Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6

by Paul Hutchens

  The water had filled up the old swamp and the bayou that was on Little Jim’s dad’s farm, backing way up into their barnyard and making their straw stack look like a big brownish-yellow island in a dirty brown lake.

  Little Jim finished his piano lesson and came out to where I was.

  “Hi, Little Jim,” I said, and he said, “Hi, Bill.”

  He still had a sad expression on his face because he didn’t have any baby bear to play with.

  “I came over to borrow some baking soda,” I said. “How’s the new kitten today? Where is he? I want to see him. Boy, it sure is a pretty day. Wish we could go down and watch the flood.”

  He grinned at all the different things I had said, and he sighed and mumbled, “I’d rather have my bear back.”

  “You could have a bare back if you tore your shirt on a barbed wire,” I said, trying to be funny and not being.

  And just then I saw his little blue-and-white cat out in their barnyard on top of the hog house. It was a brand new hog house about four feet high and had a board floor, Little Jim told me. He knew because his dad and he had built it themselves. They hadn’t even set it up on its foundation yet.

  The kitten looked lonesome. How it got up there we didn’t know, unless it had been trying to catch a mouse and the water had crept up on it unawares. Anyway, there it was, and it was meowing like everything and looking like a boy feels when he’s lost.

  It looked like a rescue job for lifeguards, which all of a sudden Little Jim and I decided we were.

  “Let’s go out and get him,” I said.

  There really wasn’t any danger, for the water wasn’t moving. It had backed up from the bayou and was just standing there making a big dirty lake in their barnyard.

  “We ought to have a boat,” I said, looking around for something that might be good to ride in.

  It was Little Jim’s idea, not mine, to get his mom’s washtub. It wouldn’t be big enough for two of us, but it would hold Little Jim, and I had on boots anyway and could pull him. Then when we got there, we could put the kitten in the tub too, and I could pull them both back to shore, the “shore” being the side of a little hill right close to the barn.

  It didn’t take us more than a jiffy to get the tub and to get Little Jim squatted down in the middle of it and me on the other end of a long rope, pulling him out to the hog house.

  Squash, squash, slop, splash went my big rubber boots, and Little Jim floated along behind me, grinning and holding onto the sides of the tub with both hands and with his teeth shut tight, trying not to act scared.

  “Where’s your dad?” I asked when we were halfway out to the kitten, which was meowing even worse than before.

  “He and Big Jim’s daddy are up at the other end of the bayou piling up sacks of sand,” Little Jim said, “so the water won’t break over and flood our cornfield. Because if it does, it’ll wash out all the wheat Dad sowed between the rows last fall.”

  Well, we didn’t know very much about floods, except that when we were little we’d heard about one on the Ohio River. But anyway, we were having a lot of fun, so we went on out through the muddy water toward the hog house.

  Pretty soon we were there, and Little Jim and I climbed up on top of it and sat there in the sun, pretending we were on an enchanted island and were pirates. Then we were shipwrecked sailors.

  We put the cute little fuzzy kitten in the tub and pushed it out into the water—the tub, I mean—with the kitten in it. Kitty didn’t seem to mind that, so we left him there while we told stories we’d read in books and talked about our coming camping trip up north and how much fun we’d have and a lot of things. I tied the end of the rope around my leg so Kitty wouldn’t drift away.

  And all the time, time was passing, and the snow up in the hills was melting, and all the little rivers and branches that ran into Sugar Creek kept on emptying themselves. And all the time, the men were up there at the head of the bayou stacking big sacks of sand on the levee that protected Little Jim’s dad’s field from the flood.

  Then, just as time does when a boy is having a lot of fun, two whole hours went past, and all of a sudden Little Jim said, “Look, Bill! The water’s getting higher! It’s almost—look out!” And then he began to scream, “We’re moving! We’re—” He turned as white as a piece of typewriter paper, and he grabbed hold of me so tight his nails dug into my arm.

