The Golden Worm
Once there was a young girl named Wendy who lived in a little house by some woods, which would’ve been fine except that her mean old uncle lived there, too.
Day in and day out he would tell her, “Now, Roberta,” (he could never remember her name), “you’re lucky I took a pathetic little orphan like yourself into my own house and home and gave you a roof over your head and all the clothes and toys a girl like yourself could want.”
It’s true, Wendy’s uncle had taken her in after her parents had died, but he only agreed to that because it meant he could steal the silver coins that were sent, one at a time, once a month, from the lawyers as her inheritance. He spent this on pipe tobacco. Moreover, he made her sleep in the drafty attic and only gave her old dishcloths to sew and patch into strange looking dresses, so it wasn’t really fair for him to be patting himself on the back for that. Her only toy was a bucket which she’d found in a trash heap—the handle was broken. She had replaced the handle with a strip of dishcloth and kept it with her for picking berries or gathering pecans when she was hungry.
As a rule, Wendy did not eat with her awful uncle. This was because he had such nasty habits. Since he was a lazy man, Wendy’s uncle would not work, so instead of earning his bread honestly, he would loaf about until he was hungry and then take a jar of water out to the garden Wendy kept and pour it on the soil in heavy puddles. After a minute, ten or so earthworms would wriggle to the surface of the fertile earth. That wretched man would gather the worms and take them to the kitchen where he would sizzle them up in a dirty frying pan and eat them on a paper plate—also dirty—like gruesome little French fries. This made Wendy’s uncle have very bad breath, and it made Wendy sick to her stomach. She liked the worms, who kept the soil in her garden fertile and wriggled amicably anytime she turned the soil to freshen it or to plant new seeds.
One morning, while she was harvesting some strawberries for her breakfast, one of the juicy little berries fell out of her hand and rolled under the foliage . As she pushed aside the leaves to find the lost berry, Wendy saw something glimmering in the soil. Thinking that the shimmering thing was perhaps a lost trinket or, more likely, a piece of garbage or broken glass, Wendy carefully reached to remove it from the soil. But wasn’t she surprised when she felt the pull of an earthworm's body and found a shiny, golden worm between her fingers!
Wendy gasped a soft breath of air and looked at the creature who flicked its long form about in her palm just like its ungilded brothers.
“What a beauty!” Wendy whispered. The worm wriggled with pleasure and mock humility. “Would you like to come with me?” Wendy asked the worm, and it nodded both of its ends so the girl would be sure to understand.
Wendy tied the strawberries she had picked into a spare dish cloth and scooped soft, fresh handfuls of dirt into her bucket. She laid the golden worm on top of the soil, and it capered around as best it could to show how happy it was.
Wendy’s stomach made a noise, and she felt she might need more than strawberries to eat that morning. So, she decided to take her fishing rod—a stick with long strips of dish cloth sewn together as a line and tied to a rusty bit of wire in the shape of a hook—the berries, and her bucket with the worm across the meadow and down to the pond to see about catching some fish.
As she strode in the way of the playful child, Wendy felt the urge to sing, a feeling that often struck her in the middle of the sunny meadow, dotted with little wildflowers. She sang:
A-tisket, a-tusket,
My little broken bucket
Was full of rust,
Now fairy dust,
A crock of gold,
I found it!
The worm cocked one of its ends to the side and tapped the other end on the soil in tune to the song.
Wendy stopped and bent to pick a few flowers from the field. She whispered, “Widow’s Tears,” as she gently tucked some sprigs of the bright blue blossoms into the soil in the bucket. “You never really know when or where they’ll pop up, but they’re so pretty—rather like you,” she said to the worm, who immediately wrapped an end around the stem of the wildflower. By the time they’d reached the bank of the pond, the flowers had turned into golden-stemmed sapphires; the filigree work of the leaves alone was beyond any worldly metalsmith’s ability.
Seeing the worm’s offering, Wendy smiled sweetly at it and simply said, “How kind!”
Wendy’s favorite place to fish was at a very old oak tree which grew right next to the pond and had been spreading luxurious roots about the bank for hundreds of years before the reign of the Queen Lady Dora.
She nestled herself and her new friend into the curve of a root, untied the cloth with the strawberries and pushed a little berry onto her makeshift hook. She gently tossed the bait into the water and sang more little songs and occasionally popped a berry into her mouth while waiting for a fish to come.
But no fish came. The foolish fish were all still asleep in the mud, and the sharper fish were not willing to risk getting hooked for a little strawberry. Wendy pulled her line back in and saw that the soggy strawberry didn’t have a single bite on it.
