Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36

by Paul Hutchens

  I let out another yell. And another. And another. I started waving my arms and running toward Charlotte Ann, ordering her, “I said get out of here! Run for your life!”

  With my right gloved hand, I scooped up the ball, which had maybe nineteen bees all over it, and tossed it up and over the board fence where five boys were. Then I lit out for Charlotte Ann, taking with me and around me and all over me as many bees as were already all around and all over me.

  Now, I ask you, what do you do at a time like that? What do you do?

  To get my mind in even more of a whirlwind than it was, five pairs of lungs on the other side of the board fence started yelling different orders.

  Anybody with even half as much sense as I didn’t seem to have right then would have known I was making a mistake, taking all those bees with me where I was going. I wouldn’t get stung on my face and neck on account of the veil I had on. The gloves would protect my hands, and my heavy jacket and jeans would protect the rest of me, but Charlotte Ann didn’t have on any protection.

  One idea did come to me, as I dashed toward the gate and the cutest little sister a boy ever had. It was what Dragonfly’s scared voice called out for me to do, and that was, “Take off your veil and put it on her!”

  Poetry, who nearly always had a keen mind in an emergency, called, “Drop flat! They’ll wonder what happened, and they’ll buzz around all over where your head was, and you’ll be saved.”

  “I don’t need to be saved!” I yelled. “I’m already safe! I’m trying to save Charlotte Ann!”

  But of course, you don’t save any three-year-old, happy-go-lucky little sister from getting stung half to death by taking a swarm of mad bees toward her as fast as you can run.

  Right then, in the middle of all that excited yelling and screaming and angry buzzing and worry, there was a blurred flurry of something else happening. I heard it almost before I saw it start to happen. And then I really saw.

  Our acrobat—the boy who could climb trees quicker than any other member of the gang, who had muscles like steel, who could run faster than any of the rest of us and jump higher and farther—that boy shot up and over that board fence like a boy doing a pole vault in a track meet.

  Like a streak of blue-jeaned lightning, Circus was out in the middle of the apiary, driving his way to the gate near where Charlotte Ann still was. Quicker than a cat’s claw striking out at a dog in a fight, Circus scooped up that innocent-faced dumbbell of a sister of mine and galloped with her toward the low-hanging branches of the Maiden-blush apple tree. The second he was beneath it, he dropped to the ground with Charlotte Ann under him, spreading his arms out over her the way a mother hen spreads her wings over her chicks.

  Even while I was seeing all that excitement through the netting of Dad’s veil, there went racing through my mind part of a sermon I’d heard in the Sugar Creek church. One sad day, the One who had come to save the world stood looking down at the city of Jerusalem and said, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem .… How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings …” Something like that.

  The bees were still landing on me from all around, whamming into my hat and veil and arms and shoulders, and their noise was like a tornado tearing along through Harm Groenwald’s south clover field.

  Then, like a scared cottontail with a pack of hounds after him, I raced through that open apiary gate and into the orchard. I headed off to the left so I wouldn’t be carrying any bees toward Circus and Charlotte Ann, running buzzety-sizzle for the low branches of the Jonathan apple tree at the edge of the blackberry patch. Quicker than a scared flash, I was under and lying panting on the ground. I was also wincing and grunting, because I had landed on maybe seven hard windfall apples.

  I lay there holding my onion breath and waiting till the bees decided I was dead—or wasn’t worth wasting a lot of good stingers on—and went back to a more interesting fight. Then I came out into the peaceful world of sunlight and hurried to where Circus and Charlotte Ann were, a safe distance away from the battlefield and not far from the end of the row of hollyhocks, which were still saying to me, “Ambition, Bill Collins! Don’t be a lazy good-for-nothing. Don’t be a drone, lying around the front of a beehive.”

  “Will you be quiet!” I cried in the direction of those tall, beautiful flower stalks.

  “Will who be quiet?” Big Jim demanded.

  And Circus answered, “She can’t help crying. She got stung on her arm.”

