The night might be gone, but my breath still hangs in wispy clouds of ice.
Flakes of frost sprinkle my stained leather gloves and melt against my cheek as I heft a sack of pig feed over my shoulder and trudge toward the pen. At dawn, everything sounds different, amplified. Gravel crunches under my boots, and a magpie chatters from branches high overhead as if to say, “Keep it down!” But by then, it’s too late for quiet.
A long cry rises up over all other birdsongs, echoing a “Ha, ha, heyo, heyo!”
And the world goes quiet to listen as Royal breaks his silence. More piercing than a goose’s honk, the first two sounds cry out a question: Are you there? Can you hear me? Then he answers, I’m here. I’m here.
“Ha, ha, heyo, heyo!”
I’m part thrilled to hear it, because that’s gotta mean he’s feeling better, but sound can travel for miles around here. Who else is up early enough to hear?
I wait for more, but he must’ve said all he wanted to say, so I turn back to the pigs.
Excited squeals and snorts greet me as sows push and shove for the best spots by the trough. A flock of mourning doves settles behind them, pecking and cooing where sharp hooves and leathery snouts have turned up the soil.
I pull the string on the sack, opening up one corner, and pour a long line of feed down the metal trough, the mash swishing like sand against the metal sides. The second bag fills the rest of the feeder, and the squeals quiet into happy grunts. Too much in one spot, and they hurt themselves all bunching up at once, but spread out, there’s room for all.
Cupping my mouth, I call, “Here pig, pig. Sooey!”
I don’t know what “sooey” means. I should know. Shoulda asked Dad when I had the chance, but it was just one of those things he did, and I never thought to ask why. His voice was deep, wasn’t it? I keep trying to remember, but it plays at the edge of my mind, and I can’t quite catch it—fragments of a tune where I can’t remember the words.
My heart aches where the memory of his voice used to be, another piece of the puzzle erased, the leftover edges raw and bleeding.
Enough. There’s no time for hanging out at the trough all mopey—not when there are more chores to do. Every minute that slips by splashes more golden rays of sunlight against the barn walls and frosted leaves. Scotty and Grandpa ought to be about done checking irrigation lines, and I can’t keep them waiting.
Empty feed sacks in hand, I hurry to the cows and try to ignore Dolly’s brand-new sign at the end of the driveway, where it sits all bright and awful like a maggot perched at the edge of a pie. Her workers came by late last night to put it up again. She’s determined, I’ll give her that, but oh, just knowing it’s there chafes something terrible.
The whole thing’s as welcome as a blister.
Sawing it down twice in a row would make for too many questions, so I gotta think of some other way to get it down. I could burn it, but fire’s tricky-dangerous, and it’s not in a good open spot like the wishfire.
A robin lands in a clump of daffodils beside the path, pecks at something, and flits off. Wild daffodils are Mom’s favorite flower, ’cause they keep coming back no matter what.
They’re not as pretty as Mateo’s hanging basket, but . . .
I stop. I totally forgot about Mateo’s flowers. Did it frost last night? Did I leave the fans on? I jog to the greenhouse.
“Please be alive. Please, please!”
Pushing the blue tarp aside, I step inside the plastic dome. Empty seed trays lie in a jumble on one side of the wall, and a few scruffs of grass grow where our garden ought to be, but the hanging basket is alive. Long ivy vines hang from the sides like green tentacles from a jellyfish, and flowers bubble up from the middle and trail down like pink frosting. Pink ribbons spiral down from the hook overhead, and a smattering of baby’s breath dots the center with tiny explosions of white.
Mateo’s mom had a scare a few years ago with breast cancer and survived. Now they celebrate her birthday with something extra special. This year, they must’ve spent a fortune on these flowers.
It’s a little wilted and thirsty maybe, but alive, so I grab the watering can and give it a good drink. I’ll have to remember to refill the watering can and turn on the fans later.
The blue tarp crinkles as I slip back outside and start jogging toward the cows. Every minute, the sun creeps higher, and my time gets shorter.
