Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6

by Paul Hutchens

  Pretty soon it was summer and growing hotter all the time—and getting closer and closer to the fifth of July, which was the date on which we were supposed to leave for northern Minnesota on our camping trip. We spent the Fourth of July without shooting off any firecrackers, because one of the boys in our town had burned his hand badly the year before. That had made all our parents extra cautious, so they wouldn’t let us have firecrackers.

  But we didn’t much care, because nobody else was doing it. There was plenty of excitement at our house on the Fourth to satisfy me anyway, just getting things ready.

  All the gang had agreed to meet at the spring at two o’clock to talk things over and maybe have a last swim in Sugar Creek. Old Man Paddler’s nephew, Barry Boyland, had come from California with his new house trailer. He’d parked it under a big oak tree close to the spring and had been living there for about a week.

  There was something especially nice about Mr. Boyland that we all liked. Barry had been a Scout once—still was one, I guess—and he knew all the things a First Class Scout has to know to be one.

  Nearly all the gang had already taken their camping equipment to the trailer, and it was planned that we would leave early the next morning. I still had to take my overnight kit down and pack it in with the rest of my luggage—the overnight kit being a long, rectangular piece of waterproof material with pockets for toothbrush, soap, comb, brush, small mirror, and washcloth. When everything was all in it, you rolled it up into a little package. I hadn’t wanted to take the washcloth, but Mom said I had to.

  Pretty soon it was noon at our house on the Fourth, and it was a terribly hot day again, making me glad we were going up north to where it would be nice and cool. Mom and Dad and Charlotte Ann and I were sitting around our kitchen table, where we nearly always ate at noon except when we had company. I was finishing my piece of blackberry pie, which Mom had baked especially for me because it was my favorite pie. It was the last piece of Mom’s pie I’d get for two whole weeks.

  I was all a-tingle inside, thinking about tomorrow, feeling very happy, yet kind of sad too. I looked across the table at Charlotte Ann, my one-year-old baby sister. Because she was sleepy, she was leaning over in her high chair the way a willow tree down along Sugar Creek leans over the water, and her pretty blue eyes were half shut. Her little round head with its tangle of black curls was nodding the way a baby’s head does, and I felt strange in my heart, as if I was in a big vise that was being squeezed shut on me. She’s a great little sister, I thought. In fact, she’s wonderful.

  What makes a boy feel that way toward his sister, anyway?

  Then I took another bite of pie, using the best table manners I could think of, so my parents would have something pleasant to remember me by while I was away.

  I looked at Mom, who was chewing her pie, and at some new gray hair that was mixed with the brown and which I had never noticed before.

  Then I looked at Dad, sitting at the head of the table with his sleeves rolled up. The muscles of his brown arms were moving like big ropes that were alive, and they kept moving all the time and making the brown skin bulge out in different places.

  They’re great parents, I thought, and I’ll bet they ’ll miss me while I’m away.

  And all of a sudden I wasn’t hungry.

  “May I be excused?” I asked as courteously as I could. That week I’d been reading a book on courtesy, which my parents had bought for me and which all boys ought to read, and the book had made me decide that if I ever wanted to be anybody important in the world, I’d have to have good manners, even when I was at home.

  “Excused?” Mom said with a question mark on the end of her voice. “Why, you haven’t finished your pie, Bill! I baked it especially for you.”

  I looked down at my plate and could hardly believe my eyes. I actually had left some of my pie, which goes to show that even blackberry pie isn’t the most important thing in the world to a boy who likes his folks. I finished the pie and excused myself again, reminding Mom to be sure to call me as soon as the dishes were ready to be dried.

  I went outdoors and down to the barn to say good-bye to the horses and cows and pigs and chickens. And especially to our old black-and-white mother cat, who we called Mixy and who had a whole nestful of brand-new black and white and brown and yellow kittens, with the different colors all mixed up.

