Blueberry hill
Byrne, Katharine
THE LAST WORD BLUEBERRY HILL Katharine Byrne We did not own a car, but I traveled each summer by Greyhound bus from our drab two-flat on the far south side of Chicago to Uncle Harry's farm...
...Oh, Mrs...
...Any young 'uns around here want to make a little money...
...And wore the recurring brown oxfords that autumn and winter...
...They'll take a good shine," my father would say...
...Commonweal 31 August 17, 2001...
...I was crying my way through four volumes of Charles Dickens...
...As I scraped my gym shoes against the floor to keep the swing moving, I thought about the beautiful shoes I had seen in a shop in Benton Harbor...
...Cooper," she trilled, "we couldn't take money...
...We would love to help you," she assured him without even asking me...
...My fellow workers were three skinny farm boys my own age...
...Cooper, owner of the next farm and father of Geraldine's Malcolm, stuck his head inside the screen door...
...He sent me the ticket...
...Then what...
...Geraldine greeted the prospect of manual labor with a musical laugh...
...But in my years of writing those "What I Did Last Summer" compositions, I had learned that nobody wants to hear about your helping Aunt Bessie feed the thrashers, or how you selected skeins of embroidery thread to outline "mother" on a guest towel...
...Cooper, who would add a tally to my name on a sheet of lined paper...
...One of the boys, a shrimpy little kid, was closer to the ground and faster than the rest of us...
...At the end of the afternoon, as I approached the old kitchen table where Mrs...
...Who cares, I was thinking when a Studebaker half truck bounced down the washboard road and stopped in a cloud of dust near the house...
...We need pickers for the blueberries, early tomorrow...
...Nor did making a little money appeal to her...
...But I was better than the other two...
...They accumulate slowly, a few at a time plopping into an aluminum bucket...
...She was gracious, however, to Mr...
...That's what neighbors are for...
...And gave me an extra quarter for being, as she said, "the best litttle blueberry picker in Berrien County...
...Thus did I emerge from this episode once more the star of the show, if only on paper...
...The day was a blur of sun and backache and the small pleasure of bringing one and then another and another full bucket to Mrs...
...And Geraldine stood there abashed and silent as Mrs...
...We've had fun helping you...
...I accepted Geraldine's decision without protest and walked home ahead of her, tears smearing my crooked goldwire glasses...
...On hot August afternoons, I would sit on the porch with my cousin Geraldine, but we were miles apart, for she was queen of the local teen scene, four years older than I, beautiful and accomplished...
...But there were other matters on my mind...
...I bought the beautiful shoes and I am saving them for next Easter...
...When school opened I would have a pair of sturdy brown oxfords, much like those I had last year and the year before that...
...Did Aunt Bessie hear about Geraldine's generosity at my expense and buy me the beautiful shoes...
...In the unlikely event that I would be invited to a real party, I wanted to own these party shoes, a desire unworthy of The Old Curiosity Shop's Little Nell, but I harbored it nonetheless, although the possibility of my owning them was remote...
...In the story I wrote for Sister Mary Charles Borromeo that year, and read aloud to the class, I turned to my cousin with the appropriate retort of an outraged child, and reminded her, "You're not in charge of me, Geraldine...
...So it was that in recounting the events of my day in the blueberry patch, travail turned to triumph...
...Since not much happened there, when the invariable "What I Did on My Vacation" assignment was announced each September, I had to invent and augment appropriate incidents...
...Blueberries are small...
...he wanted to know...
...Cooper insist on paying me...
...THE LAST WORD BLUEBERRY HILL Katharine Byrne We did not own a car, but I traveled each summer by Greyhound bus from our drab two-flat on the far south side of Chicago to Uncle Harry's farm in Michigan...
...That's why one year I had invented a runaway pony cart, and the next year an encounter with an unfriendly bulldog...
...Did Mrs...
...At 7:30 the next day we were off to work, on a day Aunt Bessie assured us was "going to be a scorcher...
...Soft honey-colored leather pumps with rounded toes, Cuban heels, and brown grosgrain ribbon bows...
...While waiting for her boyfriend Malcolm, home from Hillanvale College in the next county, she would buff her perfect fingernails and brush her long blond hair...
...Katharine Byrne writes from Chicago...
...Cooper...
...Cooper counted out the precious wages into my hand...
...My hands were soon bloody from squashed fruit as I moved slowly up and down rows of low bushes, the sun blistering the back of my neck...
...Cooper sat with her list and her purse, Geraldine, who had gone for a walk with Malcolm, reappeared...
...Most of the time Geraldine sat under a pear tree laughing at Malcolm's dumb jokes...
...In eighth grade, my tale about involuntary stoop labor in a neighbor's blueberry patch had its own imagined details...
...In each of these stories I behaved heroically...
Vol. 128 • August 2001 • No. 14
