5
The Ekenberg Farm had been the Ekenberg Farm for generations.
Seasons came and went, sleepy cattle wore paths into pastures, neighbors traveled back and forth to town on the gravel road that ran beside the lower fields, and the Ekenbergs worked their land.
Even as other farms around them were getting carved up and sold off, the Ekenbergs remained where they were and did what the Ekenbergs had always done.
They were such a constant that folks in Medley used the old farm as a landmark when giving directions.
‘Go past the Ekenberg Farm, and it’s the first house on your right.
’ Or, ‘Head east like you’re going out to the Ekenberg Farm, but take a left at the fork.
’ The Ekenbergs were the sort of people you could count on being there, decade after decade, for centuries on end.
Until Asta.
Asta had been something of a mystery to her parents from the start.
When Asta’s cousins were visiting from the city, they adapted quickly enough to the early mornings of farm life, but Asta, despite the fact that she had been born on the farm and grown up there, stayed curled in bed as long as she could to avoid going out to do her chores.
Her poor mother spent many a morning wrestling the girl into her overalls and barn coat with Asta slumped over her shoulder, sleepy and unwilling.
Mama would hand her over to Papa, who would drag her to the barn and set her to work, only to find her a few minutes later, leaning against a tractor wheel or a hay bale, snoring away.
‘Uh oh,’ Papa would tease, shaking her shoulder. ‘Looks like the sleep monster got you again. Come on, Asta girl. You’re not getting out of it that easy.’
Asta tried to stay awake. She would raise her eyebrows as high as they would go and blink her eyes to perk them up.
She tried waving her arms around, but that only startled the chickens.
And as soon as she stopped, along came the sleep monster, wrapping its soft, heavy arms around her and dragging her down, down, down.
At night, it was the opposite problem. Asta would be sent to bed before she was tired, and while she would do her best to sleep, it just wouldn’t happen – especially in the summer, when the sky was still light, and she could hear the birds singing their evening songs.
Asta wanted to be down at the creek catching lightning bugs or climbing the big oak in the upper fields, and dreaming up new games to play.
But instead, she was trapped in her room, in her bed, dying of boredom as she waited for the sleep monster to make its slow way back to her.
She felt trapped there, staring at the glass sleep charms that Mama had hung over her bed.
To amuse herself, she imagined she was running one of those obstacle courses like she had seen on TV in those few moments that she was allowed to watch before being shooed upstairs.
She devised clever strategies for scaling the walls and leaping across crocodile-filled gullies.
Her restless body would flex and squirm as she played her imaginary games.
Sometimes she couldn’t help herself, and she would have to get up and try one of the jumps from one end of the bed to the other, crashing about until Mama came in and yelled at her to stop and for god’s sake go to sleep.
One night, when Asta was twelve and getting too old to be sent to bed anymore, she parked herself in the living room by Papa’s scratchy plaid chair until he drifted off watching one of his game shows.
After a commercial for soft drinks and another for an expensive illusion pet that would last three whole days before needing a recharge, a new program began.
It was a live broadcast of a dragon race.
A fiery logo flashed on the screen. The Silverscale Grand Prix.
Asta’s whole body lit up. Even on their small television with its slightly pixelated display, she could see the bright lights beaming down on the track where dragons champed and roared and tore around and around, over flaming obstacles and through water trenches, trying to beat each other to the finish line.
Asta loved dragons. When she was ten, a traveling carnival had come through Medley.
The flyers had advertised live dragons, but all they’d had was a pair of rather bored-looking drakes.
They looked, Asta thought, a little like the orange salamanders that she caught by the creek – only their skin was scaly instead of smooth, their legs were a bit longer in relation to their bodies, and they were the size of rhinoceroses.
Impressive, but they weren’t what she had hoped to see.
The western dragons now galloping on the television were the creatures of her dreams. They had huge wings and curved horns.
Some were crested with bright feathers. Others had neck frills that they could raise into a fearsome collar.
Their long, almost cat-like legs made those drakes look like squat old toads by comparison.
When the first dragon on the TV approached the fire hedge, the creature let loose its own blazing breath, and the fiery wall faltered.
