I certainly didn’t enjoy being exploded back into such an ordinary world as it was that day, especially when I might get called in to do a stack of dishes. I wanted to go on swinging to the tune of the dying cat, quoting the poem all the way to its end. Just in case you’ve never read it or heard anybody read it, this is the way the rest of it goes.
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside—
Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown—
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!
As I said, Dragonfly’s ridiculous sneeze interrupted me in the middle of the second stanza.
I looked in the direction it seemed the sneeze had come from and saw across the road, standing beside our washtub birdbath in the shade of the elderberry bush that grew there, a spindle-legged, crooked-nosed boy, Dragonfly himself. I could hardly see his face, though, for the broad-brimmed cowboy hat he was wearing. His jeans made his legs look even skinnier than they were, which is what jeans sometimes do to people.
Half angry because of the interruption and because of who it was, I started to yell out to him the rest of the verse I was in the middle of.
I didn’t get very far, because he interrupted me again to boast, “I’m going to ride on the longest chairlift in the world when I get out West, clear up to the top of Ajax Mountain! We can look out over thousands of square miles of mountains! The people below us will look like ants and the cars like toy cars!”
“Oh yeah!” I yelled back across the dusty road to him. My dying cat came to life again as my temper and I both went higher and higher.
“Yeah!” he called back in a bragging voice.
It was the way he said what he said that stirred up my pet peeve, not just my being interrupted two or three times. I was used to all the members of the gang bragging a little, doing it just for fun, the way most boys do. But this seemed different. After all, he needn’t act so uppity just because of his fancy boots and hat.
Besides, our rope swing was the highest in the whole Sugar Creek territory, and you could see a long way when you were up in the air on it!
“Hey!” I exclaimed to him all of a sudden. “Don’t empty out that water! That’s for the birds!”
I was really mad now. That washtub had been left there on purpose. I kept it filled with clean water for the birds to bathe in and for them to get their drinking water, so we’d have more birds in the neighborhood and they wouldn’t have to fly way down to the spring or to the creek every time they were thirsty.
But do you know what? That sneezy little guy had swept off his wide-brimmed hat, plunged it into the tub of water, and lifted it out with its crown filled to the brim! “Here, Silver!” I heard him say. “Have a drink! You’re plumb tuckered out after that wild ride across the prairie from Dodge!”
And in my mind I saw what was going on in his. He was imagining himself to be one of the most popular cowboys of the Old West, the Lone Ranger himself, and was giving his white horse, Silver, a drink.
Anybody who knows even a little about a Western cowboy probably knows that his hat and his boots are the most important part of his clothes. He’s not too particular about what he wears between his head and his feet. He buys an extrafine hat with a stiff brim so it won’t flop in his eyes in the wind and blind him when he is in danger. He chooses an extrawide brim so he’ll have it for a sunshade when it’s hot, and it makes a good umbrella when it rains or sleets or snows. He also uses his hat to carry water to his horse from a creek or water hole.
Getting his hands wet must have started a tickling in Dragonfly’s nose, because right away he let out another long-tailed sneeze. This time the tail was a trembling neigh, sounding like a worried horse crying across the woods to another horse.
Ever since Dragonfly had found out he was going to get to go to the Rockies for the hay fever season and his mother had bought him that fine Stetson, he’d been strutting around in his also-new, high-heeled, pointy-toed cowboy boots. Watching him that week, anybody could have seen that cowboy boots were meant for show-off and for riding more than for comfort. They certainly weren’t meant for running, and they weren’t easy to walk in.
Imagine an ordinary man or boy wearing high-heeled shoes! Of course, a rider has to have high-heeled, pointed-toed shoes. They fit better in the stirrups, and the high heels keep his feet from going on through. What if a rider should accidentally get thrown off his horse when one foot was clear through the stirrup? He’d be dragged head down and maybe lose his life.
But it wasn’t any use to stay mad at Dragonfly.
It seemed a waste of bad temper I might need some other time. His imaginary horse couldn’t drink much water anyway. So I killed the old cat’s ninth life, swung out of the swing, and crossed the road to where he was still talking to my horse, Silver.
Pretty soon Dragonfly and I were on the way to the gang meeting.
We stopped for a few minutes at the bottom of Bumblebee Hill where the Little Jim Tree grows. “Here,” I said to him, “is where Little Jim killed the bear.”
“Whoa, Silver! Whoa! You big restless critter, you! Stand still!”
I could see Dragonfly was having a lot of fun pretending he was the famous masked marshal of the Old West. Because, as I’ve already told you, it would have been a waste of bad temper for me to stay really angry with him, I made a dive for his horse’s bridle, went through an acrobatic struggle to stop him from rearing and plunging, and quickly tied his reins to the trunk of the Little Jim Tree.
But in my mind’s eye I was seeing again the fierce old mother bear that had been killed here when Little Jim had accidentally rammed the muzzle of Big Jim’s rifle down her throat and pulled the trigger. He had saved his own life and maybe the rest of our lives also. That was why we’d named the tree the Little Jim Tree.
