Alice's Farm

by Maryrose Wood

  “Glamp,” Marie replied. She’d found her mother’s suggestion about glamping to be the most appealing proposal so far.

  “Gurrrrr,” countered Foxy, who preferred Carl’s rock concert idea. “Woo, woo, gurrrr,” she added, noting that people were still talking about Woodstock and Yasgur’s farm despite it being extremely old news, judging from the musical style of Brad and Sally’s duet.

  “Your dog doesn’t bite, does it?” Ruth asked, sipping her coffee. “It just growled something awful.”

  “Foxy’s pretty nice to most people.” Carl stood. “Mom, Dad, are we done? I’ll take the dog outside.”

  Brad nodded his permission.

  “What a good idea!” Ruth beamed at Carl. “And I’ve heard so much about your garden. Would a tour be all right? I can meet you outside in a minute. I just want to talk to your folks a tiny bit. One minute!”

  “I guess so,” Carl said, uneasy. “Come on, girl.”

  With a worried, backward glance at Marie, Foxy trotted after him.

  Once boy and dog were gone, Ruth Shirley turned to Brad and Sally. “Look, I didn’t want to say this in front of your son. I remember how upset he got that one time…”

  “We’re not selling the farm, Ruth,” Brad said flatly.

  Ruth Shirley didn’t seem to hear him. “Brad, Sally, I like your family! Everybody around here likes you folks. I hear nothing but good things, so don’t take this the wrong way.”

  “We’re not selling,” Sally said, not even attempting a smile.

  Ruth went on as if no one had said a word. “I happen to know, and I really shouldn’t say this—but I happen to know that Tom Rowes made an offer a few weeks ago on a piece of property he liked almost as much as he likes this one—and the deal just fell through. He’s back looking, and I am almost one hundred percent sure his offer on this property would still stand. Now, I know what you said in the spring. You’ve gotten a whole growing season under your belts since then, right?” She smiled indulgently. “Maybe you can make a more informed decision now, hmm?”

  “We appreciate your concern,” Brad said firmly. “We’re doing just fine.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear.” She looked at them with sympathy shining in her eyes. “Are you folks making any money, though? I don’t mean to pry, but … are you?”

  Something about the ensuing silence emboldened Ruth Shirley to switch gears. “I grew up on a farm myself, you know. I spent my childhood summers sitting behind a roadside table, getting sunburned and selling apples by the pound, while the other kids were playing sports and fishing in the lake. I knew I wasn’t ever going to do that to a child of mine.”

  “I didn’t know you had kids, Ruth.” Sally looked ready to growl herself.

  “I don’t. I’m just speaking symbolically.”

  “I think you mean hypothetically,” Brad said.

  “I’m speaking from experience, is what I mean. Your kid is not going thank you for this someday. He’s not. I’m telling you.”

  “This is really none of your business.” Brad stood up.

  Ruth stood, too, still talking. “The truth is, there’s not that many people interested in buying a small farm these days. Tom Rowes happens to be interested, and unless you’ve struck oil on this land, you won’t be able to do better than what he’ll give you.” Her voice dropped. “You haven’t struck oil, have you?”

  “Not yet.” Brad crossed his arms tightly against his chest, as if trying to restrain himself. “Maybe we ought to start digging.”

  “I’m just saying: Think of your family. Tom’s offer is a unique opportunity to do the right thing for your family.”

  “It’s always such a pleasure to see you, Ruth,” Sally said, moving to the door. “I wish you could stay longer. Here, take some of these for the road.”

  Ruth took Sally’s offering. “What’s that?”

  “Part of the Prune Street Farm product line of dehydrated snacks. I’m still refining this one, but I’ll be presenting the finished version at Loco for Locavore very soon.” She tried not to look at Brad, who was cracking up and fake coughing to cover it. “They’re very interested. I expect we’ll have a distribution deal in the works imminently.”

  Ruth trilled a laugh, but she looked concerned. “You mean Chef Shubert and that funny little restaurant of his? Chopsticks only and they don’t even serve Chinese food, isn’t that something? The portions are so small you don’t have time to miss the fork, ha ha!”

