Follow Me (7 page)

She picked up an old movie magazine Georgie had given her. She’d already read everything in it, so she just paged through
looking at the pictures. Uncle Mason’s whittling knife made a sound that reminded her of her younger brothers when they slurped
soup. He didn’t say much while he worked. He never said much.

Was that a bird? Sally asked after a long while, motioning to the feathery lines he’d carved along the head of the cane.

It was a swan.

Oh.

She noticed for the first time that he was left-handed. She found herself staring at the hand that held the knife and the
dull gold band on his ring finger. She wondered what had happened to his wife, though she decided it would have been impolite
to ask. But he guessed that she was hiding her curiosity, and he asked abruptly, “What are you staring at?” without looking
up.

“Nothing.”

“M-my ring?”

“No. Well, yes. You had a wife?”

“I did.”

“She passed away?”

“She left.”

“Oh.”

He kept working, shaping the swan, peeling off curls of wood. Sally decided he preferred to be finished with the conversation,
so she stood up and went to her room.

Shortly before noon he called to her, “I’ll b-b-be seeing you.” He was heading to his brother’s house for the afternoon.

“Sure,” she called back through her closed door. “Bye-bye.”

“Help yourself to wh-whatever you can find. I’ll bring b-b-back some ham for s-supper.”

“Thanks.”

A few minutes later she heard his truck sputtering, stalling, revving again, and then clattering along the drive. She came
out of her room in time to watch through the living room window as he turned onto the road and disappeared.

Leaving Sally behind to do whatever. Fixing a cheese sandwich, then eating it, kept her occupied for a short time. She smoked
a cigarette and practiced blowing smoke rings. She smoked another cigarette. And then she searched among the piano scrolls
for music she might want to hear.

While she was looking through the box she found the publisher’s brochure, which included lyrics to the songs. It wasn’t easy
figuring out how to thread the first scroll onto the take-up spool, but she managed it finally. She pumped the pedals and
played a song called “Blue Sky Blues,” listened to it once, then played it again, singing along.

Sun don’t care,

blue sky won’t mind,

this aching heart you left behind.

Nothing left of rainy-day love

but a secret memory…

She played the song over and over, singing it with more confidence each time, with more of what Sally liked to think could
be called
pizzazz
. She sang it for the boy she loved, whoever that was — any good-looking boy who treated her with respect and wasn’t Daniel
Werner. She sang it on the stage of a smoky nightclub. She growled it into a microphone in front of an audience of hundreds.

She paged through the brochure to another song — “Boomerang Girl” — and put the scroll in the piano. It was a song about a
lover who keeps leaving and coming back —

She flies away and out of sight,

she’s gone as far as I can see,

and then she’s flying right back to me!

— and Sally sang it in a way she liked to think would sneak up on listeners, making them realize there was a reason they were
paying attention.

High-flying girl coming right back,

boomerang right back,

right back to me!

She sang the few songs she knew without needing to read the lyrics: “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me” and “My Darling
Clementine” and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” She sang for hours in the empty house, pumping the pedals of that old
player piano and singing as though she were trying to be heard across the mountain in Tauntonville. She imagined someone saying
to her in appreciation:
Sweetheart, you sing like there’s no tomorrow.

But there was tomorrow, and by then the scrolls would be packed away in their box, the lid to the piano closed, Uncle Mason
fixed in his chair whittling a stick’s knob into a swan while Sally swept the floor around him, sweeping up wood shavings
as they fell because that was virtually all that needed doing.

High-flying girl singing like a nightingale under a blue sky on a summer day. Oh, heartache. Oh, my darling Clementine. Humming
life away. Strange life, trading one family for another. Uncle Mason better than any uncle she ever had, kinder, more generous,
and he didn’t have a son named Daniel. Georgie as good as a sister. Swill standing off to the side when he came to pick up
his brother to go hunting, eyeing her suspiciously. His gun in the bed of his truck.

I wouldn’t ever shoot a doe.

Swill an enemy for life. And if he was ever in danger of softening his attitude toward Sally, back at his house there was
an invalid wife whispering in his ear, telling him about all the bad things a bad girl will do. Even though she’d never met
Sally. So what? She didn’t have to meet Sally to know what she was like. All bad girls were the same.

