June Sparrow and the Million-Dollar Penny

by Rebecca Chace

  “Helping you?” Bob glared at her. “If you want to see my house, you knock on the front door and ask permission to come inside and have a visit! I don’t know about New York City, but that’s how we do things around here.” He seemed to have caught his breath, and now he turned on Joe. “I must say I am surprised at you, Joe. And I’m afraid I’m going to have to call your mother.”

  “Yes, sir.” Joe looked at his feet. June had never seen anyone look so ashamed since Indigo was first being housebroken and made a few “mistakes.”

  “I will be calling Bridget as well,” Bob huffed at June. “You’ve caused a heck of a lot of trouble, you know.”

  June opened and closed her mouth without protest. The main thing was that Bob not find out they knew the Penny Book was here. That part still didn’t compute, but she would figure it out later. Now she knew where it was, and that Bob (for whatever reason) had decided to keep it. Nobody kept things headed for the This ’n’ That shop on the highest shelf in the pantry.

  “Yes, sir. I am sorry, sir.” She tried to look as contrite as Joe.

  “And stop calling me sir!” he thundered. “I’m not your teacher; I’m your neighbor!”

  “Yes, sir,” June said without meaning to.

  Bob threw up his hands. “Just don’t do anything,” he said to them both, which of course was what they were already doing. Bob checked around the roots of the holly bush for damage. Joe and June looked at each other, and June wondered how much it cost to replace a holly bush if it was ruined forever. Bob slowly stood up, brushed the dirt off his hands, and turned to look at the house. “You kids find anything of interest looking from the outside?”

  “No, sir,” said Joe.

  “No, Mr. Burgess,” said June.

  “You may find it more interesting to come in the front door and wait in the living room while I call your people.”

  He started around the side of the house toward the front porch. June mouthed “I’m sorry” silently at Joe, who shrugged without even the ghost of a smile. They followed Bob up the front steps to meet their doom.

  June was scared of how angry Aunt Bridget would be, but Joe looked truly miserable. June could have kicked herself. Of course Joe had been right all along! She kept trying to apologize and take the blame, but when Joe’s mother spoke to him on the phone after Bob called, Joe quietly agreed with everything she said. After he hung up, he asked if Bob thought Aunt Bridget would mind bringing him home.

  “My mom wants me back right away,” he said to Bob. “I’ll drive the tractor home tomorrow, after the chores are done.”

  June looked from one to the other. Chores? What chores?

  “You can count on a full afternoon here,” Bob said to Joe.

  “I’ll come right after school,” Joe said. Bob nodded without saying anything. In fact, nobody had said much after Bob made the necessary phone calls. June was afraid that if she tried to apologize again it would only make things worse.

  The old black-and-white portraits stared at her sternly from the wall above the sideboard. There was a woman wearing a high-collared shirt, with her hair pulled straight back, who looked only slightly less friendly than the man in the frame next to her. At least he had a large mustache that curled up at both ends, though he wasn’t exactly smiling for the camera. June didn’t have to be told that Bob’s people would not have appreciated anyone spying on their descendants. She tried not to keep looking at the doorway that led into the kitchen and the pantry beyond, where the Penny Book was waiting for her.

  If only she had some kind of magic spell to get the book to fly off that high shelf—and while she was at it, she might as well give herself powers of invisibility or she’d never get away with it. The family portraits scowled as if they could read her mind.

  The arrival of the old pickup that never left the farm broke the silence; it was so loud, it sounded like a motorcycle. Aunt Bridget entered without knocking and immediately started in on June.

  “I ask one thing of you.” She glared at June. “Only one thing on one day, and this is what happens?” June and Joe both kept their mouths shut. Bridget looked at Bob, who was sitting in his chair with hands clasped, nodding at everything she said. “I am so sorry, Bob. Trespassing on your property!”

  “Well, I wouldn’t call it trespassing, exactly—” began Bob.

  “What else is it called when you make yourself at home on somebody else’s land without permission?” Aunt Bridget snapped, and turned back to June. “And what about decorating for the Halloween dance? Was that just another story to get into some other kind of trouble?”

