep talking to you, if that’s all right. Talking and talking. Anyway, I promised to tell you my story from the beginning. I apologize if I get sidetracked. I wonder if it would help to start over. Yes, I’ll do that. All right, here goes. There was my birth, and… and there were two years I can’t account for. I was sent to live with the Boyles around the time of my second birthday. The Boyles were an older couple from Pittsburgh. They had one son, Philip, and since his birth they’d tried and failed to have another child. All my parents ever told me was that I’d been adopted through the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. My adoptive mother’s name was June Henrietta McAllister Boyle. My father had been named Redding in honor of his maternal grandfather. He was called Red Boyle, and, you know, that’s a problem, to be called Red Boyle. So when he was still young he changed his name to his initials, RB. But you say RB aloud, of course you think of rhythm and blues, and that’s what some of his friends called him. Blues for short. He grew up in Pittsburgh and went to the university there. He’d risen up in the ranks of the accounting department for WESCO. Shortly after I joined the family, RB was transferred to the New York office. We lived across the Hudson River, there in Jersey City, for a year. Then, then we moved to Long Island because that’s where the executives in the office lived. My parents took out a big mortgage to purchase a fancy house, it was a modern house, floor-to-ceiling glass walls, out there in Oyster Bay. They joined a country club and also the local Episcopalian church, though they’d both been raised Catholic, actually. They sent my brother to a boarding school, I can’t recall the name of it, and then he went to Dartmouth. They sent me to a private day school. Those were flush times, with June and RB thinking that the way to get ahead was to act like they were stinking rich. But they weren’t stinking rich enough to afford the monthly payments on the loans they’d taken out to cover their expenses. They fell behind on payments. And they lost money, they lost a ton on bad investments. When the plate glass in the kitchen was shattered by a tree during a storm, they replaced it with plywood. They couldn’t afford my brother’s college tuition, so he dropped out, he never finished his degree. Just when they thought it couldn’t get worse, RB lost his job over a fellow accountant’s embezzlement, or I guess it was an attempted embezzlement thing. Though RB swore he wasn’t involved in anything illegal, the company blamed him for failing to expose the scheme and fired him. So there he was, fifty-six years old, broke and unemployed and without the references, you know, that would have helped him land another job. He’d take the train into New York each day to look for work. I’d go with my mother to pick him up at the station in the evening, and I’d watch him follow the other men, the other commuters, off the train. He wore a suit and carried a briefcase like, oh, I don’t know, like he was just a normal businessman, but I tell you, he looked more worn out than the others. When he got into the car he wouldn’t say a word about how he’d fared that day, and my mother wouldn’t ask. Those were tough times, sure. But you know, it wasn’t all bad from my perspective. I liked the public school I went to much better than the private school, where I’d had to wear a tie every day. We always had plenty to eat at home. And RB and June stuck it out together. They really shored each other up. They’d nuzzle on the couch in front of the TV at night, ha, and sometimes they’d go shut themselves in their bedroom even before the T
V show was over. We didn’t hear much from my brother, Phil, in that time. All my parents knew was that he was up in Buffalo, living with friends and working for, I think it was a roofing company at first. Phil got the short end, really. Anyway, the bank was threatening my parents with foreclosure, so they had to put the house up for sale. It took nearly a year to sell and only then for, what, a lot less than what they’d paid for it because it was in such poor condition. We moved into a two-bedroom bungalow in Roslyn, behind the YMCA. My mother got a job waiting tables at the IHOP in Roslyn, and my father kept on taking the train to New York and looking for work. I guess we were strapped for cash, yeah, we must have been, but I thought we were managing just fine. I’d spend my afternoons shooting baskets with friends at the Y. My mom would bring home sausages wrapped in pancakes, the IHOP special, pigs in blankets. I named my dog Pig in honor of that dish. I found him one day on my way home from school, or I guess I should say he found me. He came out of nowhere and began bouncing on his hind legs and licking my hand until I gave him the rest of the roll I was eating. He was some kind of terrier mix, a scrawny mutt, he hardly looked like a dog at all, more like a wet rodent. I brought him home and wrapped him in an old blanket. He stopped shivering, and I named him Pig. My mother let him stick around. You see, there wasn’t too much unusual going on, the way I saw it. I was a kid like other kids. Then what happened was one day, uh, we went to pick up my father at the station, and, well, he didn’t get off the train. We waited for the next train, but he wasn’t on it. We waited in the car until long past dark, I remember I was so bored and kept complaining and June told me to shut up. Finally we went home and waited for him to call. I fell asleep waiting, and when I woke up it was morning, I was on the couch, and Pig, uh, Pig was barking at a sheriff’s deputy, who for some reason was knocking on the back door instead of the front. Yeah… well.… Listen, I’m going to stop here. You can fast-forward over the pause. Good-bye for now, dear Sally.
