The phone rang then, two shorts and a long, which I knew was the Thompsons’ number. Because I was closer to it than Mrs. Thompson or Poetry, I leaped to answer it, and it was the sheriff’s deputy.
“We’re setting up roadblocks,” he told me, “and we need your help. You boys know where the north road bridge is …”
He gave me special orders, which I passed on to the rest of the gang as soon as I could. In a split second we were off, on our way down Poetry’s hill to the branch bridge and across it, skirting the edge of a cornfield. At the north road bridge, we piled rails from the fence and stumps and anything else loose and carryable in the road to block the way onto the bridge.
“How come we block the road here?” Little Jim puffed, out of breath from dragging a rail from the other side of the road and plumping it down with the other blockade stuff we were piling there.
“Yeah, how come?” Dragonfly wanted to know, but he was obeying orders without knowing why.
“Because,” I told him, repeating in my own words the orders the deputy had given me, “the thugs will see the roadblock the state patrol is putting up two miles up the road beyond your house and may turn back and try to make it across the bridge here and get away. If they do come roaring back and take the north road, our blockade’ll stop ’em! Hurry up, everybody!”
I got my orders interrupted right then by somebody shouting from the direction of the Till’s house. Looking across the bridge, I saw a boy on a bicycle pedaling like mad, steering with one hand and waving with the other and shouting, “Stop! Don’t do that! Get that roadblock away from there!” And it was Bob Till himself, bareheaded and excited.
What on earth!
I felt my muscles tighten, maybe just from instinct, because the gang had had so much trouble with him and had been forced into so many fights since the first one on Bumblebee Hill.
One thing was for sure: Bob Till wasn’t one of the vandals in the stolen car. It also seemed that whatever was on his mind was making him mad. I found out while we were in the middle of the excitement that it was not anger but was something else.
He swung onto the bridge with his bike, pedaled across, and—still ordering us to stop piling up rails and boards and old tree trunks and pieces of stumps—he dived in and started to throw everything back out into the ditch. Some of it rolled down the embankment where it landed against one of the red bridge abutments.
“They’ll be here any minute, and we’ve got to let them through!” he cried. Picking up a long rail the size Abraham Lincoln used to split when he was a little boy, he gave it a heave, grabbed another, and dragged it to the side.
He was hauling away a piece of stump when Big Jim grabbed him. I just knew there was going to be what we’d had before—a rough-and-tumble fight.
But Bob was wiry as well as strong. He twisted out of Big Jim’s grasp and cried, “Mother’s worse again, and they’re sending an ambulance to take her to the hospital! We’ve got to let them get through!”
That’s when I saw, for the first time in my life, tears in Bob Till’s eyes. His face, which was shaped quite a lot like his father’s face, was worried and looked like any boy’s face might look if the boy was scared and needed somebody to help him.
My mind remembered in less than six seconds his mother’s face as she had looked when my own mother and I had come into the bedroom where she was, carrying the casserole of food for their supper.
Bob Till’s mother might even be dying! We didn’t dare block the ambulance from getting through, yet we had to stop the rough boys who had stolen the Collins car with a little girl in it!
In a few seconds we had told Bob what was what and why we were setting up the roadblock.
We had to choose between my mother’s hurt, worrying heart and Big Bob Till’s mother’s life. It seemed, if I could have left the choice up to my own mother, she’d have ordered us, “Tear down that roadblock, boys! Let the ambulance through.”
What else my mother might have said if she had had a chance to say anything, I maybe would never know, for right then there was the sound of a car coming at high speed. It had already passed the Collins place and was roaring on to the north road. Would it slow down, I wondered, and make the turn toward the bridge where we were, or would it go racing past to the little branch bridge and up the hill past the Thompson house and toward the other roadblock the deputy said they’d put up farther on?
My question was answered a second later when the Collins family car reached the north road corner, swung right, and came flying down the road to the place where, guarding the bridge, there were seven boys and a still-pretty-good roadblock.
The car’s horn was going full blast, ordering us to get out of the way or be killed. The driver, with another boy beside him and with the finest baby sister there ever was in the world somewhere in the back, came roaring like mad toward us.
A terrible thought came to me then: What if the boys were doing more than trying to get away from the police? What if, after they found out Charlotte Ann was in the backseat, they’d decided to kidnap her!
We would find out in less than another minute!
We would have to find out, because the car would have to stop. It just couldn’t keep on coming that fast and go crashing into our roadblock and on across the bridge.
Before I could finish thinking that, there was a screeching of our car’s brakes and a skidding and a fast and furious slowing down.
But it was already too late. Our green car just couldn’t stop that quick.
Crash!
The second the bumper and right front side of the car crashed into the roadblock, Mom’s unpainted fender crumpled as if it was a piece of tin. Then the whole car swerved to the right and down the embankment. It stopped when the bumper whammed into the bridge abutment.
There were sounds as well as fast-moving sights, all of them piling up in my mind and exploding. Two car doors were shoved open at the same time, and two boys, one a little bigger than the other, leaped out and started running in different directions—one toward the sycamore tree and the cave and the other toward the fence, which had a few rails missing.
