The Secrets of Blueberries, Brothers, Moose & Me

by Sara Nickerson

  Lyle said, “How’d this happen? This cut on his nose?”

  “He chased one of my pickers,” Moose said.

  “I’ll have to take him to the vet.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  Lyle squinted at me, sitting on my white bucket. “So he was all the way down the hill, huh? He chased you all the way back up here?”

  I knew exactly what he was getting at. Moose did, too. He stepped in front of me and said, “Your dog was loose on my property. He scared one of my workers. And you happen to be on my property right now, too.”

  “What’s that, big brother?”

  The way he said it made me jump. I felt Bev’s hand tighten on my shoulder and wondered how long it had been there. “I don’t feel too good, Bev,” I whispered up to her. “My stomach is kind of queasy.”

  “You just sit here and rest,” she said.

  The puppy padded over to me with his head bowed down. Lyle straightened up to a full-size man. “Come, Tippy.”

  But Tippy didn’t listen. He found my hand and nuzzled it, like a big wet apology. I wanted to laugh and cry. I couldn’t stop the shivers. “Nice puppy,” I said softly. “Nice dog. I’m sorry.”

  “How’s Helen?” Bev asked suddenly. Her voice was tight, like my mom sounded with my dad sometimes.

  “She’s fine. I know she’d want me to give you her best.”

  “Back to her,” Bev said. After a moment she added, “I miss talking with her.” I looked up to her face and saw a heavy sadness. Moose cleared his throat and so did Lyle.

  “Well then, sorry about my pup,” Lyle said curtly.

  “Okay then,” Moose answered.

  Lyle turned his back to us and whistled for his dog. “Come, Tippy. Come, boy.” We all watched Lyle cross the drive and head to the road.

  Bev sighed when he was out of sight.

  I said, “Could I maybe have some water?”

  “Sure,” she said. But she didn’t move. Not even her eyes. They still looked out, across the drive, to the giant hedge.

  Moose, back at his truck, unloaded flats of berries. He worked fast and hard, and whistled a sharp, loud tune.

  So this was the blood feud, I thought to myself. I had imagined it as some epic battle with flashing swords and suits of armor. But what I’d seen instead was the complete opposite. Something dark and silent and so dried up and cold that it made my bones hurt.

  Moose passed with his crates, and I tried again. “I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t slow down. “What are you sorry about?” As if nothing had happened.

  “You know. The dog. I was just sitting there waiting for you. I thought I heard you coming.”

  “And then it was the dog?”

  “Yes,” I said. I was piecing it back together. I had found a snakeskin. I was wearing my 3-D glasses. “Well, no. See the dog was in the middle of the field when I looked up.”

  My head was pounding. I could feel my heartbeat in my ears. “I heard a noise. The next thing I knew there was this dog running at me. I just got so scared. I was thinking about the scar on your arm. The one you showed me that day.”

  Bev still hadn’t moved from her spot next to me, watching the place where Lyle had last been. “I wonder what happened to the last Tippy?” she said, almost to herself.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He names all his dogs Tippy. The last one was brown and black. It was the name of their childhood dog.”

  “I didn’t know he was just a puppy. I thought he was going to eat me. Maybe, can I have some water, please?”

  Bev said, “Sure, hon,” but she still didn’t move.

  Moose came back to the garage, rubbing his head. “So, I’m a little confused. You said you heard footsteps? You thought it was me?”

  “I heard footsteps, yes. I thought it was you. Then I saw the dog. Standing in the field.” My throat was burning I wanted water so bad.

  Moose shook his head. “But you heard footsteps?”

  “Well, I heard something. I thought it was you. And then you weren’t there.”

  “So what you heard was the dog?”

  “Sure,” I said. But as I said it a cold shiver ran up the back of my neck. What I’d heard had made me think Moose was there. So what I’d heard sounded more like a person. Or did I just think it sounded like a person?

  The harder I tried to remember, the more I kept picturing something else: my brother’s face at the dinner table, holding up one of the berries from the Little Field; my brother’s face that morning, hearing me repeat the joke with the monkey poo. All I could see was my brother’s face. It was right there, dancing on the edge of my brain—a terrible thought that I couldn’t bear to let myself have. And there had been that flash of something near the hedge earlier, too, when I’d come in with my first load of berries. What had I seen? Had someone been hiding, waiting to follow me?

  “Moose,” I started, getting shakily to my feet. Moose was already out the door.

  “You stay here, hon,” Bev said.

  But I was running past her, out the back door and across the worn and empty yard.

  CHAPTER 37

  HE WAS STILL AS A STATUE WHEN I GOT THERE. HE WAS crouched over a small bush in the first row. My head was spinning, and my stomach felt like I might get sick. I asked, “What happened?” Even though I knew. Because even before I saw it, I felt it. The tiny bushes had been picked clean. There was not a berry left. I looked out across the field for an actual, physical sign that someone had been there, but except for the footprints, there was nothing. My full buckets were gone, too.

  “Did you see anyone, Moose?” I held my breath, waiting.

