Green Heart

by Alice Hoffman

  I tried to avoid the looters who had wrecked my garden. I’d heard they’d taken up residence near the river, at a place made out of half-dead timbers they called the forgetting shack. Some slept beneath bridges, but they all gathered at the fire they kept burning when the dark began to fall. I could smell smoke coming from their direction. When I held up my hands to the east, where they were gathered, I could feel their pain, a kind of pain that was much worse than what I did to myself with my ink and my pins.

  Once in a while, the looters arrived at a house in town in the middle of the night, threatening the citizens, demanding food. Most of them were no older than me, a few were only eleven or twelve. They had lost their parents, and, one by one, they’d run away from their empty homes. They drank gin until they were dizzy. They made themselves sick with whatever they found in their parents’ medicine cabinets, tablets to make them woozy with dreams, pills that kept them up all night.

  I had seen Heather Jones, the girl I knew who had joined them, panhandling on a corner. She had woven a hundred braids in her hair, and she wore what had once been a beautiful white dress. People walked by without looking, they didn’t want to see the emptiness in her eyes, but I put some coins in her tin. I didn’t wait for her to thank me. That’s not why I did it. It was because I remembered the white dress she wore, how pretty she’d looked in school, how jealous I’d been. Now, the fabric was torn from the brambles she slept upon. Now, it was closer to gray.

  I could hear the looters every once in a while, music rising from down at the forgetting shack at the river. I felt protected by my bad reputation and the nails I hammered into the trees all around my house, a warning not to come near. But sometimes I’d wake in the night and I’d listen to their music. I couldn’t help myself. Voices carried on the wind, and their voices called to me. Several times, I’d left my sister in my dreams, and risen from my bed under the table. The loneliness I felt cut right through me, and not even sleep could ease my sorrow on nights such as these.

  Help me, my sister called in my dreams, but I no longer went to her to help her carry water from the well, or sweep the floor, or close the window.

  One night I went out very late. I made my way through the woods to see the forgetting shack for myself. I watched the looters dancing until their feet were bruised. Their bodies were covered with sweat. Some of them howled, and the sound went down my spine. Some of them spun in circles, until they looked like spires of silver.

  Standing there alone, I swayed in time with the music. There were drums and tambourines. There was the organ they’d stolen from the church and the flutes they’d taken from the school music room. But this music was different from anything I’d heard before. It was something that scared me and made me want to be closer to it at the very same time.

  I thought dancing with the looters would be like jumping into the fire. I would never have to think again. All I had to do was join them, do as they said, follow their lead, forget everything that had come before.

  I laughed out loud at the notion and my laughter made them turn to me, all at once. The boys I’d gone to school with were all looking at me. Most of them had never noticed me before. Now I could probably have any one of them, if that’s what I’d wanted. They were lonely the way I was. I could dance all night long with any boy I chose. I could forget right along with them.

  They started to call to me as if they knew me. They started to come nearer. They thought I was Green, too shy to speak. Green, who had patience and pretty long hair. Green, who would dance with anyone who asked, anyone who grabbed her, anyone who pulled her closer to the fire.

  Leave her alone, a girl shouted. It was Heather Jones in her dirty white dress. She was drunk, but she recognized me. Does she look like she’s one of us?

  Now the boys examined me closely. They saw the black roses and ravens on my skin. They noticed the nails on my boots, and my clothes, covered with thorns, so that anyone who tried to touch me would surely bleed.

  They ran from me then, as though I were the dangerous one. They went back to their fire as if they’d never even noticed me standing so close by. I went home, grateful to Heather for calling out. She knew I wasn’t like them. All the same, I understood what they were after. I understood wanting to forget. Things that made you remember cut like pieces of glass. A song, a memory, a blade of grass, a white dress, a dream, all of it as painful as the deepest wound.

  I went home and locked my door. I was glad to be away from those pathetic creatures at the forgetting shack who didn’t know how to face the darkness of their lives. That wasn’t me. Heather Jones was right. I wasn’t afraid of the dark. I didn’t mind a certain kind of pain. I welcomed it because it took me away from my loss. It was better than anything at the forgetting shack. It was under my control.

