Alice's Farm

by Maryrose Wood

  Rabbits don’t believe in magic as a rule. They feel no need for it, as the natural world has wonders aplenty. But there are scores of old rabbits’ tales about rabbits with special powers. These stories have been told so often and for so long that some of them have snuck into the stories told by humans. Do you know the rabbits in East Asian myths who live on the moon, cooking up tasty snacks? That’s a rabbit’s tale. Or the African stories about Kalulu, the trickster hare? Those are rabbits’ tales, although who knows how the fellow got turned into a hare. Hares might look like rabbits, but they’re a whole different species, as different as a fox and a Shiba Inu.

  And what about the four hundred drunken rabbit gods of the Aztecs? Or Nanabozho, whose stories are still told by the Anishinaabe people of the Great Lakes? They say Nanabozho helped create the world and named all the plants and animals. To Alice and her fellow cottontails that was the most important rabbit’s tale of them all, for those achievements belonged to the Great Rabbit and none other.

  Marigold and Berry heard the strange stories going around, and they came looking for their siblings right away. Marigold especially was always one to speak her mind.

  “We’ve known each other from our blind days in the nest, dear sister! But now we don’t know what to believe. As your littermates, we feel we deserve an explanation,” she said. All four rabbits nibbled, ear-swiveled, and sniff-sniff-sniffed as they talked. It was the sunset feeding, the day after the Night of the Great Planting, as the story-loving cottontails of Burrow had already taken to calling it. Alice and Thistle had slept most of the day and missed all the gossip, but now they were getting an earful. “Trained foxes standing guard? Honestly! Everyone keeps asking us if it’s true. What are we supposed to tell them?”

  Berry pressed close to Marigold. His tone was less sharp, but just as concerned. “Alice, we know you’re a clever cottontail, maybe cleverer than most. But you should hear what the others say about you. It’s like you’re a character from an old rabbits’ tale! What will you do next? Fly to the moon and bake clover cakes for us all?”

  “Don’t be silly, Berry; all rabbits are full of tricks,” Alice said jokingly, but her ears prickled with embarrassment. “There’s nothing special about me. If I could fly to the moon that would be something, though!”

  Her siblings’ snow-white tails shimmied with amusement. “Anyway,” said Thistle, when their tails had stilled, “only one of the guards is a fox. The other one’s a—”

  “What Thistle means,” Alice interrupted, “is that we’ve been lucky to get help from all kinds of animals who see the purpose in what we’re doing. If some of them are foxes, or look like foxes—well, we’re grateful for any help we can get.”

  “You mean, there is a fox standing guard?” Berry said, trembling.

  Marigold’s ears flattened in annoyance. “If there is, he’ll be having a feast of rabbit soon enough! Alice, listen to me. Do you really think that this farming of yours”—she said farming the way you’d say something shameful—“can really stop the Mauler? Personally, I think it can’t be stopped. It’s much bigger than we are, and we oughtn’t to indulge in false hope. Anyway, we don’t know for sure if the Mauler’s coming, or when. Shouldn’t we just enjoy our days in the meadow, and be grateful for the nice life we have now?”

  They were hard words to hear, for Alice herself was grappling with how much work farming had already proven to be. Poor Thistle’s front paws were still bleeding from all that digging; she’d licked the wounds clean herself.

  “Marigold and Berry, your words make sense,” she began. “But it seems to me that all hope is false until what you hope for comes true. A patch of grass to eat, a quick escape from a hungry owl, enough time in the meadow to bear a few litters … every rabbit hopes for those things. I do, too.”

  Marigold looked at her with impatience, and Berry seemed full of doubt, but Thistle gazed at her with pure admiration, and she took courage from it. “And I also hope that our litters—and our litters’ litters—will have a valley to live in, a burrow to sleep in, a green meadow to nest in, a forest’s edge to run to when danger is near. The Mauler could take all that away, and none of us can imagine what life would be like afterward. If there is an afterward.”

  Alice shivered, for she had spooked herself with imagining the worst. “If we can at least try to stop it—surely it’s worth a try,” she finished.

