Here on Earth

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

“Hoffman conveys the mesmerizing lure of a lost love with haunting sensuality ... high drama ... assured and lyrical prose.”

 

 

“A
Wuthering Heights
. . . profound.”

 

“Her books unfold artfully without feeling fussed over or writing-workshopped to death ... [In] Here on
Earth,
she plumbs the interior lives of, among others, a drunken recluse, a heartsick teenage boy, an angry daughter, a near madman, a cuckolded husband, and three wounded women, with such modesty and skill that she seems to witness rather than invent their lives.”

 

“It’s always a pleasure to read Hoffman’s lyrical, luminous writing.”

 

“Hoffman’s is a gentle kind of magic that exists quietly on the edge of our vision, changing and reordering small-town and suburban lives ... one of her most disturbing works ...
Here
on Earth will disappoint none of her fans, and proves again that to read Hoffman is to have one’s life enriched immeasurably.”

 

“Hoffman takes great care here to examine the many facets of love and relationships . . . [Her] evocative language and her lyrical descriptions of place contrast sharply with the emotional scars that her characters must uncover and bear ... Highly recommended.”

“A good, old-fashioned love story . . . Alice Hoffman’s writing at its precise and heartbreaking best.”

 

“A memorable novel.”

 

“An affecting love story, laced with humor.”

 

“A satisfying book, one that is hard to lay aside.”

 

“Magical and daring . . . very possibly her best.”

 

“Suspenseful ... a dark, romantic meditation on what it means to be human.”

 

“Hoffman tells a great story. Expect to finish this one in a single. guilty sitting.”

—
Mirabella

 

“Intelligent and absorbing . . . a celebration of the simple, unstinting grace of human love.”

—
Chicago Sun-Times

 

“Generous, magical . . .
Second Nature
may be best read at full speed, hurtling down the mountain, as if falling in love.”

—
San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle

“Magnificent.”

 

“A spectacular novel.”

—Susan Isaacs,
The Washington Post Book World

 

“Hard to put down ... full of characters who take hold of your heart.”

 

“Beautiful.”

—
Seattle Times

 

“She is a born storyteller . . . and
Turtle Moon
is one of her best.”

 

 

“A beautiful, moving book about the power of love and the desires of the heart.”

—
Denver Post

 

“Splendid . . .
Practical Magic
is one of her best novels, showing on every page her gift for touching ordinary life as if with a wand, to reveal how extraordinary life really is.”

—
Newsweek

 

“Written with a light hand and perfect rhythm . . .
Practical Magic
has the pace of a fairy tale but the impact of accomplished fiction.”

—
People

 

“[A] delicious fantasy of witchcraft and love in a world where gardens smell of lemon verbena and happy endings are possible.”
—Cosmopolitan

“Alice Hoffman takes seemingly ordinary lives and lets us see and feel extraordinary things.”—Amy Tan

 

“Hoffman seems certain to join such writers as Anne Tyler and Mary Gordon . . . a major novelist.”—
Newsweek

 

“One of the brightest and most imaginative of contemporary writers.”

 

“Her touch is so light, her writing so luminous.”

—
Orlando Sentinel

 

“Her novels are as fluid and graceful as dreams.”

 

“Showing the magic that lies below the surface of everyday life is just what we hope for in a satisfying novel, and that’s what Ms. Hoffman gives us every time.”

 

“A reader is in good hands with Ms. Hoffman, able to count on many pleasures. She is one of our quirkiest and most interesting novelists.”

 

—Jane Smiley,
USA Today

 

“With her glorious prose and extraordinary eye . . . Alice Hoffman seems to know what it means to be a human being.”

—Susan Isaacs,
Newsday

PROPERTY OF
THE DROWNING SEASON
ANGEL LANDING
WHITE HORSES
FORTUNE’S DAUGHTER
ILLUMINATION NIGHT
AT RISK
SEVENTH HEAVEN
TURTLE MOON
SECOND NATURE
PRACTICAL MAGIC
HERE ON EARTH
LOCAL GIRLS
THE RIVER KING
BLUE DIARY

 

 

FIREFLIES
HORSEFLY
AQUAMARINE
INDIGO

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and
any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses,
companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

HERE ON EARTH

 

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with
Property Of. Inc.

