The Red Garden Read online

  She brought the little dead bear home, dragging the frozen carcass through the snow. It was difficult going because she had to carry the sleeping Harry as well, hoisted upon her shoulder. She was stronger than she looked in many ways. But she refused to assist when they skinned the little bear and readied the meat. Instead she stood outside and gazed at the mountain. She hated the house and those people. She hated their weakness and their hunger. Harry woke from his dreams and came to stand by her. He didn’t remember much of what had happened, only that they had been lost and then had found their way home.

  The next time she went to the cave, Hallie made certain to leave Harry at home. She cared for him as if he were her own, but she didn’t want him accidentally telling the others where she’d gone. She brought along a bucket for the milk. She would lie to the members of the expedition, insist she had found a cow wandering the forest. They would be hungry enough to believe whatever she said. She didn’t want those fool men setting out to kill a slumbering mother bear and her cub.

  Now when she took the gun no one said anything about a woman not being able to hunt. On the way through the woods she heard a crunching sound in the snow. She thought about wolves. Her throat tightened, then she saw clearly and her fear abided. It was a man making camp, setting up a tent, whistling to himself. Hallie had dealt with his species before. She held up the rifle and cocked it. The stranger turned when he heard the sight click. He was a trapper. He threw up his hands and shouted to her in French, a language she recognized but didn’t understand. He reached down to a stone circle he’d made in the snow where he kept his belongings, then held up some skinned rabbits, offering her several. Pour vous, he said. Ici. As if she knew what that meant. But she knew what she saw. The rabbits would keep them fed for days. Hallie approached. She felt like an animal herself, drawn to the scent of blood. Her shawl fell off her head. That was when the trapper realized she was a woman.

  Hallie took the rabbits. She didn’t believe in something for nothing. In return she gave the man her wedding ring. She’d lost so much weight it was slipping off her finger anyway.

  “Go on,” she said when the trapper seemed puzzled. “Take it. It’s real gold. Now go away.” She slapped her hands together in an attempt to make him understand. She felt a wave of protectiveness, not for the people in the cold wooden house, but for the bears in their den. “Go back where you came from. You can’t camp here.”

  The man nodded. His name was Flynn. He’d only spoken French because most of the trappers in these mountains were down from Canada and he’d assumed this woman belonged to them. He himself was from Albany and clearly understood every word Hallie said.

  He pretended to leave, but instead hid behind some pine trees. Sheltered by their branches, he watched Hallie go inside the cave, then come out later with the bucket of milk. He thought it was curious. And yet he was enthralled despite the cold and the strangeness of the day. He felt the sort of desire for her that a man might feel for a creature he had never before sighted.

  Hallie told her husband that her ring must have fallen off when she was milking the cow she swore she had found loose in the woods. In fact, Flynn was just then studying her ring, biting on it to see what it was made of as he stood beside the ravine near the frozen waterfall Hallie called Dead Husband’s Falls. It was definitely gold.

  The next time the trapper spied Hallie, he followed her. When she turned to see him and asked him what he thought he was doing, he looped his arms around her, pulling her close. He forgot his life in Albany. Hallie was not like any other woman. She was tempted, lonely. But before he could have her, she made him promise he would never shoot a bear. He laughed but she insisted. She had already come inside his tent and was slipping off her coat, so what could he do? It was a foolish request, and like a fool he agreed. He slid his hands inside her clothes, his body into hers. As soon as they were done, and he had turned his back, Hallie left him. She was quiet as she took the path up to the mountain. The mother bear was sleeping in the cave. The cub came to curl up beside Hallie. He recognized her and had waited for her. She petted him and sang to him, and for a time she could forget everything that had happened to her and everything that would happen to her still. No wonder Flynn found he was jealous when she left him. When he’d turned to find her gone, he’d wondered who it was she truly loved.

  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. The women stopped speaking when she came near. The men made certain to avoid her, including her own husband. She didn’t complain or seem put out. She took every chance to escape their company. Her life had veered off into the mountainside. She had found the place where she was sheltered, where the reaches of the next kingdom seemed close enough to touch. Soon she could find her way to the mountain in the dark.

  When Harry turned seven, Hallie made him a little cake out of cornmeal and bear’s milk. It was almost spring. The snow had begun to melt and where it did there was swamp cabbage that was edible if you boiled it for hours and held your nose when you took a bite. There were baby eels gathering under the melting ice, tender when cooked in their own skins. The first stalks of wild asparagus appeared in the marshland that Hallie told Harry was called Dead Husband’s Swamp.

  One day Flynn was waiting for her just beyond the clearing. He had never before come so near to where they lived. All winter they had lain together and each time she had run off afterward, leaving him wondering about her true nature. On this day he told her it was the season when the bears were waking. That meant it was time for him to go back to Albany, where, he now admitted to Hallie, he had a wife. He had loved Hallie, truly, but the mountain was only a place to hunt, there was no life for him there. Flynn wouldn’t be back and she knew it. Albany was far, and there were other, better places for a trapper to spend the winter. Hallie didn’t look at him when he said his good-byes. She already knew something was different inside her. And why would she beg him to stay? When she thought back to the winter they’d spent together, what she would miss most of all was the bear.

  That night Hallie got under the blankets with her husband. He was surprised, but he didn’t turn her down. She hoped Harry over in the corner wouldn’t hear him grunting, but she was glad that William was loud enough to cause Elizabeth Starr to hush them from the loft where the Starrs slept. Hallie prayed this one time would be enough so when the baby came, everyone would be convinced it belonged to William Brady.

  HALLIE WENT BACK to the cave once more. She saw footprints and pools of blood. She sat down and wept. The mother bear had been killed and skinned right there at the mouth of her den. There were bits of bone on the ground. Hallie felt that her heart had been broken. Like a fool she’d trusted Flynn’s promise. He was a liar, like most men. She had worked so hard all winter to survive, but now she wished winter had never ended. As she was leaving, Hallie saw the footprints leading away from the cave, those of a small bear wandering off alone. She sank to her knees, grateful that the cub was out there somewhere, still alive.

  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.

  ONE NIGHT HARRY 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.

  THAT NIGHT HARRY 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.”

  SIXTEEN 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.