The Red Garden (5 page)

That night Minette fed the Chapmans pie for supper, outside in the garden. The brothers had worked all day. They had walked past the burying ground in the meadow and had seen the stones for Minette’s husband and child and sister and mother. Before supper, they held hands and said a prayer for those no longer in the living world. As John spoke about meeting with angels in the world above their own, Minette cried for the first time since her sister’s passing. That night she slept with the window open. She slept better than she had in a month.

The Jacobs began it, taking up the idle gossip, insisting that the devils with red feet were now at work in the meadow and needed to be stopped. Soon the town was in an uproar. The men joined together at the meetinghouse and decided to take action. But when they came for the boys, they found Minette outside with the brothers, meaning to sleep in the open air with the strangers. The Chapmans were given ten minutes to get out of
William Jacob’s widow’s yard and twenty-four hours to leave Blackwell.

The boys went as far as the meadow, where they set up their camp in the grass. It was a cool, dewy night, and the foxes in the hollow nearby bolted, surprised by the sudden intrusion. It made no difference to the Chapmans where they slept. It was Minette who cared. She packed a bag and followed them. She felt headstrong and light. She’d heard stories to the effect that her grandmother had disappeared one August night, and she wondered if she had felt the way Minette herself did now, not caring if she ever saw anyone in town ever again.

Minette wore her old black skirt, one she didn’t mind ruining if burrs caught in the fabric. She had on a pair of her husband’s old boots. The brothers weren’t surprised to see her. They accepted all they were offered and considered every moment a blessing. They had their supper in the meadow that night. Fresh asparagus, fiddlehead ferns, the last of the maple sugar pie. That was the night Minette realized that John Chapman didn’t sleep. When she startled awake, surprised to find herself where she was, beneath the stars, she saw that he hadn’t yet lain down. He was hunched in the grass, on fire with ideas. He said he didn’t need sleep. It was a waste of time and he had too much to accomplish. Minette stayed beside him. They studied the sky, and she listened attentively when he told her that every set of stars told a story. There was a spider, there was a crab, there was the lion of the night.

Her father came out to the meadow the next day to find that Minette was laboring with the men, planting seeds. There was soil on her hands and on her face. Her black skirt was hiked up out of the mud.

“You should come home.” Harry Partridge would have been firmer but he knew that if you tugged too hard on someone who was beginning to wander, they might just bolt and run.

Minette shook her head. She loved her father, but she couldn’t go back.

That night she and John went for a walk after Nathaniel was asleep. There was a blanket of clouds over the stars, like a carpet, a thin veil separating the world from the sky. They went as far as the start of the mountain, where the caves were. They knew that spring had fully arrived when they saw signs of bear: pawprints, shrubs trampled. She kissed him then, in a way she had never kissed her husband. She leapt forward into the shining light. When she’d been married she had been too busy to notice that the world was beautiful. Or perhaps she’d known and had forgotten.

The next day the men in town came to the meadow with a document they had drawn up that evicted the Chapmans from town. John Chapman stood to face his accusers. He was far taller than any of the other men. He said that someday they would understand his motives and would be grateful that he had lingered in their town. He had divine work to finish before he moved on.

When would that be? the men wanted to know. They were edgy facing him. If they’d had a jail, they would have thrown him into it. Their eviction notice was only as good as its effects.

“Three days,” John told them. “But what I’ve done here will stay with you forever.”

They didn’t know if they liked the sound of that or not, but they backed off and allowed him the time he’d asked for.

That night John and Minette went back into the woods and lay together. John had never been with a woman before, and everything about Minette was a miracle to him. Once she laughed out loud because of the way he was studying her. “It’s because you’re perfect and wonderful,” he said solemnly.

He watched while she slipped out of her clothes, something her husband would have never done. She felt as if she was a constellation or a blade of grass.

They planted till noon the next day. Then she insisted the brothers must see the Eel River, which was rushing with melted snow, its current so loud they had to shout. They took off their clothes right there on the riverbank, all three of them, though Nathaniel was shy at first, then plunged into the water. John was careful not to step on any of the eels that lived in the shallows. He lifted one up to examine for a moment. “Brother eel,” he said before replacing the creature into the waters from which it had come.

