The Red Garden

  “I don’t know about that,” Louise hedged. “The expedition’s being funded by Harvard.”

  “What gets found in Blackwell stays in Blackwell,” Allegra Mott said. “You of all people should understand that.”

  It sounded like some sort of veiled threat. But as a matter of fact, Louise had been experiencing a sinking feeling every time she saw the bones on the porch or heard the click clack of Brian Alter’s shovel. She was actually pleased the skull hadn’t yet been found.

  “I’ll keep your request in mind,” she said.

  Soon after, a professor from Harvard phoned looking for Brian. Dr. Seymour, the professor in charge of Brian’s research. Brian hadn’t checked in or sent a report in some time.

  “I’m certain he’ll be in touch soon,” Louise assured the professor.

  In fact, Brian had taken to sleeping all day, then getting up and going directly to the Jack Straw. Louise thought she had a budding alcoholic on her hands, maybe even a full-fledged drunk. One night she heard a ruckus on her porch. She ran downstairs in her nightgown and was met by the Motts, Johnny and his father, Frank, there on police business. They had brought home a sloshed, argumentative Brian, who tripped over his own feet as he attempted to take off and go back to the tavern for last call.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” Frank Mott said to Louise. “This gentleman said he was staying with you. We’ll haul him up to bed if you like.”

  “Your bedroom or his?” Johnny Mott asked.

  “John,” his father warned.

  “When you see the mess, you’ll know you’ve found the right room,” Louise told Frank Mott. “Just throw him on top of the mattress.”

  Louise went out on the porch. It was already the end of July. There were cicadas calling. In the Blackwell Museum there was a display of a dusty pile of cicada casings, including what was said to be the largest one ever found in the eastern United States.

  “What does your expert say this thing is?”

  Johnny had come outside while Frank went on to have a fatherly discussion with Brian upstairs, informing him that he was no longer welcome at the Jack Straw and that if he got caught drinking and driving in town, it would be good-bye to his license.

  “Let me guess,” Johnny went on. “He doesn’t have a clue.”

  “Why don’t you figure it out?” Louise said hotly.

  She was furious. She’d been the one to write to Harvard, and now she resented the fact that her garden was a wreck. All the plants were dying. Even the poor lilacs, uprooted and replanted in a precarious row, had lost their leaves.

  “Are you saying you want me to?” Johnny said. “Are you asking me to do it?”

  Louise looked at him, secretly aghast that she was wearing her mother’s old nightgown, that her hair was in braids. She seemed to be crying over her ruined garden. She would have answered, but she was suddenly tongue-tied, her usual ferocity gone.

  Frank Mott came out and shook Louise’s hand, apologizing for the bother in the middle of the night, suggesting that her boarder might need to be directed toward the AA meetings held every Thursday and Sunday at eight and at ten at the town hall.

  That night Louise could barely sleep. She dreamed about her mother’s last day on earth. She was small as a bird in her hospital bed, shivering, waiting patiently for the end. She said, “Maybe he’ll still be waiting for me.” Louise had no idea whom she was referring to; her husband, gone so many years, or God, or perhaps an angel. There had been so much that had been left unspoken between them. Louise didn’t know the first thing about her mother, not really, and now it was too late.

  She’d had such a restless night, it was nearly ten when she woke. She went downstairs, and while making coffee, she saw something out on the porch. She pushed open the door to find the skeleton of a huge creature laid out, skull and all.

  She ran upstairs and shook Brian awake. He followed her, two steps at a time, bleary-eyed. He had been dreaming about being on the cover of Newsweek and didn’t appreciate being woken. He was also dreaming that he was having sex with every woman he’d met at the Jack Straw Bar and Grill—not one at a time, but all at once, a great, gorgeous, heaving mass of local women.

  “Shit,” he said when he saw the skeleton.

  “Isn’t this a good thing?” Louise said. She thought of Johnny in the garden all night, digging and digging, piling up red dirt. She thought of him crouched on her porch in the dark, thoughtfully working the bones like a puzzle. She had a chill and wished she were wearing her robe.

