The Red Garden (3 page)

She threw herself into work in the hopes that she would stop mourning the bear. The settlers began to follow her lead and became equally industrious. They snapped out of their gloom and worked hard all through the summer. Soon all had blood blisters on their hands. Tom Partridge chopped off half his thumb while swinging an ax, but even that didn’t stop him. People were renewed by the simple fact that they were still alive. They were mindful of the many ways in which they’d been blessed each morning when they saw the first glimmer of daylight.

By November, when the babies were born—twins, a boy and a girl—the families each had their own houses. The new homes were built in a circle around a wild grassy area that Hallie and Harry had dubbed Dead Husband’s Park. Hallie’s baby girl was very beautiful, with eggshell-blue eyes and skin that shone with good health, but the boy was too small. He couldn’t seem to breathe. He didn’t open his eyes. That was when Hallie knew he wouldn’t last. He lived for only one week. Hallie insisted on burying him behind the house, in the place where she’d begun a garden in the summer, to ensure he wouldn’t be too far away. After the burial she sat down in the weeds. She didn’t get up again. No one could urge her back to her house, not even Harry. She wouldn’t hold her baby girl or even drink a sip of water. She wrapped herself in the shawl that the hatmaker’s wife had given her when she left England. She wore her husband’s leather boots,
the ones she’d had on when she tramped through the forest that first time, when she’d found her way the way pilgrims do, following nothing more than her own faith.

During the day she was silent, but at night they could hear her crying. Susanna Partridge covered Harry’s ears so he wouldn’t have to listen, because every time he did, he cried as well. Rachel Mott had not long ago had a baby herself and she took in the Bradys’ little girl and nursed her. She gave her a name as well, since no one else had bothered, calling her Josephine, after her own mother.

O
NE NIGHT
H
ARRY
Partridge looked out to see Hallie in what should have been the garden but was now a graveyard. She wasn’t alone. There was a bear out there with her. Harry rubbed his eyes. It was late, after all, and very dark. The night was pitch, the wind was rising. He thought about the time he’d been so certain there was a bear up in a tree in the meadow and it had only been a squirrel’s nest. He remembered how all the men had laughed at him, including his father. Harry hadn’t liked that one bit. He blamed himself for the name the men had given their town. Every time someone passing through said
Bearsville
he thought they were making a mockery of him. He wished the town was called anything else, even New Boston, a name that would not remind him of what a fool he’d once been.

Harry often thought about the time when he’d nearly frozen to death, when he hadn’t had solid food for three days, and he’d run after Hallie Brady because she was the only one who seemed sure there was a future waiting. He’d had a dream about a bear then, too. That bear had saved him and sang to him and told him
to hush. That bear had promised that everything would soon be set right.

In the Partridges’ house Harry’s bed was downstairs by the fire while his parents slept up in the loft. He thought what he saw in the garden of the Bradys’ house was most likely a dream, so it was best that he creep back to his mattress, which was stuffed with late-summer straw. Still he worried about Hallie Brady out in the dark with a bear. If the truth be told, he wished Hallie were his mother. His own mother was distant and afraid of things such as thunderstorms and blizzards and bears. Hallie, he knew, wasn’t frightened of much in this world.

When he woke the next morning, Harry wondered if there really had been a bear out behind the Bradys’ house. Perhaps he should have rescued Hallie, or at the very least, called out. He was terrified to think he might peer through the window only to see blood and bones. But when he gazed outside there was only the patch of tall grass that marked the little burial ground. Hallie Brady wasn’t there anymore, however. She’d recovered her strength. She had gone to Rachel Mott’s house and taken back her baby girl, whom she renamed Beatrice, the name of her baby sister who had died at birth, even though everyone else continued to call the child Josephine.

T
HAT NIGHT
H
ARRY
Partridge sneaked out of his house. His mother had told him never to go out alone after dark, but he went anyway. It was growing cold. The sky was blue-black and still. All the brilliant leaves had dropped from the trees; only a few brown ones remained. Ice was forming on Eel River and skimming the pond Harry and Hallie called Dead Husband’s
Lake. There were squirrels nesting high in the trees, the mark of a hard winter to come.

