Insulting the Angels

1863

On the farthest edges of the Cape, it was widely believed that cranberries first came to earth in the beak of a dove. If that was indeed true, then heaven was red, and the memory of paradise could be plucked from the low-growing shrubs that grew in the dampest, muddiest bogs, a far cry from heaven it would seem, at least to some.

To Larkin Howard the bogs were heaven and earth and everything in between; he had worked harvesting cranberries from the time he was twelve, and his hands were permanently dyed red. That he would be marked in this way embarrassed Larkin, for he was a shy man, mortified by his own clumsiness. He rarely spoke, not even to the Dills, where he boarded, or to the neighbors who had known him since he was an orphaned child. He wore gloves to cover his stained flesh when he went to the meeting house or the tavern, no matter the weather. He even wore gloves to the barbershop on Main Street when he went in for a haircut and a shave. The barber, Max Jeffries, had a pet squirrel who would spin in a circle and whenever he came in, Larkin always made certain to give the squirrel a handful of dried cranberries he kept in his pocket.

Larkin was only twenty, but his family had died in a house fire, and since that time Larkin had worked for any farmer who would hire him, in any bog, and he never complained. He wasn't the sort to think about everything he didn't have, even when an employer cheated him, even when he worked all summer and fall with little to show for his labor but his red hands and his board paid in full. That was Larkin; he'd learned to make do, though that meant ignoring the harsh realities of his life. He put away the loneliness that had surfaced inside him the year he lost his family. In doing so, he put away other things as well. He looked away from anything he didn't want to see, and therefore he often didn't recognize the truth even when it was staring him right in the face. Those cranberries he fed the barber's pet squirrel, for instance, were so bitter, the squirrel always spit them out the moment Larkin left the shop.

Sometimes, on his way to work, so early that the blackbirds weren't yet awake, Larkin would make a detour, and wander down a leafy lane to an abandoned farm he especially admired. The hedges were overgrown and the rooms were empty, but the place reminded him of the house where he'd grown up, the one that had gone up in flames when a kerosene lamp fell over unnoticed. He breathed in deeply when he stood there in the high grass. He had to force himself to turn away, but turn away he did, each and every time. He had no expectations; he didn't think about the day that would follow the one he was living. It might have been that way forever more, until he was an old man too crippled by the cranberry scoop to manage a spoon up to his mouth, too bent by tending those low-growing bushes to stand upright, if he hadn't met up with Lucinda Parker on the day the blackfish came ashore.

It was a pink morning, misty, and the tide was especially high. Beaching of whales often happened in the place where the dike road had been built, a marshy acre which in older times, the days before men and roads and even cranberries, had led directly from the bay to the ocean. This particular migration had begun sometime in the night. Perhaps the whales were misled by a full moon, a false beacon shining off the dark water beside the dike road. Perhaps some of the blackfish were diseased, or one ill-fated turn was followed by scores of...