The Red Garden

by Alice Hoffman

  Emily let out a short laugh. She held up five fingers in front of his face. As she suspected, he didn’t seem to notice. “You can’t.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Impossible,” Emily declared. “I’m invisible.”

  “Not for me. I see inside. One of the benefits of my tragedy.”

  “Then perhaps it’s not a tragedy.”

  “Life is a tragedy,” Charles said pleasantly.

  Emily felt the sprig of lad’s love in her shoe prick through her stocking. She had said the very same thing to her sister only weeks ago.

  “Shall I prove that I can see what no one else can?” Charles asked.

  Emily nodded. “Please. Do.”

  They sat there and nothing happened and Emily didn’t know what to think. Then Charles suddenly reached down.

  “Did you catch a shadow?” Emily asked, intrigued.

  Charles signaled for her to put her hand out. When she did, he placed his hand atop hers and opened it. There was a tiny field mouse. Emily laughed, delighted. “You’re like an owl,” she declared. “You see in the dark.” And from then on, although others might call him Charles or Carlo, she thought of him as her owl.

  “He’s yours,” Charles Straw said. “He’s at your mercy.”

  WHEN CHARLES’S COUSIN Olive Starr Partridge came to fetch the tray, she was surprised to find a young woman deep in conversation with her cousin, and even more startled to see a field mouse in one of the good Spode teacups. Introductions were made, and Charles immediately asked Olive to give Emily a tour of the house and of the garden that had been planted more than a hundred years earlier.

  “Don’t be silly,” Olive said. “I’m sure she has no interest in that old garden.”

  “She’s a botanist,” Charles said.

  “Amateur,” Emily added.

  “And don’t forget to introduce her to the dog.”

  “How do you know our Carlo?” Olive asked as she took Emily up to the garden. There were granite steps and a white picket fence. The earth was a funny, reddish color, as if raw pigment had been added to the soil.

  “Our paths happened to cross one day,” Emily said. She wondered if dreamers knew they were in a dream while it was happening, or if they had no idea that everything around them was purely imagined until the dream had gone.

  “Which day was that?” Olive was a nurse and quite protective of her cousin. Her husband and grown sons had traveled to Boston, but she had stayed to care for Carlo. He was terribly ill, yet he insisted he must return to his travels. He had never been one to stay in one place. His steamer trunks were packed and waiting on the porch.

  “Today,” Emily admitted.

  They had reached the garden, ignored for many years. It was a wild tangle filled mostly with thistle. A clutch of larks and sparrows took flight when the women approached.

  “It must have been lovely,” Emily said.

  There was still some scarlet amaranth and a stray crimson larkspur, nearly six feet tall, the likes of which Emily had never seen. There was a scraggly row of ruby lettuce and some bright radishes that Olive had put in, which she now pulled from the ground to have with their dinner. The family lore insisted that only red plants would grow in this stretch of ground. Even those blooms that went in as white or pink or blue turned in a matter of weeks. Emily took a bite of a small, muddy radish. The juice in her mouth was red.

  “It’s a shame poor Charles can’t see any of his old hometown before he leaves again. He’s going back.”

  “To South America?”

  “He insists. The Berkshires aren’t big enough for him. He says our mountains are hills.”

  As a boy Charles had spent hours in the library reading journals by James Cook and Lewis and Clark, concocting an imaginary travel journal for himself. While the other boys in town were sledding and ice fishing, Charles was teaching himself Spanish and Arabic in the old abandoned house Emily had passed by. He had always been daring, a naturalist at heart. When he was twelve, he was out with the family dog, a young collie, when a fisher attacked. Fisher cats were large weasels so powerful and fierce they were the only creatures known to kill and eat porcupines, including the quills. Charles and the fisher had fought wildly over the dog. The fisher hissed and growled, arching its back, burying its teeth in the collie’s neck. Charles kept his hands around the fisher’s throat, choking off its breathing passage. It turned and bit him on the arm, but he managed to strangle it before the fight was through.

