Medley of Fairy Tales and Fables

by Jenni James

  For Jane, Emilia and William

  Chapter 1

  E xcept for Peter Pan, all children grow up.

  Jane learned about growing up when she was six. She stood in the corner and watched her parents argue late at night in the light of the television, long after her little sister and newborn brother had gone to sleep. With a shaking voice, her mother pointed at Jane and said to her father, “Don’t you want to see your little ones grow up?” Jane’s father never answered the question, and he never came home again.

  Jane wanted nothing to do with growing up but she knew there was no escaping it. Grown-ups were usually rotten, except for her mother, Miriam, the most intelligent, beautiful, and gentle woman in all the world.

  Her mother and father argued about money when she was born. And when her sister Emilia was born, then later her little brother William, her parents argued more earnestly. It went something like this—

  “We can’t afford to raise this child!” Jane’s father cried. “We can’t even afford to feed ourselves.”

  Jane’s mother pled with him, because the thought of losing a child was too great. “We can sell the car, and you can take the bus to work. We can shut off my phone…”

  So her father worked the math with paper and pen and a calculator, but it never quite worked. He left for a while, but he always came back because nobody else loved him. In the end, after William was born, Jane never saw him again. Jane’s lesson from her father was that grown-ups are afraid of everything, like birds who abandon their nests at the slightest sound. She counted herself lucky to have a good mother.

  Later, when Jane was seven, she still remembered what her mother said about growing up. When she was eight, she forgot about it. At nine, she wanted to grow up. At ten, she argued with her mother all the time, as children do when they are breaking from the shell. Then she turned eleven and knew she was a grown-up.

  Miriam went out to work after Jane’s father left. First she cleaned hotel rooms. Then she became a cashier at a department store, and soon became the manager of all the cashiers. At the end of every day, after dinner was done and the children were bathed and ready for bed, she sat on a little wood rocking chair in the bedroom where all three children slept, and she read stories to them.

  The night Peter Pan arrived was like most other nights. Miriam opened the tattered book and switched on the lamp that sat on a table beside the chair. Peter Pan was their favorite book and they had read it many times. Miriam must have read it a hundred times before she ever had children. Its binding had begun to crack and a few pages had come loose and were tucked into their proper places. Miriam cradled the book like a treasure, and she turned the pages as if they held all her memories of the children.

  “Is everyone ready?” she asked.

  Emilia said yes. Jane finished sending a text message to a friend, and she shut off the phone and laid it on the floor beside her bed.

  William squirmed in his covers, fluffed his pillow, and threw his head onto it with a flump. “Ready!”

  Miriam placed her finger on the page to find her place from the night before.

  “Mama,” William said.

  “Yes, sweetie?”

  “Why didn’t Peter Pan grow up?”

  “I’m not sure. Magic, maybe. Maybe he found something that made him never grow up.” She puzzled over the question for a moment. “All the lost boys grow up. Wendy, John and Michael grow up. Peter’s the only one that doesn’t. It’s a good question.” She prepared to read again.

  “Mama!” William sat up in bed and his eyes were wide with excitement.

  Emilia told him to be quiet, but Miriam let him speak.

  “I wanna learn how to fly like Peter Pan so I can jump on Trevor’s trampoline and pretend I can’t fly. And then I’ll jump higher and higher, until I fly away. That’ll be funny, won’t it, mama?”

  Miriam chuckled. “That’ll be pretty funny.”

  “But, mama, ‘Milia said Peter Pan’s not real and nobody can fly. I think she should shut up.”

  “Quiet, Will!” Emilia stuck her head over the top bunk and looked down at him.

  “You be quiet!” William cried.

  “No, you!”

  “Shut up, ‘Milia!”

  Jane groaned.

  Miriam put a finger to her lips and shushed quietly.

  “Sorry, mama,” William said. “Sorry, ‘Milia. I love you.” He pulled the blanket over his face.

  Emilia laid her head on the pillow. “I love you too, Will. “She gazed down at Miriam with her large brown eyes.

