It’s a good thing I did rake the yard. While I was doing it, I accidentally found Poetry’s compass out by the orchard fence. My finding it gave Mom a chance to show what a thoughtful person she was, for she sent me over to Poetry’s house to give it to him, having forgotten she wanted me to go to the spring to get a jug of water for her.
When I got to Poetry’s toolshed, under which a mother skunk once raised her family of black-and-white little stinkers, I was startled to hear a voice behind me calling, “Hey! Wait forme!”
It was Dragonfly, panting and running as if he had something very important on his mind.
Poetry, hearing Dragonfly’s yelling, came out from behind the toolshed where he had been, carrying a spade, a tin can, and a cane fishing pole.
“‘S’matter?” I asked Dragonfly.
His answer came out in short, jerky sentences, as he stammered, “Th-th-that old black man! He-he-he’s up there in our cemetery measuring things! He’s hobbling along from one tombstone to another, and-and-and he’s driving stakes and tying white rags on ’em. He-he-he’s trespassing!”
I was still unhappy in my mind about Dragonfly because of his parents having had two vacancies at the Green Corn the night before and there hadn’t been even one room for the old man to stay in. So I answered him, “That old cemetery belongs to everybody, not to just us. What are you so hot about?”
“B-but wh-wh-what’s he doing with a t-tape measure m-measuring all around everywhere?”
The question was one I myself would have liked the answer to. But I hated to help Dragonfly feel any meaner toward the black man, so I answered, “It’s my dad’s tape measure. He borrowed it from us. Let him measure anything he wants to with it. Who cares?”
“Let’s go up and sp—spy on him anyway,” Dragonfly said. “S-see if we can s-see what he’s doing in our cemetery.”
Poetry disagreed. “That’s not our cemetery. It belongs to the people who live there and to everybody else. It’s the old man’s business what he’s doing there, anyway.”
“Let’s go up and offer to help him, if he needs help. That’d be more sociable,” I suggested, realizing kind of proudly that I was using one of Aunt Miriam’s most important words.
“Let’s go down to the spring first and get a drink,” Poetry said.
When I agreed, Dragonfly all of a sudden exclaimed, “I got to get home. My mother doesn’t know where I am.”
Without saying anything else, but with a worried look in his eyes, he glanced down at his wristwatch, turned, and started running in the direction of the Gilberts’ house.
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked Poetry. “And what makes him so mean in his heart against an innocent old man?”
As soon as Dragonfly was out of sight, Poetry and I started toward the spring, which was also toward our tree house. He was carrying his pole and can of worms and the compass I’d given him, and I had my binoculars so that I could watch for birds of different kinds.
“Wait a minute,” Poetry said. “I need my butterfly net.” When I asked him, “What for?” he answered, “I want to see if I can get another dragonfly for my collection.”
“A human one or an insect?” I asked as he left his pole and can of worms and started back into the toolshed.
He answered me over his shoulder. “I know a boy who is both.”
It wasn’t a very nice thing to say about Dragonfly, and it didn’t feel good to have to think it. To have one of our own gang be the way he was was kind of like having a sore finger. It was as if Dragonfly wasn’t even one of us anymore.
Poetry and I stopped at the Black Widow Stump in the open space not far from the linden tree, where we could look up the creek and see our tree house. The sun was pouring its yellow light down on everything. The bees were droning in the linden tree’s creamy yellow flowers.
It was the kind of day that made a boy want to be lazy and content to be alive. It seemed all the animals and birds and everything in nature had a clean heart because the One who had made the world loved everybody. Part of Dad’s prayer came into my mind then, and I remembered he had said, “Give us a greater love for Your Son, our Savior, for each other, and for people of every color.”
Pretty soon Poetry and I rambled across the sunny space between the stump and the leaning linden tree, which grows at the rim of the ridge overlooking the spring. Our getting there scared the afternoon daylights out of a green heron that had been hunting frogs or insects or some other kind of food, and it took off in a long-necked flight straight up the creek in the direction of our weaverbird hideout.
