Sometimes some of us boys weren’t as quiet in church as we should have been. We were always so glad to see each other and to be together and to tell each other different things that we had a hard time keeping still even in church. We are learning to, though, because a church building is a house of worship. But even though I knew Jesus was my Savior, and I was learning to like Him better than anything in the world, I still had a hard time sitting still.
But when that kind old man with his long whiskers and his very neatly combed silky white hair would come in and take his seat, it sort of seemed that God Himself had come into the church and it was time to start being quiet and reverent.
Well, when Old Man Paddler saw us there at his spring he called out, “Hello, boys! Come on in and have some sassafras tea!”—which is exactly what we hoped he would say.
In a few minutes we were in his cabin, sitting around on different chairs and on the bottom step of the old wooden stairway that leads up to his loft. We were sitting or half lying down on the floor while he stirred up the fire in his cookstove and heated the water a little hotter.
While the old man dropped little red chips of sassafras roots in the kettle of hot water, and we were chattering and half wrestling with each other as boys do, I looked around a little. The very first thing I noticed was his map on the wall above the kitchen table. It was a map of the world and had different-colored pins stuck in different places on it. That old man had friends all over the world, most of them missionaries. Nearly everybody at Sugar Creek knew he kept that map on his wall so that he could be reminded to pray for the different people.
“I was just about ready to stop work, boys,” his kind, trembling voice said as he moved around, setting out seven blue-flowered cups and saucers on the table. I noticed there was a brand-new oilcloth on it with a checkerboard design, which would make a great checkerboard for Dad and me to play checkers on during a winter night at our house. Dad and I play that game a lot. Another thing I noticed over on a corner of the table was a tablet of yellow paper like the kind we often used at school.
It was what the tablet said on the front cover that made Dragonfly ask the question he did. And that started Old Man Paddler telling us about ghosts and also about Old Tom the Trapper of the Sugar Creek of long ago, whom an Indian had shot with an arrow.
Dragonfly, who is always seeing things first anyway, saw the writing on the tablet and nudged me. I looked, and this is what I saw:
“THE CHRISTIAN AFTER DEATH,”
by Seneth Paddler
And I knew he was maybe writing a book for somebody to publish.
Just as he always does when he wants to know something, Dragonfly spoke up without waiting to think first. “Mr. Paddler, do you believe in ghosts?”
You could have knocked me over with a drop of sassafras tea when he asked that question, but a little later I was glad he had, because it was that question that got the old man started on the story of Old Tom the Trapper.
“I’ll tell you a ghost story in just a minute,” he said. He looked around at us with his twinkling gray-green eyes. I could tell that, if his whiskers hadn’t been in the way, I could have seen a smile on his face. When a man has a twinkle in his eyes like that, he is thinking something pleasant. Even if he doesn’t have a smile on his face he maybe does have one in his mind.
“It tastes just like a bright red melted lollipop,” Little Jim said, while he swished his cup around and sipped his last sweet drop of sassafras tea, while most of the rest of us did the same thing.
“You see,” the old man said, when he started his story, “Old Tom was a very kind old man who lived about a mile from here on a little hill above Sugar Creek. He made his living by trapping muskrat and raccoon and beaver and other fur-bearing animals. My twin brother, Kenneth, and I were boys at the time, and we used to go over to Old Tom’s house once in a while to see him and to hear him tell stories, just like you boys come to see me.
“There were quite a few Indians living about a mile farther on, and they were hunting and trapping, too. They and Old Tom were pretty good friends—that is, most of the Indians liked him. But one big half-breed Indian, named War Face, decided Tom was catching too much fur. He used to sneak down along the creek right after Tom had set his traps and ‘throw’ them, so he wouldn’t catch anything. Sometimes game would be stolen right out of Tom’s traps, and that worried the old man a lot.
“Old Tom was one of the best Christians that ever lived, I guess, and he was always reading his Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress and some books by George Eliot, and it made him feel pretty bad that somebody was stealing from his traps. Well, he didn’t know who was doing it until one day he wrote a little note and tied it to a branch not far from the place where he had one of his traps set. And that note said, ‘Remember, whenever you are about to do something wrong, that Somebody is watching you.’
“Old Tom spelled that word ‘Somebody’ with a capital S, and you boys know that Old Tom meant that God was watching. Tom thought maybe that would make the thief stop and think, and then maybe he wouldn’t do any more poaching.
“Well, next morning Old Tom found a note tied to the knob of his cabin door, which said, ‘Any traps set on the west side of the North Road will be thrown, and any fur caught will be taken. Somebody will be watching you.’
“Old Tom didn’t know what to do. The best trapping was on the west side nearer the swamp, and he’d been trapping there for years. But he was very kind and didn’t like to quarrel with anybody, so he decided to go see War Face to talk things over.
“He started out very early that same morning, following his trapline. He had maybe a dozen traps on the west side. He’d made his mind up that if he had caught anything during the night he wouldn’t take it until he’d talked with War Face. But when he passed one of his traps, about a hundred yards west of the road, it had a red fox in it. Because Old Tom had a very tender heart and couldn’t stand to see anything suffer unnecessarily, he decided to stop and kill the fox before going on.
