Cheating for the Chicken Man Read online

  Kate returned to the doorway and looked up the hill again toward the maple tree where the van was parked. She knew it had taken a huge effort on her mother’s part to not only get in the van again, but to take it down the driveway.

  “So what are you going to do?” Kate asked, noticing that J.T. had attached the big mower, the Bush Hog, to the back of the large red tractor.

  “They’re getting ready to harvest the soybeans. Uncle Ray hired someone. But before they come, I want to trim the brush out of the field that got left fallow last year. If I don’t, we’ll have a forest out there.”

  “Well, watch out for turtles,” Kate said.

  “What?” J.T. screwed up his face. “You looking for another injured animal to take care of?”

  “No! Don’t you remember how Dad used to stop the tractor if he came across a turtle? He’d get down to move it.”

  “Oh, yeah!” J.T. brightened. “Right! And he had to be careful when he set the turtle back down, to keep it headed in the same direction.”

  “Yes! Because turtles only go in one direction! If he put the turtle down on the wrong side, the turtle would simply walk right back into his path.”

  J.T. smiled. “Huh. I haven’t thought of that in a long time.”

  Talking about their dad made them both grow quiet. When Kate sat down on a pile of old lumber, J.T. took a seat beside her and hunched over with his elbows on his knees.

  “I miss Dad,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  “I never realized before how much talking we did out here while we worked and fixed stuff. I learned a lot from him.”

  Kate nodded.

  “He sure loved going to my basketball games, didn’t he?” It was more of a statement than a question.

  Kate readily agreed. “He did. He loved watching you play.”

  “I was thinking I might go out for the team this winter.”

  “That would be great!”

  “But we’ll see. I’m not sure yet,” J.T. said. “I really want to get this project done first. Boy, and I’ll tell you, if Dad was here right now, he’d be mighty interested in what I’m doing.”

  “Did you find out yet if your chicken manure samples have arsenic?”

  “Not yet. We haven’t found a lab where we can test them. In the meantime, I’m doing some other research. You know what I found out?”

  “What?”

  “Some companies add antibiotics to the feed.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Probably, because the kind of antibiotics they discovered in some chicken samples may keep the chickens from getting sick, but they get passed along in the meat and can create antibiotic-resistant superbugs in people.”

  “That sounds pretty scary.”

  “It is! For sure, I’m going to include that in my report.”

  “Do you think Valley Shore puts that stuff in our chicken feed?”

  J.T. shrugged. “Who knows? Nobody’s testing it. Boy, Valley Shore would go nuts if they knew I was poking around in this stuff.”

  “But I feel really proud of you, J.T., for doing this. It sounds important. I’m glad you got involved and that you’ve bounced back at school with everything.”

  “Well, not everything,” J.T. disagreed.

  “Why?” Kate asked, alarmed that there was a bullying incident she hadn’t heard about. “What else happened?”

  Her brother made a tent with his fingers, but didn’t answer.

  “J.T., what is it? You can tell me.” Kate nudged him gently with her elbow.

  “Well, there’s this girl at school.”

  Surprised, Kate turned to look at him. “Yeah,” she said, smiling and feeling relieved it wasn’t bullying after all. “Some of us noticed!”

  “What? Like, at lunch?”

  “Her name’s Ashley, right?”

  J.T.’s face softened, then flushed. “Ashley Newberg,” he confirmed. “We were in band together in middle school. She plays flute in the marching band. She’s been trying to get me to join up.”

  “I remember Ashley,” Kate said. “She looked different in middle school, though.”

  “I’ll say! She looks great now, doesn’t she? I mean, she lost a lot of weight and let her hair get long.”

  “Maybe that’s why I didn’t recognize her at first.”

  “She wrote to me, you know, when I was at Cliffside.”

  “She did?”

  “A couple times,” J.T. said.

  “So what’s bothering you about Ashley?”

  “This guy, he’s a junior, he asked Ashley to homecoming.”

  “What? And you wanted to ask her?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure I even want to go.”

