The Berry Pickers

DedicationFor my dad. Thank you for the stories.Wela’lin a’tukowin. ContentsCoverTitle PageDedicationPrologueOne: JoeTwo: NormaThree: JoeFour: NormaFive: JoeSix: NormaSeven: JoeEight: NormaNine: JoeTen: NormaEleven: JoeTwelve: NormaThirteen: JoeFourteen: NormaFifteen: RuthieSixteen: JoeSeventeen: RuthieAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyrightAbout the Publisher PrologueI SIT WITH MY BACK TO THE WALL, MY PILLOWS FLAT. MAE punched them and made them full, but that was hours ago. I’m holding a picture of Leah in my hands. In it, she is small, before I knew she existed. The sun is beginning to fade outside the window, and I am marvelling at how I’ve been shaped and moulded by women, even though I was absent from them most of my life.The pain in my legs prevents me from sitting by the fire, the one beside the tree trunk that I have long considered a friend. I’m tired of this bed, of the medications, of the loneliness that comes with sickness, knowing that the people I love, no matter how much they try, will never understand my solitude. Dying is something I have to do alone. Leah, a grown woman now, visits a couple of times a week. My sister Mae and older brother Ben care for me even when I don’t deserve it. My mother prays.“Joe?” Mae opens the door a crack, her face framed by the door on one side and wall on the other.“I’m awake.”The door opens fully, and Mae walks in. There is something joyful in her eyes. Something I haven’t seen from anyone in quite some time.“You look happy, Mae.”“It’s because I am.”I try to sit up straighter. I want to be my full self for her, to show her that whatever is making her happy, makes me happy, too.“Joe, there’s someone here to see us. And I think we might have some catching up to do.” OneJoeTHE DAY RUTHIE WENT MISSING, THE BLACKFLIES SEEMED to be especially hungry. The white folks at the store where we got our supplies said that Indians made such good berry pickers because something sour in our blood kept the blackflies away. But even then, as a boy of six, I knew that wasn’t true. Blackflies don’t discriminate. But now, lying here almost fifty years to the day and getting eaten from the inside out by a disease I can’t even see, I’m not sure what’s true and what’s not anymore. Maybe we are sour.Regardless of the taste of our blood, we still got bit. But Mom knew how to make the itching stop at night, so we could get some sleep. She peeled the bark of an alder branch and chewed it to a pulp before putting it on the bites.“Hold still, Joe. Stop squirming,” Mom said as she applied the thick paste. The alders grew all along the thin line of trees that bordered the back of the fields. Those fields stretched on forever, or so it seemed then. Mr. Ellis, the landowner, had sectioned the land with big rocks, making it easier to keep track of where we’d been and where we needed to go. But eventually, and always, you’d reach the trees again. Either the trees or Route 9, a crumbling road littered with holes the size of watermelons and as deep as the lake, a dark line of asphalt slithering its way through the fields that brought us there year after year.Even then, in 1962, there weren’t many houses along Route 9, and those that were there were already old, the grey and white paint peeling away, the porches tilted and rotting, the tall grass growing green and yellow between abandoned cars and refrigerators, their rust flaking off and flying away with a strong wind. When we arrived from Nova Scotia, midsummer, a caravan of dark-skinned workers, laughing and singing, travelling through their overgrown and rusting world, the local folks turned their backs, our presence a testament to their failure to prosper. The only time that place showed any joy at all was in the fall when the setting sun shone gold and the fields glowed under a glorious September sky.Among all that rust and decay stood Mr. Ellis’s house. It was on the corner where Route 9 met the dirt road that led to the other side of the lake, the side without Indians, where the white people swam and picnicked on Sundays, their skin blistering under the weak Maine sun. At home, years later and before I left again, I remembered that house like it was a picture from a book or a magazine that you looked at when waiting at the bus station or the doctor’s office. The tall maples hung over the driveway, and someone had planted a long, straight line of pine trees between the house and the dirt road that led to the camps, so we couldn’t peek at it, not that we didn’t try.“Ben, why do they bother having a house at all if it’s just gonna be all windows?” I asked my brother.“People need a roof over their heads. It gets cold here just like home.”“But all those windows.” I gaped.“Windows are expensive. That’s how they show the world they’re rich.”I nodded in agreement, even if I didn’t understand exactly.The whiteness of that house, painted every second summer, with the red trim and two columns framing the front door, was enough for me, who lived in a tiny three-bedroom with a leaky roof, to declare it “the mansion.” Years later, when I returned, Mr. Ellis long dead of a heart attack, I had fresh eyes and realized it was nothing more than a two-storey with a bay window.When we arrived in mid-July, that summer we lost Ruthie, the fields were thick with green leaves and tiny wild berries. We were still full of excitement, the memories of hard work and long days from years past all but forgotten. My father dropped us off with the supplies we needed for the next eight to twelve weeks, and then left again the same day. The dust followed him as he headed back to