Little Jim explained it to me—his dad was one of the members of Old Man Paddler’s missionary board and knew ahead of time what they planned to do. The dinner for the fathers and sons was to be free, but after it was over there would be what our church called a “freewill offering” to pay for the dinner, and the money that was left over would be used to pay for preaching the gospel to the Indians and Eskimos and others who lived in Alaska.
“Mother is going to give five music lessons,” Little Jim went on.
I knew that meant she would give ten whole dollars, because she received two dollars apiece for the piano lessons she taught. Little Jim got his lessons free, though, and he was one of the best players in the whole county.
“Circus wants to give three muskrats if he can catch them, but he has only caught one so far,” he said.
I knew that meant that Circus, the acrobat of our gang, was going to try to give three dollars to the missionary offering at the banquet, since a muskrat fur was worth a dollar a pelt that fall.
Last year, Circus had had a trapline along Sugar Creek and the bayou and had caught thirteen muskrats and three possums. His father, who hunted at night, had caught thirty-seven coons with his big long-eared, long-voiced hounds.
I tossed up another spadeful of dirt and said, “How come he’s caught only one muskrat so far? I’ll bet there are a dozen in the bayou right above the spring. I saw three yesterday myself.”
Little Jim picked up a clod of dirt and threw it toward a blackbird that had just lit by our rosebush and was probably looking for a grub to eat. I had been digging around the rosebush that afternoon, heaping dirt high about its roots to get it ready for winter.
Little Jim acted as if he hadn’t heard me, so I said to him again, “How come?”
He answered, “Maybe the muskrats are smarter this year than they were last year. They keep setting off his traps without getting caught.”
Just that second a car honked out in front, and it was Little Jim’s dad’s car. It had stopped beside our mailbox.
“I have to go now,” Little Jim said, and away he ran, past the rosebush toward our front gate by the walnut tree, whisking along as light as a feather, and for some reason reminding me not of an awkward, gray-haired possum, as he had a few minutes before, but of a happy little chestnut-colored chipmunk dashing from one stump to another along the bayou.
For quite a while after their car disappeared up the gravel road, I stood looking at the long train of gray dust floating in the air, being carried by the wind across Dragonfly’s dad’s pasture toward Bumblebee Hill.
I was thinking how much easier it was for Little Jim’s folks and for Little Jim himself to give a lot of money to missionary work than it was for some of the rest of the gang members, especially Circus, whose father hadn’t been a Christian very long and hadn’t been able to save any money. He had been an alcoholic before that, and most of the money he had made had been put into the Sugar Creek Bank by the owner of the Sugar Creek Tavern instead.
Then I got to thinking about Little Tom Till again, whose father was still an alcoholic, and how Little Tom had been invited to go to the banquet with Dad and me. I knew Tom wouldn’t have anything to put in the offering basket when it came past his place at the table, and he might feel sad inside and ashamed and wish he hadn’t come.
Then all of a sudden a cheerful idea popped into my mind, and it was: get Dad to hire Little Tom to help me with the chores tonight and maybe do some other work tomorrow morning and pay him for it. And Tom would be proud to put part of whatever he earned in the offering and also be glad he was alive.
Thinking that made me feel as happy as a cottontail rabbit hopping along the path that goes through our blackberry patch down in the orchard. And before I knew it, I had finished putting in the last tulip bulb and covered all of them with eight inches of soft brown dirt. It certainly felt good to have strong muscles, and be in good health, and be able to work, and just be alive.
The more I thought about my idea, the better I felt. The only thing was, I didn’t realize that my being especially friendly to Tom was going to be one of the things that would get me into trouble and into the middle of that fist-fight in our apple orchard.
2
When I’d finished cleaning the dirt off the spade I had been using and had hung it on the toolshed wall, I was feeling so happy inside that it was like a little whirlwind spiraling in my mind. I felt even better than I sometimes do when it’s summer and I am splashing and diving in Sugar Creek with all the other members of the gang—not only Little Jim, the littlest and best member, but Poetry, the barrel-shaped one; Big Jim, with an almost-mustache on his upper lip; Circus, the acrobat; and Dragonfly, the allergic-nosed, spindle-legged member.
