Three Good Deeds (2 page)

The old witch spoke right over him. "You won't be able to talk your way out of this."

"But
you said,
" Howard honked at her. "You said nobody could help me except myself. That means something
can
be done. Besides, you can't keep me a goose forever. My father will come looking for me."

"Will your father know to come here?" the old witch asked.

That
was a good point, though a bad outlook—for Howard had not told anyone where he was going.

Not only could the old witch understand goose language, she was also good at reading the expression on his little goose face. Perhaps it was that the lower portion of his beak began to quiver. "It won't be forever," she told him. "Just until you've learned your lesson—until you're no longer a bad boy."

"Oh, I've learned my lesson," Howard assured her. "I'll be a much better boy from now on. I am very, very, very, very sorry for what I did."

Howard waited to return to human shape.

And waited.

And waited.

"Why am I not changing back?" he asked.

"Because you haven't proven yourself."

"Well?" Howard honked at the old witch impatiently. "How do I do that?"

"By doing three good deeds," she told him. "Good luck to you." She started walking back to her cottage with her back bent and her foot dragging.

Three good deeds.

Three didn't sound so bad. Three was better than, for example, one hundred.

So long as they weren't three hard deeds.

He shouted after her, "Which three?"

She didn't even stop walking. "Any three."

Howard thought about this. He thought about his arms that were wings. He thought about his short little legs. He thought about his voice that came out as honks. "How can I do three good deeds if I'm a goose?"

The witch had reached her cottage. She opened the door. She called over her shoulder, "Try hard." Then she shut the door behind her.

Try hard?
What kind of advice was "Try hard"?

"That's stupid!" Howard shouted at the closed door. "And mean." Then, even though it was fairly strong proof that he wasn't nearly as sorry as he knew he needed to be, he added, "And you're old and ugly, too."

The sound of his honking faded, and Howard was alone in the stillness of the day.

Howard considered what he might do.
I could just walk up to that door,
he thought.
I could kick it in, and I could shake that old witch and MAKE her change me back into a boy.

He looked at his floppy webbed feet—though he had to turn his head sideways because his eyes were too far back on his face for him to look straight ahead. He looked at his wings, which still seemed like bent-the-wrong-way arms rather than any
useful body part. He realized there probably wouldn't be much kicking-in or shaking-sense-into going on for a while.

"Mother?" he tried his voice out. "Father?"

It was no use practicing anything more complicated. His words came out a quavery honk. How could he explain to his parents that something bad had happened when geese were limited to honking, quacking, and the occasional hissing?

Howard waddled to the edge of the pond and looked at his reflection. Never mind that he looked silly. He tipped his head this way and that, hoping to catch a glimpse of something a loving parent could recognize despite the feathers.

"Help," he moaned. But he knew there was no one to help. He went from sad to frightened, and his honking for help got louder.

Nobody would ever know what had happened to him. He went from frightened to angry, and his honking got louder yet.

Howard's ears were ringing from all the noise he was making. He went from angry to having a plan, and he honked as loudly as he could. The old witch did not seem to be the kind of person who had a lot of patience. Surely he could eventually annoy her into changing her mind.

"Help! Help! Help! Help! Help!" he honked as loudly as his little goose lungs would allow. His little goose lungs did a fine job. His honking hurt his ears and his throat. His honking echoed under the sky.

But his noise did not make the old witch change her mind.

Howard's honking slowed down from frantic to tired to defeated. He let his too-long neck sag. His feathers drooped. The
old witch had more stamina than he did. He stopped honking altogether.

There was a rustling in the weeds at the edge of the pond.

Howard jumped backward. His wings beat at the air, but he was in enough trouble as it was without trying to fly. After all, his goose body might know how but his boy brain knew flying was not one of his natural talents. What if he froze again, and this time fell from a great height?

Or what if he could fly too well, and he went so far that he got lost, and then even if he
did
do the old witch's stupid three good deeds, he couldn't find his way back to tell her about it so she could return him to his real form?

Or what if the old witch realized she'd been much too harsh with him and that it really was Roscoe she should have punished, and she changed her mind but she couldn't find him—or worse yet, turned him back into a boy while he was up in the air?

So, no flying.

"Who's there?" he demanded in his fiercest goose hiss.

"Sorry," a voice honked at him, soft and uncertain as a honk could be. "I didn't mean to startle you. I was just wondering what was wrong."

Recent experience had turned Howard into a suspicious goose. "You didn't answer my question," he pointed out. "Who are you?"

The tall weeds parted just the tiniest bit. Howard caught a glimpse of a goose's beak. "Well, so far I have been called Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow."

Howard snorted. "That has to be the silliest name I've ever heard."

There was a sniffle from the other goose. "I'm sorry," she said, as though her name were her fault. She still didn't step out from her hiding place. "What's your name?"

"Howard."

"How-Word," the other goose repeated carefully as though she'd never heard that name before. Then she said, "I've been called Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow since the time I was little more than a hatchling and I got separated from my brothers and sisters. Our parents searched for the rest of the day, but they couldn't find me until after the moon rose and shed it's light on the pond. How did you come to be called How-Word?"

"Oh," Howard said. He had no idea how his parents had chosen his name. Rather than admit that, he asked, "Why do you keep talking like your name's about to change?"

Still hidden, for the most part, behind the weeds, Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow gave a shuddery sigh. "Well," she said, "you know how geese can be."

"I do?" Howard asked. He knew how people could be, and wondered if that was the same.

"I'm afraid once they see what's happened to me, they'll call me cruel names, and one of those will stick, and then I'll be called that for the rest of my life."

So apparently geese and people
did
have something in common.

"What's happened to you?" Howard asked.

Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow must have taken a step back, because even her beak disappeared among the fronds of the water weeds. "Oh," she said, sounding distressed, "never mind. I'll just go now."

