Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12

by Paul Hutchens

  Well, that was that. Poetry and I, who were at the top of Bumblebee Hill, hurried down to where we had left our sleds—the rest of the gang had taken theirs with them when we’d gone to the cave. At the bottom of the hill, we saw the big tall snowman. The sun was still shining right straight on it but wouldn’t be pretty soon, because it would go down. So Poetry and I stopped close to it, and he got his camera ready.

  “You get The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Bill, and turn it around and stand it up against the snowman’s stomach,” Poetry ordered, “so I can get a good picture of it.”

  I started to do what he said and then gasped. There wasn’t any Hoosier Schoolmaster! The book was gone. “It’s gone!” I said, and it was. There was a page of yellow writing paper there, instead.

  The piece of yellow writing tablet was standing up on the two sticks, leaning against the snowman’s stomach. So that the wind wouldn’t blow it away, it was fastened by another stick, stuck through the paper and into the snowman.

  “There’s something printed on it!” I said. “It’s your poem, Poetry!” I remembered the poem that Poetry had written about our teacher. “How’d it get here?”

  I read the poem again. It was almost funny, but I didn’t feel like laughing because of wondering who had stolen the book and had put the poem here in its place. The poem was written exactly right:

  The Sugar Creek Gang had the worst of

  teachers,

  And “Black” his name was called.

  His round red face had the homeliest

  of features;

  He was fat and forty and bald.

  It had been funny the first time I’d read it, which was not more than a week ago, but for some reason right that minute it was anything in the world but funny. I was gritting my teeth and wondering who had done it and who had stolen The Hoosier Schoolmaster. There wasn’t one of the gang that could have done it, because we had been together all afternoon; and from the cave all the rest of us had gone directly home.

  “Who in the world wrote it and put it there?” I said, noticing that the printing was very large and had been put on with black crayon, the kind we used in school.

  “There’s only one other person in the world who knows I wrote that poem,” Poetry said, “and that’s Shorty Long.”

  “Shorty Long!” I said, remembering the newest boy who had moved into our neighborhood—who was almost as big as Poetry and who had been the cause of most of our trouble with our new teacher and who had licked the stuffings out of me once, and I had licked the stuffings out of him once also, almost worse than he had me.

  “How’d he find out?” I asked.

  “Dragonfly told him.”

  I remembered that Dragonfly and Shorty Long had been kind of chummy last week. We had all worried for fear there was maybe going to be trouble in our own gang, which there’d never been before, all because of the new big guy who had started coming to our school.

  “Are you going to take a picture of it?” I asked Poetry.

  He said, “I certainly am. I’m going to have the evidence, and then I can prove to anybody who doesn’t believe it that somebody actually put it here.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but everybody knows you wrote the poem.”

  Poetry lowered his camera.

  And just that minute I saw something else that made me stare. In fact, it startled me so that for a minute I was almost as much excited as I had been when that fierce, mad old mother bear had tried to kill Little Jim at that very place about a year and a half ago.

  “Look!” I said. “Mr. Black’s been here himself!”

  “Mr. Black!” Poetry said in a half scream.

  And right away both of us were looking down in the snow around the beech tree and around the snowman. There were horse’s tracks, the kind of tracks that showed that the horse had horseshoes on. And even while I was scared and wondering, What on earth! there popped into my red head the crazy superstition that if you found a horseshoe and put it up over the door of your house or one of the rooms of your house, you would have good luck.

  “I’ll bet Mr. Black took the book and wrote the poem and put it here.”

  “He wouldn’t,” I said, but I was afraid he might have.

  “I’m going to take a picture anyway,” Poetry said. He stepped back and took one and then, real quick, took another. Then he took the yellow sheet of paper with the poem on it and folded it up and put it in his coat pocket.

  And then, with our faces and minds worried, we started fiercely knocking the living daylights out of that snowman. The first thing we did was to pull off the red nose, and pull out the corncob pipe, and knock the round head off and watch it go ker-swish onto the ground and break into pieces. Then we pulled the sticks out of his stomach, kicked him in the same place, and in minutes had him looking like nothing.