Because it was getting close to the time we were supposed to meet the gang at the Snatzerpazooka Tree down by the swimming hole, I got a bright idea. I quickly rolled to my feet from where I’d been lying in the grass, made a dive for Silver’s reins, untied them from the tree, and sprang into the saddle.
With a “Hi-yo, Silver!” I started off on a wild gallop for the bayou rail fence, with Dragonfly racing along behind me and yelling, “Come back here with my horse! After him, Tonto! Shoot him down!”
Tonto shot a few times with Dragonfly’s saucy voice making him do it, but I knew Tonto and I were supposed to be good friends, so I didn’t let any of his imaginary bullets hit me and tumble me off my big white stallion.
It took us only a little while to get to the river birch, where the scarecrow was still hanging, swinging in the breeze and looking like a bedraggled skeleton wearing dirty, faded, ragged clothes. His matted floor-mop hair still covered his face, and he looked pretty fierce.
We’d been panting there only a few minutes, resting on the long, mashed-down blue-grass, before I heard flying footsteps coming up the path from the spring. It was Poetry first, the barrel-shaped member of the gang. Right behind him were Circus, our acrobat, and Little Jim himself with his mouselike face and his tattered straw hat. The second Little Jim got there, I noticed that he had beads of perspiration standing out all over his forehead.
He stopped, looked down at us, grinned, and reached his forefinger to his forehead. Leaning over at the same time, he wiped off all the drops of sweat. The wind blew some of the salty drops onto my face.
Soon Big Jim, carrying a flashlight and a roll of burlap gunnysacks, came swinging along from the direction of the bayou, and we were ready for our important meeting. It was important because—well, because. I’ll tell you why in just a minute.
Big Jim had an air of mystery about him. The jaw muscles below his earlobes were working the way they always do when he is thinking hard about something important. I wished he’d hurry up and start the meeting.
Dragonfly was disgruntled about something. I could tell by the expression on his face. I found out why when he mumbled, “Whoever said to water your horse by letting him drink out of your cowboy hat ought to be horsewhipped.” Then he plopped himself down on the ground, winced, and took off both new high-heeled cowboy boots.
“Too hot to wear high boots?” I asked, admiring the very pretty leather. I still wished I had a pair, but I was glad I could feel the fresh air on my already too-hot bare feet.
He shook his head no but sighed the way my dad does when he takes his shoes off after or before supper to rest his feet.
“Feet hurt?” I sort of whispered to Dragonfly, hoping they did but trying not to be angry at him anymore.
It was when I saw the small blister on his right heel that my temper fire almost went out. Whenever I see anybody in pain, it always hurts my heart and makes me want to stop the pain if I can. Someday, maybe, I’ll be a doctor. I was thinking that when Big Jim called the meeting to order.
As soon as we were as quiet as we usually are at a gang meeting, Big Jim said to us grimly, “You guys get set for a lot of hard work. We have to do something not a one of us’ll want to do.”
“What?” a chorus of voices asked him.
And he answered, “We have to go up into the hills and dig up a dead dog and bury it over again.”
“Why?” I asked, knowing what dog he meant. It was my cousin Wally’s dog, Alexander the Coppersmith, who had gotten killed in a wildcat fight.
“Because,” Big Jim said, “I just met Old Man Paddler down at the mouth of the cave, and he said so. He said the very first time there’s a flash flood up there in the hills, that canyon will have a rush of water and Alexander’ll get washed out and carried down the canyon to the creek. He would like us to dig him up and bury him in Old Tom the Trapper’s dog cemetery. Do you think your cousin Wally would care if we moved Alexander’s remains to a better place and gave him a more honorable burial?” Big Jim asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe not. But he kind of wanted him to stay there right where he fell in battle,” I answered.
“How’re you going to carry a dug-up dog?” Little Jim asked.
“In one of these.” Big Jim showed us the roll of burlap bags he had brought.
We all had sober faces, remembering how Little Jim could easily have lost his life when the wildcat had made a savage, spread-clawed leap toward him, away up there on a ledge of the canyon wall. Little Jim was saved only because Wally’s dog had met the wildcat in midair before he could reach Little Jim.
“I move we do it,” Little Jim said, and in a few seconds we had all voted yes.
“We’ll use Old Man Paddler’s spade and shovel,” Big Jim announced.
The meeting was soon over, and we were on our way to exhume the body of one of the finest dogs there ever was, in order to bury it in a better place. We didn’t have any idea that we would also revive an old mystery that had almost been forgotten around Sugar Creek.
2
We were untangling ourselves from our lying down positions and getting ready to start toward the old sycamore tree and the cave. We would go through it to the basement of Old Man Paddler’s cabin—to get his spade and shovel, to go still farther up into the hills, to dig up the body of Alexander the Coppersmith, to take it to the haunted house, and to bury it under the big sugar maple tree in the fenced place we all knew as Old Tom the Trapper’s dog cemetery. While we were getting ready to start to do all that, something happened.
It wasn’t very important, and it only took a few seconds for it, but it shows you what kind of weather it really was that day. And the weather had a lot to do with the most important part of our sensational adventure.
As I’ve already told you, it was the kind of day when every now and then a whirlwind would come along out of almost nowhere. Then, after a few minutes of swirling leaves and dust, it’d be gone, and nature would settle down again to a stifling hot day.
