The wild carrot, or Queen Anne’s lace, which is one of its other names, was Dad’s worst-hated weed. Mom liked to look at its pretty lacelike flowers, which, when they are only half opened, are all in a little circle with a hollow in the middle. And that’s the reason it is sometimes called by still another name, Bird’s Nest. But Dad always made me pull up all the Queen Anne’s lace I could find on account of its being a very bad weed with very stubborn roots, he says, and if you leave one for a year, then next year there’ll be a great big family of them to get rid of.
As soon as I saw Dad’s toad friend, I cheerfully said down to him, “Why, hello, Warty, old pal! Am I glad to see you! Will Mom ever be pleased!”
I decided to run and tell Mom about him right away, so I started to the house. Then I changed my mind, because an interesting plan popped into my head. In a jiffy, I had Warty picked up in the big handkerchief I had in my pocket, not exactly wanting to handle him with my bare hands.
Right under a toad’s warty skin there are glands that give off a bitter fluid of some kind that is just a little bit poisonous. If a dumb puppy tries to pick up a toad to play with it, he quick drops it, not liking the toad’s taste. I was afraid Warty wouldn’t know I was a friend and that I’d maybe get some poisonous gland fluid on my bare hands.
Some boys think toads cause warts on a boy’s hands, but they don’t. It makes Dad mad to hear anybody say that about an innocent toad, because it isn’t so at all.
Anyway, I wrapped up Warty in my handkerchief, leaving his nose out so he could breathe. Holding him tight so that he wouldn’t squirm himself out of my grasp, I carried him back to the garden where Mom’s cabbage plants needed him to take care of them.
To be sure Warty wouldn’t hop away again, I tied the end of my fishing line around the joint of one of his fat legs, leaving the rest of the long line on the reel on my fishing pole. Warty would be free to hop all over the garden and gobble up all the cutworms he could find that night—for as you maybe know, cutworms always do their cutting off of cabbage plants and young corn shoots at night.
It was sort of like tethering out our old one-eared cow on a long rope where she can eat grass in every direction for quite a long ways, but she can’t get away to eat where she is not supposed to.
“There you are, my friend,” I said to Warty, as soon as I had him tied to the end of the line. “Now see to it that you behave yourself and stay here where we need you a lot worse than we do down yonder in that other potato patch.”
Mom certainly was pleased when I told her Warty was back again and that I’d brought him myself. I didn’t tell her about tying him up.
At the supper table that night, Dad and Mom and Charlotte Ann and I sat very quiet for a minute as we always do before we eat, with our heads bowed while Dad asked the blessing. For a second or so I opened my eyes and looked at Mom’s kind of grayish-brown hair, all combed nice and pretty, the way she hurries up and combs it whenever she knows my dad is coming home from working in the field.
I also noticed his reddish-brown hair and his long, shaggy, reddish-brown eyebrows, which he also combs sometimes and won’t let the barber clip them shorter, the way barbers try to do, Dad says, if you don’t stop them.
Also I saw my brown-haired baby sister’s head. I noticed she had her hands unfolded, and her eyes wide open, and she was looking around at different things. Without knowing I was going to do it, I whispered to her, saying, “Sh! Charlotte Ann! Shut your eyes! Dad is going to ask the blessing! You’re supposed to have your eyes shut!”
My dad probably heard me, but he didn’t pay any attention to me. In his prayer he said that we were thankful for the food before us, which I certainly was because it was raw-fried potatoes, bread and butter, apple pie and cheese, and some leftover cold chicken.
There was also a bottle of cod-liver oil from which Mom was going to put half a spoonful into Charlotte Ann’s orange juice as soon as Pop finished praying. In fact, right that second, Charlotte Ann was stretching one hand as far as she could toward the glass of juice—the way maybe Warty, that very minute, was straining at the end of my fishing line for a nice juicy cutworm.
