Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36

by Paul Hutchens

  “Take that tree house you’ve rented me. I’ve seen the real thing in Africa. Hundreds of pairs of weaverbirds living in the same big, umbrella-shaped nest. No other birds of any other species dared try to make their home with them. There would have been a bird war—though, as we know, sometimes even birds of the same species fight each other. One swarm of bees will attack and rob another of its honey.

  “That’s the way it is in nature. But we are God’s highest creatures. We ought to love one another. The Bible says, ‘Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.’”

  The man’s tone of voice changed then. It was as if Circus wasn’t there but a big crowd of people instead. He seemed to be making a speech as he went on.

  “Here in America we have our misunderstandings, but it’s a good country. I am proud to be an American. Proud also that I belong to the black race. During the Civil War, two hundred thirty thousand black people fought for the Union. My own father was killed at the Battle of Bull Run.

  “Millions of us black people live in America today, and included in our number are successful people of all professions and occupations and of both low and high social standing.

  “Many of the world’s best athletes are blacks, including Olympics champions. Some of us are bad people, which is true also of every race, but many of us are serving the Lord and doing His will—also true of every race.”

  He was easy to listen to, although it was kind of hard to hear every word. After a few minutes of talking as if he was making a speech, the old man’s voice changed back to its gentle, quavering tone. He was talking to just Circus again, finishing, “Yes, I am thankful and proud to be black.”

  He stopped altogether, and I could hear him breathing sort of heavily, as though he had been running in a race or climbing a hill fast.

  Then Circus said something that gave me the surprise of my life. You could have knocked me over with a breath of fresh air, I was so astonished.

  Circus said, “Mr. Robinson, I’m not only proud to be an American, but I’m also proud to have Indian blood. My great-great-grandmother on my father’s side was half Indian. Nobody around here knows that, because our family moved here from Missouri fifty years ago. Even my folks don’t know that I know. I read it in an old diary I found in a trunk in the attic.” Circus finished with a proud voice.

  Mr. Robinson’s answer made me feel good. He said, “And don’t ever be ashamed of it, son. Always remember that the Indians were the very first Americans.”

  And Circus answered, “Maybe that’s why I like hunting and fishing so much. And everything in nature. Maybe I inherited it.”

  Right that second, Bawler, who had been lying at the old man’s feet, raised his head as though he was proud to be a dog and pointed a suspicious nose toward the other side of the cemetery, which was in the direction the wind was coming from. Then he was on his four feet, his nose still suspicious. He growled an un-friendly growl as much as to say, “I don’t like whoever’s over there!”

  “’S’matter, Bawler?” Circus asked.

  Bawler answered with a deep growl. His nose was still pointed in the direction of the other side of the cemetery, and he stood stiff-legged. The hair on his back bristled—which is what the hair on a dog’s back always does when his temper is bristling on the inside of him.

  “See what a good watchdog he is?” Circus asked. “If you’d just let him stay with you tonight, he’d tear anybody to pieces who tried to break in and take any of your money or hurt you. There are some mean men over in Halifax County—they don’t like black people, Mr. Robinson. They burned a cross at Sam Ballard’s place the other night. If anybody tried to do that in front of your house, Bawler would stop him if he was your watchdog. Wouldn’t you, Bawler?”

  Bawler heard his name and growled a friendly growl as much as to say that whoever was on the other side of the cemetery wasn’t important or dangerous, anyway. He turned back, licked Circus’s hand, and lay down again at the old man’s feet. I noticed, though, that he kept his eyes and ears and nose pointed in the direction the wind was blowing.

  Bawler hadn’t any sooner settled down than he had to get up again, because Circus decided it was time for them to go. I saw that the hound was still suspicious as he sort of led the way for Circus in the path that winds to the north side of the cemetery and down across the battleground of the Battle of Bumblebee Hill.

  No sooner was Circus out of sight than the old man began talking again.

  “He’s praying,” Poetry whispered.

