A Tale Magnolious Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Suzanne Nelson

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2019 by Emilia Dziubak

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781984831743 (trade) — ISBN 9781984831750 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9781984831767

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One: In Which a Thief and a Pachyderm Vanish

  Chapter Two: In Which an Elephant Shows Great Promise as a Compass

  Chapter Three: In Which an Event of Life-Changing Enormity Befuddles Windle Homes

  Chapter Four: In Which a Cough Heralds a Friendship

  Chapter Five: In Which Dirt Discovers Its Potential

  Chapter Six: In Which a Spectral Smile Prevents an Untimely Departure

  Chapter Seven: In Which a Nose Exhibits a Peculiarly Worrisome Talent

  Chapter Eight: In Which a Hand Is Taken and a Great Gulf Crossed

  Chapter Nine: In Which the Nature of Bottomless Hunger and Whumping Is Explored

  Chapter Ten: In Which Sleuthing and Snakeskins Collide

  Chapter Eleven: In Which the Pogonologist Tells a Tale of a Mustache and Its Nits

  Chapter Twelve: In Which a Motorcar Is Driven by Two Loaves of Bread

  Chapter Thirteen: In Which There Is Much Cogitation on Secrets and Speedy Seed-Spitters

  Chapter Fourteen: In Which an Accomplice Prophesies Calamity

  Chapter Fifteen: In Which an Eggplant Is Mistaken for an Elephant

  Chapter Sixteen: In Which a Confession Is Made and a Leap Taken

  Chapter Seventeen: In Which Moonlight Brings Blossoming

  Chapter Eighteen: In Which Fruit Is Given a Most Unusual Name

  Chapter Nineteen: In Which a Farm Takes a Trip into Town

  Chapter Twenty: In Which a Town and an Elephant Are Properly Introduced

  Chapter Twenty-one: In Which Friends and Foes Come to Blows

  Chapter Twenty-two: In Which a Nincompoop Reckons and Is Reckoned

  Chapter Twenty-three: In Which a Sigh Is a Hopeful Sign

  Chapter Twenty-four: In Which Foulsome Rotten Villainy Is at Long Last Revealed

  Chapter Twenty-five: In Which Matters Are Complicated by Mayors and Missing Elephants

  Chapter Twenty-six: In Which Tears, Large in Size and Amount, Are Shed

  Chapter Twenty-seven: In Which Escapes Are Made and Farewells Spoken

  Chapter Twenty-eight: In Which There Are Reunions, Happy and Unhappy

  Chapter Twenty-nine: In Which Machine Betrays Master

  Chapter Thirty: In Which a Town Is Lost but Juice Is Found

  Chapter Thirty-one: In Which Hope Is a Thing with Froozles

  Chapter Thirty-two: In Which a Girl and an Elephant Ponder Triumphs and the Great Unknowable

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  In loving memory of my grandfather George W. Tallman, a magnolious farmer who believed in luck and dreaming big and who always embraced the great unknowable with joy. And for the many farmers in my family, loved one and all.

  —S.N.

  A girl,

  an elephant,

  and a dust storm.

  That’s how it all began….

  Nitty Luce wasn’t born a thief. She wasn’t born to rescue elephants. Or to make miracles. Nobody ever told her that, though, so she never had reason to doubt. If she’d doubted, none of the bamboozling goings-on in Fortune’s Bluff that spring might ever have happened.

  But they did happen.

  The morning started much like any other, with Nitty’s empty stomach. It was near on two weeks since she’d run away from Grimsgate Orphanage, two weeks fighting pigs for the slop in their troughs and waiting for breadlines to empty out to scrounge a few dropped crumbs. She wouldn’t stoop to begging, not after Headmistress Ricketts’s stories of police tossing street urchins into lockup. Just yesterday she’d caught sight of her reflection in a store window, and oh, was she a shambles! Her tumbleweed hair poked out in all directions, crispy with days-old dust. There was a film over her sun-toasted skin and her flour-sack dress, so in the glass she appeared more as a dirt smear than a ten-year-old girl.

  “You’ll bunk in prison with the likes of Cutthroat Cob,” Miz Ricketts had told them at the orphanage. She always gave this sinister warning before lights-out, in case any of her wards got ideas about running away at night. “Or worse, Fang-Toothed Lou.”

  Nitty didn’t believe a word of it. At least, not during daylight hours. Still, she didn’t like the idea of fangs of any sort, so whenever she caught sight of police officers, she kept her distance.

  But this particular morning, she was doing battle with her hunger again, and it was being a downright bully. When she wandered into the heart of a city, a solid piece west of Grimsgate and north of nowhere, she was too light-headed to worry over police. In fact, on reading the poster nailed to a lone withering tree on Main Street, Nitty had to steady herself against a nearby lamppost.

  COME ONE, COME ALL!

  WITNESS THE DEATH OF A MURDEROUS FOUR-TON BEAST!

  PUBLIC HANGING IN THE SQUARE AT HIGH NOON.

  A GUSTO AND GALLANT SPECTACLE NEVER TO BE FORGOTTEN.