  I took the pins and the bottle of ink and held them close. Every night I tattooed more black thorns, vines, roses, bats. When I had less skin to cover, the task grew more difficult. I turned to my fingers and toes. My instep. My thigh. I had to squint and take my time. I worked hard, far into the night. Once I fell asleep still clutching my pins, spilled ink spreading across the table in a dark and endless pool.

  Now when I dreamed, my sister took my hand in hers. She was still like moonlight, but fainter, more sorrowful. She whispered something I couldn’t understand. It was as if we spoke different languages, as if I were losing her even in my dreams. The thorns on my skin were sharp and fierce, like me. The thorns could pierce through any dream. I grew restless in my sleep. I took to avoiding it whenever I could.

  Green, my sister called to me whenever I grew so tired, I couldn’t help but drift off.

  It was the only word she spoke that I understood, but I couldn’t answer to that name. Instead of tears there was soot in my eyes, so I called myself Ash. This was who I had become, but it was also the reason my sister stopped coming to me in my dreams after that. She didn’t know me by name anymore, so how could she call to me?

  When I closed my eyes to search for her, I was a stranger.

  Treasure

  This is who I loved

  I was gathering chestnuts deep in the woods where no one ever ventured, not even the crows, when I heard something nearby. Beside me, Onion began to growl, low in his throat, the way he used to whenever hawks came too close to our garden. Whenever there were strangers in the yard.

  I bent to the ground, and I could feel footsteps.

  At first I thought it might be the looters, come after me.

  But when I touched the air, I could feel regret in the wind.

  I thought it might be the girl, Heather Jones, with her neat braids and her ruined dress. Every once in a while she left her tin outside my gate. I filled it with bread or cooked rice or a bit of sugar. Sometimes I added a small pot of my asparagus soup.

  But when I pushed away the overhanging branch of an oak tree in order to peer through, I could feel hope in the stems of the singed leaves.

  The few birds that were left in the woods were chattering, flapping their wings, hopping from branch to branch. I could hardly see through the shadows, but when I narrowed my eyes I observed something white moving through the bare trees. It wasn’t Heather in her torn dress. She slept most of the day, along with the others from the forgetting shack, exhausted from their wild nights.

  I thought it might be a ghost that approached me. My sister, perhaps, with her snow-white hair, or my mother, in her favorite white shawl, or my father, his beard gone white with the shock of what had happened to our beautiful green world.

  I dropped to my knees, not caring about sticks and stones. I could feel the thorns I had sewn onto my jacket and leggings stabbing through me. I wanted my family more than I ever thought I could want anything. Any bit of them, any piece would suffice.

  If it were only a ghost that I’d found, that would have been enough for me. I wouldn’t have asked for more. If it were nothing more than mist I could neither touch nor hold, formed into the shapes of those I loved, so be i
t. As long as I could see my sister, my mother, my father, I would pay any price. Accept any answer.

  But it was no one I loved there before me. Not in spirit or in body. It wasn’t a ghost or an angel or an enemy. It wasn’t mist or cloud or memory. It was only a dog, a huge white greyhound. She was standing motionless, the scattered leaves on the ground turning to powder beneath her paws.

  I grabbed Onion to make sure he wouldn’t charge only to be snapped up by the larger dog in one bite. I carried my sister’s terrier and the basket of chestnuts through the woods. I had traded away nearly everything that was worth trading, but I still had to eat. I had to quiet my churning stomach. Later, I would pound the chestnuts into flour and bake bread, but if I needed to defend myself against this strange dog on the way home, the chestnuts would work as well as stones when put to use with my slingshot.

  Onion growled all the way home, so I knew the other dog was following. But I couldn’t see her. I didn’t hear a thing. She was a stray, like so many others, but something more as well. She was a ghostdog, mist through the woods, a pale cloud, silent and graceful. When I went inside the house, I could still feel her out in the yard. I put my hand on the cool glass of the windowpane, and there she was.

