The Wish and the Peacock

by Wendy S. Swore

  “Royal?” Scotty tests the word, and the peacock pauses its eating and stares back at us.

  Good enough for me. “Royal it is.”

  “Paige? Scotty?” Mom’s voice floats through the cracks in the barn wall, and we slide down off the stack.

  “Coming!” I holler. We head for the house, but halfway there, I notice T-Rex staring across the field toward the road, where a red truck idles, stopped on the road. I bump Scotty. “Hey, is that the same truck that passed by the other day?”

  He climbs a rail fence and peers over the top. “I think so. What’s it doing?”

  I squint but can’t quite make out the driver. Is he staring right back at us? Are those sunglasses—or binoculars?

  Slowly, the truck eases forward and picks up speed before disappearing over the rise.

  “Do you think he’s lost?”

  “No.” I glare at the dust trail he’s left behind. “Ten bucks says he’s Miss Dolly’s spy. Come on, we better hurry.”

  When we reach the house, Mom holds the back door open and steps aside to let Scotty rush in under her arm. “You’ve only got a few minutes before we need to go. Are you ready? Backpack? Breakfast? Jacket?”

  I slip past her. “I’ll be ready in a sec.”

  Three minutes later, we’re settled into the van, with me riding shotgun and Scotty in the back. Country songs play over the radio, guitar riffs and tunes sweet as spun sugar. Mom taps the wheel with the beat a few times—a habit from before—but like always, the music leaks right out, and her fingers fall still.

  We used to always take the bus, but that was when Dad finished up morning chores. Now there’s not enough morning daylight to do both, so Mom drives us.

  Mom’s phone chimes from where it’s tucked into her purse. I glance at her hands; she keeps them on the wheel.

  Good.

  Mom turns onto the highway and heads toward town. “I’ll need you both to come right home and help clean up.”

  “Clean what?” Scotty looks up from his textbook.

  “A little of everything, I guess. Miss Dolly called. She’s bringing someone by to see the farm this afternoon.”

  “Someone like who?” I pull the tie off my braid, pluck some straw out of the weave, then smooth and rebraid it before wrapping the band again.

  “She didn’t say. Probably an inspector or something. Whoever real estate agents need to get approval from.”

  “Great.” It’s probably the same person she called on the phone that first day when she talked about her big payoff. Whoever it is, if he’s a friend of hers, he’s no friend of mine.

  “Honey, even though things are hard, we need to make the best of it. We’ll have a lot of people coming to the farm over the next couple weeks. I need to know I can count on you to welcome them.”

  I glance back at Scotty, who mimics opening a jar and shaking it out, then clasps his hands against his face like he’s screaming before giving me a thumbs-up.

  Covering my laugh with a cough, I smile back at him. “You bet, Mom. We’ll welcome the heck out of everyone.”

  Chapter Six

  Scotty’s already got his backpack on when Mom pulls into the drop-off loop in front of Tyhee Elementary, but instead of hopping out, he sits sideways with a knee on the seat and peers out the rear window, his fingers tapping the door handle as he watches kids spill out of the cars behind us. “That’s Austin’s car.”

  “Well, run out and meet him.” Mom glances in the rearview mirror at the line of cars behind us.

  “If I get out, I have to walk around to the back of the school.” He glances at the teacher on morning duty. “It’s the rules. We can’t wait in front.”

  “Honey, we need to go. People are waiting, and we can’t make Paige late.”

  “Wait one second.” He taps a little faster and squints at the car. “One second.”

  I watch in the passenger side mirror as a kindergartener with a huge backpack jumps out of her van. She teeters when she hits the ground but doesn’t fall. Good thing too, ’cause with a backpack that big, she’d be stuck worse than a beetle on its back.

  “Scotty . . .” Mom warns.

  A husky boy with an Avengers T-shirt and three long black braids hops out of a car and slams the door before looking around.