  She put the tidbits in her mouth. “That’s … minty!” she said. She chewed, and chewed, and chewed. “Well,” she said, after a moment, “some things are just meant to have a little juice in them, I guess. Oh, I have got to skedaddle. Tell your son I’ll come back another time for that tour of the vegetable patch. I’m sure he’s doing a bang-up job. It’s so much responsibility for a child. Too much, really. I know.”

  Sally held the door wide open. “Such a pleasure, Ruth.”

  Brad added, “Come by the Harvest Festival. We’ve got some fun stuff planned.”

  “Booo, go way,” said Marie, meaning it.

  Ruth Shirley backed out, smiling and chewing. “Harvest Festival, you bet! I will pop in for sure.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Trouble in the henhouse.

  Ruth Shirley had been just plain rude, and perhaps Sally shouldn’t have fed her the GlitterTooth Chew-Bones, although Marie had eaten plenty with no ill effects—but the visit weighed heavily upon Brad and Sally, despite their bravado. It shone a bright and unforgiving light on their true circumstances.

  Glamping and rock concerts, seriously? What kind of vision for the farm of their future was that? Clearly, they were desperate. The golden parachute had fluttered to the ground and now lay in a crumpled heap at the bottom of their empty bank account. The First Annual Prune Street Farm Harvest Festival was a week away, and it was highly unlikely there would ever be a second.

  In front of their children, Brad and Sally joked and sang duets. To each other, they spoke bravely and exuded hope. Privately, they worried and prepared for the worst.

  Without telling Sally, Brad put out feelers to some old clients to see if he could get any freelance work. Without telling Brad, Sally sat in the car in the parking lot outside the fast-food restaurant and tried to will herself to go in and apply for a job. But it was a small town, and people she knew kept pulling up in their cars and trucks and rolling down their windows to make conversation.

  Finally, she got out of the car and walked inside. There, beneath the blinding fluorescent lights, with the stink of burned grease eagerly knitting itself into the fibers of her clothes and hair, she ordered herself a supersized chocolate milkshake. Back in the car, she slurped it down too fast and had to spend ten minutes massaging the brain freeze out of her temples. Then she drove straight to Loco for Locavore.

  The ice cream headache of truth was this: Sally had never been able to get a follow-up appointment with Armando Shubert. Her weekly phone messages had gone unanswered, and on the few occasions the restaurant manager happened to pick up, the woman had been evasive. She almost sounded nervous, and hustled Sally off the phone fast.

  Sally knew when she was getting the brush-off. There was no point in courting humiliation by pestering Loco for Locavore any further. But desperate people do desperate things, and her overwhelming impulse was to barge into Armando Shubert’s legendary kitchen and find out just how big a fool she could make of herself.

  Supersized, was the answer.

  “It’s so much worse than I thought,” Sally wailed when she got home. “They’ve been dodging my calls for a reason. They were told not to buy from us. Told.”

  “By who?”

  She let her purse drop to the floor. “Rhymes with crows.”

  Brad put down his apple peeler and looked up. “Tom Rowes told Loco for Locavore not to buy from us? Why? And why would they listen to Rowes?”

  Sally’s headache was coming back. She slumped into a chair and grabbed a peeler.
“I took the manager outside and begged her to tell me the truth. I showed her pictures of the kids on my phone. When she saw Foxy she burst into tears and told me everything; apparently she had a Shiba of her own once who ran off, and she’s never gotten over it.”

  Sally peeled manically as she spoke, the little curled bits of apple skin flying everywhere. “Shubert leases the restaurant space—from Rowes! He owns the building and sets the rent. He’s their landlord, and he told them not to buy anything from us, not so much as a raisin. Tom Rowes wants us to fail, but it’s worse than that. The man’s a saboteur.”

  “Saba saba saba,” Marie said. She was helping with the apples by taking bites out of each one, to test them for sweetness. Her baby teeth were only able to make tiny vampire punctures in the skin, which Brad was peeling anyway, so no harm done.

  Brad picked up a fresh apple and handed it to Marie. “That’s pretty unscrupulous.”