  “I agree with Alice,” Thistle said. “It’s worth a try.”

  Marigold fluffed herself from head to toe. “Well, sister. It sounds like you have the situation between your teeth, and nothing we say will change it.” (“Between your teeth” was a cottontail’s way of saying “you’ve already made up your mind.”) “But remember: Rabbitfolk don’t live long! You might as well enjoy your life, and not take things so seriously.”

  “I agree with Marigold. Use your ears—use your nose!” Berry could barely bring himself to say it, as the revelation that his own littermates conversed with foxes had made him woozy, and his hind legs were twitching to get away.

  “Use your ears, use your nose,” each kit repeated, as they all touched noses farewell, and “may a hawk take you, in good time!” Then Marigold and Berry went to graze elsewhere.

  “They don’t think we’ll make it to the harvest,” Thistle observed, nibbling contentedly.

  “Perhaps they’re right.” The idea didn’t trouble Alice—it’s not a thought that troubles rabbits in general—but who would tend the farm if she and Thistle couldn’t see things through to the end? Rabbits don’t plan for the future much, for obvious reasons. Now that she was a farmer-rabbit, that, too, had changed. But she kept this particular worry to herself. One hop at a time, she thought. One hop at a time.

  At least Thistle’s exuberant sense of possibility was undimmed—riding on a dog’s back will do that to a bunny. “Never mind them,” he said, play-fighting with her. “We did it, we did it! We planted the seeds, and now we just have to watch them grow.”

  “Planting seeds is only the beginning,” she said, sounding weary. “I’m no magic rabbit, Thistle, and neither are you. Farming is going to be hard work. It might be harder than we thought.”

  “Keep your tail up, sister!” He stopped play-fighting and nuzzled her ear instead. “Rabbits are way more clever than farmers. If farmers can do farming, we certainly can.”

  That cheered her somewhat, and with full tummies they headed to Burrow to sleep some more. There, her spirits were fully restored by Lester’s reaction to the news about the Swiss chard.

  “Rabbitfolk don’t live long,” he crowed in joy, when Thistle told him they’d been able to plant some after all. “But I’d sure like to be hopping around the meadow long enough to taste that Swiss chard!”

  * * *

  The seeds sprouted the way so many things do: slowly at first, then all at once. All it took was rain and sunshine, the well-prepared soil, and some luck. Being new to farming, the rabbits hadn’t anticipated this, but their chipmunk delivery team had moistened the seeds by carrying them in their mouths. That moisture had worked through the outer husks and softened them, so that the seeds sprouted in half the usual time. The radishes came up first; most of the other seedlings poked through the soil within a week or so.

  Brad Harvey made the big discovery himself when he went out to remeasure the garden. It wasn’t so much that he thought it had changed size in the preceding days, but now that the time had come to actually farm, rather than just dream about it, he found himself curiously reluctant to begin. Each morning, he’d sit at the kitchen table with his seed catalogs laid out in front of him and a calculator beside his coffee mug, sharpening his pencil more often than he needed to as he drew one graph-paper diagram after another, trying different layouts and plant combinations.

  In one version, the pea vines climbed up bamboo stakes in the garden’s center. Another had them trailing on metal hoops around the edges. A different design featured a swooping double helix of marigolds planted around and be
tween the heirloom tomatoes, to discourage a kind of tiny worm called nematodes from eating the roots of the tomato plants. Using marigolds to protect tomatoes was called “companion planting.” According to Brad’s research, people held mixed opinions about this practice—some thought it worked, some didn’t—but Brad figured, why not? Everyone likes a companion, and the marigolds would look pretty, at least.

  Best to measure everything one more time, he’d decided. It was raining lightly and Carl, bored, had followed his dad outside to try out his new work boots. They walked the garden perimeter twice. Brad fiddled with the tape measure and calculator, the hood of his rain slicker enveloping his head like blinders on a horse. Carl walked with his face turned up to the pale sky, catching raindrops on his tongue, until they reached the garden.

  “It’s growing already,” Carl observed. “Cool.”