When I cross the canal, three ducks quack like mad and explode off the water way down the ditch. Squinting to catch sight of whatever critter mighta startled them, I peer upstream, but steam rises from the water, making a line of fog down the bank. Something moves out there—a quarter mile or so down the way. Mateo’s fox, maybe?
No.
A man-shaped silhouette walks down the canal—headed away from the farm as sneaky as a viper slithering away from our beds.
Someone has been here.
I bite my lip and watch the tiny form walk away as I try to talk myself out of worrying. But how can I not worry? Sometimes bad folks walk through just to make trouble. What if the stranger bothered my animals, or lit the haystacks on fire? That happened once before. A whole year’s worth of hard-earned feed gone in one awful night of fire that smoldered and smoked for weeks afterward.
“Please don’t let him be a firebug,” I whisper as I break into a jog. With one eye on the haystacks, watching for smoke, I rush from pen to pen, checking for open gates, tampered feed, damaged equipment, or anything else amiss. The pasture gates seem okay, but what about the barns? Could he have gone after the tools? I check the doors on the shop, the toolshed, the animal barns. I poke my head inside each one just to be sure, but I don’t see anything.
I’m still scowling in the direction the man disappeared when Grandpa and Scotty rumble up in the truck and step out, T-Rex ambling up beside them.
“What’s the matter?” Scotty follows my gaze.
“Someone was here. I saw a man on the ditch.”
Grandpa slams his door. “Unless something’s missing, I wouldn’t worry too much. People walk by sometimes.”
“What if it’s a firebug?”
T-Rex nudges my hand for a scratch, and Grandpa surveys the haystacks. “If he had started a fire, we’d have seen smoke by now. You know how fast they go up. It’s probably just someone out for some morning air. Folks don’t always know ditches are private property.”
“Well, he should.” He wouldn’t think it was okay to run around in someone’s backyard in town, would he? Maybe I should have marched right up to see who it was and showed him the “no trespassing” sign, but walking up to a stranger without Grandpa or Dad feels like poking a rattlesnake.
“No use worrying about it now. It’s over and done.” Grandpa gathers irrigation valves out of the truck and carries them by the long handles, two dangling from each hand so they hang past his knees like oversized aluminum bells. “You two check the chickens and that cow of yours.”
“On it,” I say.
As we near the barn, Scotty bumps my arm. “Did you hear Royal? Wasn’t it awesome? It’s like our farm has a tiny piece of the Jungle Book.”
“Did Grandpa hear it?”
“I don’t think so. He didn’t stop working. Mom says he doesn’t always hear so good. Oh, and Dad’s cat has a new friend. You see it?”
Tucked into a pile of loose straw by the doorway, Scuzbag’s lean orange body curls protectively around the magic cat’s black shadow.
Scuzbag’s lazy green eyes watch us come, and his ears flick at the sound of Scotty’s voice. But before I can say anything, the black cat’s yellow eyes open wide, and it streaks into the barn and out of sight.
Scuzbag arches up as I stop to stroke his head. “I’ve seen him twice before. The same day you found Royal.”
“You think it’s a female?” Scotty starts to climb up the straw stack. “Maybe we’ll hav
e kittens.”
“Maybe.” Dad was always real good about catching and fixing any strays, so most of the cats we have are all grown up, but a feral cat that skittish is harder to catch.
I pass food and water up for Royal and check the feeder levels for the chickens, then pour a few more buckets of grain in. “It looks good down here. How’s Royal?”
“Great! Did you give him the oyster shells for grit?”
“Yep.”
“I wish we had some worms to give him. That’s what we need: Lumbricus terrestris.” Scotty slips down the stack, and we trek to Milkshake’s barn. “Peacocks are omnivores—not herbivores. He needs more than grain to eat.”
“I know. That’s why we gave him cat food too. He’ll be alright.”
“Carnivorous cats. Felis catus.” He skips ahead of me, his fingertips tapping his thumbs one after another—pointer, middle, ring, pinkie—on repeat. “Lumbricus terrestris. Did you know worms have gizzards same as chickens and other birds?”
“I think I remember that.” I grab hay for Milkshake and break up the flakes into her trough.
