Generally, not very much can wake me up once I drop off to sleep.
It had been such a wonderful trip so far, I thought. We’d seen so many things and had so much fun. Also, it seemed wonderful to be in a warm place right here in the United States. I got to thinking about all the wild animals I had seen in their cages, and I was glad the Sugar Creek Gang didn’t have to live in cages but were as free as the red-winged blackbirds that make their nests along the Sugar Creek bank and whose songs are so pretty to listen to that it almost makes a boy’s heart hurt to hear them.
Up above the telephone-pole-shaped palm tree outside, I could see—when the wind whipped the branches around just right—the whole big, round face of the moon, which right that same minute was also shining down on a lot of terribly cold snowdrifts and bare trees up North and also on old frozen-faced Sugar Creek itself.
I drifted off into a strange sort of dream then. A big ugly, scaly, black alligator with straw-hat-colored markings on him raised his head up out of Sugar Creek, opened his mouth, and made a lunge for Little Jim, who was in swimming with the rest of us. It was a terrible dream, and I was still scared when I woke up. But Little Jim was there in his bed beside me, still sleeping, so right away I felt good again. Later, when I told Dad about my dream, he sort of laughed and said, “That is because you ate too big a supper.”
It took us a day of driving to get from Houston to the Rio Grande Valley, that very pretty territory at the bottom of the United States map. But all of a sudden we were there, and our cars were flying along a road with palm trees and orange and lemon and grapefruit groves on each side.
Dragonfly and Poetry were in the backseat with me at the time. “Look,” Dragonfly said, “there are a lot of people working out in the field.”
“Migrant workers,” my dad said from behind the steering wheel. “There are thousands of them working in the Rio Grande Valley between Brownsville and El Paso. People used to call them ‘wetbacks.’”
“What’s a wetback?” Dragonfly asked.
Dad, who always seemed to know something about everything because he was always reading and learning, said, “A wetback is a Mexican who has entered our country illegally by wading or swimming across the Rio Grande. They get jobs here and make a lot more money than they can in their own country. Some of them go back to Mexico later, where they spend the money.”
Poetry and Dragonfly and I got interested in something else just then, while Mom and Dad talked about different things. I didn’t realize what kind of things until I heard Dad say, “They found thirty-eight dead illegal immigrants in the Rio Grande in one year.”
Mom gasped, and I sat up straight to listen, especially since Poetry’s elbow pushed itself against my ribs and he raised a mysterious finger to his lips.
But I spoke up quick and said to Dad, “What’s that?”
“Oh, nothing,” Mom said, not wanting me to hear anything she called “gruesome” and not remembering that I wasn’t little anymore.
“Did they drown trying to swim across?” Dragonfly asked. He was maybe too little to hear about such things.
Dad must have decided we could stand it, so he said, “They were murdered.”
“Murdered!” Mom exclaimed, and the way she said it made me think maybe she was too little herself.
“It’s this way,” Dad explained. “After an illegal immigrant has been in our country long enough to have a nice little sum of money, he tries to go back secretly, sometimes swimming or wading or being rowed across the river. Evidently some criminals were hiding out along the river, watching for any illegals who were going home. They waylaid them at the border either on the Texas or the Mexico side, robbed and killed them, and threw their bodies into the river.”
“How did they kill them?” Dragonfly asked.
“In different ways,” Dad said and changed the subject. “Look, here’s where we turn off to go to McAllen. This road goes on to Brownsville.”
Dad slowed down, turned right, and away we went west on a road that was numbered Routes 83 and 281. We went zipping along between orange and grapefruit orchards. Tall palm trees were on either side of the road the way maples and elms border the roads back home. Our car window was open, and the cool, friendly breeze that came in felt wonderful on my warm freckled face.
The towns seemed so close together that you were in the middle of the next one almost before you left the end of the last—towns such as Mercedes, Welasco, Donna, and Pharr. And then in a little while we were in McAllen, where I noticed that most of the people were Mexicans. They had dark hair, and everybody was busy and looked happy, and the stores were nearly all new.
Dad drove straight to a hotel, which was named Casa de Palmas. That means “House of Palms.” He and Mom and Dragonfly’s parents went in to register, while we six boys climbed out of the cars. We roamed around kind of bashfully, looking at different things, especially the big palm trees and the red double-sized poinsettias blossoming at the tops of flower stalks higher than our heads. We also looked at a beautiful vine with brilliant purplish-red flowers, which Little Jim, who had a book of garden flowers at home, said was bougainvillea.
Circus didn’t seem very happy. He had a dark scowl on his face, so I said, “’S’matter, Circus?”
He said gloomily, “Who wants to climb a palm tree?”
As you know, Circus would rather climb a tree than do anything else, and if ever we don’t know where he is at Sugar Creek, we always look up when we try to find him.
“Yeah,” Poetry said, being so chubby he couldn’t climb one anyway. “Who does?”
