Project Mulberry (15 page)

scientists dont even KNOW if worms HAVE consciousness, not like humans anyway, thats why theyre called a LOWER FORM OF LIFE!!!

 

From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
Date: Sunday, May 27,7:38 PM
Subject:WIGGLE PROJECT PLEASE READ AND REPLY

 

you kill mosquitoes dont you? ALL THE TIME. you dont worry about THEM do you??? WHY IS THIS ANY DIFFERENT?????

 

From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
Date: Sunday, May 27,8:23 PM
Subject:Wiggle project

ARE YOU GOING TO ANSWER ME????

 

From:
[email protected]
To:
[email protected]
Date: Sunday, May 27,9:06 PM
Subject:Wiggle project

I cant believe you would do this to me. its MY PROJECT TOO AND I WANT A CHANCE TO GO TO THE STATE FAIR!

 

Patrick and I weren't speaking. It was the first time this had ever happened. Sometimes I would feel bad about it, but mostly I was too angry at him. He didn't care. He could hardly even look at the caterpillars, much less hold them. It didn't matter one bit to him if they lived or died.

And, although it was hard to admit, I was mad at myself, too. If I'd read the book when he gave it to me, I'd have known what to expect. I was sure I'd still have felt bad about having to kill them, but it might have made a difference.

Somewhere along the line, winning a prize at the state fair had sort of faded from my mind. When had that happened? It was before this—before I found out about killing the worms.... Probably the first molting, when I'd thought they were dead. From then on I was worried about the caterpillars, and the silk, and the embroidery. But somehow I'd stopped thinking about the prize.

So Patrick was still thinking about the fair and the prize, and I wasn't. Did that make one of us right and the other one wrong?

And which was which?

***

I left home early so I wouldn't have to walk to school with Patrick. Not that it was hard—he was avoiding me, too. But we couldn't avoid each other at the Wiggle club. Mr. Maxwell was meeting with everyone about their projects. I heard Patrick go up to him and ask to go last, and we waited until everyone else had left.

Mr. Maxwell must have been able to tell that something was wrong. He looked from Patrick to me and back again and said quietly, "What's up, kids?"

Neither of us said anything for a moment. Then Patrick took a deep breath and explained everything in one of the longest sentences I'd ever heard. He finished by saying, "and you need to talk to her, Mr. Maxwell, because you're a farmer and you kill stuff all the time, don't you, and it doesn't make you a bad person, so could you make her see that?"

Mr. Maxwell leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. "Julia, I know exactly how you feel," he said quietly. "I didn't grow up on a farm, either. And I'll never forget the first time I killed an animal that I'd raised myself. It was a chicken." He smiled, but it was a serious smile. "It was bloody, and messy, and I almost got sick."

He flicked a glance at Patrick. "But Patrick's right.
I do kill things all the time now. Or rather, I send them off to be killed." He paused. "Remember the field trip a couple of weeks ago, those lambs in the first pasture?"

We both nodded.

"They're gone now. I sent them off to the locker—that's the place that does the slaughtering."

I swallowed hard. Those sweet fluffy lambs ...

And I love lamb chops.

Mr. Maxwell spread out his hands in sort of a shrug. "Nowadays, most people get meat already cut up and wrapped in nice neat plastic packages. They don't really want to be reminded that it came from a living, breathing animal."

He looked at us and nodded. "I think it's important not to forget. To feel responsibility for what we eat, and to raise farm animals with respect for their lives. That's why I work the way I do. And that's also why I run the Wiggle Club. I want at least a few kids to learn some of these things, and think about them, and maybe appreciate farming a little more."

He reached out and patted me on the shoulder. "Julia, I'm sorry you're upset about your worms. But I'm also glad in a way. Not glad like hip, hip, hooray. Glad because it means you're really going to appreciate that silk. It's going to mean a lot more to you than if you didn't care."

I took a deep breath.

He'd almost changed my mind.

Almost convinced me that it wouldn't be so bad to kill our worms. The way he had to kill his chickens and his lambs.

But that last thing he'd said—"you're really going to appreciate that silk."

He was
assuming
we were going to make the silk. He wasn't trying to convince me that it was okay to kill the worms—he was only trying to make me feel better about doing it.

Patrick was looking at me, and I knew he knew me well enough to know what I was thinking.

I put on what I hoped was a perfect face. "Thanks, Mr. Maxwell," I forced myself to say. "And thanks for doing the Wiggle Club. You're right—it does make me think about things I never thought about before."

"Great," he said, and grinned. "My good deed for the day." He stood up and put his jacket back on. The three of us walked out of the building. Mr. Maxwell said goodbye and went off toward the parking lot.

I started walking toward home. On my own.

"Jules."

I walked a couple more steps. Then I stopped and turned back.

Patrick didn't try to catch up with me. He just spoke from where he was standing. "I know I'm not gonna be able to change your mind," Patrick said. "I figure we can still finish the animal part of the project. But I gotta ask you something. The other day when—when we were—well, you said you hadn't wanted to do the project in the first place. How come you never told me that?"

He wasn't going to try to change my mind anymore.

It was too much to think about all at once—so much that my mind sort of went blank for a second. But then I focused again. One thing at a time. Patrick was waiting, and he'd made the first move toward trying to fix things up between us, and he'd told me the truth about his phobia, even though it must have been hard.

So it was only fair that I should tell him the truth, too.

"It was too Korean," I said at last. "I didn't want to do the project because it seemed so, well,
foreign.
I wanted to do a really American project."

Now for the hard part. I looked down at the sidewalk in front of Patrick's feet. "So for a while I was only pretending I wanted to do it. I kept trying to find a way out of it. That's why I wouldn't ask my mom for a loan at first. I figured if we couldn't buy the silkworm eggs, that would mean no project. And we'd have to think of something else."