  “Good? Are you kidding me? We were looking for prehistoric. This is nothing but a fucking bear. Ursa fucking major.”

  THERE WAS NO longer any reason for Brian Alter to stay, so he phoned his professor, saying it had all been a hoax and they’d been wasting their time. He’d pack up the bones in a box just to show Harvard that he’d tried his best and maybe still get credit for the whole stupid escapade. But first he got in his Volvo and took off, saying he’d be back later to pick it all up. Desperate for a drink, he headed to the bar at the Hightop Inn, since the Jack Straw Bar and Grill wouldn’t have him anymore.

  Louise went to examine the skeleton. It was hot, and the air smelled like hay. The skull Johnny had found was huge and sad. It made everything much realer and more pitiful. Louise realized it was a grave they had found, not just a jumbled rubbish heap of bones.

  She got dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. She didn’t even bother with shoes. She fetched the wheelbarrow and started to work. She wished her mother and aunt had told her the truth about the garden, why it was best left undisturbed. The creature that had been buried here had belonged to someone, been loved. She returned all the bones to the original site, even the bit of bone she carried in her pocket. She was especially careful with the skull. She spent the rest of the day shoveling the whole thing over with dirt and thinking about the way Johnny Mott looked at her.

  She was out on her porch in her mother’s favorite wicker chair, the old rifle that was usually displayed over the fireplace across her lap, when Brian came back. He was tipsy, so he squinted, not sure whether or not he was imagining the scene before him. It was August first, the day many people in town say that Louise Partridge went crazy and others say she came to her senses.

  “What did you do with it?” Brian cried when he saw that the bones were missing.

  “This is private property,” Louise informed him. “And I will shoot you if I have to.”

  Brian picked up one of the rocks Louise had removed from the garden and heaved it. It went right through the living room window. The shattered glass was falling when Brian got back in his car and took off, weaving down Hubbard Street. Louise went inside for a dustpan and broom. She’d tell the museum committee that the researcher from Harvard had absconded with the skeleton in the middle of the night. Maybe when things simmered down, she’d admit that what belonged to Blackwell had stayed there.

  KING OF THE BEES

  THERE WAS SOME QUESTION AS TO WHETHER or not James Mott would be born. When he finally appeared, after eighteen hours of labor, his body was still and blue. There was a haunting silence, and it seemed to those in the delivery room that he wouldn’t survive his birth. Then, all at once, he drew in a shuddering breath and revived. There he was, alive and well in the maternity ward at Blackwell Hospital. He never cried, but merely gazed quietly as the doctors congratulated one another, his mother’s tears his first glimpse of the world.

  He grew to be a big, handsome child, and although he continued to be quiet, he was ardently curious about the life he’d entered so perilously, facing it head-on. He crawled at four months and walked before his first birthday. Other children sat in front of the TV set, but James hurtled into each day. Wherever he went, he managed to find danger. His parents kept a close eye on him, but it was difficult, if not impossible, to keep track of him. When he was two, he disappeared from a family reunion, only to be found in the Eel River. His father was the one who located him. John Mott was the chief of police, as his
father before him had been, and perhaps that was why he thought to follow the trail of cracker crumbs James had left behind. When John saw his son floating in the cold muddy water, he dove right in. He couldn’t help but think of the Apparition, the little girl whose ghost was said to wander along the river-banks. It was only a story, nothing more. All the same, John thought, Not this time. Not mine.

  NO MATTER HOW his father might try to protect him, James continued to be unusually susceptible to harm. When he was six, he stumbled over a yellow jackets’ nest during a kindergarten outing. It was a warm September day, the end of bee season, a time when swarms had been known to go wild. John Mott was driving through town when he heard the droning. The other children in the class had scattered safely away, but there was James, smack in the center of a yellow whirlwind, trapped inside the beating, buzzing mayhem of stingers and wings.

