Jack

by Liesl Shurtliff

  Annabella and I looked at each other. She shook her head at me, and I knew she meant I shouldn’t argue with Mama. I shouldn’t tell her that Papa had been taken by giants, because she would not believe me. Mama thought the tales were all hogwash, and what was the use of telling her otherwise? She wouldn’t know how to get to the giants any more than I did.

  So I went to the village. The road had been trampled by giant footsteps, and I had to climb over uprooted trees and branches. When I got to the village, this is what I found:

  Nothing and no one.

  There were no horses or mules or chickens or goats. No cows or sheep. There was no mill. There was no cobbler’s shop or smithy or bakery. All the shops and houses had been ripped up and taken away, leaving gaping holes in the ground.

  “Hello…?” I called out, but no one answered. Not the blacksmith or the cobbler or Baker Baker. Not the Widow Francis and her thirteen children or Horace and his pigs. I imagined he’d held on to Cindy the way Papa had held on to our calf, and the giants had just carried them up.

  I sat down in the hole where the bakery should have been. The wind blew. It swirled the dust and lifted the faintest smell of fresh bread and sugar. What was I going to tell Mama now? Not only was there no one in the village to help, there was no village.

  In the meantime, Papa could be in a cage or a dungeon now—just waiting for the giants to get hungry….

  Blurp-da-durr! Blah-durp-da-duuuurp!

  A horn blew in the distance. It sounded official, like someone important was coming. I looked down the road and saw a waving flag, and a knight riding toward the village!

  In the stories of my seven-greats-grandpa Jack, he befriends a brave knight, who helps him fight the giants. It seemed fitting that a knight in shining armor, riding a noble steed, should come now to assist me, except as the knight drew closer, I noticed that his armor was not exactly shining—it was dingy and rusty. And his noble steed was a swaybacked mule that kept bucking and veering off course.

  “Whoa there! Ho, you lowly beast!” shouted the knight. “Heed my command!” The mule bellowed and bucked so hard, the knight nearly fell to the ground with a clatter. The knight quickly stood and bowed before me. His rusty armor creaked with every move.

  “Lowly villagers!” He spoke as though an entire village was present to hear him. “I, Sir Bluberys the Chivalrous, have come to protect thee from giants who roam the land, attacking men, women, and children. Be warned, they will pillage your farms, steal your animals, and wreak terror and havoc, but never fear! I shall protect thee with my strength and valor!” He lifted his creaking arms as though he was expecting a great cheer.

  “The giants already came,” I said.

  The knight looked down in surprise. “What’s that you say? Speak up, peasant boy! My noble ears need a gallant voice!”

  I nearly shouted at him. “The giants already came! They raided the village and took our food and animals, and they took my papa.”

  “Did they truly?” The knight blinked and looked around, taking in the evidence that giants had indeed already been to our village. He dropped his arms. “Drat! I thought we were fifty miles ahead of them at least.”

  “Have you fought any giants?” I asked. “Have you seen them?”

  “Oh yes, hundreds!” said Sir Bluberys. “The last giant I met tried to bite my head off, but I chopped his off first.” He drew a rusty sword that didn’t look sharp enough to cut cheese. “The giants practically flee when they hear my name! That’s probably why I missed them. They knew Sir Bluberys the Chivalrous was near and fled for their lives!”

  “Where do they live?” I asked.

  “Oh…here and there.” Clearly he had no idea. “Is there any place to get some good grub around here? Stew? Pie? A little bread and butter perhaps for a chivalrous knight and his noble steed? I’m famished!” Sir Bluberys thumped his metal belly and looked around, as if he were expecting a feast to appear. What a blubberhead. I needed to get rid of this idiot fast.

  “There’s another village a short distance that way.” I pointed down the road. “They probably have lots of food. Maybe you can catch up to the giants before they attack.”

  “Oh yes, of course!” Sir Bluberys tried to mount his mule, but it kept shifting and turning, so by the time he finally got on, he was backward. “Farewell, lowly peasants!” He waved as though bidding farewell to a large, cheering crowd and not just one disappointed boy. “I am Sir Bluberys the Chivalrous, sworn to defend and protect the meek and lowly. I will save ye from the giants!”

