Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18

by Paul Hutchens

  “Well, I’m surprised,” he said.

  But it wasn’t funny, and I wouldn’t laugh.

  Just that second there was a heavy, clumsy movement at my feet. Looking down, I saw a big, fat, friendly-looking garden toad, which I had almost stepped on and smashed.

  “Hi, Warty,” I said down to him.

  “Hi, who?” Poetry exclaimed.

  “Warty,” I said, “Dad’s pet toad. He lives here in the garden and eats cutworms and mosquitoes and bugs and stuff. Last night Dad and I made a big supper for him.”

  “Supper! For a toad!” Poetry looked down at Warty, who was sitting as quiet as an old setting hen on a nest, all widened out like a mother chicken covering a nest full of eggs.

  “Sure,” I said and explained. “Dad hung a sheet over the fence right here, close to where Warty hangs out, and turned his big electric lantern on the sheet for fifteen minutes. And all kinds of bugs and night moths and things flew against it, and those that plopped down to the ground, Warty gobbled up. Look—he’s as fat as a stuffed toad today”—which Warty was. I’d never seen him so fat.

  When I was littler, Pop had taught me to be very glad if we had a toad living in our garden, because toads are the farmer’s friends. “A toad will eat over ten thousand injurious insects in one summer,” he had told me.

  “Let’s see you throw your voice at him and kill him,” Poetry said.

  But I wouldn’t. Besides, I thought Poetry was just making fun of me.

  So he decided to try it himself, which he did, yelling down at Warty in his half-man-half-boy’s voice, which is the kind of voice he had, he being at the age in his life when a boy is part boy and part man, like a tadpole about to turn into a frog.

  But Warty, who had dived halfway under a rhubarb leaf, just blinked his lazy-looking eyes at us or at nothing and didn’t move a muscle.

  Well, we had to hurry on. Just as we reached our henhouse, I turned around to take a final look at the big fierce-looking snake hanging on the garden fence, and it wasn’t there!

  Poetry looked at the same time and said, “Your dead snake doesn’t like hanging on a fence in the hot sun for people to look at, or else he lost his balance and fell off”—which was probably right, I thought.

  Anyway, when Dad came home, I could remember where the snake had been hanging, and it’d be as easy as falling off a rail fence to find it lying there in the weeds.

  “What’s that song you’re whistling?” Poetry asked me all of a sudden.

  “What song?” I listened to my thoughts, and, sure enough, I had been whistling a song and didn’t know it. In a second I remembered what it was. It was one of the hymns we sometimes sing in the Sugar Creek church on Sunday mornings, when Mom and Dad and Charlotte Ann and I are all sitting together in a row. I could hardly believe my astonished thoughts when I realized that it was a song called “A Mighty Fortress,” which I remembered was written by a man who, our minister said, was a converted priest named Martin Luther. The place in the song that I had been whistling was where it tells about Satan, and the words were “One little word shall fell him.”

  I didn’t understand it very well, but I could sort of feel that it was the Savior of the world whose word was strong enough to hit the Devil and knock the living daylights out of him—even if He threw at him only one little word.

  Anyway, I felt kind of good inside for some reason.

  But it was time to get going to the gang meeting.

  “I wonder what Big Jim wants a meeting for?” I asked Poetry, as we decided to run to make up the lost time.

  Boy oh boy, if I had known what that gang meeting was going to be about, and also what was going to happen to us before the things we had planned at that meeting were finally all finished, I’d really have been excited.

  If I had known that, later that year, when summer was over and winter came and there was a lot of snow everywhere, the gang would have to make a very important trip up into the hills to the old haunted house I told you about in the last story of the Sugar Creek Gang—if I had only known …

  But I didn’t, so Poetry and I weren’t even excited as we hurried on to the spring where we were to meet the gang.

  I can hardly wait till I write that far in the story before telling you about that terribly exciting experience. If we hadn’t had Big Jim’s rifle along with us, every one of us might have died.

