The Red Garden

  She was the closest blood relative to the town’s founding families, related on her mother’s side to Hallie Brady, as well as to the Partridges, who had also been among the first settlers. There were still plenty of Partridges around. Louise’s own father had been a long-lost Partridge cousin, one of the ones who’d gone off to California, probably driven off in the first weeks of spring, unable to think straight because of all those flies buzzing around. Louise’s father had come back east to go to Harvard and had fallen in love with her mother. He’d died when Louise was ten, and not long after, her beloved aunt Hannah passed on. Their Thanksgiving dinners, at which the traditional Brady Indian pudding was always served, had shrunk from four to three, and then there was only Louise and her mother, Kate. Now, when next November rolled around, Louise would be eating Indian pudding alone. She’d been practicing the recipe—cornmeal, milk, molasses—and had scalded it every time. Fixing the pudding made her miss her mother, who had died far too young, and she wished she had paid more attention to details. While she was growing up there were times when she would glance out her window at night to spy her mother out in the garden amid the green shadows. Louise had never even asked her why she was out there at such a late hour.

  Louise had inherited the Brady house, the oldest in town. If she hadn’t been her mother’s sole beneficiary, she might have gone back to Cambridge and finished her classes. She’d been studying biology and had even considered med school, but after her mother’s long illness, a ferocious battle with bone cancer, she never wanted to enter a hospital again. Her mother had been delusional at the end. She insisted she was in the wrong life, that someone from her other, truer life came to sit beside her late at night when the hospital corridors were empty and yellow light spilled across the parking lot.

  “I’m the one who’s here for you,” Louise would say then, taking her mother’s frail hand. “It’s just me.”

  “Oh, I know,” her mother would murmur. “That’s why I love you so.”

  Love had never been discussed before. Louise’s mother had tended to be undemonstrative, and hearing her speak so tenderly of love made tears well up in Louise’s eyes. Now that her mother was gone, Louise always stepped down hard on the gas when she passed the Blackwell Community Hospital. She had the feeling that if she didn’t, she’d be trapped. She’d never get away.

  Louise planned to leave town as soon as she came up with a plan. Until then, she had nothing but time on her hands. The house was far too big for one person. The original structure had been added on to in a crazy quilt of rooms over the years. There were rooms where you least expected them—under the staircase, off the breezeway, through a crawl space into the eaves of the roof. There was a shed out back that had been a house at one time, rented out to schoolteachers, and was now home to shovels and peat moss. People in town said the big house had a buried history, just as they swore that Johnny Appleseed himself had planted the twisted old tree out in Band’s Meadow—a local variety known as the Blackwell Look-No-Further, perfect for cider and pies. In the old days people had called this apple tree the Tree of Life and had insisted that the town of Blackwell would last as long as the tree did. There were still several cuttings, now grown into tall trees, all over town. They were extras, just in case the original should suffer from blight or be struck by lightning. No one in Blackwell was taking any chances.

  THAT SPRING LOUISE took her mother’s old Jeep down to Harvest Hill, a huge nursery off the Mass Pike. She came back with fertilizer and seedlings and flowers of every variety. After all those months in the hospital watching her mother die, Louise had a strong desire to witness something grow. She donned the mosquito net cloak, affixed it with one of her father’s old eelskin belts, then got to work, pulling out brambles and weeds in the abandoned garden. Louise had no friends in town and only a few acquaintances, card-playing pals of her parents. But even the old guard had mostly retired to Florida or moved to the village of Lenox, where the long, snowy winters were better spent and there were card games galore in the summertime.

