Blackbird House (5 page)

There was Ruth in the field, riding that old horse Domino, teaching him to jump over a barrel while the cows gazed on, disinterested.
 
When she saw Easter, Ruth left the horse and came to meet her at the gate.
 
That past night, Ruth herself had dreamed of tea, and of needles and thread set to work, and of a woman who was raising three sons alone while her husband was off to sea.
 
She had been expecting Easter, and had a pail of milk waiting under the shade of an oak tree.
 
The milk was greener than ever, and sweeter than ever, too; Easter West drank two tin cups full before she realized that Ruth Blackbird Hill was crying.

It was near the end of summer.
 
Everything was blooming and fresh, but it wouldn’t last long.

“What is it?”
 
Easter said.
 
“Does he make you work too hard?
 
Is he cruel?”

Ruth shook her head.
 
“It’s just that I’ll never get what I want.
 
It’s not possible.”

“What is it you want?”

There was the scent of cows, and of hay, and of smoke from the blacksmith’s shop.
 
Ruth had been swimming in the pond behind the house earlier in the day, and her hair was shiny; she smelled like water, and her skin was cool even in the heat of the day.

“It doesn’t matter.
 
Whenever I want something, I don’t get it.
 
No matter what it might be.
 
That’s the story of my life.”

When Easter was leaving, Lysander Wynn came out of his shop.
 
He was leaning on his crutch.
 
He wanted something, too.
 
He wasn’t yet thirty, and his work made him strong in his arms and his back, but he felt weak deep inside, bitten by something painful and sharp.

“What did she tell you?”
 
he asked Easter West.

“She’s afraid she won’t get what she wants,” Easter said.

Lysander thought this over while he finished up working.
 
He thought about it while he made supper, a corn-and-tomato stew.
 
When he left Ruth’s dinner on the stair he left a note as well.
 
I’ll get you anything you want.

That night, Lysander dreamed he wouldn’t be able to give Ruth what she asked for despite his promise.
 
She would ask for gold, of which he had none.
 
She would demand to live in London, on the other side of the ocean.
 
She would want another man, one with two legs who didn’t spit out halibut teeth, who didn’t fear rain and pond water.
 
But in the morning, he found a note by the anvil in his shed.
 
What she seemed to want was entirely different from anything he had imagined.
 
Bring me a tree that has pears the color of blood.
 
The same exact color as my shoes.

The next day, Lysander Wynn hitched up his horse to a wagon and left on the King’s Highway.
 
He went early, while the cows were still sleeping in the field, while the blackbirds were quiet and the fox were running across the sandy ruts in the road.
 
Ruth knew he was gone when she woke because there was no smoke spiraling from the chimney in the shed; when Edward Hastings came to get his horse shod, no one answered his call.
 
Ruth Blackbird Hill took care of the cows, then she went into the shed herself.
 
She put her hand into the ashes they were still hot, embers continuing to burn from the day before.
 
She thought about red grass and burning trees and her parents calling out for her to save them. She kept her hand there, unmoving, until she couldn’t stand the pain anymore.

He was gone for two weeks, and he never said exactly where he’d been.
 
He admitted only that he’d been through Providence and on into Connecticut.
 
What he didn’t say was that he would have gone farther still if it had been necessary.
 
He had no time frame in mind of when he might return.
 
He would have kept on even if snow had begun to fall, if the orchards had turned so white it would have been impossible to tell an apple tree from a plum, a grapevine from a trellis of wisteria.

Lysander planted the pear tree right in front of the house.
 
While he was working, Ruth brought him a cold glass of milk that he drank in a single gulp.
 
She showed him her burned hand, then she took off her shoes and stood barefoot in the grass.
 
Lysander hoped what he’d been told in Connecticut was true.
 
The last farmer he’d gone to was experienced with fruit trees, and his orchard was legendary.
 
When Lysander had wanted a guarantee, the old farmer had told him that often what you grew turned out to be what you had wanted all along.
 
He said that there was a fine line between crimson and scarlet, and that a person simply had to wait to see what appeared.
 
Ruth wouldn’t know until the following fall whether or not the pears would be red, nearly a full year, but she was hopeful that by that time she wouldn’t care.

THE TOKEN

MOST PEOPLE WEAR BLACK FOR MOURNING,

but my mother wasn’t like other people.
 
When my father died she tinted all our clothes red, from the tree sap we called dragon’s blood.
 
She dyed the leather of my shoes, to match her scarlet boots.
 
She made a pie with her favorite red pears, and after she had eaten every crumb, she cried red tears.
 
She tied our father’s blacksmith anvil to our two cows and had the startled creatures pull it into the pond; when the mud splattered up, it was red as well.

I was eleven, but my sister, Ruby, was only a baby, little more than a year.
 
She didn’t speak yet, not a word, but even Ruby could tell how wrong it all was.
 
My sister’s hair was red like mine, but she was quieter; now she wanted to be held all the time, and she often made a whimpering noise, like a mourning dove.
 
We had been pulled inside out by my father’s death, our sorrow and our blood there for anyone to see, in our hair, our boots, our clothes, our pies, our very names.
 
People in town used to think my mother was a witch; now that talk started up again.
 
There was suspicion that my mother had dug up my father’s grave; that she’d burned what was left of him on a pyre made of oak branches so she could keep his ashes under her bed.
 
A witch without love was dangerous.
 
Everyone knew that.
 
