Right away he was out and sitting on the edge of his bed, leaning forward a little so he could breathe easier. Then he said, “Where’s your flashlight, Bill?”
“What do you want it for?” I said.
“I’m going out where the air is good,” he said wheezily.
It really was pitiful to see him—hear him, rather, for I couldn’t see him very well.
“There might be some wild animal out there,” I said. “In fact, wild dogs run loose on Palm Tree Island at night.” I really didn’t see any sense in Dragonfly’s going outdoors.
“My dad gets asthma sometimes,” he said, “and he always gets up, if it’s summertime, and goes out into the fresh air.”
Well, the air was as fresh in that room as any I’d ever breathed, but Dragonfly said he was allergic to the mosquito netting, so up we all three got and into our slippers. In the moonlight I could see us—Poetry in his striped pajamas, which made him look like a prisoner; me with stripes running up and down mine, making me look like a beanpole; and Dragonfly with his pink ones, which looked a darkish white.
We went quietly to the door, opened it, and stepped out onto a tiled porch, and then down some stone steps and out under the prettiest moon you ever saw. For a minute I got to thinking about the folks back home and about Charlotte Ann lying with her face buried against her fist in her crib, and about my dad and mom sound asleep in their room right off our side porch. And I wondered if maybe my parents were awake instead, wondering about me and also worrying, especially Mom, who did most of the out-loud worrying for our family.
Anyway, there wasn’t any use for me to worry about whether they were worrying about me, so I stopped worrying, but for a minute I was lonesome. We walked down toward the rio, sort of slow for Dragonfly’s sake, although he was already better.
“Do you hear that?” Poetry said all of a sudden.
I said, “No, what?”
“Sh!” he said, and I shushed, stopping stock-still and getting bumped into by Dragonfly.
We all listened, and we heard a crazy sound like somebody calling for help. It was coming from a different direction than the one from which we had just come, so we knew it wasn’t any of the rest of the Sugar Creek Gang trying to fool us.
Poetry swung his flashlight around in the direction the sound was coming from, and we saw, away off to the right, what at first looked like a straw stack but which we guessed was the house of some farmer. It was probably made out of the big leaves of a royal palm tree.
Pretty soon we heard the noise again, and it sounded like a ghost’s voice.
“We’ve got to do something,” Poetry said. All of a sudden his ducklike voice sounded like a man’s, and he said, “Come on! Follow me!”
We thought maybe we ought to call the gang or tell the missionary or Barry Boyland, but the noise came again, and we all gasped, and Dragonfly said, “My asthma’s gone,” which probably meant it had been gone for a while. Somewhere I’d heard that when you’re scared or mad or terribly excited you can breathe easier because your adrenal glands work faster and better then.
Anyway, that meant we could all run faster and get away if we had to.
So the three of us started toward that old thatched building.
Just that second a dark something came out through a place in the side of the building and darted straight toward my flashlight, which was shining right into its eyes. Then it began making a trembling-voiced noise as though it was either scared or terribly mad. It looked like a wild animal with horns.
Almost before we knew it, we were on our way down the hill, past the row of little new pine trees, and were dashing back up to the cottage where we’d been staying. We were panting and scared worse than we had been for a long time. We made so much noise, in spite of trying to keep quiet, that we woke up a lot of people.
Pretty soon, the rest of the Sugar Creek Gang was up, all standing around in their different kinds of pajamas, and a carbide light was lighted, and we were telling the whole scary story to them and to everybody else that was there. But we couldn’t seem to get anybody excited.
“There aren’t any wild animals on this part of the island,” the missionary said. “What you saw was probably one of our oxen.”
“An ox can’t run that fast,” I said, and Dragonfly and Poetry said the same thing.
Well, we couldn’t get anybody to believe us, so after a while we hardly believed ourselves. Anyway, we all went back to bed, each one of us being very sleepy.
It seemed I hadn’t any more than crawled under my mosquito net than I heard somebody sneezing several times in a row. I grunted and groaned, heard somebody sneeze again and again, and then I knew it was Dragonfly—and it was morning.
I looked across the room at him, and he was sitting up and grinning at us, and it looked as though he was feeling fine, except for having to sneeze.
Then I heard voices outside, and one of them was Little Jim’s, saying, “Hey, Circus, be careful!”
Even before I knew what I was going to do, I was out from under my mosquito net and walking on the cold tile floor, which is what most of the good floors on the island were made of. I crossed the room to the tall window, which was not really a window but a long door that reached from the floor almost to the high ceiling. I looked out through a crack in the wooden slatted blinds, and, sure enough, there was Circus halfway up a palm tree growing right outside our window. And Little Jim was standing there looking up at him. There were also several other boys and girls looking up at him and jabbering in Spanish. One of them was a girl about Circus’s age, which is probably why all of a sudden he had wanted to climb the tree.
Suddenly I wanted to be outdoors, so I made a dive for my clothes and squirmed myself into them. Then, with Poetry and Dragonfly right behind me, the three of us got out onto the tiled porch and outside, following a stone pathway bordered with flowers of different kinds on either side. We went out to the little roadway where the children were and where the Sugar Creek Gang was.