I was thinking that Tom Till was really a great little guy. I was remembering also that his hair was as fiery red as mine, his face had even more freckles than mine, his temper was just as quick as mine, and it was his dirty fist that had socked me in the eye in that other fight—the one that was called the Battle of Bumblebee Hill.
There were seven boys in that tough town gang that day and only six in our gang, but every one of us had two fists apiece. That made twenty-six fists, making almost as many fists as there were bumblebees.
I guess it was the bumblebees that saved the day for all thirteen of us and kept us from getting thirteen broken noses. Boy oh boy, those yellow-and-black bumblebees had probably been living in that little underground gopher den for a long time. So when one of our twenty-six bare feet accidentally stepped on the entrance, it woke up the whole hairy-bodied army, and they came storming out in every direction. In only a few seconds, the thirteen of us were going in the same number of directions to get away, swatting at them with our straw hats and dodging, running down the hill for the shelter of the elderberry bushes. And just like that, the fight was over, which is how six middle-sized boys licked seven bigger boys—the bumblebees helping us a little.
I wasn’t the only one of our gang who thought Tom was a pretty nice guy. Circus himself had taken a special liking to him and was always giving him an ice-cream cone or candy bar. And when the gang was running through the woods and Tom accidentally stubbed his toe and fell down, Circus would stop and help him up and act as if he thought Tom was as special as I think my baby sister, Charlotte Ann, is.
Maybe that was because every time they got a new baby at Circus’s house—which was about every year—not one of the babies was a boy but was always a girl. As much as Circus liked every one of his sisters, so far he always had to get over being disappointed when he didn’t get a little brother.
There was one other reason he liked Tom so well, and I was the first one of the gang to find out about it. He explained it to me one day when we were down at the farther end of the schoolyard. I had noticed that nearly every noon at school Circus would sneak a sandwich out of his lunch box, when he thought no one was looking, and would slip it to Tom.
“How come you do that?” I asked him.
He said, “Do what?”
“You know—give Tom part of your lunch.”
“It’s not part of my lunch,” he said. “My mother sends an extra sandwich every day just for him.”
“How come?” I asked.
Circus looked all around to be sure no one else was close enough to hear him and said, “Because when Dad used to be—I didn’t always get enough to eat myself. Now that my dad is a Christian and Tom’s isn’t—”
Circus’s voice broke, and he never did finish his sentence. He didn’t have to, though. I understood, and it helped me like Little Tom Till even more. I also liked Circus himself better, and I felt more and more sorry for Tom and his mother and even for Tom’s big brother, Bob, and his mean father.
Bob Till had been the leader of that tough gang that had been on the losing side of the Battle of Bumblebee Hill. Tom had been a member of that gang, too, at the time. But since he and Bob had moved into our neighborhood, Tom had been playing around with us. Bob was
the only boy in the whole territory that was what could be called a “bad boy” or, as I overheard Dad tell Mom, “a juvenile delinquent.”
As I shut the toolshed door after planting the tulip bulbs and went to get a drink, I noticed I was whistling “Yankee Doodle.”
But then I stopped whistling for a minute and stood at the pump, remembering that just one week ago Dad and Mom had been standing at that very place when he had said that to her about Bob—his being a “juvenile delinquent.”
Dad had just pumped a tin cup of sparkling water and handed it to her with a sparkle in his eyes, as though he thought she was wonderful. And Mom had just taken it from his hand and was drinking it and looking over the top of the cup at him with a sparkle in her own eyes, as if she thought he was a pretty nice person himself.
Then Dad said, “Sometimes—not always—it’s delinquent fathers that make delinquent sons. In this case, John Till is probably to blame for his oldest boy being what he is.”