Harry knocked and when Hallie called for him to come in, he did so. She was in a chair rocking the baby, engrossed in the little girl’s lovely face. William Brady was already up in the loft, asleep. The past year had taken a toll. It had done that to them all.

“She looks like a nice baby,” Harry said in his most polite voice. He didn’t really know how children were supposed to behave because he was never around them. When he thought of himself, he envisioned a small, fully grown individual, only one without the privileges of a man. His mother refused to let him have a gun, for instance. She wouldn’t let him ride the horse, either.

“She is a nice baby,” Hallie said. “Her name is Beatrice.”

“I thought it was Josephine.” Harry was confused. He always felt that way when he was with Hallie. As if anything could happen. He liked that feeling, but he was afraid of it too.

“It’s Beatrice,” Hallie said firmly.

Harry sat down on the floor even though there was some new furniture a peddler from Lenox had sold the Bradys. William was no longer poor. He’d been the first to craft expensive items out of eelskin—belts, then wallets, now boots. They were beautiful and waterproof and highly valued. The other men had followed suit, just as they’d followed him into the unknown Massachusetts wilderness. Peddlers from Lenox and Albany and Stockbridge were more than happy to trade for the fine leather goods, which they then resold in Boston at a higher cost.

Because of the eels in the river the Partridges had been able to buy a cow, the Motts some chickens and goats, and the Starrs could afford some sheep and a brand-new barn.

“I dream about bears sometimes,” Harry said, offhand. He gazed up, curious for Hallie’s reaction.

“That sounds like a nice dream,” she replied.

“Does it?”

“A lovely dream.”

Hallie put the baby in the cradle that Jonathan Mott had made for the infant. The Motts had been led to believe they would be raising the baby, since Hallie hadn’t seemed the least bit interested after the other twin’s death. They had actually seemed a little put out when Hallie came to fetch her own child. “Don’t come by my house,” Hallie had protested when Rachel Mott tried to stop her from taking the child. “Don’t you even try.”

The baby was dozing, so Hallie went to the cold box for a serving of the Indian pudding she’d made for Harry. It tasted of molasses and honey. It was so delicious Harry felt he could eat a hundred bowlsful. But before he was even half done with his serving, he heard his mother calling. She must have woken to find he wasn’t in his place by the fire. She would most probably not let him go hunting with his father in the morning. She would say he was a bad, irresponsible boy.

Harry took another forkful of the corn pudding. Hallie was humming a little song. Her face was plain and pretty at the same time. In the firelight her eyes looked bright.

There was Harry’s mother right outside, knocking at the door. He would have to go home now.

“Did you ever wish you had a different life?” Harry asked.

Hallie Brady nodded. She was looking right at him. “All the time.”

S
IXTEEN YEARS LATER
there were ten more families living in Bearsville, mostly from Boston, although a pastor from New York had settled in, along with a couple named Collier who’d been lost in a snowstorm, just as the original settlers had been all those years before. The Kellys stayed with the Mott family, then decided to build a house near the creek since Clement Kelly was a fisherman by trade. A well was dug in what became the town center, surrounded by black mica stones, and people liked to meet there and gossip. It still wasn’t much of a town. When William Brady died, after a fever that left him unable to move or to eat, thirty-seven people attended his funeral, and that included everyone in town. The pastor, John Jacob, gave the epistle, and although Hallie declined to speak, Josephine Brady read a poem she had written about her father. She was a dreamy girl of sixteen who hadn’t inherited her mother’s instincts for survival. In fact, she seemed a target for the cruelty of the world. She was often stung by bees, for they were drawn to her because she was so sweet, her mother told her. She was also extremely bright, the only one in town who could write a poem. There was hardly a dry eye at the service by the time she was through, even though William Brady wasn’t particularly well liked. He was a taciturn man who preferred to be left alone with his eelskins and his tools.