  “All right now,” Miriam said. She ran her finger down the page until she found the right place, and she cleared her throat before she began. “Peter was such a small boy that one tends to wonder at the man’s hatred of him. True, he had—”

  “What man?” William asked.

  “Captain Hook,” Miriam said. “Remember, the pirates attacked and caught the lost boys?”

  “Uh-huh. I remember.”

  She went on. “True, he had flung Hook’s arm to the crocodile, but even this and the increased insecurity of life to which it led, owing to the crocodile’s pertinacity—”

  “What’s pernacity?” William interrupted again.

  Miriam had looked up the word years ago, when she was a child, and she had written the definition with a pencil in the book’s margin. “It means not giving up. The crocodile never gave up trying to catch Captain Hook.”

  She read on. “...owning to the crocodile’s pertinacity, hardly account for vindictiveness so relentless and malignant—”

  Strange sounds erupted just outside the window—the yowl of a cat, a frantic jingling of bells, a child’s cry. The children sat up in their beds.

  Miriam held the book to her chest and went to the window and pulled the blinds open. The white light below the street lamps and on the porches and all the shadows everywhere revealed nothing but the sleeping trailer park. An occasional bat swooped down to catch a flying insect, and toads were on their nightly stroll in the narrow gray streets. Crickets chirped near and far, and the warm air smelled of the river. Everything was ordinary. But, just as she closed the blinds she saw sparks that fell like snowflakes. When she looked again, the sparks were gone.

  “What was it, mom?” Jane asked.

  Miriam smiled down at her. “It’s nothing, sweetheart. Everything is all right.” She unlatched the window, pulled it more tightly shut, and latched it again. “Make sure you always lock the windows and doors at night, okay?”

  The children laid back down, and Miriam finished reading the chapter. After she closed the book and turned off the lamp, she spent a moment with each child.

  She knelt first at William’s bedside and gently pulled the blanket from his face. “My precious, brave little boy.” She kissed his fingers, his forehead, and his cheek.

  Then she stood and reached to Emilia. “My wonderful, happy, intelligent Emilia.” They kissed each other’s cheeks.

  Miriam then sat on Jane’s bed and caressed her hair, and laid her hand gently on her cheek. Their eyes twinkled with the light that shone through the doorway from the hall. She leaned in and touched her forehead to Jane’s. “My beautiful, bright daughter. I love you.”

  “I love you, too, mom.”

  A teardrop always lingered in the corner of Miriam’s left eye, and it never fell, and Jane had never seen her mother without it. That night the teardrop swelled, and it should have rolled down her cheek, but it clung stubbornly to its place, forever about to fall.

  Chapter 2

  F rom Neverland, Peter Pan and his Tinker fairy followed the third star to the left, just to see where it led them. That is how they ended up at the trailer park.

  Peter marveled at the number of children packed into one place. Tink investigated, and before long reported that she found the perfect candidates to lure away. They made their new home in a grove of enormous weeping willows and cottonwoods that formed a cozy canopy over the little muddy river that flowed
past the trailer park.

  On the night that the housecat nearly ate Tink while Peter listened to the story about Hook and the crocodile, they flew back to their new home over the river. Peter lay on his belly on a high horizontal willow branch and gazed down at the water and watched slivers of moonlight fall on muddy ripples.

  Tink alighted on the tree beside him. She carried a pile of wide leaves, and a few strands of hair for mending Peter’s tunic. She laid these things on a nearby branch and placed a rock on top of them to keep them there. The breeze from her dragonfly wings lapped sweetly at the boy’s wild windblown hair. Her glow, the glow of all fairies, illuminated Peter’s freckled cheeks and blue eyes.

  “I wish I had heard the whole story tonight,” Peter said.

  The children of Neverland seldom remember much, because their minds are filled with the here and now, and nothing is left for the past and future. Memories sit on shelves in the dark rooms of their minds, and are rarely dusted except sometimes in daydreams.