At that minute, I happened to be hanging upside down by my knees from the two-by-four crossbeam at the top of the grape arbor. I heard Dad with my upside-down ears and saw him with my upside-down eyes, so I asked him, “What’s a ‘juvenile delinquent’?”
Dad explained that it was a boy or a girl who, for some reason or other, had a twisted heart or mind and did things that were against the law or just weren’t right to do.
By the time he had finished saying that, I decided I was thirsty, too, so I said, “Let me see if I can take a drink upside down.”
Dad gave me an astonished look, but he turned quick, pumped a cup of water, and started toward me, saying, “Anything to accommodate an only son.”
I was surprised that Mom didn’t try to stop him, as she sometimes does when he tries to do something she thinks isn’t sensible. (Dad doesn’t always stop.)
Mom not only didn’t try to stop him, but she didn’t even try to stop me from trying to drink it. So I decided to try it. It was probably a silly thing to do. If you don’t believe it, just try it yourself sometime when you are hanging upside down somewhere.
With my cup of water in my upside-down hand, I was trying to put a right-side-up cup of water to my upside-down lips and swallow upside down. I managed to get it to my lips all right and was just starting to try to drink when, for some reason, the water spilled over the rim of the cup. Then, instead of running down my chin, the way it would have if I had been right side up, it ran into the two upside-down nostrils of my upside-down nose and up—down, rather—into what I decided afterward was a pretty dumb head. In a second, my nose was full to the top—or to the bottom—and the rest of the spilled water ran into my eyes and onto my forehead and my mussed-up red hair.
I quickly dropped the tin cup and almost dropped myself. If I had, I would have landed ker-wham-bang on my head in the path that leads from the back door to the grape arbor to the toolshed. I might have gotten a concussion or something. But I quickly scrambled into a skin-the-cat movement, bent double, caught hold of the two-by-four, and swung myself up onto the top of it, where I sneezed several times in quick succession.
Mom, deciding for sure it hadn’t been a good idea, said, “Such nonsensical things you two do sometimes! It’s a wonder you don’t make a juvenile delinquent out of that boy—the way you let him do any ridiculous thing he gets into his head.”
“Such as drinking water?” Dad asked with a mischievous grin. Then added to Mom, “I don’t have to worry about him. He’ll never become one as long as he has you for his mother.”
In spite of my having tears in my eyes as well as pitcher-pump drinking water, I was able to see Dad and Mom looking at each other again as though they liked each other in spite of me. And a fleeting thought flashed through my mind that it would be pretty hard for a boy to be an honest-to-goodness-for-sure juvenile delinquent with such nice people for his parents.
Well, as I said, today I was whistling “Yankee Doodle” when I went to get a drink.
Dad saw me by the pump and said, “Run into the house, will you, Bill, and look in my other pants to see if my keys are there?”
I started to go but had to stop at the kitchen door to keep Mixy, our black-and-white cat, from going into the house with me or ahead of me or after me. She always tries to do that when I go into the house.
A minute later, I was in the downstairs bedroom closet going through Dad’s pockets for his ring of keys. I had to do that almost twice every day, because Dad was always changing his pants and forgetting to take the keys out of one of the four or five pockets that each of his many pairs of pants had, and which is four or five times as many as a marsupial has.
Mom, hearing me rummaging around, called from the front room rocking chair, “You won’t find any cookies in the clothes closet!”
Now what on earth made her think I was looking for cookies? I had to tell her what I was looking for, because Dad was making a fatherly noise out in the barnyard for me to hurry up.
Mom also heard him, so she told me to get her own ring of keys from her handbag.
“Which handbag?” I called.
She called back, “The brown one. It’s on the dresser upstairs.”
It seemed I had no sooner started upstairs than I heard Mom’s voice calling, “But be quiet! Don’t knock the house down! You’ll wake up Charlotte Ann!”
I went the other few steps up the stairs as quiet as a mouse, but a second later I yelled back down to her again, “They’re not in the brown one!”
“Then come on down and look in the green butterfly bag! I think I left it on one of the dining room chairs!”
