Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12

by Paul Hutchens

  There were nearly half the leaves still on the tree in spite of its being winter and nearly every other tree in the woods being as bare as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. A beech tree usually keeps on a lot of its old frostbitten brown leaves nearly all winter and only drops them in the spring when the new leaves start to come and push them off.

  It was the same tree where one summer day there had been a big old mother bear and her cub. All of a sudden, while sitting there on my stack of sleds, I was remembering that fight we’d had with the fierce bear. I guessed maybe Little Jim was remembering it also. Everything was so quiet, I said to him, “I bet you’re thinking about how you killed a bear right there.”

  Little Jim, who had his stick, which he always carried with him, said, “Nope, something else.”

  Poetry spoke up from where he was standing beside Mr. Black’s snow statue and said, “I’ll bet you’re thinking about the little cub which you had for a pet after you killed the bear.”

  Little Jim took a swipe with his stick at the trunk of the tree, and I noticed that his stick went ker-whack right on some initials on the trunk that said “W. J. C.,” which meant “William Jasper Collins,” which is my full name—only nobody ever calls me by the middle name except my dad, who calls me that only when I’ve done something I shouldn’t.

  Then Little Jim said to Poetry, just as his stick ker-whammed the initials, “Nope, something else.” Then he whirled around and started making marks that looked like rabbit tracks in the snow with his stick.

  Tom Till spoke up and said, “I’ll bet you’re thinking about the fight we had that day.”

  It was in that fight that I’d licked little red-haired Tom Till, who with his big brother, Bob, had belonged to another gang. But now Little Tom’s family lived in our neighborhood, and Tom had joined our gang, also went to our Sunday school, and was a good friend. But Bob was still a tough guy and hated Big Jim and all of us, and we never knew when he was going to start some new trouble in the Sugar Creek territory.

  “Well,” I said to Little Jim, who was looking up into the tree again as though he was still thinking something important, “what are you thinking about?”

  And he said, “I was just thinking about all the leaves and wondering why they didn’t fall off like the ones on the maple trees do. Don’t they know they’re dead?”

  I looked at the tree Little Jim was looking at, and it was the first time I’d noticed that the beech tree still had nearly every one of its leaves on it. They were very brown, even browner than some of the maple and walnut tree leaves had been when they’d all fallen off last fall.

  “How could they know they’re dead, if they are dead?” Poetry said.

  Just that second I heard Circus and Dragonfly coming up from the direction of the bayou, which was down close to Sugar Creek itself. Circus had his knife and was just finishing trimming the small branch he had in his hand. Dragonfly had a long fierce-looking switch and was swinging it around and saying loud and fierce, “All right, Bill Collins, you can take a licking for throwing that snowball—take that—and that—and that—” Dragonfly was making fierce swings with his switch and grunting every time he swung.

  I knew what he was thinking about—the snowball I’d thrown in our schoolyard that week, the one that had accidentally hit our new teacher right in the middle of the top of his bald head.

  Circus stuck both those switches into the snowman, right where his right hand was supposed to be. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out an ear of corn and began to shell it, shoving handfuls of the big yellow kernels into his pocket at the same time. A jiffy later, all that was left was a long red corncob, which he broke in half and stuck one of the halves into the snowman’s face for a nose.

  He took the other half of the corncob and with his knife made a hole in its side near the bottom. Then he took a small stick out of his pocket and stuck it into the cob.

  “What on earth?” I said.

  He said, “All right, everybody, shut your eyes,” which we wouldn’t.

  We watched him finish what he was doing, which was making a pipe for the snowman to smoke. A moment later it was sticking into the snowman’s face right under his nose—a corncob pipe. It looked very funny, and we all laughed, all except Little Jim, who just giggled a little.

  We all stood back and looked at it, and it was the funniest-looking snowman I’d ever seen—brown “hair” all around his head, and none on top, and a big red nose, and a corncob pipe sticking out at an angle, and black walnuts for buttons on his coat, and a couple of fierce-looking switches in his hand. Also there were two thin corn silk eyebrows that curled up a little.

