Since both our coats are made of fuzz,
You are the only one to buzz;
To bzzzz—to bzzzz—to bzzzzzzzzzzz.”
The second verse goes like this:
To the striped caterpillar said the black-and-yellow bee,
“Indeed our colors are the same; you look a lot like me.
If you’ll grow wings as well as fuzz,
So you can fly, why, then you’ll buzz.
You’ll bzzzzz—you’ll bzzzz—you’ll bzzzzzzzzzzz!”
I made a long, low buzzing sound every time I came to the z’s, and that made my little rascal of a sister very happy. Her blue eyes would light up, and she would giggle and act as if I was maybe the most wonderful person in the world—until I wouldn’t sing anymore, and then I wasn’t.
While I was baby-sitting and standing and talking and entertaining and not getting anywhere with Charlotte Ann, I was also trying to remember what our family had learned at garden time at the breakfast table.
Beside the sandbox, I saw growing a small pink flower I knew was called the wood sorrel. I pulled a half dozen of its cloverlike leaves and began to chew them, which different members of the gang were always doing. The leaves had a sour juice in them that we liked.
“Here,” I said to Charlotte Ann, holding out a long, slender stalk I had just broken off at the plant’s roots. “This wood sorrel is what the dictionary calls ‘the sleeping beauty,’” I explained to her in a teacherlike voice. “When you handle its leaves roughly, it closes up and looks like a wilted flower. That,” I went on to Charlotte Ann, who wasn’t listening, “is why it’s named that. It is very pretty, and it goes to sleep when a boy touches it. And that, my very pretty lady, is what I expect you to do this afternoon while Mom and Dad are in town shopping. If you don’t go to sleep, I’ll maybe have to handle you roughly so you will.”
I stopped trying to teach her when she scooped up a shovelful of sand, tossed it in the air, and it came down all over everything, including my bare red head.
Because she was at the age when girls like to learn rough boys’ games, I decided to try playing catch with her, using her soft rubber ball, and that made her happy. Every time she missed a catch, she would chase off after the ball like a trained puppy chasing a tossed ball or stick.
Dad came out of the house about that time, went into the toolshed, and came out with his beekeeping outfit. In only a few minutes he had his smoker going, his bee gloves and bee veil on, a hive tool in one hand, and one of Mom’s large dishpans in the other. I knew he was going out into the apiary to get some honey to take to town to sell.
Pretty soon he was all the way out to the bee garden, where he had six hives, and was working around one of them, helping himself to the bees’ hard-worked-for honey.
“The bees are pretty hot tempered this morning!” he called to where I was, a safe distance away. “There’s a bee war on! You and your shadow better keep away today!”
“Don’t worry!” I called back to him. He needn’t have worried. The last time there was a war on with one swarm of bees trying to steal another hive’s honey, I’d gotten too close and had been stung five times. For a while I was so sick I almost fainted—being what is called allergic to bee stings, which quite a few people in the world are. To me, a mad bee was about as scary as a mad bull.
Hearing Dad say there was a bee war on, though, made me curious—not to get anywhere near the battle but to have a secret look. I watched for a chance to get away from Charlotte Ann and pretty soon was peeking through the board fence that separates the chicken yard from the apiary.
There really was a war on this time, one of the hottest ones I’d ever seen and heard. There was the sound of thousands of angry bees everywhere. And at the ramp of one of the hives, instead of there being several dozen dopey drones sleeping, there were scores of dead and dying bees piled all around the entrance.
I was glad I wasn’t my father, who had to get a few pounds of honey to take to town to sell-even though he was getting it from a hive the farthest away from the thick of the battle.
Then, while he was finishing getting the honey, I gathered the eggs for Mom to sell at the produce market in town, which would give her more grocery money.
Because something pretty important happened about the middle of the morning, I won’t waste your reading time telling you about how many eggs my shadow and I found in the barn, hen house, and in different secret places where our old hens had sneaked away to lay their daily eggs.
