Thomas Savage, a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN/Faulkner Award nominee, has long been a critically acclaimed author. The New Yorker calls him "a writer of the first order." This starkly elegant story details the lives of Emma Russell Sweringen and her family in the early 1900s. Emma's daughter Beth secretly gave up a baby girl for adoption many years ago. Now, Beth's secret life is being unraveled as her daughter comes looking for her long-lost family.
Release date:
August 1, 2009
Publisher:
Little, Brown and Company
Print pages:
256
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“A fine book… where the printed words fade from consciousness and the reader floats off into a private world of his own and
the author's imagining.… Thomas Savage has a magic hand with his characters.… He is not one to waste a whole word if no word
will do.”
— Marshall Sprague, New York Times
“Savage testifies that the novel, in the right hands, remains an instrument of sensitivity and power, capable of illuminating
the lives of others and so expanding our own.”
— Theodore M. O'Leary, Kansas City Star
“Thomas Savage is one of the most eloquent writers practicing today.”
— Tom E. Huff, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Savage is a superb writer … extraordinary.”
— Doris Grumbach, Washington Post Book World
“The best parts of The Sheep Queen are the ones most distant in time. The tale of how old George Sweringen discovered gold is stirring indeed, and the Sheep
Queen is marvelous, one of those shrewd-eyed matriarchs who so often peer out from Victorian photographs. Her reign has a
mythic grandeur.”
— Katha Pollitt, New York Times Book Review
“Savage's writing is as lucid as Willa Carrier's … a fine novelist.”
— The New Yorker
“In his tenth novel, Savage has written an absorbing, moving story about identity, family relationships, the human need for
a heritage, and the mysterious dispositions of fate.… They are a marvelous brood, full of vitality and purposefulness, ruled
by indomitable Emma Sweringen, the Sheep Queen of Idaho, surely one of the most fascinating characters in current fiction.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A master of the simple declarative sentence.”
— Ginny Merriam, Chicago Tribune
Mr. Savage is not only an accessible writer and an elegantly lean stylist, he is also concerned with American themes and landscapes
so familiar … he deserves to be discovered by more readers.”
— Valerie Sayers, New York Times Book Review
“Savage is a powerful storyteller.”
— Roger Sale, New York Review of Books
“The Sheep Queen, to get right to the point, is a beautiful novel. It is the work of a masterful novelist writing at the peak of his form,
and it contains a depth of riches sufficient to give every reader pleasure and illumination. It deals with the most universal
of subjects, the human family, and it does so in a tone that is leisurely, discursive, elegaic, controlled.… The best of his
ten novels, the capstone of a distinguished and, I think, important career.… It invites the attention, admiration, and, I
think, affection of any careful and open-hearted reader. And any such reader who accepts the invitation will come away from
the novel richly and happily rewarded.”
—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
SO I WILL call myself Tom Burton, or Thomas Burton, as the name would appear on the novels I write. I am too difficult for some readers
and my sentences are sometimes more than statements. Many readers are comfortable only with the simple sentences, and prefer
books that reward a belief in the happy ending and the pot at the end of the rainbow, even as the rainbow retreats and those
who follow are footsore. There is no ending, happy or otherwise, only a pause.
I live with my wife, herself a novelist; together we make a decent living. Except for the children, we would make a better
living. But we eat, pay the bills and see our way clear to having the leaks in the roof fixed — or at least located. We consider
ourselves lucky to do what we want in the place where we want to do it. We have not seriously considered divorce, but sometimes
after a few martinis we shout and pick at old scabs. My wife once hurled at me a plate of salt mackerel and boiled potatoes,
a favorite meal until then. Months later we still discovered elusive bits of fish set in potato on the iron railing leading
down into the dining room, on the rungs of chairs, and clinging to the spines of certain books, Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds and Pipes's Russia Under the Old Regime, each discovery a reminder of the fruitlessness of passion. Ordinarily we laugh and talk and worry about the children, like
anybody else. In the past, our sons have troubled us. They didn't seem to fit into the world as it was, and we blamed ourselves
for setting a poor example and not taking the business world seriously. There are so many people out there in that world it
is better to know how to get along with them, to learn their ways and how to trick them as they know how to trick each other.
