Reaching the corner where the gravel road turns north, I shot past the three big maple trees and on toward the bridge.
At the bridge, I swung off the road and up the grade to the left, squeezed through the rail fence at the top, and galloped on, following the ridge above the creek. In another few minutes I’d be at the mouth of the branch. Then I’d cross on the log bridge and be on the last lap to the sycamore tree and the cave.
Panting—panting—panting—
In a little while, I, Bill Collins, the doctor, would be there. I’d find the old man lying with his crutches beside him in the shade of the sycamore, gasping for breath, and with the water I was bringing for the pill he would have to take, I’d save his life.
For some reason, as I flew along in the path, leaping over fallen trees, dodging shrubbery and stumps, I was remembering Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, which we’d had to memorize in school and which has a line in it that says, “All men are created equal.”
With every step, the word “equal” repeated itself in my mind.
Equal. Equal. Equal. Equal.
Then my thoughts were interrupted by somebody behind me, yelling, “Hey, Bill! Wait for me!”
It was Dragonfly’s high-pitched voice.
“I can’t,” I yelled back over my shoulder to him. But I also looked over my shoulder, which means that for a few seconds my eyes were not on the path I was supposed to be running on. I also didn’t see the ponderosa pine tree root sticking up several inches in the path. The next thing I knew, I was in the middle of a head-over-heels tumble. My right big toe felt as though it had been struck with a hammer, and my right ankle hurt with one of the worst pains I’d ever felt in my life.
I landed upside down, off the path and beside a sweetbrier bush. I knew it was that kind of bush because I could smell the flowers. Also I had been scratched on my face and arms when I fell, landing partly in, partly on, and partly under the sharp-thorned rosebush.
But I was still holding onto the milk bottle, and only a little of the water had been spilled.
Dragonfly caught up with me then, but I could hardly see him. I was dizzy with the pain in my toe and ankle.
“’S’matter?” he asked me.
I rolled over and up to a sitting position. I tried to get up all the way and did. But when I started to walk, my ankle hurt even worse, and I went down in a pile of pain.
“Quick!” I gasped to Dragonfly. “Help me up! I have to get to him to save his life! He’s down by the mouth of the cave and has to have a drink of water so he can take his pill, or he might die!”
“What’s the matter with who?” Dragonfly asked, his voice whiny.
“Mr. Robinson! He’s having a heart attack! Help me up!”
He did, but I couldn’t run. I couldn’t even walk, and I knew I’d never be able to hop on one foot all the way to the cave. “You’ll have to take it to him yourself,” I told Dragonfly, who just that minute got a mussed-up expression on his face and let out two fast sneezes.
“Take what to who?” He couldn’t seem to get it into his head what I meant and whose life he was supposed to help save.
“Old Mr. Robinson!” I told him impatiently. “He’s got to have a drink of water! You’ve got to take it to him yourself!”
I looked at my twisted foot, and a frightened feeling shot through me. Maybe I’d been hurt so badly that I’d have to wear an artificial leg myself!
Then Dragonfly’s puckered face and the branches of the ponderosa pine above him began to whirl, and it seemed a million mixed-up thoughts were racing round and round in my mind. Mixy with her tail straight up was marching proudly across the yard with a dead robin in her mouth. The robin right away changed into a baby kitten. Then five baby kittens were lying beside Mixy in a hen’s nest under a loose board in the barn floor. Our tree house was torn down and scattered all over everywhere by an African lion, which had just finished eating all of Mr. Robinson except one leg, which he couldn’t eat because it was made of some kind of metal.
Then it seemed I was falling. Down—down—down—
The next thing I knew, I felt cold water being splashed into my face and heard Dragonfly’s nervous voice crying, “Bill! Wake up and tell me again whose life has got to be saved, and where is he?”
