Goodbye Chicken Little Read online

  Goodbye, Chicken Little

  Betsy Byars

  Contents

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  A Biography of Betsy Byars

  one

  FOUR DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Jimmie Little’s uncle announced he would walk across the Monday River. It was a sudden decision, made after several beers in Harry’s Bar and Grill, and at once the other customers, posse-like, hurried him to the riverbank.

  Up the hill, in his house, Jimmie Little was standing by the clothes drier, waiting for his jeans to dry. Suddenly the kitchen door burst open.

  Jimmie spun around. “Will you close that door? I am standing here in my underwear.”

  “Your uncle’s getting ready to walk across the Monday River!” his friend Conrad shouted. He was panting for breath.

  It was Conrad who brought Jimmie most of his bad news, and all of it in a loud, excited and—it seemed to Jimmie—happy voice.

  “What?” Jimmie asked. He put one hand on the drier for support. The drier was so old that it trembled with every rotation.

  “Come on! Some men in Harry’s Bar and Grill bet your uncle he couldn’t walk across the river and he’s going to try.”

  “But the ice is too thin. He’ll fall through.”

  “You know that. I know that. The men at Harry’s know that. But your uncle—” With both hands he made circular motions around his head to indicate that Uncle Pete was a little lacking in that area.

  “Come on!” he urged.

  Jimmie took his jeans from the drier and pulled them on. The seams were still damp.

  “Come on!” Conrad pressed Jimmie’s jacket and cap into his hands.

  Jimmie grimaced, not only because of the discomfort of the damp jeans. He would have wanted to go down to the river and watch somebody else’s uncle try to walk across. Lately, however, he had begun to notice that his own family drew attention to themselves in the wrong way. They did silly, senseless things that made them look foolish even when they succeeded.

  He put on his jacket and drew his stocking cap on his head. Then he followed Conrad out the door, dragging his feet along as if they were the heaviest part of his body.

  “Hurry!” Conrad urged. “If we miss this …”

  “I’m hurrying as fast as I can,” Jimmie said.

  As they picked up speed, Conrad began going over Uncle Pete’s chances. “He could make it. It could be solid. On the other hand, I have to admit it looks thin out in the middle, Jimbo.”

  Jimmie glanced at Conrad and then away. Conrad was always giving people nicknames, but he took great pleasure in his own name, Conrad Pugh, and forbade anyone to call him Connie.

  “It’s a football player’s name,” he had once told Jimmie enthusiastically. “With a name like Conrad Pugh, I got to be one of the all-time greats.” And so, based only on a name odd enough to rank with Haven Moses and Claudie Minor, he had chosen his life’s occupation.

  As they rounded the curve they saw the river. “Yeah, Jimbo, it does look thin,” Conrad said.

  The ice was pale green, streaked with white patches of blown snow. On the bank a group of people had gathered, mostly men and children. “Not as big a crowd as Billy Carter got when he opened the Mall,” Conrad commented.

  “No,” Jimmie agreed. He pulled his jacket collar up against the wind.

  Winter had come early this year. Usually it was January, with its bitter storms, when the river froze. But now, four days before Christmas, the river was, or appeared to be, frozen solid.

  “Hey, Jimmie,” a boy in the crowd yelled, “your uncle’s going across!”

  “I know,” he answered in a voice too low to be heard.

  He sighed inwardly. For the first time in his life he regretted the holidays. He wanted all his friends to be in school. He even wanted to be there himself, stumbling over a lesson or opening his peanut-butter-and-bologna sandwich in the cafeteria.

  “Hey, we’re in luck. Your uncle hasn’t started yet,” Conrad said.

  “Yes, that’s luck all right.”

  Uncle Pete was standing with the men from Harry’s Bar and Grill. Two of the men, partially sobered by the frigid air, were trying to talk him out of the attempt. Uncle Pete laughed and shook his head. He was a man who, all his life, had tried anything. Someone had only to say “Nobody can …” or “I bet you can’t …” and he would be off.

