The Secrets of Blueberries, Brothers, Moose & Me

by Sara Nickerson

  Shauna glanced down at me, slumped in the weeds: grubby little sister girl. I knew how I looked to them.

  She called out, “Tell us a joke, Smith Brothers. Maybe if you’re funny enough I’ll tell you which row we’re on.” Then she whispered to me, “Don’t worry. I won’t let them come over.” And for a moment, I was grateful.

  The voice I recognized as Smith One yelled, “Okay. Hey, everybody! I just finished reading a great book called Fifteen Yards to the Outhouse. It’s written by I. P. Freely.” Patrick laughed.

  I said, “I don’t get it.”

  “Shhh,” Shauna said. “Keep listening.”

  Another voice, Smith Two, shouted back, “Oh, yeah. The sequel is good. It’s called, Will He Make It? by Betty Won’t.”

  “Get it?” Patrick said. “I PEE freely.”

  Shauna laughed and said, “Bet—he—won’t. Get it, Melissa? It’s a play on words.”

  It took me a moment but I finally got the joke. Will he make it to the outhouse? Bet he won’t. I started to laugh, too.

  Shauna crouched down. She smiled at me through the bottom of the bushes. “You’re actually laughing. I thought there was something wrong with your larynx.”

  “So?” I said. I didn’t want to ask her what a larynx was.

  “So. The middle one, Smith Two, is super cute. Probably your age. Do you want to meet him?”

  “Of course not. Why would I?”

  “Because we’re people, silly girl. People need other people. Even monkeys do. They’ve done experiments. It’s so incredibly sad, the monkeys who are all alone. They start to eat their own hands.”

  “Those are raccoons that get caught in traps,” I said. “And I do have people. I have my own people. And, if you’ve forgotten, we’re out here to do a job. Right, Patrick?” I waited, hoping Patrick would say something, stick up for me, but he was silent.

  Shauna shook her head. “Are you kidding? This is our camp. Camp Blueberry. Moose G’s Blueberry Camp for Troubled Teens—” she stopped and then added, “Preteens, too.”

  “Oh, goody,” I said. “Where are the canoes? Where’s the campfire?” Even to my own ears I sounded like a crabby old lady.

  “You’d be surprised at the fun we can have out here.”

  “Like what? What’s so fun?” I got a whiff of green apple shampoo and couldn’t help it—I breathed in deeply.

  Shauna bit her bottom lip, as though that would be enough to keep the words from spilling from her mouth. I saw her glance back, over her shoulder. Were she and Patrick sharing some kind of secret? Were their eyebrows tapping out some sort of Morse code message?

  “You know the hedge?” she said finally.

  “Uh, yeah. I’m not blind.” I thought about the warning from the first day: Stay on this side of the hedge.

  “It was planted because of the blood feud.”

  The two words together made me feel queasy. “I know the brothers don’t get along,” I said. “I know all that already. Bev told my mom on the first day.”

  “But do you want to hear more?” Shauna asked. “About Moose? And his brother, Lyle? About the giant hedge?”

  “No,” I said. But I did. And she kept talking anyway.

  “There’s a reason the fields were divided. My mom told me. She said the brothers had this huge fight, years ago. The whole town heard about it.”

  “Was there blood?” I couldn’t help it. I had to know.

  Shauna laughed. “Blood feud just means the fight is between people in the same family. You know. They have the same blood.”

  “I know that,” I said, relieved about the blood, but angry with myself for giving in to her story, even with an important question.

  “So we’re exploring,” she went on. “We want to find out what the fight was all about. We’re searching every inch of this place.”

  I thought about Moose, about the one time I’d seen him jumping out of his shiny orange truck. “I’m going in,” I said. And then, because I couldn’t help myself I added, “Before I vomit.”

  Hot leaves slapped against my face as I marched to the front of the row. Even with the temperature so high the air had shiny waves, Al held his red plastic thermos-top cup filled with steaming coffee.

  “Always a pleasure to see you, Melissa,” he said. He put down his cup and poured my berries into a flat wooden crate and smoothed them out with his giant hand. “Look—I don’t have to pick out a bad one or even remove a stem when I have a bucket from you.”

  He marked my pounds in his book. “You know, most people are in such a rush to make an extra buck that they give me all sorts of garbage. Leaves and stems and twigs. I even had a fellow fill the bottom with dirt so the bucket would weigh more.”

  I shook my head. Imagine!

  Al handed me my paper cup filled to the top with cherry Kool-Aid. I drank it quickly, because it was so good and cold and sweet. Then I wiped my mouth and blurted, “I just heard something. I heard there’s a blood feud out here. And also, I’m still wondering about the prize.”

  A muscle in Al’s neck twitched so that, even when his voice sounded normal, I knew things were not. “Hard work is its own reward,” he said. “Didn’t I mention that before?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t really know what it means.”

  “It means stop thinking about the prize.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  He picked up his coffee. “Blood feud, eh?”

  “It was just something I heard.” I wished I could take it back. The way he was looking at me made me feel like I was the one full of shenanigans. And I knew I should stop, before I made things worse, but my mouth wouldn’t listen to my brain’s good shut up, Missy, advice.