  I believed it and didn’t believe it both at the same time. I looked down at the water, which was certainly a lot higher than it had been. The back side of the hog house was sliding down deeper. I knew what had happened. That back end was set right at the edge of a little hill, and the water had crept up and washed the dirt away from underneath it. And quick as a flash I knew we were in for it.

  I looked toward the river and the bayou, and there was a big log spinning toward us. The dark, swirling, muddy water was carrying cornstalks and tree branches and pieces of wood and all kinds of debris, and the log was headed toward us.

  Straight toward us, faster and faster! It looked as if all of Sugar Creek was running over the cornfield below us and that it had picked up all the woodpiles in the country and was carrying them away.

  Little Jim held onto me, and I held onto him, and we both held onto the roof of the hog house, knowing that if the hog house slid down the hill a little farther, it’d turn over or slide right out into the current, and we’d be carried away. I tell you I was scared, so scared that I was numb all over and couldn’t think straight.

  Then, with a terrible grinding roar, that big log crashed into the side of our hog house. And that was the only thing that was needed to break it loose and start it moving. In seconds there we were, floating away, twisting around and around but not turning over! And we were being carried down toward the big bridge where Sugar Creek was the maddest of all.

  “We—we’re g-gone!” Little Jim said, his teeth chattering. And then that little fellow, because he was a wonderful Christian, said, “It’s better for us to d-drown than it would be for Little Tom Till or Big B-Bob, ’cause th-they’re not saved.”

  Imagine that! He knew that if we’d drowned right there we would have gone straight to heaven! And that’s a lot more than a lot of the smartest people in the world know.

  2

  I tell you, it’s a funny feeling, riding on the top of a hog house in flood waters. I guess we weren’t moving nearly as fast as we thought we were, but we were moving around in little circles, doing whatever the water wanted us to.

  If we hadn’t been so scared, it would have been funny, because coming right along behind us was Little Jim’s mom’s big washtub with that little white-faced, blue-and-white kitten sitting in it and looking even more scared than we felt.

  Well, I’d heard of boys tying tin cans to a cat’s tail, but I’d never heard of a washtub with a cat in it being tied to a boy’s leg. For some reason it didn’t seem very funny at the time, especially when I saw Little Jim’s face and thought, What if we do drown! What if we never see our parents again or any of the gang!

  And all the time we were drifting out across the field, getting nearer and nearer to the main part of Sugar Creek, where he was madder than a nestful of bumblebees. We weren’t drifting straight toward the bridge, though, but toward the road, which was up on a high embankment. It looked as if we would bump into the bank first and then follow the current along the edge until it got to the bridge.

  And there, unless something stopped us, the fierce brown current would grab us and whirl us under the bridge. We’d come out on the other side, right in the worst part of the creek, and go lickety-sizzle straight toward the big island down below the bridge, where there were some tall trees. Maybe we’d bump into one of them and be stopped and could catch hold of a branch and climb up into a tree.

  “Look!” Little Jim cried. “There’s somebody running down the road!”

  Sure enough there was, and it was Circus, our acrobat. He was running and yelling and waving his arms and trying to get to the pla
ce where we were going to hit the bank before we did. I guess a million thoughts started wrestling around in my head.

  And then I saw a telephone pole at the foot of the embankment, and I knew what Circus was hollering about. And then there he was out in the water, swimming toward that telephone pole. It was a race between him and us, but he got there first and wrapped his legs around the pole just the way he does around a tree when he’s climbing one.

  And just that second we went racing past, with the cat in the tub swishing along behind us.

  You should have seen Circus’s right foot shoot out like an octopus’s tentacle grabbing for a man. Quicker’n a flash he’d wrapped it around the rope that was fastened to the tub on one end and to my leg on the other.

  Before I knew what was happening, I was jerked loose from the roof of the hog house and from Little Jim and was out in the water.

  As long as Circus was holding onto the rope with his foot, I knew that if I could get to the telephone pole we’d be saved. But it all happened so suddenly that I went under. I came up sputtering and trying to swim.

