Olly, Olly, Oxen Frey

by Paul Manchester

  * * * *

  Saturday morning was shorts and t-shirt weather in the Pacific Northwest, and inside was too depressing. The house echoed with his parents’ silence and the roar of commercials.

  Jack mumbled that he would check on the mushrooms. But he really just needed to get out of the house.

  His mom shouted without looking up, “Don’t go far!” She was gluing colored rhinestones to baseball caps –making crosses or spelling out spiritual catch-phrases. They were for the church bazaar which was trying to raise funding for the new building to house the growing congregation. It was really something for his mom to focus on while waiting for news about Jenny.

  The half-light of the mushroom cellar was peaceful. The special Reishi mushrooms grew in sawdust and were enclosed in an improvised plastic terrarium. They were supposed to be a medicinal sleep aid. They didn’t need all that much attention... at least not like the other mushrooms in the cellar. His dad thought they might sell well to all the health food nuts.

  Jack thought that the cellar must have been where Jenny would have hidden. She was seven and always tended to hide in the same place. He intentionally did not go looking down in the cellar first. The bigger kids were always faster, so they liked to give her a chance.

  He felt closer to Jenny down there. Jack wished he could turn the clock backwards and do things different. Do something so Pirate Jenny would still be his pestering little sister. He needed her even if she was a pain sometimes. Especially when he just wanted to be alone with Finn.

  He mindlessly made the rickety bench he sat on, squeak back and forth by shifting his weight.

  Creeeeak. Creeak. Creeeeak. Creeak.

  The percussive sound contrasted with the quiet groaning of the barn’s old wood. It sounded like the barn was alive sometimes. It was like he was sitting in the barn’s bowels. Or maybe not. Not the right metaphor. Bowels? Hmmm. Gross. Maybe not. Sometimes his writer’s brain got carried away.

  The cellar was cool and moist and kind of smelly. But not in a really bad way. Up in the yard, the sun was still deciding whether it would Easy-Bake the world or not.

  The mushroom cellar was a pet project of his dad’s. The cellar was old. The barn and its cellar were decades older than the white clapboard, two-story house across the yard. The cellar was big – it mirrored the front half of the barn above. There were tiered tables with square, plastic pallets sprouting baby mushrooms. They each stretched out of their beds with little yawns. Reishi, Oyster, Crimini... many types of mushrooms. Along two walls were longer, deeper trays where his father experimented with different growing mediums. Straw, shredded paper, manure – which Jack thought was disgusting. Mushrooms were popping up in those bins as well. One of Jack’s chores was to mist them with water each day and check for mushroom flies and mold. But, he hadn’t felt like doing it this week. Clearly his dad wasn’t thinking about mushrooms either.

  Dad had a bit of a heart condition. He wanted to retire. Sell the agency. He always had some sort of project that would someday free him from selling insurance. Something that he said would be less stress and allow him to spend more time with his kids. Not that his dad ever really spent time with them. He mostly just watched sports on TV. But every once in a while, they would work on the mushrooms together. Jack liked that. He pretended to moan about it, just for his teenage dignity, but he honestly liked spending time with his dad. It didn’t happen very often. He didn’t really care what the project was, it was just doing stuff together.

  For the last couple of years, that project had been mushrooms, and that was cool. But, without Jenny it didn’t matter anymore. His dad thought it was Jack’s fault that she was gone. Without Jenny, who cares about stupid mushrooms?

  Jack had always wanted a little sister. When she was born, she was his in the same way another kid would have embraced a pet dog. He loved her like crazy. They teased each other mercilessly as she’d gotten older. She followed Jack and Finn like a hornet chases a hamburger on a picnic.

  Footsteps entered the barn upstairs.

  Jack eased off the creaking bench and slid to the ground behind a bin of newspapers. He couldn’t go back into the house. He couldn’t breathe around his parents right now. Jack decided that they didn’t want him there anyway. He crouched down between the bin and a crate of loose straw. Behind him, the wooden slats of the wall lined up vertically like teeth – held in place top and bottom with horizontal boards. Like lips framing a toothy grin waiting to vomit forth all the hard packed dirt behind it. Or perhaps they were waiting to eat him up and make him a part of all that dirt?