At first I couldn’t remember anything clearly. But then I came to and told him again that Mr. Robinson was having a heart attack down by the cave. “He always takes a pill when he’s having one, and it revives him. But he hasn’t got any water! You’ve got to get some to him! It’s in the milk bottle there—there—”
My eyes searched frantically for the bottle, as I struggled to a sitting position. Then I saw the bottle lying in the shade of the sweetbrier bush, and it was empty!
Dragonfly had used the water to revive me! He’d splashed every drop of it on my face and neck to bring me out of my faint!
There wasn’t any water left for the old man, not even enough for him to swallow a pill!
What to do now!
I was surprised that there was hardly any pain in my ankle and toe now. There was only a warm feeling instead. Then I remembered that once last year, when I’d hit my thumb with a hammer, there had been at first a rush of pain that had made me sick at my stomach and very faint, but about two minutes later there was only a warm feeling in my thumb and hand. The worst of the pain was gone, and it never came back.
The pain in my toe and ankle might be gone for good, too. I still might be able to get some water to the old man if I could get to the spring.
Then I spied Dragonfly’s Thermos bottle, and an idea came to me. The old man could take his pill with chocolate milk.
“Do you have chocolate milk in your Thermos?”
“It’s water. I got it at the spring after I finished my milk. You need some more in your face? You still feel faint?” Dragonfly, still not seeming to understand the situation, started to unscrew the Thermos cap.
I made a grab for it, took it away from him, and came to still faster life as I said, “I can save his life with this.” And then I was off on a limping run toward the mouth of the branch.
“Save whose life?” that slow-to-catch-on Gang member asked me, and I yelled back over my shoulder, “I told you! Ben Robinson’s! He’s having a heart attack!”
I was all the way to the log bridge before Dragonfly caught up with me again.
With every limping step while Dragonfly was chasing me, it seemed I was fighting something in my mind. Why, I kept asking myself, is he so stubborn? Doesn’t he understand, or doesn’t he want the old man to live? Has he been just pretending to be a changed boy? Does he still think like Shorty Long? Maybe he doesn’t even think a black man should drink out of a white boy’s Thermos!
In my mind’s eye, I was seeing the two signs at the spring and another one in the captain’s chair at our tree house. Dragonfly admitted that he had put the signs there but had blamed Shorty Long for talking him into doing it. Still …
And then I came back into my right mind and remembered I was a doctor rushing to save a man’s life. I limped my way across the log bridge to the other side, with Dragonfly right behind me.
My ankle still wouldn’t behave right, and I felt sharp pain in every step as I struggled down the path ahead of him.
We weren’t far from the cave now. I could see the trunk of the big sycamore with its white, purple, and gray patches of bark, and I knew that somewhere down on the ground there was the old man we still might be able to save.
Then things began to whirl in front of my eyes. I felt my knees buckling and myself going down as I had before. I was going to faint again. I knew it, and I couldn’t help it.
Even as I started to go down, face first, I glimpsed Dragonfly’s blue-overalled, spindle-legged self breaking out into the open. His flying feet were carrying him farther and farther away, and he was taking the Thermos bottle with him.
10
I had several important surprises when I came to. Quite a few things had happene
d while I was lying there, not knowing anything.
The first thing I realized was that I was lying on my back, having cold water sprinkled in my face again.
The first thing I saw was the worried face of Dragonfly Gilbert. He was kneeling in the grass beside me. In one of his hands he had the Thermos bottle. He was pouring water from it into his other hand and sprinkling the water on my face and neck.
The first thing I heard was Mr. Robinson’s quavering voice saying, “He’s coming to”—meaning I was regaining consciousness and was in my mind again. Mr. Robinson was there, alive and all right!
Several other people were there, also: Old Man Paddler, Dr. Manswood, and Mom, with Charlotte Ann standing beside her, wide-eyed and grinning, as if she was pleased to see me and thought her big homely brother was a very nice person.
I should have known Charlotte Ann better than that, though. When I was on my hands and knees, halfway up, she broke loose from Mom and flew into action, her bare feet carrying her like a mischievous little chipmunk toward me.
