This church was just like any ordinary church, except that about one-fourth of the worshipers were American Indians. The gang and their friends sat in a row by themselves. Sitting right next to me was little Snow-in-the-Face, and on the other side of him was his mother.
Santa sang a solo, which was the best I’d ever heard.
While he was singing, I looked for a minute at Circus, and his eyes were shining. He’d never heard anybody who could sing so well and who was a born-again Christian at the same time—and who was always trying to get somebody else to become one. Circus’s fists were all doubled up, and he was almost trembling. I could see that he liked Santa almost as well as we all liked Barry Boyland—and wanted to be the same kind of man they both were.
After church, when Circus and I were standing out by the car watching the people go home, Circus looked at me and said, “When I get big, I’m going to be a pastor of a church in a big city and sing and preach both.” Then he climbed into the backseat of the car, took out his knife, opened the blade, and looked at it as if it was a very interesting knife, blinking his eyes a little like they had dust in them.
After dinner, we all changed clothes—in fact, we changed clothes first. And after we’d had a little nap, which is good for boys on Sunday afternoons, if you can get them to take it, we all hiked over to the railroad coach near the Indian reservation, where Eagle Eye was conducting a Sunday school.
On the way over we passed by the place where the neck of the forest is fastened onto its body, and Poetry and I dropped behind the gang a little and planned an early morning fishing trip around the point, with our minds all made up to catch that big fish.
“Look there!” Poetry said, pointing out across the lake. Its waves were moving like lazy boys hoeing potatoes, not caring whether they moved at all. The whole lake, with the sun shining down on it, looked like a big blue desert with a gang of white seagulls tumbling around in the air above it.
Poetry had just started to say, “‘O beautiful for spacious skies—’” when we heard a twig snap behind us, and it was Dr. Dragonfly. He’d heard what we’d been planning about the fishing trip early the next morning.
“I’m going too,” he announced without asking us if we wanted him.
“Nothing doing,” Poetry said, shaking his head. “You’re always sleepy in the morning, and we don’t want you to fall out of the boat. Besides, we’re going after northern pike, not walleye.”
Dragonfly didn’t like that very well, and Poetry really shouldn’t have said it. Anyway, Dragonfly’s face turned red, and he said, “All right then, smarties, I’ll tell the whole gang right away!” He lifted his voice and shouted, “Hey, gang! Listen! Bill and—”
That was as far as Dragonfly got. We both grabbed him. I clapped my hand over his mouth, and Poetry said, “Of course, you can go, but for good sense’s sake, keep still!” He whispered the last two words.
The gang all stopped and looked back and yelled for us to hurry up or we’d be late to Sunday school, so we hurried.
But the plan was still a secret, and we knew that tomorrow morning the little outboard motor would be going out across the lake—that is, if we could borrow Eagle Eye’s rowboat so that we wouldn’t be heard by any of the gang when we started out. The little motor weighed only fourteen pounds—we could carry it easily without getting tired.
Boy oh boy! Early tomorrow morning! It was great to think about! I’d rather have run an outboard motor than do anything—even better than I’d liked to ride my bicycle when it was new.
We hurried along behind the gang, hiking toward the strange new church. And pretty soon we were there.
11
At half past two that Sunday afternoon, we were all in the railroad car church. Big Jim and I sat together on one of the seats. Dragonfly and Tom Till were right across the aisle from us. A lot of Indians were there.
I won’t take time to tell you all about it, but you ought to know that it was Little Jim who played for Circus’s solo when he sang. It was great to look down the long aisle and up to the platform at the end and see that little brown-haired pal of mine sitting at the upside-down suitcase, pedaling away and playing it the way his very pretty mother does for our church back at Sugar Creek.
Circus stood behind the homemade wooden pulpit, lifted his head, and sang, shaking his head a little to emphasize his words, just as Santa had done in the morning. I don’t know why I felt the way I did, but all of a sudden I couldn’t swallow, and a second later I couldn’t see very well either.
