Alice's Farm

by Maryrose Wood

  Now, that’s going around and coming around in style.

  * * *

  Tom Rowes had been right about one thing: Farming was a lot of work. Hiring help had freed up some time for Brad, and he started writing a regular column for Hipster Farmer magazine. He’d hoped to share his thoughts about beekeeping and his unabashedly poetic vision of how small family farms might teach all of us something about how to live in harmony with nature and one another. Yet once again, his marketing and branding expertise was what the readers wanted. At first, he was disappointed, but he quickly saw the value of it. Most folks tend to have a better appetite for poetry once there’s food on the table.

  Winters on the farm were quieter but far from idle. Sally’s dehydrator was replaced with a bigger model, and when she wasn’t ruining perfectly good fruit she was fulfilling orders at the kitchen table, answering the cute letters that kids sent to “Alice,” as Carl had dubbed the farm’s bunny-in-overalls mascot, and inventing new, healthy, and delicious ways of turning farming into money, just as Lester had long ago explained.

  By summer, Brad finally got his beehives working right and mostly bear-proofed. Farmer Brad’s Apple Honey started appearing on the shelves right next to Farmer Sally’s Pruney Bears, along with baby-sized jars of Farmer Marie’s Applesauce.

  Carl didn’t want any of the farm’s goods named after him—he felt funny taking credit when he knew he’d had so much help—but when carrots were in season at the farm stand, he liked to put a sign on them that read RABBIT TREATS. The customers got a real kick out of that.

  Speaking of signs: The billboard the Harveys rented on the Thruway was just a little bit bigger then Ruth Shirley Realty’s billboard. It had a picture of the whole Harvey family on it, including Foxy. Foxy just loved driving past it. How many dogs get their picture on a billboard? Not many, but Foxy just waggled her doughnut tail and took it as her due.

  * * *

  Carl homeschooled and worked on the farm all through the following spring and summer, and chose to go to school in the fall. That worked out fine, and he found that friends were easy to make now that he was feeling more friendly toward himself, and more at home in his life in general.

  He always stayed friends with Emmanuel. They visited back and forth when they could, and Emmanuel’s family even spent part of their winter holiday on the farm. Lying under the Christmas tree, the boys talked about going to camp together. They were too old for Camp Kids in the Woods, but Orin at the library had told Carl about some science camp options that might be interesting. One camp was about dinosaurs and one was about birds. This made it hard to choose since, thanks to Meryl Streep, both boys knew that birds were living dinosaurs anyway.

  Thinking about Emmanuel and how different their lives had become led Carl to a shocking realization, which he confided to Janis late one January afternoon, over at her place. It was a cold day and short on daylight. Carl’s parents had taken Marie to check out a ballet class in town, and Carl and Foxy opted to have dinner at Janis’s house. She had a nice fire going, and there was a big pot of vegetable soup on the stove, almost ready to eat.

  They sat and gazed at the upward-leaping flames.

  “I thought of something weird,” he said. “Marie is going to grow up a country girl.”

  “So?”

  “She doesn’t even remember living in the city.”

  “She was a baby then, kid. Babies don’t remember being babies anyway.”

  “I know. But she won’t know about subways and skyscrapers and stuff.” He rubbed his feet on the dog, who was curled underfoot on the rug near the fire. “Foxy, do you remember Brooklyn? Remember the pigeons? And the dog park?”

  Foxy made a grumbly noise in her sleep, as if to say that urban dog parks were cramped and vastly overrated, full of rude canines who didn’t know how to share their toys, and please don’t get her started about pigeons and their interminable, pointless cooing! She’d rather listen to a blue jay squawk any day.

  “Riding the subway seems like a big thing not to know about,” Carl said, after a bit. “But I guess city kids don’t know a lot of stuff, either.” He sighed at his own threadbare observation. It was the kind of thing you’d write in an essay at school: “In conclusion, being a city kid isn’t better or worse than being a kid from the country. They’re just different. The end.” Such teacher-pleasing platitudes hardly caught the complexity of the feeling he had inside him.

