I had to tell you about this almost-fight, though, so you’ll understand what happened in Chicago when Big Jim and Bob met again under the strangest circumstances you ever saw.
Of course, none of us knew that Bob would be in Chicago ahead of us. And certainly none of us ever dreamed why he’d be there, but he was.
3
It was the morning before we were to leave for Chicago that I found out Bob Till had gone there ahead of us.
Mom and Dad and I were sitting at the breakfast table, each one of us having finished eating. Charlotte Ann was in her crib in the other room. Dad reached over to a corner of the table for our Bible, which was always on that corner at mealtime.
All of us knew that we would have what we called “family devotions” at our house at least once a day, and we usually had it at the table. Sometimes Dad would read, sometimes Mom, and sometimes me. Once in a while, we just passed around what is called a “Bread Box,” which is a little square box full of Bible verses printed on cards.
Dad picked up the Bible, and I sat quiet, ready to listen. Even though I was anxious to get outdoors and feel the ground under my bare feet—and even though Jenny Wren was outside on our clothesline just whooping it up with a song that sounded like a lot of beautiful gibberish all mixed up with different tones—I knew the Bible was the most important book in the world and that I was supposed to listen politely. Little Jim’s mom had taught him, and he had told me, that it was full of “sweet music.”
Well, Dad opened the Bible respectfully and asked me to read, which I had started to do when there was a knock on our screen door.
We were eating breakfast in our kitchen, so the door wasn’t very far behind me. I turned around and looked, and there, sort of half sitting and half standing on the steps, was Tom Till, the only Christian in the whole Till family, looking very sad, as though something had happened to him.
“Come in, Tom,” Mom said, going to the screen door and opening it.
Little Tom bashfully came in and looked around at the different things in the kitchen, such as our new refrigerator and gas stove, which we used especially in the summer instead of our wood stove so Mom wouldn’t half smother to death getting meals for the Collins family.
“We’re having family devotions,” I said.
Dad reached behind him for a chair, and Tom sat down between him and me. Just that minute Charlotte Ann started a funny cooing noise in the other room, but she wasn’t crying, so Mom didn’t go to get her. Charlotte Ann always half sang and half gurgled in the morning when she was feeling good, which she nearly always was.
I knew Tom Till didn’t know what family devotions were, which most boys in the world don’t because their parents are not like mine and maybe don’t know God well enough to talk to Him.
Pretty soon I was reading the passage Dad had picked out, and it was about people giving their bodies to God so He could use them to do what needed to be done in the world. Just like a great musician playing on a violin or a piano, so we were supposed to let God play on us or else use us like a carpenter uses his tools to build something.
Tom Till’s red hair and my red hair were so close together and only a little different in color that for a minute I let my mind stray to the pretty two-tone car that Dad had bought just the other day.
Mom had a notebook in her hand, and she wrote down one of the best verses I’d read. She did that at every family devotions meeting we had, and then, once every week or whenever we wanted to, we checked back over the verses we’d talked about and recalled the different things they meant.
Dad explained to Tom why we did that. “A boy who goes to Sunday school every Sunday for a year still only gets about twenty-six hours a year of Bible instruction, and that isn’t very much out of eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours in a year.”
It didn’t take us long, but when we got through, I understood what the verses meant. If God had my whole body, including my mind, hands, feet, eyes, ears, and all of me, I’d be a great guy, which I really wasn’t most of the time.
If He had my eyes, I wouldn’t look at things I oughtn’t to. If He had my feet, I wouldn’t let them carry me places I oughtn’t go. If He had my ears, I wouldn’t listen to the tough boys’ filthy talk at school. And if He had my tongue, I’d tell them in no uncertain terms that their words sounded like the mud in our barnyard looked. And I wouldn’t fuss or whine when my parents told me to do something my lazy body didn’t want to do. And I’d be polite and wouldn’t talk back to them, even when I thought maybe they might have made a mistake in something they accused me of doing and I hadn’t done it.