  When Charles carried the dead collie up to his father’s house in the meadow, he was crying, but his face was set. Three years later he left town. He went to Harvard, which didn’t interest him, then on to New York, and finally to South America, where he worked as a liaison for American companies. He liked jungle living, the heat, the brackish rivers filled with fish that had pointed teeth. He began to dream in Spanish. He didn’t miss a single thing about Massachusetts, not the snow or the people or the proper homes, although there were times when he found himself thinking about Hightop Mountain and walking there with his dog.

  Charles didn’t know his father had died until six months after the fact. His vision had already begun to fail by then. It might have been partially salvaged if he’d thought to come home. Now that he was back to pay his final respects all he could see were shadows, but even they had begun to fade. Emily’s presence had been faint, a mere breeze blowing across his face. Soon there wouldn’t even be that. That was why he was leaving while he still could.

  During his time with his cousin Olive, Charles had been training a dog to take back to South America, as a companion and helpmate. He was tied up behind the house. When Emily saw him on her way back from the garden, she marveled, delighted. “Is it a bear?” she cried. “An ox?”

  She crouched down and petted the huge, gentle creature.

  “It’s a Newfoundland. My cousin thinks the dog will guide him along the Amazon. It will probably die of heat prostration. Or Carlo will.”

  Charles had already hired a local boy to travel with him to New York and help with the luggage. Then Charles and the dog would embark a ship bound for Venezuela. Emily stayed for dinner and was glad she did. Charles told her about otters that were as big as tigers, and tiny wild pigs with long tusks, and spotted wildcats that loved their aloneness so well they screamed when they came upon another of their kind. She felt as though she could listen to him all night long, and nearly did. Then it was too late to go. Her excuse for being in Blackwell was simple: She’d gotten lost in the woods. It was partially true and was therefore neither a sin nor a lie. They were happy to take her in as their guest. Before retiring, she went outside with the little box in which she’d kept the field mouse all day. She opened the top and set him free. Charles had said he was at her mercy, and so she did right by the poor thing. But the little mouse stood frozen. “Go on,” Emily insisted. She felt the trapped thing inside her and nearly wept when at last the mouse ran away, off into the woods behind the yard, to the owl or hawk that surely was waiting nearby.

  THAT NIGHT, SLEEPING in a stranger’s house, Emily found herself thinking of a way to keep Charles from leaving. It was a wild, frantic thought. She had no right to it, yet there it was. She rose while it was dark and went outside to sit with the dog. After a while, she took a shovel from a shed, then made her way through the sleeping town. The young Newfoundland followed her, waiting while she crept into the yards of the houses they passed. She found peonies, quince, snowy phlox. She dug up two small rosebushes, one with tea-scented flowers, the other with a scent that reminded her of burned sugar. She pilfered lavender, stargazer lilies, basil, rosemary, sage. She carried her loot back to the house, then went out again, this time to the woods. The dog dutifully waited while she found what she wanted. Four o’clocks, sweet William, lemon mint, swamp pink, tuberose, trillium, marsh clematis, barberry, witch hazel, mallow, honeysuckle, loosestrife. Emily took only scented plants, specimens that announced themselves with their odor. Each flower would be a
part of a blind man’s garden, a thicket of fragrance in which even the poorest weed might be miraculous.

  She worked through the night. The soil in the old garden was indeed red, and by the time Emily was done she looked like something out of a devil’s dream. The dog’s fur was dusted with soil so that he resembled a creature from another world. Emily took a bucket, filled it at the well, then washed her feet and the dog’s paws. She wondered if the mouse had been caught or if he had found his way home. She wondered if her family had realized she was gone, if her brother was searching for her door-to-door, and if Charles would be content with what she’d crafted, a place of beauty he couldn’t find anywhere else, even if he searched the whole world over. Dear Owl, she would have written if he could have read a note or a letter. Surely you’ll see this. All you have to do is breathe in and there it will be. All you have to do is stay.

