Tom gulped as his blue eyes stared at the money.
Poor little guy! I thought. He’s really caught in a trap. And it seemed I could hear two voices talking in my mind. One of them was Big Jim’s and the other Circus’s. Big Jim’s voice was saying, “You shall not steal!” and Circus’s was answering, “The Bible also tells us to love everybody.”
But in the produce house, Circus’s dad’s big friendly voice surprised me by saying, “Congratulations, Tom. I hope you catch a lot more. My boy and I haven’t been doing so well this year, but maybe we’ll catch a few coon tonight. Weather will be perfect if it doesn’t get too foggy.” He was talking to Mr. Black when he finished. “The humidity and the temperature are just right.”
Tom was still looking at the four dollar bills as if he couldn’t decide what to do about them. Then he absolutely astonished me by saying politely to Mr. Black, “Thank you very much.” He picked up the money, folded it, and looked all around as though he thought somebody might be watching. Seeing me, he let out a great big heavy sigh and said, “Let’s go,” and started toward the door.
I got to the door first, opened it for him, and we went outside together.
Through the glass panel of the produce house door I could see Circus’s dad talking to Mr. Black about something. And even though I was sure I knew what it was, I wished I could have heard it.
As Dad turned the car around and headed for Main Street, I was all mixed up in my mind. I wanted to believe Tom was an honest boy, yet the muskrat I had seen him take with my own eyes that afternoon and the four dollar bills he had in his pocket right that minute proved he was a thief. Didn’t it? I was glad, though, that Tom’s drinking father didn’t get the money, because, if he had, the owner of the Sugar Creek Tavern would have had most of it before midnight.
Sad as I felt inside, Little Tom Till must have felt worse. He not only had the four dollars for the stolen muskrats in his pocket, but he had to leave town knowing his father was drunk and maybe would have to spend part of the night in jail.
Dad drove down Main Street toward LaRue’s Grocery, where he was going to stop to get some things for Mom and also for the committee that was working at the church. The only place we could find to park was right in front of the tavern, and that is where Tom and I were ten minutes later when Circus’s dad come hurrying down the street in his hunter’s coat just as he had before at the produce house. At the tavern he stopped, pushed the door open partway, and looked in.
Looking through the car windshield at the same time, I saw what he probably saw: blue gray smoke as thick as a fog in the Sugar Creek swamp, a lot of noisy men standing at the long bar, and a few women.
Something inside of me made my blood boil. I remembered that Dan Browne used to spend a lot of time in there himself but didn’t anymore since God had pulled the jimson-weeds out of his heart.
Then, like a flash, Mr. Browne opened the door all the way and went in.
What on earth!
The door went shut, and I couldn’t see in any longer. But I didn’t need to even start to worry. A minute later the door opened again, and two men came out—one of them Circus’s dad and the other Tom Till’s dad, who acted as if he didn’t want to come. At the same time, Tom, beside me, dropped down onto the floor of the car so that he wouldn’t be seen. I could see that his father was very drunk and wouldn’t have been able to see Tom anyway.
And probably he was too drunk to understand what I heard Circus’s dad say: “I know what I am talking about, John. I have been through it. It is a life of terrible slavery, but the Lord can set you free. He saved me one night last summer, and I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since—haven’t even wanted any.”
Old John tried to break away. He stumbled over his own feet and would have fallen if Dan Browne hadn’t held him up.
“Jesus Christ is more powerful than liquor, John, if only you will give Him a chance.”
But the gospel Mr. Browne was pouring into John Till’s ears was like rain on a duck’s back—the duck never gets wet. John shrugged himself loose and staggered back toward the tavern door and a second later was inside again.
Pretty soon Dad came back with Mom’s groceries, and away the three of us went, out of town and following the foggy country road to the church. Without knowing it, I was also on the way toward a fistfight in which I was going to get the living daylights knocked out of me.
8
We hadn’t any sooner reached the churchyard than, by looking at the different cars parked there, I discovered that Poetry’s and Little Jim’s parents were there, too, and a lot of other grown-ups.
Everybody was working to get the basement ready for tomorrow night. They were doing such things as setting up long tables, putting strips of white paper on them instead of tablecloths, hanging different-colored crepe paper at the windows, and placing a few evergreens over the door and other places.
I noticed they had moved the piano to the north end, where it could be seen and heard best, and I remembered that Little Jim was going to play a solo and Circus was going to sing. They were the best musicians in the Sugar Creek Gang, and Poetry and I were the worst. Poetry sang in a voice that was half like a boy’s and half like a man’s—and sometimes like a duck with a bad cold.
In the kitchen there were about a hundred new plates and that many cups and saucers. The church board had bought a whole new set of dishes with that many in it. They had to be washed and dried before they could be used—although, when I looked at them, they certainly looked nice and clean. I suppose, though, that all the Sugar Creek mothers were like the one that lived at our house, who always wanted to wash everything every so often whether it looked as if it needed it or not.
I hadn’t been there more than three minutes before I noticed that the Sugar Creek mothers were seeing to it that the Sugar Creek fathers were doing quite a lot of the work, which at home they hardly knew how to do at all. Right away, also, they began to see to it that four of the Sugar Creek Gang members helped a little, which Poetry and I actually did for a while.