I never saw anybody look so interested—and also as though he was all stirred up inside—as Tom Till. When we’d finished saying things about the verses I’d read, and Mom had finished writing down one of them especially, Dad started to sing the chorus of a church hymn, and I joined in with a kind of tenor and Mom with an alto.
Tom didn’t know the song at all and didn’t have much of a voice for singing anyway, so he just listened.
We finished the chorus, and Dad got ready to pray. “Are there any requests?” he asked, as he nearly always does.
“Pray for Old Man Paddler,” I said. “He doesn’t feel very well.”
“Pray for our minister,” Mom said, and I thought right away of Sylvia, our new minister’s oldest daughter, whom Big Jim seemed to like better than anybody.
Then my mind flashed to Circus’s sort of ordinary-looking sister, who wasn’t saved yet, whom I’d tried to kill a spider for last year at school and didn’t because of her thinking I was afraid of it and killing it herself. And even though I didn’t much like girls and I especially didn’t like her, I thought she ought to be saved anyway.
So I said, “Pray for—” And then I felt the roots of my hair acting as if they were worms and were all starting to crawl at once. I knew that if I had been looking at my freckled face in the mirror, I’d be blushing.
Dad looked at me, and I bowed my head and shut my eyes and shut up, and he said to Tom, “Any requests? Anything or anybody you want us to pray for?”
I’d forgotten Tom for a minute, so I opened my eyes again, and I saw him swallow as though he’d forgotten to chew a big bite of something.
Then he said, “Pray for B-Bob. He’s—he ran away this morning—”
Dad prayed only a very few minutes, and in language we could all understand. Then at the end of his prayer, he prayed for all our gang by name and especially for Big Bob Till, who it seemed he already knew about.
I thought it was sort of funny that he prayed for Mr. Simondson, our grocer, right along with Bob, and it wasn’t until afterward that I found out that Bob Till had broken into his store last night and stolen money out of the cash register.
After breakfast, when Tom and I were outdoors getting ready to dig potatoes, which he had come over to our house to help me do that day—my mom having hired him on purpose so he would have a little spending money when he got to Chicago—I asked him where Bob had gone.
“I don’t know,” he said, poking one of his bare toes into the soft dirt of our garden. “Maybe he went to Chicago. He’s been a-wantin’ to go there for a long time.”
“Chicago?” I said.
And he said, “Ssh! Not so loud. And please don’t tell anybody, or the police’ll get him.”
I felt sorry for Tom, and I knew if he’d had parents like mine or like the parents most of the boys in our gang had, Bob would have been different and would have had Bible verses growing in his heart and mind instead of a lot of big nasty sins like the tall ugly weeds that grew on both sides of the path on the way to our potato patch.
There wouldn’t have been any big weeds there, I thought, if I’d pulled them up or cut them down when they were little.
Anyway, I got to wondering what if we found Bob Till somewhere when we got to Chicago, and I wished we would. In fact, I kind of knew we would.
Tom and I worked hard digging potatoes until ten o’clock, wh
en Mom called us to come in and have a cup of chocolate milk. My mom did it more for Tom’s sake than for mine. I have enough vitamins in my diet, but Tom’s eyes always looked as if he needed more food of some kind.
We dropped our potato forks and walked back to the house. When we got to the lawn, we started stepping on the gray dandelion heads, doing it all the way to the back door, looking like football players trying to dodge somebody on the other team. I was always doing that in our kitchen too—walking around and stepping on my favorite patterns on the linoleum, until Mom’s nerves couldn’t stand it any longer, and then I’d go outdoors awhile.
I didn’t even tell Mom or Dad what Tom had told me about Bob. That day finally passed by, with the thing in my mind almost all the time: Big Bob Till is in Chicago. Big Bob Till is in Chicago, where the Sugar Creek Gang is going.
