Chicken Boy, page 11
He looked out the window. Headlights flashed across his face, but it was like he didn’t see them. “We didn’t have any money when she started feeling so bad. I’d just started working again after being laid off for nearly half a year. But I should’ve done something.”
We all sat there, mouths shut tight. Then Shane started shaking his head, frowning hard.
“You ain’t remembering right,” he said to Daddy. “You ain’t remembering it right at all.” Daddy’s eyes opened wide, like he’d just come out of a hard sleep. “She’d been feeling sick a long time before she even told anybody about it. I knew something was wrong with her. I was in seventh grade, taking that North Carolina history class, and she used to help me with it all the time. She’d come home from work and drill me about every single North Carolina fact that ever was.”
Shane turned and looked at me. “You taking that class now?” I nodded. “Well, if Mama was here, you’d be getting an A. She was like the queen of North Carolina or something. And then all the sudden she stopped helping me. She’d come home and go to sleep. Daddy was working some second-shift job, and me and Summer would have to fix dinner.”
Summer laughed at that. “You didn’t ever once fix dinner, Shane. You just poured the tea into the glasses. I remember that napping, though, since you brought it up. That went on for a long time. I remember saying something to Granny about it, and she said maybe Mama was pregnant.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Daddy said. He rubbed his eyes. “I forgot about that part. She was sleeping a lot on the weekends, and I thought, ‘Please don’t let it be another baby.’”
Shane nodded, like he thought Daddy was finally seeing the light. “And then when she did finally say something about feeling sick, you called up Granny because Mama wouldn’t listen to you about going to see a doctor. Granny took her to the doctor the next day.”
“Man, how you remember all this stuff?” Patrick asked. “It’s like you got some superhero memory power.”
Shane chewed on a fingernail. “I remember everything about it,” he said. “From the first to the last.”
That night I went home and took my autobiography out of my backpack, where I’d been keeping it ever since Miss Thesman handed it back to me. On the back of the last page I started writing down our barbecue story. Needed two more pages to finish it. Then I got out a fresh sheet and wrote down about when my mom got sick.
And then I put my autobiography in the box.
At the next session, Ms. Hill gave our family an assignment. She said we had to make a date to go through Mama’s closet and get rid of most of the stuff.
“It’s been five years, Randy,” she said, staring Daddy down. “It’s time.”
Daddy looked at his shoes, like they’d gotten real interesting all the sudden. But that Saturday during my visiting time we did it—me, Daddy, Shane, and Summer. Patrick stood in the doorway and watched. We took out the clothes and put them in boxes, all but a few things Summer wanted to keep, a peach-colored slip and two sweaters.
“You gonna give one of them boxes to Granny?” I asked Daddy after we’d gotten everything packed away. “For that quilt she wants to do?”
Daddy gave me a steady look. “There ain’t no quilt, son. Never was a quilt, never would be one, even if I gave your granny an attic full of clothes.”
“So why does she want the clothes, then?”
“She don’t want the clothes,” Daddy said, lifting one of the boxes onto his shoulder. “She wants Sandy. That’s two different things completely.”
TWENTY-FOUR
You might not know it, but you can get to missing a chicken.
I didn’t have one intention of going to Granny’s house again, but I kept wondering how Miss Blue and the rest of them was doing. Not to mention I had to work up an oral report for Mr. Peabody, and how was I supposed to do that without having my chickens to study on?
First time I went, Mrs. Paulsen drove me after school. She waited in the car with a book while I went out back. I was hoping Granny wouldn’t be there, but I saw her through the kitchen window. She waved. I didn’t bother waving back.
“You gonna stand in my backyard and ignore me to my face?” she called a few minutes later from the porch.
I looked up at her, shading my eyes from the sun. She wanted to talk, fine. “Is it true you wanted custody of me just to get back at Daddy for not giving you Mama’s clothes?”
Granny’s eyes got all squinty, like she was confused about something. “No, that wasn’t it at all,” she told me. “Is that what your no-good daddy said?”
And I said, “Stop calling him no-good. He’s pretty good. He’s getting better.”
Granny turned and went inside. End of conversation.
This last time I went to visit my chickens, I didn’t expect to exchange a single word with Granny. But I’d only been there a few minutes when I could feel Granny watching me from the porch. When she finally went in the house, I figured that was that, but she came back, this time carrying something in her hand. “Come on up here for a minute, son,” she called to me. “I’ve got something I want to give you.”
I trudged up the hill to the house, thinking there wasn’t one thing she had to give me that I had the least bit of interest in taking.
I stood on the bottom step and put my hand out. Granny leaned down and handed me a picture. It was my parents on their wedding day. My dad’s face wasn’t cut out. It was right there, next to my mom’s. They both looked young and happy, their arms around each other, big smiles stretched across their faces.
“Mama sure was pretty,” I said, holding the picture close to my face, like maybe I could step inside it if I tried hard enough.
Granny sat down on the step and stared off into the trees. “That girl right there, she was my only child. She was my baby. I have lost two husbands, one by death, the other by divorce, and I have lost my parents and my brothers and sisters. But nothing ever pierced me to the core like that little girl’s dying. I know it wasn’t your daddy’s fault. I know I messed up by filing a report with Social Services. Is that what you want to hear? Is that what it takes for you not to be mad at me?”