Before I realized what was going to happen, that little rascal of a sister was climbing on my shoulders for a piggyback ride!
It could have been a happy time for me if Dragonfly hadn’t been so proud of himself.
Mr. Robinson, who seemed to be feeling all right again and was breathing like a well person, braced himself against the white and purple and gray trunk of the sycamore tree, laid a hand on Dragonfly’s thin shoulder, and said, “This boy saved my life. He brought me a drink of water just in time.”
I looked at Dragonfly, and even before his voice said what his mind was thinking, I read it on his crooked-nosed face. This is what that little dumb bunny actually said: “I gave him a drink out of my Thermos bottle.”
Even Mom didn’t know any better, because she said to Dragonfly—my own mother, mind you!—“I always knew you were alert. You stop at the house after a while for a piece of peach pie I baked just this morning.”
Dr. Manswood, after examining my ankle, decided I’d have to stay off it—for a few days, anyway. Mom got worried then. When the doctor had driven me home in his car, she took care of me extra-carefully, as if I had been Roy “Dragonfly” Gilbert himself, the life-saving hero!
Another thing Dr. Manswood did was to take Mr. Robinson to his office and give him a very special examination and change his medicine. He gave him a new kind of pill he could take without water. All he had to do was slip the pill under his tongue and let it dissolve. It would give very fast relief to a person with his kind of heart trouble. I found out about that later.
Before we left the cave, though, there was a big surprise. Old Man Paddler found out who the stranger was. I saw the long-whiskered old white man give the long-whiskered old black man a hearty handshake and a hug, exclaiming “So you’re Benjamin Robinson!”
I found out later that Old Man Paddler had been sending money to Mr. Robinson’s mission board, helping to support him when he was in Africa, but he had kept his gifts secret. Old Man Paddler liked to give that way for some reason.
Anyway, because the Sociable Weaverbird Motel couldn’t be lived in anymore, Old Man Paddler asked the retired missionary to stay at his house, a clapboard-roofed cabin in the hills.
As I started to say, Mom gave me and my ankle very special care, as if I was even more important than Dragonfly had made himself seem. You could tell by the tone of her voice that she was a little suspicious of the story of Dragonfly’s having saved Mr. Robinson’s life. As she finished wrapping a cold, wet towel around my ankle, she said, “Roy is quite a hero, isn’t he?”
“Quite,” I grunted.
Dad, who was at the water pail in the corner getting a drink, remarked, “Quite a change from the Dragonfly of last week.”
I had my eyes buried in a book on first aid, checking to see if what the doctor had ordered for my ankle was right—and it was. I answered Dad with a tone of voice he didn’t like very well when I said, “It was a good chance for him to show off a little.”
“You couldn’t possibly be a little jealous because you didn’t get to do what he did?” Dad asked.
Mom put in then, “There seems to be part of the story missing. My milk bottle, for instance. You know where it is?”
“Ask Dragonfly,” I answered, with the same wrong tone of voice. “He poured water out of it onto my face to bring me out of my first faint. I fainted twice, you know.”
“Good boy!” Dad said.
But I didn’t get a chance to feel proud of myself for being able to “come to” twice in one afternoon, because he wasn’t talking about me. He was talking about a boy named Dragonfly Gilbert.
I wasn’t even glad about what Dad said next. “Somebody has done a good job snipping off the graveclothes he was wrapped in only a week or so ago.”
I wasn’t sure Dragonfly was set free. It seemed he had just changed one kind of grave-clothes for another. First, he’d been wrapped round and round with race prejudice, and now he was wrapped round and round with the thought that he was a big hero. It still seemed that the only reason he had changed his attitude toward Ben Robinson was that Shorty Long had moved out of the Green Corn Motel and wasn’t there anymore to control his wishy-washy mind. Also, he hated to be on the outs with the Gang.
