Also, who was the girl with the red blouse and gray pants? Why was she taking pictures of the wildlife in the swamp? And what was making that ghostly sound of a howling dog in the swamp and along the bayou?
8
Next day, being Sunday, the Collins family was up as early as on any weekday, flying around to get the outside chores done, breakfast over, and the dishes washed and dried. Our Sunday clothes were on, including my shoes, which I’d shined two days before. Dad’s whiskers were shaved. Mom’s face was fixed a little so that it wouldn’t shine from hurrying around too much on what was going to be a hot day. Charlotte Ann’s hair was combed and brushed and tied with a ribbon to keep it from getting gone with the wind even before we could get in the car. And in plenty of time we were on our way, zooming up the road as fast as Mom would let Dad drive.
I was in the front seat with him. Mom was in the back, trying to keep Charlotte Ann from acting her age. I decided to come out with a question I had asked my parents before but hadn’t had an answer to.
“Has anybody found out yet whether there is a special heaven for dogs? Do maybe they go racing up and down the creek at night, bawling on a coon trail like Alexander—”
Dad chopped my question in two by saying, “I thought you boys went up to put flowers on his grave yesterday. He was still buried there, wasn’t he?”
“His body still was,” I answered.
“Of all things!” Mom burst out. “Did you see that! That woman driver almost ran into us head-on!”
“Not a woman,” Dad disagreed. “He just had long hair. Didn’t you see his beard?”
Something went wrong in the backseat right then, and somebody’s first and worst daughter let out a squawk like a young rooster learning to crow.
“She bumped her head on the door handle when you swerved to miss that woman driver,” Mom explained.
“Man driver,” Dad said.
Remembering Little Jim’s verse “Outside are the dogs,” I quoted it to Dad and added, “If any dog deserved to go to dogs’ heaven, it would be Alexander the Coppersmith.”
Mom sighed and broke in with something I’d heard our minister say quite a few times, which was: “Even we human beings don’t go to heaven because we deserve it. We are saved because of the grace of God, through faith.” Then she added, “If anybody did get to heaven because he had done so many good things, he’d probably spend part of eternity bragging on himself.”
Dad answered her kind of bright remark by saying, “Which would be like a dog chasing himself up a tree and barking down to everybody below, ‘Look! I’m a very clever canine, don’t you think?’”
Then his voice took on a teacherlike tone, the way it gets when he is giving a talk about nitrogen on alfalfa roots to a farm convention, as he began to explain what Revelation 22:15 means. “That very solemn Bible verse is talking about people, the people who, because of their stubborn rebellion against God, reject the Savior. They are the ‘dogs’ who will be on the outside. When anyone closes his heart against the love of God, he is automatically closing the door to heaven against himself.”
In a little while we swished down a shaded hill, rattled across Wolf Creek bridge, started up the incline on the other side, and right away came to and turned into the church driveway.
As soon as we were parked in the shade of a spreading elm tree beside the Thompsons’ automobile, Poetry came around to my side of the car before I could get out and whispered excitedly, “Guess what!”
“What?” I asked, beginning to get that happy feeling I nearly always get when he says, “Guess what!” or, “I tell you what let’s do!”
“I have something wonderful to tell you. Remember old Whitey’s picture in the Hoosier Graphic?”
I wasn’t exactly glad to be reminded of it, because it seemed that a red mother hog with seven little wrigglers would have made a better picture. “What’s so wonderful about it?” I asked.
“That picture woke up the State Farm Bureau to the fact that Sugar Creek raises wonderful hogs, and they phoned my father last night to come to Indianapolis for the convention tomorrow. They want to introduce him to all those people and have him make a speech.”
“It’s Whitey who ought to be introduced,” I said to my friend. “She’s the one who is raising those dirty little off-white pigs.”
Poetry frowned at my innocent remark, but he went on with what he had wanted to tell me in the first place. “Because Dad has to leave right after dinner and will be gone all night, and because he wants to give me a happiness break, he’s going to let you stay all night and sleep in the tent with me! My mother’s already asked your mother, and she’s already said it’s all right.”