  Below the words was a gruesome cartoon drawing of a circus elephant trampling a man, with a small caption: GREAT MAGNOLIOUS KILLS TRAINER IN COLD BLOOD.

  Nitty leaned closer, studying the fangs and claws drawn on the elephant, the steam pouring from its mouth and trunk, the smoldering rage in its eyes. The picture was nightmarish, the sort of sensational rubbish Miz Ricketts loved to read about in the Daily Tattler. Nitty didn’t think too harshly of the Tattler, though. In fact, she often rescued old editions from the fireplace before they became kindling. They offered the most entertaining reading at Grimsgate.

  Now the crowd gathered about the poster was nodding and whispering, heads bobbing like the wind-up tin clowns Nitty had once seen in a toy shop.

  “Savage business,” one man declared, while two young women fretted about needing to procure smelling salts before the hanging. “The Gusto and Gallant Circus is well rid of the monster. I feel its devilry in my very bones. It would kill again, mark my words.”

  “Yes,” one woman twittered. “I heard its eyes are red as Beelzebub himself.”

  Nitty frowned. What did these people know about this elephant? Not a speck more than she did, probably. She’d never seen an elephant before, and she doubted any of them had either. She’d once read an account of an elephant in the Tattler, a “Just So” story by a man named Rudyard Kipling, that said the animals had an “insatiable curiosity.” “Insatiable” made her think of eating chocolate, which would be delicious and wonderful, if there were any chocolate to be had. Which there was not. But if “insatiable” made her think of the delicious and wonderful, then an elephant’s curiosity must be those things as well.

  Elephants must surely be like orphan girls, she decided: creatures sorely misunderstood and blamed for a host of troubles they had nothing to do with.

  She nudged her way through the crowd, glimpsing food carts and tinkers’ wagons lining the edges of the square. A barbershop quartet sang at one corner while a clown at another sold balloons. The square had the jaunty atmosphere of a carnival, which seemed even worse than backward to Nitty, given the occasion—especially once she spotted a towering crane rising up from its center. The crane, she guessed, was how they meant to hoist Magnolious from her feet. It was every kind of awful. A chain fashioned into a noose hung from its arm, swaying as a forceful gust of wind hit it.

  Nitty shielded her eyes from the grit blasting her face, and others around her held kerchiefs to their mouths and scanned the sky. They were worrying over a dust storm, waiting for the telltale mud-colored clouds to barrel down on them with the force of a bison stampede.

  Nitty held her breath, scoping for alleyways where she might take shelter, but the gust soon wheezed out.

  She turned away from the crane. She wouldn’t watch the hanging, a gawker like the rest. It would be too cruel. But—her stomach whined at wafting scents of roasted peanuts and cotton candy—she would stay
close by, in case somebody spilled popcorn or dropped one or two precious peanuts. Most any food had a sandy aftertaste these days anyway, so it wouldn’t much matter if she got it from the ground.

  She was heading toward the peanut cart when a sudden spark of green caught her eye. She swiveled her head and spotted a wooden wagon. A slatted board in its side was propped open to display an array of colorful oddities. Puppets dangling from strings, jewel-toned bottles full of mysterious potions or exotic perfumes, glass globes holding miniature kingdoms so real-looking that Nitty half expected to see ant-sized people popping out of their cottages and castles. The sign painted along the wagon’s side read THE MERRYTHOUGHT WINDOWSHOP.

  Nitty stepped closer, and again a twinkle of green flashed. She traced it to a small open pouch full of the strangest objects she’d ever seen. Shaped like question marks no bigger than a fingernail, they were the greenest sight in town. Maybe in the whole county—or state, for that matter. Their bright hue was so cheerful, so incandescent, that Nitty had the urge to climb into the pouch with them.

  Her heart reached out to them, rising snugly and pleasantly into her throat. Being inside that pouch would be like being in a proper jungle—a jungle so full up with trees and plants that she could wrap herself in hammocks of leaves and weave herself a home of vines. Nothing would be brown in that jungle. Even dirt and rocks would grow lovely, fuzzy moss.

  “I know that look, girl.” The tinker—mostly hidden by a threadbare cloak—leaned out over the window. Nitty couldn’t see the eyes appraising her, but she felt them spinning her stomach like a whirligig. The voice inside the hood echoed like water over stones. “That’s a hungry look,” it continued. A knotted hand passed over the pouch. “If it’s food you’re after, I have none to offer.”

  “I don’t want food,” Nitty blurted. She had wanted it, badly, only a minute before, but now…she couldn’t take her eyes from the green glow of the pouch. “That there in the pouch—”

  “These?” The tinker’s eyes glittered from the cloak’s shadows. “These are seeds. They came from the very first garden on earth. The one that grew before anything else. Before people or animals.” The tinker leaned closer. “Before hate and cruelty, before kindness was forgotten. Back when there was only love. And hope. Before time itself.”

  “There wasn’t any such garden,” Nitty scoffed.

  The tinker smiled, a smile that despite its toothlessness was strangely buoyant. “Oh, but there was, and it was greener than spring grass after a rain, so green that being in the garden was like sitting inside an emerald. It held every dream and every promise of what could be, of what the world wanted to become.” The tinker’s voice was lullaby soft now, and Nitty felt it again, the urge to be sitting in the midst of that green.

