Amanda Peters' The Berry Pickers reveals what happens when family secrets are unravel — read an excerpt now
The Berry Pickers is on the shortlist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.
In The Berry Pickers, a four-year-old girl from a Mi'kmaq family goes missing in Maine's blueberry fields in the 1960s. Nearly 50 years later, Norma, a young girl from an affluent family is determined to find out what her parents aren't telling her. Little by little, the two families' interconnected secrets unravel.
Peters is a writer of Mi'kmaq and settler ancestry living in Annapolis Valley, N.S. She is the winner of the 2021 Indigenous Voices Award for Unpublished Prose and a participant in the 2021 Writers' Trust Rising Stars program.
The Berry Pickers is on the shortlist for the 2023 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. The annual $60,000 award recognizes the best novel or short story collection by a Canadian author. The winner will be announced on Nov. 21 at the annual Writers' Trust Awards ceremony at CBC's Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto.
You can read an excerpt from The Berry Pickers below.
The day Ruthie went missing, the blackflies seemed to be especially hungry. The white folks at the store where we got our supplies said that Indians made such good berry pickers because something sour in our blood kept the blackflies away. But even then, as a boy of six, I knew that wasn't true. Blackflies don't discriminate. But now, lying here almost 50 years to the day and getting eaten from the inside out by a disease I can't even see, I'm not sure what's true and what's not anymore. Maybe we are sour.
Regardless of the taste of our blood, we still got bit. But Mom knew how to make the itching stop at night, so we could get some sleep. She peeled the bark of an alder branch and chewed it to a pulp before putting it on the bites.
"Hold still, Joe. Stop squirming," Mom said as she applied the thick paste. The alders grew all along the thin line of trees that bordered the back of the fields. Those fields stretched on forever, or so it seemed then. Mr. Ellis, the landowner, had sectioned the land with big rocks, making it easier to keep track of where we'd been and where we needed to go. But eventually, and always, you'd reach the trees again. Either the trees or Route 9, a crumbling road littered with holes the size of watermelons and as deep as the lake, a dark line of asphalt slithering its way through the fields that brought us there year after year.
I'm not sure what's true and what's not anymore. Maybe we are sour.
Even then, in 1962, there weren't many houses along Route 9, and those that were there were already old, the grey and white paint peeling away, the porches tilted and rotting, the tall grass growing green and yellow between abandoned cars and refrigerators, their rust flaking off and flying away with a strong wind. When we arrived from Nova Scotia, midsummer, a caravan of dark-skinned workers, laughing and singing, travelling through their overgrown and rusting world, the local folks turned their backs, our presence a testament to their fail- ure to prosper. The only time that place showed any joy at all was in the fall when the setting sun shone gold and the fields glowed under a glorious September sky.
Among all that rust and decay stood Mr. Ellis's house. It was on the corner where Route 9 met the dirt road that led to the other side of the lake, the side without Indians, where the white people swam and picnicked on Sundays, their skin blistering under the weak Maine sun. At home, years later and before I left again, I remembered that house like it was a picture from a book or a magazine that you looked at when waiting at the bus station or the doctor's office. The tall maples hung over the driveway, and someone had planted a long, straight line of pine trees between the house and the dirt road that led to the camps, so we couldn't peek at it, not that we didn't try.
"Ben, why do they bother having a house at all if it's just gonna be all windows?" I asked my brother.
"People need a roof over their heads. It gets cold here just like home."
"But all those windows." I gaped.
"Windows are expensive. That's how they show the world they're rich."
I remembered that house like it was a picture from a book or a magazine that you looked at when waiting at the bus station or the doctor's office.
I nodded in agreement, even if I didn't understand exactly. The whiteness of that house, painted every second summer, with the red trim and two columns framing the front door, was enough for me, who lived in a tiny three-bedroom with a leaky roof, to declare it "the mansion." Years later, when I returned, Mr. Ellis long dead of a heart attack, I had fresh eyes and real-ized it was nothing more than a two-storey with a bay window. When we arrived in mid-July, that summer we lost Ruthie, the fields were thick with green leaves and tiny wild berries. We were still full of excitement, the memories of hard work and long days from years past all but forgotten. My father dropped us off with the supplies we needed for the next eight to twelve weeks, and then left again the same day. The dust followed him as he headed back to the border. He went to New Brunswick to grab the same pickers who always came. The ones he could trust. Old Gerald and his wife, Julia, Hank and Bernard, twins who worked hard and stayed to themselves, Widow Agnus and her six children, all of them big and strong, and Frankie, the drunk. A funny man, scared of bears and the dark and not much of a worker.
We were still full of excitement, the memories of hard work and long days from years past all but forgotten.
Dad always said, "Your mother says that even people like Frankie need money and a purpose in life, even if only for eight weeks."
"I pick more than him, Dad," I said, nodding my head at Frankie as he absent-mindedly plopped a berry into his mouth, "and he eats just as much as he picks."
"There are some people, Joe, that we make allowances for. You know he nearly drowned as a baby and didn't quite grow up right after that. Nothing wrong with Frankie. God must have had a plan for him, so we take him just the way he is. He needs this each summer just like we do. He likes to come and sit 'round the fire and earn a bit of pocket change. Gives him something to look forward to."
"Yeah, but Dad—" I started to say, annoyed that Frankie got paid in money and I picked more and all I got were new school clothes in September.
"No but. Just get back to work and be kind to Frankie. You never know when you might need kindness from people."
Excerpt from The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters ©2023. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
