The Great Chicken Debacle Read online

  For Rebecca and Melissa, with love

  Copyright © 2001 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  All rights reserved.

  Amazon Publishing

  Attn: Amazon Children’s Publishing

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89149

  www.amazon.com/amazonchildrenspublishing

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds.

  The great chicken debacle / Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Hoping to earn a trip to an amusement park, the three Morgan children agree to take care of a chicken that their father plans to give their mother as a birthday surprise.

  ISBN 0-7614-5095-5

  [1. Chickens—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.

  3. Birthdays—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.N24 Gs 2001 [Fic]—dc21 00-064514

  The text of this book is set in 12.5 point Sabon.

  Book design by Constance Ftera

  First edition

  1 3 5 6 4 2

  Contents

  1. The Screaming Cyclone

  2. Deeter Delaney’s Finest Moment

  3. No-Name

  4. Never Say Chicken

  5. Ghost Feathers

  6. A Very Close Call

  7. Camping Out

  8. The Following Night

  9. Ransom

  10. Waiting for Homer

  11. The Message and the Messenger

  12. Deeter’s Turn

  13. Rescue

  14. Plans

  15. The Awful, Terrible Something

  16. The Big Day

  1

  The Screaming Cyclone

  You had to be four feet tall to ride the Screaming Cyclone, Cornelia heard, but by standing as straight as possible, she was sure she would measure up.

  Charles, of course, would only be tall enough to ride the Red Devil, and Mindy simply wanted to ride the merry-go-round, which was supposed to be one of the fanciest merry-go-rounds in the world. But the three Morgan children longed to go to Starlight Park even more than they longed for Christmas. It was all kids talked about at school.

  “No! No! No!” their father had told them. “I’d rather be buried in mud up to my armpits! The crowds! The noise! The traffic!”

  Mother agreed. “Just looking at those rides makes me dizzy,” she’d said. “We’ll find other things to do this summer.”

  But ten-year-old Cornelia didn’t want to do other things. She wanted the Screaming Cyclone. She wanted to feel her hair blowing back from her face, her lips stretching thin over her teeth, and her sweaty hands grasping the metal bar that held her in.

  She adored roller coasters, the faster and higher the better. When they’d lived in Iowa, Uncle Bert used to take them on rides with their cousins. They would try out every ride in the park, from bumper cars to sky chutes, from water slides to twisters. But now that they’d moved to Illinois, there were no relatives around.

  “So what are we going to do?” Charles asked her as they walked home the last day of school. Mindy skipped happily along beside them, holding her rolled-up kindergarten diploma to her eye like a spyglass. “Do you suppose Mrs. Delaney would take us?”

  Cornelia thought of the neighbor who lived next door and shook her head. “I’ve already asked. She hates rides as much as Mother and said she didn’t want the responsibility.”

  “What happens to parents, anyway?” Charles grumbled. “Once they grow up, they don’t have any fun.”

  “I guess they’re just too busy taking care of us,” sighed Mindy. She and Charles looked the most alike, with their round faces and blond hair. It was dark-haired Cornelia, with her little pointed chin and brown eyes, who resembled Father. And right now Cornelia’s eyes had that determined look.

  “I’m going to talk to Dad again,” she said. “Maybe we could make a bargain. Wash his car ten times or something if he’ll take us.”

  “We could vacuum the inside of it too,” Charles suggested.

  “And shine his shoes,” said Cornelia.

  “Pull up weeds in the driveway.”

  “Scrub the porch.”

  Mindy stopped skipping. “Maybe I don’t want to go to Starlight Park after all,” she said.

  “Yes, you do!” cried Cornelia and Charles together.

  “We all want to go,” said Cornelia, “and we’ve got to find a way to make it happen.”

  After dinner that evening, with Charles and Mindy watching from the bushes and Mother reading up in her room, Cornelia went out on the back porch and sat down beside her dad in the swing. It was a warm evening, and Cornelia held her dark ponytail off the nape of her neck and fanned herself with it.

