The husky, rusty rustle
Of tassels of the corn …
For the first time in my life I realized that whoever wrote that poem had made a mistake. Anybody who knows anything about a cornfield knows it isn’t the tassels of the corn that make the rustling sounds in the wind, because they are too far apart to rub against each other. But it is the big, long, sword-shaped blades brushing against each other that make the noise.
So I said to Poetry, “If James Whitcomb Riley had lived down here, he could have said, ‘The husky, rusty rasping of the palm leaves of the palm’—or something.”
Just thinking about the tall, dark-green grown-up corn that lives in the fields up North in the summer, and also thinking about the woods where maple, elm, ash, walnut, linden, and all kinds of other friendly trees grow, the kind a boy can climb and have fun in, made me lonesome for home. It didn’t seem right for it to be summer weather in the winter.
But the moon looked just the way it did back home, and also it felt the same way to be sleepy down along the Rio Grande as it did along Sugar Creek. So Poetry and I left the moon to take care of itself and went inside, where most of the rest of us were asleep already.
In what seemed like only minutes, it was morning again, our first morning in the Rio Grande Valley. Right in the middle of the kind of noise a gang of boys makes when it starts waking up and getting up, I heard a bird outside making a very friendly, cheerful bird call. “Cheo. Cheo. Cheo …”
Little Jim, who was already up and out on the porch, called back in to us, “Hey, you guys, it’s a cardinal!”
In a jiffy I was out there with him with only one shoe on and still wearing my green-striped pajamas. I got there just in time to see what looked like a flash of red fire in the top of the orange tree before it shot like an arrow right through the warm blue-skied weather straight toward some other kind of tree in the direction of the brush, which was also in the direction of the Rio Grande River.
“If a cardinal flies across the river into Mexico, will somebody make him fly back again and live here?” Dragonfly asked.
Circus heard him say that and answered, “Birds don’t have any nationality. They just belong to the world.”
“Where do we eat?” Poetry wanted to know, and so did the rest of us.
Big Jim had a map of the town, so pretty soon we were on our way to the hotel, where we were supposed to meet the four parents, who were our chaperons while we were down there.
While we were half walking and half running beside and behind and in front of one another through the very interesting townful of Americans and Mexicans, I thought how much Mexicans just seemed like suntanned white people, except that they had the kind of a tan that would not have to have sunshine all the time or it would fade.
Then I was remembering Mom’s last words to me yesterday when I had told her good night at the hotel before the gang left for our apartment: “Be a good boy, Bill—like you sometimes are when you don’t have a chaperon.”
There had been a twinkle in her eye, which meant she liked me but didn’t quite trust me 100 per cent.
“What’s a chaperon?” Dragonfly had asked.
And Poetry, trying to be funny, answered for me, saying, “It’s what the rest of us are glad we don’t have two apiece of.”
When we got to the hotel desk, I asked the clerk to phone the room of Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Collins of Sugar Creek to tell them there were six boys in the lobby.
The friendly, middle-aged woman who was the telephone operator pressed a buzzer, waited for Dad or Mom to answer, and said, “There are six hungry boys waiting for you in the lobby.”
“Terribly hungry,” Poetry said.
“Terribly hungry,” the middle-aged woman repeated into the telephone.
And Poetry’s face turned as red as the red side of a maiden blush apple from the tree in his backyard at home.
“They will be down in about ten minutes,” the telephone operator said. “You are to wait outside in the patio.”
“Would you please call Dragonfly’s parents too?” I asked, and the woman’s mischievous eyes flashed from one to the other of our kind of homely faces as though she had never seen such different-looking faces in her life.
