Follow Me (25 page)

Another customer appeared and followed Sally and Penelope back into the store. He needed her to mix a gallon of paint — and
while he was there he’d get some lightbulbs, he added, a comment that was overheard by the older of the other two men, reminding
him that he needed batteries for his flashlight.

As all three of them went off in search of bulbs and batteries, the bell over the door jangled, and Penny Campbell entered
the store. She was on her coffee break, stopping in to say a quick hello to Sally and to give her namesake a big fat kiss.
She called the baby her scrumptious little goose, her funny creature, her darling, and took her in her arms, lifting her high.
Penelope snorted at her; Penny snorted back. Back and forth they went, snort snort, leaving Sally free to ring up the purchases
for the first pair of men and then fill a can with paint.

All three men knew one another and Penny as well, and soon they were in conversation, talking about the forecast for six inches
of fresh snow overnight. With the prediction of a thaw later in the week, they wondered if there was a danger of flooding.

Sally pivoted the can to secure it in the mixer while the men and Penny traded more thoughts about the weather, debating the
patterns of this winter versus the last and last winter versus the decade of winters before.

Oblivious to them, Sally sang as she worked the mixer, raising her voice above the motor’s noise. She wouldn’t have thought
she remembered that particular song after all this time, but she did remember it, every word and every note.

If the sandman brought me dreams of you

I’d want to sleep my whole life through…

She failed to notice that the conversation across the counter had stopped. Not until she’d finished pressing the lid on the
can did she look up and realize that she had an audience.

Funny how a single note surrounds itself with the company of other notes, words collect in lyrics, and a singer creates the
need for an accompanist. Sally wouldn’t have expected it to be so easy. One day she was singing lullabies to her baby; the
next day after work she was at the Campbells’ sitting on the piano bench next to Penny. They began with a song they both already
knew, “Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy,” Penny leading, then nodding for Sally to catch up, urging her to jump right in,
to sing the chorus straight through, sing louder, sing the whole thing again on her own.

When they were done, Mrs. Campbell stepped in from the doorway, where she’d been listening. Why, Sally Mole sang like a lark,
she said, and Penny agreed. With a little training, Sally would give Dinah a run for her money.

“Who’s Dinah?”

Had Sally been living in a root cellar for the past twenty years? Was it possible that she’d never heard Dinah Shore sing
“Dear Hearts and Gentle People”? What about “Blues in the Night”? Penny preferred Peggy Lee’s version to Dinah’s. Mrs. Campbell
wasn’t so sure. Her favorite Peggy Lee song was “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good.” She hummed the opening, which Sally recognized.
Yeah, she knew that song. Okay, it was a start. And how about Ethel Waters? Even if Sally hadn’t heard a recording, maybe
she’d seen her in
Pinky
? Well… no, in fact. But she had loved Judy Garland’s vaudeville act in
Easter Parade
. Sure, everyone loved Judy. But how about Kay Starr or Ella Mae Morse?

Sally had plenty to learn, and Penny, who admitted to being cursed with a creaky hinge of a voice, had plenty to teach. She
began with “Yes, My Darling Daughter” —
I gotta be good or Mama will scold me, yes, yes, yes.
She taught her “Buttons and Bows” and a simple ballad she’d made up herself about Nestor the talking Appaloos’. They quit
at midnight, satisfied that they had something amounting to a repertoire.

The next day on their lunch hour they tried out their songs in the back room of the hardware store, with Penny gently coaxing
Sally on the different ways to hold a note. The following day was Sunday, and Sally spent most of it at the Campbells’ piano,
Penny blending notes into songs that Sally would pick up in snatches while the children raced around the living room.

Sally enjoyed singing, but she wasn’t engaged in any kind of effort she thought was worth developing, despite the Campbells’
praise. Singing was what she did to pass the time, and if there were appreciative listeners, well, that was just good luck.

The Campbells shared her sense of luck. News of the impromptu performances traveled quickly around Tuskee, and by the end
of that first Sunday there were a dozen extra guests who had stopped by to listen. The next Sunday afternoon the Campbells’
little house was packed again with visitors. Some who came by brought a dish to share or beer or fresh fruit. There was more
than they could eat, and Sally ended up taking home enough leftovers to last a week.