It was the same song I’d heard Circus sing before, and I got to thinking about how his father had been an alcoholic and had gotten bit by a black widow spider and then one night had been saved. And now Circus’s whole family went to church, and maybe someday one of our Sugar Creek Gang was going to be very famous, and all the world would know about him.
I made up my mind that I was going to be as great as Circus would be, only I didn’t exactly want to be great. I wanted to be—well, I wished I could be a Christian doctor who would save people’s lives but that when people talked about me to each other, they wouldn’t only say, “He’s a great surgeon,” but they’d say, “William Collins, M.D., is a famous Christian surgeon. He gives lots of money to help spread the Gospel.”
As soon as Circus’s solo was finished, Eagle Eye stood up and had us all stand. Then he shut his eyes and prayed a kind of long prayer in the Chippewa language. After that Barry gave a short sermon, and Santa and Mrs. Santa sang a duet, which was great, all about Jesus being “the Savior for me.”
It was a sort of funny Sunday school because they kept everybody in one big class and different ones talked to us. After a while Santa had what is called a “testimony” meeting, and he asked everybody who wanted to, to stand up one at a time right where they were and tell, in just about ten words, where and when Jesus had saved them.
Santa said he was saved in Long Beach, California, in a tabernacle built on an old baseball field—on a spot that used to be first base.
Barry said, “I was saved in the hospital a year ago, when a Christian farmer from Sugar Creek came and talked to me.”
And again I couldn’t see straight. The crazy old tears got all tangled with my eyes, and before I knew it I was on my feet and saying, “Yes, and that Christian farmer was my father! And—and he’s the best dad in the world, and I was saved up in our haymow one day while I was praying and reading my New Testament.”
Well, it didn’t seem nearly as hard for me to stand up in that railroad car and say those words as I knew it would have been at home. The next thing I knew I was sitting down, and I guess I never was so happy in my life, which is the way a boy feels when he gets up like that in church.
One after another we stood. Circus and Big Jim and Poetry each knew when and where.
Then Little Jim stood up. He didn’t say anything for a bit, then he said, with his Little Jim voice, “I don’t know any special place where I was when I let Jesus come into my heart, but I know He’s there!”
Quite a number of people who were not Indians had come out from town to attend that meeting, and when Little Jim said that, two or three men with big voices up in the front of the church, said, “Amen!”
I kept thinking about Dragonfly and wondering what he’d do or if he’d just keep still. But he stood right after Little Jim and said, “I got saved when I was sliding down out of a sycamore tree down along Sugar Creek, just like Zacchaeus did in the Bible.”
That was all of us except Little Tom Till, the new member of our gang.
Pretty soon a lady stood and said something in Chippewa, which I couldn’t understand but which had the word Jesus in it. Eagle Eye’s mom and his father stood up too—and even Snow-in-the-Face. I was sitting right where I could look into his face, and I thought of all the interesting things I’d have to tell the folks when I got home.
All of a sudden, Tom Till was standing and gulping and trying to talk and couldn’t, and then he did. This is what he said: �
��I—I don’t know whether I’m s-saved or not, but I w-wish everybody in the world was, and especially my father and mother—” His voice choked off, and he sat down.
Eagle Eye was acting as interpreter, that is, he stood on the platform and said everything we said all over again in Chippewa, just as soon as we had said it, so that everybody there would understand. Well, when Tom Till said he didn’t know whether he was saved or not but that he wished everybody in the world was, Eagle Eye said that was a good sign that maybe Little Tom Till was.
You know, there are a lot of people in the world who have opened their heart’s door and invited Jesus to come in, and He has actually saved them, but they don’t know the Bible well enough to know that having Jesus in the heart is the same as being saved.
Santa, who preached a short sermon right after that, explained that to us, stopping after nearly every sentence for Eagle Eye to interpret for him.
