Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [36]
‘Tell you what: why don’t I make us a blackberry pie? We’ll go blackberry picking, like we used to.’
She made an extravagant decision: they took a bus to their old neighbourhood, then walked, though Nancy made sure they avoided the tree-lined street and the house where they had lived in happier days. Further out, on the edge of town they came to the patch of open land where fat, juicy blackberries had flourished, but found it was transformed: no longer a haven of wild fruit and flowers, it was a place of flimsy shacks and cinders, with torn scraps of paper blowing across the wrecked landscape. The brambles were gone, the trees too, chopped down to be put to use as makeshift walls. Pet dogs had formed themselves into packs, loping the perimeter, seeking out trash cans in the hunt for food.
The boy looked up at Nancy, bewildered. ‘What happened?’
‘These are people that lost their homes, Joey. This is where they live now.’
They walked on; she led him to the river where, not long before, the family had spent a Sunday afternoon watching kingfishers and dragonflies, with boys seated on the banks fishing alongside fathers. Now the bank was lined with shanties occupied by homeless squatters. Broken-down trucks without their wheels lay alongside the river like ruined barges.
‘There are lots of these places,’ Nancy said. ‘They call them Hooverville, after the President. It’s a sort of joke, but it’s not funny.’
The two of them looked around silently at the flimsy structures created from rotting planks, cardboard, bits of scrap. There were chimneys made out of tin cans joined together, poking from roofs of tar-paper held down by branches. Nancy saw with a pang that some even had improvised doors that flapped, creaking as the wind hit them.
Women, bodies slack, the hollow of their eyes dark as soot, watched them. She forced herself not to turn quickly aside, to look at these figures, grey as cinders, branded with an invisible scar of shame, and see them as ordinary folk who had once possessed proper homes, where the men had left for work after breakfast, the women had sometimes bought flowers to put in a vase on the window ledge. But they were no longer ordinary; they had slipped through the grid and were drowning in hopelessness. And she became aware that there were no men in sight; an eerie absence at a time when there was really no place else for them to go.
A girl about the same age as Joey squatted to defecate in the scrubland behind a shack. She glanced across at them, her face blank. Nancy took Joey’s arm and turned in the opposite direction, talking rapidly to distract his attention.
‘Well! No blackberries today. We’ll think of something else. One of the mothers at the nursery was telling me she’s trying out all kinds of interesting new ideas for food. She made soup out of stinging nettles.’
Joey wrinkled his nose thoughtfully, trying to grasp a fugitive memory.
‘Nettles are good. I ate nettles.’
She was surprised. ‘When was that?’
‘I don’t remember.’ He began to feel anxious.
Nettles. What next? Nancy wondered. Prices rising, farmers producing less. Perhaps kingfishers and dragonflies would be on the menu; cicadas trapped and broiled. Anything edible.
She recalled a phrase from Ambrose Bierce that she had gleefully committed to memory in college. Bierce said ‘edible’ meant good to eat and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm. It seemed less amusing today.
The toddlers enjoyed singing, and Nancy sang along with them – she loved the high sweet voices wavering through old nursery songs, chubby hands clapping – but there were days when the singing itself became difficult: taking a deep breath she found herself gasping, on the point of sudden tears, lungs swelling, her voice wobbling on the note. It was as though the stream of sound unblocked a cache of sadness she was holding within her. She longed to get it out, wash it away. Instead she gulped, swallowed, beat time and nodded