The Dragons of Ordinary Farm

Chapter 12

A fter several days of discomfort that kept the whole farm in a state of alert, Meseret finally laid an egg.

Lucinda snuck a quick peek at the dragon’s egg from the door of the Sick Barn. It looked like a partially deflated beach ball, a pale leathery sack big as the beanbag chair her brother spent most of his time in back at home, headphones on, sneakered feet on the wall, GameBoss Portable held only squinting inches in front of his eyes.

They’re sure making a lot of fuss over a big beanbag, she thought. It wasn’t that she didn’t care; there was just something about being around the dragon that upset her, something about the watchfulness in the creature’s huge red-gold eyes. Lucinda often found herself making excuses to avoid being near the dragon very long-not that anyone was urging her to stay. The Sick Barn was a busy place now and it was easy to get in the way: Uncle Gideon and Mr. Walkwell hardly left Meseret’s side for the first week. Apparently this was the third or fourth time Meseret had given birth and none of the other eggs had hatched, so everyone was worried.

The children spent most of their time that week with Mrs. Needle or Ragnar, doing chores and helping out, or trying to. Tyler hated doing the inside jobs, and he didn’t like Mrs. Needle at all. Lucinda had more mixed feelings about the Englishwoman. She remembered very little of the conversation they had shared, but she remembered feeling very grown-up and privileged to be spending time with someone so interesting and special. When Lucinda came in to the farm office one morning to ask a question and found Mrs. Needle winding her long black hair into a French pleat, it felt like stumbling onto a fairy creature in a patch of forest moonlight. Patience Needle was so pale, so lovely-and yet somehow as fierce as a panther and more than a little frightening. Lucinda didn’t really know what to think.

Being around Ragnar was entirely different. He was obviously fairly old, but he looked like a barbarian out of one of Tyler’s games, or some long-haired professional wrestler. Ragnar didn’t try to be tough or cool, although in his own weird way he really was cool.

“Where do you come from?” she asked him one morning, amused by his pronunciation of “jam jar” as “yam yar.”

“Denmark, you would call it. But I have not been there in a long time. Everything is different now, they tell me.” He shook his head, staring out past the field whose wire fence he was fixing, as though he could see Denmark just beyond. For all Lucinda knew, he could. (She had never been much good at geography.)

Tyler seemed glad of this opportunity to rest for a moment and wipe the sweat from his face. They had been working all afternoon restringing wire fences in the valley sun, and even though Ragnar did the lion’s share of the chores-Lucinda suspected this whole thing was more about babysitting them than getting any actual labor out of them-it was still hot and tiring work. “Why did you come?” Tyler asked. “Here, I mean.”

Ragnar laughed. “Things had gone sour for old Ragnar. I had little choice but to take Gideon’s kind offer.”

“I don’t get it,” Lucinda said.

“And I hope you do not ‘get it,’ ” he told her, serious now. He bent and heaved up another bale of wire in one hand as if it was a roll of aluminum foil, and directed Tyler where to help steady it against the fence post. “But you are Gideon’s kin, which is for the good. Others around him are sometimes forced to pay a very high price indeed.” He laughed again but it almost sounded angry. After that he began banging huge metal staples into the post and it was too noisy for them to ask any other questions.

So many jobs! Feeding all the animals, doctoring them, repairing their cages and pens and tanks, as well as taking care of the farm’s vegetable garden and house and kitchen. Not to mention the huge variety of creatures-not just unicorns and dragons, but skittish, snarling wampus cats, hoop snakes, and even something called a hodag, a truculent creature that looked like a badger covered with crocodile skin and smelled like old cheese. Lucinda couldn’t begin to imagine how Uncle Gideon and his employees kept a place like this going with only a dozen or so employees, although Mr. Walkwell, for one, never actually seemed to stop working. Twice she had woken up in the middle of the night and gone out to the hall and the bathroom there only to spot him through the window, driving his wagon across to the Sick Barn or limping across the farm hauling bags of feed by moonlight. Didn’t he ever sleep? And how could somebody who was so obviously crippled, or at least severely limited in his mobility, work so hard? She had no idea what was wrong with his legs-she had asked Ragnar, but he only shook his head and said, “Mr. Walkwell has his own stories. They are not mine to tell.”

