Becca Fair and Foul

by Deirdre Baker

  “‘A south-west wind blow on ye and blister you all o’er!’” Jane ranted, and then she and Lucy went on to be the lovers, Miranda and Ferdinand.

  The play raced along.

  “More enthusiasm!” cried Becca.

  “What?” Lucy asked, but at that moment the eagles roused themselves to such a pitch of clangorous twitterings that Becca could hardly hear her.

  The eaglet was on eagle-tiptoe on the edge of the nest. It flapped its wings up and down, up and down, as if it was flexing its muscles.

  “It’s teetering,” said Jane.

  The mother loomed over it.

  “It’s going to fly!” Lucy said. “It’s going to give it a go!”

  With a blur of flapping, the eaglet hopped off the nest, out into the air.

  Becca didn’t know an airborne bird could wobble so much. The eaglet lurched in the sky, flapping desperately and crying out with alarm. It didn’t seem at all sure about flying.

  It came to a crashing sort of landing on a nearby branch.

  “All that noise,” said Lucy. “It didn’t get very far.”

  “It was its first time,” Becca said.

  “They usually go farther than that,” Jane said. “Last year the baby eagles from this nest really cruised around.”

  But this eaglet just hunched on its branch.

  “Its eyes are squinched shut,” Lucy said.

  “You can’t really see that,” said Jane.

  “No, but if it was me my eyes would be squinched shut,” said Lucy.

  The eaglet’s wings were furled tight around it. It turned its head aside, away from its mother.

  “No way is it going to fly back,” said Lucy.

  “But it can’t sleep there,” Becca said. “It will fall off!”

  “Don’t eagles sleep standing up?” Jane asked. “Anyway, it’s ages ’til bedtime.”

  The eaglet actually seemed to be quivering with fear.

  “It’ll go eventually,” Becca said at last. “Whoever heard of an eaglet who was chicken?”

  Maybe it just wasn’t grown enough, like a little kid too small to ride a bike.

  “I want to see what happens,” said Lucy.

  “But we have to practice!” Becca said. “We can’t watch birds all day. And you guys should sound more enthusiastic about the romance stuff. You’re supposed to be all lovey-dovey, so don’t look bored! Miranda shouldn’t call Ferdinand “a thing divine” and sound like she’s, I don’t know, searching under the sink for toilet cleaner.”

  “I never would,” said Lucy. “I hate cleaning toilets.”

  Up in the fir tree, the eaglet cowered as if its feet were stuck to the branch, as if its talons were actually growing into the tree’s flesh.

  And it looked like it had pushed its beak right into the tree trunk, like it was anchored at both ends.

  Down in the treehouse, Jane went into her Caliban-the-monster-fish-man mode again and Becca and Lucy read the parts of the two clowns and sang and danced.

  And then they did the scene where the shipwrecked noblemen sat around moping — the people the magician was getting revenge on.

  “Not revenge, exactly,” said Jane.

  “He’s just trying to make things fair again, because they stole his country and pushed him out to sea without any oars,” Becca said.

  “Just like us!” said Jane.

  Overhead, nothing changed. The eaglet sat and the mother nattered at it. Sometimes she flew back and forth.

  The tide turned and the sun reached them from a different part of the sky.

  The whole time the eaglet and its mum talked, or maybe argued. Every once in a while the mum coaxed the eaglet to move a little way out on the branch.

  The mum would fly by, as if she was showing the eaglet what to do.

  Then the eaglet would look down, and that was that. It shuffled back towards the trunk of the tree.

  “That’s some stubborn bird,” said Lucy.

  “It’s scared,” Becca said.

  “It must be hungry by now,” Jane said. “Usually it eats, eats, eats all day.”

  The eaglet squawked and the mum answered with her high twittering squeaks.

  In the play, Miranda and Ferdinand got married.

  Then Caliban and the clowns got lost in a swamp.

  “‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on,’” Becca said in the voice of Prospero the magician, and for a minute it was like they were in a different world up in the treehouse, perched between land and sea, earth and sky, and with eagles having family time nearby.