My shadow went in and out with me but not up. In maybe another year, though—or maybe even a month!—she’d be able to climb way up the straight-up ladder leading from the barn’s first floor to the haymow, and then we would have trouble. I’d have to tie her up the way you do a dog, or she’d follow me up as far as she could. Then she’d lose her grip and go tumbling down and crack her crown.
The eggs were gathered finally and in Mom’s market basket in the house. I went back to work in the garden. I was thinning out the Scarlet Globe radishes. Dad was still in his bee veil, robbing the bees of the honey they’d worked so hard for all spring and summer. And Charlotte Ann was, for a change, busy at the swing under the walnut tree, not fussing or whining but actually sitting with her big, new, freckle-faced doll beside her on the wide board seat.
She wasn’t big enough to do any chores around the place, but one thing we’d been letting her do for about a month was to get the mail when it came. Our mailman would stop his car near the gate and push the mail through the wire mesh into Charlotte Ann’s chubby little hands. He’d call her some kind of nice name, such as “honey” or “sweetheart,” wave a cheery good morning to any of the rest of the family that happened to be in sight, and go spinning down the pike toward Poetry’s house, which was his next stop.
I didn’t hear the mail coming and didn’t see it either, since my head was lower than the tops of the Golden Bantam. When I straightened up to give my aching back a rest, though, I saw that Charlotte Ann had left the swing and was moseying around on the other side of the yellow rosebush, her new doll in one arm and the mail in the other.
The daily newspaper always had one comic strip I liked to read and one that was Mom’s favorite, so I yelled to my shadow, “Come on with the mail! Hurry up!”
Her cute answer was almost good enough to be in the paper. Her small, high-pitched voice came all the way across the rest of the yard with an answer that landed in my surprised ears and made me like her even better. “I am hurry-uppening!”
But she wasn’t “hurry-uppening” fast enough, so I ran to meet her. I was standing under the grape arbor reading the comics, when Mom came out to look over my shoulder to read what was happening to Dagwood and Blondie and what Aunt Het thought about what was going on in the world.
Dad yelled from the apiary, asking if there were any letters for him. There weren’t, and we all went back to our different jobs to get them done before we would have to eat our middle-of-the-day meal.
Well, as soon after eating as she could, Mom got my shadow to sleep in the front bedroom, and away she and Dad went toward town.
I watched our car as it stirred up a quarter-of-a-mile-long cloud of brown dust that moved with the lazy breeze out across the clover field to Bumblebee Hill. After it disappeared on the other side of the lane leading to Little Jim’s house, I plopped myself down on the board seat of the walnut tree swing to have a dreamy, lazy time baby-sitting until Charlotte Ann would wake up and start me on my topsy-turvy afternoon.
Nature was busy doing interesting things all around me. I let myself listen for a while to the different sounds, trying to hear more than I heard, and my mind’s ear enjoyed it all. Every few seconds, a short-horned grasshopper would take off from the ground, rattle around in the air awhile, and plop down in another place. A robin whooped it up in the trees across the road, and a red squirrel saucily scolded about something or other, telling whatever he was mad at to go jump in the lake or something.
In a sandy place
at the base of the walnut tree beside me, I noticed five or six very small cone-shaped pits, which I knew had been dug by ant lions. At the bottom of each inch-deep pit, with all but its tiny head and jaws buried, was an ant lion larva waiting for a fly or some other insect such as an ordinary ant to tumble accidentally in. Then—presto!—like a fierce-fanged African lion, the larva would have a free breakfast or dinner or supper, depending on what time of day it was when its food came stumbling down into its homemade trap.
But as interesting as nature was to study and to think about, I’ll have to admit I wasn’t feeling very happy about not getting to meet with the gang at two o’clock under the Snatzerpazooka tree.
While I was still sitting and swinging, I tried to cheer myself up a little by quoting a poem called “The Swing,” which I used to like when I was little. But it didn’t help. All it did was remind me of what I wasn’t going to get to do. The second stanza especially was hard on my nerves. That second stanza, as you probably know, goes like this:
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all,
Over the countryside.
