Blackberry Preserves
by Claudia Koch
College of Charleston
Originally from New Jersey, Claudia Koch is currently a student at the College of Charleston, where she is studying English. Her work has been recognized by the SCAA’s Elizabeth Boatwright Coker Student Award in Poetry, as well as the Sarah Margaret Goad Memorial Undergraduate Prize in Fiction.
Dozens of little girls’ dresses line the closet in my attic.
In truth, the attic isn’t quite an attic, nor is the closet quite a closet. The attic is the large bedroom sprawling across the top floor of my old, creaking house way down the lane past Harry’s Farm. As for the closet, it is a five-foot long armoire which has sat in that room atop the house for as long as I can remember. As children, my younger sister Autumn and I used to frighten each other on nights when the rain tapped at the windows, telling tales of ghosts living in the armoire.
The stories seemed to have come true.
***
When I first met Harry I was seventeen, and he eighteen. His father–also named Harry–had just purchased the farm down the lane which had, for the entirety of my life thus far, lain dark and vacant.
When Harry showed up I had been sitting on my porch, enveloped by the sweet scent of the butterfly bushes wafting on the warm air. I was reading one of the many dusty novels from the attic shelves. It might have been Tom Sawyer, or maybe something by Steinbeck, I can’t recall. But I do know that it felt revolutionary to me, at seventeen, because doesn’t everything? At seventeen?
It’s funny what the brain forgets, and what it grips onto for dear life.
And so, I had been eyes down, deep in my perusal of this groundbreaking many-decade-old novel when Harry knocked on the white-washed wooden railing beside me, holding a large jar full of blackberries. The sight of this real-life farm boy–plaid shirt and all–with his jar of blackberries, mere feet away from me, startled me quite abruptly out of my mental wanderings along the Mississippi, or through the Salinas Valley, or wherever the yellowed pages in my hands had taken me. I was so startled, in fact, that I flung my hands up, flinging my dusty paperback right at Harry–or rather, at his stupidly large jar of blackberries–causing the jar to come flying, the blackberries to soar, and Harry’s red shirt to become more of a purple one.
I rushed to my feet, mouth agape, preparing to stammer out an apology, but Harry shushed me with his tanned finger, shoulders shaking with laughter. He reached into his breast pocket, fishing out a stowaway blackberry, and popped it into my still-agape mouth.
Harry and I ate a lot of blackberries that summer.
***
We were married the June after my college graduation. I had attended a tiny all girls school in Amherst, Harry staying home to work on his father’s farm. He wrote me letters all the time, in language not flowery in the least, just simple enough that it must have been plucked straight from the soul.
Every May when I arrived back home from school for the summer, Harry greeted me at my porch with a jar full of glistening blackberries. Sometimes even a cloth napkin-lined basket, if he was feeling extra ceremonious.
After our wedding, Harry continued working at his father’s farm, and he and I began living in the attic of my family’s big house. He had fixed it up, papering the walls a pale floral (upon my request) and scrubbing new life into the wooden floor. My sister had gone away to college in New York but came home during breaks from school. My parents still slept in their yellow bedroom on the second floor, and we all had meals together at the kitchen table, sharing stories, cackling at our own jokes.
There was a lot of love in that big house, but still room for more.
***
When the doctor told me I couldn’t have children of my own, Harry refused to believe it.
“Can’t you run a few more tests?” he asked. “How can you be so sure?” His eyes, which I had only ever seen brought to tears from too much laughter, began to water.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Finley, but in cases like this there is really no point to further testing. Your wife’s condition falls under the category of what we call ‘absolute infertility’,” responded the doctor, hands stuffed into the pockets of his white lab coat, eyes cast downward. I was never sure if his empathy was all an act, or if he truly was sorry, but either way I couldn’t stand to look at his face anymore. I grabbed my purse and fled the too-brightly-lit room.
***
I used to think about baby names all the time, while lying in the grass beneath the big oak tree or curled up in my favorite wicker armchair on the porch. After that day at the doctor’s office–with those stomach-turning terms and the sickeningly sweet look on the doctor’s face–these baby name ponderings became daydreams about an imaginary child, so full and complete that she (it was a girl) felt to me like a real living, breathing child. Her name was Jane. She had chestnut curls, like Harry, and her favorite color was forest green (unusual for a girl, I know, but that’s just my Jane, always unafraid to be different).
