I guess I must have looked doubtful, so Dad took another minute to explain it to me.
“Farmers in some of the Eastern states have been spreading high-nitrogen hay under their apple trees instead of fertilizer out of a sack, and the nonproductive trees have come to life in a very wonderful way. Those five trees next to the blackberries have been limping along for two or three years, hardly bearing at all.”
It sounded silly and sensible at the same time.
But I still wanted to go with him. I hadn’t seen Poetry since yesterday—yesterday being the last day of school for this week, because of there being a teachers’ convention today and tomorrow. All schools in the county were closed, giving all the tired-out boys and girls a three-day weekend.
“Maybe you can bring Poetry back with you,” I suggested, “and he could help us unload the hay”—anything to get to be with my good friend for a while.
“I can’t do that either,” Dad said, racing the motor and getting ready to start. “I’m getting the hay from their other farm—on the other side of the creek.”
And that was that. I watched him drive through the gate and down the turnpike to the north road. There he turned and went on toward the bridge, leaving a trail of gray dust moving along behind him.
I was still standing by “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox, watching the gray dust boiling along after the truck and remembering I had forgotten to ask Dad if we could hire Little Tom Till to help with the chores. I was feeling sad inside—in spite of not having had to go to school today—when Theodore Collins’s wife opened one of the windows of our front room, the one next to the telephone, and called Theodore Collins’s son to come in and help her.
Almost right away I started taking slow, sad steps toward the kitchen door to see what she wanted. I hoped it wouldn’t be dishes, not knowing I was going to stumble onto another strange adventure that very afternoon before Dad got back—one that would make any red-haired boy’s hair stand on end.
3
As I have told you, it was a beautiful autumn day. The sky was one of the prettiest blues I’d ever seen. It looked like a big upside-down blue breakfast bowl with a yellow hole in it and nice warm sunshine coming through the hole and scattering all over everything like water out of a garden sprinkler.
By the time I had reached the board walk that runs from the kitchen door to the pump, Mixy was there, too. Even if I had wanted to stop her, I couldn’t have, because the second I opened the door she was under and in. With her big, long, bushy black-and-white tail straight up, she marched ahead of me to the living room, where Mom was.
As I followed Mixy, I hissed, “Hey, scat! Keep out!” I knew I wasn’t supposed to let her in if I could help it. As I passed the stove and the woodbox, I took a quick look toward the place where the lunch dishes are nearly always standing stacked if nobody has asked me to do them yet. I noticed that they were already done, which made me feel a little better about having to stay at home.
Mom was sitting in our red armless rocker with some pretty blue-and-white calico or gingham cloth spread out on her lap. She had several straight pins in her mouth—and shouldn’t have had, because she never lets me hold pins in my mouth and doesn’t want to set a bad example for Charlotte Ann. She didn’t even look up but kept her eyes on her scissors as she cut carefully around the edge of a paper pattern. The cutting sound sounded like our horses in the barn when they are chewing corn or hay. That is one of the most interesting sounds a boy ever hears around a farm, especially if he is in the barn at night and everything else is quiet—a horse eating hay or corn or other horse food.
“Did you call me?” I asked Mom.
She answered from around the pins. “Who else could it have been?”
“If you need me for anything, I’ll be down at the barn,” I said cheerfully, starting toward the kitchen door.
But I was stopped by Mom’s voice saying very firmly, “Stop!”
I had already guessed what she wanted me to do before she said, “Get your shoes off. I want you to stand on a chair for me.”
Then I did wish I was with Dad in the truck. Whenever Mom wanted me to stand on a chair and told me like that, I knew it meant she wanted me to be what she called “a live dress form.” She would put some kind of an unfinished girl’s or woman’s dress over my head and pull it down over my shoulders as if it was an extra-long shirt. And then I would have to stand and stand and stand and stand. And also stand and stand and stand, while the seconds, which seemed like minutes, and the minutes, which seemed like hours, dragged slowly past, and while she measured and tucked and pinned and sewed and measured and talked around the pins in her mouth.