  “If you don’t want to go, then what’s the problem?”

  J.T. pushed the glasses up on his nose. “That’s what I’m confused about. She said she didn’t give that guy an answer yet.”

  “She told you that? Then she must be waiting for you!”

  “I don’t know, Kate. I don’t know what to do.”

  Kate smirked. “You dummy. Ask her to go! Why not?”

  J.T. stood up and wiped his hands on a rag. “I’ll think about it.” He climbed up into the tractor seat, pushed in the clutch, gave it some gas, and this time, the tractor sputtered, then roared to life.

  Kate got up and moved out of the way. She waved to J.T. and, journal in hand, set off to feed her chickens. As she walked across the soybean field, the plants, turning brown with autumn, brushed against her legs. She heard the old tractor settle into its regular putt-putt-putt and, glancing back, saw J.T. sitting tall in the high seat. She smiled, knowing that her brother’s mind wasn’t solely on chicken manure.

  By the time she’d crossed the field, Kate could also hear the loud chomp-chomp-chomp—and occasional zing!—of the Bush Hog as its powerful blades tore through the tangled brush and every now and then sent a rock flying.

  After squeezing through the barbed wire at the edge of the Beck property, she walked up a small incline toward the chicken coop. Her three chickens were just sitting there, as usual. She fed them some grain and refreshed their water from a jug she kept in the corner. Then she sat outside the coop, leaning up against its worn, gray wood in a sunny spot, and opened her journal. She made notes about the entire day, from the humiliation of English class to the surprising sight of her mother sitting in the van, to the revealing conversation with J.T.: I just hope his testing of the chicken manure samples for arsenic doesn’t get our family into trouble.

  She chewed on the end of the pen, and tried to write a conclusion. Basically, I’m still not sorry for the cheating I’ve done, because it protected J.T. and gave him a chance. I guess I need to be like one of those turtles crossing the field and just keep going in the same direction, no matter what.

  The sound of the tractor and the Bush Hog suddenly got louder, distracting Kate. Odd, she thought, because the fallow field J.T. was cutting didn’t abut the Beck property. What was he doing way over here?

  Kate stood and walked a few steps to where she could get a better look. Shading her eyes with one hand, she stared, suddenly alarmed. The tall, red tractor was rumbling through the soybean field, chewing up the plants about to be harvested, as it circled without direction—and without a driver.

  ~20~

  SO MUCH BLOOD

  Dropping her journal and the pen, Kate sprinted to the fence. Had J.T. jumped off the tractor? Had he fallen? Kate’s eyes swept the field again. He could have hit his head. He could be lying in the field somewhere, knocked out and hurt!

  Unable to see any sign of him, Kate yanked up the top strand of wire, squeezed through, and took off, jumping over the rows of soybeans, as she raced to where J.T. had been cutting.

  The tractor, meanwhile, continued its menacing arc. If her b
rother was lying unconscious in the field, the tractor and the Bush Hog could run over him and shred him into a million pieces! She’d heard her dad tell stories about Bush Hog accidents. No one ever survived an accident with a Bush Hog.

  Finally, she could see the path J.T. had cut with his first sweep of the tractor. Her eyes followed the cut area until she saw how the tractor must have crossed one of the field’s drainage ditches. At that point, the path deviated and went off at an odd angle. Suddenly, a spot of blue caught her attention—J.T.’s shirt! Her brother lay in the brush beside the ditch.

  “J.T.!” Kate screamed, rushing to his side.

  Blood was everywhere—on her brother, on the grass beside him. There was even a gruesome red trail along the path the Bush Hog had cleared. Stunned, Kate pressed her hands to her face and dropped to her knees beside him. “J.T.! I’m here!” She squeezed his arm and tried to sound calm. “You’ll be all right!”

  But Kate wasn’t sure that her brother would be all right. So much blood! She could even see part of a white leg bone, but couldn’t tell if all of his leg was there.