I took a half-worried look out the screened upstairs window under the ivy leaves that Jack Frost had changed from green to red. Dad was standing by the cab of the truck with both hands on his hips and both elbows straight out from his sides, looking toward the house. Knowing what he was thinking from the way he was standing, I yelled to him, “Wait till I look in the green one downstairs in the dining room!”
Dad yelled back, “I haven’t got any green pants, and I certainly didn’t leave them in the dining room!”
Well, there wasn’t any use to try to explain anything to him right then. I finished knocking the house down as I hurried two steps at a time down to the dining room, where I raced through all the different compartments of Mom’s green butterfly-shaped handbag. Some of its pockets were fastened shut with zippers and one with a snap. The stuff she had in that handbag!
I found the keys, though, and a little later was out the back door, scooting across the barnyard to where Dad was waiting.
“Here’s Mom’s keys,” I said and handed them to him. “I couldn’t find yours.”
“Oh, fine,” Dad answered. Then he added, “Don’t forget I have them. I’ll just have time to get there and back.”
“Where you going?” I asked him. “Can I go along?”
“I would like to have you—in fact, I need you—but your mother needs you worse,” Dad answered.
The way he said it made my heart sink. As much as I had enjoyed planting tulip bulbs, I felt sure that what Mom probably wanted me to do was to help with the dishes or something else that was made for girls to do.
“Where are you going?” I asked Dad again.
“Over to Thompsons’—to get a load of hay.”
Then I did want to go, because Thompson was the last name of my almost favorite member of the gang—Poetry, the barrel-shaped one, whose actual name is Leslie.
I would rather go to Poetry’s house than to any other place in the neighborhood. There are so many interesting things we can do at his house. His folks have a recreation room in their basement, where we can play Ping-Pong or checkers or look over his seashells. Or I watch his snails run a lazy race or his pet tree frog gobble down mealworms. Poetry had the cutest little green-and-brown frog living in a glass jar with an inch of water in it and an upside-down small glass in the container for a stool. The jar had a net cover so that the friendly little fellow couldn’t jump out.
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Also, Poetry always had more mischievous ideas and plans for adventure than any of the rest of the gang. We could have more fun together just by imagining we were pirates, or policemen, or cowboys, or something else a boy is always imagining himself to be.
“Are you sure Mom needs me? Can’t I help her when I get back?” I asked with a hopeful question mark in my voice.
But Dad put a sad period on the end of his answer by saying, “Absolutely not. Poetry may have a little work to do himself, and his parents wouldn’t want him to be interrupted.”
“I could help him help you load up the hay. Poetry and I could go up into their haymow and throw the hay down for you.”
“The hay is already down. It’s baled hay.”
That didn’t seem to make sense. Our barn was already full of hay, anyway. A lot of it was baled, and it seemed strange for Dad to be going after a load, so I said, “We don’t need any more hay, do we?”
I felt a little bit stubborn in my mind about not getting to go, but when Dad says a thing and is sure he means it, it’s the same as trying to push over a barn to get him to change his mind. So I only asked, “What do we need any more hay for?”
“To feed those starving old apple trees out there in the orchard—the ones that didn’t bear apples last year. They are getting old and scraggly and need some good high-nitrogen hay.”
What on earth? I thought, trying to imagine an apple tree eating hay. It really sounded silly. We fed hay only to horses and cows and pigs and sheep around our farm—actual honest-to-goodness livestock, certainly not to anything that belonged to the vegetable kingdom, which is what trees belong to.
I knew Dad was always reading farm magazines and books and trying to use up-to-date methods and ideas, but I couldn’t imagine an apple tree eating hay. It was ridiculous.
Dad started the truck then and gave me several last-minute instructions. “You behave yourself this afternoon and do everything your mother says. I’ll be back in time for supper. And the first thing in the morning, you can help me feed the trees. We want to get them mulched down before the fall rains start, so the nitrogen in the hay will soak down to where the roots can feed on it all winter. And then, next year we’ll really have apples!”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 38