We were standing right beside a palm whose smooth, gray trunk zoomed straight up almost forty feet before there were any limbs. In fact, there weren’t any limbs at all but only a lot of dark green fan-shaped leaves as big as an elephant’s ears in the Hermann Park Zoo. Circus was right, I thought. A palm tree might be very pretty to look at, but no tree seemed like a good tree to a boy if he couldn’t climb it or swing on its branches or pick mulberries or cherries or something from it. And you couldn’t do any of that to the prettiest, straightest palm tree in the world.
Dragonfly’s dad and my dad arranged for all of us six boys to sleep in an apartment over somebody’s garage away out at the edge of town, not far from what is called the “brush.” That’s the name of the thick forestlike woods that grow all along the Rio Grande River. The garage and apartment belonged to a man who had lived at Sugar Creek a long time ago before any of our gang was born. He had been a special friend of Dragonfly’s parents and had been trying to get them to move down there. They had fixed up enough beds for all of the gang to sleep.
Mom didn’t exactly want to stay in the fancy hotel that Dad had picked out for her, but Dad had decided she had to. “You’re going to live in luxury and be waited on and not have to cook a single meal or wash a dish for a whole week,” he’d said.
Even before we had left home, Dad told me about it, saying, “It’s this way, Son. A man who really loves his wife ought to see to it that she gets a little variety in life, even if it seems to cost a lot of money, because a wife is worth more than the money it costs to take care of her. There is nothing a man can buy that is more important than his wife’s goodwill and good health. And your mother needs a vacation pretty badly—a lot more than she thinks she does. She has worked very hard all these years, and I can tell it is beginning to get on her nerves. We have a pretty wonderful wife and mother, Bill—you know that, don’t you?”
He and I had been out in the barn at the time, and Mom had just called us to supper. I had known she was that kind of a mother all my life without anybody having to tell me. But when Dad said that, I looked up at his big bushy eyebrows and his gray-green eyes under them, and I think maybe for the first time I realized that Mom belonged to both of us. It was up to us to look after her, and take care of her, and not let her work too hard, and to see to it that she didn’t have too much to worry about. Also it seemed maybe I ought to try to be a better boy than I ha
d been.
“Sure,” I said to Dad, and that evening when I had gone up to the haymow to throw down hay for old Topsy and the cows, I stayed up there a little longer than I sometimes do. As you maybe know, away off in a far corner of our haymow where there is a crack between the logs, I had a very special place in the hay where sometimes, when I felt lonesome and also when I was especially happy inside, I liked to go. I would take out from the crack in the logs my little brown leather New Testament, which I kept there, and would read a verse or two or more. Then I’d drop down on both knees in the hay and pray something to God, whom I liked even better than I liked my folks and who had made all the world we lived in and had sent His Son to be our Savior.
I can’t remember exactly what I prayed that late afternoon, but there was sort of an ache in my heart because maybe I had caused my mother too much worry that summer and winter. So I asked God to help me to do something about myself, to make me kinder to my mother, and also to help me actually look for things I could do to help her around the house and yard without being told to. I felt I wanted to be as kind to her as Dad was.
3
Well, there we were in the Rio Grande Valley, all six of the Sugar Creek Gang and four of our parents, and I just knew something absolutely very, very different was going to happen to us. We were going fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and visit Old Point Lighthouse at Port Isabel. Also we were going to cross over the Rio Grande to Old Mexico and see different things there. Why, we might run into some kind of a dangerous experience with an illegal immigrant or a criminal of some kind.
That night when the gang was sitting and lying and sprawling around on bunks and chairs and gliders on our upstairs apartment porch, chattering about our trip and the wonderful warm weather and planning tomorrow’s adventures, Poetry was on the glider beside me helping me make it swing. He sort of leaned his head over next to my shoulder and whispered, saying, “If we expect to really have an exciting adventure down here, we may have to go out and look for one. Adventures are funny things. They don’t come hunting you up—you have to go where they happen.”
I was kind of sleepy and not too interested in having any kind of adventure right that minute. Certainly I didn’t want to start out that night in a new place like Texas, especially when our apartment wasn’t too far from a regular jungle of strange trees, bushes, prickly pear cactus, which is called “cat’s claw,” and mesquite, and stuff. It was the kind of growth you have to watch out for all the time when you walk through it, or you’ll get scratched or stuck or clawed. Definitely I didn’t want to look for any adventures in the dangerous dark, which it probably would be, that close to the Mexican border.
So I grunted and answered Poetry, saying, “Let’s all get to bed so we’ll feel like a million dollars in the morning and be ready for our trip into Old Mexico.”
“Sh!” Poetry said. “Don’t mention money out here on this open porch. You remember they throw dead bodies in the Rio Grande River after they have robbed and killed them.”
“They just do that to illegals,” I said.
Little Jim heard me say that and spoke up and said, “What’s an illegal?”
I remembered then that Little Jim had not been in the car with us when we had talked about them. So pretty soon all of us were discussing illegal immigrants. I explained to Little Jim and the others that they are Mexican citizens who, because they can make more money working in the United States or maybe because they don’t have any work in their hometowns, wade or swim or maybe row across the Rio Grande to get a job here.
“Why don’t they just go right down to the bridge and walk across?” Little Jim asked.
