The Red Garden (4 page)

I
T HAPPENED IN
August, when the fields were dry and hot. The month was halfway done and there hadn’t been rain for weeks. It was so hot that people went swimming in the river despite the eels and the dangerous currents. So hot Harry Partridge couldn’t sleep. One evening he went to the back door to try to catch a cool breeze. That’s when he saw them in the garden. Hallie Brady and the bear. By then the bear was old. From a distance Hallie Brady looked the way she had all those years ago, when they were naming waterfalls and creeks, when
everything was a mystery and a revelation, and every river and meadow and snowdrift was something to be tamed.

Harry wasn’t dreaming or imagining anything. He ran for the rifle that was kept above the fireplace, then charged outside and fired. He did it without thinking, with a hero’s response, but in the end he was anything but. Afterward, when he dreamed, he dreamed about the look on her face, the tenderness there, the terrible sorrow. In that instant he saw everything there was to know about love. It terrified and humbled him and made him realize how little he knew.

By the time the neighbors heard the shot and came running, Hallie Brady was gone. She’d run off to the woods, her dress covered with blood. Although the neighbors sent out a search party, choosing men who knew the woods around Hightop, they didn’t find her. Afterward, they wanted to skin the bear, make good use of the meat and the pelt, but Harry forbade it. He himself dug the grave in the garden. He worked so hard his hands bled. He had been attached to Hallie from the time he was a child, so of course he would be upset and want the job of the burial for himself. People closed their windows, and went to bed, and didn’t think about it anymore. All the same, they could hear him sobbing. When at last he came inside, Harry removed the hammer from the rifle he’d used. He would never take up a gun again.

It was days before Josephine realized her mother wouldn’t be coming back. Weeks before she stopped looking out over Hightop Mountain. She never asked her husband why he’d killed the bear or why her mother had run off. She never asked why years later, when they had been married for many years and had raised two daughters, Harry suddenly decided to run for
mayor. The first resolution he passed was to change the name of the town. The second was to sign an edict for a yearly celebration honoring Hallie Brady in the middle of August. Some people believed it to be the founder’s birthday, but it was only the mark of blueberry season, the time when people who knew the territory avoided Hightop Mountain, leaving it to the bears.

EIGHT NIGHTS OF LOVE

1792

T
HE
T
REE OF
L
IFE WAS PLANTED IN THE
center of Blackwell. People said that when it bloomed, anyone standing beneath its boughs could ask for mercy for his sins. For decades a town bylaw forbade defacing the tree, but at night people took cuttings. They secretly planted saplings in their yards, wrapping the tender bark in burlap to ward off the cold. Such thievery was meant to protect the future of the town, which people said would flourish as long as the Tree of Life did. Should the original tree ever be struck by lightning or consumed by beetles, the cuttings ensured there would be others to take its place. In time the apples that came from these trees, the same fruit that had tempted Adam and Eve, came to be called the Blackwell Look-No-Further. Once you’d come to Blackwell and tasted
these apples, you would never need go anywhere else. If the whole world beckoned, you’d still be happy enough to spend your life in this small valley in Massachusetts.

T
HERE WEREN’T MANY
people who saw the man who planted the original tree on the day he arrived in Blackwell. He was John Chapman, who came to town with his half brother, Nathaniel. John was eighteen and Nathaniel only eleven. They were quiet and serious, and both seemed older than their age. They’d left home to sleep in meadows, under the stars. John had worked as an apprentice in an apple orchard, and as far as he was concerned his employment there had been a part of God’s plan. He had a philosophy about freedom, one that had come to him in a dream, then had filtered into his waking life. He eschewed things made by man and yearned for a more godly and natural state. He believed that every creature belonged to God equally, a product of divine love and wisdom. Man and beast, insect and tree, all of it reflected the face of the Maker. John had been reading pamphlets written by Swedenborg, the Christian mystic, and the sentiment of charity as divine spoke deeply to him. He felt swept up in something far bigger than himself.

