Maybe I never told you that every autumn about thirty garter snakes get together in a garter snake family reunion on Strawberry Hill near the cemetery where Old Man Paddler’s wife and two boys are buried. When the days are warm, those innocent snakes warm themselves in the sun. Then at night they crawl into burrows and clefts in the rocky places and sleep late every morning, the way a schoolboy would do every Saturday if his parents or baby sister would let him. Then when a hard freeze comes and kills the leaves on the trees and spreads the frost, those easygoing garter snakes go underground for the winter.
Another kind of snake around Sugar Creek is the blue racer. It has a greenish blue back and a pale yellow stomach and sometimes gets to be four or five feet long. Once in a while there is a rattlesnake too, and in the swamp now and then we spot a savage water moccasin. Those are sometimes as long as five feet and eat frogs, fish, small rabbits, and even rats.
Well, that girl was working her way closer and closer to our hiding place now, and any minute she might find out we were there. If all of a sudden she discovered six boys, one of them all wet and caked with mud, it might startle her worse than a rattlesnake would.
Then, all of a sudden, Circus let out a yell, grabbed Little Jim’s stick, and sprang out of our hiding place. He streaked toward the girl, who had her back turned to a small water puddle and didn’t see what Circus saw and what none of the rest of us saw until later.
“Look out!” Circus screamed as he ran. “There’s a water moccasin behind you, ready to strike!”
Like a streak of curly-headed lightning, our acrobat raced toward the girl, getting there almost faster than anybody could think. He began flailing away with Little Jim’s cane on the head and two-inches-in-diameter body of what looked like a big water moccasin, the most poisonous snake in our territory, except for maybe the rattler, which always warns before it strikes—though sometimes there are not more than a few seconds between the rattling noise and the savage strike-strike-strike.
I knew that a water moccasin warns you with its tail, too, but not with a rattling noise. When you accidentally surprise one or wake him out of his nap, he draws back his ugly head, lifts it ready to strike, and opens his mouth wide enough for the white parts to show—which is why a water moccasin is sometimes called a cottonmouth. Then he shakes his tail, not like a friendly dog wagging his but in angry back-and-forth jerks—which is the snake’s way of shouting, “I hate you. I hate you, and I’m going to kill you!” Then if you are still close enough for it to strike, and it is still angry at you or maybe afraid you are going to hurt it, it will strike, and you’d better not be in the way, and you’d better not have bare feet or legs.
If the moccasin doesn’t strike, after a few seconds of glaring at you with its beady eyes as if you were a saber-toothed tiger, it might just glide away, as much as to say, “So what! You’re only a human being and not fit for afine snake like me!”
But this moccasin must have hated girls, or maybe her red blouse made him see red. Before Circus got there, I saw that savage-headed, brown-backed, yellow-stomached, beady-eyed, fierce-fanged water moccasin, which carried deadly poison in its cotton-mouthed mouth, strike twice at the girl’s ankles.
7
Circus racing toward that cottonmouth, getting there in nothing flat, then smashing that water moccasin’s ugly head flatter than a pancake, was like a copper-colored dog leaping into action to save Little Jim from being killed by a wildcat.
Wham, wham, sock, sock, and double-wham! Little Jim’s stick, in the strong-muscled hands of our acrobat, rose and fell, rose and fell, rose and fell. Instead of what might have happened, what did happen was as cheerful as one of Mom’s happiness breaks. Instead of that ugly water moccasin’s two poisonous fangs burying themselves deep in the girl’s ankle and holding on the way those fangs do when they strike a rabbit or fish or bird or frog—instead of what might have happened, something wonderful did. Several things, in fact, happened.
The girl’s face did blanch, and she looked scared, but only for a few seconds. She looked quick at her booted ankles where the snake had struck, then she said to Circus, “Thank you, sir. Thank you very, very much. If I hadn’t been wearing these clumsy old boots—thanks to my father—when I was just going to wear my tennis shoes because I thought the weather was too hot for boots—excuse me …”
She cut off her sentence and flew into fast action, focusing her camera on the writhing snake as it twisted and turned, coiled and uncoiled, then rolled over on its dark back, exposing its yellow stomach and blotched brown-and-black markings.
We were all out of our hiding place behind the drift now, watching the girl take a picture of the dying moccasin. I was wondering different things, such as who was she and why was she taking the pictures and also how come she didn’t act scared—at least as much as a boy might have.
Then, as clear as a church bell ringing on Sunday morning calling all the Sugar Creek boys and their families to hurry up or they’d be late, we heard from somewhere deep in the swamp—or maybe from the other side near the wooded area below Old Man Paddler’s cabin—the ghostly, long, trembling squall of an animal of some kind.
That trembling howl couldn’t have been Circus Browne imitating a loon or a howling dog, because he was right beside us, and the sound I had just heard had come from quite a distance away. It wasn’t a screech owl, either, or a rain crow and turtledove duet. It was—I was absolutely sure—an honest-to-goodness howling dog.
