“Look,” I said down to her, “you don’t know what trouble is!”
Leaving Addie to her worries, I went back to my own. One thought was milling around in my mind. It was something my father had once said to me. “If you want to wash the temper out of your mind, hard work is the best soap there is.”
In a few minutes I was scrubbing away on my angry mind by chasing around from one hen’s nest to another. I looked in the toolshed, in seven or eight coops along the orchard fence, and up in the haymow, where my favorite laying hen, old Bent Comb, sometimes laid her daily egg in a nest under a log. Where, I asked myself, is that rascal of a hen laying her eggs now? It had been more than a week since she’d laid any eggs in the nest I was looking at right that minute.
Come to think of it, I thought, where is she herself? I hadn’t seen her all day. Or for several days.
Maybe I ought to tell you that, beside hard work, I had found another way to get my temper under control. It was even better than Dad’s method. My mind was still smoking a little when I climbed up over the alfalfa to a secret place in the far corner of the haymow.
There I reached into a crack in a log, took out a smallish brown leather book, and opened it. It was kind of like looking in the dictionary for a word for the day. My word for the minute right then was: “Your word I have treasured in my heart, that I may not sin against You.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to treasure God’s Word in my heart, but it seemed that maybe if I would memorize the verse and keep saying it over and over again to myself, it would be the same as treasuring it. My short prayer to the One who made boys and the whole wide world, and even the universes out in space, didn’t sound very much like our pastor’s prayer, but part of it was: “Maybe You could help the gang do something about Shorty Long, so we won’t make him any worse than he is. If You made him the same as You did us, how come he is so ornery?”
I didn’t hear any answer from God, but all of a sudden I thought a thought I’d never thought before, and it was: Shorty Long is trying to do his own making, and he is doing a bad job of it. Anybody who wants to be a better boy will have to turn his life over to Somebody who knows how to make him better.
As soon as my eyes were open again, I looked out through a crack between the weatherboarding and saw, away up near the twin pignut trees at the farther end of the garden, my smallish sister, all alone, toddling around in the clover. She was running back and forth and stopping now and then to look all around and up into the trees. Listening to see if I could hear her fussing about anything, which she sometimes does about almost nothing, I heard her singing a song we sometimes sing in the primary department at Sunday school, and it was
“This little light of mine,
I’m going to let it shine;
This little light of mine,
I’m going to let it shine, let it shine,
Let it shine, let it shine.”
I couldn’t hear all the words, but I knew what they were from having heard and sung them myself when I was little.
Pretty soon I was down the haymow ladder and looking for more eggs. As soon as I was outdoors, Charlotte Ann spotted me and began to call me to come and help her find her red ball.
With her little light trying to shine in my mind, I took my time moseying up to her, looking all along the fencerow of the garden to see if I could find old Bent Comb’s nest. And that’s when I did find it. It was beyond the pignut trees and under the weed-grown lower rail of the garden fence, with Charlotte Ann’s red ball right beside it. And on the nest was Bent Comb herself.
“Hey, young lady!” I said down to her. “What are you doing still on your nest this late in the afternoon? You’re the only hen in the flock who’s not already laid her egg for the day!”
She cocked her saucy head at me, her fiery red bent comb almost hiding her left eye. She squatted a little lower and wider and stayed where she was.
“Look!” I ordered her. “You can’t stay in bed all day and all night too. Up! Out!” I reached for her to pick her up by the feathers on her back. And what on my wondering right hand did I get but several short, sharp, savage pecks!
Charlotte Ann was tugging at me now, begging me to come and play ball with her, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t until I found out what my curiosity told me to find out about old Bent Comb.
Very carefully, so as not to be a henpecked boy, I managed to ease that snow-white leghorn off her nest. Then I saw in a quick count that she had maybe seven eggs, as many as she could have laid at the rate of one a day for a week—which was as long as Mom had been missing her.
