From across the fields you sometimes can hear a nervous dog barking and somebody else’s dog answering from across the creek. You even like to listen to the corn blades whispering to each other as the wind blows through them.
Summer nights on our farm even smell good. Nearly always there is the smell of new-mown hay or pine tree fragrance, which is always sweeter at night. If you are near the creek, you can smell the fish that don’t want to bite, and the wild peppermint, the sweet clover, and a thousand other half-friendly, half-lonely smells that make you feel sad and glad at the same time.
Things you think at night are wonderful, too. You can lie on the grass in the yard in the summertime and look up at the purplish blue sky—which is like a big upside-down sieve with a million white holes in it—and in your mind go sailing out across the Milky Way like a boy skating on the bayou pond, dodging this way and that so you won’t run into any of the stars.
But this wasn’t the right time to hear or see or smell how wonderful a night it was. It was, instead, a time for two worried boys, including a red-haired, freckle-faced one, to get inside the tent and into bed and to sleep.
Pretty soon Poetry and I were at the rail fence across from our mailbox. There we stopped, keeping ourselves in the shadow of the elderberry bush that grew there. It seemed the moonlight had never been brighter, and we couldn’t afford to let ourselves be seen or heard by anybody.
I was shivering with the cold, and just that second I sneezed.
Poetry shushed me with a shush that was almost louder than my sneeze, and he whispered, “Hey, don’t wake anybody up! Your father has told us for the last time to—”
“Shush, yourself!” I ordered him.
We decided to go along the fence and cross the road by the hickory nut trees, then climb over into our cornfield and sneak down between the corn rows to arrive at the tent from the opposite side. That way, nobody could see us from the house. So we did.
We had to pass Old Red Addie’s apartment hog house on the way, which is the kind of place on a farm that doesn’t have a nice, clean, sweet farm smell. Pretty soon, though, still shivering and wishing I had dry nightclothes to sleep in, we were behind the tent, waiting and listening to see if we could get in without being seen or heard.
Right then I sneezed again, and I knew I was either going to catch a cold or I already had one. I quickly lifted the tent flap and swished through the plastic screen, expecting Poetry to follow me.
But he didn’t and wouldn’t. He stood for a second in the clear moonlight that came slanting through a branchless place in the plum tree overhead. Then he said, “I’ll be back in a minute.” And he started toward the house—in the moonlight, where he could be seen!
“Wait!” I called to him in as quiet a whisper as I could. “Where are you going?”
“I’m thirsty,” he whispered back. “I forgot to get a drink at the spring.”
“You’ll wake up my father!” I exclaimed. “Don’t you dare pump that pump handle!”
But Poetry couldn’t be stopped, and I knew that if Dad ever waked up and came out to prove he had meant what he had said, there’d really be trouble. He would hear me sneeze or see my wet nightclothes, and he would wonder what on earth and why.
So in a second, like the old story in one of our schoolbooks about a man named Mr. McGregor chasing Peter Rabbit, who was all wet from having jumped into a can of water to hide—and Peter Rabbit sneezing—in a second I was acting out that story backward. I myself was a very wet, very dumb bunny chasing Leslie Poetry Thompson to try to stop him from getting us into even more trouble than we were already in.
We arrived at the pitcher pump platform at the same time, where I hissed to him not to pump the pump. I pushed in between him and the pump, blocking him from doing what his stubborn mind was driving him to do.
“I’m thirsty,” he squawked.
“The pump handle squeaks!” I hissed back to him and shoved him off the platform. My wet left pajama sleeve pressed against his face.
What happened after that happened so fast and with so much noise it would have wakened seventeen fathers. Poetry, my almost best friend, who had always stood by me when I was in trouble, who was always on my side, all of a sudden didn’t act as if he was my friend at all.
We weren’t any more than three feet from the large iron kettle filled with innocent water, which up to that moment had been reflecting the moon as clearly as if it had been a mirror— clearly enough, in fact, for you to see the man in the moon in it.