Some things Ragnar would talk about, though. He was happy to tell her about the Carrillo kids they had met at the store.

“They come from the farm next door,” he told them.

“The family has owned that land for a very long time. Those children’s great-grandfather loaned old Octavio workers to do repairs on the farmhouse, and helped him find people to do some of the other jobs on the place-Gideon did not bring me and the others until later, you see. So the Carrillo family does not know your uncle’s secrets but he likes them and trusts them. Sometimes he even goes to their house for the Christian and American holy days.”

Lucinda wasn’t sure exactly what the last part meant-American holy days?-but she gathered that the Carrillo kids weren’t considered Official Enemies of the Farm or anything, so it made a little more sense that Mr. Walkwell carved things for them. Still, that was the last thing she ever would have imagined such a strange, grumpy man doing.

Lucinda and Tyler quickly settled into a routine. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays they went with Ragnar and did repairs and other small chores around the farm in the morning, then came back in the afternoon to help the people working mostly inside. Lucinda ran errands around the house, helped Pema take care of the bed linens and other things, or helped Sarah and Azinza put things away in the pantry. Azinza looked like nothing less than a supermodel and made Lucinda feel like a dwarf. The African girl was at least six feet tall, with cropped hair and a profile like the most exquisite sculpture Lucinda had ever seen. Her skin was so dark it had almost a blue sheen to it; beside the beauteous Azinza, Mrs. Needle actually appeared quite ordinary.

Tyler mostly wound up helping old Caesar as he made his rounds replacing lightbulbs and broken coat hooks and hammering in nails that had worked their way out of the house’s ancient paneling.

“Caesar sings a lot,” Tyler told Lucinda one evening as they went down to dinner. “And he can tell you anything you want to know about polishing silver, that’s for sure. But when I ask him how he came to the farm, he just says, ‘I was in a worse place before, the good Lord knows,’ and he won’t say anything else. Why won’t any of them tell us anything? Did Uncle Gideon clone the people who live here too-is that the big secret?”

On the working-outside days they usually rode around with Ragnar, or Mr. Walkwell on the occasions he was free. Sometimes Haneb came with them too. Lucinda tried to thank him again for saving her from being hurt by the unicorn, but the slender man was so shy that even her gratitude seemed to pain him. She and Tyler usually helped feed the animals-hoop snakes and griffins both liked milk, Lucinda learned-and sometimes even groomed them. Once Lucinda got to currycomb a unicorn, which was one of the most exciting things she had ever done. Ragnar held its head (so that it wouldn’t spear her with its horn like an olive on a toothpick, Tyler explained in a loud stage whisper) while Lucinda brushed burrs out of its shaggy pale coat. Up close it smelled a little like a horse, but also a little like flowers and a little like something else-something prickly and odd, like electricity.

Sometimes they fed the baby animals, which was Lucinda’s favorite chore. Once, Mr. Walkwell let her put on a bird-headed glove to feed a baby griffin, which was about the size of a housecat. It had a four-legged body but a head like a bird, and was covered all over with golden down like a baby chick. Despite having fierce little claws the baby griffin was more nervous about her than she was about it. Lucinda had to be very patient until it would accept the bits of worms and ground tuna fish she held in the puppet’s beak.

“If this is a baby, how big do they get?” she asked.

Mr. Walkwell gestured to one of the older siblings in the main pen a few yards away-the aiglet, as Uncle Gideon called the baby, had a small cage of its own. Tawny, feathered hind legs were tucked under its body as their owner napped, its tail occasionally lifting to slap away flies. It was big-about the size of a lion-and she was suddenly grateful that they didn’t have to get the baby out of the adults’ enclosure to feed it. The tail went slap again and the adult griffin sighed in its sleep, a strange noise that might have come from a trumpet made of bone.