  “I’m ready for a swim,” said Jane.

  “Oh, let’s just get through the last act,” Becca said. “It won’t take long.”

  She really felt like the magician in the play, suddenly. He was always worrying about running out of time.

  The mother eagle flew towards them from across Midshipman Bay, and just as Becca was gathering herself for the very last words of the play, she felt a drip.

  “It can’t be raining,” she said.

  But drips were definitely falling.

  And the mother eagle had just flown right over them.

  “Ew!” said Lucy. “What’s she holding?”

  “It’s a fish,” Becca said. “It’s a dead fish with its guts hanging out. Dripping! Look!”

  She pointed to her arm, wet with drips of pink fish juice.

  “She’s flying past the eaglet,” Jane said. “She’s tempting it back to the nest.”

  “With juicy innards!” said Lucy. “Yum!”

  Mother and eaglet called to each other.

  The eaglet reached out and opened and shut its beak.

  “Look!” Becca said. “It’s trying to grab it.”

  The mother eagle came to rest on the edge of the nest, the fish clutched in her talons.

  The eaglet began to work its wings, complaining.

  “I’ve never seen this before,” said Jane. “Other times our eagles didn’t act like this.”

  “It’s going to go,” Lucy said, speaking very quietly.

  Becca found herself holding her breath. The eaglet tottered on the edge of its branch.

  The mother eagle dangled the fish. It was as if she was using willpower to get her eaglet home. Pulling it with its hunger for fish and fish guts.

  The eaglet opened its wings.

  It jumped up towards the nest.

  It worked its wings madly, and its jump was almost like flight.

  It was a big jump and it seemed to take a really long time.

  Holding her breath, Becca started to get that feeling of strangeness that would mean she’d have to let it go. But she didn’t want to. She felt somehow that if the eaglet couldn’t make it to the nest in the space of a girl’s breath, it wasn’t going to get there at all. It would fall — crash down through the branches and end up broken. Or dead, even.

  “It’s going to make it,” Lucy muttered. “I know it will. I know it will.”

  Time seemed to stop. The eaglet flapped, the mother waved the dripping fish, the breeze blew the swagging branches of the Douglas firs.

  With one last effortful pump of its wings, the eaglet scrabbled over the edge of the nest, tumbled into it and disappeared.

  With great gusts everyone breathed out, and in again — a windy chorus that could have carried the eaglet home with its warm force.

  “It worked!” Lucy said. “I knew it would.”

  But Becca met Jane’s eyes.

  They hadn’t been sure, thinking of the other eagle and fish they had seen.

  There wasn’t any rule to make it have a good ending. It wasn’t like one of Shakespeare’s happy plays where you knew everything would come out all right at the end.

  It was a sort of luck, Becca thought. You didn’t k
now.

  Sometimes things worked out all right, and sometimes they didn’t.

  7. The Clothesline

  “But what if I don’t want to be in a play?” Alicia said. “It sounds like a ton of work. All those lines. It would take eighty million hours to memorize it. And even then we couldn’t understand it.”

  Alicia’s stomach was fine now but she insisted on lying about, all pale and weak-looking. Becca thought it was an act. And if she was going to act, she might as well be in the play.

  “We can understand it,” Becca said. “Mostly.”

  “Acting’s better than pulling couch grass or washing the toilet,” said Lucy. “Which is what Gran will get you to do if you aren’t doing something else.”

  Lucy was nursing blisters from her morning chores. But it was her own fault for using a trowel to turn the compost instead of the shovel, which was way more efficient.

  “I don’t want a boat anyway,” Alicia went on. “Sailing is boring. I want a motor scooter — one of those Italian ones.”

  “I guess we could do it without you,” Becca said. “But …”

  “It’ll be fun,” said Jane. “You know it will.”

  “And Lucy’s right. It might get you out of some chores,” Becca said. “Gran said before Auntie Clare arrives she wants to clean out the tool shed and the loft. You know what that means. And the play’s for a good cause.”

