Becca Fair and Foul Read online

  Then he rushed off to his next appointment.

  “Why are those clothes all soaked?” asked Lucy, wandering out in her pajamas.

  “All the interesting stuff happens when I’m away or asleep,” complained Alicia.

  “You should get up earlier,” said Becca. She stood on the chopping block to peg the sea-sodden clothes to the clothesline.

  “Goodness, now we have Merlin’s laundry,” Aunt Fifi said, and then she marched off to the well to get water, as if it was a perfectly normal day of chores. “What next?”

  5. The Tide Came In and Took It

  “Now Gull isn’t just slow. She has a broken oarlock, too,” Becca said.

  “Never mind,” said Jane. “We’re going to do this play and earn money and then, after tons and tons of chores and saving our allowance for years, we’ll have a boat with two completely non-broken oarlocks that we never use because it sails perfectly.”

  “Gannet,” said Becca.

  “What?” Jane asked. “Look — Dad had to get stuff from the store so I went with him and picked up Merlin’s copies of the play. Let’s read it through and see how it goes. That’s what we did at school.”

  “We could name it Gannet,” Becca explained. “It’s a bird that never has to come to land. Basically.”

  Jane pushed a copy of The Tempest into Becca’s hand.

  “Whoa,” Becca said. “We might need help with this.”

  “It’s not so bad,” said Jane. “If you read it fast and don’t bother trying to figure out what all the words mean, you can understand it pretty well.”

  They sat on Mermaid’s Rock. Then they lay on it. First they lay on their stomachs and read, and when they got to Act Three, they lay on their backs and read.

  Then they sat up again for Acts Four and Five.

  Some bits were hard to understand and some bits weren’t. Jane was right.

  The story had three kinds of people — romantic ones and mopey ones and funny ones. There was a magician, two sweethearts and a sprite named Ariel, and a group of shipwrecked noblemen who sat around a lot, and a monster-fish-man named Caliban, and a couple of clowns who sang, danced, stole laundry and tried to take over the island.

  It took ages to read it out loud. The sea, which started out way far away in the regions of sand dollars and eelgrass, crept up as they read until it was licking at the barnacles on Mermaid’s Rock.

  At last Jane said the magician Prospero’s final speech. She stood up and spoke out over the rocks, as if the gulls and oystercatchers were her audience.

  “‘What strength I have’s mine own, which is most faint …’” she declared. Then she added, “I do feel faint. I’m starved.”

  Becca felt as though she’d been far, far away, blundering in swamps and forests, flying over a stormy sea and making thunderous magic with the characters in the story. For a while she’d forgotten everything — Lucy, Alicia, the tide, her very self.

  “Let’s go to my place for lunch,” said Jane. “Dad got some excellent food. Luckily he’s open to taking advice when shopping.”

  “I have to tell Gran or one of the aunts,” said Becca, coming back into the world. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  * * *

  Becca heard a car door slam and the murmur of voices up in the driveway.

  Auntie Meg!

  Everything about The Tempest went out of her head. She thought of Betsy had a baby … and the tide came in and took it and ’twas never seen no more.

  Last summer, Auntie Meg had been pregnant. Becca had been the only cousin who noticed then, but during the winter, when Auntie Meg was back on the little island where she and Uncle Martin lived, she got bigger and bigger. She sent pictures.

  But then something happened. Somehow, it all went wrong. The baby wasn’t alive any more, even though she was almost ready to be born.

  Nobody knew why the baby didn’t live. Mum and Dad, Becca and Pin sent a hazelnut tree to plant in her memory.

  Becca had talked about it with Mum and Dad, and with Gran, and she had talked to Auntie Meg and Uncle Martin on the phone.

  There should be a baby out in the world now, a new cousin who was Auntie Meg and Uncle Martin’s family. And there wasn’t.

  What had that been like for Auntie Meg? And even though it had happened months ago, what was it like for her now, empty-armed? That’s what Uncle Martin called it when he talked to Becca on the phone at that sad time.

