Unfollowers Design Sample Pages

ruggiero

w i n n e r o f t h e j u n i p e r p r i ze f o r f i ct i o n

“This beautiful novel sprawls across space and time, bounces between continents and decades. With a comforting hand, Ruggiero keeps us orientated and engaged. Energetic, stylistically brave, emotionally complex, and gripping—Unfollowers is a singular achievement.”

—gabriel bump, author of Everywhere You Don’t Belong: A Novel l e i g h a n n r u g g i e r o earned an MFA from the University of Maryland before moving to Montana, where she teaches literature, writing, and film at Great Falls College. She was a finalist for the 2019 Ohio Writers’ Association’s Great Novel Contest.

Cover design by Deste Roosa. Cover art by Sara Tafere Barnes, Dreamscape, 20"x16" acrylic on canvas painting, ©2020. Courtesy of the artist. Author photo by Liz Lauver.

unfollowers

Barb Matheson doesn’t fit in: not on the Standing Rock Reservation where her mother was born; not at the mission in rural Ethiopia where she grew up; and certainly not at the Pennsylvania church where her husband preaches. Expansive and lyrical, Unfollowers is a tale of religious angst, unrequited love, and the upheaval of racial and economic privilege. Equally adrift on both sides of the Atlantic, Barb must negotiate the distance between white America and Africa, between the spirituality of her ancestors and the straight tones of Evangelicalism, and between rules and grace.

UNIVERSITY OF

massachusetts press

AMHERST AND BOSTON

www.umasspress.com

MASSACHUSETTS

Unfollowers

Unfollowers

Leigh Ann Ruggiero

University of Massachusetts Press Amherst and Boston

Copyright © 2022 by University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-­1-­62534-­640-7 (paper) Designed by Deste Roosa Set in Perpetua and Miss Lankfort Printed and bound by Books International, Inc. Cover design by Deste Roosa Cover art by Sara Tafere Barnes, Dreamscape, 20"x16" acrylic on canvas painting, © 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Ruggiero, Leigh Ann, 1983– author.

Title: Unfollowers / Leigh Ann Ruggiero.

Description: Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, [2022] | Series: Juniper prize for fiction Identifiers: LCCN 2021054331 (print) | LCCN 2021054332 (ebook) | ISBN 9781625346407 (paperback) | ISBN 9781613769157 (ebook) | ISBN 9781613769164 (ebook) Subjects: LCGFT: Psychological fiction. | Novels.

Classification: LCC PS3618.U436 U94 2022 (print) | LCC PS3618.U436 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20211116 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054331 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054332 British Library Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Excerpts from the first Welete section appeared in The Write Launch 21 (January 2019), https://thewritelaunch.com/2019/01/unfollowers-chapter-one/.

for my heart-­grain

Contents

3 • 5 • 39 • 71 •

Part One Kaldi and the Dancing Goats Welete After Welete Before Welete

91 • 93 • 155 • 177 •

Part Two The Queen of Sheba and the Fountain Welete Home Assignment Welete

201 • 203 • 247 •

Part Three Saint Takla and the Cave After Welete Halfway

Part Four 285 • The First Coffin 287 • Addis 299 •

Acknowledgments

vii

Unfollowers

One It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.

Herman Melville, Moby-­Dick, chapter 19

kaldi and the dancing goats

I

t ’ s n o s u r p r i s e w h e n y o u ’ r e c h o s e n to c a r e fo r t h e

goats. As a child you spent days chasing their tails as they grazed the hills. You spent nights bedded down not with your family but with the herd.

You have always held yourself apart, as a herder should.

The years pass, you marry, and the goats start to stumble over rocks, tears streaming from their eyes, until the day you lead them south. They graze and you grow hungry, eat the injera from your satchel, and sleep. Your dreams shift among familiar landscapes and faces, among the hills you roam, among goats and humans, among beings that are a mixture of the two—­these images always umbral, always in shadow.

You wake suddenly to the bleating of the herd. It sounds like fear, and the goats are nowhere in sight. You follow the noise until you find them, butting heads and nipping tails, looking to all the world as if they’re kids again. They circle a tree you don’t recognize and nibble its purple-­red berries from the ground.