  Just as I caught hold of the rope with one hand, I looked back, and there was Little Jim lying on his stomach on the flat roof of the hog house, drifting swiftly toward the bridge and toward the maddest part of old Sugar Creek. I could see his face, still as white as a piece of typewriter paper.

  He waved an awkward right arm toward us and yelled in a trembly voice, “Good-bye!” Then he turned around and grabbed hold of the roof with both hands and was whirled away.

  I tell you, it didn’t feel very good to know that I was being rescued and that my best friend might not be. All I could see for a minute, while pulling myself by the rope toward the telephone pole, was Little Jim’s sad face. And there kept ringing in my ears the words he’d said a little while before that—“It’s better for us to d-drown than it would be for Little Tom Till or Big B-Bob, ’cause they’re not saved!”

  And I made up my mind right that minute that it was the silliest thing in the world for anybody in the world not to repent of his sins and let Jesus save him, because you could never tell what minute something might go wrong and you’d have to die. It’s crazy not to be ready. It’s the most ridiculous thing in the world!

  Even while I was thinking that, and Circus and I were working our way back to the steep bank that led up to the road—saving the kitten at the same time—I kept wondering if it was too late to help Little Jim. Maybe, I thought, if we could get up to the road and make a dash for the bridge, we could get there in time to reach down and catch Little Jim by the arms and pull him up. The water was pretty high there, and if he would stand up, we could reach him easily.

  Quicker than it takes to tell, we were up the bank. I untied the tow rope, and then, leaving the tub and the cat, we were running squash, squash, kerslosh down the road in our wet clothes toward the bridge. I was feeling like a boy does in a dream when some wild animal is after him. He can’t run fast enough to get away, and then pretty soon he wakes up and finds out it isn’t so. And after he gets over being scared, he is happy again. But I knew that this wasn’t any dream, and I’d have given anything in the world, anything, to save Little Jim’s life.

  And it’s a good thing Circus’s parents were poor. If they hadn’t been, Circus would probably have been wearing boots like the rest of the kids in the neighborhood, and he couldn’t have run so fast. You should have seen him run! Lickety-sizzle, like a flash of lightning, he went down that road, leaving me far behind, his feet throwing sand and gravel behind him the way a horse’s hooves do when it’s galloping.

  Panting, gasping, half crying, crazy old tears getting into my eyes, I stumbled on after Circus, not having sense enough to take off my boots so I could run faster. Watching him, I couldn’t help but think of a football game, with the quarterback carrying the ball through a whole tangled-up mess of players toward the goal.

  Except that Circus wasn’t carrying a football but something a million times better. He was carrying the grandest heart a guy ever had, a heart that was full of honest-to-goodness love for Little Jim. I’ll bet if the angels that the Bible says are looking after boys and girls were watching Circus streaking down the road to save Little Jim’s life, they felt proud of him and felt like screaming for him to hurry up. Only I don’t suppose angels ever scream.

  You know, the Bible says in one place, where it’s talking about children, “Their angels in heaven continually see the face of My Father who is in heaven.” Jesus said that Himself, and He ought to know, because He was in heaven before He came down to earth to be our Savior. He’d seen maybe a million angels up there.

  Just that minute I stumbled over a rock in the road and went sprawling. When I got up and started toward the bridge again, I heard somebody yelling for me to hurry, which I did, not even much feeling the bruised place on my right hand where the skin was all scratched off the knuckles of two fingers from the gravel where I’d fallen.

  In a minute I was there, but I couldn’t see anybody, not even Circus. Away out in the swiftest part of the creek, heaving and whirling, was the hog house, and nobody was on it!

  “Hurry up! Quick, Bill!” I heard Circus yelling from down below somewhere.

  And I tell you, I hurried, looking all the time and yet afraid to look below for fear I’d see both Little Jim and Circus down there in the water. As quick as my old waterlogged boots would let me, I was where I’d heard Circus’s voice.