Pretty soon, though, it seemed the two of us weren’t enjoying the work as much as we were supposed to. And a little later, a poem Poetry had been learning, which was funny and also which he was supposed to quote tomorrow night, spoiled everything, and we had to quit helping. He quoted it to me secretly, when nobody was able to hear except me, and this is what part of it was:
A husband who despises housework,
Yet sometimes has to help his spouse work,
Can sometimes gain a quick acquittal
By getting in the way a little.
After I’d heard the poem, for some reason it seemed that there were two too many people in the basement.
Almost right away, Mom stopped me from awkwardly stumbling around and whispered, “Why don’t you boys go outside for a breath of fresh air?”
Almost before she had finished saying it, Poetry’s mother said the same thing to him in different words. And because it seemed a good idea, pretty soon the two of us were outside getting all the fresh air we wanted.
Little Jim was inside at the piano, practicing something, and Tom Till was watching and listening to him. Maybe they didn’t need fresh air as badly as Poetry and I did, and somehow they weren’t in the way, anyway.
I noticed that it was a little foggier than it had been when we came. Almost as soon as Poetry and I had taken a half-dozen breaths of the nice, damp, foggy air, we decided we were thirsty. So we went across the road to the consolidated school to get a drink of water at the iron pump there. It was the same kind of pump we had at our own school two miles farther out in the country.
Of course, we could have used the pump at the side door of the church, but the water in the schoolhouse pump might be better, we thought, since it was farther away from where the work was.
“Hey!” Poetry exclaimed when we got there and he was shining his flashlight onto the pump. “Somebody’s taken the handle off!”
And that’s what s
omebody had done.
“Maybe it broke, and they had to take it off to get it fixed,” I suggested.
We were still thirsty. We decided to go back to the church pump. We were halfway there when a pair of headlights swung into the church driveway. Then a noisy car came to a stop beside the big locust tree near the church steps, which is where we were at the time, and it was Dan Browne. He wanted to see Dad about something.
I went into the overcrowded basement to get Dad, and when I came back I had a chance to hear what he and Mr. Browne talked about. It was about Little Tom Till’s father.
“We won’t give up on him,” Circus’s father said. “I prayed for him all week, hoping to get him to come tomorrow night. I thought maybe if I could take him hunting with me tonight and let him see what a difference being a Christian had made in me, I could win his confidence. But somebody got to him with a drink first, and you know what that means. You know what it used to mean to me before the Lord turned me inside out and made me a new man.”
Mr. Browne sighed and then went on. “I’m afraid he’ll have to suffer awhile before he wakes up. ‘Whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.’”
“Poor Mrs. Till,” Dad said.
For a few seconds after that, nobody said anything. Then Dan Browne changed his tone of voice and asked, “How soon’ll you be through here? It’s a perfect night for coon.”
Dad answered with a sigh. That meant he was probably wishing he could be in the way a little too much, since he liked to go coon hunting almost as much as he liked to hold Charlotte Ann on his lap and coo over her. But he knew he’d have to stay until the mothers were through, so he said, “I’m afraid it’ll be another hour—a half hour, anyway. Where are you going to hunt first? Maybe I could meet you somewhere—say at Seneth Paddler’s cabin, if you’re going down the creek.”
They decided that was a good idea.
That gave me a still better idea, and it was that Poetry and I could both go right now. If we stayed here and tried to help with the work, we would be in the way, anyhow. Just talking about coon hunting reminded me of the afternoon’s chase, and my blood was still tingling with excitement over it. It seemed a shame that the bluetick had had to give up on the coon whose trail his nose had lost in the swamp.
Poetry’s father didn’t like the idea very well at first, and both our mothers didn’t. But when Mom found out that Dad himself thought it was all right—and that we would all meet at Old Man Paddler’s a little later—she let me go. She told me I would have to stop at our house first, though, to change into some old clothes, which I was glad to promise to do, being willing to do almost anything to get to go. Poetry already had on his overalls and old shoes and his second-best jacket, which his mother said he could wear if he would be careful with it.
Boy oh boy! To go galloping through the night behind the best pair of coonhounds that ever lived! It was a wonderful feeling that got half squelched almost right away when I found out that Poetry and I could hunt only until Dad and Mr. Thompson could get through here and meet us at Old Man Paddler’s cabin. Then we would have to go on home and get our sleep.
“Growing boys need ten hours every night,” Poetry’s mother said, but it was just as bad as if my own mother had said it. It meant the same thing.
“As soon as we get through here,” Dad said to Mr. Browne, “we’ll take our wives home and drop Tom off at his house. And then, look out, Mr. Coon!” Dad’s voice was filled with as much happiness as if he were only ten years old and ready to start for a circus.
Right that second I heard Tom Till’s voice pipe up behind us, saying, “I’d better go now. Mother might be afraid to stay alone.”
I jumped as if I had been shot, because his being there in the dark behind us meant he had probably heard everything Dad and Mr. Browne had said about his parents!
“Sure,” Circus’s father answered him, “we’ll drive you home right now.”
