Montana Strawberries

Melissa pushed her knees into the cool burnt-umber soil of western Montana to escape the summer heat. She plucked a strawberry from its plant, dropping it among the others in the stained bucket she shared with her grandmother. A hummingbird flew by and a horse fly landed on her arm. An image of her cousin Brian killing the big flies with a slingshot on the sunny side of the barn cast itself upon her mind like a poison.

She slapped the ugly insect away. Melissa glanced down the hill toward the line of lodge-pole trees in front of the family cemetery, and shuffled to the next row of plants to escape the miserable memory of losing her favorite cousin.

Several rows away, her grandmother straightened. "Strawberries are one of the Lord's sweetest gifts to us,” her old voice broke the silence of the garden. “They remind us that life is good.” The sun shone through her white hair as she held one of the lumpy red berries to her nose. "Smell them.” She closed her eyes and breathed in the berry’s sweetness. Her pale face flushed with pleasure.

The afternoon train whistle carried up from the river below the garden as Melissa held one of the berries to her own nose, drawing in its mouthwatering scent. She grinned at her grandmother, and unable to resist, popped the berry into her mouth. Pure joy to her taste buds.

Melissa loved to weed the garden with her grandmother and looked around satisfied.
A six-foot rusting fence protected the garden from deer and other creatures. Inside stood rows of rows of corn, squash, cucumber, peppers, asparagus, tomatoes, green-beans, onions, peas, beets, carrots, and various herbs, and of course, strawberries: a mélange of aromas wafted about at the whim of the breeze.

They were the best strawberries in the world as far as Melissa was concerned. Unlike the large berries found in a supermarket, scientifically improved, mold resistant, and genetically mothered for size and visual appeal, grandma’s strawberries tasted like magic.

Her grandmother looked her up and down. "We’ll can our harvest, and cover the garden with hay to keep out the cold of winter for next year.” The old woman stretched out a knee. “We can have a taste of the garden all year” She said as she squinted with arthritic pain. “Montana strawberries for breakfast every day, how’s that sound?” She held a berry up to her wrinkled mouth and winked as she ate it.

"Sounds yummy, Grandma." Melissa grinned conspiratorially, and returned to picking.

Melissa’s grandmother began to hum a familiar song.

“Where’s the oldest strawberry plant?”

Her grandmother’s old eyes sparkled with excitement. “Well, I don’t suppose I know … the ghosts might, I suppose.”

“Ghosts.” Melissa twisted her neck, curious and alert. “Are there really ghosts?”

“You don’t believe in ghosts?”

“I’ve never seen one,” she replied.

The blue eyes peered out from her glasses. “Do you suppose you’ve seen everything this life offers?” Her grandmother raised one white eyebrow, tossing a handful of weeds to the side.
Melissa opened her mouth, but was interrupted.

“You’re right. I haven’t either.” The old woman scratched a mole on her nose with a dirty glove. “You begin to believe when you’re as old as I.”

“I probably will too,” Melissa admitted. She picked another berry.

Her grandmother slipped her hands over her large hips and sent her a serious gaze. “Can you keep a secret, Mel?”

“I'll try, cross my heart and hope to never eat a strawberry again.”

Her grandmother jerked, taken back a bit by her statement. “That’s a little much, after all, people stretch the truth from time to time. Just for fun.” She leaned in close, as if putting her shoulder into turning a screw. “Your Aunt Mary and Uncle Stephen say they’ve seen the ghost of Brian and my mother in the garden on foggy nights.”

“Briiii … ian?” Melissa’s mouth opened, her jaw moving back and forth working the mystery. "Do you think they're telling¬ the truth?"

“Who can say? People see what they want to see, Mel. It is nice to wonder, what if though.” Her grandmother sighed.

“Grandma … Aunt Mary and Uncle Stephen are a little … weird, aren’t they?"

Her grandmother laughed, pulling more weeds. "Who can say? I don’t know what they saw, but there are more things in heaven and earth, Mel.” She tilted her head. “And the fog can play tricks on the eye, putting things there we want to see."

"I’ll find out tonight!" Melissa declared resolutely. If Uncle Stephen and Aunt Mary could go looking for ghosts, so could she.

***

A full moon shone as Melissa squirmed on the farm's retired orange 1954 Case tractor’s steal seat. The metal seat was hard and her bony bottom ached. She had eaten a belly full of baby carrots, and became more tired and impatient by the hour.

The first night a small herd of elk passed through the field. The proud animals were on their way to the river for a drink. The big bodies were silent as they reached the tree line and disappeared, but they weren’t ghosts. Melissa went to bed really late…

Night two, more elk and deer in the field but nothing paranormal. She began to wonder, the twelve-year-old skeptic in her budding with doubt. She ate sweet peas until she couldn’t eat anymore. It was after midnight that she went to bed.

Night three, her backside aching from the seat of the tractor, Melissa wondered if she was wasting her time, and if her grandmother was just pulling her leg? But then the mountainside cooled, and a dense fog moved up from the river. She thought she saw something.

Out of the corner of her eye, the wisp emerged from the stand of lodge-pole separating the field from the family cemetery. She shook her head, rubbing her eyes to wake herself, but the vision remained. Something was out there, and it was moving.

The fog crept up the hill toward the garden and a small determined face suddenly appeared to lead the way.

Melissa sat straight up in the tractor’s wash-pan seat. She laughed softly, crazily. The face looked like Brian’s, and mixed among the dull furls, she could see that he helped a bigger form, their great-grandmother up through the garden.

Melissa was frozen. Brian looked exactly as she remembered him: brown hair, kind eyes, strong, and growing tall just before the freak accident took his life.

