What We Came For

THEY HAD TO WAIT a long time for the harvest to begin. Gerard talked to Kate of nothing else for weeks. He imagined the two of them working their way across Canada, then down the West Coast of the U.S., picking fruit and living like gypsies. But it had been a cold, rainy spring that year in Quebec, and when summer solstice arrived, there was still snow on the Laurentian Mountains. Now it was the end of June, and the strawberries were not yet ripe.

Gerard and Kate had hitchhiked out to Île d’Orléans, a little island off the coast of Quebec famous for its berries, and Gerard was angry to find there the same people he had tried to leave behind in his Brittany boyhood in France: storm-beaten, hardscrabble farmers, too tangled up in their difficult existence to look up at the sky and wonder. He had gone to Paris to escape these people, and there he’d found himself hustling to make a living among poor plumbers and roofers and tilers, Frenchmen and Arabs who would scramble along the treacherous, narrow ledges of apartment buildings, or work up to their elbows in other people’s shit, doing the jobs no one else would take. They were full of pride and shame and tobacco and stories, these men, and he became a member of their brotherhood — it showed in the squint lines already making inroads down his young cheeks, in the cock of his head as he rolled a cigarette, in the careless brown beard he let straggle over his chin in an attempt to look older and tougher than he was.

Kate had met him last year, when she was an American exchange student in Paris studying French literature. He’d approached her at a student cafe, trying to recruit her for the Communist Youth League. They had corresponded after she left Paris, breathless exchanges in pidgin English and misspelled French. He’d always dreamed of coming to the U.S., despite his disdain for its government, but had been refused a visa because of his membership in the Communist Party. She’d agreed to fly up to Canada to meet him. They’d been traveling around together for weeks now, but were still getting used to each other.

“What are you thinking of?” Gerard asked Kate abruptly as they trudged along the side of the road, thumbs out in case anyone might decide to pick them up. It had been a long day with few rides and no prospects of work. The sky threatened rain.

“Sex,” she answered, surprised he had asked. “I was wondering if you would want it the next time I wanted it, and if it would be any better.”

He laughed. “Do you ever think about anything else?”

“Oh, look — strawberries!” She had spotted the tiny, wild kind, too small for sale, growing in a ditch by the side of the road. They climbed down and fed each other these first berries of the season.

“Mmm . . . taste them. These are what we came here for,” Gerard told her happily, his face flushed and the vein in his forehead bulging with excitement. He’s forgotten everything else now, she thought. That was the beauty and the frustration of him. The first drops of rain, fat and wet, splashed on her scalp as she stood knee-deep in runners and tendrils by the side of the road.

Later, an hour before sundown, the rain was still falling lightly. “Any other woman would be crying by now,” Gerard remarked out of the blue. He took her hand and squeezed it as they hiked up a long driveway, like a road in itself, toward the distant farmhouse perched at the top of a hill and surrounded by fields. They would ask the farmer if there was work, and of course he would say no, because the strawberries — the big, placid, commercial ones, like sleeping toads under their wet leaves — were green, as anyone could see. But maybe he would let them stay in his barn for the night. Then again, maybe he would look at their dirty backpacks, and hear Gerard’s Parisian accent and Kate’s American one, and send them on their way.

“It seems I only cry over things that other people don’t,” Kate said, “and what makes them cry doesn’t bother me. A little rain never hurt anyone.” As if in response, it came down harder now, making her uneasy. They labored up the hill, past the glistening green strawberry fields and the hayfields that glowed pink in the late-afternoon sun shining through a crack in the clouds. Clumps of wild daisies grew in profusion on the edges of the fields, and she picked a few, decorating his pack with them. She stuck one in her hair, but it slipped out. When the rain became even more serious, they stopped to put on their ponchos, then started up again, two mud-colored donkeys.

Kate thought of all they had been through together in the last week — the confusing arguments and midnight attempts to make a wordless language they both might understand — and said, “You’re like these strawberries: sweet someday, but not yet ripe.”

“Not yet ready for picking!” Gerard hooted. “I love it! How do I taste?”

They kissed, staggering a bit under the weight of their packs. She licked a drop of runoff from his mustache, which smelled of the tobacco-and-dried-mint cigarettes they rolled themselves.

“So I’m not ripe yet, eh?” he said with satisfaction.

“You know what I mean. You’re not ripe because you don’t want to be ripe.”

“That’s right — because if I were ripe, someone would pick me and sell me to be eaten! For a profit! Hah!” He hitched up his pack savagely and began plowing up the hill. “And that I won’t have! Maudit capitalistes!” he shouted at the main road far below.

“Shh, we’re getting close to the house.”

