Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 633 & 634, October 1994

Wild Strawberries by James A. Ritchie

© 1994 by James A. Ritchie

A self-educated man and a lifelong fan of Louis L’Amour, James Ritchie is primarily a writer of western fiction. His first publication in that field, a short story, appeared in 1980 and was followed by two western novels for Walker and Company. Mr. Ritchie has made his living as a hunter, trapper, construction worker, and farmer; the last of these occupations may explain how he is able to capture so well the atmosphere of the midwest farm town depicted in his new story for us...

Linda had obviously stopped at the supermarket before coming home from work, because when she parked the car in the driveway she honked before coming inside. She only does that when she needs help carrying something. So I went out and helped carry the bags of groceries into the house and set them on the table. Linda dug into one of the bags and came out with a quart of strawberries.

She held the strawberries up and smiled. “I got your favorite,” she said. “I even remembered the whipped cream. Sit down and I’ll fix you a bowl.”

I sat down at the table. Linda put the groceries away, then went to work on the strawberries, slicing the stems free, then halving and washing the berries. She filled a small bowl and squirted a thick pile of whipped cream on top, completely covering the strawberries.

I do love strawberries, but Linda was wrong when she said she had bought my favorite. You can’t buy the strawberries I love at any store. Oh, I can eat store-bought strawberries. I mean, they’re better than no strawberries at all, but that’s about it.

Domestic strawberries aren’t grown for flavor, but for size. Some are the size of a baby’s fist, and because of travel time and shelf time, they have to be harvested long before they fully ripen. Yes, I can eat them, if I have enough whipped cream piled on top, but they leave a lot to be desired.

Wild strawberries are another story. Wild strawberries are small, usually not much bigger than a marble, and when allowed to ripen on the plant, they almost melt in your mouth. Wild strawberries are sweet and so full of flavor they make domestic strawberries fade into nothingness.

I spent the first nineteen years of my life in a tiny farming town in east-central Indiana, population 105. Railroad tracks ran through the exact center of town, passing the large grain elevator where corn and soybeans were loaded into the cars. At harvest time, usually most of October and November, the grain elevator ran day and night, and a freight train came through every couple of hours.

The sound of corn being stripped from the cob and shot down metal pipes into the waiting train cars, the chugging of farm tractors hauling corn and soybeans, the lonesome whistle of train engines, and the follow-the-leader banging as a train started pulling the long line of heavily loaded cars to their destination filled the town of Millville with noise. After a week or so, however, the noise seemed to fade as the ear grew accustomed to it.

I was seventeen, and Julie Craig wasn’t my first girlfriend, but she was the first woman I’d ever made love to. Julie often talked about marriage, but I never took her seriously, and nothing could have been further from my mind. I owned a car, and on Friday or Saturday night we would drive into New Castle, or Hagerstown, and eat at a McDonald’s and then hang out with friends at the bowling alley.

At other times, when the weather was nice, we would walk down the railroad to a woods half a mile from town. There we would picnic next to a small stream. We would talk, make love, pass the day in pleasant companionship.

And we would drink. Like me, Julie was seventeen, but I had a friend who would buy whiskey for us whenever we wanted, and with Julie that was every weekend. And when she drank, it was with the purpose of getting drunk. It was one of the few things I didn’t like about her, especially since I didn’t drink much and hated the feeling of being intoxicated.

But Julie did like getting drunk, and because of this, I had Randy buy whatever she wanted, and that was almost never beer or wine. Julie wanted only whiskey mixed with a little Coca-Cola. She mixed it in favor of the whiskey, and she would drink until she couldn’t walk.

We almost always kept a full bottle of Canadian Mist in a hollow log near the little stream where we picnicked, and if we stayed there long, I could count on Julie getting drunk. I don’t know why I went along with her heavy drinking, but I do know she would have dropped me quickly if I hadn’t. And while I certainly wasn’t in love with her, I liked being with her, mostly.

Once, when Julie was sober, I showed her the patch of wild strawberries I’d discovered three years earlier. They weren’t more than a quarter mile from the woods where we picnicked, near a swampy area where few people found reason to go.

Even in the country, wild strawberry patches were rare, and this was only the second patch I’d found. It was maybe fifteen yards long and four yards wide, but held hundreds of plants. Only about three inches high, the plants grew very close together, and you had to move the leaves aside to find the strawberries. No one knew of this strawberry patch except me, and it was a secret I guarded closely.