  Old Mol and Jim, Dad’s favorite plow horses, were standing quietly in a big box stall, facing each other. Jim’s nose was pushing up against Mol’s neck, right where it was fastened onto her head—the way my parents stand sometimes when they’re looking down at Charlotte Ann.

  Just as I was stooping down to pet Mixy—and to tell her not to feel bad because I was going away and not to worry—I heard a squawky voice behind me.

  “Hi, there, Bill Collins!” It was Poetry, who had come puffing into the barn without my knowing he was there.

  I jumped as if I was shot, turned around partway, and said, “Hi, there, yourself! Why don’t you tell a guy when you’re coming? You almost made me jump out of my shoes!” I looked down at my feet, and I didn’t have shoes on.

  “Sorry,” Poetry said, meaning he wasn’t. “What you looking at so sober-faced?” He came over to where I was and stood peering down into the corner at Mixy and her big family of awkward little kittens.

  All of them had their eyes still shut because they weren’t old enough yet to have them open, which baby kittens aren’t until they’re two weeks old. All of them were eating their dinner in the way baby kittens do. That is, some of them were. The others were waggling and nosing around and getting in each other’s way and stumbling over each other and falling down, which didn’t hurt them. They were so little they didn’t have far to fall, which is why it doesn’t hurt a boy to fall down nearly as much as it does a grown-up person.

  Old Mixy was looking happy, and her black-and-white tail was waving a little on the end very cheerfully as if she was trying to say, “You aren’t the only one to have a nice family. Look at mine!”

  Seeing the kittens reminded Poetry of a poem, which he started to quote:

  “Six little pigs in the straw with their mother;

  Bright eyes, curly tails, tumbling on each other;

  Bring them apples from the orchard trees

  And hear those piggies say,

  ‘Please, please, please.’”

  Poetry even sang it, because it was in our music book at school, and his voice was so squawky that Mixy actually meowed for him to shut up or he’d wake up her babies—which were already awake without having their eyes open. Anyway, she meowed, and he stopped singing, maybe because I pulled his hat down over his eyes with a jerk and told him to.

  From Mixy’s house we went out to the edge of our pasture, which was on the south side of the barn and where there was a high straw stack. We climbed on top of it and slid down several times, but it was too hot to play in the sun, so we went back toward the swing in our big walnut tree to get cooled off, and all the time I was half waiting for Mom to call me to help with the dishes, which she didn’t.

  I had planned on going up into our haymow to sit on the hay and feel sad a while because I was going to be leaving home, but Poetry’s coming changed my mood. We decided we would go down to the spring to see the trailer and to meet the gang. Poetry had brought some more of his equipment to take down there anyway—his camera and a new flashlight.

  Each one of us boys was taking along a first aid kit, which had in it a lot of different things and which every family ought to have in their medicine cabinet in case anybody gets hurt a little. Ours had waterproof adhesive tape, gauze bandage, cotton, Band-Aids, Mercurochrome, a pair of scissors, and different things like that.

  Poetry looked at his watch. “I think the gang’ll be there early, so we’d better hurry.”

  “Just as soon as I get the dishes dried,” I said, wishing I didn’t have to help do them but not saying so. A gentleman doesn’t say every unpleasant thing he thinks, the courtesy b
ook says.

  When I got back into the house, Mom and Dad had the dishes nearly all done.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” I asked, feeling guilty.

  “Surprise,” Dad said. His big, blackish-red eyebrows were up, and he looked at me as though he liked me a lot.

  “Oh, there’s Poetry!” Mom said, looking over my shoulder at Leslie Thompson, who was filling most of the doorway behind me. “Want a piece of blackberry pie?” she asked him. “We had too much, and with Bill gone there won’t be anybody to eat it.”

  My parents were like that to all my friends, which is why all the boys in the county liked my parents.

  Poetry ate his pie, and then he and I went down through the woods to the spring.