  “There’s only one thing wrong with it,” Poetry said in his ducklike voice. He was standing beside me and squinting up at the ridiculous-looking snowman.

  “What?” I said, thinking how perfect it was.

  “You can’t tell who it is supposed to be. It needs some extra identification.”

  “It’s perfect,” I said and looked at Little Jim to see if he didn’t think the same thing. But he was looking up into the beech tree again, as if he was still thinking about something mysterious and wasn’t interested in an ordinary snowman.

  I looked toward Dragonfly, and he was listening in the direction of a half-dozen little cedar trees near the bayou, as though he was either seeing or hearing something, which he seemed to think he was.

  Suddenly he said, “Psst, gang, quiet! I think I saw something move over there. Sh! Don’t look now, or he’ll—”

  We all looked, of course, but didn’t see anything, although I had a funny feeling inside of me that said, What if it’s Mr. Black watching us? What if all of a sudden he should come walking out from behind those cedar trees and see the snowman we’ve made of him, and what if he’d decide to use one or two of the switches on us? Not a one of us was sure he didn’t not like us enough to do that to us.

  Poetry spoke up then and said, “I say it’s not quite perfect. There’s one thing wrong with it, and I’m going to fix that right this very minute.” With that remark, he pulled off one of his red mittens, shoved one of his hands inside his coat pocket, pulled something out, and shuffled toward Mr. Black’s snow statue.

  And then I saw what he had, as plain as day. It was a red, hardback book with gold letters on it, which said The Hoosier Schoolmaster. I knew right away it was the book he and I had read from in his bedroom one night. I remembered especially the part where the tough gang of boys in the story caused the teacher a lot of trouble and locked him out of the school-house. Then the teacher, who was very smart, had climbed up on top of the school and put a board across the top of the chimney. And the smoke, which couldn’t get out of the chimney, had poured out of the stove inside, and all the tough boys had been smoked out.

  “What are you going to do?” I said to Poetry.

  He said, “Nothing,” but right away was doing it—sticking two sticks in the snowman’s stomach side by side. Then he opened The Hoosier Schoolmaster to the place where there was the picture of the teacher on the roof and laid the open book across the two sticks.

  “There you are, sir,” Poetry said, talking to the snowman. “The Hoosier schoolmaster himself.” Then Poetry made a bow as low as he could, being so round that he grunted every time he stooped over very far.

  Well, it was funny, and most of us laughed. Circus scooped up a snowball and started to throw it at the snowman, but we all stopped him, not wanting to have all our hard work spoiled in a few minutes. Besides, Poetry suddenly wanted to take a picture of it, and his camera was at his house, which was away down past the sycamore tree and the cave, where we all wanted to go after while to see Old Man Paddler. We decided to leave “Mr. Black” out there by himself at the bottom of Bumblebee Hill until we came back later.

  “He ought to have a hat on,” Dragonfly said. “He’ll catch his death of cold with his bald head.”

  “Or he might get stung on the head by a bumblebee,” Circus said.

 
Little Jim spoke up all of a sudden and said, as though he was almost angry, “Can anybody help it that he gets bald? My dad’s beginning to lose some of his hair on top—” Then he grabbed his stick, which he had leaned up against the beech tree, and struck very fiercely at a tall brown mullein stalk that was standing there in a little open space. The seeds scattered in every direction, one of them hitting me hard right on my freckled face just below my right eye. It stung like everything.

  Then Little Jim started running as fast as he could go in the direction of the sycamore tree, as if he was mad at us for something we’d done wrong.

  In fact, when he said that, I felt a kind of sickish feeling inside of me, as though maybe I had done something wrong. I grabbed my own stick and started off on the run after Little Jim, calling out to the rest of the gang to hurry up and saying, “Last one to the sycamore tree is a cow’s tail.”

