Cheating for the Chicken Man Page 20

  Curtis threw up his hands and let them drop. “No idea. Fifty-fifty chance he does nothing.”

  Which meant a fifty-fifty chance he would do something.

  “I just wanted to talk to him,” Kate said, frustrated at Hooper’s reaction. “He didn’t even give me a chance.”

  “I told you. He doesn’t do so well with talking,” Curtis said. “But I’ll try to get to him today.”

  “You won’t fight or anything, will you?”

  Curtis almost laughed. “No. That’s not Hooper’s style.”

  Kate was unsettled, but they both needed to get to class.

  At lunchtime, Kate rushed to her locker to retrieve her cell phone. She turned her back to the stream of kids rushing to lunch and brought up Facebook. Quickly, she typed in the name of Curtis’s brother, Justin Jenkins. Sure enough, a page came up. NO HERO it said across the top. Below was a picture of Justin in his army uniform. And below that, a simple declarative sentence: Justin Jenkins killed himself.

  That was it. A small page Hooper must have made and had ready to launch. A page that people would not see unless they looked for it! And why would they look for it? Kids at Corsica High wouldn’t, because no one in the school knew Justin Jenkins! Hooper hadn’t even made the connection to Curtis. The whole thing was so stupid.

  She sent a text to Curtis.

  Kate: Did you see the Facebook page?

  Curtis: Yeah, i saw it.

  Kate: But no one else will! No one cares. Ignore it.

  Kate waited, but Curtis did not text back. She’d been too quick with her words. Of course someone cared—Curtis cared. She hoped he didn’t take her comments the wrong way. She tried to text again, but no reply. Did the appearance of a Facebook page about Justin mean that Hooper was going to follow through on the other threats? Was he going to call Valley Shore or make a Facebook page and report Kate’s secret flock and J.T.’s project?

  Cell phones were supposed to be kept in lockers all day, but Kate put her phone on mute and hid it in her purse. She kept checking, but no messages came. In Creative Writing class, Curtis didn’t even show up. As if to rub it all in, Mr. Ellison’s writing prompt was the word regret.

  Kate covered her eyes to make it look like she was contemplating an interesting idea, but she was too consumed with worry to write anything clever. She would need to move the chicks, but where? Should she call J.T. to warn him? Should she alert her mother? Should she fake a stomachache and beg to go home?

  No, she decided. She needed to chill, because Hooper might not do anything. There was still a chance for it to blow over. It was one thing to create a Facebook page on the computer and quite another to actually make a phone call to a company. She doubted Hooper would be that bold. He could barely talk to her. How would he muster the courage to talk to a strange grown-up?

  Never had there been a longer school day. Every ten minutes, Kate snuck a look at her phone. No messages. When the bus finally dropped her off at home, the anxiety only increased, because a strange car was in the yard.

  Kate’s mother met her in the driveway with a worried look on her face. “Kate, two men from Valley Shore are here. They heard you were keeping some of their chicks at an abandoned farm next door.”

  Kate froze. Hooper had made the call.

  “I don’t know what they heard, or how,” Mom continued in a hurried, low voice. “I told them I didn’t know anything. I figured maybe when they realize it’s just a kid, they won’t make a big deal out of it.”

  Kate bit her lip, listening.

  “When we get over there, let them see for themselves and just tell them the truth,” her mother advised. “Tell them the same way you told me.”

  “Okay.” She nodded. She would tell them the truth and take the blame and hope the company did not come down hard on her mother for what she’d done.

  “And listen,” Kate’s mother added, touching her arm and speaking softly. “J.T. doesn’t know these men are here. I didn’t want to get him upset.”

  Kate hung her head. If the company knew about the chicks, then surely they knew about J.T.’s project, too. That would be next.

  After putting her backpack inside, Kate walked with her mother to the car. She got into the backseat with her mother, and introductions were quickly made. A Mr. Nevill from the company, the driver, did the talking while Mr. Hornbeck had opened the car door for them.

