Joe’s face had a grin on it when he said, “I’d agree with you. Even my wife says so.”
There was the sound now of a car coming from the direction of the Collins place, and it looked like a service truck. At the same time, from up the hill at Poetry’s house, the dinner bell rang.
“That bell,” Poetry announced, “means I have only thirty minutes to get ready to eat ham and eggs, apple pie, and maybe ice cream. Come on!” he ordered me. “Let’s go see if the boat’s OK for the grand opening of the Thompson, Gilbert, and Collins Company.”
Leaving Joe and the mail truck with the maybe important mail in it, away we went, in a hurry to get to the creek where the boat was, so that Poetry wouldn’t be too late to eat the lunch that would help him grow even bigger than he was.
The lilacs were in full bloom, my eyes and nose told me as I took off after my almost best friend for the mouth of the branch. Remembering how much Old Man Paddler’s secretary liked lilacs, I decided to pick maybe five, and take them home when I went. I would stop at our toolshed, get an empty flower vase, fill it with fresh water from the iron pitcher pump, put the lilac stems in it, and carry them in to where Mom would be typing the old man’s book—if she wasn’t busy in the kitchen getting lunch. I would say, “Sweet fragrance to the sweetest member of the jury for—”
My sweet thoughts were interrupted by Poetry’s yell from the creek. “Our boat’s gone!”
Hearing him yell out like that with mad worry in his voice set my own worry on fire. I took off on the run to where he was. Breaking out into the open space by the maple sapling, I looked at the place where the boat was supposed to be. And Poetry was right—the floating stock of the Thompson, Gilbert, and Collins Frogs Legs Supply Company was gone!
3
The boat was not where we had left it and always kept it tied. And when we hurried to the secret hiding place where we kept the oars, they were gone, too!
There is only one thing you think at a time like that, and Poetry and I thought it and said it at the same time: “Somebody has stolen our boat!”
Having a detective-like mind, my almost best friend began to walk along the bank, looking for footprints or any other telltale signs that would give us a clue as to who the thieves might be.
I went this way, and he went that, and we both went both ways. But we didn’t find anything suspicious—that is, not until Poetry, about a hundred feet from where we had started looking, let out a whistle, which brought me on the run to where he was.
He was standing in a little clearing bordered on one side by wild iris in bloom. In the center was a ring of ashes, a half-dozen empty tin cans, and, behind a log that might have been used for a bench, there was an almost empty box of facial tissues that still had several tissues in the bottom. Poetry held up a forefinger to his lips, as though maybe he thought somebody might be listening or spying on us. Then he stooped, zipped out a tissue from the box, and with it picked up the very small butt of a cigarette.
Poetry lifted the brown stub to his nose, sniffed at it, and asked, “Ever smell tobacco like that?”
I smelled it, and I never had. It had a sickening odor, a little like the smell of a stepped-on overripe papaw or maybe the ripe-apple smell you get when you are close to a school of whirligig beetles, which cruise around in excited circles in shaded water near the shore, especially when the creek is quiet.
For a few seconds, while the smell of the cigarette stub was still in my nostrils, I was seeing with my mind’s eye maybe a hundred small, black, oval water beetles circling round and round each other. And with my mind’s ear I was hearing Dragonfly, the junior member of the Thompson, Gilbert, and Collins Frogs Legs Supply Company, sneeze and complain, “I’m allergic to ripe apples!” He did that every time we got too close to a milling stampede of whirligig beetles, which give off the most odor when they are scared or upset about something.
But it was only a fleeting flash of memory, because Poetry was already running toward the creek and calling over his shoulder, “I see it! Over there behind the willow!”
In a few half seconds I was where he was, and, sure enough, our boat was there, tied to the willow! And the oars were in it, not in their rowlocks but on the floor under the seats, so that if a wind would come up and rock the boat, swinging it around and back and forth, the oars wouldn’t fall out and float downstream.