While I was quickly counting and thinking, Bent Comb was cluck-clucking like a fussing old setting hen, as if she were trying to say, “For goodness’ sake! Let me alone! I’m going to raise a family!” She then came to angry hen life again and let loose with several more short, sharp, savage pecks.
“OK! OK!” I answered, lifting the back of my hand to my lips.
“What’s the matter with her?” Charlotte Ann wanted to know as she both helped and hindered me in carrying the egg basket toward the house.
My answer was something like this: “Old Bent Comb’s lonesome. She wants a family of baby chickens, and the only way to get them is to sit for three weeks on a nest of eggs. When the three weeks are over and the fluffy little babies are out and cheeping and running all over the place following her around, she’ll be happy again.”
I didn’t get to finish my lesson in nature, because the only pupil in my one-pupil barnyard school was already halfway to the grape arbor, chasing after a red ball she had thrown on ahead of her.
I looked down at my henpecked hand, and one of the peck marks was bleeding a little. Then I said in a teacher voice to myself, “Maybe you’re learning something, Bill Collins! The wood thrush doesn’t like it when her nest is disturbed; Old Bent Comb gets mad when you disturb her nest; and the Sugar Creek Gang gets upset when anything upsets the peace and quiet of their nest.”
Our nest was the whole Sugar Creek territory, which we’d had for our playground all our lives. It seemed we had a right to it without any cowbird or woodpecker or turkey buzzard—and it seemed Shorty Long was all three—trying to build another nest right beside ours!
All of a sudden there was a commotion in the barnyard. Every hen and rooster everywhere began to cackle and run for the chicken house. Several of the old hens let out wild and excited squawks, while at the same time a dozen fluffy little chickens that had been following along after Rhodie Reddie, their Rhode Island Red mother, came racing toward her as though they were half scared to death.
I quick looked up toward to the sky to see how come they were so scared, and I saw a giant chicken hawk about to light in one of the pignut trees.
Two words—and they weren’t words for the day, either—came rushing into my mind. They were “varmint” and “chicken hawk!” And Shorty Long was both of them too.
And then I thought something I maybe shouldn’t have thought, because it didn’t seem right to be thinking it. It was, If the Fenwicks hadn’t come, they wouldn’t have brought the shining new boat Shorty acts like he owns. And if there hadn’t been any missionary cabin so close to our playground—and even right in it—and if Old Man Paddler hadn’t given the land to the church—and if—
I had reached the back door with the egg basket by the time I’d thought all those half-ornery thoughts, getting there just in time to hear Mom humming the tune of a song we sometimes hear on a Western program. It was “Home on the Range”—which she was home on right that minute. The stove range, I mean.
“That you, Bill?” she asked cheerfully. “Hurry and get washed up for supper. It’ll be ready in a jiffy!”
It was maybe about nine o’clock at night before our car came through the front gate, stopped at the walnut tree, and Dad came hurrying across the moonlit yard to where Mom was waiting for him on the board walk not far from the pitcher pump and the grape arbor.
From where I was at the time, looking
out the window of my upstairs room, it seemed maybe they hadn’t been so glad to see each other for a long time. Mom kind of half ran from the pump platform to meet him in the middle of the yard under the spreading plum tree, and I heard her ask, “What kind of a day did you have?”
“Wonderful,” Dad said. And after giving her a hug or two and they were on their way back to the house, he asked, “What kind of a day did you have?”
I couldn’t hear all of Mom’s answer because of the squeaking of the screen door when Dad opened it, but part of it was, “A dozen shipwrecks and lots of flotsam. I was a wreck myself several times. But Good Ship Bill was standing by to come to the rescue.” It was something like that, anyway, which it didn’t hurt me to hear.
They came into the house, and I stayed on at the window, looking out, listening to the plick-plocking of the crickets near the grape arbor and, from the woods, one of my favorite summer night sounds. An orchestra of maybe a hundred green, long-horned insects called katydids was rasping out, “Katy did, Katy she did, Katy did, Katy she did …” On and on and still on, their monotone melody made me sleepy just to hear them.
