We used our tree house for our headquarters for all kinds of explorations into what we pretended was wild Indian country. Also we acted out the Robinson Crusoe story we all knew so well.
But it was only make-believe, and a boy can’t be satisfied all the time with a lot of let’s-pretend stuff. Once in a while something has to come to some kind of life, which nothing did except that a lot of birds—some altricial and some precocial—thought our nest was full of wonderful material for making their own smaller nests. They kept stealing the straw and sedge and stuff, which we had to replace or our roof would leak.
But still nothing happened, day after day after day. Nothing real until—
By “until” I mean not until the day we found a mysterious stranger living in our house. If we had known who he was and what kind of adventure he was going to lead us into, we probably wouldn’t have decided to let him keep on living there. We might have been scared to.
2
We had built our tree house on a knoll between the bayou and the slope leading down to the creek, where there was a good place to fish. We’d had a hard time deciding just where, at first, because Old Man Paddler, who owns the woods and most of the territory around our playground, was away on a trip to California to see his nephew, and we kind of hated to cut the top out of a sapling on his property without his permission, even though we were pretty sure he’d let us.
So when we found a very strong, just-the-right-size young tree on a grassy knoll that was on Dragonfly’s folks’ bottomland, we built it there.
The house wasn’t much to look at after the roof turned brown. When Mom saw it, which she did one day when she was down along the creek with her camera, she said, “It looks like an old brown setting hen on a nest,” and she snapped a picture of it.
The first we knew anybody had moved into it was one very hot afternoon while Old Man Paddler was still on his vacation and we were sort of lonesome for him. His cabin up in the hills looked sad and lonely, too.
“Let’s go take a look at our old setting hen to see if she has any chickens under her,” Little Jim said with his cute mouselike voice.
And away we all went, from the spring where we were at the time, zip-zip-zip through the giant ragweeds in the path toward the swimming hole, which led past our tree house.
All of a sudden, Dragonfly, who was ahead of the rest of us at the time, called, “Hey, you guys, somebody’s had a fire here.”
But the big surprise came a few minutes later, when he yelled to us again, this time from inside our thatch-roofed house, “Come here! Somebody has moved into our house and is living here!”
In a few seconds, a scramble of flying bare feet carried the rest of us to where Dragonfly was, where we quickly funneled our way inside, looking around to see what Dragonfly had seen. There wasn’t much—only an old brown suitcase, and a few cans of different kinds of food on the little folding table we had put there to eat on, and the camp cot on the far side.
Then Dragonfly’s crooked nose sniffed suspiciously. He exclaimed, “I smell turpentine,” and he sneezed to prove he had.
I’d been smelling it myself, although I’d thought it was paint of some kind. The odor was hardly strong enough for anybody except Dragonfly to notice it. It was not any more than you could smell if you walked up to the trunk of the big ponderosa pine that grows beside the path on the way to the sycamore tree and smelled the yellowish, sticky fluid that oozes from it.
Dragonfly sneezed again and squeezed his way past me to the exit, sneezing twice before he could get outside into the fresh, pure air. But he hadn’t been outside longer than it would take him to sneeze twice more, when he hollered again, this time saying, “Gang! Somebody’s coming!”
Then I heard it myself. Somebody or something was coming.
Would we be caught snooping around, looking over somebody’s private property? It seemed we ought not to be there, even if it was our very own tree house that somebody had moved into.
“I’m getting out of here!” Circus exclaimed and was the first to duck out, with the rest of us following like bumblebees storming out of their nest after a boy has poked a stick into it.
We fanned out in six different directions, but mostly in the direction of the spring, which was opposite the direction of the sounds. As soon as I felt we were out of sight, I stopped and listened.
At first there was only the sound of the worried water in the Sugar Creek riffle and a half-dozen robins scolding in the trees overhead and all around, accusing us of trespassing on robin property, saying, “Quick! Quick! Get out of here! Quick!”
I was used to hearing Robin Redbreast and his family scolding like that, because nearly every summer for years a pair of them had built their nest in a crotch in the upper branches of the plum tree in our yard.
Even though birds didn’t belong to our species, still we ought to love them and not destroy their nests. It seemed, though, that if we sort of accidentally trespassed on what they thought was their own property, they ought to be a little more sociable about it.
How we had all gotten together so soon after our helter-skelter scramble from our bird-house, I don’t know, but there we all were, crouching in the grass on another small knoll behind some shrubbery, panting and serious-faced and excited and wondering what on earth and who.
Just then Dragonfly, who was hunkering beside Little Jim and peeking through the foliage of a sweetbrier bush, sneezed again, maybe on account of the extrasweet smell of its leaves and flowers. Then he whispered, “Look! I see him! He’s a—he’s black!”
I was so surprised at Dragonfly’s tone of voice that I looked at his face.
My parents had taught me that people of other races were as good as white people, the same as robins were as good as meadowlarks, which just happen to be a different color. The One who had made the robins and all other birds had also made different-colored human beings. The color of a person’s skin wasn’t important—it was the kind of heart a person had that counted. Mom had said that many a time.