  Becca hadn’t seen Auntie Meg since then.

  Her feet slowed on the path as she thought about the cousin she would never know.

  Then she could see them, Auntie Meg and Gran, hugging and hugging.

  Becca couldn’t help it. She threw her arms around them.

  “Dearest Becca,” said Auntie Meg.

  Auntie Meg was the aunt who was always full of love.

  Becca looked up at her. She had never seen Auntie Meg unable to smile before.

  “Auntie Meg,” Becca said, and she squeezed and squeezed, and hugged every part of Auntie Meg and Gran she could reach.

  “Oh, Becca!” Gran said.

  For a moment she looked about two hundred years old. Becca actually felt her tremble.

  Gran, trembling! And with tears in her eyes.

  Then Gran shook her head, shook the drops from her eyes, and seemed to shake herself all over.

  “Well,” she said, and picked up Auntie Meg’s bag.

  Auntie Meg’s face gathered itself together as Becca watched, and she turned to get the rest of her luggage out of the car.

  * * *

  Becca ran back to Jane. She tried very hard to think about the play.

  “Alicia,” she said. “Alicia’d be a perfect Prospero. He’s always bossing people around and making things work out the way he wants. And you were so good at barking and growling at the otters. You could be Caliban, the monster-fish-man. You can roll in the otters’ bedroom to get the right smell. And we’ll get something fish-scaly for you to wear.”

  “Gee, thanks,” said Jane.

  They jumped across slippery sea lettuce.

  “Would Lucy be a good Miranda?” Jane asked.

  “Will she be good at falling in love? Miranda has to fall in love.”

  But Becca’s mind was really still full of Auntie Meg. Sea-sorrow. That was a word from Shakespeare’s play and that’s what the play was about, partly. Shipwreck and losing things, especially daughters and sons.

  Prospero and Shakespeare made things come out all right.

  But nothing could make things come right for Auntie Meg and Uncle Martin and their baby-to-be.

  Think about The Tempest, she told herself. Or think about sailing a ship called Gannet, or Pigeon Guillemot, or even Sea Otter — all seafaring creatures.

  “Look at the eagle,” Jane said, stopping suddenly.

  High, squeaking calls cascaded down from the eaglet in the nest near Jane’s cabin. And out over the sea flashed the bright head and tail of an adult eagle looking for lunch, making big airy flaps as it patrolled the strait.

  “There isn’t so much salmon now,” Jane said. “Uncle Mac said.”

  The eagle swooped in a big curve and flew back the way it had come.

  “The eagles are hungry. Merlin said he saw one trying to carry off someone’s little poodle!”

  “Mum says she remembers when her dad and Uncle Mac brought in buckets and buckets of fish, day after day,” said Jane.

  The eagle was turning again. Becca looked up at its white head shining in the sunlight. It flew over her, low enough that she could hear the beating of its wings on the air, the low, forceful noise of sky being pushed.

  Whoosh! There it went, plunging and then leveling out, raking its feet through the water and dragging a salmon in a flurry of splashes beneath it.

  “Look! It caught something
!” Jane said.

  “Something huge!”

  “Lift!” Jane shouted.

  “Heave away, eagle, all bound to go,” Becca called out.

  The eagle pumped its wings, but it still wasn’t much above the water.

  “That must be some heavy fish,” said Jane.

  “Look — it’s going to row. Or swim, sort of.”

  The eagle was pulling its wings through the water as if it was doing the butterfly stroke.

  “I didn’t know eagles could swim,” Jane said.

  “Why is it trying to swim? Why doesn’t it fly?”

  It couldn’t, Becca suddenly realized. It couldn’t get liftoff with the heavy salmon in its talons.

  She ran with Jane down to the tide’s edge, where the sandstone shelves dropped off down to the subtidal homes of sea urchins, sea cucumbers and kelp beds, and then down beyond that to the realms of rockfish, wolf eels and gobies.

