That’s when Circus, our acrobat, went into action. Like an arrow, he was down the incline on the other side, and as quick as a cowboy racing to a cow he has lassoed, he was down there with his cow lead open. Catching her with his left hand by one of her horns, he was struggling to snap the lead into her nostrils.
“Help me, one of you guys!” he cried back up to us. “I can’t hold her!”
Big Jim ran to help. He was down that incline like another arrow, and in a flash they had that cow lead snapped into her nostrils. They got one of the ropes off her halter and snapped into the ring in the lead’s handle.
And Shorty’s wild cow was in captivity.
5
It took me almost a week to get over the excitement of that one afternoon. Shorty’s cow never did get over it. If she had been afraid to go down that hill to get her drinking water before, she was more than ever scared after that experience.
Our problem was solved as far as her making a barnyard out of our nice cool resting place was concerned, but how to get water for her was another problem. We couldn’t let her die of thirst.
And that’s why, because I lived right across the road from her pasture, I borrowed one of Mom’s oldest washtubs and set it just inside her fence straight across the road from our mailbox in the shade of an elderberry bush. Every morning and night I carried a pail of water or two from our iron pitcher pump and poured it into the tub for her to drink. Shorty let me do it without even bothering to say thank you.
Of course, we couldn’t leave Circus’s cow lead in her nose or she would be too nervous and wouldn’t give much milk—which she didn’t anyway for almost a week after such an exciting experience.
Poetry got his minnow net untangled all right. It wasn’t hurt much—just torn in a few places. And as the spring days raced along, we had lots of fun with it, seining and wading in the branch and actually catching several large bass, using minnows for bait.
If Shorty’s blue cow had only showed a little appreciation for all I was doing for her, I’d have felt better about it. But her attitude was anything but polite. I kept on carrying water for her and alfalfa for her to eat, and she had so much bluegrass all day long that you’d have thought she would have been a contented cow. But she wasn’t.
She was still wild. Whenever any of us got anywhere near her in the woods, she would lift her horned head, spread her blue, hair-fringed ears wide, and stare. Then, like a deer, she would wheel and dash, with her tail switching over her back, into the bushes. And it didn’t make any difference what bushes. Wild rosebushes with pretty flowers on them got trampled, chokecherry shrubs got knocked down and smashed into the ground, and even the ground under our papaw bushes, which she used as a hiding place to get away from the flies, began to look like a barnyard.
Our playground was really being spoiled.
But Shorty himself was our worst trouble. Again, he made a special friend out of Dragonfly, and it was kind of like a big hen with one little spindle-legged chicken following her wherever she went.
I overheard them talking one day when they were alone, and what they were saying made me feel sad and mad at the same time. My temper had been under pretty good control up until then, and I was living up to Big Jim’s rule—no fighting. But it certainly didn’t feel good to realize that our gang was being divided, not only by Shorty’s making a close pal out of Dragonfly but by his almost making a bad boy out of him.
I happened to be alone down at the mouth of the branch at the time, waiting for Poetry to come and fish with me as he had before. I’d had six or seven or maybe eight fishing worms wrapping themselves around the shank of my hook for maybe thirty minutes and hadn’t had even a nibble.
Poetry would be there pretty soon, I thought, and then we would seine a few minnows, and maybe we could tempt a bass or a goggle-eye or something.
That’s when, all of a sudden, I heard somebody giggle in the bushes behind me. I knew it was Dragonfly’s voice—especially since right that second I heard him sneeze. And then I heard Shorty start talking about stuff a boy as young as Dragonfly shouldn’t even know about. It was like somebody pouring melted garbage into my ears, and I really fired up. (That was another rule of the gang. We never used any filthy language or laughed at anybody’s dirty jokes if we happened to overhear any.)
What Shorty had said was something about one of Circus’s many sisters, the one named Lucille. She was the one who would smile back at me across the schoolroom. She wouldn’t make fun of me if for some reason—when she was around—I strengthened my biceps by chinning myself with my sleeves rolled up to my shoulders or turned a handspring and accidentally bumped my nose on the ground.