  SHE SLEPT SO deeply she didn’t hear him leave. She was still muddy, and the sheets she slept on were peppered with specks of red earth. The dog was on the floor beside her bed when she awoke. Charles had left him as a gift. My dear Mouse, the weather would not have been right for a dog such as this, he wrote in his note to her. It would be cruel to take a northern creature there. She supposed he was right. The deep, relentless heat of the jungle, the fish that bit through flesh with sharp teeth, the worms that could take your sight away.

  When she rose from bed, she went to the window. Her brother was in the yard talking to Olive. He had been searching and had come to take her home. She wondered what she might have said or done if Charles had asked her to leave with him. She wondered if he hesitated as he stood in the garden. Anyone else might have guessed the garden she planted would be white, but Charles had seen it all exactly as she’d crafted it before he went away, the flash of scarlet, the trail of blood, the inside story of who she was.

  THE RIVER AT HOME

  1863

  BLACKWELL, MASSACHUSETTS, WAS REPRESENTED by the Thirty-fourth Regiment in the War Between the States, and every able-bodied man, including Tom Partridge’s grandsons, who were fourteen and fifteen, had enlisted. The Starrs went and the Jacobs and the Hildegardes and all the rest. There was a parade, and people cheered and said the war would be over in six months. After the parade, Constant Starr, who had been named for his great-grandfather and was so handsome half the women in town were in love with him, kissed his wife, Mattie, right in front of the meetinghouse. He kissed her for so long that some other men’s wives swooned just to think of how they might feel in his arms.

  When the men and boys left, there were only women, children, and old men left behind in Blackwell. The leather factory where eelskin boots and belts had been made for so many years closed down, and the windows looked ghostly in the dim spring light. The bank was vacated and people kept their money piled inside their mattresses, or buried under a stone birdbath, or in a mustard tin in the pantry. The new history museum, opened only months before, was shuttered, and the barn behind it was turned into living quarters and rented out. The women went out to the fields with the horses and mules. With tireless patience they taught their children how to work a plow and tend the apple orchards, the same way they’d instructed them on how to say grace and how to have faith in the future.

  Three months later, one of the Partridge boys was sent home with only one leg. His brother had been killed in the field. Two of the Jacobs, father and son, were missing and considered lost. Letters from loved ones could take months to reach home, and so the days were lived hesitantly, and in fear. Constant Starr had fallen in Virginia, but no one in Blackwell knew he had left his earthly life until eight weeks after the fact. A tintype of his body in uniform was eventually sent to his wife, who wore it pinned to her black dress the way another woman might clip on a corsage. People heard Mattie Starr sobbing but there was nothing they could do, no comfort that could offer real solace, although most tried their best to be neighborly. There was little enough in people’s pantries and larders, yet neighbors brought pies and stews to Mattie’s home, for her and her two children. She didn’t open her door, not even for those who knocked and called her name. The food was left out on the porch. Crows pecked at the pies with berry-stained beaks, dogs that roamed through town came and devoured the stews, and all of the Starrs grew thin.

  It was a time of great grief, a season unlike any other. When the blackflies came, as they did every spring, folks nearly went mad because of the infestation. They were on the precipice already, reeling from their losses, unable to make sense of how the war could take so much from a single small town. People were reminded of the way life used to be by the appearance of the flowers in May. The reminder was painful, provoking crying fits, despair, and arguments among surviving family members. Spring itself was an affront, and the worst offenders were the fragrant blooms of the lilac saplings brought over from England many years earlier, which had now grown as tall as the rooftops. A group of women went to cut them down one night, axes in hand, tintypes of their beloved sons and husbands and fathers clasped inside the lockets they wore on delicate gold chains at their throats. In the morning the children gathered up purple flowers and danced in circles singing ashes ashes until they fell down.

