by Joanna Scott
The problem is, you’ll never read this letter because without an address for you, I can’t send it. I can’t even say good-bye.
Penelope
He didn’t intend to throw himself off the pedestrian bridge and drown in the river. He didn’t leave his room early that morning to fulfill a specific plan. As he wove through the streets in the direction of the gorge, splashing through rivulets streaming toward sewer drains, stepping over branches that had been downed by the wind, he was thinking to himself that the whole situation was too absurd to take seriously, and he was everybody’s favorite clown. Ha-ha, look at him go, staggering on tiptoes to the right, oops, then to the left. What a funny man.
Could he help it if the ground went one way and he went another? Having stayed up the night before washing down warm Smirnoff with warm Smirnoff, he wasn’t completely balanced. He wanted to laugh at himself and was about to let out a big guffaw, but a car’s horn preempted him, warning him to get out of the middle of the street. Geesh, he could have been killed!
There — he thought of it first as an accident narrowly averted, then as a prospect to consider, then as a direction to follow. Somewhere ahead of him was an end to the torture. Beyond that point, he would no longer have to think about what he’d done and what he’d have to live without.
He followed the street under the highway, across the intersection, and toward the river. By the time he reached the ruins of Boxman’s Mill by the falls, the sky was a pale blue and most of the streetlights had blinked off. He stood for a few minutes by the stone steps leading to the old mill wheel. He pictured the wheel in motion, turned by the force of water surging through the race.
Standing by the ruined mill, he began to feel for a second time that morning that he was being watched. It seemed that he was being observed and judged by his willingness to follow through with his purpose, now that he had a purpose, which was… he had to think for a moment, yes, he was on his way to the pedestrian bridge that spanned the gorge. The bridge provided a convenient destination — the point from which he would not return. There, he could see the first lamppost behind the corner of the old button factory, and, as he approached, the second lamppost, and then the whole bridge and the smokestacks of the brewery on the opposite bank.
Good God, what was he doing?
He was walking onto the bridge, see, step by step with such balance he could have tricked a cop into thinking he was sober. He was leaning against the rail.
But he couldn’t really be planning to jump, not Abe, who had always thought of himself as unusually sensitive to pain and would go out of his way to avoid the risk of physical danger. He wasn’t about to let his body suffer bruising blows. No way. He preferred to be alive, even if it did mean living with the torment of his memory forever after. He would rather live with that torment than willfully throw himself off the bridge and fall seventy feet into a freezing river.
Still, in his current state of mind it helped to flirt with death by slinging one leg over the rail and balancing there while he pictured himself falling. It made him feel newly estimable to think of himself as a man with that much courage. He could hover there, straddling the rail, and rage at the heavens like a legitimate hero. He could tell himself that he was taking destiny into his own hands. The whole operation of consciousness was his own to start or stop at will, and he could pretend to make the final decision to jump without actually making it, leaving him free, when he was done pretending, to pull himself back to the inside of the rail and consider his next move.
Or else he could linger there a little longer, contemplating his nobility. And if he stayed long enough, lost in the drunken fantasy of suicide, then sooner or later he would be startled by a noise in the distance, perhaps the whistle of a train, or the chimes of St. Stephen’s, causing him to loosen his grip, and before he could remind himself that the decision to jump was only hypothetical, it was too late.
One and two and three and…
Uh-oh, here comes another.
In the real world, he wouldn’t be saved. In a world governed by the laws of physics, he would lose consciousness upon impact with the water and plunge to the bottom, bouncing up, to be seized by the surging river and carried through the gorge, his limp body remaining submerged, revolving head over heels with the swirling current. Silty water would fill his lungs, inhibiting the exchange of essential gases. His heart would race in an effort to compensate for the oxygen deficit even as the sensitive tissue of the brain would begin to die. Soon whatever glimmer of physical self-awareness the nervous system had retained within a state of unconsciousness would fade and go out altogether, leaving an eternal blackness, the soul fleeing, the mind emptied, the skin a bag stuffed with contents that had been abruptly stripped of their value. Without a reason to keep beating, the heart would stop. Eventually the body would float near the surface, facedown, only a patch on the back of the jacket visible, bloated by an air bubble.
But the way Sally explained it, when Abe disappeared into the Tuskee he left the real world behind.
____
The river had been surging over the falls at twenty thousand cubic feet of water per second. Add the November storm, upstream rains, scum from overflowing sewers, a stopped-up cofferdam built by a corrupt construction company owner… and, in Sally’s opinion, it still wasn’t enough to make the current flow backward and propel Abe out of its depths.
She heard about it afterward. Abe wrote to her and described the event in an attempt to display the extent of his despair, which she, his mother, had provoked. Thanks to Sally Bliss, Abe had been compelled to try to drown himself. But the river wouldn’t have him. The river hadn’t liked the taste of him and spit him out.
