For some time, there had been a small feud going on between the Slingers and the owner of the bull. The bull loved the Slinger’s cornfield and would always reach over or through the fence to treat himself to a corn lunch. Mr. Slinger demanded the neighbor pay him $20 for crop damage done by the animal, but the neighbor said that was crazy and refused to pay. Instead, the neighbor added a $300 electric fence to the existing fence between his pasture and the Slinger’s cornfield. That didn’t make sense to Tim—paying $280 more just to make a point—but he realized that sometimes adults didn’t make much sense when pride was at stake.
Tim found the feud between his dad and the neighbor amusing and didn’t want to see a little thing like the addition of an electric fence end the war. So he walked along the fence line, trying to figure out a plan to help the bull enjoy another corn lunch. Maybe I can find a loose post and pull it out...
The beast saw Tim and approached him. Tim continued to walk and the bull walked with him, but on the other side of the electric fence, of course. Big and black with a ring in his nose, bloodshot eyes and drool running down from his mouth, the bull was so large that the ground shuddered with every step he took. Feeling the vibrations, Tim decided his original plan to pull out a fence post was a really bad one. So he tried thinking of something else.
The bull and Tim continued walking together, eyeing each other suspiciously across the fence, wondering what was on each other’s minds. Then the bull stopped—there was a stalk of corn bent over, right next to the fence. Very carefully, and avoiding the electric wires, the bull turned his head sideways, stuck it through the fence, bit down on the stalk and yanked it back to his side of the fence.
“Brilliant!” Tim said aloud. He wondered why he had not thought of that. With glee, Tim bent more stalks of Slinger corn toward the fence then stepped back to watch. The beast ate and ate and ate until he was full. Then he wandered away. This is gonna be good, Tim thought to himself as he hurried back to the farm to tell his dad the corn thief had struck again.
Upon hearing the news, Mr. Slinger immediately went to inspect the damage. Returning to the house later, he was angry. He jumped into his old pickup truck and tore down the road, gravel flying everywhere, on his way to the neighbor’s house.
Not wanting to miss anything, Tim ran back to the pasture. He found the two men standing at the scene of the crime.
“Look at this! There’s at least a bushel of corn gone,” Tim’s dad said to the neighbor.
“There’s no way my bull could reach those stalks!” the neighbor said.
As luck would have it, the beast wandered back to grab a little desert. Right in front of the two men and Tim, the bull stuck his head between the electric wires, not touching either one. He bit off another stalk of corn, pulled it back through and ate it.
Both men were surprised and shocked by the bull’s resourcefulness. Tim’s dad smiled because he was right and the neighbor was wrong. The neighbor frowned and without saying a word to either Mr. Slinger or Tim, stormed off across the pasture.
* * *
Later in the day, near dusk, Tim went to see if there were any new developments in the corn caper. The beast was standing near the same spot Tim had earlier served him a corn lunch. But something was different. The beast had a new accessory—a necklace made of a length of logging chain, with one strand hanging down almost to the ground. The bull looked at Tim then at the corn.
“Can you believe the adults think they’re so smart,” Tim said to the bull. “They try to ruin our fun with a piece of chain, huh? We’ll show them.” Tim bent a stalk of corn all the way over so it nearly touched the fence, and then stepped back. As he had done in the past, the beast moved forward, turned his head and stuck it through the fence to grab the corn.
For safety reasons, an electric fence turns on and off every few seconds, rather than having a steady current of electricity going through it at all times. The fence must have been in the off cycle when the bull stuck his head through, because nothing happened, even with the long chain touching the bottom wire.
Then the electricity came back on. The shock hit the bull, and it was a good one! The beast bellowed and his eyes bugged out. Trying to get away from the fence, the bull pulled his head up so fast that the chain wrapped around the bottom electric wire three times. The beast was trapped.
