Right then, to my surprise, Dad swung west and started on the run toward the spring. We quick dodged behind some chokecherry shrubs so as not to be seen. Then we scrambled up the hill and into the path made by boys’ bare feet and in a jiffy reached the rail fence just across the road from the Collins gate and the walnut tree.
After that, in less than almost no time, we were inside the tent, Dragonfly puffing and wheezing because of his asthma, Poetry puffing because of his weight, and I just puffing.
But it wasn’t any peaceful, quiet tent that we had come back to. Dragonfly was as wet as a drowned rat from having been dunked in the spring and was shivering with the cold, even on such a hot midsummer night!
We certainly had a problem on our hands. In fact the whole night was all messed up with problems. Who had crawled into our garden, picked one of our melons, slipped it into a burlap bag, dragged it on the end of a long plastic clothesline to a hole in the fence under the elderberry bushes, hoisted it into his car, and driven away with it? Who, quite a while later, had come rowing up the creek and left the melon in the spring? And how come there wasn’t even one melon there a little later? What on earth was Dragonfly himself doing there? Was he actually looking for his knife, or had he had it with him all the time?
I felt the way I do sometimes on test day in school when the teacher gives me a piece of paper with seven or eight questions on it, quite a few of which I know I can’t answer. Generally the paper has a note at the top that says, “Answer any five.” But tonight’s questions were worse. I’d certainly need to do a lot of studying to answer even one of them!
“I have got to get home and into bed before my father gets home from town and finds I’m not there!” Dragonfly whined.
“Why doesn’t he know you are gone?” Poetry asked.
Dragonfly answered, “I climbed out of my bedroom window. I had to get to the spring to get the knife.”
Then Dragonfly got what he thought was a good idea. “Let me have your red-striped pajamas until tomorrow, Bill.” He was looking at me and, I guess, noticing I had on my yellow ones.
“I can’t,” I said. “They’re all wet.”
He was standing shivering in the light of Poetry’s flashlight, and I was shivering, too—from all the excitement. Also I was still wondering how soon Dad would give up looking for us in the woods and come back to the tent. Dragonfly and I both had our fathers after us, I thought.
“Your red-striped pajamas are all wet?” Dragonfly exclaimed.
I answered, “Yes, they got dunked in the spring!” Of course, that didn’t make sense to him.
We were all standing in the middle of the tent between the two cots, trying to decide what to do, when Poetry said, “I hear a telephone ringing somewhere.”
I had already heard it. The sound was coming from our house through the open east window. Who, I wondered, would be calling the Collinses at this time of night? I knew that if Mom woke up and came downstairs to answer the phone, she’d be within a foot of the open window and she could hear anything we would say or do in the tent.
But nobody answered the phone. A second later it rang again. When still nobody answered, Poetry said, “Maybe your mother’s out in the woods somewhere with your father. You’d better go answer it yourself.”
I lifted the tent flap, sped out across the lawn to the board walk that leads from the back door to the pump, slipped into the house, worked my way through the dark kitchen to the living room, and hurried to the phone, my heart pounding from having hurried so fast.
“Hello,” I said into the mouthpiece, making my voice sound as much like my mother’s as I could.
There came screeching into my ear an excited woman’s voice saying worriedly, “Hello, Mrs. Collins; I’ve been trying to get you. Is our boy, Roy, there?”
“Roy?” I asked. “Roy who?” I forgot for a second that Dragonfly’s real name is Roy. The gang never called him that. He was just plain Dragonfly to us.
“Roy! My boy! He’s not in his room, and I can’t find him anywhere.”
I didn’t have time to tell her anything, because right that minute there was a voice whispering to me from outside the window, saying, “Who is it?”
I turned my face away from the telephone mouthpiece and said to Poetry, “It’s Dragonfly’s mother. She’s afraid he’s been kidnapped.”
Then from behind me I heard footsteps in our dark house. Before I could wonder who it was, Mom’s voice called from the bottom of the stairs, “What’s going on down here?”
