Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18

by Paul Hutchens

  “Hey,” Dad said, trying to be mischievous at a very serious time. “You can’t perform an operation without first giving the patient an anesthetic” (which any boy knows is a medicine a doctor uses on a patient before he operates, so as to kill the pain).

  I didn’t pay any attention to Dad’s half-funny remark. I had my official Scout knife out of my pocket and was opening its sharp cutting blade.

  “Aren’t you going to kill the pain first?” Pop asked, still with a mischievous grin in his voice.

  “I’m going to kill the snake,” I said.

  With my left hand, I grabbed the snake’s heavy body halfway between my foot and Warty’s bulge and started to operate just as Dad said, “All good doctors wash their hands with soap before they perform an operation.”

  I couldn’t be bothered. All I could think of was my friend Warty inside that bulge, where he couldn’t get a breath of fresh air. So I said, “This good doctor will wash his hands after the operation.”

  “Your mother will see to that,” my dad remarked.

  I was down on my left knee in the garden dirt, my right foot still on the snake’s body.

  “Never mind making a fancy incision,” Pop said. “Just cut him in two and let Warty hop out by himself.”

  Well, the rest of the operation isn’t very pleasant to write about, so I won’t write about it. Besides, it was too sad.

  “Poor Warty,” Dad said after it was all over and Warty lay motionless on the ground. It looked as if he was completely dead. I looked down at him and felt my eyes stinging. I knew that if I had been a little younger, I’d maybe have cried.

  “It’s all my fault,” I said, feeling very sad. “If I hadn’t tied him up, he could have gotten away.”

  “Maybe not,” Dad said. “Snakes like that live on toads and frogs—toads especially—and they know how to catch them without help.”

  I cut my line off, and Dad dug a hole in the corner of the garden for Warty’s grave, and there we buried him.

  We dug another grave for the snake and covered them both up.

  Dad and I were getting to be better and better friends, I thought, as we carried the hoe back toward the toolshed. He was not only my great big dad, who was my mom’s husband, but he was a pretty nice person also, even if he was a father.

  Just then Mom opened the back door of our house and stood in the doorway and looked at us with a question mark in her eyes. “Now what have you two boys been up to?” she asked.

  “Bill just performed a surgical operation,” Dad said and added, “but the patient died.”

  “We just had a funeral,” I said.

  “A funeral?”

  “Warty,” I said.

  We told Mom everything, and her eyes took on a faraway expression. I thought I saw tears in them, but she changed the subject by saying, “If the doctor and the undertaker will get washed up, we’ll have breakfast in just a few minutes,” which we did.

  Well, that was the end of this part of the story and the end also of both the toad and the snake. It was too terribly bad that Warty had to die, I thought. Still, it was a good thing there had been a big hognose snake around our garden, because it was when Middle-sized Jim got excited that time when the snake had been trying to glide away that he had got what his doctor called “absolute concentration” and had learned to walk and even to run. From then on, he could do both, although, as I said, his run was more of a lurch than a run.

  Also, it was Middle-sized Jim’s learning to walk and run that made the most important part of this story happen. I’ll get going on that just as soon as I can.

  First, though, I have to tell you about what happened in our garden the next day when Little Jim came over to our house.

  He had come to get a copy of one of Mom’s recipes for making a very special kind of pie that Little Jim’s mom had tasted at a potluck dinner at their Sunday school class party. I think it was called lemon meringue. Mom had surprised all the other Sugar Creek mothers by mixing in some chopped black walnuts, and it had tasted wonderful.

  Little Jim wanted to know the whole story about Warty, just as it happened to Dad and me.

  Poetry was already at my house when Little Jim came, and he and I had just finished making a couple of twig whistles and were blowing them, making a lot of boy noise. We took Little Jim out to the garden, and I told the whole story over again, having already told it to Poetry. Little Jim always listened to stories with his face as well as with both ears. His small, mouselike face with its cherry-shaped mouth got a lot of different kinds of expressions on it while he listened.

