Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12

by Paul Hutchens

  He wasn’t going straight but was staggering this way and that, the way Circus’s dad used to stagger when he came out of a saloon before he became a Christian and God cleaned him up inside so that he didn’t drink anymore.

  He stopped right in front of the old wooden door and stared at it as if he had never seen it before. Then he staggered forward again, and the next thing I knew he was inside. The door went shut after him with a bang, leaving all of us on the outside.

  Well, there we were, staring at each other and wondering what had happened and what we ought to do and how quickly we ought to do it.

  “Let’s go get Mr. Fisher,” Dragonfly said. Then he sneezed three times real quick. His teeth were chattering, he was so scared.

  “Think we’re a bunch of sissies?” Circus said in a half-mad voice. And the way he said it made every one of us decide that not a one of us was.

  “He sure is crazy,” Poetry said and looked at me.

  I said, “He’s mentally ill.”

  Little Jim piped up and said with tears in his voice, “What—what’ll Old Man Paddler say if he finds out his brother is crazy?”

  I’d forgotten for a minute that that was who I thought the old man was, so that started us all to talking, and Big Jim called a meeting.

  We couldn’t take time to use all the rules for what is called an official meeting. Big Jim said to us, “Didn’t we plan to all come over and see the old man right after we’d been in swimming?”

  We all said, “Yes.”

  Big Jim said, “Well, then, what are we waiting for? Why don’t we go in and see him? Anybody here afraid to?”

  I looked at Little Jim, and he was looking all around him for something. I knew he was looking for a stick to carry, but there wasn’t any. I felt sorry for him because around Sugar Creek he always carried a stick. That’s one reason he was so brave whenever he was in any danger.

  Big Jim looked at all of us and said in a thundery voice, “Are we afraid or aren’t we? Are we going in to see the old man or not?”

  I felt something hot running up and down my trembling spine, and I spoke up quick, “We’re going in!”

  My voice was almost drowned out by the rest of the gang’s voices saying the same thing as loud as I had: “We’re going in!”

  11

  I was very brave while Big Jim’s voice was making me feel that way, but I hadn’t any sooner said, “We’re going in,” than I was scared. I’d never been inside a palm-leaf house where a crazy man lived.

  When we’d gotten the rest of our clothes on, we started to walk along behind each other to that old wooden door. I began to feel my heart pounding and pounding. And I was also feeling my fists double up as if I was going to be in a fight or something.

  About twenty feet from the door, Big Jim stopped us and looked around to see if we were all there and all brave enough to go in. All of us acted as if we were. Then he and Circus went up to the door first and knocked and called, “May we come in?”

  Nobody answered, but Big Jim turned the old-fashioned doorknob and pushed open the door, stepping back at the same time, and I got a look inside. All I could see, though, was a dirt floor that was swept as clean as the yard we were standing in and a long room with several old wooden straight-backed chairs beside a table.

  “Hello!” Big Jim called. “Buenas tardes!”

  But there wasn’t any answer.

  Big Jim called again, and when still nobody answered, he pushed the door open farther. And then we all heard it at the same time, I guess. The sound was coming from another room somewhere in the house, and it sounded like “Help!”

  We knew we had to do something. So in we all went, following Big Jim, who picked up one of the old wooden chairs, just in case he had to use it to protect himself.

  It was the strangest-looking house I’d ever been in. It was a little like one of the straw sheds we have on our farm. My dad builds small sheds out of boards, leaving big cracks between, and then has straw blown all over them with the blower of a threshing machine. When you’re on the inside, you can see the boards and also the cracks between, which are all filled in with straw. Except that John Machete’s house had palm leaves instead of straw all over the boards and poles.

  Big Jim whirled around and held up a finger to all of us to keep still while he and Circus crept toward the other room.

  Even while I was scared and my teeth were chattering, I noticed that the room toward which Big Jim and Circus were creeping was really just another thatched house right beside the one we were in. The eave of its roof met the eave of the roof of the house we were in, and between the two hung a big split royal palm log. All royal palm trees are hollow on the inside, somebody had told us, like a cane fishing pole, only they don’t have any joints the way fishing poles have.

