The noise stopped. Zack waited. Then it came again—a soft, sliding noise, the kind a burglar might make if he had peeked in the window to see what he might steal, and was trying to get down off the woodpile again.
Zack climbed up on a barrel to see out the dusty window.
Nothing in sight but a few hens pecking around the yard, and a cat lounging in the open doorway of the barn. But somehow a turkey you couldn’t see was almost as scary as one right in front of you. You could never tell where it might pop up next. And a burglar could be almost anywhere at all.
* * *
Eight
* * *
COMPANY
When Grandma rang the bell for lunch, Zack didn’t want to stop. He had work to do. He was finding all sorts of things that might be perfect for his trouble-shooter. He’d shaken dirt and spiders out of an old piece of rain gutter. He’d worked the wide pedal of the old sewing machine up and down, and he wanted to try out the handle of an ancient wringer washing machine too. But when he was late for lunch, Grandma’s face took on a sour look, so he tried not to let it happen again.
He climbed back over the pile of junk he’d collected and peeked out. No turkey.
With one hand holding onto the doorknob, just in case, Zack took a few steps and looked around the corner of the shack, checking the woodpile.
No turkey. No feathers.
He heard a faraway gobble, gobble off in Grandma’s garden. Phew. He could make it all the way to the farmhouse without Tailpipe catching him this time.
As he crossed the clearing, he saw the trash basket sitting beside the back steps, and it was packed with sticks. Pieces of small branches were poking out every which way.
Oh no! He had forgotten to finish his job and Grandma had done it herself.
Zack ran up the porch steps, opened the screen, and used the porch pump to wash his hands. Up and down, up and down he pumped the handle. At first no water came out, but when he pumped the third time, he could feel the handle getting harder to push as the pump drew water up from the well. At last it spilled clear and cold into the metal sink. Zack washed his hands, then headed into the big farm kitchen, ready to apologize to Grandma.
Grandpa was sitting at one end of the table, Dad at the other. Grandma sat across from Zack’s empty chair, and sitting beside Grandma was . . . Josie Wells. The meal had already begun.
Grandma was frowning, but her face brightened as she passed some ham and beans around the table, and she didn’t say a word about the sticks. “Josie’s going to eat with us today,” she said. “She brought over some flowers from her mother. Aren’t they lovely?”
Zack looked at the lavender flowers in the center of the table. Then he looked at the pink freckled face of Josie Wells across from him.
He didn’t hate Josie or anything. He didn’t even not like her. It was just that he only got to come to the farm once a week, and he didn’t want to spend the afternoon with someone else. He wanted to work on his trouble-shooter. But somehow he guessed who had finished picking up those sticks. He ought to thank her, but he didn’t.
“Do you like flowers?” Josie asked him.
Zack only shrugged and took a bite of ham.
“Me either,” said Josie. “If I had a garden of my own, all I’d plant would be strawberries and popcorn.”
“Popcorn!” Zack jeered. “You don’t plant popcorn!”
“Of course you do,” said Grandpa. “You have to plant a certain kind. Not just any old corn will pop.”
Zack hadn’t known that. He glanced back at Josie. She was either making a face at him or grinning, he couldn’t tell.
Soon the grown-ups were talking about soybeans.
“Looking good,” said Zack’s dad. “Need a little rain, though.”
They went on talking about the potato crop and the new calf and the silo and cistern.
Then Grandma turned to Zack and said, “You and Josie and I are going into the orchard this afternoon and pick some cherries before the birds get them. You ready for some cherry pie, Zack?”
Well, there goes the afternoon, Zack thought, but he was there to help out, after all. Dad didn’t bring him to the farm on weekends just to fool around. So he managed a smile at Grandma and said, “Sure.” And when lunch was over, he carried one end of the stepladder, Josie carried the other, and they followed Grandma out to the orchard.
It was a fun job, actually. Zack and Josie took turns climbing to the top of the ladder while Grandma held it steady. If Josie was up high doing the picking, Zack held the bucket below and rescued any that fell on the ground when she dropped them.
“We’ll do this tree and maybe the next one,” Grandma said, popping one of the dark, sweet cherries in her mouth. “Ummmm. Just taste the sweetness. We might even pick enough for me to make some preserves too.”
Zack liked being near the top of the ladder. He was high enough that he could see the cows in the pasture . . . could even see the top of the silo over at Josie Wells’s place.
“You kids are being a big help to me today,” Grandma said. “And thank you for picking up all those sticks this morning, Zack. We had quite a wind last night.”
Zack glanced down at Josie and saw that familiar wide smile. He’d better remember to thank her before she went home.
When they had picked the best cherries on two of the trees, Grandma took the half-filled bucket with her and told them to put the stepladder back on the porch. Zack and Josie stayed a few minutes longer to look for any cherries they might have missed on the ground. Then they folded up the ladder, and, each carrying one end of it, they ambled back toward the house.
“Thanks for finishing up the yard for me,” Zack told Josie. “I should have told Grandma you did it.”
“It’s okay. I figured you were busy,” Josie told him. And when he didn’t say more, she added, “I’ve been pretty busy too. I’ve got some detective work to do, because the burglar is back, and this time it happened here.”