  Peter, the child of Neverland, had already forgotten why he came to the mainland.

  “You silly,” Tink said, in her bell-like fairy language. She kissed Peter’s cheek, then began sorting through his tunic, looking for torn and dead leaves. When she found one, she unlaced it and tossed it away into the river, and she attached another one with a new strand of hair.

  “I haven’t any fairy dust.” Tink dropped another torn leaf into the river below.

  “But, of course you do, Tink.”

  All fairies carry a pouch filled with the dust they collect from stars during their journeys, which Peter called fairy dust. Tink showed him the pouch that she carried slung over her shoulder. It was ripped along both seams and lay wide open. “The cat got it.”

  Peter lifted the torn bag with the tip of a finger. He was confused. “We both can fly, Tink. There’s no need for fairy dust.”

  “We came to find children for you to play with.” Tink tightened a knot around the stem of another leaf. “How can they fly away with us without it?”

  Peter blinked a few times and shook his head.

  “Do you remember the story their mother read tonight?” Tink asked.

  “Yes, in which I fought that codfish, Hook!”

  Tink giggled. Her voice rang into the night. “Yes. Well, that is where the children live. We’ll take them home to Neverland to be your playmates. But we need the dust, so I must leave you here awhile.”

  “Why? I’m coming with—”

  “You’re too slow. You fly with the wind, but I can fly with the moonlight.”

  “How long?” Peter had no concept of time, and he wouldn’t have known the difference between three minutes and three days, but out of ancient habit he sometimes worried about it anyway.

  “Only a moment,” Tink said.

  She finished mending Peter’s tunic and she tossed the extra leaves and the rock into the river. Peter flew to a high limb and lay on his back and gazed into the endless stars. His mind opened its dark doors and dusted off some memories, and began to tell him stories about a blonde Tinker he called Bell, about boys named Tootles and Nibs, and about Captain James Hook—

  “Tink,” Peter said, “Are you called Bell?”

  Tink was perched on a young green willow branch that bounced lightly under her weight. “You’re probably thinking of another Tinker. There were hundreds of Tinks before me.”

  “No, Tink. You’re the one and only.” Peter gazed at her and tried to remember whether she was truly the one and only.

  “You silly boy. I’ll be back very soon.” Tink touched the gold ring on Peter’s finger, which reminded him never to go far without a Tinker. “Stay here.” She kissed his cheek one more time, then flew away.

  Peter ached to know how the fight with Hook turned out and he invented a guess. “I suppose that I won the battle, for I am here, and Hook is not.” Still, it wasn’t satisfying not to know how he won the battle.

  He drifted into and out of sleep all night. Several times he began to fly away, but when he saw the little gold ring glistening in the moonlight he remembered to go back and wait for Tink.

  When daylight returned and Peter heard children playing, he took the little pan-flute from his belt and played. His tune was the sound of flight, a sound like mermaids and lost boys and fairies. His music floated into the air and fell on the ears of the children Tink had chosen.

  A boy and a girl, the same children whose mother read stories about Peter Pan every night, and whose hair Tink had woven into Peter’s tunic, were drawn to him. They walked away from the other children, to the end of the road, and gazed into the trees that grew along the river.

  Chapter 3

  J ane first knew about Peter Pan’s arrival when William and Emilia came home late that sweltering summer evening dragging a giant catfish behind them. The dirt stuck to the fish slime and formed a coat of mud over it. Jane had never seen anything more disgusting.

  “Good heavens!” Miriam stood on the top step of the trailer’s front door, and gawked down at her children and their fish. “How did you manage to catch that?”

  “We didn’t catch it, mama,” William said.

  Jane mumbled rude comments about the fish. She told Miriam the children were at the neighbor’s house, three trailers down, when in fact she had overslept and hadn’t seen them all day long. The catfish proved she lied.

  “Peter Pan caught it, mama,” William blurted.

  “Peter Pan!” Miriam seemed more worried than surprised.

