“It’s not what this world is coming to, Thelma, it’s what it has already come to. You know what the old hymn says—‘The whole world was lost in the darkness of sin.’ Most of those longhaired, sloppy-dressed, shiftless boys and girls are just lost, that’s all. I feel so sorry for them, because they seem to like it that way … Yes, that’s one of the worst things about it, the habits they take on … But what’ll they be like ten years from now? They can’t spend all of their lives floating around with their minds in a stupor! … Oh, no!” Mom all of a sudden exclaimed to Mrs. Gilbert. “That is going too far. Just wait until Theodore hears about that!”
She quickly put down the phone, hurried through the kitchen to the back door, and let out a long, quavering high-pitched call like a screech owl crying in the night, which is the way she calls the foreman of the jury when she wants to know what some verdict is.
“What’s the matter?” I asked her.
She answered, “Those shiftless kids are stealing gasoline now! At Turkey Run State Park they left a spigot running, and the whole gas tank was empty this morning. If anyone had accidentally dropped a lighted match or a cigarette stub, half the cottages would have burned!”
Dad let Mom know he had heard her screech-owl wail by blowing a blast with the referee’s whistle he carries on a string around his neck. He quickly closed Harm’s gate, hurried across the lane that separates our two farms, swung himself over our fence, and half ran back across our south pasture to see what Mom had on her mind.
It was what was on my mind that seemed most important right then, though. What, I kept wondering as I followed the mower back and forth across the lawn, was in the letter from the missionary, and what mystery was in the little brown box in our upstairs closet? What was so important that my parents thought they ought to telephone Old Man Paddler about it?
My curiosity was so strong that, when I had finished another round-trip with the mower, I decided to stop and ask my folks an important question. I said first, standing near the iron pitcher pump, where they were at the time, “Am I a part of this family, and do I rate well enough to know what is going on? Some boys grow long hair and leave home because they feel they don’t belong to the family.”
Dad looked at me, gave my head a friendly swish of the hair on the back of my neck, and said, “You do need a haircut. We could run into town tonight, if you like, or maybe you’d rather go frog hunting.”
My mother, who sometimes—in fact, quite often—helps Dad make up his mind about something, said to me, “The jury has reached a verdict. You do have a right to know. After all, you did spend a week in Palm Tree Island, you did find Kenneth Paddler, and you are a special friend of his twin brother. The letter says that not only did they find Kenneth Paddler lying at the foot of a cliff where he had fallen, and where he had lain for a week without food and water, but after they took him to the hospital, he died.
“One thing our dear Old Man Paddler will be glad to hear was that his brother died trusting in the Savior for the salvation of his soul. Kenneth’s one heartache was that he hadn’t come home soon after you boys found him. But it took him so long to regain his full mind after so many years of amnesia. When he did fully come to himself, he remembered he had been a newspaper reporter, so he decided to study the customs of the people and maybe even write a book about the plant and animal life of the island. He was far back in the interior when he had the accident.
“His dying request was that he be buried in the old Sugar Creek cemetery on Strawberry Hill, where his parents and Sarah Paddler and his two nephews are buried—”
Mom’s voice choked, and she let Dad finish.
“There wasn’t any way to ship the body home,” he said. “So, after getting permission from the government, they had the remains cremated. The little box upstairs, Son, contains the ashes of our dear Old Man Paddler’s twin brother.”
My father’s voice sounded as if it had tears in it, and for a few minutes nobody said a word. But Nature’s voices went right on. The hens in the barnyard kept on scratching and eating and singing. A meadowlark let out a cheerful jumble of juicy notes from somewhere up near the pignut trees. And from the woods across the road, a raspy-voiced crow called out a sad, funeral-like “Caw-caw-caw-haw!”
From the grape arbor where Charlotte Ann was in her small rocker, cuddling her twin dolls, there came her own tiny voice singing to them, “Sleep, baby, sleep. Thy Father is watching the sheep.”
Mom found her voice again and said, “Maybe that’s our answer. Our heavenly Father is watching His sheep.”
Dad, with his arm around her to let her know her husband too was watching over and was going to take care of his wife, who was also my wonderful mother, said, “It’s not going to be easy telling Seneth, but it has to be done.”
With that, my father turned to go into the house to the telephone, while I, his son, stood for a few minutes beside my mother.
I hardly realized I was doing what I was doing until I had done it, but my left arm went where Dad’s arm had been only a few minutes before. “It’s all right, Mom,” I said to her. “We’ll all stick together. I’ll never let myself be a prodigal son—never. You want a drink?”
As soon as I had finished handing her a cup of fresh, clear water, which I had just pumped for her, I took a drink myself and tossed half a cup over the water trough, where it landed in the puddle there. As they always do, all the white and yellow butterflies that had been drinking around the border of the puddle took off in excited fluttering circles. Some of them loped toward the garden, others toward the blue morning glories swaying on their long vines at the grape arbor, where Charlotte Ann was sitting in the shade. But most of them settled back down around the pool where they had been—being still thirsty maybe.