At last the next day came. I was up early and acting almost like a chicken with its head cut off.
Dad and Poetry’s dad drove us all to the nearest big city where there was an airport. We drove right down through the center of town, and it seemed as if everybody turned to look at us—or else at Dad’s new two-tone car.
Old Man Paddler was sitting in the front seat with him. “I wish I were young enough to learn to drive,” the old man said, his whiskers bobbing.
Pretty soon we were at the airport and inside the terminal, where Barry Boyland, the old man’s nephew, was getting our tickets and where our baggage was being checked for weight, each one of us being allowed to take not more than forty pounds of luggage. Our tickets had been ordered ahead of time, or else we couldn’t have gone, because these days more and more people are traveling by air and you have to have reservations.
This was my first visit to an airport terminal. It was almost like a train station, with chairs all around the wall. There was a soda fountain on one end and a place to buy your favorite kind of pop.
On the other side of the ticket window was a control room where two men had earphones on their heads, listening and talking the way people do who are technicians in a little airport.
All of us sat beside each other in a long row, with Little Jim on one side of me and Poetry on the other. I’d been reading up on airplanes almost all summer—at least after we knew we were going to ride in one—so I explained nearly everything to Little Jim, while we were waiting for our plane to come.
“What are those men doing over there?” he asked, motioning toward the technicians.
“They’re probably talking to the pilots up in some airplane,” I said, and Big Jim finished explaining by saying, “They’re using a radio telephone to tell them about weather conditions.”
Weather conditions, you know, are very important for airplane officers to know about. I was glad it was a sunny day with only scattered clouds, although I knew a day could start like that at Sugar Creek and before afternoon came there could be a terrific thunderstorm. I hoped there wouldn’t be one while we were up there in the middle of where storms come from.
I couldn’t any more stay seated than anything, and neither could the rest of us. As soon as they would let us, we went outside and stood just outside the heavy woven-wire fence to watch the baggage and mail trucks moving around and to look at the different people and to wait.
Away off to the right was a hangar where a lot of little airplanes were going up and coming down all the time, maybe taking up passengers or else maybe teaching young pilots.
All of a sudden there was a mighty roaring in the sky, and then we saw our plane circling, getting ready to come down. I was tingling inside, half scared to death. I thought it looked like a long, roundish house with a lot of windows and two wings spread out like an eagle’s. It looked fierce as it came taxiing along the runway straight toward the terminal, bigger and bigger, longer and longer, with the propellers of its engines whirling around like two big windmills. It stopped right in front of us.
Somebody pushed a little stairway on wheels up to the plane, a door opened in the side, and some smiling, important-looking people came down the portable stairway. The plane had a few minutes to stay, so people could get off and stretch and look around if they wanted to.
Somebody pushed a hand truck up to the mail and baggage compartments in the plane’s long nose, just between its two eyes, which were the propellers and which weren’t turning now.
Poetry and I were standing right beside the gate, watching the people coming off the plane, and the pilot and the copilot and the stewardess, who was smiling and wearing dark glasses and light shoes and a brownish suit like one Little Jim’s mom wears sometimes. The stewardess and the two pilots are what is called the flight crew.
Well, those few minutes dragged past like a snail, but pretty soon it was time to get on ourselves.
Well, here goes, I thought.
Poetry, who was right behind me, started to quote from John Adams’s famous speech: “Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my heart and hand to this vote …” From that, he swung off into a gospel chorus that was popular in our junior meeting in church:
“Here I go in my airplane,
up in the air so high,
High in my gospel airplane,
far up into the sky,
Leaving the world so far below,
as higher and higher I go;
You are invited to go with me,
up in my airplane.”
The second verse starts like this: “Yes, I’ll go in your airplane, up in the air so high.” Then it ends with the words “I am delighted to go with you, up in your airplane.”
Poetry didn’t get to finish the poem, which he was actually trying to sing on his way up the portable stairway and into the plane.