In that same period, Buddy Potter raised her wage, and by the beginning of the year Sally could afford to split the rent with
Penny for a two-bedroom garage apartment on the same quiet lane where the Campbells lived. The Campbells lent them linens,
and Mr. Potter’s wife gave them an old Emerson portable TV. As a housewarming gift to themselves, they bought a record player
and set it up on the kitchen counter. Sally paid just seven dollars a week for her share of the rent, and with her raise she
succeeded in saving almost as much as she had when she’d been staying in the apartment above the hardware store. Now, though,
her daughter would have a yard to play in, there was usually an older child among the troop of Campbells willing to babysit,
and no one complained if they left the windows open in the evening and turned up the volume of the music.

Sally learned to sing every song on Penny’s records. She recognized that her singing was naïve, but she wasn’t about to add
music to her list of responsibilities. Her lack of training would keep her from having to improve.

She caught on quickly, though, and at the Campbells’ piano they produced something approximating music without much work.
It was lively music, “real catchy,” according to their listeners, memorable mostly for the setting where it was performed,
Sally assumed: the Campbells’ welcoming house in the pleasant city of Tuskee, where you could go and hear a tune for free
on any Sunday afternoon.

This was the period of which Sally would later speak as the good old days, those years in Tuskee when she was sentimental
about life and couldn’t help but idealize the minutiae of experience. She loved the feeling of happiness and convinced herself
that its inspiration was everywhere, not just in the predictable moments involving her baby and her friends, but also where
she would have least expected it. Once, for instance, when she was carrying out the garbage and walking barefoot across the
soggy grass, the soft earth molding to her feet made her instantly happy. And once, pushing Penelope in the stroller, she
heard Bing Crosby singing over a transistor radio propped on the shelf of a newsstand, and she started singing along with
him:

No, it isn’t a dream…

Bing Crosby made her happy. So did Dinah Shore every Tuesday and Thursday evening. So did the antics of Lucy Ricardo. She
was happy watching clothes tumble behind the glass of the dryer at the Laundromat. She was happy selling handsaws and screwdrivers.
She discovered that she loved bologna sandwiches with French’s mustard, strawberry Jell-O, and Cracker Jacks. She was happy
when she filled in blocks of a crossword puzzle, even if she didn’t finish it. Her first whiff of her first bottle of Breck
shampoo — that was nice! So was Play-Doh, Scotch tape, and an old plastic tablecloth that had been soaked by rain and left
to dry in the sun.

She understood Tuskee to be the place where the truth of life’s potential was vividly apparent. Sweet, dazzling happiness
— she couldn’t resist it and would seize upon whatever happened to fall in her path, whatever by luck or chance made itself
available.

There were times when she resolved to put on a show of cool indifference, in response, say, to a compliment she thought excessive,
and once when she was watching a silly romantic movie in which the hero everyone thought was dead suddenly appeared at the
birthday party of his fiancée. More often, she wondered if there was an element of self-deception to her enthrallment. Yet
whenever she vowed to become more neutral in her responses, her daughter would snort her snorting laugh or clap her hands
with pleasure, or she’d call out
Mama
for the first time or take her first steps, and Sally would feel plainly, simply happy all over again.

If from time to time she caught a glimpse of distant trouble coming from elsewhere in the world, it didn’t change her mood.
She happened to be at the Campbells’ watching a television broadcast when a clip came on showing some lawyer interviewing
Senator Joe McCarthy. She could guess what dangers important men believed they were holding at bay. And she even saw that
Tuskee was as vulnerable as anyplace else during the summer of 1955, when the river flooded the lumberyard, dragging a season’s
worth of timber downriver. That kind of trouble didn’t last, though. It was like the iron grapefruit of a meteorite that fell
through a lady’s ceiling in Alabama and crashed into her console radio. Everybody talked about that meteorite for a while,
and there were people willing to pay a fortune for it, but by the time that rock was put up for sale the next year its fame
had waned and a buyer couldn’t be found.

