Read Chicken Feathers for Free Online

waste more breath on it. He pushed his shovel into the mound of wheat on the trailer. “I just reminded myself. Yesterday Annalee went home without her pay. You mind running over to the Binochettes’ when you finish here?”
    Josh agreed a mite too quickly. His father looked up and smiled. “Didn’t think it’d be any hardship,” he said.
    Grandma was one of those worry wrinkles that Josh couldn’t quite straighten out. He knew she thought the Binochette family was up there with the president and the Queen of England. She would have jumped at a chance to go to the Binochette farm with him, but he deliberately didn’t ask her. I’ll make up for it, he promised himself. I’ll help her with supper. I’ll do the dishes. He tucked the pay envelope into the pocket of his overalls and made off, lickety-split, past the chicken houses, through the fence and over green fields ofsummer grass. He had long legs like his father, but he went so fast they were shaky by the time he got to the Binochettes’ front porch. Annalee and Harrison were sitting on the step with playing cards spread around them. Josh stopped on the path and bent over, hands on his knees, to get his breath back.
    “Hi, Splosh,” said Harrison. “Two aces, a king and a queen. Beat that.”
    Annalee stood up and swept her hair back. It was hanging loose on her shoulders like a black waterfall. “Is something wrong?” she asked.
    “No.” He felt in his pocket. “Dad said he didn’t give you your pay.”
    “Oh, that.”
    She walked toward him, and again he inhaled the mist of flowers that seemed to hang around her hair. It made him aware that his clothes were steeped in chicken smell and wheat dust.
    “I could have gotten it next week,” she said.
    Harrison had scooped up the cards and was shuffling them awkwardly, dropping them between his fingers. Joshwas pleased to see his clumsiness, and then he felt bad for being pleased.
    Harrison smiled up at him. “Now she can buy a new dress to go out with her boyfriend.”
    Josh didn’t say anything. He could shuffle cards when he was only seven. He never dropped them. For a while he stood on the path in front of Annalee, who had the pay envelope squished between two hands as though she didn’t know what to say either. Then he nodded, the way his father sometimes did, and turned to walk away.
    It was Harrison who called out. “Hey, Splosh! Guess what I saw yesterday. In the woods at the back of your place! A great big red fox!”
    Wang-a-dang! Now there was proof! Harrison Binochette had seen the fox with his very own eyes. Josh ran back home, lit up with excitement, tingling to tell his father he’d been right all along. But the only person around was Grandma, and she was not impressed.
    “Fox? That’s nothing. We had wolves in our woods. Big and mean. You could hear them howling from one hilltop to another. Found wolf bones in a cave once. Bear got it. You washed your hands? Go and scrub up and make a job of it. You can set the table.”
    The light inside him went out. He looked at his hands. “Sure, Grandma.”
    “I hope you’re hungry, Joshua. It’s a good one tonight. Those cornmeal hush puppies you like and catfish in beer batter.”
    “Beer batter?” He looked at her. “Made with your brew?”
    “Best batter there is,” she said. “Don’t worry. Cooking drives off the alcohol. No kid gets drunk on my fried fish.”
    Beer batter, he thought. Brew, fox, hole, eggs. He headed for the door. “How long will supper be, Grandma?”
    “About as long as a piece of string. Don’t you forget that table!”
    “Right now, Grandma,” he said, and he went outside to find Semolina.

Chapter Five
    C AULKING CEMENT HAD DRIED on Josh’s hands, and the only way to get it off was with a file from the tractor tool kit. He sat on the oil drum in the fading light, trying to see the difference between cement and skin. The setting sun shone through the poplars, touched the chicken houses with patches of