Yawning and already half asleep, I turned toward the turned-down bed, almost stumbling over the dictionary table. In the moonlight I could see that the biggest book in the house was still open, maybe to the very page it had been open to that morning. Dropping with a sigh onto the pillow, I heard my own monotone voice mumbling, “I wonder if there will be any flotsam floating around anywhere tomorrow. Or any jetsam or lagan.”
Then, as it says in a poem somebody or other wrote, “No boy knows when he goes to sleep,” I sailed off into the Land of Nod. And the next thing I knew, it was morning.
6
Even though old Bent Comb had helped me understand the gang’s feelings about having our privacy invaded, for quite a while we still felt cranky as a wood thrush when a boy peeks into her nest. Every time we were in swimming with all our clothes off, which is the way we had done it all our half-long lives, we had to stop, look, and listen to see if anybody and his wife were out in an aluminum boat taking a ride in our direction.
They did surprise us once. The boat came from upstream instead of down, where we had thought they were, and we had to make a helter-skelter, topsy-turvy, splashy race for shore, grab our clothes from the Snatzerpazooka tree, and scatter into the tall corn.
After a while we began to get used to having company every day, though, and the Maple Leaf became a favorite meeting place, especially since we got invited to come at least one night a week for a wiener roast or a fish fry.
The very first week, John taught us something he had learned as a boy—how to do what is called trotline fishing. This is a very special kind of fishing, and some states have laws to control it. He called it Elona’s trotline, and she was very proud of it. She was like a little girl who had been given a brand-new doll for her birthday or for Christmas.
Trotline fishing, in case you might like to know how to do it, is something like this: You stretch an extrastrong fishing line across the creek or partway across, with hooks suspended on fifteen-inch pieces of strong cord. You use a swivel halfway up each short, strong cord to keep it from twisting if you catch a fish on it.
Poetry brought a brick with holes in it to fasten to one end of the line. We sank it more than halfway across the creek. The other end of the long line we tied on the same shore as the Maple Leaf—to a smallish tree halfway between the dock and Old Whopper’s rock-sheltered water house.
Before rowing the tied-on brick to the end of the line and sinking it, we had baited each of the fifteen hooks we were going to use with blobs of fishing worms. We had five other smaller sinkers spaced along the line so it would stay on the bottom, where anybody knows catfish like to feed and also where we knew there was a mud bottom, which made as good a place for catfish to live and play and have their being in as a mud wallow is good for Old Red Addie and her pigs.
Almost every night Elona would catch three or four catfish. The gang had a lot of fun watching her pull in the line—we helped her bait her hooks again—and also not so much fun helping her clean those slimy, beady-eyed, horned, fierce-looking, good-eating fish, which is why we had to have a fish fry more often than we did a wiener roast.
John, being a doctor, taught us how to give first aid for such things as snakebites, poison ivy, foreign bodies in the eye, drowning, and nosebleed. He told us what to do for anybody, such as a small child, who has eaten too many aspirins, thinking it was candy.
“Because you boys spend a lot of time along and in the creek, you ought to be very sure you know how to give first aid to a person who has drowned,” he told us. Then he explained the different methods lifesavers use to revive a drowned person, saying seriously, “If you ever have to choose between the manual method and mouth-to-mouth, the very best way is mouth-to-mouth.”
To be sure we all understood how to revive a drowned person, he had us take a written examination like the kind we take in school. And all the gang passed the test with good grades.
Another very important examination was on first aid for snakebite. It felt fine to know how to keep your head and save any boy’s life if he accidentally got bitten by a rattler or if, when going through the swamp, he got fanged by a cottonmouth, which is a nickname for the water moccasin.
