Fern: A Short Story

Whatever happened to that girl from Charlotte’s Web?

She knew they called her Funny Fern. Never to her face, but she still knew.

“No one means any harm,” her brother Avery reassured her. Fern just nodded. Like most men with more farmlands than farmhands, Avery was too busy to pay much attention to what wasn’t right in front of his face. Only Henry was different.

It was Henry who stopped her from trying to walk all the way to the fairgrounds when she realized who they’d left behind.

“It’s too far, Fern.”

“Plenty of trucks go that way. Someone will give me a ride.”

“The person who picks us up like as not will know yer pa, and tell ‘im,” was all Henry said to that. Fern noticed that he said pick us up and not pick you up and was grateful.

They said it more now that Henry was gone. He died more than twenty long years ago and she still missed him the same, always waking a little surprised to find his side of the bed unslept in.

They were married forty years — good years, even the years of sickness were good years. When the shaking got so Henry couldn’t hold a fork, Fern held it for him. She would have gladly kept holding it for thirty more years but there were only five. At the end, he could not speak, except with his eyes. She read to him in the evenings, and when he closed his eyes for the last time she closed her book and sat there with him until the sun came up before she called for Lurvy.

She never remarried — what would be the point? Henry was the only man for Fern, the only man there ever could have been for her. The only one who knew what really happened those long afternoons in her uncle’s barn, the grief of the empty doorway, and later, the grave down by the creek that ran between the Arable and Zuckerman farms. It was Henry who had chiseled Wilbur’s name into the stone she paid for with money they earned walking beans.

Henry was her first friend and her best friend. She married him and they moved into the Zuckerman farm after her Aunt and Uncle passed away within six months of each other, after seventy years of marriage. At Uncle Homer’s funeral the old people shook Fern’s hand and said what a good man he was. Some of them recalled the summer of the web, saying what a wonderful time it had been. Fern agreed — it had been a strange and wonderful summer.

But everything changed after the Fair.

A picture of the last web message, Charlotte’s final word on the subject of Wilbur’s life, appeared in newspapers in far away places Fern had read about in school — places like Montana and California and New Mexico and Colorado, even New York. Throughout that fall people came to the Zuckerman farm hoping to see the miracle of the web.

They came in cars and trucks and in one case, on horseback. Many of them clutched a newspaper article with the now-famous photo in their hands, the one taken at the Fair of Wilbur standing below the web with the word Humble, looking fresh and pink from a buttermilk bath.

In one of these articles, an entomologist at the University was interviewed about what he called the web message phenomenon.

“I suspect it was a Signature Spider,” he said, “which gets its name from the unique patterns it weaves in the center of its web. The patterns, called stabilimentum, can look astonishingly like letters of the alphabet. A little imagination and the power of suggestion and everyone saw the same word.”

“Charlotte Aranea Cavatica was an orb weaver,” Fern said indignantly. “Anyone could see that.”

“He may be a university professor but he doesn’t know much about life on a farm,” Uncle Homer said when he read the story.

“Nor much about spiders,” added Mrs. Zuckerman.

Most of the web tourists were polite and a little awestruck to be in a place they’d read about in the newspaper. But some acted as though the farm was an attraction at the Fair; upon finding no new web, they stared at Wilbur for awhile, then wandered around the dooryard, their children kicking up clouds of dust chasing the goslings. Sometimes they came right up the steps of the farmhouse and cupped their hands around their eyes as they peered through the kitchen window, startling Mrs. Zuckerman.

“It’s got so I never know who I might run into when I go out my own front door,” she told Fern’s mom.

When a preacher set up a tent on the edge of town, Fern and Henry snuck into the back of the crowd to listen.

“Our Creator has spoken in a still small voice among the humble barnyard animals — the cow and the pig, the goose and the goat. Just as He has spaketh through the burning bush in the desert so too He now speaketh through the spider in its web,” said the preacher.

Fern wondered what Charlotte would think, being compared to a burning bush..

“Let us embrace this miracle and learn what our Creator wants of us through these messages. Let us pray.”

Fern thought it was pretty obvious what the creator of the web wanted from everyone — to save Wilbur from the holiday dinner table. But she stayed quiet.

