The Blueberry Plains

The Blueberry Plains
The disappearance of Annie Kathleen Lutwick: a 64-year-old mystery

by Anne Marie Beattie
as told to her by Winnie Keilty

First published in the Weekend Reader, A division of Brunswick News and included with the Saturday Mar 24, 2001, edition of the Telegraph Journal, Saint John, NB

    "Please, Annie, Please! Take me with you!"
    "Winnifred, dear, don't make this any harder than it already is!" Annie begged. "You know I can't take you. Mother won't let me. She would never speak to me again. Or you, either. You know how she can be. Please, Winnifred," Annie pleaded, wiping a tear. "You know that if I could, I would take you in a minute."
    Annie reached out to take the child's chin in her soft hand. "Now, wipe those tears and give me a smile to remember you by."
    Winnifred nodded miserably. "I know," she replied, in a small voice, eager to keep the conversation going, anything to keep this beautiful young woman with her just a little longer. "But can you maybe come home for Christmas?"
    Glancing at Clinton, her husband, Annie tried to introduce a glimmer of humor, "Honey, if I don't get going I won't be coming home for Christmas for I'll have never left," she smilled. "Come, give me a kiss and we'll say good-bye."
    Winnifred dreaded this moment most of all. She knew that once she kissed Annie's soft rouged cheek that it was over, this glorious week of having Annie as much to herself as Annie's mother would permit. Winnifred leaned into the interior of the black Ford and inhaled the delicious fragrance of Annie's perfume. Tilting her face to receive Winnifred's kiss, Annie's wide picture hat tipped to one side. Mindless of her hat, threatening to fall to the seat of the car, Annie tearfully murmured against the cheek of her daughter. "I love you, Winnifred. I will always love you. My child, my child, stay as sweet and beautiful, always, as you are right now. It's time, darling." Gently she removed the child's arms from around her slender neck. "I'll write." And in a firmer voice, she admonished, "And you write. You are getting to be a big girl now. You write."
    "I wish I could get out of here. I wish I could go with Annie, go with her to where she lives, way down in Portland, Maine," Winnie thought. "Annie showed me where it is on the map. I'm going to go there when I get big. Going to live with Annie – Annie, my mother."
    There – she'd said it. She hadn't tried the word on her tongue for a long time. She loved the sound of it. ‘Mother’, the most beautiful word in the world. As Winnifred trudged back to the house, contemplating the day's work ahead of her, and plotting perhaps a half hour between the end of the afternoon chores and the beginning of the supper chores for writing a letter to Annie. Annie, too, would have had ample time during the return drive to Portland to reflect on the events that had brought her daughter into existence.
    Winnifred herself had never tired of hearing the details of how she came to be, details that spanned her own 12 years and back to where it had all begun, back to a time when Annie had loved Allen. Such a beautiful, tall imposing young man he was. He was gorgeous, he was worldly, he'd been to the Somme. He'd fought at Vimy, he'd been away. And he'd come home all in one piece. Best of all, he had still been in love with her. She was twenty-two; he, a year older. They were ready to start their life together.
    Then had come the morning of that golden October when nausea for the third morning in a row forced the realization that the missed periods, the gentle thickening at her waist, the fuller breasts had not been a delayed growth spurt as she had hoped. She was pregnant. Recovering from her retching bout, and straightening, she had formulated a weak plan. She would tell Allen that night. He would know what to do. But Mabel, Annie's mother, had squelched all of their plans. Allen had even come to the house, had asked for her hand in marriage. He had really thought, in his naivete, that her family was as reasonable as his family. What a terrible scene that had been. Even now, 12 years later, Winnie cringed as she thoguht of the fracas that had ensued following Allen's proposal.
    As Annie told the story, Winnie could imagine her grandmother's features become inflamed with anger, rapidly escalating to venomous rage. Mabel, shrieking terrible ugly things to Annie and her lover, things about his family. The crazed session had ended even more badly, if that were possible. Picking up the straw-bound broom she had advanced upon Allen and began beating him. Defending himself with arms folded about him, Allen had backed toward the door, all the while enduring the relentless hammering of physical and verbal blows from the now clearly out of control, flailing, wailing Mabel.
    Eventually, Annie married Clinton Phinney. Winnie still had the wedding photograph of a petite, smiling, slim young woman, whose looks belied her 32 years. She knew that her laughing, girlish mother had lived in a big two-storey house for hadn't she nearly worn out the picture of her mother, short strawberry curls tossed by autumn winds, holding their little dog as she gazed into the lens of the camera, her big house in the background?
    On her birthday, Winnifred walked slowly back from the mailbox, holding the coveted card before her face, reading and re-reading the precious words. She hadn't forgotten.

"May 1934 My dear Winnifred. Just a card to let you know I thought of you on your birthday. I'd like for you to be here with me today. We are setting out strawberry plants every day for a week now. How are they all home? That, Papa and the boys. Well, we are pretty good, but awfully tired. All now. Love from Annie and Clinton. Write."

Winnifred slipped the postcard inside her apron pocket. She didn't want to share it with Grammie, not just yet. She could never tell which way Mabel would go on something. She could take to railing about how Annie doesn't live up to her responsibilities. Winnifred knew she had been American born and that she had lived in Houlton for the first three weeks of her life. If she had been able to stay in Houlton, she would have had a much easier life. She would never have had to hear the taunts and jeers of the kids. Kids can be so cruel. they never let you forget.
Why, just last week that dirty little Melburn had tormented her in the sing-song taunting rhyme of careless school kids, smug in the knowledge of their parentage: "Annie had a baby and the baby was you, Annie had a baby and no father have you."
On and on the chant had grown till the kids in the playground had surrounded her. Lashing out at Mean Melburn, Winnifred had the satisfaction of yanking out a handful of his hair before the teacher had come to the door of the school.

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Added March, 2001