  When I finished, we were all standing near Warty’s grave, where Poetry had erected a shingle with a poem on it, which he had written himself:

  Here lies Warty, the farmer’s best friend.

  How sad that he had such a terrible end!

  I thought I noticed tears in Little Jim’s eyes as he stood looking down at Poetry’s poetry. Then, as he often does when he has a couple of tears that he doesn’t want anybody to see, he turned his face away, gave his head a quick toss, and when he looked back again, the tears had disappeared. They had fallen on one of Mom’s cabbage plants, maybe. If a cabbage plant could think, it’d probably have been surprised, wondering if it had started to rain saltwater instead of rain.

  “Where’d you bury the snake?” Little Jim asked.

  “Right over there,” I said, pointing to a little mound of clay without any marker.

  Little Jim walked over to it. Then all of a sudden, he let out a gasp and said, “Hey, you guys! Come here! Look!”

  Well, you could have knocked me over with the seedpod of a milkweed when I saw what I saw. About nine inches from Little Jim’s brown, bare, dusty feet was a great big, blinking, brown-skinned, warty-looking toad!

  Poetry saw it at the same time and exclaimed, “It’s Warty! He’s come back to life!”

  I looked down at the warty-skinned amphibian, which is what Middle-sized Jim says a toad is, and he did look exactly like Warty. He was blinking his glassy eyes as though he was thinking some kind of lazy, mischievous thoughts.

  But it just couldn’t be Warty, I thought, and said so. “He doesn’t have any snake teeth marks on him.”

  “Maybe they healed up,” Little Jim said.

  “They couldn’t in only one day,” Poetry said.

  “The only way to know for sure is to dig into his grave to see if he came to life and crawled out,” I said.

  Dad, hearing all the excitement, came out of the barn.

  I saw him and yelled, “Hey, Dad! Come here!”

  In a few seconds he was there with us, and we were all standing in a little half circle looking down at the toad’s blinking eyes. Dad reached out the toe of his heavy shoe and touched the toad, which right away filled himself up with air, the way toads do, and looked as tight as a toy balloon at a county fair.

  “Do you suppose, maybe, this one is Warty, instead of the one that got swallowed yesterday?” I asked Dad.

  Poetry, feeling extra mischievous that day, made up a new poem real quick and said,

  “His tummy is so round and firm

  Because he ate a fat cutworm.”

  Pop ignored Poetry’s poetry, stooped down, and said in a kind, friendly voice, “Warty, my friend, let’s have a look at your left front foot to see if you are you, or if that’s you over there under that tombstone,” meaning under Poetry’s shingle.

  When my dad leaned down to Warty and with a small stick tried to get his front foot out where we could see it, all of a sudden that big fat toad gave an acrobatic flip and landed on his back with his brownish stomach exposed to the sky.

  “What on earth!” I said, remembering that the hognose snake had done the same thing.

  Dad ignored my exclamation and said, “Yep, that’s Warty! See, there’s one toe missing on his left front foot. I accidentally cut it off a week or two ago when I was hoeing several rows of potatoes. The very next day, he disappeared, and I thought that was why he h
ad run away. I thought he didn’t like me anymore and wasn’t going to oblige the Collins family any longer by eating up our cutworms. I didn’t know, of course, that the real reason he ran away was because he was afraid of the snake. Well, well, well, Warty, I won’t hurt you. You can get right back on your tummy again.”

  None of us said anything for a minute, as Dad made us all step back about ten or fifteen feet. “Now keep your eyes on him,” he whispered, “and you’ll see some acrobatics that will astonish you”—which we did.

  Almost right away, I saw first one and then another awkward toad foot straighten out and rise up in the air, and then with a movement that would make any circus acrobat jealous, that toad gave his body a flip, and there he was right side up again.

  And that was that. Warty was still alive! Hurrah!

  I felt sorry for the other toad I had caught, though, and had brought to our garden and tied up, and he had been swallowed by the big, ugly, hognose snake. But our old favorite friend Warty was still alive, and that made me feel fine.

  All of a sudden, Little Jim was reminded that he was supposed to hurry home with the copy of Mom’s meringue pie recipe. “I’ve got to get going,” he said. “Besides, I haven’t practiced my piano lesson yet.”

