Project Mulberry Read online

  Third was something I couldn't stop myself from thinking.

  Third was, Would she he this mad at me if Mr. Dixon was white?

  By suppertime my mom had calmed down, and I had, too. Mostly, anyway. I could understand—a little—why she'd gotten so mad, and I knew I should have phoned to let her know we were staying longer than usual. So everything at supper was back to normal.

  Except...

  Except that I couldn't get third out of my head.

  The thing was, I knew I couldn't bring myself to go up to my mom and say, "Hi, Mom, what's for dinner? And by the way, I've been wondering—are you racist?"

  I was pretty sure my mom didn't think she was. I could sort of guess what her answer might be—that of course she wasn't racist, that there were good and bad people of all colors, that you had to be careful these days and strangers could be dangerous....

  She'd be right about a lot of that. But wasn't everyone a stranger before you met them and got to know them?

  Maybe I was being a coward. Maybe I didn't want to ask my mom because if it turned out she was racist, what could I do about it?

  The worry stayed with me all evening and for a couple of days afterward. Not that I was thinking about it every second, but it kept popping up even though I wanted to forget it. It was like the time I accidentally bit the inside of my cheek and it got really sore, and after that I couldn't seem to stop biting the same spot a whole bunch of times more, when all I wanted to do was to keep from biting it. It took ages to get better.

  Fortunately, it did not take ages before something happened that pushed third right out of my head. It took only two days.

  Day seventeen was a Sunday. I slept in a little; when I got out of bed, the clock said eight fifty-seven. I did the usual: washed up, got dressed, went downstairs, and checked on the eggs. The commas had been uncurling over the past few days. Last night some of them had looked like little rings—a black outline with a clear center.

  I lifted the screen lid and peered inside. There were a whole bunch of tiny black hairs on the leaves—how the heck had hairs gotten in there?

  Kenny ... Had Kenny put hairs in the aquarium, maybe thinking the worms could use the hairs to make nests? What an idiot—they weren't birds.

  But it was weird because these weren't like hairs you'd pull out of a hairbrush. They were much too short and tiny. Where had he gotten them? And what was he doing messing with the aquarium? If he'd done anything bad to the eggs, I'd—I'd think of the very worst thing I could possibly do to him and then do something worse than that.

  I put the lid down, leaning it against my leg, reached in to brush away the hairs—and froze with my hand an inch above the glass bowl.

  Because I thought I saw the hairs moving.

  I blinked, then stared for a few seconds. The hairs were so tiny that I almost couldn't tell—were they moving? Yes—yes, there they went again, tiny, tiny wiggles....

  Wiggles.

  They weren't hairs.

  They were worms.

  Little tiny itsy-bitsy worms!

  Our eggs had hatched!

  I hopped up and down, forgetting that the lid was leaning against my leg. It crashed down and landed on my bare foot. Which hurt, but I was too excited to really notice. Still, the pain calmed me down a little. I picked up the lid and put it carefully, carefully, back on the aquarium, so I wouldn't bump or jar it and scare the poor little things. I took one last look through the glass, then ran inside to call Patrick.

  I swear he was on the back porch almost before I'd hung up the phone. With a major case of bed-head, and his sneakers untied and a jacket on over his T-shirt and sweatpants, which was what he wore for pajamas.

  I lifted the lid again. Patrick sort of leaned back, like he didn't want to get in my way. Then he squatted down so he could look through the glass.

  "Wow," he said in a quiet voice. "They're so little! They're almost—well, you wouldn't really say they're cute, would you? But they're the littlest worms I ever saw."

  "It's like they're barely there," I said. "I can't believe they're going to become big huge caterpillars."

  Patrick had shown me pictures on the Internet. The worms were supposed to grow to be as big as a person's finger.

  We saw that there weren't any rings in the eggs anymore—all of the eggs had hatched. "They'll need to eat within a day," Patrick said. "They'll be too weak to eat much at first, but from now on we'll have to keep a really close eye on them. And on the leaves—we have to make sure there are always fresh ones in there."

