Mom sighed heavily, and I noticed that her eyes had a faraway expression in them. Just looking at her made me think it would be pretty hard for me to be a bad boy as long as I had such a wonderful mother.
After breakfast and before we left the table, we passed around what we call the “Bread Box,” which is a small box of cards, each one with a Bible verse printed on it. And do you know what? Just as it had been when Dad prayed, I felt like a frisky young steer that has just been lassoed, because the card I picked out of the box when it was passed to me had on it, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you … pray for those who mistreat you.”
When I got through reading my verse aloud, as we all do every time, I looked across the table toward Dad, and his gray green eyes were looking straight into mine. He had a half grin on his face when he said, just as if there wasn’t anybody else in the room, “Your watermelon and my fence!” I could tell by the expression in his voice that he had been lassoed, too!
Poetry and I managed to get through the morning all right, but it was hard to wait until two o’clock in the afternoon. We did quite a little work around the place, though, such as helping Mom with the dishes, helping Dad with the chores, and running a few errands for each of them.
Once we stopped in the middle of the barnyard while I pointed out to Poetry the boss hen of our whole flock, the one Dad has named Cleopatra. Cleopatra is a very proud, high-combed, very pretty white leghorn. Like all boss hens in a hen flock, she could peck all the other hens anytime she wanted to, but not a one of them ever dared to peck her back. She had already proved to them who was boss by giving every one of them a licking one at a time.
“We’ve got a boss hen, too,” Poetry told me as we stood watching Cleopatra proudly lifting her yellow feet and strutting around to show how important she was.
“We have a second boss too. She pecks every other hen except the boss hen, and Cleopatra is the only one that can peck her,” I told him. Anybody who knows anything about what Dad calls the “social life of a flock of hens” knows that is the way they live and get along with each other. At the very bottom of the social ladder in the Collins chicken yard is a bedraggled-looking hen Mom has named Marybelle Elizabeth. She gets pecked by every other hen in the barnyard and can never peck any of them back.
We liked Marybelle Elizabeth, though. She was one of the best-laying hens we had, even though in a fight she wasn’t any good at defending herself and she always ate her lunch alone when all the others were through.
I was standing beside Poetry near our garden fence, watching Marybelle while she foraged around by herself as though she didn’t have a friend in the world. I was feeling very sorry for her and thinking how lonely a life she had to live and how she had to take all the unfair things the other hens did to her and couldn’t ever fight back.
Poetry moseyed on toward the house then, and I kept on standing not more than fifteen feet from Marybelle. “Here, Marybelle,” I comforted her, “don’t you feel too bad. I live a kind of henpecked life myself.” Taking a handful of corn from my pocket, I tossed it to her. She lifted her head high, twisted her neck in every direction as if she wondered how come anybody wanted to be kind to her, then started gobbling up the kernels of corn as fast as she could.
“Attagirl,” I said to her. “Go to it!”
Pretty soon Mom called to us that lunch was ready, and pretty soon after lunch—and after Poetry and I had offered to help Mom with the dishes and she had surprised us by letting us—it was time for the gang to meet under the Little Jim Tree.
It was the nicest dog-days day I ever saw. The heat waves danced above the fields, and short-horned grasshoppers sprang up along the sunny path as Poetry and I moseyed along, not wanting to run and get hot on such a hot day. I still felt kind of sad because of the watermelon and also because our boys’ world had been invaded by a flock of girl campers. Girls in our woods would be a lasso on a boy’s fun. He couldn’t go racing wildly among the trees, playing leapfrog and yelling and whooping it up like a banshee, because he would be afraid they would think he was a banshee.
As I was saying, the short-horned grasshoppers were springing up all along the path, making their funny little rattling sounds during the short time they were in the air. The rattling stopped the very second they landed, which they generally did only a few yards from where they took off. Butterflies of a half-dozen families were tossing themselves about in the air above the wild rosebushes and here and there and everywhere in the yellow afternoon.