THE PALE-EYED FARMER stood at the door with his equally pale-eyed wife beside him, their four runny-nosed children clustered around her. “Nothing is ripe yet,” the farmer said wearily, “but you can stay a night in the school bus back of the barn. Come back in a week or two when they’re ready.” His wife said nothing. She looked as flat and white as a freshly ironed sheet. Kate wondered how old she was.

There were a couple of old, abandoned school buses shipwrecked behind the barn. Gerard and Kate entered one and found the seats ripped out to make room for two dirty mattresses piled one on top of the other. Everything sloped to the front because of two missing wheels. They piled their packs on the driver’s seat, sat down on the edge of the stacked mattresses, which were dirty but didn’t smell too bad, and began laughing like maniacs. Gerard threw his arms around Kate’s neck and kissed and bit her fiercely. “Alors! Welcome home! The little bear and the little rabbit have arrived in their new hutch,” he said, using their pet names for each other.

Kate laughed, too, her relief tinged with hysteria. Before long they were kissing extravagantly, rolling in their wet clothes over the old mattress while rain pounded its voodoo dance on the roof.

Later, the rain let up, and she walked the fields at sunset: purple hills and the blue-green St. Lawrence River far below, lit by the pink and peach-colored clouds, like a brush fire. The wind softened until all she could hear was the gentle flap of her poncho on her tired shoulders and the squelch of her wet sneakers in the mud. Although most of the strawberries were huge and green, looking down she could see here and there, brilliantly outlined in the last unearthly rays, one, two, a cluster that were ripe. Stooping, she began to pick, with raw fingers, the wet red berries, juicy as a bruise when she bit into them. Their fresh taste made her forget everything, and for a few minutes she was lost in a frenzy of picking and eating, as if she would never get enough. Finally, she slowed and began to set aside the more perfect ones for Gerard. When she straightened up, she saw the farmer half a field away, watching, expressionless.

Back at the bus, her stomach still cold with shame, she told Gerard what had happened, but he only laughed.

“A handful of berries! That’s what he gets for inviting a little rabbit onto his property. Don’t worry, he’ll still make money this summer — hey, don’t worry, I said.” He saw now that she was on the verge of tears.

“But it’s so hard to live here, Gerard. The winters are nine months long! How do they live?”

“Everyone lives,” he said, “only most people don’t spend as much time worrying about it as you do. Come on — eat. While you were out I met our neighbors in the other bus and they invited us over for coffee after dinner.”

He cut slices of bread and cheese for her, and even produced from his pocket a crumpled wrapper with a piece of chocolate inside. She ate vaguely, her sketchbook open on her knees. She flipped to a picture she had tried to draw of Gerard; it had come out looking improbably like Jesus. (“It’s the beard,” she’d protested.) Then she turned the page to the picture he had drawn of her in return — owl eyes burning underneath a mess of uncombed hair. Gerard was getting impatient, so she closed the book and they went to visit their new neighbors: an out-of-work woodcutter, his young, round wife, and three of their relatives, all staying in a single bus.

“C’est la crise économique,” the woodcutter’s wife said cheerfully, passing around cups of instant coffee. Her name was Marie-Thérèse, and she had blond sausage curls and a droll accent that made everything seem funny, even “the economic crisis.” Kate couldn’t help laughing, and Marie-Thérèse laughed along with her. “It’s because of my accent, yes? Well, the way you talk sounds funny to us!” And she and her husband imitated a Parisian saying, “Please pass the butter.” Gerard laughed and poured himself a second cup of coffee and Kate thought that this was how she liked him best: relaxed, among his own kind of people, working people, of whatever nation. They talked about regionalisms, “our ways,” as Marie-Thérèse put it, but mostly about “la crise.”

The woodcutter, Jean, explained their predicament simply: “If the economy is bad, people have no money to build houses; if they don’t build houses, there is no need for wood.”

“So we come to pick strawberries,” Marie-Thérèse finished for him, laughing.

“Only there are no strawberries either!” someone burst out.

“Have another cup,” Marie-Thérèse urged Kate. “Sugar? Oh, yes, I remember now; they say the Americans never take sugar. Have some biscuits?” Out of their meager stores, little cans stacked neatly on a folding plastic shelf, she pressed food on them. The back half of the bus was curtained off for sleeping, and they sat clustered together, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee. There were improvised curtains on whittled rods over the windows.

It was late when Kate and Gerard stumbled back across the field to their own dark bus and laid out the damp sleeping bags on the bare mattress and listened to the bus creak as it settled more deeply into the mud. She reached for him, and he pressed himself against her; then, without warning, he fell asleep. 

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