“That’s ’cause worms don’t have teeth. They gather tiny rocks into their gizzards, and the muscles squeeze all the food they eat right through all those rocks. Like a garbage disposal for leaves and stuff. The rocks chew the food—but worms use smaller rocks than chickens do. A worm couldn’t eat pieces of oyster shell. I think it’s more like sand. Tiny sand-sized pieces of rock.”
“Did you just read that?
“No. I knew that forever ago.” He sighs. “Library day isn’t till Friday, and I’ve read everything already.”
“Why don’t you ask if you can check out more books?”
“We get five. Mrs. Foster says five new books every week.” He dumps a measure of grain in with Milkshake’s hay.
I reach through the wood slats and scratch the short, thick fur on her forehead. “You should ask for more books. I bet the librarian would let you. She’s nice.”
“The other kids only get fi—Hey! Who else was in here besides Grandpa?” He crouches beside the stall and touches the shallow heel of a footprint in the dust. It’s not crescent-shaped like Grandpa’s boots, and the toe is far too round.
I peer over his shoulder. “That’s from a dress shoe.”
“Does Grandpa have dress shoes?” Scotty stands and looks up at me.
“No. He wears nice boots to church, not dress shoes.” Who would wear dress shoes to a barn? That doesn’t even make sense. Tennis shoes, sure, or maybe work boots, but dress shoes? “C’mon. I want to check something.”
We run back toward the pigs and stop at the canal, where I scan the ground for a moment before spying the same shoe-print pressed into the soft dirt, leading away in the same direction the man went. My heart hiccups at the thought of a stranger in the barn with Milkshake.
“The man on the ditch was in our barn.”
“Are you sure?”
“Definitely.” I may have to look twice at letters and things, but shapes are just big puzzle pieces. And this one fits perfectly.
The hum of tractors on the road grumbles, and we glance over to see Mr. Rivas in his Deere 4850, the plow raised high and proud behind him like a shiny green rooster tail. A couple hundred feet behind him, Mateo motors along in a yellow front-end loader with a wide blade across the whole front and the long excavator bucket arm curled up behind him. Mr. Rivas cruises right on by toward their farm ’round the bend, but when Mateo nears our driveway, he pivots a bit from right to left, like he’s having trouble controlling the loader.
I take a step forward. Did something break? My brain clicks through the different parts that might have failed—the steering column, maybe the front axles, or the ball joints?
Mateo fights with the controls, his whole posture proof of his struggle to get things back in line as the tractor slows down, angles to the side . . . and catches Miss Dolly’s sign head-on.
I never knew how beautiful the sound of wood splintering could be in the morning air.
Black diesel smoke billows up from the exhaust stack as the blade jerks up and rolls right over the sign. Plywood breaks into smithereens and dirt flies as the stakes topple over and smash to the ground. Wood chunks soar over the cab and bounce across the road—and in the middle of it all, Mateo raises an arm as if to apologize for being so careless.
“Oh!” Scotty gasps. “Poor Mateo. I bet that was scary—accidentally running off the road like that. Noisy too.”
Mateo swerves back onto the road, a few pieces of the sign clinging to the blade for a yard or two before falling away as he guns the engine and disappears around the bend after his dad.
A slow smile starts deep in my chest and wriggles all the way up to my face. “You know, Scotty, I think he went exactly where he wanted to.”
Chapter Eleven
After school, Mom worries on everything like a cow on a salt lick. We help her move stuff around like she wants, but a shed with twenty boxes in it looks an awful lot like a shed with fifteen boxes in it.
Finally, T-Rex raises his head, and I expect to see Miss Dolly’s black Cadillac, except it’s not her car coming down the driveway. It’s the Dodge Ram with the driver’s window rolled halfway down.
Scotty squeezes my arm. “It’s him. The guy from the road when we were—”
“Shh,” I hiss, glancing at Mom, but she’s on the far side of the van, watching the truck come up the lane.
As the shiny red Dodge pulls in next to Patches, the two vehicles seem as different as a peacock and a pigeon. Where the truck sparkles in the sun, we have rust spots. And Patches’s faded blue might qualify as a color, but the mirror finish on the truck is so flashy it’s like the van isn’t there at all.