I used to draw illustrations of Jane. Her image was so vivid in my mind that it was as easy as depicting the likeness of a reference right in front of me, like I used to do in my art classes in school. I always drew Jane smiling, playing outside, a tall brunette woman at her side. Or snuggled up with the woman, reading fairy tales by a crackling fire. I always drew her wearing green. While all of the other colors in the box remained intact, my forest green pencil became a short nub.
I stuffed each of my sketches under the mattress in the attic upon completion. If Harry saw them he would think me insane. Or just sad, which would almost be worse–because it would be the truth.
I would have liked Jane to have been real, but she was real to me, and I would just have to live with that for the time being.
***
One day, a few months after the doctor’s appointment, my sister called. It was the beginning of her final year in college, and she had plans to move abroad after graduation, working as an English teacher in Italy, the type of path I always knew Autumn was bound to take.
“Hi, Daisy,” she began, in a shaky yet cheery voice that sounded like a plastered-on smile.
“Autumn, hi, what’s going on?” I questioned, knowing that she hadn’t called me simply for a run-of-the-mill sisterly chat.
After a labored inhale loud enough to be audible on my end of the line, Autumn began, “So, I messed up. I honestly don’t know what to do. I’m super scared right now.”
Fifteen minutes later I was in the car, shooting down the highway like a bullet.
I arrived at Autumn’s dorm in three hours. I threw my arms around my little sister and whispered in her ear, “I’ll support you no matter what.”
***
After another visit to see my sister seven months later, I arrived home with a newborn baby in my arms.
Harry’s mouth hung open so wide you could have popped a blackberry in there.
“I didn’t know what else to do, Harry, I had to help Autumn,” I explained. “But if you don’t want to do this, I understand, I can bring her to an orphanage right now. It’ll break my heart, but of course I’ll do it,” I stammered while he listened silently.
His initial shock lasted for about five minutes, in which he ran his hands through his hair and stared out of the front windows at the peach-colored sunset. Then suddenly he stood and gathered the infant in his arms. He gazed down at her round little face, the only part of her not swathed in a pale pink blanket. A faint smile crept onto his lips, and the skin beside his eyes crinkled.
“What should we name her?” was all he said.
***
Charlotte Finley took up residence in the wooden crib that had been collecting cobwebs in the attic since Autumn had slept in it all those years ago. She was dressed in frilly white outfits and read stories in the rocking chair by the fire. Her grandparents spent every free second with their blonde little princess, and although they knew the truth regarding her birth, they never mentioned it. It would be for the family alone to know.
She was the most loved little girl on the East Coast. Maybe even the world.
***
Autumn returned home after her six months teaching in Italy and took a teaching position at the local high school. Now, in addition to her loving parents and doting grandparents, Charlotte had an aunt whose love bordered on obsessive. When Autumn came home from work each day, chalk dusting her flowy dress, she would gather up Charlotte and push her in her carriage, strolling all the way to the end of the lane. She would lay down a blanket in the soft grass beside the pond, and place Charlotte on it. The two would lie facing the swirling clouds, and Autumn would tell her make-believe stories about the oddly-shaped ones. One would be a dragon, storming a crumbling castle. Another would be a talking cat, whose best friend was a gray little mouse. And sometimes, she told me, she would slip in true stories. Stories about a little girl whose mother loved her very much, but had to make a tough decision, for both of their sakes. And whose father would have loved her very much, had he been a better man.
Autumn would have to stop telling her these stories soon, once she began to understand what she was saying. But one day, years from now, she would tell her the truth. Unadulterated, in its entirety. She deserved to know.
***
On the chilly spring morning of Charlotte’s first birthday, I rose early to make pancakes. I quietly padded down the stairs from the attic bedroom, my feet wrapped in woolen socks, to find Harry already in the kitchen. He had started a pot of coffee and was reading the paper at the round kitchen table while the pot hissed into action. As I tied on my apron, threadbare from use, Harry put down the paper and began plucking the ingredients out of the cabinet.
He first got out the flour.
“Did you hear about the Reids? Their obituary is in the paper today,” he began, reaching back into the cabinet.
“My mother told me last night after you went to sleep…isn’t it heartbreaking? A car crash, I think she said it was,” I responded, grabbing the large glass mixing bowl.