Minette felt cold and hot at the same time. She had lost nearly everyone but she was standing in the Eel River, the deep water rushing past, the sunlight beating down on her slim shoulders. She felt the eels swimming along, ancient mysterious creatures that managed to survive the terribly cold winters in Blackwell beneath a cover of ice.

H
ARRY
P
ARTRIDGE CAME
to see them at suppertime. They had a fire burning, and sparks drifted into the sky. Minette’s father had brought a loaf of bread, gratefully accepted, and a pot of stew, which he alone ate. He ignored the fact that John didn’t
wear shoes and that his hair was so long. The air was thick with mosquitoes. Bats swooped across the meadow, feeding upon them. It was a beautiful spring night.

After supper Harry asked John Chapman what his intentions were.

“I intend to make this country a garden of trees,” John said solemnly.

“I mean Minette. Your intentions toward her.”

John nodded. “I intend to remind her that she’s alive.”

It was all Harry could do not to punch him. “And then?” he managed to ask.

“Then on to the West,” John said.

Afterward, Harry took Minette aside. He realized she was just a girl. He had expected too much from her and had been so consumed with his own sorrows he had never noticed hers. “Do you hear what he’s saying?” Harry asked his daughter. “Do you understand? He’s not staying here. He’s not the man for you.”

Minette laughed and hugged her father. He couldn’t begin to know what had been revealed to her. He had no idea that the universe could be found in a single instant, a drop of water, a blade of grass, a leaf of an apple tree.

That night Minette slept in John’s arms, warmed by his strange heat. There were burrs on her skirt and in her hair. The scent of the river clung to her skin. She thought about her father sitting at home, worrying about her, and of her own little house, empty. In the morning, the Chapmans got ready to go. There was a light rain falling that John said would be good for the seeds they planted. In a hundred years there would be a hundred trees and each one would bear fruit. Minette waited, but he didn’t ask her to go. She was not especially surprised. Nathaniel
shook her hand and wished her well and said if he ever came back this way he would surely stop and visit. John Chapman was singing to himself the way he sometimes did. The rain didn’t bother him. He was already moving forward, thinking about stories he’d heard about the West, how the land was so endless and untouched it was indeed like heaven.

The larks were swooping through the rain. The river was running so fast they could hear it in this meadow. Minette kissed him good-bye in a way she had never kissed her husband, and John kissed her back as if she was perfect and wondrous and alive.

I
N THE MIDDLE
of the next winter one of the Starr boys came running into town. The tree John Chapman had planted in Husband’s Meadow had bloomed. Everyone went to see, tromping through the snow. It was twilight and the snow was still falling. Indeed, one bough of the young tree was covered with apple blossoms. This was an impossibility, a miracle, not unlike Minette Jacob’s baby being born ten months after her husband’s death. It was the reason the apples from this wonderful tree were called Look-No-Furthers. It was why Minette’s father, Harry Partridge—who was so close to his grandson that the boy took his last name when he came of age—vowed he would never eat apples again.

THE YEAR THERE WAS NO SUMMER

1816

T
HERE WAS FROST IN THE GARDEN IN
J
UNE
. Clothes set out on the line froze, their wrinkles set in place. Bedsheets turned hard as stone. The wind from Hightop Mountain gusted across the meadows, sifting through cracks below windows and doors, chilling residents to the bone. Horses in their barns grew skittish when the sky pooled into black puddles in the middle of the day. The spring had been unnaturally cold and dry, and now the weather took a turn for the worse. Throughout the Commonwealth, cornfields were ruined and vegetables were covered with slick coatings of ice. There was talk of a famine to come. People were preoccupied, panicked. Perhaps that was why no one noticed when Rebecca and Ernest Starr’s daughter Amy disappeared.