  “You really are dreaming if you think it will get you out of some chores,” said Alicia. “And I don’t think you wanting a boat is especially a good cause. What Auntie Clare and Uncle Clarence do is a good cause, working with orphans and grandmothers and sick people in Africa.” She turned over on her towel so she was facing away from them. “You just want to have fun.”

  “What’s wrong with fun?” asked Jane.

  Alicia flapped her hand at them.

  Becca thought about the play. Some of what Alicia said was true. It was too long, at least for the sort of show she and Jane and Lucy could put on. They would have to cut out a lot of lines, and maybe some characters, too.

  “We’ve got Lucy,” said Jane. “And if Alicia won’t do it, I can play Prospero. Probably. And we can switch roles around some more.”

  “But you’re so excellent as Caliban the monster-fish-man,” Becca said.

  “We could figure out a way for me to do both,” said Jane. “I’m just saying. If we need to.”

  But Becca was sure Alicia had to be Prospero — forceful as she was. A bit like an Aunt Fifi in the making. Or even Gran!

  They just had to find a way to make her want to do it.

  “We’ll figure it out,” she said. “Anyway, for now there are some words we don’t get, and some that are weird but make sense if you think about them, like ‘o’erstunk’ and ‘up-staring.’”

  “I like ‘o’erstunk,’” said Jane. “It suits a person who lives by an otter family’s bedroom.”

  “The main thing is that some characters just go on and on. And lots of times their jokes are barely funny,” said Becca.

  “They might be funny if we knew what they meant,” said Jane.

  “Let’s just keep the jokes we like,” said Becca.

  “And the lines we like the sound of,” said Jane. “Like ‘hedgehogs tumbling in my barefoot way.’ Even if we don’t know exactly what they mean.”

  “We can ask Aunt Fifi to help us shorten it and keep it sensible,” Becca said.

  “Or Merlin,” said Jane.

  “But not both,” said Becca, thinking of Gran and her efforts to keep Merlin and Aunt Fifi away from Shakespeare.

  * * *

  “Of course I’ll help,” said Aunt Fifi. “What do you want me to do?”

  She was on a wood-chopping rampage. Bit by bit, she was chopping up the logs in the woodshed, making way for the wood Merlin’s brother-in-law had dumped for Gran.

  Becca stood a little distance away, but she could feel the brisk puff of air each time Aunt Fifi brought the axe down.

  “This alder is perfect for splitting,” Aunt Fifi said, and with a blow the alder log fell into two beautiful chunks.

  “Fifi! You should take the laundry down first,” said Gran. “Those are Merlin’s things waving about over the woodpile.”

  “Well, he should stop by and collect them,” said Aunt Fifi in three gusty breaths as she whacked at the alder. “They’ve been hanging here for days. And I’m busy. Does he really need to air his underpants at our house?”

  “Take it easy,” Gran said. “He’s a busy man. He’s the only plumber on the island! And leave some of that wood in big pieces so it will hold the fire when I use it in winter.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” said Aunt Fifi, attacking another log.

  The clothesline ran right near the woodpile. Becca wanted to hang up her bathing suit, but with Aunt Fifi swinging the axe around so fast it felt dangerous. She got up on Gran’s stoop and pulled in the line so she could pin her things next to Merlin’s still-damp shirt and jeans and underwear. That way she didn’t have to go so close to Aunt Fifi.

  Whack! Aunt Fifi swung the axe again. All the exertion was making her pink in the face.

  “We are going to need your help with the play,” Becca told her. “We need to make it shorter and cut out bits that are hard to understand.”

  “Any time,” said Aunt Fifi, punctuating her offer with a sharp blow. “As long as Merlin isn’t sticking his nose in, too. He has outlandish notions about Shakespeare. He thinks Prospero is nothing but a blowhard!”

  She bent for another log. Becca’s bathing suit and Merlin’s damp clothes bounced as Becca moved them along, and the pulleys at either end of the line screeched like excited gulls.

