Project Mulberry Page 13

  Patrick reminded me that the moths wouldn't eat at all. They didn't even fly. All they did was mate and lay eggs, and they lived for only about ten days.

  Ten days? It hardly seemed worth the trouble—all the work of spinning a cocoon. But then I figured that ten days for them was like seventy or eighty years for us. A whole lifetime. I guess if I were a moth, I'd think it was worth it.

  Seven of the moths were almost twice as big as the rest. Patrick got really excited about that. "The big ones are the females," he said. He reached into the aquarium and gently picked one up. He looked at me a little sheepishly. "No phobia," he said. "I don't mind bugs at all."

  For once, I was the one using the camcorder. I videotaped Patrick holding a moth.

  A few days later, the moths mated and started laying eggs.

  Hundreds of them. Maybe even thousands. Little gray seeds just like the ones we'd gotten in the mail.

  What were we going to do with the eggs? We couldn't keep thousands of caterpillars. If we released them around where we lived, they'd never be able to find any mulberry leaves—they'd just die. Unless we took them to Mr. Dixon's house. And thousands of caterpillars on his little tree—they'd eat it to death.

  Mr. Maxwell came to our rescue. He found a place that would take our eggs—a university lab that did research into sericulture. "That's the scientific word for silk farming," Patrick said. We mailed our egg cartons to the lab—the moths had laid the eggs in the pockets—and got a nice thank-you letter back, which Patrick put in our project album.

  Besides the letter and the photos, the album held the brochure that had come with the eggs and one other thing: Kenny's pages and pages of temperature recordings. That had been my idea, but I was almost sorry I'd suggested it: Kenny was so proud to have them in the album that he asked to look at it about a million times a day. I had to make sure that his hands were clean and that he always gave it back to me when he was finished.

  When the moths died, we dug little holes for them under a bush in front of my house, next to where Patrick had buried the five pupae earlier. He'd done that entirely on his own after the unreeling was finished, and showed me the spot later. I thought it was super-nice of him. He wondered if we should bury the moths under Mr. Dixon's mulberry tree, so their decomposing bodies would help sustain the tree, but we decided it would be a little weird, carrying all those dead moths over to his house. I mean, what would we say? "Mr. Dixon, can we please make a moth cemetery under your tree?"

  We put a moth in each hole and gently covered them with dirt. I felt a little sad, but not too bad, because they'd done everything they would have wanted to do. It was probably stupid of me, but I wished that somehow they knew—how, because of those five worms, the rest of them got to live and mate and lay eggs.

  They couldn't know, of course.

  I'd just have to do the knowing for them.

  Our project turned out great. Patrick's videotape wobbled in only a few places. Otherwise, it was really professional-looking. He'd taken the tape into the technology lab at school, and Mrs. Moran, our tech teacher, had helped him edit it.

  My mom and I picked a nice blue fabric for the background of my embroidery. The final picture ended up being even fancier than my original sketch, because I decided to show several different stages of the caterpillars.

  I did little French knots for the eggs using black floss. Next to the eggs I did tiny outline stitches, also in black, to make a newly hatched caterpillar. Underneath that I used gray thread to make a week-old caterpillar, and underneath that I used gray and green and black for a big caterpillar in the stage just before it started to spin.

  I kept thinking while I was embroidering how each of the stages had a special meaning for me. The egg—that was like my mom giving us the idea. The smallest caterpillar, barely a little black squiggle, kind of weak and wimpy-looking—that was when I was trying to get out of doing the project. The medium-sized caterpillar was when I'd decided we should go ahead, but I still wasn't crazy about it. And the biggest caterpillar showed how I'd gotten to love them all. Around the caterpillars I embroidered two mulberry leaves, which was my way of giving credit to Mr. Dixon for his help.