  “How much? For the seeds?”

  The tinker huffed. “You can’t afford them. Few people can.”

  “But…what do they grow?” She couldn’t stop staring at the shimmering pods. The longer she stared, the more they looked like they were quivering in the pouch, wanting to be free.

  With a crooked finger, the tinker beckoned her closer. “That, girl, depends on the farmer. What do you need them to grow?”

  Nitty stalled, her thoughts a tangle. She hadn’t been thinking about planting them, only keeping them. She felt her Gleam Jar pressed against her side, tied around her waist with twine, and thought how lovely the seeds would look inside. It was only a plain mason jar she’d filched from the Grimsgate kitchen on canning day, but what was inside it…well…those objects gleamed in all the ways, and with all the colors, that the world—in these days of dust and doldrums—didn’t. If Nitty had a second heart, her Gleam Jar was it.

  Nitty felt the tinker’s hooded gaze, and wanted to be out from under it. She lifted her chin and fixed the tinker with a glare. “I don’t need anything.”

  The tinker straightened with a crowlike cackle. “Ah, but you do. More than you know.” Just then, a wisp-thin woman with a passel of knee-high children approached the wagon, asking about cough tonics, and the tinker’s focus shifted to her.

  Nitty’s fingers tingled, itching for that pouch. The wind picked up again, and there was a static hum to the air, the sure sign of a dust storm brewing. Murmurs of excitement suddenly rippled through the crowd, and Nitty turned to see a path being parted by police officers in the square as an enormous creature ambled down the street.

  “Great Magnolious!” one of the knee-high boys near her cried out. He yanked on his mother’s hand, trying to pry her away from the Merrythought wagon. “Hurry up, Mama, or we’ll miss the hanging!”

  Nitty stretched onto tiptoe for a better view. The elephant was shackled in chains that gave her a shortened, awkward gait. Her folds of skin bore crisscrossing scars, some puffed and gray like the rest of her, others pink, raw, and fresh. Her head hung low, her long-lashed eyelids half closed in tiredness, or sadness. For no logical reason at all, Nitty longed to go to her, to take that enormous head in her hands and press her face against that trunk. She imagined it feeling tickly with bristles, wrinkled as a raisin but altogether lovelier to touch.

  Nitty’s fists clenched as jeers and taunts burbled in the crowd. Poor Old Mag, she thought, there’s nothing beastly about you.

  “Mama!” the boy beside Nitty shouted. “Come on!”

  Nitty’s attention turned back to the Merrythought wagon and to the seed pouch. She’d had enough of this town and would be on her way. Any town about to kill such a strange- and wonderful-looking animal was too ugly to stay in, even if there were food pickings to be had. But…she hesitated. The seeds. She couldn’t leave them. She reached out her hand, fingers buzzing with yearning.

  A small dirt devil swirled through the square, making everyone lower their heads just long enough for Nitty to snatch the pouch and scurry into the crowd.

  She glanced back once, and she could’ve sworn the tinker’s hood swiveled toward her in a knowing way. Seconds passed, without anyone coming after her. She slowed, wrestling a jab of guilt. The truth of it was, she wasn’t cut out for stealing. No more than that elephant was cut out for cruelty. Nitty had goodness in her, she was sure of it. Even if nobody else was.

  “Nothing but a scrappy, selfish babe you were, from the moment I set eyes on you,” Miz Ricketts liked to remind her. “No wonder you were dropped at Grimsgate’s doorstep. Who else would have you? What, with that rat’s-nest hair and those peculiar eyes?”

  Nitty didn’t think her eyes were peculiar. They were simply very green. Greener than the seeds she’d just stolen. Greener than the tree frog that Nitty had once hidden atop Miz Ricketts’s best Sunday hat. (This might’ve been the best trick Nitty had ever played on the headmistress, except she wasn’t positive the poor frog had recovered from the broom beating Miz Ricketts gave it afterward. Nitty herself had been sore for a week from that broom, and she was much sturdier than a frog.)

  “Highly suspicious,” Miz Ricketts said whenever the subject of Nitty’s eyes came up (and she made sure the subject came up daily). “Suspicious and very probably dangerous.”

  Miz Ricketts expected nothing but the worst from Nitty, and that disapproval stuck faster than a bur to a bear. It had spread through the Grimsgate staff and the other orphans until Nitty was blamed for every turn of rotten luck that happened at the orphanage. When the children took sick, it was Nitty’s “contagion” that had caused it. If a mouse was discovered in the pantry, it was because “that impish child” had put it there. (Of this offense, Nitty was often actually guilty.) Even if Miz Ricketts’s bunion took to swelling, it was because Nitty had given it the “evil eye.”

  For ten years, Nitty had taken the blame when she was (mostly) blameless. Ten years nearly to the day, and now she hurried through the square with the stolen pouch of seeds. Maybe she’d give up on goodness altogether, since it wasn’t being generous with offering her chances to claim it. But then she’d be proving Miz Ricketts right.