  “Bye, Momma!” Scotty jumps out, darts through the crowd, and runs right up to his friend. They bump knuckles and start to walk around the side of the school toward the playground.

  I notice that Scotty’s shirt has a tear in it, and both knees in his jeans are ripped open. He always looks like a farm kid, but today he’s rocking the ragamuffin look. If Mom was paying attention, she’d probably take him home to change, but she’s already watching the cars in front.

  “Paige!” Scotty turns and waves.

  I roll down the window as Mom starts to pull out. “What?”

  “Check your library. For books . . . that I want to read!” He stares at me, hard, so I can’t mistake what he means.

  I can’t imagine why there’d be books about peacocks at my school, but I wave out the window anyway. “I will!”

  As we wait our turn to pull away from the red-brick building, Mom shakes her head. “The way he talks, you’d think we starve him for reading material, but he brings home a new armful from school every week.”

  I shrug. If Scotty had to choose between books and breathing, he’d probably go for the books. When teachers turn him loose in the library, he prowls the aisles like a fox raiding a henhouse full of fat, lazy chickens. He eyes the books hungrily, caressing the spines, and snatching one, then another, till he’s plucked so many off the shelves, his arms can barely hold them all. His fingers twitch quicker than a rabbit’s nose as he cracks them open one by one, a feeding frenzy of words. He savors them too. Sometimes I catch him repeating the words just to taste them rolling off his tongue—the longer, the better.

  Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia?

  Dee-licious!

  Reading’s never been that way for me. Sometimes the words squiggle around like tadpoles in my head, ’cause I keep thinking of chores, or robots, or calves, and before I know it, I’ve read the same line three times without understanding a word.

  Mom used to always push me to read more—which mostly made me read less—until Dad had the transmission all tore apart on the Deere 4850 and asked me to read him the manual so we could figure out how to put it all back together. It was slow going, ’cause I was little and the words were big, but I did it. And I’ve read every manual since.

  I guess for me, reading’s a tool I can use if I need to, but most of the time I get around it. Why use a drill if all you really need is a screwdriver? Same thing.

  The closer we get to town, the closer the houses sit next to each other. They’re nice houses, but when land is what’s needed to grow food and keep everyone fed, it’s a whole different feel. Neighborhoods gobble up field after field, farm after farm, ruthless and relentless in their need for more open spaces.

  A yawn catches me off guard, and I cover my mouth. Mornings are always hard for me, because from the minute I leave the farm, there’s seven hours of school ahead. Seven hours wasted where I could be getting things done. I smooth my pants and stop when my hands run into a bump in my pocket.

  Dad’s wishstone!

  I curl my fingers around the stone, rub the smooth surface, and watch them come away sooty. Suddenly the day doesn’t seem as long as it did before.

  By the time Mom drops me off at Hawthorne Middle School, there’s only fifteen minutes before the bell rings, so I make a beeline for the library in the basement and slip inside.

  With the phone to her ear, the librarian smiles and waves at me, the overhead lights sparkling on her silver bracelets and rings. Mom still wears a wedding ring, but Dad never did, ’cause he didn’t want to lose a finger in an engine.
He only ever wore his once—on their wedding day. It’s been sitting safe in a black velvet case in his dresser drawer ever since.

  I wave at the librarian as I walk past the long wooden counter and head straight to the computers against the back wall. I type in “peacock,” then blink at the list of books that comes up. With the cursor highlighting one book after another, I narrow it down to Sojourn, An Exploration of India by Annie Alaina Evers, and Wild Nature Child by Ellie May Shelby.

  After I’ve found the books I’m looking for, I spy Kimana tucked in a corner table of the library, her long, straight, black hair spilling over her shoulders to her waist as her clever fingers work on her latest project. She used to work on her beading projects only at home, but her beadwork started selling real good, and she’s trying to save up money for a special jingle dress, so she uses whatever bits of time she can find to make more.

  “Hey, Kimana.” I plop down in the chair across from her.

  She looks up from her work. “Hey.”