In Leominster, where John had been born, the streets were filthy. His neighbors had sickened and fought among each other. Many had died young. As a child he’d seen a man gun down his wife in the road. He’d seen dogs tied up and left to starve, children set out to fend for themselves. He ached to sleep in the grass with the sound of buzzing all around him. He dreamed of a time when there were trees everywhere instead of houses. Every tree was perfect, unlike human beings, especially the
variety of tree that brought forth what John believed to be manna—the apple. When turned into cider and fermented, the juice of the apple was nearly holy in nature. The drink could transport a man out of himself, into a world much closer to God. Not drunkenness—that was not the goal—but an ecstatic state.

John and Nathaniel made their way easily across Hightop Mountain. They were young and strong, buoyed by faith. Each carried a sack on his back and a staff of apple wood from the oldest tree in their town, which had been cut down so that the main road could be expanded. That was the day John decided to head west. As he watched the gnarled branches of that old tree in his hometown destroyed, something inside made him veer radically from the path of other men. He had a yearning for heaven on earth, and that surely wasn’t Leominster. When he walked out the door, his half brother was right behind him.

It was the season when the bears woke, when snow was melting and the air was bracing. Just sleeping in those mountains, waking to hear the rushing echo of the streams that formed the Eel River down in the valley, could induce near ecstasy. From a perch on the mica-lined crag it was possible to spy the town of Blackwell below them. It was the kind of village that needed manna.

John Chapman was tall and thin and didn’t need much sleep. He had long dark hair, which he vowed he would never again cut. His face was angular and beautiful, but in his opinion an ant was more beautiful than he would ever be, a black snake more wondrous. When he first set off for the West, he decided he would have as little as possible to do with anything that had been man-made. The divine was in every human, as it was in him. The closer he was to the natural world, the closer to heaven.
He wore homespun clothes and no shoes. As he tramped through the countryside his excitement increased. For some reason he didn’t feel the cold, perhaps because he was burning up with ideas.

He crouched down next to his brother and shook him awake. They had their breakfast, some tea boiled from mint and bear-berry, along with a few handfuls of fiddlehead ferns cooked over the fire in the one pan they carried with them. John had vowed never to eat another living creature or to cause pain to any being. He liked the light-headed feeling that eating so little gave him. He was steady enough, sure of himself as he led Nathaniel down the mountain, then across the plain that people in these parts called Husband’s Meadow, a field that in summer filled with pitcher plants and black-eyed Susans.

It was a small town. The sky was still dark, with bands of pearly gray breaking through. The men from the Starr family were already at work in the pastures on the far side of the Eel River, Harry Partridge was off fishing, the Motts were chopping down trees to expand the small meetinghouse. The only one to see the Chapman boys come into town was Minette Jacob, who had gone out to hang herself from the big oak tree in the meadow, a length of strong rope trailing from her hands.

The meadow grass swished under her boots and around her long skirt. Minette was pale with a cloud of dark hair. She resembled the Partridge side of her family, rather than the Bradys, who tended to be redheads with independent temperaments. She had little in common with the pious Jacobs, the family she had married into, only that their son had been her husband.

Minette had planned this dreadful undertaking carefully, well aware of the hour when she would at last be alone in Husband’s
Meadow and could finally end her life on earth. She stopped when she saw the strangers striding toward her. Her heart sank. She knew that self-harm was an abomination, but she was beyond caring. She had lost her husband, William, to measles, and their newborn child, Josie, as well. Two weeks later, her dear sister, Lucy Ann Partridge, only sixteen, had passed on. Minette had no reason to be in the world. She was nineteen and a lost soul. She had not slept for five nights or had a bite of food. Daily life had become a blur, but now her vision cleared. She watched the boy and the man walking through the tall grass, and all at once she knew they were angels who’d been sent to her. She dropped to her knees right there.

They found her like that, whispering a prayer under her breath, eyes closed, prepared to meet and be undone by a fiery celestial sword.