So when Dragonfly said what he had just said in the tone of voice he had used, I felt my temper getting ready to catch fire.
Maybe I ought to explain that there were very few black families in Sugar Creek territory. The one we knew best was named Ballard. The father’s name was Samson, but everybody called him Sam. He was one of the kindest men anybody ever saw. He was also a hard worker, with muscles as strong as the village blacksmith’s in a poem we studied in school, and he made a good living for his family.
My eyes galloped after Dragonfly’s, and I saw what he saw. Sure enough, the person was black. He was walking with a limp, using a cane, and heading straight for our tree house door. He was coming from the direction of the spring.
“Look!” Dragonfly whispered again. “He’s got a bottle of something!”
I was seeing the same thing. The man did have a bottle. It was shaped like a whiskey flask.
I saw something else too. I saw the man-he was an old man—raise his hand to his head as if he wasn’t feeling well. He swayed a little and sort of sank down on the grass. Then he fumbled in a shirt pocket for something, took it out, poured something into his hand, and put it into his mouth. Then he lifted the bottle to his lips and took a drink.
I knew it was an actual whiskey flask, because I’d seen quite a few lying along the roadside and sometimes even down at the spring on Monday morning when there had been Sunday picnickers in the woods. Whiskey bottles make good targets for a boy’s slingshot, if you set them up on a fencepost.
“He’s trespassing on our territory,” Dragonfly said. “Let’s go order him off.”
When we’d been inside our tree house a little while before, we’d seen enough to know that the man had really moved in. How long he had been there, we didn’t know, but he’d stayed at least one night.
We couldn’t keep on crouching there in the grass doing nothing, so pretty soon Little Jim suggested, “Why don’t we all start whistling and talking and moseying alon
g toward where he is and see who he is and if we can help him someway.”
Big Jim made that an order, and a few seconds later, with all my nerves tingling and my heart pounding for wondering what on earth, I was following along with the rest of the gang. All of us were trying to act like ordinary boys doing ordinary things, just rambling along the creek with nothing on our minds except being happy on a sunshiny afternoon.
That is what we started to do.
But Dragonfly stopped us with a bossy “Wait! You guys stand back of me! I’m going to order him off our property!”
“Why?” Big Jim wanted to know. “What’s he doing wrong?”
“Trespassing,” Dragonfly answered with a set face, then added with a loud whisper, “he’s a black!”
I just couldn’t believe it! A member of the Sugar Creek Gang feeling the way Dragonfly’s tone of voice said he felt right that minute!
My thoughts were interrupted then, because something started to happen behind me. It was Circus and Dragonfly having a scuffle. Circus was shaking Dragonfly by his shoulders and saying, “That old man is not trespassing. Nobody is trespassing on anybody else’s property unless there’s a sign that says No Trespassing. And besides, he’s a human being, the same as you are—only maybe more so!”
Big Jim stopped the scuffle with his voice and his powerful muscles. He pulled the boys apart and said, “There doesn’t actually have to be a No Trespassing sign. But if we all say he’s not trespassing, then he isn’t.”
I was glad there wasn’t going to be any rough-and-tumble battle between two members of our gang, though I knew their thoughts were still fighting even if their muscles weren’t. I was also proud of Circus for feeling the way he did.
Circus was one of the best thinkers in the whole gang. He always made good grades in school, too. He was especially good in arithmetic, which I sometimes wasn’t, and he had one of the best boy-soprano singing voices in the whole territory. Sometimes he sang solos in church.
A boy as fine as Circus couldn’t help it that he had six sisters and hardly ever got a chance to help his mother with the dishes, the way a certain other boy I know gets to do.
But this wasn’t any time to let myself feel sorry for myself for being maybe the best boy dishwasher in the county. As the robins—which had been scolding that we were trespassing on their territory—calmed down a little, I asked myself what would happen during the next few minutes.
3
While we were topsy-turvying along toward the very bald, very black old man, who just that minute took another drink out of his flask, a lot of things were tumbling about in my mind. In my imagination I was sitting in our one-room, red-brick schoolhouse, during what is called Opening Exercises, which we have every morning.
Sometimes for Opening Exercises we listen to our teacher read from a story, sometimes we listen to a recording by some famous musician—things that are supposed to be good for boys and girls to know about.
But the morning I was remembering right that minute was the morning Miss Trillium had written the words of a gospel song on the blackboard and was teaching it to us, letting us learn it by singing it ourselves. First she sang it with her own contralto voice, then she asked us to sing with her, which we did, singing or squawking or growling or whining along. The other members of the gang were in their different seats beside, behind, and in front of me. Only Poetry, home with a cold, was missing.
Scattered in other seats were the nine girls who came to our school. Girls also belong to the human race and sometimes are smarter than boys, but they can’t help it.
In a little while I had the words and the tune of the song in my mind and was making a singing noise with the rest of the school:
“Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world;
Red and yellow, black and white,
They are precious in His sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.”