“Look at that!” Poetry exclaimed. “There goes a milkweed butterfly! I’ve got to have him for my collection!” And he started after it.
But I stopped him with: “Quiet! The girls will hear you!”
He stopped and scowled, and the beautiful monarch butterfly swung proudly away in the air, starting to stop every now and then, and not doing it but lifting itself on the breeze and floating away to another place.
It wouldn’t be long until fall now, I thought, when all the monarchs in the Sugar Creek territory would gather themselves into flocks the way blackbirds and crows do. Before winter they would migrate south, flying all the way down to the bottom of the United States and even into Mexico or South America. Then, next spring, they would be back at Sugar Creek to lay their eggs on the milkweeds that grow in the fencerows or wherever a farmer doesn’t cut them down.
The larva that hatches from the milkweed, or monarch, butterfly is one of the prettiest a boy ever sees. It’s a long, greenish yellow caterpillar with black rings around it all along its body from its head to its tail. But it is hard to tell which end is its head, because it has two short black horns on each end of itself.
You can see a yellow-and-black Monarch larva hanging from a milkweed leaf most anytime in the late summer, if you stop and look close enough.
Dragonfly was the only one of the gang who didn’t come to our meeting that day, and Poetry and I thought we knew why.
We all plumped ourselves down on the grass under the Little Jim Tree and relaxed awhile, each of us lying in a different direction, as we nearly always do. Big Jim looked around at the rest of us, letting his stern eyes stop on each of our faces for a flash of a second—Poetry’s round, mischievous face; Little Jim’s mouselike, innocent face; Circus’s monkey-shaped face; and my freckle-faced face.
Big Jim’s own face was more sober than it is sometimes, and I noticed that the almost-mustache on his upper lip was really almost there now. If it should keep on growing as fast as it had the last two or three years, pretty soon he would actually have to start shaving.
“Anybody know where Dragonfly is?” Big Jim asked.
And Poetry answered, “He had asthma last night. Maybe his mother wouldn’t let him come today.”
Big Jim’s serious face probably meant he was remembering his resolution not to fight Bob Till anymore unless he was forced to in self-defense. Of course, if Bob himself started a fight, we’d have to defend ourselves.
I got an idea then, so I said, “Bob Till has already started a fight by stealing our watermelons last night. That’s the same as whamming me in the stomach, because that’s where the watermelons would have been if I had eaten them. And since he’s already started a fight, I’ve got a right to defend myself, haven’t I?”
“It’s not the same,” Big Jim said grimly, his jaw muscles still working. His fists were doubled up, though, I noticed, and I could see he didn’t like the lasso with which he had lassoed himself.
Little Jim spoke up then. “How would we feel in Sunday school tomorrow if Bob came in with a black eye?”
I looked into that little guy’s face and saw how innocent he was. He was so tenderhearted that he’d probably even hate to swat a fly—and wouldn’t if he didn’t think the fly needed to be swatted.
Right then was when I noticed for the first time the manila envelope Little Jim had brought with him. It looked about five inches wide and nine inches long and had something in it. I couldn’t tell what it was and didn’t ge
t to find out until later in the afternoon.
Little Jim’s question took some of the fight out of me, because I knew Bob had to be in church tomorrow. That was one of the things the judge who had put him on probation had said he had to do—go to Sunday school and church at least once every Sunday for a whole year.
I spoke up then with a half-mischievous voice. “The judge told him he had to go every Sunday unless he is sick and unable to. He might not be able to if—”
“Stop!” Big Jim cut in. “The thing is not funny!”
Not a one of us said a word more for a minute. Then Big Jim told us in a serious voice, “We can’t let Bob break his parole. If he does, he’ll have to go to reform school for from one to ten years, and we wouldn’t want that.”
“Hasn’t he already broken parole by stealing my watermelons?” I asked.
Again Big Jim cut in on me almost savagely, “You don’t know that. It could have been somebody else.”
“It was his car,” I countered. “I’d know it anywhere.”