  “Uncle Pete,” Jimmie said, “what are you getting ready to do?”

  His uncle turned. His face was red from the cold and the beer. He wore a checkered cap and matching scarf.

  “I’m going to take a walk,” Uncle Pete said. “And don’t you tell your mother.” His breath turned the cold air to steam.

  “Hopefully a dry walk,” one of the men said. The others laughed.

  “Uncle Pete—”

  “I have wanted to do this all my life.” Uncle Pete threw his scarf about his neck in a gallant, old-timey gesture. “That river has been waiting for someone to walk across it for a hundred years.”

  “But listen—”

  “I grew up hearing it was impossible to walk across that river, and I’m surprised it took me this long to try.”

  He turned quickly and slid down the bank. He got to his feet, laughing, and turned. “I want to get all my falling out of the way before I hit the ice.”

  “Hit may be just the right word.”

  Uncle Pete, feigning fear, took a few steps out on the ice. It was like the comedy routines at Ice Capades when someone from the audience steps on the ice and pretends to be unsteady.

  “You’ll get your legs in a minute,” one of the men called.

  Up on the sidewalk a group of children from the Baptist kindergarten paused to watch.

  “Boys and girls, keep walking. It’s too cold to stop,” their teacher said.

  They stood without moving, in twos, holding hands tightly. The first thing they had learned in kindergarten was the buddy system.

  “We want to see,” a boy in a Yogi Bear face mask protested.

  “Yes, we want to see,” cried the class echo.

  “Now, boys and girls, we don’t want to be late for Santa Claus, do we?” The teacher leaned toward them. “We told Santa we’d be at the Mall at one o’clock!”

  But their faces were turned to the pale green of the Monday River, and the lone figure starting across the ice. Even Santa with his promises of gifts somehow paled beside that figure.

  “Well, five minutes,” the teacher conceded, then added as an afterthought, “but do we ever walk on ice, boys and girls?”

  “No, Miss Elizabeth.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we might fall through!”

  This childish recitation sent a chill to Jimmie’s bones. “Why does he do these things?” Jimmie asked.

  “It’s just the way he is,” Conrad explained. “And let’s face it, he may make it, get his picture in the paper, be a hero!”

  Uncle Pete picked up a stick from the ice. He pretended to be an old man, broken by age, picking his way over the ice. The men laughed. Encouraged, Uncle Pete suddenly turned into Charlie Chaplin. Cane swinging, he walked comically on the green ice.

  Jimmie clamped his legs together. The seams of his pants were frozen. His legs were beginning to tremble. In his jacket pockets, he crossed his fingers for luck.

  two

  “ACTUALLY, YOUR FAMILY’S ALWAYS doing crazy stuff,” Conrad said.

  There was no point in Jimmie’s den
ying it with Uncle Pete ten feet out onto the Monday River. Uncle Pete was now crouched down like a football player. He ran forward, turned and caught an imaginary ball. The crowd on the riverbank cheered.

  There were cheers from the bridge too, and Conrad punched Jimmie. He pointed to the people leaning over the rail. “Crowd’s growing.”

  Jimmie nodded.

  Conrad glanced at him. “Except you. You don’t do much crazy stuff.”

  Jimmie felt grateful for being excluded, even momentarily, from his crazy family.

  “Maybe you’ll get that way though, when you’re older. Maybe it’ll come out later—you know, like a beard.”

  “Maybe.”

  Jimmie kept watching his uncle. Uncle Pete had paused twenty feet out on the ice to call back, “Solid as a rock.” Then he began moving again, sliding his feet forward in an imitation skating movement.

  “Way to go,” one of the men called. He had a ten-dollar bet that Uncle Pete would make it.

  “Course you did do one crazy thing,” Conrad admitted.

  Jimmie did not ask what this crazy thing was because he didn’t want to hear about it. He glanced at Conrad, his look telling him to shut up, and then turned back to Uncle Pete.

