That Wild Berries Should Grow
The Story of a Summer
Gloria Whelan
CONTENTS
The City
The Country
Greenbush
The Screen Porch
Night
Fishing
The Library
The Rat
Broken Promises
The Gully
Air Mail
Talk
The Great Lake
Meyer’s Fish House
Chickens
Grandfather
The Dummy
The Card Game
Quick Change
The Violin
Canning Day
For the First Time
Grandmother
That Wild Berries Should Grow
September Storm
Last Look
About the Author
The City
They tell me,
“The country will be good for you,”
and send me like a package
to my grandparents’ cottage.
On the highway
the car is an eraser,
friends and houses disappear.
Driving all day,
country is what’s left
when everything else
is taken away.
We live in Detroit. Even though it’s 1933 and the Depression, the city is alive with things to do. The sidewalks are crowded with people. The air has the rich smell of the buses and cars that rush by our apartment. The Packard automobile factory is just down the street. Before the Depression, when all the people lost their jobs, the factory windows flickered day and night with a wonderful blue-green light. It made you think witchery was going on inside.
There are six apartments in our building. We aren’t the only members of our family who live there. When the Depression came, all of Grandpapa’s children moved into his apartment building because they couldn’t afford to keep their own houses. Our apartment is on the first floor. My Aunt Edna and Uncle Tom live across the way from us. Aunt Fritzie and Uncle Tim live over us on the second floor, and Uncle John and Aunt Emmy live across from them.
We’re all supposed to pay rent to my grandfather, but none of us do. My uncles have lost their jobs. Only my Aunt Edna works. She is a schoolteacher. When my grandfather comes to collect the rents, all he gets is oatmeal cookies at our place, date and nut squares from Aunt Ella, store-bought cookies from Aunt Edna, and a big kiss from Aunt Fritzie. My grandfather never complains.
The good thing about having so many aunts and uncles under the same roof is that if one of them gets bored with me there is always another aunt and uncle. The bad thing is that they don’t have any children of their own, so I am always being divided up.
I love the city. Before I got sick, my mom would put on her best dress, her hat with the veil, and her white gloves. I would wear my organdy dress and my crocheted gloves. We’d take the bus downtown. Holding hands, we’d wander through Hudson’s Department Store — all twelve floors. We never bought anything. It was the Depression, and we didn’t have money to spend. Still, as long as we were in the store we could pretend that anything we wanted was ours.
My parents took me to the Art Institute, where you walk through a great hall lined with the armor that knights used to wear. Besides all the pictures there is a room with mummies, which are dead people all bandaged up. On Sunday afternoons, if we had enough money for gasoline, we would join the long lines of automobiles snaking down East Grand Boulevard on their way to Belle Isle for picnics and canoeing. There is always something to see and do in the city.
Usually when I saw my grandparents it was in their big old-fashioned house in the city, but twice I had gone with my mother and father for short visits to Greenbush, where my grandparents had a summer cottage on Lake Huron. I remembered two things about those visits. There was nothing to do, and the huge lake you couldn’t see to the end of was everywhere you looked. I was so relieved when it was time to climb into the car and leave that I hardly noticed my grandparents waving good-bye, a sad look on their faces.
I never guessed that one day I would be sent away from the city to spend a whole summer with my grandparents. It happened because I got sick. First I had a sore throat. Then the doctor listened to my heart. He shook his head and said I had to go to bed for five months — half of fifth grade. I lost January, February, March, April, and May. There was nothing to do but read books and write poems.
The poems happened because of the get-well letters my teacher made my classmates write to me. One of the letters was a poem. It was a dumb one written by Lucille Macken, who thought she was so smart:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Because you’re sick,
I feel sorry for you.
I was sure I could write better poems. So I tried. I didn’t think they were very good, but my mom saw them and said they were excellent — her favorite word for something that’s not bad; she’s an optimist.
Just when I could finally get out of bed, my parents sat me down.
“We have a wonderful surprise for you,” Mom said. Surprises are someone else’s idea of what you would like. “The doctor feels you need fresh air.” She was trying to look happy, but it wasn’t working.
I began to worry. I knew the only place you find fresh air is where there is nothing else.
Dad said, “You’re going to spend the whole summer in Greenbush with your grandmama and grandpapa at their cottage on Lake Huron.”
“What do you mean the whole summer?” I guessed what my dad must mean. Three months. Thirty days times three. Ninety days times twenty-four hours. There would be thousands of hours. I would hate every one of them. I’d be far away from my friends. There would be nothing to do in the country. That big lake would be there ready to swallow me up.
Besides, there was my grandmama. We often go to my grandparents’ home in the city. But I am always a little afraid of Grandmama. She seems sour and prickly. You have to think ahead about what you say to her or you’ll get a tart reply. Now I was going to have to spend the whole summer with her.
“But I’m all better,” I pleaded.
“You still have headaches,” Dad reminded me.
“No, I don’t,” I said. I wasn’t telling the truth. Sometimes my head felt like someone was careening around inside it with a hammer.
