Then Mom gave me a whole hug and said, “Don’t forget you’re a Christian, Billy-boy!”
Then Dad came over, and we had a big three-cornered hug, which we were always having anyway, especially when I was smaller. While Mom and Dad were hugging me and each other at the same time, I reached down and laid my hand on the top of Charlotte Ann’s head, making it a rectangular hug instead of a triangular one. Her little head was round and as soft as a rose petal.
“Do you have your New Testament?” Mom asked.
“Yep,” I said indifferently, and that was the last thing I said. But that little “yep” was a promise to read my Bible every day and to act like a Christian.
There were eight of us instead of seven because Little Tom Till got to go too, so there wasn’t room enough for us all to ride in the car. Three of us had to ride in the trailer, which was a lot of fun. We took turns, a different group of three every fifty miles, so that we all got a chance to ride in it.
To ride in the trailer was sort of like riding in a train. Barry made us promise to sit still. It was dangerous not to, and if we got to cutting up, it might make the trailer sway and cause an accident.
It was great watching the telephone poles and trees go whizzing past and imagining all the fun that was ahead of us.
Barry drove hard all day, and the road wound round and round, with lakes or forest on either side, nearly all afternoon of that first day. And still we weren’t there. At six o’clock we stopped at a lakeside camp and pitched Poetry’s tent and another one that we’d brought along.
After supper, which was hot dogs and buns and fruit—the hot dogs being roasted over a campfire—we all played table tennis in a garage close by. Then, when our suppers had settled, we took a swim in the lake, which was only about a hundred feet from camp.
Wow! Talk about cold water! We’d been used to swimming in Sugar Creek, whose water in the summertime was almost hot, but the water of this lake was like ice water at first—until we were used to it. Then it was great.
The sun was still up, although pretty soon it’d go down. The tall trees were making long shadows on the clear blue water, and the little clouds in the east were purple and cream-colored like my mom’s irises back home. Some of the clouds looked like the inch-high creamy foam on the top of our milk pail when Dad’s finished milking and is carrying the milk toward the house—with old Mixy the cat following along behind or running on ahead or rubbing against his legs and meowing for him to give her her supper.
And then it was dark. We all put on our sweaters or coats, whichever we’d brought along. Barry stirred up the campfire so that the sparks shot up high and the big yellow flames leaped—like Circus’s dad’s dogs jumping up and down around a tree when there’s a coon up there somewhere.
I guess I never will forget that first night. Each one of us told a story—or rather, part of the same story—which Poetry said was a “hash” story because it had so many different things in it and was all mixed up. Big Jim started it, and then when he got to an interesting place he stopped, and Poetry went on from there. Each of us made up his own part as he told it. By the time the story was finished, it was almost time for us to go to bed.
Then Barry Boyland reached over to the campfire with his long stick and stirred up the sparks again, which looked like stars shooting up. We were all around the fire, half lying down and half sitting up, waiting for Barry to give us his special campfire talk, which we were to have every night, that being one of the reasons our parents wanted us to go on our camping trip.
While Barry was talking, I looked across the fire to where Little Tom Till was sitting. His red hair was combed, and his big blue eyes were looking at Barry’s brown face, and maybe at the scar on his cheek, and I could tell that he thought Barry was greater even than Abraham Lincoln.
I wished all the boys in the world could have heard what Barry said. It was the story of the prodigal son in the Bible, whose father gave him a lot of money and things. And instead of being sensible and saving his money, the boy took everything and started on a long trip. While he was in a far country, he got into trouble and lived a sinful life, spending all his money—just wasting it—and thinking about himself and being selfish. And all the time his dad was heavyhearted back home because his boy had run away.
Then one day the boy got a job feeding hogs. He got sadder and sadder and hungrier and hungrier and lonesomer and lonesomer. He was so hungry that he could actually have eaten some of the big long pods of the carob tree, which grew in that country and which were good hog food but not very good for boys. Although Barry said that in time of famine even the people over there in that country used to eat them, making a kind of syrup out of the pulp.