One thing we couldn’t understand, as the summer flew along too fast, was how come the Fenwicks kept on liking Shorty Long so well and how come he was the only boy in the neighborhood who got to run the Vida Eterna all by himself, even though Shorty seemed to be a careful driver. Every few days he and John would go fishing alone far up the creek above the Long’s ranch. And sometimes when they all of a sudden came putt-putting along where we were in swimming or close to where we were fishing, Shorty would be sitting in the stern of the boat, driving and guiding it, steering it carefully around the shoals, and always making a wide circle to the big rock where Old Whopper was still safe and sound.
Another thing that bothered me was that Shorty had stopped shooting “varmints,” and he even came to Sunday school and church.
Poetry was pretty upset about Shorty’s beginning to behave himself so well, and he told me so one Sunday between Sunday school and the morning worship service. We were outdoors at the time getting a drink from the long-handled iron pump across the road from the church, waiting for the bell to ring. He handed me a cup of water as he said, “I don’t get it! How come all of a sudden Shorty Long is an angel? Or how come he is an angel with John and Elona and a not-angel when he is with us?”
“The trouble is,” I answered him, “all our mothers think he is getting to be so polite—even more polite than their own children!”
Saying that, I looked across the elm-shaded lane to the church entrance, where right that very minute our not-angel friend was going up the steps. I felt my eyes squinting, my jaw and temple muscles tensing.
Poetry must have been feeling the same as I, except that he was keeping his mind under better control. His eyes were on Shorty Long, too, at first. Then he finished his drink and looked around for a place to toss the leftover water in his cup. Spying a wild carrot growing in the fencerow behind the pump platform, he moved toward it and poured the water into its half-opened flower, which when it is only half opened is like a lace-bordered bird’s nest. That is why the wild carrot around Sugar Creek is sometimes called a bird’s nest. It is the most hated weed on the Collins farm because, if you give it a chance, in a few years it will take over a whole field.
“Here,” Poetry said to the wild carrot, “is a little drink for you. You are the most hated weed in the county, so your short life will not be long.”
With that, Poetry stooped, broke off the weak stem of the Queen Anne’s lace, which is another name farmers use for the wild carrot, and, swinging his right arm in a wide circle, threw the whole plant as hard as he could in the direction of the front door of the Sugar Plain Schoolhouse, finishing with, “Class is dismissed!”
The churc
h bell rang then, and we started on the run for the front door. Then we walked like boy angels up the same steps Wild Carrot Long had climbed three minutes earlier.
Inside and seated in the quiet church, I looked way down to the right of the pulpit to where, seated at the organ, was Little Jim’s mother, playing “Break Thou the Bread of Life,” her fingers walking carefully around over the keys. The music made a boy want to be quiet and behave himself a little better after he got home.
Knowing the whole song by heart from having sung it so many times, my mind took me on a sightseeing trip away back into the history section of Palestine. And I saw the Savior taking up five loaves of bread, breaking them into small pieces, and handing the pieces to the disciples, who carried the broken bread to the hundreds of people scattered all over the mountainside. It seemed that maybe, if I were the kind of disciple I ought to be, I would help pass the bread to somebody who was hungry.
Poetry, sitting beside me, eased his elbow into my side, and I came back from Galilee in time to start singing with the others.
That afternoon the gang stopped at the Maple Leaf to see if there was anything we could do for the Fenwicks. While we drank another cup apiece of Costa Rican punch, Elona told us something that helped us understand a little better what was going on in Shorty Long’s mind. Shorty and John were out in the boat right that very minute, far up the creek.
“John and I used to have a boy just Shorty’s age, and he looked very much like him. Well, the Lord allowed our son to die and go on ahead of us to heaven. It has been especially hard for John all these years. Now that he won’t be able to be a missionary again for a long time—maybe never—he’s even more lonely. You understand, don’t you?”
I was looking up at the hummingbird feeder at the time, watching a ruby-throated hummer poised in the air, his wings holding him as safe as if he were on a twig. Then like a flash of feathery lightning, he pushed his long, sharp proboscis into the feeder tube, took a short sweet sip, and flashed away, skimming straight for the dock post at the end of the pier, where he perched as if he was short of breath and needed a rest.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 14