I moped. I sulked. I refused to eat. I cried. I tried temper tantrums. All my parents would say is, “Dr. Kellet thinks a summer in the country will be good for you.” Things that are supposed to be good for you usually turn out to be terrible.
There was another reason why I had to spend the summer with my grandparents. My dad is a builder. With the Depression, no one is building anything. Things are so bad that for a couple of days in March all the banks in the country closed down. Every morning my father shines his shoes and brushes his hat. He whistles “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” while he brushes and shines. I think it’s for good luck. Mom presses his trousers, the steam from her damp pressing cloth clouding the kitchen. As Dad leaves he always says, “I’ve got a feeling today is my lucky day.” At supper time when he comes home he just looks at Mom and shakes his head. After I’m in bed at night I can hear their worried whispers in the next room.
Little by little the nice things we had, presents from my dad to my mom or from my grandparents to us, have disappeared. Mom’s silver dresser set and even her sewing machine were sold for money to buy groceries. I know the special food they buy to make me healthy is expensive. That makes me feel so bad I can hardly eat it. So it just gets wasted, which is even worse. “In the country you’ll have wonderful things to eat, Elsa,” Mom
said. And I knew that was the other reason I was being sent away.
So on June 5 we left for Greenbush and my grandparents’ cottage. Dad took a day off. I think he was sort of relieved to have a reason not to have to face all those people who don’t want him to build things. Just before we piled into the car, Mother said, “Here’s a present for you.” It was wrapped up in the pretty paper and ribbon she saved from my dad’s birthday present to her. I was still sulking, but except for Christmas and my birthday I’d never had a present, so it was hard pretending I wasn’t excited. I unwrapped the present carefully to save the paper. There was a notebook with flowers all over the cover and empty pages.
“It’s for your poems,” Mom said.
We got in the car and headed for the country. I watched through the car windows as the buildings got smaller and the trees got larger. Where there should have been houses there were only fields. I opened my new notebook. It’s hard to write when you’re bumping around in a car, but I wrote a poem.
The Country
Homesick
under blank sky,
empty land around me,
I want the city
where tall buildings knock clouds,
lock arms to keep back
the boring fields.
We drove for hours until finally we got to the town, which doesn’t seem like a real town at all. It only has one long street with a few small stores on either side. A little way out of Greenbush we turned onto a narrow road. At the end of the road, perched on a high bank, I saw my grandparents’ white and green cottage. Neat rows of trees march across the yard, and flowers spill over the walk. Behind the cottage, the blue lake goes on forever.
My grandparents hurried out to meet the car. They both came from Germany. That was a long time ago, but they still talk with a German accent. Grandpapa is short, with a round face, round blue eyes, and a neatly trimmed mustache. Grandmama is a large, square woman, with green slanty eyes and a pile of brown hair coiled on top of her head. She would be pretty if it weren’t for the tight way she holds her lips.
From the outside, the two-storied cottage looks no different from any other cottage. Inside, the cottage is like an art museum. My grandpapa is an artist and decorates houses for a living. Around the dining room walls he’s painted bunches of grapes and bowls of fruit and jugs of wine. Fish swim on the bathroom walls, and little angels fly up the stairway. Sometimes I have the feeling that if I stand still I might have something painted on me.
Mom spent most of the evening telling Grandmama what I was supposed to eat. “Broths and vegetables and fruits,” Mother said. “Healthy things.”
“And lots of rest,” Dad said. “Elsa needs a nap in the afternoon and an early bedtime.” I’d spent so much time resting in the last five months that I hated the very sight of a bed. It’s bad enough to be sick, but it’s worse if you’re an only child. You have your parents’ and all your aunts’ and uncles’ full attention. It’s like you’re swimming around in a goldfish bowl and you’re the only goldfish.
Grandpapa saw the look on my face and winked at me.
Grandmama said, “We’re busy here. There’s not going to be time for a lot of pampering.”
The rest of the evening they talked about how bad things were in Germany. They didn’t like the new government that had been elected there. My grandparents were worried about friends of theirs who lived in Berlin. “We write to them,” Grandpapa said, “but we wonder if our letters will make trouble for them.”
In the morning, before my parents left to go back home, my mom took me aside. “You’re not to worry about your grandmama’s ‘ways,’” she said, and she sighed. “Your grandmama means well. Watch her hands and you’ll understand her better.”
Before I could ask her what she meant, it was time to say good-bye. Mom and Dad drove off, turning around every inch of the way to wave. When their car disappeared around a bend in the road, I waited for my grandparents to tell me what to do, just like my parents always do. My parents don’t exactly tell me, but when they start a sentence with “Why don’t you …,” I know they expect me to do what they suggest. They suggest all the time.
My grandparents put on matching straw hats. Grandmama said she had to weed her garden. Grandpapa said he was going to prune the apple trees. There were no suggestions for me, so I followed my grandpapa to the orchard.