But eventually, after checking to be certain the strawberries were ripe, I showed it to Julie. Together we sat and plucked the small, red, sweet strawberries from the plants and popped them into our mouths. Julie’s eyes widened in surprise as she tasted the first one, and she began picking them so fast I feared she would go through the whole patch.

Wanting to save a few strawberries for another day, I at last stopped her from eating, but only by promising to have Randy buy a fresh bottle of Canadian Mist. He drove to a liquor store just inside the city limits of New Castle and bought two bottles, one for our immediate usage, and a fresh one for the hollow log, though a partial bottle was already there.

Randy never charged anything extra for buying us the whiskey, and he wouldn’t buy it for anyone else. We’d been friends for several years, and I never had to ask him twice. I just told him what we needed, gave him the money, and within an hour I had whiskey in hand.

It was just a week later, with nearly all the ripe strawberries gone, but with a couple of hundred only a few days from ripening, when Julie told me she was pregnant. She told me at the worst possible time, and in the worst possible way.

You couldn’t walk through the strawberry patch without smashing a lot of plants, and the ones near the middle were almost impossible to reach. I was on hands and knees, my weight resting on the fingertips of my left hand, each finger carefully placed so it wouldn’t smash a plant. With my right hand I was reaching as far into the patch as possible, looking for ripe strawberries we’d missed. I found a couple of dozen.

Julie was sitting on the grass a few feet away, her knees drawn up to her chin. She took the ripe strawberries as I found them, eating a couple and dropping the others into an empty glass. Deciding I’d found most of the ripe strawberries within reach, I moved back beside Julie and brushed my hands together, then reached into the glass for a ripe strawberry.

I held the glass out to Julie and she took a strawberry, but rather than eating it she rolled it around in the palm of her hand, watching as it turned this way and that. Then she looked at me and said, “Jim, I’m pregnant.”

She blurted it out just like that. No warning, no softening of the blow. I guess it kind of shocked me or something, because for a time I just looked at her, wondering if she was kidding, and what I should say if she wasn’t. “I thought you were on the pill,” I finally said. “You can’t get pregnant on the pill.”

“Yes you can,” she said. “But I didn’t. I... I stopped taking the pill a couple of months ago. It was messing me up, so I stopped taking it.”

“God, why didn’t you tell me?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

A thought came to mind. “Did you want to get pregnant? Is that why you stopped taking the pill?”

“It was messing me up. But I don’t know, maybe I did want to get pregnant. Is that so terrible?”

My mind seemed somehow blank, and the thoughts that came in just bounced around without staying long enough to read. Almost without realizing it, I moved back over to the strawberry patch and began looking for ripe strawberries. Julie was still talking, but the words didn’t seem to get past my ears.

I found a ripe strawberry, ate it, found another and another, popped each into my mouth, and continued to look for more. Suddenly, Julie was standing in front of me, her feet in the middle of the strawberries, a dozen delicate plants crushed beneath each shoe.

Jumping to my feet, I grabbed Julie’s arm and pulled her away from the strawberries. “What are you doing?” I yelled. “You have to be careful. You don’t know how easy it is to kill strawberry plants.”

Julie jerked her arm free and ran to the middle of the strawberry patch. There she began to kick at the ground with first one foot, then the other. Her shoes ripped the fragile plants from the ground, sent plants and dirt and unripe strawberries flying through the air. “I don’t care how easy strawberry plants are to kill,” she screamed. “I tell you I’m pregnant, and all you can do is think about your damned strawberries.”

I honestly don’t remember the next couple of minutes. When I came to my senses Julie was on the ground and I was straddling her, slapping her face, first with the palm of my hand, then with the back. Her nose was bleeding a little and both cheeks were red. The right cheek was beginning to bruise.

Even when I stopped hitting her, Julie kept screaming. She managed to pull one arm free and began flailing at me with a small fist. I rolled off her, but for a minute she kept hitting me. Then she rolled away. For several minutes neither of us said anything.

“I need a drink,” Julie said at last. “I’m going back to get a drink.”

She stood up and walked back toward the hollow log. It was a quarter mile from the strawberry patch, and I let her walk half the distance before following. Julie was already sitting down and drinking when I arrived. She hadn’t bothered to mix the whiskey with Coca-Cola, but simply turned the bottle up and drank deeply.