“What’s this all about?” Nathaniel whispered to his older brother. The world was a strange, open place to them both now that they’d left Leominster. Nathaniel was still young enough to believe that there was an explanation for everything, and John’s explanation was that the Lord was everywhere. The sunshine was bright that day. There were blackflies in the air, flitting around them, and the sound of bumblebees droned in the tall grass.

“It’s about mercy,” John replied. He gazed down at the woman before him with the rope in her hands and knew that this was a divine moment that would forever change both their lives.

He dropped to his knees beside her, then took her hands in his. The rope fell into the grass, coiled like a snake. Minette looked up, shocked. She had expected to be burned alive. Now she gazed into John Chapman’s kind, soulful eyes.

“You have no idea what’s inside of you,” he said to her. He was younger than she, but he spoke with authority. Minette had indeed believed there was nothing inside of her, so it was as though he had answered her unspoken prayer. There was some sort of spark between them that had to do with questions and answers. But there was also something more. Minette felt as if she were opening, as if what was bruised inside her was in his hands. She wondered if this is what an angel did to you.

Minette stayed on her knees while John Chapman planted the Tree of Life, right there in the meadow. He had hundreds of seeds in his knapsack, taken from the orchard where he’d worked and from the cider mills he’d passed, but he also had a few saplings that were wrapped in cloth and twine, one of which he presented to the town of Blackwell.

After he was done, they sat in the grass and watched meadowlarks and drank some of the hard cider John carried with him in a metal flask. When the cider went down, it burned. The burning spread out into Minette’s chest in an arc and then in a circle. She laughed at the feeling, and at the larks, and at the fact that she was still alive when she hadn’t meant to be.

“You forgot that the world was this beautiful,” John said to her then, and she knew she’d been right in her first impression, that he was indeed an angel, and that he’d been sent to her, and that while she had believed she had come out on this morning to finish her life, there had been a different plan meant for her all along.

M
INETTE TOOK THE
Chapman brothers back to the cottage William Jacob had built for her in the acre behind her father’s
house. The bigger house had belonged to her grandmother Hallie Brady, who had founded the town, and had been added on to piecemeal as more children came along. Minette’s father seemed to have grown old all at once after his wife and younger daughter and grandchild had died. He didn’t seem to notice Minette and her losses. There was no one to whom she could confide her sorrows, but somehow this man John understood them without her needing to voice a single one aloud. “We have one Father,” he told her. “And He knows our pain and our salvation.”

Minette offered the Chapmans an extra pallet in front of the fireplace in her cottage, but they said they preferred to sleep outside, under the stars. She fixed them dinner, and although they accepted bread and honey, they would not take more. “There’s no need for us to have more than our share,” John explained. “We take our lessons from the bees, who work for the glory of our Maker.”

On that first night Minette looked out the window and watched them. The boy was in a blanket roll, but John slept with nothing covering him other than the night air. It was so early in the spring, there were patches of ice in the shady sections of the yard. The bears in the forest still slumbered in their dens. As she sat there, Minette felt her milk come in, even though her baby had been gone for weeks.

In the morning everyone in town knew the Chapmans were there. They had made their camp in the patch of garden behind the house that had a peculiar red soil. People noticed the brothers down at the well in the center of town, pouring buckets of water to wash the soil from their bare feet, stained red from the dirt. Someone said only the devil had red feet. That sort of gossip traveled quickly. Minette’s father, Harry Partridge, came to her
cottage soon after. Minette was baking a maple sugar pie. Her father took note of the knapsacks and blankets set against the garden gate.

“You’re letting strangers into your house? Do you think that’s wise?”

“They sleep outside.”

Minette knew that the Chapmans were planting an orchard down in the meadow. They’d gone off early in the morning dark and were at work when most people were in their beds. They planned to do this all across the country so that the land would be a sea of apples, manna from heaven in a line leading west.

“They’re just boys,” she told her father, who was hardly comforted by her words.