You lift one sweet berry to your mouth, chew, and spit out the pit. Something unnamable creeps along your body and seeps through your skin.

Perhaps the berries are magic, firelight by which to read your dreams.

You fold them into your satchel to take home—­to your family, to the village, or to the monastery, depending on who’s telling the story.

—

3

welete

Barb • May 1978

B

a‌r b E k l u n d d i d n ’ t c h oo s e w h e r e s h e wa s bo r n — n ­ o

one could—­but she still regretted the way America sat lodged between her ribs like the pain of a torn intercostal. Her parents brought her from Maryland to Welete, Ethiopia, when she was four.

Barb didn’t understand what she was leaving behind when she boarded the plane: Oscar the stuffed cat, the season of winter, or the red bike with training wheels she rode when winter was in abeyance.

Any sadness was short-­lived. The scenery around the Welete mission—­hills upon hills of vibrant red soil, the steep banks of the Omo River, the groves of unfamiliar trees and flocks of peculiar birds—­extinguished her guttering homesickness. There were too many buildings to explore. The gatehouse. The office. The refectory.

The schoolhouse that doubled as the church, its mud walls and tin roof just like homes in the village. The hangar and its Cessna, that magnificent growling machine that popped in and out of the clouds like magic. The missionaries’ bungalows, larger than her parents’ cramped apartment in Baltimore, and with raised foundations, shingled roofs, and plastered walls. They had no kitchen or running water, just three rooms. Everyone relied on kerosene lamps, and that was part of the fun.

It was the middle of the Red Terror. Ethiopia was ruled by the Derg and led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, deposer of Haile Selassie.

Barb pictured Mengistu angry and brooding atop a throne in Addis Ababa, a five-­hour drive, but a world away to her in 1978. The villagers preferred the Gadaa system to the chairman’s rules, and Barb

5

was more concerned with being alone. It took a year to find a friend among the village children. Makeda was the only other five-­year-­old girl and the only girl of any age who didn’t call Barb ferengi to her face.

They met during morning lessons. Barb sat in the last row behind a barricade of books. She kept her head down, her pencil moving while Marty, her mother, spoke in a tangle of English, Amharic, and Oromo. (Simeon, her father, taught boys in the other classroom.)

Makeda’s hair was plaited in rows along her scalp, and one of her bottom teeth was chipped. She sat directly in front of Barb, turned around, and said, “Hello. How are you? ” The question felt like a prelude to more ridicule, but Barb answered anyway.

“Dehna negn. I’m fine.”

Makeda pulled a bean from her dress pocket. “We play!” She mimed what looked like feeding chickens. Barb nodded without understanding, and Makeda, pleased, turned back around, grinning over her shoulder whenever Marty wrote on the board.

From that day on, Makeda would tug Barb away from lunch and lead her to the grove of eucalyptus and coffee trees on the mission.

There she taught Barb how to spot and flush mole vipers, to feed the ibises, and, most importantly, to play mancala with beans stolen from the mission’s provisions. The player who collected the most beans at the end of the game won. That player was invariably Barb until Makeda started bringing extra beans and sitting on them. When the game was over, she slipped them into her stash.

Barb argued she wasn’t playing by the rules, and Makeda laughed.

Barb suddenly wondered if she’d been wrong—­about her insistence on fairness and that cheating was a “sin”—­but Makeda was already on to something else.

They didn’t trade pieces of glass like the other children, but languages— ­flower for abeba, mountain for terara, coffee tree for buna-­zaf. Sometimes Barb told Bible stories, but she’d rather listen to Makeda’s tales stolen from the village healer—­about the brothers Borana and Barentu, about the Rat King’s Son and the man who grew feathers, about budas who wielded the power of the evil eye.

Barb’s favorite story was of Kaldi’s dancing goats. It made her hold the coffee berries in reverence. They were smooth and dense like her 6

•

pa rt one

mother’s pearls—­the Eklunds hadn’t brought much with them, two suitcases of clothes and books, pocket Bibles stuffed into every crevice, but the thing of most value was the necklace. Marty had tucked it in her bra to clear customs and had carved out a place to stash it in the plaster of the Eklunds’ bungalow. Now the hole was covered by a beaded wall-­hanging that depicted images from the Twenty-­Third Psalm: a shepherd’s crook, a stream, a valley, a chalice.