It felt good to know our boat was still there, but it didn’t feel good to know somebody had taken it without asking any of us. And it was worrisome to think that whoever had borrowed it had moved it from the place where we kept it.
“Maybe we ought to keep it locked up and take the oars home whenever we are through with them,” Poetry suggested. But quickly he changed his mind. “But we’d have to have six keys, and who would ever know where the oars were if whoever used the boat last took the oars home with him?”
Our minds came back to our appetites when from Poetry’s place their five-minute dinner bell rang. There was also the sound of a car starting up near the mouth of the branch, which meant that Joe Sanders’s tire was changed and he might get to Theodore Collins’s mailbox before Theodore Collins’s son did.
“Come over as soon after supper as you can,” Poetry said as we separated. “And don’t forget to bring a gunnysack for the frogs. And wear your sneakers so we won’t get our feet cut on rocks while we’re wading around. And bring your flashlight.”
So away we went, he in his direction, and I in mine—Theodore Collins’s first and worst son pedaling fast to try to catch up with Joe Sanders so that I could be there when Mom opened the letter from Palm Tree Island and also the package, to see what was in it.
The mailman’s red-white-and-blue truck had already stopped at our place and gone on. It was as far as the twin hickory nut trees on the way to Pony Ward’s when I came pedaling up to our mailbox. Dad and Mom were standing under the plum tree, Dad holding the package from Palm Tree Island and Mom reading the letter, when I came through the gate.
My curiosity was ordering me to ask, “Anything special from Palm Tree Island, such as a letter or a package?” But I didn’t.
Mom, who had been reading out loud, handed the letter to Dad. Then she began shuffling through the other letters to see if there was anything important enough to read next, as Charlotte Ann came toddling toward us from the grape arbor where she had been sitting in the shade cuddling her new twin dolls.
And then Old Man Paddler’s secretary sniffed toward the kitchen and exclaimed, “Oh, my land of Goshen! Something’s been on the stove too long!”
With that, Mom took off on the run toward the kitchen door so that whatever it was that was burning—if it was—could be saved.
Dad started whistling under his reddish brown mustache. He folded the letter Mom had handed to him and he had been listening to, took a deep breath, sighed, and said, “I hope you appreciate your mother, Son. When I married her, I didn’t have any idea she would be such a good cook. I thought maybe a girl that had been a secretary for so many years, and a schoolteacher before that, might burn everything for the first few months. But, well, you haven’t had any complaint, have you?”
There was such a friendly odor coming from the kitchen now that I let my curiosity about the mail from Palm Tree Island go to sleep in my mind and hurried to get washed up for lunch.
I had washed my hands at the grape arbor washbasin, dried them, and was at the screen door ready to open it and go in when I overheard Dad say, “Suppose I’d better telephone him?”
Guessing they were talking about Old Man Paddler, I said through the screen, “I got a card from him this morning. Joe gave it to me down at the branch bridge while he was waiting to get his tire fixed. What’d the letter from Palm Tree Island have in it? Anything special in the package? Any news about his twin brother?”
Dad looked quick at Mom.
She gave her head a mysterious shake, and then she said to me, “You want to come on in and finish setting the table? I typed right up to the last
minute and almost forgot what time it was—the book is so interesting.” Then Mom started humming the tune of a song that Little Jim’s mother plays on the organ at all the funerals we have in Sugar Plain Church. It is on page 129 in our hymnal and begins:
Beyond the sunset, O blissful morning,
When with our Saviour heav’n is begun.
At the table we talked about different things, but most of the time, even though my mind was full of excitement about our new business venture, it seemed my folks had a secret that their first and worst son wasn’t supposed to know about. The package, I noticed, wasn’t anywhere in sight, and I wondered where it had gone so fast.
An idea hit me then. “Did they find Old Man Paddler’s brother?” I asked. “Is he all right? When is he coming back to Sugar Creek? What did the letter say?”
