The Berry Patch

by WALLACE STEGNER

1

THAT day the sun came down in a vertical fall of heat, but the wind came under it, flat out of the gap beyond Mansfield, and cooled a sweating forehead as fast as the sun could heat it. In the washed ruts of the trail there were no tracks.

“Lord,” Perley Hill said. “It’s a day for seeing things, right enough.”

He jerked off the black tie and unbuttoned his shirt, rolled up his sleeves and set his right arm gingerly on the hot door, and as Alma steered the Plymouth up the long slope of Stannard he looked back across the valley to where the asbestos mine on Belvidere blew up its perpetual white plume, and on down south across the hills folding back in layers of blue to Mansfield and Elmore and the shark-fin spine of Camel’s Hump. Just across the valley the lake was like a mirror leaned on edge against the hills, with the white houses of the village propped against its lower edge to keep it from sliding down into the river valley.

“It’s pretty on a clear day,” Alma said, without looking.

Perley continued to look down. “Things show up,” he said. “There’s Donald Swain’s place.”

“’Twon’t be his much longer,” Alma said.

Perley glanced at her. She was watching the road with rigid concentration. “Having trouble?” he said.

“I thought I told you. He’s in hospital in St. Johnsbury. Stomach trouble or something. With Henry and George in the navy, Allen can’t run it alone. Donald’s had him put it up for sale.”

“I guess you did tell me,” he said. “I forgot.”

“Already sold half his cows,” Alma said.

They passed an abandoned farm, with a long meadow that flowed downhill between tight walls of spruce. “Looks like a feller could’ve made that pay,” Perley said. “How long’s it been since Gardner left here?”

“I remember coming up here to pick apples when I was about fifteen,” Alma said. “Must be tentwelve years since anybody’s worked this place.”

Perley drummed on the door, grinning a little to himself at the way Alma never took her eyes off the road when she talked. She faced it as if it were a touchy bull-critter. “Kind of proud of yourself since you learned to drive, ain’t you?” he said. “Be putting Sam Boyce out of business, taxiing people around.”

She look her foot off the accelerator. “Why, you can drive,” she said. “I didn’t mean —”

“Go ahead,” Perley said. “Any OPA agents around, you can do the explaining about the pleasure driving.”

“’Tisn’t pleasure driving,” Alma said. “Berrying’s all right to do.”

Perley watched the roadside, the chokecherry bushes getting heavy with green clusters already, the daisies and paintbrush just going out;, but still lush in the shaded places, the firewood and green goldenrod flowing back into every little bay in the brush.

Just as Alma shifted and crawled out onto a level before an abandoned schoolhouse, a partridge swarmed out of a beech, and Perley bent to look upward. “See them two little ones hugging the branch?” he said. “They’d sit there and never move till you knocked them off with a stick.”

Alma pulled off the road into the long grass. An old skid road wormed up the hill through heavy timber, and the air was rich with the faint, warm, moist smell of woods after rain. Perley stretched till his muscles cracked, yawned, stepped out to look across the broken stone wall that disappeared into deep brush.

“Makes a feller just want to lay down in the cool,” he said. “If I lay down will you braid my hair full of daisies?”

The berry pails in her hands, Alma looked at him seriously. “Well, if you’d rather just lay down,” she said. “We don’t have to —

“I guess I can stay up a mite longer,” Perley said.

“ But if you’d rather,” she said, and looked at him as if she didn’t quite know what he’d like to do, but was willing to agree to anything he said. She’d been that way ever since he came home. If he yawned, she wondered if he didn’t want to go to bed. If he sat down, she brought a pillow or a magazine as if he might be going to stay there all day.

He reached in and got the big granite kettle and set it over her head like a helmet, and then fended her off with one hand while he got t he blanket, the lunch box, the Mason jar of water. “Think the army had wrapped me up in cellophane too pretty to touch,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “I just wanted to be sure.” She looked at his face and added, “You big lummox.”

He nested the pails, hooked his arm through the basket, slung the blanket across his shoulder, picked up the water jar. “If I just had me a wife would do for me,” he said, “ I’d lay down and get my strength back. With the wife I got, I s’pose I got to work.”

“Here,” Alma said mildly. “Give me some of them things. You’ll get so toggled up I’ll have to cut you out with the pliers.”

2

ALL the way up the skid road under the deep shade their feet made trails in the wet grass. Perley jerked his head at them. “Nobody been in since yesterday anyway,” he said.

“Wasn’t any tracks on the road.”

“Thought somebody might’ve walked,” Perley said. “Haven’t, though.”

“ Be nice if we had the patch all to our lonesomes,” she said.

They came out of the woods into a meadow. A house that had once stood at the edge was a ruined foundation overgrown with fireweed, and the hurricane of 1938 had scooped a path two hundred yards long and fifty wide out of the maples behind. Root tables lay up on edge, trunks were crisscrossed, flat, leaning, dead and half-dead. Perley went over and looked into the tangle. “Plenty raspberries,” he said.

“I’ve got my face fixed for blueberries,’ Alma said. “We can get some of those too, though. They’re about gone down below.”

Perley was already inspecting the ruined cellar. “Ha!” he said. “Gooseberries, too. Amessof’em.”

“It’s blueberries I’m interested in,” she said.

“Well, I’ll find you some blueberries then.” He tightroped the foundation and jumped clear of the gooseberry bushes. Fifty feet down the meadow he went into a point with lifted foot, the pails dangling in one hand. “Hey!” he said. “Hey!”

When she got to his side he was standing among knee-high bushes, and all down the falling meadow, which opened on the west into a clear view of the valley, the village, the lake, the hills beyond hills and the final peaks, the dwarf bushes were so laden that the berries gleamed through the covering leaves like clusters of tiny flowers.

