The Red Garden (13 page)

THE FISHERMAN’S WIFE

1935

T
HE FISHERMAN’S WIFE ARRIVED IN THE
spring. She lived in a one-room house in a clearing beside the Eel River. One week the fisherman was gone, and the next he was back with his young beautiful wife, whose black hair was so long she would have stepped on it if she hadn’t arranged it atop her head with pins. She didn’t speak to anyone in town, or even raise her eyes if someone greeted her. No one knew her name or where she’d come from. In those days, no one asked.

Times were hard, and distractions weren’t easy to come by. Perhaps that was why the gossip began. A story can still entrance people even while the world is falling apart. The bank had closed down, and the banker’s family had been forced to move into a cottage behind the church; they kept up the
grounds in exchange for shelter and food. The leather factory was abandoned, as were many of the mills along the river. In cities everywhere people were starving. In New York, hundreds of shacks had been set up in Central Park. In Albany, riots broke out when people grew hungry. The citizens of Blackwell, Massachusetts, were luckier than most. Many had their own gardens. They stitched their own clothes, owned their properties outright. Still, the disaster of the stock market crash had sifted down from the mighty to the everyday man. Everyone had been damaged: a bank account frozen or emptied, an order for apples canceled, a roof falling down, a son or daughter unable to finish school. Every day people could hear the low whistle of trains that passed through with carloads of orphans sent out west. The trains didn’t stop at Blackwell—only in Amherst and Albany—but stray individuals occasionally leapt from passenger cars when they spied a place where they imagined they might find welcome, even if it was only a stretch of woods or a meadow where they could set up camp. Soon there were so many outsiders that a resident of Blackwell no longer knew everyone for miles around. The pastor began to advise that people use caution when coming upon strangers. He suggested they lock their doors.

That was when people began to amuse themselves with tales of the fisherman and his wife. They did so over coffee and when coffee became too dear, over liberty tea, a cheap brew made of loosestrife. The fisherman’s wife wasn’t much more than twenty—on that everyone agreed—while the fisherman, Horace Kelly, was seventy at least, a man so cantankerous he’d fallen out with his own family and kept to himself. People speculated that the young woman had been desperate, somehow provoked into marrying the old man. Perhaps she’d been a servant or a motherless
child. Perhaps Horace had rescued or kidnapped her. According to the most optimistic among them, the fisherman had saved her from some dreadful economic plight—her father had jumped from a ledge in New York City, as so many had done, or she’d come from the Midwest, where farms were failing daily. The doomsayers said it wouldn’t last.

Horace Kelly fished for rainbow trout and salmon that were often seventeen inches long, as much as three pounds, but he was mostly known as one of the best eel-men in the county. It was said that in his lifetime he’d caught over a million eels, setting off at twilight, wrestling his catch into burlap bags since eels often clung to a man’s arm in a battle of muscle and slime. Because of Kelly there were far fewer eels in the river than there’d been in the old days, back when the spring thaw meant thousands of them roiling in the water, turning the river black.

The fisherman’s wife went door-to-door selling fish that was smoked in a stone oven. She wore a smock over her dress, a black scarf, laced-up boots. She nodded when asked a question, or shrugged if the answer was unknown. She had the price for fish written down on little cards, but if a customer didn’t have enough money, she took what they had and made do. On smoke-days the scent of fish lingered over town. There were wisps of dove-colored clouds rising up from the oven, and occasionally a rain of black scales drifted across the yards. Because people’s savings had been lost in the bank run and cash was short, they soon began to trade whatever they had in exchange for fish—a basket of apples, fresh strawberries, a clutch of brown eggs from the henhouse. When times grew even worse, they offered whatever treasures they had: silver teaspoons, a turquoise brooch, even a
leather-bound copy of
Great Expectations
, which Horace Kelly threw into the smokehouse fire as kindling.

A year went by and circumstances worsened. There was a flurry of crime. Clothes were stolen off washing lines. Gardens were raided. Someone broke into the shuttered Blackwell History Museum and pilfered whatever they thought could be sold for quick cash. The Jack Straw Tavern, closed during Prohibition, reopened, but some passing tramps set a fire and there was serious damage. People began to feel that anything might happen. The futures they had expected had been rewritten by some greater hand, and no one had the slightest idea of what fate might bring next.

The stories about the fisherman and his wife grew stranger. In June, two young women saw the fisherman’s wife crouched down at the riverbank. When they looked more closely, they noticed she was feeding bread to an eel that ate from her hand like one of the collie dogs in town. The eel, the women reported, was unusually large. The fisherman’s wife had laughed as she fed him, which disproved some people’s theory that she was a deaf-mute. She had rested her hand on the eel’s back, in a motion so intimate it startled both young women, who glanced away.