Hiss.

“Where’s Sally?”

“She’s out b-b-back in the garden.”

No, she wasn’t. She was in her room with the door open a crack, but Swill and Mason didn’t know that.

“Mason, listen, I’ve been thinking.”

“Mmm?”

Silence.

“Wh-what have you been thinking? Eh, Swill?”

“You still keep your savings in that box?”

“Mmm.”

“You keep it hidden, don’t you?”

“I k-keep it where I’ve always kept it, t-t-top of the shelf there.”

“Right there in the open.”

“It’s no p-p-place anyone would look.”

“You can see it if you stand on a chair, can’t you?”

“Who will be st-standing on a chair here?”

“Doesn’t the girl ever clean up the cobwebs? Doesn’t she dust up there?”

“Why, I suppose.”

“And someday she’ll see that box and wonder what’s inside.”

“Th-th-that’s enough, Swill.”

“I’m just trying to watch out for you. You got your whole life savings —”

“I d-d-d-don’t w-w-w-want to hear it!”

The world, Sally considered, was divided into those who thought she’d amount to nothing and those who thought she’d amount
to something. Between Swill and Mason. One who said she was a thief just waiting for an opportunity. One who trusted her alone
in his house.

Here living this strange life inside an old man’s house. La, la, la. Sharp lines of unupholstered furniture. Vague, sweet
smell of wood everywhere. Like cinnamon mixed with pine sap and dry leaves. Uncle Mason’s trust in her as constant as the
sound of the river. He was right — she’d never steal his money. Never, never! She wasn’t a thief. He paid a good wage, like
he’d promised — twenty-five dollars a week, plus room and board. He had never put a grimy paw on her, never touched her inappropriately
and never would. He wanted only to enjoy the sense that he was helping her get by — and more. That spring he paid for typing
lessons and drove her to Amity, to the secretarial school above the Fat Cat Diner, three times a week for a month.

The qick bown fox. The quick brown foz. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog,
at ten words per minute, then sixteen, then twenty-three, then thirty-two, then fifty-one words per minute, with no mistakes.

What a fortunate girl. When she no longer worked for Uncle Mason, she’d have a skill to offer and would be able to find a
job. A girl who could type would never be without a job. And since she didn’t plan to profit by thievery…

She was shocked just by the idea of it. There wasn’t a thieving bone in her body. No, she wasn’t a thief.

Say it again.

She wasn’t a thief.

Since she wasn’t a thief, she told herself that it wouldn’t do any harm, would it, to climb on a chair on a Sunday afternoon
when Mason was at Swill’s? She had to dust those cobwebs in the corner, after all, up there above the shelf. It sure was dusty
up there. She’d never thought to get up that high, not until she’d heard Mason and Swill talking about the box. And there
it was, a nice, dark, shellacked oak box, there on top of the highest of the built-in shelves in the kitchen, above the shelf
of canned vegetables.

It wouldn’t do any harm, would it, to lift the box down and set it on the kitchen table and lift the tiny latch? It wasn’t
even locked, after all. The hinges creaked slightly. The wind preceding a spring storm rattled the windowpanes. Sally was
hardly breathing as she lifted the lid. And then she forgot to breathe entirely, so baffled was she by the money — thick stacks
of bills in denominations of ten and twenty, secured with rubber bands.

She’d expected to find money in the box. But not stacks of money — enough money to last a lifetime; money that smelled like
fresh-cut grass, pipe smoke, and sanded wood, all at once; so much money that if she tucked a whole stack of bills in her
pocket, it probably wouldn’t be missed.

What a terrible thought. She almost apologized aloud. She wanted also, weirdly, to laugh, for she was conscious of the possibility
that the whole thing was a trap set out for her, which she’d sprung, and she was being watched, the effect of the joke measured
by spying eyes. Aha! Caught red-handed! Young ladies shouldn’t pry into the affairs of old men. Who said that? Who said what?

Hurry up and close the box.

She closed the box.