I didn’t say anything. Didn’t want to give her the pleasure of me forgiving her. I held on to that feeling for as long as I could, and then I looked at that picture of my parents. Thought about how it would be a nice thing to put in my box. That’s when something hard inside of me broke open. Leaning down, I brushed some dirt off my shoe. “I might be mad at you for a while longer, I ain’t sure,” I said.
Granny nodded, like she understood. Then she swiped her hand across her eyes. She pointed to Calvin. “I believe that dog has got egg envy. I caught him sitting on a nest yesterday, practically squawking with the effort of laying.”
I sat down next to her on the step. She put out her hand. I put my hand in it. We sat that way for a while, and then I said I needed to see my chickens.
I had to give my report in the morning. Henry’d already given his. I could still picture it, him walking to the front of the room, applause popping out here and there, and a few boos, too. Henry took a deep bow. “My friends and fellow scientists, today I will present to you the soul of a chicken.” He pulled out a stack of charts from behind Mr. Peabody’s desk. “But first let us begin with the chicken brain, a compact marvel of sense and sensibility.”
I leaned back in my chair. I could hear people shuffling in their seats up and down the aisles. A pencil dropped, and then another. I wondered if Henry had given a lot of thought to his audience, a bunch of seventh graders hopped up on chewing gum and Reese’s Pieces. Maybe not the biggest convention of chicken lovers in the world. But then Henry wouldn’t care if they loved chickens or not. He just wanted them to understand chickens.
My chickens started to cluck and fuss as I walked down the yard. I wondered what they’d think if they knew tomorrow they were going to be the subject of a big, scientific presentation.
Only maybe they wouldn’t be. I didn’t know how much scientific stuff I had to say about them. Mostly what I’d learned by having chickens is that you could love some things you’d never guess. You might not think you could love a chicken. A dog, sure. Everybody loves dogs. But a chicken? For a long time I didn’t even think a chicken had a soul. Brain the size of a pea. A heart that thumped for nobody but itself.
Miss Blue began to peck hard at the ground. A worm stretched out of the dirt, caught in her beak, and that made the other chickens gather around her, just one big gaggle of cheerleaders. Calvin barked. I got all wrapped up in it too, like I was watching an Olympic competition and Miss Blue was going for the gold.
All my life I’d been around my granny’s chickens, or at least could see them way out there in the very back of her yard, but they hadn’t interested me. Maybe it was because I’d never sat down in the dirt with them and watched them go about their business or tried to make some conversation. Or maybe it was because I’d seen Granny kill a chicken by twisting off its head with her bare hands. It was like she was wringing out a dish towel. How could I get interested in chickens when I’d seen a sight like that?
“You can’t expect a person to love an animal they might see decapitated at any minute. It ain’t realistic,” I told Miss Blue, who was gulping down her worm. She looked up at me like it shocked her to learn that some chickens got treated that way.
I stepped onto an old tree stump. “Here is a scientific fact,” I told the chickens, pretending they were my classmates. “I used to not like chickens, and now I do.”
Calvin barked again, and I wondered if he’d been the very same way. I continued. “I used to think chickens were dumb, and now I don’t. I never would have thought you could be friends with a chicken, but now I do think that. So how come I changed my mind?”
A horn honked up in the driveway. When I turned around, there was Harrison sitting in the driver’s seat of Granny’s truck. “Hey, Tobin,” he called out. “You want a ride?”
“I’m giving a speech,” I yelled back, and that about cracked me up. I was giving a speech to a bunch of chickens. On top of that, I was pretty sure they could understand every word I was saying. I’d use that as proof in my report. If chickens could listen, didn’t that mean they could think?
I turned back to the chickens. Lefty was looking at me with her head cocked. It appeared she couldn’t wait to hear what I had to say next. “Maybe I changed my mind about chickens because taking care of chickens got me off my butt,” I announced, and something about Lefty’s expression made me think she appreciated that answer. But I wasn’t sure if it was the right one. Maybe I got to liking chickens because my chickens were like me. Not as dumb or prehistoric as you might think after you studied on them some.
You’d be surprised how many people don’t know the first thing about chickens.
“Tobin, my man!”
I turned around to see Henry walking down the hill. I could tell by the look on his face he had some big idea he wanted to tell me about. But the second he opened his mouth, Granny’s truck muttered and grumbled, and there was old Harrison smiling at us through the windshield, waving like he was about to take off into the wild blue yonder.
Me and Henry started running. I heard Granny yell, “What the Sam Hill …?” and then she was hauling tail out the back door. The chickens were clucking and racing us up the hill, and Calvin was barking his head off. It only took Granny a second to reach the truck and grab the keys out of the ignition. It about busted me and Henry up, the look on Harrison’s face. I guessed Granny must have turned a new leaf if she wasn’t going to let Harrison learn to drive.
Henry threw himself down on the ground. “Tobin, my man,” he huffed, his chest wheezing in and out like an accordion, “for our next project, I think we ought to teach our chickens to sing. Not like people, but like singing birds. I read something about how you can do that.”
I sat down next to him. “Easier than teaching them how to read,” I said.
“Hey, that’s not a bad idea either.” Henry grinned, like he was picturing Miss Blue holding open a copy of Romeo and Juliet. “If anybody could teach a chicken to read, it would be me and you.”
Hard to argue with that, son.
Frances O'Roark Dowell, Chicken Boy