Zack stopped walking, making the ladder jerk, and turned around. “How do you know?” he asked.
“Your grandma told me. Well, she didn’t exactly tell me. But she said that one of her silver earrings is missing, and she didn’t realize it till this morning.”
“Why would a burglar take only one?” Zack said, slowly moving forward again, and Josie, at the other end of the ladder, followed behind.
“To make it look like she’d just lost it,” Josie answered. “Someday he’ll come back and get the other one. That’s the way burglars work. They’re clever.”
“Did you tell Gram about your mom’s bracelet that’s missing?” Zack asked.
Josie shook her head. “I didn’t want to scare her. I need more proof. But we’ve got to keep our eyes open, Zack. Tell me every single thing that goes missing at your grandma’s house and I’ll tell you what’s missing from mine.”
“Okay,” Zack said.
They reached the house and got the stepladder inside, propped against one wall of the back porch. Then Josie said good-bye, and Zack watched her heading for the shortcut home through the evergreen trees, hands in her pockets, eyes on the ground. Every so often she kicked at something with the toe of her shoe or bent down to examine the grass.
He went back to the machine shack to sort through boxes and barrels, looking for stuff he could use.
Gobble, gobble, gobble came the turkey, grumbling from outside the door, just waiting for Zack to come out so he could peck him.
“You’ll have to peck at something else,” Zack called out. “I’m busy.”
He stopped working suddenly as a new thought came to him. How was it that Josie got around the farm without the turkey chasing her? He’d have to ask her sometime.
* * *
Nine
* * *
A BAD IDEA
Oh, man!” said Matthew when Zack told him that the squirt bottle hadn’t worked to scare the turkey. “What you need is a waterfall.”
“A waterfall?” Zack exclaimed
.
Matthew nodded. He was sprawled on the steps of Zack’s front porch, eating a candy bar that stuck to his fingers. “You need something really huge to stop him from chasing you.”
“Well, so far I’ve got a wagon with a turnaround thing on top where I’ll build my trouble-shooter,” Zack told him.
Matthew shook his head. “A waterfall. You need a waterfall. You can use the other stuff too, but that old gobbler’s got to learn that if he starts pecking on you, he doesn’t just get squirted, he gets soaked!”
“How do I make a waterfall?” Zack asked.
“Simple,” said Matthew, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Your gramps has a hose, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah . . . ,” said Zack.
“Does he have a porch with a roof over it?”
Zack nodded. “Two of them, front and back.”
“Okay, then, here’s the deal. You’ve got to be somewhere the turkey never goes, but where he can still see you. And what you do is, you drag one end of the hose, with the spray handle turned off, into your grandparents’ house, up the stairs, and over to a front window. You wait till you see the turkey in the yard, then you set the spray handle to ‘full force’ and let him have it. Yell something so he sees it’s you up there. Try this two or three times, and he’ll know better than to peck you again.”
“And if he tries to come up on the porch and get in the house?” asked Zack.
“That’s where the waterfall comes in. Every few seconds you aim the nozzle at the roof so there’s a waterfall coming off the edge. But each time you soak him, you have to yell something—‘turkey dinner,’ maybe. That’s important. He’ll connect the two in his little bird brain. After a while, all you’ll have to do when he starts after you in the yard is yell ‘turkey dinner’ and he’ll run.”
“Yeah? How do you know all this?” said Zack.
“Because that’s how we trained our cat when we got him,” Matthew said. “The vet told us to never let him go out, so I’d open the door and stand just outside with a pitcher of water. The minute he stepped out, I’d dump it on him. After three times, we could leave the door wide open and he’d never even try to go through. Come on, let’s try it out!”
Actually, Zack’s dad had two long hoses connected together at the water faucet at the side of the house. It didn’t have a spray handle on the end, so Matthew said he’d turn the water on once Zack got the hose upstairs.
With one end attached to the faucet, Zack dragged the other end up the porch steps, into the house, up the stairs, into Emilene’s bedroom, and over to the window above the front porch. He pushed the nozzle out under the screen so it was pointing straight down at the shingles on the roof.
“Okay, Matthew!” he yelled. “Ready.”
He waited, and then he thought the hose jerked a little.
Matthew appeared out on the lawn.
“Can you feel it?” he called up.
“I think it’s coming,” Zack shouted back, as the hose jerked again.
And then he yelled, “Turkey dinner!” as a gush of water exploded out the end of the hose.
At that very moment his dad came around the other side of the house and Matthew dived headfirst into some bushes.
“Hey!” yelled Zack’s dad, as a rush of water cascaded off the porch roof.
Zack couldn’t pull the hose back inside because the water was still running. He couldn’t leave the hose and go outside to turn the faucet off because the end of the hose might fall back into the room.
“Matthew!” he yelled, but obviously his friend was hiding.
“Zack!” came his mom’s voice from downstairs. “What is this hose doing in the hallway?”
And with Dad yelling at him from outside, Mom calling to him from below, Emilene suddenly walked into her bedroom and screamed, “What are you doing?”
And then she yelled, “Mom! Zack’s watering the roof!”
