Cheating for the Chicken Man (2 page)

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W
hat happens next?” Kerry asked, tugging on the skirt of Kate's dress.

“I think it's over,” Kate told her. “We walk back to our cars.”

“Are we going home, then?” She pouted. “I want my kitty. I want Jingles.”

“I don't know, Kerry,” Kate said, distracted. She glanced at the hill behind them to see if it was still empty. “I'm not sure if we go straight home or not.”

Suddenly, a commotion up ahead had people scrambling.

Kate glimpsed her mother, crumpled on the ground, with Uncle Ray bending over her. Pulling Kerry along, Kate began to run toward them.

Aunt Helen stopped her. “Kate, let me take Kerry,” she said.

“No!” Kerry whimpered. “I'm scared. What's wrong with Mommy?” But Kate released her sister into Aunt Helen's arms and rushed on.

Was it a heart attack? Kate's own heart pounded high in her
chest. Her mother's hand was up at her throat, like she was struggling to breathe. Was she going to die the same day they buried her father? Kate's hand covered her mouth. Could something like that really happen to people?

Uncle Ray stood up. “It's okay,” he told the chaplain, who was pulling out a cell phone. Her uncle's voice was surprisingly calm. “You don't need to call for help. It's a panic attack. She's had them before.”

“He's right,” said Kate's grandmother, who was kneeling on the ground beside Kate's mother. She looked up at the two men. “She needs to focus on her breathing. Give us some space.
Please
.”

The chaplain turned to the gathering crowd and held up his arms. “She needs space! Some privacy, please!”

People stopped and, haltingly, moved away. Kate brought her hand down, but stayed kneeling beside her grandmother.

“She'll be all right, hon,” Grandma said, tapping Kate's knee before leaning over Kate's mother. “Angela, a deep breath. That's it! In on five. Now hold for two.”

This was all new to Kate. A panic attack? Breathing and counting? Kate had thought she knew her mother's secrets. But apparently not.

*

It took Grandma two hours to drive from the cemetery to the Tylers' home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. By the time they arrived, it was late afternoon, and Kate's exhausted mother went straight to bed. The two girls changed into jeans, while Kate's grandmother fixed them grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. Kerry was allowed to keep the cat on her lap while
they ate, and no one spoke much. Even Tucker, J.T.'s border collie, seemed to pick up on the mood and lay quietly beneath the kitchen table, surrounded by their feet.

A low rumble and the grating sound of a large truck shifting gears distracted them. Kate pushed back her chair and, flip-flops flapping, went to the living room picture window that faced the road. “Darn!” she muttered, disappointed to see a gray-colored school bus crunching over the long oyster-shell driveway.

“What is it?” Grandma asked when Kate returned to the kitchen.

“The new chicks are here,” Kate told her.

“Oh, dear,” her grandmother sympathized. “They wouldn't even give you the day off for your father's funeral.”

“It's fine, Grandma. No big deal,” Kate said, quickly putting her best face on it. “We knew they were coming; I just forgot. Uncle Ray already asked me to do it. He had to get home for that plumber, remember? Something happened to their well.”

“Well, bless your heart,” Grandma said, reaching for a napkin. “Here, take the sandwich with you.”

Kate waved her off. “It's okay,” she said, sitting on the floor to pull on old sneakers. “I'd rather eat when it's done.”

When she was ready, Tucker scrambled through the back door before Kate and rushed across the yard, barking at the bus-turned-delivery truck as it beeped and backed up to a long, low building.
V
ALLEY SHORE CHICKEN
FARMS
was written in big black letters beneath the bus windows. This was the business that hatched the chicks and delivered them to the Tylers to raise. Every nine weeks, 54,400 chicks were brought to the farm. Funny, but after all these years, the company's name
suddenly struck Kate as absurd. There were no mountains on the Eastern Shore of Maryland—it was flat as a pancake—so how could there be valleys? But it sounded nice, didn't it? Valleys and shores. If people only knew, Kate thought.

