The Red Garden

by Alice Hoffman

THE TOWN OF BLACKWELL, MASSACHUSETTS, changed its name in 1786. It had been called Bearsville when it was founded in 1750,

Aka con man

She could not believe how helpless her stranded group was. None of the men were skilled hunters. They knew little about survival.

She had come all the way from England and she didn’t intend to die her first winter out, not on the western side of this high dark mountain. After that, she built traps out of twigs and rope and, with Harry beside her, began to catch rabbits in the meadow.

It was true; rabbits cried.

She next concocted a net out of a satin skirt she’d bought in Birmingham, an article of clothing she had done terrible things in order to afford.

William Brady laughed at her when she set off. He said women weren’t hunters

She was patient enough to catch trout in the creek that she had decided to call Dead Husband’s Creek.

Hallie thought about manna, how you had to be ready to receive what you were given. She went in without any fears of possible dangers. She had made her choice. Despite everything she did not wish to be back in the hat shop in Birmingham,

Her choice was to go back out into the snow and die with Harry, or lie down beside the slumbering bear to warm their nearly frozen bodies.

He was a trapper. He threw up his hands and shouted to her in French,

But before he could have her, she made him promise he would never shoot a bear.

HALLIE BRADY SAVED her neighbors from starvation that winter. But instead of being grateful, they seemed to grow afraid of her, as if they were mere humans and she was something more.

Beatrice, the name of her baby sister who had died at birth, even though everyone else continued to call the child Josephine.

“Did you ever wish you had a different life?” Harry asked. Hallie Brady nodded. She was looking right at him. “All the time.”

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.

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.

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.

John Chapman, who came to town with his half brother, Nathaniel.

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.

Minette Jacob, who had gone out to hang herself from the big oak tree in the meadow,

“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.

The bigger house had belonged to her grandmother Hallie Brady, who had founded the town,

“You should come home.” Harry Partridge would have been firmer but he knew that if you tugged too hard on

someone who was beginning to wander, they might just bolt and run.

He had no idea that the universe could be found in a single instant, a drop of water, a blade of grass, a leaf of an apple tree.

IN THE MIDDLE of the next winter one of the Starr boys came running into town. The tree John Chapman had planted in Husband’s Meadow had bloomed.

This was an impossibility, a miracle, not unlike Minette Jacob’s baby being born ten months after her husband’s death.

No one realized Amy Starr was missing until it began to snow.

“What good can ever come from a girl with so much knowledge?”

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.

Emily had read that injured bears sobbed like human beings, and that gave her some comfort. They were not so unalike.

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.

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.

“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.

The family lore insisted that only red plants would grow in this stretch of ground.

She wondered what she might have said or done if Charles had asked her to leave with him. She wondered if he hesitated as he stood in the garden.

After the parade, Constant Starr, who had been named for his great-grandfather and was so handsome half the women in town were in love with him, kissed his wife, Mattie, right in front of the meetinghouse. He kissed her for so long that some other men’s wives swooned just to think of how they might feel in his arms.

a young girl in a blue dress began to appear on the banks of the Eel River.

husband’s old fishing boots.

“I don’t suppose anything,” Mattie told him. “Not anymore.”

It was only Isaac Partridge who lived in the big house. His father, a relation of the town founder, had his leg shot off in the Civil War and when he’d returned, he had married a widow in town with children of her own.

But at night when she stood in the garden, she looked young. She looked the way she had when she killed my father in Brooklyn.

If you went out on our roof, you could see Sheepshead Bay. I didn’t like the word Sheepshead,

except in our house my father was the tornado. It was him we hid from.

Thousands of people came to see Topsy die. My mother thought the desire to view such anguish was a sign of the innate cruelty of human beings.

elephant’s last keeper had been sitting on a bench nearby, weeping. She said she wanted a man like that, someone who understood sorrow, not someone who caused it.

This is what ten meant to me: I would never sit on a bench and wait for what happened next. I would never look into the crowd, searching for someone to save me.

We went to Albany because it was the next train scheduled. That was how we chose our fate, quickly, ready for whatever happened next.

My mother told me to stay in Lenox. It was easier for a woman alone to find a position. She would come back for me when everything was settled.