“Turn that water off immediately!” Mom called.
But first Zack had to push the hose out farther still so it wouldn’t slide back in. The end of it flopped this way and that, spraying water out over the yard in all directions.
“Zack!” Dad bellowed, wiping his sleeve across his face. “What’s the big idea?”
The water finally went off, but when Zack got the hose outside again, Matthew was nowhere in sight.
“Whatever you were doing up there, stop it!” his dad scolded.
“Don’t let me see you bringing a hose in the house again!” said his mom.
“And stay out of my room forever!” said Emilene.
Zack sat on the porch steps, arms crossed, a deep, dark scowl on his face. Finally Matthew came slowly around the corner of the house and sat down beside him.
“Sorry about that,” Matthew said. “What you need is—”
“What I need is for you to come out to the farm and work on my machine yourself!” said Zack.
After a long minute, Matthew said, “Okay, I will.”
* * *
Ten
* * *
THE WAITING GAME
The next weekend, however, Matthew told Zack that he had a stomachache and couldn’t come. “But the Saturday after this one, I will,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” said Zack. “I don’t think you want to come.”
“I do!” said Matthew. “As soon as my stomachache’s better, I’ll be there.”
So once again, Zack and his dad set off for Grandpa’s. Matthew, of the Big Ideas, wasn’t with them.
This time, when they drove up the lane where the turkey was waiting, Zack didn’t get out his side of the truck. He scooted over into the driver’s seat and slid out right after his dad. With his legs as close to his father’s as he could get, he took giant steps, just like his dad’s, and walked with him up onto the porch.
Tailpipe was confused and complained loudly as he strutted around the truck, looking for a boy to peck.
But Zack didn’t want to spend the rest of his life having to slide into the driver’s seat to get out of the truck without being pecked. He didn’t want to have to lie on his back and kick his feet in the air to keep the turkey off him. He didn’t want to be chased by a turkey every time he came to the farm.
Grandma had spent the week making blueberry and cherry preserves. After breakfast, she asked Zack to take her twenty-four jars of jam to the storeroom in the cellar.
Carefully he placed six jars at a time in a box and carried them down the narrow stairs to the damp, dark basement. He lined them up on the shelves along with jars of green lima beans, orange and yellow peppers, red tomatoes, and dark-purple plums. After his fourth trip, he was about to head for the machine shack when Grandma said there was one more job to do.
“Come in here,” she called, leading him into the parlor, and there, lying on the rug, was a man. A man made of straw. Part of a man, anyway, because his hands and feet were missing.
“Help me finish this old scarecrow,” Grandma said, “and then we’ll take him out to my garden and set him up.”
Zack grinned. “Okay. What should I do next?”
“Put this old yardstick inside his shirt so that it’s holding the sleeves out on both sides,” Grandma said. “Then stuff those old work gloves with straw and we’ll pin them to the shirt cuffs. I’ll figure out a way to tie your grandpa’s old slippers to the bottoms of the trousers. Maybe we can make him look real enough to keep those pesky crows away from my plants.”
“Does a scarecrow really work?” Zack asked as he picked up a handful of straw from a basket and pushed it down into the fingers of the raggedy gloves.
“For a while it does, but we’ll have to keep moving it around from time to time. Crows are pretty smart, but I’d like to think I’m smarter.”
When it was done at last, Zack lifted the scarecrow off the floor, and with Grandma carrying an old broomstick and a hammer, they crossed the front lawn, into Grandma’s garden, and found a spot among the new seedlings.
Grandma p
ounded the end of the broomstick into the ground until it didn’t wiggle much at all. Then Zack slipped the bottom of the scarecrow’s shirt over the end of the broomstick, up behind its back and under the old cap on its head.
They both stepped back and looked it over. Grandma had painted a face on the round pillow that formed the head. The cap slouched down over one eye, and one of the gloves, dangling from a sleeve, waved a little in the morning breeze.
“In a week or so, I’ll come out and stick a little flag in his hand,” said Grandma. “Just to keep the crows guessing.”
When Grandma went back into the house, Zack waited till Tailpipe had gone off behind the barn. Then he ran to the machine shack and closed the door.
There was the old wagon, just where he had left it, but something was different. It had a new wheel. Wow! Zack would have to remember to thank Gramps for it at lunch. Now he could pull his trouble-shooter anywhere he needed to go.
He worked all morning. He couldn’t figure out how to use the lazy Susan yet, but he nailed an old window screen to the back of the wagon so that it stuck up in the air like a sail. He nailed one end of a piece of rain gutter to the top of the screen. When he dropped a croquet ball down the gutter, it shot out the curved end at the bottom and hit the front rim of the wagon. Bam! Zack smiled. This was a start.
When Grandma rang the bell for lunch and Zack sat down at the table with his dad and his grandparents, he said, “Thanks, Gramps, for fixing the wagon.”
“What’s that?” said Gramps. “What wagon?”
“The one in the machine shack. It’s got a new wheel,” Zack told him.
“Well, I don’t know how that happened, because I don’t have an extra wheel, and if I did, I don’t have any extra minutes,” said Grandpa.
Zack looked at his dad.