Everyone was surprised when Lurvy went to the front of the tent and let the preacher dunk his head in a barrel of rainwater. Everyone but Fern, that is. Lurvy was the only person who spent more time in the barn than Fern; he’d spent many hours gazing at Charlotte’s web and the words written there.

“It gets so you don’t want to look at anything else,” he told Fern. “When the light comes through in the morning real pretty like, it’s like looking at God’s own handwriting.”

“You are washed in the blood of the lamb,” the preacher proclaimed when he ducked Lurvy’s head. Everyone clapped at the drenched and smiling Lurvy. Fern was just glad that Lurvy was drenched in water and not blood like Fern’s father and Uncle Homer on butchering day. She thought that if people really knew what happened to animals they would lose their appetite for chicken and steak and ham.

Since the summer of the web, Fern has never eaten meat. That summer, none of the Arables did. It wasn’t something they discussed, just something that evolved, when Mrs. Arable started putting more vegetables on the table. Broccoli baked into a casserole of sweet onions and potatoes topped with buttered breadcrumbs. Broiled tomatoes crowned with fried squash blossoms. Green peppers stuffed with spinach and carrots and mushrooms, tomatoes and cheeses, topped with crispy onions.

“The land provides all we need,” Mr. Arable said often, after grace was said and before they began passing the steaming bowls and platters.

“Hear hear,” cheered Avery, sounding, Fern thought, like one of the goslings.

“Not at the table dear,” Mrs. Arable said, and passed the basket of cornbread.

Mrs. Arable told Dr. Dorian about this change in Fern’s diet, worried it might affect her growth.

“How’s her energy?” asked the doctor.

“More active than ever,” said Mrs. Arable. “Just last week Fern and Avery and Henry Fusse picked and cleaned all the Zuckerman’s strawberries. Homer paid them a dollar each.”

“Remarkable!” Dr. Dorian said.

Not long after the fair a reporter from Chicago came to the Arable house to interview Fern with her parents. With a twinkly smile he asked Fern, was she sure the web wasn’t something she and her little boyfriend Henry had cooked up — maybe a joke that went too far?

“I’m sure,” Fern said, confused. No one who had seen Charlotte’s web had ever asked her that. They sometimes said they couldn’t believe their eyes but no one ever said anything about not believing Fern.

“Terrific, radiant, humble…..those sound like the vocabulary words a school girl might be studying,” the reporter said.

“John,” said Mrs. Arable.

“Those were the words Templeton brought to Charlotte,” Fern said. “From little scraps of newspapers and magazines.”

“Who is Templeton?” the reporter asked, his pen scribbling something on his notepad.

“A rat,” Fern told him.

“John,” said Mrs. Arable.

“Ah! A rat. And why did a rat bring words to the spider? Didn’t the spider know any word’s himself?” the reporter wondered.

“Herself,” Fern corrected. “Her name was Charlotte and she asked Templeton to find words. For inspiration.”

The reporter looked up from his scribbling.

“You’re saying the spider talked?” he asked. He scribbled rapidly, even as his eyes seemed never to leave Fern’s face.

Fern nodded. “They all do,” she said.

“All spiders talk?” the reporter asked.

“Oh I wouldn’t know that,” Fern said. “I meant, all the animals in Uncle Homer’s barn.”.

“Fascinating!”” said the reporter. “One might even say, terrific, hmmm?”

“John,” said Mrs. Arable

Mr. Arable stood up. “You’ll be leaving now,” he told the reporter in a polite but firm voice.

When the reporter did not stand up, Mr.Arable pulled him to his feet by his upper arm.

“Here, here!” said the reporter. Mrs. Arable held the door open. The reporter kept protesting, but Mr. Arable, like all farmers, was a strong man, and he led the reporter down the steps and seated him in his automobile and stood with his hands on his hips while the reporter drove off.

Mr. Arable came back into the house where Fern sat watching out the window.

“Fern, there will be no more talk of talking animals,” he said sternly.

“John,” said Mrs. Arable.

“Yes father.” Fern’s voice was very small.

The reporter published his story. “NOT SO TERRIFIC: WEB HOAX REVEALED,” shouted the headlines. And underneath:”Girl Claims Animals Talked To Her.”

