I took a look at the arena where we’d had our battle and said, gritting my teeth, “Take that—and that—and that!” I swung my one free fist around a little, then came to myself and started on toward the Black Widow Stump, saying to myself as I ran—and quoting my father, who had given me a talking to about keeping my temper under control—“Tempers are given to us by the Lord, Son. You can use them or lose them. If you waste your good temper in an explosion, you feel sick afterward. Some people actually feel as weak as a sick cat.”
“How,” I had asked my lowered-eyebrowed father that day—he had his own temper under good control at the time—“how can a boy who has had his nose bashed in a battle keep from losing his temper?”
Dad’s answer was as if I had thrown a hard snowball at him and he had dodged it. Here is part of what he told me: “Just keep your eye on your mother. A hundred times a day things go wrong around the house and farm that could make her the saddest or maddest person in the world. Instead, she keeps her mind filled with thoughts of God and with Bible truth. She keeps her heart’s radio tuned to heaven and—well, you just watch her, and you’ll see!”
I had been watching my wonderful gray-brown-haired mother ever since, and little by little I was learning.
“But,” I said to myself as I zip-zip-zipped and zag-zag-zagged my way along on the little brown path to the Black Widow Stump, “What do I do today if my worst enemy happens along and stirs my temper all up with something he says or does?”
Shorty Long, being the only boy in the neighborhood whose parents took winter vacations in warm climates, was very proud of himself and very uppity about things they saw and did in the places they visited.
I gave my shoulders a twisting shrug as if I was a bucking bronco in a rodeo. And right away, in my mind, I was a bucking bronco, and Shorty Long was a cowboy trying to ride me and couldn’t. I was a trained Western pony, my mane blowing in the wind. Shorty Long was lying in the dust behind me as I leaped into a fast gallop toward what was maybe going to be one of the most wonderful days the gang would ever have.
Maybe.
2
It was one of the happiest gallops through the woods I’d ever had. Nature helped me feel excited by letting me scare up a cottontail rabbit, whose white almost-no-tail went bob-bob-bobbing along toward a brush pile near a patch of light green mayapples.
“Don’t worry, Little Brer Rabbit!” I called after him. “I know you were born and bred in the bramble patch, and I wouldn’t hurt you for anything in the world!”
While I was still stopped, I eased over to a little thicket of seven-foot-tall bushes. I wanted to have a look at a thrush’s nest I’d stopped at yesterday, to see if any of the four green-and-brown speckled eggs had hatched. And I got one of the worst scoldings that ever a boy can get. The mother thrush came storming out of those bushes, leaping from one branch to another, saying “Prut-prut!” in a short, sharp, angry, high-pitched tone. It certainly didn’t sound anything like her early spring song, which is one of the sweetest bird melodies in the whole territory.
I worked my way cautiously through the branches and took a quick peek into the nest, but there weren’t any baby birds. There were still only the same four light green, thickly speckled eggs. Then I stepped back and got out of the way, because suddenly two rusty red birds were storming all around, screaming at me as if I wasn’t a part of nature at all.
“All right! All right!” I scolded them back. “What’re you doing up there, letting your eggs get cold! Get back on the nest! And learn to keep your voices down when you have company!”
I wasn’t really angry at them, though. I was remembering what Mom once told me about the brown thrasher, which is another name for the brown thrush. She had said, “It sings best in late April and May. But when it begins to build its nest and get its family started, it’s too busy looking after the house and the children.”
I took a good-bye look at the half-hidden nest of grapevine tendrils, dead grass, twigs, and stringlike roots, and said to the eggs, “Now you hurry up and get yourselves hatched! And furthermore, from the day you’re old enough to know anything, start being polite to strangers! Obey your parents and make it easy for your mother to sing around the house!”
With that advice, I swung back into the path made by boys’ bare feet, listening in my mind to the words of a song we use every Sunday or so in our church school. It starts, “Look all around you, find someone in need. Help somebody today!”