  Bits of blood and clothing scattered nearby suggested what had happened. The ditch was partially hidden by the tall brush, so maybe J.T. hadn’t seen it. The tractor could have been thrown off balance and started to topple over, enough to make J.T. fall. Kate cringed at the thought of those powerful Bush Hog blades tearing into her brother’s leg.

  J.T. moaned. “Kate, help me.”

  Kate whipped her sweatshirt off and gently wrapped it around her brother’s blood-soaked leg. Her hands were shaking, but she spread her fingers as wide as she could and squeezed, hoping to stop the bleeding. Still, the blood came. She needed help. Reaching with one hand for her cell phone, she felt only a flat pocket. She’d left the phone back on her desk. Her heart dropped. She was on her own then. What was she going to do to stop the blood? Make a tourniquet?

  How do you make a tourniquet? Desperately, she tried to recall what she’d learned from a first aid session years ago. A group of homeschoolers had met at the fire department one evening. They took turns bandaging one another’s arms. Someone had showed them how to stop bleeding with a belt—that was a last resort. The tightened belt cut off the blood supply. But it also meant a person would probably lose that limb, Kate recalled. No way was she going to do that. Still, Kate took note that J.T. had worn a belt that day.

  Pressure points, she suddenly remembered. There were pressure points to stop bleeding, but where exactly were they?

  All she could do was squeeze hard. She stretched her hands as much as she could trying to wrap her fingers around J.T.’s lower thigh. Up on her knees, leaning into her arms, she pressed down with everything she had.

  Dazed, J.T. tried to sit up.

  “No—lie down,” Kate told him. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”

  While her brother fell back, Kate kept up the pressure. But was she pressing hard enough to stop the bleeding? There was so much blood it was hard to tell.

  The tractor’s noise grew louder. Unbelievably, it was circling back toward them—like an enemy! She would have to move her brother or else stop the tractor. It wasn’t going fast, probably just second gear. If she grabbed onto the back, and climbed up to where they’d stood as kids getting rides, maybe she could pull herself up onto the seat and slam it out of gear.

  She kept squeezing.

  It wouldn’t work, though, standing on the back of the tractor, she realized. The PTO was there, the equipment that connected the tractor to the Bush Hog.

  Panicked, Kate turned back to J.T. “The tractor’s coming back! What should I do?”

  Her brother didn’t answer.

  “J.T.! The tractor’s coming back! How do I stop it?!”

  “Run alongside,” J.T. said weakly. “Reach in . . . hit the gearshift.” He grimaced before finishing. “Put it in neutral.”

  Kate must have looked terrified.

  “You can do it,” J.T. told her. “Don’t be afraid, Kate.”

  He was telling her not to be afraid?

  “Okay, but when I let go, J.T., you have to keep squeezing your leg. You’ve got to stop the bleeding.”

  Kate helped her brother roll over on his side so it was easier for him to keep his hands on the injured leg. “Get a good grip. That’s it. Now squeeze as hard as you can!”

  Standing up, Kate fixed her bearings and took off running through the brush toward the tractor. Sharp prickers tore at her legs, and the tall grass made it hard to see where she was running, but she raced on, falling once over an unseen rock. Up and running again, she plunged forward until she was alongside one of the tractor’s large back wheels. She could see the gearshift with the bulbous end, but there was no way for her to reach in and hit it. She couldn’t get close enough.

  She kept running, trying to figure out what to do next, then suddenly, the tractor hit the same drainage ditch it must have hit before and toppled. The Bush Hog flipped over too, its sharp blades still spinning. Quickly, Kate scrambled over the tractor’s wheel and reached in to turn the key that shut off the engine.

  In the eerie quiet that followed, she rushed back to J.T. Carefully, she removed his hand on the saturated sweatshirt and replaced it with her own, but she couldn’t tell if the bleeding had stopped or not.

  J.T. curled his mouth in pain.

  Should she run for help? Should she stay and try to stop the bleeding? Tears sprang into Kate’s eyes. Why hadn’t she slipped her cell phone into her pocket like she always did?

  Blood was pooling on the ground.

  Kate swallowed hard. She had to make a decision.