  Poetry didn’t act scared at all. He whispered in my ear and told me what the log was for. He said, “That’s called a ‘canal,’ because it’s hung there to catch the water which runs down the roofs of the two houses, and it falls in the hollow log and runs away instead of inside.” That sounded like good sense.

  I had started to think about how smart the island people were, when, from the other room, the old man interrupted my thoughts by saying to Big Jim and Circus, “Who are you? What do you want? Where am I? How did I get here?”

  My eyes saw him sitting in a corner beside a long table that had a little hole in the center, and a little fire of live coals was in the hole. I knew it was a charcoal fire like they had in the missionary’s home. Most Islanders use charcoal stoves to cook with.

  In the old man’s hands was his machete with its gold-inlaid handle. And he looked at us as though he would use it on the first one of us who got too close to him or who might do anything else he didn’t like. So we just stared at him and he at us, and he held onto his machete.

  Well, he had asked four questions: “Who are you? What do you want? Where am I? How did I get here?”

  Little Jim piped up and said, “We’re the Sugar Creek Gang from the United States, and we’re Christians, and we won’t hurt you.”

  You should have seen the strange look that came into the old man’s eyes when Little Jim said that. We couldn’t believe our ears when he said, “The last time I was in Sugar Creek was two years ago, just before I came down here.”

  The very second the old man said “Sugar Creek,” he got a scared look in his eyes again, and his old hands gripped his machete, as if he was expecting to have to use it any minute.

  He wasn’t looking at us, though, but was looking between my head and Big Jim’s to something or somebody behind us. The look in his eyes said he was seeing a ghost or maybe a dead man.

  Right away I thought, Is somebody coming into the room, or is some fierce person standing behind me—maybe ready to do something to all of us? Being in a foreign country made it easy for me to be scared, when I was already scared anyway. That look in his eyes was so fierce that I was afraid to turn around. I felt my knees getting weak, as though I was going to slide down kerplop onto the swept dirt floor.

  All of us must have thought he was looking at something behind us. First Dragonfly turned around quick to see what was there, and then the rest of us did the same thing. But, shucks! There wasn’t anything there at all. Nobody was coming into the room. All that we could see was a mirror on the wall—just an ordinary looking glass, maybe about the size of the one that hangs on the bathroom wall in our house at home.

  “Who—who is that?” the old man cried and staggered out of his chair and started toward the mirror.

  Everything was still crazy, and so also was the old man, I thought. He had his machete in his hands, but he wasn’t paying attention to any of us. He was only looking with a crazy expression in his eyes at the mirror.

  Then he let out a terrible cry, and what he said was, “It’s me! I’m an old man! I’m an old man!” He almost screamed the words.

  Then he staggered back away from the mirror as if he was afraid of it. He lifted his
hand to the place on his forehead where he had been struck when he’d fallen over the plow. And then he swayed a little, and, like a tired old maple tree along Sugar Creek, he started to fall again. Before any one of us could get to him, he had crumpled to the floor.

  “Quick!” Big Jim ordered. “You, Bill! Run and get Mr. Fisher. We’ve got to get him into the mission hospital.”

  I certainly didn’t feel like running. I didn’t feel like anything, but something had to be done. So I whirled around, dived under the canal into the other room, dodged the table and a wooden chair, and swished through the still open door, out across the old man’s yard, dodging rosebushes and flowers of different kinds, running lickety-sizzle toward the creek. There was a place where I could get across on some stones at a narrow, shallow spot that the gang had found on Saturday.

  I had to pass the swimming hole first, though, and right there was where I stumbled over something and fell down, tumbling over myself and hurting my knees. I scrambled to my feet and looked around to see what I had stumbled over, and it was a—I could hardly believe my eyes—it was an honest-to-goodness cane fishing pole like the kind we used at Sugar Creek. Somebody had been fishing with it, in fact had set and left it. There was a line on it, and the very minute I scrambled to my feet the pole started to wiggle as though it was alive. I looked out into the water. Sure enough, there was a fish on the line out there somewhere. Even while I was scared and worried and hurrying to get the missionary, I was all of a sudden lonesome for home again and wanted to get back to Sugar Creek and go fishing.