She exhaled. The ghosts were real.

Both continued to the old red barn. They hovered over a patch of strawberry plants. Her great-grandmother knelt down and waved her old fingers through the foliage.

Melissa swore she saw the leaves of the strawberry plants tussling, and watched as they both lifted their fingers to their noses. ‘Those must be the oldest plants,’ Melissa thought.

An owl hooted from somewhere in the deep forest.

With the wan moonlight at her back, she sprang from the Case like a buck upon hearing the first shot of hunting season, and hit the ground running.

The air was cool and crisp as she ran through the familiar apple orchard and burst into the house. The door slammed behind her on its rusty springs, creaking. The flooring protested with each foot-fall, the knick-knacks quaking on their shelves as she ran through the living room and into her grandmother’s bedroom.

“Who’s there?” her grandmother blurted, sitting up. A touch of fear in her voice at having been startled out of a deep sleep.


“I saw Brian. I saw his ghost. Your mother!”


“What are you talking about? Waking me up? I was kidding, Mel.”

“I saw them. I saw Brian. In the fog, with your mother too. I did. They’re real!”

“Goodness, angels and ministers of grace give me strength.” Her grandmother lay back in bed. “That’s nice, Mel. You can call Aunt Mary and Uncle Stephen in the morning.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Go to bed. You were seeing faces in the fog.”

“What?”

Her grandmother tossed a cover pillow.

Melissa left her grandmother’s bedroom kicking the door.


***

Twenty years later, Melissa turned her rental car onto a remote gravel road in western Montana known as the Blue Slide. She switched the radio off to enjoy the silence and count deer.

The river swirled to her right and tall mountains loomed like sentinels on both sides of the valley. There were blue flowers along the road, announcing the first days of Spring.

She counted fourteen white tail deer before turning off the main road and onto the ranch. The long dirt lane that curved through the bull-pine and ponderosa of the family farm brought her past the gate to family cemetery. Melissa looked to her great-grandfather’s tall headstone dominating the yard. A doe and her fawn ran across the small road and disappeared into the pine.

She continued past the old schoolhouse her great-grandfather had built for the local children, and stopped at the main house nestled in the crook of an apple orchard.

Uncle Stephen stepped from the front door. “We’ve been expecting you, Mel. Mother wants to see you.”

A tear formed in the corner of Melissa’s eye. She wiped it away and stepped in the front room with her uncle. The small house was filled with aunts, uncles, and cousins all chatting in the big kitchen and eating warm shortcake with strawberry-rhubarb jam.

“Hello!” They chimed together.

“Hi,” she returned.

Uncle Stephen motioned for her to go to the master bedroom. Aunt Mary sat reading from the
Bible at the side of the bed.

Her grandmother was nearly lost in the blankets. Her white face under a knitted pink cap. She slept through incredible pain, and everyone knew it.

Aunt Mary stood while slipping the Good Book onto the stand. “Hey, Mel.”

“Hello.” Melissa gave her a long tight hug.

“Good to see you, young lady.” She took Melissa’s hand and pulled her to the edge of the bed.

Melissa glanced out the window to the garden down the soft slope and wondered if it would be a foggy night.

“How is she?”

“She’s holding on for you.”

Melissa gave her aunt a look of wonder.

Mary gave her one back. “I’ll leave you two alone. Wake her.”

The thin arm of her grandmother lay slack and wrinkled among the folds of the hand-made quilt and Melissa gently lifted the pale hand into her own. She pulled the cold crooked fingers to her chest and kissed them. How much soil had the hand turned, noses wiped? How many behinds paddled, gifts wrapped, and hearts consoled? How many strawberries had it picked and canned in its eighty-five years?

Melissa was struck by a memory from childhood. Brian unpacking a box of jars in the kitchen, setting them on the table. She remembered the smell of the kitchen and the mounds of green-beans they were canning on that fateful day so long ago.

On the stove beside the big canning-pot sat a small pot of strawberries and rhubarb bubbling into a sweet dessert. Inside the oven, small cakes were cooking.

It was just after breakfast. The pot’s pressure vented like a train. “Should I get some more lids?”
Brian was always eager to help.

Later that same afternoon, Melissa and Brian were helping their uncle Stephen cut down two dead trees and split them for firewood. Melissa stood on the tailgate of the truck watching her

Uncle split the wood with a mall and old wedge, waiting for Brian to hand her the pieces of wood to stack.

Brian stood nearby.

The splitting-mall smashed down onto the wedge, but this time the sound was strange. It was not the heavy clank and deep thud of the wedge moving into the wood. This time it was a ping, and a zip, as a ragged chunk of the old wedge shot off in a random direction like a bullet.

The piece had been no bigger than horsefly, but it hit Brian right behind the ear in an upward arc. Her cousin fell to the ground limp, his eyes dark and staring.

He died later that day.

Melissa wrenched her thoughts to the present. “Grandma,” she whispered.

There was a moment when the voices of her relatives in the next room went silent and she thought she heard a train whistle reaching up from the river as it rolled up the track.

Her grandmother’s eyelids fluttered. “Mel.” The voice was soft and tired.

“I’m here.”

“I saw mother and Brian.” She tried to lift her hand but could only point a finger at the big window. “Their ghosts.”

Her mind struggled with the déjà vu of the drive. The train’s calliope wailed from the tracks below the house. She glanced out the big window that looked down the family mountain and turned back to meet her grandmother’s blue eyes. Her grandmother gave her a weak smile.

Melissa grinned, she knew the ghosts were real too. “We can still smell the strawberries, Grandma.”


The End