The bus stopped, and with it, the irritating
beep
,
b
eep
,
beep
.

First things first.

“Tucker!” Kate called, clapping her hands. When the dog trotted to her side, she took hold of his collar and gently led him into a toolshed off the tractor garage. “Just for a little bit, okay?” The dog sat and looked up at her. “No bark. Stay!” she ordered, showing him the palm of her hand.

After closing the shed door, she walked across the yard to where the bus had parked at one of the two chicken houses. She entered a number combination that unlocked the door and stepped aside so the deliverymen could begin unloading plastic trays full of newly hatched baby chicks. Each tray held about a hundred chicks, and both men carried about ten trays stacked one on top of the other, like a tall and very noisy bread delivery.

“Good afternoon,” Kate said politely.

“Afternoon there, young lady,” one of the men said. He was chewing tobacco—a wad of it made one cheek bulge—and after he greeted her, he turned his head to spit a dark stream of juice into the dust.

Uncle Ray had spent almost a week getting ready for the baby chicks. Using a backhoe, he had scraped the floors clean of caked manure, then hosed everything off, stocked the feeders with smaller, starter feed, and freshened the water supply. Even though the early fall weather was still warm, the nights were cool, and a propane heater had been blowing hot air into
the building for twenty-four hours so it would be a toasty ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit for the chicks, most of whom were only hours old.

Kate stepped out of the way a second time. She wanted to tell the men that they didn't have to throw the chicks at the feed line the way they did. It seemed so cruel. But she didn't say anything or interfere. She wasn't supposed to get involved—just keep the dog away, open the doors, and check on the delivery afterward.

While she waited for the two workers to finish dumping their delicate cargo, Kate sat on the toolshed's cement steps. Arms crossed and hugging her elbows, she thought about her father. She was glad he wasn't suffering anymore, but she was going to miss him so much. All those long Scrabble games, his corny jokes and hearty laugh, his big bear hugs, even the war-injured knee that gave him a heads-up when it was going to rain.

And J.T. Was he back at the detention center? Had he and Miss Laurie stopped somewhere for lunch? It was a long way out to western Maryland. Was he glad he had come to the funeral? Had he seen them? Did he have any idea what Kate had done to find that trumpet and get him there . . . ?

*

Kate thought back to the day her father died and how, the same afternoon, she had defied her mother by unlocking her brother's bedroom to begin her search for the instrument.

She understood why her mother had closed up J.T.'s room after his conviction in juvenile court. “No one goes in there, do you hear?” Red-rimmed eyes and the way her mother held a hand, limp on her chest, were clues that beneath a hard shell of
anger, a heart had been broken. But hers wasn't the only heart to break. Downstairs on the couch, Kate's father, too sick to go to court, didn't speak until the next day. And Kate was left to wonder if hearing about how they took J.T. away in handcuffs hadn't hastened her father's death seven weeks later.

Kate's world had been tipped upside down, too. And while she knew why J.T.'s room was shut off, she also knew there was a key to unlock all the bedroom doors in her mother's jewelry box. The top tray of necklaces, rings, and pins lifted out. Underneath was where her mother stored important things like keys, baby teeth, old silver dollars, and the Purple Heart Kate's father had been awarded after he was wounded. Kate and her brother had secretly examined these treasures many times. Kate simply plucked out the key she needed.

She had only an hour that day to get into J.T.'s room and find the trumpet before her family returned from the hospital where Kate's father had died. Still, she hesitated once more before putting the key into the lock. She didn't want to disobey. She loved her mother, even if her mother had changed. Kate thought to herself that she would gently explain how it was her father's wish, whispered to her during a final visit, that J.T. would play taps at his funeral—even though Kate suspected her mother would forbid it. But this is what made it so hard: While it was true that her brother had made a terrible mistake that shamed the family, it wasn't his fault that their father got sick. It wasn't right for their mother to blame him for that, too! But she did, forbidding him to be at the funeral.

It was a tough call going against her mother's orders, but Kate was changing as well. She had already started doing things—
adult things—that most kids her age didn't do. She put the key into the lock and turned it.