Now put it back where you found it
.

She put it back.

Now get off the chair
.

She got off the chair.

Now breathe, Sally Werner
.

She breathed.

She lived at Mason Jackson’s house for a little more than two years, from the fall of 1947 to the spring of 1950, much as
a niece might live with her elderly uncle for a time. She didn’t manage to save much of her wages, as generous as Mason was.
She spent the money thoughtlessly, buying straw hats she’d wear only once, going out to the Saturday matinees in Amity to
see the same movies over again, getting fancy hairdos at Erna’s Beauty Parlor on Main Street. Erna knew how to do a beehive
before Sally had even seen a beehive in the magazines. She dyed Sally’s red hair a silky blond. She could tame Sally’s waves
or curl them into corkscrews, and she and the other ladies there always had something interesting to say.

Though she was grateful to have shelter and secure work, Sally couldn’t help but long for more out of life than she was getting.
Her chores didn’t come close to filling up the week. On Sunday afternoons, when everything in town was closed and people were
home with their families, she stayed in, singing along with the player piano. But singing didn’t keep her from growing restless.

Georgie had met a foreman at the cement factory in the spring of 1948 and within a year was engaged to be married, but she
still invited Sally to go to the movies every Saturday afternoon. She made it a point to introduce Sally to other eligible
young men from the factory and even succeeded in setting up some blind dates with friends of her fiancé. But nothing came
of it. Sally didn’t mind, though. She wasn’t in any hurry to give up her freedom.

She found she was always welcome at Erna’s Beauty Parlor. Sometimes she even helped with customers, setting up the hair dryers
and answering the phone when the parlor got busy. She met Erna’s sister, an older woman named Gladdy Toffit, who drove in
once a week, nearly an hour each way, from Helena, a hamlet north of Amity. Gladdy was in her forties and, to Sally’s fascination,
had been divorced twice. She had one child, a grown daughter who had broken Gladdy’s heart by eloping to California with a
man she met at the tavern where she’d been working. Gladdy didn’t work at all. She lived off what she called a
handsome trust
set up for her by the mother of her first ex-husband.

Gladdy Toffit told Sally just what a woman needed to know: First of all, said Gladdy, she needed to be prepared to be abandoned.
Men liked two kinds of romance — the romance of first love, and the romance of new love, which meant that most every woman
would have a chance to be discardable old love at some point in her life. Second, a woman needed to know how to hold her liquor.
She couldn’t turn silly from a few swallows of whiskey. Third, a woman needed to know how to shoot a rifle. Fourth, a woman
needed to know how to choose a perfume that suited her.

Sally pondered all of these notions, especially the last. “How do I know what’s the right perfume?” she wondered aloud.

Gladdy had no sure formula for finding an appropriate fragrance. But she could say with some certainty that women who smoked
shouldn’t wear lavender. Why not?

There was no single reason. It was just a fact. Also, a woman should never splash herself with rose water if she knew she’d
be frying eggs later in the day.

Erna called her sister Gladdy a Fount of Knowledge. Gladdy would sit under the hair dryer, lifting up the helmet every few
seconds when she thought of other important information to pass along. She was fond of Sally, she said, because she reminded
her of her daughter. Sally could fill in as her daughter until the real daughter came home.

Sally learned something of the world during her visits to Erna’s salon. More precisely, she was getting a sense of proportion,
understanding the scope of her provincial ignorance. And as she became more aware of how narrow her life was, she felt increasingly
dissatisfied with the confinements of Uncle Mason’s house, the stark quiet of the rooms, and the repetition of the routine.
Sweeping, cooking, dusting, washing, and singing for no one on Sundays. La, la, la. Mason Jackson was as nice a man as you’d
ever meet — that’s what she told Gladdy and Erna. But she didn’t tell them how each day was like a song she’d grown tired
of singing but sang anyway, returning to the same chorus over and over and always ending on the same note.

“ ’Night, g-g-g-girlie. See you in the morning.”

She wanted something unexpected to happen. But all the potential for surprise was closed up in that box on the high shelf
in the kitchen, bundles held with rubber bands and hidden from view.