  “Oh! And will you please look out for my papa?” I shouted after him. “His name is Henry!”

  “Of course! Of course!” said Sir Bluberys. “I always rescue the fair maidens!”

  The mule stumbled in one of the giant footprints, and Sir Bluberys pitched forward and grabbed onto its bottom. It bellowed again and then started trotting down the road with Sir Bluberys hanging backward and sideways.

  I trudged home, worn and hopeless. In the daylight I could see our farm more clearly. It was a wreck, worse than Miss Lettie’s cabbage field. I gazed at the ruined barn, wishing I had been inside last night. It always should have been me to face the giants, not Papa.

  “It really does look like a storm hit,” said a small voice behind me. I turned to see Annabella. She had a piece of bread in her hands and held it out to me. I took it, suddenly realizing how hungry I was.

  “It was giants,” I said. “I saw them.”

  “I believe you, Jack,” she said, and that comforted me some, but not enough. What did it matter if my scrawny little sister believed me? What could she do?

  Our fields were torn up and trampled. Our trees, our animals, our garden, all ripped up and taken. We had nothing. We’d been poorer than dirt before, so what were we now? Nothing. Nothing minus Papa.

  MoooooOOOOO!

  Annabella and I started.

  MooooOOOOOO!

  “That sounds like Milky White,” she said. We raced to the barn. At first we didn’t see any sign of the cow in the now-roofless barn. But she mewled and cried, and finally we found her buried under some hay and rubble. We pulled away the hay in tufts and lifted off the rubble, until at last Milky White was free. She heaved herself to a standing position.

  MooOOOO!

  “Oh, Jack, she’s in pain,” said Annabella as she rubbed at Milky White’s neck.

  “She just had her calf,” I said, “and she probably needs to be milked.” I found a dented bucket and milked the cow, but afterward she kept mooing and groaning like she was in horrible pain.

  “I think she misses her baby,” said Annabella. “Poor Milky White.”

  Of course. Her baby got taken right along with Papa. I didn’t want to think what the giants had planned for them. If there was any truth in Grandpa Jack’s tales, the prospects were not good.

  “I’m sorry, Milky.” I patted her on the neck. Even though she was just a cow, I could imagine how she must feel about losing her calf, not knowing where he was, or what was happening to him…. I imagined we felt about the same, Milky and I.

  I would leave this instant to find Papa, if only I could find a way to the sky.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Cow Worth Beans

  I waited three days for the clouds to rain dirt, for the sky to split open, for the giants to reach down and take me with them, but the only thing that came out of the clouds was water, cold and wet. It turned the giant footprints into ponds and seeped through our roof. I plugged the holes with rags and straw while Annabella placed pots and buckets to catch the drips.

  Mama stayed in bed with her broken leg and sore heart. It was clear Mama wouldn’t or couldn’t accept the truth about giants. Not even when I told her about the village. She just kept talking about storms and how we were lucky we didn’t get hit too hard. At least we still had the cow.

  “We’ll have to sell her.” said Mama. “Get a good price while she’s worth something.”

  “But…she’s all we
have.” I had seen Annabella scraping the bottom of the barrel that morning to make bread.

  “She won’t give milk forever,” said Mama. “If we sell her now, we can buy enough grain to last through the winter.”

  “And then what?”

  “We’ll plant seed,” said Mama. “We’ll survive.”

  That was Mama, ever practical, even in dire distress. But I didn’t want to survive. I wanted to live. I wanted Papa back.

  “Go milk the cow, Jack,” said Mama. “She won’t be worth beans if she runs dry.”

  I milked Milky White and then took her out to graze in the muddy fields. It had finally stopped raining and the sun shone. I petted Milky’s neck as she plodded along, tearing at bits of grass and scattered straw. She still seemed melancholy over her lost calf, but she wasn’t crying anymore. Maybe she had given up hope like Mama.