The dragon leapt through, its rider tucked down tight to avoid the searing heat.
The dragons crashed over the fences and fought their way up the rockslide, leaving Asta breathless.
And then, at the top of the mountain, the dragons took flight. The cheering of the crowds sent shivers down Asta’s spine. She was up on her knees, her eyes glued to the screen. Her heart had shaken off its sleep monster at last and had come wide awake, racing alongside the dragons.
‘I wanna do that,’ Asta said, her voice reverent and awed.
Papa stirred from his snooze, and his head jerked up. ‘What’s that?’ he said.
‘That.’ Asta pointed. ‘I want to do that.’ She sank back against her father’s chair, bringing her right knee under her chin and wrapping her arms tight around the leg.
‘What is this garbage?’ Papa fumbled for the remote control. It had slipped from his hand when he nodded off. ‘Damned dragons.’ He pressed the button, and the race disappeared into a black screen.
Asta could see the reflection of herself in the silent TV – she saw the look of excitement on her own face, the disgust on her father’s.
‘A god-awful waste of good land,’ he said, his voice hard and sharp as shale. ‘It’s a travesty. And with everything that’s happening at Steve and Rachel’s! You know about that, don’t you?’
‘No,’ Asta said. Steve and Rachel Turrentine lived just across the road from the Ekenberg Farm. She could see their house and fields when she climbed her favorite tree.
‘They’re good farmers, Asta. Best winter wheat in a hundred miles. They work hard, and they feed people. That means something. But they’re selling their farm.’
‘Why?’
‘Some hotshot came along, offering to buy at some puffed-up price. They had to take it, of course. They have debts to pay. But you know . . .’ He sounded so sad. ‘I just wish they had found another way.’
Asta was confused. ‘Isn’t it good to have money?’
Papa frowned. ‘Money isn’t everything, girlie. That farm won’t be a farm anymore. The buyer’s a dragon breeder. Whatever that land produces from now on, it will just go straight down the gullets of those damned beasts.’
Asta’s skin tingled with excitement. ‘There’s going to be dragons in Medley?’
‘And what good does that do anyone?’ Papa said, grasping the arms of his chair with his rough hands.
‘Can’t eat ’em. Can’t make leather out of ’em.
Can’t work the field with ’em. They’ll be taking up all that space and all that food just so the rich folks have something to do on a Saturday night.
And they’ll attract the wild ones, too. Mark my words, we’re going to lose livestock over this.
People got dragon fever. That’s what my grandpop called it.
It doesn’t make a bit of sense. Big smoky rats, that’s what they are. ’
Asta felt tears springing to her eyes. ‘They’re beautiful. I want one.’
Papa was half out of his chair. ‘No, ma’am. No, indeed. This farm will never have dragons on it, not as long as I live.’ He got to his feet and stood above Asta, like a tall and angry hemlock rocking in the wind. ‘Do you hear me?’
Asta nodded and forced her chin into her knee so hard that it hurt.
But the news that there was a dragon breeder moving into the neighborhood could not be retracted.
It was all that Asta thought about from that moment forward.
She would climb up into the oak to spy on Steve and Rachel’s farm with a toy telescope she had gotten for her birthday years ago.
She watched the cars drive up for the auction.
She watched as the cultivator and the threshing machine and the other big equipment were all carted away.
She watched the Turrentines carry boxes out of the farmhouse to a moving truck, roll down the door, latch it, and drive away.
She watched the construction crew come and knock down the old house and build a brand-new one with lots of gables and columns, so that it looked like a castle from a storybook.
She watched the stables go up with their huge openings and tall gates.
She watched the workers set the posts for the containment fence and the magicians gather around to charge it until it shimmered. For a whole year, she watched.
And then, one day at the very end of summer, a month after Asta’s thirteenth birthday, a line of trucks made their way up the long driveway, each pulling a large trailer, some with smoke wafting from the narrow windows.
One after another, the drivers maneuvered their trailers up to the paddock and someone came around to open the back doors – and suddenly there were dragons. Real dragons. A dozen of them at least.