It was a good sermon, not very long but the kind that made a boy feel as if he wanted to be a fisherman like Peter and the other disciples in the Bible, who were always going fishing and having a lot of fun but who became what is called “soul winners,” or fishers of men, instead of just fishers of fish.
While Santa was talking, I could almost see that beautiful big lake over there in Galilee with its pretty blue water dancing and sparkling in the sunlight. I could see the boats bobbing up and down on the water, with the big fish wriggling and bouncing around in them when they got pulled in.
And then I could picture Jesus standing over on the sandy shore where He had built a little fire that morning and was roasting fish for their breakfast. And I wondered if they knew how to cook an underground dinner, so they could let the fire go out and then fish for two hours and, when they were hungry, come back and eat.
I could see Peter, that big rough fisherman, who made me think of Big John Till, Tom’s father, and maybe looked like him too. Only Peter became a fine Christian, and John Till was still an unsaved man.
Well, I could see Peter stop fishing all of a sudden, just as the Bible story says, and look over toward the shore to where blue smoke was rising from the little yellow-tongued fire, with flames leaping up like Circus’s father’s hounds do. And then Peter grabbed his fisherman’s coat, tied it on, and went splashity-sizzle out across the shallow water toward shore.
Then the rest of the disciple-fishermen came to shore in a boat. When they got there, there weren’t any big flames and not much smoke but just live coals with fish broiling on them, which goes to show that Jesus knew all about how to cook fish the best way—over an open fire.
It was a great story.
After the sermon was finished, Tom Till and I and a lot of Indian boys and girls were standing around the folding organ near the platform. Different people were talking to each other and looking at Little Jim play, which he kept on doing, his playing being called a postlude. Little Jim knew all about music and nearly all the musical terms—his mom, you know, was the best musician in all of Sugar Creek territory.
Pretty soon Santa walked over to Tom and stood in front of him. He reached out both of his big hands and put them on Tom’s shoulders, looked at him with his big, soft brown eyes, and asked him something that I couldn’t hear.
Little Tom Till dropped his head and nodded it, and a couple of tears squeezed themselves out of his eyes and fell down on Santa’s shining black shoes, like a couple of sparkling diamonds falling. And I’ll bet, if Jesus saw them fall, that those two little salty tears must have looked more important to Him than a whole truckload of jewelry.
Big Santa’s big arm went around Little Tom, and they walked toward a curtained-off place at the end of the railroad coach. I knew that in about a minute there’d be another member of the Sugar Creek Gang who was born again—which is an expression the Bible uses for becoming a Christian. And you have to be that or you aren’t saved yet, no matter how good you think you are, Old Man Paddler says.
On the way home, as we were hiking back along the same way we’d come, all of us walking together, Circus surprised us by saying, “Guess what!”
We stopped walking, and Circus was looking up at a balsam tree as though he wished he didn’t have on such good clothes, so that he could climb it.
“What’s so important?” Dragonfly wanted to know.
And all of a sudden Circus forgot his clothes and went shinnying up that tree to the first limb, where he sat and looked down at us, grinning like a half-grown chimpanzee. Then he said, “I’ve been invited to go to Chicago to sing in Santa’s church and over the radio.”
I stared at him. Dragonfly picked up a stick and tossed it up at him. Big Jim’s face was sober. Poetry started to quote a poem, picking up a handful of leaves and tossing them in the air and watching them blow away:
“As dry leaves before the hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle,
mount to the sky,
So up to the housetop
the coursers they flew,
With a sleigh full of toys,
and St. Nicholas, too.”
That verse is a part of the poem “The Night Before Christmas,” and St. Nicholas is another name for Santa Claus.
Little Jim said, “Why didn’t Santa invite all of us to come?”
“Why?” Circus called down to us. “Because it’s at Thanksgiving time, and there wouldn’t be enough turkey for all of us and Poetry too. The turkey would have to be as big as a roast lamb!”
