The Red Garden - Alice Hoffman [45]
“Business bad?” Ben asked the bartender, who was Joshua Kelly, a nephew of Horace the fisherman’s, and the son of Arnold, who had last owned the Jack Straw and had recently shot himself in Band’s Meadow due to his financial woes. He’d been buried two days earlier. His brother hadn’t bothered to attend. Joshua still wore a black armband on his sleeve.
“You might say so,” he said to the newcomer.
“No interesting characters around?”
“Characters?” Joshua didn’t like New Yorkers, and this fellow sounded like one. He looked like one, too. He wore glasses and a hat tipped back on his head. He had on fancy shoes even though he swore he had walked all the way from Albany and had been camping along the way. “Like Mickey Mouse? Is that what you mean?”
“Not at all.” Ben decided to order a second whisky, which meant he would have very little spending money during his time in Blackwell. But buying another whisky might make for an easier time asking questions at the bar of the Jack Straw. “People with interesting stories. Oral history project.”
“The government send you around?”
“Something like that.”
“Nope. Can’t help you out. Unless you count my uncle’s wife. She swims with eels.”
“Not exactly what I’m looking for.” Ben thanked Joshua Kelly and put his money down, gazing at it tenderly, for it would be a long time before he saw any cash. Then he set out in the direction of town. He took notes as he went along. If he didn’t find any worthwhile folklore, he’d have to invent some. He was a newspaperman, but he was a novelist as well, even though after writing half a novel he had pretty much hit a wall. It was a story about a student at Yale who felt alienated from everyone, then found his calling in political action but still couldn’t get over the fact that his older brother, the smarter, more talented of the two, had died of typhus. Ben’s own brother, Seth, had died at the age of fourteen, from an ear infection of all things. The infection had spread and in less than twenty-four hours Seth was dead. Ben couldn’t write past that moment. He was glad to be in Blackwell. To be outside himself, looking for other people’s personal histories.
He walked through an apple orchard where some local boys were climbing trees. He was told the local variety of apples was called Look-No-Furthers and that the trees had been planted by Johnny Appleseed himself. Whether or not it was true, Ben got to writing, pleased by the information. He wandered on, searching for what the boys had called the Tree of Life, the oldest apple tree in town. He found it at the edge of the meadow, standing alone. A small twisted black specimen laden with dusty leaves, drooping in the summer heat. An old woman passing by told him that one year the Tree of Life had bloomed when all other crops for miles around had failed. In this way the citizens of Blackwell had been saved from starvation. The old woman’s grandmother had been there and seen the boughs bloom with her very own eyes as the snow was falling in heaps. Ben wrote that down, too. When he admitted he was starving, the old woman took him home and made him something she called red flannel hash, fixed from scraps of beef and potatoes and cabbage fried in oil. Considering Ben had had nothing but bread, hard cheese, and whisky since getting off the train in Albany, the food seemed especially delicious. The recipe merited an entry in his notebook.
The old woman, whose name was Ruth Starr Carson, lived in a cottage behind the Blackwell History Museum. For years she had been the curator, but now there were no funds for such cultural institutions, so she’d draped white muslin over the displays to keep them from fading and locked the doors. A few neighbors had helped to board up the windows, and still