Shorty looked at his cow, too, when Mom said that about her, and his eyes lit up. Then he explained to all of us—and maybe to the veterinarian especially, “She didn’t have very good pasture where we lived before. That’s why she’s kind of skinny. But she’s been picking up a little since she came here.”
The vet, who was getting his doctor’s case ready to put into his car, stopped and looked Babe over again. He said to Shorty, “She picked up a little too much this morning and got too fat for a while. Well, I’ve another case waiting for me over across the creek—bad case of actino-mycosis!”
He was just getting into his car, when Shorty asked, “What’s actino—what kind of trouble is that?”
“Just a lumpy jaw,” the vet answered.
He was slamming his car door when Shorty called after him, “Is there a special name for what my cow had?”
“The bloat?” the doctor said. “Sure. Your Milking Shorthorn had a bad case of tympanites!”
I looked at Guenther’s face, and he was as proud as anything—not only of his cow because she was a special breed but because she had had such an important-sounding sickness.
“Tympanites,” he repeated to himself and acted like a much smaller boy with a new toy, not even thinking to say good-bye to the doctor as he drove away.
About two hours later, when Dad came driving up to our mailbox, Charlotte Ann was in her picket fence corral by the plum tree, playing with her dolls. I was out in the garden hoeing potatoes, not even bothering to save the nice-looking fishing worms I kept accidentally digging up. Every gate on the farm was absolutely and for sure closed and absolutely and for sure carefully latched, and my heart was pounding for wondering what he would say when he found out all the exciting things that had happened.
Old Babe, out in her own pasture again, was munching away on some bluegrass not far from the path that leads down to the spring. The hole in the fence, where she had broken through before she’d come through our two gates, had been fixed by Bill Collins himself, who had learned how to build fences earlier in the spring. Shorty Long had helped a little.
There wasn’t a thing around the farm that was wrong that I could think of—except the way I felt about what had been wrong earlier in the morning.
I wondered how soon Dad would find out about everything, and who would start to tell him first—Mom or I—and what would he say first.
One minute after he was out of the car and had whisked up Charlotte Ann into his arms and was carrying her toward the house, he stopped and picked up something that had been lying beside Mom’s tulip bed. “What’s the trocar doing, lying out here in the weather?”
And that’s how the thing started. The same boy who had forgotten to shut two gates had also forgotten to put the trocar back into the cabinet.
Mom had seen and heard the car drive in, too, and was outdoors just in time to hear the question and to start to answer it.
My heart was still pounding, and I felt worried inside. I certainly hadn’t been very much of a man of the house, I thought sadly, wondering what Mom would say. A lot would depend on her.
We were at the dinner table before I was sure everybody was going to be forgiven by each other and everything would be all right again. Dad had just prayed, when Mom said in a serious voice, “I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t pray anytime and wherever I am.”
Dad’s gray green eyes looked at her from under his shaggy-ledged brows, and he answered, “You’re a wonderful wife and mother.”
When he said that, her face kind of lit up, and she said, “You’ve said that before in a roundabout way.”
I saw their four eyes meet for a few seconds, and it seemed I wasn’t going to have to worry about whether I was a wonderful boy and son or not. In my mind’s eye, I was in our dark kitchen shining my flashlight into a basket of eggs.
Suddenly I felt kind of brave and asked, “When do I get punished for being so forgetful about the gates?”
The answer was certainly a pleasant surprise. Dad asked, “How do you feel inside about it?”
I had hardly eaten a bite yet, but just then I had a bite of bread and butter that needed to be chewed a little more before I could answer. When I could get a word out, I said, “Not very good.”
Dad looked at me for quite a while, not chewing or saying a thing. Then he said, “I’m proud of you, son. You’re all right.” And he changed the subject, saying, “The bass season opens next week.”
Just like that, the heavy load that was inside of me somewhere wasn’t anymore there than a dragonfly is when you see it perched on your bobber out in the water, and you get a bite and your bobber twitches a little, and the dragonfly’s wings swish it to some other place quicker than a flash.
“We’ll cut the clover tomorrow, put the hay up as soon as it’s dry, and away we’ll go—you, Leslie Thompson’s father and his son, and Mrs. Theodore Collins’s husband—just for fun. Want to go? Want to make a try for that bear we talked about last month?”
“He killed a big one this morning,” Mom said.
I was making short work of a bite of steak right then, so I didn’t answer till I could talk and be understood. “I pretty near killed an innocent cow, if that’s what you mean,” I answered.
“It’s not what I mean. What I mean is that you don’t hate Guenther Long anymore. Isn’t that right?”
I frowned into my plate, thinking. And while I was looking down, I absentmindedly shut my right eye, looked down the left side of my nose to see if I could see any fuzz on my stuck-out upper lip, and couldn’t. The fact is, I had enjoyed helping Shorty fix the pasture fence where old Babe had broken through.
Then I remembered what his mother had said over the telephone, and I answered Mom: “That’s why his folks moved back to Sugar Creek, so he’d have some Christian boys to play with.”
Just then the phone rang our ring. They let me go answer it, and it was good old Poetry. He had heard in some roundabout way about the fishing trip. “Just think,” his squawky voice said cheerfully, “we’re going away up North, clear up where Paul Bunyan and his blue cow used to live a long time ago!”
“I’m going to kill a bear when we get there,” I said. “A real one.”
When I hung up to go back to finish one of the best dinners I had ever had, I was feeling wonderful inside—absolutely wonderful.
One of the positively first things I’ll do when we get back from that bass fishing trip—if I can find time between doing chores and making garden and milking cows and other farmwork—is to tell you all about it in another north woods story.
I certainly hope I’ll have time. I also hope I’ll manage to bring back a big black bearskin for our living-room floor.
The Sugar Creek Gang Series:
1 The Swamp Robber
2 The KillerBear
3 The Winter Rescue
4 The Lost Campers
5 The Chicago Adventure
6 The Secret Hideout
7 The Mystery Cave
8 Palm Tree Manhunt
9 One Stormy Day
10 The Mystery Thief
11 Teacher Trouble
12 Screams in the Night
13 The Indian Cemetery
14 The Treasure Hunt
15 Thousand Dollar Fish
16 The Haunted House
17 Lost in the Blizzard
18 On the Mexican Border
19 The Green Tent Mystery
20 The Bull Fighter
21 The Timber Wolf
22 Western Adventure
23 The Killer Cat
24 The Colorado Kidnapping
25 The Ghost Dog
26 The White Boat Rescue
27 The Brown Box Mystery
28 The Watermelon Mystery
29 The Trapline Thie
30 The Blue Cow
31 Treehouse Mystery
32 The Cemetery Vandals
33 The Battle of the Bees
34 Locked in the Attic
35
Runaway Rescue
36 The Case of Missing Calf
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 56