A third boy started running too—Theodore Collins’s worried son. I was down that embankment like lightning to find out what if anything had happened to my sister in the backseat—if she was still there.
I quick looked in through the window of the back door and saw her lying upside down on her pink pillow, holding onto her twenty-inch-long panda for dear life, and not a bit hurt.
She was crying, though, and pretty badly scared. But she wasn’t crying as hard as she was a minute later when Mom in her blue-flowered dress came running from the Thompsons’ house and gathered her up in her arms, crying and exclaiming, “Oh, my poor baby! My poor baby!”
Then my up-to-that-minute brave little sister cut loose with the kind of crying she usually cuts loose with when she’s gotten herself hurt and Mom is anywhere around for her to cry to. Most baby girls are like that.
Since Charlotte Ann was safe, I gave excited attention to what else was going on. Big Jim and Circus, being the closest to the shorter boy, had raced after him and already had him down, holding his arms and head to keep from getting hit with hard-knuckled fists or bitten with sharp teeth.
It was the bigger boy that was getting away in spite of Poetry’s having tackled him football-style near the rail fence.
Like a streak, that bigger boy was up from the ground and over the fence, headed in the direction of the papaw bushes—with another boy, who was not a member of the Sugar Creek Gang, running after him.
That boy who was not a member of the gang and who, ever since he’d moved into the territory, had been our enemy, and who right that minute was streaking off after the runaway vandal, was Big Bob Till!
“Get him down!” Dragonfly called to Bob, when he made a flying leap for the runaway’s shoulders. But the vandal shook Bob loose as though he was a smaller boy than he was and raced on.
Now that I knew for
sure Charlotte Ann was all right in spite of her noisy crying, there wasn’t anything to keep me from joining in the chase. So over the broken-down rail fence I went, trying hard to catch up.
Poetry was puffing along beside and behind me.
Things were happening beside the papaw tree, things that I could hear but couldn’t see very well until I got there. Two boys were on the ground, with Bob Till on top and using his fists on his man, trying to beat him into giving up.
But the battle changed in another second. The vandal shoved Bob off, then swung around and caught him with a long, hard right to his jaw.
You could hear the impact from as far away as I still was. I saw Bob’s knees sag, and he went down, grabbing his opponent’s right leg as he fell.
Bob held on for maybe seven feet before he let go. Then he was up and on his own feet again, giving chase as both boys headed for the creek.
Quicker than you could have said, “Jack Robinson,” the big rough boy was out into the water, wading and then swimming toward the other side where there was a thicket he could dive into and get away. Also, quicker than you could have said it, Bob was in the water, too. Both boys were in a race to the other side, with Bob not more than nine feet behind.
6
Two boys were in the water, one of them swimming for his life to keep away from a faster-fisted other boy who was also a faster swimmer and gaining inches every second!
My thoughts were pretty well tangled up right that minute. Why in the world would Bob Till want to help us capture another boy who was maybe not even as bad a boy as he himself was? Why was he trying to help us at all? He’d been our enemy for so long, how could he all of a sudden want to be our friend?
Even before I could finish asking myself the different questions, it seemed my muddled mind had found the answer. Bob Till was doing it for my mother! She and I had driven all the way over to their house day before yesterday with a hot supper, and Mom had shown that it didn’t make any difference in the world that Bob and the Sugar Creek Gang didn’t get along.
I could hear Mom’s words even now, as every second Bob was gaining on the runaway swimmer, now only four feet ahead of him. “Mrs. Till, we want you to know we love you, and if at any time we can be of help, just let us know.”
Also, right that minute, just as Bob made a lunge forward and grappled with his man, I remembered Mrs. Till’s last, sad words before we left: “Pray for my boys!”
It seemed strange at the time, and also right now, that a woman who was so sick that she could hardly talk at all should be thinking about her sons. But maybe that’s the way mothers are.
The fight over on the other side of Sugar Creek was up on the shore now and getting pretty fierce. Watching it was sending a shower of shivers up and down my spine. Just when I thought it was over and Bob had won, I saw the vandal, who was on his back at the time with Bob on top of him, double up his legs and kick hard. Both feet landed in Bob’s stomach.
Bob Till shot backward toward the creek, stumbled over a pile of drift there from last spring’s high water, and landed with an awkward splash in the water under an overhanging willow.
The action was so fast and so surprising, just when I thought the battle was over, that I could hardly believe it. Then the other boy was up and running as fast as he could go. He disappeared into the shrubbery that bordered the creek.
“Bob won’t give up!” I heard Poetry exclaim. “He’ll be out and after him in a split second.”
In a split second he will, I thought. Our old enemy, who was fighting on our side, would come soaking wet out onto the shore and go sloshing like mad into the bushes, giving chase.
But Big Bob Till didn’t come sloshing out. Instead, he didn’t do anything. I could see from where I was, over on our side of the creek, his blue denim overalls and shirt lying there with a boy in them, right at the edge of the water!
It was Big Jim who all of a sudden realized what had happened. He and Circus had the other boy already tied up, using their handkerchiefs to do it, and he’d come running to see what else was going on and to help if we needed him.
“He—he’s knocked out!” he cried excitedly. “We’ve got to get to him, or he’ll drown!”