Little Jim found out what was going on, but his parents decided he couldn’t go because he had on his best clothes, and it’d hold up the hunt if we had to wait for him to stop at his house and change.
So in a little while, Poetry and Tom Till and I drove away with Mr. Browne in his car. It must have seemed wonderful to our parents that they could let us go with him and not have to worry about us being in bad company, as they would have a year ago.
On the way we had to cross Wolf Creek bridge. We also had to stop there because there was a shock of corn standing right in the center of it!
“What on earth!” I said out loud.
Circus’s dad answered, “Halloween.”
“But Halloween’s not till tomorrow night,” I said, and so did Poetry.
But Little Tom Till, sitting beside Poetry in the backseat, didn’t say a word. He did get out and help us get the shock of corn off the bridge and out into the side ditch, though, but all the time he kept on not saying a word.
“Boys will be boys,” Circus’s dad said. “I hope they don’t do any serious damage to anybody’s property.”
I hoped so, too, but it didn’t look as if I was going to be right. Several more times we had to stop to get the road unblocked, and whoever had done it had used somebody’s farmyard gate or part of a fence to do it each time.
I was just boiling inside. I thought I knew who it was. The farther we drove, and the more pranks we ran into, the more I realized that Tom Till wasn’t the only one who was caught in a trap. There was another red-haired, freckle-faced boy caught, too, in a different kind of a trap. Little Jim’s mother’s idea—that if the members of the Sugar Creek Gang were at the father-and-son banquet on Halloween night, we wouldn’t get the blame for a lot of nonsensical things that some nonsensical vandals would do—well, it was a good idea. But she probably hadn’t figured on what Big Bob Till and his gang would try to do to get even with our gang for having licked the stuffings out of them last summer in the Battle of Bumblebee Hill.
Bob and the rough-looking boys that had been with him at the produce house an hour or two ago were probably running wild all over the countryside tonight—the night before Halloween—taking gates off their hinges, setting up roadblocks, and who knew what else? And tomorrow our gang would get the blame for it!
But there was something even more worrisome than that on my mind, and it was Little Tom Till’s being a thief. All the time as we drove along, getting farther and farther out into the country and nearer and nearer our house, I was thinking about what I had seen happen along the bayou that afternoon—and the four dollar bills that Tom Till had in his pocket right that minute as he sat behind me beside Poetry in the backseat.
In my mind’s ear, also, I was hearing old Jay bawling on Little Tom’s trail, getting closer and closer to him and finally treeing him, and—well, how could Tom do such a thing? How could he? He didn’t seem that kind of boy at all.
Pretty soon we came to Dragonfly’s house and crossed the little culvert at the foot of the last hill before you get to our place. There we ran into a fog bank so thick we had to slow to almost nothing so that we could see the road and not run off into the ditch.
At the top of the hill, the fog cleared a little, and in a little while we were stopping beside our mailbox. Poetry and I would go in, and I would change clothes.
Tom came tumbling out of the car after us, saying, “I’ll get out here and walk the rest of the way.”
He started to run, instead, down the road and toward the corner where it turns north and goes on toward the bridge. He only stayed on the road a few seconds, though. When he came to the place where the gang nearly always climbed over the fence to take the shortcut to the spring and the bridge, he made a dive for it, crawled through, and broke into a run to get home as fast as he could.
I knew that Tom knew the territory pretty well. He would not get lost even on a foggy night, which right that minute wasn’t nearly as foggy as it had been. A second later I knew he could find his way.
“Hey!” I exclaimed to Poetry. “He’
s got a flashlight! I didn’t know he had a flashlight!”
Poetry beside me giggled and said, “It’s mine. I put the idea into his head so we could get started hunting quicker.”
And that was another that. “You’re almost bright,” I answered.
“I’ll get on home and get Circus and the dogs,” Mr. Browne said, “and we’ll be back right away. Circus’ll be wondering what happened to me. I’m afraid the dogs will be getting impatient.”
And away he went. It’d probably take him only ten or fifteen minutes, but we might not get to hunt long before we’d have to stop.
Poetry and I hurried across our moonlit lawn toward the house, and, being still thirsty, we stopped at the iron pitcher pump.
“Hey!” Poetry startled me with a yelp. “Some vandals have been here too!”
And sure enough, the handle of our pump was wired tightly to the rest of it with baling wire. The wire was wrapped round and round a dozen times. Well, that set my temper to boiling again, but there wasn’t a thing I could do except to let it boil.
I got the kitchen-door key out of the secret place where we always kept it when we were away from home, and pretty soon Poetry and I were in the house. We didn’t bother to take time to light any lamps but got Dad’s long flashlight out of the cabinet drawer. Then we went upstairs to my room, where I had left my everyday clothes.
I had just stepped out of my Sunday pants and was about to step into my overalls when Poetry whispered excitedly, “I hear somebody outside!”
I quickly looked out the open window, not having remembered to shut it, as you are supposed to whenever you leave home—so that if it rains, you won’t get your house all wet inside.
And Poetry was right. There was a noise like somebody doing something down by our barn near the load of high-nitrogen hay, which in the foggy moonlight was only a big rectangular shadow.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 43