“Boys,” Barry said, “the heavenly Father has given each of you a wonderful body, strong and healthy, and a good mind. I hope not one of you will ever waste it by not taking care of it. That you’ll never have any habits that’ll waste your health or make your mind dirty, but you will be clean and strong. Keep your thoughts pure like … like …”
Barry stopped talking for almost a minute, it seemed, before he finished that sentence. He pushed his stick into the fire once more, sending up a shower of sparks that looked like big raindrops going up instead of down. Then he started the sentence all over again. “Keep your thoughts pure like Jesus, who was God’s only begotten Son. The Father in heaven never had to be ashamed of Him.”
Things were quiet around the campfire after that until Poetry’s squawky voice started to sing a new chorus that Sylvia’s dad had taught us. Sylvia’s dad, you know, is our new minister back home, who likes kids. Sylvia is a girl in the eighth grade, and Big Jim is always especially polite to her.
The chorus went like this: “It’s a grand thing to be a Christian. It’s a grand thing, I know …” And pretty soon we were all singing it together, none of us caring that Poetry’s voice squawked or that Tom Till couldn’t carry a tune very well. You could hear Circus’s bell-like voice above all of ours, singing a kind of tenor.
Well, it was time to go to bed, because tomorrow would be there in a jiffy after we got to sleep, and we’d be off again, going still farther north.
Barry and Little Jim and I slept in one tent. Poetry and Dragonfly were in Poetry’s tent, and Circus and Big Jim and Little Tom Till were in the trailer.
I went to sleep right away in my sleeping bag—and right away, it seemed, I was wide awake. The luminous dial on my watch, which my parents had given me, said it was two o’clock in the morning. What makes a boy sleep so fast anyway? I’d actually slept five whole hours in about half a minute!
For some reason I was wide awake, listening to Barry Boyland’s heavy breathing.
Maybe it was Little Jim’s wiggling around on his cot right next to me that woke me up. Just that minute he mumbled something in his sleep, and he seemed to be trying to wake up and couldn’t. I leaned over and heard him say, “The flood—the water—it’s better for us to d-drown than for Tom Till—my kitty—here, kitty, don’t be afraid!”
Then he whimpered and twisted in his bed as if somebody was chasing him and he couldn’t run very fast. So I reached up with my kind of rough hand and wriggled it around until I found his little soft one, and all of a sudden he took a great big breath and sighed and was fast asleep with his hand in mine.
And do you know what I thought? It’s kind of a secret, and having Little Jim for a friend helps make me think things like this, but I guess it belongs in this story. Anyway, I thought that if I was a prodigal son and had run away from home and wasted my life for a while, and then was terribly sorry and went back home to my parents or to … to God … if He’d just sort of reach out His great big kind hand and put it on mine, I’d know He had forgiven me. And I’ll bet, if I was tired, I’d go right to sleep without worrying.
I left my hand on Little Jim’s a long time so I wouldn’t wake him up when I took it away.
Outside, the waves of the lake were washing up against the shore, washing and washin
g. And when I pushed my head out through the tent flap, the sky was as clear as the blue on our American flag, and the stars were just as bright, only they twinkled as if they were alive, and for a minute I was lonesome for my parents.
The sky with all the bright stars in it made me think of a big saltshaker that was shaking down little grains of light instead of salt. Or maybe sand, and the sand was getting mixed up with my eyes, making me shut them, and the waves washing on the shore turned into Barry Boyland’s heavy breathing, and then mine …
The next thing I knew it was morning, the tent flap was open, Little Jim and Barry were gone, and Poetry was standing over me, dropping little drops of water on my face to make me wake up.
Outside the tent the rest of the gang were hollering and running around, pulling down the other tent, and getting ready to start on the last leg of the trip.