Pop’s prayer was kind of short, as it sometimes is at supper time, when he knows all of us are hungry and tired. But I remember he prayed for Middle-sized Jim, saying, “Dear Father, we pray that You will bless all the fine boys and girls in the world who were born like Jimmy Lion. Help people to understand them and to love them. We thank You for the blessing Jimmy has been to all of us with his sunny disposition and his eager mind. Help us all to apply ourselves to our studies as earnestly as he does …”
When my dad got that far, I thought maybe he was praying for me too, and I couldn’t tell for sure whether he was talking to God or to me. But it seemed maybe I ought to study a little harder that fall when school started.
Mom, hearing him pray for Jimmy, must have been reminded of the hognose snake that had disappeared a week or two ago. And that must have reminded her of my hands, because the very second Dad finished his prayer, she looked straight at my hands, which were already busy spreading butter on a slice of her homemade bread.
I quick spoke up and said, just to show her I knew what she was thinking about, “I didn’t touch Warty at all. I used my handkerchief.”
Then I saw Mom’s face get a strange expression on it, and I knew I’d made a mistake even before she said, “You mean you used one of your nice white handkerchiefs to pick up a dirty toad!”
I had to quick think of something to defend myself with, so I said, “It wasn’t all white. It already had bloodstains on it from trying to—”
“Blood!” Mom said, astonished.
“I—yes, ma’am,” I said, unusually polite. “Dragonfly and I were wading in the branch, and he stepped on a sharp stone and cut his foot, and I had to help him stop it from bleeding.”
“You were wading in the branch!” my dad said with an exclamation point in his voice. He looked around the edge of the table at my overalls to see if, when I’d had them rolled up and was in the water, the trouser legs had come down as they sometimes do and had gotten wet.
“We didn’t have our overalls on,” I said. “It was too deep there.”
“What?” Dad asked. “The only place the branch is deep is down near where it empties into the creek, and that’s close to the road! I hope you boys didn’t wade out there that close to the road with your clothes off!”
“We had to,” I said. “We were looking for something we had lost.”
“You lost something? Bill Collins!” Mom said. “You haven’t lost anything important, I hope!”
“Just a piece of fishing line that got fastened onto the bottom on a snag.”
“Did you have to break your new line?” Dad asked.
And I said, yawning, as if it didn’t matter much, “Oh, a few feet, maybe.”
“Several?” Dad asked. Out of the corner of my eye, as I poked into my mouth a forkful of great-tasting raw-fried potatoes, I saw that he had a twinkle in his eyes, and I knew he wasn’t mad at me at all for having hoed only three rows of potatoes that other afternoon.
“I’ll try to make it six or seven next time,” I said to him.
And Mom said, “You mean you’ll try to lose more line next time?”
My dad looked at me and winked, and I made up my mind that the very next time I had to hoe several rows of potatoes, I’d see if I could stretch the word “several” until it was almost as long as “many.”
When I was in my room that night with the light out and was getting ready to drop into bed on the nice clean sheets Mom had put on that very day, I looked out the window to the moonlit garden where Warty was tethered. I was a little worried about him, wondering if he would get himself tangled up in the line before he even got started on his trips up and down the corn rows for cutworms.
Warty really knew how to gobble them up too, just as he does a fly or a mosquito or a grub or anything else in the insect family that gets within two i
nches of his mouth. Warty’s tongue isn’t fastened at the back of his mouth as mine is but at the front, and he can all of a sudden flip his tongue out like a whip. If there is a fly buzzing around his head, quicker than nothing there isn’t any fly, and the only way you know Warty got him is when you see the tiny movement he makes in his throat when he swallows.
Once Dad and I watched Warty hopping down one of Mom’s bean rows, and even though we didn’t see his long sticky whiplike tongue catch a single bug, when he got to the end of the row, there wasn’t a one left.
As I said, I was looking out the window toward our moonlit garden. I cocked one ear in Warty’s direction to see if I could hear my reel clicking, the way it does when I’m fishing and get a bite. But as hard as I listened, I couldn’t hear a thing except the leaves of the ivy vine that grew across the upper part of the window, rustling in the wind.
