While Mom was drinking, Dad got a mischievous tone in his voice and said to Tom, “You ought to see Bill drink out of that cup upside down. Want to show him how you do it, Bill?”
“Sure,” I said. I reached up and caught hold of the two-by-four of the grape arbor, swinging my feet up and pushing them between my arms and up and over. A second later I was hanging upside down, waiting to give Little Tom Till an education in acrobatics.
But Mom stopped what probably would have turned out to be another sneezing spell for me by stopping Tom from giving me the water.
As soon as I was on my feet again, Dad ordered, “You run on out to the truck, Bill, and get your mother’s keys. I think I left them in the switch.”
I managed to get a mischievous thought then, and it was, “Did you change your clothes out there?”
He answered in his firm voice, “You go jump in the first lake you come to. I’ll be back out in a few minutes. I want to get Mother’s grocery list.” And he turned and followed her into the house.
6
Right away I thought of something I wanted to do, and I started on a boy-sized gallop out past the pump and across the barnyard, scattering chickens in every direction and yelling back to Tom, “Come on. I want to show you something.”
“Coming,” he answered in a very cheerful voice.
Even as I ran, I couldn’t understand how he could act so cheerful after having done what he had done when he was down along the bayou. Whenever I do anything I shouldn’t, I always feel sad inside. Also, I thought, how could he be so happy when he had just been scared half to death by a big one-hundred-pound bluetick coonhound trailing him like a bloodhound on the trail of a criminal?
Right away, Tom and I were inside the barn, hurrying across the alfalfa-strewn board floor, and up the wooden ladder to the haymow. There I showed Tom what I wanted him to see, which was a small basketball court Dad and I had fixed up there so I could practice shooting baskets.
Tom made a dive for the ball. He liked to play basketball more than any other game. Our new schoolteacher had started us playing that fall, and Tom was turning out to be one of the best forwards on the team.
But I could see he was only pretending to be cheerful. He was missing nearly all his shots and didn’t seem to be interested. He kept looking around at different things and up at the rafters and at some wooden boxes I had put way up on a high log near the roof.
“How many pigeons you got?” he asked.
I remembered then that he used to have ten or twelve in a special pigeon pen on the north side of their barn. “How many you got?” I asked.
He didn’t say anything for a minute but quickly shot another basket. Then he mumbled, “I haven’t any.”
“How come?” I asked, just as he stumbled over my foot and landed on the floor.
He was up again in a flash, took a quick squint at the basket, shot and missed, made an awkward scramble for the ball, and fell down again. It was only quite a while afterward that I realized he hadn’t answered my question.
Just then Dad honked the horn up by the walnut tree, which meant for us to hurry down because he was ready to go. That is, that’s what I thought it meant. But when we came sailing out the barn door a little later and dashed across the barnyard toward him, he said, “Mrs. Collins has just announced a change of plans. She’s going along with us—but after supper. There’s too much work to do at the church to get ready for tomorrow, and the Collins family is going to pitch in and help, she says. So get going, boys, on the chores. She’ll have early supper ready in two jerks of a lamb’s tail.”
Tom looked bothered as he stopped by the pump and worked the handle up and down a few times. “I don’t know if I can. I promised to be home for supper.”
But Dad had already settled that with Little Tom’s mother. “We just telephoned her,” he said, “and promised to get you home by eight-thirty It’ll probably take us about that long to get to town and back and wind things up at the church. You boys can run a lot of errands there, too.”
Tom was still bothered, as I could tell when he said, while still working the pump handle, “Who’ll do our chores?”
“Bob’s home,” Dad said.
Well, that little guy jumped as if he had been shot at and missed. Then he looked all around quickly as though he was expecting to see his brother somewhere about the house or yard. I could see that for some reason he seemed to be afraid of something.