Soon afterward some boys in town, forced to fish on a regular basis to put food on their families’ tables, spied the fisherman’s wife in another strange situation, waist-deep in the river. At first they thought she was a log, or, in the case of the banker’s son, Calen Jacob, who was fanciful and bookish, a mermaid. The fisherman’s wife bolted when she realized the boys were there, swimming like a fish herself, head underwater, long black hair tumbling down her naked back. Several of the boys had dreams about her after that, and a few dreamt about her their whole
lives long, returning to that moment at the river even when they were old men who hadn’t caught a fish in decades. After that, the fisherman’s wife was often sighted at the river late at night, wading in the water. People went to look for her the way they’d scan the sky when there was the promise of shooting stars. On more than one occasion she’d been caught talking to the eels the way another woman might speak to a child or a pet.

By August there were travelers on the roads all through the Berkshires—honest men searching for work, thieves looking for a window that had been left open, mothers with children to feed—many of whom had already lost their faith. A group set up a camp in Band’s Meadow. Shacks were thrown together with planks and old nails collected from the railroad tracks. Bonfires burned through the night. Mrs. Jacob at the church went around collecting what little food there was for the needy. When she called on the cabin by the river, the fisherman’s wife contributed more than anyone else. Whole smoked fish. Shad that were filleted and ready to cook. The fisherman’s wife didn’t speak as she packed the fish into a basket. Instead, she held a finger to her lips to make her message clear: the fisherman was not to know there had been a donation.

Most people did what they could for the lost and forgotten. Women gathered in the evening to sew and knit clothes for the dozens of children who were suddenly members of the community. The church pews were full on Sundays, perhaps because the pastor gave out apples and bread at the end of every sermon. He vowed that faith in the future would see the town through, although some people wondered if the country could withstand such strife, let alone their little village. From a distance, Blackwell looked the same, but the closer a person came, the more changes
he noticed. Fences were falling down. Men sat on chairs outside the meetinghouse, idle, with no ready work available. Collie dogs clustered in the shade. Before long the collies began to hunt rabbits in a pack, and on at least one occasion they were so hungry these gentle shepherds took down a small deer near the pond. They came home to their owners with blood on their muzzles and coats.

A
T THE END
of the summer another group of outsiders arrived in the Berkshires, sent by the WPA. They were five men in all—a children’s book author, two professors, and two newspapermen. The men had been directed to collect folklore. It was part of the Federal Writers Project, and, frankly, it was sheer luck to have any work at all. They took the train to Albany en masse, sharing some whisky and a few laughs. All five were embarrassed by their current circumstances and by their foolish task. But they were broke, without serious employment, and so they decided to make the best of it. On their journey they poked fun at one another and one-upped each other. They told New York City big fish stories while the train rumbled upstate—where they’d been published, whom they had interviewed, who’d gone to Harvard or Yale, whose byline was bigger, stronger, better. They made a bet before they got to Albany, the end of the road, where they would split up to go in different directions to collect local legends. Whoever caught the best and biggest story and found the most extraordinary life would be bought drinks at the Oak Bar at the Plaza by the rest of the gang on New Year’s Day of the following year. They shook hands on the platform, then went their separate ways.

Ben Levy, who had written for the
Herald Tribune
and had half a novel in his knapsack, headed out in the direction of Hightop Mountain and the towns east of Lenox. He had a map and the names of several contacts—mayors, pastors, schoolteachers. He was thirty, a city boy, but he found he enjoyed walking along the country roads. He liked the sensation of the sun beating down on him and the silence of the countryside. He had the urge to do a cartwheel, and he might have, if he’d known how. He’d spent the better part of his life in classrooms, newspaper offices, and libraries. He was smart and passionate, political by nature, but he didn’t know the first thing about the natural world. He had no idea that the white things growing in the ditches were called Queen Anne’s lace or that the berries on the bushes he passed by were gooseberries—which he actually found to be quite delicious—or that the spindly-legged dogs he spied as he was making camp were actually coyotes. He’d grown up in the Bronx, on Jerome Avenue, where there was only one kind of tree. He’d never thought to ask exactly what kind it was. Now he had a tent and a lantern and blisters on his feet. Once it rained while he was sleeping, and when he awoke in the morning, the whole world seemed blue and fresh. He felt weirdly hopeful out in the middle of nowhere, even though the whole country was crashing down around him.

As he approached Blackwell, Ben stopped at the Jack Straw Tavern. He took out his notebook so he could jot a few lines about it, then went inside. He had little enough money, but he ordered a whisky, which he savored. Some things were still the same, and just as good. Jack Straw’s was dark and smoky. There were no other customers. The tavern had managed to get through Prohibition because the town council had graciously turned a
blind eye to liquor sales after 10:00 p.m. But the current economic situation had made people stay home. Plus, there’d been the somewhat suspicious fire, which had left a mess. The beams in the ceilings were charred and pitted.

“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.