While I was still in the toolshed, I stood for a few seconds looking at Dad’s two shotguns on the gun rack and at my .22. Just below it were the three beech switches he hardly ever used anymore. They might just as well be broken into pieces and burned.
It seemed for a second or six that my .22 was talking to me, saying, “You’d better take me with you Friday night. Remember the fierce old, mad old mother bear the gang stumbled onto a few summers ago? If Big Jim hadn’t had his gun along, Little Jim might have been killed. Remember the fierce-fanged wildcat you killed? Who knows what you might need me for up in the hills away from everybody in the middle of the night?”
In my mind I could sort of hear the three beech switches talking, too, and saying, “Ambition, Bill Collins!” It was the same thing the hollyhocks out along the fence were supposed to be saying.
In a little while I was all the way out to the garden, pushing the hand plow back and forth between the rows of black-seeded Simpson lettuce, the Ebenezer onions, and the Golden Bantam sweet corn. In my mind as I worked, my .22 was still talking and warning me of some danger we might run into Friday night.
But danger was something I wouldn’t dare mention to my parents—especially not to my mother. She would worry about me, since mothers are made that way and can’t help it.
In my mind were also two words we had found in the gray book that morning. Mom had liked those two words so well she’d said them over and over again. She’d even said them several times sort of half to herself, while standing at the stove with her back to us and pouring herself another cup of coffee. Those two words, if you didn’t happen to hear them, were “slumbering splendor.”
The sentence the words were in, and which Dad had read to us, went something like this, “There may be any amount of slumbering splendor in us, but it cannot get out because of sin.”
“It’s just like a lily bulb,” Mom had thought to say. Her spoon, stirring the sugar and cream in her cup, squeaked a little as she talked.
“Inside the dry-looking, sometimes ugly bulb, there is a beautiful lily, snow-white and fragrant. But as long as it’s asleep in the bulb, wrapped round and round with layer after layer of its self life, it cannot get out.” She had a faraway look in her eyes as she said it, as if she was seeing something wonderful for the first time.
I could tell that Mom and Dad were getting more out of what they were talking about than I was, but it did seem pretty wonderful that a dried-up old lily bulb or tulip bulb could grow out of itself and become something different.
“In other words,” Dad looked at me to say, “when you look at anything, you’re supposed to see more than you see. When your two gray green eyes see a tulip bulb lying in a box with a dozen others, your inner eye sees the future—a border of tulips somewhere with a dozen two-foot-tall tulip stalks, each one holding up a blue or yellow or red or white or purple cup, all the cups empty and trying to catch as much rain and sunshine as they can hold.”
Mom cut in then to say, “Isn’t that pretty flowery language?”
Dad’s friendly answer was, “We’re talking about pretty flowers, aren’t we?”
Right then, our garden time was stopped by a familiar sound coming from the front bedroom—the way a cat sounds when you accidentally step on its tail or like the “six little pigs in the straw with their mother, with bright eyes, curly tails, tumbling on each other” and squealing for their breakfast. It was Charlotte Ann coming out of the night into the day.
Back and forth, forth and back, push, grunt, walk, push, grunt, sweat—my cultivator crawled back and forth across the garden, while all the time I was straining my inner eye to see if I could see more than I saw.
If there was a lot of sleeping splendor in every boy, it was also maybe in everything a boy looked at. Also, the boy might even try to wake up a little of it.
Right then, I spied our old black-and-white cat sleeping in the sun on the sloping cellar door, not far from the iron pitcher pump. I stooped, picked up a clod of dirt, and slung it across the yard, where it landed with a noisy thud less than twelve inches from Mixy’s early morning nap.
Talk about sleeping splendor waking up! Mixy came to the fastest cat life a cat ever came to. She leaped into the air and took off like a streak toward Mom’s flowerpot table beside the toolshed.
Right that second I heard a fluttering of wings. A robin with an orange breast had landed ker-plop a few feet behind me and started helping herself to a wriggling worm my hand plow had just unearthed.
