The Red Garden - Alice Hoffman [9]
“Don’t ask her where she’s going, because she’ll never tell you the truth,” Josephine’s father said when he was alive, and so she never did. Her mother was an unusual person, quiet and self-assured and very private. She was able to take care of herself in the wilderness, for once upon a time the wilderness was all she had. She assured Josephine she was fine on her own, even up on the mountain. The strangest thing about her was the way she gazed out the window, as if there was someplace she wanted to be, some other life that was more worth living.
IN THE SEASON after William Brady’s death, Hallie stayed away for several weeks, even longer than usual. When she came back, Josephine was already halfway through trimming her wedding dress. Mrs. Mott, who’d never had daughters of her own, had been helping with the stitchery. If a daughter’s wedding was a glorious time, Josephine wondered why it was that her mother had looked happy until she walked through the door and was home once more.
The wedding was held in the garden. The body of Josephine’s twin was still there. Hallie refused to have his remains moved to the burying ground, and she still spent a good deal of time in that garden. She bought seeds from peddlers for flowers and herbs whenever they passed through. Once she went to Albany herself and came back with three rosebush seedlings that had been brought all the way from England. She favored plants that she’d spied in the gardens of fine houses in Birmingham, the ones she used to pass by on the way to the hatmaker’s when she was a girl. But she also liked local varieties that she found on the mountain: trout lilies, wood violet, ferns. Anything wild would do.
Josephine wore a garland made of daisies that complemented the white dress she and Mrs. Mott had sewn by hand. She was the first and most beautiful bride in the village. Harry moved into the Bradys’ house afterward. He had always preferred it to his own and had been working all year to add a room for himself and his new wife. There were tended fields outside town now, and Harry and his father, Tom, grew corn and wheat and beans. They carted the surplus to Lenox and Amherst. They marked off their acreage with stone walls, carrying the boulders down from the ridgetop until their backs nearly gave out, proud of all they’d created out of the wilderness. It was a different place than it had been all those years ago, when there was little to shelter a man but the tall pine trees. Still Harry dreamed sometimes about that first year, and in his dreams there wasn’t any hunger or cold. The woods stretched on forever and everything was white.
IT HAPPENED IN August, when the fields were dry and hot. The month was halfway done and there hadn’t been rain for weeks. It was so hot that people went swimming in the river despite the eels and the dangerous currents. So hot Harry Partridge couldn’t sleep. One evening he went to the back door to try to catch a cool breeze. That’s when he saw them in the garden. Hallie Brady and the bear. By then the bear was old. From a distance Hallie Brady looked the way she had all those years ago, when they were naming waterfalls and creeks, when everything was a mystery and a revelation, and every river and meadow and snowdrift was something to be tamed.
Harry wasn’t dreaming or imagining anything. He ran for the rifle that