  Although she’d grown up in Blackwell, Louise had always been an outsider. She was shy, red-haired and freckled, and that alone would have set her apart. Then her parents plucked her out of the local kindergarten and sent her to the Mill School in Lenox, where they felt she would get a better education. She’d never really made connections in town. Although she knew Latin and Greek and had the honor of dropping out of Radcliffe, she had never been in the Jack Straw Bar and Grill or had anything more than a hurried cup of tea and a slice of Look-No-Further Pie at the coffee shop or a wedge of their famous Apology Cake, made from a secret recipe a summer resident had once given the owner’s grandmother. Louise had never been to a high school football game, even though the Blackwell Bears were ranked among the Commonwealth’s top ten teams, nor had she attended one of the ballet recitals held at the town hall that attracted people from as far away as Connecticut and New York. She talked to people as if they were strangers, even though some were her very own cousins. She had attended several of the Hallie Brady festivals, held each August to commemorate the birth of Louise’s ancestor who had founded the town, without whom the original settlers wouldn’t have lasted past their first winter. But mostly she’d been gone in the summer, off to camp in Maine, or on trips to France to study the language or renting a cottage in Provincetown, where she worked as a waitress, rooming with a gang of college friends whom she imagined she liked until she got to know them, and vice versa if truth be told.

  Living in the old Brady house, Louise simultaneously had the feeling of being at home and also being in a foreign land. She hadn’t been up to the attic since she was a little girl playing dress up. She couldn’t abide the sadness of entering the bedrooms where her aunt and her mother had slept. Sometimes she dreamed of burning the house down. Then she’d finally skip town. She’d have the freedom to head off to Vienna, where she’d buy a season ticket for the opera, or better still, she’d hightail it to Oregon, where it was leafy and green and there was rarely snow. Instead, she stayed on, making plans for the old garden. She was a big planner. She always looked before she leapt, so Oregon and Vienna were probably out of the question at the moment. It would take her months just to get through the guidebooks and come up with an acceptable plan of action so that she could finally fashion a life of her own.

  AFTER HER FIRST week of work, the brambles in the garden were torn out and fertilizer was spread around. One night Louise had a bonfire and watched the weeds burn in a metal trash can, sending sparks blazing into the sky. After that, she started collecting the rocks that littered the ground, shards of mica-filled granite. She made a pile she intended to use for a rock garden, unless she wound up in Portland. She worked tirelessly. She had discovered that gardening made her stop thinking, and she was pleased by the effect of hard labor. When she realized her hands had become ragged from her digging, she found an old pair of her mother’s leather gloves. Even they didn’t do the trick; when she took the gloves off at night, her fingers were bleeding. She soaked them in a bowl of warm water and olive oil, then rubbed in some of her mother’s lemon-scented hand cream.

  One day Louise went to the hardware store to buy white paint. She planned to freshen the shabby picket fence that surrounded the garden. She hadn’t even known it was there till she’d cut down the last of the brambles. The fence was falling apart, and she hoped a coat of paint might spruce it up enough to make it last a while longer. People thought anyone related to the Bradys was surely rich, but they just looked that way. After her mother’s illness, the accounts had dwindled to almost nothing. Louise didn’t mind being thrifty. She’d never had an extravagant personality.

  The checkout girl at the hardware store was about her age, pretty, and extremely competent. “Hey,” the girl said to her, tentative. “Don’t I know you?”

  “Nice to meet you,” Louise said, not really listening in the way that people who live alone often ignore others, their heads filled with silent, argumentati
ve dialogue. Right then Louise was busy thinking about paint, debating between Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore. She made her decision and pointed to the shelf of Benjamin Moore. “I’ll take two gallons of the white.”

  “No. I mean we’ve already met.”

  The clerk was Allegra Mott, a local girl. Her brother Johnny had gone to kindergarten with Louise and had hit her on the head one bright afternoon and made her cry, which was the reason Louise’s parents decided to send her off to private school in Lenox. She’d had a bump on her forehead for weeks.

  “Did you know you were wearing a mosquito net?” Allegra asked gently. She had heard rumors about the Brady genes. Everyone had. Some of the Bradys were said to be completely mad. In the old days, one of them ran around town swearing she’d slept with Johnny Appleseed of all things, as if he were Mick Jagger. Others had disappeared, drowned, married the wrong men, generally scandalized the town.