My cultivator had wakened a sleeping fish-worm. When I saw it, I saw more than I saw. In a few fast flashes of my inner eye, I saw it wriggling on a boy’s hook far down in the water in the fishing hole near the mouth of the branch of the creek. I saw a monster sunfish make a dive for it and even saw seven fish on a stringer.
But the mother robin, seeing the worm, had seen five baby robins in the nest in the plum tree with five hungry mouths wide open and cheeping for food.
It was sort of a game I was playing. A little later I came to and found I had plowed my way back and forth across the garden thirteen or fourteen times without knowing it. And it hadn’t even seemed like work.
I hadn’t even heard Dad coming—didn’t know he was there until suddenly I saw him standing like a fence post at the end of the garden gate, watching me.
“Good work, son!” he called to me, and his gruff voice was like music. There is probably nothing a boy would like to hear more than one of his parents praising him for something.
“My sleeping splendor,” I called jokingly from where I was stooping over to pull a small smartweed from an Ebenezer onion, “has just come to life!”
Then with Dad’s compliment pushing me like a breeze blowing a cloud of dust, I grabbed the cultivator handles and went swooshing down the row to the other end. My shovel was turning up fishworms, the larvae of June beetles, and a lot of other underground insect life that lived in our garden.
Dad waited till I came panting back before he said anything else. Then in a very fatherly voice he announced, “Your mother and I have to run into town after lunch. I need another quart of paint for the toolshed, and we have to have a screen for the front bedroom window. It’s just too hot these summer days with the window shut, and the flies and mosquitoes get in when it’s open. And your mother wants to get the groceries while the sales are on. You know how Charlotte Ann is in the supermarket, so we’re leaving her here with you. You won’t mind baby-sitting her?”
His voice had a question mark on the end of his sentence, but I knew it was an order. I, Bill Collins, who had planned to meet with the gang at two o’clock to go in swimming and to help make plans for Friday’s all-night in Old Man Paddler’s cabin, was going to have to baby-sit a baby that couldn’t be baby-sat with!
Suddenly something inside of me woke up, and it wasn’t anything that could be spelled s-p-l-e-n-d-o-r! Out of my mouth like a baseball off a fast bat there flew a sizzling exclamation. “Baby-sit! That’s not fair, when the gang is meeting at the Snatzerpazooka tree at two o’clock!”
It was the stormiest temper explosion I’d had in a long time, and it had happened just when I’d been feeling better inside than for a long time.
Now any boy knows that a sentence full of hot words coming out of his mouth at his father is like poking a stick into a bumblebees’ nest—the bumblebees’ nest being the boy’s father. And that boy is likely to get stung several fast, sharp times with a beech switch.
There isn’t a boy in the whole Sugar Creek territory that would know that any better than Theodore Collins’s son. But my temper had picked me up and tossed me around in the air as though I was a last year’s leaf in a whirlwind.
My hands were gripping the cultivator handles. When I looked down at them, the knuckles were white. My teeth were set, and my jaw muscles were in a knot.
And then something very strange happened—something I decided afterward was maybe one of the most wonderful things that can happen to a boy. As fast as lightnin
g there flashed into my mind one of the Ten Commandments we had studied in Sunday school the week before. “Honor your father and your mother!” were the words that came to me, burning my temper into nothing.
I felt as weak as a sick cat and ashamed of myself. And what did my wondering ears hear but my own voice saying to Dad, “There’s a lot of sleeping splendor in a baby sister. Tell Mom I’ll be glad to stay with her, but I’ll have to call the gang and explain why I can’t come to the meeting.”
Dad stared at me. His mouth was open to say something else, but not even one word came out. Instead there were actual honest-to-goodness tears in his eyes, and I saw him swallow as if he had a lump in his throat.
For maybe a full thirty seconds, we just stared at each other. Then he spoke in a husky voice, saying, “God bless you, Son. God bless you!”
