We knew it wasn’t safe for us to get any nearer than Jeep was, so the only thing we could do for a minute was to stand there and argue with ourselves, deciding what to do.
Little Jim’s dad said, “We ought to have a rope. We ought to have a tree or sapling, something to push out to him so he can catch hold of it.”
None of us had an ax or hatchet with us, and we knew we wouldn’t have time to take our knives and cut down a small tree and trim all the small branches off and push it out to John Till so he could grab it. All this time he was hollering for help because he was not only in all the way to his neck, but he was down so far that he had to keep his chin lifted or he couldn’t even breathe.
We knew that most any minute he would slip under and that would be the end. He was struggling like a boy who is trying to swim and keep his head above the water and can’t because he has cramps.
My brain generally works quicker when I am angry about something, but it started to work quick right that minute too, when I realized that something had to be done to save the man’s life. I was thinking, what if he’d actually go down and his mouth would get filled with that awful quicksand and he would choke to death and he would have to leave his body and go somewhere to meet God. He would be lost forever on account of being stubborn and rebellious and not willing to bow his stubborn old will and confess that he was an honest-to-goodness sinner needing a Savior—the only One there is. And you know what His name is.
I felt sorry for Little Tom Till and for his big brother, Bob. They would miss their dad even if he had been mean to them. I felt sorry especially for the boys’ mother, sad-faced Mrs. Till, who had a hard enough time to make a living as it was, although maybe it would be easier for her if John Till was dead and then—well, if he was dead, he wouldn’t spend all the money he earned on himself. I remembered that sometimes my mom let Mrs. Till do our washing and paid her more than it was worth, so as to be kind to her.
Old John Till spent most of his money and his time in the combination pool hall and beer parlor in our town, and you never saw him in church. Not once!
“Here,” Poetry said, “here’s something that we could get out to him if we can do it.” He slipped his hand into his pocket and out again with his knife. He opened the blade, while I held the flashlight for him, and in seconds he had a grapevine cut in two at its root.
You see, all around Sugar Creek, and especially around the swamp and down along the old bayou where we played, grapevines came out of the ground not far from the trees. Sometimes they actually grew holding onto the trees and then on up into the branches. In some places the grapevines were so long that they reached into the treetops. Well, I knew that Poetry had a good idea. The only thing was that we had to have a vine that was fifteen or twenty feet long or longer in order to save the man out there.
Of course, if we had wanted to, we might have made a rope out of ourselves. Poetry could have lain down on the ground, and I could have lain down at the end of his big feet and taken hold of them, and Dragonfly could have crawled out over us and held onto my feet, and … But that wouldn’t have made a very strong rope, and we might have lost a boy as well as John Till.
I hesitated just a second, wishing Circus was there to go shinning up that red oak. He could have done it quick as a monkey and could have cut off the vine up there, and then we could have thrown it out to John Till in time to save his life. I thought all these things in less than half a minute. Then I did some quick acting, much quicker than I do when my dad tells me to do something I don’t especially want to do and should.
I didn’t have time to think anymore, because I was already on my way up that rough-barked oak tree. I held on as tight as I could, wrapping my legs around the trunk to keep from falling. Then I shoved one hand into my pocket to get hold of my knife. I didn’t have it!
All this time John Till was hollering for help. All this time the picayune was barking, first at me up the tree, then at John Till, and then at the excitement. And all the time I was wishing I would hurry, and I couldn’t. It was like being in a dream in which you are trying to get away from a mad bull and can’t run. I was just hanging there, holding on.
Then Poetry yelled up to me, “You can have my knife!” He threw it up to me.
It came sizzling through the air, but I couldn’t see it, and it dropped back into the leaves beside the footpath. Then Little Jim’s dad sprang into action. He had his own knife in his hand, and right away he was on his way up the tree to where I was. He was almost as good a climber as Circus. He handed the knife to me, and before you could say “Jack Robinson Crusoe,” I had that vine cut in two.
Little Jim’s dad slid down the oak tree and in almost no time at all had the end of the vine out to where John Till was. He was not a bit deeper down, as if maybe he had managed to stay up by struggling.
John Till hooked his long fingers around that end of the vine like a drowning man clinging to a straw! We started to pull, all of us that could get hold of the other end. I did too, as soon as I was down the tree.
It looked good to see John slowly coming up a little and moving toward the safe place where we were. I was glad.
Then suddenly somebody hollered, “Hey! Hey! Where’s Little Jim! He’s g-gone!”
Poetry’s yell unnerved us all so that for a second we forgot what we were doing. John Till started sliding back into the quicksand again. Little Jim gone? My head swam round and round and round. What on earth had happened? Had he slipped away while we weren’t watching, or had he tried to go out there and get John Till and had slid into the quagmire himself?
I guess the excitement made us pull too hard on the grapevine then, for the very worst thing that could have happened did happen, and that was—well, I heard it before I could believe it. I felt it next, and then I knew it, because all of a sudden I lost my balance and stumbled backward over Dragonfly and Mr. Foote’s foot, and we all landed in a heap on top of and underneath each other. The grapevine rope had broken!