“And they were so young,” he continued, placing the sugar and baking powder on the counter beside me. After a pause, he said, “They left behind a little boy, you know.”
“Right, isn’t his name Thomas? The little freckled boy?” I responded, reaching into the refrigerator for the rest of the ingredients.
“Yes, Thomas. Well, after the Reids’ obituary I read something else in the newspaper…it was a notice that Thomas was in the temporary care of his sickly great aunt, but that he is in need of a proper guardian. And–and I was thinking that, um, well, that we could fill that role? Only if you really wanted to, and if not I completely understand.”
My hands halted in their work at this, my mind the one now laboring.
“I’d love to,” I replied after just a moment, in a near whisper, a smile creeping onto my face.
Harry plopped the rainbow sprinkles onto the counter.
Once the whole family was seated around the table, pouring syrup and smearing butter, Harry and I told everyone of our plan to raise Thomas. Their faces all lit up with smiles as bright as the sprinkles in the pancakes. Even little Charlotte began to smile, perched in her highchair.
***
One sunny day when Charlotte was three and Thomas six, after the dark winter when my father passed away, Autumn returned home from work with a pensive look on her face. She took my hand and led me to take a seat on the couch, where we had a hushed conversation.
One of her students, a girl of only sixteen, had fallen pregnant and needed someone to take in her baby without the whole town finding out.
It was on that day that I decided to open the orphanage.
After receiving the firm approval from my mother and Harry, I got to work. Moving Harry and my things to the second floor bedroom I had slept in as a child, I lined the attic room with rows of twin-sized beds, some from the local charity shop, others constructed by Harry himself. I piled on thick quilts and organized trunks of toys. Once it was all ready, I stood back to admire my work.
Summer was fast approaching, and the hazy breeze murmured through the open window. A little white bird flew down and perched itself on the sill, glancing inside. It was almost time.
***
Autumn came home with the little girl in mid-June. She had the soft beginnings of dark hair atop her head, and deep, round eyes. Her mother had named her Rose. We soon began calling her Rosie.
After Rosie, we took in parentless children from all over the area. We cared for fourteen in total.
The old armoire became stuffed with little dresses.
***
The years that followed winded on like a lazy stream. Eventually Thomas went off to college in Boston, Charlotte following suit a few years later. Sweet little Rosie had been adopted by a middle-aged couple a few towns over, and the others’ turns all came as well.
Autumn married a university professor and moved to the city, living just a few miles from Charlotte’s school. She had long ago told Charlotte the truth of her birth, and Charlotte now called her “mom”, and me “Aunt Daisy”. It’s funny how open children’s minds are to change–I don’t think I will ever fully consider Charlotte my niece, as opposed to my daughter.
As for my mother, she was still with us, living at home with Harry and I, but her movements were slower and her hair was more gray than brown.
It was often much too quiet in the house during these years, especially on nights when the wind whistled at the panes of the attic window. No children told stories, huddled under blankets. The attic room lay dark and undisturbed.
The little dresses and slacks hung limply in the armoire, like ghosts of the children who once wore them.
***
It was an evening in the fall when we found the basket on our porch.
Harry and I had been sitting in the kitchen, nibbling on thumbprint cookies filled with dollops of blackberry preserves. We had baked them that afternoon, pressing our thumbs into the soft centers of the dough. I had mentioned to Harry offhandedly while we baked that I wished we still had little thumbs around to leave their tiny thumbprints in the batch. Harry squeezed my hand, knowing how deeply I meant it.
While we enjoyed our cookies in the warm kitchen, I got the urge to step outside into the crisp night, and Harry followed. When I opened the door and gazed outside, I saw the amber leaves of the big oak tree laying lifeless on the ground. I also saw the sky, bright with sunset, and the squirrels scurrying around the bushes at the edge of the yard. Life was all around us.
When I crossed the door’s threshold, I nearly tripped over the basket at my feet. In it lay a little girl, wrapped in a thick green blanket. She lay there, serene, almost happy-looking, her brown eyes shining up at us. Her little chestnut-colored curls poked out from beneath the blanket. After a moment of admiring this precious creature, I bent down to examine the piece of cardstock tucked beside her. It was a note that said only one word, in bold rounded letters. It was a name. Jane.
I scooped her up and brought her into her new home.