He turned away slowly, stooped, picked up a clod of dirt, and broke it apart. And do you know what? There was a middle-sized fishworm in it. Before you could have said Jack Robinson, he stooped again, picked up an empty tin can lying by the gate, sifted a handful of dirt into it, dropped the worm in on top of the dirt, and said, “You might watch while you’re working. Save all the worms you turn up. You’ll probably want to go fishing again before long.”
I watched my father’s broad back as he strode toward the house. I could hardly see him because of the mist in my eyes, and it seemed that in all my life I had never liked my big-voiced, hard-muscled, callous-handed father as much as I did right that second. And I was feeling as clean inside as a cottontail dashing through the snow in our south pasture.
At the iron pitcher pump, Dad stopped, gave the handle a few fast squeaking strokes, took a drink, and tossed what water was left in the cup over the top of the water tank and into a puddle. In a second, about fifteen white and yellow butterflies fluttered in every direction of up there is—that’s another happy sight a boy sees around our farm.
I said something to myself then, not knowing I was going to say it, and it was, “Sleeping splendor! It’s everywhere, if you look for it. Even in a father.”
I was whistling “Yankee Doodle” and slicing away at the sandy loam of the garden when, from as far away as I was, I heard the phone ring in the house, and it was our number—two long longs and a very short short. A jiffy later Mom’s voice came quavering out to the garden where I was, calling, “Bill! Telephone!”
And away I went lickety-sizzle for the house, wondering who would be calling me and why. My feet were wings, and my heart was like a feather in the wind as I ran.
3
One of the happiest feelings I ever get is when the party-line phone rings our number and it’s for me. Just as I said, my feet are wings, and my heart is a feather in the wind, as I drop whatever I’m doing and fly for our back door.
A galloping boy stirs up quite a lot of excitement at our place. About thirty-seven old hens and two roosters were gobbling up grain, greens, grubs, and grit in our barnyard, part of which is between the garden and the iron pitcher pump. When they saw and heard me coming, they parted before my flying bare feet like the waves of the Red Sea before the children of Israel in the Bible. There was a squawking and cackling of scared chickens, and they stormed out of that part of the barnyard as if they were trying to get out of the way of a runaway horse.
Mixy, who had gone back for her midmorning nap on the sloping cellar door, came to one of her nine lives. Like a black-and-white streak of four-footed fur, she scooted for her hiding place under Mom’s flowerpot table by the tool-shed. The butterflies near the pump were up and off again, and a second later our back screen door slammed behind me.
In three leaps I was through the kitchen and into the living room, just in time for Mom, who was at the phone, to wave her arm and shush me.
Stunned, I stopped stock-still and stared, wondering, What on earth? I knew she had called me.
“Yes,” Mom was saying into the phone, “I think that would be fine … No, I’m sure she didn’t mean that. She just said that if I wanted to, I could bring a covered dish instead of a salad … No, I’d … That’s all right, I’d rather cooperate … Oh, Bill won’t care. He likes any kind of pie. And besides … Oh, yes, well, Stella Foote—you know how nice she always is about things like that … She what?”
Words were flying thick and fast between Mom and whatever other woman was on the other end of the line. It was the kind of women’s talk that went on every day in our neighborhood. Dad had said to me one time, “Women need to talk to women as much as boys need to play with boys.”
I was standing beside the organ. The hymn-book on the rack was open to “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning.” I was clearing my throat to ask Mom who wanted to talk to me, if anybody still did, when she came to long enough to notice I was still there. She quick covered the phone with her free hand and whispered in my direction, “It’s Mrs. Thompson. I asked to talk with her while you were coming. We’ll be through in a minute” (one minute being the same as five at a time like that).
My mind’s eye was seeing more than I saw. I saw all the way over to Poetry’s house. I saw my barrel-shaped friend standing in their living room waiting for his mother to stop listening to my mother, while I was standing waiting for my mother to stop listening to his.
Pretty soon Mom made herself quit and handed me the phone.
