Alice's Farm

by Maryrose Wood

  The eagle bowed low and spread its great right wing along the ground. The wing was bigger than Foxy, who examined it as best she could.

  “I think I see what you mean,” she said. “The strap is twisted, and the whole thing has slipped to the side. Did you want me to try to slide it back?”

  “I want you to take it off. I’m done wearing it.”

  Foxy sat and gazed up at the hopeful bird. “John Glenn. I can sit, stay, roll over, and shake hands with the best of them, but my paws are not suited for fine work, and my teeth are nowhere near sharp enough for quick and accurate slicing. I’m more of a destructive chewer. You should see what I did to a chair leg once! What you propose is a delicate operation. I’d hate to make things worse by damaging your feathers.”

  “Dexterity is needed,” John Glenn agreed, and turned his noble head to the side in disappointment.

  Foxy grinned until her back teeth showed. “Don’t be glum, Glenn! Your problem is easily solved; we just need the right personnel. I have some very small and lightweight friends who could scamper onto your back and make short work of this. They’ve got deft little paws and teeth like tiny wood chippers, and they’re nimble as can be. They can help you for sure. You’ll have to come back after dark, though. That’s when they’ll be here. Can you manage that?”

  “Certainly,” John Glenn said. “I’m no owl, but I can see in the dark well enough to get around.”

  “Wonderful! Just so you know: They’re rabbits. Alice and Thistle.” Foxy’s tail paused in its waggling. “You don’t eat rabbits, do you?”

  “Everybody eats rabbits,” said the eagle. “I’d eat them if I were hungry and had nothing else. But I prefer fish. There are plenty of those in the river.”

  “Well, if you eat them, they won’t be able to help you, so please bear that in mind.” Foxy glanced at the house. “If I happen to get locked inside later and can’t be here to introduce you, just tell them you’re a friend of Foxy’s.”

  “Even though you’re not a fox.” There was a hint of mischief in the bird’s usually somber aspect.

  Foxy’s ears twitched forward, amused. “Well, you’re not an astronaut, either, John Glenn! Yes, I know who John Glenn is. Carl has a book about him on the shelf. How did you come to have such a name? I bet it has to do with those scientists you mentioned.”

  “It’s a long story. Perhaps I’ll tell you another time.” John Glenn preened the feathers on his good wing. “I do fly extremely high, though, all on my own, no spaceship required. Just me, my wings, the thermals. It’s beautiful up there. It’s very quiet, when you’re up high.” He ruffled all his feathers. The twisted backpack hampered his right wing noticeably. “I miss being up high, but I can’t do it with my tracker like this.”

  The eagle sighed. His hooked beak gave him a stern expression by nature, but now his golden eyes just looked sad.

  Foxy wagged her tail and nudged the big bird with her nose. “Cheer up, John. You’ll be up there again in no time. My friends are small but terrifically clever. They’ll fix you right up.”

  * * *

  Janis asked Carl to walk her to the street so she could show him something interesting that had to do with Tin Can. When they got to the green machine, she strolled to the far side of it, shielding them from view of the house, and turned to him.

  “Look, kid. I haven’t read all those murder books for nothing. I love a good mystery, and I’m pretty good at cracking them. But the mystery of what’s going on at your house is better than any I’ve ever read in a book.”

  Only now did Carl understand that the tractor was a ruse, and Farmer Janis just wanted to talk to him in private. It was exciting when grown-ups lied, and his attention was sharply piqued.

  “What mystery?” he asked.

  “The garden, you city kid, you. The vegetable garden!”

  Carl shrugged. “I thought it was growing fine. Isn’t it?”

  “That’s what I’m talking about.” Janis removed her hat to smooth her hair, then put it on again. The gesture seemed to calm her. “The mystery is: Who’s the farmer? Someone is weeding, fertilizing, keeping the bugs and critters away. Someone even staked the pea vines, for Pete’s sake! Did you notice that? But your dad spends all day building the world’s most architecturally innovative, energy-efficient, and biodegradable sheep pen, never mind that he’s still working up the nerve to put actual sheep in it, and your mom’s a full-time mad scientist in the kitchen. They’re doing bupkes out there in the garden. And don’t tell me it’s Applesauce doing all the work.” She’d taken to calling Marie Applesauce, for obvious reasons. “That kid can’t even walk across a room without holding on.”