  I knew Mr. Robinson’s words weren’t meant for any human being to hear. I couldn’t hear them very well, anyway—just a few phrases about being tired and short of breath. One sentence came through, though: “I don’t know why You let me live instead of him—when I’ve done so little with my life.”

  That was all I could hear. In fact, the old gentleman stopped talking after that. He yawned, stretched as though he was sleepy, and then did the strangest thing. He pulled his right trouser leg up to above his knee, unstrapped his artificial limb, and took it off.

  If only I could have whispered to Poetry without being heard by Mr. Robinson, I’d have said, “Look how red and inflamed looking his stump is. No wonder he takes his leg off now and then and uses crutches.”

  When the leg was off, Benjamin Robinson took off his hearing aid and tucked it into his shirt pocket—maybe to give his ear a rest, too.

  Poetry and I knew then that we could whisper to each other. The very first thing he said to me was, “He’s got a map.”

  I watched with my heart pounding in my ears, wondering what was going on in the old man’s mind. After he had studied the map a while—if it was a map—he yawned again, stretched, and wormed his way into the deeper shade near Sarah Paddler’s tombstone, leaving his artificial limb to lie in the sun. He made a pillow out of his light coat, lay down, closed his eyes, and in only a few minutes was breathing heavily and regularly, meaning he was probably asleep.

  It was what Mom would call a peaceful scene. The breeze was rippling the bluegrass around the gravestones, stirring the leaves of the sweetbrier bushes, and making the tall and straight mullein stalks stagger like drunk men trying to walk.

  If there hadn’t been so much on my mind, it would have been a good time to take an afternoon nap. But I wasn’t sleepy. In fact, I was very wide awake a second later when I saw something glittering in the grass. It was the metal case of Dad’s new tape measure.

  We had come up to see the old man, to find out what he was measuring, and to give him a can of worms. But he had gone to sleep on us.

  “Let’s go see if we can find out what old Bawler was suspicious about,” I suggested to Poetry. “Maybe it was Dragonfly.”

  “It better not be,” Poetry said grimly, and I could feel his temper bristling. In fact, both our tempers were hot.

  As we moved along the trail Circus had followed, my mind, like old Bawler’s nose, was pointing in every direction to see if I could see anything out of the ordinary. Somebody had put the signs at the spring. Somebody who didn’t like black people and who maybe didn’t like the members of the Sugar Creek Gang, unless it was Dragonfly, who was supposed to like us.

  “Circus Brown’s a pretty nice guy,” Poetry said to me, puffing, as we rambled along, stopping every now and then to peek through my binoculars or to untangle his butterfly net from a brier or bush it got caught on.

  “Pretty nice is right,” I answered.

  At the foot of Bumblebee Hill, we circled the Little Jim Tree, then made our way down toward the Black Widow Stump again, all the time keeping our eyes peeled to see if we could see what had made old Bawler so suspicious.

  “Maybe we’ll run into Circus down here somewhere,” one of us said to the other—I can’t remember which—and neither of us answered a word.

  When we were getting near our tree house, Poetry suggested, “Let’s leave the can of worms and a note just outside the door so
he’ll know what they’re for.”

  But we didn’t leave our can of worms, and we didn’t leave any note. The reason we didn’t was that a note was already there. It was not written with pencil or pen but printed in large letters on a placard the same size as the cards at the spring, one of which, you remember, said Black and the other White.

  My temper came to the hottest life it had come to in a long time when we reached the edge of the clearing and saw, propped on the seat of the captain’s chair we had put there for the old man to use, that foot-square white placard and on it the words:

  White Only

  Not only that, but the ashes from the fireplace we’d built for the old man were scattered all over, and the pail of water I’d carried earlier in the afternoon was spilled on the ground. The pail itself was lying on its side just inside the tree house door!

  7

  Poetry and I stood frozen in our tracks at what some unsociable person had done—practically ordering our tenant out of our house! Imagine that!

