Those hens had to be around here somewhere. Probably had enough of me stealing their future chicks and snuck off to lay their eggs in a secret hidey-hole. Our hens never went far, though. They liked being fed. So out I went to look for them, in the pouring rain after all. Shoot. Why hadn’t Ma told me to wear my raincoat? I grabbed an empty feed sack to hold over my head as I searched the chickens’ favorite hiding places.
Nope, no sign of them under any of the bushes or the porch steps or perched on Jed’s castle. Not even a lonely feather. And the dish next to the lawnmower was half full of Jed’s Stupid Cat’s food. The chickens would have cleaned that up if they’d gone near it.
Ouch. My stomach hurt. Those dough rocks were doing somersaults. Pa would blame me for this. He’d make me pay. Oh, I wished I knew where to find Jed. I’d run away and stay with him. He’d understand.
I was searching high and low for the third time when Barbie came outside—in her raincoat and carrying an umbrella. “Ma wants to know what’s taking you so long. She wants the new eggs now so she can take them—hey, why are you looking at me like a beggar?”
“I’m dying of cookie dough poisoning. And all of the chickens have been kidnapped by Colonel Sanders.”
“Sebby! You lost the hens? You’re dead all right.” She was looking under the porch. I was glad I had taken Odum’s pebble to bed. Now it was safe in my pillowcase.
“I already looked everywhere. Three times. The chickens aren’t anywhere.”
“You look three times for your sneakers every morning, too, and they aren’t anywhere in the house until someone else points at them.” Yeah, that was true. My sneakers have invisible cloaking powers that only work on me.
She checked all the bushes and Jed’s castle and the cat food corner, then she headed into the henhouse. I followed her. “Shish, there’s no use. I’m telling you, they aren’t—what are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
It looked like she was going to the feed closet at the back of the building, but there was no way the chickens could get in there.
“Why look there?” I said. “The chickens can’t get in. I never, ever leave that door open, or the chickens would eat—”
I was interrupted by a howl and a blur of gray and white fur that shot out of the closet, between Barbie’s feet, and out the henhouse door. Which I’d decided to leave open for the moment in case the chickens showed up and wanted back in.
“—everything. How did Jed’s Stupid Cat get in there?”
“Gee, Seb, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask your sneakers?”
“But—”
“Sh!” Barbie put her finger over her lips and leaned into the closet. “Do you hear that?”
I listened hard, heard rain on the roof, heard myself breathing, and then I heard a pathetic faint cluck . . . cluck . . . cluck.
“Sounds like they’re back behind all this mess of yours. Sheesh, Sebby, what do you do on Saturdays when you’re supposed to be out here cleaning?”
“This is how I clean,” I said with a shrug. Everything was put away. So what if I didn’t take the time to make it all neat like the Shish would. She even folded her socks. And put them in Roy G Biv rainbow order. My system wasn’t fancy, but it was easy.
The closet was just barely longer than a bathtub, and wider, so you could walk in and reach the long shelves on the left side of the door. The closest shelves were for bales of clean hay, feed, and other chicken stuff. The far end held the plastic bins of Christmas decorations and other junk in storage. The open part near the door held the tall and wide things like the pitchfork, wheelbarrow, and a deep sink with a drippy spigot.
“Help me move this stuff,” the Shish commanded. And I tried to help. I really did. But with each step I took toward the closet my stomach somersaulted harder. I felt like those dough rocks were going to pick me right up in the air and spin me in circles. “Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!” I held on to the door and doubled over with the pain.
“Oh, puh-leeze, Seb. If you want me to help find your missing chickens so Ma won’t kill you, you’d better cut out the melodrama right now. I’m serious.” She crossed her arms to show me. But I wasn’t acting, and the tears came to prove it. That melted her down.
“Sebby, what’s wrong? Your stomach again?”
I nodded.
Barbie put her arm around my shoulders. I didn’t push her away. I was really scared.
“We gotta go tell Ma. You probably need a doctor.”
Probably. Except that Ma had enough to worry about. And I had other plans, too. Spying is hard to do in an emergency room. So I wiped my eyes. “No big deal. I’m fine. I’ll just get some fresh air, and then I’ll come back and help you.”
The Shish looked doubtful, but she nodded. I took her umbrella and went outside. The fresh air did help. My stomach went back to the same dull ache I’d been living with for a couple of days.
While I was out there, the Post Office truck came by, so I crossed the road to get the mail. Making myself useful. Ma and Grum would love that. On the top of the stack sat an envelope with the Mildew School logo in the return address. Uh-oh. The letter was addressed to Ma and Pa in the tiny, neat handwriting I saw on all my school papers. Ms. Byron. And then I remembered that she’d said she was writing home to my parents about my homework.
Suddenly a very unfortunate accident occurred. An ORC truck whizzed by with a whoosh of air that dragged the envelope right out of my hand. It tumbled like an autumn leaf into the ditch and sank into the frothy wastewater from the gore.