The shock hit the bull again, and he jumped back so hard that he yanked two of the metal posts right out of the ground. And the shocks kept coming, again and again! The bull jumped straight into the air and did a 180-degree turn. When he landed the bull took off on a dead run across his own pasture, dragging a large part of the fence behind him.
Dad can figure this one out by himself, Tim thought, as he tore off to his barn on a dead run, too. He was worried that the bull would turn and come after him, seeking revenge.
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Chapter 6
It was almost dark when a very scared Tim ran out of the cornfield and onto the dirt lane heading home. He chose a path around the barn silo to avoid the electric fence’s gate, a gate that kept the Slinger’s bull from escaping the barnyard.
A gate on an electric fence consists of a single strand of wire between two fence posts. It’s hard to see at dusk and impossible to see at night. Also, Tim’s dad sometimes changed the location of the gate, depending on where the cows were or where he needed to drive the tractor through safely.
Still on that dead run, Tim headed around the huge silo moving so fast that he was leaning inward to keep his balance in the turn. Suddenly, he felt a strange pressure on his forehead. It felt like a thin line or wire. Zap!
Tim had run right into the electric fence’s gate! The electric shock turned Tim’s legs into noodles and the spring on the gate caused the gate handle to smack him in the head. His feet flew out from under him and into the air. He landed flat on his back in the dirt.
Tim lay there, motionless. What happened? Was it the bull? Tim thought, trying to come back to reality. The dust cloud he made upon landing on the ground settled around him.
Dana watched the whole thing from the safety of the barn. She wandered over to see if Tim was okay. When Tim finally opened his eyes, he saw a blurred image of Dana floating above him.
“Are you dead?” she asked.
Tim wasn’t sure, and he couldn’t answer her. He felt like he was in one of those dreams where he’s falling endlessly and can’t wake up.
“I’ll get Mom,” Dana said.
Soon after Dana disappeared, another object drifted over Tim—it was large and black and drooling all over him. Suddenly, Tim realized it was the Slinger’s angry bull!
Even though Tim was still a little woozy from the fall, he jumped up and headed for the safe side of the electric fence faster than a frightened rabbit. But this time, he ducked when he went under.
Needing to get back to the house, Tim decided to take a favorite shortcut between two buildings next to the barn. When he spotted a pile of boards ahead of him—a pile he had run over the top of a dozen times before—he wasn’t concerned in the least.
Tim made a beeline right for the boards without noticing they were not the same boards he had run over before, but new ones added to the pile a few days earlier. He took two steps on top of them at full speed when suddenly . . . “Ye-oow!” he screamed.
What Tim didn’t realize was that one of the boards had a rusty nail sticking out of it. The nail rammed through Tim’s shoe and into his foot. It went in so deep that the board stayed attached, causing him to fall face-first into the dirt. When he hit the ground, the board popped off.
In horrible pain, Tim reached for his foot and saw blood coming from the hole the nail had made through his tennis shoe. “Crud!” was all he could say.
The blood quickly filled the inside of Tim’s shoe and the pain was so bad that it numbed his leg all the way to his waist. He knew he had to get to the house fast, and there was only one way to do it. He jumped up and began screaming for his mom a
s he made his way to the house.
Mom and Dana met him at the door. “What did you do?!” Mom asked the instant she saw his blood-soaked shoe.
“Nail . . . running . . . old board. It hurts!”
Mom picked up her son and carried him into the kitchen. She removed his shoe and looked at his foot. She then got a large dishpan, filled it with salt water and stuck his foot in it.
The dissolved salt, which was used many times on farms to clean wounds, made the pain in Tim’s foot even worse. It shot up Tim’s leg all the way to his hair. And the water instantly turned red from the blood.
Tim could see his mom was scared and that made him even more scared. And Dana was confused, because when she had left him, he was on his back. There was no injury to his foot. “Eeww, you’re gonna die for sure this time!” was all she said.
Tears of fear and pain filled Tim’s eyes. “Mom, am I gonna die?!”
