Cheating for the Chicken Man (16 page)

“Kate!” a boy's voice called out on the stairwell.

Kate stopped and turned to see her lab partner, Marc.

“Wait up, Kate. There's something I want to ask you!”

“Marc, I can't! I'm late to field hockey!” She resumed her rush down the stairs. At the bottom, she paused briefly to call back, “Send me a text, okay?”

The locker room was empty by the time Kate arrived to change. Quickly, she pulled on shorts and a T-shirt, threw her things into the locker, and pulled a hair elastic over her wrist. She'd make a ponytail out on the field, since there wasn't time to braid her hair. A mad dash out the back door—and abruptly, Kate stopped. The field was empty. The team wasn't out there, because they had an away game today. The bus had already left.

Kate sank down on the cement steps leading to the athletic fields and held the field hockey stick across her lap. She hadn't even packed her uniform.

Missing the game without an excuse meant she was
automatically off the team.

LIKE A TURTLE

I
t took nearly an hour and a half for Kate to walk home from the high school. She'd never had to walk home before, and the main highway was nerve-racking, especially when tractor trailers barreled by blowing sand in her eyes. When she was finally off the busy road, the route became quieter—and a lot safer as it wound through the countryside past farms and fields. Along the way, she saw a fox and two deer, and almost stepped on a tiny lizard.

By the time Kate turned up the long driveway to her home, she had thought a lot about her situation. It would be embarrassing to be off the team, and it would hurt, for sure. She could only hope it didn't further damage her friendship with Jess. But there was so much else on her mind that she was almost relieved.

Field hockey wasn't the only thing to go. Because she hadn't written the piece on Mr. Ellison for the school newspaper, she had stopped attending newspaper staff meetings. And poor Marc, her lab partner. What did he want? She'd probably never know now. He hadn't sent a text and probably never would, because she'd been so rude by not stopping to talk. Probably just as well, she thought. She didn't have time for a boyfriend or a social life.

Getting good grades and protecting J.T. were the two most important things, she decided. There was always next year for the newspaper and field hockey. In the spring, she could try out for lacrosse—or maybe softball. Things would be settled down by then. Now if she could just come home after school every day, she'd have more time for homework and chores—and that one last assignment for Curtis. She felt the piece of paper in her pocket:
Comp
are and contrast hie
roglyphics and cunei
form.
She'd have to do some research for that one.

As she neared the house, Kate could see her brother walking off toward the tractor sheds. And then, as she got closer, she noticed the family van parked in a different spot—off to the left under the maple tree near the old swing set, instead of to the right where it usually sat in front of the garage. Soon she was able to see that someone was sitting in the driver's seat. Not J.T., but her mother?

What was that all about? Kate crouched behind the tangle of forsythia that lined the driveway and crept closer. Had her mother driven the van from one side of the yard to the other? She was trying, wasn't she? She was doing battle with her demons, whatever they were. Not wanting to interfere, Kate stayed low behind the bushes and circled the yard, sneaking in the back door of the house.

After changing into jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt, Kate set aside her cell phone, picked up her personal journal and a pen, and quietly slipped back outside. She planned to take care of her chickens next door and then sit outside their coop and write. But first she wanted to check in with her brother.

“What happened?” Kate asked, finding J.T. in the tractor
shed standing with one hand on his hip and the other drumming his fingers with annoyance on the tractor's fender.

“That darn choke. I flooded the engine, so now I've got to wait for some of the gas to evaporate before I can try again. A complete waste of time.”

“No,” Kate said. “I mean with Mom? Why is she sitting in the van?”

J.T. shifted his attention to Kate. “She's still there?”

“Yeah. Just sitting.”

“I don't know. I mean, she drove the van down the driveway and met me at the bus and let me drive back. I thought she got out after I did.”

“She
d
rove
the van?”

“Wonders never cease, huh? She was just letting me practice so I can go for my learner's permit in a couple months.”

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 c
hicken manure sample
s for arsenic doesn'
t get our family int
o trouble.

She chewed on the end of the pen, and tried to write a conclusion.
Ba
sically, I'm still n
ot sorry for the che
ating I've done, bec
ause it protected J.
T. and gave him a ch
ance. I guess I need
to be like one of t
hose turtles crossin
g the field and just
keep going in the s
ame direction, no ma
tter 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.

SO MUCH BLOOD

D
ropping 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 brother 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?

H
ow do you make a tou
rniquet?
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 to 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.”