Sure enough, that’s what I had to do. It seemed Mom was always making a dress for somebody, for herself or for some neighbor. She was one of the best seamstresses in the whole Sugar Creek territory. Some of the prettiest dresses that ever got worn to the Sugar Creek Church or to the Literary Society, which met in the Sugar Creek School once a month in the winter, were the ones I had worn first myself, standing on a chair in our front room.
“Who you making it for this time?” I asked after I had stood still on the chair for what seemed three or four days.
“For Mrs. Till,” Mom replied. “So she can wear it to the banquet. She’s going to help serve. Oh dear, there goes the phone.”
And Mom left me standing there while she went to answer our party line telephone. I couldn’t tell from what she was saying who had called, but I could tell it was some woman, because right away they were talking about women’s stuff, such as baking and housecleaning.
I kept waiting on the chair.
Then they started to talk about sewing, and I kept on standing, still with an unfinished woman’s dress on. I glimpsed myself in the mirror above the mantel and noticed I was wearing a mussed-up forehead as well as a dress.
Mixy was on the floor below me. She was arching her back against everything in the room, including the legs of the chair I was on and the living-room table—and also against Mom’s ankles as she sat at the phone talking.
It sounded as if Mom and whoever it was were having more fun than a flock of blackbirds in autumn getting ready to start South for the winter. They were talking about seams and stitches and tucks and gathers and needles and thread and hems and other stuff mothers talk about, which they understand and hardly any boy in the world does, and which Dad says is some kind of foreign language that human beings such as men and boys can’t understand.
Then, all of a sudden, I looked past my reflection in the mirror and saw through the window that was behind me a cute little bushy-tailed, frisky, bright-eyed red squirrel digging a hole in our front yard, probably getting ready to bury a walnut. Knowing squirrels, I knew that sometime during the winter, when the squirrel would be hungry, it would dig down through the snow and into the ground and unearth that very same walnut and have it for breakfast or lunch or supper or for a between-meal snack. That is one of the happiest sights I ever see around our neighborhood—old Bushy-Tail with his blunt, rounded head and his large, broad ears and short, thick fur. His tail was almost as long as his body and head. Since he was so active, it would be as hard for him to keep still, if his mother wanted him to, as it would be for a boy standing on the edge of a chair with a dress full of pins on him.
In spite of the fact that I was wearing a dress with pins sticking all over it—and didn’t dare move or get off the chair to sit down on it or I would become a live pin cushion—when I saw that cute bushy-tailed red squirrel whisking around on our lawn and digging a hole right beside our rosebush to bury a walnut, a little glad feeling came to life somewhere inside of me. I felt as fine as I do on a hot, stuffy summer day when I am tired from having to hoe potatoes or weed onions and all of a sudden a cool, sweet-smelling breeze comes scampering across somebody’s field of new-mown hay and fans my cheeks and makes me glad to be alive.
“Hsst!” I exclaimed to Mom. “We have company! Look at that squirrel out there digging unde
r the rosebush!”
But my “Hsst!” blasting into Mom’s uncovered ear, while she was trying to hear with her other ear something someone a long way off was saying, must have made her feel what Dad would probably call “impatient.”
She quickly waved in my direction to warn me to keep still, not realizing that at that very second I was trying to balance myself on my left foot and at the same time see how far I could reach out in front of me with my right foot, with a dress on. Her arm sort of blindly swinging around accidentally struck my right foot and unbalanced me.
The next thing I knew, I was swaying in several directions. The chair I was standing on lost its balance, too, and in a sixth of a second it was like our house had been struck with a tornado. Theodore Collins’s only son and his chair and somebody’s unfinished dress full of pins went down onto the living-room floor with a crashety-wham-bang, rollety-sprawlety, sizzlety-plop-stop! And at the same time what felt like seventeen pins stuck me in even more than that many different places!