“Don’t be stupid,” Mom said. She lifted his foot out of the water then tied a dishcloth around it as tightly as she could. “Now stand up and step on this to keep pressure on it—maybe it’ll stop bleeding.”
“Are you nuts?! That’ll hurt!”
“Fine, bleed to death if you want to. I need to call the clinic and tell them we’re coming in,” Mom said.
Did she say the clinic? Oh no! Now Tim was really scared. Farm kids only went to the clinic if something was cut off or if they were near death.
Dana raised her foot over Tim’s, ready to inflict more pain. “I’ll step on it.”
“You stay away!” Tim said, pushing her aside. He stood up and stepped down on the dishcloth, hard. The pain nearly made him pass out.
Mrs. Slinger called the clinic then scribbled a note to her husband, leaving it on the counter. She then carried Tim to the truck and Dana jumped in next to him. They took off for the clinic, with Mom making the seven-mile drive in record time. Tim thought they were all goners once or twice when Mom had the old truck sliding sideways down the gravel road.
The clinic’s attendants were at the door, waiting for the farm family to show up. When they received Mrs. Slinger’s call, the staff cleared out all the whining city kids with their bruises, skinned knees and stuffy noses, so the real injury could get through.
When the Slingers arrived, the staff took Tim and Mrs. Slinger right into a treatment room. A nurse pulled the dishcloth off Tim’s foot. “Get the doctor—now!” she said to the attendant.
“But he’s with another patient,” the attendant answered.
“Now!” the nurse said.
The doctor came in, took one look at Tim’s foot and shook his head. “Oh man, what happened?” the doctor asked.
The alarm in the doctor’s voice did not calm Tim’s fears in the least. “Stepped on a nail,” he said through tears.
Dana, who was waiting just outside the door, pushed her way in between the nurse and the doctor. “I wanna see!”
“Go to the waiting room,” Mom said to her.
An attendant took Dana away while the doctor inspected Tim’s foot and a nurse applied medicine to stop the bleeding.
“You sure it was a nail?” he asked.
“Pretty sure, but I didn’t look at the board,” Tim said, wishing the doctor would stop talking and do something to stop the pain.
“Why?” Mom asked. Tim shrugged—he didn’t want to admit he was running from Slinger’s bull.
“This isn’t a puncture wound. It looks like his foot was torn open by a hook. He’ll need stitches,” the doctor said to Mrs. Slinger.
“Stitches! First this and now a needle in my foot!” Tim said.
The doctor gave Tim several shots of painkiller, which made his entire leg numb. He began to relax as the doctor probed his foot.
“Wait a minute. There’s something inside,” the doctor said.
Tim leaned forward, now more curious than afraid since the pain was gone. “Inside my foot?” he asked the doctor.
Using a pair of large tweezers, the doctor pulled a long piece of Tim’s tennis shoe from his foot. At the same time, Tim’s dad rushed in, carrying the board his son had stepped on. It had a rusty, blood-covered nail poking out of it that was bent around like a fishhook. A piece of Tim’s skin was still on it.
“You stepped on that?” the doctor asked Tim.
“Well, I was kind of running—as fast as I could.”
The doctor shook his head then went to work, sewing Tim’s foot back together. When he was finished, the doctor wrapped his foot tightly in a large bandage.
* * *
While Tim was getting his foot looked at, Mrs. Slinger called her mother and her sisters to tell them what happened. When the doctor finished, Mr. Slinger headed back to the farm, but Mrs. Slinger took Tim and Dana to their grandma’s house. There five of their cousins were waiting to examine Tim’s hero wound and have ice cream.
Dana was ready to cause trouble when they entered the yard. “His foot is going to fall off pretty soon!”
“It is not!” Tim said.
Dana pointed at Tim’s foot and declared confidently, “Yes, it will—when they take the stitches out.”
“You have stitches? I wanna see!” cousin Roxy said.