  The fire crackled and leapt. “You don’t have to be just one thing, you know,” Janis said. “You can be a cosmopolite.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A cosmopolite is a cosmopolitan person. Comfortable everywhere and anywhere, with all kinds of people and all kinds of ideas.” She leaned back in her chair. “A citizen of the cosmos.”

  Carl knew what cosmos meant; it was one of the Greek roots he’d studied in his homeschool days. “You mean like outer space? A citizen of other planets?”

  She chuckled. “Well, I don’t know about that. This planet’s good enough for me.”

  “Me too.” Carl’s stomach made a noise. “Is the soup ready yet? I’m hungry.”

  “In a minute, kid.” Janis stretched her feet toward the fire. She was wearing her favorite pair of slippers, which she’d made for herself in a moccasin style. When weasel fur is made into luxury items it’s usually called ermine, but Janis was nothing if not a straight talker. To her, a weasel was a weasel was a weasel.

  No matter what you called it, the fur was thick and white and soft as a cloud, and the slippers kept her feet cozy and warm, now and for winters yet to come.

  * * *

  Alice lived a few more years, which was more than enough for a cottontail. She had quite a good number of litters, too. All rabbits are clever, but Alice’s offspring tended to be cleverer than most—maybe that was just Thistle’s opinion, but he voiced it often. She became a wise guide to all the young ’uns. She taught them how to be careful, of course, but also how to be brave. She had plenty of old rabbits’ tales of her own to tell! Some of them were true, too.

  When her time came, she was ready. She collected on a very special favor John Glenn had promised her years before. This was nothing like the deal she’d made with Worm. The business between Alice and John Glenn was a joyous pact between two good friends, and indeed, they had remained devoted to each other until the end.

  “I’m ready for my ride today,” she told him, without fanfare. It was a fine spring day in the meadow, and it had rained a little during the night. Now the sky was pure bright blue, and the air was so clean and clear, you’d think it was the first day of the first meadow that ever was.

  “All right. Anywhere in particular you’d like to go?” he asked, flexing his wings.

  “Up there,” she said, tipping her nose up to the sky. The sky, that glorious firmament! So blue and so big, and she was so small in comparison—but there was nothing small about Alice, really. Not when you think of all she’d done, and the difference it made in how things turned out, for all the living creatures in the valley between the hills.

  “Up there it shall be, then,” he said. “Higher than you can imagine.”

  “Then let’s go. Do I need to hop on?” she asked, thinking of the time she’d climbed on his back to free him from the tracker.

  “No more hopping for you,” John Glenn said. “I’ll carry you.”

  The eagle cradled the wise old rabbit with a wing and drew her close to his thickly feathered breast.

  “Oh, this is soft!” she said, delighted. “I’d like to see the river, I think.”

  “I can show you where it flows into the sea,” John Glenn said. “That will be a view that no rabbit has ever seen before.”

  Well, it wasn’t the first time Alice would do something no rabbit had done before. Her nose twitched with anticipation. “That sounds wonderful. Let’s stay up a good long time. And when I’ve had enough, I’ll close my eyes and be gone. You can just put me down anywhere, then. I’ll already be dark
.”

  John Glenn’s golden eyes softened. “And what would you like to happen next?”

  Alice hadn’t thought ahead that far, but she remembered something the great bird had said to her, long ago. “John Glenn, you make a meal of rabbit now and then, don’t you? Would that be too much to ask? I know you prefer fish. Still, perhaps you’ll be hungry after a long flight.”

  “I could do that, if you so choose,” the bird replied. “But you love the soil, too. You could go back to the earth. I’d bury you myself. My claws are more than capable of that much digging. Either way, we’ll always be together.”

  Alice’s tail shimmied with pleasure. “These are both such lovely ideas! Can I decide in the air?”

  “Of course,” the eagle said. “I always do my best thinking up high. Shall we go?”

