The Red Garden

  Evan went down to the Starrs’ acreage the following morning. They were cousins, but there’d been a falling-out, and the families hadn’t seen much of each other. There was Constant’s father, William, who seemed an old man, older by far, it seemed, since he’d lost his son. William was sitting on the porch. Lately, that was what he did. He had cloudy blue eyes and white hair and he had on his good tweed jacket, the one he’d worn to the funeral they’d held for Constant in the chapel since no body had been sent home for the burying ground. William Starr didn’t say a word when Evan came to sit in a chair beside him, although he was thinking he would give anything to have a son with one leg, on crutches, but alive. Evan spoke of the weather—Still beautiful—and Will Starr answered while gazing down the road where the fiddlehead ferns had unfolded—Indeed. Then Evan asked about the little girl who had drowned in the year 1816, wondering if the figure in the blue dress on the shore might be William’s little sister.

  William turned and looked into Evan’s open face. In that instant, he understood this boy had seen terrible things.

  “My sister drowned one summer,” William said evenly. He didn’t mention that his parents had been destroyed by her death, or that his other sister had run away with a horse trader that very night. He didn’t say that Amy’s favorite dress had been blue. It was the dress she’d been buried in, nearly fifty years earlier.

  “I think I saw her by the river.” Evan glanced up to see if Mr. Starr would laugh at him, but no, the old man merely shook his head.

  “You’ve been through a war,” Will remarked, with more kindness than he imagined he could manage since his beloved son had been taken. “It will take a while before everything you’ve been through settles down inside you.”

  “She wasn’t wearing any shoes,” Evan went on, hoping a further description might jog Mr. Starr’s memory.

  Little Amy hadn’t been wearing shoes when she was found, nor when she was buried. Will’s mother had said that in the kingdom of heaven no one wore shoes. She’d made them open the coffin so she could unlace the pair of eelskin boots the women in town had fitted on her daughter when they’d dressed her. Will had glimpsed his sister’s pale face. He was terrified that her eyes would be open, but thankfully they were closed.

  THE NEXT MORNING they went down to the river together, the old man who didn’t care whether he lived and the boy who thought he might already be dead. Since they’d probably have time to spare, they decided to bring their fishing poles. Trout were biting, and in a little over an hour they had both caught two rainbows. Ordinarily they would have spoken out about their good fortune, but not today. They sat on the riverbank and listened to the torrents of water go by. Once Evan thought he saw a flash of blue beyond the willow trees, but it was only a cornflower wavering on a thin green stalk. The next day they came again. Evan had dug worms from the old abandoned garden behind his house where there was red soil that was said to be lucky for fish but unlucky for love, not that he believed in such things. Will had his daughter-in-law fix a lunch for them to bring along. When Mattie Starr overheard what their mission was, and understood that it concerned a messenger from the world to come, her eyes brightened.

  “We’ll sit there and nothing will happen,” her father-in-law assured her. “But at least we’ll have a good lunch.”

  When Will Starr left to meet Evan at the river, Mattie took her children over to Mrs. Kelly’s house and asked if her neighbor would mind Glenna, who was only three, and little Will, who would soon be two. Mattie had a wild look in her eyes, and her tone was urgent. Mrs. Kelly agreed to watch the babies, even though she had plenty to care for in her own household, a brood of children and a plot of land to till with the help of a single mule. Mattie didn’t take note of Mrs. Kelly’s hesitation. She left Will and Glenna and ran off through the meadow in her husband’s old fishing boots. She felt light and oddly free, like the seedpods that were carried along in the mild breeze, floating over the fields in wispy gray threads. Mattie had taken to wearing her husband’s clothing and had lately been seen tramping through town in britches and Constant’s blue jacket. She wore his socks and his undergarments. She slept with the tintype image of Constant inside her nightdress. Sometimes she dreamed he was there with her. She could feel his long thin feet beside hers, his fingers in her hair, his breath on her skin. She woke in the throes of desire, and when she realized she was in the present time and not inside her dream, she didn’t want to leave her bed. Sometimes she stayed there until noon, and the children would have gone hungry if their grandfather had not moved in to help care for them.