When we finished singing the chorus for the last time, Miss Trillium said something I will never forget as long as I live, and at the time it seemed one of the most important things a boy could ever know.
I can’t remember exactly what she said, but it was something like this: “Let us always remember that all human beings are the handwriting of God, and the Creator writes with different-colored ink—sometimes He uses red, sometimes brown, sometimes black, or yellow, or white. All human beings are His creation, though, and all are souls for whom Christ died.”
Miss Trillium finished her quiet talk by adding, “Let us learn to see God’s handwriting in all people. He knows that a man’s worth is not determined by the color of his eyes or hair or skin. God looks upon the heart of a man-not just his outward appearance—and since He loves us all, should we not also love one another?”
All those thoughts went scurrying through my mind as fast as a chipmunk scooting across the open space between the Black Widow Stump and the leaning linden tree.
Poetry, beside me, whispered, “Red and yellow, black and white—”
Big Jim took over for us then, calling out politely, “Good afternoon, sir! Is there anything we can do for you?”
The old man reached for his cane and held onto it tightly, as if to use it to protect himself if he had to.
I got a shock then. Suddenly, Dragonfly called out in a saucy voice from behind us, “Do you know you’re trespassing on private property? My father owns the land that house is built on, and this tree house belongs to the Sugar Creek Gang!”
The old man winced as if someone had struck him in the face. But I knew that, instead, Dragonfly had stabbed him in the heart with his harsh words. He looked at his cane, then into the house at the few things he had there.
My own eyes took in the pint flask out of which he had been drinking and which he was holding in his right hand. Whatever was in the flask was so transparent it could easily have been water.
Another thing I noticed was that in his other hand he had a tiny bottle.
Little Jim must have been thinking what I was, because right then he whispered in my ear, “It’s a medicine bottle. I’ll bet he’s got heart trouble or something.”
For a second after Dragonfly’s insulting remark, not a one of us said a word. It was as if there’d been a big explosion of some kind, and we couldn’t talk. Everything was quiet, except for what Little Jim had whispered to me.
The old man must have been really shocked, because he looked very sad for a minute. Then he raised his right hand and waved it back and forth as a boy in school does when the teacher has asked a question and a boy wants to answer.
This is what his trembling voice said in answer to Dragonfly’s insult: “I’m sorry if I trespassed on your property, boys. But it was chilly and rainy last night, and I—well, I did sort of move in. I’ll be glad to pay. How much for one night?” He fumbled in his left hip pocket and drew out a billfold. When he opened it, I saw bills and bills and bills!
“You don’t owe us anything,” Big Jim answered for all of us. “Not a single red cent.” When he had said it, I noticed a frown on Dragonfly’s forehead. He was looking and looking at the bulging billfold.
“But I’d really like to pay. Here. Take this. It would have cost me much more if I’d stayed in a hotel or motel.” He counted out five one-dollar bills and pushed them toward us.
Again Big Jim answered without bothering even to look at any of the rest of us. “If you want to stay another night, that’ll be all right, too, but we’d rather not charge anything.”
A very grateful expression came into the old man’s brown eyes. He looked us all over from head to foot, then grinned a friendly, toothless grin. “I think I’d rather pay rent. As I said, I’d have had to pay at a hotel or motel. I tried to get a room at the Green Corn up the road a piece, but they were filled up. Maybe they’ll have a vacancy later in the week, but I would like to stay here a few nights. It’s closer to what I want to do.” Again, his hands were busy with his billfold. Agai
n he offered us money.
And again Big Jim refused it. “Not for last night, Mr.—Mr.—”
“Robinson,” the trembling voice said. “Benjamin Robinson.”
“Mr. Robinson, we’ll talk it over to see if we want to accept anything, if you decide to stay longer, but—” and then Big Jim added something I’d never thought of “—we don’t have a license to run a motel, and we might get into trouble by charging for our house.”
Benjamin Robinson gave Big Jim a friendly look, and with a twinkle in his eye—maybe at the idea of our sociable weaverbird tree house being a motel unit—said, “Thank you. Thank you very much.”
All of a sudden he began to open and close his lips very fast and to act as though he was chewing something. Then he said, looking around, “I’ve been talking all this time without my teeth. I’m sorry.”
He drew from his jacket pocket a napkin, unwrapped a set of false teeth, and fitted them into his mouth.
Well, I’ll speed up this part of the story for you so I can get started on what followed. We left the old man and went up to the cemetery for a very special meeting to decide whether to charge him rent.
We held our meeting, as we do quite often, in a grassy place not far from the tombstone at Sarah Paddler’s grave. That’s the one that has on it the chiseled hand with a forefinger pointing toward the sky and the words “There is rest in heaven.”
Dragonfly sat a little outside our circle. He had a pout on his lips, as if he knew what we were going to decide and he was against it. He spoke first and said, “Did you see all that money in his billfold? I’ll bet he had a hundred dollars! I’m going to charge him for every night he stays!”
“You what!” Big Jim almost thundered at him. “You are going to charge him! What do you mean?”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 2