“You’re a bastard,” she said. “I tell you I’m pregnant, and all you do is get mad because I stepped on a few stupid plants. If you were any kind of man you’d ask me to marry you. You’d think about the baby, even if you don’t care about me.”

The fifth of whiskey Julie held was a little less than half full, but another was tucked back in the log, and I wondered if she would get to the second bottle before passing out. She drank the whiskey in long, deep swallows, coughing only a little. I could see her eyes begin to come unfocused, and hear the slur of her words.

“You’re a shombich,” she said. “But I’ll show you. I’ll shue you, by God. I’ll make you pay through the noshe for this baby.”

Julie finished the whiskey in the first bottle, and by then she was so drunk she couldn’t begin to stand up. Nor could she get the second bottle opened. A train whistle sounded in the distance, sounding lonesome. It was nearly dark. It wasn’t quite harvest season yet, but a train came through every two or three hours.

Julie finished the first bottle. She was too drunk to stand up, too drunk even to walk, but she was still conscious. I opened the second fifth and held it to her mouth, tipping her head back. She drank, coughed, choked. I let her breathe a minute, then tilted her head back again. Somewhere along the line she passed out. I poured more whiskey down her throat.

Suddenly she turned her head sideways and began to throw up. The sound and smell of it made me retch, but I forced myself to regain control. Only when I had half the second bottle down her did I stop.

I didn’t plan it. I swear I didn’t once think about how to kill her. At least not consciously. But I did throw her over my shoulder and start back down the railroad toward Millville. Two hundred yards from the crossing I put her down in the middle of the tracks, her head resting on a rail. Sitting on the rail next to her, I rested, breathing hard from the exertion.

A train whistle sounded and I jumped to my feet. It was fully dark, but early for another train. Looking east, I saw the light of a train engine. It was well over a mile away, but coming fast. I ran back down the tracks, hoping to reach the hollow log before the train reached Julie.

It was a passenger train, and coming too fast. When I saw I couldn’t reach the spot I wanted, I climbed over a bank beside the railroad and dropped flat. The train passed me, sounding too close and too loud. Passenger trains ran sixty miles an hour and usually weren’t very long. In thirty seconds or less it was past me.

Then I heard the whistle scream long and loud, sounding anxious. A screeching filled the night as the brakes on the train locked and metal wheels ground on metal rails, filling the night with showers of sparks. But brakes on a train are useless for quick stops. It takes a passenger train half a mile to stop from a speed of sixty miles an hour. When I looked down the railroad I could see the train was only then coming to a stop, several hundred yards past the Millville crossing.

With my heart beating fast and my breathing so labored I could hardly run, I hurried the rest of the way to the hollow log and grabbed the half-empty fifth of Canadian Mist. I drank deeply, and kept drinking until the world swam in my vision. I drank more, threw up, drank still more. At some point I either went to sleep or passed out.

When I woke up I felt worse than I ever had in my life. I was still drunk, but knew I had to keep drinking. Two inches of whiskey remained in the bottle, and I drank it all. It was enough to make me pass out again. The next time I opened my eyes it was daylight and two county sheriff’s deputies were shaking me.

Things got pretty scary after that. They asked all kinds of questions about Julie, and I told them she had been with me, but walked back home about dark the night before. They told me she was dead, that a train hit her. I cried. The tears were real.

They believed me. Everyone did. I talked to the sheriff later and told him Randy Carter bought the whiskey for us. They arrested him, and under a law I didn’t even know about, he was charged with manslaughter. He was sentenced to ten years, and I think he served five.

The funny part was he plead guilty. Randy believed the story I told just like everybody else. He honestly thought he was responsible for Julie’s death.

Linda sat the bowl of strawberries on the table in front of me. Picking up the fork, I stuck the tines through the whipped cream and into a strawberry. It was good. Not nearly as good as wild strawberries, but still tasty. I ate until the bowl was empty, then asked for seconds.

“Why don’t you wait until after supper,” Linda said. “You’ll ruin your appetite.”

“All right. Guess I’ll have a drink and watch a little TV. Can I make you something?”

“Sure. What are you having?”

“Canadian Mist and Coke, I think. Somehow the strawberries put me in the mood.”

“Sounds good. Fix me a tall one.”

“I’ll be right back. Just don’t eat all the strawberries while I’m gone.”

Going into the living room, I mixed two tall drinks, putting ice in each. I mixed them a little stronger than usual, favoring the whiskey over the Coca-Cola.