“I never said any such thing,” Fern told Henry. “I just listened to them, they never said anything to me. Just each other.”

People in town stared at Fern when she went to church. Some pointed and laughed, though most of the folks who had visited the farm and saw the web staunchly defended Fern — Lurvy loudest among them. There was no doubt, they said, that words were written in the web.

Others argued that there had been no spider in sight which of course was true — Charlotte had always stayed well hidden.

“You saw her,” Fern said to Avery. “You tried to knock her down with a stick.”

“Sure did,” Avery said. “She was a big ‘un! I was going to keep her in a jar with holes in the lid.” He paused. “I never heard her say nothing though.”

At school some of the kids teased Fern. Frank and Lenny Smith were the worst. Their father was a hog farmer with more than a hundred pigs. None of them had names; Frank and Lenny referred to them as “heads”. “We have a hundred head of hogs,” they’d say. “Someday our pa will have a thousand head.”

“Some pig,” Frank muttered as Fern walked past him in the schoolyard. Lenny carved Some pig on Fern desk.

A few kids brought beetles and grasshoppers to school in matchboxes and asked Fern what they were saying, then skipped away laughing and chanting “Funny Fern, Funny Fern! Talks to animals in the barn!”

Henry stood up for her. “Fern doesn’t lie,” he told them. “If she says they talked then they talked. Maybe you don’t understand their language is all.”

Fern was grateful, for Henry had never sat in the barn himself listening to Wilbur and Charlotte, or Templeton, or the geese. He’d only seen the web.

“But what does it mean, terrific?” Henry asked Fern, right after Charlotte wrote it.

“Maybe it means what we want it to mean,” Fern said.

They were laying flat on their backs in the haymow so that they were looking straight up into a blue sky puffy with clouds.

“Anyway don’t you think it is terrific?” Fern asked. “Is there something more terrific than the word terrific in a spider web happening around here?”

“The top of the Ferris wheel at the county Fair,” Henry replied promptly, which was all it took to get them talking about what foods they would eat and what rides they would ride at the Fair that was only four weeks away. In the barn below them Wilbur snoozed in the afternoon sun, while Charlotte gathered the silk from the tattered letters in her web,readying herself for the next word.

After the article, people stopped stopping by Zuckerman’s farm. The preacher packed up and left town. A week passed with no visitors, then another. The weather turned cooler and Fern and Avery wore sweaters to school.

Eventually people forgot, as they will; life, as they say, moves on. Even the most remarkable events stop being remarked on as they recede into the past, and new events take place.

There was the harvest, and the long fall season of hayrides and bonfires. Fern and Henry sat close together on a log and roasted marshmallows and in the flickering light with straw in her hair Fern told Henry for the first time that she loved him.

Autumn vegetables appeared on the Arable table — roasted eggplant and butternut squash soup and Fern’s favorite, pumpkin pie. But not pork; never again did Mrs. Arable serve ham, or bacon. Some things in life are inexplicable, almost unbelievable, just as some are indisputable; that Wilbur was some pig was one of these things. On that the Arables would always agree.

There was also Joy, and Aranea and Nellie — the only of Charlotte’s children who did not balloon away. Each of them spun a web at night, as is the way with orb spinners. Each morning the webs were just webs, sometimes containing unlucky insects — nothing more and nothing less.

“It’s a miracle,” Mrs. Zuckerman exclaimed when she saw the three webs.

“But they don’t have words in them,” Lurvy objected.

“That doesn’t make them any less miraculous,” Mrs. Zuckerman said in a scolding, quavering voice, and no one contradicted her.

None of the girls, as Wilbur called them, were as large or pretty or as talkative or knowledgeable as Charlotte, who was truly one of a kind. But they were cheerful and interested in the world around them, and they loved Wilbur and kept him company, and eventually produced egg sacs of their own.

Wilbur grew old, and if he was lonely without the friend who saved his life a second time, he was still luckier than most pigs — for how many of us are saved even once? — and he vowed to live each day to its fullest. It was a vow he mostly kept, and if he cried every once in awhile for the friend he missed from the best summer of his life, he still had Fern and sometimes old Templeton to talk to, and farm life was a good life.