I’d have swum for it, honestly, but I couldn’t keep Barbie waiting any longer.
8
By now Barbie had most of the closet emptied out in neat stacks. It seemed impossible that so much had fit into such a tight space, including the broken furniture and toys Pa was going to fix someday. Seeing the rusty red wagon he used to pull me and Barbie around in made me smile. Until I saw what was in it. Jed’s protest signs. So much for smiling. Those signs depressed me.
Nobody in town liked what Boots Odum had done to the gore, but nobody hated it more than Jed. The week before he ran away, he had started a protest all by himself. He made picket signs and marched them back and forth across the main entrance to ORC. One read:THIS NATURAL BEAUTIFICATION PROJECT
BROUGHT TO KOKADJO BY
OUR RICHEST CITIZEN
Another one had a picture of the gore from Kettle Ridge before ORC, all glorious with fall foliage and curls of wood smoke coming out of stone chimneys, most of which Pa had built. Then another picture of the same area stripped down to the crumbly dirt. The caption said:DON’T YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY?
My favorite one was a picture of Boots Odum from one of his billboards, pasted next to a picture of Grum packing all her stuff up in garbage bags. It said:WHAT DO YOU EXPECT
FROM A GUY CALLED “BOOTS”?
HE BOOTS PEOPLE.
That one was my favorite because it made you feel something, even if the sad little old raggedy lady wasn’t your own grandmother kicked out of her home. But Grum was embarrassed when she rode by and saw Jed and his signs on her way to the church coffee klatch one day. “I wasn’t booted, I was bought out,” she said and made Pa stop the truck.
It wasn’t pretty what Pa did to Jed right out on the street at the edge of town. Jed stayed to himself for a couple of days afterward, like always after Pa got after him. But then he up and disappeared.
It upset me terribly to see those signs again. I hadn’t forgiven Pa yet for driving my brother off. I didn’t know if I ever could.
“Hey, Seb, I can’t see anything back here. Will you come back from Pluto and get me the flashlight?” Oh yeah, I was supposed to be helping the Shish look for the chickens.
“I’ll get us a flashlight. Have to take the mail inside anyway.”
“Well, hurry up. I still have my own chores, you know.” She poked her head out of the closet. There were cobwebs all over her hair. It made me feel kind of affectionate towa
rd her.
“Thanks, Barbie. Really,” I said. I meant it, too. And then she had to go and say, “Don’t tell Ma yet about having no eggs. We might find some when we find the chickens.”
“Well, duh.” Now Miss Smartypants was ticking me off. I already knew that. After all, I was just as gifted and talented as she was.
“And don’t tell her about the missing chickens yet, either.” She pointed her perfect fingernail at me. Made me wish I’d broken it off when we wrestled yesterday. Anyway, instead of all the insults I was thinking, which would make her quit doing all the work, I just said, “Yes, your majesty.”
The first thing Ma said when I kicked my way in was, “Seb, you have to stop giving milk to the cat. We can’t afford it, and milk isn’t good for cats anyway.”
As usual on Saturday mornings, she was going through the cupboards and the coupons, making her weekly grocery shopping list. Pa was still jackhammering upstairs louder than the washing machine spinning in the basement.
“I didn’t feed the cat anything,” I said. “Must have been Barbie dumping her milk to get out of—”
Whoops, if Grum heard that, Barbie would be hearing from her, and then I’d be hearing from Barbie. I looked around and saw Grum on the couch grinning at the TV. It was quite a sight since she hadn’t yet put her teeth in for the day. I had to find out what had made her gums so happy, so I headed for the couch to join her.
“Hold on, no TV for you yet,” said Ma, grabbing me by the belt loop as I passed her. “Where are the eggs? And where’s your sister? If she doesn’t get her chores done pretty soon, there won’t be any roller skating for you two this afternoon.”
Oh, right. “She’s actually helping me clean out the feed closet,” I said. “We emptied it all out and we’re going to reorganize everything. I came in to get a flashlight.”
“Really!” Ma looked surprised and pleased. “Good idea! That closet does need a good reaming out. You can help Barbie clean the bathroom later, since she’s helping you now.”
“And I brought in the mail,” I said, pointing to the pile I’d left on the table.
“Why, thanks, Sebby,” Ma said with her sudden bright smile that always made me smile back, no matter how crummy I felt. Then her smile fell as she leafed through the envelopes. My heart stopped for a beat. Was she expecting the letter from school?
I cleared my throat. “Everything okay, Ma?”
She tried to bring back that bright smile, but this time it looked more like a wince. “Nothing for you to worry about, hon. It’s just the property tax bill. We’ll figure out how to get it paid, somehow. We always have.”
Our property went from the Zensylvania border down along one side of the gore, and then it crossed the road and wrapped around the narrow end of the triangle. The taxes on all that land were pretty high. Pa’d been after Ma to sell it and buy something cheaper near where she worked, and then she’d save money on gas, too, but Ma didn’t want to move. This place had been in her family for generations—the house tucked into a little niche in the ledge, plus a narrow stretch of mountain that rose almost straight up behind us. Ma loved this place, even if Pa was always calling it a worthless hunk of rock.
