Greetings!

I'm looking for 8-10 readers to critique this reasonably polished childhood memoir. Written largely from this child's perspective, all of it is based on memories of myself and my siblings. Writing this was both enjoyable and, at times, painful. This book covers six years and does not involve violence. In your critique I'm looking for your input on content, pace, flow, writing style, and addictiveness. Does it keep you strongly interested, page-by-page, or do you lose interest at any point? More than anything, I will need you to be frank and not hold back, both on negative and positive comments. Thanks for that. Book 2, in progress, will cover nine years to my eventual marriage to the love of my life, an Italian woman I fell in love with in Rome.

(I apologize in that I needed to remove an earlier post yesterday and repost today; the reason being I am working on a few projects and inserted the wrong word count in the title field. )

Synopsis

THE STRAWBERRY KING is the story of our parents’ dream of becoming wealthy raising strawberries on a remote and broken-down farm deep in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and their reliance on the labor of their four children to realize that dream. Dad forever promised us that if we just worked hard enough and made the farm a success, he would take us on our first family vacation, a dream vacation to Hawaii to our own “hukilau”. 

The youngest of four kids, I am a toddler when Dad quits his job working for the railroad and uproots our family from a middle-class life in 1960s suburbia to that abandoned farm. The farmhouse itself is a century-old wreck, lacking heat and with limited electricity. Rainwater streaks the inside walls. To us kids, the house is surely haunted.  We use oil lanterns casting wicked shadows to make our way to bed at night. Mice and squirrels live in the walls; raccoons and skunks claim the basement. 

A dark cavern upstairs named the Unfinished Room is cordoned off behind a red plywood door and Mom warns us to never enter or we might “fall through”.  As a child, I wonder, fall through to where? Another world? From behind that red door comes the faint whisperings of “ghosts” that terrify us kids. We eventually find the dimly lit room is filled with the twenty nests of mud swallows and their many hungry hatchlings. 

This story blends the telling of our struggle to survive with many unique moments of childhood humor, including when we kids invite the horse into the kitchen for lunch. And when we kids invite an elderly couple into our home thinking, hoping, they are our grandparents with food. There is the telling of when Mom takes us on the only “vacation” we can afford - camping - by dragging our bedding into the back field, only to be forced back to the house by a drenching 3:00 am thunderstorm.

 In poverty, we kids become hunter-gatherers, harvesting salal, cascara and berries from the forests and fish from a nearby lake to survive.  There are episodes of terror, such as when a grizzly bear chases us kids out of the huckleberries and when prowlers take up residence in our dark basement and the sheriff is too frightened to investigate.

By the third spring, with the farm an abject failure, Mom orders Dad to Alaska to fish the summer’s commercial salmon season. Dad promises to send “big money” home to save us.  He leaves with tears and hugs, never sends a dime, and returns in the fall, drunk and penniless. Mom evicts him the next day.

There is the pivotal moment of shock when we kids and our only friends - children from the Therialt family living nearby - are gazing out the small attic window and spy our mother and their father consummating their relationship in the twilight.

There is the humiliation when Mom refuses the church pastor’s sexual advances and he then warns the wives in his flock at Sunday services that my mother is a “harlot”, thus motivating other men to drop by the house and try their luck.  And there is the moment when my twelve-year-old brother, Will, fires four rounds from an ancient hunting rifle into the woods at night to scare off the “grunting” grizzly bears, only to find it is Mom and Mr. Therialt in the forest at 1:00 am.

We barely survive six years living on the edge, seemingly banished from civilization, and are finally freed when Mom lands a job at Boeing and the farm finally sells. Miraculously, we leave that wicked house and the poverty behind to rejoin the world of food, heat, lights, and people.

This moves quickly with 160 scenes over 185 pages.

Timeline: Looking for a six-to-eight week turnaround.

Am I willing to swap critique? Definitely! I prefer thrillers, mysteries, and memoirs. I may need a bit of time.

The opening eight pages follow for your consideration.

Year One

The Big Move

I was four years old when Dad quit his job as a conductor for Northern Pacific Railroad and moved our family from Auburn, Washington – back then a bucolic little town consisting of three-bedroom ramblers, a neighborhood park, and a police station – to a distant unknown in Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula.