  We felt pretty mixed up in our minds, I can tell you.

  “Do you suppose Mr. Black did that?” I said.

  “He wouldn’t,” Poetry said. “But if he rode his horse down here and saw it, he’ll certainly think we’re a bunch of heathens.”

  “We aren’t though—are we?” I said. For some reason I was remembering that Little Jim had acted as if maybe we shouldn’t make fun of our teacher just because he had hair only all around his head and not on top and couldn’t help it. And for some reason it all didn’t seem very funny right that minute, and it seemed that Little Jim was right.

  “What about The Hoosier Schoolmaster?” I asked as we dragged our sleds up Bumblebee Hill. “What’ll we tell your mother? And what’ll she tell Mrs. Mansfield?”

  “I don’t know,” Poetry said, his voice sounding more worried than I’d heard it in a long time.

  The first thing Mom said when we got to our house was “Mr. Black was here twice this afternoon.”

  “Twice?” I said. “What for? What did he want?”

  “Oh, he was just visiting around, getting acquainted with the parents of the boys. Such a beautiful brown saddle horse,” she said. “And he was so polite.”

  “The horse?” Poetry said.

  But Mom ignored his remark and said, “He took a picture of our house and barn and tried to get one of Mixy-cat, but Mixy was scared of the horse, I guess, and ran like a frightened rabbit.”

  “Was he actually taking pictures?” Poetry asked with a worried voice.

  “Yes, and he wanted to get one of you boys playing on Bumblebee Hill. But you were all gone, he said. But he found the book you left there, so he brought it back—you know, the one Mrs. Mansfield wanted.”

  “What book?” I said, pretending to be surprised. “Did Mrs. Mansfield want a book?”

  And Mom, who was standing at our back door bareheaded, and shouldn’t have been because she might catch cold, said, “Yes, she phoned here for The Hoosier Schoolmaster while Mr. Black was here, but I knew your mother had one, Poetry, so I told her to call there.”

  Poetry and I were looking at each other.

  Then Mom said, “Mr. Black thought maybe you boys had been reading it and had forgotten it when you left.”

  “D-d-did he—did he—” Poetry began but stuttered so much he had to stop and start again. “Did he say where he found it? I mean was it—that is, where did he find it?”

  “He didn’t say,” Mom said. “But he said since he was going over to Mrs. Mansfield’s anyway, he’d take it over for me. So you won’t have to take it over, Bill,” she finished.

  Well, that was that.

  Poetry and I sighed to each other, and he said, “Did you tell my mother?”

  “I’ve just called her,” Mom said, “and you’re to come on home right away to get the chores done early. It’s early to bed for all of us on Saturday night, you know.”

  Poetry must have felt pretty bad, just as I did, but he managed to say politely to Mom, “Thank you, Mrs. Collins. I’ll hurry right home.”

  I walked out to the gate with him, where we just stood and looked at each other, both of us with worried looks on our
faces.

  “Do you suppose he really took a picture of himself with that poem on his stomach?” Poetry asked. “And if he did, who on earth put it there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but what would he want with pictures of all of us and our parents?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Poetry said in a worried voice.

  Just that minute Dad called from the barn and said, “Bill, hurry up and gather the eggs! It’ll be too dark to see in the barn as soon as the sun goes down! Poetry, be sure to come again sometime,” which was Dad’s way of telling Poetry to step on the gas and get going home right now, which Poetry did.

  I went back to the house and got the egg basket to start to gather eggs, wondering what would happen next.

  6

  Just as I started to open our kitchen door and go out to the barn, Mom came from the other room where she’d been talking on the phone. She said, “Little Jim’s mother is coming down with the flu and won’t be able to go to church tomorrow, so we’re to pick up Little Jim and also stop for Tom Till and take him to church with us. So we’ll have to get up a little earlier tomorrow morning. You get the chores done quick so we can get supper over and go to bed nice and early.”