  Just as we got to the top of the little hill that leads past the old beech tree to the spring, where the trailer was parked, Barry Boyland started up his big black car and began to drive away. But seeing us, he stopped and waited till we got there.

  He was wearing a hat with a Scout insignia embroidered on it and a khaki shirt that was open at the neck and had short sleeves, which let his big brown muscles show like my dad’s—and they were almost as big. His face was so tanned it was almost black, and he had a little scar on his cheek where he’d been shot by the police that time I told you about in my story The Swamp Robber, when the police thought he was a bank robber.

  Barry Boyland had blue eyes that were as blue as a Fourth of July sky. His hair was as black as a piece of coal, and there was one all-gold tooth right in front, which made him look important.

  “Here you are, Bill,” he said, handing me the key to the trailer. “I have to run into town for half an hour or so. You boys can pack your luggage in the compartment behind the folding bed. I’ll stop at your house on the way back and pick up your tent,” he said to Poetry.

  Holding the key in my hand, I felt important myself to be trusted like that.

  None of the rest of the gang were there yet, so Poetry and I decided to go inside and wait, and he could pack his overnight kit and blanket, which each one of us boys had to take with us.

  Just as I was inserting the key in the lock, I heard a sound down at the spring. Looking around quick, I saw a red head peeping from behind the big linden tree—or bee tree, as my dad called it, which in June was covered all over with small, sweet-smelling, creamy-yellow flowers, which bees like better than bears like blackberries. The other name for the tree is white basswood.

  Well, I knew that head of red hair belonged to Little Tom Till, whose nose I’d smashed once in a fight, and whose big brother Bob was so mean, and who4se father wasn’t a Christian, and who had never been to church in his life until I got him started, and who was a great little guy even if he and I both did have red hair.

  I finished unlocking the door, pulled it open, and then without knowing I was going to, I called, “Hey, Tom! Want to see what it looks like inside?” All of a sudden I’d remembered a promise I made to myself one day last winter-that someday, if I could, I was going to do something very important for Little Tom Till.

  He came out from behind the tree kind of bashful-like, because he didn’t belong to the gang, but pretty soon we were inside the trailer, and I was showing him different things. There were a kitchen and dining room and sitting room and bathroom and bedroom and storeroom all in one big long room.

  “See here?” I said to Tom, whose blue eyes were open wide with looking. I lifted up a linoleum-topped trapdoor on one end of a worktable and hooked it so it would stay up, and there underneath was a two-burner gas stove, which was connected to a big steel bottle of compressed gas under one of the seats in the dinette, and which you couldn’t see without lifting up the seat.

  At the other end of the worktable was a sink and a water faucet—only you didn’t turn the water on like a faucet in a house but lifted it up and down, and it pumped the water out of a tank under the long seat on the other side of the eating table.

  “Want a drink?” I asked Tom and gave him one out of the faucet.

  “Where do you sleep?” he asked, looking around and not seeing any beds.

  “Right here,” Poetry said, flopping down on a neat, blue davenport.

  “Seven people sleep there?” Tom asked with doubt in his voice.

  We laughed.

  “No, just two. See?” Poetry jumped up, gave the davenport a quick movement, which made it turn a somersault, and there, as pretty as you please, was a bed wide enough for two or even three boys. All you had to do was to put blankets and pillows and sheets on it, and it’d be ready.

  “And some of us’ll sleep here,” I said, pointing to the dinette. “This table comes out and goes underneath, and these cushions lie across it, making a nice bed for two. And the rest of the gang will sleep outside in tents, which we’ll pitch close by when we get up there. We’re going to park right beside a big lake where we can go in swimming every morning and every night or anytime we want to. And when we’re hungry we’ll throw in a line and hook and catch all the fish we want to. There are so many fish up there that they get all tangled up in your lines—”

  Poetry interrupted me to say, “And sometimes we use redheaded boys for bait, the fish are so big.”

  All of a sudden Little Tom Till began to look very sad.