“Heart, get out of my mouth!” I felt like saying because it felt as though it was there.
Inside the plane on the right was a little door leading into a room of some kind, which I afterward learned was a lavatory with running water and everything.
The plane was like a train inside, with a row of seats on each side of a narrow aisle, nice soft, cushioned seats like the ones in our new car, and a window beside each one. I followed Poetry up the aisle to where they wanted me to sit.
Soon we were all seated, with Poetry in front of me, Dragonfly behind me, and Little Jim right across the aisle. The rest of us were on one side or the other.
And then the flight crew came in, the door was shut and locked, and we were ready. I looked out my little window to watch somebody push away the portable stairway and to watch the people who were waving good-bye to us.
And there, standing just inside the gate beside my dad, was Old Man Paddler. He looked like one of the pictures I’d once seen of a man named Potato Creek Johnny, who’d lived out West in the Black Hills and had discovered the largest gold nugget ever found there.
Old Man Paddler’s long white whiskers hung almost to his belt. He had a cane in his right hand, which he had to use because he was getting older and older and couldn’t walk so well. I looked at my dad’s big blackish-red eyebrows, and at his mustache, and at Dad himself, and swallowed something that felt stuck in my throat.
Then the big engines started to turn, first one and then the other, and the plane itself began to move. The first thing it did was to turn clear around and move slowly off on its three big balloon tires, two in front just below the place where the wings were fastened onto its body, and the other way back under the end of the tail. I’d noticed them when I was outside.
The stewardess had come through before we started and showed us how to fasten our seat belts and gave us some gum to chew. We were supposed to chew gum, so that when we got up in the air it would help our ears to keep from feeling as if they had dwarfs in them, pounding with little hammers and trying to get out.
Pretty soon our plane came to a runway. It turned left and moved faster and faster out across the field to the far end, and I expected any minute to start going up into the air. I held onto the sides of my seat, I can tell you.
Bu
t we didn’t go up. Instead, when we got to the other side of the field, we stopped, and the plane turned halfway around until we were crossways on the runway. All of a sudden, the motors started to roar, first one and then the other, and the propellers went faster than a hummingbird’s wings.
“Wh-what’s that for?” Dragonfly asked me, his eyes bulging a little. “What’s the matter? Won’t it go up?”
The plane certainly wasn’t doing anything but standing still, like an automobile standing crossways on the road, and with the engines roaring.
But Poetry, who had been studying airplanes even more than I had, knew what was going on. He called back to Dragonfly and said, “They’ve quartered it into the wind, and they’re testing the engines to see if they’re all right. You wouldn’t want anything to go wrong with them up in the sky, would you?”
Little Jim heard him say that, and for a minute he looked scared. Then he was grinning, even though his hands were holding onto the arms of his seat so tight the knuckles were white. I knew he wouldn’t let being scared keep him from enjoying the ride.
“What’s ‘quartered into the wind’ mean?” Dragonfly wanted to know.
“Dividing it into four equal parts,” Poetry said with a sober face.
Dragonfly’s eyebrows went down. He didn’t feel like joking, so Poetry explained it, and Dragonfly was satisfied.
The engines must have been all right, for the plane turned the rest of the way around, and we started to move, straight into the wind, faster and faster, and the tail began to rise. Faster and faster, faster and faster.
Looking out, I saw that we weren’t on the ground anymore.
4
It didn’t even seem we were in an airplane—at least it wasn’t like I’d thought being in an airplane would seem. There wasn’t any sensation of being high, which a person has when he is standing on a cliff looking down, or when he is up in a tree along Sugar Creek and the wind is blowing the tree back and forth.
That was because of our not having any contact with the earth. Poetry and the book I’d been reading said that was the reason, anyway. It was just as if we were in a big long car, riding on an air road that you couldn’t see. Even the noisy engines seemed quieter, because the plane was soundproofed.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6 Page 34