  “It’s illegal, you know, to take chickens from the company. If you were not culling properly, that’s against policy as well,” Mr. Nevill said.

  Kate sat without expression. Neither she nor her mother said anything.

  “Let’s go check it out and see what we’ve got,” Mr. Nevill said.

  Sitting in the backseat of a strange car that smelled like stale cigarette smoke, Kate felt her downfall was nearly complete. Maybe she had helped J.T., but in the process, she’d become a liar and a cheat, an eavesdropper, a bad friend, and a mediocre student. Now it would be her fault if the farm lost its contract, and she would have destroyed her brother’s project.

  Kate pressed her lips together and held her mother’s hand tightly. She didn’t see any way out. As the car drove up Beck’s bumpy, overgrown driveway, it was apparent that a vehicle had been on the property recently. When the car stopped, Kate and her mother followed the two men down the path through tall grass that Kate and Curtis had created when they hauled in the feed bag. Tears gathered in Kate’s eyes. In addition to her own downfall, she knew the men would simply take all the chicks and kill them.

  Oddly, the door to the coop was open. When the two men disappeared inside, Kate glanced quizzically at her mother. “Did you do something?”

  “No!” she whispered. “I had no idea these people were coming!”

  Kate wiped at her eyes, then she and her mother followed the men inside the coop and stopped, astonished.

  The coop was empty. Not a chicken in it. Even the bag of feed and the water jugs were gone. Kate glanced at the spot where an animal had almost dug a hole to get inside, but the board she had used was exactly where she had left it.

  It was obvious, however, that chickens had been there. White feathers and chicken manure covered the floor.

  Mr. Nevill turned to Kate. “Where are they?”

  Stunned, Kate turned to her mother, who shrugged, then looked back at Mr. Nevill. “I told you. We don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  *

  Back at the house, the two company men stood in the yard with stern looks and hands on their hips—like referees who couldn’t decide on a call.

  “I don’t know what happened with those chicks,” Mr. Nevill said loudly in order to be heard over the noise of the combine harvesting soybeans. “But we also have information about your son, Mrs. Tyler. We understand he’s doing a project for school that involves testing your chicken manure for arsenic.”

  “He is?” Kate’s mother was genuinely surprised.

  Frowning, Mr. Hornbeck crossed his arms as Mr. Nevill continued. “We hear he has collected samples from three different farms, including this one.”

  “Well, let me stop you right there,” Kate’s mother declared in an equally loud voice. “Because I thought that chicken manure belonged to the farmer. That it was ours because the company did not want the responsibility for getting rid of it.”

  Mr. Nevill glared at Kate’s mother and had to wait a few seconds until the nearby combine turned a corner and started moving away from the house. “If we find out your son is testing chicken manure from this farm for arsenic, or for anything else, we will shut you down so fast you won’t know what happened.”

  Kate knew he wasn’t kidding, and in that moment, it struck her how much power the company had over their lives. It wasn’t just the chickens, but the crops, too. All the soybeans being harvested at that very moment would be trucked to a mill owned by the chicken
company. Just like their corn and the final price paid for their chicken meat, the company would determine the value of the soybeans.

  Kate’s mother was not intimidated by the company men. She put her own hands on her hips. “What have you got to fear, Mr. Nevill? Valley Shore says it hasn’t put arsenic in the chicken feed for years. Why would you worry?”

  Inwardly, Kate was beaming. Go, Mom! she silently cheered.

  “Do I need to repeat myself?” Mr. Nevill asked. “If we find out your son is testing chicken manure, we will shut you down. We have plenty of different ways to do it. Am I making myself clear, Mrs. Tyler?”

  Kate’s eyes widened. Amazed, she thought, Who is the bully now?

  ~28~

  RUFFLING FEATHERS

  That night, Uncle Ray came over to help them figure out what to do. With his arm still cradled in a sling, he sat in the living room armchair surrounded by Kate’s family, including J.T., who lay on the couch with his injured leg on a pillow. Only Kerry was missing, but she was just outside playing on the swings with her three cousins.