The Starrs lived in the house local people called the Museum. Ernest Starr was a collector. He searched out rocks, seeds, minerals, animal skeletons. On his mantel there was a moose jaw and a rust-colored fox’s pelt. In his cabinet he kept a strange piece of rock that was always hot to the touch and another in which there was a hole caused by a four-inch piece of hail that Ernest himself had witnessed before the ice melted into a wash of greenish water there in his hands. He had specimens preserved in jars of salt and liked nothing more than to study the desiccated bodies of bats and birds. He was enthralled by the wonders of nature and took special delight in amassing information no one else had. Over the years he’d gathered a library of atlases, maps, and scientific books that were so rare, professors from Harvard College had come to view them.

The Starrs were an old family in town, with ancestors who were part of the founding expedition. Ernest had inherited the wheat fields beyond Band’s Meadow, as well as the leatherworks. He was a man in his forties, distracted, intelligent, the father of five. He employed several men to work at the farm and had only weeks earlier hired a new woman to come in to help with the laundry and meals. The housemaid lived among the ragtag settlement of horse traders from Virginia who had recently set up camp on the far side of the Eel River, but Ernest didn’t hold that against her. He was a fair and liberal man. The Starrs’ house was bustling, and Ernest had trained himself to read and study in the midst of extreme chaos. Doors slammed, children argued and laughed—none of that stopped him. When his wife, Rebecca, called everyone to lunch, he often ignored her. Rebecca would then have a tray brought to his study so he could go on working through meals. He was currently fascinated by moths
and had been searching the mountains for elusive varieties. Set upon his desk there were glass bell jars and a small bottle of spirits that was used to stun the moths, which he could then pin and study.

On the day his daughter disappeared there was stew and molasses bread for lunch, with lemon sponge cake for dessert. He remembered that because he wrote it down in his dietary book, in which he recorded all of his meals. He thought such a diary might be of interest if he were ever diagnosed with an illness that might be related to diet. He worked all that morning in his study on the day of the storm, as the temperature outside dipped. It was the coldest June ever recorded, not just in the Commonwealth but all up and down the Atlantic Coast, as far west as Pennsylvania. There were no birds that year, for their eggs had frozen in their shells. Foxes and wolves had come down from the mountains, searching for food, drawing ever nearer to town. The eels in the river were sleepy because of the frigid water and were therefore easy to catch. Since many in town made their living from fashioning eelskin wallets and belts and shoes, and were employed at the Starrs’ leatherworks, there was a mob of fishermen down on the banks. People wore high boots and gloves as they rushed into the brackish water with their nets and hooks. It was a sea of eel flesh, the water roiling. Black thunderhead clouds were moving in from the west, a sign of worse weather to come.

No one realized Amy Starr was missing until it began to snow. Rebecca thought the drifting white drops fluttering into the yard were blossoms from the apple trees, then she remembered that the leaves on the fruit trees had been stunted from the spring drought. Apple blossoms had never formed. The little
girl in question was six years old, a quiet, well-behaved child. She was the last to follow the birth of her brothers and sisters: Henry was ten; Olive, twelve; William, thirteen; and the eldest was sixteen-year-old Mary. By dinnertime the sky was black as coal. The falling snow was gaining muster, nearly six inches on the ground already when Amy’s absence became known. She didn’t show up at the table for dinner, even though she was usually the first to scramble onto her chair, her folded napkin neatly placed in her lap. No one could remember seeing her all day. Had she been at lunch? Had she been at play?

Rebecca rose from the table and looked through the rooms, growing increasingly worried. She called and called, but there was no reply. When she reached Ernest’s study, up on the third floor, her neck was flushed even though she was shivering. It had gotten progressively colder as she’d gone from room to room, and she took that as a bad sign. The hired woman, Sonia, had read her fortune that morning, using a pack of cards she kept tied up with a silk scarf. They had sat in the kitchen engrossed in the future while they were supposed to be paying attention to the preserved pears simmering in the kettle. Sonia had laid out her mistress’s fortune on the pine trestle table. One card was for love, another for luck. Sonia had put down a third card, then had quickly snatched it up again. “That one’s a mistake,” she said. But Rebecca had seen it. The card was death.