The Chicken Dance Read online

  “I forgot to ask them,” I told him.

  Mr. Bufford squatted down and said, “Forgot? Forgot? Did you forget all I did for you, boy? Did you forget that I risked my good name to get that chicken for you?”

  “No, sir,” I said.

  Mr. Bufford stared at me the way Mrs. Forest stared at Leon Leonard when she wanted him to confess to something. He stood up and said, “Well, you know I like you, Don, and because I like you, I’m going to help you solve this problem of yours. Let me think about this and I’ll get back to you. Until then, you keep bringing me all your eggs.”

  I said, “Okay,” and then Mr. Bufford said, “I’ll figure this out, my boy, even if I have to take out the big guns.”

  Mr. Bufford made his hands look like pistols and then put them at his side and pulled them out like he was drawing guns from a holster. He made a popping sound and pretended like he was shooting me. I jumped back and he started laughing and said, “I got you, boy. You take care now and I’ll get back to you next week.”

  I didn’t know what he meant by the “big guns.” I wondered if he meant that he was going to shoot me if I didn’t give him more than five dozen eggs a week. That seemed kind of weird but I didn’t want to think about it, so I got on my bike and peddled back to my house.

  When I got home I decided that these big guns probably weren’t a good thing and that I should find a way to get some more chickens so Mr. Bufford didn’t use them. This is when I got the idea to show my parents the paper because I figured that they’d be so proud of me and give me whatever I wanted and if it meant more chickens, they’d buy me more chickens.

  I walked into the house and looked at my parents. They were both in the living room and a basketball game was playing on the television. My mother was gluing on some fake pink fingernails and my father was flipping through the TV Guide.

  Since my parents were busy, I didn’t want to disturb them. But I really wanted to show them the paper. That’s when I got an idea to have them ask me about it.

  First I went to my room and got my blue ribbon. Then I walked into the living room with it and the newspaper. I sat down on the sofa and put my blue ribbon right next to me. Neither of my parents looked at me, so I opened up the newspaper and shook it a little so it would make a noise. Then I fixed it so that the front page of the newspaper faced out and my parents could see my picture. I sat like that for a couple of seconds and then my mother shouted, “Don!”

  Here it was, I thought. She’d seen my picture and now she was going to run over to me and put her arms around me carefully, so she wouldn’t mess up her new glued nails, and tell me how proud she was of me.

  But she didn’t do that. Instead she said, “Don’t get any ink from that newspaper on the sofa.”

  She didn’t see the picture or the ribbon so I decided to just tell her.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “My picture is in the paper because I won the chicken-judging contest. I even got a blue ribbon.”

  “What?” my mother asked.

  “My picture is in the paper because I won the chicken-judging contest,” I said.

  “Let me see that,” my mother said, and I walked over to her and held it out and she told me, “Don, can’t you see I’m doing my nails? Hold it up for me.”

  I stood in front of my mother and held the paper.

  “Stop dancing around,” she told me. “I can’t read it.”

  She looked at it for about a minute and then said, “You know, it’s a sad day when the most exciting news in the town is about a little boy winning some chicken contest. Don’t these people care about what’s going on in the world?”

  I stood in front of my mother for about ten more seconds and then she told me, “Don, you’re blocking the television. Don’t you have something better to do?”

  I folded up the newspaper, put the blue ribbon in my jeans pocket, and went out to the chicken yard and sat on an old tree stump and read the article over and over again to my chickens.

  “You see?” I told them. “That’s me. Do you want to hear what they said about me?”

  They didn’t do anything but peck at the ground and since it kind of looked like they were bobbing their heads up and down to say yes, I read the article.

  It said:

  Yesterday at the Dairy Festival, history was made in Horse Island. After a heated town committee meeting several weeks ago, it was decided to lower the age requirements of the youngest-aged participant category of the chicken-judging contest to eleven years old. Concerns were that eleven-year-olds weren’t mature enough to seriously compete. One committee member was quoted as saying, “An eleven-year-old knows as much about judging a chicken as a Yankee knows about baking biscuits.”