  The eagle pulled its wings through the water again and again. Becca thought she could almost hear it panting, it was working so hard. It made her breathe hard herself, trying to lend the strength of her own breath so it could get up, up out of the sea and into the sky where it should be.

  “It’s slowing down,” Jane said. “What’s it going to do?”

  The splash of the eagle’s rowing mingled with the splash of the fish that was under water, clutched in its talons.

  “It’s a big salmon,” said Becca.

  “If we had a boat we could help it,” said Jane, but Becca didn’t think so. She didn’t think an eagle would let itself be helped that way.

  “Why doesn’t it just let go of the fish?”

  “Maybe it’s stubborn,” said Jane.

  “Maybe it can’t.” Becca realized that she was clasping her hands, squeezing her fingers as if her own wishing could give the eagle strength.

  But the eagle’s wings moved slowly and heavily now. It could hardly lift them out of the water.

  “You can do it. You can do it. You can do it,” she muttered. She hardly noticed that her feet were soggy, that she and Jane were standing right in the sea, as if they were trying to get as close to the eagle as they could.

  The eagle slogged and strained.

  Everything seemed to happen slowly then. The eagle gave an exhausted push with its wings.

  “Oh!” said Jane.

  Quietly, slowly, the eagle disappeared beneath the sea.

  Before Becca’s and Jane’s surprised eyes the water burbled. Bubbles floated on the surface for a minute, and then it was as if that eagle and salmon had never been.

  Right before their eyes, but hidden from them, underwater, the eagle was sinking. There wasn’t a thing they could do about it.

  The tide came in and took it and ’twas never seen no more, Becca thought.

  “It isn’t fair!” Jane said. “What if it’s the mum or dad of the eaglet in the nest by our cabin?”

  “But the fish might live,” Becca said. “Instead of being eaten by the eagle.”

  “But how could it, if the eagle is still hooked into it?” asked Jane. “It isn’t fair.”

  “Nature isn’t fair or unfair,” Becca said. “That’s what Gran would say. It just is.”

  And, she thought, Auntie Meg’s baby dying wasn’t fair or not fair. It just was.

  But that didn’t make it not sad.

  She had to stop still for a minute, waiting for her face to go into its proper shape again, and her eyes to stop being blurry.

  Jane looked out to where the eagle had sunk out of sight.

  Becca looked at the sea, too.

  “After the eagle’s dead it will feed other sea creatures,” she said. “I mean, they’ll eat every bit of it so it will be giving life in a way. And they’ll eat the salmon, too, just the way the eagle would have.”

  “I know. But it’s still horrible.”

  “The Tempest has sea-sorrow in it,” Becca said.

  “Yes, they get sad when they think the prince has drowned,” said Jane. “But he doesn’t really drown. Not like this eagle. Or fish.”

  “It’s a story about a magician who tries to make things fair,” said Becca.

  They couldn’t make things fair, not for the eagle or for Auntie Meg and Uncle Martin. But Becca thought about how the play had taken her away for a time, the way a good story could do.

  Maybe a play could do that for Auntie Meg. It might give her heart a rest.

  Even if it was only for a little while.

  6. Flying

  Auntie Meg put her arms around Becca.

  “Of course I’m sad,” she said.

  She was quite still then, and Becca hugged her and smelled her good Auntie Meg smell, a mixture of flowery soap, bicycle grease and Douglas fir.

  “You would have been an excellent mum,” Becca said. “You’re such a good rower and sailor.”

  “We still hope I’ll be a mum some day,” Auntie Meg said. “And to practice, maybe you and I could go rowing or sailing together.”

  “Or probably both,” Becca said. “Because of how Gull is.”

  She and Auntie Meg were in the community garden, but even so they could hear the eagle parents near Jane’s cabin having their high, hoarse conversations — and the eaglet, too, with a quick series of notes that were like a squeaking laugh.

  So that eaglet still had its mum and dad.

  Becca picked kale leaves, and then she pinched off some of the yellow flowers to put in the salad.

  Auntie Meg cut some sprigs of mint and rosemary. Becca pulled up a few tiny carrots so the others would have more room to grow.