"Oh." Patrick shifted his feet a little.

Silence. The money stuff was still no fun to talk about.

"I'm sorry," I whispered. "I guess I should have told you at the very beginning. But you seemed so—so happy about the idea, and I didn't think I could talk you out of it."

More silence.

"Okay," he said at last. "I just wanted to know." We didn't say anything more the whole way home.

 

That evening, just when I was about to shut down the computer and go to bed, I got an e-mail. From Patrick. No message, just a link to an article on a website.

It was an article about Susan B. Anthony. I knew about her—we'd studied her last year in social studies. She was famous for her work on equal rights for women in the U.S. She'd helped women get the right to vote.

Why the heck was he sending me stuff about Susan B. Anthony?

But I wasn't going to make the same mistake again. I read the article from start to finish.

It was mostly about her house somewhere in New York, and how it was a museum now, with exhibits on her life. And then I came to this paragraph:

 

One display shows a dress made of black silk brocade. The silk was made from worms raised by women of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Utah, and was given to Anthony by them on the occasion of her 80th birthday. (She had the cloth made into the dress.) Susan B. Anthony said of the dress: "My pleasure in the rich brocaded silk is quadrupled because it was made by women politically equal with men. The fact that the mulberry trees grew in Utah, that the silkworms made their cocoons there, that women reeled and spun and colored and wove the silk in a free state, greatly increases its value."

 

So that was why he'd sent it to me.

I sat back in my chair.

Susan B. Anthony was as American as you could get.

I knew then what Patrick had done. He'd probably spent the whole rest of the afternoon and evening searching the Internet. He must have had to make a
huge
fuss to get all his brothers and sisters to let him have the computer for that long. He must have told them it was really important.

But not because he was still trying to talk me into killing the caterpillars. He'd said he wouldn't try to convince me anymore, and I believed him.

What he was trying to do was find something that would make me feel better.

The next morning, I waited out front so we could walk to school together.

 

Ms. Park:
Welcome back! I'm so glad you're talking to me again! Does this mean you've decided what to do?

Me:
No. Yes. What I mean is, I've decided that I can't decide. You're going to have to do it yourself.

Ms. Park:
I am not going to decide this for you.

Me:
Well, how about this then: We end the story now, right here. Without me deciding either way.

Ms. Park:
Oh, I'm sure the readers would just love that.

Me:
I don't care what they think.

Ms. Park:
That's no good. You have to care about the readers. Because without them, you won't exist.

Me:
What do you mean?

Ms. Park:
It's like this: You exist while the story is being written—like right now—but pretty soon the story will get made into a book. And after that, it's the readers who will bring you to life.

Me:
So ... the story has to have an ending that readers will like?

Ms. Park:
Well, they don't have to like the ending. But it's completely unfair not to give them one. It's like not keeping a promise. And you've already told me how much you hate that.

That afternoon we got my mom's permission and went to Mr. Dixon's house to tell him that the worms had spun their cocoons and we wouldn't be needing any more leaves.

We went to the gas station first. We said hello to Miss Mona and thanked her for her help—we told her how we'd ended up getting leaves from Mr. Dixon's tree. Then we bought three rolls of winter-green mints as a thank-you present for him.

My money, Patrick's idea. It was really thoughtful of him to come up with that.

Mr. Dixon greeted us, and we told him our project was almost finished.

"So was it a success?" he asked.

There was a little silence. Then Patrick said, "Yeah, you could say that. I mean, we learned a lot."

Mr. Dixon nodded. "Good. Glad my leaves could help. Will you be coming round again? I hope you'll stop by, time to time."

"Sure, Mr. Dixon," Patrick said. "We could bring the video once it's finished, if you'd like to see it."

"I'll look forward to that," Mr. Dixon said. He winked at us. "You two are going to make my leaves famous, isn't that right?"

We all laughed. Then Patrick and I gave him the mints. He laughed again and thanked us, then told us about the trick of eating them in front of the bathroom mirror with the door closed and the lights out, and crunching down on them hard so you could see sparks in your mouth. I'd known that from a long time ago, but I'd forgotten about it. I thought I'd buy another roll sometime and show Kenny—he'd think it was totally cool.

And then I could use the mints to bribe him when I wanted him to leave me alone.

We walked back, and Patrick went home for supper. I went out to the back porch, lifted the lid off the aquarium, and opened one of the egg cartons just a crack.

The worms had finished spinning. There were nine cocoons in that carton, each one of them a perfect oval. Egg-shaped, but smaller than chicken eggs.

I touched one gently. A nice dry shell around the little pupa inside. It was like a miracle, how worm spit could turn into something so sturdy and beautiful.

Kenny came out and stood next to me. "Can I see?" he asked.

I lifted the carton top a little more.

"Cool," he breathed.

Then he looked at me, his face serious. "Patrick told me. About killing them to get the stuff you need. But you don't want to."

I put the top back on.

"It'd be neat to see the moths come out," Kenny said.

Well, what do you know. The first person who'd said anything at all about the moths.

"Julia, do you have to kill
all
of them? Why can't you just get the stuff from some of them and let the others get to be moths?"

I'd already thought of that. But we'd still be killing them—some of them, anyway. And besides, how would I choose? It would be like playing God, to have to decide which lived and which died.

Mr. Maxwell probably had to do that. There were sheep in the pasture—adult sheep. That meant not all the lambs got slaughtered. Some of them got to live and grow up. How did he decide which ones?

"Maybe you wouldn't have to kill that many of them, Julia," Kenny said. "How much stuff do you need? Maybe just one cocoon-thingy would give you enough."