  Then we all were running and jumping and diving around bushes and trees and leaping over snow-covered brush piles toward the sycamore tree and the mouth of the cave that comes out at the other end in the cellar of Old Man Paddler’s cabin.

  3

  Of course, everybody knows about Old Man Paddler, the kindest, long-whiskered old man who ever lived and the best friend the Sugar Creek Gang ever had. He lived up in the hills above Sugar Creek, and almost every week the gang went up to see him. In the summertime we went nearly every day. We went in the winter too, because he lived all by himself and we had to go up to take him things that our moms were always cooking for him. Also we had to be sure he didn’t get sick, because there wouldn’t be anybody there to take care of him or call the doctor. He didn’t have a telephone.

  After a little while we were tired of running so fast, so we slowed down. It was easier to be a cow’s tail than to get all out of breath.

  Poetry and I were side by side most of the time with Little Jim and Tom Till walking along behind us and Circus and Dragonfly swishing on ahead. Once when Tom and Little Jim were beside each other, close behind Poetry and me, I’d heard Little Jim say to Tom, “Mom says for you to be ready a little early tomorrow morning because the choir has to practice the anthem again before they sing.”

  I knew what Little Jim was talking about. His folks stopped at Tom’s house every Sunday morning about nine o’clock, and Little Tom got in and rode to Sunday school with them in their big maroon and gray car. Little Jim’s pretty mom was the pianist at our church and always had to be on time.

  Little Jim’s words came out kind of jerkily, as if he was doing something that made him short of breath while he talked. I turned around quick to see, and, sure enough, he was shuffling along, making rabbit tracks with his stick and saying his words with every punch of the stick into the snow.

  Tom answered by saying, “O de koke,” which is the same as saying, “Okeydoke,” which means “OK,” which is what most anybody says when he means “all right.” It meant that Tom Till would be ready early and that when Little Jim’s folks came driving up to their front gate tomorrow, Tom, with his best clothes on, would come running out of their dilapidated old unpainted house, carrying his New Testament, which Old Man Paddler had bought for him. Then they’d all drive away together to Sunday school.

  Then I heard Little Jim ask something else, which showed what a great little guy he was. “S’pose maybe your mother would like to go with us too?”

  “My mother would like to go with us,” Tom said, “but she doesn’t have any clothes that are good enough.” And knowing the reason was that her husband drank up nearly all the money he made in the Sugar Creek beer taverns, and also drank whiskey which he bought in the liquor store—knowing that, I felt my teeth gritting hard, and I took a fierce swing with the stick I was carrying at a little maple tree beside me. I socked that tree so fiercely that my hands stung. The stick broke in the middle, and one end of it flew ahead to where Circus and Dragonfly were and nearly hit them.

  “Hey, you!” Dragonfly yelled back toward us. “What you trying to do—kill us?”

  “What on earth!” Circus yelled back to me.

  I stood looking at the broken end of the rest of the stick in my hand, then whirled around and threw it as hard as I could straight toward another tree about twenty feet away. That broken stick hit the tree right in the center of its trunk with a loud whack.

  I didn’t answer them in words at all. I was so mad at Tom’s dad and at beer and whiskey and stuff.

  But I couldn’t waste all my temper on something I couldn’t help, so I kept still, and we went on to the cave and went in. Then we followed its long narrow passageway clear through until we came to the big wooden door that opened into Old Man Paddler’s cellar.

  As soon as we got there, Circus, who was always the leader of our gang when Big Jim wasn’t with us, stopped us and made us keep still. Then he knocked on the door—three knocks, then two, then three more, then two, which was the code the gang always used when we came, so that Old Man Paddler would know it was us.

  If he was home, he would call down and say in his quavering old voice, “Who’s there?” and we’d answer, and right away we’d hear the trapdoor in the floor of his house open, hear his steps coming down his stairway, and hear him lift the big wooden latch that held the door shut. Then when he saw us, he’d say, “Well, well, well, well, the Sugar Creek Gang—” And he’d name every one of us by our nicknames and say, “Come in, boys, we’ll have some sassafras tea,” which all of us, especially Little Jim, liked so very much.