We got the chores done and supper over as fast as we could, but the autumn days were a lot shorter than summer days were, so it was dark by the time we let Mom and Charlotte Ann off at the church and Dad and Tom and I went on to town to get the extra things the workers at the church would need. When we came driving onto Main Street, I didn’t have any idea that I was going to run into one of the most exciting experiences of my life before we left town.
One of the first places to which Dad drove when we got to town was the produce house, where he was going to sell a gross of eggs. The money from all twelve dozen was to be Mom’s offering, which Dad himself would give for her at the banquet.
The man at the produce house, whose name was Tim Black, bought not only eggs but chickens and ducks and turkeys and even pigeons. I had sold quite a few pigeons there myself when too many had come to live in our barn and, as Dad said, they had been spoiling the hay. Mr. Black also bought all kinds of furs, such as muskrat and coon and skunk, so I had been there with Circus quite a few times.
Just as we were about to pull up to a parking place out in front, somebody in everyday clothes came hurrying out, made a dash toward a battered-looking automobile that was parked down the street, jerked open the door on the driver’s side, plopped himself inside, slammed the door, and started the car. His motor came to life with a noisy roar, and away the oldish-model car went, so fast that I knew if there had been a highway patrolman around, he would have chased after him with his siren shrieking.
I looked quick at Little Tom’s face to see if he had seen what I had seen. That dangerous driver was his own big brother, Bob, and there were half a dozen other rough-looking boys in the car.
The expression on Tom’s face was even worse than the one he had been wearing when he was in the linden tree in the swamp and old Jay had been whooping it up down below. His blue eyes were glued to the crazy-running car, which right that second came to a corner, slowed down with its brakes screeching, turned right on two wheels, and went on.
Dad, who generally drove carefully, slammed on our own brakes so hard that we came to a quicker four-wheel-brakes stop than we usually do. He said in a disgusted voice, “The idiotic fool! No wonder our highways are slaughterhouses. He ought to be reported. Either one of you boys get his number?”
I hadn’t thought of it, so I said, “No.”
Tom, who maybe didn’t want to say what he was thinking, didn’t answer a thing.
We all three went inside the produce house—Tom opening the door for Dad, who was carrying the crate of eggs.
“Well, well, look who’s here,” Mr. Black, a round-faced, round-stomached, fast-talking, friendly man, said to us as he shuffled around the counter to show Dad where to put the eggs. “These both your boys, Theo?” he asked, calling Dad by the name lots of people around Sugar Creek call him.
“Both of them,” Dad said cheerfully and also as if he wished it were so.
I saw Tom Till swallow hard as he looked around at different things in the produce house, such as egg crates and sacks of feed and empty boxes of different kinds.
I also noticed the worried expression on his face, when, a little later, Mr. Black looked at him and asked, “You boys catching any more muskrats? They’re a dollar apiece today.”
There were a lot of different sounds in that produce house: chickens cackling and squawking, now and then a hen singing or a rooster crowing, doors opening and closing in some of the back rooms. Also, somebody had a radio on back there. It was tuned to a gospel program, and a male quartet was singing a song we someti
mes used in church on Sunday: “Throw Out the Life Line.”
The minute Mr. Black said, “You boys catching any more muskrats?” I thought of Circus’s trapline and in my mind’s eye saw somebody in a coonskin cap steal a muskrat and shove it into the blood-proof pocket of his hunter’s coat.
I could hardly hear Little Tom’s voice as he answered Mr. Black’s question about whether he had been catching any more muskrats, meaning, of course, that Tom had been catching some. What he did say wasn’t much of an answer. In fact, it wasn’t even a word but was only a kind of worried grunt that sounded like “Huh-uh,” as he jerked his head no. He started looking around again at the different things in the big room where we were. Then, all of a sudden, he got a frightened look on his face and made a dive along the counter to a high stack of crates near the wall.
At almost the same second, the front door opened. In shuffled a big hook-nosed man with a two-or three-day-old beard on his face. It was Little Tom Till’s father—old John Till himself. He was carrying a gunnysack half full of something that seemed to be alive.