With that, Big Jim—our fuzzy-mustached leader, whose muscles, like the village blacksmith’s, were as strong as iron bands and who had been the one of our gang that Bob Till hated the most— Big Jim kicked off his hiking shoes and in a few fast-flying seconds was down the embankment and into the water, wading and swimming, hurrying across Sugar Creek as fast as he could to see if he could help his enemy stay alive!
It really wasn’t the time when a boy would ordinarily be thinking of something he had read in the leather-bound Bible that lies on the library table near a cracked mirror. But a thought came to my mind, and it was: “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.” And I knew Who had done it first!
Along with the verse, while Big Jim was still splashing his way across, was the memory of the time in Chicago when Bob had needed a blood transfusion to save his life, and Big Jim had volunteered some of his. You’d think that any boy who had quite a lot of a good boy’s blood in him wouldn’t keep on having such a wicked heart, but that hadn’t seemed to make any difference with Bob. He had kept right on being ornery.
Now other things were going on at the bridge. Turning north at the corner by the Collins family’s orchard was a long, gray ambulance, coming fast to go over the bridge to the Tills’ house to get Mrs. Till and take her to the hospital.
The ambulance hadn’t any sooner stopped —they had to take out of the way a few rails from a fence and a piece or two of an old stump—than there was a yell from under the overhanging willow where Big Jim had just pulled Bob out of the water. “Help! Somebody! He’s drowned! We’ve got to give him artificial respiration!”
And now the ambulance driver would have to make a decision: whether to drive on over to the Tills’ house for Bob’s mother or cross the bridge, stop, jump out of the ambulance, and go racing down to where Big Jim was and give artificial respiration to her son!
It seemed I knew that if Bob Till’s very sick mother was there and had a chance to say what to do, she’d say with her sick, sad voice, “Save my boy! I’ve already lived half of my life, and he’s just beginning!”
It wasn’t easy for the men in the ambulance to decide, but I knew they would decide at least to rush down to see if Bob actually was drowned before going on to get his mother. And that is what they did.
A little later, I was across the bridge and down past the washed-clean abutment and at the place where the resuscitation was going on. Those of us who weren’t helping were in a little circle, just watching.
Things were moving fast. The two men from the ambulance were working as though they’d done things like this before. First, they wiped out Bob’s mouth to be sure there wasn’t any sand or pickerel weed in it from the creek. Then, with Bob lying on his back, they tilted his head back until his chin was pointing upward. “Get the jaw in a jutting-out position,” I heard one of the men say, “so the base of his tongue won’t obstruct the airway.”
As best I could, without getting in the way, I watched them working to save Bob, whose face was pasty pale.
One of the men was on his knees at Bob’s head now. With his mouth opened wide, he placed it tightly over Bob’s, one hand holding Bob’s nose shut.
“What’s he doing that for?” Dragonfly asked me.
Little Jim said, “He’s blowing air into his lungs!” which a second later, I knew was the truth. The man who’d just done the blowing put his left ear to Bob’s mouth to listen and find out if any of the air he’d just blown in came out again.
“They do it and keep on doing it till he can breathe by himself,” Little Jim explained.
Three times, the dark-haired ambulance driver blew, and three times he listened, and three times he didn’t hear any air coming back out.
“There’s an obstruction!”
he said grimly. “We’ve got to get it out, whatever it is.”
Action speeded up then, and a great big lump of fear came from somewhere and landed in my heart and stayed there. All the mean things Bob Till had ever done to us or said about us, all the hard-knuckled fists he had landed on Big Jim’s nose in the Battle of Bumblebee Hill, plus all the other things—it seemed I wanted to forgive every one of them and have my thoughts about him be as pure as God had made my heart that very afternoon when I’d been on my knees beside the library table near the cracked mirror.
I didn’t pray out loud, but God could hear me anyway. There was a heavy ache in my heart, and it was crying and saying, “Please, heavenly Father, don’t let Bob Till die! Spare him and make him a Christian. Give him time to become one before You let him die!”
Quicker than a flash, the gray-haired ambulance man turned Bob to his side and gave him three or four sharp blows between the shoulder blades, saying to the dark-haired man, “We’ve got to dislodge whatever is obstructing.”
Again they had Bob on his back, his chin tilted up and forward, and again the dark-haired man was blowing and listening, blowing and listening, blowing and listening …
“He’s coming to! I hear it! Air is coming back!”
If I had known at the time as much as I knew later, I could have guessed Bob would be breathing again in a few minutes—or even in a few seconds—because I’d noticed a little twitching of his fingers, and once I thought I heard him give a sighlike gasp.
It certainly was different from the easy way the different members of the gang had come back to life when we had practiced the prone resuscitation method on ourselves. We wouldn’t any sooner start breathing again than we’d roll over from our face-down position and be on our feet, feeling fine in a few seconds and ready for a footrace with somebody.
Pretty soon Bob was fully conscious and trying to sit up but not being allowed to. He wasn’t strong enough to, anyway.
Explaining it later, the gray-haired man said, “Every drowning case should be treated as a potential case of shock, and we usually take them to the hospital for a while.”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 14