  “Let’s go over it again,” Uncle Ray said. “The company pretty much let the issue of the chicks go, since they didn’t find any of them, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but his eyes flicked over to Kate. “I don’t think I want to know too much more about that one,” he said, thankfully letting the subject drop.

  Her uncle cleared his throat. “The company also said that if J.T. completes his project involving the testing of chicken manure for arsenic, they would shut you down.”

  “That’s it,” Kate’s mother confirmed. “That’s what he said.”

  Uncle Ray turned to J.T. “Is it worth it, son,” he asked, “to put your family’s farm in jeopardy for the sake of a school project?”

  J.T. sat up and looked stunned. “Is that what this is all about? Wow. Why didn’t you tell me earlier? How did they even get wind of that?”

  Kate quickly averted her eyes.

  “I had to give up on that project!” J.T. exclaimed. “I can’t test the chicken manure! The testing is too sophisticated—and way too expensive for a kid like me. But I would have done it if I could have!”

  “J.T., I think you need to assume that if it’s illegal to put arsenic in chicken feed, the companies are complying with the law.”

  “No one is doing regular tests, though!” J.T. argued. “I just wanted to find out for sure.”

  “But why?” Uncle Ray asked.

  J.T. paused before answering. “Because I was angry. I still am. Because even if there is a state law banning arsenic in feed now, it was new in 2012. There wasn’t a law for a lot of years. A long time ago, when Dad was hauling his own feed bags and slitting them open with his jackknife, he was probably inhaling that stuff. He told me himself one day he wondered if that dust could have given him the cancer.”

  Silence.

  “He never mentioned that to me,” Uncle Ray said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  Kate’s mother leaned forward. “No. I never heard that either.”

  “That’s because Dad didn’t want you to worry,” J.T. told them. “Anyway, no one could ever know for sure if the two things were linked.”

  Kate watched her mother’s face droop with sadness. Were they all thinking the same thing? How in this very room they had moved in a hospital bed for the last month of her father’s life? The couch had to be carried into the dining room to make space, and the bed never did look right, pushed up against the wall beneath a narrow wooden shelf displaying her mother’s pretty china teacups. Kate stared at the spot where an IV pole had replaced her father’s reading lamp and a TV tray by the bed had always been littered with wadded tissues and medicine bottles.

  “Look,” J.T. continued in a softer voice, “I’m not doing the chicken manure thing, because I can’t. I shifted gears. The federal Food and Drug Administration banned arsenic in chicken feed nationwide the year after Maryland—in 2013. So maybe we don’t have to worry about it anymore. Although who knows? Plus, I’ve read that they can still give it to turkeys.”

  “Well, we don’t raise turkeys,” Uncle Ray said.

  “Tell them about the antibiotics,” Kate urged her brother.

  “That’s what I want to focus on,” J.T. said. “Feed companies can put antibiotics in the chicken feed if they say they’re treating sick chickens. But a lot of them could be doing it just to make the chickens grow faster.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?” Uncle Ray asked.

  “What’s wrong is we could be creating all this antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It could get passed on to humans through chicken meat! You could get sick from it, but there wouldn’t be a medicine to cure you. You could die!”

  “Do you think there could be antibiotics in our chicken feed now?” J.T.’s mother asked.

  J.T. shrugged. “Mom, we’ve never known what’s in the feed. For years it was arsenic. I read a report that said chicken farmers in other countries used stuff like Benadryl, Tylenol, and Prozac to keep chickens calm because if they’re stressed, they grow slower. Another report says they fed them coffee pulp and green tea to keep them awake so they’d eat more.”

  Uncle Ray was shaking his head. “I don’t know a chicken farmer around here who would feed that stuff to his birds.”

