John O. Harney: Remembering my brother; ‘safe for blueberrying’

Robert Harney

My oldest brother Robert, historian, social observer and role model, died nearly 35 years ago after an unsuccessful heart transplant. One doctor quipped that there was not a heart big enough to replace Bob’s.

Memories of my childhood feature Bob’s summer visits to the North Shore … Essex clams, tennis, various adventures on the coast. Also my visits to him in Toronto, where he led the Multicultural History Society of Ontario and introduced me to seemingly limitless exotic culinary experiences.

I still often have questions I wish I could ask Bob on issues ranging from family history to world tensions. I can imagine his presumably sharp and funny take on the explosion in amateur ancestry.

After being surprised at how little Bob’s important work intersected with the age of the Internet, I was recently cheered to see many references to Bob’s work.

But even with all his fascinating work in multiculturalism, it’s Bob’s humanity that sticks with me. Check out this poem of his …

Blueberries

It took the better half of the day
to reach the woods and piggery
up beyond the Lynn road
blueberrying with Capt.
He knew the route. the sun,
prickly shrubs and soggy spots.
He knew the granite outcroppings
beneath the berry bushes
the snakes nesting there—
garter, milk, and copperhead.
He overturned the stones with sticks
making startled humus steam
and baby snakes wriggle
like green tendrils at low tide
of shorewall seaweed.

Beyond the ledge was the piggery fence.
Sows and swill, the farmer’s share
of Salem’s scavenger economy.
The sun made us giddy, the brambles stung
we dreamed Capt.’s tales of bears and lynx,
and so a grunting sow, a piglet’s squeal,
a towhee rustling through the leaves
made the stooping berrypickers freeze.
My sister and I believed in bears
in Salem’s woods.
The old man’s stories made us surer,
gave circumstances and color to the dream.
The fear we knew to be untrue,
for what they didn’t convert,
the Puritans drove away or slew,
and that included beasts as well as men.

Then to show our own descent,
our links in time and space to them.
We threw the little snakes by handfuls
as morsels for the hungry sows
propitiating bears and
exorcizing woods.
Making the ledge
forever safe for blueberrying.

John O. Harney is a writer and retired executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.