When I saw him, another What on earth? exploded in my mind. He was lurching crazily, as if he had just come from the Sugar Creek Tavern. He staggered up to the counter where Mr. Black was, hoisted the gunnysack up onto it, and said, “Pigeons.”
Pigeons!
That one word went off in my head like a Fourth of July firecracker, and the fastest story I ever thought of raced through my mind like lightning. In my mind’s eye I was back up in our haymow with Little Tom Till. He was shooting baskets and acting sad and also looking all around to see if he could see any pigeons. Maybe he was also looking to see if any of his were there after they had gotten out of his pen, because pigeons around the Sugar Creek farms went from one farmer’s barn to another.
Then it seemed I was seeing old hook-nosed John Till himself going to Tom’s pigeon pen when Tom wasn’t there and catching some of his pigeons and putting them into a sack and bringing them to town to sell. No wonder Tom didn’t have any, and no wonder he had acted as if he didn’t want to talk about it!
But that was only imagination. Right that minute in front of my eyes an actual honest-to-goodness story began to happen so fast I couldn’t think or see straight. Little Tom shot out of his hiding place behind the high stack of boxes like a red-haired arrow and flew straight for the counter where the gunnysack was.
That brought his father to life. He whirled around awkwardly and lunged at Tom, who already had his hands on the sack. But Tom ducked, and he missed him. Tom darted with the sack behind the first high stack of boxes with his angry dad right after him.
John Till was saying with a fierce, mad voice, “You little good-for-nothing runt!”
But the floor had sawdust on it, and old John’s feet slipped. Reaching out to keep himself from falling, he staggered against the boxes and—I saw what was going to happen before it happened, but I couldn’t do a thing to stop it.
That high stack of crates and boxes and stuff started to tip over. It was just like a tall tower of blocks falling onto our living-room floor when Charlotte Ann has socked it with one of her chubby little fists. Those fifteen or more boxes and crates came down with a terrific crash.
The same second, almost, the door to the street opened and closed, and through the glass panel I saw Little Tom with the gunnysack in his hand, just before he darted around behind our car and disappeared.
What on earth? I thought. Only it wasn’t anything on earth but, instead, was a lot of crates and boxes on John Till. Right that minute he was lying on the floor, wriggling and twisting. His arms and legs were working like the feet of a big snapping turtle a boy has turned on its back and it can’t get over on its stomach again.
Such grunting and swearing I had never heard before as John kept on kicking and struggling to get himself out from under what was on him. I was glad Little Jim wasn’t there, because anybody swearing gives him a hurt heart and also sometimes makes him angry enough to fight.
By the time John got to his feet, with Dad and Mr. Black and me helping by getting the boxes off him, his boy was really gone.
“Where’s that good-for-nothing son of mine?” he shouted, swearing at the same time.
Well, that fired up Dad’s temper—he being my father and having the same kind of temper I had. He said with a thundery voice, shaking old John by the collar at the same time, “You’re the one that’s good-for-nothing, John Till!”
But for some reason John Till seemed not to hear what Dad said. Instead, he swayed as though he was going to fall, and he lifted his right hand to his head as if he had a bad headache or had been hurt when he fell and couldn’t think straight.
Then it seemed he forgot why he had come in the first place. Seeing the door, he staggered toward it, mumbling to himself. He yanked it open, lurched through, and started on a crazy man’s walk down the dark street.
7
And now where was John Till going, and where had his red-haired boy with a gunnysack half full of live pigeons already gone?
Thinking what he might do to Tom if he caught him, I said, “Excuse me,” to Dad and hurried out the door after John Till.
As soon as I got outside, I noticed he was about a half block away, pushing along toward the bright lights of Main Street. So I decided first to see if maybe Tom was hiding with his pigeons in the alley beside the produce house.
“Hey, Tom,” I called in a voice that was like a smothered whisper. “Where are you?”
There wasn’t any answer at first. Then I heard the window of our car roll down and Tom whisper back, “In here—in the car.”
