Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 31-36

by Paul Hutchens

  You see, Little Dogie, Wandering Winnie, and Winnie the Pooh was an honest-to-goodness orphaned calf. Her mother had died about a week after Winnie had been born, and that made the calf a “dogie.” Little Jim had bottle-fed Winnie until she was old enough to eat grass and bran shorts and other calf food.

  Well, almost as soon as Winnie was a dogie old enough to run and gambol about Little Jim’s barnyard, she had taken on a very bad habit. Having a wandering spirit in her heart, she was always running away from home.

  Winnie never went very far, though. Most always it was over to our place. Sometimes as often as twice a week, when I would go out to our south pasture to drive Lady MacBeth, our Holstein milk cow, into her corral for Dad to milk her, I would find Little Jim’s dogie lying in the shade of the elderberry bushes along the fencerow by Lady MacBeth.

  Both of them would be lazily chewing their cuds, as if it was the pleasantest thing ever a cow and a calf could do. A black-and-white Holstein who didn’t have a calf of her own and a white-faced Hereford who didn’t have any mother would be lying side by side, doing nothing except maybe just liking each other. Mom, trying to defend Little Dogie, said that was very important even to a human being—just liking and being liked by somebody.

  I guess maybe Mom felt that way about animals and people because in the Sugar Creek cemetery, not far from the church we all went to, there was a small tombstone that had on it the name of a baby sister I had never seen. She was born before I was and died when she was still little.

  Mom had maybe one of the tenderest hearts for babies anybody ever saw.

  Nearly every time I saw a contented cow lying on her side with her head up, chewing away, her eyes half closed as though she was almost asleep, I was reminded of a poem Poetry was always quoting. It had a line that ran: “Cows lie down upon their sides when they would go to sleep …”

  Did you ever stop to think of all the different ways animals go to sleep? Our Mixy cat makes three or four turns round and round and settles down in a semicircle. Our old red rooster flies up to a tree branch or onto a roost in the chicken house and stands all night on one leg. A horse hangs its head and stands still all night in a stall.

  And Lady MacBeth lies down on her side and spends all night chewing the food she has taken all day to eat too fast. Actually she swallows backwards every few minutes, doing it maybe a thousand times a night, and then the next day she starts in all over again. A cow is what is called a “ruminant,” and all ruminants have two stomachs, one to eat into and the other to digest with.

  One morning when I found Winnie lying on her side with Lady MacBeth, she had a cut over her left eye that was still bleeding a little and which she’d probably got when she came through the barbed-wire fence into our pasture.

  Even as sorry as I felt for Winnie, I enjoyed running to our house, getting a special germ-killing salve we kept in the medicine cabinet, and dressing the wound, since I’m maybe going to be a doctor someday.

  “You dumb little dogie!” I said to her in a playful scold. “Don’t you ever let me catch you getting cut on that barbed wire again!”

  Then I patted her on her hornless head and phoned Little Jim to come and get his cute little calf.

  Just to be sure she wouldn’t get cut again, I went down to our lane fence to the place where Winnie had been squeezing through and wrapped the barbed wire with a strip of burlap I tore from one of the gunnysacks we had in the barn.

  Well, while I was in the history section of my mind out in our garden with the Ebenezer onions, the black-seeded Simpson lettuce, and the Scarlet Globe radishes, I was remembering that morning just three days ago when Little Dogie—Wandering Winnie the Pooh—had disappeared.

  Little Jim had come pedaling over to our house on his bike, bringing with him a three-foot-long, yellow-barked willow switch, planning to do with the switch what I knew he’d done a half-dozen other times that summer-drive his white-faced, long-eyelashed, dumb dogie back home to her corral again.

  That morning, three days ago, Lady Mac-Beth was already in her corral, already milked. She was waiting for me to turn her out to pasture again, where she would eat all day, so she could chew all night, so she could make white milk and yellow butter out of the brown bran and green grass she would eat.