Wilbur never regretted the deal he struck with Templeton except to wish the rat had not indulged so much. Had he not grown so enormously fat Templeton might not have gotten stuck in one of his own tunnels, no one realizing until the barn began to smell.

“It’s not a rotten egg,” said the goose. “I’m abso-abso-lutely-lutely sure!”

Everyone complained about the mysterious bad smell, unable to find the source. But Wilbur thought he knew, when his slops went untouched for a whole day, then another. It was Lurvy who found Templeton wedged in the tunnel beneath Wilbur’s trough.

“Look at the size of that thing,” Lurvy had all but screamed in horror as he dragged Templeton’s corpse out. It was even larger in death, bloated with gasses as it was.

When John Arable heard an extraordinarily large rat had been found in the Zuckerman barn, he came over for a look. Templeton’s nest was also found, littered with foul smelling bits of food he saved for later, a bottle cap or two, the tongue of an old shoe, a tin can with moldy beef clinging to it, scraps of paper.

Mr. Arable picked up one of the scraps and stared at it for a long while, saying nothing, before putting it in his pocket.

With Templeton gone Wilbur had first pick of his own slops again, and quickly regained the weight he’d lost after the death of Charlotte. Despite becoming quite large, no one ever suggested Wilbur should meet the fate of most pigs. He was some pig, terrific and radiant and humble, to the very end of his long life.

“Those were wonderful days,” Uncle Homer would reminisce, scratching Wilbur’s back with a stick while he ate, and Wilbur sighed in agreement.

Wilbur filled his days with eating and napping and talking to the latest spiderling to spin a web in the barn doorway. He told each new set of spiderlings the story of the summer of the web, and how Charlotte saved his life. And with each new generation there inevitably would be one or two who took a liking to the barn, and to Wilbur, and would set up housekeeping in the barn doorway.

The last spider to spin her web in the barn doorway was Chelsea, who would often drop a drag line to dangle in front of Wilbur’s face while they talked. Wilbur, like most pigs, was nearsighted, a condition that worsened with age. There was nothing wrong with his hearing, however. To the end of his days, Wilbur was forever listening for the still small voice of Charlotte’s descendants like the loyal friend that he was.

Fern happened to be in the barn seated on the milking stool when she heard his last conversation.

“Why do you tremble?” Chelsea asked Wilbur.

“I am trembling for joy,” Wilbur said. His voice was very weak but Fern could still understand him perfectly. Such is the way with lifelong friends.

“Why do you feel joy?” Chelsea asked.

“Because I will soon. see my friend again,” Wilbur said. He told Chelsea — or maybe he only thought he did for he was very tired these days — how he had begun dreaming of a voice calling his name and looking up in the doorway to see a spider web with the word Soon.

“That’s a nice dream,” Chelsea said. Fern thought so too.

Ever since riding the Ferris wheel with Henry at the fair, Fern would sometimes dream of flying, perhaps one of those planes with the smoke coming out of it that crowds gathered to see at the Fair. If she could do that, she thought, people would look up and marvel at the words she wrote in the sky, just like Charlotte.

But what word would she write? Fern didn’t know; she only knew that it would have to be exactly the right word, a word that made people think of good things and not bad. A word with not too many letters.

After Henry and Lurvy passed, Avery — who lived in their childhood home down the road — was the only person besides Fern who had seen Charlotte’s web with his own eyes. Fern reminded him.

“How long ago was that?” Avery asked, scratching his head.

“Avery how can you forget such a thing?” Fern scolded. But she knew. Times had grown hard for farmers. The town had long since dried up; people sold their land and moved away. Most had the same buyer — the Smith Brothers. They bought the farm adjoining the Zuckerman farm and where before there had only been corn, there was now a series of long windowless sheds, housing hogs.

At first Fern had hopes the pigs next store might mean friends for Wilbur, and was glad. But they rarely saw any of the pigs, except from a distance; large animals that were alway stained dark with their own filth. Even if one had wanted to talk to Wilbur it would have been impossible: between Wilbur peering through the fence slats and the low sheds lay a stinking lagoon of manure. Fern could smell if she left her kitchen window open.