  Allegra gave a little smile and touched her head, signifying that Louise had forgotten to remove the mosquito netting cape she’d fashioned to fend off the flies.

  “Oh, crap.” Louise quickly grabbed off the netting and scrunched it into a ball. “I haven’t experienced blackfly season in some time. It’s a killer. I’m trying to undermine the flies without losing my marbles in the process.”

  “Right-o,” Allegra said, ringing up the paint.

  She couldn’t wait to tell her brother that the love of his life was back.

  LOUISE FOUND THERE were fewer flies in the mornings, so she went out to work while the sky was still dark. Blackwell was known for its songbirds, and this was the hour when they were waking in the trees. Sparrow, mockingbird, lark. All of them sounded glad to be alive. Because the garden was elevated, Louise could see the crest of Hightop Mountain as she toiled away. For some reason the view caused her to experience a catch in her throat. She hadn’t thought she cared much about her hometown; she wasn’t a rah-rah sort of girl. Yet when she saw the mountain, she felt moved in some deep way, the way she had when her mother had squeezed her hand in her last moments. Louise had known it was her mother’s way of thanking her for all the time she’d spent with her in the hospital, for coming home from school and insisting everything would turn out fine when clearly it wouldn’t.

  Once the garden was ready, the red soil turned, Louise planted a grapevine, cucumbers, green Zebra tomatoes. She added a yellow rosebush. She put in some bleeding hearts, irises, and several rows of lettuce; and she set up a trellis that would support peppers and runner beans. It was more work than she would ever have imagined. In the evenings she was so tired she didn’t bother to fix herself dinner. She ate cold baked beans from the can spread onto toast or threw together one-step macaroni from one of the scores of boxes she found in the pantry, prepackaged stuff that her mother, who had always been so intent on proper meals while Louise was growing up, must have been living on once Louise was away at school.

  By then rumors about Louise Partridge returning home and running around town dressed in mosquito netting had swept through the village. Some people were waiting for her to have a full-fledged crack-up, or maybe drugs were at the root of her odd behavior, or an addiction to alcohol—she had gone off and lived in Cambridge after all. There were bets not about whether she’d wind up at Austin Riggs for rehab, but when.

  But if Louise had a drink, it was only a glass of white wine, one that she sipped in the bathtub while soaking off the garden’s grime. The only drug she allowed herself was a mild sedative to help her sleep. She’d found Valium in her mother’s medicine cabinet. Dozens of vials were stacked on the shelves. Evidently, her mother had been living on nothing but sedatives and instant macaroni and cheese during the entire time Louise had been away at Radcliffe. This sad realization made Louise even more convinced she shouldn’t have gone to Provincetown to spend summers with people she didn’t even like and instead she should have stayed home to work in the garden with her mother. Maybe she would have known her then.

  THERE WAS A week of driving rain. Spring rain, spitting against the windows, flooding the lanes. During that time the blackflies, which anyone might have imagined would have been washed away by the deluge, multiplied. Louise was irritated beyond measure. She went back to the hardware store and found a sort of zapping machine that was said to make an area undesirable to insects. The zapper cost almost two hundred dollars, but she didn’t care. Despite her mosquito netting outfit, there were dozens of raised red bites on her skin.

  “My brother said he never was in love with you,” Allegra, who’d recently been promoted to store manager, revealed to Louise as she deposited the zapper in a shopping bag. “He said I was very much mistaken.”

  “That’s good, since I have no idea who he is.” Whenever Louise got flustered or felt insecure, her demeanor became haughty. Anyone might suppose she thought she was better than they were just because she lived in that big, falling-down house. But her redhead’s complexion gave her away. She was blotchy with anxiety. All of a sudden she recalled that sunny afternoon when she was still in the Blackwell Elementary School. She remembered someone hitting her on the head. Johnny Mott. “Tell him to drop dead,” she said tightly, gathering up the bug zapper.

  “Will do,” Allegra said. “Gladly.”