Mom certainly looked strange, standing there in the kitchen doorway in her nightgown and her hair all done up in curlers, which were shining in the light of the lamp she was carrying.
Right then Poetry’s mischievous mind made him say something that he must have thought was funny, but it wasn’t because it made Mom gasp. His squawky, ducklike voice was almost like a ghost’s voice coming loudly from just outside the window: “Everything’s all right, Mrs. Collins. The phone rang, and Bill answered it, because your husband wasn’t here but was out in the woods in his nightclothes racing around with a lantern and yelling wildly. The last we saw of him, he was running like an excited deer with hounds on his trail!”
To make matters worse, Dragonfly’s mother was still on the phone and heard everything Poetry said. And she thought he had said that Dragonfly was running around in the woods with a lantern and yelling wildly with hounds on his trail. She gasped into the telephone the same kind of gasp Mom had just made.
“You want to talk to my mother?” I asked Mrs. Gilbert, glad for a chance to get out of the house. The second Mom took the receiver, I started to leave, and I would have if right that minute Charlotte Ann, in her bed in the downstairs bedroom, hadn’t come to life with a frightened cry.
Mom told me to go in and see if Charlotte Ann had fallen out of bed.
In another second I would have been in the room where Charlotte Ann was, but first my eyes took a fleeting glance out the front screen door and across the road in the direction of the spring. There I saw a lighted lantern making crazy jiggling movements, which told me that Dad, who was carrying it, was running like a deer in the direction of our house. I knew that in another minute Theodore Collins would be over the rail fence, swishing past our mailbox, and sooner than anything would be there in the middle of all our excitement and wanting to know what was what and why.
Boy oh boy, you should have seen the way Dad flew into action the very minute he landed in his nightshirt and trousers in the middle of our brain-whirling trouble and excitement. But, for a father, he certainly didn’t calm things down very fast—not the way a father is supposed to when he yells to everybody to calm down. Dad sometimes does that at our house when he thinks I, especially, am raising what he calls a “ruckus.”
Of course, at first Dad didn’t know I was inside the house trying to quiet Charlotte Ann or that Mom had gotten up and come downstairs and was talking to Dragonfly’s mother on the phone trying to calm her down.
The first thing Dad noticed was Poetry, who by that time was in the middle of the yard not far from Dragonfly, who was not far from the tent. I could hear Dad’s strong voice not far from the plum tree as he demanded of the whole Collins farm, “William Jasper Collins”—meaning me—“where on earth have you boys been? And what are you doing with those wet pajamas on again?” He was yelling that question at poor little red-striped-pajama-clad Dragonfly, who, of course, Dad must have thought was his own son.
Seeing and hearing Dad from the open window near the telephone, I yelled out to him, “I haven’t got my red-striped pajamas on! They’re still out on the line behind the grape arbor where you hung them yourself!”
You’d have thought Dad’s ears could have told him that his son’s voice had come from the house behind him and not from the tent in front of him. But Dad was looking at the boy in the shadow of the plum tree and in the sputtering light of his lantern. He barked back at Dragonfly, “Don’t try to be funny!” and demanded an explanatio
n.
All this time, Mom was using a soothing voice on Roy Gilbert’s mother, while I was trying to quiet Charlotte Ann’s half-scared-to-death voice.
And that was the way Dad’s understanding of things began—and the way the next thirty minutes started.
What a night!
6
The excitement we were splashing around in—squawky-voiced, barrel-shaped Poetry; red-striped-pajama-clad Dragonfly; nightgown-dressed Mom; crying Charlotte Ann; my confused father; and his actual son—couldn’t last forever, and this didn’t!
In not too long a while, Dad began to get things clear in his usually bright mind, as Poetry and I managed to squeeze in a few words of explanation. We kept some of the mystery to ourselves to talk over with the gang tomorrow, when we would have our meeting at the Little Jim Tree at the bottom of Bumblebee Hill. (That’s the name we had given the tree under which Little Jim had killed the fierce, mad old mother bear.)