  The Collins family was at the breakfast table at the time, eating pancakes and sausage and stuff.

  Hearing a noise out at our front gate, I looked across the table past Mom’s grayish brown hair and through the screened side door of our kitchen. I saw Little Jim leaning his bike against the walnut tree just inside the gate. Then he went scooting across the lawn toward our barnyard and the pasture bars, carrying the willow switch. Even from as far away as I was, I could see the little guy had a very set face, as though his temper was up and he couldn’t wait to explode it on Winnie.

  In the middle of the barnyard, Little Jim stopped, looked toward the south pasture, and let out two or three long cow calls, which any farm boy knows sound like “Swoo-ooo-ook! Sw-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ook!”

  I was pretty soon out of my place without being excused, which is impolite to do, and was out the side door, letting it slam behind me—and shouldn’t have or it might wake up Charlotte Ann. In a barefoot flash I was hurrying down the board walk and past the iron pitcher pump to where Little Jim was.

  His set face was flushed from having pedaled so hard, his eyebrows were down, and he was as angry as I had ever seen him. He nearly always doesn’t get angry at anything.

  As soon as I reached the center of the barnyard, where Little Jim was, I said to him, “’S’-matter? How come you’re yelling like that at nothing?”

  “I’m not yelling at nothing!” Little Jim Foote disagreed crossly. “It’s Wandering Winnie the Pooh. That dumb dogie has run away again, and when I find her I’m going to give her a switching she’ll never forget as long as she lives! You seen anything of her?”

  I hadn’t, of course, and neither had anybody else at our house. When I said so, Little Jim asked, “Where on earth can she be?”

  What he said next got mixed up in my mind with something that was happening out by our garden gate right then—something I’d seen and heard happen maybe a hundred times that spring and summer. Old Red, our Rhode Island Red rooster, had just flown up to the top of the gatepost and was arching his long, proud neck, standing on tiptoe and getting ready to crow.

  Hardly realizing what I was doing, I quickly stooped, grabbed up a roundish stone from the ground, and slung it toward the post. Even while that small round stone was flying through the air with the greatest of ease, Old Red was in the middle of his proud “Cock-a-doodle-doo.”

  Wham! The stone landed with a thud against the locust post just below Old Red’s yellow legs, interrupting his ordinarily long, squawking cock-a-doodle, stopping it before it was half done, and scaring the early morning daylights out of him.

  Old Red made a jump straight up, his wings flapping and his voice complaining, and came down ker-floppety-plop on the other side of the garden fence in the middle of the Ebenezers.

  But Old Red wasn’t any more scared right then than I was. What—my stirred-up worry yelled at me inside me—what if either of my parents comes to at the kitchen table and comes storming out to see what on earth is going on and why?

  Little Jim had already finished saying what he had started to say. I had heard his words without hearing them, but I did remember them later.

  Quicker than a crash of thunder, I was off with an explosion of fast-running feet, galloping toward the garden gate with Little Jim’s words flying along with me. Those worried words had been: “What I can’t understand is how Winnie got out! We had the gate shut tight all night, and it was still shut this morning when I went out to feed her!”

  Well, when you are in a garden, zigzagging after a scared rooster who is running wild all over the black-seeded Simpson lettuce, acting as crazy as a chicken with its head cut off, which you are going to have for dinner—the chicken, I mean, not the head—when
your mind and muscles are as busy as mine were, you hardly notice anything strange in what Little Jim said, something that had a mystery in it.

  All the noise I was making at the garden gate and, especially, the noise Old Red was making were like the noise Santa Claus’s reindeer made in the “Night Before Christmas” when “out on the lawn there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.”

  “You,” I thundered at Mom’s favorite Rhode Island Red, “stay out of the garden!”

  Little Jim’s temper was still up as he hurried back to the walnut tree to his bicycle. He was maybe fifty yards up the road on the way to Dragonfly’s house to see if Winnie was there, before what he’d said came to life in my mind. The words I all of a sudden remembered were “We had the gate shut tight all night, and it was still shut this morning when I went out to feed her.”