Well, I couldn’t see any wall, or cattle, or rivers, or even the countryside, from where I was sitting swinging.
I tried quoting the sentence our family had enjoyed at garden time that morning—about the slumbering splendor in all of us that couldn’t get out because of sin. And I said to myself, “Bill Collins, if there’s any sleeping splendor inside you anywhere, you’d better do something about getting some of it out!”
Next I quoted to myself the Bible verse we’d had in Sunday school about honoring your father and your mother. It didn’t make me feel any better, but it did calm me down a little. There was one thing I had made up my mind to do, and that was to obey God as long as I lived, even when I didn’t feel like it, because He was always good to me and had loved everybody in the world enough to send His only Son to be punished for our sins.
I let my mind dream back through history to a time when the most important Person there ever was had let Himself be nailed to a cross at a skull-shaped place called Golgotha.
All of a sudden, while I was feeling the wind in my face and the pleasant flapping of my shirt sleeves as I whizzed back and forth, I got an idea that every boy in the world ought to get. There wasn’t a sin in the whole twenty-five thousand miles around the world that He hadn’t died for.
But He’d hung on that cross on a hot afternoon under a scorching sun with nails driven all the way through His hands and feet. It was a sad thought to think, and for a minute, while I was talking to myself in my mind about it, it seemed that a boy named Bill Collins ought to try to be a better boy than he was.
Right then I remembered the hot-tempered words I had said to Dad that morning. Without even realizing I was going to do it, I thought a quick, sad prayer for forgiveness. Then I swallowed a lump in my throat, took a deep breath, and brought my swing to a stop.
As soon as I was off, I moved stealthily across the yard toward an open screenless window to see how my sister was doing with her daily nap. She never wanted to go to bed by day any more than the boy in a certain poem, who said,
“In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candlelight;
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.”
I’d gotten as far as the yellow rosebush in the middle of our side yard, when I heard one of the happiest sounds there ever is around Sugar Creek—a chattering and buzzing and talking and laughing like a flock of blackbirds in autumn getting ready to fly South for the winter. It was the Gang coming through the orchard to our house.
In a fleeting flash I was off to meet them. I swished past the cedar tree that grows near our front door and Charlotte Ann’s window and was all the way out to the end of the hollyhocks in nothing flat. There I stopped, shaded my eyes from the two o’clock sun, peered through the trees, and saw a flight of boys in different-colored jeans and shirts, leapfrogging, tumbling over each other, climbing on and off each other’s shoulders, laughing, and teasing.
Good old gang! I thought. They’re coming to have the meeting at my house instead of at the Snatzerpazooka tree!
While my folks were away that afternoon, Charlotte Ann would have six baby-sitters instead of only one. Can you imagine that—six baby-sitters for one baby sister who couldn’t be baby-sat with!
I dashed like a streak of lightning through the gate between the two cherry trees and out into the orchard to shush them from all the noise they had been making. I warned them to keep still, or they’d wake up my shadow, and our afternoon would be upset.
“Yeah,” Dragonfly chimed in, his pop eyes bulging a little and his crooked nose seeming a little more crooked than I’d ever noticed before. “Let sleeping dogs lie!”
Well, what he said and the way he said it stirred up my slumbering pride in my sister. Without knowing I was going to say it, I said, “My sister is not a sleeping dog!”
What he said and what I answered made Charlotte Ann seem about seven times more wonderful than any boy’s sister ever was. That goes to show that even though brothers and sisters sometimes fight with each other, they are ready to fight for each other the very minute one or the other of them is in trouble or needs any kind of help.
Dragonfly wasn’t interested in what would maybe be a one-sided scuffle, so he said, “I’m sorry. She’s really very pretty—for a girl, anyway,” which spoiled his apology.
He made up for it by pulling a brand-new softball out of one of his pockets and saying, “Come on, everybody, let’s play ball!”