  Nobody else was in the garden. The sweetpeas were covered with their first flowers — pink and white and purple and blue — each breathing its scent into the air. The frothy baby’s breath and summer roses of Kay-next-door’s garden swayed in the wind.

  * * *

  “Gran said the eagle couldn’t retract its talons,” Becca told Jane. “She said they were probably stuck far into the fish and when the fish turned out to be so heavy, it was fatal.”

  “I’m glad it wasn’t one of our baby eagle’s parents,” said Jane. “They’re still here, and the eaglet’s screeching away like stink.”

  “And then Gran rushed away to tell Merlin’s brother-in-law Arnulf where to dump the load of wood he delivered,” Becca continued. “But before she went she said nature isn’t right or wrong. It just is.”

  “She sounds like you,” Jane said. “Or you sound like her.”

  * * *

  “So, what do I have to do for this?” Lucy asked.

  “We’re just going to read our parts right now,” said Becca. “Even though Alicia isn’t here yet.”

  “Yet? She said no,” said Lucy. “She said, quote, I’m too old to play with you kids. Plus, Shakespeare’s for school. End quote.”

  They were sitting in the treehouse at Jane’s, near the otters’ bedroom but high in the trees.

  Above them was Jane’s cabin, and the tree that was the home of a bald eagle family. From the treehouse Becca could see the mattress of sticks that was their nest near the top of a Douglas fir.

  And she could hear them, just like Jane said. Screech, screech, screech went the baby eagle, nonstop.

  Really, being in the treehouse was like being in an eagle’s nest. A perfect Tempest place, airy but surrounded by sea.

  “Oh, man, I don’t know if I’m ever going to understand this,” Lucy said, staring at her book. “Plus, there’s no way I’ll remember it.”

  “Just try,” Becca said.

  “What are those eagles screeching about?” Lucy asked.

  “They’re yelling at the baby,” said Jane. “They start early in the morning and pretty much go on until dark. I think they want it to fly.”

  A clashing clamor arose from
the trees. It made Becca think of The Tempest, and how the island was full of noises, like “a thousand twangling instruments that clang about the ears.”

  “They’re so loud!” she said.

  “It’s just the baby eagle,” said Jane. “Well, he’s not really a baby now. More like a kid.”

  Becca tried to get everyone going with the play, but the eagle family’s discussion suddenly rose to an enormous ruckus. Lucy forgot to read her part.

  “What!” she said.

  “It’s eagles! It’s normal!” Jane said. “You get used to it. Well, sort of.”

  “It sounds like fighting,” Lucy complained. “I hate fighting.”

  “It’s not a fight,” Jane said. “It’s an eaglet growing up.”

  Up against the blue, on the top of the tree, the eagle mother stared down her beak into the nest.

  “See, there,” said Jane. “You can see its head.”

  Screech, screech, went the mother. The sound was like fingernails on a blackboard. Lucy put her hands over her ears.

  Now Becca could see the eaglet, all scruffy and brown. It stepped up near the edge of the nest and flapped its wings.

  “It’s doing exercises,” she said.

  The mother flew to a nearby tree and glared back at it.

  “She’s trying to teach it, I bet,” said Jane.

  But apparently the eaglet didn’t want to learn to fly. It disappeared back into the nest, and the mother eagle dropped into the nest, too.

  “Okay,” Becca said. “Back to the play.”

  In the play, Prospero was bossing his slave, the sprite Ariel. Lucy acted Ariel, and she was not too bad at it.

  “I’ve had lots of experience being bossed around,” she said.

  When they finished that scene, she went back to gazing at the eagles.

  “The baby’s looking over the edge again,” she reported.

  But now Jane was growling and snorting as Caliban the monster-fish-man. Becca couldn’t really pay attention to Lucy and the eaglet. In her Caliban voice Jane sounded a bit like the otters, as if she was crunching on fishbones hard as crockery. You had to really pay attention to understand her, never mind to understand Shakespeare’s funny way of talking.