The Last Bed
The bogs along the Grayland road were flooded one after another through October, and from the highway they looked like rooms of red light laid out in the dark ground between the shore pines. Tourists stopped on the shoulder to photograph them. The growers did not stop. They worked in chest waders from the first grey hour, in a wind that came straight off the Pacific with nothing in its way, and they went home smelling of tannic water and two-stroke exhaust and the sour green smell of the vines.
The Saarinens had grown cranberries on the same twenty-two acres since 1914, when Della’s great-grandfather came down from the coal country around Aberdeen with a little money and a great deal of patience and cut the first beds out of the peat by hand. There were nine beds now, separated by sand dikes wide enough for a truck. They were picked in the same order every year, the farthest first and the nearest to the house last, and the last bed was not picked on the day it was flooded.
That was the custom, and there was nothing more to it than that. The last bed was flooded at dusk. The water reel went through it once, knocking the berries loose from the vines, and the berries rose. Then everyone went up to the house. Nobody walked the dike around the last bed that night, and nobody boomed the berries in until it was full light. In the morning the family went down together and looked at it before anyone touched it.
Most years there was nothing to see. The berries lay where the wind had pushed them, packed against the downwind dike in a red so deep it looked black at the edges, and the crew boomed them in and pumped them up into the truck and the harvest was over.
Some years there was a clear place.
Della had seen it twice. The first time she was nine. Her father had brought her down at dawn in his coat, and she remembered being lifted up on the dike to see, and she remembered the clear place: a long patch of open black water near the middle of the bed, where the berries had drawn back on every side as if from something that disliked them. The wind blew across it and the berries around it shivered and did not move in. Her father had looked at it for a long time. Then he set her down and went to open the drain gate, and they let the water out, and the berries settled on the vines and lay there and softened through November, and the starlings had them. No one in the family said a word about the money. That was a hard year. There were other hard years that had nothing to do with it.
The second time was 1988, the autumn after her father died, and she had been the one to open the gate.
She tried to tell Mark this, sitting at the kitchen table on the last Thursday of the harvest, with the radar open on his laptop between them and a long white comma of cloud turning in from the southwest.
Mark had married her daughter Annie eleven years ago and moved down from Tacoma four years after that, when Della’s knees went and the farm needed someone, and he had been good for it. Della would say so to anyone. He understood the cooperative contracts and the bank and the new varieties, and he’d replaced the irrigation heads and the old Farmall, and he worked. The crew liked him. He listened to people, mostly. He was listening to her now, with his hands flat on the table, the way he did when he had already decided.
“Sixty-mile-an-hour gusts by tomorrow noon,” he said. “Two inches of rain. If we flood the last bed tonight and leave it, the wind piles everything against the north dike and half of it goes over into the ditch. You’ve seen it happen.”
“I’ve seen it happen.”
“We can have it boomed and in the truck by midnight. I’ve got Lalo and his brother for the lights. That’s forty thousand dollars of fruit, Della.”
“I know what it is.”
“So tell me what the rule is for.”
She thought about that. The wind leaned on the north side of the house and the window over the sink ticked in its frame.
“It’s for the morning,” she said finally. “So we can look.”
“Look for what?”
She did not answer, and he waited a while, kindly, and then he closed the laptop.
They flooded the last bed at five. It was nearly dark already, the sky over the dunes the colour of a bruise healing, and the water came in from the reservoir ditch brown and cold and spread out over the vines until the whole bed was one sheet of dull pewter, with the vines a dark weave under it. Lalo drove the water reel through in long passes, the paddles churning, and the berries let go and came up.
Della watched from the dike nearest the house. She had always loved this part and did not stop loving it now. The berries rose in their thousands, slowly at first and then all at once, as if the bed had been holding its breath, and in a few minutes the brown water was gone under red, a crimson so complete and so bright, even in that light, that it seemed to make its own. The air smelled of crushed leaves and peat. On the far side of the bed a heron that had been fishing the ditch lifted itself without hurry and flew off south along the line of pines, low, its legs trailing.
Annie came down and stood beside her with her hands in her sleeves.
“He’s going to do it,” Annie said.
“I know.”
“Do you want me to stop him?”
Della thought her daughter was asking a real question, and she gave it a real answer. “I don’t think you could,” she said. “And I don’t know that I’m right.”