  That little guy was certainly a great person, I thought, as I watched him crawl through the rail fence and run as fast as his short legs could carry him toward our front gate—where “Theodore Collins” was on the mailbox beside it—scramble onto his bicycle, and ride away.

  I looked up at Dad then. “I’ll bet you knew all the time that the toad I was trying to save wasn’t Warty. You did, didn’t you?”

  “I’m afraid I did,” he said. “In fact, I was watching you yesterday afternoon while you were tying up your toad with your fishing line. After you had gone to bed last night, I went out to the garden to be sure by taking a look at your toad’s toes. I had a little trouble catching him because he was as scared of me as a cottontail rabbit. He started hopping away in short, quick jumps, almost as fast as a frog jumps, unwinding your reel a little with every jump.”

  And that was that, and a very exciting that, at that.

  7

  Autumn with a million different shades of color came to Sugar Creek. The hills that year were especially pretty after the first frost. When Mom puts frosting on a cake, it’s nearly always one color—white or pink or chocolate brown—but when old Jack Frost gets through with the maples and oaks and elms and sycamores and lindens and a lot of other kinds of trees on the Sugar Creek hills, they have all the colors of the rainbow at the same time.

  “Did you ever see such a big bouquet of colors?” I heard Mom say to Dad one day when they were standing out by our barn looking toward Strawberry Hill.

  “It is pretty, isn’t it?” he answered her.

  I don’t think they knew I was behind them, looking out the open barn window at Strawberry Hill myself. In fact, they didn’t seem to know there was anybody in the world except themselves. All of a sudden, I noticed Dad’s left arm go around Mom’s kind of roundish shoulders, and I heard him say, “But I like grayish-brown color just as well”—which is the color of Mom’s hair.

  Then she leaned her head on his big wide shoulder and said something to him that I couldn’t hear and maybe wasn’t supposed to anyway. But I guess it must have been about her hair getting gray and her not wanting it to, for Dad answered her, saying, “Everybody’s life has to have a winter. That’s the way God made us.”

  For about a whole minute neither one of them said a word, and I was quiet as a mouse. In fact, I was even quieter, because right that minute I heard a rustling above my head. Looking up, I saw on the top shelf of Dad’s cupboard a pointed-nosed, beady-eyed mouse, which, I knew, if Mom saw, she’d scream the way women and girls are supposed to when they see a mouse.

  I kept on being quieter than a mouse, and I was glad I did, because I heard Mom say something kind of important. It was, “I hope we can bring up our children to love the One who made those beautiful hills.”

  Then I saw my dad’s arm tighten around her shoulders. For some reason, I felt terribly good inside, and I decided I ought to try to help Mom and Dad do what they were trying to do—and were having a hard time doing.

  It was time to throw down hay for the horses, so I left the yellow-brown-furred mouse to himself and went over to the wooden ladder that leads up to our hayloft. When I got to the top, I started whistling and throwing down forkfuls of sweet-smelling alfalfa, and—do you know what?—I noticed I was whistling the same hymn I had been whistling a whole lot that summer and fall. The words of the first line were:

  A mighty fortress is our God.

  Suddenly it seemed He was what the song said He was, and even though He was awfully wonderful, He still had time to look after me and all of our gang. In fact, I knew He was interested in us when we had a very dangerous experience one cold winter day that same year.

  There were maybe three inches of snow on the ground that day, nice fresh snow, very white and very clean and just right for making tracks, although the weather seemed to be getting colder fast, and the snow didn’t pack well into snowballs.

  The gang had been planning to spend a night up in the hills in the haunted house, if our parents would let us. We had tried hard to show them that it would be all right for us to do it. We had carried a lot of firewood into the house and stacked it in the big living room. We had even laid the fire so it would be ready to start in a hurry. Also, we had cleaned the room we had planned to sleep in. If we all took sleeping bags and blankets and had a good fire in the fireplace, it would be more fun than you could shake a stick at to stay there all night.