  “What’s bupkes?” Carl asked, lost. “Can you use it in a sentence, please?”

  “I just did. It means nada. Zippo. Diddly squat. Have you ever heard of Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Sure.”

  “For a made-up fictional guy he said some smart things. My favorite is this: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ Well, I’ve figured out the truth, kid. And it’s you. You’re the farmer.”

  Carl almost looked over his shoulder to make sure she meant him. “But—I’m not,” he protested weakly.

  “Oh, yes, you are. No point in denying it. I know it’s you, kid. What I don’t know is why you’re keeping it a secret. Maybe you’re embarrassed about being a farmer—no, hear me out. A lot of people with educations think that farming is dumb folks’ work, or that country people are all rubes who don’t have the brains or sense to become lawyers and podiatrists and financial planners. They’re wrong. Farming is the greatest profession, and I’ll prove it. How many days in your life do you need a lawyer?”

  “Um, I don’t know?” he answered. He’d never needed one yet.

  “Or a podiatrist? Very rarely, if you’re lucky. But how many days of the year do you need a farmer?”

  Carl thought of the milk on his cereal, the eggs in his egg salad sandwich, the garlicky mashed potatoes, beef stew, and fresh green salad they’d enjoyed last night at dinner.

  “Every day,” he said. “Every day of your whole life.”

  “That is one hundred percent correct. And that is why farming is the greatest profession there is.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “Kid, you’re doing an amazing job with that garden. You should take credit for it. You’ve got the greenest thumb I’ve ever seen. You could win a blue ribbon at the county fair, if you set your mind to it.” She seemed to take Carl’s lack of response as something other than the utter confoundedness that it was. “No interest, huh? Don’t you like being a farmer?”

  Carl thought about it. “I do like being a farmer. I didn’t know what it meant, at first. But I like it now. I think.” He looked up at Janis. “But I’m really not the one taking care of the vegetables. I’m not lying, I swear!”

  She dropped her hand and climbed into the tractor, clearly annoyed. “Look. I’ve eliminated the impossible and you’re what’s left. I just wish you’d own up to it! Farmers need to help each other, not keep secrets. Here’s an example of what I mean: I’m getting killed by critters this year. Slaughtered! You guys, not at all. It breaks my heart to set traps, but I’m gonna be forced to do it in self-defense. If only you’d show me your methods, maybe I wouldn’t have to.”

  There, in the driver’s seat of the John Deere, Janis’s profile was momentarily backlit by the sun. It made her look noble, like an advertisement for farm machinery. “Kid, I think of you as a friend, a neighbor, and a fellow farmer above all. I hope you’ll consider what I’ve said to you today.” She turned on the mighty machine and shouted over the roar. “Come clean. Stand proud. Tell me how you’re handling the critters. Is that asking so much?”

  He didn’t know what to say.

  “Ich bin ein Farmer!” she called as she drove away. “We’re in this together! You, me—all of us! Think about it!”

  * * *

  That night
Carl couldn’t fall asleep. The more he thought about what Janis had said, the more agitated he felt.

  She was wrong about one thing, obviously—it wasn’t him doing the gardening—but could she be right about the other?

  Was there a big mystery going on at Prune Street Farm, right under the Harveys’ collective noses?

  He desperately wanted to know the answer, but he didn’t want to ask his parents or get any helpful librarians involved. For a mystery of this scope and complexity, Carl preferred the old-school detective model of investigation, amply documented in any number of paperbacks that had a kid holding a flashlight on the cover. Basically, he wanted to solve it himself. It was more fun that way.

  But where to begin? Perhaps the internet could help.

  He slipped out of bed and sock-shuffled to his computer, dragging his blanket behind him, as the house got cold at night. The new satellite dish on the roof had opened up a world of possibilities, and Carl’s nature study was going like gangbusters.

  He’d watched a ton of cute kitten videos.

  He’d rated dogs.