Just thinking about that burlap bag with the stolen watermelon in it and Ida herself being gone stirred me all up inside again, and I was in a whirlwind of a mood to do something about it. I thought about poor old Marybelle Elizabeth out by our garden fence, all alone at the very bottom of our chicken yard’s social ladder, and how she had to take all the pecks of all the other hens and didn’t dare fight back. I felt sorry for her having to live such a henpecked life. Right that minute, if I had been Marybelle, I’d have felt in a mood to start in licking the feathers off every other hen in the whole Sugar Creek territory.
But we couldn’t just lie around and talk all afternoon and do nothing. Nothing is something a boy can do for only a few minutes at a time, anyway.
“Let’s go swimming,” Little Jim suggested.
“Can’t,” I said crossly. “We don’t have our swimsuits.”
“Swimsuits!” Circus exclaimed. “Who ever heard of the Sugar Creek Gang using swim trunks in our own swimming hole!”
Nobody ever had, because our swimming hole was quite a way up the creek and was well protected on both sides by bushes and shrubbery. Besides, nobody lived anywhere near the place.
“There are guests in our woods,” Big Jim reminded Circus.
And my sad heart told me he was right. We couldn’t go swimming.
“Girls!” Poetry grunted grouchily.
He got shushed by Big Jim, who asked, “They’re human beings, aren’t they?”
“Are they?” Poetry asked in an innocent voice.
Big Jim sighed, looked around at all of us again, and said, “Little Jim here has something he has to do this afternoon, and it could be a little dangerous. He might need our help. You guys want to go along with him and me?”
I said, “I am going to do something dangerous myself before the afternoon is over, but I don’t suppose any of you would care to go with me. You don’t care whether my prize watermelon was stolen or not. But I do, and I’m going to do something about it!”
My words sounded hot in my ears and made me a little braver than I had been. They reminded me of Marybelle Elizabeth at the bottom of our chicken yard’s social ladder, living a henpecked life and not daring to fight back at all at anytime.
“What you going to do?” Circus asked. “I’m willing to go along and help save your life if you need any help.”
“Yeah, what are you going to do?” Poetry asked me.
I answered, “First, I’m going down to the spring to see if Ida is there. If she’s not, I’m going down to the bridge, and across it, and straight to Bob Till’s house, and ask him straight out if he knows anything about a watermelon thief.”
I caught Big Jim and Little Jim’s eyes meeting and thought I saw some kind of message pass between them.
“You guys don’t have to go along if you don’t want to,” I said, beginning to feel a little less brave, now that it seemed I was about to do more than just talk and was actually going to do what I said I was going to do.
“We can’t let you be killed,” Circus said. “Maybe we all ought to go along!”
Pretty soon we were on our way—to the spring first, of course. As we moved grimly along, I noticed my teeth were clenched, my lips were pressed together in a straight line, my eyebrows were down. I was remembering last night’s ridiculous ride on the melon in the spring reservoir, the screaming girls, and especially what had happened in our melon patch near the elderberry bushes.
But right in the front of my mind’s eye was the oblong indentation in the sandy loam where Ida Watermelon Collins had spent all the eighty-five days of her life from a tiny quarter-of-an-inch-long green baby to the huge, dark green watermelon she now was, if she was. Where, I asked myself, was Ida now?
Maybe she was in the spring reservoir. Maybe whoever stole her had sold her to the Girl Scouts. When we got there, would we run into a flock of perfumed guests, and would they recognize a zebra who had changed his color and shape since last night?
Well, we didn’t find any girls there, and we didn’t find any watermelon, either. All there was in the big cement pool was a glass fruit jar filled with butter and a half-dozen cartons of milk, and there were girls’ shoe tracks all around the place.
There weren’t any boys’ tracks—not even barefoot ones.
Big Jim wanted to look around where the boat had been moored, so we all gathered in a huddle by the maple tree, keeping as quiet as we could so that, if anyone did come to the spring, we wouldn’t be seen or heard.