  “Janis says he’s greedy and can’t take no for an answer, and he just wants to gloat over Old Man Crenshaw by getting hold of the place in the end.” Sally grabbed another apple. “Is that the whole reason, though? I wonder.”

  * * *

  Carl checked his email every day, first thing. He hadn’t lost hope, but he wasn’t expecting much, either. It was October, for Pete’s sake. Surely they’d read all the applications by now?

  He ran to the mailbox every morning, too, just in case the people at Hipster Farmer magazine were too hip to send emails. He timed out the postal worker’s routine so he could be the first one there. He still hadn’t told anyone about his application to the contest, and now he was glad he hadn’t, as the odds against Prune Street Farm winning were sky-high. But he didn’t want to risk his parents throwing away a letter from the magazine. They might think it was a subscription offer and toss it in the recycling bin. Best if he was the one to take in the mail.

  His mother noticed, of course. Sally noticed everything. “Why such an interest in the mail? You didn’t apply to college, did you?”

  “Mommmmm!” He drew out the word with maximum sarcasm and eye roll. He’d be a teenager soon enough. It was time to start practicing.

  Sally chuckled. “I’m teasing. Never mind. I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because college means my little chick is ready to leave the nest.”

  “I’m not a bird,” he said, flapping his arms like wings. Marie flapped hers, too.

  “Stop being so cute, you two.” Sally kissed the baby on the head. “Birds aren’t the only ones who grow up and leave the nest.”

  Carl stopped flapping and thought about it. “Do I have to leave? Can’t I homeschool for college?”

  Sally’s face changed. “Oh, honey, so many things are bound to happen between now and then … who knows what our life will be like?” She paused, and when she spoke again, she sounded more like her normal, upbeat self. “When the time comes, you’ll know what you want to do. Anyway, after a certain point, all of life is homeschool. It’s just you going through the years, deciding what you want to do next and learning what you need to know in order to do it.”

  “Does that mean yes?”

  “Cham, go mail,” Marie ordered. She was not so easily distracted as her brother. Didn’t he realize how much was riding on this contest? “Bwanding!” she said sternly, in case he’d forgotten.

  Carl ran to the mailbox, but there was nothing but advertisements and bills.

  * * *

  The day before the second Saturday of October was a busy one. From county line to county line, the farmers went all out. Pies were baked, paths were swept, jugs of fresh lemonade were prepared. Farms with orchards braced themselves for a pick-your-own stampede, with folded stacks of custom-printed canvas bags ready to be filled. Those with reasonably docile farm animals set up petting areas and “selfie stands.”

  The farms that were less visitor-friendly had to be more inventive, but even the Fleischmans had come up with a few things. Larry Senior has been persuaded to wear a crown that said THE ONION KING and walk around with a scepter (it looked a lot like a garden spade that’d been spray-painted gold). They’d made jars of onion soup and onion jam to put on sale, and there’d be barrels of pickled onions, too. They even had a cook-while-you-watch onion ring stand all set up and ready to fry. Larry Junior and his wife would take turns dunking wire baskets of fresh-battered onion rings in the deep fryer and serve them in cardboard baskets lined with paper. The entire family spent Friday slicing the onions. The smell of their farm was stupendous and wafted quite a distance.

  By the end of the day, every farmer in the valley was exhausted. Those downwind of the Fleischmans couldn’t stop crying because of the fumes, but one farmer was downright furious.

  “Of all the days to be under attack!” It was Janis, and she stood at the back door of the Harveys’ place with a shotgun in her hands.

  “What’s the matter?” Sally cried, alarmed. “Are you all right? Is that thing loaded?”

  “Nope. Shells are close at hand, though.” Janis patted the pockets of her overalls. “You wanna hold it, kid?” She offered the gun to Carl.

  “No, not really,” he said, backing away.

  Janis sat down and laid the gun on the table. “When I was your age I hunted squirrels with a .22.”

  “Why would you hunt squirrels with a .22?” Carl asked, horrified. He liked squirrels! They were chock-full of personality, and they seemed just as happy in city parks as they did out here in the country, which struck him as wonderfully open-minded.