  Of course, Charlotte Ann was crying. What little girl wouldn’t at a time like that?

  I quick had Dad’s hat and veil and gloves off and was focusing my eyes on Charlotte Ann’s chubby little arm just below her dimpled elbow. Sure enough, she had been stung. She wasn’t crying very loud but was sobbing in her throat. She actually seemed to be trying to keep from being a scaredy-cat.

  Well, I knew from things I’d read that even one sting was nothing to be sneezed at and ought to be treated at once. So right away I was on the run for the house to get the special bee ointment we had in the medicine cabinet.

  And that’s when I ran into more trouble. The medicine cabinet was locked. That was a precaution our family had taken because it isn’t good to have any medicines where a small child can get them and poison herself.

  I looked in the secret place where we kept the key, and it wasn’t there! I kept on looking around in different places and still couldn’t find the key. Now I could hear Charlotte Ann really crying out there by the pump—and calling me.

  What, I wondered, was somebody trying to do to her? For that was the way it sounded—as if somebody was hurting her.

  I went back out just in time to see Dragonfly with a pair of pliers that looked like Dad’s, ready to use them on Charlotte Ann’s arm.

  “Hey!” I yelled. The screen door slammed behind me, and I dashed down the steps onto the board walk to the pump. “Let my sister alone!”

  “The stinger!” Dragonfly defended himself. “It’s still in! I was only going to pull it out!”

  That’s when I was glad I was a beekeeper’s son. My dad had taught me something everybody ought to know about honeybee stings.

  “That stinger’s full of poison,” I said to anybody who was interested in hearing. “A bee stinger is shaped like a barbed blade, and its barbs catch into your flesh like a fishhook. Sometimes the bee gets stuck onto your arm or back or wherever it happens to sting you and can’t get away without tearing loose.

  “When it does tear loose—here, give me that pair of pliers!” I had to talk sharply to that stubborn little member of the gang, or he’d have still used the pliers on the stinger, and that would have been like squeezing on a squeeze bottle of detergent. He’d have squeezed into Charlotte Ann’s already swelling arm all the poison that was left in the stinger.

  As soon as I had stopped Dragonfly, I asked Poetry for his knife.

  “Knife!” different voices cried out to me. “You’re going to cut it out? Going to cut a hole in your sister’s arm?”

  Remembering I was going to be a doctor someday, I said as calmly as I could, “When a bee tears loose, he leaves his stinger behind. Also he leaves the sheath the stinger was in, which is a part of the bee, and he leaves his whole sackful of poison.”

  And right then I began to feel fine. I was a doctor right now. I was going to perform an operation, and all the rest of the gang were just interns watching—and maybe taking orders from me to help.

  “Like this,” I said, remembering how Dad had done it to three of the five stingers I’d been stung with a month ago (only three of them had been left in my flesh). I was going to use the knife blade to carefully scrape the stinger loose without any of the rest of the poison being squeezed out.

  “All right, girl patient!” I said. “We’ll be through in just a minute.” I got my left hand under her arm and loosened the stinger with the knife blade. Just like that, there it was, lying on the pink skin of her fast-swelling arm. Part of the bee was still fa
stened to it.

  “Now,” I said to Dragonfly, “I’ll use the pliers.” With them, I picked up the stinger and held it up for them all to see.

  Little Jim let out a gasp then and said, “No wonder you didn’t want to use the pliers on it. Look at that little drop of poison on the end!”

  Charlotte Ann had stopped crying now and was watching through her tears, as though it was somebody else’s arm that had been operated on. But I could tell there was still a lot of pain, and I wished I could find our cabinet key so that I could get the ointment.

  Then Little Jim came up with what sounded like a good idea. “Remember,” he said, “when we killed the old mother bear and we had her cub for a week? When he got stung all over his nose, he went down to the spring and made his own medicine out of clay and patted it on his nose.”

  That, I thought, made sense. If a baby bear used a clay pack to take away the pain and maybe even the swelling out of bee stings, then why not use clay for a little girl human being?

