The only thing was that time seems to fly a lot faster when a boy is lying in the shade at the mouth of the branch, catching one fish after another, than it does when that same boy is sweating back and forth between long, dusty hot rows of Ebenezer onions.
It was nearly four o’clock before I knew it. But even then I couldn’t go home. Poetry had it in his mind that we ought to go to the Sugar Creek bridge again to see if there’d been any more vandalism—which we did, and there hadn’t been.
From the bridge, we went back to where we had set our poles, and it took me quite a while longer to land the whopper of a catfish that had swallowed my hook while I was gone and had twisted my line around a sunken tree branch on the bottom.
It was a little out of the way to go past the sycamore tree and the mouth of the cave—out of the way if you were going to my house but not if you were going to Poetry’s.
“We might have a leftover piece of cherry pie,” he tempted me. “That way my mother could pay back your mother for yesterday’s apple pie.”
Any boy knows it is always good to pay back what you borrow, so it did seem I ought to help Poetry’s mother get even with my mother that way.
When we came to the cave, we stood for a minute, studying its strong, extraheavy new door. Old Man Paddler had put it there before he left for California.
Tomorrow we’d all be standing there waiting for Big Jim to unlock the door with the key the old man had left with him. Then we’d follow the long, winding, narrow, uphill underground passage all the way to the cellar door of the old man’s cabin, unlock that door, and, after climbing up a short stairway to the trapdoor, be inside the very homelike place we all liked so well.
That cave certainly made a fine shortcut for us and also for the old man when he was in a hurry to get from his place to the neighborhood where we all lived or from our neighborhood to his own.
“A vandal would have a hard time breaking down a door like that,” I said, “but I suppose he could chop his way in with an ax, if he was mean enough to.”
“Any boy who would chop through the bottom of a rowboat would be that mean,” was Poetry’s set-faced answer. The way he said it set my own temper on edge again against whoever was doing all the malicious mischief.
It certainly felt fine that there wasn’t one of the Sugar Creek Gang who would want to destroy anybody else’s property. It also felt good to be trusted by Old Man Paddler to look after his place for him.
That kind old man had even showed us his secret hiding place for the spare key to the cave.
Poetry and I moseyed over to the hollow sycamore tree. And just to help myself feel a little more proud that we could be trusted, I reached my arm in, felt around behind a shelf of dead wood, and brought out the secret key on its little chain.
In that fleeting second my mind unwrapped the memory I had in it of the time I’d gotten stuck inside that tree. That’s in a story called Western Adventure. I had had to stay there until way into the night before I could get out and had been as badly scared as I’d ever been in my life.
Holding and looking at the key we had been trusted with made me feel as fine as I do when I look at the little bankbook I have at home, which shows how much money I have saved out of my allowance. It certainly makes a boy feel rich to be trusted like that.
I was holding the key with my left hand when I all of a sudden saw my wristwatch. It told me that it was past time to get started on the run for the Collins front gate and get myself out into the garden with the Ebenezer onions before Mom came home—which I just might not be able to do.
Well, the Collins family had six sunfish and one catfish for supper that night. Mom had been home a long time, and for some reason I didn’t get a single bite of her freshly baked custard pie. Also, I got to go to bed as soon as the after-supper chores were finished. Worst of all, I wasn’t going to get to go with the gang next day to help them look after Old Man Paddler’s place in the hills.
I think it hurt my mother’s tender heart not to let me go, but after she decided something, there wasn’t any use to try to get her to change her mind. It wasn’t good for a boy for a mother to do that, she had told me.
Lying upstairs in bed like the boy in Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem who “had to go to bed by day,” I thought about some advice the old man had given us just before he left for California: “You boys have proved that you can be trusted, and I know that when I get back my flowers won’t be wilted, the grass will be cut, and the birds will be having the time of their lives in the birdbath out on the patio. One thing I want you to be very sure about is always to lock the doors when you leave. An unlocked door, boys, is an invitation to thieves.”
I had been a little surprised at what he said next, but it seemed he was right. He was a very wise old man and knew the Bible almost by heart. He said, “One of the Ten Commandments is ‘You shall not steal.’ I’ve always figured that since it is wrong to steal, it’s also wrong for us to make it easy for anybody else to do it. That’s why, whenever you leave home, it’s wise to lock the doors. And never leave your car unlocked or the keys in the ignition.”
There was a rustling of the leaves of the ivy vine that grew across the corner of the window next to my bed. From the plum tree, a father robin was whooping it up. I thought he might be saying that it had been a wonderful day and for his robin wife to go to sleep without a worry in the world because he was around to look after her.
Robins, I thought sadly, don’t have any parents to obey, and if they want to take off anywhere for a trip across the sky, they can do it.
I was feeling pretty sorry for myself, yet I knew there wasn’t any use licking my sore feelings like a hound that’s been in a fight with a coon. When a red-haired only-son’s parents come to what Mom that very afternoon called “the end of my patience rope” for neglecting his garden work and going fishing instead of doing it, there isn’t anything that sad son can do except take his punishment.