“Not so fast and so many questions at once,” Dad said, stopping me. Then he added, using an indifferent tone of voice and looking at Mom while he was talking to me, “One of the mission workers found him at the foot of a cliff, and he … well …” Then Dad looked at Mom again, got another mysterious look back, and finished, “He’d had a bad fall, and—” Dad stopped as if he wanted for some reason to change the subject, but then he went on. “The letter had a special message in it for Old Man Paddler. That’s one reason why we think we’d better telephone him rather than just forward the letter to him. By the way, did you boys find your boat in good condition?”
That changed the subject, and even though I wasn’t satisfied, it seemed I would have to wait for more information about the twin brother of Old Man Paddler.
Dad, who teaches the Homebuilder’s Bible Class in our church, had the Bible on the table beside him open to Luke 15. Looking across at Mom, who was stirring the sugar she had just spooned into her cup of tea, he said, “If they had published The Sugar Creek Times in New Testament days, the shepherd who had a hundred sheep and lost one could have run an ad in the lost and found column, and the whole neighborhood would have started looking for it.”
Mom, being a mother and a housekeeper as well as a part-time secretary, said, “And if the woman in that chapter who had ten coins and lost one had been a better housekeeper, she wouldn’t have had to sweep the house first to find it.”
“Also,” I joined in to remark, “if early that morning, her son had washed all the downstairs windows for her”—which I myself had done at our house—“she wouldn’t have had to light a candle so she could see the coin shining on the floor or wherever it was she finally found it.”
Dad, who never likes to have anybody interrupt him when he is explaining something from the Bible or making a speech at a Farm Bureau convention, waved both arms around like a boy who has had his tent fall in on him and is trying to work his way up and out so that he can breathe. With a twinkle in his eyes at Mom, he accused us, “Words—words—words! You smother me with them. Let me finish.”
We let him, and he and Mom discussed next week’s Sunday school lesson while I asked to be excused and went out onto the side porch to look through The Sugar Creek Times and see if anything new had happened in the neighborhood.
I looked again at the big three-columns-wide, six-inches-deep ad featuring the Bay Tree Inn menu, wondering why we would get paid only fifty cents for a pair of frogs legs when they were going to charge so much more for a frogs legs dinner. I thought, Maybe we ought to go on strike for higher wages.
One item on page two of the Times had an Australian dateline. It told about a woman who walked into a tavern, emptied a box of ashes on the bar, and said, “Here he is—all that’s left of him. You wanted him here all the time, and he was here every night. So take him, and good riddance!” And it was the cremated remains of her dead husband!
Another news story was about a boy named Darrel Inwood who had run away from home two weeks ago and hadn’t been found. The sheriff and residents of Montgomery County had been looking for him all up and down the creek, thinking maybe he had drowned. But nobody had found him. His mother was “almost frantic,” because he had been running around town with a motorcycle gang and several times had threatened to run away.
I didn’t get to finish the news item because, from up the road in the direction of Pony Ward’s place, there was the sound of a motorcycle again, coming at what looked and sounded like sixty miles an hour. It was stirring up a long cloud of gray white dust that went boiling out across our cornfield. As far as I could see up the road, there was dust and dust and more dust.
From behind me, Mom exclaimed, “Quick, Bill! Run upstairs and close the north window!”
Before I was able to get into the kitchen and through it and halfway up the stairs, I could hear Old Man Paddler’s secretary closing the downstairs just-washed north windows to keep the road dust out of a good housekeeper’s house.
I was at the upstairs window, closing it, when the motorcycle with two long-haired, red-jacketed riders on it went roaring past, pulling after them a trail of dust as dense as gray fog on a dark and humid Sugar Creek night.
Before going downstairs again, I noticed that the clothes closet door was open, and I saw, sitting on the top shelf, a brown box the size and shape of the package I had first seen in Joe Sanders’s mail truck. I was standing and thinking and looking at it when I heard Dad’s voice downstairs going on about his Sunday school lesson, as if the motorcycle with two boys on it wasn’t any more than a fly buzzing around his mind and he could shoo it away with a wave of his hand.