Well, when I heard Shorty’s voice saying what he was saying, and I knew who he was saying it about, and hearing Dragonfly giggle as if he himself thought it was funny, well, my long cane fishing pole with its strong line and its wriggling night crawlers on its hook went ker-splash into the water. I didn’t even take time to set the pole.
I scrambled to my feet, every nerve in my body alive with temper, and every drop of blood in my veins tingling. I started on a firm-footed march toward the big elm tree behind which I guessed the boys were.
In seconds I was where they were lying on the mashed-down bluegrass. With my two fists so tight the knuckles were white, I looked down at Shorty and demanded, “You—you low-minded, foulmouthed skunk! Say that again!” My voice was trembling, I noticed, but it wasn’t from fear.
“It’s the truth!” he said, and he was over on his side and up on his knees and his feet in a flash.
And the rule about no fighting was broken into a thousand pieces.
My right arm shot out, and, with the hardest-knuckled fist I ever had, I socked him right in the center of his jaw. I saw his head jerk back, his eyes go glassy, and his knees buckle, and he went down like a cornstalk that has been run over by a spring-toothed harrow.
He landed in a tangled-up scramble of arms and legs and groaned and lay still.
Dragonfly looked at him with his pop-eyes and cried, “You—you’ve killed him! You’ve killed him!”
I was down on my knees beside Shorty in a second, trembling with temper and fear, feeling proud that I could hit so hard but also feeling sorry. It took me only a second more to see that he was still breathing.
I quickly grabbed up Dragonfly’s straw hat, which was lying there, raced to the branch, and came back with it full of water—half full, that is, because of most of it had leaked through the straw as though the hat was a sieve. I started sprinkling it on Shorty’s face, and in almost no time he came to, groaning and complaining and holding his jaw and his head.
“I’ve got a headache!” he said. “Oh—” And he groaned and rolled over and doubled up as if he also had cramps from having eaten too many green grapes or apples or something.
Just then I heard running steps, and Poetry’s voice called from the creek behind me, “Where are you? You’ve got a fish on your line! Come and get him!”
Realizing Shorty wasn’t injured—not seriously, anyway—I yelled to Poetry, “I’m back here. I just landed a big one. Come and help me!”
“You come and catch the one on your line!” Poetry called. “I can’t hold him.”
“A fish in the bushes is worth two in the creek!” I cried back to him. But then, looking down at Shorty’s disgusting-looking face and the mouth out of which so many slimy words had come, I pitied him—not because I had licked him with one powerful sock but because of the kind of mind he had.
Behind me at the creek I could hear Poetry struggling, and I knew I’d rather be with him catching the fish he said was on my line. But I couldn’t go just yet. I had something more important to do.
“Get up!” I ordered Shorty, standing there with my doubled-up fists and my bent elbows ready to plunge into another fight if I had to. “I said, get up!” I ordered him again.
He rolled over two or three times in the direction of the branch, and then, with his eyes on me the way a
rooster in a fight looks at another rooster that has been licking him, he got to his feet.
With my feet carefully easing me and my flexed biceps and my set jaw toward him, I was waiting for one move that would show me he was going to fight back.
But he started to walk backward, still eyeing me, and I decided to stay where I was and see what happened.
When he was maybe fifteen feet from me in the direction of the branch bridge, he got a stubborn expression on his face and a sarcastic tone in his voice and called to Dragonfly, “Come on, Roy! Let’s get out of here! Let’s leave these goody-goody boys to themselves!”
When Dragonfly, who was now standing and looking worried, didn’t come, he yelled at him, “I said, come on!”
And the thundery voice brought Dragonfly to life. He swept up his straw hat from the ground and started toward the bridge after his friend.
“Stay where you are!”
My own thundery voice socked Dragonfly’s ears, and he stopped, looking like a baby rabbit being held in a boy’s hand, trembling and not knowing what to do.
“You’ve got to choose!” Shorty’s voice sounded braver than it had, maybe because he was now even farther away.
