“Oh, is that so!” I said up to him. My overalls were all splashed up, and the cuffs, which I had rolled up, were soaking wet where I’d stepped into a hole in my mad race to help him get his cow out of the branch and up onto the road and across the bridge where he wanted her.
And that boy looked down at me from his dry standing place and said, “Yes, that’s so! You’re the same kind of impulsive boy you used to be!”
Then from behind me, I heard another boy’s voice saying angrily, “Oh, is that so! Well, I want you to know that Bill Collins is my best friend, and whoever insults him insults me.”
Shorty’s broad face looked from Poetry to me and back again to Poetry.
I saw that Poetry’s eyebrows were down and his jaw was set, and I could tell he was really mad.
Then Shorty shrugged his shoulders twice in a way that would stir up the temper of even Little Jim himself or maybe Dragonfly, who was sometimes slow to get angry. He said saucily, “You two hotheads better go on back to the creek and finish your fishing.” Then he spied our big catfish, which Poetry had on his stringer, and said, “Oh, a bullpout! Well, what do you know? Didn’t you ever see a bull pout before? Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Then he whirled and started off toward the bridge.
That fired Poetry’s imagination as well as his temper, and he shouted after him:
“I never saw a purple cow—I never hope
to see one;
But I can tell you anyhow, I’d rather see
than be one.”
And that fired Shorty’s temper. He stood stock-still and shouted back at Poetry:
“You are a poet, and don’t know it;
If you had whiskers, you’d be a go-at.”
Then that short-tempered boy whirled again and went on toward the branch bridge, waddling along as though he was very proud of himself as well as disgusted with two very ordinary boys who, when they went fishing, couldn’t catch anything more important than an ugly, slimy bullpout.
And that was our introduction to Shorty Long’s blue cow! Also, it was the beginning of a lot of upsetting trouble for the whole Sugar Creek Gang but especially for Theodore Collins’s only son.
I knew that one of the very first things the gang would have to do would be to call a meeting to decide what we’d better do about having the peace and quiet of our neighborhood interrupted. Something would have to be done—and done quick.
3
Poetry and I decided that, since it was sup-pertime, we ought to go on home as soon as we could so that our parents wouldn’t worry about us being drowned, and come after us.
I wasn’t worried about my wet overall legs, because they had gotten wet while I was working for a good cause. Actually, it wasn’t so good, but my parents were smart enough to understand.
The only thing was, Mom had made a new rule at our house. It was that if I used a towel without washing myself carefully first, I had to wash the towel, and that rule had solved a five-year-long problem for her. She had another rule, too, and that was that if I got my overalls or other clothes soiled by being careless, I got to wash them too—free!
Sometimes when I got through washing the towel or my shirt or other clothes, though, they were almost worse than they had been, and I got to wash them over, taking a little more time and soap than I had the first time.
But, as I said, this time my soiled overalls weren’t what was bothering me as I carried the great big catfish on Poetry’s stringer up the dusty road toward my house. The thing that was making me make a face a boy shouldn’t make was one other thing Shorty had yelled back to us just before he crossed the bridge. It was:
“You may not like my cow, but you’ll get to see plenty of her before the summer is over. We’ve rented pasture for her in the woods right across from where the red-haired Collins boy lives.”
Imagine that! Why, there never had been even a horse pasturing in that woods! Old Man Paddler, who owned it, had sort of kept it just for boys to play in. Anyway, that’s the way it seemed to the gang. The only animals that had ever been in it were squirrels and cottontail rabbits and chipmunks and flying squirrels and possums and coons and skunks. And now and then a fox. And once a big black bear, which Little Jim had shot. But to have a wild-eyed blue cow running loose in that woods would spoil it!
Poetry and I hadn’t tried to finish untangling our lines. Because we had both been mad at Shorty and because we liked each other a lot, Poetry had made me take the catfish, saying, “It was probably your extralarge, wriggling fish-worm bait he took first, anyway. He had your hook swallowed clear down into his stomach, and mine was only hooked a little bit into his upper lip.”