It seemed we should tell Dad and Mom why Poetry and I had been running around in a beautiful moonlit night in our nightclothes, though. So, as soon as we could, we explained about the watermelon in the burlap bag and the noisy old car racing down the lane and coming back a little later.
Dad really fired up when I mentioned how the thief had managed to get the watermelon through the fence. “You mean somebody cut a hole in my new woven wire fence!” he half shouted. “We’ll go down there right now and have a look at it!” He was more angry, it seemed, that his fence had been cut than that one of our watermelons had been stolen.
Dragonfly broke in then, saying, “I’ve got to get home.”
The way he said it made me wonder if he knew all about the whole thing and just wanted to get away from us.
Mom decided what we were going to do first. She said, “I promised Roy’s mother we’d drive him home right away.”
That did seem the best thing to do, and in a little while all of us, including Mom and Charlotte Ann, were in our car driving up the road to Dragonfly’s house.
It took quite a few minutes for Mom and Dad and me to calm Dragonfly’s mother down—she was so upset. I helped as much as I could, taking as much blame as I thought would be safe. But I didn’t want his mother to punish that spindle-legged, crooked-nosed little guy for doing practically nothing, which it looked like maybe she was excited enough and nervous enough to do.
“You know how boys are,” Mom said. “They get ideas of things they want to do, and they think afterward.”
Dad helped a little by saying, “Even our own son does unpredictable things once in a while. Isn’t that right, Bill?”
It was too dark there in the shadow of the big cedar tree that grows close to Dragonfly’s side door for Dad to see me frown. But I decided to look up the word unpredictable in our dictionary as soon as I got a chance, just to see what kind of things I did once in a while. I hoped they weren’t as bad as such a long word made them sound.
“It’s my fault he got his pajamas all wet,” I thought it was safe to say to Dragonfly’s worried mother. Then I told her a little about the girls at the spring and how they probably thought Dragonfly was me. I didn’t tell her I thought maybe her innocent son was mixed up in our watermelon mystery, or she might have had insomnia that night even worse than another boy’s mother.
From Dragonfly’s house we drove back toward ours, turned into the lane that goes down the south side of our farm, and stopped at the place in the fence where the elderberry bushes were. It was the very same place where not more than two hours ago the noisy oldish car had been parked.
When Dad’s flashlight showed him the hole in the fence under the elderberry bushes, he was as angry as I have ever seen him get. He just stood there at the side of our car, with the moonlight shining on his stern face, his jaw muscles working, and I knew every other muscle in his body was tense.
“It’s hard to believe anybody would be that mean,” he said.
“Bob Till is mean enough to do anything,” I answered.
But Mom stopped me before I could say another word. “You’re not to say that!” she ordered me. “We’re going to give that boy a chance. We’re not going to believe he did this until we have proof.”
“How much more proof do we want?” I asked. “We saw his car parked here. We saw the watermelon being dragged in the gunnysack along the fence right over there. And we actually saw it being dragged through this hole and hoisted into the car. And we saw him drive away—Poetry and I both did.”
“Did you count your melons?” Mom asked. “Were there any missing?”
“Were there any—” I stopped. I didn’t even know how many melons we had. I’d never bothered to count them. Those smaller melons hadn’t seemed as important to me as Ida had, because they had grown from ordinary watermelon seed and not from the packet of special seed from the state experiment station.
The only way I could know for sure if any were taken would be to look all over the patch to see if there were any oblong indentations in the ground where a melon had been.
“All right,” I said, “I’ll find out right now. I know there was a watermelon in that gunnysack. I felt it with my own hands, and it was long and round and hard.”
Dad let me have his flashlight, and I crawled through the fence and started looking around all over the garden to see if there were any melons missing. I made a beeline straight for Ida’s vine to be sure she was there and all right.
Poetry wanted to go with me, but he couldn’t get through the small hole in the fence. “At least that proves he didn’t do it,” Dad said grimly.