The expression on Dragonfly’s face was almost pitiful, and I knew that for some reason he was afraid of what might happen to him if he didn’t do what Shorty Long ordered!
He looked up at me, and for a second I thought I saw in his eyes the very special expression he’d had many a time when he liked me. But then, as if he had decided something, he came to life. As Shorty started off on a run, Dragonfly broke into a run of his own right after him.
From behind me, Poetry was yelling, “I’ve got him! He’s another channel cat! What’s the matter with you? Come on!”
But I couldn’t go. I just stood as if I was glued to the spot where, a few minutes before, Shorty’s socked jaw had been lying. My eyes were focused on two boys—a spindle-legged one and a short, chubby one. Running.
Up the hill at the side of the bridge they went and onto the noisy wooden bridge itself, where they stopped and looked back for only a second. Then they went on, and I noticed that Shorty had his arm across Dragonfly’s shoulder as if they were pals, and they were talking as they went.
When I got back to where Poetry was just putting what looked like a three-pound channel cat onto his stringer, I could hardly see for some reason.
He looked up at me and said, “What’s the matter? What you got tears in your eyes for?”
We didn’t catch a single other fish. In fact, we didn’t even seine any minnows, because after I told him what had happened back in the bushes while he was landing the catfish, neither one of us felt much like being happy. So after we tried for thirty minutes or more to land another fish of just any kind, we gave up and started for home.
Besides, it would soon be time to start doing the chores, such things as gathering the eggs and watering the stock, including Shorty’s cow.
I made Poetry take the big fish this time. “You caught it,” I insisted when he objected.
He finally gave in, and I was glad he did, because the proud expression on his face as he carried the big fish, which looked bigger and bigger as we walked along, was something to see.
When we got to the middle of the branch bridge, Poetry and I stopped for a few jiffies, lay down on our different-sized stomachs, and looked over the edge at the new fence he and his father had put there and at the scores of chubs and shiners and different kinds of minnows that were swimming in the lively water.
Then we stood up, and all of a sudden Poetry said, “Let’s be friends forever.”
When I didn’t say anything except “Uh-huh,” which meant I’d rather be that than anything else in the world, he put his arm across my shoulders, and we walked the rest of the way across the bridge and up the hill toward the lane that branches off toward their tool-shed and their barn and house.
When I got home, Dad wasn’t there, having gone somewhere in the car and not being back yet. So without anybody to tell me to, I dived into the chores, getting them done faster than usual.
I was all the way up the haymow ladder and looking in the corner under the log for old Bentcomb’s egg before I remembered that she was cooped up out by the orchard fence. Her three weeks must be almost over, I thought as I tossed a few balls at the basketball hoop Dad and I had fixed there.
Mixy had her eye on my egg bucket as I came down the ladder, not knowing for sure what was in it and walking along in little jerky runs, back and forth and all around me. She was meowing and meowing hungrily, as she does when we have just milked old Jersey Jill and she knows she’ll probably get a little in her tin pan by the cabinet.
“Nothing but eggs,” I said to her, holding the pail down for her to stick her black-and-white nose into and see—and maybe smell—for herself.
She took one short peek, then walked with upright tail to her pan by Dad’s cabinet. While going past, I happened to see another new book that he had bought. He had joined the “Farm Book of the Month Club,” I had found out, which was why his shelf of books was growing so fast.
Spying the one called A Veterinary Handbook for the Average Farmer, or What to Do Before the Doctor Arrives, I was reminded that it had a chapter in it about diet for milk cows. I took a quick look through that chapter, and that’s when I got the idea to try to make up for Shorty’s sore jaw.
All the time since I’d started the chores, I’d been remembering what Mom had said about watching our attitudes. I had really tried and had been a fairly good boy in spite of myself. But less than an hour ago, my attitude had been like a Sugar Creek tornado. Part of me had gone tearing into Shorty, knocking the living daylights out of him, and part of me had stood still and felt proud of me while I did it.
