Before I get into the middle of the stolen watermelon story, I’d better explain that my wonderful grayish brown haired mother had been having what is called “insomnia” that summer. So Dad had arranged for her to sleep upstairs in our guest bedroom. That was the farthest away from the night noises of our farm, especially the ones that came from the direction of the barn. Mom simply had to have her rest, or she wouldn’t be able to keep on doing all the things a farm mother has to do every day all summer.
That guest room was also the farthest away from the tent under the plum tree—which Poetry and I decided maybe was another reason that Dad had put Mom upstairs.
Just one other thing I have to explain quick is that the reason Poetry was staying at my house for a week was that his parents were on a vacation in Canada and had left Poetry with us. He and I were going to have a vacation at the same time by sleeping in his tent in our yard.
It was a very hot late summer night, the time of year when the cicadas were as much a part of a Sugar Creek night as sunshine is part of the day. Cicadas are broad-headed, protruding-eyed insects, which some people call locusts and others call harvest flies. In the late summer evenings, they set the whole country half crazy with their whirring sounds from the trees, where thousands of them are like an orchestra with that many members, each member playing nothing but a drum.
I was lying on my hot cot just across the tent from Poetry in his own hot cot, each of us having tried about seven times to go to sleep, which Dad had ordered us to do about seventy times seven times that very night, barking out his orders from the back door or from the living-room window.
Poetry, being in a mischievous mood, was right in the middle of quoting one of his favorite poems, “The Village Blacksmith,” speaking to an imaginary audience out in the barnyard, when Dad called to us again to keep still. His voice came bellowing out through the drumming of the cicadas, saying, “Bill Collins, if you boys don’t stop talking and laughing and go to sleep, I’m coming out there and put you to sleep!”
A few seconds later, he added in a still-thundery voice, “I’ve told you boys for the last time! You’re keeping Charlotte Ann awake—and you’re liable to wake up your mother too!” When Dad says anything like that, I know he really means it, especially when he has already said it that many times.
I knew it was no time of night for my cute little brown-haired sister, Charlotte Ann, to be awake, and certainly my nice friendly-faced mother would need a lot of extra sleep, because tomorrow was Saturday and there would be the house to clean, pies and cookies to bake for Sunday, and a million chores a farm woman has to do every Saturday.
“Wonderful!” Poetry whispered across to me. “He won’t tell us anymore. He’s told us for the last time. We can laugh and talk now as much as we want to!”
“You don’t know Dad,” I said.
“I’m thirsty,” he said. “Let’s go get a drink.” His voice came across the darkness like the voice of a duck with laryngitis.
Right away there was a squeaking of the springs of his cot as he rolled himself into a sitting position. He swung his feet out of bed and set them ker-plop on the canvas floor of the tent. I could see him sitting there like the shadow of a fat grizzly in the moonlight that filtered in through the plastic net window just above my cot.
A split second later, he was across the three feet of space between us and sitting on the edge of my cot, making it groan almost loud enough for Dad to hear.
“Let’s go!” he said, using a businesslike tone.
I certainly didn’t want to get up and go with him to get a drink. Besides, I knew that the very minute we started to pump the iron pitcher pump at the end of the board walk, not more than fifteen feet from our kitchen door, Dad would hear the pump pumping and the water splashing into the big iron kettle under the spout. He would come storming out, with or without words, and would start saying again something he had already said for the last time.
I yawned the laziest, longest yawn I could, sighed the longest, drawn-out sigh I could, and said to Poetry, “I’m too sleepy. You go and get a drink for both of us.”
Then I sighed once more, turned over, and began to breathe heavily, as though I was sound asleep.
But Poetry couldn’t be stopped by sighs and yawns. He shook me awake and said, “Come on, treat a guest with a little politeness, will you?”
He meant I had to wake up and get up and go out with him to pump a noisy pump and run the risk of stirring up Dad’s already stirred-up temper.
When I kept on breathing like a sleeping baby, Poetry said with a disgruntled grunt, “Give me one little reason why you won’t help me get a drink!”