  My imagination kept seeing old Bawler standing stiff legged with his nose pointed in this direction, and I wished I could know with my mind what I knew his nose knew.

  My eyes were still focused on the insulting words on the sign when my ears caught the sound of something going on farther up the bayou.

  “Sounds like somebody digging,” I whispered. “Ker-slup—scrish—ker-slup—scrish—” It was like a shovel or spade being filled with dirt and emptied. Filled—emptied—filled—emptied—

  Then the digging stopped, and we heard an entirely different sound. This was like somebody chopping with an ax or hatchet.

  “Let’s find out what’s going on, right now!” Poetry said.

  I looked into his set face to see if he meant it, and he did.

  As my heart always does at a time like that, it was pounding in my ears, and I was feeling pretty tense as we carefully picked our way through the underbrush toward the sound of the chopping ax or hatchet. I just knew that we’d see some stranger when we got there, maybe someone with a fierce face and powerful muscles and an explosive temper who—

  But that was as far as my thoughts went, because Poetry let out a surprised, “It’s only Little Jim digging!”

  Right away we were both where Little Jim was. He had quite a good-sized hole dug at the base of a small tree.

  “What you digging sassafras roots for?” Poetry demanded, squinting up at the only tree that grows around Sugar Creek that has three different kinds of leaves on the same twig. The three kinds were what our schoolteacher calls “oval,” “two-lobed,” and “three-lobed.”

  Little Jim answered Poetry with a mouselike squeak in his small voice. “For Mr. Robinson, so he can have sassafras tea.”

  For a second, a discouraging thought came into my mind. It was this: Poetry had dug a can of worms for our tenant; Circus offered his hound for a watchdog; Little Jim dug sassafras roots so he could make some of the best-tasting tea there ever was; but I, Bill Collins, hadn’t planned to do a single thing for him! All I had done was go to our toolshed to get Dad’s tape measure for him, he having asked for it first. Of course, I’d helped him through the rail fence across from our mailbox and had carried a pail of water for him, but what I’d done didn’t seem important.

  My mind came back to our little circle of things when Poetry said to me, “Little Jim’s got his bird guide with him.”

  There wasn’t anything unusual about that. That summer Little Jim carried it around with him nearly all the time. He was as proud as I was about what he knew about different kinds of birds, especially since I had told him that all the birds in the world were divided into two classes: altricial and precocial. The past several weeks, he had been using the words over and over and over. He would say them to himself, and whenever he’d see a bird, he’d call out its name and what kind it was. He almost wore out those two long words from using them so much.

  Right while he was yanking at the piece of sassafras root he was trying to pry loose, Little Jim stopped, looked up and all around, and listened in several directions, holding one small hand up to his ear. “Hear that?” he exclaimed. “It’s going to rain!”

  I’d heard it myself. It was a rain crow spouting off a long-drawn-out series of “kuks”—“Kuk—kuk—kuk—kuk—kuk—kuk”—in a harsh, grating voice from up in some tree along the bayou.

  “I’ve got to see him!” Little Jim cried. Looking at his wristwatch to see what time it was, he dropped his shovel and started off with his bird guide on a fast, short-legged run.

  A very few seconds later, I heard him yell back to us from the rail fence that borders the bayou, “I see him! He’s a yellow-billed altricial cuckoo! Come here, quick!”

  The “rain crow” and the “yellow-billed cuckoo” were different names for the same bird. Because it did more “kuk—kuk—kuk—kuk”-ing in rainy weather, many people around Sugar Creek thought it was a very good weather prophet.

  About that same second, a dragonfly came gliding to where we were, darting here and there, looking like a small four-winged airplane. When Poetry saw it, he mimicked Little Jim’s excitement and cried, “Look! There goes a devil’s darning needle!”

  And he was right. The speeding dragonfly was an actual green darner, which is its true name.

  Poetry, as if he had forgotten all about the insulting sign practically ordering our tenant to pack up and get out, started on a fast chase after the green darner. He swung his butterfly net and panted and dodged all over the place.