When she entered J.T.'s bedroom that day, a wall of stuffy, hot air hit her because both of the windows had been closed and the air-conditioning unit turned off. She hadn't been in the room for weeks—no one had since J.T. left—and it startled Kate to see that her brother's bed had never been made. Neither had his dirty socks been picked up from the floor, nor the water glass retrieved from the bedside table.

A thin patina of dust had collected on J.T.'s desk. She made a path with her index finger, then wiped the dust off on her shorts and closed the cover that had been left open on his laptop. Every spare minute he had, he'd been on that computer. Most kids at school probably thought he was a nerd, but Kate knew better. J.T. made her laugh, and he was a genius when it came to math and science. He knew how things worked, and not just computers, but tractor engines, fertilizer, and generators, too.

Kate picked up her brother's Game Boy and then set it back down on the desk beside his copy of
Lor
d of the Rings
, his place kept with a triangular bookmark that looked like a slice of pizza. Her eyes flicked to a shelf above his desk where a framed picture of a black and white puppy prompted a faint smile. Beside the picture was a plastic “magic wand” that her brother had used not so many years ago in magic shows down at the tractor shed. Kate remembered sitting on prickly hay bales in the audience with J.T.'s friends Digger and Brady, clapping and chuckling at the performances.

They were best friends, those three boys. But could they ever
be friends again after what had happened? It seemed impossible. And yet Kate had wondered how a bond so strong could simply disappear. When J.T. came home in seven months, it would be hard enough not having his dad, but what was going to happen when the boys eventually saw each other in school? If J.T.'s two best friends couldn't be his friends anymore, then who would be? Everybody needed at least one friend.
Who would want t
o be J.T.'s friend?

Maybe growing up on the farm and being homeschooled all those years made them closer. But J.T. was the best brother anybody could wish for. Kate knew this for a fact, because he had protected her in a special way that neither of them would probably ever acknowledge out loud.

Was prison changing him? When he came home, would he be the same inside?

Kate needed her brother to be the same inside. It was the first step to saving her family, she had decided. And it was the reason she did not quit searching until she finally found the trumpet, buried under clothes, in the back of J.T.'s closet. She sat with the case on her lap and opened it. Inside, the silver instrument her father had passed on to J.T. lay nestled in faded blue velvet. Kate slid the trumpet case under her own bed and gave an extra tug to the dust ruffle to be sure it was hidden. Then she locked up J.T.'s room and returned the key to her mother's jewelry box.

After her grandmother arrived, Kate took the trumpet case—wrapped in brown paper and addressed in black marker—with her when they ran errands.

“Big package,” her grandmother commented, finally noticing the parcel on Kate's lap as they pulled up to the post office. “What's in there?”

“A cat!” Kerry piped up from the backseat.

Kate and her grandmother chuckled.

“Just something J.T. will like,” Kate said.

Grandma frowned slightly. “I thought you couldn't send him food.”

Kate did not meet her grandmother's eyes. “Because of Dad, they're making some exceptions. I'll be right back. Do you need stamps or anything, Gram?”

*

The workers who delivered the chicks were tossing empty trays back into the bus, and the noise startled Kate out of her daydream. “All done, miss!” one of them called out.

Kate signed off on some paperwork, freed Tucker, and went to work, checking the temperature in each of the houses once again and then entering with a bucket and a flashlight to survey the new arrivals. The chicken company had long ago required her father to shut all the windows and put up blackout curtains so the chickens would think it was night all the time. That way, they ate more, didn't move as much, and grew faster.

Shining her light around, Kate could see that most of the chicks were fine, just tired from a long trip and ready to sleep. However, a few had not survived, so she waded carefully through the mass of young life peeping and swarming around her feet and began picking up the dead ones with her bare hands. Delicately, she placed them into the plastic five-gallon bucket she
carried. Kate tried never to think too deeply about this, but just did what needed to be done. She knew it was all part of how her family made a living.