The worst thing about it, I thought with a sigh, was that I couldn’t just take my punishment and get it over with because my father wasn’t home. If he had been home, I might have gotten it over in a hurry.
But he wasn’t home and wouldn’t be until after the trip to Old Man Paddler’s cabin tomorrow would be some kind of history. If he had been home, I could have had a good old-fashioned switching in the woodshed, and then I could have had custard pie for dessert, an hour or more twilight fun, and gone to bed by night like any other human being that wasn’t a baby.
But my tenderhearted mother didn’t like to punish her son by a beech switch in a woodshed. It hadn’t been her way of doing it for quite a while because of something she had read in a book she had borrowed at the library.
In that book was a chapter called “Discipline Through Affection,” and in that chapter was a paragraph with a heading called “To Spank or Not to Spank.” I had sort of accidentally read that chapter myself, and the very last sentence of it was probably what Mom had especially liked. It ran something like this: “The best that can be said for spanking is that it sometimes clears the air.”
Dad had disagreed with the library book because of something he’d read in the newspaper that comes to our house. For some reason, I had read that same article, which had the very interesting title “Spanking’s Still a Good Teacher.”
In spite of my sad feeling, I must have gone to sleep, because all of a sudden it was morning. The father robin was yelling what a wonderful day it was with nothing to do, our old red rooster was bragging with his cock-a-doodle-do that he was the most important chicken in the flock, and a slant of sunlight was lying across the windowsill of my room—also with nothing to do.
The morning wasn’t so bad, and for lunch at noon I got to eat an extralarge piece of yesterday’s custard pie. My mother’s face wasn’t sad anymore, but she was very busy getting ready for a committee meeting of some kind at the Thompsons’.
I was going to get to have my humane punishment all by myself. I was to be my own
boss while I finished yesterday’s garden work. The punishment was finishing the Ebenezer onions, weeding the Golden Bantam sweet corn, hoeing the Yellow Cherry tomatoes, and thinning out the Scarlet Globe radishes.
“Can’t I even rest a little while between the rows of Golden Bantam?” I asked just before Mom drove away, and she surprised me with, “You be your own boss.”
I was standing beside the car door. Mom was under the steering wheel. Charlotte Ann was on the seat beside her, cranky fussy and whining with the heat and from needing to go to bed by day and not wanting to. She would have to when they got to the Thompsons’.
“If your conscience tells you to rest a little now and then,” Mom finished, “that’s up to you. It is a very hot afternoon.”
Charlotte Ann was making it hard for Mom and me to hear each other. Because I wanted to have a better feeling between myself and the most wonderful mother there ever was, I ordered my little sister to pipe down, saying, “What are you so cranky about? You’re not being punished for anything!”
But it was the wrong thing to say and maybe not even right to think, because Charlotte Ann was not only my ornery little sister, she was also Mom’s only baby girl. My mother’s tone of voice was a little sharper than she usually uses on me when she answered, “She doesn’t know any better. She’s just cranky-sleepy. She’s used to her nap this time of day.”
Still trying to say something that would make a better feeling between us, I began, “Be sure not to leave the keys in the ignition when you’re in the house having your committee meeting, Old Man Paddler says.”
Mom for some reason didn’t seem to realize that I was trying to prove to her I wasn’t such a thoughtless boy after all. She interrupted me with, “Mrs. Thompson doesn’t know how to drive, and there’s not likely to be a woman there who would want to steal a car.”
She did smile though, to show me she still liked me in spite of me, and she started the car.
In a few seconds she was gone, driving through the gate out onto the road and almost speeding to get to the Thompsons’ as soon as she could.
I was left to go out into the garden to be my own boss for a while.
As I watched the trail of whitish brown dust boiling up behind the car and being carried by the lazy afternoon breeze in the direction of the papaw trees in the woods, I realized that the feeling between Mom and me was still not very good. And it wouldn’t be until I had yesterday’s garden work finished.
Now, will you tell me how in the world a boy can be his own boss and make himself do what he, the boss, doesn’t want to do in the first place?
Anyway, Mom hadn’t been gone more than a few minutes and I had just finished one row of Ebenezer onions when I, the boss, said to myself, “All right, son, you’ve been working pretty hard, and you’re thirsty. Go get yourself a drink.”
“Yes sir,” I said to myself.
Leaning the cultivator against the garden gate, I made my tired way to the iron pitcher pump at the end of the board walk that runs back and forth between the pump and the house. I pumped a few sad, squeaking strokes and drank half a cupful of the cool, clean water that gushed out the pump’s pitcher-shaped spout. Then I tossed the other half over and across the top of the iron kettle, where it landed in a puddle and scattered thirteen or more thirsty yellow butterflies in that many fluttering directions.
Then I pumped a pail of water and walked it around to the west side of the house to pour it into the trough that circles the little two-foot-tall blue spruce we’d set out there just last week, halfway between the two cherry trees at the end of the row of hollyhocks.
That very pretty, symmetrical blue spruce tree was my birthday present to my mother-since I’m the best son she ever had, and also the worst, as Pop sometimes says. I am also their only son.