  But as much as I wanted to stay and catch that fish, I didn’t dare. I came right away to the spot where there were stones across the narrow place, and I whisked across and ran like a deer for the hospital.

  I came panting past the windmill that was used to pump water for the mission and rushed up to the red-tile-roofed missionary cabin, calling: “Mr. Fisher! Mr. Fisher! Come quick! John Machete has gone crazy and has fainted and is dangerous and might kill somebody!”

  12

  We got the old man to the hospital, and it looked as if he was a lot worse than just being mentally ill. They kept him there the rest of that day and also the next and the next. All he did was wake up and go to sleep and wake up and go to sleep and talk about Sugar Creek. Once when I was standing in the doorway looking in at him as he lay there asleep in his clean white cot, he woke up and said to the missionary nurse, “Bring me the morning paper.”

  The missionary nurse had one lying on a table close by, and it was a copy of the Palacia paper I’d seen before. Old John Machete looked at it and said, “That’s all wrong! The date is wrong!”

  Then he let the paper fall onto his cot. It slid off onto the floor, and he went back to sleep again.

  Just that minute Mr. Fisher came in, and he and the nurse started talking quietly not far from where I was. I heard them say to each other, “Looks like amnesia. He may be an American.”

  Well, when I heard that, I was so excited I could hardly stand still for wanting to dive out of doors and hurry to the gang and tell them what I’d heard and that maybe we’d actually found Old Man Paddler’s twin brother.

  I raced lickety-sizzle along the little path that ran from the hospital to the missionary’s cabin to where I knew the gang was supposed to be taking their siestas. I was supposed to be taking mine, too, but I wasn’t because I’d been down talking to the kind of pretty nurse, because of her having red hair like mine and also because of my wanting to find out what they had found out about the old man. But mostly because of not wanting to take a siesta.

  But I had something to tell the gang now, I thought, as my feet flew up the path to where they were. In a flash I was across the porch and through the door into the big airy tile-floored room where the gang would be trying to sleep. The minute I came bursting in, I yelled, “Old John Machete is Old Man Paddler’s twin brother!”

  Dragonfly was the only one of the gang who wasn’t asleep. He was sitting on the edge of his cot under the open window and was blowing his nose with a big red handkerchief.

  The gang woke up, each one in a different way. Poetry grunted, groaned, and rolled over with a jerk that shook his cot; then he shoved a fist into his pillow and started to sleep again. Little Jim, who was sleeping on his back, just opened his eyes, blinked them at me, blinked twice more, and started to rub his eyes awake.

  Circus was wide awake quick, rolling over and out of bed in a hurry. He was feeling so fine that he looked up at the rafters stretched across the room above his head as if he wished he was up there. That is, he looked like that until he saw what I saw at the same time. It was a spider almost as big as Little Jim’s hand when it is spread out—or, anyway, as big as my baby sister Charlotte Ann’s hand.

  “Look!” Circus cried. “A spider!” Maybe he remembered the black widow spider that had bitten his dad once and almost killed him.

  Right away everybody was awake and looking at the terribly big spider.

  Just then Dragonfly sneezed twice. He looked up at the rafter and at the spider and said, “I’ll bet I’m allergic to—”

  Well, we’d heard him say he was allergic so much that we all were tired of it. He didn’t get to finish his sentence because one of the gang’s pillows went kerplop into his face before he could.

  “Honest,” I said. “They’ve just found out old John Machete is Old Man Paddler’s brother and—”

  And right away that was the end of their siestas. You should have heard us talking and talking and still talking and deciding—even before the doctor and the nurse did—that we were right.

