Middle-sized Jim heard me, stopped doing what he had awkwardly been doing, and looked me right square in my greenish-gray eyes with a pair just as greenish-gray as mine. And he said, with his neck jerking a little and leaning toward the left, “I’m sorry. I didn’t see you.” He raised his kind of friendly voice and called, “Mother! We have company!” Then his eyes looked out toward the tree where my bike was, and he said, “I’m going to learn to ride a bike sometime. I’ve earned almost enough money to buy one.”
Just like that, I thought. It was easy to get acquainted with him. He didn’t act bashful or embarrassed, but I thought, How in the world can he learn to ride a bicycle?
“I have to learn to walk first,” he said.
Well, we talked a little while about different things, and pretty soon I was on my way home with the last thing he had said tumbling around in my mind, which was, “Any time you need any letters typed, bring them over, and I’ll type them for you for free. I have a big library of books, too. Books on nature especially—flowers and trees and birds and all kinds of animals and reptiles such as snakes and turtles. Anything you want to know about.”
I decided that if Dad didn’t know what kind of snake I’d killed that afternoon, maybe Middle-sized Jim could look it up for me in one of his nature books.
When I came pedaling up to “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox, I could see my red-dish-brown-mustached, bushy-eyebrowed dad in our garden by the twin pignut trees. He had a hoe in his hands and was hoeing like a house afire.
I wanted, the worst way, to swing happily into the drive, lean my bike up against the side of our toolshed, which is beside the grape arbor, and yell out to him about the big snake I’d killed. Then I’d go dashing over and show it to him, lying there in the weeds beside the rail fence. But for some reason, I was thinking about the dictionary definition of “several,” which was “more than one or two, but not many.”
Knowing that Dad had probably hoed several rows of potatoes himself, and his several would not only be more than one or two but maybe five or six, I decided to go out to the barn and start to gather the eggs. That is, I decided, and then right away I undecided it.
When my dad called to me in a gruff voice, saying, “WILLIAM!” I knew there was something I had done wrong or that I hadn’t done right or just hadn’t done and should have, because that is the only time he ever calls me William.
“What?” I yelled back as cheerfully as I could. “I’m going to gather the eggs!”
“Come here!” Dad’s voice sounded as if he meant business, so I denied myself the privilege of gathering the eggs. Not wanting him to think I was worried about the several rows of potatoes that were left unhoed, I started to whistle and also to sing a little. In fact, the tune was the one about “one little word shall fell him.”
“Hurry up!” he called, and I hurried a little.
Dad leaned on his hoe till I got to the garden fence, then he said, “You like our new dictionary, Bill?”
I felt myself blushing all the way up to the roots of my red hair. Had he guessed what word I had looked up, and was he going to give me a scolding?
“You left the dictionary open,” he said. “You should never leave a good book open on a windy, dusty afternoon like it was today.” Then just as though he wanted to change the subject, he said, “What else did you do today?”
I breathed a sigh of wonderful relief and said cheerfully, “I killed a great big, ugly, heavy-bodied snake. I don’t know what kind it is. I never saw such a fierce snake in my life. He’s lying dead there in the weeds right behind you.”
Right away, I was in the garden with Dad, and he and I were looking around in the weeds below the place where Poetry had draped the snake over the fence. But the big, fierce-looking dead snake wasn’t there anywhere!
“That’s funny,” I said, puzzled.
“What did he look like?” Dad asked me, holding his hoe in both hands as though he was ready to cut a snake in two if he saw one that was alive.
When I told him it was reddish-yellow with brown blotches on it and that it puffed out its neck fiercely and struck at me and hissed and that its nose was turned up like a scoop shovel, his bushy eyebrows went down, and he looked serious. “Where did you say he was when you first saw him?”
“Lying in the path, halfway between here and the stile—all by himself.”
“And were you all by yourself, without a thing with which to protect yourself?” Dad’s voice was anxious.