  The footsteps thumped to the trap door at the top of the steps. He pushed further behind the crates where the light didn’t reach. He held his breath as the cellar trap opened with a creak and a thud.

  Jack squinted as the intrusive light hit the old steps. He relaxed when he saw Finn’s fluorescent green tennis shoes, Jack exhaled.

  Finn was like the first star you saw in the evening sky on a warm night. A cuddly puppy. A Hawaiian style pizza. Finn was like being around everything that he loved. With the rest of the world, Jack said yes because he was supposed to. With Finn, he said yes because he wanted to. Or no. It didn’t make any difference with Finn. Jack was just himself around Finn. Finn was amazing. Finn was the type of kid who till recently wore board shorts and T-shirts in all weathers. Jack thought he was the coolest guy ever. They’d been practically inseparable since they were six.

  Finn was a bit taller than Jack. His hair was so blond it was almost green from too much swimming at the Mount Vernon Y. Finn had been on the school swim team till he quit last year because he said he was getting rashes from public pools. Finn showed him once. Disgusting! Jack would have quit too! Other than swimming, Finn didn’t care about sports. Finn mostly loved to draw, and he liked to hang out with Jack. Which was perfect, as Jack loved to write and hang out with Finn.

  Finn kept spiral drawing pads in a big, old, leather satchel that was always slung around his shoulder. If Jack had carried that same bag he’d have been teased without mercy. They’d have called it a purse. But kids didn’t tease Finn. If Finn called it his bag, then that’s what it was called: Finn’s Bag. In the schoolyard ecosystem, Finn was considered weird, but interesting weird. In that bag was everything from food and water, to old action figures. It had hidden pockets. You never knew what he was going to pull out of it. It was waterproofed for Washington weather. The outside had a merman design tooled into the leather which Finn had done himself. Jack thought the artwork was really professional looking. Finn loved mermen and mermaids and all things fantastical.

  Jack thought it was because of his mysterious origins.

  Finn’s bag was one of two clues as to who his parents might be.

  Almost sixteen years earlier, tourists stumbled across the leather satchel near the otter exhibit inside the Seattle Aquarium. Inside the satchel was a baby, and a pink jade key with the name “Finn” beautifully engraved in the top part of the key. The department of child services was called. A social worker with a sense of humor gave him the last name of Otterson. Finn Otterson. He was placed with a foster family. Other kids got adopted. But not Finn. And Finn hung on to that key and that satchel, much like other kids would hang on to their first blankie. Finn always wore the key on a chain around his neck, and the satchel over his shoulder.

  The story triggered Jack’s imagination. Finn didn’t talk much about it. When they hung out in their tree house, Jack invented stories of royal blood, or aliens – anything but the scandalous stories that Mr. and Mrs. Jones believed, – they were Finn’s foster parents. Sometimes, Jack was envious – to be an orphan with mysterious beginnings was exciting, even if Finn didn’t like to talk about it. Not that Jack wanted anything to happen to his parents... but being an orphan seemed kind of cool. Disney heroes were nearly always orphans.

  Finn had been an oddly silent toddler, and he was very pale. H
e didn’t start speaking when other kids did. There were whispers that something was wrong with him. The foster parents were not warm people. They were good church folk who did all the right things, but they also loved their monthly checks from the county. Finn got enough to eat, he had clean clothes and his stand-in parents said all the appropriate things. Other foster kids came and went. But, the Joneses were mildly uncomfortable with this strange mute child. Finn had been a lonely kid till Jack appeared.

  When six year old Jack moved into the house down the street, everything changed. Finn latched onto him like a life preserver. And Finn started speaking in complete sentences when he met Jack! It dispelled all the rumors about him being “not right in the head.” Over time, Finn proved that he was pretty clever. This relieved his foster parents, who hoped that he might finally generate some interest from adoptive parents, but still he was never adopted. His pallid complexion made folks suspect that he might have underlying health issues. And now that Jack was around, Finn didn’t want to be adopted.