  He’d played a game about a family of mutant frogs trying to cross a radioactive pond by hopping from lily pad to lily pad without falling in. If they landed in the water, they started to glow and mutated into something else (what they turned into was always a fun surprise), before bursting into fireworks of glittering ash.

  The point of the game was to save the frogs, but it was more entertaining to watch them fall in than save them, he’d realized. There was a sad truth about human nature embedded in this discovery, but Carl was just a kid having fun, and he wasn’t inclined to think it through that deeply. Luckily, it was only a game.

  He’d looked at the Eagle Restoration Project site a few times, but the graphs of data had quickly lost their appeal. The best feature on the site was a real-time eagle tracker. It reminded him of the site that tracked Santa Claus at Christmastime, only more scientific-looking. The map view showed where all four tracked eagles were. They showed up as four differently colored points of light: Neil Armstrong was red, Buzz Aldrin was green, Sally Ride was blue, and John Glenn was bright yellow.

  If one of the eagles happened to be flying, that was the best; it looked like a shooting star blipping along the screen. The birds traveled separately but tended to stay in the mountains farther north, where the river was twisty and narrow.

  He tried typing “gardens that grow by themselves” in the search bar, but it just delivered general gardening tips and advice about growing something called “perennials.” That didn’t seem pertinent, and like many an online investigator before him, Carl soon got distracted from what he’d meant to look up and started checking his favorite sites instead.

  Kittens, check. Dogs, check. Frogs, check. What were the eagles up to?

  Tonight he found Neil, Buzz, and Sally, all stationary, up in the mountains. Neil and Buzz were on the west side of the river, while Sally was on the eastern shore. He had to scroll farther south to find John Glenn. The bird was in the air, a golden blip moving across the screen.

  Curious, Carl zoomed in.

  “Holy cow,” he whispered. The aerial map view was full of familiar shapes. There was the exit ramp from the interstate that looked like a check mark, the snaking road that led to Prune Street.

  The yellow blip hovered in one spot. Carl zoomed all the way in and switched to street view. The big red house was unmissable; a bright red poppy in a green field. The yellow blip was directly above, making ever smaller circles, zeroing in.

  The bird was coming to his house.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Nothing short of a miracle.

  The feeling of slipping on one’s coat over pajamas is the feeling of adventure. Binoculars slung around his neck, sneakers hastily put on and left untied, full of stealth and strategically avoiding every squeaky floorboard in an old farmhouse that was full of them, Carl padded downstairs and crept outside.

  The moon was one of those strange, bloated moons, not full but getting there, with a shape like a balloon that had started to deflate. It had a name he couldn’t remember, something like gibbon, but a gibbon was an ape, not a moon. Later he’d look it up. Now that he was homeschooling, he guessed he’d be looking up a lot of things.

  It was pitch-dark in the country, no streetlights or house lights to be seen, but the balloon-moon was extra bright. It was plenty of light to see by, once his eyes adjusted.

  He made his way to the garden, and hid himself behind an old lilac bush not too far from the garden gate. The lilac was still in bloom and the rich perfume masked his scent nicely, though Carl didn’t know that. He was cold, but willed himself not to shiver.

  He scanned the skies, then the ground. What he saw almost made him cry out. Foxy! But it couldn’t be. Foxy was curled up on her cozy bed in the kitchen. He’d just tiptoed past her. She’d been deeply asleep, paws twitching, as if chasing something in a dream.

  This Foxy lookalike—Carl quickly guessed it must be a fox—padded confidently across the moonlit yard and went straight to the garden. Two rabbits, one smaller than the other, hopped along behind. The sheer unlikelihood of this trio was lost on Carl, who was more used to the behavior of cartoon animals than real ones. Roadrunners and coyotes, moose and flying squirrels, rabbits and foxes—it was all the same to him. Still, he wondered: What were they up to? They looked as if they knew exactly where they were headed.

  The fox yawned and sat down. The rabbits wriggled easily beneath the gate and popped up on the other side, inside the garden.

  Rabbits in the garden! Farmer Janis had it all wrong. There was no mystery here. The Harveys had just been lucky so far, and now the critters were coming for their vegetables at last, just as nature decreed. Carl knew he ought to chase the rabbits away, but he desperately wanted to see the eagle again, and that meant holding still.