Though uncommon, it is more often the father who gets the unmoored idea to drag his wife and kids into the African jungle to make happy with the lions or north into Alaska’s boreal forests to commune with the moose during their rut. In our case both parents were afflicted and their dream was more straightforward. They had purchased a broken-down farm on the Olympic Peninsula, a big nowhere back then, and they planned to grow rich raising strawberries. According to Mom and Dad, everyone’s secret yearning was to milk cows, shovel manure, grow crops, and raise chickens, they just weren’t brave enough to admit it. Fancy neighborhoods with three-bedroom ramblers and picket fences were for pansy asses lacking the guts to follow their dreams, they said. Luckily for us kids, our parents weren’t pansy asses.

Dad would enjoy the inevitable fame; they would call him “The Strawberry King,” and the sky was the limit. Mom’s dream had no title and less imagery. She just wanted the big money, and surely, fields of red strawberries would be their path to riches. She would keep her job in Tacoma as a secretary for a while to help bridge the money gap, but they were going to pursue their destiny.

My five-year old sister, Laurie, and I made crayon drawings of our Strawberry King daddy, a stick figure sporting a red robe and a golden bowl of red berries for a crown. He enjoyed our artwork and often had us make more elaborate creations.

Buying a farm and starting up a new business required some cash, so to save up we sheltered for a year in a one-bedroom “cottage”. Our abode before the big move was a chicken coop lacking interior walls and insulation. Exterior walls consisted only of exposed studs and clapboard siding, so Dad assigned my big brother, Will, to fill the gaps in the walls with strips of old newspaper, to reduce the cold. Plumbing was suspect; the bathtub drain emptied straight onto the ground under the coop.

We were six - four kids, two parents, our border collie mix named Bimbo, and Bootsie, our Siamese cat. Nearby was a pansy-ass neighborhood filled with painted houses and sidewalks, and we kids sometimes escaped our chicken coop to play in their pansy-ass park.

Mom and Dad loaded our sparse existence, second-hand everything, into an open U-Haul trailer and the trunk of Dad’s Cadillac Coupe de Ville. The “de Ville” was a rusty-yellow spaceship sporting two massive doors and giant, chrome “Dagmar” bumpers. The bumpers were named after a popular actress back then who was known for her breasts.

We kids said tearful goodbyes to our best friends, the Burkes (they were a matching family with four kids who had befriended us at the park), and we embarked on our big adventure, taking the drive out through Tacoma and across the great Narrows Bridge.

The Narrows Straight separates Washington’s mainland from the Olympic Peninsula, but it isn’t narrow. We kids stared agog at the wide, deep chasm and the green saltwater churning in the current far below. Years later, that mile-long bridge suspended in the sky came to mark a permanent threshold for me, a long, pillared gateway between normalcy and crushing despair.

We drove for what seemed like hours. I sat, tiny in the front seat, next to Mom while Dad chained-smoked his non-filter Lucky Strike cigarettes and stubbed them out in the over-flowing ashtray facing my nose. My three siblings sat in the back and we all shared in Dad’s cigarettes, bathing in the smoke as if it was a family ritual, an endless barbecue of sorts.

We traveled north past rocky, saltwater beaches and small fishing towns. Eventually the houses vanished and the road became a dark, narrow channel between tall Douglas fir trees that blocked the sky.

“How much farther?” Annette, my eight-year-old sister called from the back seat.

Sitting between my parents, I arched up to get a look out of Mom’s window. Through the smoke, the dark forest slipped by. Urgency overcame fear and I squirmed. “I gotta go pee-pee!”

Dad finally pulled the de Ville over and every door flew open. Bimbo leapt from the car and instantly relieved himself on the faithful rear tire while Dad, I, and Will climbed out.

Silence. Under a low cloud cover, the road snaked through the forest, foreboding. Cool air, evergreen-sweet and thick with mist, wafted through the trees. Only the wind’s whisper broke the silence. Dad ripped down his zipper, arched his back, and peed in the middle of the road, a fresh cigarette hanging from his lips. “Ahhh.” The splatter covered his red Keds tennis shoes, which over time had turned yellow-pink.

I retreated close to Will, at eleven the oldest kid in our family. With our backs to the girls we made tiny Grand Canyons in the red clay soil. For me, peeing together was a brother-bonding thing, and for reasons unknown to me then, the girls didn’t have this wonderful talent we had. I turned to them with glee and showed off my creation. “Look-it what I did!”