“One little reason?” I yawned up at his shadow. “I’ll give you a big one—five feet eleven inches tall, one hundred seventy-two pounds, bushy-eyebrowed, reddish brown mustached—”
“You want me to die of thirst?” asked Poetry.
“Thirst or whatever you want to do it of. But hurry up and do it and get it over with, because I’m going to sleep.”
That must have stirred up Poetry’s own temper a little, because he said, “OK, pal, I’ll go by myself!”
Quicker than a firefly’s fleeting flash, he had zipped open the plastic screen door of the tent, whipped the canvas flap aside, and stepped out into the moonlight.
I was up and out and after him in a nervous hurry. I grabbed him by the sleeve of his green-striped pajamas.
But he wouldn’t stay stopped. He growled at me and whispered, “If you try to stop me, I’ll scream, and you’ll be in trouble.”
With that he started off on the run across the moonlit yard, not toward the pump but in a different direction—toward the front gate!—saying over his shoulder, “I’m going down to the spring to get a drink.”
That idea was even crazier, I thought, than pumping the iron pitcher pump and waking up Dad.
But you might as well try to start a balky mule as try to stop Leslie Thompson from doing what he has made up his stubborn mind he is going to do. So a minute later, the two of us were hurrying past “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox—Theodore Collins being Dad’s name. Then we were across the gravel road, over the rail fence, and following the path made by barefoot boys’ feet through the woods to the spring. Poetry used his flashlight every few seconds to light the way.
And that is where we ran into our mystery!
Zippety-zip-zip, swishety-swish-swish, clomp-clomp-clomp, dodge, swerve, gallop. It’s nearly always one of the happiest times of my life when I am running down that little brown path to the spring, where the gang has nearly all its meetings and where so many interesting and exciting things have happened. Generally, my barefoot gallop through the woods is in the daytime, though, and I feel like a frisky young colt turned out to pasture. I had never run down that path in red-striped pajamas at night or when I was as sleepily disgruntled as I was right that minute for having to follow a not very bright barrel-shaped boy.
So when we had passed the Black Widow Stump and the linden tree and had dashed down the steep grade to the spring itself and found a dark green watermelon floating in the cement pool that Dad had built there as a reservoir for the water, it was as easy as anything for me to get fighting angry at most anything or anybody.
A watermelon there could mean only one thing—especially when right beside it was a glass fruit jar with a pound of butter in it. It meant there were campers somewhere nearby. And campers in the Sugar Creek woods were something that which the Sugar Creek Gang would rather have most anything else. It meant our peace and quiet would be interrupted, that we would have to wear swimsuits when we went in swimming, and we couldn’t yell and scream to each other the way we liked to do.
Poetry, who was on his haunches beside the spring, surprised me by saying, “Look! It’s plugged! Let’s see how ripe it is!”
Before I could have stopped him even if I had thought of trying to do it, he was working the extralarge rectangular plug out of the middle of the extralarge melon’s lon
g fat side.
It was one of the prettiest watermelons I had ever seen. In fact, it was as pretty as Ida Watermelon Collins herself.
Then Poetry had the plug out and was holding it up for me to see.
Somebody had bitten off what red there had been on the end of the plug, I noticed.
Then Poetry said, “Well, what do you know! This melon’s not ripe. See, it’s all white inside!”
That didn’t make sense. This time of year, even a watermelon that wasn’t more than half ripe would be at least pink inside. My eyes flashed from the rectangular plug to the hole in the melon, and Poetry was right—it was white inside!
Then he said, “Oh, there’s something in it! There’s a ball of white paper or something stuffed inside it!”
I felt curiosity creeping up and down my spine and was all set for a mystery. Hardly realizing that I was trespassing on other people’s property and most certainly not having a right to, even if the melon was in our spring, I quickly stooped and with nervous fingers pulled out the folded piece of paper. It was the kind that comes off a loaf of bread and which, at our house, I nearly always toss into the woodbox or the wastebasket unless Mom sees me first and stops me. Sometimes she wants to save the paper and use it for wrapping sandwiches for Dad’s or my lunches, mine especially during the school year.
