The Red Garden (19 page)

He studied her beautiful face. He hesitated. He had never thought of himself by name. He was simply himself.

“Matthew James,” he said. Matthew was the name his aunt called him. James he plucked out of the air. He had passed a town called Jamestown; maybe that’s why it came to mind. He’d never known his surname. He’d never even wondered until now.

“Matthew James,” Kate said approvingly.

He told her about the house he was building, and the collection of books he had. He had run out of novels and was now reading science fiction magazines he had picked up from the AtoZ Market. She promised to bring books from the library, along with pens and paper, and anything else he needed. She didn’t have to be told why he wasn’t living in a city or a town. He didn’t belong there. She felt older when they said good-bye, as if time had shifted while they sat in the meadow and knowing him for this one evening had made her grow up fast. She opened her eyes and watched him walk away. From this distance, he looked like a tall young man. He turned to wave when he thought he was far enough away so that she couldn’t see him. But she could.

T
HE FIRST WINTER
was the hardest. Some days he didn’t leave his house. The snow fell and kept falling, and he stayed in and
read the library books she’d brought him. He liked rebels. Lawrence, Dostoyevsky, Miller, Kafka. He had a rain barrel of melted snow, and he boiled the water for coffee and tea. After a while he began to feel deeply at home on those winter evenings. He made a set of weights out of a tree limb and rocks to keep himself fit. On days when it was clear enough he went out to trap game. He broke through the ice of a nearby stream to fish. He didn’t mind crouching down in the snow, waiting to see a flash of silver in the water.

He waited for her visits, fewer in the winter, more frequent the following spring. In time he forgot to tell her to close her eyes, or she forgot to listen to him. Once, when they were together in the woods, she took his hand. He burned and had to look away. He warned her not to do that again. How could her hair be so red? She’d unplaited it while they were in the woods, and he’d been made mute with desire. How was it possible for her to be there with him? Why would she search him out? He thought perhaps he had invented her the way some cruel soul must have surely dreamed him up. She was quiet when he told her not to touch him, her mouth set. She became upset when he then suggested that perhaps she should go home. She walked through the orchard on her way back to town, confused because he’d told her to go. She broke off budding branches and set them in her bedroom in vases. She told herself she was done. Nothing would come of tramping through the woods, playing at love. She told herself she needed to get back on course. It was her senior year of high school and her future was at stake. She dreamed of apples all night. When she opened her eyes the next day, she was still thinking of him.

S
HE APPLIED TO
Wellesley but didn’t want to go. Her mother and aunt sat her down and convinced her it was best. They knew something was wrong with Kate. Her moodiness, her solitary ways, her refusal to see friends. She got a summer job at the library and she took home armfuls of books and locked herself in her room at night. Once their cousin Henry came all the way from Cambridge to take her out to the movies in Lenox, but when he brought her home he confided to her mother and aunt that Kate didn’t seem to be there with him.

When Hannah found a bone in the garden that same summer, she thought perhaps their food had been contaminated. She had worked in that same garden all her life and had never found anything odd before. She wasn’t the sort to believe in curses, but there it was, a smooth, white bone. Kate’s aunt and mother dug up an entire section of the garden and found more bones. There were rumors that this area had once been a burying ground. Perhaps it was bad luck. They reburied the bones they’d found, filled in the holes, then tore out the seedlings and the old vines. They locked the gate and decided to forsake their garden that year. Kate no longer had homegrown vegetables to take to the woods. Instead, she saved the money she earned from her job at the library and bought food at the AtoZ Market to carry up to the mountain. Once she made a cake. Her mother spied her walking down the road with the cake tin. Then she knew there was a man.

When Kate told Matthew she was going to Wellesley, he said he understood, and he did. He took her to his house soon
after. She’d always asked to see it, and he’d always been standoffish, but now he changed his mind. He took her there when it was dark. He hoped she couldn’t see him when they went inside the one room where he lived. She kissed him first, and all the rest followed. He led her back to the road in the dark so that she would be home before morning. It was not only to keep her mother and aunt from knowing she had vanished. He was afraid that the things they did and said would melt in the light.

They were together from midsummer on, and then there were no more nights and the summer was through. He’d known it was a stolen time, but he felt crushed when it was over. Before Kate left for college, he gave her a poem. He told her not to read it until she had gone to Wellesley, but she read it in her room that night.

You told me to wait in a field
.

It was dusk and I could smell summer. The world was green
.

I had been a bear for so long I couldn’t imagine anything human
.

There was nothing I missed living in another world

Except this:

A woman cutting through the field to meet you

Grass in her hair, pollen on her fingers, your name in her mouth
.

She folded the poem into a box, which she then stored on the top shelf of her closet. If she had chosen to read it again, she might not have left.

