Planet Jupiter by Jane Kurtz

Author:Jane Kurtz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow.

Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow.

Whether you like it or whether you know

Oats, peas, beans, and barley grow.

The first week of garden work was damp with bursts of rain. Every afternoon, when we decided we couldn’t work another second, I looked like the algae Topher had showed me when we stayed in the cabin—brown slime in the mountain stream.

It was called rock snot.

Exactly how I felt on our new job.

After Edom and I got cleaned up, we’d go with Mom to find useful things. One afternoon, we figured out the buses to see the St. Johns Bridge, the prettiest of all. The day Madam had a physical therapy appointment, Mom took us to Union Station to walk on a pedestrian bridge. When we got to the middle, she showed us how to jump ten times in unison and then freeze perfectly still.

The whole, long bridge danced and trembled under us. We all looked at each other and started laughing. “I can’t believe we’re making it bounce!” Edom said.

“My friends, you’ve just experienced the boing-boing bridge,” Mom said.

That day was like the best family times in my old orbit.

In the evenings, while Mom played her cello, Edom and I sat on the front porch and watched the parade of people out and about in the neighborhood. Crows gathered close because Edom tended to drop things they liked to eat. A guy passed us rapping softly. Words seemed to float around him like move and prove, learning and burning, in you and continue.

The next week, temperatures climbed into the eighties, and at work, we went from damp to dusty. Like someone turned off a spigot, just the way Victor said. We had to open our windows to sleep. But parts of Madam’s yard looked like swirls of color, and the first raspberry I ate burst in my mouth giving me jolts of joy.

Edom took to everything. Even slug patrol. Every morning, she and Madam turned over boards and pots and grapefruit halves and scooped slugs into a bucket. Most had pulled their little ear things in and looked like pebbles. If you held them on your palm, they lengthened out again and started to crawl.

“Ugh,” I said.

“I don’t judge them for their slime,” Edom said.

“Fine,” I said. “Judge them for their 27,000 teeth that can chomp everything.”

I helped Edom carry the bucket of slugs across the street to dump into Victor’s chicken house. The hens set up a great cackling.

“Slugs are like ice cream for chickens,” Edom said.

I wanted ice cream. Too bad it didn’t come in a family box from the Food Bank. Sisters of the Open Road Café also gave meals, in barter for volunteer work, but Mom and I agreed that downtown place was too intense for Edom. Mom went by herself when Edom and I were on the job.

Mom was drinking a lot of coffee these days.

A lot of coffee.

Both Tuesdays, Edom and I beat the competition to the neighborhood redeemables. I

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