Project Mulberry (16 page)

I didn't know the answer to his question. The jostling started again.

What if he was right?

What if I only needed one cocoon?

What if I only had to kill one of them?

Which one?

I needed to do some reading.

 

I went up to my bedroom, scrabbled around in the mess for a few minutes, and found the book Patrick had left me. Ages ago. He told me he'd renewed it twice already.

I read the table of contents, found the chapter I needed, and turned to one of the last pages.

 

You can make your own thread by twisting the silk from five cocoons together. Fewer than five and your thread will be too fine....

 

I flipped back a few pages and skimmed until I found the answer to my next question.

 

The silk of each cocoon can be up to a mile long....

 

A mile! Amazing!

Five strands of silk each a mile long, twisted together into one thread.

Way
more than enough to embroider a cocoon.

If we boiled five of the cocoons, we'd have enough thread for the project. The other twenty-one pupae could become moths. And I wouldn't be letting Patrick down.

That was the big picture. It wasn't exponents. It was baby math—even Kenny could have done it. ■

I thought about it all the rest of that evening. Especially while I was embroidering.

I was getting pretty good at embroidery. I'd figured out a few things lately, which helped my stitching a lot. When I was doing outlines, tinier was better. Stitches so small that one by itself looked like a speck. If I kept taking tiny stitches like that, I ended up with a line that was beautifully smooth. I loved seeing how those specks, one after another after another after another, merged together into a nice unbroken line.

It took me almost an hour for just one leaf! And all that time, in between being careful about where I put the needle in and how tightly I pulled the thread, I was thinking about my darling caterpillars.

Five. (Take a stitch.)

Sacrifice five of them, and the rest could live.
(Take five stitches.)

It's not a compromise. Not for the doomed five. Life and death is not something you can compromise about.
(Take two stitches. Undo one and do it over.)

I want them all to live. But I also want to be able to finish our project the way we planned it.
(Three more stitches.)

I want a perfect solution.
(Two perfect stitches.)

There is no such thing as perfect.

Even my leaf. It was beautiful, but it was not perfect. There was a knot on the underside.

And even if there wasn't a knot—if I was good enough to cover up that loose thread—would that make it perfect? Not really. Because the loose thread would still be there. You just wouldn't be able to see it.

Maybe everything in life had its messy bits. Things other people didn't see. Or didn't know they didn't know. Or didn't want to think about.

Maybe that was exactly the reason I had to think about them.

 

On the way home from school the next day, I told Patrick what I'd decided.

He looked shocked at first, and then really, really happy, and then serious. All in about two seconds.

"You sure, Jules?" he said anxiously. "You sure you're okay with that?"

I nodded. I didn't want to talk about it—I might change my mind again.

He said I was a double genius, and our project would be even better because now we'd have tape of the moths emerging. "And you can sew your picture just like you drew it," he said. "You won't have to leave the moth out."

Patrick always said "sew" when he meant "embroider." It bugged me a little, but I guess they must have seemed like the same thing to him. Weird, when he was so hyper about words.

Then he looked more solemn. "I'll do it, Jules," he said. "You can go up to your room, or whatever. You don't have to be there when—when—"

"No," I said. "I want us to do it together."

Something about what Mr. Maxwell had said, and how I felt about the worms—I wanted to be responsible.

"By the way, I've been doing some more thinking," Patrick said, "about—you know, Susan B. Anthony."

We'd never said anything about that e-mail he'd sent me. But I knew that he knew that I knew—well, that I'd appreciated it.

"Pizza," he said.

Pizza? Honestly, just when I thought I had Patrick figured out...

He waited for me to say something, and when I didn't, he went on. "Pizza is, like, totally American, right? But it started out Italian. And now everyone thinks of it as American."

"So?" I didn't see what he was getting at.

"Well, between that Susan B. Anthony dress and us doing this project for Wiggle—maybe someday people will think of making your own silk as a really American thing to do."

Oh, brother. Him and his ideas. But I couldn't help smiling. "I kind of doubt it," I said. "Still, you never know."

