The bucket is thick plastic with a metal handle. The handle has a kitchen rag wrapped around and around it to keep it from digging into Cecily’s hand too hard. It’s enormously heavy—a month’s worth of pocket-iron is in there, so the bucket is all the way full, and that means it needs to be emptied. Cecily spits out the chewed-up sourgrass stem.
She knows what you are thinking: if she doesn’t feed the dragon, then maybe it will go away. After all, it isn’t trapped in the barn. It just likes to stay there, because there’s iron and darkness and owls and other things that dragons like. Maybe, you are thinking, if Cecily stops feeding the dragon, it will go away.
But you’re wrong. Cecily has to feed the dragon, because it’s her turn, and because the bucket is all the way full. If she doesn’t feed the dragon, then the bucket will overflow. There will be scraps of metal on the floor. Her mother will look at her with grave disappointment, will tell her that she should go to her bedroom until her father gets home, and it won’t matter if Cecily tries to clean up the spilled iron, because her mother will have decided that she needs fixing. She will go to her bedroom and clean it and tidy it, hoping that her cleanliness there will make up for her other failures, and then her father will come home and her mother will tell him what she has done, and she will be afraid, and then all her fears will come to pass.
Cecily has to feed the dragon. It’s her turn. That’s just the way things are: sometimes there’s a dragon in the barn, and it’s your turn to feed the dragon. Cecily is eight years old, and even she understands that this is how the world works. She would explain all this to you if she had time, but she has to do her chores.
Cecily is ten years old, and there is a dragon in the barn.
The ladder to the hayloft has not gotten less scary over the years. It’s so high up, and it’s not fixed to anything—it just leans up against the outside of the barn, even though Cecily’s father keeps saying that he really ought to strap it down with plumber’s tape or a cross brace or something. The metal gets wet in the winter and hot in the summer, and no matter what time of year it is, the whole thing wobbles and shakes and creaks in ways that make Cecily feel like there’s something yanking at her bellybutton from the inside. The bucket is still heavy, too, and she’s starting to wonder if maybe it’s getting heavier as she gets older, because surely it should feel easier to carry by now.
The dragon is still angry, and his anger still radiates through the wood grain of the barn like heat rising off asphalt. Cecily has almost gotten used to it, although when she’s finished feeding the dragon, she always runs away from the barn fast as her legs will carry her.
Climbing the ladder one-handed has gotten easier, so at least there’s that. Cecily braces the forearm of her bucket-carrying hand against the frame of the ladder to keep her balanced every time she has to take her free hand off the ladder to grab at a higher rung. That forearm—her left—is scarred from all the times the ladder’s been sun-baked to scalding, from all the times she’s slipped and caught herself hard on the frame. She has an angry scab on her chin, too, from the time last month when she didn’t catch herself. She fell hard that day, bouncing her chin off the rung of the ladder that her foot had been on just a moment before.
Her mother scolded her when she came back to the house spitting blood. Her mother told her to take her time, be more careful, not to rush. Then her mother sent her back outside with an ice cube in her cheek to suck on, because there was iron scattered all over the ground at the base of the ladder and the dragon still needed to be fed. Cecily remembers the way the ice crunched between her back teeth as she picked through the weeds to find all the iron she could. She managed to fill the bucket back up all the way, and then she climbed the ladder again, because the dragon needed to be fed.
Of course, you are thinking that Cecily could just open the barn doors up and get to the dragon that way. After all, the barn doors are on ground level, and they’re well oiled and easy to open. Her father opens them once every six months, when he goes in to try to talk to the dragon, to ask it to leave. Every time he does this, he swears that he’s going to make it stick this time, that he’s going to look that dragon in the face and tell it to get out of the barn for the good of his family. Every time, he tells them that things are really going to change.
You are wondering why Cecily doesn’t just open the barn doors, why she carries a heavy bucket of scrap iron up a dangerous ladder, why her brothers do that when it’s their turn to feed the dragon, why the dragon is there at all. You are wondering why they feed the dragon from the hayloft instead of from the ground.
Cecily has asked this question herself, which was tricky, because asking questions about the dragon isn’t allowed. It’s not that she’s ever been told it’s not allowed, but she knows it’s not allowed the way so many things are not allowed—like telling her mother that there’s too much pepper on the pork chops or making a joke about how much her oldest brother hates working at the foundry. No one says not to do these things, but if she does these things, a weight will descend on the room like a fog, and her father’s eyes will go dark and cruel, and everyone will find quiet excuses to leave the room before the weight in the room congeals into a consequence.
But the day Cecily fell off the ladder, her tooth fell out at dinner, and her father asked what happened to her with real concern in his voice, and she gathered her courage and she told him.
“I fell off the ladder,” she said.
“What were you doing on the ladder?” her father asked, which struck Cecily as strange, because there’s only one reason why she would be on the ladder. But then she realized that she was being tested somehow, that there was a right answer and a wrong answer, and she thought hard before giving her reply.
“The bucket was full,” she said. Her oldest brother exhaled softly beside her. Her mother took a long sip of water. Cecily read these movements as signs that she’d answered her father correctly, because no one was looking at her with warning, and no one was moving toward the door.
“You’ll be more careful next time,” her father said, cutting a piece of chicken but looking at Cecily’s chin. “That’s going to scar, I bet. Shame. Right on your face.”
This is the part where Cecily needed an awful lot of courage, because she knew that it was supposed to be the end of the conversation. Her father had told her how not to make the mistake again, and he’d said something very slightly cruel about the consequence of her mistake, something that could pass for an observation but that would stick with her for a long time (shame, she would think that night as she tried to fall asleep, shame). This was the part where one of her brothers was supposed to change the subject, to ask their father for advice about a problem at school or at work.
But Cecily swallowed around the nothing that was suddenly taking up her entire throat. She reached under the table and grabbed her middle brother’s hand, and he squeezed her fingers and he gave her the courage she didn’t have enough of.
“Maybe I could go through the door next time, instead of using the ladder?” She said it in as reasonable a voice as she could.
Cecily’s mother put her knife and fork down on her plate and glanced toward the kitchen door. “I should check on the kettle,” she said, which was silly because the kettle wasn’t on, but no one would say anything about that because they were trying to figure out their own excuses to leave the room, and if one person’s excuse was silly then everyone else’s excuse might be silly, too.