“Except for a clod of dirt as big around as Charlotte Ann’s head, which I missed him with when I threw it at him. But I threw my voice at him, too, and that killed him. Scared him to death,” I said. “The very minute the clod struck close to his three-inch-wide head and puffed-out neck, he twisted himself up into several knots, plopped over on his back, and died. Poetry came along just then, and we poked at him with a stick to see if he was really dead, and he was. Poetry picked him up by the tail then and draped him over the fence right here.”
“Sounds like a fish story,” Dad said. “You’re sure you’re not kidding me?”
“It’s the truth,” I said, still looking for the greenish-yellow-stomached snake.
“You say he puffed out his neck and head and hissed at you?”
“Yes sir.”
Pop’s face looked as if he believed me, then he said, “Sounds like a hissing adder or a puff adder. If it was, you’re lucky to be alive, Bill Collins.”
At that, he looked around very carefully to see if he could still find it, but he couldn’t.
We did find Warty, though, who had been hiding in the shade of a very large plantain leaf.
When Dad saw him, he said, “Well, hello, Warty! Glad to see you’re still alive, anyway.”
I noticed he’d called both Warty and me by the names he liked us by, and I felt better but was still kind of tense inside. Where, I thought, was the hissing adder now?
Just that second there was the sound of chickens making about a hundred scared squawks in our chicken yard. I looked up in time to see a big hawk swooping down from the top of one of the pignut trees. He made a dive straight for a little lonely, fluffy, peeping chicken by the grape arbor. And the next thing I knew, the hawk was up in the air again, and the soft, fluffy baby chick was gone.
“That’s what happened to your snake,” Dad said. “Chicken hawks like snakes too.”
And maybe he was right. In fact I knew he was—until the next day when I was finishing hoeing several more rows of potatoes.
This time my several was not only more than one or two; it seemed it was more than many.
Poetry was there too. He had stopped at the Lions’ den, as Middle-sized Jim called their house, and wheeled him over in his wheelchair, and Middle-sized Jim had showed us how he could almost walk without his crutches.
But every time after he had taken a few steps, he fell ker-sprawlety-plop. While we were helping him up, he’d say, “It didn’t hurt a bit. I’m used to it,” and he would be grinning as though he was having fun.
We told him the snake story. “A great big chicken hawk ate him up,” I said.
But Middle-sized Jim spoiled our story for us by saying, “Chicken hawks won’t eat dead things unless they kill them themselves.”
I looked up from my hoeing, and I thought he had a mischievous grin on his face, although I couldn’t tell for sure on account of his smiling almost all the time anyway.
Well, after what seemed a terribly long time, I finished hoeing the last row, and since we were all thirsty we decided to go down to the stile to get a drink at the iron pitcher pump there, rather than at the pump at the end of the board walk near our house.
Middle-sized Jim could make it OK with his crutches, and several times he took a couple of steps by himself before losing his balance and falling and landing all tangled up in the dust of the path. But he’d always just laugh, and we’d help him up and go on. And then, all of a sudden he let out a yell. “Look! There’s your dead snake taking a s
unbath!”
I looked, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a reddish-yellow snake as big as the one I had killed yesterday.
5
A boy has a hard time believing his eyes when the mind under his red hair tells him that what he sees isn’t so. Yesterday we’d picked up a dead snake and carried it to the rail fence that enclosed our garden and had draped it over the top rail and left it. A chicken hawk had eaten it. But today—twenty-four hours later—here it was, the same big, heavy-bodied, savage-looking snake, lying alive out in the middle of the field!
We were already close to it, and just as it had done yesterday, it acted as mad as anything. It was puffing out its neck and head and hissing and striking in our direction as though it wanted to kill us quick and would if we came any closer.
“He’s mad because we woke him up out of his sleep,” Poetry said.
“We interrupted his sunbath, and he probably wanted privacy,” Middle-sized Jim said.
I had a big stick with me this time, and I was going to be sure we really killed it. I started to make a rush at the snake and take a swipe at its upraised head.