“Oh, Seb, is that the pebble Miss Beverly gave you?” Ma nodded toward a gray orb paperweighting the shopping list. “I found it in your pillowcase when I stripped the beds for laundry.”
“Looks like it,” I said with a gulp. Hoping my little pet had been behaving itself.
“I see why you like it,” she said. “It’s a soothing size and shape to hold.” She knew about my habit of falling asleep with a pebble in my hand. My heart beat fast as I waited for the “but . . . ,” but Ma just said, “Hurry up and bring me my eggs, sweetie.”
I put the rock in my pants pocket, and it started to vibrate a little. How annoying. As soon as I got outside I rolled it into my sock again so I could concentrate on the great chicken closet caper.
Barbie had finished clearing everything out. I went in with the flashlight on high, and the yellow arc lit up the problem loud and clear. A jagged black stripe had formed where the vertical barn boards were rotting away along the ground. The outline of the black mildew stain looked like half of a giant snowflake, symmetrical swirls branching down from each side of the center tall point.
“Look, there!” I said. In the middle of the jagged half snowflake I’d spotted a dark hole just big enough for a chicken to squeeze through. Or a cat!
Barbie lifted the shelves off their brackets to clear the way. “Give me the umbrella, Seb,” she said with her hand out. She took it and started poking it through the hole. The metal tip clinked and clanked against something hard.
“Gee, I wonder what that is,” I said, being sarcastic of course. The coop was built right up against the sheer face of a rock. Over the years, tree roots and undergrowth had filled it in at the sides and over the top to join the mountainside to the roof. It looked pretty, actually, almost like pictures of thatched cottages in storybooks.
Barbie kept clanking around, making the hole bigger. “If you really cared about those chickens, you wouldn’t do that,” I said. “You’re going to Shish Kebarb them.” Heh heh heh.
“Chickens should be smart enough to get out of the way,” she said. “And besides, I’m just trying to find out if they’re really back there. Why aren’t they squawking and shuffling around?”
She was right. We both fell silent and listened. Rain. A car going by. The roof creaking. But not even a pathetic little cluck.
“Maybe they died,” she said, putting her face down to the hole. “It smells musty and—something else. Can’t put my finger on it. It’s not a foul odor, though.” Then she laughed. “God, I’m smart.”
“Huh?”
“F-O-U-L, F-O-W-L?”
“Ha ha. If you were really smart, you’d try this.” I handed her the flashlight. She blushed and said wittily, “I don’t see how the chickens could even get back there anyway, with the closet door always shut.”
I leaned closer as she aimed the light through the hole. A strange smell did come from there—sweet, almost. It reminded me of Ma’s cookies baking. Ouch, that made my stomach ache harder.
“Oh my my my,” Barbie said.
“Yup,” I said.
At the edge of the flashlight’s arc lay a pair of chicken feet, toes up in a pool of dark water.
I reached into the hidey-hole to pull on them. It hurt my stomach more the closer I got, but curiosity eased the pain. The chicken seemed kind of stuck. In fact, it seemed almost as if she was pulling on me! Mostly I felt it in my guts. That was one rugged bird. I braced my feet against the wall and pulled as hard as I could with both hands. The chicken made a hard banging sound as its body hit the wood. I gave it my best yank. Finally the whole board gave up and pulled away, sending me THWACK! against the wall. Barbie screamed.
“Don’t worry, Shish, I’m all right. Not too sure about the chicken, though.”
“I’m not worried about you. Look what’s back there!” She pointed at the opening. The broken board had pulled several other boards ajar, just like a door. Whoa, it was a door! And behind it, we found what we were looking for all right.
Chickens. Lots and lots of chickens, and a few eggs, piled every which way in the narrow space. Nothing moved, though.
“That,” I said, “is really, really freaky.”
“Are they still alive? Sebby, you check. I don’t wanna touch them.”
“I meant the door,” I said, but I was still on my butt with a chicken between my sneakers, so I tapped on it with the broken board. The hen no longer had soft, giving feathers. They thumped.
That bird was petrified.
“Wow. And I thought the turkey Ma made for Thanksgiving was tough.”
Barbie rolled her eyes at me. “So the chickens are all dead. We’re gonna hafta tell Ma.”
“Well of course.”
We were both quiet a moment, staring at the rock chicken. I felt the absolute worst I had ever f
elt about being me, even worse than the moment I saw myself in the mirror at Odum’s mansion. This was all my fault. I must have left the supply closet door open. I honestly thought I hadn’t, but that’s the only way the hens could have gotten in there. The chickens never got away when Jed was tending them. If only I could be more like him.
“You can tell Ma, Barbie,” I said. “I’ll be on my bike. On my way to Canada. You know Pa’s gonna blame me for this, and I for one don’t want to be around to see it.”
The Hole in the Wall Page 7