Our daughter gives surprisingly little trouble; she and her husband have so far kept their trouble to themselves. That may
change tomorrow. Things have a way of changing, I find. That fact keeps us on our toes.
The children are all gone now, which means they all live somewhere else, but they come back with their children, eight of
them and all beautiful — to me, anyway. The grandchildren rather like to sleep on the floor; they pretend this is an Indian
camp. Everybody is here for the holidays because I was brought up to believe everybody should be with everybody else on holidays.
They like Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's, which come so close together you can scarcely get your head up. My wife
and I thought it might be easier this year, because of the small house and the new grandchildren, to have dinner out at Thanksgiving.
The two youngest ones could sleep in those little trays you see now. We could get a big table in a good restaurant not far
away that is built out over the ocean, as if we did not have the entire ocean right in front of our house, and we could sit
there and watch gulls other than our own and have drinks and talk and order and everything would be brought and eaten and
the remainders taken away, some in doggie bags, and we would all go back to a clean house. However, there was such an outcry
among the children that eating out was found to be an impossibility.
“Daddy, we've never done anything like that,” my daughter said. “I'm surprised you'd even suggest such a thing.”
“Well you see, it was only a suggestion,” I said.
They said, the children said, that if now at our age we found it impossible to get together a simple Thanksgiving dinner of
the things we'd been cooking all their lives and to clean up after it, well, they would be glad to get the dinner and clean
up; one would bring the turkey, another the vegetables, another the pies. But a turkey is better cooked in the house where
it is to be consumed; vegetables can't well be cooked ahead; they lose color and vitamins, the cream sauce for the creamed
onions curdles, and neither my daughter nor the wives of my sons are much for pie crust, so that was that. The new Maytag
dishwasher helped a good deal. My wife said she didn't know what we did without it, but I know what we did.
So we lived peacefully beside the sea on the coast of Maine on the rocks, and never a sun came up that we didn't thank God
we lived where we lived. Each winter the storms shifted the rocks and each spring we found new ways down to the beach. A beach
is a good place for grandchildren. (They never forget it.) Everybody likes picnics and when it got cold we built fires of
driftwood and roasted frankfurters and our own childhood was close. We had enough frontage on the ocean so that later on my
younger son could live in the house, my daughter and her husband could build on the next two lots and my older son on the
next two lots and they could all see each other every day. My wife and I intended to be cremated, which is neater, and to
have our ashes thrown off the rocks into the sea, although I understand that is now illegal, too many people doing it, people
getting upset about it, afraid of having ashes cling to them. But it could be done where we lived because the place was isolated
except in the summertime. In the summertime it could be done very quickly in the dark. I have read somewhere of a man who
had his ashes put in under the bricks of the hearth and that seemed reasonable, but is it reasonable to wish to remind your
son of you whenever he pokes up the fire? No. He will have his own problems. So my wife and I have decided to be pollutants.
Sometimes I felt I should be shipped out West where I came from, and have my ashes scattered over the sagebrush.
My aunts could not understand why I would want to leave the Rocky Mountains, which they called their mountains, and go and
live on the coast of Maine. They said it was a lot nicer living where everybody knows who you are.
“Maine's sort of a crazy place to live,” my Aunt Maude said. “Like living in Arkansas or Delaware. None of us ever came from
there. I don't think Mama would have liked it.”
Well, maybe Crow Point was a crazy place. In June the summer people came with their boats and their bathing caps and their
ice buckets. The stomach muscles of the men were slack from abundant sitting, their skin pale from overexposure to fluorescent
lights, and at sundown the wives pulled cashmere sweaters close and suggested a little fire. Some men had money, some advanced
degrees; few had both. One pulled teeth. Another professed English.
Social status was based on how long one had been coming there summers. The first comers remarked that it was a shame the latecomers
hadn't known the Point as it was, but latecomers, having established themselves with a sign bearing their names tacked to
the birch tree at the fork in the road, were as suspicious of change and of strangers as the first comers. All sometimes trained
their binoculars on those who clambered over the rocks with so little style, wearing shoes instead of sneakers. All stood
against paving the road and the introduction of the telephone, but not against the power lines; after all, there are limits:
people do need ice.