  “So I was just wondering, is there one for real? And if so, why would there be one in the first place? And what is it exactly?”

  Al handed me another Kool-Aid and I wondered if he’d forgotten the first. I drank it quickly, before he could remember and take it back. He bent down to look me in the eye. “Who is saying it? Who is so full of information?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Nobody. Just voices.”

  “Remember this, Melissa.” Al wagged his sausage finger in a wise-old-man way. “People like to tell stories. It’s wired into the brain of the human animal, and is both a good thing and a bad thing. I believe I gave you a piece of advice your first day here. Do you remember it?”

  “Pick clean, stay on our own row, don’t get dehydrated—”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

  “What?”

  “Do you remember me saying that?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m telling you the truth here. It’s the kind of advice that will last you your whole lifetime. And probably the most valuable thing I can offer you.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I thought he was done, but as I was grabbing my empty bucket, he cleared his throat and I knew he had more to say, like my mom always does when she gets riled up about something. This time his voice was different, like what he was saying was extra real. And he said my name, too. It made me stop.

  “I don’t usually talk about this, Melissa,” he said, “but you are a kid worthy of trust. So here it is: We have two brothers on either side of this giant hedge here. Two brothers who divided their father’s field. They cut it right down the middle. Took a big, strong farm and weakened it. If you want to call that a blood feud, so be it.” He raised his giant hands helplessly. “And I’m not saying another thing about another thing.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thank you, Al.”

  My head was spinning when I got back to my row. As soon as my fingers fell into their picking rhythm, though, I forgot some of that confusing talk. My head got back to normal and it was just me and the berries.

  They were my own reward.

  CHA
PTER 17

  HERE’S SOMETHING ELSE I’VE LEARNED FROM MOM’S old cowboy movies: When the bolt of lightning strikes, the bad guy is coming into town. When the sky rumbles and the horses flare their giant horse nostrils, get ready—big change is on the way. That next Monday, when I woke to gray skies and a chilly wind, I didn’t think about the lightning bolts in a cowboy movie. If I would have, I might have been prepared.

  The weekend at Dad’s had been mostly full of them doing wedding stuff, like sampling different pieces of white cake and looking at paper samples for invitations and moving boulders around in the backyard. I still didn’t know how I was going to ruin the wedding. I needed my two best friends to help me come up with ideas, but every time I started writing a letter to them, it came out sounding like a weird TV version of a stupid fairy tale and I crumpled it up.

  It didn’t help that I’d gotten my first letter from them. The blue-lined pieces of paper could barely contain all their stories of canoe rides, backflips off the diving board, bow-and-arrow practice at the archery range, midnight hikes, a dead rattlesnake, campfires with skits and s’mores, and this one boy who was so cute, they’d practically forgotten about BM (“But don’t forget to write in the book, if you see him!”).

  I was happy for my friends. I guess I was. I was supposed to be. But the truth was, maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I felt the same way about them as I felt about Patrick.

  Patrick had gone to the mall that weekend, to spend some of his blueberry money on a new swimsuit for going to the lake. The lake was where Shauna said he could find her when she wasn’t in the blueberry field. When he came back from the mall with his new suit, he locked himself in the bathroom for an hour. And he never ended up going to the lake, after all.

  So on Monday, bundled up in the backseat with Claude, I stared out the window at the horses with their heads hanging low in their chill, damp fields and said, “Too bad you spent all your money on that fancy swimsuit you won’t even use.”

  Mom squinted up at the sky. “It might clear up today. If it doesn’t, it will soon. You’ll get to the lake, Patrick.”

  Patrick didn’t even look at me.

  • • •

  When we got to the field, I kissed my baby brother good-bye and waved to him until the car was out of sight. By then, Patrick was already halfway down the tire-track road. I ran to catch up, grateful for the warmth the exercise gave me.

  “Everything seems so strange,” I said to Patrick. “The bushes, the sounds. It even smells different today. Like it’s a different part of the world.” I glanced over at the dark towering hedge and couldn’t help it—I shivered.

  Al had on a yellow raincoat and his hands were squeezed into thick wool gloves, the kind with the tips cut off, so the tops of his fingers poked through like pale, fat worms. “Looks like rain today,” he said, handing us our buckets. “Let’s hope you can get something picked before it gets serious.”

  I said, “What happens when it gets serious?”

  “You go up to the office. Bev will call your ride. Can’t pick in the rain, the berries get too mushy. I’ll put you on forty-seven today. Lucky forty-seven.” And he winked.

  Out in our row, the weight of the sky gave me a completely new feeling—it was like being in the middle of an ocean when the waves turned rough. No one was talking or yelling out jokes. I wondered if we were the only two out there. “Isn’t it strange, Patrick?” I caught a glimpse of him through gaps in the bushes.

  “What?”

  “The feeling all around us. How gray the sky is. How the air is so heavy it almost sounds heavy, even though there’s no sound at all.”

