The Red Garden (7 page)

They stood together in the shallows of the river, the little girl’s sopping body between them, their breath hot and fast while Mary sobbed and Yaron did his best to comfort her. The dog was quiet now, down on his haunches, his eyes never leaving the child he’d been sent to find. Amy’s clothes were frozen stiff, and she was heavy as a block of ice. They laid her down on the riverbank. Mary covered her sister’s body with her own and breathed into the little girl’s tiny cold mouth. She’d read that it was sometimes possible to bring the dead back by doing so. But it did no good.

“They’ll think I did it because I found her,” Yaron said.

“No.” The snow was oddly bright. Amy looked like a fallen star, shining beside them.

Yaron shook his head. His dark hair was wet. “They always think that.”

The clothes he wore were frozen now, too, and there was snow in his hair. Mary thought about the way she’d felt when he’d disappeared into the river. She recalled the look on his face before he dove in. She felt something inside her that was unexpected as Yaron leaned to tenderly close her sister’s eyes.

In the morning the search party found the child on the bank of the Eel River, the blue dress covering her. The snow had hardened overnight, and it made a crunching noise beneath their boots. Ernest Starr had to be restrained. He was in a state of grief so immense he vowed he would never let his daughter go. He claimed he would find a way to preserve Amy’s body in salt or brandy and she would be with him still, but Rebecca wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted her child be taken to the burying ground outside of town, with the service held under the one tree that had managed to bloom in that cold season, the one people called the Tree of Life, which was true enough, for its fruit kept people in town from starving during the coming winter’s famine. Rebecca Starr demanded that the coffin be opened so she could take off her child’s boots and Amy could walk into the kingdom of heaven in her bare feet. No one was about to deny Rebecca anything. They let her do as she pleased. She had lost two daughters in a single day, for Mary had disappeared. No one dared question Rebecca when she kept the horse traders’ pup that had been left on her doorstep. She walked with the collie every day, along the river and through the meadow, where there were still ruts in the earth the following summer when the weather was warm once more and the sky was at last cloudless and clear.

OWL AND MOUSE

1848

E
MILY WENT FOR A WALK ON HER LAST DAY
at school. Her family was taking her out of Mount Holyoke Seminary; she was needed at home and she hadn’t been happy at the school. Her views were her own, and educators did not always appreciate free thought. It was time to leave. But before she went back to the family house and everyone else’s demands, she wanted to go somewhere she’d never been. She longed for the woods and for great distances. She’d often gone rambling as a child, collecting nearly six hundred species of wildflowers, some never seen before. She liked to disappear, even when she was in the same room as other people. It was a talent, as it was a curse. There was something that came between Emily and other people, a white linen curtain, hazy. It made the world quieter and
farther away, although occasionally she could see through to the other side. She had the feeling that if she went home, she might never get away. She thought of birds caught in nets. There was something inside her, beating against her ribs, urging her to do things she might not otherwise attempt. She had the strongest desire to get lost.

She passed the boundary of the school grounds and kept on. She had always been a walker, and being alone was her natural state. Once she was in the woods, she was a shadow. She recognized wildflowers the way someone else might recognize old friends: velvet-leaf, live forever, lad’s love. She stooped to pick a sprig of lad’s love and slipped it in her shoe. Local people said it was a charm that would lead you to your true love. She did feel charmed. She went on, hour after hour. She spied red lily, wood lily, trout lily. She crossed two roads, then went into even deeper woods. The forest here was dark and green. The world had become topsy-turvy. Day was night and night was day, and no one on earth knew where she was. She had a wild, careless feeling that made her limbs feel loose and free. There was bloodroot in among the carpet of moss and leaves, hyacinth and squill. She had reached Hightop Mountain without knowing it. At last, she was visiting a place she’d never been to before. She had been walking for almost ten hours, and for most of that time she’d been caught up in a dream. There were black bears up here that could run faster than any man and weighed up to six hundred pounds. Emily had read that injured bears sobbed like human beings, and that gave her some comfort. They were not so unalike.