  The committee member was forced to eat his words when eleven-year-old Don Schmidt walked away with the blue ribbon. Not only did he beat out ninety-nine other participants, but several judges said that they’d never seen anyone who knew as much about chickens as this young boy.

  The chickens danced around the yard after I read them the article, and so I closed my eyes and made up a song in my head and then imagined the red, white, and brown chickens making a circle around me and dancing until I floated up in the air above them. I flew around the chicken yard until my mother called me in to dinner and told me to make sure I washed my hands because she didn’t want me to give her some chicken disease.

  Eight

  The Monday morning after the contest, when I walked out of my front door to go to school, I saw this brown-haired kid on a bike by our mailbox. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that it was Leon Leonard, but when I did, I stopped on our steps.

  “Hey, Don,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say back. I was sure that he was there to hit me because I’d beaten him in the contest, so I stepped back to go into my house. And then I realized he’d called me “Don” instead of “new kid.” I was confused about why he would do that if he wanted to beat me up. So I decided that instead of going back into my house, I would risk getting hit by Leon.

  “Hey,” I said back, and then he smiled and asked me, “You want to ride bikes to school together?”

  I wondered why Leon Leonard, the most popular and toughest boy in the fifth grade, wanted to ride his bike to school with me. I thought it might be a trap and that there would be some other kids waiting at the end of the road to beat me up. But that didn’t make sense because Leon was big enough to beat me up by himself. I wasn’t sure I felt safe riding my bike with him, but I didn’t want to tell him no because I thought then he’d beat me up for sure.

  While we were riding our bikes side by side and I waited for him to push me over or throw a stick in my wheel, Leon asked me, “Where did you learn so much about chickens?”

  “I take care of ours and so I spend a lot of time with them and I read a lot of books about them,” I told him.

  “Really?” he said. “There are books on chickens?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “There’s a lot in the library.”

  “Huh,” he said. “Who knew?”

  Then Leon asked me a few more questions like what types of feed I gave my chickens, how many eggs per week did each one give, and did I think this girl, Susie Sanders, looked like a bird. I answered him real quick and then stopped talking until he’d ask me another question.

  When we got to school and walked down the hall toward class, all the kids were looking at me and saying stuff like, “Hey, Don!” and, “Hi, buddy!” and, “How about a high five?”

  They did more than just that, though. A lot of them wanted to sit next to me at lunch and girls handed me notes during class asking if I wanted to be their boyfriend. Leon hardly ever left my side and wanted me to do everything he did.

  During lunch, Leon stopped me and said, “Hey, Don. Do you want to come watch me hit Jeremy Jones because he’s a big geek?”

  I said, “No thanks,” and then he said, “Oh, okay. Do you want to chase that stray dog and pig around the school yard?” />
  “Yeah. Okay.”

  Kids would chase after the stray dog and pig to try and catch them, but no one ever had because they were too fast. I had watched kids chase the dog and pig for years and I’d always thought it would be fun but that I’d never get to do it.

  But I did get to do it. That day Leon made a plan and then explained it to about ten of us. You see what we did was make a large circle around them. When Leon nodded his head up and down, we took one step in. We didn’t look at the stray dog and pig when we’d step in because we were trying to act like we didn’t see them so they wouldn’t figure out what we were doing. Some of us would pretend to be tying our shoes or playing in the dirt with a stick or pointing up at the sky. When the circle reached about ten feet from the stray dog and pig, the two of them ran in different directions.

  Leon shouted, “Get them!” and half the kids went for the dog and the other half went for the pig. I didn’t move because I was trying to figure out which one to chase, but then Leon ran toward the pig and shouted, “Come on, Don!”

  I ran as fast as I could and followed him and about three other kids. When the pig turned left, we turned left, and when he turned right, we all turned right. We chased that pig all over the school yard until he ran into the corner of a chain-link fence and turned around and looked at us.