It seemed what I had done was right—but it also seemed it was wrong. I really couldn’t tell for sure. But I decided if there was anything wrong about it that I couldn’t see yet, I’d ask God to forgive me for it and to please fix my heart up so that it would feel good again inside.
I was carrying a pail of sparkling clear water from our pitcher pump and looking at the bluegrass that seemed to be the only kind of cow diet the woods had, except for flowers and rosebushes and stuff. Then I got to thinking how Jersey Jill got to eat ensilage and chopped corn and bran, all kinds of good milk-producing food, including some of the nice new ladino clover in the field up by the pignut trees.
Thinking that, I quickly poured the water into the tub under the elderberry bush, ran back to the barn, got the sickle, and went through the nice new gate Dad and I had hung after we’d put up the big corner post my biceps had helped dig the hole for. In a few minutes I had a pitchfork heaped high with fresh-smelling green clover and was on my way with it through the front gate. A second later I was calling with my cow-calling voice and tossing that nice forkful of ladino clover over the fence for a nervous, unappreciative cow to eat for her supper.
She couldn’t have been far away—I had poured in the water just a few minutes before, and now, when I looked into the tub, I noticed she had drunk almost half a tubful while I had been up cutting the clover. Maybe I had forgotten to water her that morning. I wasn’t sure.
She came kind of hesitantly toward the fence, again eyeing me suspiciously, as much as to say, “I don’t trust you.” When she got to within a few feet of the fresh clover, she sniffed as if she was going to turn up her nose at it and maybe refuse to even touch it. But just one taste of that clover and she went after it as though she was half starved.
As I stood there with my pitchfork over my shoulder, watching her, it seemed I was feeling a little better inside. And for a second I half liked her and felt sorry for her for being such a lonesome cow without a friend in the world.
Dad came driving up about that time, and, seeing what I had done, he warned me, “It won’t hurt her if she already has a lot of blue-grass in her stomach, but be careful you don’t feed her or any other cow a lot of that ladino clover when it�
�s wet with dew or feed her on an empty stomach. She’d blow up like a dirigible. Harm Groenwald lost two heifers on just plain white clover this morning. They died in thirty minutes after they started to bloat.”
“I didn’t give her very much,’’ I said. “Just a small forkful. That won’t hurt her, will it?”
Dad drove on into the drive and then came back and stood with me, watching. “Better take a little of it away. I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen. The dew sometimes falls early this time of year. That clover looks pretty wet.”
I didn’t want anything to happen either, so I climbed over the fence with my pitchfork and started to take away some of the hay. But that cow was stubborn. She wouldn’t budge, and I had to turn the fork around and tap her with it to make her get out of the way so that I could toss the hay back on our side of the fence.
“Get back out of the way!” I ordered her.
But she wouldn’t take orders. She liked that hay and was going to have it or else. It might not be dangerously wet with dew, but she had just drunk a lot of water, and it would certainly get wet inside of her. And when her stomach started churning it around, it would cause gas aplenty.
Shorty would have to come running through the woods at just that same time, yelling, “Hey, you! Let my cow alone! Don’t you dare stick her with that pitchfork!”
“I’m trying to save her life,” I exclaimed to him.
He thundered back, “You don’t save cows’ lives by jabbing them with pitchforks!” He rushed against me, whamming me in the side with his hip and bowling me over.
I landed in the shade of the elderberry bush and in what was left of the water his blue cow hadn’t finished drinking.
I could feel my attitude blowing up like a dirigible, and I was getting the temper bloat worse than any cow could have gotten cow bloat by eating white clover or alfalfa or even ladino. And before I knew it I was making short work of Shorty again.
We squared off and rushed at each other. We struck and boxed and dodged and rushed in at each other—I with my all-wet overalls seat and he with fists much bigger and harder than mine. I could tell I was licking him, though, and I kept trying for the same place on his jaw where I had hit him before and laid him out. I also was talking and half yelling to him, “You say anything rotten about Lucille Browne again, and it’ll be the last time you ever talk at all!”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 51