When he told me that, I was proud of my idea to put on those six long, wriggling worms.
And, of course, Poetry was right: that big channel cat—for that’s what it was, now that I
had caught it—had seen that octopus-like bait coming down toward him from the surface of the water above him. And he had said, “Oh boy! What a supper!” He had made a dive for it and swallowed it in one gulp. Almost the same second, he had seen Poetry’s small, scrawny-looking worm lying there in the mud or sand or on a weed and had decided to have it for dessert. Then—well, you know the rest of that story.
At supper, Mom and Dad and Charlotte Ann listened to me tell the story. I had on dry overalls—my others were hanging outdoors on the line, not being soiled enough to have to be washed but only needing drying. If it hadn’t been for Shorty Long and his wild blue cow, we’d have been a happy family.
The radio in the other room was making a lot of unnecessary noise, so I had to get up and go turn it off so they could hear my story better. And there, as I looked out the front window, I saw Shorty and his round-fronted father with two ropes fastened to a blue cow’s halter!
They were being dragged along by her up the road past our house toward the wooden gate to the woods, which was up the road by the two hickory trees. They’d gotten her out of Poetry’s dad’s woods, and it was going to be just as Shorty had said—they were going to put her into the pasture across from the Collins boy’s house.
I turned up the radio volume control till the music was deafening and Mom and Dad made a parently noise in the kitchen for me to turn it down. Then I turned it all the way off and went back to finish my kind of half-mad story about Poetry and the catfish and the blue cow.
“I congratulate you,” Dad said right in the middle of my story. But being interrupted made me feel the way Mom feels sometimes when she is sewing and her needle comes unthreaded. She lets out an impatient sigh that sounds a little bit like Mixy when she hisses at a dog. I’d seen and heard Mom do it quite a few times.
“Should you sigh so disgustedly?” Dad asked.
I answered, “My needle came unthreaded.”
He laughed and said with a joking voice, “You mean the arch under the bridge is the needle’s eye, and the cow is the thread, and—”
“Theodore!” Mom cut in on him. “Let him finish.”
So I did by telling them I didn’t appreciate having Shorty call me an impulsive boy, even if maybe I was a little bit. Besides, I wasn’t exactly sure what the word meant. It sounded like an insult.
“You’re only impulsive at times,” Mom said. “You generally think things through before you act.”
“And afterward,” Dad remarked.
I looked up from my plate of raw-fried potatoes into his gray green eyes under the shaggy, reddish brown brows that hung over his eyes like a grassy ledge on a high bank of the branch. He had a mischievous twinkle in them, so I controlled my temper and went on eating.
We had already had the blessing at the table, which we always have before we eat, sometimes doing it silently, each one of us just thinking his own prayer. So I was surprised to hear Mom say, just as we were getting ready to eat a raisin rice pudding dessert with cream on it, “I think we ought to pray about our attitudes, that we’ll not make it any harder for the Longs to become Christians than it would have been if they
never had met us.”
I already had my spoon filled with pudding and had it halfway to my mouth when Dad answered, “Let’s do it right now, then, before we forget it.”
We’d done it like that before at our table but not very often, and for some reason it seemed they were wanting to pray about Bill Collins’s attitudes—that he wouldn’t hate Shorty Long and do or say something my impulsive nature oughtn’t do or say.
Only Dad did the out loud praying, and I guess what he said had a little to do with the rest of what happened in this mixed-up, rough-and-tumble story.
I was thinking about things a half hour later when I was out in the barn gathering eggs and helping with the other chores.
“Hi, old Bentcomb!” I said to my favorite white leghorn hen. I noticed she was still on her nest under the log in the haymow. “Haven’t you laid your egg yet? Don’t you know all the other hens have already started for their roosts in the chicken house?”
I went over to see if she had laid her egg, and swish! Peck! Peck! Peck! Her sharp bill darted out three or four times like a snapping turtle’s head, pecking me hard on the hand, and she acted as fussy as an old setting hen.
