Green Heart

by Alice Hoffman

  Start with your own story.

  I lost everything — my mother, my father, my sister, Aurora. They went into the city on the day of the disaster. My last words to them were not pretty. I wanted to be the one to cross the river. I was hurt and resentful. I wanted more. But I was the one who stayed home to work in the garden. It was my sister’s turn to visit the city that I loved so much, not mine.

  I wasn’t with them when they died.

  Afterward, I didn’t want to move forward from that moment when our world fell apart. My garden was chalk and ashes after the city across the river burned down. Cinders covered the countryside. But time changes things, like it or not. Now, a year later, whatever I plant grows overnight. I can hear my garden in my dreams, unfolding, flourishing. Each morning I have to take an ax and cut back the vines or my cottage will disappear into the thicket.

  Every one of my roses is blood red. Red to remind me of all that is gone — my family, my city, the life I led before. Blood red to remind me that despite everything, I’m alive. I’m still bleeding.

  A few survivors managed to escape. They set out on rafts even though the river itself was on fire, every wave roiling with embers. Those who made it to our shores told us that the people who destroyed the city call themselves the Horde. They had been coming down from the mountains in secret for years, setting up shops, befriending their neighbors in the city, biding their time.

  Once the city had been destroyed, they announced that their mission was to put an end to everything we had built. They said we had only ourselves to blame for what happened — the sheets of flame, the skies of death. They believed it wasn’t their fires that had destroyed us, but what we had built — our trains and libraries and bridges, even our schools — that had brought us to ruin. They want to go back to a time when men toiled in the fields without plows and trucks, when women were shut into their houses, sweeping, cooking, never daring to speak back.

  They insist the fire that killed so many was an act of heaven meant to punish us for our sins. Repent, they tell us. Join with us. Don’t even try to fight, because heaven is on our side. Angels ride on the backs of our black horses.

  But my sister, Aurora, was there in the city that day, selling vegetables from our truck, and I know she hadn’t sinned. She was a globe of light, a white dove. Heaven would have never burned her alive.

  Only a year ago, the world seemed dead. We hid in our houses. We cursed our fate. Some of us used our regret and grief to destroy ourselves. Everywhere you went, people were in shock, wondering why they had survived when so many had not.

  I know. Twelve months have passed, but often it’s the only thing I can see, even when I close my eyes. I was on the hillside when my family set up our vegetable stand in our favorite marketplace. I saw the spark, the flames, the red walls that trapped everyone I loved.

  That day I stood on our side of the river and had no choice but to look. I looked until I couldn’t see anything anymore.

  I watched as my world disappeared.

  Now there are buds on the trees. There are fish in the river — silver eels, trout with blue scales. The Horde keeps a watchful eye on us, but they have allowed the bridge to the city to be rebuilt, made of logs and rope and hard work. Our village has begun to trade with the few survivors who remain in the city. Some of those who were there when the explosions happened are burned. Some are mute and some are so easily startled they dart away whenever they see birds in the sky. They live underground, equally frightened by the light and the darkness. They no longer trust strangers. They appear in the marketplace when they are desperate. They offer those who come to trade with them gold and diamonds in exchange for barrels of clean water, blankets, clothes for their children. Nothing works in the city. There are no church bells, no trains, no radios, no schools, no stores. Still, whenever they’re asked if they want to leave, the few who remain always refuse.

  We’ll rebuild, they say. It will just take time.

  In our village, life has moved forward. We once relied on the city for nearly everything, including our clothes, our building materials, our water. Now a well stands in the center of the town square, and the water we draw in wooden buckets is clean and cold. An old man who was a professor at the university in the city has taught some local boys how to build the windmills that dot the fields. It has been difficult piecing back together all we once had. We are lucky to have the Finder, a mysterious person who lives in the woods. This curious individual leaves out parts of machines that are useful. If you need it, he can find whatever you desire among the ruins of villages that have been deserted. No one has seen the Finder, but there are many strange people in the countryside now.

  The world has changed, so it only makes sense that people have changed as well. There are women who live in trees, men who sit on rooftops keeping watch for looters, bands of orphans who refused to come back to town until the woman who had been our teacher gathered them up like wildflowers. There’s Uncle Tim, who is nobody’s uncle but seems kindly enough and has been adopted by the village. He washed up onshore after the fires and now cares for abandoned dogs at his campsite in the woods.

  These are the people who can’t get past that terrible day. We know them, and leave them to their grief. We avoid the woman who sits at the banks of the river and howls when the moon is full. We never bother the man who lost his beloved and has torn out all his hair. Loss does different things to different people. Some fall apart. Some, like the Finder, rebuild. I have done both. I have crawled under my table and refused to come out. I have covered myself with thorns and tattoos. I have planted a garden, reached out to my neighbors, begun to write down my story.

  Surely, I can never sit in judgment of the lost or the found.