  3

  Even while Poetry and I were running lickety-sizzle through the woods, following the path made by barefoot boys’ bare feet—and wondering what on earth could be so important that Big Jim, our leader, had to call a special meeting to tell us about it—I was still thinking about that heavy, four-foot-long snake I had killed all by myself, either by scaring it to death or maybe by a small stone that had been in the clod of dirt I had missed it with.

  Dad would be proud of me, I thought, for killing such a big snake, but my grayish-brown-haired mom would probably look at me across the supper table and say, “Let me see your hands. Are you sure you washed them after handling that snake?” It’s the kind of question Mom asks me after I’ve handled almost anything, especially if she wants me to help her with some work in the house. It’s the kind of question Little Jim says his mom also asks him maybe twenty times a day.

  Poetry, who was puffing along behind me, all of a sudden yelled a breathy yell and said, “Hey! The papaws are turning brown! Look!”

  I stopped quick, looked to my right to the thicket of papaw shrubs that grew not more than forty feet from the path—there were several wild gooseberry bushes there also—and, sure enough, Poetry was right. I could see a half-dozen pear-shaped brown papaws half hidden among their long bright-green leaves.

  “Let’s pick a couple for Circus,” Poetry said.

  Circus, as you know, is the acrobatic member of our gang. He is the only one of us who likes the taste of papaws better than the rest of us.

  We crossed to the papaw thicket, and in a jiffy I had two of the wrinkled, brown-skinned fruits in my hand. Poetry and I right away each were eating one. A papaw is like a banana inside, only softer, and is as soft and yellow as the custard Mom puts in her custard pies. It was so sickeningly sweet that only a bite or two was all I could eat.

  There were always one or two or more large, hard seeds in each papaw, which I liked to save and carry around in my pockets, the way a boy likes to carry a buckeye, which is supposed to keep him from getting rheumatism and doesn’t. But a boy likes to carry one anyway. I had a buckeye in my pocket right that minute.

  All of a sudden Poetry acted as if he didn’t like the bite of the custard-soft yellow papaw he had in his mouth. He turned his face the other way, which you are supposed to do when you have to spit, so other people won’t see you do it, and I heard him say, sounding as though he had mush in his mouth, “That’s the most insipid taste I ever tasted.”

  “The most what kind of taste you ever tasted?” I asked, tasting the same kind of taste myself.

  He said, “Insipid.”

  “Just because you know a hundred poems by heart isn’t any reason why you have to use the longest words in the dictionary,” I said to him.

  Picking another wrinkled-skinned softish papaw, I looked down the hill toward the spring, which was still fifty yards away, and saw Circus himself, halfway up a small sapling that grew there. And down on the ground, looking up at him, was little red-haired Tom Till, the newest member of our gang. So I said to Poetry, “I’ll beat you there.” I started to run, with him after me.

  Well, in only a few more minutes, we were all there: Big Jim, our leader, who is the only one of us who has any fuzz on his upper lip; Circus, our acrobat; Little Jim, the cutest one of us—in fact, the only one of us who is cute; Tom Till, who has more freckles and even redder hair than I have; Dragonfly, the spindle-legged and pop-eyed member, who has hay fever and asthma in the summer part of the time; and last of all, myself, red-haired, freckle-faced, fiery-tempered Bill Collins, Theodore Collins’s only boy, whom he sometimes
tells people is his “first and worst son,” not meaning it, exactly.

  All of us were sitting or lying down in different directions, the way we generally are at a meeting. When Big Jim got us quiet enough so he could be heard, he said with a very grim face, “I want every one of you to vote yes on the proposition, not because I say so but because, as soon as you hear about it, you’ll know you ought to. It’s very important.”

  “Then let’s take a ‘sight unseen’ vote,” Dragonfly said, and I noticed his face had an expression on it as if he was getting ready to be allergic to something or other and sneeze. A sight-unseen vote was the kind we sometimes took when we all made up our minds that we’d do whatever Big Jim wanted us to without knowing what it was first.

  “How many want a sight-unseen vote?” Big Jim asked.

  We all put up our hands except Circus.

  Big Jim looked around at all of us, and his eyes stopped at Circus, who had one of my papaws in his hand and was holding it up looking at it as if he was getting ready to take an insipid bite.