As the first week passed, then the second and third, and June gave way to the first of July, Lucinda began to get a sense of how the farm truly worked, but it only made her more confused. First of all, she came to realize, it didn’t seem to be a farm at all. Gideon and his workers didn’t seem to be raising the animals for any purpose, and except for the acres of grass that would be hay for winter feed, and the orchard of fruit trees behind the house, the only normal thing the farm seemed to grow were the vegetables and spices and herbs in Mrs. Needle’s kitchen garden. It was a good-sized garden, full of plants Lucinda had never seen before, and even had a mysterious greenhouse with lots of elaborate, Victorian-looking ironwork, but Mrs. Needle wasn’t growing anything to sell. In fact, nothing on the farm seemed set up to make money or satisfy more than a few basic needs for the people who lived there.

No, Ordinary Farm was more a zoo than anything else-everything seemed to revolve around taking care of all the fantastic animals. But zoos made money by selling tickets to people, Lucinda knew, and that certainly wasn’t going on here (although Gideon could make millions, she realized-maybe billions-if they ever did). So what was going on? If they weren’t making anything, and they weren’t showing anyone the dragons and unicorns, then how were they paying for all the food the animals and people ate, and the medicine, and the people’s salaries, and…?

She hated to admit Tyler was right, but the whole thing just didn’t make sense.

And there were a lot of mouths to feed. The herders, Kiwa, Jeg, and Hoka-“the Three Amigos,” as Tyler called them-spent most of their time in a hut out by the pastureland, but came into the house to eat. Besides them and Haneb and Ragnar and Mr. Walkwell, more than a half dozen other men of many colors and sizes worked on the property and lived in a bunkhouse near the reptile barn. Lucinda hadn’t had a chance to learn their names yet. So what was that altogether-eighteen or nineteen people to be fed and housed, not including herself and Tyler? And if the animals had been made, somehow, as Tyler thought, then there had to be things she and her brother hadn’t seen-a laboratory and people to staff it.

So how did it all work? Was Uncle Gideon rich? You’d sure never know it from his old striped bathrobe and his threadbare pajamas, which he seemed to be wearing most of the times she saw him, even in the middle of a hot afternoon. In fact, rich or not, Lucinda was pretty sure he was at least a little crazy, especially when she thought about the scary way he had forced that promise out of them.

Still, even if their great-uncle turned out to be the world’s richest loony, it didn’t explain the dragons.

It was a Friday, the third Friday since she and Tyler had come to Ordinary Farm, and Lucinda was in the huge front parlor. The room had a marvelous stained-glass window featuring a gorgeous snake-Lucinda found herself quite hypnotized by it-plus a large collection of mirrors and clocks, which she was giving an offhand dusting when she heard the bell summoning everyone to dinner. She was thinking with pleasurable anticipation about the apple brown betty Sarah was baking when Gideon walked in the front door.

Lucinda assumed that he was on his way to dinner as well, but he only walked by her on his way to the staircase, his face sagging and empty.

“Uncle Gideon?”

He didn’t even speak or look back as he trudged through a door at the back of the stairs and off somewhere into the depths of the house, his bathrobe flapping like the cape of a defeated superhero who had just decided to retire from the crime-fighting business. Then Colin Needle came through the front door also, his bony face twisted with anger.

“What’s wrong?” Lucinda asked him. “What’s going on?”

Colin was so upset that flecks of spit flew from his mouth as he spoke. “I tried to tell him I was sorry. I tried to tell him how upset I am too. But he never listens to me! He just pushed me aside like I was nothing.”

Lucinda had never seen the older boy show much emotion. She felt sorry for him, though-she’d been on the other end of Gideon’s anger and knew what it felt like. “Sorry about what? What’s happened?”

Colin looked at her almost blankly. Then he said, “Meseret’s egg isn’t going to hatch. There’s a baby inside but no heartbeat. Again. It’s happened every time.” His anger surged again. “But he blames my mother for it! In spite of everything she tried to do!” He was getting loud now and it made Lucinda a little nervous-Gideon couldn’t have gone very far in such a short time. “Like she’s supposed to fix the dragon, fix the money, fix everything that’s wrong with this stupid farm! Fix all his stupid mistakes!”

“Colin, I’m really sorry… ” she began, but the boy was so consumed with his feelings that he wasn’t even looking at her. Instead Colin turned and half walked, half ran toward the kitchen.

Suddenly Lucinda was in no hurry to follow him. She wasn’t very hungry anymore. In fact, the thought of apple brown betty made her stomach turn.