The next second, Poetry’s powerful arms were around me, and he was dragging me and himself toward that big kettle. The next second after that, he scooped my eighty-nine pounds up and, with me kicking and squirming and trying to wriggle out of his grasp and not being able to, he set me down kerplop-splash, double-splashety-slump right in the center of that large kettle of water.
“What on earth!” I cried, my voice trembling with temper, my teeth chattering with the cold, and my mind whirling.
My words exploded out of my mouth at the very minute Dad exploded out the back door. “‘What on earth’ is right,” he exclaimed in his big father-sounding voice. “What on earth are you doing in the water?”
Poetry answered for me, saying politely, “It’s all my fault, Mr. Collins. We were getting a drink and I—I shouldn’t have done it, but I pushed him in. I—” Then Poetry’s voice took on a mischievous tone as he said, “The water was so clear and the man in the moon reflected in it was so handsome, I wanted to see what a good-looking boy would look like in it. I couldn’t resist the temptation.”
Such an innocent voice! So polite! I was boiling inside as I splashed myself out of the kettle and stood dripping on the pump platform.
Then I did get a surprise. Dad’s voice, instead of being like black thunder, which it sometimes is at a time like that, was a sort of husky whisper. “Let’s keep quiet—all of us. We wouldn’t want to wake up your mother, Bill. You boys get back into the tent quick, while I slip into the house and get Bill a pair of dry pajamas. Hurry up! Quick, into the tent!”
He turned, tiptoed to the back screen door, and opened it quietly while Poetry and I scooted to the tent. A second later we were inside, standing in the shadowy moonlight that oozed in through the plastic window above my cot.
Dad was back out of the house almost before I was out of my wet pajamas. He whispered to us at the tent door, “Here’s a towel. Dry yourself good. Put these fresh pajamas on—but be quiet!” He whispered the last two words almost savagely. “Here, let me have your old wet ones. I’ll hang them on the line behind the house to dry. And remember, not a word of this to your mother, Bill. Do you hear me?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. It was easy to hear anything as easy to listen to as that.
Then Dad was gone.
In only a few jiffies I was dry and had on my nice, fresh, clean-smelling, stripeless yellow pajamas, and there wasn’t even a sniffle in my nose to hint that maybe I would catch cold.
Boy oh boy, was it ever quiet in the tent! The only sounds were those in my mind. Everything had happened so fast that it seemed as if it all had taken only a minute. But it also seemed as though a year had passed. So many exciting things had happened—crazy things, too, such as a boy galloping around on a green watermelon in a pool of cold water while a gang of girls screamed like wild hyenas that there was a zebra taking a bath in the spring.
“Wait,” Poetry ordered, as I sat down on the edge of my cot and started to crawl in. “We can’t get in between your mother’s nice clean sheets with feet that have waded through mud and dusty cornfields. I’ll go get the wash pan from the grape arbor, fill it with water, and bring it back.”
“You stay here!” I ordered. “I don’t trust you out of this tent one minute! I’ll get the water myself.”
And do you know what that dumb bunny answered me? He said in his very polite voice, “But I’m thirsty. I haven’t had a chance to get a drink. I—”
“Stay here!” I ord
ered again. “I’ll bring you a drink.”
“After all I’ve done for you, you won’t even let me go with you?” he begged.
“What have you done for me, I’d like to know? You—with your plunking me into the middle of that kettle of water!”
Poetry grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. “Listen, pal,” he said fiercely, “I saved you out of big trouble. I heard your father opening the back door, and I knew he’d be there in a minute. If he found you all wet with that springwater, he’d have asked you how come, and you’d really have been in a pretty kettle. So I pushed you in. Don’t you see?”
Well, I decided maybe Poetry really had been my friend. Besides, if I let him go to get a pan of water for washing our feet, and if Dad did see and hear him, Dad would probably not say a word—not wanting to wake Mom up.