Maybe she hadn’t, and she hadn’t missed much either. There was Big Jim’s face, which was the oldest-looking one with an almost mustache on his upper lip. Circus’s face looked like one of the chimpanzees in the Hermann Park Zoo at Houston. Poetry’s face looked like a full moon with a fat nose in the middle and with eyebrows that grew together in the center, just above the bridge of his nose. Dragonfly’s face had a crooked nose, which he could see the south end of without looking in the mirror if he would shut his right eye. Little Jim’s friendly, innocent face was mouse shaped. And finally there was mine with its very ordinary nose, which even in the winter had a lot of unnecessary freckles on it.
“Are you Dragonfly?” the telephone operator asked, looking straight at Dragonfly himself.
He grinned with a scowl on his forehead and answered, “Yes, ma’am,” and swallowed as if he had a big lump in his throat.
“Your chaperons’ names are Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert, aren’t they?”
Pretty soon, while we were still waiting for the Gilbert and Collins parents, the gang was walking around on one of the hotel patios. It was like a large lawn with lawn furniture and colored outdoor umbrellas. But, where the grass was supposed to be, there was beautifully designed tiled flooring like the kind Poetry’s parents had in the recreation room in the basement of their house.
“Look,” Little Jim said, “yonder is a whole lot of live fishing poles.”
We all looked where he was pointing. And, sure enough, at the farther end of the tiled patio, on the back side of what looked like the latticed backdrop of a stage, was a cluster of maybe thirty tall, green bamboo stalks, most of them just the right size for fishing poles.
There were a lot of flowers and trees and shrubs on a pretty lawn on the other side of the hotel. And across the paved street in a park, which had a bandstand in the middle, there were many more flowers such as oleander, bougainvillea, roses, and poinsettias.
“Look,” Circus said, “there are a lot of melons growing on that tree.”
They weren’t melons. They only looked like it, and we found out later they were called papaya. About fifteen of the green-and-orange fruits were hanging in a large cluster about eight feet from the ground.
Pretty soon Dad came out onto the patio.
Boy oh boy! Whew! Land sakes! I thought. Who was that tall woman in the extrapretty summer suit walking along with her hand resting in the crook of his arm? It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t be, and yet it had to be because it was! It was my very own mom dressed up in a brand-new toast-colored suit with a daffodil-colored blouse and a frilly collar, which had a neck shaped like the letter V. Also she was wearing a new perky hat with flowers on it, which made her look even more than ever special. She was wearing high-heeled green shoes too.
4
I stood stock-still and stared at my different-looking mother. She didn’t even look as big around as she did at home. For a half second I couldn’t believe it was her. Then Dragonfly beside me sneezed, and I remembered he was allergic to Mom’s new face powder. Then my mixed-up mind found my lost voice, and I said, “How do you do, parents!”
Dad himself looked dressed up. He had on a noisy necktie that had a hand-painted tall palm tree on it with a pretty green lake in the background and a sailboat in the middle of the lake.
“The name is Collins,” Dad said in a mischievous, dignified voice. “Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Collins of Sugar Creek.” He held out his hand as if he was meeting me for the first time in my life.
Not to be outdone by him, I took his hand and shook it and also Mrs. Collins’s hand.
Even if I hadn’t seen Mom or heard her Sugar Creek voice, I would have known her just by looking at and feeling her hand. It was one of the same hands she used when she did the work at ho
me, such as peeling potatoes or washing dishes while I dried them. It was also the same hand she had used to stroke my forehead once that very same winter when I had been sick with a high fever and she sat beside me the way she always does when I have to go to bed with a cold or something. It was also the same hand that, a couple of times or more, had given me a few sad spankings.
Pretty soon all of us were in the hotel’s ritzy dining room waiting for breakfast.
“Quite a nice change,” Mom said to Dragonfly’s mom, when we were all seated around a large table. “It feels good to be waited on for once.”
Dad heard her say that and caught my eye, and I could tell by the way he winked at me that he was feeling good that he and I could give Mom a winter vacation away from home with nothing for her to do.
All ten of us were seated at one big table at the end of the classy dining room and were waiting to be waited on by two white-coated Mexican boys.