  My cocoon was the best cocoon ever in the history of embroidery. (I'm only guessing that. But my mom said she'd never seen an embroidered cocoon before, so maybe it was the first in history, as well as the best.) I used outline stitches and about a million satin stitches. The silk was a grayish white color. My mom explained that it was called "raw" silk because it hadn't been professionally processed. It wasn't perfectly smooth—it had little wisps and blebs here and there. I liked that; it looked homemade, but in a good way. Like how you know even before you taste them that homemade brownies are going to be better than the packaged kind.

  And finally I used cream-colored floss to embroider a moth, with gray antennae and black eyes.

  I thought of the moth as both the end and the beginning—the end of our project but the beginning of a whole new cycle. So if the moth was like the future, would the eggs be the past? Maybe it didn't start with my mom giving us the idea. Maybe it went all the way back to her grandmother, raising silkworms in Korea, which was really where my mom had gotten the idea, right? And where had my great-grandmother gotten the idea? From her mother or grandmother? And how had that person gotten the idea in the first place?

  Sheesh. Even when I was trying to keep my thoughts all nice and organized, they started jostling around and making me dizzy....

  Boy, did it take me a long time to finish. It was a good thing school had let out in early June—I was embroidering practically every minute for two solid weeks to get the picture finished in time. It seemed like I picked out way more stitches than I put in, and once I had to undo almost half of the big caterpillar. I knew in my head what I wanted the final picture to look like, but it was really hard work to get it to turn out that way.

  On the back there were some stitches and loops of thread where there shouldn't have been. But I was going to keep practicing. One of these years, I promised myself, I'd enter a project that looked exactly the same on both sides, the way they'd done it in old-time Korea, and I'd display it between two pieces of glass so you could see what I'd done, and the judges would be blown away.

  Secretly, though, I liked that the underneath of my embroidery was kind of messy. I thought all those knots and loops showed how much work I'd done.

  Once it was ironed and put in a frame, my picture looked really nice. Between the embroidery, the video, and the album, we had one whale of a project. We called the whole thing "Project Mulberry: An Experiment in Sericulture." The main title was my idea; the subtitle was Patrick's.

  The Wiggle Club voted for Project Mulberry as one of the three from the Plainfield chapter for the state fair. The other two were Abby's pies—she'd finally gotten the crust flaky enough—and Kevin with Gossage the Goose.

  Once I found out we were going to the fair, I started caring about winning a prize again. Not as much as before, but still a little. Patrick was hyper- excited. He never stopped talking the whole way to Springfield, three hours in the car.

  At the fair there was a bit of a mix-up. It turned out there was a new category called Ecotherm Farming, for cold-blooded animals. It was so new that it wasn't in the pamphlets, and even Mr. Maxwell hadn't known about it. So we had to withdraw from Animal Husbandry and enter Ecotherm Farming instead, which had only four other projects, and three of them were about honeybees.

  We got second place. First place went to a boy from Carbondale who'd started his own mini-aqua-culture farm, raising trout in a pond. He'd been working on it for three years, so Patrick and I agreed it was right that he won.

  I think we sort of helped each other there. When we found out we hadn't gotten first place, we were both disappointed, but neither of us wanted to be a bad sport about it. So I tried to be a better sport than Patrick, and he tried to be a better sport than me, and together we ended up feeling pretty good, because, as Mr. Maxwell
said, it was really great to take second place with our first-ever project. He and Patrick were delighted that the judges specifically mentioned our efforts to make our silk farm sustainable. I kept the ribbon at my house—it was a very nice ribbon, red with a huge rosette on top—and Patrick kept the fancy certificate.

  In the Domestic Arts/Needlework category, my Life Cycle of the Silkworm embroidery didn't win a ribbon. The projects that did win were amazing. The blue ribbon was won by a girl who'd made a quilt with applique pictures of her family's history, starting with a slave ship from Africa. But the judges were very impressed that I'd used homemade silk thread for my picture, so they gave me a Special Citation for Originality.