People tried to talk to my mother, and in response she spat on the ground; she tore at her own flesh so they could all see how red our world had become.

My baby sister was my doll to play with, but she was also my responsibility.
 
All the while my father was dying, from influenza and fever, I covered Ruby’s ears, so she couldn’t hear my mother sobbing, then weeping, then cursing our world.
 
I sang Ruby songs about stars in the sky and about true love; I sang about the gates of heaven and about a pony who always knew the way home.
 
I kept my sister even closer when my mother started bringing our belongings out of the house with that look on her face, the one I had grown to recognize meant, Stay away.

A desk went first, then a table, then our Sunday clothes; anything she

could get her hands on.
 
Blankets, yarn, flour,

tea, all of it heaped in a huge pile on the shore of our pond.
 
I was smart enough to take the few things my sister and I cared about and hide them behind the lilac hedge.
 
Ruby’s little poppet doll and a spoon with a lamb carved into the handle; a silver bracelet my father made for me when I was born and my blue dress, the prettiest in town, the one my mother had spent weeks stitching, back when she could see colors other than red.

We were sleeping on the bare floor by then.
 
Our beds were on the pile beside the pond, along with our quilts, our clothes, our everything.
 
Every night we listened to my mother crying.
 
We got so used to it that now Ruby woke only when the wailing stopped.
 
We were like people who lived in a windy country, and then one day the wind stops.
 
Suddenly, there’s only silence, and that’s far worse than the wind.
 
We were about to take another bad turn.
 
I could feel that in the silence, in the way my mother was disappearing, inside out, unraveling one red thread at a time.

One evening when I went to look for my mother, she wasn’t in her room.
 
She’d left behind our last blanket, dotted red along the edges, as though she’d been picking at her skin.
 
There was a tin box in the corner, and I wondered if my father was in there, his bones carefully wrapped in red ribbon.
 
Because my father was a blacksmith, his skin was always hot.
 
Even in November or January, if he held you near you forgot about snow and ice.
 
I was afraid I would cry if I thought about my father for too long.
 
I was afraid my tears would be red, and then I would be lost.
 
I would be like my mother.

I carried my sister outside, even though it was cold, the air forming crystals when we breathed out.
 
People said our mother was a witch because she’d known bad fortune.
 
Her parents had died in the last epidemic, her house had burned down, and now she had lost the person she’d loved best in this world.
 
She went back to what she’d always known, and that was fire.
 
She had started with kindling, baskets of dried peach wood and pitch pine.
 
While my sister and I were sleeping on the bare floor, our mother had built a huge pile out of our belongings; it was just starting to burn.
 
I went to the window to watch.
 
The fire was blue at first; then, in a wink, it turned red.
 
When I saw that color, it went through my heart.
 
I had red hair, like my sister, and so I was called Garnet.
 
Worth less than a ruby, but red all the same.
 
Now I wondered if people whispered things about me when I walked into town; I wondered what they said when my back was turned.
 
As I stood there, holding my sister, watching nearly everything we owned burn, I realized I would have to be careful about who I be came.

By the time my mother was through, there was such a huge bonfire that men from five farms had rushed to our property to help put it out; they lugged pond water all through the night.
 
Those men stared at my mother in her red widow’s dress; surely some of them wished they had a woman who loved them the way my father had been loved, but they didn’t say a word.
 
When it was all done, Ruby had cinders in her strawberry hair.
 
My mother’s skin was streaked with smoke.
 
My red shoes were covered with a black film that had to be scrubbed, hard.

My mother stayed beside the pond when the men went away, so I fed my sister breakfast.
 
It was November, and there was very little difference between the color of the air and that of the ground.
 
I had a feeling in my stomach that my mother would never walk back inside our house.
 
Ruby and I picked the last few blackberries, but when we brought some to my mother, she wouldn’t eat.
 
She looked at me, and I could see the panic in her eyes.
 
She could not believe that the world could still exist without my father.
 
Her eyes were red, her clothes were red; she was bleeding right into the ground, disappearing.
 
If I didn’t do something, I would lose both my parents.
 
I would be just like my mother, an orphan, a witch.
 
I already had the red shoes.
 
I already knew what she felt.
 
I waited for the next bad thing.
 
I tried to be ready, to invent a plan, but that’s not so easy when you don’t know what you’re planning for.

Not long after, my mother found a cardinal.
 
She killed it, then propped up its body with a stick in our yard.
 
This was bad.
 
More red, more blood.
 
When it rained, the bird turned bright as a heart.
 
As night fell, the cardinal’s drab partner fluttered around the yard, chirping, hopeless.
 
All at once, I saw what my mother was thinking.
 
I saw it as clearly as though it had been written on her forehead with dried blood.
 
If the cardinal’s mate died of heartbreak, then my mother would do so as well.
 
She would do away with herself, one way or another.
 
I saw the look in her eye; I saw her red boots and the skirt that had once been dove-colored but was now scarlet.
 
I understood that she might do away with my sister and me as well.

My plan started to form around leaving.
 
I had heard about California.
 
Eli Crosby had an uncle who’d gone there, and he’d written back that the grass was yellow; November was as hot as summer.
 
Here, November was brown with a blood-red center.
 
You could see your breath turn to smoke in the air.
 
There were winter berries turning plummy already, but my mother was still sleeping on the shore of the pond in her red dress, beside a pile of ashes.