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into an ancient tradition that went back further than the time when our ancestors settled that remote piece of country. My father beamed with pride, my mother got teary-eyed, my girlfriend, Darlene, let me get to third base and partway home.
    Our town was one of those places you pass but never stop at while on the way to a vacation in some national park; out in the sticks, up in the mountains—places where the population is rendered in three figures on a board by the side of the road; the first numeral no more than a four and the last with a hand-painted slash through it and replaced with one of lesser value beneath. The people in our town were pretty much like people everywhere, only the remoteness of the locale had insulated us against the relentless tide of change and the judgment of the wider world. We had radios and televisions and telephones, and as these things came in, what they promised lured a few of our number away. But for those who stayed in Gatchfield, progress moved like a tortoise dragging a ball and chain. The old ways hung on with more tenacity than Relletta Clome, who was 110 years old and had died and been revived by Dr. Kvench eight times in ten years. We had our little ways and customs that were like the exotic beasts of Tasmania, isolated in their evolution to become completely singular. The strangest of these traditions was the Drunk Harvest.
    The Harvest centered on an odd little berry that, as far as Iknow, grows nowhere else in the world. The natives had called it vachimi atatsi , but because of its shiny black hue and the nature of its growth, the settlers had renamed it the deathberry. It didn’t grow in the meadows or bogs as do blueberries and cranberries, no, this berry grew only out of the partially decayed carcasses of animals left to lie where they’d fallen. If you were out hunting in the woods and you came across say, a dead deer, which had not been touched by coyotes or wolves, you could be certain that the deceased creature would eventually sprout a small hedge from its rotted gut before autumn and that the long thin branches would be thick with juicy black berries. Predators knew somehow that these fallen beasts had the seeds of the deathberry bush within them, because although it went against their nature not to devour fresh meat, they wouldn’t go near these particular carcasses. It wasn’t just wild creatures either; even livestock that died in the field and was left untouched could be counted on to serve as host for the parasitic plant. Instances of this weren’t common but I’d seen it firsthand a couple of times in my youth—a rotting body, head maybe already turning to skull, and out of the belly like a green explosion, a wild spray of long thin branches tipped with atoms of black like tiny marbles, bobbing in the breeze. It was a frightening sight to behold for the first time, and as I overheard Lester Bildab, a man who foraged for the deathberry, tell my father once, “No matter how many times I see it, I still get a little chill in the backbone.”
    Lester and his son, a dim-witted boy in my class at school, Lester II, would head out at the start of each August across the fields and through the woods and swamps searching for fallen creatures hosting the hideous flora. Bildab had learned from his father about gathering the fruit, as Bildab’s father had learned from his father, and so on all the way back to the settlers and the natives from whom they’d learned.
    You can’t eat the berries; they’ll make you violently ill. But you can ferment them and make a drink, like a thick black brandy, that had come to be called Night Whiskey and supposedly had the sweetest taste on earth. I didn’t know the process, as only a select few did, but from berry to glass I knew it took about a month. Lester and his son would gather all the berries they could find and usually returned from their foraging with three good-size grocery