  “I did have to decorate—” June began, but that only gave Aunt Bridget more fuel for the fire.

  “You better have, because I am going to check up on that with Ms. Huff! Don’t think that I won’t!” Now she turned to Joe. “And you! You’ve got the reputation of being a good, steady boy, Joe Pye. I must say I am shocked, and I’m sure that your mother is as well.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Joe murmured, his face turning so red, it matched Bob’s suspenders.

  “It was all my fault—” June began, but Aunt Bridget held up her hand and June stopped, knowing it wouldn’t do any good.

  “Well!” Aunt Bridget stopped to draw breath and looked at all three of them as if she was simply beyond words. “Well. Well!”

  “Well, indeed,” said Bob fervently.

  June kept her eyes on the carpet.

  “Have you discussed the punishment?” she asked Bob.

  “We discussed it, yes,” said Bob, looking at Joe. “They can come over and do some chores after school tomorrow.”

  “After school! How about June arrives here at six a.m. and gets to work before she gets picked up for school!”

  “Bridget—” Bob began.

  “Sunup to sundown! That’s what I say,” Aunt Bridget continued, glaring at June.

  “Fine with me,” June said. “I don’t need to go to school.”

  “Now, now.” Bob held up his hand before Aunt Bridget could say anything. “I think that after-school chores are a good way to learn their lesson. They won’t do it again.”

  Aunt Bridget opened and closed her mouth, looked at Bob, then June, and finally, Joe.

  “Very well,” she said. “You will start here directly after school. I don’t care if you’re supposed to decorate the whole darn town for Halloween!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Joe.

  They all looked at June.

  “Yes, Aunt Bridget,” June said.

  “You can set them to chores for the rest of the week if you like,” Bridget said to Bob. “Make a list!”

  “I’m sure one day will be enough,” Bob said. “There’s always plenty to do around here.”

  June thought despairingly of Bob’s perfectly trimmed hedges and how bad she had been at cutting the hair of her dolls and stuffed animals when she was little. (More than one had ended up with an accidental Mohawk.) If she was lucky, maybe he would let her shovel the manure out of the pens. She had gotten pretty good at that over the past month.

  Aunt Bridget was right: she had been getting into trouble ever since she got off the plane. And now she had gotten her one and only friend into hot water as well. But there was a very good reason for everything she had done except for the biggest thing of all—ending up here in the first place.

  It was a silent ride in the pickup to Joe’s place. June kept hoping that Joe would look at her and forgive her, but he stared out the windshield with his lips pressed tightly together. June sat squeezed between the two of them, dreading being alone with Aunt Bridget and wondering what kind of tasks she would have lined up for June as punishment once she got home. Plus, she had missed her chance to get the Penny Book back. Why did Bob have to come home just when she found it! June stared glumly at the road ahead. It seemed like nothing was ever going her way in South Dakota. They passed the entrance to the dump, and June was surprised when they pulled in at a sign for the state park.

  “Y
ou live here?” she asked. Joe nodded. “Cool!”

  Joe looked out the window. “Yeah,” he said without enthusiasm. “We’re the third campground on this loop,” he said to Aunt Bridget, who drove right past the unattended entrance booth. Bridget stopped in front of a pop-up camper that was all set up with a blue tarp strung over a picnic table, a camp stove, and a large container of drinking water. A stream ran past the campsite, and there was a fire pit with a metal grate across it and tree-stump chairs in a circle. It was a very pretty spot, though June noticed that there was no car parked in front, and this was the kind of trailer that needed to be towed.

  “This is great, thanks.” Joe reached for the door handle.

  “Joe—” Aunt Bridget put her hand on his arm to stop him. “It may not look like it, but winter’s nearly here.”

  “I know,” Joe said quietly. “Don’t worry, Miss Andersen, we always move back into town before it gets real cold. Mom’s got it all figured out.”

  “Well . . .” Aunt Bridget looked hard at Joe, and again that word seemed to have a world of meanings. June looked at the lit-up camper windows, hoping for a glimpse of Joe’s mother, but there was no sign of life. “All right,” Aunt Bridget said at last, letting go of Joe’s arm. “I’ll see you tomorrow at the Burgess place.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Joe opened the door quickly. “Thank you for the ride.”