  And there, with his legs wrapped around one of the steel beams that stretched from one support of the bridge to another, was Circus, hanging head down and with his arms around Little Jim, holding onto him for dear life.

  And Little Jim was holding onto Circus and swaying back and forth. His feet were almost touching the water, which was all foam-covered and full of cornstalks and slabs of ice.

  And even while I looked, out of the corner of my eye I saw the hog house bump into a tree downstream and whirl around and turn over on its side.

  In a tenth of a jiffy I was helping Little Jim climb up Circus’s body to the bridge floor, where he was safe. And then I started to help Circus, whose face was very red from hanging down like that, and his legs were trembling as if they couldn’t have held on another minute. I braced my feet against the iron girders, and with Little Jim helping a little, but not much because he was weak from being so scared, I gave Circus just enough of a pull to help him up to safety too.

  The very minute he knew he was safe, he just flopped onto the floor of the bridge the way an athlete does after he’s run in a terrible race, and he gasped and panted and his breast heaved up and down.

  But Little Jim was safe, and so was I. And good old Circus was safe too. We were all trembling and weak but very happy.

  I thought I heard Circus say something under his breath about “lifted me.”

  “What’d you say, Circus?” I asked.

  And he said, “Nothing,” but after a while, when we were on the way back to Little Jim’s house, I heard Circus singing. He had a beautiful voice for a boy, and Little Jim’s mom had been giving him voice lessons free, and he liked to sing church hymns very much. He even sang in church sometimes, when they wanted him to. And what do you suppose Circus was singing? I wouldn’t let him know I noticed, or he might have stopped—a boy nearly always starts to feel bashful when he knows somebody is listening to him. But this is the chorus of the song:

  Love lifted me, love lifted me,

  When nothing else could help,

  Love lifted me;

  Love lifted me, love lifted me,

  When nothing else could help,

  Love lifted me.

  So away we went, I with my high rubber boots going splash, swish, kerslosh through the puddles in the road. Circus, even though his shoes were very wet, was dodging all the big ones because his mother had taught him not to walk in mud puddles.

  And Little Jim was still dry, because he hadn’t even gotten his feet wet. He could hardly wait until we got back to where his
kitten was—and it was still there, sitting down beside the wash-tub, looking lonesome.

  You should have seen Little Jim scoop up that little white-faced kitty and hug it. Circus and I carried the washtub between us on the way to Little Jim’s house, and pretty soon Little Jim decided to let the kitten ride in it. He walked happily along behind us, looking up at Circus as if he thought he was the most wonderful person in the world for saving his life, which I guess he was.

  It didn’t make any difference that Circus’s parents were poor and that he couldn’t afford a haircut as often as the rest of the gang. And sometimes his mother had to patch even the patches on his overalls. Circus was all right on the inside, which is more important than being rich and at the same time being mean or stingy or keeping your heart’s door jammed tight shut against the most important Person in the whole universe.

  Well, that’s the most interesting part of the flood story, so I’ll get busy now and tell you about our camping trip up north, which we took in a trailer that Old Man Paddler bought for his nephew to live in—and to give us a vacation in.

  It was when our parents heard about Little Jim’s and my crazy boat ride that afternoon that they decided we couldn’t go out in real boats when we were up north unless we wore life preservers. And it’s a good thing we did, because—

  But I’ll tell you about that when I get to it, and about a little Indian boy whose name was Snow-in-the-Face, and the railroad car Poetry and I discovered away out in the deep woods up there, and a lot of other exciting things.

  3

  When old Sugar Creek calmed down after having lost his temper so terribly, his face was as kind and gentle as a lamb’s. He had left some of his water standing in little lakes on nearly all our farms. There were fish in them, which we caught not with pole and line but by wading around in the water with our overalls rolled up. We’d wade about until the water got so muddy and thick like gravy that the fish had to stick their noses up for air. Then all we had to do was to walk over, cup our hands under them one at a time, and pull them out, holding on tight so they wouldn’t get away.