All objected to the removal of trees, even dead ones, except for those that cast confusing shadows over the tennis court and
interfered with the view of the ocean.
Up the road, a couple conversed with spirits and had selected mediums down for the weekend. Down the road, an attorney had
established contact with the mechanical world through the purchase of power tools, cranky in his hands. With them he cut off
little pieces of himself, never enough to seriously cripple him or to threaten his happiness. He sometimes arrived, bleeding,
to show me.
A congressman invited laughing friends down from Washington to drink and to eat native corn and lobsters. When he drank alone,
he stripped down to his shorts and called to me from a rocky ledge.
“Tom!”
I sat in the early hours with a drink in my hand before his fireplace and watched him burn up old wills he had drawn up in
favor of people he no longer favored.
There were parties. It was not uncommon to see an angry woman in fairly formal dress limping down the road with but a single
shoe. Friendships blew up even before the tapers were set aflame. What had been said was unforgivable. Vows were taken never
again to darken a certain door. Tow trucks came with flashing lights.
The day after Labor Day they all went away. The woods and the sea belonged to us and the birds and animals.
I believe I lived in Maine because Maine is about as far as I could get from the ranch in Montana where I grew up, and where
my mother was unhappy, my beautiful, angel mother.
The morning in question — and it certainly was in question — was only a few years ago and began — for me — as I stood on the
porch, which is so close to the sea you might call it a deck. The sea, that morning, was unusually calm; little ripples fled
across the surface and caught the sun. Such a sun on similar waters had moved Aeschylus to write, “The many-twinkling smile
of Ocean.” He knew what he was talking about. It might have been a joyous day.
Then suddenly a seagull swept past — and so close I felt the draft and the glance of its beady eye.
Two kinds of gulls command our beach and the sky above. Herring gulls are common, protected by law because they are scavengers,
and loved because they are graceful in flight and suggest freedom. Their likeness is painted on driftwood and carved in pine
and sold along Route One as souvenirs of another Maine summer, the rocks and the eternal tides.
The black-backed gulls are not so common. They are bigger and stand apart from the herring gulls. They like the isolation
of ledge or island; they steer clear of human beings. And well they might, for they are detested. They search out and eat
the eggs and chicks and ducklings of other birds.
The gull whose draft I felt and whose glance I knew was a black-backed gull.
ACCORDING TO RECORDS kept locked up in Saint Luke's Hospital in Seattle, Washington, a female child was born to a young woman twenty-two years
old named Elizabeth Owen. The nurse, whose name was Mrs. Alma Porter, wore her Waltham watch on a chain around her neck and
she had looked at it. The time was exactly 2 A.M. The baby had no blemishes of any kind and had cried lustily after birth and then went right to sleep.
The year was 1912.
Mrs. Porter liked being a nurse. She felt that nursing was rewarding and she liked Dr. Gray because she did. He said she was
a credit to the profession and had many times given her a lift in his Pierce-Arrow machine. She was a little too heavy and
her feet were small. She liked the third shift. She liked being there when the little children were born into this strange,
strange world. She herself had three grandchildren. Although her elder daughter had never before known a Norwegian, she had
married one. They are clean and you can count on them. Her younger daughter married a policeman.
She was sorry to say that many young nurses were not so serious as they had been when she herself was young; they thought
only of running around and so forth, so they didn't like the third shift. They wanted to be on hand to walk out with young
men and so forth. The way everybody was acting now.
The young nurses were romantic and jumped to many conclusions. They thought if a girl had a ring on her finger she was married,
but it is easy as pie for a girl to borrow a ring from a friend or even from her mother, painful as that would be for the
mother, or a gold-plated ring from the five-and-dime, and sterling silver rings look like platinum or white gold but a sharp
eye can tell silver rings from platinum rings because cheap silver leaves a smudge on the finger and you can tell when you
are washing a patient. These rings you can buy at places are also worn by girls who check into hotels with men or as a protection
from mashers who happen to be sitting and watching at nearby tables. And they are worn by plain girls who want people to think
they are married. There is a good deal of deceit in this old world, some of it innocent enough. A lot of water runs under
the bridge, a lot of it dirty.