“See if you can figure out this riddle,” Poetry said, changing the subject:
“Two legs sat upon three legs
With one leg in his lap;
In comes four legs
And runs away with one leg;
Up jumps two legs,
Catches up three legs,
Throws it after four legs,
And makes him bring back one leg.”
As soon as Poetry had finished, he said, “Give up?”
We finally gave up, and he explained it. “Man with two legs sits on three-legged stool with leg of lamb on his lap. Dog with four legs comes in, runs away with leg of lamb. Man with two legs jumps up, throws three-legged stool at dog and makes him bring back the leg of lamb! Now, hurry up, everybody, and let’s get back to camp to supper.”
Which we did.
But it was true. Circus was invited to go to Chicago, with all expenses paid, to sing in Santa’s big church and also over the radio. Not only that, but he could ride to that big noisy city anyway he wanted to, either on the train or on a bus, or he could go by airplane!
Imagine that! By airplane! You can guess that I felt like Little Jim did. “Why didn’t Santa invite us all to come?”
“Maybe he will,” Circus said, just as we came within sight of the camp.
And maybe he will. Who knows? If he does, I’ll write about it for you.
And if he does, the Sugar Creek Gang will spend Thanksgiving vacation in one of the largest cities in the world. We’ll see the zoo and the museum and store buildings that are as big as mountains. That would make a good title for a new story, wouldn’t it? The Chicago Adventure.
Pretty soon it would be night and time to go to bed. And early in the morning, Poetry and Dragonfly and I would be out on the lake fishing for a twenty-pound northern pike. Boy, oh boy!
Barry sent Tom Till and me to gather wood for the campfire. Tom was very quiet while we picked up different-sized sticks, and I knew he was remembering what had happened to him in the railroad car church.
All of a sudden he said, “My big brother Bob’s been workin’ for your dad this week, hoein’ potatoes.”
“I know it,” I said, and then that little red-haired guy said, “Do you suppose your mom’ll give him an extra-large piece of blackberry pie?”
“Sure she will,” I said, thinking about my mom’s extra-kind face.
And then Tom Till said something that sounded just like something Little Jim would have thought of saying. He said, “I’ll bet if your mom gives him an extr
a-big piece of blackberry pie—and is especially nice to him—maybe he’ll think Jesus is all right too, and it’ll be easier to get him to go to church.”
When he said that, I sort of felt that he had said one of the most important things in the world.
Well, Tom and I came grunting back into camp with our big armloads of wood. Then he asked to borrow my binoculars, so he could look out across the lake to an island in the middle, where the sun was shining on the tops of the trees as though somebody had taken a paintbrush and splotched a lot of yellowish-red paint on them.
“Sure,” I said, “here they are,” handing my binoculars to him. “Keep them as long as you like,” which he did, not giving them back until the next day, which was the day of all the excitement in camp, the day of the big fishing trip.
12
That night around the campfire, just before going to bed, Barry gave us five Bible verses to memorize. I wrote them down in a little notebook, where I had a lot of other important things a Christian boy ought to know. One of the verses ended like this: “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
Even though I was remembering the sermon Santa had preached in the afternoon, and even though I was actually listening to Barry’s talk, I caught Poetry’s eye across the fire, and he winked at me, meaning, Tomorrow morning early.
And that reminds me—I forgot to tell you that right after the meeting in the railroad coach, Poetry and Dragonfly and I had asked Eagle Eye if we could borrow his rowboat tomorrow morning early, and he said we could and had handed us the key so we could unlock it.
So when Poetry winked at me, my hand slid into one of my pockets and brought out the key, which I held half hidden, yet so Poetry could see it. Dragonfly saw it too, but I looked at him with my eyebrows down so he wouldn’t look happy and make the rest of the gang wonder what mischief was afoot.
We even arranged it so that the three of us could sleep in the same tent that night. Whichever one of us should awaken first in the morning was supposed to waken the rest of us.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6 Page 30