Chapter 20
LAURIE
The next morning, while Chary slept off yesterday’s sunburn, Laurie decided to return to the barrens.
Professional curiosity: he wanted to see the harvest. And there might’ve been a reason Chary had chosen a hot afternoon picnic over a morning one; the reason might’ve been to do with not wanting Laurie to observe the harvest. A brother kind of reason.
When Laurie had gone into Berryfield proper yesterday to send Hiram his telegram—because obviously, he hadn’t wanted to route anything through the cowboy—he’d looked around briefly for signs of seasonal housing.
He’d found only a typically barracks-like brick boardinghouse for the workers of the town’s other, more major industry, logging and millwork.
But somebody had to be picking those blueberries, and they had to sleep somewhere.
It wasn’t as though Chary’s staff was spending their spare time on it.
As restless as he felt, Laurie didn’t intend to do any actual field labor, even if he thought he could’ve gotten away with it.
He couldn’t have. He wasn’t part of an established crew, and besides that, Mr. Herbert knew his face.
Even with his cover of leisurely lover, the bigot of a foreman was rendered unapproachable, thanks to yesterday, a consequence Laurie hadn’t thought through in the moment.
No going back now, though. Unlike Chary in New York, here he couldn’t be every man at once: normal and queer, workingman and “that kind of friend.”
He could still observe the blueberry fields.
Picking happened in the morning, beginning just after the dew had dried off the bushes, and continuing until the afternoon heat made the tiny fruits too hot and delicate—Chary’s words, when he’d asked about it yesterday—so Laurie made his way north through the white pine woods around midmorning.
Mr. Herbert had come back to finish his mark-out of the field at some point yesterday; a new section was fenced in by a grid of string. From the woods the barrens looked like rocky, weed-overgrown sheep pastures turned into some kind of twine maze.
Picking was underway. Laurie kept to the periphery woods until he found the end of the grid mark-out, then doubled back to find where the pickers were about halfway through the day’s progress.
Blueberry barrens weren’t expansive and rolling like other fields, and were penned in by evergreens instead of sparse windbreaks, but otherwise, they were not really much different.
It was hot. Folks were probably paid by the pound, or by the box, or by the crate.
The berries were harvested with a handheld steel rake that looked like a square scoop with narrow tines on the bottom edge, and to pick them, the workers had to stoop, rake, dump the berries into a box, and move along.
Laurie’s upper back ached just watching.
Most of them didn’t have to stoop far, because they were children.
Black and brown and Asian and Native American, as he’d suspected.
A handful of paler kids who could’ve been mixed.
The median age looked to be ten, maybe twelve, and they were almost all male.
A few rows seemed to contain whole families, from mother duck all the way down; otherwise, there were few women, who usually hung back for sorting and packing jobs.
It wasn’t relative misery. Not like the slaughterhouse had been or even the farm fields of the South.
There was satisfaction in a hard day’s work out of doors—Laurie had had the best sleep of his life, that summer of cotton—and the field there was as beautiful as he’d imagined it would be: blue-green, rolling hills dotted with boulders, with a fresh-smelling westerly breeze coming through the evergreens.
This was a premier picking job and the workers knew it.
They moved along quickly down the rows of bushes, stooping, raking, scooping. Still not getting paid nearly enough.
Laurie itched to join, but that wasn’t the job.
If it had been, he’d have had to do as he’d done with the cotton, orange, and strawberry jobs: join a picking crew at the start of the season, as any other migrant worker would, except in his case with the crew boss appropriately paid not to find him an unacceptable cuckoo.
And even with the bribe eventually smoothing things, it’d been difficult enough to begin a job.
Crew bosses—men who gathered a network of migrant pickers and wagoned them up and down the East Coast, season to season, crop to crop, for a fee—looked at Laurie and refused him out of hand for the headache they suspected he’d become.
Knowing he’d likely demand too much pay.
Knowing they could always get a different kind of worker.
One there without papers, without a permanent home or connections to a community, no union, no status.
Laurie, as a well-fed, strong, white, adult man who could not even claim Irishness, was the antithesis of their ideal picker.
He had too many people who cared, too many advocates.
He was represented in protests and papers and unto elections.