I put on my mom’s favorite table manners, which she had made for me herself. Because most of the rest of the gang were half scared or half bashful or both, we behaved the way all our parents thought we should.
With so many people all around us, I wondered what Dad would do about the blessing before we ate. I knew that if he asked it out loud, other people in the dining room might stop and look and listen as if we were some kind of odd people—which people do when you bow your head to pray in a public eating place, because most people start right in eating without praying, like cows do—cows not knowing any better, Dad says.
Pretty soon ten platters of buckwheat pancakes came steaming in. They were a pretty sight to see, not only when you looked around the table at them but also when you saw them reflected in the very large six-by-eight-foot mirror that was on the wall across from where I sat.
While I was still watching us in the mirror and while the two white-coated Mexican boys hurried back and forth around us, I noticed that Mom’s green hat was the same color as the six or seven philodendron plants that were growing in the same number of copper flower pots on the branches of an iron tree standing in front of the mirror. I thought the color of the hat and the philodendron plant leaves was the same as a maple leaf in the woods back home. In the mirror I could even recognize the back of Mom’s green hat and her head.
Just then Dad said to all of us, “Let’s each one ask his own blessing quietly.” Then he bowed his head first, and right away we all did the same thing. In a jiffy our ten quiet prayers were finished, and we were all sawing away on our pancakes.
Dragonfly’s mom seemed even more bashful than she thought he was, because the Gilbert family hardly ever ate any meals anywhere except at home. I noticed that she kept watching her boy with a worried look on her face as if to see if he was using good manners. If he wasn’t, it might mean she was to blame.
But Dragonfly was perfect. He had to sneeze only once, which he did very politely into his handkerchief while he turned his face to one side as if he was used to it, and he said, “Excuse me, please,” which we all did without saying so.
“There was a time,” Dad said to Dragonfly’s dad across the corner of the table, “when I hesitated about bowing my head over my plate in a public dining room for fear of what people would think. But I don’t feel that way about it anymore. I always begin my silent prayer by saying, ‘May somebody with a heavy heart see me and be reminded that there is a God who loves him and to whom he can tell his troubles.’”
It was certainly different eating breakfast in that fancy dining room with all the windows wide open and the cool breeze blowing in and birds singing outside. But the gang didn’t seem to be enjoying it as much as our chaperons were. We were eager to get started on some kind of an adventure where we could use our muscles to save somebody from danger or something.
Dad and Dragonfly’s dad had already decided to spend part of their morning looking at citrus groves. Mom and Dragonfly’s mom were going to “meander around the stores awhile,” as Mom expressed it. We, the gang, could do anything we wanted to but had to be ready to meet at the hotel at 11:00. Then we would all drive across the Rio Grande to Old Mexico and maybe have dinner in a Mexican cafe. Also I hoped we would run into an honest-to-goodness adventure.
We stumbled onto the beginning of a different kind of adventure that very afternoon. We had been in Mexico for maybe an hour, driving and walking around and looking at the different interesting and educational things such as a very pretty, block-square, flower-filled, tree-shaded park, right in the middle of the town. We saw also a very gruesome-looking cemetery. The graves were only a couple of feet apart, and each of them had a black wooden cross for a marker and a wreath of dead or dying flowers hanging across the upright of the cross. There was a new cemetery right beside the older one, which had a sign in Spanish above the gate. Big Jim translated it for us, and it was “Modern Funerals, Day or Night.”
Also our two lady chaperons visited what they called “exciting shops” and acted like two grown-up schoolgirls who were having the time of their lives looking at things and also buying stuff such as two baskets, a couple of scarves, and some fancy drinking glasses.
After our Mexican dinner and before going back across the border, Mom and Dragonfly’s mom decided they wanted to look around in other exciting shops near the park, so Dad and Dragonfly’s dad drove round and round looking for a place to park but couldn’t find one until we came to an old Mexican church.