I let out a couple of unearthly screams. Mom let out several of the same kind, her voice probably shooting like a scared arrow into the telephone’s mouthpiece and scaring half to death whoever she had been talking to on the other end of the line.
You couldn’t expect Charlotte Ann, my baby sister, to sleep through noise like that. Within six seconds—or maybe even less—she decided to help us make noise. Even before I started to get up from the floor, she started to cry in the other room. Now Mom not only couldn’t hear the other woman on the telephone but probably couldn’t hear herself think.
I couldn’t hear myself think, either. My thoughts were as mixed up and noisy as the midway of a county fair with the calliope playing full blast and the merry-go-round going around, and a hundred voices calling from every direction. Besides, I had pins in me!
I did manage to hear Mom say just before she hung up, “It will have to be good-bye for now. I’ll call you later. I hope nobody was listening in. They would think we were a pack of hyenas over at our house.”
Well, I managed to live through the experience, and Mom did, also. I found out that actually there were only three or four pins that had stuck me.
I hadn’t any sooner gotten back up on the chair and started to stand still for another week or two than I spied something else in our mirror. This time it was a barrel-shaped boy bicycling up to our mailbox—mischievous Poetry himself, my just-about-favorite gang member.
I could have let loose a yell that would have scared a wildcat out of his chestnut brown skin, I felt so good. Good old Poetry, I thought. He knows just when to come to my rescue. Mom won’t have the nerve to make me be a dress form while she makes a dress for Mrs. Till—not with him here.
Generally, when Poetry gets that close to our house, he stops and whistles one of his favorite whistles, which nearly always is a wood thrush’s mating call in the spring. Sometimes, though, he lets loose a blast with a wooden whistle, which he is extragood at doing. Then he waits around by the gate till I can manage to break loose from what I am supposed to be doing—and usually don’t want to be—and can make a dash out whatever door I am nearest to get to him as quick as I can, which is never too quick to suit me but sometimes is too quick to suit Mom or Dad or both.
But this time Poetry didn’t stop. He parked his bike, then swished through that gate as fast as anything, not even closing it after him, and came waddling across the yard, past the rosebush and straight for our front door. In a second he was knocking a businesslike knock as if he was in a worried hurry.
“I’ll get it,” I said to Mom, but she stopped me.
“Don’t you dare move,” she commanded me. “I’ll get it.”
But before Mom could even start to start toward the door, it burst open, and Poetry breezed in.
In his hand he had a small carrying case about twice as big as Mom’s largest handbag. His mischievous eyes had a worried look in them as they swept around the room, taking in everything at a glance, such as the heating stove, which we had put up that week to be ready for winter when it came, the davenport against the wall by the window, the library table on the north side by the other window with our red-bound family Bible on it that was getting worn from Dad and Mom’s using it so much—especially to study their Sunday school lessons—the sewing machine in front of Mom, and the telephone.
Finally, Poetry’s eyes squinted up at me, standing on the chair with a dress on, and he said in a businesslike, half-anxious, ducklike voice, “Where is the patient? The accident victim?”
With that, he opened his case, and I recognized it as one he used on our last camping trip. The second he opened it, I noticed it had in it only a Red Cross first-aid kit, which he also opened as he sat down puffing on a straight-backed chair by the stove. He said again, “The accident victim. The one that screamed a while ago—I came to see if I could help save a life.”
“You mean you heard me yell?” I gasped. Why, he lived a quarter of a mile away. Of course, he might have heard Mom scream, because she had screamed toward the window in the direction of their house. But I had screamed in the other direction. “You couldn’t hear that far away,” I said.
Then he laughed. “Mother did, over the telephone. I mean—she told me about the accident, and I grabbed my bag and bicycled over as fast as I could!”
Mom came to life then and said, “But I wasn’t talking to your mother on the phone. I was talking to Big Jim’s mother.”