  Thinking fast, he pocketed a few pebbles, to toss when the rabbits began their destructive work. Maybe it would be enough to scatter them. For now, he’d watch. He lifted his binoculars to get a close-up view.

  As the fox waited outside the gate, the rabbits methodically hopped up and down each planted row. They nibbled the weeds—but not the plants—to the ground. They inspected each leaf carefully, and when they found a bug, they ate it.

  They turned tailward and made poo pellets by each plant, then scratched the pellets into the soil near the roots.

  Next, they gnawed long twigs into sharp-ended stakes. When they used these stakes to prop up the ever-expanding pea vines, the boy had to put down his binoculars and rub his eyes. Agriculture was still a relatively new vocation for young Carl Harvey, but he recognized farming when he saw it. Those rabbits were taking the most dedicated and tender care of the vegetable garden that any farmer could have. Farmer Janis had been wrong in the particulars, but she was one hundred percent right about the mystery.

  She’d never believe this, though. No one would. Carl wasn’t sure he believed it himself. He thought of Sherlock Holmes and wanted to laugh. Eliminating the impossible sounded easy, until the impossible was hopping along, right in front of your eyes!

  It was a strange sensation, to know that you’d seen the most mind-boggling thing imaginable before you’d even reached the end of fifth grade. If he lived to be a hundred and two, nothing in his life was ever going to top this.

  Flap. Flap. Flap.

  He looked up. The beat of broad wings was heavy and slow. Something sizeable plunged through the moonlight, casting long blue shadows on the ground. Then, thud.

  The eagle had landed.

  * * *

  John Glenn, formidable as a German shepherd and awe-inspiring as the Rocky Mountains, shook off the hard landing by spreading his wings and folding them up again to make sure all his parts were working properly.

  Doggo was already on his feet, fiercely holding his ground. “Identify yourself, giant bird,” he barked. “We don’t see your kind here much.”

  “I apologize for my clumsy desc
ent into your territory,” John Glenn replied meekly. “I’m John Glenn, a friend of Foxy’s. She told me to say so.”

  Doggo’s bristled stance softened. “Oh, Foxy! I’m not surprised. That Shiba makes friends wherever she goes. We foxes tend to be more solitary.”

  “Eagles are solitary, too,” John Glenn said. “But at least we’re not going extinct anymore. There’s nothing more solitary than that.”

  “No doubt,” Doggo agreed. “All right, friend of Foxy’s. What brings you here?”

  “I would like to speak to the rabbits.”

  Doggo tensed once more, and his lips curled into a snarl. “Easy now, bird! No one’s bothering those rabbits on my watch. If I can’t eat them, no one can.”

  “I won’t eat them. In fact, I’ve come to ask for their help.” John Glenn sounded sad and humble. “My tracking device is askew and causing me no end of discomfort. Foxy thought the rabbits could remove it. Unless you’d rather do it yourself?”

  John Glenn turned around and showed the fox what he meant. Doggo was forced to agree; it was a delicate job far more suited to the rabbits, if the eagle didn’t mind waiting a bit. “They have important work to do,” Doggo explained. “When they’re finished, I’ll bring them over to you. Just don’t frighten them.”

  “I would never,” John Glenn said gravely. “I come in peace.”

  “I certainly hope so,” the fox replied, “but you look like you might want to eat them, and they frighten easily.”

  The eagle blinked. “That’s odd. Foxy said they were brave.”

  “Well, I suppose they are!” Doggo exclaimed. “Imagine having so much to be frightened of, and yet they carry on. They’re the bravest little creatures I know. Wait right here, and in a while I’ll introduce you.”

  * * *

  The rabbits paused to stretch and flex their paws. Frankly, they were exhausted. Their farming chores seemed to be growing faster than the plants. Staking the pea vines was an ongoing puzzle. As the cottontails couldn’t reach very high, they’d trained the vines to grow sideways, but peas were fast growers and the sprawling plants had already run out of room. Should they find a way to add taller stakes and train the tendrils upward instead? Or should they admit defeat, trim back the vines at both ends, and lose pea production as a result?