  “Probably not! But still, they don’t know what’s in the feed, Uncle Ray! By contract, the company provides the feed! You can’t ask questions about it! You can’t ask questions about hardly anything about the chicken business ’cause of politics and state laws. It’s called ‘agricultural secrecy.’ There’s a lot we don’t know. Like about all that chicken manure running off into the water. People like us—the public—we can’t even read the reports about it!” As he spoke, he struggled to sit up on the couch.

  “J.T., calm down,” Grandma warned, reaching over to put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re going to hurt that leg!”

  “Where are you getting this information?” Uncle Ray pressed him.

  “Lots of places,” J.T. said. “I read reports online, and I’ve been e-mailing with a researcher at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.”

  Uncle Ray rubbed his forehead. “Whew! I don’t know what you’re getting yourself into with all this, J.T. I understand why it’s important. But I also know Valley Shore won’t like you shining a light on their business and making some kind of poster about it at the school fair, where the local press will pick up on it. I’m telling you, the company won’t stand for it. You ruffle their feathers, and they will shut you down. And I’ll bet your dad has two or three hundred thousand dollars invested in those two buildings and all the equipment.”

  “Two hundred thousand,” Kate’s mother clarified.

  “There you go. That’s a big chunk of change,” Uncle Ray declared. “The bank loaned your family that money, and you all have to pay it back. How else are you going to do it without the income from the chickens?”

  “They’re like bullies!” Kate interjected. “The chicken companies are like bullies to all the chicken farmers, aren’t they? Do this. Do that. Do it our way, or we’ll cancel your contract and put you out of business!”

  A brief pause. Nobody disagreed.

  “Be practical. You’ve got to protect yourselves,” Uncle Ray said. “You and the Richards family down the way, the Masons, the Franklins. You’re all good people, working hard, just trying to make a living. It’s a business. There’s a lot of money and powerful people behind Valley Shore. You can’t fight them and expect to win.”

  “You’re probably right,” J.T. admitted. He looked across the table at Kate’s mother. “I’ll let it go if you want, Mom. I sure don’t want to get us in trouble. But someday I’m going to follow up on this. I know now that there are people who study these issues and put pressure on the government to change the laws. That’s what I want to do. It’s
not fair what these big companies and factory farms get away with—it’s not right! People deserve to know what they’re buying—and what they’re eating.

  “Maybe this is what I’ll do for my job one day. Do research like that scientist I e-mailed,” J.T. declared. Then he added softly, “I’ll do it for Dad.”

  Kate blinked her moist eyes. She felt so proud of J.T., and so guilty for her role in exposing his project, which he was now giving up.

  “No,” Kate’s mother declared.

  Everyone looked at her.

  She shook her head. “No. You should continue with your project, J.T. You have a right to research and write a paper for school on these issues.” She tapped a finger on the coffee table to make her point. “If Valley Shore has a problem with that, let them cancel our contract.”

  Uncle Ray winced. “But that’s not practical!”

  Kate’s mother held up a hand to stop him. “I’ve got some life insurance money that Jacob left us.”

  It was the first anyone had heard about life insurance.

  “How much, Angela? Can you tell us?” Uncle Ray asked.

  “The policy is for one hundred thousand dollars,” she said.

  “But that would barely cover half of your mortgage,” Uncle Ray noted.

  “Yes, but we have some savings, too. Things would be tight, there’s no question, but maybe this is the change we all need.”

  J.T. and Kate widened their eyes.

  Uncle Ray leaned back in his chair.

  “The more I think about it, the more I think it’s time for us to get out of this business,” Kate’s mother went on. “Maybe we should just pay off the mortgage and try something else.”

  “Like what?” Kate asked.

  “Well. We’d own these chicken houses. We could raise chickens for the eggs. People want cage-free and free-range eggs. We could do that.”

  J.T. tried to sit up again. “Mom?”

  “It’s just a suggestion,” she said, with a wan smile.

  “But we could all help!” Kate said eagerly.

  “Absolutely!” J.T. agreed.