Dragonfly, seeing us talking and maybe not wanting to be left out of any secrets, came hurrying over from their car, which had just stopped and parked. So Poetry and I had to start whistling a tune of some kind and begin talking about the weather, not wanting him to feel jealous if he didn’t get to sleep in the tent, too.
“My mother heard him again last night,” Dragonfly told us, “and she saw another flying saucer above the Sugar Creek island.”
The Sunday school bell rang then, and all the people who were still outside stopped visiting and moved toward the double-door entrance of the church. Just as Poetry and I reached the top of the stone steps, he whispered, “If the dog howls again tonight, and if there is a flying saucer, I’m going to take its picture. I bought a new roll of film last night.”
Even though I had that to think about during Sunday school and all through the sermon that followed, I did hear most everything our kind-voiced pastor said about the “Man from Outer Space.” One of the important things that seemed extrawonderful for a boy to know was: “Our Savior did not begin as a little baby in the manger at Bethlehem. He always was. He came from heaven and only went through Bethlehem on His way to the cross to die for our sins. After His death, He rose again and ascended into heaven, and someday He will come back to our planet again, as He said. Until He comes, we are to be busy serving Him.”
I wasn’t sure what a boy my age could do for Jesus, but it seemed I ought to try to be a better boy, be a little kinder to my family—especially to my smallish sister, Charlotte Ann—and that I might help Mom and Dad around the place without being told two or three times. Also I ought not to make fun of anybody, not even Dragonfly, who was superstitious because his mother was.
And besides, I thought, as I sat beside the open church window listening to the sermon and also every now and then to a meadowlark’s juicy notes from the cemetery fence about a hundred yards away, Dragonfly might be right. What if there were actual UFOs flying around? What if there were visitors from outer space? What if some of the things people were seeing or thought they were seeing—whichever it was—what if God was letting those things happen to kind of scare people a little into behaving themselves and maybe getting their hearts ready for the time when the real Man from Outer Space would come back?
Different thoughts came fast into my mind and went fast out of my mind. One wonderful thought seemed most important. It was: When the Savior does come, I won’t have to be scared, because He and I are already good friends.
In the car again on our way home, as we went rattling across Wolf Creek bridge, I looked out the window to my right and saw three or four saucer-shaped, soft-shelled turtles sunning themselves on a log. The minute the bridge’s board floor and steel rafters began to rattle and to shake, they came to awkward turtle life and slithered off into the water. Even before we reached the other side of the bridge, one had swum underwater maybe ten feet and come up again for air.
A very quiet, very glad feeling began to swim around in my mind right then. I happened to think that the same heavenly Father who made all the wild things of the world—and I figured He maybe loved them a lot because of the way He had taught them to take care of themselves—that same heavenly Father had loved human beings even more and had given His Son, our very own Savior who liked boys, to die for th
eir sins.
Without knowing I was going to do it, I took a deep breath, sighed as if I had just come up for air, and began humming a line of the song we had just sung at the closing of the church service:
“Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee.”
Mom, in the backseat, heard me sort of sigh the words, and she asked, “Did you say something, Bill?”
“Did you see the way those soft-shelled flying saucers took off from the raft back there?” I answered her.
Dad came in then with “I’ll bet all the little minnows down under the water thought their world was being invaded.” Then, reaching the crest of the hill, he stepped on the gas, and we went zooming toward the Collins place, while my thoughts flew on ahead to what might happen tonight in Poetry’s tent.
What if we heard the dog howling in the swamp again? What would we do? What if—when we got up and went down to where it sounded as if the howling was coming from—what if we got an actual picture of it? Or even of a UFO of some kind? If we did, it’d be maybe the first honest-to-goodness picture of one that anybody in the world ever saw!