Tim pulled his pant leg up a little so everyone could see his heavily bandaged foot. “I can’t take the bandage off for three days.”
“Then you can come see his foot fall off,” Dana said.
Aunt Linda broke up the group when she walked out of the house carrying a box of Dilly Bars. “I have ice cream for everyone!” The cousins and Tim and Dana helped themselves to a bar then sat down on the edge of the patio to eat.
Taking a bite of her treat, Roxy stared at Tim’s foot. Then she bent over for a closer look. “You really are going to kill yourself if you don’t move into town pretty soon.”
Tim lifted his foot up to show it off. “Well, it’s better than being bored to death.”
“You won’t be bored to death in town. You’ll see when you come to visit us in Chicago in a couple of months,” Roxy said.
Tim put his foot down as everyone stared at Roxy, who was now the center of attention.
“Chicago? Why would I visit you in Chicago?” Tim asked.
“Dad got a new job there. We’re moving next week. We’re going to live in a big apartment building with a lot of other kids. It’ll be a blast!”
Tim almost dropped his Dilly Bar. “You can’t move! You’re my best friend!”
“We’ll still be best friends. It’s only a four-hour drive to Chicago.”
“It might as well be a 100-hour drive,” Roxie’s brother, Tommy, said.
Roxy gave Tommy a shove with her shoulder, nearly knocking his ice cream out of his hand. “Hey, cut it out!” he said.
“Tommy’s right. Chicago’s not here and that’s all that matters,” Tim said.
Roxy flipped her hair back. “It doesn’t matter what Tommy says. Dad says times are changing and we have to keep up.”
“They’re not changing for me,” Tim said, clenching his fist in a defiant pose.
“They are. You’ll see,” Roxy said.
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Chapter 7
Because of his heavily bandaged foot, Tim got a break from doing his chores for a few days. But that left him with a lot more free time than he was used to, and he had fewer options for fun due to his injury.
After days of limping around the farm on his swollen foot, Tim worked out a plan to ride instead of hobble. He pulled a coil of rope out of the toolshed and carried it to the back of his dad’s pickup. He tied one end to the back of the pickup and the other end to the handle of his little red wagon. He placed the wagon really close to the back of the pickup so his dad wouldn’t see it. Mr. Slinger was usually in too big of a hurry to look around the back of the truck before driving away.
Tim knew Dad would be in a hurry that day since he had to get to the back forty to relieve Mom of plowing duty on the tractor. If he didn’t get there in time, she
would get mad at him.
Once the wagon was hooked up, Tim jumped inside it and waited. He then heard his dad walk out of the house, climb into the pickup and fire up the engine. Tim gripped the sides of the wagon as his dad put the truck into gear, revved the engine and let out the clutch. The truck lurched forward, jerking the wagon so hard it flipped Tim right off the back.
Tim jumped up as quickly as he could with an injured foot, a little dazed but unhurt. And that’s when he spotted his wagon flipping over and over behind the old pickup as Dad headed around the barn to the rutted dirt lane that led to the back forty.
No point running after him, Tim thought. He couldn’t anyway, because of his foot. Plus, Tim knew his dad drove like a mad man. Heartbroken that his great idea didn’t work, Tim hobbled into the barn to find something else to do.
About 30 minutes later, the pickup reappeared, but with his mom driving it at a much tamer pace than his dad. She stopped in front of the house and went in to fix lunch. Tim made his way around to the back of the pickup and found the rope still attached to it. But there was nothing left on the other end but the handle from Tim’s wagon.
Tim untied the rope and slowly made his way down the dirt lane that went back to the fields. He had only gone a few yards when he spotted one wagon wheel lying in the grass at the edge of the lane. A few yards farther, Tim found the other wheel with the axle still attached. Another few yards and Tim found what was left of the main part of the wagon—bent and twisted beyond recognition—lying in the weeds next to a fence post.
The Cow-Pie Chronicles Page 3