  Joe hurried inside the camper, and Aunt Bridget pulled past the other campsites, all of them empty. It was nearly dark now, and without any campfires or other people around, it felt a little spooky.

  “Is it safe to live out here?” June asked as they pulled back onto the main road.

  Aunt Bridget didn’t answer right away, and June was afraid that she had made another misstep, but when her aunt replied, her voice was quiet. “Safe enough,” she said. “I don’t think anyone’s going to bother them, if that’s what you mean. I’d rather be out in the woods than lots of places.”

  “But nobody’s camping out here but them,” said June.

  Aunt Bridget kept her eyes on the road. “There’s camping and then there’s living. Joe and his mother aren’t on vacation; they live there. You know that.”

  “But why?” June asked.

  This time her aunt did turn to look at her, but now she looked more sad than angry. “It’s not just in made-up stories and faraway places that people fall on hard times, lose their jobs, have to move—happens right here in Red Bank, and I’m quite certain it happens in New York City.” Aunt Bridget pressed on the gas, and the old truck lurched forward. “There’s worse places than out in the woods,” she said again.

  When June arrived at Bob’s farm the next day after stopping at home to change into work clothes and pick up Indigo, Bob was sitting on his front porch, reading the paper. June was wearing a clean flannel shirt and had pulled her hair back into a ponytail, hoping to give the impression of a hard-working sixth grader instead of a small-time burglar. If she worked long and hard enough, maybe Bob would change his mind about how much trouble she was. If Bob changed his mind, maybe Aunt Bridget would too. But most of all, she wanted Joe to forgive her.

  “Hello, Mr.—Bob,” June said politely from the porch stairs.

  Bob looked up from the paper. “Joe’s already in the barn,” he said. “I made a list of some chores.”

  “My aunt said that she’s expecting me home by dark,” June said. “But I can walk home from here.”

  “Radio said we might be getting first snow tonight,” said Bob, looking at the horizon. A slow-moving bank of gray was overtaking the high blue sky. Bob shaded his eyes and scanned the clouds. “We’ll see if that’s snow or rain when it gets here. If it hits before you leave, I can drive you both home.”

  June wondered how there could possibly be a snowstorm on the way. It was only October and a perfect fall day. She jumped off the last step of the front porch with Indigo at her heels. Joe was halfway under a tractor inside the barn, and when she kicked his feet hello, he grunted.

  “What are you doing?” Indigo scooted under the tractor and started licking his face.

  “Hey, cut it out!” Joe said to Indigo, who ignored him and kept snuffling at his ear until Joe pushed him away. “I’m changing the oil on the tractor—that’s first up on the list.” He sounded kind of cranky.

  “Oh,” said June. “Need help?”

  “Not really,” Joe said. “It’s almost done.”

  “Where’s the list?”

  “In my back pocket. I’ll be done in a minute.”

  June looked around the barn, which couldn’t have been more different from Aunt Bridget’s. This barn was clean and freshly painted. All the stalls were empty except for a pigpen, with a large black pig lolling inside a doghouse with its snout poking out. The pigpen led outside, and she saw two smaller pigs at the trough.

  It was hard to connect these solid, living creatures with bacon and eggs on Sunday morning. June had read that some cultures thanked the animals for giving up their lives before eating them, and even though she didn’t eat bacon, she leaned way over the railings of the pigpen and said “Thank you” to all three of the pigs.

  “What are you doing?” asked Joe. She hadn’t heard him come up, and he and Indigo were both staring at her.

  “Thanking them for the tradition of Sunday breakfast,” she said. “Not for me, but on behalf of the species: humankind to porcinekind.”

  “Porcinekind?”

  “Porcine just means pig. It’s a great Scrabble word. ‘Porcinekind’ I just made up, so you couldn’t use it in Scrabble, but it sounds pretty good, don’t you think?”