“Because they aren’t supposed to work in the United States unless they are American citizens,” Big Jim said, “which you aren’t if you are born in Mexico. If the United States let all of the Mexicans who wanted to come over here, there wouldn’t be any jobs left for the people who are already citizens. And maybe the Mexicans would work all summer and make a lot of money and just take it all back to Mexico and spend it there instead of here in our country.”
I didn’t understand it very well myself. It sounded like some things we were supposed to study in our history and civics books in school, and I wasn’t very good in those subjects. But I remembered what Dad had said in the car that afternoon, so I kept on explaining it.
“Sometimes when they try to go back across the river at night, robbers waylay them and take their money. Sometimes they kill them and throw their bodies in the Rio Grande. One year the police found thirty-eight different bodies of people who—” That was as far as I got.
Big Jim interrupted me then. “Let’s don’t talk about stuff like that before going to bed, or somebody will have a nightmare.”
Well, if there is anything I don’t like more than I don’t like anything else it is to be shushed right in the middle of something I am saying, so I said to Big Jim, “Oh, of course, if you’re scared or nervous or—”
Then Big Jim shushed me again and said, “Listen, everybody. Somebody’s singing or something.”
So I shushed myself and listened, expecting to hear some pretty Mexican music, but instead it was a quartet of men’s voices singing a very cheerful gospel song, which we sometimes sing on Sunday in the Sugar Creek church. It was:
“I won’t have to cross Jordan alone—
Jesus died for my sins to atone.”
“It’s a sound truck,” Big Jim said. “It’s coming nearer”—which it was.
Because every single one of the Sugar Creek Gang liked to hear gospel songs and hymns, we all kept still and listened. As quick as the quartet finished, I heard a loud, amplified voice say:
“Beginning Sunday night in the big tent on the highway between Donna and Pharr, be sure to hear the Rio Grande quartet and the boy evangelist David Mulder. Everyone is invited. See also the Christian motion picture Dust or Destiny. Admission free.”
All of a sudden I got a warm feeling in my heart. My folks had taken me to church ever since I was old enough to be carried there, and I was glad the people way down here, halfway to the bottom of the world, were going to hear the gospel, too. I had never heard a “boy preacher,” and I wished the gang could get to go tomorrow night to hear him.
Also, I would like to see an honest-to-goodness Christian movie in a big tent. None of the Collins family ever went to the Sugar Creek theater, because Dad and Mom both have told me so many times I can quote it from memory, “The motion picture industry as a whole is rotten, Bill, and even though there may be a good picture once in a while, we do not believe we should support it.” Also our minister says that people who go to shows all the time never care very much about getting anybody to become a Christian. So if I got to see an honest-to-good-ness Christian picture, it would be fine.
The sound of the sound truck faded away as it went on down the street.
“What’s the Jordan?” Dragonfly asked all of a sudden, as if he had just that second heard the quartet singing “I Won’t Have to Cross Jordan Alone.”
Poetry said, “That’s the name of a river in Palestine.”
“Was somebody afraid he would have to go across all by himself?” Dragonfly asked, being slower even than I am to understand things like that.
All of us were quiet for a while. Even though every single one of us liked to listen to other people talk about things the Bible teaches, still we were kind of bashful about doing it ourselves. But I knew that if our minister had been with us and Dragonfly had asked that question, he’d probably have said, “In the song, ‘the Jordan’ means death. The man who wrote it meant that, when he died, the Savior would meet him on the bank of the river of death and go across with him.”
In fact, Big Jim himself said that very thing a minute later.
Then Dragonfly asked an ignorant question that got me started thinking about the Rio Grande and illegals again. “When we die, will we wade across or swim across or will there be a boat or a canoe?”
Even Little Jim knew b
etter than to ask a dumb question like that. He piped up right then in his small friendly voice and said, “It’s not an actual river!”—which anybody knows it isn’t.
Anyway, it was time for us all to get into our nightclothes and also into our bunks. I was so sleepy by that time that I was sure, if my eyes ever went shut without my knowing it, it would be morning before I opened them again.
But right after I had finished saying a quiet good-night prayer and just as Poetry finished his, he and I slipped out onto the moonlit porch again. The weather was so warm that we could be out there in our pajamas without even feeling chilly. I noticed that the moon’s round face was as clean and white as it had been in Houston last night. It seemed wonderful to think that right below us on the lawn was an honest-to-goodness orange tree with honest-to-goodness oranges on it. Tomorrow maybe we could pick one apiece and eat them.
A warm breeze was blowing, and the extra-long branches of the palm tree in the center of the lawn swung from side to side, making a very happy swishing sound as they rubbed together. It was like the sound the waves of a lake make, washing and washing against a sandy shore.
I had heard that same friendly over-and-over-again sound many a summer moonlit night on vacations the gang had taken in northern Minnesota, which I have told you about in some of the other Sugar Creek Gang books.
All of a sudden Poetry said, “Listen.”
I listened but couldn’t hear anything except the wind. “It’s the wind in the palm tree,” I said.
And he said, “I know it.”
Because nearly everything Poetry ever saw or heard or tasted or smelled or felt reminded him of a poem, he started quoting part of one we had all memorized from one of our Sugar Creek schoolbooks. It went something like this:
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 38