No punishment? I thought. No scolding?
But there wasn’t. Not even a frown. And do you know what? Just that quick, I decided I liked our new teacher very much, and someday when I got big enough, I was going to be a very special friend of somebody just like her and protect her from all kinds of danger, such as wolves howling at night, or some gangster, or save her from drowning or something. And if she was afraid of a spider or a mouse, as most girls and even women are, I’d kill one of them for her too.
Well, all the Sugar Creek Gang went to work on that schoolhouse floor, and in almost less than no time it was ready for occupation. The bell rang, and the girls came back in, all of them looking at us.
School started again and went on as usual, with nothing important happening until noon that day.
The gang was lying out in the shade of a big ash tree at the west end of our schoolyard, and Big Jim pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and read it to us. It was the note Sylvia’s little sister had given him in the morning. And what that note said was plenty!
Plenty!
7
We were all lying under the ash tree, with our heads together and our bodies resting in seven different directions like a human wheel with seven spokes. The lower end of each spoke divided like the fork of a boy’s slingshot, and there wasn’t any rim on the wheel, and some of the spokes were shorter than some of the others.
Big Jim opened the note and asked us to get ready to listen to something important. And it wasn’t from Sylvia at all but was printed in somebody’s awkward style, maybe a boy’s, and whoever had done it had used a purple indelible pencil, probably wetting the pencil with a sponge or something. Or if he didn’t know better, he might have done it with his tongue. Indelible pencil is poison, you know, if you wet it that way.
Well, I was watching the almost imaginary fuzz on Big Jim’s upper lip while he was talking and getting ready to read.
This is what the note said:
Just to warn you that the cave at the base of the old sycamore tree is haunted. So please STAY AWAY!
I don’t know what made me do it, but all of a sudden I lifted my eyes and looked at Dragonfly. He was acting a little funny, I thought. His eyes were big, the way they always are, and he looked very innocent. But just that second, I looked under his crooked nose, which turns south at the end, and I saw with my own eyes a little bit of purple marking on his teeth, which were too big for his small face and would be until his face grew some more.
I looked from Dragonfly’s funny face to Poetry’s round one, and Poetry was already looking at my freckled one. He winked at me, and I remembered the pounding noise he and I had heard the day before in the cave. I’d even thought there had been the sound of water running, like from a small underground spring. I also remembered his poem about not talking about all you see and hear.
There was no name signed to the note, I noticed. So did the rest of us, and right that minute our nice wagon wheel with its seven divided spokes got broken up, and all of us sat in an interested huddle around Big Jim.
Such crazy printing I had never seen, and the note was so short that it almost made me feel creepy. What if the cave is haunted? I thought. What if Dragonfly’s mother had been right?
And then I felt Little Jim’s hand catch hold of my suspender as though he was glad to have something to hold onto, and I knew that even though he knew there wasn’t any such thing as a ghost, he still wondered if there might not be maybe just one!
Just that minute also, I clapped my hand over my mouth to stop myself from asking Big Jim, “How come Sylvia’s little sister, Jeanelle, gave the note to you?” I would ask that later, I thought.
We sat there talking and still talking, saying there wasn’t any such thing as a ghost and Dragonfly saying there might be.
Every now and then I saw the purple on his two big incisors, which is the name of the two biggest front teeth a boy has. But I decided to keep still for a while and talk it over with Poetry later.
We talked a little about the lamb at school, and we also watched the girls who were walking around on the other side of the schoolyard. Circus did a few acrobatic stunts on a strong limb of the ash tree, which hung down close to the ground. And then Big Jim said, “Let’s have a meeting.”
We gathered around him in a tangled-up circle, some of us on our elbows, and some of us on our knees and on each other’s elbows and knees.
Big Jim said, “Will someone make a motion to the effect that we have a meeting at the cave next Friday night—that is, that we take our sleeping bags and sleep in the cave just to show the ghosts that there aren’t any?”
We looked at each other, and then most of us looked at Dragonfly, and I said to that popeyed person, nodding my red head to him at the same time, “Go ahead and make the motion.”
“I will not,” he said, and I saw the purple stains on his teeth again.
“You’re a scaredy-cat,” Poetry said to him, and Big Jim’s voice said gruffly, “Order, please!” and there was.
Just then Circus said, “I move we sleep in the cave next Friday night.”
“Second the motion,” I said.
“Third it,” Poetry squawked.
Big Jim said, “Order,” again. Then he said, “It has been moved and seconded that we, all of us including Dragonfly, sleep in the cave next Friday night. Are you ready for the question?”
We were, so he said, “All in favor, please respond by the uplifted hand.”
Dragonfly cut in then and said, “You forgot to ask if there were any remarks.”
Big Jim frowned and said, “Well, are there any? Anybody afraid to sleep in a cave—an innocent cave?”
Nobody was, and the motion carried, which means that most of us voted yes. Sitting and lying and sprawling there on the long grass, each one of us, except Dragonfly, had his hand up, although I couldn’t help but notice that Little Jim’s hand wasn’t very high. His fingers were pressed tight together, and his hand was very close to his face, right beside his right blue eye, which had a hollow look in it. Tom Till waited till the rest of us had voted yes before he did the same thing.