  Mattie hastened through the tall meadow grass, past the oldest apple tree in town, the one people said had long ago saved the population of Blackwell by stubbornly bearing fruit in the year when there was no summer. There was a cloud of white blossoms on the tree. Mattie wondered if there had been apple trees in Virginia when Constant had been there, if the snow had fallen in those meadows in the winter of his death, as it did in Blackwell, so very deep and quiet. She wondered if the soil was as red as it was in the oldest garden in their village, the one behind the Partridge house. Where blood has fallen, the ground aches but the fruit is sweet—that’s what the old women in town vowed. They thought it would bring her comfort to hear such nonsense, as if her loss could ever be sweetened. No wonder she had stopped talking to most people.

  Mattie veered into the woods. There were wild gooseberries here. Just last summer she had brought the children with her to pick some for a pie for Constant’s supper. The night before he left she had begged him not to go, knowing as she did so that he wouldn’t listen to her pleas. It wasn’t like Constant to let the other men down. “It’s a war,” he told her, as if that would explain everything. “Oh, I don’t care,” she had answered fiercely. She had pleaded and sat on his lap and kissed him and offered herself to him; she said she would do anything to make him stay, but in the morning he still got up from their bed and packed his bag. He left while he thought she was sleeping. She let him think that. She refused to watch him go.

  HALFWAY THROUGH THE woods Mattie could hear the river. The earth was soggier as she went along, dense with moss, thick with fallen leaves and ferns. Mattie’s feet kept dry in her husband’s boots. Soon enough she saw her father-in-law and the boy who’d come back without a leg. They were watching the river, their backs to Mattie, eating the lunch she’d made them. They didn’t hear her walking over the ferns, through the white birch and the pines. Her boots were worn from the steps her husband had taken, and she made little noise; her skirt fluttered around her legs. Mattie was twenty-five and a widow. Everything in her life had already happened to her, the wondrous and terrible both. Her whole world was over; all the rest would only be marking time. She had a sudden deep desire to run. She thought of deer and how they slipped through the woods, invisible, as if they were ghosts themselves. She thought of the river at twilight; she would crouch down onto hands and knees to drink from the cold water, her long pale hair tumbling into the shallows, the ends turned to ice. No one would find her. No one would know where she was. She imagined taking off her clothes, leaving on only the thin undergarments that had belonged to Constant, then stepping into the current, her feet settling between the iron-red rocks, the eels rushing past until they could find a tangle of wild water hyacinth to wrap themselves around, until they had carried her away.

  Evan Partridge was finished with his lunch. Bread and butter and some slices of orange cheese. There were fresh wild strawberries, crushed but still good. He closed his eyes against the haze of sunlight falling through the tall trees. For a moment he was back in time, with his brother beside him. He was running home from the schoolhouse, so fast the dust rose behind him in a cloud. He heard the snap of a branch under a boot heel in the woods and caught a faint glimmer from the corner of his eye. He thought of gunfire and doves, and he turned like a shot himself. He saw Mattie Starr, stumbling over a sapling, falling to her knees. He forgot he had only one leg. He galumphed over
the forest growth to made sure she hadn’t hit her head on a rock. She hadn’t even put her hands out to stop herself. It was as though she had just given up and let herself fall.

  Mattie’s eyes were closed when he reached her. Evan put his arms around her and said, “Wake up.” Then he shouted out, and Will Starr came to squat down next to him. In a few moments, Mattie opened her eyes. They were blue. They were like the sky in Virginia, hot and pale, open and endless.

  “I saw her,” she said. “At the riverside.”