  I should have guessed cattle rustlers right then, but I didn’t. Instead I had to let three days pass by and have a dream about a cowboy lassoing me and dragging me across the barnyard, before all the different ideas came to a crossroads in my head. And it seemed maybe there had been honest-to-goodness-for-sure cattle rustlers in the neighborhood and that Winnie the Pooh had been rustled right out of Little Jim’s corral and taken off to a sales pavilion or somewhere, nobody knew where.

  The morning of that fourth day finally passed at our house, and the Collins family was flying around getting ready to sit down to the noon meal, which was going to be fried chicken, bread and butter, rice pudding, and other stuff Mom had made.

  “Don’t forget early supper tonight,” Mom said. “It’s Saturday, you remember, and tomorrow is Sunday. So we go to town early, come home early, go to bed early, get up early, and get to Sunday school on time without rushing.”

  It seemed I had heard Mom say that maybe a thousand times in my half-long life, so, when all of us were at the table and Dad was getting ready to ask the blessing, I said—and shouldn’t have—“Not too long a prayer, Dad. We have to have early supper so we can go to town early, and get home early, so we can go to bed early, and …”

  Dad’s answer was kinder than he maybe felt in his heart. He looked with lowered bushy eyebrows at me and said, “Do I ever pray all the way through to supper time?”

  His prayer was long enough to be thankful in words for the food and to ask the Lord to “bless the hands that have prepared it”—meaning Mom’s hardworking brown hands. He also prayed for our church’s missionary who was working in an orphanage in Korea.

  Just before saying, “Amen,” at the end of his prayer, Dad thought of something else, which was, “And help us to do what we can about the hungry orphans over there.”

  To Mom he said, when he finished and before unfolding his napkin and laying it across his lap, “It’s like the new Sunday school song says:

  ‘Look all around you, find someone in need;

  Help somebody today.’”

  As serious as my mind was at the time, it was still hard to keep from thinking a mischievous thought, which right that second popped into my mind. It was: “How come, Dad, you always pray for the hands that prepare the dinner but never for the hands that dry the dishes after dinner?”

  Dad looked at my already busy hands and said, “When they’re clean, they don’t need anybody to pray for them.”

  And for some reason I left the table and went outdoors to the washbasin not far from the pitcher pump and scrubbed my hands with soap, as I was supposed to have not forgotten to do in the first place.

  Bit by bit and bite by bite, I managed to get Mom’s fried chicken dinner into the history section of my life. Pretty soon I would be ready to meet the Gang at the place we had agreed on—near the Black Widow Stump, halfway between that well-known stump and the linden tree that leans out over the hill sloping down to the spring.

  With a swish, swish, swish and a scrub, scrub, scrub, I brushed my teeth for the second time that day, dried the dishes for maybe the thirty-seventh time that month, and pretty soon was on my way.

  Out across the grassy yard I loped, past the plum tree, on to and past the walnut tree near the front gate, through the gate and past “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox, and across the road. My bare feet didn’t even stop to enjoy the feel of the fluffy white road dust I usually liked to go plop-plop-plop in. With a flying leap I was over the rail fence, sailing over the way I’d seen a deer do it in an Audubon film one night that winter at the Sugar Creek Literary Society.

  My shirt sleeves flapped in the wind, and my brown bare feet raced lickety-sizzle along the path made by barefoot boys’ feet. I ran and ran and ran. A great big blob of happiness was in my heart, because that is almost the pleasantest thing ever a boy could do—to fly along, as I was flying along, toward an afternoon of adventure in a boy’s world.

  And it is almost the most wonderful feeling ever a boy can have to know you are not running away from something your mother wants you to do, because you have already helped keep her from getting too tired by helping her with the housework.