Seven times as fast as a turtle tumbling off a log raft into the water, the girl with the camera gave three sharp, shrill blasts with the whistle she had on a string around her neck. Then she turned to say to us—to Circus especially—“Thank you again, very, very, very much. If Old Moccasin had had a chance to strike a third time, he might have struck above my boot tops. I knew he was here somewhere, and I’d been trying to get a good picture of him, but always he’d slither away before I could get focused on him. Father will be so pleased with the pictures I did get.”
My eyes and mind were still on the twisting, still-dying water moccasin, so I was startled when we heard again the long wailing of some kind of animal—alive in his own body or dead without one.
A sound like that when you are in a swamp, cringing beside a dying snake, not even able to believe what you are seeing and hearing anyway—it can give you a scary feeling.
“It’s time for me to start supper,” the girl in the red blouse said. She turned, picked up the attaché case, and started off in the direction the wailing seemed to have come from. Then she stopped, turned back to us, and said in a friendly voice, “Father and I are camping in the aspen grove at the Seneth Paddler place. You must come to see us while we’re here. I think my father will have a reward for you, sir.” She finished with her eyes on Circus.
As another howl came from whatever it was—a coyote or some other animal—she broke into a run. A few seconds later she had disappeared into the little winding path that leads to the woods below Old Man Paddler’s cabin, leaving six boys to wonder what on earth and why, especially because of the UFOs that people had been talking about lately.
For maybe a hundred seconds, we kept as quiet as six scared mice hiding from a hungry cat.
Then Big Jim broke the silence with a husky question. “Tell me,” he began, “did we or didn’t we see a girl taking a picture of nine turtles on a raft, then losing her balance and falling off into the water? And did we or didn’t we kill a water moccasin that would have scared any ordinary girl half to death?”
Dragonfly joined in with another question. “D–didn’t we or did we h–hear Alexander the Coppersmith, alive like my mother said?”
I rubbed my eyes to see if I was awake, thinking maybe I’d only dreamed what I’d seen and heard. Maybe pretty soon I’d wake up and find myself lying in the shade of the beechnut tree near the Black Widow Stump, listening to the hum and buzz of seven hundred honeybees working the creamy yellow flowers of the leaning linden tree.
But one
look at the two-inch-in-diameter, five-foot-long water moccasin, its head bashed in from Little Jim’s cane, convinced me that I had not been dreaming—unless maybe I only thought I saw the snake.
Little Jim helped bring me back to reality when he took his stick, eased himself down to the edge of the pond, and began swishing it in the water to get the blood off the end.
“Listen!” Dragonfly cried excitedly. “There he is again!”
As sure as anything—and maybe still surer—from a long distance away there came once more the long, lonely wail of the ghost dog—if it was a ghost and if it was a dog. A second later we heard a sharp, shrill blast from the girl’s whistle.
Well, we couldn’t stay all the rest of the afternoon where we were, as our parents might start worrying. And for a boy there isn’t anything worse than a worrying parent, even when there isn’t anything to worry about. He tries to keep from doing things that will cause them to worry, and if they are already worrying, he will go whistling around the place, doing things to help squeeze all the worry out of them, things such as speeding up the outdoor chores or offering to help with the housework without being told to. Mom does most of her out-loud worrying when she is tired or doesn’t feel well and needs her first and worst son to prove he loves her.
For Theodore Collins’s first and worst son, his jeans still soiled with swamp dirt and on his way home from an afternoon’s happiness break, there might be a little worrying he himself would have to do. In fifteen or twenty minutes I’d find out.
The first thing I saw when I came through the orchard gate—coming home the back way instead of through the front gate by our mailbox—was Mixy near the grape arbor, giving herself a bath with her damp, rough tongue.
“You been wallowing in the barnyard dust?” I said down to her.
She looked up at me with smoky green eyes, meowed a lazy meow, then went back to her bath.
Mixy’s giving herself a licking like that gave me an idea, though. I quick went to the tool-shed and came out with a beech switch in my right hand. Then I went around to the front door of our house, where company or salesmen nearly always come first, and knocked on the screen door. By the time Mom could get to the door from some other part of the house, I was ready for her. I was going to try a little playacting as she and I sometimes do when we are together.
My mom had one of the nicest company faces a mother ever had and also one of the nicest company voices. That made it especially cheerful at our house when anybody came. It also made company want to come back, “sometimes too soon,” Dad sometimes told her.
So when I looked through the screen door and saw her grayish brown hair and her soft, friendly brown eyes, I hurried to say, “Good afternoon, madam, I’ve come to report an accident. Your son fell into the water near the mouth of the branch, and then while he was hiding from a girl wearing a red blouse and taking pictures of a dying snake that had been killed by Little Jim’s stick, just before a dog howled, he got himself covered with dust from the drift he was hiding behind with the gang. Would you be interested in buying a beech switch to use on him?”
Mom had opened her mouth several times to try to get a word in edgewise. But she couldn’t until I had finished my fast-talking speech. Then she said in as calm a voice as I had ever heard her use, “I get everything but the drift. But whatever happened, you’re still my son, and there’s so much work to be done before supper that I won’t have time to be interested in anything made out of beech wood.”
“Could I interest you in anything else? I have several marbles.”
“I’m sorry,” Mom answered, “but this is Saturday, and we have shopping to do tonight.”
