Strawberries

Summers on the farm were never easy. Long days, and heat that stifled sleep, followed by longer days, and harder work. Everyone was expected to pull their weight, no matter how little.

Jeanie and Louise, being older, always had the harder jobs, stringing barbed wire, tagging the cattle, mucking stalls. Little Jane, she was empty headed, besides being little, and couldn't be trusted to do anything hard, or complex. The garden was all she was good at, the only thing she was given as a responsibility.
Her garden was a little over an acre, and everyone in three towns knew her tomatoes and cucumbers were the best. Always tasted just right, always picked on just the right day. Jane had a green thumb, that's for sure, even if she had a hard time talking, and thinking. Her daddy was always real clear with her, about what she was to plant. That garden, and the canning she'd do, had to be enough to get them through till next summer, so there wasn't time for her to plant nonsense, like berries, or flowers.
All her attention had to be given to the vegetables, so they wouldn't be hungry. She set aside a little corner once, to try to grow sunflowers, but when her daddy found them, he tore them all to pieces, and then did the same to her. The scar on her shoulder reminded her she shouldn't ought to think, or try do anything but what she was told, ever again.
The summer after their momma died, Jane took to wandering off at night. Her sisters questioned her every time she came back, warned her not to do it again. It was too dangerous, and she might not ever find her way back. When it happened every night for a month, and she always came home safe, they let her be, and figured she'd either come home, or more likely, they'd just find her in the morning.
That was the summer daddy started drinking, and got freer with his hands. Most mornings the girls went to work with handprints on their arms, or back, or bruises on their faces. But since it was just them on the farm, nobody ever saw. Jane bore the brunt of it, the girls always said it was because she looked like their mama, but didn’t have the sense of child, and she made their daddy madder than his sensible girls did.
One afternoon, after his drinking started at first light, he found Jane playing with a kitten that had wandered into her garden, instead of weeding. He broke that sweet little kittens neck, and beat Jane so bad she lost her right eye. Her sisters warned her, after that, that she wasn’t to go wandering at night, like she had been.
She did anyway though. Every night.
It was almost September when their daddy went missing. The sisters woke one morning, to Jane, singing softly in the kitchen, and fresh strawberries in bowls on the table. Sherriff took the dogs out, searching for their daddy, but then never found him.
Never found Jane’s carefully tended strawberry patch either.