“All right,” I said with a sigh, “but hurry back.”
Which he did.
Pretty soon we had our feet washed and dried on the towel. When we got through, I noticed that the towel might also have to be washed in the morning.
In only a little while we were in our cots again and, I guess, sound asleep, for right away I began dreaming a crazy mixed-up dream. I was running in red-striped pajamas through the woods, leaving the path made by boys’ bare feet and working my way along the crest of the hill where the papaw bushes were, just to see how many girl campers there were. Then it seemed I was in the spring again, galloping around on a green no-legged bronco, which somebody had stolen and plugged and maybe sold to the girls. Or maybe some of the girls had invaded our melon patch that very night and stolen it themselves.
I hated to think that, though, because any girl who is a Girl Scout is supposed to be like a boy who is a Boy Scout, which is absolutely honest. Besides, as much as I didn’t like girls—not most of them, anyway—and was scared of them a little, it seemed there was a small voice inside of me that all my life had been whispering that girls are kind of special. Anybody couldn’t help it if she happened to be born one. Mom had been a girl for quite a few years herself, and it hadn’t hurt her a bit. She had grown up to become one of the most wonderful people in the world.
But who had stolen my watermelon? And how had it gotten down there in the spring? It was my melon, of course!
The idea woke me up. Or else my own voice did when I heard myself saying to Poetry, “Hey, you! Poetry! Come on, wake up!”
He groaned, turned over in his cot, and groaned again. “Let me sleep, will you?”
“No,” I whispered, “wake up! Come on and go with me. I’ve got to go down into our watermelon patch to see—”
“I don’t want any more water,” he mumbled, “and I wouldn’t think you would either.”
“That melon in the spring,” I said. “I just dreamed it was my prize melon! I think somebody stole it. I want to go down to our garden to see if it’s gone.”
Then Poetry showed that he hadn’t been asleep at all. He rolled over, sat up, swung his feet out over the edge of his cot and onto the canvas floor, and I knew we were both going outside once more—just once more.
What we were going to do was one of the most important things we had ever done, even if it might not seem so to a boy’s father if he should happen to wake up and see us in the melon patch and think we were two strange boys out there stealing watermelons.
Pretty soon Poetry and I were outside the tent again in the wonderful moonlight, where now most of the cicadas had stopped their whirring and the crickets had begun to take over for the rest of the night. Fireflies were everywhere, too. It seemed there were thousands of them flashing their green lights on and off in every tree in our orchard and in all the open spaces everywhere. The lights of those that were flying were like short, yellowish green chalk marks being made on a school-house blackboard.
Poetry, with his flashlight, was leading the way as he and I moved out across our barnyard. At the wooden gate near the barn, he said, “Hear that, will you?”
I listened, but all I could hear was the sound of pigeons cooing in the haymow. The low, lonesome cooing of pigeons is one of the friendliest sounds a boy ever hears.
There are certainly a lot of different sounds around our farm. I have learned to imitate nearly all of them so well that I sound like a farmyard full of animals sometimes, Dad says. Mom also says that sometimes I actually look like a red-haired, freckle-faced pig—which I probably don’t.
Did you ever stop to think about all the different kinds of sounds a country boy gets to enjoy?
While you are imagining Poetry and me cutting across the south pasture to the east side of our melon patch, I’ll mention just a few that we get to hear a hundred times a year: the wind roaring in a winter blizzard, Dragonfly’s dad’s bulls bellowing, Circus’s dad’s hounds baying or bawling or snarling or growling, our black-and-white cat meowing or purring, mice squeaking in the corncrib, Old Topsy neighing, Poetry’s dad’s sheep bleating, all the old setting hens clucking, the laying hens singing or cackling, Big Jim’s folks’ ducks quacking, honeybees and bumblebees droning and buzzing, crows cawing, our red rooster crowing at midnight or just at daybreak, screech owls screeching, hoot owls hooting, cicadas drumming, crickets chirping. And Dragonfly sneezing, especially in ragweed season, which it already was in the Sugar Creek territory.