  I thought that was a good idea. I was already tired all of a sudden, almost too tired to gather eggs.

  Tomorrow, though, would be a fine day. It’d be fun to stop at Little Jim’s and Tom Till’s houses and to take them to church with us.

  Little Jim had something on his mind that was bothering him, though, and I wondered what it was. Also I wondered who was coming to our house for dinner tomorrow. Maybe it would be Little Jim as well as somebody else, if his mom was going to have the flu.

  Pretty soon I was up in our haymow all by myself carrying the egg basket around to the different places where different ones of our hens laid their eggs. Old Bent Comb still laid her daily egg up in a corner of the mow, so I climbed over a big stack of sweet-smelling hay to where I knew the nest was. I wasn’t feeling very good inside, because things hadn’t gone right during the day, and yet I couldn’t tell what was wrong, except that maybe it was just me.

  When I got to Bent Comb’s nest, there were two eggs in it—one was the pretty white egg Bent Comb herself had laid that day, and the other was an artificial glass egg, which we kept in the nest all the time just to encourage any hen that might see it to stop and lay an egg there herself. It was easy to fool old Bent Comb, I thought.

  While I was getting ready to go back down to the main floor of the barn, my eyes climbed up Dad’s brand-new ladder, which goes up to the cupola at the very peak of the roof of our very high barn. It certainly was a nice light ladder, and next summer it would be easy for me to carry it to one cherry tree after another in our orchard when I helped pick cherries for Mom. It was such a light ladder that even Little Jim could carry it.

  While I was looking up and wishing spring would hurry up and come, I all of a sudden wanted to climb up the ladder and look out the windows of the cupola and see what I could see in the different directions around the Sugar Creek territory. Also I wondered if Snow-White, my favorite pigeon, and her husband had decided to have their nest in the cupola again this year and if there were eggs or maybe a couple of baby pigeons, although parent pigeons hardly ever decide to raise any baby pigeons in the wintertime. If there was anything I liked to look at more than anything else, it was baby birds in a nest. Their fuzz always reminded me of Big Jim’s fuzzy mustache—he was the only one of the Sugar Creek Gang to begin to have any.

  In a jiffy I was on my way, and in another jiffy I was there, standing on the second from the top rung of the ladder. It was nice and light up there with the sun still shining in, although pretty soon it would go down. In one direction I could see Poetry’s house and their big maple close beside it in the backyard, under which in the summertime he always pitched his tent, and sometimes he would invite me to stay all night with him. In another direction, far away across our cornfield, was Dragonfly’s house. It had an orchard close by it, where, in the fall of the year, we could all have all the apples we wanted. Big Jim and Circus lived right across the road from each other, but I couldn’t see either one of their houses, or Little Tom’s, either, because Tom lived across the bridge on the other side of Sugar Creek.

  I could see our redbrick schoolhouse, though, away on past Dragonfly’s house. But when I looked at it, instead of feeling happy inside as I nearly always did when we had our pretty woman teacher for a teacher, I felt kind of sad. I saw the big maple tree, which I knew was close beside a tall iron pump, near which we had built a snow fort. Behind that was the woodshed where we’d been locked in by our new man teacher, and behind the woodshed was the great big schoolyard where we played baseball and blindman’s buff and other games in the fall and spring, and where we play fox and geese in the winter.

  For a few minutes I forgot I was supposed to be gathering eggs. I did what Dad is always accusing me of doing, which is daydreaming. I was thinking about what had happened that afternoon—such as the trip we’d taken through the cave to Old Man Paddler’s cabin, and the prayer he’d said for all of us and especially for old hook-nosed John Till, and which, when Little Tom heard, had made him cry and want to go home.

  Poor Tom, I thought. What if I had had a dad like his instead of the kind of wonderful dad I had, who made it easy for Mom to be happy, which is why maybe Mom was always singing around our kitchen, even when she was tired, and also why, whenever Dad came into our house after being gone awhile, Mom would look up quickly from whatever she was doing and give him a nice look. And sometimes they’d be awfully glad to see each other, and Dad would give her a great big hug the way dads are supposed to do to moms. Poor Little Tom’s mom, I thought.