"Honestly, Jules, I've always thought it was so cool that your family has all this Korean stuff. It makes things much more interesting. Not like my family. We're just plain old nothing American."

I thought about that for a second. "Patrick, that can't be right. Your family must have come from somewhere else, even if it was ages ago. I mean, everyone comes from somewhere else. Even the Native Americans came from Asia, remember?" Part of our social studies unit.

"I guess so," Patrick said doubtfully. He frowned. "I think my grandma's grandma came from Ireland. But there's a bunch of other stuff mixed in—English and French and some German, maybe." He brightened up. "Maybe I'll make it a project—finding out my family tree."

He grinned at me. "Probably be even harder than finding a mulberry tree."

When we got home, Patrick tore a sheet of paper into tiny pieces. He numbered the pieces from one to twenty-six. Meanwhile, I opened up the egg cartons; I had to use scissors to cut the webbing, but it wasn't hard.

Patrick put one number randomly in the egg-carton pocket with each cocoon. He did this without me looking.

"Okay, Jules," he said. "They're ready."

I was going to pick five numbers. This was how we'd decided to choose the cocoons for boiling. Patrick's idea again.

I stood with my back to the aquarium and said the numbers really fast, without thinking, to make it even more random.

"Twelve, seventeen, four, nine, twenty-three."

"Wait—what were the last two? You were going too fast."

I gritted my teeth. "Nine and twenty-three," I said.

I turned around. Patrick had the five cocoons in his hands.

***

My mom took out a pot. I filled it with cold water and put it on the stove. Patrick stood next to me and handed me the cocoons one by one. I cupped each cocoon in my hand for a second and wondered, Was this the one with the wider stripes? Or one of the big guys?

I said goodbye to each one—silently, of course—before I put it in the pot. I might not have minded saying goodbye out loud in front of Patrick; he seemed to understand—he was being very quiet and sort of respectful. But my mom was there, too, and I didn't think
she
would have understood. She'd probably have thought I was nuts.

At last it was time.

I was lucky in a way. It wasn't like Mr. Maxwell's chicken. It wouldn't be all bloody and horrible. The water would heat up slowly—it'd be nice and warm for a while, and Patrick had told me (about a million times) that the worms wouldn't feel a thing.

I whispered a final goodbye in my head. Then I put the lid on the pot.

And turned on the burner.

 

We kept working. I was a little numb, which was a good thing. We rearranged the remaining cocoons so we had one empty egg carton. After the water had boiled for five minutes, we turned the burner down. Then my mom showed us how to stir the cocoons with a stick. As she stirred, the silk started coming apart in sort of a mass. The stick, from a bush in our backyard, was rough and had little twigs on it, and pretty soon she was able to pick up a single strand.

Then Patrick and I each tried, and between the three of us we finally separated out five strands, one from each cocoon.

My mom took over again. She pulled the five strands and twisted them together at the same time. When she had a couple of feet of twisted thread, she handed the end to me. I held a wooden spool and started winding the thread onto it.

It took
forever.
I couldn't believe how
long
the strands were! We pulled and twisted and wound and pulled and twisted and wound, and the silk never seemed to end. I got so tired of it that I even let Kenny do some. I was faster at twisting and winding than either Kenny or Patrick, but my mom was
way
faster than any of us.

Kenny got bored quickly. He stood behind me and made stupid faces while Patrick was taping me—he did it twice, and Patrick had to stop the camcorder each time. I was about to yell at Kenny when I got a better idea.

"Kenny, I'm busy twisting," I said. "Would you count down for Patrick while he films?"

I gave him my watch. He went and stood next to Patrick, and counted down with his fingers like he'd seen me do, and Patrick finally got some decent tape.

After we'd been twisting for almost two hours, I started to feel a little funny. The feeling got stronger until at last I stopped and stood up. "I'm taking a break," I said quietly and looked at Patrick. "You finish up."

"Okay," he answered just as quietly.