She slept beneath a tree that night, sitting upright. She imagined she would have been scared for her life out in the open, for
she was often terrified in her own room at home, even after double-locking the windows and covering the glass with quilts. Instead, she felt an odd calm spirit here in the wilderness. Was this the way people felt at the instant they leapt into rivers and streams? Was it like this when you fell in love, stood on the train tracks, went to a country where no one spoke your language? That was the country she was in most of the time, a place where people heard what she said but not what she meant. She wanted to be known, but no one knew her.

It was cold in the morning when Emily awoke. She was shivering. Now that it was daylight she realized she had reached the top of the mountain. She made her way down, to the village below. There were brambles, thorn trees, yellow jacket nests, poison oak. She had never walked quite so far and was thrilled and terrified by her own bravery. Her hair was knotted. Her hands were raw. There was dew on her shoes.

Soon the sun warmed the air. Emily went on, past an abandoned house on the outskirts of town. There were rabbits in the yard. They too cried like human beings when trapped. The house at the edge of the woods was old with a thatched roof. What if she lived there? If her brother and father searched for her, they would walk right past, not guessing she was inside. She could will herself to be invisible. Her family would give up hope and stop their search and here she’d be, safe and alone and free. She could make her clothes out of tablecloths, sleep on a pallet of straw, keep the windows open, leaving behind the overriding fear she carried so close to her bones.

She went on, past meadows, through an orchard. There was a canopy of apple blossoms and the air was fragrant. When she gazed up through the haze of white she could imagine there was
snow, that heaven had opened, that the world was hers alone. It was a small town she’d stumbled upon, and no one noticed her until she went past the Brady homestead, the oldest house in town. There was a man out in the yard, sitting in a chair in the sunlight. He was in his thirties, handsome, with a dark beard. He was looking up at the sky, but somehow he knew she was there.

“Were you going to pass without saying good morning?” He had a slight accent, a charming manner.

“Good morning,” Emily managed to say. She felt as if she had swallowed bees. Perhaps she’d been stung. Later, a red welt would rise on her wrist, one she hadn’t noticed as she stood at the gate. She was in a town she’d never been to, conversing with a man who had the nerve to address her as though he knew her, when no one on earth knew her. Likely no one in heaven did either.

“You’re not from here,” the man said. He knew that much.

“I was in the woods. Looking for wildflowers.” It was something of the truth. Enough.

“You’re not afraid of bears?” the man teased.

“I fear myself more than I fear any bear,” Emily blurted. It was the way she’d felt in her aloneness, the comfort she took in being on the mountain. What might she do next?

“So you’re fierce?” He didn’t laugh at the notion but asked in all honesty. He sat forward, shifted his gaze.

“I’m a mouse,” Emily said, suddenly shamed.

“I doubt that. Have breakfast with me,” the man requested. He had a napkin tied around his neck. “I’m desperate to talk to someone interesting.” The dark-haired man wore a white shirt and a light-colored suit. He was casual, the way too-handsome
men often were. He bordered on rude, but he did have a tray of delicious-looking food set out before him. There were muffins, honey butter, apple slices, along with a plate of bacon. Emily realized she was starving. Still, she hesitated.

“Sir,” she said, “I don’t even know you.”

“I’m Charles Straw,” the man said. “My friends call me Carlo.”

Emily felt the bird in her chest, trapped in a net.

“Don’t say no,” this man Charles urged. “How many times does a beautiful woman walk by this old house?”

That was when Emily understood he was blind. She nearly laughed out loud. No one who could see would ever think she was anything but plain. She came in through the gate to take the chair that faced him.

He felt her shadow graze his skin, and he knew he’d drawn her in. He smiled. “So you’re not so fierce as you pretend.”

“It was you who suggested I was anything other than a mouse,” Emily protested. “What happened to your eyes?” she asked when she noticed they were without a gleam. They were the most unusual color—a flat, deep blue. If she had to describe them on a page, she would say a lake, a door to heaven.

“You’re very blunt.” Charles laughed. “Or is it rude?”

“If you think I’m rude, I can leave.” Emily’s hands were folded on her lap. She had no intention of going.