  “All right!” Leon shouted. “We got him! We finally got him!”

  Then Matt Marceaux asked, “How do you know it’s a him?”

  “Because a girl can’t run that fast,” Leon said, and then Kay Kramer said, “Yeah, a girl can.”

  They kept arguing about it, and while they were, I was looking at the pig and noticed that something pink came out of its stomach. I had seen something similar on dogs and knew what that was, but the thing on the pig kind of looked like a corkscrew so I wasn’t sure if it was the same thing. I thought that Leon might know what it was, so I asked him, “Leon, what’s that pink thing coming out of the bottom of its stomach?”

  Leon bent down and said, “That’s the thing that tells us it’s a boy.”

  Kay took a step back and said, “Yuck! I’m not touching him now. That’s gross.”

  Leon said, “I don’t care. I want to catch him, so those of you that are man enough to catch him, follow me.”

  The pig looked at us, and we looked back at it. It put its head down and then started scratching the ground the way a bull does right before it charges.

  “Okay,” Leon said. “Let’s walk in slowly and jump on him. On the count of three we’ll all take a step in. One. Two.”

  Before he could say three, the dog ran in front of us and the pig followed him.

  Matt screamed, “Jump on it!”

  We all jumped, and landed on one another on the grass.

  “I can’t believe this!” Leon shouted.

  I started laughing and I think it was the hardest I’d ever laughed in my life. Tears fell down my face, and my side started hurting, and then the other kids started laughing too and we all laid there rolling around until the bell rang.

  For the rest of the week, we chased the stray dog and pig if they were on the playground for recess. When I wasn’t chasing them, I was answering questions for people. In that week, I had more people talk to me than I’d ever had in my whole life.

  Nine

  That first week after the contest was awesome because I was the most popular kid in the fifth grade. Maybe even the whole school! Well, not high school, but probably elementary and junior high. Anyway, it wasn’t just me that got popular. The Saturday after the contest, my mother got real popular too.

  It started when we went to Horse Island Food and Furniture to grocery shop. We always went on Saturdays because my mother told me that the frozen dinners were delivered the night before and so she knew she was buying them fresh.

  Horse Island Food and Furniture was the biggest building on Main Street because they needed a lot of space to sell both food and furniture. When you walked in, the first thing you saw was a row of cash registers, and on the other side of those were a bunch of small rooms separated by half walls. There were bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms, bathrooms, and kitchens. In each room, some of the things in the rooms were used to hold food. There were cases of beer on coffee tables, diapers on top of washing machines, and laundry detergent in bathtubs.

  My mother and I walked past all the furniture rooms to the frozen food section of the grocery store. She opened the freezer door and pulled out a dinner and said, “Oh my god! They have a new one here, Don. It’s called ‘Turkey Ziti Delight.’ Dawn would have loved this. I’ll get some so you can try it.”

  At the time I was too worried about running into Mr. Bufford to get excited about the new frozen foods. I had brought eggs to his brother every day, but just like I’d thought, it was only about five dozen and I thought that Mr. Bufford would be mad at me and pull out those “big guns” he was talking about. I still hadn’t come up with an idea of how to get more chickens in our yard. My number one idea was to buy some more and hope my parents didn’t notice. The only problem was that I needed money to buy some, and I didn’t have enough.

  Anyway, I walked over to the frozen breakfast section and pulled out a box of waffles. Leon walked up to me carrying a squash and a clock radio and said, “Hey, what’s shaking, Don?”

  “Hi, Leon,” I said. “I like your shirt.”

  He looked down at his shirt, which was a white T-shirt, and then said, “Look. My mom’s talking to your mom.”

  Leon’s mom waved him over to her and he said, “See you later, buddy.”

  I looked at my mother and she yelled, “Don, come here!”

  I walked over slowly and before I got to her, she asked, “What’s this about you winning some big award?”