That, Bill Collins, I explained to myself, is the real reason why you feel fine inside this morning. You’re on the way to do something for somebody else—not just to have fun for yourself.
“You’re right,” I answered me and galloped on.
At the bottom of the slope, maybe fifty feet from the Black Widow Stump, I stopped again and looked through the dancing heat waves hanging over the open space to see if any of the gang was already there, but none of them was.
Listening for footsteps, I heard instead the busy buzzing of maybe seven thousand honeybees, which this time of year went swimming and diving and tumbling over each other among the flowers of the leaning linden tree. At the same time, my nose was caught up into a whirlwind of the sweetest natural perfume in the whole territory—the nectarlike scent of thousands of creamy yellow flowers of the tree that bees seem to like even better than they do wild crab apple blossoms.
“Slaves,” I said, half to myself and half to the bees, “you don’t know it, but you’re working for my father. The honey you make out of that sweet nectar is being stored in my father’s own beehives. But we do appreciate it very much, my little friends. Maybe that’s the reason you’re so happy—you’re helping somebody else, even if you don’t know it!”
Sitting on his haunches on the stump was one of my favorite animal brothers, a chestnut brown chipmunk. He was looking the world over, listening to see if there was any danger.
“Good morning, Chippy-chip-chee!” I cooed, not wanting to scare him. The second he was scared, he would all of a sudden disappear the way other ground squirrels do. Sometimes—but only sometimes—Chippy-chip-chee would let us creep up really close. Then, maybe deciding we were for sure his friends, he would scoot back and forth all around in front of us, working his way closer and closer until he got up enough nerve to dash in and pick up a nut or piece of bread or cracker crumb we had tossed out to him.
For some reason Chippy was a little nervous today. And when he saw me creeping toward him, like a flash he was gone.
Getting to the Black Widow Stump before any of the rest of the gang arrived, I plopped myself down in the long, brown, last year’s grass to rest, not being as tired as I would have been if I had been pushing our one-row cultivator across Theodore Collins’s garden.
My nose was close to the flotsam Mom had given me, and I wondered if it would taste as good as it smelled. Right then it seemed like a good idea to put it about three feet behind me, which I did.
And right away I was daydreaming again—this time while I was looking toward the linden tree and the rail fence beside it. Growing there, and dancing a little in the breeze, were maybe seventeen yellowish fawn lilies, nodding their heads to each other as fawn lilies do when they are in full bloom.
I was jarred out of my daydream right then by a flock of voices. Rolling over and up to a sitting position, I leaned back against the stump and watched five different-sized, different-shaped boys moving toward me. There was Big Jim, our leader, the oldest and biggest of us, the only one with fuzz on his upper lip and whose voice was beginning to sound like the quawking of the big night heron that lives in the swamp. There was Circus, our acrobat, who had six sisters and never got a chance to help his mother with the dishes—which is why Charlotte Ann ought to hurry and grow up. There was Little Jim, carrying—as he always does—his handmade ash cane. There was Dragonfly, the most spindly-legged one of us, and last of all, Poetry, my almost best friend, the chubbiest one of us. He was on a diet this summer and had been on it on and off a
ll spring.
In the right or left hand of each boy was a package of something for the Fenwicks.
Almost right away we called our business meeting to order so that we could decide different things we would try to do the next few weeks to make the Fenwicks feel at home. In the middle of the meeting, Big Jim unfolded a piece of typewriter paper, saying, “Here, gang, is something we can do this morning.”
On the paper was a hand-drawn map of the whole Sugar Creek playground. Outlined on the page were the spring at the bottom of the incline, the swimming hole, the bridge, the island, the cave, Old Man Paddler’s cabin up in the hills, the haunted house, Old Tom the Trapper’s canine cemetery behind it, the best fishing places—things like that.
Our meeting over, we were soon on our way, all of us having put our flotsam in the big picnic basket Poetry had brought his in—and letting him carry it. A vote we had just taken had decided it that way.