  Moose shook his head. “There were quite a few of them. They ran off when I came.” He motioned to the far side, the one that led to the big field. “Right there. They went through the hedge.”

  I stumbled across the sandy soil to the hedge, remembering the voices I’d heard there the day before. “I’m sorry,” I whispered to the bushes and the berries and the bugs and the bees. I stared at the hedge for a long time, like there was something I should do. When I finally walked back, Moose was in the same spot, still staring at his Little Field.

  “There’s a hole in the hedge,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “I’m sorry, Moose.”

  Moose reached up and pulled his green cap low over his brow. “It’s not your fault,” he said in his kind, quiet way. “Not one bit of it.”

  But I knew it was.

  “I shouldn’t have run from the dog.”

  Moose squinted at the sky and let out a soft whistle. “No permanent damage. We just lost some berries, that’s all. We’ll just keep a better eye out next year, won’t we? Might have to move the field again. We’ll see.”

  The way he said that, the way he said we made me want to cry. After all that had happened, he still trusted me. He turned his back on his Little Field of berries. His most precious Little Field. “How about we get out of this sun?”

  I followed Moose back across the meadow to the secret path. Halfway there, I stopped to pick something off the ground. My 3-D glasses. They were bent and crooked, probably trampled by running feet, but I put them in my pocket anyway.

  Back at the sorting garage Bev was waiting, frozen where we left her. When Moose nodded, she came unfrozen. She shook her head angrily. “I’m calling the police.”

  My heart stopped. “What?”

  “Theft,” she explained.

  I glanced quickly at Moose. The police! Would my brother be hauled away in a police car? Would he go to trial? Become a juvenile delinquent?

  “Wait on calling the police,” Moose said as he walked out of the garage and across the gravel drive. “I’ll be out with the picking machine.”

  “Well I am calling the police!” she shouted after h
im. Then under her breath she muttered, “Oh, Moose.”

  As Moose drove off in a cloud of smoke and dust she grabbed my arm. “You come into the office and keep me company, Melissa. With all this craziness you missed your lunch. You can eat in front of the fan.”

  Lunch? Could there really be something as normal as lunch? I said, “I’m not very hungry.” I should have told them, I thought. I should have told them I’d let it slip. I should have told them about my brother.

  I glanced down at my fingers, stained purple. I imagined a bright white plate in a small restaurant in France. Berries I’d picked, traveling all the way to France, and a table where two people would sit across from each other and speak about their lives, their childhoods, maybe make plans for the future. How unreal, I thought. To be so connected and so far apart. To our food, our families, and people all over the world. There was a dog that chased me and then licked my hand. How strange. How unreal.

  “Bev,” I said, “if you don’t mind, I’ll just wait over there.” I pointed to our spot underneath the cherry tree. “I’ll wait there until it’s time to go home.”

  When I sat on my bucket I tried to concentrate on small things in front of me, like the ants climbing over the gravel. I watched a fat black beetle, stuck on its back, wiggle its legs in the air. When I took a twig and gently flipped it over, that’s when I remembered the snakeskin. It had been with my buckets of berries!

  I had wanted that snakeskin so badly. I’d wanted to take it home and keep it, to show Claude and Patrick its amazing perfect snake shape. I put my face in my hands and squeezed my eyes tightly so that tears wouldn’t come. But that didn’t work. They slid out anyway, two hot trails down my cheeks. I’d lost too much that day. There was no holding them back.

  CHAPTER 38

  THE SUN FOUND ITS WAY THROUGH THE LEAVES ON THE cherry tree. When it touched my head in the right spot I knew it was nearly quitting time. Footsteps crunched across the gravel and I looked up to see Bev. I was long cried out by then, but I wiped my eyes again anyway.

  When Bev reached me she held out her hands. One was filled with crisp, new bills and the other with a frosty can. “Here’s your pay,” she said. “And I bet you’re thirsty.”

  When I shook my head, the world started to spin. I was desperate for a glass of water, but I didn’t feel like asking. I didn’t deserve to ask either one of them for anything.

  Bev shoved the bills into my hand and then hovered over me, like she was waiting for something more. Finally she perched on the other overturned bucket. “I need to tell you something,” she said.

  “What is it? The police?”

  “No. No police. But we’ll be closing down after today. Moose just decided. He doesn’t want any more kids out here this season. He’ll bring extra machines in earlier than we’d planned. It was about time, with this heat. Machine picking makes the most sense anyway. I don’t know what Moose was thinking, hiring kids again.”

  I cleared my throat. “Where is he?”

  “He’s still out in the field. He called to tell me the news.”

  “Will he be back before my mom picks me up?”

  “I don’t think so, hon.”

  I didn’t know if I could speak without crying. Did this mean I would never see him again? I took a deep breath. “Could you just tell him something for me, then? Could you tell him—” but I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. I tried to swallow the ache in my throat, but my mouth was too dry. Finally, I looked up at her helplessly.

  She smiled and rested her hand on my shoulder. “He knows, hon. He knows. You were a wonderful worker and a true friend.”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t get the right words out.