According to the world at large, he had no business being exploited by anybody. The crew bosses acted accordingly.
Speaking of well-fed white men: today, there was a different cuckoo in the fields, moving along his end row slower than all the rest, with laughingly obvious less experience even compared to the youngest pickers. A man whom Laurie now recognized, shirtless, blond, young—supposedly very dead.
Laurie huffed in bemusement. The Wright brothers and their laboring in their own industries. They were the leisure class. They were presumably warned against labor of any kind; surely, their peers acted like they were.
It made sense now why Chary hadn’t wanted Laurie to witness the harvest, why he hadn’t had any visitors at all. There was the brother he’d worked hard to keep hidden, out in the open for anyone to see, with the sun glinting off his sweaty, golden shoulders.
Stuffy high collars and blurry photographs sure did hide a lot.
Despite their unnecessary labor in common, Laurie quickly realized August didn’t have his brother’s talent for anonymity nor Chary’s sincerity.
It was obvious that he had always been obvious, and had always leaned in to it; possibly, he’d had no choice about it.
Laurie understood a little bit of that. Folks noticed handsome men more than they did others, and disguises or not, he’d had to actively learn how to disappear in a crowd.
August wasn’t disappearing; he was performing.
It was a pretty good performance. The other workers gave August’s enthusiasm very little side-eye, just small, tolerant smiles, the smiles that lived in Laurie’s personal nightmares because when he caught them, they meant he wasn’t sinking into a job well enough to learn and understand.
August hadn’t a need to blend in, of course. Everybody already knew he was the boss. He could be as visible and white and there for the fun of it as he wanted, and nobody would stop him.
Laurie saw how easy it would’ve been for August to enter and charm New York society—and subsequently one Tjofabier Raberding. The world ate at the feet of a man like that.
So, how difficult was it for a trophy like August to stay hidden in the dark, in the middle of nowhere? Why had he faked his death and come there? Why not simply just move?
There was a straggler blueberry bush at Laurie’s feet, ignored by the harvesters because it was out of the way or perhaps because of bears.
He plucked off three blueberries, ate them—definitely better not a season old and sun-dried—then observed the fresh purple stain dotting his fingers like bruises.
“Huh,” he said. He touched his lips. Probably just as blue.
He pulled off another blueberry, smashed it between and over his fingertips, the pads, the nails, then sucked his fingers clean. The stain left behind was stark. It looked like his hand was dying.
He cursed. “Of course.” Blueberries. Was this how August had faked his death?
He laughed, though sobered fast.
“I found him,” Raberding had said.
“I saw nothing but his beautiful, cold face, his blue lips, firm like wax already. Like a corpse, Laurie, with no paint. I cannot even tell you what he was wearing. If he was clothed. But—oh. His hands were the same, purple-blue just on the ends and beneath his fingernails. As cold as ice. … Not that I wanted to touch him more. I’m sorry to say I fled. ”
And Laurie, later, to the same man, with more suspicion in mind: “You know what’s said of those who find the body.”
He reframed it now: August hadn’t been killed.
So, what was said about the person who’d found the “body” now?
For the “body” had been there for a purpose.
Blueberry stain, the accomplices, all for a purpose.
Surely, that Raberding had been the one to find August was significant in that purpose somehow.
The demi-mondaines would’ve done the job of reporting his “death” just as well.
Could it have been intentional for August’s lover to find his body?
Had August faked his death and done so precisely where he was sure his lover would find him? Had gone to elaborate lengths—blueberry stain, ice-cold skin, demi-mondaines paid to scream—to ensure Raberding, in particular, thought he was truly gone?
The police didn’t matter. They’d obviously been paid off. Too, the coroner. The papers—they mattered because they had spread the story, but neither blueberries nor ice had been necessary to sell his death to those.
Could it be that Raberding’s firsthand “knowledge” of August’s death had been the most important purpose of all?
Either August was unreasonably cruel... or he’d been desperate, with no other recourse. Laurie hadn’t met him face-to-face, but Chary didn’t seem like a man to lie to protect an unreasonably cruel brother. Less so to admire him as he so obviously did.
Laurie had known Tjofabier Raberding was cruel from first kiss.