When the sun reached its peak, Barb crushed the berries between her fingers and elbowed Makeda. The girls raced back to the schoolhouse, hands sticky and uniforms stained. Her mother would hiss out a sigh, but Barb’s need for friendship eclipsed her impulse to lead by example.

Makeda and the other children vanished after the mission gates closed, leaving Barb to wander the grounds alone, looking for scenes to draw in the sketchpad she got from the Bjornstads, the couple who tended the chickens. Barb made a game of turning over rocks. Some undersides bore the imprints of pinnules: tiny encoded messages that had taken millennia to reach her.

Sent from where? she wondered and squinted at the sky.

These aimless evenings disappeared when she was nine and a half.

The mission pilot transferred, and Barb considered this an open invitation to explore the hangar. Inside she found a wall lined with an alphabet of tools: clamps in the shape of cs, iron tubes bent into ls, a hinged device like a w. She gazed at os and us and is, trying to translate their uses as Daniel had the message in Belshazzar’s dining hall.

She wondered if the tools were as threatening as the writing on the wall: M e n e , M e n e , T e k e l , U p h a r s i n . God has numbered the days of your kingdom.

Behind an unlocked door in the back sat a room with a bed and a dresser. She didn’t search the dresser—­it felt too much like trespassing—but turned her attention to that growling glory, the Cessna.

The plane delivered food, something Marty called pro-­fill-­ack-­ticks, and the Good News to nearby towns, roaming the hills like the hyenas that scavenged them. The plane felt just as wild. Barb peeled up the dust cover and slid inside the cockpit to examine its profusion of dials and levers. She often returned with a book and her sketchpad. welete

•

7

Barb • February 2021

With an unfamiliar peace in her chest, Barb found it easy to forget the journal. It seemed more likely to be lost in the mail than to be read by Ross.

(If he bothered to read it.)

She certainly hadn’t expected him to write back.

The envelope stuck out from the pile of mail. Alma had always been considerate, but Kima wasted no time, teasing, “What do you have? From Dr. Fekede, yes?”

Barb shook her head. “My husband.” Her shock bordered on fear.

She was a child in the hangar again, staring at the alphabet of tools, enough possibilities to swallow her whole.

She waited until lights-­out to open it and smoothed the pages so slowly she chastised herself. The worst he could say was I never loved you.

Though the thought paralyzed her, she forced herself to read anyway.

He started with Barb—­not Dear Barb, just her name—­and a perfunctory paragraph describing how his function on the mission had changed during the pandemic. It took time for the Ross she knew to bleed through, like the ink from his pen when he pressed too hard: For what it’s worth, I wish we’d come to Welete sooner. Because I see what you saw as a child, the largeness here. I spent years going on those mission trips trying to capture that largeness, but it was all wrong.

I’d been told a story in seminary—­one where I was going to change the world for the better, no matter the cost.

Now I’m just tired.

It’s hard being around people on the mission who never admit their doubts. Like the way our parents believe in God—­it’s hardly faith, they’re so sure. They just blink the doubt away.

The university in Jimma might need a language instructor, but I don’t know.

I’m happy to hear that you think less of me. of me less often. I’ve noticed the same thing in myself. It’s easier to take walks, to visit the

270

•

pa rt t hr e e

hangar, and not be reminded of the day I asked you to leave, of my naïveté and disappointment—­the things I’d like to forget.

There was a space, and a change in pen.

You wrote that you used to measure friendship in grand gestures. I knew this about you. I think I even used it to my advantage.

Another space, another change.

I told you about Kristy, my other serious relationship. I reached out to her, and while you took the kids to Europe, she took me on a horseback ride, and, yes, I was sore for a week, but I’m stalling.

After the ride, we started something that we didn’t finish—­just like when we were teenagers. Some days I wish we would have finished.

Barb thought she had left the pain in her ribs in the States, but here it was, flaring up as she discovered she’d lost something. She pushed herself away from the letter, went upstairs to the bathroom, and sat in a stall deciding whether she was nauseous or something worse—­ angry? jealous? disgusted? She had been the last person to share a bed with Ross until, suddenly, she wasn’t. She imagined Abeba and Eli calling Kristy Mom and knew someday it would happen—­if not with Kristy, then with someone else. She felt powerless at the inevitability.