  The problem wasn’t that Father didn’t like to have fun, she decided. Cornelia could remember the time her parents woke her and Charles and Mindy because it was snowing, and they all went sledding at midnight. And the Halloween that her parents went out the back door, put on masks, and rang the front doorbell, asking Mindy for a “trick or treat.” They always gave wild and crazy gifts to each other on their birthdays too, and this caused lots of laughter when they’d gathered for celebrations back on Grandpa’s farm. The trouble was they just didn’t like amusement parks, in any way, shape, or form, Father always said.

  “How was your last day of fifth grade?” he asked Cornelia as she pushed her feet against the floor to give the swing a boost.

  “It was okay,” she told him. “The teacher passed out M&M’s and showed us pictures of her grandchildren.”

  And then, before she could say any more, before she could even mention the Screaming Cyclone, her father began to chuckle. “Your mother’s birthday is only a week off,” he said, “and I’ve been thinking about getting her a present that would remind her of the farm.”

  Cornelia smiled too. “You could always buy her a sheep,” she suggested.

  Father grinned even wider and propped his feet on the railing. He and Cornelia could look out over the whole yard, way back to the woods at the end of the property where their beech tree hung over the Delaneys’ shed next door and a little creek trickled among the rocks. “I bought a house with the largest yard we could afford,” he said, “but there’s not enough grass for a sheep.”

  “A horse?” Cornelia asked. “We could feed it oats.” She tried to imagine her father riding a horse up to the front steps on Mother’s birthday. She could imagine it very well, because last year he had given her a carton of coconuts and Mother gave him a bass drum. The year before that she gave him a barrel of pickles and he gave her a canoe.

  “No, not a horse,” said Father, laughing. “I’d like to give her a chicken.”

  “A chicken!” cried Cornelia.

  He nodded. “I know a man who’s selling his poultry business. It’s up for auction, and he said he’d give me a chicken. But there’s one little problem: I have to get it tomorrow. Everything has to go. As soon as the auction’s over, he’s leaving for Maine.”

  “So?” said Cornelia.

  “So how do I hide a chicken from your mother for a whole week?”

  Cornelia’s heart began to race, and goose bumps traveled up and down her spine. Screaming Cyclone, here I come! she told herself. Was this her lucky day or what? She propped one ankle across her knee and looked at her father. “What if I said I could hide it till Mom’s birthday?” she asked.

  “Ha! You and who else?”

  “Charles and Mindy, that’s who.”

  “Fat chance,” said her father.

  “But what if we could?”

  “Then I’d be a heap grateful, that’s what.”

  “Nope!” said Cornelia. “You’d have
to do better than that.”

  “Five bucks?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ten?”

  “Nope.”

  “Hey! What are you holding out for?” asked Father.

  “The Screaming Cyclone at Starlight Park,” said Cornelia. “The day after Mother’s birthday.”

  Her father groaned. He tipped his head over the back of the swing and groaned again, even louder. Finally he said, “Well, I want something fun, and I can’t think of anything crazier to give her, but chickens have to be fed and watered, you know.”

  “I know,” said Cornelia.

  “They’re noisy. They cluck.”

  “I know,” said Cornelia.

  “They poop,” said her father.

  Cornelia swallowed. “I know,” she said.

  “And once I brought that chicken home, I wouldn’t want to see it, hear it, or even think about it till the morning of Mother’s birthday. If it ran off, I wouldn’t even want to know. I wouldn’t want you coming to me with this problem and that problem; it would be up to you kids entirely to take care of it for a week. Do you really think you could do that?”

  “I really do,” said Cornelia, though not at all sure.

  “Then you’ve got yourself a deal,” he told her.

  And out in the bushes, Charles and Mindy gave each other a high five.

  2

  Deeter Delaney’s Finest Moment

  When Deeter Delaney saw the three Morgans heading toward the woods, he followed, and soon all four children were sitting along the bank of the creek with their feet in the water.