  The eagle gathered her up with his great clawed feet, and spread his broad wings until they shadowed the ground. With a mighty downward stroke, the two friends were in the air, and rising.

  * * *

  Through the window in the upstairs playroom, Foxy watched the eagle circle the farmhouse, gaining altitude with each beat of its wings, cradling something small to his chest. The dog whimpered, low and long.

  “What’s the matter, girl?” Carl looked up from his algebra book. “Do you want to go out?”

  “She’s hungry. I’ll get her a treat,” Marie said, putting down her crayon. She was practicing for kindergarten, where she’d been told that coloring with crayons was a big deal. She hardly looked like her picture on the billboard anymore; that’s how fast children grow.

  Foxy kept her front paws on the sill, gazing out and up. “What kind of glutton would beg for food at a time like this!” the dog replied, full of feeling. “What do I care for treats? I just watched a dear friend fly to her final resting place. Farewell, sweet Alice! A bunny among bunnies, indeed. I salute you, oh brave rabbit, and all that you did for us. We will never forget, never!”

  But all the two children heard was woof, woof, woof.

  * * *

  Season after season, the new kits of Burrow would listen raptly to the story of a young eastern cottontail who became a farmer herself, and who saved the whole valley from the Mauler for the benefit of all rabbits and their descendants.

  It was a wild and improbable story, no question. By the end of it, the kits’ teeth would be chattering with disbelief. “Aw, come on, Thistle!” they’d say. “That’s just one of your old rabbits’ tales! Isn’t it?”

  And Old Thistle, who by then had lived to be the oldest rabbit in the warren, would shimmy his tail and answer, “Don’t be so skeptical, young ’uns! This tale’s as true as they come. It’s true as the sunrise. I know it is, because I was there.”

  But you know how young ’uns are. They thought the old bun-bun was pulling their whiskers. Thistle didn’t take offense. He’d just take out his most precious possession, an empty glass jar with a label on it that showed a cute little cottontail in overalls. A raccoon had found it in the human trash and brought it to Burrow as a token of respect. Imagine! A raccoon, showing respect to a cottontail! But the other animals of the valley hadn’t forgotten, either.

  “There’s my sister,” Thistle would say, showing the picture around. “That’s Alice, right there.”

  That gave the kits something to think about. By the time the next batch of litters were leaving the nest, it was the older kits who were passing on the tale to the younger ones, who did the same when it was their turn.

  The warren wasn’t running out of rabbits any time soon; no, sir. And where there are rabbits, there are rabbits’ tales. That’s something that will never change.

  By then, the people of the region had taken to calling Prune Street Farm the old Harvey place, even though the Harveys weren’t old at all, and wouldn’t be for a great many years to come. But to the creatures of the valley between the hills, it was Alice’s farm, pure and simple.

  –THE END–

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The real John Glenn was the first American astronaut to orbit Earth. That happened the same month I was born, in February of 1962.

  His spacecraft was called Friendship 7. A fine name, don’t you think? It reminds me of one of my favorite books, which I want to mention here because Alice’s Farm owes a debt of inspiration to it.

  Of course, I’m talking about Charlotte’s Web, written in 1952 by the great E. B. White, and still read and loved today by children and adults all over the world.

  Charlotte’s Web takes place on a family farm, where animals, humans, and a very special spider share a remarkable adventure over the course of a single growing season, from springtime to harvest. Together, they learn a thing or two about the beauty of life, how precious and sometimes difficult it can be, and how miraculous, too. Above all, it’s a book about friendship.

  It’s been nearly seventy years since Charlotte’s Web was written. Life on the farm has changed a great deal since then. Much has been written about the challenges facing today’s farmers, and the dangers posed by using the wrong kinds of shortcuts to try to grow more crops more cheaply. In answer, more sustainable, soil-replenishing methods that work in cooperation with nature’s diverse wisdom are being rediscovered and put into practice.