  “What’s the matter, Circus?” Big Jim asked. “Why don’t you put your hand up?”

  “It is up,” Circus said. “S-see,” he stammered on purpose. “I’ve got my p-p-papaw up!”

  Little Jim giggled, but it didn’t seem very funny, especially because I was a little worried by the expression on Big Jim’s face. It seemed to say that we were about to vote on something that was not only important but maybe sad too.

  Well, we took a sight-unseen vote, and then Big Jim said, “All right, gang, here’s what you’ve just voted yes to …”

  While he was starting to tell us, I squirmed myself around into another uncomfortable position behind Poetry’s back with my red head looking over the top of him.

  “It’s this way”—Big Jim’s words came out from under his fuzzy mustache—“there’s a new boy moved into the neighborhood—”

  When he got that far, different ones of us, including me, interrupted disgustedly, exclaiming, “NO!”

  That would mean that there’d probably be another boy for one of us to have to lick before he could belong to our gang. Nearly always when a new boy moved into Sugar Creek territory, he was the kind of boy who wanted to run the gang, or wanted to introduce a lot of new ideas, or else he was the kind of dumb person who used swear words, which none of the gang used anymore on account of we’d become Christians, and Christians are supposed to have sense enough to have respect for the One who made them.

  Also, nearly every new boy who had come into our neighborhood used all kinds of filthy talk about girls. And if he was a big boy, Big Jim nearly always got into a fight with him and knocked the living daylights out of him, on account of Big Jim’s being a special friend of a girl named Sylvia, who was our minister’s daughter, and also because all our mothers used to be girls themselves. It made us all boiling mad to hear filthy words said about them, even though, I’ll have to admit, I didn’t like girls very well myself on account of … well, I just didn’t.

  So when Big Jim said, “There’s a new boy moved into our neighborhood,” it meant our gang would be interrupted for a while.

  “Don’t worry,” Big Jim consoled us, “we won’t have to lick him. He’s a great guy. His dad is going to work for my dad this summer, and his mother will help my mother with the canning and things, and they’ll live in the little brown house Dad and I just finished building. We had to have another hired man, and we just happened to get a family with a boy in it.”

  “That’s better than having one with a girl in it,” Dragonfly said. He was the only one of us who was more afraid of girls than the rest of us.

  But Circus gave him a fierce frown. Circus, as you know, had six sisters, and even though sometimes he had small fights with them, as brothers sometimes do with their sisters, he still liked them and would fight for them at the drop of a hat.

  “What’s he look like? How big is he?” Little Tom Till wanted to know.

  And Big Jim said, “He hasn’t learned to walk alone yet. You see—”

  At that, we all interrupted him with a lot of different exclamations. I got a let-down feeling. Imagine calling a special meeting to talk about a baby boy who was so little he couldn’t walk yet!

  But then Big Jim explained it to us. “He has what is called cerebral palsy, and he was born that way. Even though he’s ten years old, he can’t walk without leaning on something or somebody, and part of the time he wheels himself around in a wheelchair. He can’t use his hands very well, and sometimes they won’t do what he wants them to do at all. But he can talk pretty well when he’s not too excited. He’s really a good kid, and he reads a lot and wants to learn to do everything. We’ll have to take him with us sometimes on our gang trips, and we’ll have to act like he is a perfectly normal boy and not tell him we feel sorry for him, and stuff like that. Dad says so.”

  Well, when one of our parents says so about something, that nearly always settles it for the whole gang.

  I was watching Little Jim at the time. His cute mouselike face was always so kind, and I noticed that he had an expression on it that seemed to say he was already sorry for the new boy and pitied him.

  “What’s his name?” he asked.

  And when Big Jim said, “Jimmy Lion,” it was time for all of us to gasp and exclaim again. Why, that made three Jims in our neighborhood! We had Big Jim, our fuzzy-mustached leader; Little Jim, our littlest member; and now Jimmy Lion!

  “How big is he?” Poetry asked.

  And when Big Jim said, “Almost halfway between Little Jim and me,” Tom Till’s high-pitched, soprano voice cut in and said, “Let’s call him Middle-sized Jim.”