  “I won the chicken-judging contest at the Dairy Festival,” I told her.

  She jerked her head back like she was surprised and asked, “Why didn’t you tell your father and me about this?”

  “I did,” I told her.

  Then she shook her head and said, “No you didn’t. Are you calling me a liar?”

  I wondered if the contest and chasing the stray dog and pig was a dream. I was pretty sure it wasn’t so I said, “I showed you my picture in the newspaper and my blue ribbon.”

  My mother turned her head a little to the side and said, “Is that what that was for? I forgot about that. Anyway, listen, that Leonard lady told me that she runs a beauty salon in town and that if I brought her some of our eggs, she’d give me a free permanent. God, I’m due for a new one. Should I trust her with my hair?”

  She passed her fingers through her hair and then said, “Now why do you think she’d want our eggs? I’ve spoken to her once before and stayed clear of her after that because she really needed a breath mint or mouth-wash or something. What did you think of her hair? It looked a little shiny, but I think that look is in style. Oh well, we’d better get moving.”

  Before she could push the cart any farther, though, another woman walked up to us. It was Mrs. Cameron who owned a flower shop. She looked at me and said, “Good morning, young man. Don’t you look handsome today.”

  My mother looked at the lady, then at me, then back at the lady. Mr. Bufford walked by and I put my head inside one of the standing freezers until he was out of sight.

  Then I heard Mrs. Cameron tell my mother, “You must be so proud of your son.”

  I pulled my head out of the freezer and looked at my mother and watched her say, “Oh yes. Oh yes, I am.”

  She put her hand on my head and moved it around a little like she was giving me a scalp massage. I flinched a bit and made a yelping sound kind of like a puppy when it’s scared. My mother pulled her hand away real fast like I’d tried to bite her.

  Then Mrs. Cameron looked at my mother and said, “Listen. I was wondering if you’d be interested in trading some of your eggs for some flowers. I know you’ve probably gotten a thousand offers for those eggs, but if you have a few left over, I’d really
appreciate some.”

  My mother looked at Mrs. Cameron the same way people looked at her when she said we kept our chickens for ambience. It looked like she was confused. I was right because then she said, “I’m confused.”

  Mrs. Cameron smiled and said, “Your eggs. They’re a hot commodity in this town.”

  My mother tilted her head and asked, “They are?” and Mrs. Cameron opened her eyes wide and said, “Oh yes, very much so.”

  My mother didn’t say anything and Mrs. Cameron smiled and my mother smiled back at her and then Mrs. Cameron said, “Listen, it was really great catching up with you, but I have to go. Now I want you to promise me you’ll stop by the shop and we’ll see if we can trade some of those eggs for some lovely long-stemmed roses I got in this morning.”

  Mrs. Cameron left, and my mother stared after her until she turned the corner. Then she said, “What a strange lady. How does she know who you are?”

  “Her son, Clet, is in my class,” I told her.

  “Clet?” she asked. “Are you sure that’s her son’s name? That’s not a name. That’s a noise. Now I don’t understand why two ladies in a matter of five minutes would ask me for our eggs. They’ve never wanted our eggs before and now they’re like money to these people. You can’t go five feet in this town without having some kind of bird running across the street, so I know they can get eggs from anywhere they want. Why all of a sudden do they want eggs from our chickens? And why is that lady acting like we’re best friends? I’ve only spoken to her once before when she asked me if I wanted to donate something to the bake sale at school. I told her my oven was broken but that I’d give her a couple cans of beets if she wanted. What do you think of her hair? Do you think she goes to that Leonard lady?”

  My mother talked to me like this for the rest of the time we were in the store. I think I would have been a little confused too about the ladies wanting our eggs if I hadn’t talked to Mr. Bufford the week before or if Leon and all the other kids at school hadn’t been so nice to me. I knew that chicken farming in Horse Island was important, but I didn’t know that it would be such a big deal to them that an eleven-year-old had won a chicken-judging contest.