“And that’s where it happened, boys,” Old Man Paddler said. He lifted his blue-flowered cup and looked at it as though his thoughts were far away. Then he looked out his kitchen window down toward the spring.
I was sitting on the edge of my chair, waiting to hear the rest of the story, feeling sorry for Old Tom and hoping maybe the story would end without his getting killed, but it didn’t.
A second later Old Man Paddler went on, and this is what he said: “Tom had just killed the fox and straightened up to look around and go on when an arrow came whizzing out from behind the bushes up the shore. It struck him in the breast, and the arrowhead went clear through and came out his back.
“And there Kenneth and I found him when we happened along a little later. He died in just a little while but not until he’d had a chance to tell us the story.
“‘Bury me under the big tree beside my new house,’ he managed to gasp out, just before he stopped breathing.”
There was a little more to the story, which I won’t take time to tell you now, but I was thinking about that arrow and wondering what had become of it, so I watched for a chance to ask a question, which was, “What became of the arrow?”
He didn’t seem to be much interested in that, but he said, “Kenneth and I kept it, but one day it got mislaid and was accidentally burned in the fireplace. We saved the arrowhead and kept it for years until one day we lost it.”
Dragonfly seemed interested in Old Tom. He asked, “Where did they bury him?”
“Just where he wanted them to—under the maple tree beside his new stone house.”
I guess we all gasped at once when he said that, and Big Jim spoke up real quick and said, “Stone house? Where?”
“About a mile down the creek. I went to see it one day last week. There’s a regular jungle around the house now with the whole place overgrown with weeds and bushes and shrubs.”
Up to that minute Old Man Paddler hadn’t told us anything about any ghost, so
Dragonfly said, “What about the ghost you were going to tell us about?”
Old Man Paddler focused his gray-green eyes on Dragonfly’s dragonflylike eyes and said, “That’s where a lot of people think a ghost lives—in that old house. You see, boys, about twenty years ago a man and his wife moved into it and lived there a while until the woman found out about Old Tom having been buried under the maple tree. After that, whenever she heard noises in the woods at night, she imagined it was Old Tom’s ghost walking around. So they moved out, and the house has been empty ever since. No one seems to want to live in the woods so far away from where other people live, I suppose. A few years ago a tornado twisted the barn off its foundation and blew down a lot of trees, so it’s more forsaken-looking than ever. But the old maple tree under which Tom was buried still stands.”
Old Man Paddler stopped talking, looked at us, and said, “Tom’s in heaven now, boys, where all saved people go, you know.”
Dragonfly wasn’t satisfied. “Did the woman really hear sounds in the woods?”
“Of course not,” Big Jim said.
But the old man startled us by saying, “There are a lot of folks around Sugar Creek who believe she did. It’s hard to get people not to believe a house is haunted once the story gets going.”
Listening to the old man talk and thinking about ghosts gave me a creepy feeling. I didn’t believe in ghosts myself, no sir, but before we left the cabin, I knew that one of the very first things the gang was going to do was hike up to that old stone house and see the big tree under which Old Tom the Trapper was buried. I just knew that if we went up there, we’d find something very interesting. Also, we might run into a very exciting adventure of some kind.
It was too late to go that afternoon, though, because the house was so far down the creek and in a territory where none of us had gone before.
On the way back to the spring, we decided to stop at the old swimming hole and have a swim before we went to our different homes. We went by the North Road bridge, and Big Jim picked out the place that we thought might be the exact spot where Old Tom had been shot with the arrow.
As boys sometimes do when they read or hear an interesting story, we decided to act out the story of “Old Tom the Trapper.” We let Little Jim and Dragonfly be the twin brothers Kenneth and Seneth Paddler, and Circus was the half-breed Indian War Face. Poetry was the red fox that got caught in a trap, and I was going to be Old Tom the Trapper and get shot through the chest with an arrow.
Big Jim took the part of the director of the play and told each one of us what to do and when to do it.
Circus hid himself back in the bushes, and Poetry stuck his hand in a forked branch as though it was caught in a trap.
Then I came whistling through the woods along the creek till I came to Poetry, who was lying on his stomach and whimpering like a caught fox. When I got to where he was, I made myself act sad, and I said, “Oh, you poor, poor little foxie! I feel so sorry for you, but you’ve been eating up all my chickens, and besides I need your fur to help make a living.”
Poetry looked up, made a face at me, and said with a mischievous grin in his voice, “If you kill me, I’ll turn into a fox’s ghost and yelp and bark at you all the rest of your life.”
“I won’t have any life,” I said. “I’ll be dead in just another minute.”
I picked up a stick, and pretended to sock Poetry with it, and he, being a good actor, stiffened out and acted as if he was dying. Then, just as I straightened up—whizz!—Circus threw a mayapple at me from behind the bushes. Even though I tried to dodge, it hit me ker-squash on the chest and spattered itself and its insides all over my shirt.
“Help!” I yelled, mad at Circus for actually throwing something at me. I plopped myself down to the ground beside my dead fox and groaned and held one hand to my chest-holding in my other hand the flint arrowhead that I’d found back in the cemetery.