  We were almost a hundred yards from our homemade boys’ nest when we woke up to the fact that we had lost a lot of time. We turned around and hurried back to find Mr. Robinson standing near the entrance, steadying himself with his cane and reading the sign.

  What to do? What can you do when there isn’t a thing you can think of to do?

  You suddenly feel so sad that you want to run over to the old gentleman tottering on his cane, look into his eyes, and exclaim to him, “Don’t you worry, Mr. Robinson! Don’t you worry one little bit! The Sugar Creek Gang’ll never stand for a thing like that! We’re American citizens in the land of the free and the home of the brave, and we’re not going to stand for anybody robbing any of our citizens of their freedom!”

  Then my muscles leaped into the fight my mind was already in the middle of. I dashed across the space between myself and the sign with the insulting words on it. I grabbed it up, tore it to pieces, dashed the pieces onto the ground, and stamped my feet on them. I was still stamping when there was a streak of small boy flying across the open space to where I was. And then Little Jim was there, too, stamping his own small feet on them right along with my kind of large feet.

  “There, Mr. Robinson!” I exclaimed to him proudly. “That’s what the Sugar Creek Gang thinks of a thing like that! We don’t know who put it there, but none of us did.”

  It certainly felt good to say what I had said and, even better, to do what I had done.

  But then the old man began to sway dizzily. He steadied himself with his cane, staggered to his captain’s chair, where the sign had been a few minutes before, looked all around, took a deep breath, and said to us, “I’ve always been proud of my race, boys. I haven’t lived in our country too much of my life, for when I was a young man I went to Africa as a missionary to help win my people there to Christ. That’s where I lost my leg—in a fight with that lion when I was hunting big game. I always liked to hunt.”

  He stopped talking then, heaved a sigh, slumped into his chair, let out a groan, and lowered his voice as if he were going to tell us something very important.

  “If you boys can stay a few minutes, there’s something I’d like you to know. Right now in some parts of our country there is a lot of bitterness and what is called racism. Another name for it is race hatred. This is not right in God’s sight.

  “Also, boys, people of different groups are trampling on the hearts of innocent people. If only we could give each other, and God too, a little more t
ime and love each other the way the Savior loves us all—”

  He focused his eyes on the scattered pieces of cardboard and said, “I wonder what it would be like to come up to heaven’s gate and find a sign on the door: White Only.”

  For a second or maybe ten or twenty, after the old man said that, everything was very quiet, none of us saying a word. Away over the top of the hill, where I was looking at the time, a white cloud was hanging in the afternoon sky. From somewhere along the creek behind us a crow let out a worried “Caw—caw—caw,” as if it was lonesome for its mate.

  It was Little Jim who spoke first, and his answer showed what kind of mind he had—and maybe, also, what kind of parents he had. He said, “If the word ‘White’ meant ‘Pure in Heart,’ it’d be all right, because the pure in heart get to see God. But if it meant white skin, that wouldn’t be the gate to heaven, because God looks on the kind of hearts people have.”

  Again everything was quiet, and then even nature seemed to agree. A lively—in fact, very lively—wind swept across the bayou and woke up the leaves in the trees. The sound they made was a little like a crowd of people clapping their hands, as it says in one of Mom’s favorite Bible verses: “And all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”

  Right that second I saw a blank expression come over the man’s wrinkled face. He raised his hand to his forehead, a helpless look came into his eyes, and his other hand fumbled in his shirt pocket for the small bottle I’d seen him take from there before. His breath began to come hard and fast, and he leaned forward, the way first-aid rules say to do if you feel faint. He reached in his hip pocket for the flask he kept there and managed to get it out, but there wasn’t any water in it—not even a drop.

  Mr. Robinson sank back in his chair and gasped, “Water! Get me a drink!”

  How I ever managed to get to the spring and back with a pail of water in time to rescue the old man from his heart attack, I don’t know, but I did.