I didn’t find out for sure if he had changed or not until some time later, when the gang was having a special meeting in the cemetery near Sarah Paddler’s tombstone. All of us except Circus were in for quite a surprise.
One reason we’d planned our meeting for the cemetery was that the day before, while I was up in our haymow—being able to walk on my ankle again and to climb the haymow ladder if I would be careful—I looked out the always-open east window, which Dad calls his “picture window.” I noticed a truck with two men in it driving down the far side of the cemetery, following the grassy lane inside the rock fence Poetry and I had been hiding behind on that important day you already know about.
The truck stayed in the cemetery quite a while, maybe two hours, before it came back and went east up the gravel road leading toward town.
I hadn’t thought anything about it, since just three days before had been Memorial Day, and quite a few people had gone through the cemetery, following the little brown paths and leaving flags or flowers or potted plants at different people’s graves. A few soldiers from the Civil War had been buried there. Memorial Day was always on May 30 in our part of the United States.
Wondering if maybe the men in the truck had done some special work there, such as cutting grass away from different stones or maybe even putting up a new headstone for somebody, I thought maybe the gang would like to know about it. So I phoned Poetry, who phoned Circus, who phoned Little Jim, who phoned Big Jim, who was supposed to phone Dragonfly and didn’t on account of the Gilberts’ phone being out of order. Everybody was supposed to tell everybody that we would meet at the Little Jim Tree. The meeting was for Sunday afternoon at two o’clock.
Sunday morning, we went to church as our family had been doing ever since I was old enough to be carried there. We hadn’t seen very much of Benjamin Robinson since he had moved up to Old Man Paddler’s, so it seemed good to see him in church that Sunday. Little Jim’s folks had driven up into the hills to get the two men, since it was a long way for them to have to walk at their age. They were the oldest old men in the whole territory.
When Mr. Robinson came limping in, I got a warm feeling in my heart. I had had to use crutches for a few days myself and still had a little limp. Right that very second, I was wearing an elastic bandage on my ankle.
The church was almost full of all kinds of people, some of them being tourists who were on early vacations.
We had already sung the first hymn, “Blest Be the Tie That Binds,” and were sitting down, when Circus’s pop, who was an usher that year, came down the outside west aisle ahead of Old Man Paddler and Ben Robinson. He seated them in the same pew with the Gilbert family.
The sermon was something about Memorial Day
and soldiers and the Civil War and the memorial of the Lord’s Supper. Every time we held a Communion service, we were sort of decorating the grave of the Savior, even though He hadn’t stayed there but was alive. I knew that the best way to decorate His grave was to live a clean, honest life, as if we had come out of the grave of sin ourselves.
Part of the sermon was about the cross and how it was more important to have the cross in your heart than to have it on the church steeple or to wear it as a lapel pin.
“The Christian cross is aflame today with the love of God. It lights the darkness in the human heart and helps every person of every race to see himself a sinner in need of the Savior.”
Just as our pastor said those words, I was reminded of a special little pocket mirror I always carried with me. Taking it out, I looked on the back, where some printed words were:
Christ died for the sinner.
Which one?
See the other side.
As I always do when I read those words, I looked on the other side and saw a freckle-faced, red-haired boy named William Jasper Collins.
And then I got a very cheerful surprise. While I was looking in the mirror, I saw behind me, up in the front row of the balcony, the Ballard family, all seven of them. They were listening with serious faces, and I knew that maybe all of them were remembering another flaming cross, the one that had burned outside their house. The expression on Sam Ballard’s face said he wasn’t mad at anybody for hating his family, though, but he was sorry they didn’t understand about the real cross—or the love of the One who had died on it for the sins of everybody.
It was a very hot, sultry day, and without knowing I was going to do it—because as a certain poem says, “No boy knows when he goes to sleep”—I drifted off into the land of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod and missed most of the rest of the sermon.
I came to with a jerk when our pastor announced a hymn, and people all around me started leafing through their hymnbooks.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 9