  “What is?” Brad said absently. He was busy making notes in his garden journal—light rain since midnight, temp 52 deg @ 11 AM.

  “The garden, Dad. Look.”

  Brad looked.

  He tugged his hood away from his face to see better, then pushed the hood all the way down. He rubbed his eyes, in case the mist had impaired his vision. It hadn’t.

  Neat rows of seedlings had sprouted through the soil. They weren’t in straight rows, like in Brad’s graph-paper drawings, but complex zigzag patterns. It was as if some genius gardener had carefully thought out how to get the most production from every square inch of earth.

  “Zigzags,” Brad mumbled, amazed. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  Back in the house, he sheepishly told Sally that the garden had miraculously come up on its own.

  “When you say miraculously,” Sally said, without a break in her stirring, “do you mean, in a supernatural sense?”

  Brad looked at Carl. They both shrugged.

  Sally laughed and suggested that the rain had simply made weeds sprout all at once, and that’s what you get for spending so much time planning your garden on graph paper and no time at all laying weed barrier fabric on the actual dirt, as had been advised by the nice man at the hardware store.

  Brad begged to differ. Not only were the seedlings growing in neat, efficient patterns, but he’d spent a lot of time looking at seed catalogs, and these tender leaflets looked awfully familiar. “There were radishes, carrots, cucumbers. I swear I saw some zucchini. Lettuce, too, I’m not sure what kind. Sal, I’m not kidding. Come see for yourself.”

  Sally reluctantly put on her boots, stuck the baby monitor walkie-talkie in her coat pocket, and came outside, despite it being a waste of a perfectly good naptime. Then she looked.

  There was no way it could be weeds. The patterns were too perfect, the seedlings too carefully grouped and arranged.

  There was nothing to do but ask Janis. She was busy with her own chores but promised to pop in at lunchtime. So they waited. When she arrived, an air of normalcy was carefully observed. Sally fixed coffee and served it leisurely, and the Harveys all held their tongues about the miracle garden, in order to get Janis’s pure, unvarnished interpretation of what she was about to see.

  By then it had stopped raining, but only just. The sun caught the raindrops that clung to every newly unfurled leaflet and made a sparkling rhinestone display of all those zigzags. The efficient and tidy pattern was unmissable, and all the more striking.

  Farmer Janis scratched her chin.

  “Well, that’s just about the prettiest-planted little vegetable garden I’ve ever seen.” She cocked her head. “A zigzag pattern! Clever, Brad. Where’d you get the idea to do it that way?”

  Brad explained that the garden had sprouted that way on its own, and what he really hoped Janis might provide was some explanation of how that might be. He also wanted to know if these seedlings were what he thought they were.

  Frowning, Janis strolled through again, careful not to step on any of the newborn plants. Following the trail of seedlings forced her to walk in a zigzag pattern herself. If she’d been hopping instead of walking, she’d have looked like a human-sized cottontail in overalls.

  Brad was right about the seedlings, Janis confirmed. She grew pretty much the exact same vegetables in her own garden and knew these seedlings like old friends. There was no mistake about it, although it did seem like a strange coincidence.

  “Zigzags!” she said, shaking her head. “Who’d have thunk. I’ll try mine that way, too, when I replant. Which might be soon. I’ve never had such a problem with chipmunks! They’re everywhere this spring, aren’t they?”

  Brad confessed that he hadn’t noticed any chipmunks in the vicinity.

  Meanwhile, Carl thought of a documentary film he’d seen at his old school about the ancient Mayans, and remembered that they liked zigzag patterns and gardens and had even invented a kind of building called a zigzag-orama. Or so he told Janis. She laughed.

  “It’s ziggurat. And you’re thinking of Mesopotamia. The Mayans were in Peru.”

  “Where’s Peru?”

  “Where’s Peru, he says! South America. Hey, kid, when are you going to school?”

  It was a sensitive subject, as Carl was still being stubborn. Brad put his hands on the boy’s shoulders.

  “Soon, right, champ? Meanwhile—I don’t mean to suggest something magical about the garden just coming up like this, but it does seem odd. I mean, what do you make of it, Janis?”