Poetry threw open the tent flap very wide, let the sun in on my eyes, and said:
“A birdie with a yellow bill
Hopped upon a window sill,
Cocked his pretty eye and said,
‘Ain’t you ’shamed, you sleepyhead!’”
Which I wasn’t, but I zipped down my sleeping bag zipper, rolled out, and started off the day with a flying tackle on Poetry’s stovepipe-shaped legs.
5
I don’t know where I got the idea that the Indians up north would be wearing war bonnets on their heads or have long black hair with all colors of feathers stuck in them. Most of the Indians we saw dressed just like other Americans. The boys and girls and men and women went around the streets with faces that were brown instead of red—otherwise, they looked just like everybody else.
We came driving into the town of Pass Lake, Minnesota, about two o’clock in the afternoon. Barry went into the post office to see if he had any mail and to tell the postmaster to send all our mail out to a place called “The Pines,” which was the name of the place where we were going to make camp. The mailman didn’t bring mail out there in a car but came put-putting around the lake in a motorboat.
Well, Pass Lake was a lake as well as a town, and that was the name of the lake we camped beside. “The Pines” was the name of the summer resort close by.
We parked our trailer on a lot that was like a park with a neat little cabin on it. It belonged to a man who lived in Chicago, a big round man who looked like Santa Claus except for his not having any whiskers, and he was always laughing and liked boys. We named him Santa Claus right away and called him that all the time we were camped on his lot. And Mrs. Santa Claus! She was a grand little person who looked like Little Jim’s mom and had a very special giggle when she laughed.
Santa Claus showed us where to park and helped us pitch the tents. Then he went back to work cutting down small trees on the back of his lot. He’d come up there especially because his doctor in Chicago had wanted him to get more exercise in the open air and see if he could lose ten or twenty pounds of weight that he didn’t need.
“See there,” I said to Poetry when he and I were driving in tent stakes for his tent, “if you don’t get more exercise and stop eating so much pie, you’ll have to chop wood to get thin when you grow up.”
Poetry grunted, whacked the tent stake hard with the back of his hatchet, and said, “I’d rather be fat and cheerful like Santa Claus than thin and grumpy.”
You could tell right away that Mrs. Santa Claus, whose first name was Georgia, liked boys too. Just that minute she came around to where we were and said, “Psst! If you boys would like a piece of pie—”
“Of course,” Poetry said politely. He wiped his forehead and licked his chops the way a pup does when it sees a piece of steak being held up.
Well, that was the beginning. Different things happened that afternoon, and then we went swimming in water that was even colder than the water in the other lake had been.
That night Santa Claus gave the campfire talk and taught us a new chorus. And the next day, Poetry and I had a strange adventure.
It happened like this. In the afternoon, Big Jim and Tom and Barry Boyland took Santa Claus’s big white boat with its outboard motor and went fishing for walleyed pike, leaving Poetry, Dragonfly, Circus, Little Jim, and me to guard the camp and to fish off the dock if we wanted to.
We didn’t want to do that. We’d wanted to go fishing in the boat and couldn’t—three was enough to go fishing in one boat when you’re trolling, which is a way to fish that I’ll tell you about in another chapter. The five of us who stayed behind went in swimming and got cooled off. Then we lay around on blankets in Poetry’s tent.
We even slept, until Santa Claus came over after having taken his afternoon nap, which the doctor had said he ought to have every day. I could see right away that Santa Claus was beginning to like Circus very much, there not being any children in his family. Someday they might adopt a boy from some orphans’ home or somewhere, they said.
Anyway, he asked Circus and Dragonfly and Little Jim to drive to town with him in his car to get some minnows, so the rest of us could go fishing when the boat came back, which would be along about five o’clock.
That left Poetry and me alone at camp. The summer resort was two or three blocks distant on the east. Santa Claus’s cabin was between us and that, and on the other side was forest. And away back up in there somewhere was an Indian reservation where, I thought, Indians lived the way Indians do in the stories we’d read about in books.