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” Mom said. And when I didn’t answer because for some reason the tears my parents had had in their voices had gotten into mine, she added, “But they weren’t always beautiful. In the larva stage, they were only little green or white caterpillars.”
My mother’s voice trailed away, and it seemed maybe she was thinking about Kenneth Paddler again.
I knew she was when her mind seemed to come back from wherever it was and she said, “I must get back to the typewriter.” And she left me and went into the house, where Dad was trying to place a long-distance call to Old Man Paddler in California. I thought the old man might be out on the barge in the Pacific Ocean fishing again for mackerel.
Never in all my life before had I had a feeling like the one that was hurting my heart right that minute. The little brown box upstairs was all that was left of Kenneth Paddler, the man who, when he was a boy, used to play right here in our own territory, up and down and in Sugar Creek. He probably ran lickety-sizzle through the woods with bare feet, listening to the birds singing and watching the flying squirrels take off on long, slanting leaps, riding the air from the trees to the ground. He had fished in all the best places. He had gone to the Sugar Plain Church, which, that many years ago, Old Man Paddler had told us, was only a small log building without even a steeple. But now he had gone beyond the sunset, and all that was left of his life here was a little box of ashes.
Charlotte Ann all of a sudden got tired of rocking her dolls. She came over to the pump platform where I still was, saying up to me, “I’m thirsty.”
I looked down at her reddish brown hair and into her blue eyes, as blue as the morning glories at the grape arbor, and said to her, calling her by the new name our family had been calling her for the past several weeks, “Don’t worry, Honey Girl. Your brother will always look after you. Promise me you’ll never be a prodigal girl?”
Her answer was, “Honeybee Girl is thirsty!”
“Not Honeybee Girl,” I corrected her. “Just Honey Girl.”
I took her little pink plastic drinking cup from the wire hook on the pump, filled it, and handed it to her.
But instead of drinking it, she tossed the water over the tank into the puddle, saying
as she did it, “Peanut butterflies thirsty!”
“Not peanut butterflies,” I corrected her, “just butterflies.”
And do you know what? That little reddish-brown-haired sister of mine proved she was a member of the Collins family and a sister of her brother by getting a set expression in her eyes as she looked up at me, shook her head, and answered, “Peanut butterflies!” Then she took off in the direction of the garden, chasing one of the yellow peanut butterflies that had been drinking with the white ones a few seconds before, and I went into the house.
As I stopped in the kitchen, listening for a minute to Mom’s typewriter keys flying along on Old Man Paddler’s book, The Christian After Death, part of a poem we had to memorize in school went fluttering around in my mind:
Life is real, life is earnest
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest
Was not spoken of the soul.
It was after supper but still daylight when Dragonfly came biking up to “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox. Tonight was the night when the Thompson, Gilbert, and Collins Frogs Legs Supply Company would hold their grand opening. Mom was at the organ at the time, playing and singing a hymn. She sometimes took time to do that, even when there was a lot of work to be done.
“In business offices,” I had heard her once explain to Dad, “they have a coffee break. It gives all the workers a chance to relax for a few minutes and pick up a little energy. As a busy housewife and mother, I find a hymn break absolutely necessary now and then.”
Having heard her say that to Dad, I had said, “There are times, too, when your son needs a fishing break. It gives him a chance to pick up a lot of energy he loses weeding the garden.”
The hymn my mother was playing and also singing loud enough for me to hear, but not loud enough for Dragonfly at our front gate to hear, was one we had in our new church hymnal. It goes:
Have you come to the Red Sea place in
your life,
Where in spite of all you can do,
There is no way out, there is no way back,
There is no other way but through?
As I left the window and raced out to meet Dragonfly, it seemed I ought to pray for Old Man Paddler, who had come to a Red Sea place in his life, and there wasn’t any way out or back. He would have to go through with the funeral of his twin brother, Kenneth. Even as I ran, I heard myself saying, “Let him know how much You love him, and help him all the way through. Help the gang to be extra kind to him and to all old people.”
In a few minutes Dragonfly and I were on our bikes, pedaling as fast as we could into our new venture, not knowing we were going to stumble onto another little brown box the size and shape of the one sitting on the top shelf of the closet of the Collins upstairs north room.
We waited at Poetry’s guest house until dark, which came a lot sooner than it sometimes does, because low gray clouds had begun to move in from the west. There was the feel of rain in the air, and it was already beginning to mist a little.
“Perfect weather for frogs,” Poetry said, shining his flashlight down the gravel road toward the branch bridge. “On a night like this, the frogs are very happy. Hear those tree frogs down in the swamp? They like damp weather.”
I listened in the direction of the swamp, the sycamore tree, and the cave, which is the back passageway to the basement of Old Man Paddler’s cabin. And it seemed the tree frogs might be having some kind of national frog celebration, there were so many of them.
But it was the bullfrogs I was especially interested in. It sounded as though there were maybe a hundred great big luggers all up and down the creek but especially over on the island where, in a little while, we would begin harvesting them for the Bay Tree Inn Dining Room.
As we rambled down the hill, our sneakers made little crunching noises on the road like baby bullfrogs with gravelly voices just learning to talk frog language.