Poetry answered, “If I’d been cutting a hole in a nice new fence, I’d have made it large enough for a man my size to get through.” He was trying to be funny even at a time like that!
In only a few barefoot minutes, I was standing beside the circular trough in which Ida’s vine was growing, and my flashlight was making a circular arc all around the place while my eyes were looking for Ida herself.
And then, all of a sudden, I felt myself get hot inside, and I heard at the same time my excited, angry voice almost screaming back across the moonlit watermelon patch to Mom and Dad and Charlotte Ann and Poetry, “She’s gone! Somebody’s sneaked in while we were away and stolen her!”
There in front of my tear-blurred eyes was a long, smooth indentation in the ground where for the last eighty-five days—which is how long it takes to mature a melon—Ida Watermelon Collins had made her home. I was all mixed up with temper and sobs and doubled-up fists and was ready to explode.
Ida was gone! Ida had been stolen! My prize watermelon! The mother of my next year’s watermelon children and the grandmother of my year-after-next’s watermelon grandchildren—and my college education.
I tell you, there were a lot of what Dad called “stormy emotions” whirling around in our minds when, a little later, the five of us got back into the car and drove on down the lane in the direction of the Sugar Creek school-house, so as to find a place in the road wide enough to turn around in.
We talked a lot and tried to make plans, especially Poetry and I in the backseat. I simply couldn’t understand my parents’ attitude. There was Dad’s fence with an ugly hole in it, and Ida was missing, and yet he was now very calm and very set in his mind about what not to do.
“Like your mother says, Bill, we don’t know that Bob did it. It won’t cost much to repair the fence, and next year we’ll raise another melon that’ll be even bigger and better.”
I stormed awhile there in the backseat until I got strict orders from both my parents to calm down. Mom made it easier for me to do that by adding, as we pulled up to our mailbox, “We’re Christians. We don’t take revenge on people. We’re going to commit this thing to the Lord and see what good He will bring out of it.”
It was quite a while before things were quiet around the Collins farm that night, with Dad and Mom and Charlotte Ann in the house and Poetry and I in our hot cots in the tent under the plum tree.
Tomorrow, when the
gang got together, we’d decide what to do. It seemed, though, that Mom’s attitude was going to be like a lasso on a rodeo steer to keep me from doing what I really wanted to do, which was to hunt up Bob Till himself and face him with the question of what he had done with my watermelon.
“Listen,” I hissed all of a sudden to Poetry in his cot. Before he could answer, I went on, “If we can find out what happened to the melon, maybe we can still get the seed from it. Anybody he sold it to wouldn’t eat the seeds.”
At the breakfast table the next morning, Dad’s prayer was a little longer than usual, and it seemed sort of meant for me to hear. Right in the middle of it, while Charlotte Ann, in the crook of Mom’s arm, was wriggling and squirming and reaching both hands and fussing to get started eating, Dad said, “… And bless with a very special blessing those who have sinned against themselves and against You by breaking the commandment ‘You shall not steal. Help us to love them and to show them by our lives that the Christian life is the only truly satisfying life. Keep us under Your control …”
That last request bothered me a little because it seemed I wanted to be under my own control all day—and that if I was going to be under anybody else’s control, I might not get to help teach Bob Till, or whoever it was who had cut the hole in Dad’s new fence and stolen that watermelon, a good old-fashioned lesson by giving him a licking.
Mom’s buckwheat pancakes were the best Poetry had ever tasted, he told her—which was probably his excuse for tasting so many of them. He certainly knew how to make Mom’s eyes twinkle. Mom liked boys so well, anyway. In fact all the boys of the Sugar Creek Gang liked Mom so well that they stopped at our house every chance they got just to make her eyes twinkle while they ate some of her cookies or a piece of one of her pies.
She surprised us all right then by saying, “Last night while I couldn’t sleep for a while, I got to thinking about whoever took your melon and cut the hole in the fence, and it seemed the Lord wanted me to pray for him or them. I feel so sorry for boys who do things like that.”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 31