9
It’s a terrible feeling knowing you have to save a man’s life or it will never be saved—knowing that if you don’t do something, nothing will be done.
It’s a worse feeling when all of a sudden, while you’re saving the life of a man you don’t like very well, you discover your best friend is gone, and you don’t know where, and you think maybe you’ll never see him again.
There we were with our broken vine, all in a jumble of legs and arms and bodies, with a dog barking so excitedly we couldn’t think straight, and with everything upside down including ourselves, trying to think what to do next. There we were when from behind us I heard the sweetest music I’d ever heard in most of my life. It was Little Jim’s voice, saying, “Here, Daddy! Here’s one of the canvas curtains from the cave. We can make a rope out of that.”
I felt so relieved that I jumped to my feet, whirled around, and made a dive for Little Jim and the canvas. I knew we’d have to cut it into strips and tie the strips together, twisting them so the new “rope” would be strong enough not to break.
But I whirled around so quick that I lost my balance and stepped too far to one side of our safe place, and the next thing I knew I was out in the ooze and water and mud. It felt as if I was also into the quicksand. I began to go down, down, down, feeling suction down there pulling on the bottoms of my feet. Right away I was in halfway to the top of my high boots, so I began to scream for help myself.
Poetry, who was standing closest to me, reached out his hand. I caught hold of it and managed to pull one of my feet out. It made a sucking noise, the way a cow’s foot does when she pulls it out of about ten inches of mud in a very muddy barnyard. Almost right away I was back onto solid ground again, but I knew we didn’t dare trifle with danger. It would be very easy for every single one of us to get out there, and every single one of us would go down.
It didn’t take Little Jim’s dad long to get a makeshift rope made out of that tough canvas.
We tossed one end out to where
John Till could take hold of it.
“Hey!” I yelled to him. “Don’t pull so hard!”
He was pulling and pulling as though he was scared half to death, and maybe he was.
Hand over hand, every one of us pulled. But Little Jim’s dad and Poetry had the strongest grip on the canvas “rope.” Steadily, steadily, we saw the man come up out of the mire. When we got him a little closer, he found solid ground under his feet. He was about waist deep at the time, right where I had been a little while before, so I knew now that I couldn’t have gone all the way down.
I held the flashlight so that everybody could see. John Till was the strangest-looking person. He was absolutely covered with mud, a whitish, brownish, yellowish mud or clay or quicksand or whatever it was, from his chin to the toes of his boots. He still looked scared. And he must have been very cold, for he was trembling and trembling.
All of a sudden I remembered a Bible story I’d once read where a jail keeper was doing the same thing—trembling. He sprang through the jail door and said to Paul and Silas—the Christian men who had been staying in his jail because they had preached the gospel—he said to them, “What must I do to be saved?” That’s a very important question, which anybody can answer by saying what Paul said to that scared jailer. What he said was, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household,” meaning a person’s whole family can be saved the same way. And Paul wasn’t talking about being saved from quicksand but about being saved forever and having eternal life.
I didn’t get to think any more along that line. John Till was standing there shaking, so we knew we had to do something. Little Jim’s dad said, “Well, John, your life has been saved. If you’ll come along home with me, we’ll get you some clean, dry clothes.”
John Till stood still. There was the kind of sob in his voice that he’d had in the cabin. He said, “Mr. Foote, I made up my mind while I was down there—going down deeper and calling for help, and nobody heard me—I made up my mind that I was goin’ to go straight. I made up my mind I wasn’t goin’ to live the kind of life I’d lived all these years. Made up my mind I was goin’ to go to church. Made up my mind—”
He just stood there and shook and sobbed, and some more tears came out. One of them fell right down on his muddy right hand, the same hand that last summer had been all doubled up into a fist and had whammed me on the jaw and knocked the daylights out of me.
“Made up my mind,” he went on with his voice choking, “that I was goin’ to set an example for my boys. I was goin’ to follow Jesus. I was goin’ to be a good man and follow Jesus and go home to heaven.”
I thought that was a wonderful thing. I guess I felt pretty good to hear a bad man say that.
So I was surprised to hear Little Jim’s dad say, “That’s wonderful, John. There are going to be a lot of people at Sugar Creek happy because of that. But do you know, John, that that won’t save you?”
We all started then toward the Foote house because John Till was so cold. We took a shortcut through the woods, and all the way home Little Jim’s dad explained things to him. You could hear our boots squishing and squashing. You could hear John Till’s boots doing the same thing because they were full of water. It was pitiful to look at him with the mud all over him like that. I hoped the police wouldn’t come and get him. I hoped he was really meaning business this time, that he was actually going to do what he said he was going to do.
One of the things Little Jim’s dad said was, “Being good won’t save you, John. You can’t follow the example of Jesus and be saved that way.”
All the rest of us were listening, not understanding it very well but knowing enough to keep still.
“It’s this way, John,” Little Jim’s dad said. “Suppose, while you were down there in the quagmire all the way up to your chin, that I had stood on the safe solid ground and said to you, ‘Look at me, John Till! Turn over a new leaf! Just follow me, and I’ll take you home. See how tall and straight I am. See how I stand on this solid ground! Look at me and follow me along home!’”