So I quick dropped down on my knees to pray a sort of tired prayer to the heavenly Father, whom my parents had taught me to pray to when I was as little as Charlotte Ann, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I was so tired I couldn’t think straight. Maybe my words were mixed up a little, but even though God might be pretty busy running such a big world and a whole skyful of stars and planets and things, still I just sort of knew that He liked boys and was interested in the things they like to do. It also seemed He even liked me, Bill Collins, and that He wasn’t holding it against me for praying such an ordinary prayer.
I guess I must have gotten Dad’s supper-time prayer mixed up with mine, although I wasn’t sure, but I heard myself saying, “Bless Middle-sized Jim and take care of him. He’s been a blessing to all of us.”
I don’t remember finishing my prayer at all, but when I woke up sometime in the middle of the night, I was in bed, so I must have climbed in. I had been dreaming that I was fishing and had hooked a terribly big fish like the kind the gang sometimes catches on our northern fishing trips. In my dream, the reel was singing and singing, and the line was running out clear to the end, and I was trying to hold onto the pole and not lose my fish. That was when I woke up. And then I was sure I had heard a noise out in the garden.
I lay quiet for a minute, my heart pounding. I rolled over to sit on the edge of the bed, leaned forward to the open window, and then I knew I was hearing something. I was hearing my reel make little sharp jerking sounds as though the line was being unwound only a little at a time.
Then I grinned to myself there in the moonlight as in my mind’s eye I saw Warty hopping down a row of Mom’s young cabbage plants with his lightning-quick, sticky tongue flipping in and out, gobbling up cutworms and other plant enemies.
I sighed happily and went back to sleep until morning. Then, just as I do when there is something very interesting to get up for, I sprang out of bed, shoved myself into my clothes and, two steps at a time, was on my way downstairs to see how much of my fishing line had been unwound and if Warty had worked himself loose and run away again.
6
I forgot that I was up earlier than Mom herself and even Dad himself. Certainly I was up before Charlotte Ann was supposed to be. So when I heard the screen door slam behind me as I dashed out past our iron pitcher pump, I realized that the loud noise the door had made would probably wake up Charlotte Ann. And once she waked up in the morning, that was the end of it for any sleep any of the rest of the family wanted to get.
But it was too late now to go back to shut the door “like a gentleman,” as my parents tell me is the way to do it, so I ran on till I came to within about ten feet of the rail fence. Not knowing what to expect, I crept forward quietly till I got to where I could see my fishing pole.
The first thing I noticed was that the reel was nearly all unwound, so I figured Warty must have done quite a lot of traveling. I peeked through the fence, let my eyes run down the length of the line, which had threaded its way around through the potatoes and corn and beans and cabbage plants. Away over at the other side of the garden, not far from the pignut trees, it disappeared in the tall weeds.
What would Warty be doing out there in the weeds? I wondered. It wasn’t hot enough for him to be looking for shade, because the sun wasn’t even up yet, it was so early.
After climbing over the fence, I followed the trail of the line until I came to where it disappeared. I wondered if Warty had got tangled up in the weeds or what. And then, all of a sudden, in a little open space in the weeds, I saw something that made me stop stock-still and stare. I saw a great big hognose snake fastened onto my line instead of Warty. In fact, the line was right in his mouth! What on earth! I thought.
And then, all of a sickening sudden, I knew what had happened. I knew, because I saw a pair of toad’s legs sticking out of the snake’s mouth. The legs were kicking, making the snake look as if he had two big live horns on his head. That fierce-looking hognose had swallowed my friend Warty headfirst, all the way down to his legs!
I must have gotten there more quietly than I thought, because the snake didn’t even seem to realize I was watching him. He kept struggling and struggling with Warty, his head and neck puffed out much farther than they had been the day I’d first seen him and he had been hissing at me.
