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“No, too busy,” she said, setting down her unfinished bowl of soup.

In the evenings, if he had the energy, it was Papa who would make a batch of popcorn with butter and brewer’s yeast and bring it over to the campground to hang out with the apprentices and increasing numbers of random visitors who came to see the Nearings and now our farm, too. The oil embargo had ended in March, but not before the country’s energy innocence was lost, leaving many seeking a simpler lifestyle and finding in us an example. The visitors were young and free and adoring of Papa, especially the women. When they turned to him, they shone brighter. It wasn’t a party in the traditional sense, but everyone was high from hard work, fasting, and the low-protein diet. They talked into the night about soil and compost mostly, but also of the effects of the energy crisis, Nixon and Watergate, and other more personal topics. Papa enjoyed the attention and gave it back in return, while Mama stayed home and kept to herself.

In the warmth of July Mama often sent Heidi and me out to pick berries, “for pie,” she promised as a bribe to keep us from coming home belly-full and bucket-empty. It’d been difficult of late to buy the mason jar lids for putting away the magic stores of raspberry juice. The reason was said to be because people were nervous over the oil shortage and were growing and storing their own food in numbers unanticipated by the lid manufacturers. Happily for us kids, we made pies instead of canning.

Heidi and I walked barefoot and bare-bellied under the coolness of the fir trees, where the air smelled of sap and the ground was covered in brown and fallen needles, soft underfoot. The trees opened up to the scraggly berry bush area around the foundation from the early settlers, with the campground to the left, empty tents flapping in the breeze.

Raspberry bushes loved places inhabited by the people who lived before us. The old stones of the foundation were sunk into the ground, round and bleached from the sun. Nearby the shallow dry well was full of berry bushes, too, but harder to get in, so the berries weren’t eaten by others as quickly. I made Heidi wait at the top as I climbed down the well. Cobwebs tied the spaces between the brambles, and the air was heavier from the heat of sun on the stones, berries red and overripe. They fell off into my hands so easily I had to eat them because they would be too mushy in the pail. My fingers quickly stained red.

“Wa ba-ba,” Heidi said from above. Her eyes were blue pools of want, bare belly pushing out.

“Just testing them,” I said. “Yum, yup, pretty good.”

“Me!” she said.

I put some of the less ripe berries into the empty bucket. They made plink-plink sounds like those in our book Blueberries for Sal, and the thorns on the bushes left raised welts on my arms as I reached into the deeper clumps. Soon the berries made a layer in the bucket and didn’t plink-plink anymore. When I climbed out of the well Heidi reached in for a handful and put them all in her mouth, leaving her with red lipstick lips like Skates. She took another handful.

“Stop eating all the berries,” I said and held the bucket up so she couldn’t reach in. “Let’s go, you can pick your own.”

Down in the larger space of the foundation the berries had been combed over by others. We scavenged what we could find, but the bucket wasn’t getting any fuller for pie, and our arms and legs were covered with scratches. I knew where more raspberries might be. Old places. Secret places. The big patch past the graveyard with the many granite headstones above the blueberry field—but I was scared to go over without Mama. Sometimes I could hear the sounds of people who lived here before, just beneath the surface, like layers of time in the earth. Every so often they reached through and touched, leaving a trail of goose bumps across my skin.

A local elderly lady named Lucy, who sometimes stopped at the farm stand, told Papa she was related to the people who lived on our land over a century ago. “They were the Colsons,” she said. There