 

PRINTING HISTORY
G. P. Putnam’s Sons edition / August 1997
Berkley trade paperback edition / March 1998
Berkley mass-market edition / July 1999

 

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1997 by Alice Hoffman.

Readers Guide copyright © by Penguin Putnam Inc.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced
in any form without permission.
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street. New York, New York 10014.

 

 

eISBN : 978-1-440-67324-5

 

BERKLEY®
Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a
division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY and the “B” design
are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

 

 

 

10 9

To E.B.

T
onight, the hay in the fields is already brittle with frost, especially to the west of Fox Hill, where the pastures shine like stars. In October, darkness begins to settle by four-thirty and although the leaves have turned scarlet and gold, in the dark everything is a shadow of itself, gray with a purple edge. At this time of year, these woods are best avoided, or so the local boys say. Even the bravest among them wouldn’t dare stray from the High Road after soccer practice at Fire-men’s Field, and those who are old enough to stand beside the murky waters of Olive Tree Lake and pry kisses from their girlfriends still walk home quickly. If the truth be told, some of them run. A person could get lost up here. After enough wrong turns he might find himself in the Marshes, and once he was there, a man could wander forever among the minnows and the reeds, his soul struggling to find its way long after his bones had been discovered and buried on the crest of the hill, where wild blueberries grow.

People from out of town might be tempted to laugh at boys who believed in such things; they might go so far as to call them fools. And yet there are grown men who have lived in Jenkintown all their lives, and are afraid of very little in this world, who will not cross the hill after dark. Even the firefighters down at the station on Main Street, courageous volunteers who have twice been commended for heroism by the governor himself, are always relieved to discover that the fire bells are tolling for flames on Richdale or Seventh Street—any location that’s not the hill is one worth getting to fast.

The town founder himself, Aaron Jenkins, a seventeen-year-old boy from Warwick, England, was the first to realize that some localities are accompanied by bad luck. Jenkins built his house in the Marshes in the year 1663. One October night, when the tide froze solid and refused to go back to sea. he received a message in his dreams that he must flee immediately or be trapped in the ice himself. He left what little he owned and ran over the hill, even though there was a terrible storm, with thunder just above his head and hailstones the size of apples. In his journal, exhibited in the reading room at the library, Aaron Jenkins vows that a thousand foxes followed on his heels. All the same, he didn’t stop until he reached what is now the town square, where he built a new home, a neat, one-roomed house that is currently a visitors’ center where tourists from New York and Boston can pick up maps.

Those foxes who chased after Aaron Jenkins are all but gone now. Still, some of the older residents in the village can recall the days when there were foxes in every inch of the woods. You’d see them slipping into the henhouses, or searching for catfish out by Olive Tree Lake. Some people insist that every time a dog was abandoned, the foxes would befriend the stray, and a breed of odd reddish dogs with coarse coats came from these unions. Indeed, such dogs were once plentiful in these parts, back when farms lined Route 22 and so many orchards circled the village that on some crisp October afternoons the whole world smelled like pie.

Twenty-five years ago, there were still hundreds of foxes in the woods. They would gather and raise their voices every evening at twilight, at such a regular hour people in the village could set their watches by the sound. Then one dreadful season the hunting ban was lifted, and people went crazy; they’d shoot at anything that moved. Most folks still regret what went on; they truly do. For one thing, the rabbits in these parts are now so fearless you’re likely to see them sitting on the steps to the library, right in the middle of the day. You’ll catch them in your garden, helping themselves to your finest lettuce and beans. You’ll spy them in the parking lot behind the hardware store, comfortable as can be on a hot afternoon, resting in the shadow left by your car. They’re pests, there’s no doubt about that, and even the most gracious ladies on the library committee find themselves setting out poison every now and then.

There are so many rabbits along the back road to Fox Hill that even cautious drivers risk running over one. This, of course, is simply one more reason to avoid the hill. March Murray, who was raised here, agrees that it’s best to stay away, and she has done exactly that for nineteen years. All this time she has lived in California, where the light is so lemon-colored and clear it is almost possible to forget there are other places in the world; these woods for instance, where one could easily mistake day for night on an October afternoon, where the rain falls in such drenching sheets no birds can take flight. It is exactly such a day, when the sky is the color of stone and the rain is so cold it stings the skin, that March returns home, and although coming back was not in her plans, she is definitely here of her own free will.