  “Help me,” J.T. begged.

  Sucking in her breath, Kate reached for her brother’s belt. Quickly, she pulled it from his waist, then slipped it around the mid part of his thigh, above his knee, and pulled it through the buckle again. She paused before pulling it tight. She wasn’t a doctor—she wasn’t sure! But bottom line, she didn’t want her brother to bleed to death on the ground beside her.

  Up on her knees, Kate used all her strength to pull the belt tight with one hand and push down on J.T.’s leg with the other.

  Her brother grimaced.

  Kate pulled even tighter.

  “Can you reach down and hold it?” she asked J.T.

  “I can try,” he mouthed, opening his hand.

  Kate helped to wrap the end of the belt twice around his fingers so it wouldn’t loosen up.

  “I’m going for help,” Kate said. “Can you hold on, J.T.?”

  His eyes were closed, but he moved his head to indicate “yes.”

  *

  Kate burst into the house just as her mother was coming down the front stairs.

  “Mom, call for help! J.T. fell off the tractor!”

  “Where is he?” Her mother flew down the stairs.

  Breathless, Kate grabbed the bottom of the banister. “The field!”

  Her mother gasped upon seeing the blood on her hands.

  “Up toward Beck’s old place!” Kate told her. “The overgrown field!”

  Kate’s mother rushed to the phone in the living room.

  “Tell them the Bush Hog cut his leg! A lot of bleeding!”

  Kate dashed to the bathroom, grabbed all the clean towels she could find and was running back through the house when her mother hung up the phone and stopped her.

  “I’ll go!” her mother exclaimed, reaching for the towels and thrusting the phone toward Kate. “Stay and direct the ambulance!”

  Kate ran with her mother partway through the first soybean field until they could both see the toppled tractor. “He’s just beyond it,” Kate told her.

  When her mother ran ahead, Kate returned to the front yard and anxiously awaited the ambulance. It came just a few minutes later, its lights flashing, followed by a fire truck. Kate pointed t
o the fields. “He’s out there!”

  “Run ahead and show us,” someone called out the window. “We’ll have to go slow over the crops.”

  Kate took off and the vehicles followed. But they could only go so far. The paramedics finally had to get out and follow Kate on foot, jogging with their equipment.

  When they arrived at the scene, J.T. was lying with his head in his mother’s lap. Kate was able to see that it was Brady’s cousin Carl who had responded with the ambulance. “Let’s get that leg elevated,” Carl said. After he and Kate’s mother carefully repositioned J.T., Carl ripped open a bandage pack.

  Suddenly, there was Brady! He must have been riding along with his older cousin. She watched, astonished, as Brady kneeled beside J.T.

  A woman medic started an IV while Carl unwound the bloody towels and pressed thick wads of clean gauze against the wound. Kate spied J.T.’s broken glasses in the grass nearby. She picked them up and stood watching, her eyes brimming with tears, and a tight, sticky fist at her mouth.

  While Carl and Kate’s mother worked together to press the gauze pads on the largest leg wound, it was Brady who stayed by J.T.’s shoulders and took one of his bloodied hands in his own. Brady’s familiar voice was strong and calm. “Hey, J.T., can you hear me? It’s gonna be all right, man,” he told his old friend. “We got here as quickly as we could. You’re gonna be all right now.”

  ~21~

  WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED

  Kate stood at a window in the high-rise hospital’s waiting room and stared into a dense gray fog that covered the city streets. A yellow traffic light blinked through the heavy mist, and portions of other buildings poked through. But there was one thing Kate saw clearly: how all of life’s priorities had suddenly lined up differently. Bullies, cheaters, chickens being fed arsenic and antibiotics—they weren’t even in the picture anymore. Homecoming dances, field hockey games, good grades—who cared? The one and only thing that mattered was that her brother lived.

  She didn’t even care if J.T. lost his leg. She knew that lots of people lived full lives with artificial limbs. She’d seen how brave soldiers who lost legs in war went on to play basketball, climb mountains, and run races.