Her remark made him smile. He found her charming, unlike most people. “You’re very observant. It’s called river blindness. Contracted in South America. The cause is a form of worm too tiny for the human eye to see. I swam across a lake in Venezuela that was so deep local people said it reached to the far side of heaven. Unfortunately, it turned out to be hell for me.
That was when the world grew blurry. Though I can see you quite clearly.”

Emily let out a short laugh. She held up five fingers in front of his face. As she suspected, he didn’t seem to notice. “You can’t.”

“It’s true.”

“Impossible,” Emily declared. “I’m invisible.”

“Not for me. I see inside. One of the benefits of my tragedy.”

“Then perhaps it’s not a tragedy.”

“Life is a tragedy,” Charles said pleasantly.

Emily felt the sprig of lad’s love in her shoe prick through her stocking. She had said the very same thing to her sister only weeks ago.

“Shall I prove that I can see what no one else can?” Charles asked.

Emily nodded. “Please. Do.”

They sat there and nothing happened and Emily didn’t know what to think. Then Charles suddenly reached down.

“Did you catch a shadow?” Emily asked, intrigued.

Charles signaled for her to put her hand out. When she did, he placed his hand atop hers and opened it. There was a tiny field mouse. Emily laughed, delighted. “You’re like an owl,” she declared. “You see in the dark.” And from then on, although others might call him Charles or Carlo, she thought of him as her owl.

“He’s yours,” Charles Straw said. “He’s at your mercy.”

W
HEN
C
HARLES’S COUSIN
Olive Starr Partridge came to fetch the tray, she was surprised to find a young woman deep in conversation with her cousin, and even more startled to see a field
mouse in one of the good Spode teacups. Introductions were made, and Charles immediately asked Olive to give Emily a tour of the house and of the garden that had been planted more than a hundred years earlier.

“Don’t be silly,” Olive said. “I’m sure she has no interest in that old garden.”

“She’s a botanist,” Charles said.

“Amateur,” Emily added.

“And don’t forget to introduce her to the dog.”

“How do you know our Carlo?” Olive asked as she took Emily up to the garden. There were granite steps and a white picket fence. The earth was a funny, reddish color, as if raw pigment had been added to the soil.

“Our paths happened to cross one day,” Emily said. She wondered if dreamers knew they were in a dream while it was happening, or if they had no idea that everything around them was purely imagined until the dream had gone.

“Which day was that?” Olive was a nurse and quite protective of her cousin. Her husband and grown sons had traveled to Boston, but she had stayed to care for Carlo. He was terribly ill, yet he insisted he must return to his travels. He had never been one to stay in one place. His steamer trunks were packed and waiting on the porch.

“Today,” Emily admitted.

They had reached the garden, ignored for many years. It was a wild tangle filled mostly with thistle. A clutch of larks and sparrows took flight when the women approached.

“It must have been lovely,” Emily said.

There was still some scarlet amaranth and a stray crimson larkspur, nearly six feet tall, the likes of which Emily had never
seen. There was a scraggly row of ruby lettuce and some bright radishes that Olive had put in, which she now pulled from the ground to have with their dinner. The family lore insisted that only red plants would grow in this stretch of ground. Even those blooms that went in as white or pink or blue turned in a matter of weeks. Emily took a bite of a small, muddy radish. The juice in her mouth was red.

“It’s a shame poor Charles can’t see any of his old hometown before he leaves again. He’s going back.”

“To South America?”

“He insists. The Berkshires aren’t big enough for him. He says our mountains are hills.”

As a boy Charles had spent hours in the library reading journals by James Cook and Lewis and Clark, concocting an imaginary travel journal for himself. While the other boys in town were sledding and ice fishing, Charles was teaching himself Spanish and Arabic in the old abandoned house Emily had passed by. He had always been daring, a naturalist at heart. When he was twelve, he was out with the family dog, a young collie, when a fisher attacked. Fisher cats were large weasels so powerful and fierce they were the only creatures known to kill and eat porcupines, including the quills. Charles and the fisher had fought wildly over the dog. The fisher hissed and growled, arching its back, burying its teeth in the collie’s neck. Charles kept his hands around the fisher’s throat, choking off its breathing passage. It turned and bit him on the arm, but he managed to strangle it before the fight was through.