It would have been natural for Sally to dismiss Abe’s account as exaggeration. But Sally not only believed every word, she took it upon herself to enhance her son’s version with her own fanciful additions. She made up a fairy tale to explain what happened that day in the gorge. It was the unreal counterpart to a real situation, the fanciful tag to experience, the portion that couldn’t be verified with testimony and documents. And in her understanding it was more than a necessary part of the story that began the day she climbed onto the back of her cousin’s motorcycle; it was the salvation she’d been seeking for the last twenty-seven years.
Everything she’d learned during her early years in her parents’ church had led her to believe that she would never be relieved of her responsibility. She was guilty and would always be guilty. But at the point when it really counted, the effort she’d made to see to her son’s well-being and protect him in her absence had been rewarded. She had tried to do what was expected of her, to follow the path that was her destiny. And here, in the eleventh hour, was her reward: God summoned His little river angels, who made the river run backward in order to save a drowning man from death. Abe’s survival was a gift to Sally, proof that she had been forgiven.
As much as she wanted to celebrate the miracle, she couldn’t go around announcing that there were tiny angels living in the river. She didn’t want the world to think she was crazy, even if she was crazy. But she couldn’t deny what she’d seen with her own eyes, the glimpses she’d caught of the creatures over the years. There were strange and wonderful secrets hidden in the Tuskee, and they became Sally’s handy explanation for an inexplicable event.
After she learned about the flood in the gorge and her son’s improbable survival, she filled in the content to fit the event. And because it stretched even her own flexible credulity to the breaking point, she kept the details to herself for a long while. It was the part of the story that threatened to invalidate the rest. She had to remind herself that regarding the identity of Abraham Boyle, she had gone to great lengths to gather substantial proof. But there was nothing substantial about her version of the miracle that dumped Abe into the parking lot of the Beebee Electric plant.
She had to wait until a summer day in 1998, when she was at the county fair and happened to overhear an elderly native
wood-carver reciting the legend of the Tuskawali. Only then would Sally realize that she wasn’t the only one who knew the river’s secrets. And if the rest of the crowd believed that they were hearing nothing more than superstition, so much the better, in Sally’s opinion. Then no one would bring nets and poles and start hunting for them in the river — a good thing, since as the wood-carver warned, the Tuskawali don’t like to be caught.
In her letters to Abe, she pleaded with him to find happiness. She would do anything for him. She had failed him once but would not do so again. She sent him money. She shared all the good advice she could think of. As she wrote, she was reminded of the letters she used to type for the old woman in Helena, Mrs. Mellow. She remembered that Mrs. Mellow smelled of potpourri and that she seemed to know everything. Sally went to the public library and with the help of the reference librarian found some useful information to add to the letters she sent Abe.
He must live a full and happy life. Her daughter must live a full and happy life. Sally’s own happiness depended upon theirs. She could accept that their definition of happiness differed from hers, as long as they were content. And neither of them should assume that trouble experienced at any point in their lives would cancel out future happiness. The ingredients for the feeling would change through the years, as they had for Sally. She’d learned to be open to unfamiliar prompts and find satisfying purpose where she would have least expected it. And she’d found a way to salvage a faith that had terrified her as a child and to experience it as a private set of beliefs, some borrowed, some eccentric, with fanciful and sentimental aspects, but all of them useful, as it turned out, during a crisis.
She would always regret that she was so poorly educated. But she made an effort to stay attentive to the dangers of ignorance. She’d done her best to be cautious. In her own estimate, she’d proven that she had a reliable instinct when it came to trusting people — or at least she’d worked to refine her perceptive skills and wasn’t as easily misled as she’d been when she was younger. She liked to think that as she’d grown older, she’d become more adept at understanding bewildering experience. She didn’t choose the beliefs that were most convenient, nor was she without skepticism. She simply remained open to persuasion and preferred to trust those who claimed to be telling the truth.
Without evidence to the contrary, she wouldn’t guess that she’d been misled about Abe by the Werners of Tauntonville. She’d have no reason to suspect that the document Sylvia sent relating to his relinquishment was a forgery. It would never occur to her to doubt that the original document had been destroyed by fire. She wouldn’t have a chance to learn that there hadn’t been any fire. It was right and inevitable that her son had been returned to her, and she was always grateful to hear about his successes, which she interpreted as proof that he’d recovered from his unfortunate romance with her daughter. Abe and Penelope would both recover. And there’d be the addition of their child, Sally’s granddaughter, her namesake, who, to her relief, wasn’t born a monster. She thanked the grace of the good Lord that the girl wasn’t marked by the sin that had produced her.
I was born on April 30, 1975. For the first five years of my life, my grandmother was my primary caregiver, while my mother finished her undergraduate degree and then attended law school in Buffalo. I don’t remember the ranch house on Vernon Street, though I’ve seen photographs of it. After Arnie Caddeau and my grandmother were married in the spring of 1976, they bought a fancy Tudor backing up to the park behind the reservoir, and that’s where I lived until 1980. I had a large bedroom shaded by a huge magnolia tree. I remember that in May when the blossoms were out, the sunlight would splash their tint on the walls of my room. And I remember hearing my grandmother singing while we wandered in opposite directions along the rim of the yard. By her late middle age, she’d stopped trying to stifle her urge to sing and had taken to singing easily, naturally, for the sheer pleasure of it. I’d listen to her while I greedily searched for weeds to add to my bouquet, hoping to make it bigger and more various than my grandmother’s.