When I went back down, Mom was at the table again, and Dad was right where he had been, the Bible still open at Luke 15 and his teacher voice saying, “As I was just explaining before my class left me, the shepherd went after the lost sheep, the woman searched for the lost coin, but no one went after the lost son. The prodigal had to get fed up with the disgusting life he was living, had to get sick at heart and homesick and ashamed. He had to learn the hard way that the way of the transgressor is hard. Then and only then did he come home. That’s the law of life. That’s the way it is.”
“The way it is, yes,” Mom said, “but the boy hadn’t any business sinking all the way down to his neck in the hog wallow. Peter was smarter. When he was making such a fizzle of trying to walk on the water, he didn’t wait until he had sunk all the way down. The Bible says, ‘Beginning to sink,’ he called on the Lord to save him.”
Mom was on her feet now, with hurrying in her mind. “If you and Bill want to help a working mother keep her house clean enough to drop a coin in without it getting lost, maybe you could clear the table for me. If Seneth decides to come right home, I’d like to have his manuscript finished. Strange, isn’t it, that at a time like this he should have just completed a book on The Christian After Death.”
Mom stopped, as though she had been driving too fast and had slammed on the brakes. “Whatever am I talking about, anyway?”
And now, for some reason, the fog in my mind was thicker than ever. From what Mom had just said, and had interrupted herself before finishing, it seemed that if I could just read the letter from Palm Tree Island it might say that they had not only found Kenneth Paddler and taken him to the hospital but that he had died. And my folks were going to telephone Old Man Paddler in California to see if maybe he would want to fly down to Palm Tree Island for the funeral.
Dad must have decided his class had really walked out on him, because he arose from the table, carried the Bible into the living room, and laid it on the table by the north window. From where he was, I heard him call, “Who closed all the windows in this house? Don’t you know it’s stuffy in here?”
Both Mom and I knew why the windows happened to be closed, but Dad didn’t know, because he had been walking around in the pasture of his mind looking for a lost sheep.
Just then we heard the sound of the motorcycle again, this time from the other side of the house.
Looking away out across our south pasture toward Harm Groenwold’s place, I saw a cloud of dust and a streak of shining cycle zooming up the lane. Then t
he motorcycle slowed down and skidded to a stop at the gate that led into Harm’s cow pasture. One of the riders got off, swung open the gate, and climbed back on the motorcycle. Away the two went again toward the woods on the other side—out across the field, mind you, leaving the gate open—-not wide open but wide enough for a boy or a cow to squeeze through.
4
Harm’s old red bull!” Dad exclaimed. “He’ll get out and run wild all over the county!” With that, the teacher of the Homebuilders Bible Class was off like a two-legged bullet past the pitcher pump, through the barnyard, and over the pasture bars on the way to shut Harm Groenwold’s gate so that Harm wouldn’t have to go looking all over for a lost red bull.
I went to the kitchen to look for a towel to help dry the dishes Mom was already busy washing. The towel, for some reason, never managed to get lost but was always right there where it was supposed to be.
“Your father,” Mom said, “is a remarkable man. He may have his few faults, but he is the finest husband a woman ever had. He was such a dreamer when I married him that I thought he might never be practical enough to get his work done. But I’d rather have him than any other man in the world. When you grow up, I hope you’ll be as kind and gentle as he is. And as thoughtful of your wife.
“I was sorry the dust interrupted his lesson,” Mom went on. “He was going to explain, I think, that the coin the woman lost was not out in the world somewhere but was inside the house, just like there are some lost people in the church or in the family who don’t even know they are lost. We have to look for and find them too. Your father thinks the woman who sweeps the house reminds us of God’s Holy Spirit, and the candle makes us think of the light of the gospel.”
The phone rang then, and it was Dragonfly’s mother, who had one of her many worries to talk over with Mom. So I got to finish the dishes alone. I was outdoors oiling the lawn mower only a few feet from the telephone window when I happened to hear Mom say through the now open window:
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 20