We went on down the slope to the spring itself, where two streams of water tumbled out of two pipes into the big cement pool Dad had built there. The pipes themselves had been put there several years before, when we’d decided to do what Dad called “salvage the water” that was coming out in two places from between the layers of sandstone.
The pipes had been driven back into the wall about five feet apart, but the spring water from both of them splashed with a friendly gurgling sound into the same deep, wide pool.
Just seeing and hearing the water made me thirsty. In another minute I’d be down on my knees, drinking like a cow out of the pool itself, or else I might decide to use one of the cups from our paper-cup dispenser we’d put there for people to use—people like strangers or girls who maybe wouldn’t want to drink like a boy. Or if I wanted to, I could hang my head under the end of one of the pipes and drink that way.
And then is when I got the surprise of my life. At the same time, Poetry let out a whistle that seemed to say, “What on earth!”
There in front of my wondering eyes, standing on the ledge above the first lead pipe, was a foot-square sign that said White. Another sign the same size stood above the other pipe and said Black!
I stood and stared, not wanting to believe my eyes. My thoughts flew up to the cemetery where the old man probably still was. I wondered if he had seen the signs, and what he had felt in his heart about them.
Poetry was the first one of us to find his voice. He said, “Who on earth would do a thing like that? We don’t have signs like that in America anymore! Not in Sugar Creek territory, anyway!”
“You suppose maybe Dragonfly—”
“Don’t say it. Don’t even think it!” Poetry exclaimed. “It’d almost have to be an older person who used to live in some part of America where they did have signs like that on drinking fountains and on doors to restaurants. But there’s not anybody we know who would do it.”
Then he said, “Sh! Listen. Somebody’s coming!”
We scurried for the board fence in the direction of the swimming hole, squeezed through, and hid ourselves behind the underbrush there.
Poetry saw him first. “It’s Mr. Robinson himself.”
I noticed that he had his artificial leg on again and that he hardly limped at all as he worked his way down the slope, using only his cane to steady himself. Also he was half singing and half humming a song we had sung a few times in school during Opening Exercises. It was called “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
Reaching the bottom of the incline, Mr. Robinson stopped beside the reservoir and took his water flask from his hip pocket.
He stopped singing then and peered at the two signs we boys had seen a few minutes before.
His head dropped forward as I had seen it do at our house before he had started to eat what Mom had given him. And I heard him say as clear as anything, “That’s all right, Lord. They probably don’t know why they do it.”
Right away, he was singing again—a little louder than before, I thought—beginning right where he had left off. The place was:
“A band of angels, comin’ after me,
Comin’ for to carry me Home.”
I was wondering, as I crouched with Poetry behind the underbrush, how long it would be before a band of angels would actually come to carry him to heaven. I hoped it wouldn’t be soon.
My thoughts came back just in time to see Mr.
Robinson fill his flask from the water that came tumbling out of the pipe that said Black above it. Then he took a pill from the small bottle in his pocket, put it to his mouth, took a swallow of water from the flask, filled the flask again, and started back up the incline, walking slowly and very carefully and puffing a little from being short of breath.
Not till we were sure that he was beyond hearing us did either of us say a word to each other. Poetry spoke first. “Of course, Dragonfly could have done it!”
Then we heard footsteps again, not slow and faltering steps like the old man’s but those of somebody running. In fact, it sounded like the steps of quite a few people.
Poetry and I dropped back into our hiding place, getting there just as down the leaf-strewn slope trotted old Bawler, one of Circus’s dad’s hounds. With his long ears flapping and his long tongue hanging out, he went straight to the reservoir, sniffed around as if he was wondering something or other, then lifted his head with its sad face and looked back up the incline as Circus reached the brink.
Bawler was what is called a Black and Tan, and his voice when crying on a coon trail was about the most beautiful night sound anybody ever heard. It was like a cornet part of the time and like an organ’s highest tones the rest of the time.
