They had to wait a long time for the harvest to begin. Gerard talked to Kate of nothing else for weeks. He imagined the two of them working their way across Canada, then down the West Coast of the U.S., picking fruit and living like gypsies. But it had been a cold, rainy spring that year in Quebec, and when summer solstice arrived, there was still snow on the Laurentian Mountains. Now it was the end of June, and the strawberries were not yet ripe.
Gerard and Kate had hitchhiked out to Île d’Orléans, a little island off the coast of Quebec famous for its berries, and Gerard was angry to find there the same people he had tried to leave behind in his Brittany boyhood in France: storm-beaten, hardscrabble farmers, too tangled up in their difficult existence to look up at the sky and wonder. He had gone to Paris to escape these people, and there he’d found himself hustling to make a living among poor plumbers and roofers and tilers, Frenchmen and Arabs who would scramble along the treacherous, narrow ledges of apartment buildings, or work up to their elbows in other people’s shit, doing the jobs no one else would take. They were full of pride and shame and tobacco and stories, these men, and he became a member of their brotherhood — it showed in the squint lines already making inroads down his young cheeks, in the cock of his head as he rolled a cigarette, in the careless brown beard he let straggle over his chin in an attempt to look older and tougher than he was.