“Oh, you do, do you? You want to set? You want to go clucking around the barnyard with a whole flock of fluffy little white chickens cheeping along behind you! Well, what do you know?”
Old Bentcomb got a fussy idea like that nearly every spring.
I felt under her, and she had laid her egg all right. So I said to her, “I’ll tell Mom, and she’ll give you a whole nestful of eggs in a cute little house all your own up by the orchard fence beside a lot of other old lady hens.”
I decided to leave the one egg so she wouldn’t feel like somebody that is sewing and the needle has come unthreaded. But I thought maybe I ought to stroke her on the back of her neck just to let her know she was still my favorite hen.
I did, and swish! Again I got pecked really hard, which made me sigh impatiently at her and say, “Don’t be so impulsive!”
And that’s when I remembered part of Dad’s prayer. As I got the pitchfork and threw down several forkfuls of hay, I seemed to hear him saying, “We know that Peter, one of Your best disciples, was impatient at times. Yet You loved him and made a great man out of him. And we know he also loved You,”
I never would forget that part of what Dad had said. And as I stopped for a minute to look back at Bentcomb, I said, “I still like you even if you did hurt me.” And it seemed I ought to be careful not to hurt the One who made me by doing or saying something I shouldn’t.
Then I went down the ladder and up to the house to put some Merthiolate on my henpecked hand and to tell Mom to be extranice to such an impatient farmyard fowl.
Night finally came. As I finished undressing and took a look out the south window of my upstairs room, it seemed wonderful to be alive. Spring had been here quite a while, and summer was coming fast, and everybody in our family liked everybody else in it, which is the best way for a family to go to bed at night, with everybody forgiven by everybody.
The moon was making our farm and garden look as if it was painted with silver paint. The weather was just right for growing Mom’s tulips in their own bed that stretched from near the iron pitcher pump about ten or fifteen feet toward the plum tree. They had looked wonderful all day, every time I had looked at them. The onions and sweet corn and beans and peas in their rows in the garden certainly looked pretty, too, I thought. But I was almost too sleepy to appreciate them, and I knew that a certain boy would have to do a lot of work on them or they’d get smothered in weeds in no time.
Away out across the top of Old Red Addie’s house, Dad’s clover field, beside which we were putting up a fence to protect it from the stock, was as smooth as a green lake, like the kind we had seen up North on one of our vacations. That clover would be knee-high in another month, and we’d have to cut it and put it up for hay.
Dad certainly was an interesting farmer, I thought. He was always trying some new kind of crop we’d never had before. Ladino clover was the kind he had out in the field, the kind that—and then, wham! Just like that, an impulsive thought socked me and kind of scared me for a second.
The thought was: We’d better get that fence finished as soon as possible. If we didn’t, somebody’s blue cow might ignore the two strands of wire we had stretched along the side of it now, and we’d wake up some morning to find half the field trampled and that same blue cow’s paunch puffed up as big as a three-foot-wide balloon!
I was still sleepy though, and pretty soon I was lying on Mom’s nice fresh white sheets, and pretty soon after that it was a nice sunshiny morning.
One of the first things I did, as soon as I got a chance that first day after meeting Shorty and his cow friend, was to look up in Dad’s dictionary two new words I had learned yesterday. One of them was impulsive, and that meant “having the power of driving or impelling; easily excited to sudden action.”
So, I thought, that’s what Shorty Long thinks I am—easily excited to sudden action! Well, I knew somebody’s wild-eyed cow that was impulsive, too!
I wasn’t sure about the other half of the meaning of impulsive, though—the half that said “the power of driving.” I’d tried to drive Shorty’s cow out of the branch and up a hill and, instead, had driven her through a needle’s eye and a rusty wire fence and out into the woods!
I turned in the dictionary back to the A’s and found the word attitude, which I was supposed to be careful of. And the dictionary said “state of mind, behavior.” Well, when a boy stirs you all up inside and makes you impulsive, how can you be sure you can behave yourself?