  We put it to a vote and decided it quicker than anything.

  “Is that all we called this meeting for?” I asked. “If it is, I move we adjourn and let’s all go in swimming.”

  “Second the motion,” Poetry said. He “third-ed” it by beginning to unbutton his shirt and to roll himself into a sitting position so that he could get up quicker.

  “Remember,” Big Jim said, “we’re not to say anything or do anything that will embarrass Middle-sized Jim or make him feel he’s different from us, because it would have been very easy for any one of us to have been born that way, if—”

  He stopped, not saying what we all knew he was thinking. Boys always do more thinking about God than talking about Him. But I knew if Big Jim had finished what he had started to say, he would have said, “It would have been easy for any one of us to have been born handicapped, if God, who is the Ruler of everything, had let us be.”

  Deep down inside of me, I was thankful I had a good strong body that would do most everything I wanted it to, although sometimes my parents had a hard time getting my hands and feet to do what they wanted them to do.

  Pretty soon we were on our way to the old swimming hole, where, I knew, we’d have the time of our lives. I felt kind of sad inside, though, on account of the new boy who couldn’t walk, so I slowed down and let the gang run on ahead.

  I was imagining, What if I couldn’t run—in fact, couldn’t even walk? I looked out toward old Sugar Creek, my very best nature friend, who was making a very happy little rippling sound about twenty feet from me. There was some fast, sparkling, clear water tumbling over the rocks close to the shore. I stood there listening to it, looking at the hundreds of sparkles in it, feeling good and sad at the same time.

  I didn’t know Little Jim had stopped too, until I heard him sigh behind me.

  In case you haven’t read any of the other Sugar Creek Gang stories yet, and don’t know how that little guy is always thinking out loud and saying things that my dad calls “philosophical,” I’d better tell you that almost anytime you can expect that kind of thought to come tumbling out of his cherry-shaped mouth.

  Anyway, while Little Jim and I were standing side by each, looking at and listening to the happy water with maybe a thousand sparkles in it, he piped up and said, “It’s nice to have stars in the daytime t
oo.” Then all of a sudden, he noticed the rest of the gang laughing and splashing farther up the creek, and away he went, with me chasing right after him.

  4

  The first time I met Middle-sized Jim was that very afternoon. I had to go over to his house to take a pie, which, by the time we got through swimming, Mom had got home and baked. Different ones of the Sugar Creek Gang’s mothers had decided to make the Lion family welcome to Sugar Creek by taking them some homemade baked goods. Mom had baked a very nice-smelling raspberry pie, which is my favorite, and wrapped it up in waxed paper.

  I put it in the wire basket on the handle bars of my bicycle, and pretty soon I was pedaling like everything toward Big Jim’s house, which was across the road from Circus’s house, where all of Circus’s awkward sisters lived. One of them, named Lucille, who was about my size, was not as awkward as the rest and would smile back at me across the schoolroom sometimes.

  When I got past Circus’s house, I turned right, went down a narrow county road, and pretty soon came to the new brown house Big Jim’s dad had made for the Lions to live in.

  It was a pretty little house, I thought. As I put on my brakes and stopped out in front and leaned my bike up against a maple tree that grew there, I noticed a new tin mailbox with the name “John Lion” on it, which I guessed was Middle-sized Jim’s pop’s name.

  Then I saw Jim himself, sitting in a wheelchair with some kind of swinging folding table beside him with a typewriter on it. He was using one of his very awkward-looking hands to hit the different typewriter keys. He hadn’t seen me come up or heard me, either, I guess.

  I didn’t know what to say or how to say it, but I remembered our sight-unseen vote, so I stood there looking at him as politely as I could. It seemed there wasn’t a thing to say to a boy I didn’t know and who had cerebral palsy. I noticed the braces on his legs. Also there was a pair of crutches close beside him, leaning against the porch railing.

  Well, I took the wrapped-up pie in my hands, feeling how warm it was and knowing how good it would taste on account of I had helped our family eat maybe five hundred pies like that since I was born a red-haired baby boy. Without knowing I was going to do it, I cleared my throat.