“Maybe you’d like a bit of this?” Wendy said to the worm as she buried a bit of the berry pulp in the bucket. When she turned to put a fresh strawberry on her hook, Wendy heard a fierce little clanking from the bucket. The worm was frantically tapping one of its ends on the metal and straining desperately toward the hook with the other end.
“You’d like another strawberry?” Wendy asked.
The golden worm shook its ends.
“You don’t think I’m going to catch anything with these?”
The worm shook its ends again, mildly embarrassed.
“What should I do?” Wendy asked, and in the next moment, she had to reach out her hand to catch her friend as it dove out of the bucket and made straight for the hook.
The worm wrapped its body around the hook, except for one long end, which it dangled in a way that would probably be tantalizing to a fish.
“Why, I couldn’t!” Wendy was horrified. The worm tightened its body around the hook and pointed its ends towards the water.
“Well… I suppose… if you’re sure…” Wendy said and tossed the hook, worm and all, into the pond.
There was an immediate stir in the water, currents running left and right and round and round until the largest current of all rushed toward the dish cloth line and almost jerked Wendy right into the water.
But she was eager to get her little golden friend back, so she put all of her weight into it and pulled until she brought a beautiful, big fish, unlike any she’d seen before, onto the oak tree roots.
The beast had swallowed the hook; without fear, Wendy reached her arm inside and fished it out, as it were. The golden worm, covered in slime, wriggled with delight in the palm of Wendy’s hand.
“Well done, little friend!” Wendy said and rubbed the worm’s middle and put it down into the bucket to rest. In a minute, the fish’s eyes had become like emeralds and each scale was edged in a crescent of gold.
Wendy wrapped the fish in a large dish cloth, gathered her things, and decided to walk along the road to get her fish home and cook it. She was now quite hungry, so to distract herself as she walked she sang again:
A-tisket, a-tusket—
“A pretty voice you have, miss,” came a voice from around the bend. Startled, Wendy saw sitting at the side of the road a boy, a few years older than herself and very dirty, one of his legs tied with rags, and a chipped pitcher on the ground in front of him. “Could you spare a penny, miss, for a cripple like me with an ailing mother and no one to care for us?”
Wendy, still a bit uneasy at the appearance of the stranger, said, “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t have any money to give you. My uncle—” she began to say and then thought it best not to bring up someone as nasty as her uncle to someone who clearly had problems of his own.
The youth tilted his head and searched Wendy’s eyes with his and said, “Please, miss, anything would be a great help to me. We’re about to starve.”
Wendy looked at her beautiful fish with the emerald eyes and gilded scales and said, “Take this fish, please. It has good white meat on it from the looks of it.”
“Thank you, miss, thank you! I know this will help my mother find her health again,” the youth beamed up at her.
Wendy smiled at the boy for a moment, then said, “Please, give these flowers to your mother, too. I hope they help her get her strength back.” She handed the youth the gilded Widow’s Tears she’d plucked earlier in the meadow, and the boy, utterly amazed, watched Wendy as she walked down the road toward her uncle’s home. When she was out of sight, the youth jumped up with the gilded fish and flowers and took off running down the road toward town.
At the last little stretch of the road to her uncle’s house, Wendy looked down at her worm friend and said, “I’m sure you don’t mind. They needed food much more than I did. And his poor mother could use cheering up, I’m sure.” The worm nodded its ends.
Wendy entered the house softly singing to herself, “A-tisket, a-tusket, my little broken bucket, was full of rust, now fairy dust—” but when she got to the part about the crock of gold just as she was about to climb the stairs to the attic, her dreadful uncle’s voice came from the kitchen, “What was that about gold, Betty?”
Wendy clutched her bucket to her heart and tried to sound calm, “Oh, nothing, Uncle! Just a song!”
Wendy’s uncle may have been disgusting, but his greed made him unusually shrewd. Once he heard Wendy’s feet skipping steps up to the attic, he decided to give chase.
“Alice! Give Uncle that gold! Be a good girl now; it’s only fair!” He raced up the stairs, each of the old steps creaking and giving off little clouds of dust as he went.
The brute caught Wendy’s arm and pried the bucket from her grip. She cried out, “Uncle! Please! It was only a song!”
Holding the bucket out of Wendy’s reach, her uncle fished his dirty hand through the soft soil in the bucket, spilling dirt everywhere. “Where’s this gold?” He said under his breath, and his fingers finally closed on the golden worm.
“Is this ugly yellow thing all you have?” Wendy’s uncle asked, peering at the worm while it flicked around in his grip. Wendy couldn’t say a word she was so frightened.
“Well, Sarah, if you don’t have any gold to give me, the least you can do is give me this little fella for my snack.”
Wendy gasped and her eyes widened as her uncle brought the worm up to his mouth. But before he could snap his decaying teeth on the worm, Wendy’s uncle was all of a sudden transformed—into solid gold, no less!