Our journey continued. Dilapidated houses separated by a half mile or more passed by. Imposing fir trees, dark and crowded, engulfed these dwellings, but there were few people. A rusty No Trespassing sign clung to one tree and years later I wondered, who would possibly want to trespass out here? After another half mile, Dad finally slowed the car. “Coming up!”

On the right, a dense crown of huckleberry straddled a dark cedar stump, which itself was as wide as a dining table. The wall of trees finally parted, spilling daylight across the road and revealing a field of tall grass. Dad slowed the car to a crawl. A thinning in the grass offered an entry. He turned slowly in and killed the motor.

I stood up in the front seat, and the house filled the windshield. The massive, gray structure, circled by thistles and blackberry vines, stood stalwart against a gray, bulbous sky. For us kids, this was our first visit.

We stared in silence until Annette whispered, “That’s our house?” At eight years, Annette was already the one to get just a little mouthy.

“There it is!” Mom replied cheerfully.

This house was lost to time. Narrow, black windows concealed the interior. A wickedly-pitched gable roof resembled some kind of gothic weapon, defiant before God. A partially detached gutter hung down.

Laurie’s round eyes locked on the windows. Her child’s voice squeaked the only possible question. “Is it a haunted house?”

Our parents stepped out of the car. We emerged, stumbling over clumps of grass, unable to take our eyes from it. Bimbo, always one to flee, stayed close.

Dad led through the grass, up rotted wooden steps, and onto a wobbly, cracked porch that had detached from the house. He reached across the gap and tried the key in the lock, but the gray door opened half an inch. He pushed it wide against resistant hinges. Past a dark void, a dim, yellow glow emanated from a far window. He stepped inside and waived us in. “Come on!”

Annette and Will jumped across the gap. Mom set my small self and Laurie inside as one handles bags of groceries. A cold stench pervaded and I grabbed my nose. Annette spoke our thoughts. “Peee-uuu!”

Dad found the brown wall switch. It gave a sharp click but no light. “Dammit.” He walked the first floor, checked the lights, and found a working bulb in a tiny bathroom off the kitchen.

We children huddled at the front door, and Laurie began to cry in small, jerky sniffles. Dad returned. “What are you balling about?”

 “Ghosts,” she squeaked.

“There aren’t any ghosts.”

Mom instructed Dad. “It’s four o’clock. Try to find a fuse box in the basement. We’ll start unloading.”

Dad took a small flashlight and explored the dark basement. He eventually located the fuse box and replaced a glass fuse. At Mom’s direction we kids circled the house, dodging thistles and blackberries, in search of a wooden plank to bridge the porch gap. Will found a half-rotted board in an old barn nearby, dragged it up, and set it across the gap. They proceeded to unload the trailer. Furniture was placed inside the house, but dust and debris covered the floors and they paused repeatedly to sweep.

Inside, the house reeked of wood smoke, a soot-filled oil heater in the living room, mildewed and rotted wood and other unknown sources. At the kitchen faucet, water ran rust-brown for ten minutes before finally purging to a weak tea color. Dad lit a fire in the small wood stove in the kitchen and smoke drifted throughout the house.

Dusk came early. The upstairs had no electricity, no lights, so the mattresses were all left downstairs in the living room.

For dinner Mom prepared a pot of macaroni embellished with a can of tomato sauce, and as night fell, the strangest sounds started up just as we began to eat, cross-legged on the mattresses. They began as moans and quickly escalated into a chorus of mournful howls that rose into a burst of demonic shrieks and then collapsed into long, discordant wails.

Laurie and I dropped our plates and ran to Mom. We could only cry out, “Wahhh!”

Annette could still talk. “What?! What is that?!”

Mom answered cheerfully. “Coyotes.”

Daddy laughed, the macaron spilling from his open mouth. “Wolves! Ha ha! Wolves! They’ll eat you up if you run away!”

We spread our blankets out on the mattresses. Narrow, onyx windows surrounded us and I was certain the wolves were watching from behind that black glass, waiting for us to fall asleep. Their howls terrorized us kids. Mom left on the small light in the bathroom, and its faint yellow glow, plus our brave little Bimbo, were all that kept us from being devoured that night.