“No!” She slapped his hand away. “I thought you were with Jill and her family!”
“Didn’t work out,” Jack muttered. He was still bitter about being pushed into the well. Which is a perfectly reasonable reaction to being pushed into a well.
“Did you find a job in a castle, then?”
“Didn’t work out.” This time Jack had the decency to blush, because that one had been entirely his fault. Think of how much trouble could have been avoided if Jack had been willing to eat vegetables! Then he would have known that pea and pee are very different things. Peas really aren’t so bad, you know. Unless you stick them up your nose as a joke to make your parents laugh, and then one gets stuck, and you have to go to the doctor and have it removed with a long, terrifying tool, and you can’t eat peas for years afterward because you were so traumatized. I’m, umm, not speaking from personal experience or anything. Seriously: DON’T STICK PEAS UP YOUR NOSE. And let’s get back to Jack.
“Can’t I come live with you again?” Jack asked.
His stepmother pursed her lips. That doesn’t mean she turned her lips into a purse, though that would be very impressive. It means she pushed them tightly together in a sign that Jack was not going to get what he hoped for. “Sweetheart, I’m sorry. I have too many other things going on right now. I still haven’t heard back from that idiot huntsman.” She looked with worry at the apple, then tucked it into her cloak. “Cinderella and her husband are liable to burn down the whole kingdom. I haven’t seen Rapunzel in weeks. I think her fair Herr might have eaten her.”
Jack did not understand how anyone could be eaten by her own fair hair! We should introduce him to the prince so they can teach each other some spelling.
But his stepmother was still talking. “And that’s to say nothing of all the stepsisters I’m in charge of. No, Jack, what you need is another job.”
Jack didn’t think that was fair. He wasn’t very old. But back then they didn’t have any nice child labor laws. If you said, “But I’m a kid!” they’d agree that was a very useful thing to be. They’d then send you up a chimney or down a mine, like a pea in a nose.
“Here,” his stepmother said, handing him the reins to a cow. (Did I mention she had a cow with her? I must have forgotten in my distraction over remembering that horrible tool the doctor had to use to get that pea out.) “I was going to train this cow to jump over the moon, but I guess I don’t ever get the time to do what I want to. You’ll have to lead the cow to good pastures and water, and milk her three times a day. You can sell the milk in markets, or make it into butter or cheese and sell that.”
Jack wrinkled his nose. The cow didn’t smell very good. (But it did smell very well, which meant it was yet another female that wouldn’t marry the pigpen cleaner. Poor guy.) And all that leading the cow around, milking her, and making butter seemed like an awful lot of work. “Isn’t there something else I can do, instead? Can I sell the cow for quick cash?”
“You’ve got to stop thinking short-term, Jack. That cow will provide a solid living, which is worth more than a onetime bag full of coins.” She sighed, regretfully looking up at the moon, barely visible in the blue sky. “Next time,” she whispered. “Then all I need is a cat and a fiddle …”
“What?” Jack asked.
“Nothing! You should get to work.”
Kicking moodily at the dirt, Jack tugged on the reins. And tugged. And tugged. It turns out cows are very large, and also are not super fond of being dragged around by grouchy little boys. I can’t really blame her for that. Finally, mooing reproachfully, the cow followed him.
Jack took a path through the forest, looking for a promising meadow. But he didn’t see anything that looked comfortable enough to nap in. He was about to turn around and head back toward civilization when he stopped in amazement.
Rising up from the ground in an impassable wall was a tangle of vines. The wall stretched as far as he could see in either direction. There was no way around it, and no way through it.
Well, almost no way through it. Light shone from a narrow gap. Behind it, he could see a man kneeling on the ground. He was dressed like a gardener. Which is less interesting than being dressed like a garden, but also less likely to have thorns in your underpants. Underplants? See, this is why no one dresses like a garden.
“Hey!” Jack said.
The man looked up, startled. “What are you doing here?”
“What is this doing here?” Jack pointed at the plant wall.
The gardener leaned back, wiping sweat from his forehead. “Leftover from an enchanted castle. Our princess bought it and hired me. Your kingdom is grounded.”
“We’re—what?”
“She put you all in time-out.”
Jack frowned, until he remembered that horrible princess. The last one that had visited the castle. He supposed this was, in a way, his fault. If only he had known the queen meant a pea rather than a pee!
The gardener was leaning through the hole. “That’s a very nice cow you have. It looks like she smells great.”
“Do you mean she smells good, or she smells well? It’s a very confusing distinction.”
“I’ve been looking for a cow. I want to get out of the magic plant wall business, become a sculptor instead.”
“How would a cow help with that?” Jack asked.
“I want to be a butter sculptor. People will come from far and wide to see the wonders I could make out of creamy white butter! I’ll be the most famous butter sculptor in the world!”