“Thunderation,” Perley said. “I never saw a patch like that in fifteen years.”

Before she could say anything he had stripped off the army shirt and the white undershirt and hung them on a bush, and was raking the berries into a pail with his spread fingers.

By the time two buckets were full the wind had shifted so that the trees cut it off, and it was hot in the meadow. They went back into the shade by the old foundation and ate lunch and drank from the spring. Then they lay down on the blanket and looked up at the sky. The wind came in whiffs along the edge of the blowdown, and the sweet smell of the raspberry patch drifted across them. Away down along the view that this house had had once, the lake looked more than ever like a mirror tipped against the hills. Below the village Donald Swain’s white house and round red barn were strung on a white thread of road.

Perley rolled over on his side and looked at his wife. “I guess I never asked you,” he said, “how you were getting along.”

“I get along all right.”

“You don’t want me to sell any cows?”

“You know you wouldn’t want to do that. You were just getting the herd built up.”

“A herd’s no good if you can’t get help.”

“People are good about helping,” she said.

“What’ll you do when there aren’t any more people around? Seems like half the place has gone down country or into the army already.”

“It’s been going since the Civil War,” Alma said, “ and still there always seems to be somebody around to neighbor with.”

He rolled onto his back again and plucked a spear of grass. “We should be haying,” he said, “right now.”

“Sunday,” she said.

“Sunday or no Sunday. There’s still those two top meadows. Those city kids you got can’t get all that hay in.”

“All they need is somebody to keep ‘em from raring back in the breeching,” Alma said. “I’ll be behind with a pitchfork if I have to.”

“I can see you.”

She did not stir from her comfortable sprawl, but her voice went up crisply. “You thought we ought to sell when you got called up,” she said. “Well, you’ve been gone going on a year, and hasn’t anything gone wrong, has there? Got seven new calves, an’t you? Milk checks have got bigger, an’t they? Learned to drive the tractor and the car, didn’t I? Got ten run of wood coming from DeSerres for the loan of the team, an’t we, and saved the price of feed all that time last winter.”

“Allen Swain can’t make it go,” Perley said.

“His farm don’t lay as good as ours, and he’s got a mortgage,” she said. “Mortgage,” the way she said it, sounded like an incurable disease. She half rose on her elbow to look at him. “And I an’t Allen Swain, either.”

“So you want to be a farmer.”

“I am,” she said.

Perley picked another stem of grass and grinned up into the tops of the maples. They had been growing densely before the hurricane, and the going down of trees on every side had left them standing tall and spindly. The wind went through their leaves high up, a good stiff wind that bent and threshed their tops, but only a creeping breath disturbed the grass below. It was like lying deep down in a soft, warm, sweet-smelling nest.

“Laying here, you wouldn’t think anything could ever touch you,” he said. “Wind could blow up there like all get-out, and you’d never feel it.” Alma’s hand fell across his chest, and he captured it. “ Unless you stuck your head out,” he said

3

FOR a while he lay feeling the pulse in her wrist. “Smell them raspberries?” he said once, and squirmed his shoulders more comfortable against the ground. “There isn’t anything smells sweeter, even flowers.” Alma said nothing.

“Funny about a berry patch,” he said. “Nobody ever plowed it, or planted it, or cultivated it, or fertilized it, or limed it, but there it is. You couldn’t grub it out if you tried. More you plow it up, the more berries there is next year. Burn it over, it’s up again before anything else. Blow everything down, that’s just what it likes.”

He filled his lungs with the ripe berry odor and let the breath bubble out between his lips. “Don’t seem as if you’d ever have to move,” he said. “Just lay here and reach up and pick a mouthful and then lay some more and let the wind blow over way up there and you never even feel it.”

“ ft’s nice,” Alma said. “ I didn’t hardly think the blueberries would be ripe yet, it’s been so rainy.”

“Makes you think the world’s all right,” Perley said, “the way they come along every year, rain or shine.”

Alma stirred. “We better get busy,” she said. “Some gooseberries, too, if you’d like some.”

“Might use a pie,” he said. He sat up and stretched for the pails. There were only the granite kettle and the two-quart milk pail left. “You lay still,” he said. “I’ll get some.”

“’Tisn’t as if I needed a rest,” she said. “Here I’ve been just, having fun all day.”

“Well, take the kettle then. It’s easier to pick into.” He picked up the milk pail.

“Perley,” Alma said.

“Uh?”

“This is what you want to do, isn’t it? I mean, you wouldn’t rather go see somebody?”

He watched her steadily. “Why?”

“Well, it’s only two more days. I just—”

“I already saw everybody I want to see,” he said. “I was saving the last couple days.”

“Well, all right,” she said, and went into the blowdown with the kettle.

He picked very fast, wanting to surprise her with how many he had, and when after a half hour he worked back toward the side where she was picking he had the pail filled and overflowing, mounded an inch above the brim. He liked the smell of his hand when he scratched his nose free of a tickling cobweb. For a moment he stood, turning his face upward to watch the unfelt upper-air wind thresh through the tops of the maples, and then he came up softly behind Alma where she bent far in against a root table to reach a loaded vine. He bent in after her and kissed the back of her neck.

“How’re you doing?” she said, and worked her way out. Her shirt was unbuttoned halfway down, her throat was brown even in the hollow above where her collarbones joined, and her eyes sought his with that anxiety to know that he was content, that he was doing what he wanted to do, which she had shown all the time of his furlough. “I got quite a mess,” she said, and showed the berries in her pail. “How about you?”

“All I want,” Perley said. He was watching the sun dapple the brown skin of her throat as the wind bent the thin tops of the maples. “I wouldn’t want any more,” he said.