And within the next hour, we had one of the most exciting experiences a gang of boys ever had. Some of it was even dangerous. Especially to me.
4
Dragonfly’s new softball was one of the finest I’d ever seen. He tossed it to me, and as I made a leap into the air and caught the ball with my bare right hand, I noticed how soft the waterproof white cover was.
I could hardly wait till we could get out into the barnyard to see how far I could knock it with my new softball bat—maybe clear over Old Red Addie’s pen and her apartment hog house and maybe out into the south pasture.
Before leaving the yard, though, we decided to sneak a peek to see if my shadow, who had to go to bed by day, was still asleep.
Stealthily we crept along from the yellow rosebush, like Indian scouts scouting an enemy camp, until we were just below the open window. Then, shushing each other with squinting eyes and with cautioning forefingers pressed to our lips, we sneaked six peeks and silently stole away.
Each of us had seen a tumble of soft-as-silk brown curls spread out on a pillow, a rag doll’s right foot pressed against Charlotte Ann’s nose, her pink rubber doll with its bashed-in forehead lying upside down on her stomach, her new freckle-faced doll with its own brown hair spread out on one of Charlotte Ann’s ankles, and—over in the corner—a two-foot-long brown-and-cream panda sitting up as though it was his job to look after his sleeping mistress.
As soon as we had crawled far enough away to talk, Dragonfly all of a sudden rolled over on his back, closed his eyes, and said to us, “What does my lying asleep like this remind anybody of? What story that we studied in school last year?”
For a while, as Dragonfly lay there snoring with his eyes closed, and with a possumlike grin on his anything-but-handsome lopsided face, not a one of us said anything.
Then he whined, “Can’t anybody see anything that reminds him of anything?”
Poetry, in a squawking voice that was like the husky, rusty rustle of the tassels of the corn, said, “Looking down at you, seeing how sleepy you are, and knowing you haven’t a thought in your empty head reminds me of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving.”
Several of the rest of us thought that funny enough to let out a chorus of guffaws. Anybody could see that Dragonfly wanted one of us to say he reminded us of “Sleeping
Beauty.” Well, you couldn’t blame us for exploding with those noisy horselaughs. It was funny, even though it was probably an old joke Poetry had read somewhere.
But I saw a dark scowl come to Dragonfly’s forehead and saw his thin jaw set. Then the whole boy came to fast and furious spindle-legged life. He flopped over, grabbed Poetry around his ankles, and shoved himself up onto his own knees. Poetry went down like a tackled quarterback in a football game. And a minute after that, the two of them were in a scuffle that started near the plum tree and lasted all the way across the lawn to the fence and the tall grass growing beside the gate near the mailbox.
Over and over and up and down and grunting and panting for breath and plop-plop-plopping over the grass, those two went to it while the rest of us rooted for both of them, forgetting we were baby-sitters.
And then, as quick as it had started, the scuffle was history. Poetry—with Dragonfly on the ground under him, he looked like a fat cowboy on a skinny horse—spied something in the tall grass near the mailbox post. Poetry grabbed for whatever it was and let out a squawk. “Hey! Look! Here’s a letter to Bill Collins from Old Man Paddler!”
“Letter!” I exclaimed and made a dive for it, remembering a chubby-legged girl named Charlotte Ann, who that very morning had gotten the mail and had carried it all the way to the rosebush before I’d seen her. Carrying the mail with one hand and her large doll with the other, she had dropped the letter without knowing it, and it had been lying here all this time.
The letter’s postmark was Santa Ana, California, where I knew the old man was having his vacation. It was addressed to “Bill Collins, secretary of the Sugar Creek Gang.”
“Let me open it!” Little Jim begged.
Others begged, too, but Big Jim said it was addressed to me and that nobody had a right to open anybody else’s mail without permission. So in a few seconds, with ten eyes looking over my shoulders, I tore open one end of the long envelope—and what to twelve wondering eyes should appear but a sheaf of crisp, new, green one-dollar bills! The money slipped out of my trembling hands and tumbled to the grass.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 18