  I thought it was kind of funny that something my great-grandmother had done years and years ago should be considered original. I guess that was part of what Patrick meant when he said that my family's being Korean-American made things more interesting.

  Abby's apple pie took third place in the Junior Pie division, and Kevin and Gossage got an Honorable Mention in Poultry. Mr. Maxwell bought everybody triple-dip waffle ice-cream cones, and we also finished off Abby's pie—the judges had eaten only one slice. Altogether, it was a great day for the Plainfield Wiggle Club.

  I still felt a little sad whenever I thought about those five poor worms. When I got too sad, I'd look at the embroidered picture—my dad had tacked the ribbon to one corner and hung the frame in the living room. I'd look at the cocoon and silently thank the worms for their silk.

  It made me feel a little better.

  Patrick already had an idea for our next Wiggle project. He wanted us to grow our own cabbage and make kimchee ourselves. I didn't say yes right away; I wanted to think about it a while. It seemed to me we ought to be able to come up with a project that didn't involve either killing or ferocious smells.

  After I carried out a brief campaign, my mom agreed to buy happy eggs from Mr. Maxwell. A dozen a week. It took a longer and slightly more difficult campaign, but Patrick also got his mom to buy them. His family needed two dozen. Our victory was achieved when Mr. Maxwell said he'd give us a lower price for buying three dozen every week.

  Kenny was always very nice to me when I was helping him with his quarters collection. My mom bought him a folder just like mine and Patrick's, and he wrote his name on it and I helped him keep a record of where and when we found his quarters. I told him the stories about the pictures on the backs of the coins. Or if I couldn't remember them, I'd find them on the Internet and read them to him.

  If he was being a brat and I wanted him to stop bothering me, I'd say something like, "If you don't quit it right this minute, I won't help you with Massachusetts," but it seemed to me I was saying things like that less and less often. I guess maybe he was growing up.

  My mom let us visit Mr. Dixon sometimes, but she never seemed very thrilled about it. The first time we went, we all watched the video together. Patrick and I had seen it before, of course, but it was fun showing it to Mr. Dixon. He was very impressed, and I have to say I thought it was impressive, too. All those little moments coming together on film—from an almost empty aquarium at the beginning to me holding up my embroidery at the end. Patrick and I couldn't help grinning at each other when the tape finished.

  Mr. Dixon got a pound dog—a scraggly-looking friendly little mutt named Cosmo—and Patrick and I dog-sat for him when Mr. Dixon went out of town to visit his grandchildren. One time Mr. Dixon sent us home with some fresh mulberries. They looked like long purple blackberries, and tasted a little like them, too, but with none of those annoying seeds inside. Another time he made mulberry ice cream for us. He was right—it was the best ice cream in the world.

  I asked my mom to write down some recipes for Korean food, and I took them to Mr. Dixon, hoping he would try them out sometime. That way he'd see that Korean food wasn't the same as Chinese food.

  I wasn't sure if my mom letting us visit him meant she wasn't a racist after all. I didn't know—but at least I knew I didn't know. If she was, maybe she was starting to change, at least a little. She loved the mulberries; she said they reminded her of when she was a girl in Korea. One of these days I wanted to ask her if we could have Mr. Dixon over for dinner, but not for a while yet.

  How she felt about Mrs. Roberts and Mr. Dixon and even those soldiers in Korea way back when; how there hadn't been any black people where she'd grown up—all that was the small details. I needed to figure out the big picture, and I wasn't quite sure what it would look like.

  But I knew what I wanted it to look like—at least partly. And there were things I could do that might help it turn out that way, even if they were only little things.

  So I started taking Kenny with us when we went to visit Mr. Dixon.

  Not every time.

  Just once in a while.

  When he wasn't being a snotbrain.

  Me: You forgot to put anything between chapters 15 and 16.

  Ms. Park: I didn't forget. I did it on purpose. I thought we needed to get things wrapped up toward the end there. Is that okay with you?