Good old Poetry! I thought as I heard his ducklike voice coming over the wire.
“Don’t forget the meeting at you know where at you know when,” he began.
“I can’t come,” I told him. “I have some work to do here, and my folks are going to be gone.”
“Work!” he squawked. “Oh, no! Not work!”
“Baby-sit!” I heard myself say in a disgruntled voice.
Then I explained that I was going to get to work in the garden and then keep my eyes and ears awake while Charlotte Ann slept.
“You just tell the gang I had to work,” I ordered him. “You don’t have to mention babysitting. They might not understand!” (For some reason, one of the hardest things a boy ever can do is look after a little brother or sister when his folks are away and he’d rather be with his gang.)
Well, that was that, and a rather sad that at that. I started back to the Ebenezer onions.
Trotting along beside and behind me this time, chattering and fussing a little and carrying a small pail and shovel was my shadow, as I called her. She was supposed to play in the sandpile in a big seven-by-seven box beside the garden gate while I worked.
Once, while I was on my knees pulling out two or three baby-sized jimsonweeds that were trying to smother out a stalk of Golden Bantam, I looked back across the tops of the husky, rustling corn blades at a tousled brownish head of hair in the sandbox. For some reason, it was a pretty sight.
Maybe what I was feeling was what almost any brother feels when he all of a sudden—without planning to at all—gets a big brother feeling of pride and actually likes his small-fry sister very much. It’s a good feeling and good for a boy to have. All of a sudden, it also seemed that if anybody ever tried to hurt her or be mean to her or even scold her, my voice, my biceps, and my hard-knuckled fists would go flying to her rescue.
She certainly was pretty for a girl, I thought. Then I forgot I’d thought it when I saw the gate open and two chubby legs carry a brown-haired girl across the garden. The girl herself was carrying a sand pail and shovel and was walking toward me—not between the rows of garden stuff but on the onions and lettuce and on anything else that happened to be growing where her feet were going.
Like an explosion, I was up and running in her direction. I scooped her up and carried her squirming, wriggling thirty-two pounds back to the gate and out and ordered, “You stay in your box or else!”
Well, it looked as if I wasn’t going to have to wait till afternoon to start my baby-sitting job. I had already started it.
“Here, shadow,” I said to her. “See how much fun it is to fill your pail and dump it out over there in the corner?”
But she couldn’t see what I saw, and there wasn’t any hidden splendor in a sandbox. She’d rather be out in the garden stepping on corn and lettuce and onions and on the potatoes that were just coming up.
I sat for a few minutes on the edge of her box, my bare feet in the sand. As long as I did that, she seemed satisfied. She wanted to scoop sand on my feet, which I let her do, until all the toes were covered and the sand was halfway up to my knees.
Whenever I tried to leave her, she would start to fuss, so I sighed and said, “Listen, shadow, if you would just give me a chance, I could get my work done! How can you expect me to—”
That was as far as I got right then. Her shovel scooped up a brown centipede that started on a wriggling, twisting, fast-as-lightning scramble toward her.
Then is when she proved she was a girl, and I had a chance to prove I wasn’t. It took only about seven seconds for my right arm to give that centipede a new home, which was somewhere out in the middle of the Simpson lettuce bed.
Maybe, I thought, if I can scare her again, she’ll decide to go into the house, and I can get back to something else I don’t want to do. I looked around for a worm or a bug or something else wiggly, and I spied a woolly bear caterpillar on the dead, brown stem of a last year’s purple vervain. Carefully I broke off the stalk and carefully held it out toward my sister. But that didn’t frighten her at all. Instead, she said, “Pillar song! Sing the pillar song!”
The “pillar song,” as she calls it, is a cute little chorus Mom sings to her when she gives her a bath—to keep her mind off soap and water, which she doesn’t like any better than a certain boy I know.
Just in case you would like to read the words of the “pillar song,” here they are:
Said the striped caterpillar to the black-and-yellow bee,
“Our colors are almost the same, and yet I do not see.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 17