But the story also made her wonder if Ross, too, was giving away his secrets.

By the time she retrieved the letter from her desk, she’d shaken free of the nausea. She crawled into bed with the pages, counted to ten, and read to the end.

Do you remember Ralph Wheaton? I keep thinking of him. I don’t even know—­is he still alive? On house visits I’d always find him in his old recliner. It was pink and gave massages, but it broke down and his disability checks weren’t enough to get a new one. I thought about taking a collection at the church, but he refused. He lived in that chair, sleeping, eating, watching talk shows . . . hal f way

•

271

Acknowledgments Thank you to Gabriel Bump, who chose Unfollowers for the Juniper Prize and whose own work abounds with humor, candor, and kindness.

Thank you to everyone at the University of Massachusetts Press—­ not least Dawn Potter, who rounded off all my sharp corners.

Thank you to my sensitivity readers: Vince Bantu, Kelly Silk, Linnéa Byers, and Lisa Eriksson.

Thank you to Nega Mezelekia, David C. Pollack, Ruth E. Van Reken, Tim Bascom, John Cumbers, Wolf Leslau, Claudia Rankine, and the Racial Imaginary Institute. These thinkers have broadened and deepened my understanding of the world.

This novel started as a writing exercise when I had just completed my MFA and was still slinging coffee in Washington, DC, so I must thank my cohort at school and my crew at Borders Café. You know who you are.

Countless others have inspired me along the way: my teachers Pam Whitmore, Kent L. Gramm, Nicole Mazzarella, Murad Kalam, and Maud Casey; my colleagues and friends at Great Falls College; the coffee adepts and trivia connoisseurs at Miss Kitty’s; my cheerleaders Sarah B. Winchester, Laura Deffley, Paul Yount, and Kristi Voboril; my aunt Marty, who showed me how bright the world looked through kaleidoscopes; my aunts Arlene, Alice, and Belva, who showed me that literature was something you could love as much as people; my aunt Carol, who vetted this book’s chronology; my father, who built tin can cars with me for Chuck Arnold’s science class; and my mother, who still considers me her miracle child.

Most of all, I’m indebted to my partner, who has been with me for as long as I have been with this novel. This is not a coincidence.

299

JUNIPER PRIZE FOR FICTION This volume is the twenty-second recipient of the Juniper Prize for Fiction, established in 2004 by the University of Massachusetts Press in collaboration with the UMass Amherst MFA Program for Poets and Writers, to be presented annually for an outstanding work of literary fiction. Like its sister award, the Juniper Prize for Poetry established in 1976, the prize is named in honor of Robert Francis (1901–1987), who lived for many years at Fort Juniper, Amherst, Massachusetts.

ruggiero

w i n n e r o f t h e j u n i p e r p r i ze f o r f i ct i o n

“This beautiful novel sprawls across space and time, bounces between continents and decades. With a comforting hand, Ruggiero keeps us orientated and engaged. Energetic, stylistically brave, emotionally complex, and gripping—Unfollowers is a singular achievement.”

—gabriel bump, author of Everywhere You Don’t Belong: A Novel l e i g h a n n r u g g i e r o earned an MFA from the University of Maryland before moving to Montana, where she teaches literature, writing, and film at Great Falls College. She was a finalist for the 2019 Ohio Writers’ Association’s Great Novel Contest.

Cover design by Deste Roosa. Cover art by Sara Tafere Barnes, Dreamscape, 20"x16" acrylic on canvas painting, ©2020. Courtesy of the artist. Author photo by Liz Lauver.

unfollowers

Barb Matheson doesn’t fit in: not on the Standing Rock Reservation where her mother was born; not at the mission in rural Ethiopia where she grew up; and certainly not at the Pennsylvania church where her husband preaches. Expansive and lyrical, Unfollowers is a tale of religious angst, unrequited love, and the upheaval of racial and economic privilege. Equally adrift on both sides of the Atlantic, Barb must negotiate the distance between white America and Africa, between the spirituality of her ancestors and the straight tones of Evangelicalism, and between rules and grace.

UNIVERSITY OF

massachusetts press

AMHERST AND BOSTON

www.umasspress.com

MASSACHUSETTS