  This story is getting too long, but that’s actually what they found out—that Old Man Paddler’s brother had come down to Palm Tree Island to get an important news story, and he had been arrested for being a spy and had been put in a cell in El Torro Castle. He had tried to get out and had been hit on the head with a blunt instrument of some kind. The shock had been so much for him that it was like shutting a little door to one room of his brain, and he couldn’t remember who he was or where he came from. In fact, he had been a little unbalanced all the years between then and now.

  “He came out here and built a house along the creek and did a lot of fishing, because when a man has amnesia he likes to do what he used to like to do,” Poetry said, having once read a story in a magazine about amnesia.

  “Won’t Old Man Paddler be happy?” Little Jim said. “I’ll bet they’ll go fishing together again like they used to when they were just our size and used to live and play together along Sugar Creek.”

  All of a sudden Poetry said, “I’m homesick. I want to go home and go swimming in Sugar Creek.”

  “It’ll be wintertime when we get home,” I said. “I’m lonesome for a snowdrift.”

  Dragonfly sneezed twice, and it’s a good thing there wasn’t any snowdrift right there then, or maybe he would have fallen headfirst into the middle of it—and I know which one of the Sugar Creek Gang would have made him do it.

  We were on the old man’s side of the river that day, not far from the place where we had had the interesting experience with his goat. The goat was in his pen now, and the wind was blowing our way, which is maybe why Dragonfly was sneezing worse than usual. But he was feeling good anyway—in fact, all of us were.

  Just then we heard the goat baa a few times, and Dragonfly suddenly took out his red handkerchief and said, “I told you my lottery ticket meant good luck!”

  “It did not,” I said. “It almost got us all killed!”

  Dragonfly set his face, and then he got a mischievous twinkle in both his dragonfly-like eyes. “Yes, but if I hadn’t kept it, and if the goat hadn’t tried to eat it, and if the old man hadn’t gotten knocked over and bumped his head, he wouldn’t have had the amnesia knocked out of him.”

  I just stared at him, disgusted, but he wasn’t through talking. He said, “It’s also a good thing I found that lucky horseshoe at home before I came, because that helped Mom to decide to let me come
. And if I hadn’t come, there wouldn’t have been any lottery ticket for the goat to eat, and there wouldn’t have been any red handkerchief, and there wouldn’t have been any—”

  That was as far as he got, for Poetry was reminded of the old woman who went to market, and he started to say,

  “The rat began to gnaw the rope, the rope began to hang the butcher, the butcher began to kill the cow, the cow began to drink the water, the water began to put out the fire, the fire began to burn the stick, the stick began to beat the dog, the dog began to bite the pig, the pig began to jump over the stile, and they all got home that night.”

  “Let’s go swimming,” Circus said, and already he was on his way to the creek.

  It would be our last swim before going back to America. Boy, oh, boy, I was glad we were going home. We’d all had a great time on Palm Tree Island, learning and doing a lot of things and seeing what it is like to be in a foreign country. Maybe I’d be a foreign missionary myself someday, I thought, and Little Jim had already made up his mind he was going to be one.

  Right after we finished swimming we ate supper, which was corn and rice and fried bananas and coconuts and also a very good cold drink called limonada bien fria, which means “good cold lemonade.”

  “I’d rather have sassafras tea up in Old Man Paddler’s cabin,” Little Jim said and nudged me. I looked down at his face, and he had a homesick expression in his eyes.

  Along with the lemonade we had torta con helado, which was cake and ice cream, and was it ever good. The missionary family had a refrigerator that ran on kerosene, which some kind Christian in the United States had paid for, and I knew who it was.

  Even eating the ice cream made me homesick, and I was glad we were going to get to go home soon. But if I had known what was going to happen about a week after we got home and started going to school again, I wouldn’t have been so happy.

  But of course I didn’t know, either, that our very pretty schoolteacher, whom we all liked better than any we’d ever had, was going to get married at Christmastime and that a man teacher was going to take her place. Imagine that! A man teacher for a country school! For the school the Sugar Creek Gang all had to go to!