  The men waited for Mattie to get her bearings, then helped her to her feet. William recognized his son’s boots, his socks, the sleeves of his undergarments on Mattie’s girlish frame. It should have brought him comfort to know he wasn’t alone in his grief, but it caused him only more sorrow. They walked on together to the place where Mattie had seen the little girl. The tall grass was high enough for a child to hide in. They searched around and found nothing. Evan was ashamed to be limping about, hopping around like a frog. Once when he seemed unsteady, Mattie put a hand under his elbow. “You ran fast to come help me,” she said to him in gratitude. She was trying to be kind, but Evan bowed his head, even more ashamed of who he had become. From then on when she thought of anguish, Mattie would think of the way he had dipped his head to glance away, as if the world was much too vast and wide, and the only thing contained within it was loneliness.

  They sat in a circle in the haunted place, to see if they experienced anything unusual. Will Starr remembered that his little sister used to come here to throw stones in the water. He laughed at her when she told him blue stones could make a wish come true. His sisters Amy and Mary had both been beautiful girls, one lost to the river, the other gone off with a traveling man, leaving behind a family where grief was the only emotion. His other sister, Olive, he had argued with long ago. Will laid his head against a birch tree stump and closed his eyes. The sun was warm and he fell asleep. Soon he was snoring.

  “Do you think she has a message for us?” Mattie asked Evan Partridge, referring to the ghost she thought she’d seen. “Maybe she can lead us to the world beyond this one.”

  Evan didn’t know. He wasn’t even sure there were such things as spirits and ghosts. “Maybe it’s only the way the sunlight comes through the trees. It appears to be a figure, but it’s really just a shadow.”

  “She had a doll with her. I saw it in her hands. Do shadows have dolls?”

  Evan smiled. “I suppose not,” he said.

  “I don’t suppose anything,” Mattie told him. “Not anymore.”

  She wondered what it would feel like to drown. How the water would fill your mouth and throat, how you would sink to the stony bottom where the currents were so green and cold, the chilly places the eels like best. You would look up and see the sky through the water and everything would be reversed. Perhaps time itself would go backward, unspooled like thread.

  That’s what she wanted. This life of hers undone. Mattie went down to the river while her father-in-law slept and the boy stretched out in the grass. She took off the heavy boots and her socks, then unbuttoned her dress and pulled it over her head. Evan sat up straight when she did so, his mouth dry. He’d been seeing things ever since he’d gone to war and perhaps this was simply one more mad vision: the doves flying up, his brother’s face, Mattie Starr’s nearly naked body, her shoulders, her legs, her back.

  She turned and gave him a look. She was real, all right. Evan struggled to his feet. The water was rushing so fast, one step and she would be taken downstream. If he wasn’t quick, he would watch mutely while she was swept away, the way he’d watched his world blown to pieces. Evan refused to allow his fate to be this and nothing more, to stand by helplessly while she drowned herself. He would not be defined by his inability to be a man. He raced down to the steep bank. He concentrated and willed himself to run and there he was, his arms around her. She pulled him in with her when she made the jump. They fell slowly, entwined in their strange embrace. There was barely a splash as they went in. It was more of a disappearance. Something invisible, yet there all the same. The river was colder than they would have imagined, ice water from the top of the mountain that had come tumbling down.

  They went under to where everything was green. The air bubbles were like clouds. The clouds were like white stones thrown into the far distance. Evan circled one arm around Mattie Starr’s waist and with the other he held fast to a log jutting out from the bank. They sputtered and lifted their heads out of the water. They were in a quiet pool set off from the rush of water by stacked logs that served as a dam. The sunlight was falling into the water, spreading out in waves. The air was damp and sweet. Mattie looped her arms around his neck. She kissed him, then pulled away. When she saw the look on Evan’s face, she kissed him again. She put her tongue inside his mouth, kissing him more and more deeply. When the undershirt she wore slipped off her shoulders, she didn’t grab for it. It floated away, like a white lily. The water was shallow and they could nearly stand up, but it was easier not to. She took his hand and put it between her legs. She let him pull her undergarments down. There were frogs on the banks and tadpoles in the shallows. It was the season of peepers calling all day and all night. She whispered to Evan that it was what she wanted, so he moved himself inside her. He watched her close her eyes, lean her head back. There was no place else and no other time. They weren’t going backward or forward. Blackflies spun in a funnel above the current. Evan’s head was filled with the sound of water. He thought of the ghost in the grass, her blue dress and bare feet. He thought of the way the doves had flown up into the sky all in a rush, startled by gunfire, and then all he could think was that despite everything that happened, he was alive.