  I went on showing him the different conveniences: the refrigerator, the dish cupboards, the heating stove—which was in a little cupboard about the size of a small coat closet—a big two-door clothes closet, and a lot of storage space at the end. There were sockets for electric light bulbs, and a place to attach a radio, with a built-in aerial, and you could get the electricity from the car for the lights, if you wanted to.

  All the time Little Tom looked sadder and sadder. Pretty soon, when I looked around, he was gone, out the door and down past the spring, running toward home. I saw him raise his fist up to his eyes and dab at something, which I guessed were tears, and I knew that Tom wanted to go camping with us worse than he wanted to do anything else in the world.

  “Here!” I said to Poetry, “hold the key till I get back.”

  Like a flash I was off down the path after Little Tom Till, calling him to stop, which he wouldn’t do. He turned the corner quick, darted down a steep hill, and went underneath the bridge, where he stopped in the shade, panting for breath. When I got down to where he was, he was hanging by his legs from one of the girders under the bridge, pretending to be doing acrobatic stunts.

  I liked Tom better and better all the time. As soon as I could, I told him about a promise I’d made myself last winter, and that was that I was going to try to get him to join the Sugar Creek Gang. And then I told him a story Old Man Paddler had told us out of the Bible.

  All of a sudden he spoke up and said, “I won’t go to Sunday school while you’re gone. Do they have any Sunday schools up north?”

  “Sure,” I said, “and Indians go to them. Did you ever see an Indian?”

  Just then I heard his dad calling him, and he got a scared look on his face, turned pale, and started to climb back up from under the bridge. I was scared too, because I couldn’t think of old hook-nosed John Till without remembering how mean he was.

  “Good-bye,” Tom called down to me, and soon I heard his bare feet running lickety-sizzle across the bridge toward home, where he’d probably get a licking for something he hadn’t done. His daddy was that kind of a daddy, always giving Tom a licking before he found out for sure whether he needed it. He was not like my dad at all, who always was careful to decide whether I needed to be punished or not.

  And then Poetry was down there beside me, and he had a big whiskey bottle in his hand, which he held up for me to see. “Look!” he said. “I found it in Sugar Creek back there by the spring. There’s writing inside it!”

  The bottle was corked up tight, but, sure enough, there was some paper in it with writing on it, looking like a boy’s handwriting. And it was what we found in the bottle that made us decide something very important.

  Poetry pulled th
e cork out, and what do you suppose? There was a letter in it written by Little Tom Till. It said:

  Whoever finds this, please read the little printed tract which tells all about how to be saved and go to heaven, and write to me and tell me if you let Jesus come into your heart.

  Tom had signed his name to the letter and put his address right below it.

  The tract was one of those leaflets our Sunday school teacher had given us the Sunday before, telling us to pass them out to people. I certainly felt ashamed—I’d left mine in my room all week and forgotten them because I was thinking all the time about our camping trip.

  Poetry folded the letter carefully, wrapped the tract around it, pushed it back into the bottle, put the cork in good and tight, and with a very sober face threw it back into the creek. Then he turned to me and said, “I think Tom Till ought to be invited to go with us on our camping trip.”

  “So do I,” I said.

  We ran back toward the trailer to wait for Barry and the rest of the gang so we could talk it over with them.

  4

  Hot! Hot! Hot!

  Whew!

  That’s the way we all felt that Fourth of July. Then came the fifth, just as hot or hotter, but we felt fine and very cheerful because we’d soon be on our way up north.

  By nine o’clock we were packed and ready—and had actually started—and all of us felt like yelling, “Hurrah!” when Barry Boyland’s big black car with the beautiful silver-topped house trailer on behind glided down the road, across Sugar Creek bridge, and headed north toward the place where we were to camp for two whole weeks.

  “Be a man!” my dad said to me while I was still in the house just before leaving. He gave me a half hug, the way he always does when he likes me.