“Nothing?” I said through the screen door to her.
She said, “Nothing at all. But, my dear man, if you’d like to earn your supper, you can go gather the eggs. Now excuse me, sir. There’s the phone.”
As Mom went to answer the telephone, which was on the wall by the east window of the living room, I turned, sighed a happy sigh, and listened to see if I could tell, by the tone of voice she was using and the things she was saying, who had called.
I could tell, before she’d said maybe seven words, because I heard her say, “I know the papers are full of it, but—”
It had to be Lucy Gilbert, Dragonfly’s mother, I thought, worried about all the talk there was in the county and the news in the papers about flying saucers. She was doing what maybe seventeen different women in Mom’s Sunday school class did when they had a worry to worry about—they called Mom, who was their teacher, to ask questions and to help get rid of the troubles that had been building crows’ nests in their minds.
I guess maybe there never was a better mother than mine, I thought, as I went around the house to stand a few minutes below that east window to hear what Mom was saying.
I got there just in time to hear her say, “But a mother can’t punish a boy every time he makes a mistake. If I were you, Lucy, I’d just ignore it. It was his day for a happiness break, and why should you spoil his fun? Just give him a little more love, and I’m sure he won’t be so nervous. Our pastor is going to preach on the ‘Man from Outer Space’ tomorrow, and maybe he’ll clear up a lot of things for us.”
As I came out of the toolshed, after carefully laying the unneeded beech switch across the gun rack just below Dad’s twelve-gauge double-barreled shotgun, I noticed Mixy had finished her bath and was out by the garden fence, having fun catching grasshoppers. I called to her, but she ignored me, not seeming to be interested in anything but herself and in doing what she wanted to do.
There was a warm feeling in my heart because my mother had been so kind. She had acted as though my falling off a log into the water was only a mistake. And on the phone she was trying to keep Dragonfly’s mother from being too anxious about her nervous, worrywart son, Roy, and also from worrying about whether the world was coming to an end because of all the things people had been seeing in the night sky. There was such a warm feeling that it seemed I ought to tell God something very special when I got to the barn and would be all by myself up in the haymow looking for eggs.
Just then the screen door behind me slammed. It was Charlotte Ann, coming on the run, carrying her small sand bucket, wanting to go with me to help gather the eggs.
At the iron pitcher pump I stopped and pumped her a drink in her own special tin cup that hung on a wire hook there. And when she was halfway through drinking, she did with the rest of the water what she’d seen me do maybe a half-hundred times—tossed it over the iron kettle below the pump’s spout, where it landed with a splash in a big water puddle, scattering the daylights out of seventeen or more white and sulfur butterflies that had been there getting a drink.
That is one of the prettiest sights a boy or girl ever sees—a flock of butterflies taking off into the air in all the directions of up that there are, then floating down like feathers out of a pillow and settling again in a little circle around the place where they had been drinking.
I watched the white-and-yellow action, then said to those friendly little butterflies, “If I had wings like you, I could fly across the Sugar Creek branch without getting wet.”
Later, in the haymow, I climbed over the alfalfa to my secret praying place. I took my New Testament with Psalms out of its crack in the log where I kept it and opened it to the special place where I had a bookmark and where a favorite verse was underlined, which was: “Create in me a clean heart, O God.”
My prayer with actual words was pretty short because I heard Charlotte Ann fussing at the bottom of the haymow ladder. She wanted to come up, and I had told her she couldn’t. It sounded as if she was actually halfway up. On my way to the ladder, I finished my prayer, part of which was: “And help me to act like a boy who wants to live with a clean heart.”
When I looked down and saw my smallish sister already on the third rung, it was hard to act like that kind of boy. But by my not yelling down at her, she didn’t get scared, lose her balance, and fall and crack her c
rown as Jack did in the poem called “Jack and Jill.”
As we went side by side across the barnyard toward the henhouse to look for more eggs, I felt as clean inside as a school of minnows swimming upstream in the riffle that sings along under the branch bridge. Even though I had been an honest-to-goodness-for-sure Christian for quite a few years, it seemed that every now and then I needed to have my heart washed all over again, because I kept accidentally getting it stained in some way.
Right then Mixy, spotting Charlotte Ann’s sand pail and my egg basket, must have decided we had something for her to eat. She came loping from somewhere or other toward us, meowing up at us as much as to say, “If you don’t give me something to eat or drink, I’ll starve to death!”
“Listen, cat,” I said down to her, “you have nine lives. If one of them starves to death this afternoon, you have eight more to go on! Now, scat!”
Mixy was up on her hind legs, sniffing at my egg basket, when a swallowtail butterfly came winging past. Like a four-legged flash with a bushy tail, she whirled and took off after it. I went on toward the chicken house. My kid sister was holding onto my left little finger with her small, chubby right hand, giving me one of the finest feelings a brother can ever have.
Still, even though I felt clean in my heart and liked my sister a lot, I was also a little worried. What, I wondered, was going on in the world? Maybe it was something different from what had ever gone on before. What were the different-shaped, brightly colored things people were seeing in the sky at night? And what would our minister say about a man from outer space when he preached his sermon tomorrow?
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 6