Poetry, ahead of me, stopped so suddenly I bumped into him. “Did you ever in all your life see so many fireflies?” he asked.
“It would take a lot of spiders to eat all of them,” I remarked and maybe shouldn’t have.
“As I was beginning to say before you tried to change the subject,” Poetry answered me, “the Photinus pyralis—that’s Latin for firefly—has only a short while to live after it becomes an adult.”
My almost best friend’s voice took on a teacher tone as he talked, like my father’s voice when he talks about prodigal sons, lost coins, and straying sheep. “Science has been experimenting with fireflies, catching them and storing them in a deep freeze. In one experiment they put four hundred of them in test tubes in a dark room at seventeen degrees below zero for three years. And when the three years were up, they looked at all those dead Photinus pyralis in the dark, and they still gave off a greenish light.”
Our sneakers were still making their gravel-voiced scrunch, scrunch, scrunchety-scrunch in the road. In only a little while we would come to the branch bridge, take off down the incline, and follow the lilac hedge to the boat.
“Also,” Poetry’s teacher voice went on, “science may someday discover that the energy that turns on and off the fireflies’ flashlights is very important. Already they know that it is caused by the oxidation of something called luciferin, which is Latin for ‘to bring light.’”
“You must have spent all afternoon reading your science magazine,” I said to Poetry. “But do you know that the name Lucifer was the first name the Devil had?” And then my own voice took on a teacher tone as I quoted something I had heard my father say once. “Lucifer is back of all the meanness there is in the world, and the reason for all the darkness—not light—is because people let him run their lives the way he wants to.”
But it was as if Poetry’s mind was still wading around in the science magazine Joe Sanders had left at their house that morning. “Look!” he whispered, as if he didn’t want the lightning bugs to hear us and stop their performance. “Did you ever see so much luciferin in your life?”
Over on the island there were maybe ten thousand fireflies turning on and off their cold green lights and streaking here and there above the water like that many schoolboys writing with green chalk on a blackboard as big as an outdoors night. They were making dots and dashes, question marks and exclamation points—and the blackboard was all around us and up and down the creek.
But it was the voices of the big luggers on the island that made the night seem more important.
Dragonfly startled us then. He had been quiet most of the time while Poetry and I were telling each other how much we knew. “Some of the fireflies have awful big lights,” he said. “Like maybe they are giants!”
And that’s when Poetry and I came to. We stopped stock-still and stared.
“Flashlights!” Poetry decided out loud, just as I decided the same thing in my mind.
“Somebody else has started a frogs legs company. Somebody else saw the ad in the Times and is going to sell frogs legs, too!”
Dragonfly, who had maybe read stories or heard programs about the Old West and gold mining, burst out, “Somebody’s jumped our claim. Come on! Let’s get the boat and row over and stop ’em!”
Before either Poetry or I could have stopped him, that little rascal of a junior member of the Thompson, Gilbert, and Collins Company took off ahead of us on the run for the path that leads from the branch bridge to the boat.
Poetry and I took off after that spindle-legged dumb-bunny member of our company to stop him. But he was like the lead dog of a pack of hounds on a hot coon trail as he sped down the road, his flashlight bobbing, his sneakers stirring up dust. Or else it was fog I was seeing, because the weather was beginning to get more humid, and fog was beginning to move across the road, floating in from the creek.
At the branch bridge, Dragonfly stopped, panting, and there he waited for us, as though his mind had begun to work again or else he was mixed up in his thoughts.
The minute I wa
s near enough, I grabbed him and held on, ordering him, “Don’t ever make a foolish move like that! You don’t know that anybody has jumped our claim! That might be somebody fishing. And anybody has a right to fish anywhere along the creek he wants to.”
But we decided to creep cautiously along the lilac hedge to our boat and keep on keeping as quiet as we could to see what was happening on the island.
5
My mind and muscles were tense, and I was even trembling a little, thinking about our boat having been moved. I whispered to Poetry, “Now we’ll find out who’s been borrowing our boat and what for.”
I think I was disappointed when we got to where our boat was—it was still there and all right—for the pair of flashlights that had been making on-and-off flashes over on the island began moving toward the other shore, not toward ours.
We crouched there by our boat, the gunny-sack beside us, our flashlights off, waiting, wondering what on earth and why, hoping for something. We didn’t know what. And I was still trembling a little.
Dragonfly whispered close to my ear, “They’re going on across. They’re wading the riffle to Tom Till’s side of the creek.”
Poetry showed what kind of person he was when he said, “If it is Tom Till and his brother, Bob, and if they’ve been hunting frogs, it’s all right. Their mother’s been sick, and they need the money.”
Even Dragonfly agreed when he said, “Tom’s mother is an awful nice mother. She almost died after her last operation. And when my mother was sick, she sent her a get-well card.”
In a little while the two boys—maybe men, but probably two boys—had waded across the narrow riffle to the shore on the other side of the island and disappeared in the cornfield in the direction of the Tills’ house. And we decided it was time for us to start our first business venture—if there were any frogs left, which it seemed there were, because there was still a lot of bellowing going on over on the island.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 21