  John left his car and raced over, tearing off his jacket as he ran, then throwing it over the boy to protect him. James was quiet in his father’s arms once the whirlwind had dissipated, even though he’d been stung more than a hundred times. After being rushed to the hospital, he slipped into a coma. His parents waited outside the emergency room until the doctor at last came to tell them their son would either die of a severe allergic reaction or would be forever immune to bee stings.

  James went home two days later, the raised welts on his skin the only sign of his misadventure. His parents, however, were deeply affected. After that day, John became the sort of father who was so strict and unyielding that his son had no choice but to rebel. Louise Mott joined forces with her husband, drawing up a list of house rules even she acknowledged were rigid. Number one on the list was Never Go into the Woods. Of course James didn’t comply. He disappeared the very day his mother’s rules were posted on the refrigerator. Louise called for him frantically. She raced past the gardens, the ones that were planted, and the old garden she’d let fill with nettles and weeds, not stopping until she reached the end of the fence. There, at the edge of the woods, where the air was darkened and green with floating pollen, huddled a group of coyotes. James was with them. Louise picked up a stone and flung it, hard, hitting one of the coyotes, scattering the group.

  The very next day John Mott drove out to his cousin Martha Starr’s place and bought a dog. Martha raised collies, and Blackwell collies were said to possess the ability to watch over anything and anyone. John drove home with the pup asleep on his lap. He was ferocious when it came to protecting his son, and he was only too aware of the punishing ways of the world. He had witnessed too much of the grim turns human nature could take. He’d seen people unwound by fate and desire, those who had made a single bad choice, ruining their lives and the lives of everyone they loved. He’d been privy to men crying in their jail cells, begging for forgiveness, calling for their mothers, each one wishing he could rewind time and start over. John understood that some boys had to be pulled back from the brink. They might curse you, even despise you for doing so, but it took strong measures to ensure that a boy lived long enough to become a man.

  JAMES NAMED HIS collie Cody, after his grandfather’s dog, and preferred the collie’s company to all others. The outside world continued to call to him, and he rambled more as the years went on, going farther afield, defying his parents’ expectations and their rules. Tell him one thing, and he’d do the opposite. Say no, and he’d get a glimmer in his eyes. If punished, he would simply climb through his window at night, the dog leaping out behind him. Then he’d disappear at will, up to the woods, or making his way along the highway. He’d be grounded for weeks when found out, but soon enough he’d take off all over again. He fell into a sinkhole in the marshes where the mud was so deep it took five men from the Blackwell fire department to pull him out. One winter he surely would have frozen to death in a sudden snowstorm, if Cody hadn’t led him to an abandoned fox den. He’d had so many close calls, he began to wonder if he was meant to be among the living. But if James was willing to accept a dismal future for himself, his father most certainly was not. John refused to give up his watch. He nailed James’s bedroom window shut and put a lock on the door. It made no difference. Locks and nails could not keep his son confined. James had already decided that if he couldn’t avoid his fate, he might as well enjoy what little time he had.

  BY THE TIME James entered high school, he and his father no longer spoke. If one walked into a room, the other walked out. His father still kept watch, but from a distance. That distance grew every day, until the only thing John Mott was watching was his son walking away from him. By then, James was six feet three, handsome, reserved, desperate to get out of Blackwell. One girl after the other fell in love with him, and in his senior year he briefly fell in love back with Brooke Linden. Brooke had a crush on him first. She was waiting for him one night when he climbed out his window, a big grin on her face. She was fun-loving, with a houseful of brothers, and danger didn’t scare her. All the same, James broke up with her when he crashed his mother’s car. Brooke had been his passenger, and though he might not mind endangering himself, he didn’t want to hurt anyone else. Brooke didn’t understand when he said he was cursed, although when he walked away, she herself threw out her own string of curses. His back was turned to her, but the words stung.