  THE TRUTH ABOUT MY MOTHER

  1903

  MY MOTHER BEGAN A NEW LIFE HALFWAY through her own. Such things happened often in our town. Blackwell was deep in Berkshire County, where the weather was mysterious and the people were equally unpredictable. Several of the inhabitants were descendants of the founding settlers, families who had intermarried often enough so that many of the women had red hair, with mercurial tempers that suited their coloring. The men were tall and quiet and good at most everything. All of the dogs in town were collies, smart, fast dogs, used to herd cows and sheep; they answered to an individual whistle as if they were birds instead of dogs and understood songs as easily as words.

  There were new folks in town as well, people headed out west who were stopped by the mountain on their way to Ohio or Colorado. No one knew how many residents had arrived simply because they were running away from something or someone. My mother, for instance, told everyone she was a schoolteacher and that she’d been born in Manchester, England, and trained in Boston. She said her name was Elinor Book. Because that is what she said, that was what people believed. At that point Blackwell had only a one-room schoolhouse, and my mother taught every age and subject. The town council was happy to hire her when she appeared one day with a small suitcase and no recommendations. She had beautiful handwriting, with full, sensuous letters that betrayed her inner nature. She was given the cottage behind the Brady house, the oldest house in town. When she first arrived, she would stand outside in the garden late at night, when everyone else was in bed. People thought they were hearing coyotes, or one of the dozens of panthers that remained in the woods, but it was my mother, standing in the yard, crying.

  It was only Isaac Partridge who lived in the big house. His father, a relation of the town founder, had his leg shot off in the Civil War and when he’d returned, he had married a widow in town with children of her own. They’d all passed on to their greater reward, and Isaac alone was left of the family. He was nearly forty, a bachelor. My mother wasn’t yet thirty. It was possible to tell she was beautiful even though she tried her best to hide it. She wore a black coat that covered her figure and tied her hair in a knot so she might look more responsible. But at night when she stood in the garden, she looked young. She looked the way she had when she kill
ed my father in Brooklyn.

  SHE KILLED HIM one April night. We had a house of our own. We were well-off. Money wasn’t the problem. My father worked for the new electrical company. He said in time the whole world would be lit up and it would all be his doing and that God would welcome him into a heaven that was lit by electricity. My father wore a suit and a hat when he left in the morning, but when he came home in the evening, he was drunk. My mother and I often hid from him in the vegetable cellar. To me, Brooklyn smelled like the sea and like root cellars. If you went out on our roof, you could see Sheepshead Bay. I didn’t like the word Sheepshead, but I liked to sit out and watch the blue horizon and listen to our neighbors and the sound of the streetcar. At some point, as twilight was falling, my mother would call my name and we would go down to the cellar the way some people do in towns where there are tornados, except in our house my father was the tornado. It was him we hid from.

  Sometimes my father brought home women and we could hear them up in our house, and my mother would put her hands over my ears. Sometimes he’d be sneaky. He’d be so silent that we thought he was in a stupor, sprawled out on the floor, but instead he’d be waiting for us in the parlor. He did things I won’t speak about. We try not to remember his name, but it was William Wentworth. He was a vice president at the electric company, and he smelled like smoke. We try not to remember what he did to us, but those are the kinds of things you can’t forget. He worked for Edison, whom he called the great man. Electricity was everywhere, like a snake, lighting up the city. In January, it was used to electrocute an elephant in Luna Park in Coney Island. My mother had taken me to see that same elephant the summer before, and we’d fed her peanuts through the bars. Her name was Topsy, a funny name for such an extraordinary creature. She had been noble as she daintily lifted the peanuts from our hands.