  “The best berries are farther in,” Patrick said, skipping over the first bushes as quickly as he’d skipped over my words. “Let’s try and get a big bucket filled before the rain starts. Like your old guy said.” I heard the bushes shake and rustle as he barreled through the row.

  “He’s not my old guy!” But I understood why Patrick wanted to move ahead. Part of it had to do with that saying you hear: The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. You would be standing in front of a bush and your eyes would wander, and it truly seemed that the bushes farther down the row were loaded with more berries than you’d ever seen. So you step down a bush or two and pick happily for a moment, but then your eyes would wander and the same thing would happen, all over again.

  Then there was another part to it, though. Something you would only know if you’d spent any time in a blueberry field. The truth was some bushes really were better than others. One bush might have a scattering of tiny, hard berries, while the bush right next to it would be loaded with enormous ripe clumps—berries that practically jumped into your bucket on their own. They were like people that way: pretty much the same but somehow completely different.

  “Patrick,” I called, trying to get the words out before I had completely formed the thought. “Patrick?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m starting to see bushes in a different way. I can’t really explain it. They’re living, though. They are alive, Patrick. Just like we are alive. And I really think they want to talk to me.”

  The sky rumbled and I thought I heard a giggle.

  “Patrick?” I said, and I heard it again. It was a giggle.

  I unhooked my little bucket and pushed through to Patrick’s side of the row. I saw their feet before I saw the rest of them, standing just as close as two pairs of feet could possibly stand.

  Patrick said, “We know you’re there.”

  Shauna was wearing a clear plastic raincoat over a bright orange bikini top. She said, “I agree with you, Melissa. I think all living things can communicate. That’s why I don’t eat certain vegetables.”

  “Right,” I said. “That’s stupid.” And I pushed back through to my own side and tried to clear my mind of everything but the berries.

  It must have worked, because when those first fat raindrops did fall, I was surprised. I looked up to judge the time, but without the sun, I couldn’t tell. And I had no idea how long I’d been out there picking. Which makes me think that another secret of blueberries is the same as the secret of anything you love: It’s easy to forget everything else.

  “Patrick!” I called. “Let’s get out of here.”

  But he didn’t answer.

  “Patrick?” I called again.

  Ducking my head, I pushed through the row, stopping every few feet to listen for normal sounds of the field—a bucket clanging or a fuzzy radio.

  There was nothing.

  Nothing but the sound of rain bouncing off the leaves, so new and strange that my blueberry field didn’t even feel like the same place anymore.

  I didn’t know which way to go. Should I walk the entire length of the row to make absolutely sure my brother wasn’t there? Or should I give in to the knowing feeling that he was gone and head back to the weigh station?

  I took another step down the row. And another. I called his name. And then I stopped and listened again, but all I heard was rain, pattering against the leaves.

  I started to run. Branches smacked at my body, soaking me all the way to my skin. My little bucket bounced hard against my thigh, sending berries flying in every direction, but still, I didn’t stop.

  “Patrick!” I called again, even though I knew for certain. I’d made it all the way to the end of the row and he was gone.

  Everyone was gone.

  I ran all the way to the weigh station, where I found Al, wrapped in his yellow rain slicker. Even with his big sausage fingers and old man’s nose, he looked as comforting to me right then as my own mother.

  “I was just about to send the search-and-rescue in after you, Melissa,” he said. “Your brother said you were right behind him but that was thirty minutes ago.” He pried the wire handle of my bucket from my numb fingers and set it on the scale.

  My clothes w
ere plastered to my body. Wet hair stuck to my face. “Where is he?”

  “Well, he weighed his berries, grabbed his lunch, and headed up to the office with the others.”

  I nodded. It all sounded so normal. But I hadn’t been right behind him. He would have had to sneak past me, or circle around me on another row. He would have had to work hard to give me the slip like that.

  Al said, “You’d better scoot—I’m sure your mother will be driving up any minute, if she’s not there already.” He handed me the slip of paper with the number of pounds I’d picked, and also my lunch sack. “I’ll see you when the sky dries out.”

  I couldn’t speak. I turned and walked back up the tire-track road, which was now a mess of thick, dark mud. The parking lot was even worse: slick gravel and wide puddles, soggy paper lunch bags and drenched kids climbing into minivans. When I didn’t see my brother or our car, I went to the office and stood shivering at the window. I cleared my throat and coughed and even faked a sneeze until Bev finally appeared.

  “Hon! Look at you! Soaked to the skin! Your teeth are actually chattering, just like the young ladies in my books. They always manage to get locked out during a rainstorm, too.”

  I handed over my soggy scrap of paper and glanced back across the drive. “Have you seen my brother?”

  “Sure. He was here with his buddies.” She slid a few bills my way, and some change. I scooped it up without looking. I still didn’t see Patrick.

  Bev watched me for a moment and then stuck her head out the window to help me search. “There he is, hon. Right over there.”

  I followed her pointing finger to the corner of the lot, just in time to see Shauna opening the door to a silver minivan. Her orange bikini top showed through the clear plastic raincoat, which had started to fog up from the inside.