  “So what’s up?” asked Deeter.

  Cornelia’s brown eyes sparkled like fireflies. “We’ve got a chance to go to Starlight Park, but it’s going to take a lot of work,” she announced. Cornelia was good at announcing. Whenever she had something to say, it came out sounding like the Ten Commandments. “Dad is going to give Mom a chicken for her birthday. All we have to do is feed it and keep it hidden for a week, and he’ll take us to Starlight Park.”

  Deeter scratched his head. “Why is he giving her a live one?”

  Cornelia shrugged. “They give each other crazy presents,” she said.

  “And he wants to give her something that will remind her of the farm,” said Charles. “She always liked the farm.” Charles missed the farm too. He missed riding out to Grandpa and Grandma Wheeler’s every weekend for huge Sunday dinners with the rest of Mom’s family, where there was corn on the cob, baked ham, blueberry and custard pies...No food in all the world, according to Charles, could equal the food on the farm in Iowa. And Charles was always thinking of food.

  “So what’s the problem?” asked Deeter.

  “The problem is, where are we going to hide a chicken? It will have to be fed and watered and cleaned up after. Mom mustn’t see so much as a feather or hear a cluck till her birthday. We will have to keep it spectacularly secret.” Cornelia had been in the advanced class at school, and spectacular was on the advanced spelling list.

  They were all quiet for what seemed like a very long time, their foreheads wrinkled in concentration. Finally Deeter said, “Maybe we could hide it in our shed.”

  “Really?” asked Cornelia, wondering why she hadn’t thought of that herself.

  “I could ask,” said Deeter.

  “Ask!” Cornelia commanded.

  Deeter Delaney, who was as thin as he was tall, got to his feet and leaped over a stump like a deer, which wasn’t easy to do in his baggy pants.

  There were three things the Morgan children had discovered about Deeter Delaney since they’d moved here in January: He liked baggy clothes; he liked Cornelia; and he liked to tease. He also liked to play basketball and was usually at the playground in the evenings shooting baskets. But he was hanging around home on this particular evening instead of shooting baskets because his teasing had got him into trouble.

  “Some day,” his mother always told him, “that teasing is going to get you in hot water.”

  Well, maybe it wasn’t water, but it was hot. That very day, the last day of school, Deeter Delaney had sort of “borrowed” a fourth-grader’s pen at recess—a special pen that had eight different colors of ink in it. He’d just wanted to fool around with it a while and see if it could write on the sidewalk when Homer Scoates came back from the drinking fountain and saw Deeter using his pen.

  “Give me back my pen,” he had yelled, and all Homer’s friends crowded around with their chins jutting out. Even though they were a year younger than Deeter, they were all probably ten or fifteen pounds heavier and looked like a wrestling team.

  Deeter had intended to give the pen back. He had not meant to steal it. But it was the way Homer sounded, all bossy and mean, that had rubbed him the wrong way.

  “Give me fifty cents and I will,” Deeter had said, drawing a blue circle on the back of his hand, then a red circle inside that, and a green circle inside the red, and holding it out so Homer could see it.

  “You better give me that pen!” Homer had bellowed, his face puffing up like a bullfrog, and all his friends puffed up too.

  “Fifty cents,” Deeter had said, which wasn’t nice and it wasn’t fair and he knew he wouldn’t get away with it. He’d just wanted to tease Homer a little.

  Homer’s face had gone from pink to red to purple, and somehow that just made Deeter want to tease all the more. Deeter had climbed to the very top of the monkey bars and held out the pen.

  “Get down on your hands and knees and beg,” he had told them. “I want to see you crawl.”

  “No way!” Homer had screamed, and all the boys screamed with him, “GIVE-BACK-THAT-PEN!”

  A teacher had been heading their way, so Deeter dropped the pen. And strangely, weirdly, miraculously, it had fallen right down the back—the open gaping neck—of a sixth-grader’s oversized shirt, a large sixth-grade girl who was passing by.

