Katerina's Wish (31 page)

The twinkle of pleasure in his eyes warmed me. “That's true,” I agreed. “But Old Jan will still be here, Aneshka. He can come look for it, and sooner or later, he's bound to see it. Then he can make whatever wish he wants to.”

“Will you, Old Jan?” asked Aneshka. “Promise you will come down here every day until you see the carp and make your wishes.”

“Please?” Holena said.

“Well, I don't know if I can promise every day,” said Old Jan, “but I'll try, for you girls.”

“Oh, but it's not for us,” Aneshka said. “It's for you.”

“This is all such nonsense!” Mark said suddenly, jumping to his feet. “Enough of your magic and your wishes and your dreams, Papa! It all comes to nothing!”

“But it hasn't,” I said. “My family has their farm, and we are going there right at harvest. Come with us, Mark. Please.”

“We've been through this before, Trina.”

“But it would just be for a little while. You could look for work in town. Maybe you could even go to high school. You told me once you had planned to do that before your papa's accident.”

“It wouldn't make a difference! I'm a coal miner, and I'll always be a coal miner, and that's not good enough for you.”

“But what about your dreams for the future?” I begged.

“My dream for the future was you. I don't think I believe in dreams anymore.”

I stepped forward and took his hand. “Mark, I love you. If you would just try again, I promise I will wait for you, and I'll go anywhere with you.”

“Anywhere but here,” he said.

Slowly I nodded. “Anywhere but here.”

“And with this foot, I can't work anywhere else.”

“But you can, if you just try! If you would just believe—”

Mark shook his head and pulled his hand out of mine. “It's all dreams, Trina. And for a while you had me believing, but life isn't like that. Life isn't one of Papa's fairy tales, full of dreams and wishes and magic fish.” He paused and took a deep breath. When he spoke again, he was pleading with me, his eyes desperate. “I have something here, Trina. It may not be much, but it's real. Stay with me, like you promised.”

“I can't, even if I wanted to. Mr. Johnson would just have you fired too, to get rid of me.”

“And, you don't want to.”

I dropped my eyes and shook my head again.

“Good-bye, then,” he said, bitter and defeated. He stepped out of the shade and walked away without looking back. I wanted to run after him and beg him to change his mind, but I knew it was no use. I sat down on the root, trying to fight back tears, but without success. Holena sat down beside me and slipped her hand into mine.

“He'll change his mind, Trina, when he hears how nice our farm is,” she said. “You will write him every day. He'll see how much he misses you, and he'll come join us and marry you, and you'll be happy. Okay?”

Despite my sadness, I couldn't help smiling at her innocent faith. “You are just like Papa,” I said, hugging her to me.

She squeezed my hand and nestled against me. “So are you.”

“Come on, we're wasting time!” Aneshka said. “Trina, help us make the fish come out.”

The pool had shrunk over the summer to little more than a wide spot in the creek. I could see no sign of the fish. I couldn't even be sure it was still there now that the water was so low. With noisy Aneshka there and the water no longer lapping at the roots of the tree, the magical feel of the place was gone. Or maybe the magical feeling was gone because all the wishes had been granted.

I shook my head to clear it of the idea. Though it had only been a few months since I'd first come here, I felt much more grown up. I planned to face the future with a clear head. No more magic fish for me.

“Aneshka,” I said, “seeing the fish won't make any difference. Everyone has to do what they will in their own time.”

Aneshka stamped her foot. “But it will! The fish is magic! You saw it, and we got three wishes.”

“It's true we got our wishes,” I said, thinking back over all that had happened that summer, “but we've worked hard for them too, haven't we. The fish didn't send me to the Llewellyns' house to do their washing, or to Mr. Torentino for jars.” I laughed at a new thought. “In fact, you might say it was Mr. Johnson who granted our wishes. He's the one who sent away the plums, overcharged me for the jars, and made Papa and me go to Trinidad for the order. Why don't you go ask Mr. Johnson for three more wishes, Aneshka.”

She glared at me. “You said you believed, Trina. You said so yourself!”

I nodded. “I did believe, and that's when things really started getting better. I think—” I paused and chose my words carefully, wanting to get it right. “I think the magic was in the believing, and not the other way around.”

Aneshka looked confused, but Old Jan smiled and nodded. “Believing can be powerful magic, indeed.”

“But if there's no magic fish, what is there to believe in?” Aneshka said.

“Your dreams,” I said. “Don't you see? Once we believed we could get our dream, we all started working harder for it and didn't give up. Well,
you
didn't give up, Aneshka, even when I did, and you pulled me back when I strayed. Hard work and believing is what got us our farm.”

“That's not true!” Aneshka said. “How do you explain the plums? How do you explain that Mr. Torentino just happened to know someone with a farm for us? That wasn't our hard work; that was magic!”

“Well, let's think about that,” Old Jan said slowly, considering. “The plums were certainly lucky. But as for the farm, what does Mr. Torentino do for a living?”

“He owns a store,” Aneshka said.

“More than that. He brings all kinds of goods to the mining camps like ours, right? He buys produce from farmers and sells it to Mr. Johnson. He probably knows a hundred farmers, and farming's hard work for low pay. Some of them are bound to be as desperate to get out as you are here. I think opportunities are probably around us all the time, but we have to be looking for them before we see them. What do you think?”