Anyway, I decided to watch myself all day, if I could.
The gang was supposed to meet at two o’clock at the Black Widow Stump above the spring—all of us who could—but I worked around the place all morning, helping Dad with the posthole digging, hoeing in the garden, and especially helping Mom get old Bent-comb out of the haymow and into her coop by the orchard fence. I had to wear gloves to do that, because she was as cross as anything.
I eased her up to the small door in the front of the coop and let her look the situation over. It certainly was an inviting nest, with all those pretty white leghorn eggs in a round straw-lined nest just waiting for her.
I think Bentcomb must have imagined herself with fifteen little white fluffy chicks following her around, because, after she had looked for a while, she slowly started to move in, lifting each foot carefully and stepping in as if she was walking on eggs. Then she settled herself down, facing the door, and fluffed out her wings till she was twice as wide as usual. And then she looked back out at me as much as to say, “There, Bill Collins! Try to get me off this nest, and see what you get.”
I didn’t try it, of course, but I thought—since she was my favorite hen friend—I ought to say something nice to her. So I said, “Goodbye, madam, I’ll see you again in three weeks. I congratulate you, and I wish you the best of success.”
Of course, she might not get to be the mother of more than nine or ten chickens, but that would be the eggs’ fault and not hers. Also, it wouldn’t actually be good-bye for three whole weeks, because every day Mom let our setting hens off their nests for exercise and to eat and to get a little change. Sometimes, though, they were stubborn and didn’t want to leave the coop when she wanted them to, and she had to use force.
And when they did get off, were they ever impulsive! They were no sooner out of their coops than they spread their wings and half flew and half ran, like a storm of excited feathers, out across the barnyard, squawking and cackling and flapping their wings, trying to get all their exercise at once. Then they’d rush to whatever water or food they could find and would drink and eat as if they were half starved to death.
To give old Bentcomb a last word of encouragement, I reached in to stroke her on the back of the neck again, and wham! Six sharp pecks landed in fast succession, hurting like everything. I drew back, quicker than scat, looking at my ha
nd and exclaiming to her impulsively, “I certainly don’t like your attitude!”
Two o’clock finally came, and I had finished the last piece of work my parents wanted me to do before it was time to meet the gang. The folks always tried to cooperate with the gang whenever they could. I would have only two hours, though, they told me.
It was like being let off a nestful of leghorn eggs, the way I shot out of our house and across the yard toward our mailbox, across the road, over the fence, and onto the path that leads to the spring. I was even imagining myself to be an old setting hen. I was flapping my arms with my powerful biceps and cackling and squawking and feeling wonderful to be alive.
Would any of the rest of the gang get there first? And would anything interesting happen during the afternoon? Also, what would we decide to do about Shorty Long and his blue cow?
4
For some reason I was the first one to get to the spring. While I was waiting, I decided to take a peek at several birds’ nests I had found the week before. One of them was a bulky nest made of bark, leaves, and grass. It was hidden in one of the evergreens that bordered the rail fence between the woods and the bayou.
I crept up cautiously, hoping to find Mama Cardinal on her nest of several pale gray eggs with chocolate markings. Sure enough, she was. She was not as beautiful as her bright red, black-throated husband, but she was pretty. She was more of a grayish brown, although her kind of proud-looking head was red like her wings and tail.
I stood stock-still when I saw her, not moving a muscle, not even flexing my biceps as I had been doing more or less all morning and afternoon. I stood there, poised like a pointer dog that has just discovered a covey of quail.
One of the prettiest sounds a boy ever hears around Sugar Creek is a cardinal in a tree somewhere whistling a cheery “Cheo-cheo-chehoo-cheo.” I was hoping I would hear one any minute, which would mean that the mother cardinal’s husband was somewhere around. But he was probably busy or else was high in a tree watching me to see if I would be dumb enough to scare his wife off her nest.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 49