Wendy stood there in shock for a moment and then saw her little friend wriggle out of the golden statue’s fingers, drop to the floor, and crawl over to Wendy, who picked up the worm and cupped it to her cheek in relief.
After about a minute of this, the dilapidated attic floor under the statue gave a loud creeeeeak, and Wendy’s uncle fell through the rafters to the ground floor of the house, shattering into a million gold pieces.
“Why, you are magical!” Wendy said to her friend, who curled up in her palm as if to take a nap.
Wendy scooped what dirt she could find back into her bucket and placed the worm inside to rest, and she went down the stairs to begin picking up the gold pieces.
“I suppose I’ll have more than enough to fix up this old place and really make it a home,” Wendy said to the worm, but also to herself. And then a thought occurred to her—yes, she would have more than enough.
Wendy gathered a pile of gold pieces into a dishcloth and left the house, then started running down the road to find the poor boy with the bandaged leg. When she reached the spot where he’d been sitting, all she found was the chipped pitcher he'd had in front of him earlier. Confused and a little hurt, Wendy looked up and down the road for any sign of the youth.
Then she saw him in the distance, surrounded by a cloud of dust kicked up by the glorious horse he was riding. As he drew closer, Wendy knew with certainty it was the boy because he was still very dirty, wore the same threadbare clothes, and had the same rags tied around his leg—although, Wendy noticed, he was clearly no cripple by the way he rode with such grace and ease. When he reached her, the youth slowed his horse, and Wendy smiled to herself to see what a strange and somehow charming picture he made, a ragged youth, covered with dust, crowned with a fine gold circlet in his head, his horse draped with royal insignias over its saddle.
“Hello, miss!” the youth said and beamed at Wendy.
Wendy made a polite curtsy and said, “Your Majesty,” for by now she had realized that he was no beggar but a prince, one of the sons of the Knight King.
“Miss, I am sorry I deceived you earlier. I am not a poor youth, and my mother the Queen is well,” the prince jumped off his horse.
“I am glad to hear it, Your Majesty,” Wendy replied.
“Please, miss, my name is Aric. And your name is?”
“Wendy.”
“Ah, Wendy. Well, you see, I am ashamed to say that earlier today I was cruel to my tutor—I drenched his handkerchief in some oil of mint. All of the cats in the village came and caused such a nuisance we couldn’t finish our lessons.” Prince Aric’s cheeks burned red with embarrassment and his eyes were fixed in the ground until he heard Wendy stifle a giggle.
“I also called my tutor a ‘lowly peasant.’”
“Oh,” said Wendy and looked down.
Prince Aric continued, “When my father the King found out, he was furious. But my mother tempered his anger by telling him, ‘What the boy needs is a quest.’ So they instructed me to disguise myself as a lowly peasant and seek the kindness I had not given to my tutor earlier. Wendy, I did not think to find it in such bounty and so soon.” He reached into his shirt and pulled out a snowy white handkerchief. Unwrapping it carefully, Aric said, “I’ve given the beautiful fish to my mother and father as a sign of my quest, but I wanted to return the flowers to you.” The prince held out the golden Widow’s Tears she’d given him when she thought he was a beggar.
Wendy, taken aback at hearing all of this, said, “Thank you, Prince, but you may keep them as a token of your quest. They were given out of compassion for a poor youth with a hurting heart. And though you are not poor, it seems your heart has been healed.”
“You are most kind, Wendy,” said the prince. “I only hope that my keeping the flowers will not cause you any undue hardship. I know you mentioned an uncle?” The prince tilted his head to better judge Wendy’s gaze.
“Oh!” Wendy laughed, “Yes, I had an awful uncle, but he’s just turned into gold, so it’s all right , and I’m actually a little rich now!” People—especially dreadful ones—and things turning into gold was not entirely unheard of in those days.
She led the prince to her home, and they picked up the gold pieces of Wendy’s uncle together while talking about meadows and fish and songs and all kinds of things. You’ll be pleased to know that was the first of many days of friendship between them, and that many more days later the prince would ask Wendy to be his bride.
But that day, when all the tidying of the gold was done, Wendy and Aric took the bucket of soil to the garden and gently placed the golden worm onto a particularly rich little hill of dirt. There he probably still wriggles, free to visit any spot in the garden he pleases—though he’s always most fond of the strawberry patch.
[The short story originally appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of the Joie de Vivre print journal. To order this issue or an annual subscription, click the “Subscribe” tab above.]
Grace Fitzpatrick is a Catholic wife, mother, and iconographer living in New Orleans. Her art can be found at gracefitzpatrick.art.
