Mom laughed. “Sounds like the Shorty I remember.”
“I’ll have you know I’m getting supper ready for our guests.” Uncle Shorty winked at her. Then he looked at Alex and me. He smacked the handle of the axe in the palm of his hand. “What do you say, boys? Want to give me a hand?”
When it came to cooking, I couldn’t even make toast without burning it. And I sure didn’t know how Uncle Shorty could be whipping up a meal behind a rickety old shed. Maybe he was barbecuing, but I didn’t see or smell smoke. And what was with the axe?
“I’ll help,” I said.
“Me too,” said Alex.
One thing about us Ward brothers—we were curious, sometimes too much for our own good. Mom said we inherited the trait from our dad, and that suited me just fine.
Already chatting away, Mom and Aunt Mary went inside while Alex and I went with our uncle. Behind the shed was the massive stump of a tree that must have been cut down long ago. I knew you could tell how old a tree was by counting rings on the stump. But I wouldn’t have wanted to start counting the rings of this tree. I’d surely lose track. Suffice it to say, it was old—as old as the hills. Numerous cuts crisscrossed on the stump, and a little blood spread across the scarred wood. Next to the stump lay dozens of puffy white feathers and a dead chicken. Another chicken—this one alive—clucked at us from a small wooden cage in the shadow of the shed. The bird’s head bobbed this way and that as it watched us.
“What are you going to do?” Alex asked, his eyes growing big and round again.
“Hold this for me, and I’ll show you.” Uncle Shorty offered the axe, but Alex took a step back. I took the axe, careful not to let my fingers touch the drying blood. I knew exactly what was about to happen. I knew my uncle used the ancient tree stump as a chopping block! But I wasn’t sure I wanted to watch. I swallowed hard, even though my mouth was bone dry, and my stomach started feeling queasy again.
Uncle Shorty opened the cage. The chicken squawked and flapped its wings. Feathers flew everywhere. Shorty wrapped one of his large hands around both of the fowl’s legs, hoisting it out and holding it upside down as he carried it to the stump.
He held out his hand for the axe. The late afternoon sun beat down on the back of my neck, and my face felt hot. My muscles felt frozen, though, stone cold. I thought I might lose my lunch.
“Don’t worry.” Uncle Shorty took the axe. “It’ll be quick.”
With one hand, Uncle Shorty held the chicken by the feet and laid it on the stump. The chicken didn’t move much, like it was paralyzed or something. Maybe it accepted its fate. With the other hand, Uncle Shorty hefted the axe above his head. The bloody blade gleamed.
Alex covered his eyes. I did the same—only I peered out from between my fingers. I saw the whole shocking thing from beginning to end.
There was no joy in Uncle Shorty’s face—thank goodness! If I thought for an instant he enjoyed what he was doing, I might have run for my life all the way back to Chicago. Instead, he pressed his lips tightly together, gritting his teeth through a few moments of unpleasantness.
The axe seemed to hover above the chopping block for an eternity. I saw my own reflection in the blade, blurry and twisted and horrified.
The chicken clucked curiously.
The axe fell with a chop!
I flinched.
Uncle Shorty pulled his hands away, leaving the blade of the axe embedded in the wood. The chicken scrambled off the chopping block and ran across the yard—without a head! The decapitated bird ran in circles, wings flapping wildly, until at long last it fell over and lay still.
I’d heard of jumping around like a chicken with its head cut off, but never put much thought into the origins of the expression.
“Gross!” Alex said, even though he had missed most of the event.
“What’s so gross about it?” Uncle Shorty asked. “Don’t you like fried chicken?”
“Yeah, but I never saw anyone kill a chicken before.”
“Well, you didn’t think we breaded and fried them while they were still alive and kicking, did you?”
“Do they always do that?” I asked. “Run around without their heads.”
“Not always,” Shorty said, “but sometimes.”
“But how do they live without their heads?”
“Well, they don’t, not really. The running around is really a sort of involuntary action. The muscles are convulsing, making the chicken flap around and look like its still alive, but it’s not.”
My brother and I both stared at the dead bird, half-expecting it to jump back up and attack us like a headless zombie chicken.
“Now—” Uncle Shorty clapped his hands together in anticipation. “—who wants to help me clean these birds?”