The rain started at seven, not much, a fine cold mist that came sideways and made halos round the work lights. Lalo and his brother set the lights on their stands along the south dike and the bed sprang up out of the dark under them, red and wet and shining like the inside of something. Mark was in his waders with the boom over his shoulder, the long floating arm of it trailing behind him on the berries, and he waded in from the corner, laughing at something Lalo said.
Della went up to the house. That much of the custom she could keep. She did not walk the dike. She sat in her chair by the window with the lamp off so she could see, and Annie sat on the floor beside her with her back to the wall, and they listened to the generator and the voices and the wind, which was rising.
At some point the voices stopped.
The generator went on, and the lights went on, white and steady over the bed. Della could see the three figures in the glare, small and dark against the red. Two of them were on the dike. One was in the water. None of them were moving. They stood the way people stand when they have heard a sound they can’t place and are waiting for it to come again.
She could not see what they were looking at. She did not get up. Annie, beside her, had stopped breathing, and Della put a hand on her daughter’s hair, the way she would have when Annie was small, and kept it there.
After a while the figures began to move again. The voices started up, quieter than before, and the boom went round.
Mark came up a little after eleven. He stood in the mud room and took his waders off and hung them on their peg, and he came into the kitchen and ran the tap and drank two glasses of water standing at the sink.
“It’s in,” he said. “Most of it. We’ll get the rest at first light, before the wind.” He put the glass down. “Lalo wants to know if you’ve got anything to drink.”
“There’s the bottle in the pantry,” Della said. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“You stopped.”
He rinsed the glass, though it did not need rinsing, and set it upside down on the rack. “There’s a place where the berries won’t go,” he said. “When we were bringing the boom round. We’d swing it in and they’d come with it, everything packed up tight, and then there’s this one spot near the middle they just slide off. Like there’s a current. Lalo thought it was a spring coming up under the vines. Could be. There’s springs all along this road.”
“Could be,” said Della.
“We boomed round it.” He looked at her. His face was very tired and very reasonable. “We got everything else. It’s just a hole in the berries, Della.”
“How big?”
He did not answer. He went to get the bottle for Lalo.
She did not sleep. The wind came on in earnest after two, and the house shook with it the way it had shaken for a hundred years, and the rain came in long sheets across the bogs. Once she thought she heard the generator start up again, down by the last bed, and then not. Once, near four, she thought she heard someone walking on the dike, out there in the dark where no one should be walking, slow and heavy, as if in waders. She told herself it was the wind in the shore pines. It may have been.
In the morning the rain had gone through and the sky was rinsed and cold and a hard pale blue, and Mark’s waders were not on their peg.
His truck was down at the last bed, parked on the dike with the driver’s door open and the dome light on. The work lights had been switched off. The boom lay along the north dike where it had been left the night before, holding the harvest in a long thick crescent of red, a little ragged where the wind had worked at it but nearly all there. Forty thousand dollars of fruit. Lalo and his brother were already standing at the corner of the bed in their rain jackets, not talking. They did not look round when Della and Annie came down.
The clear place was there, in the corralled berries, where it should not have been. In the night it had moved, or the berries had. It lay against the inside of the boom now, a long open patch of black water in all that red, with soft edges, about the length of a man and the width of one, and the wind went across the bed and the berries round it shivered and did not move in.
Annie said his name once, not loudly. Nobody answered it.
Della went to the drain gate. Her hands knew the wheel; she had turned it twice before. It was stiff with cold and then it gave, and the water began to go out of the last bed with a sound like a long breath being let out, and the level dropped, and the red mat sank slowly down onto the vines and settled there.
When the water was gone the berries lay heaped against the dike, and spread thin over the rest of the bed, and the vines showed through dark and wet. There was nothing else. There was no one lying on them. There was only the place where no berry lay: a long bare patch of vine against the line of the boom, clean-edged, as if something had been lifted out of it.
It had been a cold night, the first real frost of the year. The whole bed was white with it, every leaf and every berry furred with rime, the ditches skinned with ice.
The vines in the bare place were green and wet and soft. The frost had not touched them at all. They steamed a little in the sun, the way the ground does where something has been lying warm all night.
Della stood on the dike and watched them until the steam stopped.
AI was involved in writing this story.