She wasn’t willing to give up her job after she married. She continued to work part-time, three days a week. When she and Arnie were at the office and my mother was at school, I had a babysitter, an old woman who won my heart because she spread the peanut butter thickly on both slices of bread when she made me a sandwich.
My days were calm, structured by the reliable routines of meals and play. My grandmother was keen on convincing me that the world is fundamentally a peaceful place. I can recall only one unusual incident, and that was when a man came to the door and demanded to talk with Sally Mole. As it happened, my grandmother was out on an errand, so it was Arnie who answered the door. I was watching cartoons in the den when I heard voices coming from the front hall. The man had a loud voice to start with, and he grew louder as he grew angrier. Soon he was shouting. When I came to see what was going on, Arnie growled an order at me to go upstairs. It was the first time Arnie Caddeau had ever spoken harshly to me, and I was so offended that instead of obeying him I came farther into the hall and stood between the two men in defiance, my arms folded.
I remember the strange man quieted then as he asked me my name, and when he bent down to get a better look at me he blew out an unpleasant puff of sour breath. He moved to take me in his arms, but I jumped out of his reach, and as if there were a thread connecting me to the man’s lips, my movement seemed to cause his smile to twist into a snarl.
I decided that I didn’t like him and would rather be watching cartoons. I went back to the den, leaving Arnie to deal with the stranger.
That was the last I ever saw of the man. I learned later that he was my mother’s father — my grandfather Benny Patterson. He hadn’t sought out my grandmother because he wanted anything to do with us. He made it clear to Arnie that he didn’t want to stick around for long. He’d gotten divorced and was moving out west, but he was strapped for cash. He said that if Arnie could loan him some money, he wouldn’t bother us again. Arnie wrote him a check on the spot, a check for five hundred dollars, which was more than enough to satisfy Benny Patterson and send him to California.
Arnie never told my grandmother about the check. All she knew was that Benny had stopped by and grown belligerent but that Arnie had managed to calm him down.
Benny continued to write to Arnie every couple of years and ask for money. And later he’d do the same with my mother, after he got wind that she had, as he put it, a fancy-shmancy lawyer job. Though he never returned from the West Coast, he would depend upon Penelope to support him through the last decade of his life.
I learned about this only recently from my mother. I also learned that Benny’s ex-wife, Harriet, came to visit her once, in 2004, a few months after my grandmother had died. Harriet was a bitter woman, full of resentment at having wasted the best years of her life as Mrs. Patterson. In the course of their conversation she told Penelope about Benny’s role in an accident that had occurred downstate fifty years earlier, when Benny had run another car off the road on a rainy November night and then driven on without stopping. He found out later that a young couple was in that other car. The boy had been killed; the girl — my grandmother — survived without significant injury. People said they’d been drinking and had missed a curve. Benny wasn’t ready to reveal his involvement in the accident, but he felt guilty enough to seek out Sally in Helena and start courting her, as though by winning her affection he could secure her forgiveness. She couldn’t forgive him, though, for something he wouldn’t admit. And when she ditched him, he went wild with anger. It took him a few years to find Sally, and then he beat her up, Harriet said. He beat her up good. And he never stopped being angry. He was so angry that sometimes when he got drunk, he’d boast about it all. He talked so freely that eventually most everyone within a hundred miles of his home knew what he’d done, and he had to move away to escape his own infamy.
Hearing about the accident from Harriet, my mother wondered if she’d underestimate
d my grandmother. She had always thought of Sally as a simple woman, easily categorized, raised in provincial circumstances, poorly educated, with naïve beliefs and limited experience of the world. Sally loved soap operas, Cracker Jacks and canned salmon, gaudy wallpaper, bargain-basement clothes. She had traveled the length of the Tuskee River and no farther. If she ever read a book, it was the Reader’s Digest abridged version. She didn’t drink often, but when she did, she didn’t know when to stop. She smoked a pack of Lucky Strikes a day. My mother had always harbored a little bit of secret embarrassment about her mother, a feeling that through her childhood had become focused on Sally’s singing. She loved to hear her mother sing, but she hadn’t loved it when her loud singing kept the neighbors awake. It seemed to my mother that my grandmother had no idea when she was acting foolish.
Thanks to Harriet, my mother realized that there was more to my grandmother’s life than she’d assumed. There was an old boyfriend who’d been killed in an accident. There was Benny and his anger. He beat her up good. If there was this much my mother hadn’t known about my grandmother, there must have been more.
My grandmother had given her daughter the impression that she’d lived a relatively quiet life. For her own sake, she chose to cast her experiences as too ordinary to retell. And through most of her last two decades, she did live quietly, if you don’t count her easy habit of singing as she moved around the house. She worked three days a week as a secretary in her husband’s law firm. She kept a small vegetable garden out back. One spring, pumpkin seeds from the compost pile rooted, and she let the vines spread out across the yard. She harvested ten pumpkins that first year and thirty the next.