  But our parents said we couldn’t—not in the wintertime.

  “Absolutely not!” Dad and all the other pops had said. All of our moms had said the same thing, only my mom said it first. Dad had seemed a little sad when he had to agree with her, but he did almost right away, and that made me feel sad.

  So it was “absolutely not” for all of us. Middle-sized Jim had never been to the haunted house, so we decided to take him along one day to show him the upstairs and especially the attic, where we had seen the ring-tailed ghost you know about if you’ve read the book The Haunted House.

  But there was too much snow on the ground for us to take Middle-sized Jim along that day, because it’d be too hard for him to walk, even if he used his crutches. Besides, it was pretty far, and he would get too tired, and none of us wanted to walk as slowly as we knew we would have to if he went with us. So we went without him.

  We got into the house as we always do, through the basement and up through a trapdoor into the kitchen. Then we went upstairs, where we had a lot of cold fun retelling to ourselves the exciting experiences we’d had there one dark night, scaring a ring-tailed ghost that had been making its home in the attic.

  We even went into the attic and looked around a little. The first thing I noticed was that the big hole that had been in the chimney the first time we’d visited the house had been repaired.

  “It’s a good thing they plugged up the hole,” Dragonfly said, “or if anybody started a fire in the fireplace downstairs, all the smoke’d come out here.”

  Along about four in the afternoon, it began to start to get dark, as it does in the wintertime, especially on a cloudy day, so we decided to get going for our different homes, which were quite a ways away.

  “Let’s take the shortcut home,” Big Jim said, “so we can get home in time to help our folks do the chores.”

  The shortcut, as you know, is through Old Man Paddler’s cabin and his basement and then along a long tunnel-like cave that comes out at the other end by the old sycamore tree. From the tree, we would follow Sugar Creek to most of our different homes.

  It didn’t take us nearly as long to get back as it had to go, because we had played nearly all the way up, the way most boys do.

  It hadn’t been nearly as hard walking as we thought it might be, and I was feeling kind of
sad because we hadn’t taken Middle-sized Jim along after all. I knew he’d feel bad about it, too, when he found out we had gone and hadn’t even asked him if he wanted to go with us.

  Anyway, when we got to the spring, where we had all met before we started, all of sudden Circus, who had been carrying Big Jim’s rifle, said, “Hey, gang, come here! Look! There’s some strange kind of animal been following our tracks up to the haunted house.”

  His scary-sounding voice started the red hair under my cap to moving as though it was starting to stand straight up.

  We all galloped through the three-inch-deep snow to where Circus was. But, shucks, I thought, it wasn’t anything. Just some kind of a human being’s tracks that had come from the direction of Circus’s and Big Jim’s and Middle-sized Jim’s houses.

  “April fool,” Circus said, when we had all looked disgustedly down at only a boy’s tracks. “It’s only a poor crippled Lion.”

  Well, it wasn’t April first, and it didn’t seem very funny. Even though I could tell by the tangled-up way the shoe tracks were made that they were Middle-sized Jim’s tracks, I didn’t like anybody to call him “a poor crippled Lion.” I was sure Middle-sized Jim himself wouldn’t like that at all. He didn’t want anybody to pity him, as most handicapped and blind people don’t, Dad says.

  “Look everybody!” Poetry said with his squawky voice. “He’s been following our tracks all right! I’ll bet he found out we were going on an adventure and decided to follow us! We’d better take out after him and see if we can catch up with him and stop him.”

  And as soon as Big Jim had thought the idea over, we all, as quick as anything, were ready to start off.

  “How long ago was he here?” Dragonfly wanted to know.

  Circus, whose pop is a hunter and who trails more coon and rabbit tracks than any of the rest of us, stooped down and studied the shoe prints and said, “Maybe not more than an hour ago. See, the wind has already filled some of the Lion’s tracks with snow.”

  And it had. Our own tracks—the ones we had made ourselves when we had started out about two o’clock—had quite a little snow blown into them. Middle-sized Jim’s tracks—we were sure they were his because every now and then we saw where he had used his crutches—were a lot fresher than ours.