  I heard a distant melody. I turned toward the sound. A man was walking down the road, whistling, just like Papa did when he worked in the fields. Could it be…?

  I squinted and really looked. The man was walking funny. Limping. It wasn’t Papa. Of all people, it was Jaber the tinker, hobbling down the road on his wooden leg, pulling his cart through the muddy ditches and around broken branches.

  “Hello there!” he greeted me in a cheery voice. “Perfect morning, don’t you think? Doesn’t look like a dirt shower today, does it?” He smiled up at the blue sky.

  “That’s because we just had one,” I said dully. “It rained dirt, like you said, and giants came in the night and took Papa. They took the village, too. All of it.”

  “Well, you’re lucky they didn’t take you,” he said, “You’ve still got all your limbs, I see. Good. And a cow! Rare thing that the giants would leave a cow.”

  “They took her calf,” I told him. “Papa was holding on to her. They took him up to the sky, and I’m going to go after him.”

  He cocked an eye. “How do you plan to do that?”

  “I’ll find a way. If the giants can come down, then there must be a way up.”

  “There must,” Jaber agreed.

  “Do you know a way?” Everything Jaber had told us about the giants had turned out to be true. But was that all he knew?

  “I might,” said Jaber.

  “How? Tell me!”

  Jaber gave me a hard look.

  “Please,” I said. “My papa…”

  Jaber leaned against his cart and pulled up his wooden leg to rest on his good knee. He drummed his fingers on the wood and looked at the sky. “I knew a man once, had a son about your age. They were riding to market with a wagon full of turnips, just minding their own business, when all of a sudden—Boom!—a giant stomped down right in front of them. He stood fifty, maybe a hundred feet high. The giant picked up the wagon with one hand, horses and all.”

  “And the man and his son?”

  “He took the son and left the man.”

  It sounded just like Papa, only the other way around.

  “What happened then?”

  “It rained dirt, of course.”

  “But what happened to the man and his son? Didn’t his father go after him? Did he get to the giant world, too?”

  “No. The boy was never heard from again.”

  “That’s a terrible story,” I said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  We sat there and looked up at the sky. “Those giants, they’ve been coming down and taking everything from our world,” said Jaber, “and no one has ever been able to stop ’em. I’m always asking myself, who’s going to stop ’em? Who’s going to go up there and show those giants they can’t just take our crops and our people whenever they get the fancy?”

  “I will,” I said. “I was born to face giants. I’ll chop off their heads!”

  “I believe you, son, I do. And that’s why I’m going to tell you a secret. I’m going to make you an offer I don’t make to just anybody….” Jaber dug inside one of his sacks. I held my breath, thinking maybe he held the secret to getting to the giant world. A magic rope, a flying carpet, a wand. “Mostly the giants just take and take, and never leave anything behind,” said Jaber. “But once in a while they drop things. Things that are little to them but big to us.”

  Jaber held both his hands out to me like a bowl, and sitting inside were three…beans. Green beans just like the ones Mama grew in our garden, except they were as big as apples, but still…

  “Beans?” I asked.

  “Giant beans,” he corrected.

  “So? What good are those?”

  “You’re a smart boy! What do you get when you plant beans?”

  I shrugged. “More beans?”

  “Beanstalks!”

  “So what? How’s a beanstalk supposed to help me find Papa?” I was feeling a little annoyed now. Did he think I was stupid?

  “Listen here,” said Jaber. “I planted one of these once, just to see what would happen, and the beanstalk grew so tall, it went straight to the sky! Giant beanstalks can take you to the giant world!”

  That got my attention.

  “Where is it?” I asked. “This giant beanstalk you grew.”

  “Well, it’s long since died and turned to dirt. They don’t last forever, you know.”

  “You’ve been there, then? To the giants’ world?”