She sounded as miserable as Howard felt. And she was the one person ... well, the one creature ... who had shown any concern while he'd been calling for help.

Howard stumbled upon just the right thing to say. He said, "
I
would never call you a cruel name no matter what it is that's happened to you." He said this even though just the past summer he had called Roscoe's sister Gertrude "Baldy" when her mother had to cut her hair really short because of an infestation of lice.

"You wouldn't?" Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow asked. "That's very kind of you."

It felt nice to be called kind. Curious, Howard again asked, "What
did
happen to you?"

"Are you sure you won't laugh?"

"No matter what," Howard assured her.

The blades of grass separated. Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow moved very, very slowly. At first Howard couldn't see anything wrong: She had only one head; she had two big dark eyes, a beak that seemed to be the right shape and size, two feet, a pair of wings....

"It's all right," he encouraged her, because she was lingering in the shadow of the weeds and he couldn't get a good look. Something—he was assuming some nearby plant—seemed to be casting a red sheen to the feathers on her head and back so that he couldn't see what was the problem. "You look fine to me," he said. He wondered if—like himself—she wasn't supposed to be a goose. On the other hand, he guessed, with her strange name, she probably wasn't supposed to be a human, either. "Did the old witch put a spell on you?" he asked.

"No," said Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow. "It was a human boy."

And that was when Howard realized that the red sheen wasn't from something reflecting on her. Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow wore exactly the same red color as his mother's newly dyed woolens.

"Oh," Howard said.

Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow's head drooped. Her body slouched. Her tail feathers sagged. She shuffled backward into the weeds again. "Sorry," she mumbled as though her appearance was an offense. "You won't call me names after all, will you?" she asked in a honk that trembled. "I know I look ridiculous. You won't tell the others?"

"I said I wouldn't," Howard reminded
her. Then he realized what she'd said about the others. He asked, "Have you been hiding since this happened?"

"I was hoping it would go away"—Moonlight-Gives- Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow sighed—"before anybody saw me."

"Of course it will go away," Howard assured her, knowing that dyes fade. Eventually. Usually.

He saw her perk up and thought that surely, for a goose who spent so much time in the water, the dye would fade sooner rather than later.

Except, of course, that she wasn't going into the water for fear of being seen and laughed at. She could spend the whole summer long hiding in the weeds.

"But...," he said, and he saw the hope fade from her eyes. So he changed to: "But meanwhile you look fine. You look different in a good way. You look exotic and..."
What he wanted to say was that she looked—between gray-brown feathers and red dye—like a moth-eaten tea cozy. Instead he finished, "You look interesting."

Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow poked her head back out from among the weeds. "'Interesting?'" she repeated. "Is that good?"

It would be easy to make her feel bad, but it was just as easy to make her feel good.

"Absolutely," Howard said.

Someone—some goose—was paddling around in the pond and noticed Howard. "Hey!" this other goose said. "You're new. You need to come introduce yourself."

Howard turned to this other goose. "I'm not staying long," he explained. He very much hoped he wouldn't be staying long.

The other goose craned his neck to see
around Howard. "Who's that with you?" he asked. "Moonlight, is that you?"

"This," said Howard, waddling out of the way to let the goose in the pond see Moonlight-Gives- Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow, "is..."

Hmmm, what was another way to say
red
?

"This is Sunset."

Sunset
was obviously way too short a name to replace something like
Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow.

Howard cleared his throat. Luckily, when a goose clears it's throat, there's a lot of throat to clear and this gave Howard a lot of time to think. He started again. "This is Sunset Shining ... Excuse me. Ahem ... Sunset
Dances
... um ... Like Flames..."—inspired, he finished all in a rush—"on Her Feathers. Sunset-Dances-Like-Flames-on-Her-Feathers. Isn't she beautiful?"

"Ooh, I like that," whispered the goose formerly known as Moonlight-Gives-Her-Down-a-Silver-Glow. "Thank you."

Perhaps it was that not many people had had occasion to say "Thank you" to Howard. He felt a bubbling sensation—not exactly good, not exactly bad, but definitely strange—that started inside, then in the space of four or five heartbeats grew and burst through his skin with such force that he looked down at himself to see if his feathers were rippling.

From behind him came a voice, a human voice. "See? That wasn't so hard, was it?"

The old witch was standing with a basket over her arm. She reached in and tossed a handful of bread crumbs into the pond.
Sunset-Dances-Like-Flames-on-Her-Feathers dove into the water, and she and the other goose began gobbling up the soggy bread.

"What wasn't so hard?" Howard demanded.

"Doing a good deed," the old witch said.

"Complimenting a goose is a good deed?" Howard asked.

"Making her feel better is."

Howard considered that notion while the witch reached into her basket and threw out more crumbs. So the bubbly feeling was the boy-into-goose spell starting to come apart. He wondered if he would look one-third boy and two-thirds goose, because that would be very weird—though it might make doing the remaining two good deeds easier.

But, no. He still looked entirely goose.

Other geese had heard the happy honking and splashing of Sunset-Dances-Like-Flames-on-Her-Feathers and the other goose and were beginning to swim their way.

Howard took a deep breath. Then another. Then he said to the old witch, "Have I mentioned what lovely eyes you have?"

He waited for the bubbly feeling to indicate the spell loosening up further.

Nothing.

"Nice try," the old witch said, with a very unlovely snort. "A certain amount of sincerity might help. Want some bread?" She tossed a crust at his webbed feet.

Howard prodded the bread with his toe and found it as hard as the stone it had landed by. "This stale old thing?" he scoffed. His mother would never let bread go that stale. She'd toss it out to the animals rather than feed it to her family.

Oh,
Howard thought, realizing the old witch was doing just that.