Well, suddenly, while Dragonfly’s new Stetson cowboy hat was drying on the left shoulder of the scarecrow swinging from the overhanging branch of the Snatzerpazooka Tree, there came spinning toward us from the direction of the bayou one of the biggest whirlwinds I’d ever seen. At the top of its cone, which reached high into the sky, were more dust and dry leaves and what looked like feathers and other things than you could shake a stick at.
The cornfield it was driving across was making a lot of noise. Its thousands of blades were tossing like a green lake in a windstorm. It was such a pretty sight it almost hurt my heart to see it. Nature around Sugar Creek can make a boy feel like that maybe a dozen times a day.
In almost nothing flat, the whirlwind was where we were. It whammed into the Snatzerpazooka Tree, shaking its branches and whipping Snatzerpazooka into an excited jiggling. Before you could have said, “Jack Robinson Crusoe,” Dragonfly’s drying Stetson was off the cross arm and gone.
I saw it leave the shoulder of the scarecrow even while I was holding onto my own straw hat to keep it from blowing off. I caught a glimpse of it sailing like a flying saucer out across the sky toward the creek, saw it land in the water, and saw also the ordinarily quiet face of Sugar Creek churning and tossing as the whirlwind went storming on over it to the other side.
No sooner was Dragonfly’s hat off and on its way toward the creek than our spindle-legged little sneezer was on his way after it. In another couple of seconds, he’d land in the water himself with a splash.
“Hey!” I yelled after him. “Watch where you’re going!”
But he didn’t. He kept on like a baseball fielder after a high fly, running backward and sideways and forward.
It was all over in a few seconds. He was in and down and under and up, sputtering and spitting water, while the rest of us howled at how funny it was. The hot-tempered, extra-large whirlwind was already busy stirring up new excitement among the willows on the other side of the creek.
Well, the way that worked-up little guy stormed out into the excited water, grabbed up his Stetson, and started back as wet as a drowned rat and sneezing was almost funnier than when he had first landed in the water.
That showed what kind of weather it was and also how much Dragonfly thought of his new hat. He was so proud of it. I couldn’t blame him in a way, because it was a very pretty hat. And in spite of its making his small face look still smaller, it did make him look like a Westerner—or, as Dad said when he saw it, “like an Easterner gone Western.”
Dragonfly had his hat, but he looked worried when he came splashing back to where we were. Not a one of us needed to ask him why, because we knew.
I guess we all had mothers that worried about their sons and couldn’t help it, since that is the way mothers are made. But Dragonfly had been having a hard time growing up because his very nice mother worried too much about him, or so it seemed to us.
Sometimes when he would even accidentally do some foolhardy thing such as he’d just done, he’d get a licking with his mother’s sharp tongue. And yet, as my own mother once said, “Mrs. Gilbert is one of the finest mothers in the whole Sugar Creek territory. She’s just impulsive. She’s always sorry afterward when she has punished him unjustly. She’s such a likeable person most of the time.”
And then my kind of wonderful mother said something that was good for even a boy to know: “We mothers have to learn that we’re supposed to mother our sons, not smother them with too much supervision.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant, but it sounded as if she liked Dragonfly’s nervous mother in spite of the many mistakes she made because of her nerves.
Dragonfly was shivering now, standing under the Snatzerpazooka Tree, holding his wet hat, sniffling a little, too, and trying to get over his temper. All the angry feeling I’d had toward him for being so uppi
ty about his fancy hat and cowboy boots was washed away.
He picked up his boots and with a sob in his voice said, “What’ll I do! My mother will—” He stopped. I could see he liked his worrywart mother a lot and didn’t want to say anything unkind about her. He finished what he had started to say, but I could tell it wasn’t really what he’d started to say. “My mother will feel bad. She used her egg money to get me these new jeans.”
Without thinking, I spoke up. “You’re about my size. You can wear one of my shirts and a pair of my jeans till yours dry. It’ll only take a jiffy to get them. Come on, everybody! Follow me!” And I was off on the run toward our house.
It didn’t take long to get there because I was riding Silver at the time—not letting anybody know it—and the gang behind me was a mob of rustlers on ordinary horses trying to catch up with me to hang me from the nearest tree.
I left the gang at the walnut tree swing, where Poetry and Circus started waking up one of my old dead cat’s nine lives. They were standing up right away, facing each other, and pumping hard to swing high.
Quickly I went into the house, through the kitchen, and into the back bedroom to the wardrobe. I was reaching for a shirt and a pair of jeans from the carefully ironed, folded, and mended supply that Mom kept there on a shelf, when I heard a woman’s step and a rustling dress behind me.
Right away Mom started asking questions about why and what for and for whom. I guess it must have seemed odd to her that a son who already had on all the clothes a boy could stand on such a sultry day should want another shirt and another pair of jeans.
There were so many questions so fast that, spying a palm-leaf fan on the dresser, I picked it up and started fanning myself and sighing and saying, “Excuse me, I feel smothered. Mothers are supposed to mother their sons, not smother them.”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36 Page 24