Jack (22 page)

O
ne evening, after a long hot day of work, the king opened the grate. He lowered the platform and took the gold coins as usual. Then he lifted a bulging sack above the dungeons. We opened our mouths and held out our arms, but it wasn't food that rained down.

“Egg-quake!” someone shouted.

Eggs crashed down like boulders. They tumbled
down the egg mountain, creating an avalanche. Everyone ran and ducked for cover.

“In here, Jack!” Papa flipped the hollow half of the egg on top of me, closing me in like a baby bird while eggs crashed and clattered over the dungeons. When the egg-quake was over, Papa lifted the eggshell off me. The mountain of golden eggs had been well replenished, and dozens of eggs wobbled and spun all around the dungeon, but no food had come down.

We all looked up, waiting for more, but nothing came. The king replaced the grate and went away.

We dragged through the next day's work as though we had great chains about our ankles. I gathered gold. I drank water to fill my empty belly. By the end of the day I could barely move the cart. We gathered all the gold. It wasn't as much as usual, but the king had to feed us. We wouldn't be able to make his gold if we didn't eat.

Boom, boom, BOOM!

The king arrived. He removed the grate and lowered the platform. Slowly, we lifted the gold and the king raised it up. He counted it. He ran through his usual ritual of sniffing and murmuring to it.

We all waited, parched and wilting, for the food to rain down.

Finally, the king made it rain bread and cheese. Moldy bread. Moldy cheese. The food shower stopped far too soon, and we looked up, waiting for more. All that work, practically starving, and this was our reward?

“Hey! Hey!” shouted Baker Baker. “Where's the rest? This isn't enough to feed a chicken's chick!”

“Be grateful,” the king said. “You made very little gold for me today.”

Baker Baker balled up his fists and turned red all over. Something in him seemed to snap. His patience. His hope. His sanity? “Grateful?
Grateful?
You steal from us and enslave us, and we're supposed to be grateful? You're nothing but a lazy, lying, thieving, stupid tyrant!”

Angrily, the king shot down a pair of fire tongs and snatched up Baker Baker. King Barf lifted him up to the top of the grate and dangled him upside down.

“I am your king!” he shouted. “Everything you have is
mine.
Everything you see is
mine.
The gold you make for me is
mine,
and whatever I choose to give to you, that is
mine,
too. When you are not grateful, it makes me angry.” He tore the food from the baker's arms and then let him go with the tongs so he tumbled down the mountain of eggs and landed in a heap at the bottom. King Barf threw the food into one of the fires, and everyone watched it sizzle and melt and turn to ash.

“Who's next?” asked the king, whipping the tongs in the air. “Who dares to speak against me, your king?”

No one said a word. No one breathed. It was one of those moments when Grandpa Jack would have stood up and fought the king: When all was lost. When no one else would. I was supposed to be Jack the Great, but I didn't feel that way now. I was just another elf, doing whatever King Barf told me to, because I didn't want to get crushed or roasted.

I, Jack, the weak and lowly, could not vanquish the villainous giant.

“P
apa?”

“Hmmm?” Papa was leaning against an egg, half awake. There was just a faint glow from the fires and most people were asleep, but I could not rest.

“Will you tell me a story about giants? One where they get beaten.”

“They always get beaten,” said Papa.

“Tell me.”

Papa spoke with his eyes closed.

“Once there was a giant with two heads, named Thunderdell. He wanted revenge for all the giants Jack had killed.

“Let him come!” Papa spoke in his valiant Jack voice. “I have a tool to pick his teeth!”

But Jack used his wits. The castle was surrounded by a moat, over which lay a drawbridge. Jack ordered his men to cut through the ropes of the bridge until they were just about to snap. He brandished his sword of sharpness, and at length, the giant came.

“Art thou the villain who killed my kinsmen? Then I will tear thee with my teeth, suck thy blood, and grind thy bones to powder.”

“You'll have to catch me first,” said Jack, and he ran onto the bridge. The giant followed after him, swinging his club. But when the giant reached the middle of the bridge, his great weight caused it to collapse, and he tumbled headlong into the moat.

Jack laughed at him. The giant roared, but he could not get out of the moat to take his revenge. Jack wrapped the giant's two heads with rope and chopped them clean off with his sword. The end.”

The story was supposed to make me feel better, but it didn't. I felt hollow and frustrated.

“Papa?”

“Hmmmm?”

“Why did everything come so easy for him?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Grandpa Jack. Everything just…came to him,
like when he escaped the tower room out the window with the rope, or tricked the giant with a lie, and when he chopped off the giants' heads with a swoop of his sword.”

“Maybe it wasn't as easy as it sounds in the stories,” said Papa. “Action takes more effort than words.”

“But we've seen the giants now. We know how big they are. Do you really think he cut off a giant's head? A
two-headed
giant? Even cutting off a nose seems impossible.” I thought of how Martha had plucked my axe right out of my hands.