  “Well, now I wouldn’t. Now I’d use a shotgun,” Janis answered, missing his point. “There’s too many people around. A shotgun’s good for three hundred yards, max. A .22 bullet will travel over a mile. Hard to know exactly where it’ll end up.”

  Sally wiped her brow with the edge of her apron. She, too, had worked all day preparing for the festival and was feeling spent, maybe too spent to deal with even an unloaded shotgun in her kitchen. “Is it the chipmunks again?”

  “I wish it were.” Janis sighed heavily. “Something got into the henhouse. Whatever it was killed three of my best laying hens!” She looked like she was about to cry, but it might have been from driving through the onion fog. “I should have followed my instincts and set traps in the summer, when I had the urge. Well, that’s what I’m doing now, you bet.” Her hand flexed around the gun barrel.

  Sally tried to be sympathetic, but she really wanted that gun off the table. “Do you know what it was?”

  “Could be a fox. I’ll get him, don’t worry.” Janis scowled. “Dang critters! He got Florence! That’s what really stings. She was my favorite. Pretty little hen, fatter than the rest, cream-colored feathers with brown speckles all over her.”

  Carl looked stricken, and it wasn’t from the onions. “Florence?” he said. “So you really give them names?”

  “I told you I did. Poor Florence. You should have met her when you had the chance, kid.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Sally, not sure how sorry to be. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Janis shook her head. “Me too. I was saving her for Christmas dinner. She would have been delicious. Now it looks like I’ve got a real-life murder mystery on my hands. Hey, where are you going?”

  “To get Foxy’s vest,” Carl said in a choked voice, and disappeared upstairs.

  * * *

  It was the night before the Harvest Festival, and Alice and Thistle had never worked so hard. The rabbits were exhausted. They longed for the morning and dreaded it. Tomorrow would be a big day, indeed.

  Doggo had been the one to bring them to the farm, as Foxy had been abruptly locked indoors. The fox was in a curious mood, quiet and secretive. But he seemed in no hurry, and the rabbits tidied, pruned, and nibbled until it was quite late.

  Afterward, they sat in silence. Whether animals pray is a question unanswerable, but there was surely something prayerful about the way the two rabbits and their guardian fox sat, grateful
for another day in the meadow, another few hops in the grass.

  It had been a good day, and they’d done everything they could do.

  Would it be enough? That wasn’t for two little cottontails to decide. Alice was ready to accept whatever outcome there was. She felt the cool autumn nip in the air. Winter was around the corner, but she didn’t expect to see it. After tomorrow’s festival, every seed and vegetable that remained would be divided among the animals of the valley, all of whom had sacrificed in ways great and small to help make a good harvest possible. She and Thistle may have done the most, but they surely hadn’t done it alone.

  And then there would be Worm to settle with.

  The weasel had been seen skulking around Burrow only a week or so earlier. According to the jays he looked like a skunk in reverse, pale-bellied and pale-flanked, with a thin dark stripe along his back. That stripe would be the last part of him to change colors. By now it must be gone.

  Alice’s time had run out. She fully expected Worm to turn up over the next day or so, in his winter-white coat, ready to collect. She still hadn’t told Thistle or anyone else about her promise to the weasel, but there was no need. Rabbits come and rabbits go; their lives are brief and prone to end without much notice or fanfare. That’s true for all living creatures, but it’s extra true for rabbits. They’re not squeamish about it the way people are. They don’t regret the past, and they don’t pin all their hopes on the future. Each season in the meadow is a gift, and one season is as good as the next.

  Still, that night both cottontails prayed, in their fashion, that their work had been sufficient, and that the Mauler might never come to wreak havoc on the valley they called home.

  It was a modest wish, when you think about it—to sit there, flank pressed against flank, wishing for their world to simply continue, in all its harsh and tender beauty. For the sun to rise again each morning over the meadow and its delicious green grass. For the woods’ edge to meander until it gave way to low shrubs and the banks of a nearby stream. For the trees’ leaves to blaze color in autumn before falling, one by one and then all at once, drawing a warm blanket over the earth that would shelter the rabbits’ dark underground home, the whole winter long.