Written by Nancy Dillingham – I – Heat bangs off the dark blue and white Humko lard buckets, and they squeak as she swings them back and forth in either hand as she walks. Beyond the paved road, the now shaded, powder-dry path leads into the boundary. She walks along the path until she comes to an opening leading to a meadow-like field. Eden-like, it is a new world filled with clumps of forbidden fruit, for this is government property. But the wild strawberries are ripe, and everyone knows that the park ranger is not at home this morning.
The berries smell sweet and hang in heavy clusters. Their oblong shapes seem stretched to fullness leaving a slightly whitened neck under the cap. They are particularly large for wild strawberries, and she and her mother come here each year to pick them for fresh pies and jam. After cajoling and begging, she has at last persuaded her mother to let her come alone for just this one time.
The earth is loamy, and the air is damply hot. Protected by their leaves and small, dry sticks, the berries are coated with a fine mist, like frost. It is immensely quiet, and the first berries fall with small thumps into the tin bucket as she picks, lifting the vines, being careful not to step on ripe berries as she moves from one corner of the field to the center. She fills one of the two gallon buckets and, except for an occasional twig snapping as she steps and a hummingbird whirring in sudden intervals, she hears only the soft grass move under her feet. She no longer hears the intermittent, shrill cry and drone of the sawmill in the valley below.
II
She is hot now and sits under a tree at the edge of the patch. Her hat is wet, and, as she takes it off, some hair, lightened by the sun, falls around her neck. She sets the bucket of berries down carefully on a flat rock in the shade of the tree. She pries off the top of the other bucket, which she has left under the tree, and eats. The corn bread is fat and cold, and the onions are small and fresh, their tops stubby and green where they have been chopped off. She grinds their heads into a mound of salt that she has poured onto the bucket’s lid from a piece of folded waxed paper.
When she has finished eating, she smoothes the remaining salt into a flat round circle on the lid and scrawls her initials in it. Then she abruptly flings it away, dusts out the lid, claps her hands together to get rid of it, and jumps up. A small, pale-blue butterfly zigzags in her path and lights on her bucket of berries. She catches it and, holding it gently between thumb and forefinger, carries it away from the tree into the sun and throws it forward and upward. Fly away, little butterfly, she says and goes back for her hat and the now empty other bucket.
III
When the second bucket is filled, she turns from the silence of the field and the converging, small paths of parted vines and grass where she has picked. Her eyes catch the flash of red, like a bird, darting across the opening in the woods. She walks towards it. The red moves as she moves, suddenly filling up the opening. Unafraid, she continues to walk, her eyes fixing on a red shirt with sleeves rolled up over the elbows of brown arms then moving downward to blue work pants rolled at the top of hard, cracked boots. They are drawn upward again to the burst of red, then slowly to the eyes in the face above. She stops, turns and moves again towards the tree where she drops her bucket and sits propped against the trunk. From beneath the brim of her hat, she looks at the opening. She then lies down on her back and puts her hands under her head. A bird flaps its wings, and she looks up as it lights in a nest in the corner of the second branch above. In a moment, it flies again. She traces the branches in the sky above her. A cloud catches on one and appears to break into a head. The dismembered body floats away in the other direction. She floats on the cloud.
IV
Suddenly a twig snaps, and she hears the soft grass moving. As her eyes turn to the field again, the red shirt moves. The body treads heavily through one of her paths, twigs snapping under the boots. She sits up again and feels him looking down at her. She closes her eyes and opens them again to meet his, intense and shining. She smiles and reaches her hand over to the side of her and offers him the juicy berry she has set on a small rock—the largest, best of the lot, her souvenir. He bites into it slowly, and she hears the sucking sound as he takes the juice from it. He finishes the berry as she watches, looking at him intently yet innocently, like a child. Then she gets up and straightens her hat, takes the two lard buckets, one in each hand, and starts walking away. He follows, looking puzzled.
They both walk out of the forbidden place into the bright sun, glaring off the small, shiny rocks on either side of the road. He rights a beat-up, dusty motorcycle and takes the two buckets from her and hangs one on each handlebar. He steers it through the path out of the woods. He hauls himself onto the machine and jumps it to life with the quick motion of one big, cracked boot. The cycle sputters, catches, and roars. He motions with his head for her to get on behind him. Unhesitatingly, she moves and holds on.
V
As they roar around the curve, off the graveled road, onto the pavement, she hears again the rasping drone of the sawmill, punctuated at precise intervals with a shrill whine as the saw moves through the logs.
About a mile down the road, she allows her head to rest on the red back as she sees the road suddenly long before them. But seconds later, she says “Here” at a clump of mailboxes with a few straggly petunias growing around them. He scrapes his boot on the pavement and comes to a stop. She gets off, and he hands her the buckets, looks at her for a moment, and revs up again. She watches him disappear into a tiny, black speck at the end of the long, straight expanse of road, the sound no longer loud but soft and muffled, reverberating in her head as she crosses the bridge leading home, swinging her berry-laden buckets.
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Writer and educator Nancy Dillingham is a sixth-generation Dillingham from Big Ivy in WNC. She has a forthcoming work in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel: Vol. 18, The Dead, and a chapbook from Finishing Line Press coming fall of 2015.
Her poems, short stories, and commentary have appeared in various literary journals and newspapers such as Asheville Poetry Review (10th Anniversary Issue), Great Smokies Review (on line–Spring 2011), Parting Gifts (Winter 2010-11), The Arts Journal, Bay Leaves, A Carolina Literary Companion, Half Tones to Jubilee, The Lyricist, Victoria Press, Raleigh News & Observer Sunday Reader, Asheville Citizen-Times, Mountain Xpress, WNC Woman, Weaverville Tribune, and Big Ivy News. She is the author of 8 books of short stories and poems: New Ground (1998); The Ambiguity of Morning (2001); First Light: Poems (2003); Thanks for the Dark but That’s Not Home: Poems and Stories (2006); Colloquy in Black and White: Poems (2009); Home (2010 March Street Press), nominated for 2011 Poetry Book of the Year by Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance; and Americana Rural (2012 Wind Publications). She collaborated on Reflections in a River: Photographs by Joan Medicott and Haiku by Nancy Dillingham (2011 Grateful Steps). She is co-editor, along with Celia Miles of three anthologies: Christmas Presence from 45 WNC Women Writers, Clothes Lines from 75 WNC Women Writers, and Women’s Spaces Women’s Places from 50 WNC Women Writers She also co-edited, with Irene Dillingham Richards and Ken Richards, The Family Named Dillingham: 375 Years in America–1630-2005. Most recently her poetry appeared in Blue Ridge Parkway Celebration, Silver Anniversary Issue and Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel: Contemporary Appalachian Writing.
