Eva of the Farm - Hardcover

Dia Calhoun is the author of Eva of the Farm and After the River the Sun as well as the fantasy novels Avielle of Rhia, The Phoenix Dance, White Midnight, Aria of the Sea, and Firegold. She makes frequent school visits, sings Italian arias, fly-fishes, gardens, and eats lots of chocolate in her spare time. She lives with her husband, two cats, and two ghost cats in Tacoma, Washington.

Eva of the Farm


On top of the hill,

I lean against the deer fence

and write a poem in the sky.

My fingertip traces each word

on the sunlit blue—

the sky will hold the words for me

until I get the chance

to write them down.

After the last line,

I sign my name—

Eva of the Farm.

My real name is Evangeline

after the heroine

in an old poem—

Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie.

Even though I’m only twelve,

I dream of being a heroine

of shining deeds—

like Saint Joan of Arc

or Meg from A Wrinkle in Time,

but everyone just calls me Eva.

Dodging the sagebrush on the hill,

I walk on

beside the wire deer fence

that protects our farm.

My job is to check for holes

the deer may have dug

beneath the wire.

It takes an hour and a half

to walk all the way around the deer fence—

our land covers nearly a hundred acres.

Our farm is named Acadia Orchard

after the land in the old poem.

You’d think we grow ambrosia,

or something magical for gods and heroes,

but we only grow plain old apples and pears—

Galas and Anjous—

here in the Methow Valley

in Eastern Washington.

I like those words—

something magical for gods and heroes—

and stop to write them in the sky

so I won’t forget.

I want to be a poet

with a shining imagination,

but whoever heard of a heroine-poet?

There’s nothing heroic

about scribbling stuff

that nobody wants to read—

except maybe my mom,

who is crazy mad about poetry

and Greek mythology.

I don’t show anybody

but Mom

my poems—

not my teachers,

not my friends,

definitely not my dad,

who thinks poetry is useless

because it can’t save the world

from all its problems.

Before Grandma Helen died,

I shared all my poems with her—

sometimes she’d even help me

find the perfect word.

She wanted me to enter my poem

“Waking up at the Farm in Summer”

in a national poetry contest for kids,

but I couldn’t bear the thought

of some stranger judging my poem

and stamping on it

with his big black boot.

Waking Up at the Farm in Summer

I wake

under a skylight

that shouts blue against my glad eyes.

Another sunny summer day!

I scurry

down the ladder from my bedroom loft

to the smell of Dad’s blueberry pancakes

sizzling in the frying pan.

I grin

at our black Lab, Sirius,

with a Frisbee in his mouth—

waiting for the first toss of the morning.

I run

outside with the gray squirrels,

the deer, rabbits, and whip-poor-wills—

high-fiving the newborn world.

As I walk down the hill,

checking the last section

of the deer fence,

dust dances around my feet.

It is hot and dry up here.

I can see my house below,

rising like a wooden ship

in a sea of green lawn.

I can see the orchard,

ruffled with leaves.

I can see the white slash

of the hammock.

I can also see that the west gate

leading to the wild canyon

stands wide open.

In my head I hear Mom shout,

“Close the gate!”

That’s the Golden Rule of the Farm:

Close the gates to keep

the deer out of the orchard.

Five gates stand guard

in the deer fence.

The east gate—

where we drive in from the highway.

The west gate—

where we hike up to the wild canyon.

The south gate—

where I go to play with Mr. Reed’s dog.

The north gate—

where we pick wild asparagus in the Andersons’ orchard.

And the fairy gate—

only three feet high, it leads to the old cherry tree

on the farm where my best friend Chloe used to live.

I think all these gates are chimeras—

that’s a word from the Greeks

that I learned in a book today

while reading in the hammock.

It means figments of your imagination.

Because if something really wants

to get into the orchard,

it will find a way through the gates,

through the deer fence.

I’m happy there is such

determination

in the world.

Sometimes, I want to fling all the gates wide open

to see what might come in.

Unicorns? Dragons? Centaurs?

Maybe then we’d get a little excitement around here.

Even Dad, who, in my humble opinion,

doesn’t have much imagination at all,

might like to see a unicorn eating apples

by the hammock.