But Middle-sized Jim’s excited voice stopped me, saying, “Don’t, Bill! Wait! I’ve got an idea! That’s probably a brother or a wife of the one you killed yesterday! Let’s see if you can scare this one to death!”
I looked at his grinning face but couldn’t tell whether he was making fun of me or not. He was having a little trouble balancing himself with his crutches, so I made a dive in his direction to keep him from falling, just as Poetry said, “Let’s see what my voice will do.”
Without waiting for us to let him, Poetry picked up a big clod like the one I’d had yesterday and squashed it into a thousand pieces of dirt and dust about a foot from the snake’s hissing head. He yelled down at it fiercely, making up a poem at the same time, saying:
“You great big ugly squirming lummox,
Get over on your back and turn up your
stomach!”
Well, you can believe it or not, but just like the snake I’d done that to yesterday, that reddish-yellow, brown-splotched snake all of a sudden went into contortions like a boy having a spasm from eating too many green apples or green grapes. The next thing we knew, there it was, over on its back with its pretty greenish-yellow stomach shining in the sun, and it wasn’t even moving a muscle! Imagine that!
That made Middle-sized Jim laugh. “I knew it. I knew it!” he exclaimed. “It’s a hognose snake! That’s the way they do when they’re cornered. First, they act very fierce, like they are the most dangerous snake in the world, and try to scare you away. But if you don’t go and they think their lives are in danger, they’ll play dead like a possum in the woods and plop over like that and stay that way. I have a book in my library that tells about it.”
It made sense but not quite enough to suit me, so I said, “Yes, but we poked at it and carried it by the tail and draped it over the rail fence and everything!”
“That’s what the book says, but when you go away and leave a hognose snake, it looks around to see if you are really gone. And seeing a chance to escape, it quickly crawls away. It doesn’t stay dead,” Middle-sized Jim explained.
And even as he said it, and I was mad at myself for being fooled yesterday, I couldn’t help but remember a sermon that Sylvia’s dad had preached once in the Sugar Creek church. He’d said that Satan, who in the Bible is called “that old serpent,” had been licked at the cross when Jesus had died for our sins. But Satan wouldn’t give up. He still acted as if he owned the world, and if anybody would let him, he would be his boss.
Poetry interrupted my thoughts by saying, “Let’s really kill him.” He started to do what I had started to do, but Middle-sized Jim stopped him just as he had me, saying, “No, let’s have some fun! Pick him up by the tail and lay him down on his stomach again and see what happens.”
“Pop says it’s a puff adder, and they’re terribly dangerous,” I said.
“That’s just another name for the hognose snake,” Middle-sized Jim said. “They act more dangerous than even a copperhead, but they’re harmless. Go ahead. Turn him over!”
I turned the snake over with my stick and—would you believe this?—the funniest thing happened. That heavy reddish-brown-and-yellow snake was no sooner on its stomach than it twisted itself into and out of a half knot and plopped over on its back again. Then it was quiet as a dead mouse. And we knew that it’d actually been playing dead and that this was probably the same snake I thought I’d killed yesterday. It looked silly lying there now, and I could almost imagine that it had a grin on the long slit-shaped mouth on its hognose head.
“Now, let’s go off and leave him awhile. Let’s see how long he will wait before he quits playing possum and crawls away,” Middle-sized Jim said.
It seemed like a chance to have some more fun, so we left the snake and went down the path toward the stile to get the drink of water we had started out to get in the first place.
On the way to the pump, Poetry and I walked backwards part of the time, looking back to see how soon our dead snake would become a live one.
At the stile, Poetry began to pump, while I held one of the paper cups my dad kept there in a rainproof container—Dad wouldn’t leave any other kind of cup there, because he wanted to teach boys and other people not to all drink out of the same cup on account of it might spread different kinds of diseases.
All of an excited sudden, Middle-sized Jim let out a yell and said, “Look! There he goes! See him? He’s heading back to the garden!”