All of us were looking at Circus, who kept right on going up the royal palm tree. It was the prettiest palm I had ever seen, and the trunk looked like a round cement column. The treetop toward which Circus was climbing very fast was maybe three times higher than the missionary cabin we had stayed in that night. At the top, the long leaves and their long stems looked kind of like lazy turkey feathers spread out like an umbrella in every direction.
Everywhere I looked there were palm trees, looking like soldiers marching out across the sugar cane fields and farmlands where they grew different kinds of vegetables. Not far away was a wooden plow that looked like some pictures I’d seen of plows that were used in Palestine where Jesus used to live while He was here on earth. There was a yoke, which they said was used for oxen when they pulled the plows. On Monday we were going to see oxen plowing and might even get a chance to drive one of them.
Dragonfly said, “Look, Bill! There’s what we saw last night and were scared of.”
“It is not,” I said, looking at a very sleepy and reddish-looking ox, which they call a vaca in Spanish.
Poetry pinched me. “Sh! I’ve got an idea.”
I kept still and waited for a chance to be alone with Poetry, when he would tell why he had shushed me.
After a while we all had breakfast in one of the missionary homes. The Sugar Creek Gang sat around a big wooden table in a tile-floored room. We were served by some of the young ladies who had come down from the United States to be missionaries. There were also two or three island girls who helped wait on the table.
And now I had better tell you what happened while we were in church. The church building was about two miles from the mission station. It was a little place made out of two houses that had once been standing side by side. They had just knocked out the wall that had separated the two houses, and that had made one big room, and it was now a church.
I never in all my whole life had seen such interesting-looking boys and girls and grownup people. Every one of
them had a dark face and dark hair and very pretty eyes, and every one of them sang songs as though they liked to do that better than anything else in the world. I couldn’t understand the words because they were Spanish, but I had somebody write them down for me, and this is what they sang:
Yo tengo vida eterna en mi corazon,
En mi corazon, en mi corazon.
Yo tengo vida eterna en mi corazon,
Porque Cristo me salvo.
Which means,
I have eternal life in my heart,
In my heart, in my heart.
I have eternal life in my heart,
Because Christ saved me.
They asked Circus to sing a solo, and Little Jim was going to play a small folding organ for him.
The place where I was sitting was not far from the entrance at the back of the church, and there were people all around me. All of a sudden I heard something in the road outside. I forgot for a minute that Circus was singing his beautiful song “I Will Sing of My Redeemer and His Wondrous Love to Me.” I looked outside, and there, coming down the road, making a little cloud of dust, was a brown billy goat hitched to a very small buggy that looked like a wheelchair.
8
I knew right away it was the old man we had seen in Palacia and whom Poetry and I had chased. I forgot everything that was going on in that whitewashed church and looked at the old man. He came driving right up close to where we were, turned into the churchyard, and turned around as though he knew exactly where he was going. Without knowing I was going to, I slipped out of my seat and out of doors and watched. He looked almost exactly like Old Man Paddler, and I was so sure it was his twin brother that I didn’t know what to do.
He climbed out of his buggy and was very spry for an old man. The next thing I knew he was tying the goat to an old-fashioned hitching post like the kind they used to have in American towns for horses. There were also some saddled horses by the church, because a lot of the people had come on horseback.
The old man turned, looked around, and, with that same long machete in his hand, came hobbling toward the church entrance. Next thing I knew I was following right along behind him. Somebody saw him coming, got up out of his seat, and let the old man have a place to sit right by the door. I sat down just a few chairs away.
All of a sudden Circus, who was singing, “Sing, O sing, of my Redeemer,” stopped and said, “Why, it’s Old Man Paddler!”
All the people turned around to see what he was looking at. Circus’s face turned as red as a Palm Tree Island vaca. Then he went on singing. Even Little Jim was bothered for a minute and pressed the wrong key.
All during the song service and the sermon and everything, that old man just sat there as though he was wondering what it was all about and why he had come. He kept letting his eyes rove around over all the different things, the way a boy in the United States would do in church when he didn’t understand the sermon but had to keep still anyway.
There really were a lot of different interesting things to look at, such as a white chicken, which was just big enough to have for dinner. Without even acting scared, it came walking into the church and strolled around the aisles, its head and neck going forward and backward the way chickens’ heads do when they’re walking. Also there were all kinds of different-colored clothes on the people, and the sermon was in Spanish, and maybe the old man couldn’t hear it very well anyway, I thought.
Just outside, where I could see them through a large open door, six or seven small riding horses were tied. Also out there was an open well with not even a pump on it. Before church started, the gang had watched the people who lived next door to the church let down a long rope with a pail on the end of it and draw up some clear, clean water. We’d been told that the water was better and safer to drink if it was boiled first. But some people on Palm Tree Island didn’t boil their water first because of not being afraid of germs, since they didn’t know there were any.