Despite this life at the Fussie farm was happy, though they had their troubles like everyone else. Money for Henry’s treatments was scarce, but they always managed to bring a good crop or sell enough of Fern’s canned vegetables and homemade pies to get by. Or so Fern had thought.

In the summer of her seventy ninth year, when the black car drove up the long driveway and parked in the dooryard, Fern knew right away it did not contain curious web tourists who still came around from time to time.

The driver got out of the car and walked around as if he had every right to be there, taking photographs of the farmhouse, the barn and the fields beyond with one of those Polaroid cameras that spit out a picture while you waited.

How Henry would have loved one of those, Fern thought.

The sun was still summer-warm and the leaves had barely begun to turn colors. The man wore dungarees that were so blue and stiff they made swishing sounds when he walked, a red checked shirt like the one Mrs. Zuckerman put on the kitchen table for everyday, and a straw hat that had not yet taken the shape of his head, so new it was. He bore more than a passing resemblance to the scarecrow Lurvy had posted in the cornfield, Fern thought, and tried not to chuckle.

“Good afternoon,” said the man. “Are you Mrs. Fern Fussie?”

“Since you are on my property it seems to me you should be the one telling your name,” Fern said.

“Pardon me,” the man said. “I am Harold Miller, Esquire, and I represent the Smith Brothers. I am here to discuss the sale of this property,” he said.

“It’s not for sale,” Fern said shortly.

“Oh but it is already sold,” said the man. “According to the sheriff, your taxes are more than five years in arrears. Whoever pays them owns this place free and clear.”

He handed Fern a paper that bore a red stamp.

“”The Smith Brothers have paid off what you and your husband owed,” the man said. “They are generously offering to let you continue to live here for as long as you wish. Just a small matter of establishing a market rate rent of course.”

“What if I say no?” Fern asked.

“It doesn’t matter what you say. These premises will be incorporated into the Smith Farms hog operation,” the man said. “The buildings will be razed to make room for an abattoir.”

He got back into his black car and rolled the window down.

“”We could tie this up easy without involving the Sheriff, who will auction off your personal items to the highest bidder. You don’t want strangers coming here picking through everything you’ve worked so hard for, right? Asking you if you’ve heard any animals talking to you lately — because they will, you know. People still remember.”

He started the car, the smell of oil blending with the stench of the distant manure lagoon.

“I suggest you look that paper over very carefully, Fern.”

“Mrs. Fussie,” Fern corrected him. She crossed her arms and fingered the tiny arachnid that dangled from a thin silver chain around her neck, a wedding gift from Henry.

“My apologies Mrs. Fussie.”

She watched him drive off, holding her apron over her nose so as not to breathe the dust kicked up by the car as it drove too fast down the long gravel driveway. It bounced hard in the ruts, Fern was satisfied to see. She felt an unexpected, fierce little gladness at the repairs that had gone untended since Lurvy had his stroke, passing just two years after Henry and leaving Fern alone on the farm.

As he got older Lurvy would reminisce more and more about the summer of the web

“W-we saw it, didn’t we F-f ern?” he would slur. Talking had become difficult for Lurvy; the stroke had frozen the left side his face. Fern concentrated on the right side, which could still smile.

“Me n’ you. We sh- sure did.”

Fern never asked Lurvy what he meant. She knew.

“We sure did,” Fern agreed.

“He w-was s-some pig,” Lurvy said.

“Yes,” Fern always said. “He was terrific.”

Lurvy would always laugh at that, then carefully recount, in his blurred voice, each word that had appeared in the web and how he, Lurvy, had always been the first to spot it, and run to tell Uncle Homer. He wasn’t always easy to understand, but Fern didn’t mind; after all she knew the story as well as he did, and some parts even better.

“Thank you Fern for caring for m-me,” Lurvy would say.

“You’re a good man, Lurvy,” Fern would always reply, and meant it.

Lurvy would nod and close his eyes, either thinking about that long ago time or sleeping — Fern was never sure, but was glad for the little smile that played at the right corner of his mouth.

It’s not often in our lives we meet someone who is a good friend and a good listener. Fern was both.