Aneshka frowned, but before she could answer, Papa appeared from upstream with the horses and called to us. Holena and Aneshka both got to their feet. Aneshka gave Old Jan a hug. “I still think it's magic,” she insisted before flouncing off to where Papa was waiting.

“Maybe when Mark sees it like Trina does, his dreams will come true too,” Holena said to Old Jan as she hugged him.

He patted her cheek and smiled. “Perhaps.”

He chuckled as he watched her skip away. “With her wisdom, Holena will always have magic,” he said.

“And Aneshka?” I asked. We watched as she took the reins from Papa and started bullying the horses up the path.

“That one won't need magic. She'll make things happen all on her own.”

“And Mark?” I asked quietly after a moment. “What about Mark?”

Old Jan sighed. “My little Marek has let magic slip through his fingers, and not for the first time.”

“Do you think Holena is right? Do you think he might still change his mind if I write?”

Old Jan gave a sad sigh. “Marek gave up on his dreams when I lost my leg. That was my fault, I suppose, because I quit believing. He tried to revive his dreams this summer, but they are so fragile, Trina. Maybe, when his heart is not so full, he'll find the strength to try again.

“As for me, watching you this summer has me believing again. I think you may be leaving behind just enough magic for the two of us.”

I brushed tears from my cheeks and gave Old Jan a hug. “I'll miss you,” I said.

“Write when you can, child,” he said.

I started back up the path, toward where Papa and my sisters had disappeared around the bend. Just enough magic, he had said, but I was leaving behind more than that. I was leaving behind good people, the hardest thing of all to leave. But just maybe I was leaving behind enough hope for a wish, and of course, there was still the magic carp.

No sooner than I had the thought, I heard the familiar soft
plop
in the water. I turned to look back. Ripples were forming on the surface of the pool, and the fish's nose was just breaking the surface as it nibbled on a bit of Holena's bread. Old Jan turned toward it, and I could see his lips move.

Smiling to myself, I turned and climbed the bank to join my family as we set out once again, chasing the dream that had brought us to America.

Author's Note

WHILE I
have not specified the coal camp in which this story takes place, I have tried to make the setting of this novel typical of the coal camps of southern Colorado around the year 1900. Though they were called “camps,” these were permanent communities where many mining families spent their entire lives. The coal companies owned all the houses, stores, saloons, and gathering places in the towns, and since they were somewhat isolated from other communities, there were few options for residents other than those the coal company provided.

The many nationalities of miners that I have presented are accurate to those found in turn-of-the-century coal camps. Prior to 1900, the Welsh and Scottish were recruited heavily, and they were established in some of the better-paying jobs by the time my story starts. After 1900, the mines recruited heavily from eastern and southern Europe. They believed that by maintaining a large population of diverse foreigners who spoke many different languages, they could keep their labor force from unionizing, since the immigrants could not communicate well.

Of course, the difficulties in communication also led to more accidents in the mines, which increased the distrust among ethnic groups. And mining accidents were common. In 1900, half of all workers' deaths in the United States occurred in two industries: coal mining and railroading.

To create authentic details for the family life of miners, I relied heavily on the book
Coal People: Life in Southern Colorado's Company Towns 1890—1930
by Rick J. Clyne (Colorado Historical
Society, 2000), which not only describes the social life of the camps but contains numerous firsthand accounts of what life was like. Many of the background details of my story are based on the anecdotes recorded in those accounts. I also drew upon visits to the area and historic photos in the Western History Archives of the Denver Public Library, which can be accessed by the general public online at
photoswest.org
. Prices for goods were taken from newspaper ads of the era, and inflated, as they would have been in the coal company stores.

The Eastern European fairy tales told by Old Jan are all traditional stories, although I allowed Old Jan to tell them in his own style, as all traditional storytellers do. Versions of some of the se stories can be found in the Favorite Fairy Tales series, retold by Virginia Haviland and published by Little, Brown and Company. For variety, other versions of the same or similar stories were found on the Internet.

Acknowledgments

I OWE
heartfelt thanks to a number of people. My mother Betty and daughter Leah have always been my first and best readers. I have benefited from the advice, encouragement, and at times much needed nagging, from excellent critique partners: Mike, Megan, Kiersten, Jenn, Victoria, Lisa, and Rebecca. My son Greg has been my go-to idea man and keeps me laughing, and I suspect my husband Ken has stayed in bed longer than he really wanted to some Saturday mornings to give me quiet time to write. In addition, thank you to my young beta readers, Holland and Graham, who helped me see it through middle-grade eyes.

Once my little manuscript got past all of them, it benefited from the wisdom, insight, and professionalism of my brilliant agent, Erin Murphy, and my wonderful editor at McElderry, Karen Wojtyla. And to her patient assistant Emily Fabre and all the behind-the-scenes folks at Simon & Schuster who take a stack of pages and turn it into a beautiful book, thank
you.

MARGARET K. McELDERRY BOOKS

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www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places,

and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Jeannette Mobley-Tanaka

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Book design by Debra Sfetsios-Conover

The text for this book is set in Cochin LT Std.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mobley, Jeannie.

Katerina's wish / Jeannie Mobley. — 1st ed.
p. cm.