  Janis gave Carl the fish-eye. “First, I think the kid could use a few geography lessons. Second, I planted my vegetable garden two Wednesdays ago and the first radishes are just breaking through the ground. You’re a week ahead of me. Clearly you know a lot more about farming than you let on, Farmer Brad! I hope I haven’t embarrassed myself, giving advice you don’t need. I wish you’d tell me your secret.”

  Brad flung his arms wide. “We didn’t do anything, really. I’m as puzzled as you are.”

  “That’s awfully humble of you to say. Congratulations, Harveys! You’ve got yourself an excellent little vegetable garden here.” Janis reached down, scooped up a handful of the rich black earth, and gave it a squeeze. “Look at that soil. Fluffy as a feather pillow. It’s been well tilled”—she held it to her nose and sniffed—“and well fertilized, too.”

  “Fertilized with what?” Sally asked, bewildered.

  Janis closed her eyes and gave another sniff-sniff-sniff. “If I had to guess? Rabbit poo.”

  For, of course, the farmer-rabbits had thought of that, too.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Alice makes one more deal.

  Now there were two types of farmers at the old Crenshaw place on Prune Street: those with two legs and those with four.

  Only the four-legged ones knew that, of course. They did their work in secret, by moonlight and starlight. In daylight, the two-legged farmers scratched their heads. Something strange was going on down in the vegetable garden, no question.

  Luckily for the rabbits, the Harveys didn’t have the experience to know just how strange. They’d have been way more curious if they had known. As it was, there were plenty of other chores that required their full, furrowed-brow attention. Dreaming about being farmers had given way to actually being farmers, and it was a revelation. All the online beekeeping courses and kitchen table seed catalog browsing in the world didn’t prepare a person for the dirt on your hands that never fully scrubbed off, the blistered palms from pruning an orchard’s worth of neglected fruit trees, the sunburn on the nape of your neck and the tops of your ears from long days spent outdoors.

  There was always more work than daylight, and if the vegetable garden seemed to carry on independently, why, that was just a welcome bit of good fortune, wasn’t it? Something to be thankful for, and the Harveys were thankful, when they remembered to be. Most of the time they were too dang busy to give it much thought.

  Farmer Janis was a different story. She kept an eye on that pretty little garden. She knew it wasn’t farming itself, and she didn’t like being taken for a fool, either. She lik
ed to drop by unannounced to see if she could catch the Harveys in the act of caring for it, but she never did. Still, there was only one conclusion that made sense: Brad and Sally knew way more about farming than they let on, and that “we’re just a wide-eyed family from the city” routine was nothing but a perversely annoying form of humility.

  The truth was, in all Janis’s many years farming her own land, she’d never seen such a perfectly arranged and pristinely tended vegetable patch as the Harveys’. Not a weed seemed to sprout, not a leaf was chomped by beetles, not a root vegetable was pulled up by critters.

  What nearly drove her out of her mind was that the Harveys claimed not to have set a single trap. “There hasn’t been a need,” Brad had told her with a shrug, blinking those innocent, Brooklyn-bred eyes from beneath the green brim of the John Deere baseball cap she’d given him to replace his utterly impractical fedora. For some mysterious reason, the wild critters left his garden alone.

  Meanwhile, Janis was having the single worst infestation of chipmunks, voles, raccoons, and gophers that she could remember. Nearly every day, she’d plant a new row of hand-raised seedlings from her hoop house. By the next morning, they’d be dug up and eaten. She reinforced her fences and sprinkled the dirt with all the old remedies she could think of: coffee grounds, and human hair cadged from the local barber shop (in farming towns, barbers are used to this request). She tried corncobs marinated in vinegar, hot pepper flakes, dried bloodmeal, even cotton balls soaked in coyote urine she’d special-ordered from a garden supply store out west. Nothing worked.

  There was only one option left to consider, and she didn’t care for it one bit. Traps were a depressing nuisance; a sad job if they worked and a sadder one if they didn’t. Still, this year she might have no choice.