I squint at the guy inside the truck, but the man with the sunglasses isn’t alone. Miss Dolly sits tall in the passenger seat with her own pair of movie star sunglasses and waves her taloned fingers at us.
“You think he was spying for her?” Scotty whispers.
“Seeing as how they came together, I’d say chances are pretty much a hundred percent.”
The driver-side door opens, and the man steps out. He’s wearing fancy leather shoes, gray slacks, a dark-blue suit jacket, and a white button-down shirt with tiny dark-blue stripes. He’s spiffy enough to wear a tie, but the collar’s unbuttoned, and he traded a tie for a city hat—the kind you see on TV that doesn’t actually shade anything but lets people pretend they’re wearing a real hat.
Miss Dolly slips out her door and glides around the truck, her lacy silver scarf trailing partway down the front and back of her black dress, a clipboard under her arm. She walks real graceful too until her high heels sink into the soft grass and lock her steps up. She gives me a little wave when she passes me and asks Mom, “Do you know what happened to my sign?”
“We thought you were bringing it this week.” Mom glances at Grandpa. “Right?”
“I brought it last time. After my original sign and poles were gone.”
“Well, if’n you did, it didn’t last the day.” Grandpa hitches a thumb on his belt. “We looked for it at supper, and there was nothing there.”
Miss Dolly’s lips pucker like she’s trying to decide whether to call Grandpa a liar or not, then covers it with a plastic smile. “No matter. It appears there may have been an accident that knocked the second sign down. I’ll have another put up this afternoon.” She lifts her chin. “It’s just a little hiccup. Now, Hope, have you gotten those barns cleared out yet?”
“We’ve started, but it’s only been a few days,” Mom says. “We’ll get there, but we need more time.”
I watch Mom’s nervous, shy smile as she apologizes to strangers on her own farm, and I wonder who this little mouse is. Nine months ago, she was unstoppable.
Miss Dolly glances up at Sunglasses Man. “Well, it’s not i
deal, but I suppose you can use your imagination. At any rate, introductions . . .”
He waves it off and steps forward with a smile, hand outstretched toward Mom. “I’m Asher—Asher Ferro. Miss Dolly told me all about your place here.”
Mom shakes his hand. “Mr. Ferro. I’m Hope McBride. Nice to meet you.” Mom raises an eyebrow at me, and I know she wants me to say something sappy, but the thought makes me want to barf, so I pretend not to notice.
“The pleasure’s mine.”
“Are you in the market for a farm?”
The spy chuckles. “No, no. I’m researching farms for a story.”
Miss Dolly leans toward Mom as if telling a secret. “Mr. Ferro is a freelance journalist. You’ve probably seen his human interest articles in national magazines and periodicals? I’m such a fan.”
Peri-whats? I run down the list of “peri” words in my head. Periodontal. Paramedic. Paradox. I dunno. Sounds an awful lot like parasite to me. Besides, if it isn’t in the almanac, on Dad’s calendar, or in a manual, then what good is it?
“What would a reporter want with our farm?” Grandpa’s gravelly voice drops. “We don’t want no trouble.”
“No, no. This isn’t that sort of story,” Sunglasses Man says. “I’m interested in the personal side of your farm. Dolly tells me that your family has lived here for generations. I’m interested in your legacy.”
“He’s here to help,” says Miss Dolly. “Trust me. We want allies in order to find the right buyer.”
“Well, I suppose that’d be alright,” Grandpa allows.
Mom nods toward the porch. “Did you need me to show you around? I’ve got dinner on the stove, but I can turn off the burners.”
“I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you.” He tips his tiny hat as if it were a real cowboy hat, but it’s as awkward as a horse with a shorn tail trying to flick a fly.
“Oh, no, Hope, you’ve got enough on your plate. Leave this to me. We’ll be fine.” Miss Dolly spies me standing there and stretches that plastic smile even wider. “And if we have questions, I’m sure our sweet Paige here can answer them for us. Isn’t that right?”
The Wish and the Peacock Page 8