  I guess one thing that made me feel so fine was that this time I had not waited for Mom to ask me to help but had actually volunteered to wash those very discouraged-looking dishes in the sink, which, unless you actually love your mother, is one of the most unpleasant things ever a boy has to do.

  As I galloped along the winding path, the new Sunday school song was singing itself in my mind:

  Look all around you, find someone in need;

  Help somebody today;

  Though it be little, a neighborly deed,

  Help somebody today.

  Many are burdened and weary in heart,

  Help somebody today;

  Someone the journey to heaven should start,

  Help somebody today.

  All the way to the Black Widow Stump, my heart was as light as a last year’s maple leaf in a whirlwind.

  I hadn’t any sooner reached our meeting place, plopped myself down in the long, mashed-down bluegrass, and started chewing on the juicy end of a stalk of grass than Poetry came sauntering along the path that borders the bayou. Poetry was one of my almost best friends, the chubbiest one of the gang, the one with the best imagination, and also the most mischievous. His powerful binoculars were hanging by a strap around his neck.

  I rolled over and up to a sitting position, squinted my sleepy eyes at him, then plopped back again onto the grass. In a minute he was lying there beside me.

  While we waited for the rest of the gang, I was wondering if maybe I ought to tell him about my last night’s dream and what I thought I knew about what had happened to Winnie the Pooh.

  Suddenly Poetry let out an excited gasp and exclaimed, “There’s a wild turkey!”

  “Wild turkey!” I came to life. “I don’t see any turkey. Do you see a turkey?”

  “Look!” he said, handing me the binoculars. “Away up there above the Sugar Creek bridge, maybe a mile high.”

  I looked where he said to look, scanning the sky with his binoculars.

  “Buzzard,” I said. “That’s nothing but a turkey buzzard. I saw half a dozen of them this morning over the south pasture.”

  As you already maybe know, that was the way a buzzard found his breakfast, dinner, or supper. He just sailed around in a silent circle, his eyes searching the earth far below until he spotted something that looked dead enough to eat. Then he’d come slanting down, land on or near it, and that would be it. So what was special about a turkey buzzard or two sailing around in the sky?

  But I had seen something else when I was looking through Poetry’s binoculars. “If you want to see something really important,” I said to my round friend, “take a look at that big yellow woolpack of clouds hanging above the swamp. You know what that means, don’t you—clouds piling up like that in the afternoon northwest?”

  “Of course, I know what it means,” Poetry answered. “If they come this way and change into umbrella clouds and spread all over the sky, it’s going to rain pitchforks and tar ba
bies.”

  For a few minutes, while the buzzards kept on sailing around so high that without the binoculars they looked like swallows, we bragged a little to each other about the cloud lore we had been studying in a schoolbook the winter before.

  Any boy ought to know about cloud formations so that he can tell whether it is going to rain or not without listening to the radio or looking under a doorstep to see if a rock is wet because of the humidity in the air.

  “Another thing,” Poetry rolled over in the grass and said with his back turned, “when a cumulus cloud like that is opposite the sun, it is yellowish white, but when it is on the same side as the sun, with the sun behind it, it is dark and has bright edges.”

  “Is that where they got the song ‘There’s a Silver Lining’?”

  “Sure,” Poetry answered, and his squawking, half-and-half voice began croaking away:

  “There’s a silver lining,

  Through the dark cloud shining.”

  There was nothing exciting to do until the rest of the gang came, which pretty soon they did. We had a business meeting about different things boys have business meetings about, and different ones of us took turns looking through Poetry’s binoculars. We also skipped flat stones across Sugar Creek’s foam-freckled face and listened to ten thousand or more honeybees buzzing among the sweet-smelling flowers of the leaning linden tree.

  We came to with a start when Little Jim, who had the binoculars at the time, cried out, “Hey, you—everybody! Your turkey buzzard is coming down! He’s heading straight for the sycamore tree and the mouth of the cave!”

  My eyes took a quick leap toward the sky, and Little Jim was right. I saw that big buzzard slanting toward the earth like a long black arrow.