Pretty soon we came to the rail fence near the bridge and went through or over or under the rails, whichever our minds told us to do. Then we started across the board-floored, extra-long bridge. It is over one of the widest places in Sugar Creek and has several deep fishing holes below it. The best fishing place is on the north shore, fifteen feet out from the leaning sycamore tree.
Halfway across, we stopped, all of us facing west to look toward the island and especially toward the wooded knoll where the Maple Leaf missionary cabin was. Blue wood smoke was rising from the barbecue pit.
“Look, g—ang!” Dragonfly beside me stammered. “There–there–there’s a white boat at the dock!”
I’d already seen it. With its prow moored to the dock post was what looked like a brand-new, shining aluminum boat.
“And–and–and,” Dragonfly stammered on, “it’s got a life preserver! Who needs a life preserver around here?”
Big Jim answered in a teacher voice, “Every boat ought to have one, even in a creek like ours. There are a lot of places too deep for wading. And besides, you could accidentally gulp water in an upset and not be able to swim. You can drown in a bathtub, you know. A boy nearly did last week in Brown County—remember?”
“The boat’s got a name on its side,” Little Jim said.
I tried to read the letters but couldn’t make them out, and neither could any of us.
Anyway, it was time to go on, which we kind of bashfully did. Not a one of us had seen the Fenwicks in person. We had only seen their pictures on the bulletin board in the foyer of the Sugar Creek Church. We’d seen and heard quite a few different missionaries in our church but had never had a chance to see how they lived in the ordinary everyday world. For the next few weeks, we would get to, beginning just seven minutes from now.
Pretty soon we were all the way across the bridge and down the steep embankment on the other side, walking single file on the path that bordered the shore, not hurrying, because maybe we wouldn’t be able to act natural when we got there.
Back at the Black Widow Stump we had voted for Poetry to be the spokesman, knock at the Maple Leaf door, and hand in the basket of baked things. Big Jim had ordered, “After that, everybody act natural. Just be ourselves.”
But that wouldn’t be easy, my mind told me as I dodged the swinging branch of a willow Dragonfly hadn’t bothered to hold back. If I acted natural right that very second, a spindly-legged boy would get tripped by the right foot of the red-haired boy behind him. Then, if we both kept on acting natural, there’d be a rough-and-tumble scramble of arms and legs, plus some grunts and maybe even a few groans.
Also, how can a boy act natural just because he has been ordered to or voted to? Especially when, at a time like this, it would be unnatural to act natural.
At the pier that we had helped our fathers make, we stopped to study the white boat and to admire the outboard motor attached to the stern. Just looking at that very pretty shining new boat made our own boat, which was chained to a small maple sapling up near the spring, seem like a last year’s bird’s nest. Ours was made of wood. It needed painting and also cleaning on the inside.
We were still standing at the dock, admiring the boat, feeling a little envious of it maybe and not liking ours as well as we usually did, when John Fenwick came down to where we were. He was panting a little, being short of breath as if he had seen and heard us and had come in a hurry to make us welcome.
While he was still coming, Poetry gave a low whistle in my ear and whispered, “Look at those bulging muscles!”
The gray-brown-haired missionary, still working his way down the slope, was dressed in gray everyday slacks and an almost snow-white T-shirt. His face, arms, neck, and shoulders were a healthy tan, and their muscles did look like the muscles of the village blacksmith in a school poem of that name, part of which goes:
Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
………………
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
Poetry, who is always thinking in rhyme, having maybe a hundred-and-one poems stored in what he calls the “reference section” of his mind, whispered to me a little more about “The Village Blacksmith.”
“He goes on Sunday to the church,
And sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach;
He hears his daughter’s voice …”
I don’t know what I expected a missionary dressed in ordinary clothes to look like, but for some reason it felt good to see John Fenwick looking and acting as much like a human being as a human being does.