After closing the west gate,

I slide into the hammock,

swing and swing,

and remember the poem

I wrote yesterday.

Hammock Queen

In the hammock

I am a queen

in a swinging throne of string

borne by two tall knights—

the maple trees.

I toss dried corn

to my grateful subjects—

gray squirrels who peer

and chatter at me,

paying homage.

On my right stands

the boundary of my kingdom—

the tall deer fence.

Beyond it the wild world

of the canyon threatens—

beckons—

riddled with dragons,

promises of shining treasure,

and perilous quests.

But here,

on my side of the fence, is the Farm—

with rows of apple trees

lined up like soldiers.

Here, in a throne of string,

beside the wild world,

I sway,

stricken to the heart with earth and sky,

knowing,

I belong to this, my apple kingdom.

A wet nose nudges my arm

just as my eyes flutter closed

in the hammock.

“Hello, Sirius,” I say to our black Lab.

I rub his ears,

silky as the yarn Grandma Helen spun

on her spinning wheel.

“You are a good and noble dog, Sirius,” I say.

His tail thumps on the grass.

I jump out of the hammock.

Mom and Dad will be waiting

for my report on the deer fence.

With Sirius following,

I cross the yard,

passing the vegetable garden,

passing the blue spruce trees,

their branches fluttering with quail.

I walk toward the big new shed

that we built last spring

for the farm equipment, shop,

and office upstairs.

Sirius trots behind me

through the door to the shop

where Dad kneels beside our new tractor,

changing the oil.

I remember picking out the shiny orange tractor

with Mom last spring,

remember being astonished by the prices

on the dangling tags.

“Look at all those zeros,” I’d said. “Do we

really have that much money?”

“No,” Mom had said. “But the bank does.

We’re taking out a loan to buy the tractor

and build the new shed.”

Dad, still kneeling beside the tractor,

looks at the oil dripping into the pan.

“At least this new tractor

doesn’t burn oil like the old one.

That’s one more thing we’ve done

to help save the environment.”

He pushes up his round, gold-rimmed glasses,

which are always sliding down his nose.

Mom, who is fixing a sprinkler valve,

glances up at me and asks,

“How is the deer fence?”

“No holes,” I say. “The deer fence is strong.”

“Good,” Dad says.

Mom and Dad work the Farm together,

but they’re always looking for ways

to make more money—

especially now that the economy

is bad,

and our neighbors—the Quetzals—

lost their farm.

Chloe Quetzal, my best friend,

had to move far away

over the lonely mountains

to Seattle.

I can’t imagine losing our farm,

or moving to the city.

To make extra money,

Dad guides white-water rafters

on the Methow River in the summer

and teaches skiing during the winter.

Mom writes fishing, hunting,

and gardening articles

for magazines.

She hunts in fall and winter.

So we eat venison and

duck,

duck,

duck,

and more duck,

and quail and grouse, too.

My brother, Achilles—

named, what a surprise,

after the Greek hero Achilles—

chews on a plastic ring

in his playpen in the shop.

When I pick him up,

he raises his chubby arms,

grabs my nose,

and grins his lopsided grin.

A nine-month-old baby,

he mostly howls and poops.

He’s cute when he is sleeping,

which doesn’t happen often enough,

in my humble opinion—

Grandma Helen used to say

“in my humble opinion”

all the time.

I leave the shed,

go into the house,

and climb the ladder to my loft bedroom—

a fancy way of saying attic.

I call it the Crow’s Nest.

With the skylight flung open,

I look at the sky—

it still holds the poem

I wrote up on the hill

by the deer fence.

To retrieve the words,

I stand still,

so still,

watching,

waiting,

until—

I am blueness,

I am cloud,

I am wind—

I am the sky.

Then the words of my poem

come flying back to me.

They are warm,

as though sprinkled

with all the spices of the sky.

When the poem is all inside my head again,

I write it down

in my best calligraphy.

I write all my poems

in calligraphy in black ink

on white Canson calligraphy paper.

Grandma Helen taught me

to shape the graceful letters

and hold the pen lightly

at a constant angle

in spite of my being left-handed.