  If you want something from the Finder, it’s easy enough. Write a note and leave it in the notch of the big elm tree at the fork in the road. Leave a gift alongside. Not money — we don’t use that anymore. Something useful — a set of measuring spoons or a can of soup, a hammer or an apple pie. Whatever you’re looking for will be there within the week. It may be battered, it may be in pieces, but still, it will arrive. The Finder has managed to avoid the Horde’s spies by limiting his movements to the cover of darkness. Because of his efforts, there are now generators that are run by hand. Lights flicker in the darkness. There are iceboxes, stoves, medicine kits. Because of him, a bell has been found to sit atop town hall. It rings twice a day, at dawn and at dusk, reminding us there are still hours in the day.

  I had always been a city girl at heart. Moving there had been my dream. That was no longer true. The city I’d loved was in ruins. I thought of it as a graveyard, the past, not the future.

  On the day of the bridge reopening, when a big festival was held, I couldn’t go any farther than the tollgate. I stood there with my sister’s little dog, Onion, beside me. I couldn’t take another step.

  There were jugglers on the bridge and Uncle Tim played the guitar. The schoolteacher had the children make banners.

  I walked away.

  I wasn’t ready to see the place where my family had perished. I couldn’t go back to the city I had always loved. I have heard there are no longer bodies in the streets or blood on the cobblestones, but my beloved city is still in pieces, the buildings like silver stars — some fallen, some rising, some constant in the sky.

  I live alone in my cottage, deep in the woods. I rarely go into the village. I’m too busy working in my garden. I wear simple clothes: a green shirt, a faded skirt, green suede boots or bare feet. I tie up my long black hair with string. People in the village are polite. But they stare at me because of my tattoos even though I am their neighbor and they all know my name. Green, who can be depended on. Green, who has walked through to the other side of sorrow.

  Sometimes when they stare I wonder if they can see something I can’t.

  All through the winter, people came to me when they were hungry. They begged at my fence. Neighbors I had known in another lifetime, people who had alw
ays ignored me — the sheriff, the mayor, the shopkeeper’s wife who had tried to cheat me in exchange for my mother’s candlesticks and jewelry — all asked for my help. I have become someone they turn to. I can tell the false from the real, the truth from a lie, just as I am certain that when the leaves of a plum tree curl inward there are beetles at work in the bark. I know that when I reach my hands into the soil, my garden will heal and grow.

  I had been Green, too shy to speak to strangers. Green, who kept her inner self hidden away. I am someone different now. They come to me not just for apples and lettuce, but for advice, remedies, solace. I try to be of help. I remember my mother’s kindness, my father’s strength, my sister’s delight in the beauty of the world. I think of what they might have said or done.

  Women stand by my fence and cry over lost love until I offer them packets of mint tea to help them sleep at night. Children beg for sweets knowing I’ll give them strawberries and honey, or slices of rhubarb pie. The town councilmen ask me when the corn should be planted and where the new well should be dug.

  I stand in the meadow until the sun strikes me at noon and say, Plant here.

  I point to the place where the swamp cabbages grow, a marshy spot, the mark of an underground spring. Here, I tell them. Dig your well.

  There is something else I’m known for. Another reason they come to me.

  I tell their stories.

  When embers whirled across the river, books were the first thing to burn. The school turned to ash. Our library has no roof. The few editions that remain are mostly unreadable. The print has dripped off the pages, pooling into inky rivers on the floorboards. Mice live in the stacks, eating the bookbinding glue, tearing up what remains of atlases and encyclopedias for their nests. Any volumes that were left were used as fuel, tossed into fireplaces and stoves during that first harsh winter.

  I began by writing on myself, ink and pins on my own skin. I covered myself with tattoos, but when I was done, I still had more stories to tell. I started to write on clean white pages, the last of the paper that was left. I wrote about my family going to the city to sell vegetables, about my school friend Heather, who had lived in the woods, then disappeared, and about a boy I had never expected to walk past the garden gate, into my life. I wrote about who I was and who I would become and who I wanted to be.

  When I ran out of ink, I made my own from the sap of the black lilies that grow in the farthest fields. It’s an extract from the flower’s heart; it won’t wash away or smear.

  Because they know I’m a writer, people in the village come to me. Even those who rarely speak, who seem closed off, who prefer to run away and hide rather than converse, arrive at my door. Some wear shawls over their heads as they come up the steps. They don’t want to be seen. Each has a different story, but they all pose a single question once their stories have been told. Why did they live when so many others did not? Why have they lost all they treasured most in this world?

  One after the other they sit at my kitchen table, where my mother once shelled peas, where my father drank his coffee, rich with sugar and cream, where my sister painted watercolors of our family, our garden, our life. It’s here that the townspeople tell me the stories of their lives. The mistakes they made, the people they loved, the way it all used to be before the world as we knew it disappeared.

  There are other people who trail after me when I come to town, desperate to talk, holding tight to my sleeve. These people have so much to say, a single volume isn’t enough. They’re the ones who know that our stories are all we have now.