  “Did you finish those pretty moccasins already?”

  “Yeah.” She holds up a lined piece of white cloth with rows of tiny blue beads making a diamond shape. “Sold them yesterday. I’m doing bracelets this week.”

  “How far do you have to go?” I flip to the back of the Wild Nature Child book, searching for an index.

  “I’ll finish this by tonight, and I’ve got another piece of hide ready to go at home. Hutsi says she’ll make another pair of moccasins for me to bead next week after she takes these to Fort Hall Trading Post.” Kimana threads a string of blue-and-white beads on her needle and scoots the line down like a jeweled caterpillar.

  “No, I mean, how far till you can buy the jingles and everything for your regalia?” I flip through the last few pages in the book and grimace. No index. Do they expect me to read the whole thing?

  “Maybe another couple of months? I’ve been trading for some of it.” She thrusts the needle up through the cloth right beside the beaded string and sends it back down on the other side, securing the line of beads in place. “Did you see sign-ups for next year’s Lego League are open?”

  I turn a page in the book. “I’m trying not to think about it. Did you sign up?”

  “Paige, you have to sign up. The other teams murdered us last year after you dropped out. You’re the best builder on the team.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the best programmer. You can do it without me. I bet your competition was epic.”

  “Epically embarrassing, sure. For real, we can’t win without you. Last year’s robot had three arms, but they put them all on backwards and it couldn’t even flip a ball. All I could program it to do was wave at the judges on our way to last place.”

  “Oh, come on. It’s not that bad.” I laugh.

  “It’s worse.” She shakes her head. “So much worse.”

  “Whatever.” I watch her lay the beads down row by row, her second needle and thread looping over top to secure the small spheres, each as brilliant blue as Royal’s feathers. Her precision is what makes her such a good programmer. She lays down line after line of code and makes something wonderful.

  As for me, given the choice between needle and thread or duct tape, I’ll take the tape every time. It holds shoes together, doubles as a Band-Aid, catches flies, removes splinters, patches a hose, cures warts, gets cat hair off your clothes, and if a fence nail catches your jeans and rips the holy living daylights out of your pants, duct tape will save the whole world from having to see your underwear.

  Pages flip under my hands, but none of it’s what I’m looking for. “Do people ever use peacock feathers for regalia?”

  “Peacocks? Not that I’ve seen around here. Their feathers make pretty earrings though. Why?”

  I lean close. “We have one.”

  She stills halfway through a stitch. “What?”

  “We found a hurt peacock—well, Scotty did, but we’re taking care of it together.”

  “A real one? Where is it?”

  “On top of the straw stack in the chicken barn. Wanna come over? I could show you.”

  “For sure, but I better check with Hutsi first. You could have dinner with us, and I could come see it when we’re done. I could text you—” She grimaces. “I mean, I could call you or your mom after I ask.”

  Kimana’s grandma is the best cook, so normally, I’d be there in two flicks of a cow’s tail, but . . . “I can’t. Remember the real estate lady Mom invited over? She put an ad for our farm in the paper.”

  Her hands still again. “You’re moving?”

  “No. Not if I can stop it.”

  Kimana waits, watching me with deep brown eyes. She’s always been a good listener. Other people might needle and pry to find out what they want to know, but Kimana just waits till I spill my guts all on my own. It’s like her superpower.

  I scan a few more pages of the book for information about peacocks, then flip it shut. “It’s a mess. I don’t get how Mom and Grandpa can let this happen. Heck, they’re helping it happen, and nothing I say matters. It’s like Miss Dolly’s got them both hypnotized or something.”

  I watch for any sign that Kimana thinks I’m being ridicu-lous, but she only waits, so I rush on, the words spilling out and piling in a heap between us faster than grain from an auger. “Mom and Grandpa listen to everything she says, no matter how crazy it is. They’re selling all the animals—even Queenie—and throwing stuff out. Strangers are coming to the farm next week.” My finger taps the table. “Next week! To our farm—to my dad’s farm. Looking in our barns, poking at our animals, snooping through our stuff, and walkin’ right into our house like it’s some kind of dollar store.”