S
HE DIDN’T SEE
him all year after she went off to college. When she came home at term break, there was a snowstorm and the
mountain roads were impassable. She sat in her room and looked into the garden they didn’t use anymore. She kept her hair pulled back. She wore glasses now. She felt desperate for him, and then just desperate, and then she felt nothing at all. Her mother and aunt still worried over her. Kate assured them she was fine. Her life was back on course. She decided not to see him. What good would it do? He belonged in one world, she in another.

He came one night before she went back to school, even though the snow was deep. He stood outside and watched her through the window as she read a novel. She was beautiful and far away even though he was standing in her yard. He knew that coming into town was a mistake. That next spring he found the old bear, dead, in one of the caves. He slept beside the body. He dreamed the bear was his father. That was when he gave up being human. He gave her up as well.

I
N THE SUMMERS
Kate went to Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne and took a position as a counselor at an American camp for girls. In her senior year at Wellesley she became engaged to Henry Partridge, the young man she’d once ignored who was the cousin of a cousin once removed, hardly a cousin at all. After graduation Kate came home, to plan her wedding and to care for her mother, who was ill with cancer, bedridden, with only a little time left. Kate sat by her mother’s bedside and read to her in French. She gazed out the window. After that first year they spent apart, on the day before she went back to school, she’d seen the trail his boots had left in the snow. She’d known he’d come, then turned away.

“We found bones in there,” her mother told her one night. She was delirious sometimes and Kate had to lean in close to hear. She was talking about the garden and about that time when Kate seemed so distant. “We thought that was why you were acting so peculiarly that summer when you were fifteen. We thought you were under a spell. Then I realized it was a man.”

“There was no man,” Kate said.

Later when she went out to sit on the porch with her aunt, she asked Hannah about the bones.

“We stopped using the back garden after that.” It was true; the lower, newer garden where the soil wasn’t as rich or as red was now the plot of land they cultivated. Tomato plants had been set in a row, but after Kate’s mother fell ill, no one had bothered to weed and there were brambles everywhere.

The wedding date was pushed up, to ensure that Kate’s mother would be able to attend. Kate had already bought her dress in Boston. It was June, but overcast. Kate had an argument with the pastor, who would not shorten the service to accommodate Kate’s ailing mother, who often needed to lie down. Kate was defiant and wouldn’t back down, and in the end the pastor agreed to a truncated ceremony.

“If you’re getting married on your mother’s account, don’t,” Hannah said to her the week before the wedding. “All she wants is your happiness. She’s convinced there’s another man.”

K
ATE WANTED TO
see him before she was married. She found the place easily enough, as if she’d been there only the day before, even though it had been years. When she reached the clearing, she stopped and gazed at the house. She thought about the
first time she’d gone inside. There were still stories about him in town. Every new group of elementary school children started the rumors up all over again. There was a monster in the woods they said, he’d eat you up, leaving only the bones. He was half ape, half bear, but he knew how to speak. And he knew tricks as well. He could call to you as if he was injured, then leap upon you. Mothers and fathers in Blackwell told their children that if they didn’t finish their dinners, the monster wouldn’t be very happy. They used him as a cautionary tale: That was what happened to bad boys and girls, they were banished to the woods.

There was a flurry of panic when Lucy Jacob was murdered on Route 17. Kate had been away in France that semester and hadn’t heard the sad news until after she came home. Lucy had been riding her bike and someone had abducted her. She was missing all winter long until the snow melted. At last they found her with her neck broken out in the woods. She’d only been fourteen. People went out in search parties, but they found no evidence of the monster or of anything else. Things quieted down after the pastor gave a sermon in which he stated that monsters were men’s imaginings and that men had to take responsibility for the horror in the world. Be sure of one thing, he had told them. It was a man, not an imaginary being, who had taken Lucy from them.

When she was almost at his door, Kate couldn’t bring herself to go farther. She didn’t know how to explain her long absence to Matthew, she didn’t understand it herself. She clearly didn’t understand anything, so she went away. It was not until she was home that night that she dared to speculate that perhaps if she had actually seen him, she would not have gone back to town. She might have been ready to give up the world that she
knew. But even if she’d gone forward that afternoon, he hadn’t been there. He’d been at a lake miles away, up in the mountains. He’d caught several fish and spied some herons. When he returned, he found a long, red hair in the grass outside his door. He wrote a poem that night and went into town. He crept into the yard and left it inside the old garden. Kate found it there the next morning.

If I met you now, I would tell you to

beware of men who think they’re bears and bears who
think they’re men
.

Here’s my advice:

Run over the mountain
.

Run as far as you can
.

Your mistake was walking down the road where I was
.

My mistake was everything else
.

I want the words you hold in your hand, lamplight in ajar
.

We met here
.

But it could have been anywhere

the next road on the map

the one that curled around the mountain like smoke and
disappeared
.

I walked you home and didn’t say much
.

You were the one who kissed me
.

Remember that, but remember I was the one who wanted it
.

Sometimes I think I forced you to kiss me with my wanting
.