  NOT LONG AFTER that, when the trees were in full leaf and the meadows were lush, a young girl in a blue dress began to appear on the banks of the Eel River. Old Mr. Hildegarde was the first to spy her. He was fishing early in the morning when the owls were still soaring across the gunmetal sky, out hunting mice. Hildegarde did not wish to beg from his neighbors, all of whom had little enough, but he and his wife were on the verge of starving as they waited for their garden to bear fruit. Eel stew would have to suffice. The river was high after a snowy winter. Mist was rising from the cold waters into the mild air. Perhaps it was the mist that made Hildegarde stumble and nearly fall into the rushing waters. His boots were wet, and he was out of breath as he steadied himself. And then, quite suddenly, there she was, a little girl standing in the tall grass. Emile Hildegarde had never seen her before and he knew everyone in town, having come from Germany to Massachusetts as a young man. He’d lived in Blackwell the better part of fifty years.

  The child he spied couldn’t have been more than six, too young to be out alone at this early hour. The river was running so hard she seemed in peril as she scrambled closer to the riverbank. Usually Hildegarde minded his own business, but he started toward the girl, his heart pounding. He cried out, “Be careful,” and the emotion in his own voice surprised him. By the time he reached the patch of tall, plumy grass where she’d been standing, there was only a circle of blackflies in the air.

  Evan Partridge saw her in the very same place later that week. He had imagined many things since he’d returned from the battle that had taken his leg and his brother’s life. He’d come back unable to stop thinking about the surprising darkness of the color of blood and the way sound echoed when men fell to the ground. He thought about doves flushed out of the bushes as the gunfire began and the look of disbelief on his brother’s face. Evan managed to get around with a pair of crutches his grandfather Tom made for him. He often came fishing, grateful to be alone at the river, where he watched the high, cold water as if it was a gate to paradise. Each time he was there, he thought about dragging himself over to the banks and throwing himself in. A single step and it would all be out of his hands. He went over the scenario again and again. How cold the river would feel, how fast the water would take him, how pure and deep his last breath would be. He was certain that God would forgive him, considering all he had seen and all he had become at the age of fifteen.

  He was thinking about that last cold breath when he saw the girl. She wasn’t wearing any shoes. He noticed that. Her dress was blue and it flew out behind her, like a flag. Evan called out something, he didn’t know what, a blurted word of warning or surprise. He wondered how he would manage to rescue her should she fall into the water. To his shame he could barely manage to navigate the muddy riverbank. He surely couldn’t run. T
hen she was gone, the way mist disappeared. Evan felt his heart hitting against his ribs as it had in battle when he had embarrassed himself with the intensity of his own fear. He stayed there for a long time waiting for the girl in blue to return. When she didn’t, he went home and sat down to dinner with his mother and grandfather. Something hot and strange had settled over him. He felt jarred awake, thrown into the world. He wanted to ask his grandfather if he believed in the afterlife while his mother was at the sink washing the dishes, thinking they couldn’t hear her crying. He wanted to ask if in all his years his grandfather had ever received a message from the beyond, and if it had brought him comfort or simply added to his grief.

  The next day, Evan went down to the meetinghouse, where the town records were stored. He had kept to himself since his service to the Union and most of his neighbors hadn’t seen much of him since his return. Now people nodded a greeting, then looked away politely, not wishing to stare at his single leg. Evan was let into the records room by Mrs. Kelly, who served as the town clerk in her husband’s place now that he was in the army. Along the wall there were dark eelskin-covered books recording every birth and death and marriage in Blackwell. Evan sat down at the trestle table and began at the beginning. Soon enough he found the birth of a Mary Starr on April third in the year 1800. No wedding or death date had been listed. Beneath her name was that of Amy Starr, presumably her sister, who had drowned at the age of six. Hallelujah praise God she will return to us someone had written in blue ink. The ink looked so fresh it appeared to have been written that day. That was how it seemed to Evan when he thought about the doves rising and his brother falling, as if it had happened that very morning, a mere breath away.