  “Go get it if you want it!” Deeter had chortled.

  Homer had huffed and puffed, and all Homer’s friends doubled up their fists. The girl had looked puzzled, and felt the back of her shirt, but when she walked away, the pen fell out, Homer picked it up, and as far as Deeter was concerned, that should have been the end of it. Except that Homer and his friends said they were going to get even, and everybody knows that when a bunch of guys say they’re going to get even, you’d better lay low for a while. Which is why, in addition to liking Cornelia, Deeter was hanging around her place instead of the playground.

  Deeter started toward his house to ask his mom if they could use the shed, but suddenly he turned around and came back. He just stepped over the stump this time, holding onto his baggy pants.

  “So what’s wrong? Why didn’t you ask?” Cornelia wanted to know.

  “Mom couldn’t keep a secret if it were glued to her chin,” Deeter said. “If I told her about the chicken, your mom would know by tomorrow morning.”

  Cornelia’s face fell. “Then what are we going to do?”

  This was Deeter Delaney’s finest moment: “We’ll just hide it in our shed anyway. Mom never comes back here, and I’ll help you take care of it.”

  “Deeter,” said Cornelia, “You are stupendously wonderful!” Stupendous was another word on the advanced reading list, and Cornelia used it whenever she could.

  “And nobody,” she continued, looking directly at Mindy, then at Charles, “is going to even hint about any of this to Mom.”

  “When do you get the chicken?” asked Deeter.

  “Tomorrow, and we’ve got to be ready.”

  The next day, Saturday, the Morgan children didn’t go outside. They didn’t ride their bikes, didn’t go wading, didn’t do much of anything except sit around the house waiting for their father to come back. The plan was that he would take the chicken over to the shed and the four children would meet him there. They were so excited it was hard to sit still.

  “For goodness sake, it’s vacation!” Mother said, coming downstairs. “Why on earth are you sitting ins
ide?”

  “It’s too hot out there,” said Cornelia, trying to think of an excuse.

  “It’s only eighty degrees!” Mother told her.

  “It’s too noisy,” said Charles.

  “Birds? Noisy?” exclaimed Mother.

  “There are too many worms,” offered Mindy.

  “Worms! Am I going to have three children moping about the house for three months just because it’s summer?” Mother cried in disbelief.

  “Well, if we had chickens, they’d eat the worms,” said Mindy.

  Cornelia jabbed Mindy with an elbow, but Mother was already on her way to the kitchen, shaking her head.

  At that very moment they heard their father’s car coming down the street.

  Charles and Mindy leaped off the couch and tumbled after Cornelia, who was already racing through the kitchen toward the back door.

  “I think I feel a breeze,” Cornelia called to their mother.

  “A quiet breeze,” said Charles.

  “And alllll the worms have gone back in their holes,” said Mindy. “You’ll be surprised, Mom, even if it does poop.”

  Mrs. Morgan stood at the window looking at them as they scurried across the yard and over to the neighbor’s. “I have the strangest children in the whole world,” she murmured.

  3

  No-Name

  As soon as they were out of sight, Cornelia turned and grabbed Mindy by the arm.

  “You almost gave it away!” she scolded.

  “I didn’t say it was a chicken!” Mindy protested.

  “Listen,” Cornelia said, looking from Mindy to Charles, “from now until Mother’s birthday you are not to say the name of any animal at all! Do you hear me?”

  “I didn’t say anything!” Charles protested.

  “But do you see how easily you could let it slip? Mindy, don’t even hint at Mother’s birthday. Don’t even mention a surprise.”

  For a moment it looked as though Mindy were going to cry, and Cornelia realized that if Mother saw a tear-streaked face, she would coax the secret out of Mindy before you could say the word, chicken.

  “Okay, now,” she said quickly, “what is it you’re not going to say till Mom’s birthday?”