He knew what I was thinking. The cocoons had gotten smaller and smaller, and pretty soon we would get to where we'd unreeled enough silk to be able to see the dead pupae. I didn't want to see them. That wasn't very brave, but I'd done the best I could, and the thought of seeing them like that was too much for me.

I went up to my room and sat on the edge of my bed.

They were just worms.

But they were
my
worms.

I'd taken care of them, fed them, worried about them, watched them grow. And now they'd never get to be moths. I knew I would appreciate the heck out of that silk. But would that be enough to take away the feeling in my stomach—half-numb and half-sick?

Kenny appeared in the doorway. "Julia? Are you sad? Are you going to cry?"

Of course I was sad. "
Leave me alone,
" I said in the coldest voice I could manage.

He hesitated for a moment. "But I got something for you." He held out a closed fist.

"What is it?" Couldn't be much of anything, he was just a baby.

He opened his hand. "Connecticut," he said.

Kenny dropped the quarter into my hand. It was a little sweaty.

I looked at the tree on the back of the quarter. The branches were as pretty as ever—so tiny. Like strands of silk.

"At first I wasn't going to give it to you," Kenny said. "Because I wanna collect them, too. Just like you and Patrick. But now I want you to have it. Except, will you help me start my own collection?"

It hurt a little when I tried to swallow. I cleared my throat. "Sure, Kenny." I went over to my shelf and took down my money box. "You can get started right away. I've got Illinois here, and New York, too—you can have them."

Kenny beamed as he took the two coins. "Julia, you know Connecticut is my favorite quarter," he said.

"Because of the tree?"

"No, because of the story. I heard Patrick tell it to you. Will you tell it to me again? Please?"

So I did. I told him about how the British didn't want Connecticut to have its own government charter, and about the candles getting blown out, and the charter getting hidden in the hollow of a big tree. The tree on the back of the quarter.

"Cool," Kenny said.

From downstairs I could hear Patrick's voice.

"Yum," he was saying. "Thanks, Mrs. Song."

He had gotten his bite of kimchee.

 

The moths emerged, white all over except for their black eyes. I was surprised to see how fat their bodies were. I'd seen pictures before, but I guess I thought ours would be different somehow. They weren't slim and graceful like a butterfly; instead, they were squat and chunky. But their feelers were pretty, with delicate featherings almost like lace. I knew just how I'd embroider them, with tiny outline stitches. And they had adorable little teddy bear faces.

Patrick reminded me that the moths wouldn't eat at all. They didn't even fly. All they did was mate and lay eggs, and they lived for only about ten days.

Ten days? It hardly seemed worth the trouble—all the work of spinning a cocoon. But then I figured that ten days for them was like seventy or eighty years for us. A whole lifetime. I guess if I were a moth, I'd think it was worth it.

Seven of the moths were almost twice as big as the rest. Patrick got really excited about that. "The big ones are the females," he said. He reached into the aquarium and gently picked one up. He looked at me a little sheepishly. "No phobia," he said. "I don't mind bugs at all."

For once, I was the one using the camcorder. I videotaped Patrick holding a moth.

 

A few days later, the moths mated and started laying eggs.

Hundreds
of them. Maybe even thousands. Little gray seeds just like the ones we'd gotten in the mail.

What were we going to do with the eggs? We couldn't keep thousands of caterpillars. If we released them around where we lived, they'd never be able to find any mulberry leaves—they'd just die. Unless we took them to Mr. Dixon's house. And thousands of caterpillars on his little tree—they'd eat it to death.

Mr. Maxwell came to our rescue. He found a place that would take our eggs—a university lab that did research into sericulture. "That's the scientific word for silk farming," Patrick said. We mailed our egg cartons to the lab—the moths had laid the eggs in the pockets—and got a nice thank-you letter back, which Patrick put in our project album.

Besides the letter and the photos, the album held the brochure that had come with the eggs and one other thing: Kenny's pages and pages of temperature recordings. That had been my idea, but I was almost sorry I'd suggested it: Kenny was so proud to have them in the album that he asked to look at it about a million times a day. I had to make sure that his hands were clean and that he always gave it back to me when he was finished.