I love the whisper of the pen

on the paper.

It makes me remember Grandma Helen.

The Haunted Outhouse

Grandma Helen built

an outhouse with a view

of the sagebrush hills.

“Sitting pretty,” she called it.

“Why not?”

She slapped white paint

on the boards,

carved a smiling moon

on the door,

and planted violets

on every side.

Last year, Grandma Helen died.

Now the outhouse door creaks

in the lonely wind.

The metal roof rusts

in the weeds

on the ground.

But sometimes,

in the moonlight,

through glimmering spiderwebs,

I think I glimpse

Grandma’s ghost—

sitting pretty.

Early the next morning,

I walk up the canyon with Dad.

The canyon winds like a green snake

between the dry sagebrush hills

behind the Farm.

Up and up and up we go—

looking toward Heaven’s Gate Mountain.

The canyon is beautiful.

Aspens—black-and-white Dalmatian trees—

and ponderosa pines

sway in groves

with the on-again-off-again creek

chanting through

like a prayer.

Quail skitter in the brush

and deer graze.

The canyon is dangerous, too.

Cougars, bobcats, and bears

prowl here sometimes,

so I am scared to go up alone,

scared to go through that gate

in the deer fence.

So I go with Dad,

who loves wild places

and wants to save them all.

As we walk along the creek,

I think about dryads and naiads—

those Greek spirits of wood and stream,

like Pan—

and wonder if the Farm and canyon

have spirits too.

I wish I could ask Chloe

what she thinks.

Before Chloe moved away,

we explored the canyon together.

She filled her sketchbook

with pencil drawings

of flowers, leaves, birds, and bugs.

Once she even drew a dead rattlesnake.

Me—I can’t draw to save my life.

Chloe knows all the common names

of every plant and insect,

and all their Latin names, too.

I haven’t seen Chloe

for five long months,

but we’ll be together again in

six weeks,

two days,

and ten hours—

for summer camp in Mazama in August.

We’ve gone to Camp Laughing Waters

every year since we were five.

When Dad and I reach

the first meadow in the canyon,

we find a half-eaten deer

sprawled across the trail.

Her throat is a bloody gash

torn by hungry teeth.

A sour stink already rises

from her guts

savaged across the dirt.

“Wow!” Dad exclaims, pointing.

“Look at the baby deer in the womb.”

On the ground

lies a blob

as white and transparent as tapioca pudding.

Inside, pokes

the delicate hoof

and head

of the baby fawn—

dead.

Sickened, I turn away,

glad Dad didn’t bring Achilles

as he sometimes does,

in the baby backpack.

“Coyotes killed this deer,” Dad says,

“or maybe a cougar.

We’ve scared them away

from their breakfast.”

I spin around

searching for the gleam of wild gold eyes

in the brush.

“I know this is brutal, Eva,” Dad says,

scanning the ground for prints,

“but that cougar or coyote has its own babies

to feed.

It’s just the wheel of life, turning.”

I scan the bowl of hills and say,

“Let’s go home.”

On the crest of the south hill

a black snag—

the tall, spiky stump of a dead tree—

points at the sky.

Lightning must have struck it

during a storm long ago.

Suddenly I see that storm

in my imagination:

A hundred lightning bolts

fracture the sky

into a skeleton of light.

One bolt strikes the tree—

it stands—

trembling,

crackling,

absorbing

unimaginable power.

I blink,

and now I see that the black snag

looks like someone

wearing a black robe with a hood.

My skin creeps and crawls—

the stink of the dead deer

rising around me—

because I know,

just know,

that black snag has a powerful evil spirit.

One branch with a knob on the end

thrusts out like an arm

holding a black ball.

And it points straight at me.

The Demon Snag

Halfway up the canyon

the blackened snag on the hill

looms like a demon,

conjuring and cackling

evil dreams of the wild—

cougar teeth and bear claws and being eaten alive—

until fear cripples my heart.

I sharpen Dad’s ax—

but a demon felled would be a demon still.

I call for a wizard,

but they are too busy fighting dragons.

If I were Joan of Arc,

I could defeat the Demon Snag myself

with a shining sword.

But I am only Eva of the Farm,

armed wi...