Before Circus started down the slope, Bawler dropped his sad-faced head to the pool of fresh, cool water and began to lap it up with his tongue.
“He shouldn’t drink out of it like that,” Poetry whispered sarcastically in my ear. “Some dog of some other color might have taken a drink there this morning, and he might get some kind of dog contamination,” he said, using an extralong word as he sometimes did. His family had a dictionary at their house, too.
The second Circus reached the bottom of the slope, I saw him stiffen. His eyes were looking at the two signs as if burning holes in them. Then, seeming to make up his mind to do the same thing I’d had in mind to do, he stepped across the reservoir to the other side. I was sure he was going to tear those signs to pieces.
But he didn’t. Instead, he took a cup from the dispenser, held it under the end of the pipe that had the Black sign, let it fill all the way, lifted it to his lips, and drank. He sighed then, shook his head, folded the cup, and tucked it into his shirt pocket. “Here, Bawler!” he called. “Come here!”
Bawler, who had already come over to the fence we were hiding behind, sniffing suspiciously in our direction, left us and went back to his master.
Then Circus reached for the sign that said White, and let Bawler sniff it as he asked, “You know anybody who would put up a sign like that?”
Bawler looked up and let out a friendly little chopping sound that seemed to say, “Sorry, but I wouldn’t know.”
“Take a good smell,” Circus ordered him, “and if you ever smell the hands of anybody who might have left his scent on this card, let me know.” He put the sign back where it had been.
Bawler took a few more quick laps of water from the reservoir, licked his chops, and looked up again as if to say, “It wouldn’t be any dog I know.” Then he and Circus took off up the slope and disappeared over the ridge.
As soon as we knew we were alone, Poetry asked me, “Did you notice what I noticed?”
“What?” I asked, and he told me, “He took his drink out of the Black side, instead of out of the White.”
“Listen!” I whispered an exclamation.
We listened, and it was Circus’s high soprano voice coming from somewhere up near the Black Widow Stump. He was singing, “Swing low, Sweet chariot—”
A happy feeling welled up in my heart for good old monkey-faced, beautiful-voiced, dark-haired Circus Brown. He was one of the best boys in the whole Sugar Creek territory and maybe in the whole world.
I had further reason to be proud of Circus before the afternoon was over.
6
Circus’s melodious voice singing that old spiritual hadn’t any sooner faded away into the woods than Poetry suggested with a command in his voice, “Let’s hurry up and take Mr. Robinson his can of worms before he starts his afternoon nap. We’ll probably find him at the Sociable Weaverbird Motel.”
It sounded strange to hear our grass-roofed tree house called that. It sounded fine, though, and made me feel proud. I was also proud of Poetry. Mom would be proud of him, too, when she found out about his digging a can of worms for Mr. Robinson. Mom especially liked people of some other race, and every Sunday she would put an extra offering in her church envelope for missions. The very next time Poetry accidentally stopped at our house on baking day to get his usual small piece of pie, Mom would give him an extralarge slice.
And then we were on our way, Poetry whistling a tune and I whistling the same one in my mind.
In only a few minutes of moseying, we were at the tree house. As the gang made it a rule to do when we were near anybody’s camping place—since it isn’t good manners to walk right into anybody’s privacy—Poetry called, “Anybody home? Hello!”
When there was no answer, and the old gentleman wasn’t anywhere in sight, we decided to go on up to the cemetery to see if he was there.
We skirted the border of the bayou, climbed over the rail fence into the Gilberts’ cornfield, followed the hedgerow to the bottom of Bumblebee Hill, and worked our way toward the top through the thick shrubbery that grew along the steep slope. The gang hardly ever went that way because of there being a lot of stones and briers.
Pretty soon, with my curiosity still tingling to see what we would see when we got to the top and why the old gentleman was using our tape measure, we finally reached the crest. Here the shrubbery was the densest and the blackberry vines the thickest, and here also the stone fence began. We stopped to catch our breath and to look and listen.