Pretty soon we heard the school bell ring. Then we all, the whole school of seventeen, started running lickety-sizzle toward that one-room schoolhouse’s only door, which was painted a kind of blue-gray and had a white knob, which had to be washed often to keep it white.
I couldn’t help but remember the time I had been up north on our camping trip, fishing for bluegills with a worm and had looked down into the blue-gray water under the boat. Wow! The minute the worm went down, down, down, about seventeen different sizes and kinds of fish had darted toward it—the worm and the hook—perch, bluegills, rock bass, and others.
Poetry and I stayed behind a little, and on the way I said, “Did you notice Dragonfly’s teeth?”
“Sure,” he said. “They’re big enough to eat up Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.”
“I mean,” I explained, “did you notice their color? There were indelible pencil stains on them.”
“What!” he said and stood stock-still.
“Actually,” I said.
Just that minute, his lamb, which had been lying peacefully under the big maple tree near the long-handled iron pump, raised its innocent head and started toward us at a half run, with its tail flapping along behind it. That reminded Poetry of a poem, which right away he started to quote and which made us both a little late for school. The poem was:
Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep,
And can’t tell where to find them;
Leave them alone and they’ll come home,
Bringing their tails behind them.
He stood with one of his big hands resting on the lamb’s poll, and he looked down at it as if it was his best friend. He said to it, “Little innocent lamb, you’d make a very innocent white ghost next Friday night.”
With that, Poetry looked at me, winked, and put a forefinger up to his pursed lips.
Then we both realized that Miss Lilly was standing at the school door, holding it open for us to hurry up and get through before we were too late.
Well, I got busy and found out how much Mr. Brown’s lumber bill was so he could pay it. But the afternoon moved along slowly, and I realized that it was going to be a slow week. I wanted next Friday night to come right that very minute so I could take my sleeping bag and sleep in the Sugar Creek cave.
At half past two in the afternoon of that Monday, we had recess, which lasts fifteen short minutes that seem only about five. As soon as I got a chance, I talked to Big Jim alone.
I said to him, “How come Sylvia’s little sister gave the note to you? Where’d she get it, and who wrote it?”
Of course, I knew Dragonfly had written it, because he had indelible pencil stain on his teeth, and he was the only one who was afraid of ghosts. Besides, that very morning he had stood in front of our big school dictionary and looked up the word “ghost” for us.
Big Jim looked down at me with an embarrassed expression on his face and said, “Who told you that?”
“I saw her give it to you,” I said.
Big Jim looked funny for a minute. Then he said, “If you have to know, I gave it to Sylvia last night in church to see what she thought about it, and she sent it back with Jeanelle this morning.”
We were standing by ourselves under the big ash tree. The rest of the school, including even the girls, was at the other end of the yard playing prisoner’s base and hollering and making a lot of ordinary noise.
“Where’d you get the note in the first place?” I asked.
And he said, “Dragonfly gave it to me.”
Just that minute, there was the sound of somebody sneezing behind the tree. I looked, and a part of Poetry was showing on one side of the big tree and the other side of him was showing on the other side, which shows how big the tree actually was.
Big Jim looked around quick, and that’s how Poetry happened to get in on our talk. We had to invite him, because he’d heard us.
“And where did Dragonfly get the note?” Poetry asked. He winked at me secretly.
Big Jim said, “Little Jim gave it to him.”
“Little Jim!” Poetry and I exclaimed in a duet.
“What’s so funny about that?” Big Jim asked.
“Nothing,” I said, “but where’d Little Jim get it?”
“Found it,” Big Jim said, and his face was sober. “Found it on their car floor.”
“On their car floor!” Poetry and I exclaimed in another duet.
Just then the two-minute bell rang, which meant we’d all better get ready to make a dive for the schoolhouse door as soon as the last bell should ring, as it did almost right away.
As usual, Poetry and I walked and ran together, and just as we went whizzing past the lamb, he said to me, “Dragonfly didn’t write that note.”
“Why not?” I puffed.
“’Cause Big Bob Till did.”
I stopped running and walking, stood still, and said, “Bob Till is still in Chicago!”
I was remembering the excitement we’d had there over Labor Day weekend, which you already know about if you’ve read my story about the Sugar Creek Gang in Chicago. I also remembered that Tom’s brother, Big Bob, who had been arrested in Chicago, had been paroled to Little Jim’s dad.
Big Bob Till, as you know, was the leader of a tough gang of town boys whom we’d licked the daylights out of last year in the famous Battle of Bumblebee Hill near the old cemetery. Bob had stolen some money from our grocer’s store, had run away to Chicago, had been arrested, and would have been in jail right that minute, I thought, if Little Jim’s dad hadn’t been willing to have him paroled to him.
“No,” Poetry said just as we zipped up to the school porch, “Big Bob came home Saturday afternoon in Little Jim’s dad’s car.”
8
So! I thought. Big Bob Till is home again. The ugly-faced boy whose father was not a Christian. The boy who hadn’t been to church in his whole life, and who was always causing trouble for the Sugar Creek Gang, and who was the leader of that tough gang of town boys who called themselves “The Hellfire Gang.”