While the old man wasn’t listening to the sermon, and should have been because maybe he needed to, he kept looking up at the rafters of the church, which looked like the ones in our barn at Sugar Creek. Or else he would look at the people, or at the organ, or at the chicken, which nobody else—except for maybe a few of the Sugar Creek Gang—was looking at and shouldn’t have been. He also looked at a small black-haired baby with long black eyelashes, sleeping in its mother’s arms.
Whatever made the old man not listen to the sermon? I thought, kind of disgusted with him because Dad and Mom had taught me that you are supposed to listen even when the sermon isn’t very interesting. Every now and then he would pull his machete out of its sheath, test the blade of it with his thumb to see if it was sharp, and then he would put it back in again and start to listen a little to the sermon.
He didn’t stay for all the church service, though. Before the minister finished, the old man got up and walked out, with me following, hardly knowing I was going to. Then he untied his goat, climbed into his little buggy, and started to drive away.
But I wasn’t going to let him get away this time without finding out where he lived, so I ran after him, all the time remembering the promise I’d made to Old Man Paddler to help find his long-lost twin brother.
I was right beside his billy goat as the old man picked up the lines and clucked to the goat to start, just the way Dad does to our horses at home. I said, “Buenos Dias, Senor Machete.”
He looked down at me with the same kind eyes Old Man Paddler has, and there was a twinkle in them as he said, “Buenos Dias, Bill Collins!”
“What!” I said. “How’d you know my name?”
And he said, “That’s easy. I read it in the Palacia Post.” And he pulled out of his pocket an English newspaper, which was published every day in Palacia, and it gave the names of people that had come down to the island from the United States to visit. My name was there along with all the rest of the Sugar Creek Gang’s.
That still didn’t tell me how he knew how I was me, but maybe anybody who has ever seen red hair and freckles like mine will have a hard time to forget me.
The old man took hold of his reins as if he was getting ready to tell his goat to get going. Then he said, “You boys stop to see me some time. I live just across the creek from the missionary. Billy and I will be pleased to see you.”
Then he clucked to his goat, which I had learned is called a cabra in Spanish, and went spinning down the road back toward the place where he said he lived.
Just that minute I heard somebody coming up behind me, and it was Poetry, all excited and saying, “Hey, don’t let him get away!” He had come as quick as he could right after he’d noticed that the old man and I were gone.
But I stopped Poetry from being so excited by telling him, “John Machete lives just across the creek from where we stayed last night.”
We hated to go back into church because of attracting so much attention and maybe interrupting the sermon. So I said, “Let’s go over under that lemon tree and talk awhile,” which we did. There was a grapefruit tree right there too, with big, yellowish grapefruit on it and also some green ones. Some yellow ones on the ground were already spoiling. Some people on this island didn’t like grapefruit very well, not knowing how good they were for their health.
Poetry stooped, grunted, and came back up with a big, round half-flat grapefruit in his hand. We stood there beside the tree and were feeling fine because we both thought we knew something very important. But we also were feeling just a little guilty for not being in church. The people would not know we had to leave because of something important.
All of a sudden somebody sneezed behind me, and I wondered if it was Dragonfly. So I turned around, and it was.
Then I heard singing from the church and knew the sermon was over and that pretty soon church would be out and we would be eating dinner, which I was very hungry for right that minute. I was right, for almost right away I heard the organ going and then the people were singing something, which I later found ou
t was:
Hay perdon por la sangre de Jesus
Hay perdon por su muerte en la cruz.
It meant:
There’s pardon by the blood of Jesus,
There’s pardon by His death on the cross.
That is the only way anybody in the whole world, even in America, can be saved and go to heaven. Everybody in the world stays lost unless they believe that and let the Savior forgive them.
Well, Poetry, Dragonfly, and I got to the church in time to peep in and see Little Jim sitting at the organ, pedaling away, and a tall, blond, happy-faced missionary singing. And the people were singing too, as if it was the most fun they’d had in all their lives. Yet they also were kind of serious faced, as though they liked Somebody very much. Their faces looked like my mom’s face does sometimes when she has my baby sister, Charlotte Ann, in her arms. And Charlotte Ann is asleep, and mom is looking down at her and saying nothing but is happy.
The porch where we were was all along the side of the church auditorium, and we were standing near the back, so we could see everybody. But the people couldn’t see us without turning around, which you aren’t supposed to do in church anyway. Just that minute the minister had everybody shut their eyes and bow their heads. When he asked if anybody wanted to be prayed for, I saw three or four people put up their hands. One of them was a little girl sitting away down on the front row. She was the same girl Circus had climbed the tree for early that morning.
All of a sudden Poetry said in my ear, “There is some of Old Man Paddler’s money being changed into Christians.”
And right that minute I decided that Old Man Paddler was maybe one of the greatest men in the whole world.
A little later the meeting was over, and the people who had raised their hands went with the American missionary and a Palm Tree Island minister into a little room behind the platform to pray. For a minute I was remembering the time I had climbed up into our haymow back in the United States and had gotten down on both knees in the hay and prayed. That was the time a red-haired, fiery-tempered, freckle-faced boy found out for sure that his sins were all forgiven forever.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12 Page 13