  Everything was quiet when Circus knocked three times, then two, then three, and then two again, while we all waited and listened. There was always something kind of spooky about that knock, and, because we were in a cave, I always felt a little weird until I heard the old man’s voice answer us. In fact, I always felt creepy until we got inside the cabin and the trapdoor was down again. We all stood there outside that big wooden door, waiting for Old Man Paddler to call down to us, but there wasn’t a single sound, so Circus knocked again three times, then two, then three, and then two again, and we all waited.

  Except for my little pocket flashlight, which my dad had given me for Christmas, we didn’t have any light, and we couldn’t waste the battery by keeping it on all the time. So I turned it off. But it felt so spooky with it off, and nobody answering Circus’s knock, that I turned it on again just as Dragonfly—who was always hearing things first—said, “Psst!” which meant, “I heard something mysterious! Everybody keep still a minute,” which we did.

  And then as plain as day I heard it myself—an old man’s voice talking. It was high-pitched and quavering and kind of sad, as though he was begging somebody to do something for him.

  We were all as quiet as mice, not a one of us moving or hardly breathing. I couldn’t hear a word the old man was saying, but he sounded as if he needed help. I remembered how we’d saved his life two different times—once when a robber had tied him up and he’d have starved if we hadn’t found him, and another time when he’d fallen down his cellar steps in the wintertime and his fire had gone out.

  Say, when I heard Old Man Paddler half talking and half crying up there in his cabin, I got a very weird feeling inside of me.

  “Quick!” Circus said. “He’s in trouble. Let’s go in and help him.” He gave a shove on the door, turning the latch at the same time, but the door wouldn’t budge.

  “It’s barred,” Poetry said, and I remembered the heavy bar on the inside, which the old man always dropped into place whenever he was at home.

  “Sh! Listen!” Little Jim said, and we shushed and listened.

  Little Jim had his ear pressed up close to a crack in the door, and in the light of my flashlight, which I didn’t shine straight on his face because it might blind him, I could see that his eyes had a faraway look in them, as though he was thinking something important and maybe in his mind’s eye was seeing something even more important.

  “What is it?” I said to him.

  He said, “Don’t worry. He’s all right. He d
oesn’t need our help. Here, listen yourself.”

  I did, and right away I knew Little Jim was right, for this is what I heard the old man saying in his quavering, high-pitched voice:

  “And please, You’re the best friend I ever had, letting me live all these long years, taking care of me, keeping me well and strong and happy most of the time. But I’m getting lonesome now, getting older every day, getting so I can’t walk without a cane, and I can’t stand the cold weather anymore, and I know it won’t be long before I’ll have to move out of this crippled-up old house and come to live with You in a new place. I’ll be awful glad to see Sarah again and my boys. And that reminds me. Please bless the boys who live and play along Sugar Creek—all of ’em—Big Jim, Little Jim, Circus, Dragonfly, Poetry, Bill Collins …”

  I knew what the kind man was doing all right, because I’d seen and heard him do it many a time in our little white church. And also I’d seen him doing it once down on his knees behind the old sycamore tree all by himself. When I heard him mention my name, I gulped, and some crazy tears got into my eyes and into my voice. I had to swallow to keep from choking out a word that would have let the gang know that I was about to cry.

  Like a flash I thought of something. I whirled around and grabbed Little Tom Till and shoved his ear down to the crack in the door and put my ear just above his so I could hear too. And this is what the old man was saying up there in the cabin:

  “And also bless the new member of the gang, Tom Till, whose father is an atheist and spends his money on liquor and gambling. O God, how can John Till expect his boys to keep from turning out to be criminals? Bless his boy Bob, whose life has been so bent and twisted by his father. And bless the boys’ poor mother, who hasn’t had a chance in life. Lord, You know she’d go to church if John would let her. And please—”