“No, thanks.” I’d had enough of chickens for one day. I figured if I helped pluck and gut the carcasses, I’d lose my appetite forever.
Alex still watched the chicken as if he feared taking his eyes off it.
“Come on.” I nudged him. “We better unpack.”
We unloaded the car and hauled the luggage into the house. Aunt Mary took a break from her conversation with Mom long enough to show us to our room. Our room. Mom never bothered to tell Alex and me we’d be sharing a room during the vacation. Pretty smart on her part. If my brother and I had known we would be cooped up together, we might have staged a full-scale revolt. Now that we were here, there wasn’t much we could say or do except grit our teeth and bear the close quarters until the vacation drew to a merciful end.
We would be bunking downstairs, right next door to our cousin Marty—who was nowhere to be found. The room itself was kind of plain, with cinderblock walls (like a prison, I thought) painted light blue, and a thin brown carpet over the floor. On each side of the room was a bed, covered in sheets far too heavy for the summer weather. A dresser stood in one corner, and between the beds a small nightstand sat beneath a curtained window. The curtains were drawn open, overlooking the yard, a split-beam fence, and the woods beyond.
We unloaded our clothes into the dresser. I took the top two drawers and Alex took the lower two. I placed my boxes of comics and books at the foot of my bed. Alex painstakingly arranged his action figures across the top of the dresser. I also brought my digital clock radio. I plugged it in, placed it on the nightstand, and set the time to match my watch. Playing with the radio dial, though, I discovered I couldn’t pick up any good stations.
We hung our clothes in the tiny closet, Alex taking the right side, and me taking the left. Most of my clothes didn’t really need to be put on hangers. We brought mostly tee-shirts and shorts, along with a couple of pairs of jeans. But I had a few shirts that wrinkled easily, and I hate ironing. Alex pulled a heavy gray hooded sweatshirt from his suitcase and placed it in the closet.
“It’s the middle of summer,” I said. “When do you think you’ll need a sweatshirt?”
“You never know. It could get cold at night.”
By dinner—supper, I guessed they called it in these parts—I had pretty much gotten over my reluctance to eat fried chicken. Unloading the car and unpacking our bags helped work up an appetite. Everything tasted delicious—better than the chicken I usually got from fast food places. Sure, I felt bad about what had happened to the bird, but I guessed that was just life on the farm. I tried to remember fried chicken and hamburgers and hot dogs—all my favorites—came from somewhere. Alex, on the other hand, only picked at his plate. He ate some of the vegetables, but didn’t touch the golden-brown main course. He must have been really shaken if he didn’t feel like eating. I wondered if he’d ever recover or if I now had a vegetarian for a brother.
My cousin Marty joined us for supper. He was my age, but stood a little shorter than I did. Skinny as a fence post, he didn’t take after Uncle Shorty in the muscles department. He had shaggy, dark hair and deep blue eyes. He wore a pair of jeans with thick patches on the knees. The patches were so dark blue they were almost black, and they stood out starkly from the rest of the faded denim. I thought he dressed like someone out of the 1950s. When he wasn’t running his mouth excitedly about one thing or another, he looked like he was planning something mischievous. You could see the wheels turning in his head, Mom might say.
“Where were you all day?” Aunt Mary asked him. “We could have used some help around the house, you know, and it would have been nice of you to be here when your Aunt and cousins first arrived.”
Marty pursed his lips and tapped his fork lightly against his plate.
“I was out exploring,” he said.
Something about his manner reminded me of a carnival huckster or a circus ringmaster. He was hamming it up, and we were his audience. Aunt Mary had said Uncle Shorty liked to be dramatic, and Marty took after him in that respect.
“And I was looking for the perfect welcome gift for my cousins here.”
“A gift?” Alex perked up. “What gift?”
“You’ll have to wait and see,” Marty said. “It’s a surprise.”
A surprise?
As we ate, Mom and Aunt Mary caught up on old times. They grew up not far from Crooked Hills, and I wondered if they knew anything about all the ghosts supposedly haunting the area. For the most part, they chatted about everyday, ordinary things—people they went to school with, their childhood home, stuff like that.
