The Red Garden - Alice Hoffman [50]
“You can come to New York with me,” Ben said. “No one will know you’re married.”
“I’ll know,” Susan insisted.
She stood up and took off her clothes. Her black coat, her boots, her dark dress. He held her there right on the ground, not thinking about the mud or the cool air. He felt the way a drowning man might, gasping, barely surfacing until they were done. At last she pulled away. “If I was yours,” she said, “I know you’d set me free.”
She told him never to look for her again or to speak her name. Before he could argue with her, she went to the edge of the river and dove in, leaving her clothes behind. Ben ran after her, calling, but she was soon submerged under the water and quickly swam away. Ben ran through the woods, but when he reached the shack, he saw the fisherman at his door with his lantern. There was no choice but to make his way back to town.
In the morning, he couldn’t eat the breakfast Ruth prepared for him. It was the date he was meant to leave and travel to the other Berkshire towns, but instead he sat on the porch steps thinking all day. He felt maddened by the crickets calling, by the faint watery air. He told himself he should go home where he belonged, get himself to Albany or Amherst and take the first train. At twilight he went back down to the river. There was the fisherman, Horace Kelly, filleting trout and tossing the fish into the smoker.
“Are you looking for something?” Horace said when he saw Ben Levy in his good shoes with his shirt buttoned to the collar and a set look on his face. “I think you made a wrong turn at Wall Street.”
“I came to talk to you about Susan.” Ben hadn’t planned to talk about her at all, but there it was. He’d said her name.
“Susan?” Horace Kelly said. “So she told you her name. Well, she’s right there.”
Ben looked around. There was no one.
“Right over there.” The fisherman pointed to a rope stretched from tree to tree. On it hung a burlap bag that twisted back and forth as if caught in the wind. But there was no wind. It was a still evening.
“Go on,” the fisherman urged with a laugh. “Tell her you want her to run off with you. That’s what you came here to say, right?”
“I don’t think this is funny,” Ben Levy stated.
“No,” Horace said. “You wouldn’t.”
Ben noticed Susan’s black coat and boots in a heap near the smoker. He looked at the fisherman, who’d gone back to filleting his catch. Ben went over to the burlap bag. He took it down and opened it. Inside was a black eel struggling to get out. Ben shut the bag.
“That’s her,” the fisherman said. “Still want her?”
Ben went to sit in a chair by the smoker.
“I caught her one night and I kept her,” Horace said.
Ben understood that he was sitting with a lunatic. He wondered if it was the fisherman and not his wife who’d been incarcerated up in Brattleboro.
“She was so beautiful I couldn’t throw her back,” the fisherman went on. “Even though she’s asked me to again and again. She says she has a husband, and that he’s waiting for her, and that she can only be true to him. I’ve caught thousands of eels, but I can’t catch him. I try every night because I know he’s right around here, trying to get her back. I’ve seen them talking. I’ve seen them do more than talk.”
Ben Levy had a fleeting thought of Jerome Avenue, and the one kind of tree that grew there. He thought about his mother sleeping on the couch, and his brother’s funeral, and the night he stopped writing his novel, and the drinks he’d had on the train up to Albany. He felt sick at heart.
“As for me, I’ve had enough of her,” the fisherman said. “I was thinking of cooking her. Throwing her into the smoker. But now you’ve come along. What would you give me in exchange for Susan?”
Ben Levy laughed despite the madness of the evening. “I have nothing, sir.”
“I doubt that,” the fisherman said, looking him over.