  Joe looked confused, but with Indigo right there she thought it best not to explain too much about gratitude to porcinekind, though Indigo didn’t seem to look at barnyard pigs as relatives any more than June thought every human being on the planet was her first cousin once removed.

  “What’s next on the list?” June asked, to change the subject.

  “You know how to paint?” Joe asked.

  “Sure,” June said. “I love to paint! I took Saturday classes at the Art Students League.”

  “Okay,” Joe said slowly. “There’s some cans of paint set out. You can paint the chicken coop while I fix some fencing.”

  They picked up the paint, rags, and brushes, and headed over to the coop, which was a neat little shed set off from the barn with wire fencing around it.

  “Doesn’t look like it needs a coat of paint,” June said dubiously. The chicken coop was as neat as everything else on the farm, with a rooster stenciled in white on the little red door.

  “That’s how he keeps everything looking so nice,” Joe said. “You don’t want to wait till it’s peeling to get to it.”

  June gave a small sigh. Joe was a bit of a know-it-all on the farm, which was annoying even if he did know it all compared to June. She had already decided that the next time she tried to get the Penny Book from Bob (which would somehow be today), she wasn’t going to tell Joe. She didn’t want to get him into any more trouble.

  “Ever been inside a henhouse?” Joe asked.

  June shook her head.

  He opened the little door, and there was vigorous fluttering as a couple of hens skittered out to the chicken yard. The coop was well ventilated with small windows along the roof that were hinged, propped open, and screened with chicken wire.

  There was a row of hay-filled nesting boxes on either side of a central aisle that led to a narrow plank and a small hatch leading outside, where the plank continued down into the chicken yard. It must work like a drawbridge, June thought. You just pulled up the plank and closed the hatch when the chickens went to bed. A miniature chicken castle.

  Joe picked up a wire basket hanging on a nail by the door and handed it to June. “Check the nests for eggs.”

  June wasn’t sure exactly how to do that, but she took the basket and boldly put her hand right into the first one. She fished around with her fingers, hoping that chickens didn’t poop where t
hey slept. She felt something hard and a little bit warm, and when she pulled it out there was an egg! It was smaller than the ones from the store, mostly brown with a little speckling of white.

  “Holy Saskatchewan Sunday,” June breathed, holding it up for Joe and Indigo. “A real egg!” Indigo reached out his nose for a sniff.

  “I’ll bet you’ll find a few more,” Joe said.

  June put her hand into the next box—nothing, the next one—nothing, but then in the third one she came up with two! They were all slightly different shades of brown, and she placed them very gently in the wire basket. “They taste better than store-bought,” Joe said. “But your aunt probably has chickens too.”

  “She does,” said June. “But I haven’t collected any eggs yet.”

  “Don’t tell her how much you like it, and maybe she’ll let you do it every day.” Joe grinned at June despite himself. “You finish up with the egg collecting and I’ll set up the paint and brushes.”

  June went slowly from box to box, and she collected not only eggs, but feathers as well. There were gray-and-white-spotted ones, reddish downy ones in a tight curl—and stuck in the wood next to the hatch she saw one perfect tail feather from the rooster in an iridescent green arc.

  June and Joe worked all afternoon. Joe patched the wire fence that went around the vegetable garden. June cleaned and painted the inside of the chicken coop roof. The temperature was dropping as the afternoon wore on, but June didn’t mind the chores. Painting was fun because things looked better right away, and she liked watching the chickens; she made up names and stories about each of them. She wanted to tell Indigo, but when she looked for him, she found him curled up in a nest box, probably dreaming of omelets.

  Joe finished up a little before June, and Bob said it was all right for him to leave since he had started earlier. Joe had told his mother that he would loop back into town for groceries before coming home.

  “It takes a while on the tractor,” Joe said to June, who was still painting the chicken coop. “Guess I’ll see you in school.”

  “Right,” June said. She hadn’t mentioned the Penny Book to Joe all day, but she wondered if he was thinking about it too, sitting right there on the pantry shelf. She had hoped that Bob would give Joe a ride home. Then she could sneak in and grab the book, but now that wasn’t going to happen. Joe was looking at her with a funny expression on his face.