All the rest of the afternoon we kept thinking about him. I say “we” because Poetry sent a note over to me, and he shouldn’t have, and the note said:
After school let’s go down to the cave and go in and listen again.
I quickly folded the note and shoved it into one of my five pants pockets just before Miss Lilly looked around from the blackboard where she had been working a problem for Dragonfly.
As soon as school was out and all seventeen students had gone except Poetry and me—who stayed to sweep the floor and close the windows and finally lock the door after Miss Lilly left-Poetry and I went down the lane to my house. His pet lamb was following and bringing its tail behind it.
“Home early today?” Mom asked when I rushed into the kitchen to set my lunch box on a shelf in the corner.
“Yep,” I said. “Poetry stayed and helped me so I could help him with something he wanted to do after school. Can I? I mean, can I go over to Poetry’s house or somewhere to help him do something?”
Mom, who was sitting in the living room and working on a small dress for Charlotte Ann, looked up and talked with a pin in her mouth. “Why, yes, I guess so. Except that your father is expecting you to take this shirt up to Old Man Paddler’s cabin for him. He brought it to me this morning, saying you told him to. I’ve patched it the best I can.”
She got up from her rocker and carefully wrapped the shirt in a piece of paper and gave it to me. Mom had not only sewed up the jagged rip but had washed and ironed the shirt as well, which shows what kind of a mom I’ve got and also how much she liked Old Man Paddler.
“Here,” she said. “Take these to him too.” With that, she went to the pantry to our cookie jar and took out two dozen fresh raisin cookies and put them in a brown paper sack just as Poetry —who was out on the back porch—cleared his husky throat.
“Why, hello, Poetry,” Mom exclaimed. “Would you like a cookie?”
“Of course—I mean, certainly. Thank you,” Poetry said politely, always being especially polite at a time like this.
It didn’t take us long to get started through the woods to Old Man Paddler’s house up in the hills. Poetry was carrying the shirt, and I the cookies.
We had to go past the old sycamore tree to get to the path that led to the old man’s cottage. When we got there, we stopped at the cave to rest because the weather was still hot.
We laid the cookies and the shirt in the hole in the tree, and both of us crawled slowly in through the cave entrance and sat down inside. The late afternoon sun shone in and made it almost light inside.
Just to give it atmosphere, we lit one of the candles and then sat a while, noticing how nice and dry it was and what a fine place it was going to be for sleeping there next Friday night—if our parents would let us.
We listened as hard as we could, to see if we could hear the strange pounding noise we’d heard the day before. But we didn’t—not at first. We did hear running water coming from somewhere, though, but it was faraway sounding, and we decided maybe it was an underground stream somewhere. You know there are millions of little underground streams in the earth, like arteries and veins running through a boy’s body.
“Listen!” Poetry exclaimed squawkily into my ear, startling me. “Hear it? There it is again. That pounding noise.”
I listened, and, sure enough, there it was, the same pounding we’d heard the day before, like somebody with a pickax digging far back in the earth. I tell you, I felt creepy.
The next thing we knew we were both outside, looking all around to see if we could see anybody or anything, and we couldn’t. One thing I did see with my mind’s eyes was the purple stains on Dragonfly’s front teeth. And in my imagination, I also saw the scribbled note that told us the cave was haunted.
“I don’t believe it!” Poetry said. But,
for the first time in a long time, he had a worried expression on his face. “There isn’t such a thing as a ghost.”
We listened outside and didn’t hear anything, so we went inside again to blow out the candle.
“Maybe it was our imagination,” I said.
Poetry said, “Absolutely not! But I don’t believe it anyway.”
Just the same, it was spooky in that cave, so we got out, took our cookies and the shirt, and went on. Poetry carried the cookies this time.
Pretty soon, as we climbed the hill, he said, “How many cookies did you say were in this sack?”
“Twenty-four,” I answered. I’d seen Mom count them and put them in a long row in the bottom of the sack.
“There’s twenty-five,” Poetry said, holding open the sack and looking in.
We walked on a while, and then he said, “Did you say there were supposed to be only twenty-four?”
“Maybe the ghost put in an extra one while we were in the cave,” I said.
Poetry grunted and replied, “Any sensible ghost would have taken one out, rather than put one in.”
I agreed with him.
Just the same, we had a tingling feeling inside all the way up to Old Man Paddler’s cabin, thinking and talking about what made the pounding noise and wondering if it had been our imagination or not.
Just then Poetry stopped again, so suddenly that I bumped kersquash into him. “Ssh! Listen!”
I listened, and there it was again, the same pounding sound I’d heard before. This time it was right ahead of us. In fact, it was coming from the direction of Old Man Paddler’s cabin.
Poetry and I looked at each other’s face. Then we looked at the cabin again.
Out in the yard was the long-whiskered old man himself, chopping kindling on a block of wood, which was on a big slab of rock behind his house.
That settled that, I thought, and so did Poetry. We hadn’t heard any ghost because there weren’t any in the whole world.
“I’m mad!” Poetry exclaimed.
“Why?” I asked.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6 Page 43