And sure enough, he was—in the back with the gunnysack of pigeons on the floor beside him.
Just then Dad came out, and after he had talked quietly to Tom in one of the kindest voices I had ever heard him use, he said, “Don’t you feel too bad, Tom. A man does things when he is drunk that he wouldn’t think of doing if he were sober.”
Tom sobbed out an answer that proved that, even though his father didn’t believe in God, he himself did. “God will have to punish him for being so mean,” he said. “I don’t want that to happen.” Then he really started to cry.
But Dad kept on using a very kind voice, saying, “God would rather change a man’s heart than to punish him. He generally lets people’s sins do the punishing in this life, and He only does that when He has to—when they won’t let Him save them. Almost everybody in the church is praying for your father. And one of these days he will be different.”
Tom Till, not having any handkerchief, rubbed the tears out of his eyes with his fists while Dad put a big hand on his thin shoulder, the way he does to me when he likes me. He said, “You have a very good mother. You know that, don’t you?”
Tom nodded his head up and down, still sniffling. “She’s better than anyone in the whole world.” Hearing him say that made me like him even better than ever.
Then it seemed Tom had all of a sudden decided something. He slid forward on the car seat, opened the door, and slipped out with his sack of pigeons. He hurried with them toward the produce house.
I started to follow him, but Dad stopped me, saying, “Let him go alone. He’ll feel better.”
I watched Tom through the glass door as, just like his father, he hoisted the gunnysack up onto the counter.
Mr. Black opened the bag and took a peek inside. Then, to my surprise, he upended the sack as if he was going to shake out whatever was in it. I thought that was a crazy idea, because then the pigeons would fly out and all over the place.
Then I did get the surprise of my life, because out tumbled not a half-dozen live pigeons but four dead muskrats! They were not even skinned, as fur-bearing animals are supposed to be when you take them to a buyer, but they had their bodies still inside of them, which made it look as if they had just been caught that afternoon.
Not pigeons, but muskrats! No wonder Tom hadn’t wanted his father to sell what was in that sack! No wonder he had made a dive f
or it and grabbed it and darted outside!
Then something else started to happen. Somebody came hurrying down the street from the direction old John Till had gone. It was a tall man wearing a hunter’s coat. He didn’t stagger a bit but walked fast and straight, as though he was in a businesslike hurry. At the produce house door, he stopped, turned the knob, shoved it open, and went inside.
Before I could even start to wonder how John Till could have gotten over being drunk so quickly, Dad let out a surprised whistle and exclaimed, “Why, there’s Dan Browne! What’s he doing in town? He told me this afternoon it’d be a perfect night for hunting, and he was going to start as soon as it was dark. He wanted to give two coons tomorrow night.”
I always like to run lickety-sizzle and throw myself into the center of a whirlwind when it spirals out across our barnyard. And when Circus’s dad went whizzing through that open door into the center of what could be a lot of trouble for Tom Till, I was out of our car like a shot and across the sidewalk and inside the room where, only a few minutes before, Little Tom’s father had been lying under a pile of boxes and crates. I was carrying a whirlwind in my mind as I went.
When Dan Browne saw those four brown muskrats on the counter, he stopped stock-still and stood and stared as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Then he looked at Tom and asked surprisedly, “Why hello, Tom. You been catching some muskrats?”
The feeling in my mind was almost terrible as I realized that Little Tom Till himself was caught in a trap and wouldn’t be able to get away. What kind of answer could he give? I myself, with my own eyes, had seen him take one of those muskrats out of Dan Browne’s boy’s trap that very afternoon. Would he tell the truth, or would he try to lie out of it? I found out a second later when Tom looked all around and stammered, “I–ah–yes–er–no–no sir! I mean—”
His sentence got interrupted then by the ringing of the cash register bell as Mr. Black pushed down on several keys and a drawer flew open. He said to Tom, “That’s four dollars.” He counted out four one-dollar bills onto the counter.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 42