  The next week a few of the new plantings died, withering, it seemed, overnight. That seemed like a rip-off. It didn’t seem fair that after all those hours of hard labor she’d wind up with nothing. Louise drove back down the Mass Pike to Harvest Hill to complain. They said anything could have ruined the plants—not enough fertilizer, too much rain, shade, aphids. This made gardening seem like a much more precarious endeavor than Louise had imagined. She didn’t have her receipts, so they wouldn’t return her money. They suggested she buy more. Something heat tolerant, bug tolerant, water tolerant, she assumed. She chose lilacs, a hardy variety, and a few small azaleas, along with some beans and tomatoes. She kept the receipts this time.

  She put in all of the new plants in a single day, wrenching her back in the process. When she was done, she was not only filthy, but famished as well. She really could have used a drink. She realized she had no food in the house, no wine. Nothing but macaroni and cheese and sedatives. She had the sense that she was becoming her mother in her saddest period, and she was only twenty-two, not sixty. Louise braved the town and went out, driving her mother’s Jeep, which was nearly rusted out through the floor. There was the pizza kitchen, the coffee shop, and the Hightop Inn—the nicest place in Blackwell, mostly filled with tourists who couldn’t find suitable accommodations in Lenox or Williamstown. Louise switched the radio on. Prince’s “When Doves Cry” was playing. She felt old and out of it, no longer a college student and nothing else instead. She hastened over to the Jack Straw Bar and Grill. It would be her first time inside.

  The Jack Straw was a casual, wood-paneled place, busier in the summertime and on weekends. On Friday nights there were dart games that had once or twice ended in tragedy when fights flowed out into the parking lot. Louise realized that she was both under- and overdressed. She had grabbed a light Chanel jacket from her mother’s closet, but was wearing it over a white undershirt, along with denim shorts she’d had since high school and a pair of knee-high rubber gardening boots. She didn’t have on a lick of makeup. Her red hair was hooked up with a thick rubber band, whirled into a crazy-looking ponytail with bits of grass threaded through the strands.

  “Hey,” she said to the bartender when she sat down. She figured it was better to be alone at the bar than at a table meant for two.

  “Hey,” the bartender said back, not bothering to look away from the Red Sox game on the tube.

  “I’ll have a glass of sauvignon blanc,” Louise told him.

  “Chardonnay,” the bartender offered. He turned and saw it was that girl everyone expected to go crazy. He quickly backtracked. “I could look for sauvignon blanc in the storeroom if that’s what you really want. Like if you had to have it or something.”

  “Cha
rdonnay,” Louise said agreeably. She ruefully noticed mud streaking her arms. “And a grilled cheese sandwich with fries.”

  That had been her favorite meal when she was a little girl, only her drink of choice had been chocolate milk instead of white wine. She went to the toilet to wash up. There she learned that people in Blackwell seemed to fall in and out of love fairly often, and they could be vengeful when their romances didn’t work out. Names and phone numbers were written all over the wall, along with several nasty remarks about the length, or lack thereof, of one gentleman’s private parts. On this several women seemed to agree.

  When Louise got back to the bar, her dinner was waiting for her. The place had begun to fill up. The Eel River Kayak Company had just let out and several of the boatmen were there. The hospital was changing shifts, and Kelly’s repair shop had just shut down for the day. Someone had fed the jukebox. “When Doves Cry” yet again. Several men stood in a group at the end of the bar. One of them gazed at Louise, then whispered to his buddy, and they both laughed.

  Louise hated being a redhead. She blushed to the roots of her hair. She signaled the bartender over. “Why don’t you tell that guy to go to hell for me,” she said.

  “Tell him yourself,” the bartender suggested, clearly not a believer in chivalry. “He’s a cop.”

  Louise paid and stood to leave. She’d only eaten half her grilled cheese sandwich. She knew she looked ridiculous. Maybe that was why she felt so reckless.

  “Go to hell,” she called to the last man at the bar.

  He turned to her, stunned. All conversation at that end of the bar stopped. There was a play being called on TV. The Red Sox were down one.