The melon was ripe, I noticed. The inside was a deep, dark red.
While my mind was still trying to think up a mystery, something started to happen. From up in the woods at the top of the incline there was the sound of running feet and laughing voices. There were flashlights and flickering shadows, and it sounded like a whole flock of people coming. People! Only these weren’t boys’ voices or men’s voices but girls’ voices. Girls! They were giggling and laughing and coming toward the base of the linden tree just above us. In another brain-whirling second they would be where they could see us, and we’d be caught.
When you are wearing a pair of red-striped pajamas and your barrel-shaped friend is wearing a pair of green-striped pajamas, and it is night, and you hear a flock of girls running in your direction, and you are half scared of girls even in the daytime, you all of a sudden forget about a plugged watermelon floating in the nice, fresh, cool water of your spring, and you look for the quickest place you can find to hide yourself!
We couldn’t make a dash up either side of the incline, because that’s where the girls were. And we couldn’t escape in the opposite direction, because there was a barbed-wire fence there, separating us from the creek. But we had to do something! If it had been a gang of boys coming, we could have stood our ground and fought if we had to. But not when it was a bevy of girls. They sounded like a flock of blackbirds getting ready to fly South for the winter, except that they weren’t getting ready to fly south but north, which was in our direction.
“Quick!” Poetry with his faster-thinking mind cried to me. “Let’s beat it!” He showed me what he wanted us to do by making a dive east toward the place where I knew we could get through a board fence and on the other side of which was a path. It wound through a forest of giant ragweeds leading to Dragonfly’s dad’s cornfield in the direction of the Sugar Creek Gang’s swimming hole.
In another jiffy I would have followed Poetry through the fence, and we would have escaped being seen. But my right bare foot, which was standing on a thin layer of slime on the cement lip of the pool where the melon was, slipped out from under me, and I felt myself going down, down.
I couldn’t stop myself. I struggled to regain my balance and couldn’t. I couldn’t even fall where my mixed-up mind told me would be a better place to fall than into the pool, which would have been in a mud puddle on the other side. Suddenly, thuddety-whammety, slip-slop-splashety, I was half sitting and half lying in the middle of the pool of ice-cold springwater, astride that long green watermelon like a boy astride a bucking bronco at a Sugar Creek rodeo!
From above and all around and from every direction, it seemed, there sounded the voices of happy-go-lucky girls with flashlights, probably coming to get the watermelon, or the butter in the glass jar, or maybe a pail of drinking water for their camp.
2
There wasn’t any sense to what I did then because of the confusion in my mixed-up mind, if I had any mind at all. But that very minute, the light of three or four—or maybe there were seventeen—flashlights dropped over the edge of the hill. And all of them at the same time splashed down upon me, hitting me in the face and all over my red-striped pajamas.
I let loose with a wild, trembling cry like a loon’s eerie ghostlike quaver, loud enough to be heard as far away as the Sugar Creek bridge. I began to wave my arms wildly, to splash around in the water, and to yell to my watermelon bronco, “Giddap! Giddap! You great big green good-for-nothing bronco!”
I let out a whole series of loon calls, splashed myself off the watermelon and out of the cement pool, and made a fast, wet dash down the path to the opening in the board fence, through which Poetry had already gone. I quickly shoved myself through. A second later I was making a wild, moonlit run up the winding barefoot boys’ trail through the forest of giant ragweeds toward the swimming hole, crying like a loon all the way until I knew I was out of sight of all those noisy girls.
Even as I ran, flopping along in my wet pajamas, I had the memory of flashlights splashing in my eyes and some of the things I heard while I was going through the fence. Some of the excited words were, “Help! Help! There’s a wild animal down there at the spring!” Other girls had simply screamed, the way girls do when they are scared. But one of them had shrieked an unearthly shriek, crying, “There’s a zebra down there—a wild zebra, taking a bath in our drinking water!”