There are also a lot of interesting sounds down along the creek and the bayou too, such as water singing in the riffles, the big night herons going “Quoke-quoke,” cardinals whistling, bobwhites calling, squirrels barking. And when the gang is together, the happiest sounds of all are with everybody talking at once and nobody listening to anybody.
There are also a few sounds that hurt your ears, such as Dad filing a saw, Old Red Addie’s family of piglets squealing, the death squawk of a chicken just before it gets its head chopped off for the Collins family’s dinner, and the wild screeches of a bevy of girls calling an innocent boy in red-striped pajamas a zebra!
In only a few minutes we were out in the middle of our garden, looking to see if any melons were missing. I was just sure that when I came to Ida’s vine, I’d find a long oval indentation where she had been. The dream I had had about her being stolen was so real in my mind.
“All this walk for nothing,” Poetry exclaimed all of a sudden, when his flashlight beam landed ker-flash right on the fat green side of Ida Watermelon Collins, as peaceful and quiet as an old setting hen on her nest.
I stood looking down at her proudly, then I said in a grumpy voice, “What do you mean, making me get up out of a comfortable bed and drag myself all the way out here for nothing! You see to it that you don’t make me dream such a crazy dream again. Do you hear me?”
I felt better after saying that.
Then Poetry grunted grouchily and said, “And don’t ever rob me of my good night’s rest again, either!”
With that, we started to wend our way back across the melon field in the direction of the barn again.
We hadn’t gone more than a few yards when what to my wondering ears should come but the strange sound of something running. That is, that’s what it sounded like at first. I stopped and looked around in a fast moonlit circle of directions. Then I saw, away over by the new woven wire fence near the iron pitcher pump, something dark and about the size of a long, low-bodied extralarge raccoon, moving toward the shadows of the elderberry bushes.
I could feel the red hair on the back of my neck and on the top of my head beginning to crawl like the bristles on a dog’s or a cat’s or a hog’s back do when it’s angry, except that I wasn’t angry—not yet, anyway.
A little later, though, I was not only angry, but my mind was going in excited circles. If you had been me and seen what I saw and found out what I found out, you’d have felt the way I felt. I was all mixed up in my thoughts, worried and excited and stormy-minded, and ready for a headfirst dive into the middle of one of the most thrilling mysteries that ever started in the middle of a dog day’s night.
3
You don’t h
ave to wait long to decide what to do at a time like that—not when you have mischievous-minded, quick-thinking Poetry along with you, even if you are in the middle of a muddle in the middle of a melon patch, watching something the size of a long, very fat raccoon hurrying in jerky movements toward the shadows of the elderberry bushes.
If things hadn’t been so exciting, it would have been a good time to let my imagination put on wings and fly me around in my boy’s world awhile. A million stars were all over the sky, and fireflies were writing on the blackboard of the night and rubbing out all their greenish yellow marks as fast as they made them. And the crickets were singing, and the smell of sweet clover was enough to make you dizzy with just feeling fine.
But it was no time for dreaming. Instead, it was a time for acting—and quick!
“Come on!” Poetry whispered. “Let’s chase him!” and he started running and yelling, “Stop, thief! Stop!”
Away we both went, out across the garden, dodging melons as we went, leaping over them or swerving aside as we do when we are on a coon chase at night with Circus’s dad’s long-eared, long-nosed, long-voiced hounds leading the way. We were trying to catch up with that dark brown, long, low, very fat animal—something I had never seen around Sugar Creek before in all my life.
Then, all of a disappointing sudden, the brown whatever-it-was disappeared into the shadow of the elderberry bushes, and I heard a whirring noise in the lane on the other side of the fence. Then something came to noisy-motored life, a pair of headlights went on, and an old-sounding car went rattling down the lane, headed in the direction of the Sugar Creek School, which is at the end of the lane, where it meets the county line road.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 28