The Red Garden - Alice Hoffman [25]
She worked through the night. The soil in the old garden was indeed red, and by the time Emily was done she looked like something out of a devil’s dream. The dog’s fur was dusted with soil so that he resembled a creature from another world. Emily took a bucket, filled it at the well, then washed her feet and the dog’s paws. She wondered if the mouse had been caught or if he had found his way home. She wondered if her family had realized she was gone, if her brother was searching for her door-to-door, and if Charles would be content with what she’d crafted, a place of beauty he couldn’t find anywhere else, even if he searched the whole world over. Dear Owl, she would have written if he could have read a note or a letter. Surely you’ll see this. All you have to do is breathe in and there it will be. All you have to do is stay.
SHE SLEPT SO deeply she didn’t hear him leave. She was still muddy, and the sheets she slept on were peppered with specks of red earth. The dog was on the floor beside her bed when she awoke. Charles had left him as a gift. My dear Mouse, the weather would not have been right for a dog such as this, he wrote in his note to her. It would be cruel to take a northern creature there. She supposed he was right. The deep, relentless heat of the jungle, the fish that bit through flesh with sharp teeth, the worms that could take your sight away.
When she rose from bed, she went to the window. Her brother was in the yard talking to Olive. He had been searching and had come to take her home. 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. Anyone else might have guessed the garden she planted would be white, but Charles had seen it all exactly as she’d crafted it before he went away, the flash of scarlet, the trail of blood, the inside story of who she was.
THE RIVER AT HOME
1863
BLACKWELL, MASSACHUSETTS, WAS REPRESENTED by the Thirty-fourth Regiment in the War Between the States, and every able-bodied man, including Tom Partridge’s grandsons, who were fourteen and fifteen, had enlisted. The Starrs went and the Jacobs and the Hildegardes and all the rest. There was a parade, and people cheered and said the war would be over in six months. 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.
When the men and boys left, there were only women, children, and old men left behind in Blackwell. The leather factory where eelskin boots and belts had been made for so many years closed down, and the windows looked ghostly in the dim spring light. The bank was vacated and people kept their money piled inside their mattresses, or buried under a stone birdbath, or in a mustard tin in the pantry. The new history museum, opened only months before, was shuttered, and the barn behind it was turned into living quarters and rented out. The women went out to the fields with the horses and mules. With tireless patience they taught their children how to work a plow and tend the apple orchards, the same way they’d instructed them on how to say grace and how to have faith in the future.
Three months later, one of the Partridge boys was sent home with only one leg. His brother had been killed in the field. Two of the Jacobs, father and son, were missing and considered lost. Letters from loved ones could take months to reach home, and so the days were lived hesitantly, and in fear. Constant Starr had fallen in Virginia, but no one in Blackwell knew he had left his earthly life until eight weeks after the fact. A tintype of his body in uniform was eventually sent to his wife, who wore it pinned to her black dress the way another woman might clip on a corsage. People heard Mattie Starr sobbing but there was nothing they