  “Here, kid,” I said to my sister. “We’ll make you some nice, clean, brown medicine out of clay from the very pretty butterfly puddle.”

  But the kid had an idea of her own. Like a lively night crawler wriggling out of a boy’s hand to keep from being put on a fishhook, Charlotte Ann was out of my grasp and scooting like a scared squirrel for the grape arbor and Mom’s flowerpot table, with her doctor-brother in fast pursuit.

  I, the doctor, had been in the middle of my operation, and my patient, who up to now had been patient, had stopped being patient and was running away. Right then, I had what story-writers call a “flashback.”

  The flashback was of a time when Charlotte Ann, like almost any boy’s sister, had been making mud pies in that very same water puddle by the iron pitcher pump—even after Mom had ordered her not to play there anymore. All dressed up for Sunday school, she had disobeyed, accidentally lost her balance, and fallen ker-splash into the puddle. Her fresh, crisp yellow dress went down with her. There were spattered mud and muddy water all over the yellow dress and all over her black patent leather shoes.

  Talk about excitement around our place! Most of it was in Mom’s ordinarily quiet mind. When she both saw and heard what had happened, her temper came to life, and she went into motherly action. Several minutes later, when she put the beech switch back under the gun rack, her face was very sad.

  As you maybe know, that was one of the hardest things my mother ever had to do—to punish either one of her two children. She was sad almost all the rest of that whole day on account of having such a tender heart.

  But after that switching, Charlotte Ann had stayed away from the puddle—though many a time I’d seen her standing maybe three feet from it, watching the butterflies having the time of their lives there. Maybe she was wondering how come a pretty butterfly with white or yellow wings could play in a water puddle if a human being couldn’t.

  Anyway, that was the flashback I had while chasing my runaway sister.

  A doctor in the middle of an operation can’t let his patient get up and leave the surgery room, so I kept on giving chase, and she kept on running. I’d have caught her in a few fast leaps if I hadn’t stumbled over one of Mom’s flowerpots I’d been ordered to pick up and had forgotten to. I fell head over heels.

  When I finally caught my patient, she was as far as the mailbox near the front gate. I quickly scooped her up and carried her, wriggling and fussing, back toward the outdoor operating room. We had to get a little clay pack on her bee sting.

  “Listen!” I tried to explain to her as we struggled along past the plum tree to where my five interns were waiting. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m trying to help you!”

  But she couldn’t be explained to. So I kept on carrying her thirty-two wriggling pounds until we got to the pump, where she did let me put cold water on her red arm.

  “See?” I said to her. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to put something that looks like black licorice candy on you.” I winked at Poetry, who had a small clay pack already made.

  He came up behind me, slipped it into my hand and—well, that’s when it happened. We were too close to the puddle, and Charlotte Ann had too good eyesight not to see. She probably saw more than she saw—not just a small, cool clay pack in a boy’s hand but herself getting a switching with a beech switch.

  Anyway before I realized what was going on, she was out of my grasp again and starting toward the barnyard baseball diamond. Then she stumbled over a hat with a bee veil on it, and down she went—clean dress, hair ribbon, and all—into the puddle. The hat and veil got there first and landed in the puddle with her.

  But that wasn’t all that was going on. I heard from some direction or other the sound of a motor. I looked up and out to the walnut tree just in time to see a green car with two people in it, stopping at the gate.

  “My parents!” I cried to all of us. “My folks are home!”

  As you can well imagine, my father wouldn’t have a very hard time seeing a lot more than he saw. Right in front of his eyes was a bee hat lying on its crown in the butterfly puddle, a broken flowerpot on its side beside Mom’s flower table, and six boys’ worried faces. If he had looked beyond the chicken house, he might have seen an apiary gate wide open and several old hens gobbling up grain, greens, grubs, and grit on their way in. Also right in front of his eyes was his own daughter standing crying with the front of her dress and her hands and knees spattered with mud.