The trunk of each tree was painted white. “It’s a special paint that helps keep away the bugs,” Grandpapa said. “These are apple trees: Jonathan and Rome Beauty, and my Spitzenburg just like we had in the old country. These are peach trees: Mayflower and Elberta and Red Haven. Over there are pear trees: Russetts and Bosc and Bartlett, and the plum trees, Damson and Mirabelle.” He said the names as though he were introducing me to old friends.
Along one side of the orchard is a sort of bank that drops off. When I looked over the edge, all I could see was a spooky-looking tangle of trees and bushes. “What’s that?” I asked.
“That’s the gully,” he said. “When we have a heavy rain the gully takes a bite out of our land.”
“Gully,” I repeated. From my grandpapa’s explanation it sounded like an animal. I save words like some people save stamps or baseball cards. That’s a keeper, I thought, repeating it to myself.
I wandered over to Grandmama. All I could see of her was her straw hat sticking up. She was deep in a tangle of flowers, weeding. There were red and yellow and blue flowers, as if someone were trying out all the colors in a box of crayons. “Grandmama, what kind of flowers are they?” I asked politely.
She looked up at me, a little cross at being interrupted. “Cosmy, black-eyed Susans, pansies, lilies, larkspur, daisies, phlox, poppies, and Vergiss-nicht-mein, forget-me-nots.” I couldn’t remember all the names, so I picked “forget-me-nots” to keep. “Gully, Mirabelle, forget-me-nots,” I said to myself.
I saw that my grandparents were leaving me on my own. If I were in the city I could have done a hundred things: walk to the dime store and wander up and down the aisles, call my friends, bother my aunts and uncles. Just sitting on the apartment porch and watching traffic was more interesting than being here in this empty place.
There was nothing beyond the orchard but fields, so I wandered around to the front yard. A walk leads from the front of the cottage to wooden steps. The steps go down a steep bank to a wide beach and the lake. There were a few fishing boats out on the lake and, almost farther than I could see, a long freighter. Waves splashed against the beach, making a gulping sound. My dad had taught me to swim at Belle Isle, but the lake was so different — so big and rough. I felt as though the big lake were an enormous fish waiting to swallow me. I wasn’t ready to go down those steps.
The sounds I heard were strange ones. An orange and black bird, almost too bright to be real, was singing in an apple tree. The wind rattled the leaves of a birch tree. I missed the squeal of brakes and the honking of horns. I missed my friends, even Lucille Macken. I missed the city.
Greenbush
The children
who live in this town
all year round
stand in front
of the drugstore
close as the slats
in a picket fence.
I can go in —
because they let me.
We eat our meals in the kitchen on a table covered with a blue-and-white checked cloth. Lunch today was strange. Grandpapa had a huge bowl of sliced cucumbers with sour cream. Grandmama and I had potatoes that had been fried with bacon and onion. I wanted to say that my mother doesn’t allow me to have fried foods, but I thought that might not be polite. Besides, the potatoes were buttery and crisp, and I was hungry. For dessert there were slices of sunshine cake with thick lemon frosting.
It had been months and months since I had seen so much food. I wasn’t surprised, though. We had our Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas dinners at my grandparents’ home. Grandmama would heap food onto our plates and urge us to eat. I think she knew
that there often wasn’t much to eat in our own homes. When we were ready to go home she always had big packages of leftovers for us to take with us.
I ate a lot, in spite of the fact that all my grandparents talked about during lunch was worms and rusts and beetles and mildews. These were all things that killed fruit trees dead. You had to get them before they got the trees. The orchard looked peaceful, but I learned there was war out there.
Even the flowers seemed to be in danger. I helped Grandmama with the dishes. When she was finished, she took her dishpan of soapsuds and threw them over her roses. “Keeps the bugs away,” she said. Then she began gathering weeds from the lawn.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“The dandelions are tender this time of year and make a good salad,” she said. “The sorrel will make a good sauce. Taste it.”
I chewed some of the green leaves, and they tasted sour in a nice way.
No one ever told me to go to my room and rest. But now that I could do what I liked, there was nothing to do. “Is there a city near here?” I asked Grandpapa that afternoon.
“A city?” he repeated in a puzzled voice.
“You know. Stores and buildings and things.”
“Why would you want a city when you have the lake and the trees and the flowers?” I guess he saw the disappointed look on my face because then he said, “There is Greenbush.”
“Could I walk there?” I asked. I wanted to find someone my own age to play with. I didn’t want to spend the summer with no one but my old grandparents.
“Yah, it’s no more than a mile.” He showed me the direction to take. He didn’t say that he would have to come with me. Instead, he said, “Stop at the post office and pick up the mail.”
The road into Greenbush curves along fields and past scattered houses and into the small town, which is on a kind of hill. At the bottom of the hill, the lake was watching me as though it had followed me into town. On one side of Greenbush’s main street is Crosby’s Drug Store, a library, a bank, and the post office. On the other side of the street is Foley’s Grocery Store and a store with a sign that says “Hatton’s: Furniture and Undertaker.” That’s all. It’s like someone started to build the town from blocks and then ran out of blocks.