After dinner, Marty, Alex, and I tried to watch some TV, but the set only picked up three channels, and even those were static-filled. That probably thrilled Mom, who thought I spent too much time in front of the tube anyway. Instead, we hooked up my video game system, and I taught Marty to play a couple of my favorite games. He wasn’t very good at the sports games, but he loved anything involving shooting up monsters. We played for a couple of hours. Marty didn’t mention the surprise gift again.
I heard a rumbling, growling noise. Alex, sitting a few feet back watching the game, clutched at his tummy.
“Was that your stomach?” I asked.
His growling stomach answered for him.
“No wonder you’re still hungry.” Marty didn’t look away from the TV screen. His thumbs worked furiously at the game controller as he blasted several nasty critters into oblivion. “You hardly touched your supper.”
“He didn’t want to eat chicken,” I said, “because we saw Uncle Shorty lop their heads off.”
“That’s nothing.” Marty paused the game and scooted around to face my brother. “Some time I’ll tell you about the old Haskins farm.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“I probably shouldn’t tell you right now.” He looked straight at Alex. “I’d hate to scare anybody.”
“I’m not scared!” Alex said.
“All right. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Marty leaned in close and turned his head from left to right to make sure no one else was eavesdropping. “There’s a man by the name of Haskins who owns this chicken farm on the outskirts of town. He was always trying to figure out a way to make a little more money, and he figured folks probably hated chopping the heads off their chickens, so he came up with this idea...”
The light of the TV glowed behind Marty, and sinister shadows painted his face.
“Haskins decided if people hating cutting the heads off chickens so bad, he’d save them the trouble. He started breeding special chickens—chickens without heads!”
“What are you talking about?” I laughed. “That’s the silliest thing I ever heard.”
“It’s true. I saw it for myself. Hundreds of chickens, all of them without heads, stumbling around the pen, bumping into each other, walking right into walls, because they can’t see where they’re going.”
Marty couldn’t finish the story without laughing. I thought it was pretty funny, too, but Alex just rolled his eyes and shook his head.
Finally, Mom came into the room and said, “All right, kids. You’ve had a long day. Why don’t you hit the sack?”
“Aw, Mom,” I groaned. “I thought this was supposed to be a vacation.”
“It is,” she said, “but if you don’t get some rest you’ll be too cranky to enjoy it.”
To be honest, I felt a little sleepy, but I was having too much fun to go to bed just yet.
“I’m getting drowsy myself.” Marty put his game controller on the floor and exaggerated a yawn. “I should probably get some shut-eye. We’ve got a big day tomorrow, if I’m going to show you around.”
“All right,” I mumbled. I turned the television off.
“I’ll be down directly.” Marty smiled and suppressed a nervous giggle. “I’m gonna... help my mom with the dishes.”
I figured the polite thing to do was to offer to help, even though I had an almost allergic reaction to any kind of household task, but Marty wouldn’t even consider it.
“Naw,” he said. “You’ve got all summer to help me with my chores. I’ll give you a pass tonight.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I didn’t wait around for him to change his mind. Alex and I headed downstairs to our room.
A large plastic bucket sat on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. It looked like it might have once been used to carry paint. Thin streaks of dried yellow paint dribbled down the sides. I couldn’t see inside the bucket, though, because a flat piece of wood completely covered the top. I knew for sure it hadn’t been there earlier.
All of a sudden, something thumped against the underside of the board—from inside the bucket. Thump! Thump!
“There’s something alive in there,” Alex whispered.
Thump! The board trembled as whatever was in the bucket bumped against it. Thump!
What could be in the bucket, I wondered. Frogs? I’d heard of people in the country eating frog legs. Maybe Uncle Shorty had caught a few for supper tomorrow night. If so, would he want my help in yanking their legs off? I didn’t think I was up to the challenge.
Thump! Thump!
The bucket trembled. The board—which looked similar to the wood paneling of the downstairs walls—shifted just a little and popped up and down.
“Whatever’s in there,” I said. “It’s going to knock the whole bucket over.”
Alex nudged me. “Go see what it is.”
Figured. He was too scared to check for himself, but too curious to pass the quivering bucket by without inspection.
He nudged me again. “Go on.”
“All right. Quit shoving.”