  Before long, I had written down so many stories I ran out of paper. I began to make my own. I used chopped-up rags and celery stalks, boiled oak leaves, water, ground chestnut flour. Maybe that’s why some people whisper about me, even the ones who depend on me for their vegetables and fruit, who wouldn’t have made it through the winter without me. They’ve seen the kettle I keep in the yard, set over a stack of burning wood. They’ve seen the plumes of black smoke rise.

  When the mixture in the cauldron has turned soupy, I push it through a screen from an old window and let it dry in sheets set out in the sun until they harden. Then I cut the sheets with a pair of gardening shears.

  At last, there it is.

  I am the first to make paper again. If anything is magic, this is. I dream of paper as if it were a garden, sheaves of white and green, fields of it, reams of it, all smelling like spring. I never realized how beautiful paper was before. I took it for granted. I didn’t rub it between my fingers or hold it up to the light.

  I add different elements depending on the person whose story needs telling. Certain ingredients are right for certain stories. When someone asks how I know what to add to the mix, I ask, How do you know the difference between the sun and the moon? The answer is obvious, at least to me.

  For the old man who knows about windmills, I added grass to the paper. You might think a man who’d once been a scientist at a university would want a clean white page, but he told me how windmills could create energy, run water pumps, turn everything green.

  For the baker, who had lost his only son in the city on the terrible firestorm day, I added cloves and the last of the cinnamon from a metal container in my mother’s baking cupboard. He held the paper up to his nose and breathed deeply, then wept. His story was a true baker’s book — recipes for strudel and pecan pie and Sacher tortes, things we didn’t have the ingredients for anymore, mythical cakes and pies that made my mouth water.

  For the woman who had been my teacher, who had lost all of her books, I added a stray page I had found from her favorite novel. The paper turned a dovelike gray and smelled like heather and heath. The story my teacher dictated to me was a list of all of the novels she had loved, along with a description of exactly where she’d been when she’d read each one. She had been sprawled in a chair in the parlor of her grandmother’s house right in the center of the city on a hot summer day when she’d read her favorite book of all. Because of that, and because of the incendiary nature of the love affair in the novel, the paper her story was written on was always hot to the touch.

  For Uncle Tim, who was a survivor, I added ashes from that day. I had saved them in a glass bottle. When I poured in the ashes, it was like adding a storm to the mix. Uncle Tim was a hermit now because he no longer trusted men, only the stray dogs he adopted. He had seen terrible things on that day — people on fire, people leaping from ledges. He had tried to rescue several of his neighbors, but none had survived. He wept when he told his story, so I added salt. The resulting paper was black with white edges. When you ran your hand across it, tears came to your eyes.

  You could hear a faraway voice say Save me even when no one else was in the room.

  I felt it was my duty to collect these stories just as surely as if they had grown in my garden on stalks and stems, as if they had ripened in the sun and were ready to pick, one by one.

  This was the way I lived now. This was the way my garden grew.

  I am Green, the one to turn to, the one to whom you can tell your story. I live alone, but the villagers accept me. They need me, and because of their need, they trust me as well.

  Or so I had thought.

  Lately, there has been talk of witches in our midst, women they call the Enchanted. People have suspicious minds, especially in difficult times. There are those who insist my garden is the only one that flourishes because of the potions I make. They say I can mix up a remedy or a curse depending on my mood. They whisper about my tattoos. The wings of the inked bats move, people vow. The vines grow. The roses have a scent stronger than perfume.

  There are those who say if I have the talents of a witch, I must be dangerous. I go out of my way to say hello to these people. I even shake their hands. Whether someone thinks I am a farmer or a sorceress makes no difference. If they believe that writing a book is casting a spell, so be it.

  If this is magic, then call me a witch.

  No one knows the deepest truth. How can
they? I hide it well.

  Even though I have never used red ink, there is half of a red heart tattooed beneath my shirt. I’ve been in love. That is my deepest secret. The one I’ll never tell. It’s no one’s business but my own. His name was Diamond and he left me.

  He was nearly destroyed by the fire, his face half burned, his voice lost. He was the stranger who appeared in my garden when I expected my life to be empty. He was nothing to me, and then he was everything. I helped him to heal even though I knew that meant he would go off to search for his family. I thought he would come back. I thought we were meant to be together. But I haven’t even received a letter. I know letters are difficult to send in our world—still, I thought he would have managed somehow.

  Being alone for so long, I’ve grown bitter. Every night I waited for him, and every night he disappointed me and I was more alone. On the one-year anniversary of his leaving, I made a vow that I would never let anyone near my heart again. I wouldn’t even let him close.

  I thought my tattoo had turned red because my heart was opening.

  Now I wonder if it’s nothing more than a wound that has yet to heal.

  When I can’t sleep, I stand at the back door and remember the way things used to be. I think about my family working in the earth and all that the earth gave back to us in return. I look out at the gathering of white doves that were once used to send messages to survivors in the city. When the doves returned, they came back sightless. They were considered useless after that. But I love the songs they sing. I’m honored that they visit me. When the moon is out and the trees are filled with shining white doves, more beautiful than snow, I walk outside. I climb the tree and sleep among them, listening to the wind.