  After Bev walked away I pulled the 3-D glasses from my pocket. At first, I thought they’d been destroyed, but after a little bending with my hands, I saw how they could probably be fixed with tape. And when the first of the pickers came shuffling up the hill, dragging extra clothes and clouds of dust, I propped the glasses on my face.

  I watched the kids line up for their pay.

  I watched them read the sign Bev had posted.

  I felt a new anger in me rising up, ready to explode. I fixed my eyes on the tire-track road and waited for my brother. Finally, I saw him, coming up the hill with a group of kids, including Shauna in a red bikini top. I watched him laugh with them. I watched him motion with his arms. He didn’t seem nervous or shy, and I couldn’t even tell which leg had the limp. I tried to see him as if I didn’t know him—didn’t know how he looked when he cried or blew his nose or examined his face in the mirror, searching for pimples. If I weren’t his sister to know all these things, I would think he was just like everyone else. How strange.

  I saw one more thing that was strange. It was right before Mom pulled into the drive. I was on my feet, ready to march over to Patrick, ready to call him a thief and a liar. I took one wobbly step and was about to yell, “Hey!” when my eyes got all funny and full of sparkling lights. I looked up to see what Bev had described to me: little dancing boys, chasing one another across the gravel drive.

  I thought about Moose and Lyle as boys, with their game of rock, paper, scissors in the backseat of their daddy’s car. I forgot about Patrick and turned instead toward them, those bright dancing lights. I put my arms out. I took a step and then another. And that’s when my world went from spotty yellow to fuzzy gray.

  Then, as the gravel drive came rushing to meet my face, the entire world turned black: thick, silent, absolute black.

  CHAPTER 39

  LATER THEY WOULD TELL ME I HAD A CASE OF HEAT exhaustion, which is one step away from heatstroke, and that I’d collapsed face-first on the gravel drive. They would tell me that any strange dancing light things or ghost boys were simply hallucinations that came from dehydration and too much sun on the top of my head.

  As soon as we got home from the doctor, Mom whisked me to the couch. She placed an ice pack on my head, the part that wasn’t covered by bandages. She brought me water, Popsicles, and lemonade.

  “Too much sun can be a serious thing, Missy,” she explained, again and again. “It’s a good thing you didn’t get heatstroke. Or sunstroke. People die from that, you know. Every year, they die.”

  “Oh, I know,” I said, making sure Patrick could hear me. “Dog attacks, too.”

  “What?” Mom asked.

  “Dog attacks. People die from so many things, like dog attacks. And betrayal. The heartbreak of betrayal. It’s a dangerous world.”

  My mother came over and stared into my eyes. “Are you delirious again? Are you seeing things? Because if you are we’re taking you straight back to the doctor.”

  I opened my eyes. “No, Mom. I’m just tired.” And I was. I was tired all the way down to the center of my heart. “It was a hard day.”

  I looked straight at Patrick when I said it, and he spun around and stomped down the hallway. A moment later I heard the click of his bedroom door. I didn’t see him the rest of the afternoon.

  Mom let me eat my dinner on the couch, watching TV. And even though an old cowboy movie was on, she let me watch a game show. That’s what falling face-first in gravel can do for you.

  When Mom went to give Claude his bedtime bath, Patrick wandered into the living room. He stood next to the TV, his long skinny arms dangling stupidly at his sides.

  Through clenched teeth I said, “You set a dog on me.”

  “It was a puppy. I knew it wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “Then what did you expect to happen?”

  “I thought you’d just take it back to the house, like a normal person does with a stray dog. We only used the puppy because we thought it would give us more time. We wanted more time to pick the field. We also wanted it to be a message to Moose. You know, since the puppy belonged to Lyle.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “We cut a hole i
n the hedge, next to the big field. I figured out where you were after you said the monkey poo—”

  I didn’t let him finish. “How did you cut a hole? The hedge is enormous. And prickly.”

  “The Smith brothers brought a hedge clipper. We’d been cutting holes for days, looking for the Little Field. I’m really sorry about the dog, Missy. You know I am. I never wanted to scare you like that.”

  “The Little Field was mine. It was mine and you ruined it.”

  “It wasn’t yours, Missy. It wasn’t yours any more than it was mine. We were in a berry field, picking berries. That’s all.”

  “But did you even see it? Did you even see how special it was?”

  “We didn’t hurt anything, Missy.”

  “Traitor!” I yelled.

  “Do you even want to know my side of the story? There are always two sides.”

  “Monkey POO!” I yelled.

  Mom called from the bathroom, “What is going on out there?”

  “It’s a game show, Mom,” I shouted back. “One hundred thousand dollars.”

  Patrick shifted from one foot to the other. It made me happy to see him awkward and stupid and completely unlike the person he’d become in the blueberry field. “Like I said, we just picked some berries, Missy. It’s not like a big terrible crime.”

  “You stole. You could have been arrested.”

  “But Moose stole those berries from Lyle, years ago. All we did was pick some buckets and put them on his porch. It was like a dare. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “How do you know? How do you know the truth about the field?”

  “How do you?” he asked simply.

  “Shut up!” I screamed. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

  Mom called, “What is going on out there! Turn off that TV if it makes you scream like that.”