  Patrick went inside and came back with three fresh leaves. He handed them to me. "Okay, Jules," he said. "You have to get them onto the new leaves somehow."

  I picked up one of the old leaves, using my fingertips to hold just the very edges. The worms were so tiny that their wiggling didn't really get them anywhere.

  I held the old leaf right over a new one, tilted it, and gave it a very gentle shake. Nothing happened.

  The worms were either hanging on for dear life or they were somehow stuck to the leaf.

  I put the leaf down carefully. Patrick frowned. "Maybe you need to pick them up and move them," he said.

  "They're too tiny," I said. "My fingers are so fat compared to them—I'm scared I might crush them. Do you wanna try?"

  Patrick took a step back. "No way," he said.

  What we needed was something like tweezers. But even tweezers were scary—I still might squash them. Something tiny, that wouldn't squeeze them...

  I went into the house and up to my room. My mom had given me a basket to keep my sewing stuff in. I pawed through it until I found my pincushion and took it back down to the porch.

  "I'm going to try this," I said, holding up a long pin. It had a bead on the end of it.

  I took out one of the leaves with the worms on it and told Patrick to take out a fresh one, and to put the lid back on the aquarium. We put both leaves down on top of the screen. Now I wouldn't have to bend over so far.

  I held the pin tightly with the bead pushing against my palm, which helped me keep the tip steady. I put the pinpoint down next to one of the tiny worms and slid it a millimeter at a time until it was under the worm. Then I lifted it and moved it to the fresh leaf.

  "Whew," I said at the same time that Patrick said, "Good." We both let out big breaths.

  It took me more than half an hour to move all the worms. I felt like a doctor doing microsurgery—slow, gentle, careful, so I wouldn't hurt any of them.

  Sheesh! They were so tiny. It was hard to believe anything that little could survive for long.

  Me: I've been thinking about something. It's not fair. When I mess up, everyone sees it. Like with Patrick and the money thing. But no one sees any of your mistakes. Remember when you started my whole story in present tense and then decided to change it to past tense? Nobody else saw how long it took you. Or how mad you got. I think I even heard you swear a couple of times.

  Ms. Park: Ahem. Well—

  Me: So I did some digging around on my own. Look what I found.

  Ms. Park: Where did you get that?

  Me: I found it on the hard drive. In your first-draft file.

  Ms. Park: Put it back!

  Me: Too late. Already copied and pasted.

  I took up the fork. "You dig up all the weeds," I said, "I'll follow you and break up all the clods."

  Patrick threw the weeds onto the pile Mr. Dixon had already started. I broke up the clods of dirt with the fork.

  Me: Pretty awful stuff. Look at all those "ups"—four in a row.

  Ms. Park: Come on. Everyone makes mistakes. I fixed that part—you can check on page 114. Besides, if you want to know the truth, I like finding my mistakes and trying to make the story better—changing little things here and there, taking some words out, choosing others....

  Me: Hmm. It's like embroidery. Only with words instead of stitches.

  Ms. Park: I like that idea.

  Me: Thanks. That's twice now you've admitt
ed my ideas were good. So maybe you should go back and reconsider giving me a little sister—

  Ms. Park: Sorry. No dice.

  11

  It was amazing how fast our worms grew. Patrick started videotaping them twice a day. He'd come over early on the way to school to tape them, and then we'd do it again after supper. I always moved them to new leaves before we did the taping, and he'd get shots of the old leaves, too. At first the worms ate teensy nibbles, so there were only tiny holes in the leaves.

  On the second day I noticed that when I picked up a worm on the pin, there was an almost invisible strand of webbing attaching it to the leaf. Maybe it had been there all the time but I hadn't been able to see it before. It was so thin that it broke as soon as I lifted the worm.

  I pointed it out to Patrick.

  "I think that's how they attach themselves to the leaves. So they don't fall off," Patrick said. "I mean, our leaves are always flat, but if they were on a tree out in nature, the worms would have to sort of hang on."