Fern took the letter with its red stamp like a bloodstain out to the barn. When she was especially tired or sad she liked to sit on the milking stool that still sat next to Wilbur’s old pen. Here she could have a good cry when things were particularly hard for Henry, and later, Lurvy, without them hearing her. To see her cry would have worried them both terribly.

The barn looked much the same as it did that long ago summer. Uncle Homer added a horse stall and made a bigger trough for Wilbur, and filled in the old trough where they’d found Templeton. Although there had been no animals in the barn for many years, it seemed the warm comforting smell of them had seeped into the wooden beams, twined into the fibers of Lurvey’s old rope lasso still hanging on its peg, creased into the creaky old leather of the horse saddle hanging next to it. Hardly aware she did so, Fern touched both fondly every time she passed them.

Now she looked around the familiar place, smelled the familiar smells. How could she possibly leave? But she had no money to pay back taxes — an amount so large she could only look at it sideways before her eye skittered away like a mouse before a broom.

“Henry, I don’t know what to do,” she whispered. Her eyes filled with tears and she cried for a little while surrounded by the ghosts of her old friends. Perhaps she even slept. Certainly it seemed like she was dreaming when the low voice came out of the dark.

“I have an idea, Fern.”

Fern sat up, straw in her hair. “Henry?” she called, confused.

“My friends have always called me Charles,” said the voice. “But Henry is a nice name, I like it better.”

Fern looked around, confused. Was she dreaming?

“Where are you?”

“If you promise to stop crying, I promise we will talk again tomorrow,” said the voice.

And though Fern listened hard the voice didn’t speak again. The night was filled with the songs of the peepers and the cicadas.

“Old woman, you are getting as funny as they say you are,” Fern muttered. “Imagining voices.”

But the voice wasn’t her imagination, any more than the web high up in the doorway of the barn and sparkling with dew in the morning light was her imagination.

Henry, it said.

“Salutations,” Fern whispered.

The spider sitting at the top of the web lifted a leg,

“Are you Ch…Henry?” asked Fern

“At your service,” the spider replied.

“Where did you come from?” Fern asked. “There hasn’t been a spider here in I don’t know how long.”

The barn had been empty these last ten years; with Lurvy gone, Fern no longer had the capacity to care for cows and sheep and geese, as her Uncle Homer had. She focused instead on her garden, where pumpkins, cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes grew in abundance. Each year Avery planted and harvested the corn and winter wheat that helped Fern get by. It wouldn’t be enough to pay the back taxes, she knew without having to ask Avery.

“I ballooned over from the Smith Farm next door,” said Henry.

“They often talk about this barn — and you, Fern. And about some words they say you put in a spider’s web.”

“It was Charlotte’s web,” Fern said. “She put the words there.”

“Yes well of course they made no mention of my cousin, but word gets out all the same.”

“They’re going to tear down Wilbur’s barn and build a slaughterhouse,” Fern cried.

“Such a pity,” said Henry. “It’s a very nice barn.”

“I don’t have the money for their taxes,” said Fern. “Even if I did, they’ll just wait til I die and take it. Avery could never manage this place and his own. I can’t bear it!” Fern cried.

She wept for awhile in the quiet of the barn, where now only the swifts and the swallows lived.

When her tears dried she saw the web had snared an insect. The spider dropped rapidly to the center of the web. Fern knew what happened next — Charlotte had been quite matter of fact in the manner she was obliged to feed herself: wrap the victim in silk, bite it so it couldn’t feel anything, and suck its blood. It was all a bit gruesome but Fern didn’t care. She was glad to have at least one friend in the world. Life on the farm had never been the same without Henry and Lurvy.

She was under no illusion that a word in a spider’s web could save her from being forced out by the Smith Brothers. Not even a word writ high in the sky could do that. There wasn’t a word that powerful, she thought.

Still it was a nice thought. She remembered the long nights watching Charlotte weave, hearing the tiny voice chant to itself ( Up, to the right. Connect. To the left now, that’s it. Now down!)

She remembered Mrs. Zuckerman’s comment as she watched Lurvy wash Wilbur and Uncle Homer bustling about readying for the crowds that came out to stare at the web, and Wilbur.

“Seems to me it’s some spider,” she had said, and winked at Fern, who had winked back. How Fern longed for her wisdom now.