Warty still hadn’t given up, or those two legs wouldn’t have been kicking and squirming, and I knew he was trying to back out. The snake’s mouth kept working and working. It seemed he was trying to pull Warty in, as if his body was a gunnysack and he was working the end of the sack up around Warty’s fat sides.
I was so surprised and also so horrified at what I knew was happening—realizing that maybe I was to blame for tying Warty up so that he couldn’t get away—that it was like I was paralyzed. I couldn’t even scream for Dad to come to see if he could still save Warty.
And then, the next thing I knew, there was a sort of walking movement in the snake’s neck, and Warty’s two legs disappeared. And down below the snake’s head, I saw a big bulge, which meant that our friendly garden toad was completely swallowed.
Well, I knew there wasn’t any use getting hold of my fishing line and trying to pull Warty out. Middle-sized Jim had told me that snakes’ teeth are slanted back into their mouths and throats, and I could never pull Warty out.
And then, I got an idea. If Warty wasn’t dead yet, and if his tough toad skin had only been scratched by the snake’s sharp teeth, he might still be alive. And that idea quick brought me to life.
If you have read some of the other Sugar Creek Gang stories, you know that I had already made up my mind I was going to be a doctor someday and give people medicine to make them well. I would also operate on people. As quick as I got my idea, I raced across the garden, vaulted over the fence, and made a wild dive for the toolhouse, where we kept our hoes and spades.
I was going to quick grab up a hoe and race madly back to the garden, which Warty out of his kind heart had been looking after for us. I was going to get to Warty before old Hognose had a chance to start digesting him, slice the snake in two right close to the place where Warty was, and see if I could get Warty out, still alive. I would use the hoe to chop the snake in two and my Scout knife to do any other operating on him I had to do to get Warty out.
Just as I came out of the toolshed with the hoe, Dad came out of our house’s back door, saw me, and exclaimed with irony in his voice, “Well, what do you know!” He must have been astonished. He also must have felt mischievous, because he said to me, “Of all things! Bill Collins has gotten ambitious!”—which is a word to describe people who think of doing things without being told to and who also maybe like to work.
But I couldn’t be bothered with anything funny. “Quick!” I yelled to him. “Follow me and help me save Warty’s life! He’s gotten himself swallowed by a snake!”
A lot of our chickens must have thought that so much noisy excitement close to the house meant something for them to eat. A whole flock of maybe forty hens came rushing toward us, half running and half flying, the way they sometimes do when Mom comes out the kitchen door with a panf
ul of something she’s going to toss out to them.
Anyway, when I quick headed back to the garden, yelling for Dad to follow me, I stumbled over a couple of excited hens, one of them being old Bent Comb, who lays her eggs in the haymow. Those two hens and the rest of the chickens went scattering in every main direction there is and also in all the other little directions there are in between, making a noisy scared path for me to run through on my way back to Warty.
“Hurry up!” I yelled back to Dad over my shoulder. At the garden, I vaulted over the fence and swished through the dusty garden as quick as I could without stepping on any corn or cabbages.
When I got there, I found out that my dad had not only followed me, but he had also used his head and had stopped at Mom’s clothesline and brought with him the forked stick that we used as a clothesline prop. In less time than I can write it for you, Dad and I went into action.
Maybe I’d better tell you that one time the year before, Dad and our doctor had let me watch a boy having his appendix cut out. So even while I was scared and excited and worried about Warty, I imagined myself to be a doctor, and I gave quick orders to Dad like a doctor giving them to his nurse.
I was holding onto my fishing line so that old Hognose couldn’t get away. “Quick!” I said. “Get that forked clothesline prop down on his neck! Pin him to the ground! There—just above the bulge Warty makes!”
And Dad did.
But that snake’s head being pinned to the ground made the tail and the rest of his ugly heavy body come to the most excited life you ever saw. It seemed he was trying to twist himself into and out of a million twists and wiggles and knots.
I don’t know how I ever did what I did, but I did—and I certainly wasn’t smart enough to think that fast either—but suddenly I was standing on the body of the snake with my right foot and was ready to begin my first surgical operation.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 33