  Me: Yeah. Except I've been thinking—there's tons of stuff that we didn't get a chance to explain. Like some of the names of the characters.

  Ms. Park: That's easy enough to fix. Here's a list: Mr. Maxwell is named after the principal of my kids' high school; Mrs. Roberts for the baseball player Roberto Clemente; Mr. Dixon for a neighbor—

  Me: No, that's not what I meant; I was only using it as an example. What I'm trying to say is that, no matter how long we made these sections, we could never explain everything in the story.

  Ms. Park: Bingo.

  Me: And if you added it all up, we really only explained a tiny, tiny bit! So why did we even bother trying?

  Ms. Park: Well, as you said at the very beginning, some readers like to know the inside story, even if it's not the whole thing. But besides that, I think it's good for people to know that there is an inside story, and to decide for themselves when it's Important to know.

  Me: Isn't it always Important?

  Ms. Park: That's a tough one. I think ... in life, yes. The more you know about things, the more you can appreciate them. But I have to admit that with stories I'm almost never Interested In the inside story. If I were the one reading, I'd have skipped all these parts —I just want the story itself.

  Me: Really? You're kidding!

  Ms. Park: Nope.

  Me: Sheesh. That seems so weird to me. But I should have expected it from you.

  Ms. Park: What's that supposed to mean?

  Me: Never mind. I've got one last question. That part about not knowing whether my mom is racist or not—that bugs me.

  Ms. Park: I think you're going to keep working on it.

  Me: How? Is there going to be a sequel?

  Ms. Park: Well, no, that's not what I had in mind. But your story could continue in the minds of the readers. They can keep thinking about you and what might happen to you.

  Me: You think they'll do that?

  Ms. Park: Not all of them. But some of them might.

  Me: I like that.

  Ms. Park: Me, too.

  Me: How many? How many of them will keep thinking about me?

  Ms. Park: Good grief, I have no idea.

  Me: Just guess. A wild guess.

  Ms. Park: There's no way of knowing.

  Me: Ten? Fifty? A thousand? You don't have any idea?

  Ms. Park: You're being ridiculous. If we have to continue this discussion, we should do it later, in private.

  Me: Fine. I'll meet you outside.

  Author's Note

  Below are the books mentioned in the story, listed alphabetically by author. The page numbers in parentheses indicate where in the text the book is mentioned.

  Cansdale, C.H.C. Cocoon Silk: A Manual for Those Employed in the Silk Industry. London: Sir I. Pitman & Sons, Ltd., 1937. (p. 89)

  Enright, Elizabeth. Then There Were Five. New York: Puffin Books, 1997. (p. 115)

  Hoban, Russel
l. The Mouse and His Child. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 2001. (p. 142)

  Holt, Kimberly Willis. When Zachary Beaver Came to Town. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1999. (p. 21)

  Johnson, Sylvia A. Silkworms. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1982. (p. 89)

  O'Dell, Scott. Island of the Blue Dolphins. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990. (p. 85)

  The quotations on page 195 are not from Sylvia Johnson's book. They are fictional quotes based on fact.

  The model for Mr. Maxwell's farm is Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm in northern Virginia. I first read about Polyface in an article by Michael Pollan in the September 2002 issue of Gourmet.

  I had a lot of help doing the hands-on research for this story. My parents, Ed and Susie Park, raised one set of silkworms for me; Melanie and Craig Park, my sister-in-law and nephew, raised another. Special thanks to Melanie who, on learning that mulberry leaves were not available, cooked gallons and gallons of artificial silkworm food. I ordered silkworm eggs from the Carolina Biological Supply Company, http://www.carolina.com. My dad kept a diary of the worms' progress; my mom helped him spin the silk into thread; Craig took photos.

  The reason my family raised the silkworms for me is because, as Julia guessed, I do indeed have a worm phobia like Patrick's. After writing this story, I can honestly say that I like them a little better now. But only a little.