  When Jack and Finn were nine years old, they built a tree house in the red branches of an old Madrona down by the creek. The wobbly structure became their headquarters for lazy afternoons. Over the years it grew bigger as they got bigger. They’d hole up in their hideout and make up stories.

  The boys got into mischief with some frequency. Nothing serious. Mostly exploring places that they shouldn’t. Jack and Finn loved to sneak past the No Trespassing sign into a nearby wood. It seemed enormous when they were younger, but now Jack realized it wasn’t that big. They’d discovered a cave in the side of a hill that was clearly the home of monsters. In summer there were cold creeks to swim in and suspicious neighbors to spy on. Despite Finn’s height, he was slender enough to squeeze into places he shouldn’t be, and Jack appeared innocent enough to get them out of trouble when needed.

  Jack was a bookworm and loved reading all types of books. He especially loved writing stories. Stories were a form of magic. Like portals to worlds he’d never get to visit otherwise. Jack would write stories and Finn would draw pictures for the stories. They’d do their homework in the tree house too – once their parents learned to trust that they’d actually do it. They were reasonably good students.

  Jack was ordinary. He wasn’t tall and he wasn’t short. He had forgettable brown hair and brown eyes – which sometimes stared longer than they should and made people uncomfortable. He spent too much time in his head so his words would too often do somersaults in his brain instead of exiting his mouth in useful manner. Jack definitely had too many freckles. His cheeks were naturally rosy – which made him look permanently embarrassed... which was embarrassing. He didn’t have art skills like Finn, and he wasn’t great at sports like Millie. He didn’t stink at video games but his scores were nothing to brag about. Jack wasn’t picked on, but at the same time he wasn’t really noticed other than as Finn’s sidekick.

  Jack envied Jenny for her obliviousness to what other kids thought. If she wanted to march to school in a pirate hat and red galoshes, she did. That’s what made Jenny special. Not much made Jack special.

  Jack cared a lot about what other kids thought. If Jack had any gift, it was to see who people wanted him to be. He was a really good chameleon. With elderly people at church, Jack became the perfectly respectful boy whom they could admire. With the kids at school, he knew enough about the latest Xbox games to not be a total doofus. He could fake sports talk with his dad. And the weird thing was that all those people he pretended to be, were actually sides of himself. He didn’t have to lie exactly.

  There was only one thing that Finn didn’t know about Jack. But that was just the way it had to be, as Jack didn’t want to lose Finn. He couldn’t lose Finn.

  Especially after losing Jenny.

  “Jack? You here?” whispered Finn.

  “Yeah. Over here, Greenbean.” Jack leaned back against the old wooden wall.

  “It’s already hot outside. Come outside! We’ll go down to the tree house. My mom said not to bother you, but I figgered...” Finn said with a smile.

  “Glad you did.”

  Finn ambled over. He wore a baggy green pullover and old jeans. Finn stood there looking down at Jack where he sat hiding in the dark.

  “Hey.” Finn left the obvious question about Jenny unasked.

  “Nope. No news,” mumbled Jack. He closed his eyes. He wasn’t crying anymore. Maybe he was cried out. Maybe he was broken and would never cry again. He felt guilty as he probably should still be crying. Maybe he didn’t love Jenny enough?

  “Move over.”

  Jack grunted and shifted. Finn squeezed through the boxes between them and plopped down next to Jack.

  He sat in silence for a bit.

  “Kind of figured you’d be here,” offered Finn, wriggling back against the toothy wall. The wall had some give to it. He pushed back experimentally.

  Jack ran his fingers through his messy hair. “My parents are driving me crazy.”

  Finn leaned over and nudged Jack’s shoulder with his own.

  “Jenny’s gotta be somewhere...” Finn pressed gently into the wall again. The boards felt spongy.

  Jack stared into the cobwebbed ceiling.

  “I feel useless. I keep asking myself where-” Jack turned to Finn.

  But Finn was gone.