I guess Poetry and I both heard voices at the same time. The wind was blowing toward us, so it was easier for us to hear whoever was over in the cemetery than it would be for anybody there to hear us.
I said we both heard voices—it was the old man’s voice, and then a boy’s voice answering. They seemed to be coming nearer too—in fact, right toward our hiding place behind the stone fence not far from Old Man Paddler’s wife’s gravestone—the tall one that has the chiseled hand on it with one finger pointing toward the sky and the words that say “There is rest in heaven.”
Poetry and I kept each other shushed with our eyes and with our forefingers to our lips. I was all ears to hear what I felt pretty sure was going to be something very important.
“It’s very kind of you,” Mr. Robinson said. “He’s such a beautiful hound, and there’s nothing I’d like better than to go racing along the creek at night listening to the hounds in full cry on a coon or fox trail. But my old joints won’t stand it anymore. I haven’t done that for years—not since I left for Africa the last time. Hunting there was an entirely different kind.”
Circus’s beginning-to-change voice asked, “Did you kill any aardvarks?”
Before Mr. Robinson’s answer, my mind flew up to the alcove in our upstairs, and I was looking at Miriam’s very first page. I was seeing a picture of a long-eared, long-nosed, ridiculous-looking animal that Miriam says lives on nothing but ants, which it burrows through the ground to catch with its long slimy tongue.
“No aardvarks, but I saw quite a number. You boys must let me tell you some of our safari experiences sometime. What’s your hound’s name?”
“Bawler. Bawler Brown,” Circus Brown answered.
I peeped through a crack in the stone fence just in time to see Bawler’s long nose sniff at Mr. Robinson’s outstretched hand and lick it the way a dog does when he likes you.
Another thing Circus suggested right then was, “Bawler’s a good watchdog too, if you’d like him to stay with you some night. He’s a fierce fighter. You wouldn’t have to be afraid if he was sleeping outside your door.”
I was having a hard time keeping quiet, but when I heard the next four or five minutes of what Circus and the old man said to each other, I was certainly
glad I did. Maybe I can’t quote it exactly as they said it, but this is most of it anyway.
First, Circus said, “I don’t know who put those signs down at the spring, but if it was any of our gang, whoever it was is going to get some pretty rough treatment from the rest of us.”
“Don’t do it, son,” Mr. Robinson said firmly, then repeated, “Don’t do it. I lived much of my early life where there were signs like that in public places—on drinking fountains, in bus and train depots, hotels. Even some restaurants didn’t like to serve people of other races. I confess I was surprised to find that in this part of our country too. But a man shouldn’t spoil his mind by feeding it with resentments. Life is too short for that. I’ve given my heart over to winning souls to Christ.”
For a few minutes, while I crouched there beside Poetry, I could hardly see for some crazy old tears getting in my eyes. A lump of love or something came into my throat, and in my mind I was back in our one-room school again. I was hearing Miss Trillium say, “All human beings are the handwriting of God. He uses different-colored ink.”
But Circus wasn’t satisfied. “I still think it’s an insult.”
“I know,” the kind voice of the old stranger answered. “It may have been intended for that, but I refuse to accept it as such. After all, the sin—if that is what it is—is in the mind of the other person, don’t you think? I am so glad that the love of Christ is working to change people. We’re all human beings. Let’s give each other a little more time. The time will come when we will find a way to live and work together in a friendly manner. The Bible says that anybody who hates another person is a murderer.”
When the old stranger said that, it was as if I had been stabbed in the heart, because I was still angry at Dragonfly. It’s a strange feeling-loving and hating the same person at the same time.
“Even in nature,” Mr. Robinson went on, “the blackbirds flock together—and the sparrows and bluebirds and wild geese. But they get along in the same woods. They don’t spend all their time fighting each other.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 5