There was a proper burying ground now. The Motts’ third son had died in a fall, and a traveling peddler had frozen to death before anyone had known he’d come to town and holed up in the meetinghouse, which was so cold ice formed on the floor. The Starrs had experienced the greatest portion of sorrow. Byron and Elizabeth had buried two of their six children—Constant, Patience, Fear, and Love had survived, but Consider
had come down with fever when he was two, and Wrestling had taken four days to be born, his spirit having already flown before his body arrived on this earth.

A burying ground was the true mark of an established town. Theirs was at the far end of the meadow. It was a spring day when they buried William Brady. Larks and swallows flitted through the grass. There were tufts of white pollen drifting beneath the budding branches in the woods. Josephine Brady followed the wagon that carried her father’s pine coffin. Her mother walked along behind her, with Josephine’s intended, Harry Partridge.

“Now it truly is Dead Husband’s Meadow,” Hallie murmured to the young man who would soon be her son-in-law.

“I suppose so.” They exchanged an amused look. Harry often dreamed about the year when they’d first come here, when there were so many things that needed naming.

Josephine turned around when she heard them chatting. “What are you two talking about?”

“Nothing, Bee,” Harry assured her. It was the nickname Josephine’s mother and her beloved used for her. Josephine thought it was because she’d been stung so often. She had no memory of her name being Beatrice; no one in town ever used that name, although her mother had called her Bee for as long as Josephine could remember. People thought Josephine was young and innocent, just a loose-limbed girl with long blond hair, but she knew more than people gave her credit for. She knew, for instance, that Harry Partridge was by far the best man west of Hightop, just as she’d known that her parents hadn’t the kind of love she wanted for herself. In the winters her mother often went off to the mountain. Sometimes she didn’t return for days.

“Don’t ask her where she’s going, because she’ll never tell you the truth,” Josephine’s father said when he was alive, and so she never did. Her mother was an unusual person, quiet and self-assured and very private. She was able to take care of herself in the wilderness, for once upon a time the wilderness was all she had. She assured Josephine she was fine on her own, even up on the mountain. The strangest thing about her was the way she gazed out the window, as if there was someplace she wanted to be, some other life that was more worth living.

I
N THE SEASON
after William Brady’s death, Hallie stayed away for several weeks, even longer than usual. When she came back, Josephine was already halfway through trimming her wedding dress. Mrs. Mott, who’d never had daughters of her own, had been helping with the stitchery. If a daughter’s wedding was a glorious time, Josephine wondered why it was that her mother had looked happy until she walked through the door and was home once more.

The wedding was held in the garden. The body of Josephine’s twin was still there. Hallie refused to have his remains moved to the burying ground, and she still spent a good deal of time in that garden. She bought seeds from peddlers for flowers and herbs whenever they passed through. Once she went to Albany herself and came back with three rosebush seedlings that had been brought all the way from England. She favored plants that she’d spied in the gardens of fine houses in Birmingham, the ones she used to pass by on the way to the hatmaker’s when she was a girl. But she also liked local varieties that she found on
the mountain: trout lilies, wood violet, ferns. Anything wild would do.

Josephine wore a garland made of daisies that complemented the white dress she and Mrs. Mott had sewn by hand. She was the first and most beautiful bride in the village. Harry moved into the Bradys’ house afterward. He had always preferred it to his own and had been working all year to add a room for himself and his new wife. There were tended fields outside town now, and Harry and his father, Tom, grew corn and wheat and beans. They carted the surplus to Lenox and Amherst. They marked off their acreage with stone walls, carrying the boulders down from the ridgetop until their backs nearly gave out, proud of all they’d created out of the wilderness. It was a different place than it had been all those years ago, when there was little to shelter a man but the tall pine trees. Still Harry dreamed sometimes about that first year, and in his dreams there wasn’t any hunger or cold. The woods stretched on forever and everything was white.