John Till didn’t say anything for maybe twenty-five feet of walking. All we could hear was the squishing and the crunching and the other noises our shoes and boots made as we hurried through the woods. We could hear the wet leaves scrunching under our feet. Now and then in a dry place we could hear the rattle of the dry ones, which reminded Poetry of a poem we had in our schoolbooks. We were far enough behind for him to quote it without disturbing Mr. Foote or John Till, so he said:
“… the husky rusty, rustle
Of the tassels of the corn …”
Then we listened again to the men.
Mr. Foote was saying, “If I’d told you that, you’d have thought I was crazy. You see, you had to be saved first, and then you could follow me home.”
Hearing that was just like turning on a small light in my mind. It was suddenly clear as broad daylight on a summer day exactly how to be saved. If anybody wanted to be saved and go to heaven and follow Jesus home, he never could do it until after he had been rescued. First, he had to be lifted out of a quagmire. I was explaining it to Little Jim the best I could, and I said to him, “You have to be lifted out of the quagmire of—” I kind of hated to say the word sin, even though it was a Bible word and everybody was a sinner.
Little Jim said to me across the top of a small rosebush, “First, you have to be saved from sin, and then you can follow Jesus.” And I knew that little fellow had spoken the truth. Well, we could see the light in Little Jim’s house, and then we could see Little Jim’s mom sitting beside their radio. We knew that pretty soon we would be there.
At least I thought I saw Little Jim’s mom sitting by the radio. I couldn’t really tell, except that I knew their radio was near the window.
About that minute we came to a rail fence. All of us climbed over and down into a deep ditch, scrambled up through the long, tangled dead weeds, which in the summertime had been very green along the fencerow there, and reached the narrow road that goes up to Little Jim’s house and then on past to the red-brick schoolhouse where all the Sugar Creek Gang goes to school.
There was a small hill that we had to climb before we came to the front gate. Then Mr. Foote opened the gate, and we were about ready to go in when the lights of a car came swinging up the road where we had just been.
The car was going very fast. It went bangety-bang across the wooden bridge that spans the small tributary that flows into Sugar Creek. When the car reached the lane that leads into the Footes’ barnyard, it turned in and stopped all of a sudden, and a powerful, searchlight swung around in our direction and lighted up everyone of us.
You could see us as plain as day, standing there by the narrow wooden gate just getting ready to go through.
“It’s the police!” Poetry whispered hoarsely to me.
I expected John Till to get scared again and turn around and run. I thought he’d run down the road and dive under the bridge.
But John Till said, “It’s—it’s the police, and they’re after me. It’s all right. I’m ready to go. I’m ready to go!”
It was just as if he had heard the policemen in the car over there telling him to put his hands up, because he didn’t wait. He shot both mud-covered hands right up in the air, swung back through the small gate, and started walking toward the light. He raised his voice and called to them, “I’m surrendering!”
A policeman stepped out of the car, walked over to him, snapped on a pair of handcuffs, and was going to make him get into the car.
Little Jim’s dad spoke up then and said, “Men, John Till is ready to surrender to you, and he is willing to go to jail tonight, but he’s been out in the swamp, and he’s all covered with mud. I’d like to take him into our house and let him have a good warm bath, a lunch, and a change of clothes. I have a suit that he could wear, and then I’ll bring him down to the jail to you as soon as he is ready, or I’ll bring him down tomorrow morning. He can stay at our house all night if he
wants to.”
I knew that Bob Till was already living there, because he was paroled to Mr. Foote, and I started to wonder something but didn’t get to finish it.
Well, most policemen are kind when they have to arrest people, even though they have to be very firm sometimes. Anyway, this one said, “He won’t need to take any bath first. We have a shower down at the jail. And as for clothes, we have a striped suit down there which he can wear. John Till,” he said, directing his words to very cold and quiet and trembling John Till, “climb into the back of the car there!” His voice was kind, but it meant business.
Mr. Till hesitated a moment. He looked over at Little Jim’s dad. Then he looked around the circle at the rest of us, and in a very trembly voice—maybe trembling because he was still so cold or because he was still not over being frightened—he said, “Boys, I’ve never had any use for the Sugar Creek Gang up to this time, but you’ve proved to me that you are gentlemen. I’m proud to have my son Tom be a member of your gang. I’m proud of the way you’ve treated my boy Bob. And now I’m proud of the way you have treated me. I’m not goin’ to forget it in a long time. I want to thank you. And now—”
John Till was still talking, but then he stopped. I could hear the rattle of the handcuffs on his wrists. I don’t think I’d ever felt so sorry for a man in my life. I hated to see him receive the punishment he deserved, and yet there wasn’t anything any of us could do about it.
I guess the weather had been clearing up all the time. But I was surprised when the moon came bursting out from under a bank of clouds and shone down through the leafless trees in the yard and on John Till’s face. For some reason, I decided I liked John Till and was going to be kind to him. So I started to say something, but the words got stuck in my throat. I croaked like a frog when he is trying to holler in the spring along the creek and his voice chokes off and he sounds like a tin can that has been hit by a rock that some boy has thrown at it.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12 Page 7