That afternoon while I was packing my things in Mom’s overnight case, the phone rang, and it seemed to be Poetry’s mother asking if they could borrow two of our muskrat traps.
“How come?” I exclaimed to Mom. I was astonished that any boy’s mother would want a muskrat trap when it was out of season to trap muskrats.
Mom at the phone shushed me by waving her hand behind her and giving me a motherly scowl at the same time.
“Surely,” she said into the mouthpiece of our phone. “He’ll be glad to bring them.”
Even though I was itching to find out what the Thompsons wanted muskrat traps for in the middle of the out-of-season, I didn’t get to find out until maybe twenty-seven minutes later, during which extralong time I waited patiently for Mom to keep on talking and listening to Poetry’s mother until, like an eight-day clock, one of them ran down.
After finishing talking and listening and finally hanging up, Mom said to me, “Some varmint has been getting into their chicken house, and she’s already lost two of her best laying hens. You’re to take over our two traps when you go.”
I told her what most any farm or ranch boy knows. “But muskrats don’t raid anybody’s chicken yard! They eat vegetables, and crawfish, and any other kind of fish they can catch, and mussels, and they might eat sweet corn. But if it’s chickens that are getting killed, it’s a coon or possum or maybe even a fox.”
“I know that,” Mom, being a farm mother, said, “but don’t we call our traps ‘muskrat traps’?” which I admitted we did. I felt like a schoolteacher with a much older pupil who knew as much as the teacher.
Anyway, having to take the traps along and help Poetry set them meant I would get to leave early, just as soon as supper was over. I’d be taking with me my nightclothes, toothbrush, toothpaste, slippers, and other stuff a mother thinks a boy ought to take with him when he goes to spend only one night in a friend’s tent.
“I might not need a toothbrush,” I said to her. “I can’t brush while I’m asleep.”
“You’re to have breakfast at their house in the morning,” she explained.
I answered, “But I can’t brush after every meal, you know.”
That made her come back with “Breakfast isn’t every meal, my dear son. Take your toothbrush!”
Deciding it would make Mom happier if I did take it, I took it.
Then I went to the toolshed to get the steel traps. I was putting them into the front basket of my bicycle when Mixy, who had been taking a catnap on the sloping outside cellar door, came meowing up to see what I was doing, as much as to say, “Are you going anywhere where a nice friendly cat can’t go?”
“I am,” I said down to her. “I’m going over to Poetry’s place and sleep in a tent, and you can’t come.”
“Meow,” she answered back up at me, her gray green eyes smoky with laziness.
“Besides,” I went on, while she followed the bicycle and me over to the ivy arbor at our side door, “you never sleep at night anyway. You go gallivanting all over everywhere, looking for mice and rats. You’re to stay home tonight and look after my folks.”
Mom came out of the house with the overnight case, went to the toolshed, and came out with another animal trap. It was our large, galvanized metal take-it-easy trap.
“Why the take-it-easy trap,” I asked her, “when they asked for the other kind?”
“Because,” Mom answered, “you can take it easy. Catch it alive, and the animal doesn’t have to suffer for hours or even all night with its foot caught in a cruel-jawed trap. That’s why.”
I looked at her tender brown eyes and remembered that they always got a hurt expression in them whenever she had to see anything suffer or when she even read about anybody or anything suffering. So I took a quick glance at the trap she was tying on top of her overnight case on top of my front basket, and I said, “Sure, Mom, I’ll take it and make them use it, if I can.”
Charlotte Ann, Mom, and Mixy followed me all the way to the walnut tree, the gate, and “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox. There they told me good-bye as well as a few other things Mom thought of at the last minute. Then my mother scooped Charlotte Ann up in her arms, set her in the swing, and started her on a fast, back-and-forth swing until I could get gone.
“Beat it,” I said down to Mixy. “Scat, cat! I told you, you can’t go.”
But that dopey-minded feline wouldn’t beat it. Instead, she kept on brushing herself against my shins and between the wheels of the bike and would get herself run over if I didn’t get started while she was turning around to brush her way back through again.