  She felt exactly like sorrow.

  That night I baked, and while the loaves of chestnut bread cooled on the rack, I went out to the porch. I alone sat on the steps where I used to sit with my sister, back when we thought the world was ours. If Aurora walked through the gate now, she wouldn’t recognize me. She’d run from the ink on my skin; she’d shy from my choppy hair and the thorns that covered me, head to toe, front to back.

  It seemed so long ago that we used to sit side by side, shoulders touching as we shelled peas for supper. Whenever we husked corn, we would toss the corn silk on each other’s heads and laugh until we were dizzy. We were so certain of our futures back then. We were so sure of how we would fill up those blank, white pages. We would grow old together, marry brothers, live in houses so near to each other, we would be able to hear one another singing lullabies to the children we would surely have someday.

  A few stars came out and shone, glittering and far away. The ashes had all fallen to the ground and I could see the moon, silver in the sky. Like a patch of moonlight, just as white, there was the dog in the garden. I waited, because I knew it would take time before she approached. I didn’t blame her for keeping her distance.

  After a while, my legs began to cramp up. I wanted to go inside and bolt the door. I wanted to sleep and close my burning eyes. But I stayed where I was, on the porch, in the moonlight. I dredged up whatever patience I’d once had, back when I was Green.

  At last the white dog came closer. I didn’t say anything. I was afraid I might scare her away. I knew what it felt like to be alone. I knew what it was not to trust anyone. All the same, I reached out my hand, the only part of me that wasn’t covered with thorns. Now that the dog was beside me, I noticed that her paws were singed, the skin patchy and oozing and black. Greyhounds were meant to run, but every step must have brought this one agony.

  When the greyhound rested her muzzle in my outstretched hand, I understood why I’d thought she was sorrow. I would have never guessed that a dog could cry, but this one did. Maybe she’d been burned by embers, like the ones in my eyes, or maybe she’d lost everyone she’d ever cared about, the way I had.

  I called her Ghost. When I said her name aloud she looked up at me, and when I went inside she followed the way ghosts do, silent, but there all the same. She curled up on the stone hearth, which was cool on her burned paws. Then she slept as though she hadn’t had any rest for days, her feet racing through her dreams.

  My own dreams were empty that night, devoid of moonlight. Even when I closed my eyes, my sister was always just out of reach. I started in my sleep and sat up, hitting my head. I was still sleeping in the pile of quilts under the dining room table. I’d been avoiding the room I’d shared with my sister; now I dragged along the pillows and quilt and went to open the bedroom door. There was moonlight streaming through the window, and before I knew it I’d fallen asleep in my sister’s bed.

  In the morning, it was as if Ghost had always been there. She ate from the same bowl as Onion, and the terrier didn’t seem to mind. I found a salve in my mother’s medicine cabinet, made from Saint-John’s-wort and yarrow. I understood that a greyhound was not a greyhound unless it could run. I called the white dog to me, and she let me apply the ointment and wrap bandages around her paws.

  That next night, Ghost slept at the foot of my sister’s bed. I woke only once. I thought I had felt the dog running in her sleep. I thought I heard the sound of weeping, but when I stroked the greyhound’s face, there were no tears.

  The next time we went into the woods, I brought along a loaf of bread and a thermos of cold, clear well-water. I had planned to go back to where the old trees grew, to gather the last of the chestnuts, but Ghost had other ideas. She wouldn’t follow. She led. Her paws were still so tender, she couldn’t manage any more than a trot; still, I had to run to keep up with her. In no time my heart was pounding in my chest. How fast she must be when she runs at full speed. How much she must miss racing like mist. How sad that she was forced to plod through the woods with me as I stumbled through the brambles with my eyes that only saw half of what was there, with my nail-studded boots that slowed me down.