  "Makes sense," I said. "And maybe they're also getting started practicing. To make silk."

  I wondered if the worms were like dogs—if they were getting to know me by my smell. They seemed to get a little excited when I moved them; they'd squirm around more. But as soon as they were on a new leaf, they settled right down to eating again. By the fifth day they were big enough to wiggle onto a new leaf by themselves, so I didn't have to move them anymore. That was a relief. Moving them twice a day had been hard work. And when we took out the old leaves, we saw that they were always covered with strands of webbing.

  The Tuesday after our worms hatched was another Wiggle meeting. This one was a field trip. It was also our day to get more leaves from Mr. Dixon. I made sure to tell my mom that I wouldn't be home until suppertime, that after the field trip we'd be stopping by Mr. Dixon's place. She didn't say anything—just gave me a look.

  "I'll come straight home," I said. "We won't stay, okay?"

  I'd been trying to think of a way to make her change her mind—to get her to say it was all right for us to visit with Mr. Dixon sometimes. But I hadn't come up with a strategy yet. Until then, I planned to be very angelic about the whole thing and not get her mad all over again. That way maybe she'd be easier to convince later.

  She nodded. "Have a good time on the field trip," she said.

  We were going to visit Mr. Maxwell's farm. We rode in a mini-school bus, about twenty Wiggle members altogether. When we got to the farm, Mr. Maxwell had us gather around him in front of the barn.

  "Most of you have been here before," he said, "so you don't have to take the grand tour again if you don't want to. This is Tom." He raised his hand toward a man who had come out of the barn and was standing nearby. "Tom will take anyone who doesn't want to go on the tour down to the second pasture, and you can help him round up the cows."

  There were only five of us who had never been to the farm before; the rest had been Wiggle members for a long time, and Mr. Maxwell did the farm field trip every year. So it was just me and Patrick and three other kids who followed Mr. Maxwell to the field he called the first pasture—the one closest to the barn.

  Mr. Maxwell led us to the barbed-wire fence that enclosed the field. Inside the fence there was a flock of sheep. Some of them were eating, and others were lying down. I counted six lambs. They were adorable, little and white and fluffy.

  The bigger sheep were not nearly as pretty. Their butts were really nasty-looking.

  "The first thing you should know about this place is that it's what's called a 'sustainable' farm," Mr. Maxwell said. "That means we try to farm here in a way that's good for both the environment and the animals."

  He gestured at the field. "I had thirty head of cattle in here until two days ago. The cows eat, right? And what happens when an organism eats?"

  "It grows?" Patrick guessed. He must have been thinking about our worms.

  "Yes, but what else? Something more directly connected to eating. It eats, and then—" He stopped and waited for us to answer.

  "It poops?" That was a boy named Sam.

  Everyone giggled. Mr. Maxwell grinned and said, "That's right, Sam—it poops! So there are the cows, pooping all over the field"—we laughed—"and all that manure is fertilizing the field."

  He took a breath and went on. "Now, we can't leave the cows in there for too long—they'd eat up all the grass and erode the soil. We have to move them out. On other farms the field would just sit there, empty, while the farmer waited for it to recover, for the grass to grow thick again. But on a sustainable farm, you don't have to waste time waiting."

  Mr. Maxwell made a movement with one hand, like he was pushing something away from him. "Cows out—" he said, then made a pulling motion with his other hand "—chickens in. We'll take a look at the chicken coop later. It's on wheels. Chickens like shelter; they don't like to be out in the open all the time. With the coop here, the chickens can go in and out all day long, and we can move it around to cover the whole field."

  "A mobile home for chickens," Patrick said.

  "That's right," Mr. Maxwell said. "Okay, remember—I've got a field full of cow poop, right? And what happens when you have a lot of poop in one place?"

  "It stinks." That was Sam again. More laughter.

  "Yeah, okay. But you also get a lot of bugs. Flies, especially, right? They lay their eggs in the poop and you get lots of nice healthy maggots."

  "Eww." We said that all together, and Patrick added, "Yuck," and made a face as well.