That, I thought, dodging my way along the path, was almost funny. In fact, sometimes a boy feels fine inside if something he has done does make a gang of girls let out an unearthly explosion of screams. Most girls scream not because they’re really scared, anyway, but because they like to make people think they are.
Where, I wondered as I zigzagged along, was Poetry?
I didn’t have to wonder long. By the time I was through the tall weeds and at the edge of Dragonfly’s dad’s cornfield, I had caught up to where he was. His flashlight beam hit me in the face as he exclaimed in his ducklike voice, “Help! Help! A zebra! A wild zebra!”
I stood still with my wet pajama sleeve in front of my eyes to shield them from the blinding glare of his flashlight. “It’s all your fault!” I half screamed at him. “If you hadn’t had the silly notion you had to have a drink!”
His voice was saucy as he said back, “What a mess you made of things—falling into that water and yelling like a banshee! Now those Girl Scouts will tell your folks, and your father will really get on your case!”
“Girl Scouts?” I exclaimed to him with teeth chattering from being so cold and still all wet with springwater. Also, for some reason I didn’t feel very brave and most certainly was not very happy.
“Sure,” he said, “didn’t you know that? A bunch of Girl Scouts have got their tents pitched up there by the papaw bushes for a week. Old Man Paddler gave them permission. They’re his woods, you know.”
And then I was sad. Girl Scouts were supposed to be some of the nicest people in the world—even if they were girls, I thought. What would they think of a red-haired, freckle-faced creature of some kind that was part loon and part zebra, splashing around in their drinking water, riding like a cowboy on a watermelon, and acting absolutely crazy? I would never dare show my face where any of them could see me, or some of them would remember having seen me in the light of their flashlights.
I knew that one of the very first things some of those Girl Scouts would do this week would be to come to the Collins house to buy eggs and milk and such things as sweet corn and new potatoes. They would ask my mother whose boy I was. Besides, some of them would be bound to recognize me.
“We had better get back to the tent and into bed quick, before somebody comes running up to use your tele
phone to call the police or the marshal or the sheriff, to tell them some wild boys have been causing a disturbance at the camp!” Poetry said.
It was a good idea even if it was a worried one, so away we went, not the way we had come but lickety-sizzle straight up through Dragonfly’s dad’s cornfield. We would swing around the east end of the bayou and back down the south side of it until we came to the fence that goes to Bumblebee Hill, we decided.
Once we got to Bumblebee Hill we would turn southwest to the place where we always went over the rail fence in front of our house. Then we would scoot across the road and past our mailbox, hoping we wouldn’t wake up Theodore Collins in the Collins west bedroom, and a minute after that would be safe in our tent once more!
The very thought of safety and the security of Poetry’s nice green tent under the spreading plum tree gave me a spurt of hope and put wings on my feet. I followed my lumbering barrel-shaped friend, for the moment not remembering there would be more trouble when I got home because of my very wet red-striped night-clothes.
The wind I was making as I ran was blowing against my wet eighty-nine pounds of red-haired boy, making me feel chilly all over in spite of its being such a hot night.
It was a shame not to be able to enjoy such a pretty Sugar Creek summer night. Sugar Creek nights are almost the most wonderful thing in the world. I guess there isn’t anything in the whole wide world that sounds better than a Sugar Creek night when you are down along the creek fishing and you hear the bullfrogs bellowing in the riffles, the katydids’ rasping voices calling to one another, “Katy-did, Katy-she-did; Katy-did, Katy-she-did!”—and the crickets singing away, vibrating their forewings together and making one of the friendliest lonesome sounds a boy ever hears. Every now and then, you can hear a screech owl too, crying “Shay-a-a-a-a!” like a baby loon.
Oh, there are a lot of sounds that make a boy feel good all over—such as Old Topsy, our favorite horse, in her stall crunching corn, the strange noise the chickens make in their sleep, the wind sighing through the pine trees along the bayou, and every now and then somebody’s rooster turning loose a “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” as if he’s so proud of himself he can’t wait until morning to let all the sleeping hens know about it—all as though it was a waste of good time to sleep when you could listen to such nice noisy music.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 27