The very second we stopped and started to pile out, a bright-eyed, sincere-looking Mexican boy about my size came hurrying up, saying, “Watch your car—five cents,” only it sounded like “Wash your car.”
Dad looked at the boy with his bushy-eyebrow-shaded eyes, smiled at him from under his reddish-brown mustache, and said, “Sure,” and handed him a whole quarter.
“Muchas gracias, senor. Thank you!” the boy said politely.
Our two mothers hurried across to the exciting shops while our two dads went to wait for them on one of the park benches.
That left the gang alone for a while, which we would rather be anyway. We looked at the store windows for a while and finally went into an interesting-looking saddle shop. When we came out into the bright sunshine where our car was, Dad and Mom and Dragonfly’s mom and dad were just coming across the street from the park.
“Where’s the boy I gave the quarter to?” Dad said, looking all around while we all started to do the same thing.
But do you know what? That black-haired, brown-skinned, friendly Mexican boy had disappeared.
Dad laughed a little, then said, “Maybe he ran off somewhere to spend his quarter.”
In a few minutes we would be on our way to the bridge that spans the Rio Grande and soon would be back in the United States. Dragonfly’s mom had bought a colored basket, so his dad put it in the trunk of their car and locked it. I remembered that the lock on the trunk of our car had been broken back home when Mom had been accidentally driving backward one day—and we hadn’t had a chance to get the lock fixed before coming South.
At the river we were stopped by some officers who were stopping all cars because it was a toll bridge, and we had to pay a few cents apiece to ride across it.
Also, we had to answer different questions. Dragonfly and his parents and Big Jim and Circus were in the car ahead of ours. They got past Customs OK, and then came our turn.
“Are you all American citizens?” the officer asked us, and Poetry and I answered, “Yes.”
He gave us all a quick lookover, winked at Poetry and Little Jim and me in the backseat, and said to Mom and Dad in the front seat, “Did you buy anything in Mexico valued at more than one hundred dollars?”
“Only a few useless trinkets,” Dad said mischievously, and Mom held up some things she had in her lap.
“Anything in the trunk of your car?”
And that is where we had the beginning of our adventure.
5
Poetry and I got out to show the man there wasn’t anything in our trunk—as Big Jim and
Circus had done just ahead of us. I knew they had found Dragonfly’s mom’s new basket in their trunk.
Well, I guess I’d never had such a different kind of surprise in my life as when I lifted up our trunk with its smashed lock. I knew there was an old blanket in it, which we had used to cover some of our luggage when we drove down to the Rio Grande Valley to keep the dust off it, but that was all. Only it wasn’t. There was something else covered up under the robe, and it was alive! I knew, because I saw it move. In fact, right that second I saw the five brown, bare toes of a boy’s bare foot, just before it disappeared under the edge of the blanket.
The officer saw it, too, and yanked off the blanket. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but a boy, who was the owner of the five bare toes. It was Dad’s twenty-five-cent Mexican boy, whom we had last seen in front of the church. He was all curled up in as small a ball as he could curl himself into.
Right away the officer started saying something in Spanish, and the boy started talking back to him in a worried, tearful voice. It sounded like a one-sided argument, and because the boy was the littlest of the two I felt sorry for him and wished I could understand Spanish so I could take his part and explain to the officer that whatever he was doing wasn’t very bad.
Dragonfly’s car was still waiting for ours, so in a flash Big Jim and Dragonfly and Circus came tumbling out and back to see what our noisy excitement was all about. Then our two dads came, a little slower, and for a minute all of us were standing in a mixed-up circle, looking into the trunk at the scared Mexican boy, who had an expression on his face like that of a small stray dog that nobody wanted.
It hurt my heart like everything to have to go on across the bridge and leave that cute-looking boy on his side of the Rio Grande. But the Mexican government couldn’t let a boy do a thing like that, Dad explained to us. The boy wouldn’t have anyone to look after him in Texas, and the state would have to feed him.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 39