  And a moment later, Jack was gone too – even though the old grinning wall looked perfectly solid.

  * * * *

  They hadn’t noticed a small, quickly growing translucent body half buried in one of the long mushrooms bins at the side of the cellar. It was shaped very much like that of Jenny – with skin as delicate as that of a mushroom.

  And within a few more moments, there were now two more tiny bodies starting to grow quite rapidly in another tray. Little white growths which might soon look like two almost sixteen year old boys.

  Chapter 4

  A Fork

  in the Path

  Jenny remembered leaning back against the old wooden wall of the cellar and hearing footsteps overhead – and then suddenly she was sitting somewhere quite different.

  She was in a dimly lit tunnel. The walls were a hard-packed reddish clay, as was the rocky floor. The arched ceiling above glowed orange from light cast by tall flowered plants growing along the passage walls amid really big mushrooms. She was sitting on a path. The dead end of a path. Ahead of her, the path led slightly downhill and disappeared around a bend to the right.

  Behind her was only tunnel wall. There were some familiar boards embedded in the dense clay, but there was no opening to the mushroom cellar.

  It was certainly curious.

  But Jenny had seen lots of movies where young girls fall into strange adventures through looking glasses, wardrobes, and fireplaces. In books and movies, kids were transported to fantastic places all the time. Why not a mushroom cellar wall? Now that she was seven, she knew that parents did not always tell kids the truth. She’d figured out that Santa was fake all by herself – despite her parents’ crazy insistence that a fat man really squeezed down their chimney on an annual basis. She had looked up that chimney. Not possible. She’d been humoring them for over a year now. Even the stories in Sunday School had started to seem a little dodgy of late.

  But now, despite mom and dad’s laughing to the contrary, it looked like magical places really did exist! Maybe this was one of the big secrets of the adult-world! “Don’t tell the kids!” Maybe her dad really went to a magical land when he said that he was going to the office? How would she know any different? Maybe this is the place that Dad visits all the time when he is working on his mushrooms. There was no going back the way she came, so she picked herself up, adjusted her pirate hat, and brushed the dirt off her butt. In her bright red boots, she clomped down to the first bend in the tunnel and looked around the corner. Disappointing. More of the same.

  But, she
was a pirate! “A buccaneer, shows no fear!” she shouted to an invisible audience.

  She thought back to all the stories she’d heard about lost little girls in strange places. She collected a bunch of stray rocks. She carefully spelled out a message in the middle of the path.

  Pirate Jenny was HERE!

  She didn’t see how anyone else was going to get through that wall back there, but if they did, they would know that Pirate Jenny had passed this way.

  Jenny pulled her black hat more firmly down on her head. She would see where the path took her.

  The red tunnel wove back and forth, and up and down, but no tunnels branched off from the one that she was on. She discovered that the pale pink flowers on the stalks had a yellow flame at their centers which lit the tunnel. Oddly, they weren’t hot at all. Mushrooms of all shapes, sizes, and colors increasingly poked up about the fire-flower stalks.

  Really big colorful bugs, or three foot long earthworms crawled and wiggled around the mushroom clusters. But they didn’t seem scary at all. Large golden moths flittered about the ceiling. They glowed like fireflies and were quite pretty. She wasn’t exactly sure what they were, but they were bigger than dragonflies. They’d flit close then flutter away before she could get a good look at them.

  She stopped at times to pet and talk to fuzzy caterpillars (the size of big cats) which ambled across her path. They had long thick fur and they purred when she ran her fingers through the silky fibers. She wondered if that was why they were called “cat”-erpillars! When she got home, she’d have to pet the tiny caterpillars there and listen very closely. These creatures came in all colors and some were striped. Some had no fur at all but were decorated with amazing patterns.

  At one bend in the path, Jenny noticed that a strange bald fleshy caterpillar was curled up by itself and looked lonely. He had red and black furry bits that stuck out oddly here and there. She squatted down and inspected him.

  “Hey little guy. Why are you sitting all by your lonesome? You look just as special as all the others you know.”