Baby row

The baby is burbling at the end of her row. Soon little Katie will be whining, then whimpering, then giving off full fledged howls. The sun shines through the wooden slats of the square play pen, making a zebra pattern on the gray blankets.

On and on Anna picks. First she picks the outside of the bush, and then peers into the raspberry plant from above to find more berries, then squats and gets the last purple ones, like nipples on a sow, hanging soft to the touch. Her flat is filling rapidly. Sixty cents a flat. Seventy-five cents if she fills it fuller, but then the juice runs down her legs like blood when she carries it into the packing shed. Seventy-five cents more towards their own berry farm.

The baby is crying steadily now and her flat is almost full. Anna straightens, throws in two more handfuls, and takes the flat from the stand, the wooden hullocks hidden by the rich red fruit. She carries it high , over the bump of a second child due in the fall. Maybe a son this time, to go with the land they will purchase. If Werner can keep his job at the hop yard over the winter, they will have enough by spring. Old Wiens has promised them three acres of berries on good terms, with a sound little chicken house they can convert into a dwelling.

She places the dripping flat onto her pile in the shed, wipes her hands quickly on her skirt, and turns to little Katie. Anna sits in the dirt of her row, sheltered by berry canes, and tends to the child. She changes the soiled flannelette diaper and wraps the flour sack blanket lightly over the plump little body, laying her daughter on her side to nap in the shade with a bottle of cow’s milk that she has tried to keep fresh wrapped all morning in a tattered quilt.

Up the row she hurries with an empty flat clutched in both hands, the baby almost out of earshot now. She hopes the child is quiet. Three more full flats materialize before the little one stirs. This time she is harder to placate. Anna sets some berries on the rail of the wooden enclosure within the little one’s vision and hurries up the row. She knows that half of them will find their way to Katie’s mouth and the rest will paint the playpen.

Spider webs connect the wires holding up the berry canes, and she realizes that the season is almost over. She will have to see Bertha Kroeker about picking beans there, or plums at the Rempels. Anna avoids the spiders and meticulously picks the inner branches. Mr. Doerksen has recorded her name at the end of the row, and she will not let him down.

On and on, she stoops and bobs and trudges, little feet thumping her ribcage. She places a red syrupy hand over the unborn child and whispers, “Next year it will be our own berry patch, our own land.” She smiles and imagines his little toes, his little legs churning in his watery cavity, his male organs already formed. “John”, she says. “Katie and John”. One day the four of them will bend over soup in their own tiny kitchen warmed by the McClary stove, the woodbox full of hazelnut prunings and cants from Bowman’s Sawmill. It will be bean soup from her garden with onions, dill, summer savoury, and the wee potatoes from the edge of the plant. They will have chunks of ham and good dark bread.

by Helen Rose Pauls