  Uncle Pete had one arm in front, one in back. He was singing, “La, la-da da deeeeee,” as he skated forward in his brown oxfords.

  “I’m talking about the time you got the turkey bone in your foot.”

  “That was an accident.”

  “Sure, but with anybody else it would have been a splinter or a plain piece of glass. I mean, how many people in the world, in the whole world, do you think step on a turkey bone and have to go to the hospital to have it removed?”

  “Just me.”

  “That’s my point.” He lowered his voice for privacy. “You know, one time I did something sort of crazy. I never told this to anybody.”

  Jimmie said nothing. He knew Conrad had told him, at one time or another, every single thing that had ever happened to him. The secret things, the things Conrad claimed he had never told anybody, Jimmie knew well enough to recite along with him.

  “Of course, I was little, three or four, and didn’t know any better. But anyway, I was out in the backyard, and all of a sudden I stuck a rock up my nose. To this day I don’t know why I did it, Jimbo. I surprised myself. I went in the house boo-hooing, ‘There’s a rock up my nose! There’s a rock up my nose!’”

  Conrad was dividing his interest between his story and Uncle Pete. His eyes darted from Uncle Pete to Jimmie’s face.

  “Well, my mom wanted to take me to the doctor because there’s a special instrument for getting rocks out of kids’ noses. It’s painless. Only my dad said no. He said if she took me to the doctor, I’d keep on sticking rocks up my nose, just to be taken to the doctor.” Conrad now devoted himself completely to his story. “Like going to the doctor was a treat!”

  Uncle Pete was thirty feet onto the ice now, still skating. He paused to call back, “Would anybody care to see me do a triple toe loop?”

  “I’d like to see that triple toe loop, Pete,” a man called.

  Uncle Pete lifted his toe and made three tiny loops in the air. As he started forward, Conrad picked up his story.

  “Anyway, so my Dad said he’d get the rock out himself—and my dad is not a gentle man, Jimmie. And after he got it out he told me if I ever put another rock up my nose, he’d put a fist up my nose, and after that, well, somehow, Jimbo, I just never particularly wanted to put another rock up my nose. I mean, let’s face it—”

  On the ice Uncle Pete stopped skating. He stood still for a moment. The men from Harry’s had smiles on their faces, waiting to see what funny thing Uncle Pete would do now.

  “Something’s wrong,” Jimmie said.

  Uncle Pete took another step forward. He was moving slowly now, looking down at the ice as if he had lost something.

  “He’s getting ready to say something funny,” Conrad predicted.

  “No, something’s wrong.”

  Uncle Pete was a hundred feet out on the ice now, approaching the middle of the river. Here the channel was deep. The water below the ice was swift. This was the most dangerous part.

  Uncle Pete reached out with his right foot and tested the ice in front of him. He took another step. He eased his foot forward. He was moving with the caution of a tightrope walker, only it was not an imitation.

  The ice cracked loudly. The sound was as sharp as a rifle shot, and the crowd got silent. The smiles on the men’s faces faded. Conrad drew in his breath and held it.

  “Come on back,” Jimmie yelled. He ran forward a few steps. He slid down the bank, his pants catching on the frozen broom grass. He skidded onto the ice.

  The river was cold and merciless in the winter. The wind that blew between the banks was sharp enough to cut through any cloth. Jimmie wrapped his arms around himself.

  “Come back!”

  “Run for it!” a man behind Jimmie yelled.

  Uncle Pete stood with his back to them. His legs were apart, his arms stretched out to the side as if for balance. Only the ends of the scarf, caught in the wind, flapped around his neck.

  No one on the bank spoke. Above them, on the bridge, that crowd had grown silent. Beyond, on the west bank, workers on lunch break from the glass factory had gathered and stood motionless too.

  It was a moment in time that couldn’t be measured in minutes and seconds. Everything in the world seemed to have stopped.

  Slowly Uncle Pete began to turn. His arms were still stretched out to the side. Like a figure on a music box, he seemed to be turning without any footwork.