Anyway, we pretty soon found out that the Guenther Longs had spent their winter vacation in Costa Rica, and on Sundays they had attended the little mission chapel there. Then the Fenwicks found out that the Longs lived at Sugar Creek, and the Longs found out that the Fenwicks had been invited to spend a month of their furlough in the new Sugar Creek missionary cabin.
“Well,” John Fenwick told us, “that’s why I bought the new boat. When I was a boy, our family lived for several years on a beautiful little creek like this one. And the only boat I had was a battered old homemade one that leaked like a sieve. So I thought that for once in my life I’d like one that would help me live my boyhood dreams in a modern sort of way. Here, let me show you the very latest in boats.”
The big missionary stepped out onto the dock, asking us to follow him, and that’s when we got a close-up of the long, wide, aluminum boat.
“The seats,” John explained, stooping and showing us, “have built-in Styrofoam, which makes it impossible for the boat to sink. That’s another thing about my boyhood boat—I had an upset with it once, and it sank. It wouldn’t even float to shore.
“You boys remember that, if you’re ever out on a large body of water in a modern boat—never try to swim to shore if it’s far. Just stay with the boat. Most of them will not sink unless they have too much weight in them and too much water. Usually you can hang on outside the boat, keeping your body under—all except your head, of course—and by and by your boat will drift to a shore or island or somewhere.”
While John Fenwick was still talking and admiring his boat, looking at it as though he was a boy of our age and size again, I had my mind on a certain other boat that I knew would sink if it accidentally got filled with water, especially if it had a boy or two in it or even hanging onto it. It seemed maybe there wasn’t a boat in the world that was as worthless as ours, which didn’t have two new lightweight oars, two metal carrying handles on its stern, a self-bailing assembly, a fish stringer ring, or any of what John called “foam flotation encased in its seats.”
Dragonfly, who had never liked our old boat anyway—because sometimes, especially in ragweed season, he thought it was the wet wood of the gunwales that made him sneeze—right then sneaked an idea into my mind. He said, “If we’d make him a member of the gang while he is here, he might let us borrow his boat.”
“Sh!” Big Jim, who had seen us whispering, stopped us with a
shush, because right that minute John’s wife was standing at the top of the incline by the large wide-topped stump of a tree one of our Sugar Creek fathers had cut down.
She was calling to us, “Come on up!”
We went on up, and Elona Fenwick was maybe even more like a human being than her husband was. She had a very cheerful sense of humor, and she looked at us with her twinkling brown eyes as though she liked barefoot boys with dusty feet and everyday play clothes.
3
But that wasn’t all Elona Fenwick seemed to like. We found that out a little later when she surprised us by saying, “The Longs are such wonderful people, and their boy—Shorty, they sometimes call him—is so polite. Any parent would be thankful to have a boy like that.”
I must have been staring my astonishment, because right then Poetry eased an elbow into my ribs as he whispered, “Don’t look so surprised!”
From where we were standing we could read the lettering on the prow of the boat now, and it was some kind of foreign name: V-I-D-A E-T-E-R-N-A.
“That’s Spanish for ‘Life Eternal,’” Elona explained when she heard Little Jim spelling out the letters. “The children in the Costa Rica mission school sing, ‘Yo tengo vida eterna en mi corazon.’ That means, ‘I have eternal life in my heart.’”
We were all acting natural without realizing it, it seemed. It was easy to chatter along, especially when the Fenwicks were making us feel at home even more than we were them.
“I suppose Shorty belongs to your club,” Mrs. Fenwick said. “He didn’t say so, but he seemed such a polite boy, it would just be natural for him to.”
We were sitting in the shade of the big maple tree then, having to drink a cup apiece of some kind of homemade fruit drink she called Costa Rican punch. We were also eating a cookie apiece out of the flotsam basket.
How could we tell them that Shorty Long wasn’t a member of the gang because he didn’t want to be and also because we didn’t want him to be? That he was a filthy talker and sometimes said things that, as my father once expressed it, “are not fit to be poured down into a city sewer!”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 11