Children's stories, American; Fairy tales -- United States; Fantasy literature; Short stories
The girl they call Sky Blue, even though her name is Eva Evelyn
Evangeline Hummadummaduffer, she comes along one November morning. Her
father is sitting in the sun with his back against a corncrib. And he
tells her he always sits there every year listening to the mice in the
cornfields getting ready to move into the big farmhouse.
“When the frost comes and the corn is husked and put in the corncribs,
the fields are cleaned and the cold nights come. Papa mouse and mama
mouse tell the little ones it is time to sneak into the cellar and the
garret and the attic of the farmhouse,” said Feed Box to Sky Blue.
“I am listening,” she said, “and I can hear the papa mouse and the mama
mouse telling the little ones how they will find rags and paper and wool
and splinters and shavings and hair, and they will make warm nests for
the winter in the big farmhouse—if no kits, cats nor kittycats get
them.”
The old man, Feed Box, rubbed his back and his shoulders against the
boards of the corncrib and washed his hands almost as if he might be
washing them in the gold of the autumn sunshine. Then he told this
happening:
This time of the year, when the mouse in the fields whispers so I can
hear him, I remember one November when I was a boy.
One night in November when the harvest moon was shining and stacking
gold cornshocks in the sky, I got lost. Instead of going home I was
going away from home. And the next day and the next night instead of
going home I was going away from home.
That second night I came to a haystack where a yellow and gold cricket
was singing. And he was singing the same songs the crickets sing in the
haystacks back home where the Hummadummaduffers raise hay and corn, in
the corn belt near the Shampoo river.
And he told me, this cricket did, he told me when he listened soft if
everything was still in the grass and the sky, he could hear golden
crickets singing in the cornshocks the harvest moon had stacked in the
sky.
I went to sleep listening to the singing of the yellow and gold crickets
in that haystack. It was early in the morning, long before daylight, I
guess, the two of us went on a trip away from the haystack.
We took a trip. The yellow and gold cricket led the way. “It is the call
of the harvest moon,” he said to me in a singing whisper. “We are going
up to the moon towns where the harvest moon stacks the cornshocks on the
sky.”
We came to a little valley in the sky. And the harvest moon had slipped
three little towns into that valley, three little towns named Half Moon,
Baby Moon, and Silver Moon.
In the town of Half Moon they _look_ out of the doors and _come in_ at
the windows. So they have taken all the doorbells off the doors and put
them on the windows. Whenever we rang a door-bell we went to a window.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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