You can't always tell what a person is or has got herself into by the suitcase she carries into the hospital because all those
things can be borrowed, including the traveling clock that makes a good impression, and brushes and combs with silver handles.
You can often tell by a toothbrush — that is, you'd be surprised how many people in the city of Seattle don't bring toothbrushes.
The thing to watch for is the underwear.
The small suitcase Elizabeth Owen carried into the hospital might have been borrowed, since it was made of genuine leather,
and the photograph in the genuine silver frame of the young man could have been her brother, handsome as Francis X. Bushman
in the movies that time. The stitches of Elizabeth Owen's underwear were very, very small, like fairy stitching, and the garment
was made of genuine silk, and it was not brand-new, as if she was maybe used to silk.
You do not so much expect people with silk underwear to get into trouble. Because they do not need to.
The baby was such a dear little creature. How could the young woman do it? How could she give the little child away? All her
life the little girl would wonder who she was and if she had brothers and sisters, because somebody always tells.
The Reverend Doctor Matthews looked like a mad Lincoln; his eyes saw everything and he spoke with an angel's tongue. He was
famous around Seattle for his sermons on hellfire and they were printed in the papers along with his photograph. His was the
most important Presbyterian church in the city because most of those who worshipped there were blessed with money and large
front yards. Down from his high pulpit he departed in his shiny black Jeffrey coupé a gift from his flock, for Saint Luke's
Hospital where he loped along the corridors and appeared at bedsides to encourage the sick and to quiet the dying. He urged
those who yet possessed the strength to come down from their beds and to get on their knees with him. It may be that God looks
with greater favor on those who grovel.
As the Reverend was himself unmarried it may be assumed he looked on sexual union as sinful and on children as the result
of sin. He did however take a keen interest in the little girl born to Elizabeth Owen, for well-fixed parishioners of his
had just a year before lost a little boy of seven. Lost meant that the little boy had been thrown from a presumably gentle
horse and had had his neck broken.
“I know who would like to have that child,” he told Doctor Gray, and then he and Dr. Gray and the well-fixed parishioners
set things in motion. The result was that the baby born to Elizabeth Owen was left on the doorstep of a Mr. and Mrs. McKinney
in Seattle on Saint Patrick's Day, and for that reason Mr. and Mrs. McKinney saw to it that she celebrated Saint Patrick's
Day as her birthday with green balloons, shamrocks and coiled serpents of green barley sugar, although the McKinneys had not
an ounce of Irish blood between them. She was left on the doorstep as not so likely to cause neighborly comment as if she
were publicly arranged for and taken either from the hospital or from an adoption agency. The McKinneys must have had a peculiar
idea of what was most likely to cause comment, for in retrieving the infant from the doorstep they could have been hardly
more conspicuous had they marched down the aisle of the church wearing lampshades and snowshoes. On the day the McKinneys
took Amy — Amy after Mrs. McKinney — in, it happened that a young cousin of theirs who worked as a student nurse at Saint
Luke's Hospital came to call.
“I know that baby,” the young cousin said. She spoke of Elizabeth Owen as “a lovely young woman” who walked the corridors
for exercise and she spoke of the photograph of the handsome young man. If the picture of the handsome young man existed,
one wonders what the young man thought — doubtless that he was lucky that Elizabeth Owen was at least willing to abandon the
baby, and that she did not hate him as evidenced by the photograph she kept and displayed. And what did Elizabeth Owen think
as she walked the corridors? Certainly she considered the little child about to be abandoned in that hospital and tossed out
like a weed. The young man might have been pleased at the young woman's sacrifice. Everybody is flattered by sacrifice.
Amy worked out well for the McKinneys. Her birthdays made it a pleasure to buy presents and to give again; Christmas once
more had a point; there were cookies in the cookie jar. At five, when at last she was old enough to remember herself, she
knew herself to be a quiet, orderly child who picked up and put away her things in their special places; she seldom forgot
to wash her hands or to say her prayers in a clear voice. Already she was learning to save money awarded for the performance
of little tasks suitable to her small hands; she dropped coppers into the china piggy bank provided, and although a small
friend had demonstrated how these could be removed by sliding them out on a table knife, she let them remain in the pig until
the pig was full, at which time another pig was provided and then another and anot. . .
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