PACIFIC NORTHWEST GOTHIC

My mother hated the blackberry vines behind our house.

Every August she went after them with leather gloves and pruning shears, cursing when the thorns caught her sleeves. It was a losing battle. Before long, new canes would be hanging over the fence again.

“Devil’s knitting,” she called them.

She hated the vines but never wasted the berries. Most of August, the kitchen smelled of blackberry jam.

After she died, I stopped cutting them back. The brambles spread along the fence, grew over an old wheelbarrow and eventually reached the woodshed. My neighbor complained a couple of times. I kept saying I’d deal with them.

Then the crow showed up.

He was big and scruffy, with a crooked foot. Every morning he landed on the gutter and hammered at the metal with his beak until I came outside. For the first few weeks I chased him off. By July, though, there was a bowl of water under the cedar, and when we had a run of hot days I started leaving him peanuts.

Once the blackberries ripened, he took to following me along the fence while I picked.

“You’ve got the whole damn yard,” I told him after he stole a berry almost from between my fingers.

He ate it without taking his eyes off me.

A few days later I saw him fly off with a berry in his beak. Then he did it again.

He always went to the oldest part of the bramble patch. The growth was so thick there that I hadn’t tried getting through it since I was a kid. One evening, mostly out of curiosity, I followed him.

He disappeared among the canes. A moment later something knocked from somewhere beyond them.

Three knocks, not very loud.

I waited, but they didn’t come again.

I went to the shed for the shears.

Cutting a way through took the better part of an hour. The thorns kept catching my shirt, and by the time I reached the other side my forearms were scratched and bleeding. Under all that growth was a wooden door built into the hillside.

I hadn’t thought about that door in years. My mother used to tell us not to go near it because there were rats inside.

The boards she had nailed across it were soft with rot. One came away easily, bringing a shower of dirt with it. The smell from inside was cold and damp.

There wasn’t much left in the root cellar. Some shelves, a couple of broken preserving jars, an old crate collapsed in one corner.

And a red bicycle.

I stood looking at it for a long time before I went closer.

It had belonged to Anna.

My sister disappeared in August 1989, when I was eight. People searched the woods and the fields around our house for weeks. I could still remember hearing them call her name while my mother sat at the kitchen table making blackberry jam.

I hadn’t thought about what happened later that night for years.

There had been mud on the kitchen floor. I remembered getting up for a glass of water and hearing the garden hose outside. Through the window I saw my mother in the yard. There was a shovel beside her.

At the time, none of it had meant anything to me.

The crow flew down and perched on the bicycle’s handlebars.

Blackberry roots had worked their way through the stones behind it, splitting the old mortar. Near the bottom of the wall, something pale was showing through the dirt.

I didn’t touch it.

I went back to the house and called the police.

They started digging behind the cellar the next morning. I stayed out of the way and watched from the kitchen for most of it. The crow spent the morning in the cedar.

Around noon, one of the officers called the others over.

I knew they had found her.

That winter I cut the brambles down to the ground.

By April they were coming back. A few green shoots appeared beside the cellar door.

This time I let them grow.