I called out to Mom at the swing. “Will you please come and save this stubborn old cat from getting all nine of her lives killed right now and all at once?”
As soon as I had a chance to get gone with the wind, away I went, racing toward a brand-new kind of adventure, sure I’d have a lot of fun before morning. And who knows? I might hear Alexander the Coppersmith—and might even get to see with my own eyes one of Dragonfly’s mother’s flying saucers.
9
Spending the night in a tent with your almost best friend is one of the finest experiences a boy can ever have. Poetry and I had done it so many times that we knew almost exactly what it would be like.
Our clothes were hanging on a homemade clothes tree at the foot of the two cots, and all the light we needed was the moonlight filtering in through the plastic-net tent window at the other end near our heads. Everything in the tent except our voices was very quiet, but outside were all the farm noises, such as once in a while a screech owl letting out his ghostly cry; a mother hog in a hollow sycamore tree, making mother hog noises while her seven off-white little pigs made pigs of themselves; crickets chirping all around everywhere; and—as it is on any hot late summer night—hundreds of cicadas sounding like an orchestra with a hundred drumming musicians.
For a few minutes, while I was lying there in my hot cot just across from Poetry in his hot cot, listening to the night sounds, I let my mind’s eye imagine what a cicada looked like. Cicadas have quite a few different names such as harvest fly and locust. It’s an insect with a broad head, protruding eyes, and transparent wings that fold over its body like a glass roof on a greenhouse.
At the same time, my mind kept trying to drift off into a sea of dew. It’ll be easy to go to sleep when locusts are drumming and ground crickets are plick-plocking a singsong song, I thought. Also, it seemed there were several hundred small frogs having a family reunion in the swamp beyond the sycamore tree at the mouth of the cave.
I was also sort of listening in the direction of the Thompsons’ chicken house to hear if any of Mrs. Thompson’s laying hens were being stolen by a varmint of some kind.
“Do you know what?” Poetry whispered to me from three feet away.
“What?” I mumbled back.
“Baiting our traps with sar
dines like we did, we might catch a coon. A coon is like a house cat. It likes any kind offish, as well as chickens and sweet corn and almost everything else.”
“I just hope we take it in the take-it-easy trap,” I said. I knew that if we caught any varmint in one of the steel traps, as soon as Mom found out about it she’d ask all kinds of questions, such as whether it was a mother coon that had a family of babies somewhere that would now be orphans.
Pretty soon, all the friendly sounds a boy hears at night began to fade out as my mind started off into a sea of dew with Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.
How long I slept I don’t know, but I was startled out of my unconscious world by somebody’s hands shaking me by the shoulders. I forced my eyes open and looked up to see something about the size of the mother bear in the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” leaning over my cot.
“Hey, Bill!” a voice whispered. “Wake up! We’ve caught something big! Listen!”
I didn’t have to listen, now that I was awake. From the direction of Poetry’s chicken house there was a thumping and a rattling and a yowling such as I’d never heard in my life.
“We’ve caught the howling dog!” Poetry’s excited voice exclaimed. “Come on. Let’s get up and go see.”
We didn’t bother to dress. We just stepped into our slippers, and with Poetry carrying his flash camera and I my flashlight, we unzipped the door of the tent and out we went, hurrying toward whatever we were hurrying toward.
Such a sound!
“Might be a wildcat,” I panted.
“Or a hundred of them,” Poetry puffed back.
Not only was there yowling and bang-banging, but a whole henhouse full of scared hens and excited roosters were putting up such a clatter that we ran still faster to see what was the matter. We dodged rosebushes and other shrubbery in the yard on our way toward whatever we had caught, either in one of the muskrat traps or in Mom’s take-it-easy trap.
It took us only a few nerve-tingling minutes before we came to the corner of the chicken house, where the seventy-seven hens and maybe eight old roosters were still whooping it up like that many school kids let out for recess.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 7