Lying there, waiting for Kenneth and Seneth Paddler to come and find me just before I died, I got to thinking, what if I was actually dead? I knew enough of the Bible from what Dad and Mom had read out loud at our house, and from what I’d heard our minister preach, and from what I’d memorized in a contest we’d had in school, and from what I’d learned in Sunday school, and from reading my own New Testament—I knew that if I was an honest-to-goodness Christian myself, when I died I’d go right straight to heaven to be where Jesus is.
I lay on my back groaning and moaning, looking up at the very pretty sky, which had long, wrinkled white clouds running almost all the way across it. It was what our schoolbooks called a mackerel sky but which reminded me of my mom’s washboard. And I thought of the Bible verse that says, “… absent from the body … at home with the Lord.”
I shut my eyes and imagined myself to be Old Tom the Trapper’s spirit up there, looking down at my body lying beside a dead red fox and seeing the long arrow clear through my chest. Then my imagination turned a somersault, and I was looking down at a very chubby boy with his hand in the fork of a branch, and beside him was a red-haired boy who had two large upper front teeth, a million freckles on his face, and smashed mayapple stains on his shirt, and I thought how ridiculous we looked.
But then I let my thoughts take me real quick up into heaven where Jesus is, and for just a second I imagined I saw Him running to meet me and calling me by name and saying, “Welcome, Bill Collins! I appreciate very much your being a friend of Mine while you were down on the earth. I died for you down there upon the cross, and I’m glad you decided, while you were still a boy, to give your heart to Me.”
That was as far as I got to think, because right then I heard steps running along Sugar Creek. I looked quick, and it was blue-eyed Little Jim and spindle-legged Dragonfly hurrying toward me.
Well, that was as much of the story of Old Tom the Trapper as we got to act out that day. The rest of it, where Old Tom got buried under a big maple tree beside the haunted house, we’d have to act out some other day when we had lots of time—which we decided ought to be the next week.
4
The first thing Mom said to me when I got home that late afternoon was “Bill, come in the house a minute. I need a little help!” Her voice sounded as if I wasn’t as good a boy as I hoped I was.
I had just come through the front gate and had shut it, and Poetry and I were standing up in our big rope swing under the walnut tree, swinging and pumping ourselves higher and higher. At the same time we were talking to each other in panting breaths and dreaming out loud to each other about the haunted house and Old Tom the Trapper’s buried body under the maple tree. Poetry and I certainly liked each other a lot and always hated to have to leave each other and come out of our boys’ world and be part of our families again.
So when Mom’s impatient voice called to me from the side porch, it was like having a nice ice cream cone knocked out of my hand just after I’d taken a few bites.
There was something in my mother’s tone of voice that seemed to say that maybe I should have come home sooner and that she had had too many things to do all day while I hadn’t done much of anything except play.
For a second, I was half mad, so I yelled back from away up in the air where I was at the time and said to her, “Can’t a boy have a little time to himself?”
And then all of a sudden, while Poetry and I swooped down with the cool wind blowing in my face and my shirt sleeves and overalls’ legs flapping in the breeze the way they do when I’m swinging in a high swing, I saw Poetry’s forehead get a frown on it. It was as though he was disgusted with my mom for calling me in a scolding voice, and I thought he was going to say something to her himself.
I certainly got a surprise when he said what he did say, which was, “She’s an awfully nice mother. Let’s both go in and help her.”
Back and forth, back and forth, up and down, up and down, whizz, whizz, whee …
I was mad at Poetry for saying that, even though I knew it was the truth. And for a minute what we were doing wasn’t a bi
t of fun. Mom was an awfully nice mother—in fact, maybe the best mother in all Sugar Creek or the whole world, I thought. But—well. I just didn’t feel very good, so I quit pumping Poetry. He quit pumping me, too, and in a few sad jiffies our swing had stopped enough for us to get off.
I was still mad and mixed up in my mind, so I picked up a rock and threw it at our old red rooster. He was standing on top of a chicken coop in the barnyard, crowing as if he was very happy and also as though he didn’t have a thing in the world to do, such as work, and that he was glad of it.
My rock hit the roof of the coop, glanced off, and went on toward the barn. It bounced along a half-dozen times before it finally hit the side of the barn just below the open window where our cat, Mixy, was sitting sunning herself.
The old red rooster jerked, and his crowing noise ended with a scared squawk. Mixy jumped as though she had been shot and made a dive for inside the barn. And at the same time I heard my dad’s voice thunder at me from the grape arbor on the other side of our iron pitcher pump and say, “How many times have I told you not to throw rocks at Andrew Jackson?”—that being our old red rooster’s name.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Poetry said all of a sudden. He turned and picked up a corncob that was lying there and threw it toward our front gate and then ran to pick it up again and go on through the gate and start down the road toward his house.
Well, it was a sad way to end a very wonderful afternoon, and it seemed my parents were to blame for it. I let myself be pretty mad for a minute. And when a red-haired boy gets mad, it’s hard to get over it for a while. I knew a Bible verse, which I’d learned once in a Bible memory contest in our school, that said, “Do not let the sun go down on your anger,” which means to be sure to get your temper over with before night.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 25