  Well, while I was still not thinking about finishing gathering the eggs, I looked in the direction I hadn’t looked yet. That was toward our own house and over the top of the spreading branches of the plum tree and over the top of our gate, which Dragonfly had had his ride on, and on down toward Bumblebee Hill, where we’d coasted and had fun and made the snowman of Mr. Black.

  And right that second I saw something moving. It was somebody moving along just below the crest of the hill. All I could see was his bobbing-up-and-down cap, and right away I knew whose cap it was. It was the bright red cap of the new tough guy in our neighborhood, whose name was Shorty Long. And right away I knew who it was that had written Poetry’s poetry and put it on the sticks into Mr. Black’s stomach.

  I had a weird and also an angry feeling inside, because I just knew Mr. Black had seen the poem and, since it had been signed “The Sugar Creek Gang,” we would all be in for still more trouble Monday morning in school.

  While I was standing up there in that cupola, I made up my mind. No matter how much we didn’t like our teacher and no matter what ideas Poetry and I had once had in our minds to find out whether a board on the top of the schoolhouse chimney would smoke out a teacher, Bill Collins wasn’t going to vote yes if the gang put it to a vote to decide whether to do it or not. No sir, not me.

  And then I heard my dad calling me from down on the main floor of the barn. “Better come on down and finish your chores, Bill.”

  I started to climb backward down the new ladder very carefully to the haymow and then down the other ladder to the main floor of the barn.

  Dad had just finished milking our one cow. The big three-gallon bucket was full, and there was inch-high creamy-yellow foam above the top of the pail. Mixy, our black-and-white cat, was mewing and mewing and walking all around Dad’s legs and looking up and mewing and rubbing her sides against his boots and also running over toward the little milk pan by a corner of the barn floor, as if to say to Dad, “For goodness’ sake, I may be a mere cat but does that give you any right to make me wait for my supper?”

  Anyway, I was reminded that I was hungry myself and that pretty soon we’d all be in the house, sitting around the table and eating raw-fried potatoes and reddish slices of fried ham
, and other things.

  “I’ll take the milk to the house, Bill,” Dad said. “You follow me up to the back porch, Mixy—you can’t have fresh milk tonight. And also you can have only a little raw meat, because there are absolutely too many mice around this barn. Any ordinary hungry cat ought to catch at least one mouse a day, Mixy, and if you don’t catch them, we’ll have to make you hungry, so you will. Understand?”

  I looked at Dad’s big reddish-blackish eyebrows, and he was frowning at Mixy, although I knew he liked her a lot. But he didn’t like mice very well.

  I finished gathering the eggs that were in the barn and then went to the henhouse, where I knew there would be some more. And then I took my basket of maybe four dozen eggs toward the house.

  Mixy was on the back porch, lapping away at her milk like a house afire. I wiped off my boots carefully as I’d been trained to do whether I was at home or at somebody else’s house, pushed open the door to our kitchen, and went in, expecting to see Mom or Dad or both of them. But nobody was there, so I set down the egg basket on Mom’s worktable and started into the front room, where I thought they’d be.

  All of a sudden, I heard Mom saying something in a tearful voice, and I stopped cold, wondering what I’d maybe done and shouldn’t have, and if Mom was telling Dad about it. So I started to listen and then was half afraid to, so I’d begun to open the back door and go out when I heard Dad say in a low voice, “No, Mother, whatever it is, I know one thing—our Bill will tell the truth. He’d tell the truth right now if I asked him, but I’m not going to. I’m going to wait and see what happens and see if he’ll tell me himself.”

  I strained my ears hard to hear what Mom would answer.

  She said, “All right, Theodore, I’ll be patient. But just the same, I’m worried.”

  “Don’t you worry one little tiny bit, Mother,” Dad said. “A boy’s heart is like a garden. If you plant good seed in it and cultivate and plow it and water it with love, he’ll come out all right.”