Barry hadn’t told us we couldn’t take a walk if we wanted to, and we certainly wanted to, especially since Poetry had his camera along, and I had my binoculars, and we needed a chance to use them.
So pretty soon, when Mrs. Santa Claus strolled over and saw how sad we felt and how much we wanted to take a walk and do a little exploring, she laughed with her very special giggle bubbling right up out of her throat and said, “I think this would be the very nicest place to read my book, so if you boys want to scout around a little, I’ll watch camp for you.”
It was as easy as that. So, camera and binoculars in hand and a little homemade map of the territory with us, we started out.
We followed the shore for awhile and every now and then took a look out into the lake and far across to where they were trolling for walleyed pike. When we’d gone about what we thought was a mile, we looked at the map and then started off straight north toward where there was supposed to be an Indian reservation—which means a tract of land reserved for the Indians to live on.
We walked and walked through dense forest—birch and ash and cottonwood and balsam and spruce. We were studying trees that summer and making a scrapbook of the leaves of different kinds. So whenever we found a new kind, we wrote down its name in a little notebook and picked a leaf, which we put in our hats to take back to camp. Our parents would be glad to know we were interested in things like that.
All of a sudden, Poetry stopped and said, “What time is it?”
I looked at my little black-faced watch with its white numbers, and it was almost four o’clock already.
“We ought to be close to the Indian reservation by now,” he said, taking out the homemade map. “Let me see. This is south, and this is north. We’ve been walking straight north for a half hour.”
“Have we?” I said. “I thought we turned east back there at the big pine tree.”
“East?” Poetry said. “That’s where we turned north!”
“We did not,” I said, and just that minute we heard a sound that sounded like somebody screaming with a quavering voice. We’d heard that a few times before since we’d come up north, and Barry’d told us it was a loon, a diving bird that has very short tail feathers and sounds like a screech owl with a ghost’s voice.
Well, if that was a loon, then we knew we were close to a lake. We listened. The sound had come from behind us. But the lake couldn’t be behind us, because we’d just turned around.
Poetry and I looked at each other, puzzled.
It was about time to start back to camp, and we hadn’t found any
Indian reservation. Then we heard the cry of the loon again, and this time it was in just the opposite direction, which it couldn’t have been if the bird had been where it was before! I stood there all mixed up in my mind.
Poetry and I looked straight at each other again.
Then we took out the map and looked at it and laughed at ourselves, because the map showed there was a wagon trail to the north of us and the lake to the south. If we’d go either way, and walk far enough, we’d find either the lake or the wagon trail, and after that all we’d have to do would be to go the right direction, and we’d come out at the camp.
But which was the right direction?
Neither one of us knew, and Poetry didn’t have his compass because he’d lost it that snowy day last winter when we’d gone up to see Old Man Paddler—but that’s in another story, which you’ve probably already read.
“If we knew which way was north,” I said, “we’d walk to the wagon road. That ought to be closer than trying to find the lake.”
“If the road is north, then the lake is south,” Poetry said, with his eyebrows down, looking at the map. “Wish that loon’d holler again.”
But the loon didn’t, and we couldn’t tell from the sun. The sun looked as if it was in the north, which it couldn’t have been.
I’d never been actually lost in my life, but I began to feel like it, and it’s a crazy feeling. Any direction you happen to look is either north or south or east or west if you think it is, which it isn’t. That’s how you feel when you’re lost.
Well, we threw ourselves down on the grass in the sunshine, which came down through an opening in the trees overhead.
Poetry had a pucker on his forehead, which meant he was thinking or maybe just trying to. Suddenly he straightened up.
“Give me your watch,” he said, and I said, “What for?”
He grinned. “I want to make a compass out of it. I just remembered something I read once.” He took my watch and laid it down flat on its back in the sun and looked at it, all the time with that pucker on his forehead.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6 Page 26