  Emilia, who was nine, and nearly too old to believe in magical things, looked away, embarrassed.

  “Uh-huh,” William said. “He told us this was the biggest monster in the river…and there’s not a crocodile anywhere. He looked and looked, mama, and found no crocodiles.”

  The conversation became even stranger after that, with the children both describing the little boy, Peter, who wore nothing but a long shirt made of leaves. They told their wild stories while Miriam sprayed mud off the fish with the garden hose.

  To Jane’s surprise, Miriam knew how to expertly fillet the catfish, slice the fillet into strips, then how to bread, season and fry it.

  “Where’d you learn how to do that, mom?”

  Miriam smiled and dropped two more strips of fish into the pan. The oil sputtered and bubbled for a few seconds, then settled into a hum of crackling sounds. “There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me, sweetie. But I’ll tell you someday. I promise.”

  Jane didn’t know much about her mother. Miriam had no brothers, sisters or parents that Jane knew of. Everything about her mother’s childhood was a mystery, just like the teardrop. “All right, mom,” Jane said. Then she sat and wondered.

  During dinner, Miriam asked if Peter lived somewhere in the trailer park, and who his mother was.

  William piped up first, with nonsense. “He lives in the trees till Tink gets back.”

  Miriam turned to Emilia.

  Emilia tapped her plate with her fork. “I think he lives in one of the trailers by the river.” After a few seconds she said, “And I don’t know who his mom is.” She stared at her plate and chewed a bite of fish.

  Jane knew Emilia was lying, and she suspected her mother also knew.

  “Tink’s gonna be back soon, mama!” William stuffed some fish into his mouth and nodded, then he gulped from his cup of water. “She’s bringing fairy dust so we can fly—”

  “Will!” Emilia scolded. She turned to Miriam. “Tink is Peter’s...bird.”

  “No, mama, Tink’s not a bird! ‘Milia’s lying. Tink’s a fair—”

  “Quiet, Will!” Emilia gave William the angry face.

  William seemed not to care and went on talking, and the rest of the night was filled with his wild tales, and nervous corrections from Emilia, and moments when the two gazed irritably at each other.

  Jane stayed out of the Peter Pan discussion, but she knew that the more they talked about it, the more disappointed Miriam would become, because J
ane was their sitter and should have known where they were and what they were up to. Although Miriam went about her nightly business, Jane could tell she was paying close attention to the children’s conversations, because every so often she stopped what she was doing and rubbed her forehead lightly with her thumb and forefinger.

  The children bathed and went to bed early, after their nightly reading. Miriam must have heard Jane tossing in her bed, unable to sleep, because she came into the room at midnight and knelt beside her bed.

  “Jane,” she whispered.

  Jane lay with her eyes closed.

  Miriam whispered her name again.

  Jane could never bear to deceive her mother for long. “Hey, mom.”

  “What do you think of this Peter Pan story?”

  Jane’s words came with some trembling. This would be the talk about her poor babysitting. “He’s probably just a new kid in the neighborhood.”

  “Probably.” Miriam bit her lower lip.

  Jane saw the slightest wince cross her mother’s face, then disappear. That was her mother’s disappointment. “I’m sorry, mom,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For not watching Will and Emilia.”

  Miriam lifted Jane’s hand and kissed it, then held it to her cheek. “I know you’d rather not watch the kids. I’d rather have that for you, too.” The teardrop in the corner of her eye glistened in the dim light.

  “It’s okay, mom.”

  Jane lay listening to her brother and sister sleep for a long time before she drifted away. She thought about her friends, and swimming, and school. She wondered what sixth grade would be like, and she...dreamed she flew over an unknown sea toward a mountainous and forested island where mermaids lay in the sun on rocky shores, and where the jolly songs of men echoed from the belly of a pirate ship.

  Jane went to the river with William and Emilia the next morning.

  William ran ahead of his sisters, and when Jane called for him to wait, he hopped and skipped in circles until they caught up. “Can’t you hear it?”