  Even among farmers, there’s a wide range of opinions about how to proceed. What sounds far-fetched today may be less so tomorrow. But the job of putting healthy food on the table will always be with us. Finding a way to do this that’s good for rabbits and good for farmers—by which I mean, good for the earth and all its inhabitants, the people and animals and insects and birds, the plants and fish and all living things—well, that’s going to take some bravery, cleverness, and cooperation. It might mean trying things that have never been tried before, and acting neighborly toward those we see eye to eye with and perhaps especially toward those we don’t. It’ll surely mean seeking common ground with each other, and putting in plenty of hard work, too.

  Everybody’s got to eat, after all.

  Few of us will ever get to see firsthand what John Glenn saw when he and Friendship 7 orbited Earth in 1962 and witnessed the sun rise and set four times in one day. Yet even in the sprouting of a single seed, the everyday miracle of life is at work. We too can feel awe and gratitude for it, just as that brave astronaut did when he gazed upon Earth, its shining seas and fertile land, its mountains and deserts and poles capped in ice, all wreathed in clouds like cotton candy; the delicate, beautiful planet we call home.

  “Oh,” said John Glenn, “that view is tremendous.”

  Maryrose Wood

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It takes a cozy warren full of industrious geniuses to bring a book to life, and my gratitude runs deep and wide. First thanks must go to my editor, Liz Szabla, whose serene confidence in this book, from first scribble to last dotted i, has made all the difference.

  The gang at Feiwel and Friends are simply wonderful, as befits being led by Jean Feiwel, whose passion for children’s literature is a treasure. Special thanks to the Macmillan dream team: Mallory Grigg, Kim Waymer, Alexei Esikoff, Cynthia Lliguichuzhca, and Mary Van Akin.

  I cannot get over the tender beauty of Christopher Denise’s cover art and interior illustrations. Thank you, Chris.

  As for my own stellar team, deepest thanks to my witty and insightful literary agent, Brooks Sherman, as well as Wendi Gu and Roma Panganiban, all at Janklow & Nesbit. Many thanks to my film rights agent, Mary Pender at UTA, for navigating Hollywood waters with skill and care.

  Writers are not always easy to live with, and the family, friends, and loved ones who keep the home fires burning deserve prizes. Love and gratitude to Jason Culp, who is ever steady and true. Thanks to my beloved kids, Beatrix and Harry, animal lovers both, for being so interesting, and interested. Alice has her brother Thistle by her side, and I have Tom and Jim, the best bro team ever; my always inspiring sis, Deb; and my wonderfully supportive uncle, Vito Gassi.

  Thanks to my priceless crew of wri
ter buddies for the sanity. I’m grateful to all my clever and committed writing students, past and present, who remind me of what’s essential.

  I thank the darling fur babies and animal companions of a lifetime, who exemplify presence and love, and remind us how profoundly we can connect across differences, even the difference between two-legged and four. I think especially of my brave Shiba Inu, Lil, to whom this book owes a great debt.

  And how can I ever thank my readers? Words fail. This is all for you, all of you; shining lights, every one.

  Maryrose Wood

  THANK YOU FOR READING THIS FEIWEL & FRIENDS BOOK. THE FRIENDS WHO MADE

  Alice’s Farm

  A RABBIT’S TALE

  POSSIBLE ARE:

  JEAN FEIWEL, Publisher

  LIZ SZABLA, Associate Publisher

  RICH DEAS, Senior Creative Director

  MALLORY GRIGG, Art Director

  HOLLY WEST, Senior Editor

  ANNA ROBERTO, Senior Editor

  KAT BRZOZOWSKI, Senior Editor

  ALEXEI ESIKOFF, Senior Managing Editor

  KIM WAYMER, Senior Production Manager

  ERIN SIU, Assistant Editor

  EMILY SETTLE, Associate Editor

  RACHEL DIEBEL, Assistant Editor

  FOYINSI ADEGBONMIRE, Editorial Assistant

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