Then I saw the doctor’s fair face turn crimson as he stammered, “But—my mother—that is, she probably was just going to use the phone and picked up the receiver first to see if the line was busy.”
Well, it was a good idea, and it goes to show what a mischievous boy Poetry sometimes is. Anyway, it had given him an excuse to come over to our house.
As soon as Mom finished with me, which was almost right away, because I wasn’t a very good live dress form with Poetry there, I let him dress my wounds with some Band-Aids. Now that I looked at the pinpricks, I noticed they actually weren’t deep enough even to scratch through the outer layer of my skin, which is what the books we use at school call the “epidermis.” Poetry called it that as with a grim face he diagnosed my case. He said seriously, “You have a slightly pierced epidermis, caused by a sharp-pointed instrument, probably induced by a fall.”
“Such long words!” I said.
Mom always did like Poetry and seemed to know exactly how to make him like her. Right away she asked him if he had had his cherry pie today, and he hadn’t. While she was in the kitchen getting a piece of pie apiece for him and me, she called back, “Perhaps the doctor would like to treat my son’s mother’s eardrums.”
“I would,” he said. “I’m good at that. I just fixed my own mother’s before I left home.”
We went on outdoors to digest our pie and also, with Mom’s permission, decided to go across the road and through the woods to the creek.
Poetry hadn’t any sooner gotten outside than he wasn’t a doctor anymore but was a hunter. He pulled from his pocket a black-walnut duck call and blew a quick, sharp blast. It sounded almost exactly like the call ducks make when they are scared or excited.
Then he said, “Let’s go down along the bayou to see if we can see any muskrats working on their winter houses,” which seemed to be exactly what I wanted to do myself.
I quickly went into the house for my binoculars, and in minutes we were running and walking and leaping over logs and dodging around brush piles as we scrambled along through the nice autumn weather and the falling leaves toward the bayou.
“Let’s stop at the spring first,” Poetry said behind me.
When I asked him why, he answered, “To see if there are any coon tracks. There are a lot of coons around this year.”
Just then I stumbled over a fallen branch and fell sprawling. Poetry, who was still behind me, fell over me, and both of us landed in a tangled-up scramble in a big pile of leaves. Feeling lazy anyway, we decided to stay there and wallow a wh
ile, the way hogs do in a mud puddle.
We had been lying in the leaves maybe five minutes when I heard the crunch-crunch-crunchety-crunch-crunch of something running through the woods. A second later I heard a boy’s noisy sneeze and, looking up, saw a crooked-nosed little guy dressed in a cowboy outfit.
As soon as he saw us, he came whooping it up toward us, yelling like a banshee, waving a toy gun, and shouting, “Where is he? I’ll shoot him deader than a doornail!” It was Dragonfly.
He slowed down when he reached the edge of our leaf pile and looked down at me with a surprised expression on his face. “Oh, there you are! Are you all right? I thought you got half killed when you fell off that chair!”
“Who told you?” I asked as I rolled over and sat up.
He grinned and answered down at me, “Mother heard it on the phone.”
“But my mother wasn’t talking to your mother,” I said.
“I know it,” he answered. “But she accidentally heard it. I thought maybe somebody was on the warpath so I hurried over to help. Your mother sent me down here to find you.”
The three of us went on to the spring. Dragonfly was being careful not to walk in the mud. His outfit was so new and his brown shoes so shiny that he didn’t want to get them soiled.
“Where are the coon tracks you were looking for?” I asked Poetry.
He grinned, saying, “I was just thirsty and wanted to be sure you would go to the spring with me.”
Pretty soon the three of us had had a drink apiece and, pretending to be Indian scouts, were moving stealthily along the rail fence that skirts the top of the hill just above the bayou. We were keeping ourselves out of sight behind the evergreens that grew along the fence itself, hoping to get a glimpse of muskrats at work, which pretty soon we did.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 39