Helen Phillips - Some Possible Solutions

* * *

The ripe strawberrieswere clustered among the unripe ones, so each plant required some effort, to harvest the reds without disrupting the greens. For the first row it was not so unpleasant. There was the novelty of kneeling on the damp dirt in the rising sun, which cast light more yellow than gray, and the satisfaction of a huge tin pail beginning to fill with fantastic redness. Even our potato-sack garments held a certain charm. I didn’t mind moving down the row on my knees beside my sister, smelling the smell of overripe strawberries, a smell not unfamiliar to us, for we’d had strawberry jam in our day.

Not to mention the eating. We didn’t know if it was permitted, but we chose not to ask the thin man, who had awoken us by throwing a rooster into the bunkhouse where there were thirty-nine empty beds and one occupied, by me and Roo, since we always shared. Though the cabin had looked small at first, actually it was a long, low building, and we’d selected a bottom bunk at the end farthest from the door. The rooster marched all the way down the room to us and made his noise right in our ears. When we got out of bed the rooster strutted us over to these potato-sack garments hanging from a pair of hooks on the wall. We pulled off the heavy wool skirts and stiff oxford shirts we’d slept in and pulled on these strange tunics, our torsos goose-bumpy in the dawn. We emerged from the cabin feeling somewhat lighter than we’d felt. The thin man was standing outside with two stacks of tin pails. He smiled at us, revealing sharp, bloodstained teeth, and we almost screamed. He said: “Good morning, Rose and Roo.” How dare he know our names. He said it was time to harvest the strawberries. We looked at him blankly. “Harvest” was not a command we’d ever been given. He smiled again — those bloody teeth — and said: “You are correct to be surprised that strawberries are still in season. For a long time I have worked to develop a strain of strawberry plant that produces thrice over the course of the year: May, July, and September.” This meant nothing to us and we didn’t care, but he seemed proud to have taught us something. He grabbed all the tin pails; it was mildly impressive that such a small, thin man could manage such an awkward load. “Follow me,” he said.

So here we were, my sister and I, in the strawberry field, in the crispness of morning, twenty pails to fill and explicit orders about red versus green, more fields spreading out black and green toward groves of trees planted not by a mastermind of city parks but instead just growing that way, their orange and pink leaves fluttering in what we now knew to call wind, wind coming off the stream between the fields, and in the distance the rooster a black-and-white dot clawing at the mud amid the tilting wooden structures of the farmyard, and the thin man heading toward the stream with a large knife in the shape of a half-moon. In any case, hungry and not in possession of instructions to the contrary, Roo and I ate strawberries, splendid, and it was then we realized that the thin man’s teeth had been stained not by blood but rather by strawberries.

It came swift and sudden up the row, moving fast along the cool dirt, a snake three feet long and as large around the middle as Roo’s arm, greenish scales glimmering poisonously. A scattering of strawberries, an overturned pail, we ran, not looking back, crushing strawberries, leaping over rows, down toward the stream where the thin man strolled with his murderous knife, we landed in the thin man’s arms, pressed ourselves into his chest so hard that if he’d not possessed his uncanny sturdiness surely we’d have knocked him to the ground. But as it was he held us and smiled upon us with red teeth. He murmured things, I forgot to mention the snakes, my apologies, Roo, my apologies, Rose, they’re harmless, overgrown garter snakes, a by-product of the experimental strawberry plants, don’t worry, they’re everywhere, you’ll get used to them, all the while holding the half-moon knife in his left hand. I backed out of his embrace a few seconds before Roo; he touched her hair. When I turned and looked back at the strawberry field, I saw that it was alive with snakes. The whole field undulated with green bodies slithering among red strawberries.

We returned to the strawberry field, our stomachs taut with cold water from the stream. We picked strawberries, filled pails. I attributed my stomachache to the snakes that kept sliding by; only much later would I attribute it to the sight of the thin man stroking my sister’s hair extensions. Late in the day, when almost all the pails were full, Roo reached out to touch a snake as it passed. She looked at me, grinned and giggled. My nausea swelled and overflowed. I vomited red water onto a strawberry plant.

* * *

My sister andthe thin man put me to bed in the bunkhouse. They brought porridge. It was creamy and honeyed, but there was an aftertaste of salt that dried out my mouth and my gut.

* * *

My sister didn’tsleep with me that night or the next because I was ill; and then, on the third night, when I was better, she still didn’t sleep with me. She climbed up the ladder to the bunk above me.

“Roo. What are you doing.”

“Going to sleep.”

“I’m better now.”

“Good.”

“Come down!” Ever obedient, she came down. “Sleep here!”

“The mattress is so narrow.”

“We always sleep in the same bed.”

Roo shrugged and gestured at the abandoned bunkroom, the thirty-nine empty beds, as though to say, We’ve only slept together all these years because there was no alternative , before mounting the ladder once more.

* * *

Eventually our hairextensions grew out. The curls began to slide off our dull brownish hair, and soon became so loose we could remove them with the merest tug. These sheddings of synthetic hair got mixed up and mired in the muck of the barnyard, glimmering auburn amid chicken shit.

The thin man said to us, “You have nice hair.” We gazed with some longing at our lost curls, sinking in the mud. “I mean the hair on your heads,” he said. There were no mirrors on the farm, but I could see Roo’s soft straight brown hair fluttering above her eyebrows and feathering at the base of her neck, so I knew my hair was doing the same. The thin man did not compliment us except that once. It was strange to go so long without compliments from men. It was kind of nice and then sometimes not.

In the hut where he slept and where we all ate, the thin man brought out cards after the dinner porridge — playing cards, like those we’d seen a million times at the place, but now we got to handle them and examine them up close. The colorful, regal characters. There were games he taught us, and dried beans for betting. Yet, oddly, I tired long before Roo did — we always used to yawn at the same time, Roo and I — and though I tried hard to fight it so Roo wouldn’t be left alone with the thin man, still I’d retire to the bunkhouse early. At night the wind blew tremendously. It kept me up. Then I’d climb the ladder to Roo’s bunk but sometimes she wasn’t there. I’d pretend she was, putting the pillow just so to imitate the shape of her and clinging to it. I’d get so crazy and scared, like I was a tiny crumb of nothing cowering in the roaring universe. In the morning I’d wake to find Roo in my bunk and me in hers.

“Did you hear that wind?” I said.

“I love it so much,” my sister said.

At times I had feelings toward Roo that were unfamiliar to me, and for which I knew no good words, but they were not pleasant.

The thin man played banjo, peculiar songs from faraway, and one night when he pulled the banjo out after dinner, Roo sang along and knew every word of every song.