Little Jim slipped out of our huddle and began nosing around over by the board fence where last night Poetry and I had crawled through in such a hurry.
“Hey, everybody!” all of a sudden Little Jim’s excited, mouselike voice squeaked to us. “Look what I found! A note of some kind!”
He was holding up a piece of paper.
I remembered then that that was the exact place where Poetry and I had been when we had unfolded the waxed paper that said on it “Eat more Eatmore Bread.”
Poetry’s and my eyes met, and we grunted to each other.
“That’s only an old bread wrapper. We threw it away last night,” I said to Little Jim.
“You shouldn’t have,” Little Jim answered. He came loping over to where we were with the happiest grin on his face you ever saw. He held the waxed paper out to us. “Look! There’s a note inside it. See!” he cried.
You could have knocked me over with a watermelon seed, I was so astonished. The waxed paper said, “Eat more Eatmore Bread,” all right, but as plain as day there was something sealed between two layers of the paper. A thought hit my mind with a thud—there was something very important on that paper!
“Let’s get out of here quick,” Big Jim said. Taking the paper and ordering, “Follow me!” he started on the run up the path that led through the forest of giant ragweed toward the old swimming hole.
Zippety-zip-zip, plop-plop-plop went my bare feet on the cool, damp, winding path through the ragweed, following along with the rest of the gang.
But the minute we reached the place where we had had so many happy times each summer, we heard voices from up the creek.
“Girls!” Circus exclaimed disgustedly. “Let’s get out of here!”
I looked in the direction the sounds came from and saw a boat with three or four girls in it. Well, in less than a firefly’s fleeting flash, we were up and gone again, scooting through the rows of tall corn and headed for the east end of the bayou.
“We’ll have our meeting in the graveyard,” Big Jim said. “They’ll be afraid to come there.”
7
In almost less time than it has taken me to write these few paragraphs, we were in the cemetery at the top of Bumblebee Hill, sprawled out on the grass near Sarah Paddler’s tombstone—the one that has the carved hand on it with the forefinger pointing toward the sky, the one with the words that say, “There is rest in heaven.”
Every time we had a meeting there, I would read those words a
nd look at the other tombstone, exactly the same size, which had on it Old Man Paddler’s name and the date the old man was born, with a blank place after it—meaning he was still alive and nobody would put on the date of his death until after his funeral.
Also I would always remember that that kind, long-whiskered man was an honest-to-goodness Christian, who loved the heavenly Father and His only Son. He trusted in the Savior for the forgiveness of his sins. So I was sure that, when he did die, his soul would go to heaven, where his wife, Sarah, and his two boys already were—and the whole family would be together again.
That old cemetery was certainly an interesting place and was very pretty. I hoped that nobody would ever try to make it look like the well-kept cemeteries around the county. It’d be nice if people would let the wild rosebushes and the chokecherries and the sumac and the elderberries and the wild grapevines keep on growing there. Of course, it would be all right to keep the weeds away from the different markers and to keep the grass cut, but I liked the little brown paths that wound around from one to the other. And it always seemed that God was there in a special way.
You get a kind of a sad-happy feeling in your heart when you think about Him, when all your sins are forgiven, and when you and your parents like each other. It seems as if maybe He likes boys especially well, because He made such a nice boys’ world for them to live in.
There was purple vervain growing all over the place and tall mullein stalks. And already the sumac was turning red. I hadn’t any more than thought all these things, when from behind the sumac on the other side of Sarah Paddler’s tall tombstone I heard a long-tailed sneeze and knew Dragonfly was there. A moment later he came pouting into the little circular open place we were in, saying, “How come you didn’t wait for me?”
He looked a little guilty, I thought, as, panting and wheezing a little, he plumped himself down on the ground between Poetry and me.
Everything was so quiet for a minute that he must have guessed we had been talking about him. “Are the—are the girls still camping up in the woods?” he asked. I knew he was remembering last night’s dunking in the spring and also probably never would forget it.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 32