  He tempted fate more than ever after that. He swam in the Eel River during the spring floods, hiked the mountain in bear season, never backed down from a fight at the Jack Straw Bar. He figured that if death was looking for him, he might as well face it head-on. As soon as he graduated he decided to move to New York City. He wanted to get as far away from Blackwell as possible and find a place where danger was an everyday occurrence. He stopped by the police station on his way out of town, his collie waiting in the car.

  “What do you want me to say?” John Mott asked when James informed him he was leaving that day without a plan or any goal in mind. “Good-bye and good luck?”

  “I don’t believe in luck,” James told him. “Not in my case.”

  In New York, James got a job as an orderly; then, after a year of training, he became an EMT. Every time he rode in the back of an ambulance he was reminded of the many close calls he’d had. He was serious and practical, but that wild streak ran deep. He still had an affinity for disaster and longed for the adrenaline rush of accidents. He lived for such moments, as a matter of fact. After he managed to save someone, he felt so alive and euphoric, he had to polish off three or four beers in order to calm down. On those nights, he never managed to get to sleep, and instead he went out walking. He loved New York, how it seemed to have its own heartbeat, how you could be on a crowded street and still be alone. On weekends he took Cody to Central Park, where he liked to hike through the Ramble. In the middle of the city, he was reminded of Hightop Mountain. The way the sun streaked through the trees was so similar, here and in Blackwell. The light was pure and lemon colored, and there were bees nesting in the fallen logs. When James knelt in the leaves and listened to them buzzing, he forgot all the disasters he’d witnessed, the blood and sorrow and death.

  JOHN MOTT FELL ill one damp, green spring. His heart condition was unexpected and devastating, too advanced for a cure. James got the call in the middle of the night. He realized that three years had passed since he’d been home. He wondered how that had happened. Time was trickier than he’d imagined it to be. Now when he looked at his dog, he realized that Cody was suddenly old. James’s mother had come to New York several times, but his father didn’t like cities, or perhaps he was still unable to say good-bye.

  James broke the speed limit driving up Highway 91, an edge of panic coursing through him as he crossed the Massachusetts line. He went directly to the Blackwell Hospital. It was late when he got there. He forgot how soft the nights were in Blackwell, how dark the countryside was. He was surprised by how small his hometown hospital seemed compared with the ones where he’d worked in New York City. He left his dog in the car and went inside. John Mott was asleep; there was nothing to do but wait.
James went to stand against the window ledge. He felt awkward and much too big. He was used to action, not standing still. He had thought his father would look like a stranger, but he didn’t. John Mott opened his eyes. He smiled when he saw James, then closed his eyes again.

  When Louise arrived first thing in the morning, James was still there, sitting in a hard-backed chair. They kept a vigil together all that week and watched John Mott die. The fact that he hadn’t said good-bye to his father was tearing at James. He wanted to get drunk, run away, jump in the Eel River, but he did none of these things. He only left the hospital to go out and feed Cody, then walk him through the woods beside the parking lot. That’s where he was when his father died. When he went back to the room, John Mott was already gone. His mother said, “He loved you best of all,” but that only made things worse. James did go out and get drunk that night, at the Jack Straw Bar and Grill. He had the sort of expression on his face that made people avoid him. His old girlfriend, Brooke Linden, was there with a crowd of her friends. She came up and told him she’d heard about his father and wanted to say how sorry she was. John Mott had busted her youngest brother when the boy was a teenager, slinking around town committing petty robberies, something James didn’t know.

  “Where was I when that happened?” he asked.

  “Too self-involved to notice,” Brooke replied. “My brother teaches middle school in Lenox now. He’ll be at the funeral. Your dad totally turned his life around.”

  “Really? He was completely absent from mine.”

  James seemed angry and dangerous, but he wasn’t. He was falling apart. He went home with Brooke, who was divorced and had a little boy who was off spending the night at her mother’s place. James cried in her bed and told her that he was a monster who should have died a long time ago. He said things he shouldn’t have and made a fool of himself.