  Right then there was also plenty to hear: Charlotte Ann’s worried sobbing. Six boys trying to explain things. And my mother’s astonished voice crying from the pump platform, where all of a sudden she was, “Bill Collins! What on earth is going on here? What have you boys been doing to that child?”

  But nobody answered—not right then—because something else started to happen.

  Mom got a scared look on her face, and I heard her cry out, “Circus! What’s the matter?”

  I quickly looked to where our acrobat was standing under the grape arbor. He was as pale as a ghost and gasping for breath.

  “The bees!” he rasped. “They stung me all over—my shoulder—and arms and—” He doubled up then as if he had terrible pain in his stomach. And then our wonderful curly-headed acrobat—who had leaped over our board fence, like a cowboy at a rodeo leaping from his horse to tie up a roped calf, and who had scooped up my sister and carried her to safety, spreading his arms out over her to protect her from getting stung—that wonderful, quick-thinking member of our gang slumped to the ground like a sack of wheat.

  6

  And that was another that—a frightening that, enough to scare anybody who didn’t know what to do half out of what few wits he might have had at the time.

  It was my dad, who was a bee handler and well read on what to do in an emergency like that, who leaped into fast first-aid action.

  “Mother!” He was the new doctor, who had taken over a really serious case. “Get the nebulizer—quick!” he ordered his nurse. “Bill, you call Dr. Gordon! We’ve got a case of anaphylactic shock on our hands!”

  I cut in to say to Mom, “The medicine cabinet key’s lost—I couldn’t find it.”

  But she was already on her way, digging into her handbag as she ran up the board walk to the house. I didn’t find out till afterward that they’d taken the key to town with them to have another key made, so that in case one got lost, we’d have a spare.

  Mom was in and out of the house with a flurry of skirts. I was still calling the doctor as she started back with the nebulizer and a pillow. She let the screen door slam behind her like a boy in a hurry.

  And in a few minutes, the new doctor and the new nurse, with five interns watching, carried out some of the finest skill in first aid anybody ever saw.

  It was then that I realized what wise parents I really had. They not only knew what to do for anybody who went into a state of what Dad called anaphylactic shock from bee stings, but they also had emergency medication ready.

&nbs
p; In the nebulizer, which I noticed was like the one Dragonfly used sometimes when he had an asthma attack, was a special medicine. I learned later it was epinephrine. They quickly had Circus’s head on the pillow in Mom’s lap and were helping him inhale some of the fine fog that came out of the nebulizer every time Dad squeezed the bulb.

  It seemed Dr. Gordon was a long time in coming, but actually in less than ten minutes his car came racing down the road in a cloud of dust.

  Circus was breathing better by the time the doctor with his bag came striding past the high swing on the walnut tree and across the yard to where we all were.

  First, he gave his patient some kind of a shot in the arm. Then while our acrobat, still as pale as a sick white cat, lay with his head on Mom’s pillow in her lap, he started treating seven fast-swelling bee stings on Circus’s arms and shoulders—the stings Circus had gotten instead of my wonderful little sister.

  When the doctor glanced down at his watch, I noticed it was almost four o’clock.

  Well, Dragonfly must have come to right then, because I saw his scared dragonfly-like eyes on the wristwatch, too, and I knew he was seeing more than he was seeing. He was maybe thinking that if my folks had already come home from shopping, his might be home, and he’d better get there in nothing flat to get his softball back up on top of the kitchen cabinet where it was supposed to have stayed for two days and hadn’t. And if it had, we wouldn’t have played ball with it, I wouldn’t have knocked a home run, the ball wouldn’t have landed in the middle of a bee battle, and we wouldn’t have had all the trouble we were in.

  Like a spindle-legged arrow, he was off across the yard toward the still-open gate, racing like a fox with a hound after it for the Gilbert house—Gilbert being his last name, just in case you might have forgotten.

  It must have seemed to most of the rest of the gang that it was time for them to go home, too, which it was.