I ordered me to stop and admire that happy little tree, and for a few seconds I felt proud of myself for planning the present for Mom. With the help of the gang, we had managed, in spite of a thunderstormy afternoon, to get it dug and balled and set out right here where she could see it every time she looked out the west window. We had actually brought the tree home from Old Man Paddler’s place in the hills in a helicopter.
While I was still standing and admiring the tree, thinking about how much I liked my brownish gray haired mother and how she always tried to keep me from being punished in a noisy way, I began to feel sadder than ever.
“I never saw anybody with such a tender heart,” I said to myself and to the little tree, remembering it was right at this very spot one day that Mom had accidentally stepped on a baby chicken and had felt sad all day because of it. At another time a bluebird had come flying as fast as a baseball off a boy’s bat and whammed into the west window and killed itself. Mom wouldn’t even let our old black-and-white cat have the bird for supper but had me bury it out in the garden.
It certainly didn’t feel good to think that by neglecting my work and thoughtlessly going fishing, I had stepped on Mom’s heart like a careless boy stepping on a fluffy little chicken.
Thinking that, I began to feel bad inside because of all the other sad thoughts that were making a crow’s nest in my already sad mind.
And that’s when all of a sudden I spied, at the base of the spruce tree, a single dogtooth violet growing in the ball of dirt we’d brought the tree’s roots in. And that is one of the prettiest yellow flowers that grows around Sugar Creek. Dragonfly, the pop-eyed member of our gang, calls the dogtooth violet a fawn lily. Little Jim calls it a trout lily. And Circus calls it a yellow adder’s tongue. All the names are local names for the same flower.
Surprised, I stood and stared at the six-tongued yellow flower and at the two mottled green and purple white leaves its stem seemed to be growing out of. Hardly knowing what I was doing, I heard myself mumbling a poem I’d had to memorize at school. It was written by somebody called Wordsworth, I remembered.
And because our rain barrel was not more than ten feet behind me at the corner of the house, I ordered me to go over to it, stick my head inside, and yell the poem down into it just to hear the hollow sound my voice would make:
“I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.”
My head was still in the barrel when I got to the end of the first stanza. There was something else in the barrel, too. There were fifteen or twenty little wrigglers in the water, which I knew were mosquitoes in the larva stage.
The third stanza of the poem, I remembered, told that seeing the “crowd” of golden daffodils made the poet forget how lonely and unhappy he was.
I lifted my head out of the barrel and, from looking at the crowd of baby mosquitoes, went back to the baby spruce tree and stood staring down at the six-parted lemon yellow flower and its dappled, lance-shaped leaves. But it didn’t do anything for me except make me feel worse about my not getting to go to Old Man Paddler’s with the gang.
I kept on standing and looking and quoting to myself the part of the poem where Wordsworth says that sometimes, when he is lying on a couch resting, all of a sudden he sees the daffodils with his inner eye, and in a flash his sad heart is full and running over with what he calls “pleasure.”
It sounded so encouraging that I quoted it to the crowd of wrigglers in the barrel, and for a few seconds I actually felt better because of the echoes my voice made. Hollering down a rain barrel is something any boy likes to do anyway.
“For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”
The wrigglers kept on wriggling, and my mind kept on feeling mostly sad, so I gave up, took a long last loo
k at the dogtooth violet, and ordered myself into the house. There, in as vacant and pensive a mood as I could imagine myself into, I lay down on the couch, shut my eyes, and gave the dogtooth violet a chance to flash upon my inner eye.
After waiting five or maybe six or seven minutes, I realized there wasn’t any use to pretend. My name was William Collins, not William Wordsworth.
What did flash upon my inner eye was a beech switch stretched across the two tenpenny nails driven into the woodshed wall above the workbench. My inner ear kept hearing voices down along the creek, laughing, shouting, and tossing wisecracks, where six boys fluttered and danced and leapfrogged in the breeze.
Of course, there wouldn’t be six, but only five. Only five … only five … only five….
There just had to be something I could do to get the sad feeling out of my heart.
4
My outer eyes roved around the room, resting first on one thing and then another. There was the organ in the corner, and the hymnbook on the rack was opened to one of Mom’s favorite hymns. Even from as far away as I was at the time, I could see it was “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” I’d heard her sing that song many times, pumping the organ, and following the notes with her soprano voice.
Thinking that with my mind and hearing Mom’s voice with my inner ear made me feel even worse. I remembered that late yesterday afternoon when I had come back from my fishing trip with the six sunfish and one ugly catfish, my wonderful mother hadn’t even scolded me. “Scolding sharply,” the library book had said, “is an inhumane way of punishing. It cuts long, ragged slashes in the child’s heart.”
“If you get them cleaned in a hurry,” she had said to me, “we’ll have them for supper.”
It wasn’t the thing she said or the way she said it that hurt but where she was when she said it. She was out in the garden pushing the one-wheeled, two-handled cultivator back and forth between the long rows of Ebenezer onions!
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 12