Poetry stopped pumping. I dropped my cup of water and grabbed up my stick. This time there was going to be a dead snake for sure. As fast as I could, with Poetry at my heels, I dashed back across the bare field.
I never saw a snake run so fast in my life—glide, rather, which is the way snakes move. Boy, it was really going!
“Hurry up!” I yelled over my shoulder at Poetry, and he came puffing after me at a very noisy, dusty rate. I hoped I could make it before the snake got to the pignut trees and lost itself in the weeds by the rail fence where we couldn’t find it.
And then the queerest thing happened. It was so interesting and exciting and also so astonishing that it almost made me forget the snake.
From behind me, I heard Middle-sized Jim’s voice yelling, “Hey, you guys! Don’t kill him! Let him live!”
I looked back over my shoulder, and there was our new friend, who hadn’t walked five feet in his life without holding onto someone or something, and he was running after us, dragging his crutches! Running! A boy who couldn’t even walk was running! It didn’t make sense. He wasn’t running straight, the way the members of our gang did, but he was running almost as fast as Poetry and I.
I took my eyes off the snake for a second, and so did Poetry, and I yelled back to Middle-sized Jim. “Hey,” I said, “you’re running!”
Then I wished I hadn’t said it, for the minute Middle-sized Jim heard me, he got a queer expression on his face as if he had just lost something that was worth a million dollars. And the next thing I knew, he was struggling to keep his balance. A second later, down he went, ker-sprawlety-plop onto the ground, stirring up a cloud of dust, which the wind picked up and blew across the field toward the stile, like powdered snow blowing across the field in the wintertime.
Well, that was the first time Middle-sized Jim ever really walked, and he had not only walked but he had run. He was so pleased with himself, he could hardly believe it.
We were so excited that we let our snake get away, and we never saw it again until two weeks later when it turned up in the most interesting way you could ever imagine.
First, though, I’d better explain that Middle-sized Jim’s doctor said that he had learned to walk—or rather run—because he had got what is called “absolute concentration.” He got it when he saw the snake getting away and Poetry and me trying to catch it. He had wanted to stop us from killing it because he knew it wasn’t a dange
rous snake, and he had forgotten all about his not being able to run. Seeing us run, he had been so excited that he ran himself.
His running wasn’t like any ordinary boy’s. It was half-run and half-lurch. But he could do it without his crutches, which was wonderful.
That was the beginning of a much happier life for Middle-sized Jim. Also it happened to be the very thing that makes this the story of the most exciting adventure we’d had in a long time, which, pretty soon, I’ll tell you about.
Before I do, I’ll have to tell you where we found old Hognose again, and what he was doing, and why. I’ll also have to tell you a little more about Warty, my dad’s favorite toad friend, and his own very exciting adventure.
I guess I didn’t realize that hognose snakes and garter snakes would rather eat a toad for supper than a boy would like to eat a plateful of raw-fried potatoes and bread and butter when he is hungry. But they would. Only, as I said, I didn’t realize it. And, of course, I didn’t know that snake had been hanging around our garden on purpose because he had his appetite set on making a delicious supper out of Warty.
Warty must have guessed that old Hognose was laying for him, because one day he disappeared, and we didn’t see him around the garden for maybe a week. And there were all kinds of cutworms that kept snipping off Mom’s baby beans and sugar-corn shoots, and there didn’t seem to be much we could do to stop them.
“Maybe Warty finds all the cutworms he can stuff himself with out in the cornfield,” Mom said one day, and maybe she was right.
Anyway, several days later—one or two but not many—I was coming home from fishing down in the branch with Dragonfly. On the way back, I was halfway through one of our other potato patches, which is quite a ways from our regular garden, when I was startled by a clumsy movement at my feet. Looking down, I saw a large, lazy-looking brown toad in the skimpy shade of a wild carrot, which somebody’s boy should have pulled long ago.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 32