  Before I realized where we were headed, we had arrived at my neighbor’s house. The house was dark, and the front gate moved back and forth in the breeze. The yard was littered with debris, broken branches, black apples, clods of mud. Nothing grew in this place but nettles, tall and bitter, stinging to the touch.

  This was the house that belonged to the neighbor who had thrown stones when Aurora took apples from her orchard. We had hooted and stuck out our tongues and made faces at her. We had run across her meadow laughing, but late at night we had wondered if she was a witch who might put a spell on us for eating the golden delicious apples we had gathered.

  Now that I was beside my neighbor’s door, I noticed a pile of the same white stones I had found in my yard, the ones that had been carefully aimed to chase away the looters, the ones that looked like moonstones. I hadn’t given a moment’s thought to this old woman, but she had obviously remembered me. I knocked on the door, and when no one answered, I pushed it open. I went into the house and there she was in her kitchen with nothing to eat but birdseed. Soot covered everything. The clocks no longer told time.

  Have you come to return my stones? my neighbor asked.

  I have something better to give you in return, I told her.

  I left the bread and the thermos of water on the table, then I took the broom, the mop, the bucket, and began to clean. I was good at it by now. With one touch, I could tell what needed care. The books on the shelf were thick with dust. The floors were coated with muck. The paintings on the wall appeared black, until they were wiped clean to reveal women whose faces resembled my neighbor, younger, prettier relatives who looked down upon me kindly for rescuing them from the ashes.

  When I had finished my work, everything in my neighbor’s house gleamed. I had repaid my debt to her. Now I was the only thing covered in ashes. Ashes stuck to my skin, my choppy hair, the thorns on my clothes, my black tattoos.

  Green, the old woman said to me. She had eaten every crumb of the bread I’d baked and drank every drop of water from my well. I wouldn’t have guessed she knew me well enough to know my name, but it was too late to call me that now.

  That’s who I used to be, I told her. Now my name is Ash.

  Whatever your name is, I have a gift for you in return. It’s out on my porch.

  There was only a big bag of birdseed, but I carried it with me. Once I’d reached home, I left the birdseed in the garden. I guessed it was worthless. I assumed it was all the old woman had.

  My hands hurt from cleaning my neighbor’s house. My feet ached in my father’s old boots. My skin hurt from the sharpness of the
pins. I had no time for worthless gifts.

  Onion followed me into the house, but Ghost would not come inside for her dinner. I fell asleep in my sister’s bed, exhausted. I woke once, and when I looked in the garden I saw the greyhound, white as the moon. She was tossing the bag of birdseed into the air as though it were a toy, shaking it with her teeth.

  In the morning, there were a hundred birds in the garden. I sat on the porch where I used to sit with Aurora and listened as they sang a hundred different songs. The birds had converged from everywhere, from the deepest woods, from the charred canyons of the city. There were cardinals as red as cherries, jays as blue as the sky used to be, crows with night-black feathers, swallows with graceful wings, flocks of sparrows, mourning doves the color of tears.

  When the hundred birds were finished eating, the garden was littered with the husks of pumpkin and barley seeds. Something else had been left behind as well. Two baby sparrows, dusty and ash-covered, their wings too singed to fly. I took off my jacket and shook out the thorns, then carried the sparrows nestled in the jacket’s lining. I brought them into the warm kitchen.

  That night I dug until I found some juicy worms.

  Is it all right to eat those? I heard someone say.

  It was Heather Jones in her white dress, so skinny she looked like a ghost herself. She reeked of gin, and looked woozy. Her legs were covered with sores and little burns. Still, she smiled at me as though we had once been friends. I realized that Heather was prepared to eat worms. That’s how famished she was.

  I brought out some tins of beans, a loaf of bread, a few asparagus. I wished I’d had more. I’d been trying and failing to fish down at the river, and I couldn’t think of anything else I could spare.

  Then I remembered something I’d stored away. I ran and found a dress that had belonged to my mother, soft blue denim that wouldn’t be so easily torn by the brambles in the woods. Heather held the dress up to her carefully, as if it were made out of sapphires.