Papa looked thoughtful. “It was a long time ago,” he said. “I heard the stories from my papa, and he heard them from his, and he from his, and so on and so on. It's hard to know where things got exaggerated or details got left out.”

“Like how the giants live in the sky?”

“Yes, that,” said Papa.

“And how much effort it takes to travel from one place to the next when you are as small as a mouse?” He nodded. “And about giant snakes and toads and spiders, and how maybe not all giants are terrible?”

“Yes, all those things, but the important parts are there. Jack really had to fight the giants, and he really beat them. And there was nothing so great about Jack, not more than anyone else. He wasn't a knight or a soldier. He was a common man, a poor farm boy, just like you. But the thing that made Jack different was that he saw the small things, the things other people didn't notice. Maybe the way he beat the giants seems easy in
the stories, but if it was so easy, how come no one else did what Jack did? How come no one else could beat all those giants?”

I thought about it long into the night. It gnawed at my brain. I was supposed to be like my seven-greats-grandpa Jack. I was supposed to know what to do, but I didn't know anything, and I couldn't shed the feeling that I had overlooked something, but I didn't know what it could be.

There had to be something that could defeat King Barf, something that could get us out of this dungeon, if only it would show itself to me. Where was my rope? My sword of sharpness? Where was my magic?

I could really use some right now.

I
woke to a strange sound, like a moaning wind, but there was no wind in the dungeon. Someone was crying. I looked around. Papa was fast asleep, snoring lightly. Everyone else was sleeping, too. Perhaps I had imagined it. I lay back down.

Then I heard it again. A soft moaning, barely more than a sniffle. I sat up and followed the noise until I came upon someone curled up in the half shell of an egg.

“Tom?” I whispered.

He stopped crying right away.

“Tom, are you all right?”

Nothing.

“Tom, I'm really sorry that I got us trapped here. It's
awful and miserable and you'd rather be with Martha, where there's more fun and food.”

Tom turned over and wiped his sleeve across his face. “You think I'm crying over cheese?”

“Well, Martha would, wouldn't she?” I tried to laugh a little, to help lighten the mood.

“You don't know anything.” Tom sat up, and in the dim light I could just see the glisten of tears on his cheeks and the shadow of his scowl. “Did you know I used to have a papa, too? I did.” In fact, I had wondered about this. “The same giant took us together, but my papa got thrown from the giant's pocket. I grabbed onto his hand, but I couldn't hold on, and he…he fell. He fell a really long way, and I wasn't big enough or strong enough to save him.” Tom's chin quivered, and tears created little rivers through the soot caked on his face.

This was the thing inside Tom I didn't understand. Tom had lost his papa, too. All this time I had been searching for my papa, and I thought Tom just didn't care. I thought he only wanted to have fun and eat, but really he was trying to ease the pain that could not be mended. He knew his papa was gone and could not be found.

“It's not your fault,” I said. “It was the giant.”

“Maybe,” said Tom. “Maybe it's not your fault we're here in this dungeon.”

We were silent for a time and I decided I was tired of the dungeon. I was tired of being tossed and bossed around by a giant. I wanted to do something. I didn't know what, but I was resolved.

“Tom,” I said. “Let's defeat the giants. Let's conquer King Barf.”

I
n the morning I took Tom over to Papa, who was dividing what was left of our food into two small piles.

“Papa, this is Tom,” I said. “He helped me search for you.”

Papa shook Tom's hand. “Thank you for looking for me, Tom. I'm glad I was found.”

Tom smiled and looked down at his feet, just a little uncertain.

“Let's have breakfast!” said Papa, and he divided the food to make a third portion for Tom. None of us had much to eat, but I didn't mind because I was so glad to have Tom talking to me again.

Work was even better with Papa
and
Tom. We raced back and forth from the gold to the ovens, and then we gave each other rides in the carts. Once I lost control and crashed Tom and the cart into an egg, which shifted and upset the whole mountain of eggs.

“Egg-quake!” I shouted, and everyone ran for cover. Tom and I hid beneath one of the carts as the eggs tumbled and spun. When everything settled, an old man yelled at us, “You hooligans can't just run all over the place and crash into things!”

“Sorry, sir,” I said. “We just lost control of the cart.” Tom clamped his hand over his mouth to hold in a laugh.

“You think it's funny, do you? You could have knocked me into a fire! You could have killed me!”

The smile faded right off Tom's face.

“Hey, it wasn't his fault,” I said. “We were just trying to have some fun.”

“This is no place for fun,” grumbled the man.

“Come on, boys,” said Papa. “Back to work.”

We picked up our carts and started gathering gold. I picked up a few more of the yolks, and that gave me an idea.

“Tom,” I whispered, “want to try some target practice?” I pulled my sling out of my pocket.

“What are we going to throw?” he asked.

“These.” I placed one of the yolks in my sling.

Tom brightened right up. “Terrific!”