  "Well, wouldn't you know it—chickens love maggots!" Mr. Maxwell said. "So the chickens eat up the maggots, and they also scratch—they scratch at the cowpats and spread them around, and they scratch at the soil, which keeps it nice and loose and aerates it. There they are, tilling the soil and spreading the fertilizer and keeping down the pest population and saving me money on chicken feed!"

  "Cool," Patrick said. I thought so, too.

  "Then we move the chicken coop to another field and let the sheep in here—that's the stage we're at right now." Mr. Maxwell waved his arm at the sheep. "Now, because of all that cow manure, there are lots of weeds in the field. Cows won't eat weeds, but sheep will, so I don't have to use chemicals to keep the weeds down. Better for the soil, and better for the animals, too."

  I watched the sheep nearest to us. Sure enough, one of them was working on a patch of what looked like thistles—purple flowers with prickly leaves. The sheep didn't seem to be bothered by the prickles.

  "Then we move the cows back in here, and the whole thing starts over again. The field's been occupied the whole time, but it's not worn out and used up—it's ready for the next round."

  He squatted down by the fence. "Get down low, everyone," he said. "Have a look at the grass." He reached between the fence rails and raked through the grass with his fingers.

  We all got down on our knees and looked closely at the grass.

  It was green. It had blades. There were patches of clover.

  In other words, it was just grass.

  Mr. Maxwell was watching us. He grinned when he saw our faces. "Just grass, right?" he said.

  "Okay," Patrick said, "so what's so special about it?"

  "It's healthy!" Mr. Maxwell boomed out. "It's green and thick and growing like mad, and the soil underneath is full of nitrates and other good stuff. If you were a cow, that grass would look like an ice-cream sundae!"

  All of a sudden I felt like I was seeing the grass the way a cow would. It really did look quite delicious—deep and rich and juicy green, full of sweet-smelling clover.

  "When you come right down to it, I'm a grass farmer," Mr. Maxwell said. "A grass and soil farmer. That's my main job—making sure the soil stays fertile so the grass grows well. The animals do everything else, and if we all do our jobs, the system sustains itself—it keeps going and going."

  "What other kind of farming is there?" Patrick asked. "Is there such a thing as non-sustainable farming?"

  "We
ll, they don't call it that, of course," Mr. Maxwell answered. "They call it 'commercial' farming. Ever been to a chicken farm?"

  We all shook our heads.

  "But you've heard of battery chickens, haven't you?"

  "I have," said Hannah, one of the girls in the group. "I saw a program on TV once. There were, like, hundreds of chickens in one building, and they never got to go anywhere, and they had to just sit there crowded into these little boxes and lay eggs all day long."

  "That's right," Mr. Maxwell said. "And because the chickens are so crowded together, they start to fight. To keep them from hurting each other, the farmer has to snip off the ends of their beaks and the tips of their claws. Battery chickens are also more prone to disease, so the farmer has to put a lot of drugs in their feed to keep them healthy—chemicals that end up in their eggs."

  Yuck. I liked eggs. I'd never thought about what went into them before.

  "Chickens raised on battery farms are miserable creatures, in my opinion," Mr. Maxwell said. "Not like my chickens. My chickens get to run around and eat grass and worms and go into their coop whenever they feel like it. I like having happy chickens."

  I'd never heard Mr. Maxwell talk this much before. I could tell he was really into this farming stuff.

  On the way back to the barn, Patrick walked next to Mr. Maxwell and asked a bunch of questions. I didn't follow everything they said, but I did learn that commercial farming was cheaper—that it cost a lot more for Mr. Maxwell to run his farm than it did for commercial farmers to run theirs. Which meant that happy-chicken eggs were more expensive in the grocery store, which was why most people kept buying battery eggs.

  That made things trickier than I'd thought. At first I'd wondered why everyone didn't farm the way Mr. Maxwell did—it seemed so sensible. But it turned out that underneath all those cool small details, there was a bigger picture that was a lot more complicated.