  “Most people cut lines when they do Shakespeare,” Aunt Fifi said. “They always did, even in Shakespeare’s time. Where are you going to do it? And when?”

  “We haven’t decided. Maybe when Auntie Clare and Uncle Clarence are here, before they go back to Swaziland. And after Mum and Dad and Pin arrive. That way everyone can see it.”

  “You won’t have so much trouble understanding the words once you’ve been through it a few times,” Aunt Fifi said. “How you say it will make sense of it. Merlin would tell you to get your cast to sit around and read it out loud.”

  “We’ve already done that,” Becca said. “We just thought it would be faster if you helped us, so it was shorter but still made sense.”

  Aunt Fifi suddenly declared loudly, “Again!”

  And with a great swinging blow, she caught Merlin’s jeans right off the line with the blade of the axe.

  “Look out!” Becca called. The clothespins snapped and before she could stop it, Aunt Fifi had buried the axe’s blade and the jeans in a knotty chunk of pine.

  “The log didn’t split,” Aunt Fifi said with disgust. She prided herself on her efficient chopping.

  She pulled the axe out of the pine log, and out of Merlin’s jeans, too.

  “Sad,” she said, holding them up. She had cut off a leg. “I told you he should have stopped by to collect his laundry.”

  * * *

  “There may be messages more obvious than this, but if so, I don’t know what they are,” Merlin said, looking at his ruined jeans. “Maybe it’s time to give up.”

  “Don’t give up,” Becca said. “Maybe Aunt Fifi thinks you’d like shorts. Or maybe she wants to see your legs.”

  She liked Merlin and thought he would make a good uncle.

  “Anyway, we need help with this play,” she told him. “I can’t get Alicia to be in it. All she does is lie on the beach and grump.”

  “Do you think something’s bothering her, or is it just natural orneriness?”

  “She wants an Italian scooter,” Becca said.

  “Is that so?” Merlin asked, suddenly thoughtful.

  He gathered up the rest of hi
s damp clothes.

  “‘Is not, sir, my doublet as fresh as the first day I wore it?’” he quoted from The Tempest, holding up his sea-stiffened shirt.

  Becca was surprised at how everydayish Shakespeare was turning out to be. He even talked about laundry.

  “It’ll be okay if you put it through the wash,” she said. “And if you take off the other leg, you’ll have a nice pair of cutoffs. And don’t worry about Aunt Fifi. When she chops wood she’s just really, really …”

  “Enthusiastic?” asked Merlin.

  “Yes,” said Becca.

  “She takes out her hostility in strange ways,” Merlin said. “But never mind. It could have been worse. It could have been me she clipped with the axe.”

  “We were talking about the play,” said Becca.

  “That would do it. She definitely gets excited about Shakespeare.” He smiled. “What were you discussing?”

  “How the play’s so long,” Becca said.

  “Shorten it,” said Merlin.

  “That’s what Aunt Fifi said.”

  “And do a read-through with your cast. Many read-throughs. It will help you figure out what to ditch and what to keep. And it will make more sense that way, too.”

  “Aunt Fifi said that, too,” Becca said.

  “See? Sometimes we agree. Even if she thinks bossy old Prospero is marvelous.”

  “Maybe she just likes magicians,” said Becca.

  Then Merlin got a call on his pager and had to rush off. “Jane’s dad says there’s a mystery in their sewage system. Or so he thinks! Off I go for another exciting day in the plumbery. Oh, and here.” He handed Becca a brown paper bag. “Replacement oarlocks. Enjoy.”

  8. Fish for Dinner

  It was Aunt Fifi’s turn to make dinner.

  “What are we going to have?” she complained to Becca, crashing the lunch dishes around in Gran’s teeny-weeny sink. “I have no ideas. None!”

  “Fifi! Mrs. Barker made that bowl!” Gran cried.

  “Well, you should have installed a sink it fit into,” said Aunt Fifi. “I may have a word with Merlin about it.”