  There was another cracking sound from the ice.

  “Run for it!” the man urged again. He stumbled down the bank. “Run!”

  The ice cracked a third time, and Uncle Pete started toward them. Jimmie closed his eyes.

  It was an instinct he had acquired when he was little—to close his eyes when there was something he could not bear to see. In this way he had avoided seeing his dog Fritzie hit by a truck and his father’s body brought out of the coal mine.

  Eyes squeezed shut, he heard the scream of the crowd. It was such a unified, unearthly cry that there was no question what had caused it.

  He opened his eyes and saw the hole in the ice. It was a small jagged hole, and Jimmie could not believe that Uncle Pete could have disappeared into a hole that small.

  His eyes scanned the ice to see if Uncle Pete had, at the last minute, somehow miraculously made his escape. He half expected to see him clowning like Charlie Chaplin on the far bank.

  Then he looked again at the dark hole in the ice. The convincing detail was Uncle Pete’s checkered cap, which lay just beside the hole.

  Some of the men ran down the bank and onto the ice. Then they came to a helpless stop. “He didn’t even struggle,” one said.

  “He didn’t even yell.”

  “He should have run for it!” another said, striking his fist into his hand.

  “What happened?” Jimmie asked. He turned to Conrad, whose face, beneath his Steeler stocking cap, was stricken.

  “He went down,” Conrad said.

  Jimmie reached out and grabbed Conrad by the arms. “But how?” He had avoided seeing it, but now it was terribly important that he understand it. “I’ve got to know what happened!”

  “He just went down,” Conrad said again. He extended his hands in a gesture of his own helplessness.

  “But how?”

  “It was so quick I just—” Conrad shook his head. “It was—I don’t know—he just went down!”

  Jimmie turned his eyes back to the hole in the ice, the cap.

  Up on the sidewalk, the teacher was rushing the kindergarten children back up the hill. “I’ll tell you later,” she said again and again to their shrill questions.

  As the childish cries faded into the distance, an awful adult silence came over the crowd by the Monday River.

  They stood without moving, fro
zen in place, as if they were on a stage waiting for directions. They stood exactly as they were until a man on the bridge, using his CB radio, called the police.

  three

  “DO YOU SUPPOSE,” JIMMIE asked slowly, picking his words carefully, “that Uncle Pete could have fallen into the river, under the ice, and then—” He paused as he got to the important part. “And then he could have come up farther down the river?”

  Conrad shook his head.

  “It could happen.”

  Conrad was still shaking his head. “Not in real life.”

  Jimmie nodded. They had both already sensed the difference between a fictional world where miracles depended on a writer’s imagination and the real world where a harsh, unimaginative law ruled.

  They paused on the back porch of Jimmie’s house. Jimmie’s nose was running, but he had not noticed.

  “You want me to come in with you?” Conrad asked. He wiped his own dry nose and sniffed loudly.

  Jimmie shook his head.

  “Your mom must be home now. I hear her sewing machine.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure you don’t want me to come in with you?” Conrad asked. He was torn between a desire to help his friend and the need to be in his own tragedy-free home. He felt he wanted to watch one of those cartoons where characters who fall through the ice are safe in the next frame, plotting more mischief.

  Also he knew he would have wanted, would have insisted on, Jimmie coming in with him. “I can’t do it alone” was one of his favorite expressions.

  “No.” Jimmie opened the door and entered.

  “I’ll wait,” Conrad called. “You may want me.” He sat down on the top step and began jiggling his legs to keep warm.

  In the kitchen it seemed to Jimmie that the whole house had changed. There was a strange emptiness. Even the hum of his mother’s sewing machine in the next room had a different, unnatural sound.

  “Mom?”

  “Hmmmm,” she called back.

  He walked into the bedroom. She looked up, a pleased expression on her face. She loved to make her own clothes. It was the only way she could be sure no one else would have the same outfit.