  His face fell and his eyes dimmed. “It’s hard for someone like me to climb to the top of the sky.” He tapped his wooden leg. “But that’s why I only planted one, just to see what they would do. I saved the rest, waiting for the right person to take them. Someone with two good legs, and a reason!” He clutched my arm and drew close to my face. “A reason to go up there and face those giants and take back what they took from us! You, Jack. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  I’d been waiting, too, for my turn to face the giants, for a way to get to the giants, but…

  Beans? I’d always hated them. I wasn’t sorry that the giant had ripped them up from our garden. But now it looked as though these beans were my only hope of getting to Papa.

  “How do you know that beanstalks reach all the way to the giant world, if you never climbed one?”

  “Same way I know the giants are coming down. Dirt showers. You stand under that beanstalk every day while it’s growing, and once you get that sprinkling of dirt, you know it’s gone straight through the sky and struck land.”

  Well, what did I have to lose? “I’ll take the beans.” I reached for them, but Jaber yanked back his hand.

  “Not so fast, young man…. These beans are valuable. I can’t just give them away.” He eyed Milky White. I knew what he was thinking.

  “There’s a full bucket of milk in the barn,” I said. “I can give you that.”

  “A bucket of milk? Come, Jack. I’m a poor man with nothing to my name.”

  “I’ll give you a bottle of milk every day.”

  “How will you do that when you’re up in the sky?”

  “When I get back, then.”

  Jaber clutched the beans to his chest. “What if you don’t come back?”

  He had a point. If I went after the giants, there was no guarantee that I’d return. And Mama would never agree to give Jaber milk every day. She wouldn’t approve of the beans at all. Whatever I gave the tinker, I would have to give it now and be done.

  “I’ll take that cow for the beans,” said Jaber. “You find your papa and your calf and maybe some riches besides. One hears tales of the giants’ riches—diamonds and rubies the size of apples, sacks of silver and gold…. I think that’s more than a fair trade for a cow.”

  It would be a foolish trade. Nuts. But Jaber had been right about everything else. And Papa…If there was even a sliver of a chance, I had to take it.

  Slowly, I held out Milky White’s rope. “You can take the cow,” I said.

  Jaber snatched it. “Done!” He dumped the three green beans into my hands. One tumbled to the ground, so I crouched to pick it up. When I stood, Jaber was already hobbling down the road, taking our last so
urce of food with him.

  Good-bye, Milky White. I hope you were worth the beans.

  I tried to keep the news about the cow secret for as long as possible. I shuffled my feet all the way home. I didn’t go inside. I went to the Giant Foot Pond, which had multiplied into several Giant Feet Ponds. The beans sat like heavy stones in my pockets. I took one out and turned it over in my hands. What if they didn’t grow up to the sky like Jaber said they would? What if they didn’t grow at all? But they had to. Jaber had been right about the giants when no one believed him. Why wouldn’t he be right about the beans?

  It was getting dark now. I was ready to plant the beans right away in one of the giant footprints, but then Annabella came running out, calling for me. I tried to hide, but she found me anyway. Sometimes I think her floppy braids are like bug antennae and they can sense whatever she’s trying to find.

  “Mama’s asking for you. What’s that?” She pointed to the bean in my hand.

  “Nothing.” I slid the bean into my pocket. “Just a stone.”

  As soon as I walked inside, Mama asked me to go milk Milky White. Since there was no Milky White to be milked, I had to spill the beans. I mean the beans about trading Milky White to Jaber. I was still trying to keep the giant beans secret.

  “You did what with our cow?!”

  “You said I should sell her,” I reminded her.

  Mama breathed deeply and twisted her apron in her hands. “Well then, it must have been a good offer for you to sell so quickly. What did that crackpot give you? Gold, I hope.”

  I glanced at Annabella, who was standing in the corner quietly, listening. “Not quite gold, no.” I fingered the beans in my pocket, which was a stupid thing to do because Mama’s eyes went right to them. She knew my pockets were always full of mischief.

  “Turn out your pockets, Jack. Now.” Mother spoke soft and low through clenched teeth, like a growling animal about to attack. Even though Mama had an injured leg, I was certain that rage would give her whatever strength she needed to rip the hair out of my head. Slowly, I pulled out the giant beans and held them in my cupped hands.