The Red Garden - Alice Hoffman [21]
OWL AND MOUSE
1848
EMILY 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.