During the five years she spent in the city of Tuskee, from 1952 to 1957, Sally Mole gained an intimate knowledge of happiness.
That the word had a breezy, carefree sound was appropriate, since the feeling had a palpable lightness to it, giving her a
buoyancy, actually diminishing the pressure of gravity. And even if she wasn’t convinced that she’d earned her happiness,
it always seemed logical, following from previous experiences the way one year followed from the next.

There continued to be moments when she was provoked to think of the past. It wasn’t as though her memory had been emptied
the day she stepped off the bus in Tuskee. She continued to wonder about her son. And there were nights when she missed Mole
so badly that she’d invite him to visit her dreams; he’d almost always make an appearance, filling the aching emptiness with
his old jokes, making love to her in his slow, tender fashion. Sometimes in the aftermath of those dreams, the awareness of
the absolute fact of his absence would leave her bereft. But in the time it took her blinking eyes to grow used to the light
of morning, the world would find a way to remind her that
happiness is everywhere
. And though she could predict that such a claim might strike a more sophisticated person as mawkish, she knew that she could
always add a little tune, and then it would sound reasonable enough.

By the summer of 1955, Sally was a single mother of a two-year-old daughter. She was content with her life in Tuskee and had
no plans to alter her routine or move on. As it happened, the year brought three developments, relatively minor at first glance,
though each would eventually have unexpected consequences.

The first one was a long-haired calico cat, a stray male that during a thunderstorm decided to make his home in the storage
room of the hardware store. The tufts of his ears were too matted to comb out, there were oozing sores from fleabites on his
belly, and one eye dripped a creamy mucus. Sally found the cat, or the cat found Sally, when she went to fetch a can of satin
gloss in the back and was fumbling in the dark for the light switch. The cat curled against her leg, begging for food, but
Sally, thinking she’d surprised a rat, screamed and kicked out her leg, sending the cat sailing through the air. He landed
on the head of a broom, levering the shaft forward to bump Sally lightly in the face. She screamed again. The room abruptly
filled with light. Buddy Potter had rushed back and turned on the switch, revealing Sally holding her cheek and the pitiful
stray shivering on the broom bristles, starved and filthy, squinting, its mouth yawning in a growling complaint.

Sally filled a pan of water and fed the cat pieces of bologna from her sandwich; following the initial plan agreed upon with
Buddy Potter, she would nurse the cat back to health and then find him a home. But within a few days, as the animal grew stronger
and more stubborn, it became clear that he intended to make the hardware store his home for good.

Named Leonardo by Penny Campbell, he turned out to be a handsome cat with his glossy, mottled hair, his tufted ears, and his
emerald eyes gleaming yellow in the dark. Even when he reached the plump weight of twenty pounds, he was regal rather than
absurd, and as he marched down the middle of the aisle in front of customers he made it clear that he would answer to no one.

Or to almost no one. The cat allowed Penelope to use him as she pleased. He would let her yank his tail or grab at his tufts,
and his temper never flared. And as she grew fonder of the cat, her acts of torture turned to rough demonstrations of affection.
Instead of pulling his tail, she’d lift the heavy sack of him and spin him around; instead of grabbing his ears, she’d use
him as a cushion and sit on him. Through it all, he seemed entirely resigned to and sometimes genuinely cheered by the abuse.

With customers, though, and sometimes with Sally, the cat could be stony, grand in his shiny fat stature, aloof and judgmental,
all at once. He was generally a quiet cat, though his silence seemed deliberate, a calculated reticence rather than an innate
quality. At first Sally had thought the poor creature was timid by nature, but it turned out that Leo was a vain and lazy
animal, and if his needs weren’t met with satisfying alacrity, he’d sit on the counter and glare at Sally, swishing his tail
angrily and occasionally washing a paw in a way that suggested his dangerous potential, as though he were polishing a gun.
He was the sovereign of the store and would not be disregarded.

This immense, imperious cat, then, was the year’s first unexpected addition in Sally’s life. The second came with the annual
Tuskee Jubilee in August, when a singer named Dara Bliss performed on the last night of the festival. A magic show going on
at the same time across the park attracted the bigger crowd, so Penny and Sally were able to claim front-row seats for Dara
Bliss’s act and could hear every crackle and sigh, every spill of breath as she sang.