The spider’s next words made her head jerk up in surprise. She’d nodded off in the barn again, something that happened more and more since Lurvy passed.

“You could burn it all down,” Henry said pleasantly. But when Fern looked up in the doorway, there was no web, and no spider.

“It doesn’t mean a thing,” she told herself. She knew all spiders collected the silk from their old webs in order to spin new ones. She knew male orb weavers didn’t always spin webs — that mostly the females did.

She looked up at the top of the barn doorway, where a spider could crawl into any number of large knotholes to hide from sharp-eye birds and little boys. Was that a thin leg protruding from one?

“Good night,” Fern called softly. “Good night, Henry.”

There was no answer. Fern went inside. That night she dreamt of Henry, as she often did. The two of them seated on a log, marshmallows on sticks, their faces lit by fire.

“Those Smith brothers are trying to take Wilbur’s barn,” Fern told him. But Henry just smiled.

“They can’t, though,” Henry said. “You know that.” And brushing the straw from her hair, he kissed her.

The next day in the hour between sunset and darkness Fern walked the fence line of the farm as she always did, keeping an eye out for weeds and gopher holes and picking up any rocks she found and saving them to toss into the creek that ran past Wilbur’s grave.

Beep, went the horn of a red truck trundling past the farm. The arm cocked in the open driver’s window waved at Fern and she lifted her hand in return in the way of country folk.

There was a time when the road that ran past the farm was clogged with slow moving traffic, all there to see the miracle of the web. Fern remembered the sound of them passing the house as her family passed bowls of sweet corn and green beans and mashed potatoes with mushroom gravy around to each other.

Now the only sound was the slight crackle of flames. Behind her, smoke filtered through the door cracks of the farmhouse, covering the smell of the awful manure lagoon.

Carrying a wooden cigar box that had once belonged to her father John Arable, who had once spared the life of a runt pig because his daughter asked him to, Fern climbed up to the haymow where she and Henry had spent long afternoons talking about so many things — the words in Charlotte’s web, where people — and animals — go when they die, why people eat some animals and keep others as pets.

She lay back and looked up at the fluffy white clouds sailing the blue sky. She remembered, once upon a time, wishing she could fly there, writing her own message for the world to see.

She wished for Henry and lit the match, dropping it into the stall below where a lonely little pig once cried himself to sleep in a bed of straw.

As the flames rose the barn was suffused with a clear golden light, limning the word in the new web in the same corner where an uncommonly large and beautiful barn spider named Charlotte had once spun her web. Fern smiled.

“Thank you, Henry,” she called.

In the distance, sirens.

A neighbor saw the smoke rising from the Zuckerman place and called the fire department. By the time the trucks arrived the house was a total loss, the barn half burned, its contents blackened and ruined.

As the firefighters continued their work the EMTs quietly loaded a blanketed figure into the back of the ambulance.

“It would have taken a miracle to save her,” said one of the EMTs.

“Does she have any people?” asked another.

“Avery Arable, lives the next farm over.”

“I’ll call him and tell him the news.”

They got into the van and drove away. They drove without sirens or flashing lights, for there was no emergency.

“Grandpa, look!” cried young Adam Arable. He was the spit and image of his grandfather at the same age, and got into the same kinds of trouble.

Avery took the charred wooden box from his grandson’s hands — a box Avery had carved for his father as a gift when he was about Adam’s age. Inside was a watch with a chain, a pretty handkerchief of Mrs. Arable’s, and scraps of paper, crumbly to the touch.

“What’s it say, grandpa?” asked Adam.

Avery picked up the top scrap and read it aloud.

“Some pig.”

“Some pig!” Adam repeated, running off to see whatever else there was to see.

Avery read the next scrap. (“Terrific”)

And the next (“Radiant”)

And the next (“Humble.”)

“Grandpa!” called Adam from the barn. Avery saw his grandson pointing up at the corner. The morning sun rising caught and reflected the dew on the web. He looked for a long time.

“Grandpa what does it say?” Adam pestered.

“Remember,” Avery said, his voice thick with tears. “It says, remember.”

Originally published at http://reliablyuncomfortable.com on May 12, 2023.