  The librarian clears her throat and raises a bejeweled finger in warning.

  I hadn’t realized I’d raised my voice, but sitting there, saying it all out loud makes it so real. “I have to stop it, Kimana. I have to. It feels . . . it feels . . .”

  I lift my face to the ceiling, searching for the right name to give this tangled mess of barbed wire jammed inside my chest. I take a breath and meet her gaze. “It feels like I’m losing him all over again. And I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “You don’t think he’d want your mom to sell? It’s a lot of work.”

  “No way. The farm was his whole life—my whole life.”

  “It didn’t used to be your whole life. You’ve got robotics trophies to prove it. Same as me.” Kimana glances at the clock and strings another line of beads. “Maybe your mom and grandpa have reasons you don’t know about.”

  “I’ve got Dad’s calendar. Everything that matters is already on there. This is something different.”

  “You said Dolly’s making your mom sell the horses? Wasn’t she rodeo queen?”

  “Yeah, the same year your mom was Shoshone-Bannock Queen at the Festival. Mom loves our horses. How can she even think about selling them? Selling Queenie?”

  “Do they act hypnotized the rest of the time? Like zoning out or acting weird?”

  “I dunno. Mom zones out sometimes, for sure. I swear I’ve tried talking to them, but it’s hopeless.”

  “Maybe they just need more time to snap out of it. Could you get them to stall?” Her fingers swish tiny beads around inside an old mint tin before threading a few more crystal-blue beads on her needle.

  “Mom won’t stall, but I think I’ve got a plan to slow things down.”

  I slide the librarian a glance to be sure she’s not listening and whisper while Kimana lays down a couple more rows of beads.

  “We’re gonna make it so people think the farm is the grossest, most awful place ever. Scotty and me have some ideas.”

  By the time the bell rings, Kimana’s design is looking awesome, and I’ve got a new ally.

  “Besides,” I say as I help her put some beads back in the tin, “if you don’t help me, I’ll never
get to come back for Lego League, and you’ll be stuck with a three-armed robot forever.”

  Kimana laughs, then gathers her things and tucks the beadwork into a pouch before stuffing the whole thing into her backpack. “I can’t ride home with you because my brothers have practice riding for the Relay race, and Dad’s on patrol, so my Hutsi needs me. But maybe I can come over later.” Kimana stills. “Wait—I forgot, I can’t.”

  “Why not?” I glance at the clock. The last thing I want is to be late for Mr. Collier’s class. He gives detentions, and nobody’s got time for that.

  “My dirt bike won’t start.”

  “Did your brothers look at it?”

  “Not yet. They’ve been too busy with rodeo stuff. Maybe Sunday.”

  Sunday is way too long to wait. “Maybe I can fix it faster.”

  “Don’t stress if you can’t. If my brothers can’t do it, my dad will eventually.” She waves as she walks out the door. “See you at lunch!”

  “Definitely.” I set the books on the counter by the librarian. “Do you have any books on taking care of peacocks? These didn’t have anything.”

  She looks up from her work and considers me for a moment before her fingers click on her keyboard faster than the needle on Mom’s sewing machine. “Let’s see. No peacocks, but we do have several books on pheasants.”

  Wings, feathers, beaks—it’s nowhere near the same, but Scotty can fill in whatever I don’t know.

  I shrug. “I’ll take it.”

  Chapter Seven

  The chaos of hundreds of feet, excited conversations, and slamming lockers fills the gray-tinted hallways with more ruckus than a whole herd of cattle as I slide through the crowd to my first-hour class on the second floor—social studies with the newest teacher in school, Mr. Collier.

  He’s a nice enough teacher, except for when I fall asleep in class, which is sort of every day. It’s not like I sleep very long. Grandpa would say I’m just resting my eyes. I still listen . . . most of the time.