Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12

by Paul Hutchens

  I had a heavy feeling inside of me that they would maybe visit all the barns of the Sugar Creek Gang’s dads and catch a lot of pigeons, and maybe they’d catch and kill the pretty brown and white pair that had their nest in the cupola of our barn. And then what would happen to the baby pigeons?

  Dad didn’t come to church at all because of deciding to stay with Mom, but he was there in the car right afterward. All of us, including Little Jim and Tom Till and Mrs. Long and Charlotte Ann, shook hands with a lot of people and climbed into our car and drove away. Dad and all of us were talking and listening as our car went purring down the road.

  We were stopping at Shorty Long’s house to let Mrs. Long out when Little Jim said to me in a half whisper, “Sylvia’s dad certainly preached a good sermon. I thought that was why some houses didn’t have as much snow on their roofs as others, and why barns always have more snow than houses that people live in. It was a good sermon.”

  “What?” I said, not remembering anything in the sermon about snow on people’s houses or barns. Sylvia’s dad must have said that when I was thinking about snowy white wool on Poetry’s lamb—or else about a snowman standing at the bottom of Bumblebee Hill.

  Pretty soon we came to Tom Till’s house. Dad had already told us the doctor had been there, and Mrs. Till didn’t have pneumonia, only a bad chest cold.

  Dad had gone to our house to get one of our radios so that Mrs. Till could hear a good Christian program, and she was feeling a lot better. Dad also had told us that Bob had come home while Mom was taking care of Mrs. Till, but he had gone away again.

  “Did he have any pigeons?” little red-haired Tom asked when Dad started to get out and go in with him to get Mom.

  “About a dozen,” Dad told him. “He put them in the pigeon cage out in the woodshed.”

  Right away I spoke up. “Were there any white ones?” I was remembering the beautiful white pigeon with pink eyes that had her nest up in the cupola of our barn and whose big, beautiful brown husband was so proud of her and always was cooing to her when they were on the barn roof and was always strutting around so very proud, with his neck all puffed out as if he was very important.

  “I don’t know,” Dad said.

  I said, “Can I go and look, Tom?”

  He said, “Sure, I’ll go with you.”

  “Let me hold Charlotte Ann,” Little Jim said, because he liked to hold babies on his small lap anyway.

  Dad went in to get Mom, and Tom and I went into their woodshed to look through the wire cage at about fifteen very pretty pigeons.

  All of a sudden I got a hot feeling inside of me because right there in front of my eyes, with the other different-colored pigeons, was the prettiest snow-white one with pretty pink eyes, and I knew right away it was my favorite pigeon, old Snow-White herself, who had her nest in the cupola of our barn.

  “There’s my pigeon!” I cried to Little Tom.

  When he asked me which one and I told him, he said, “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive,” I said. “See that little brown spot just below the left pink eye. I’m going to get her out and take her home.”

  Little Tom looked and swallowed and got a very scared expression on his face. He started to say something and then stopped.

  “‘S’matter?” I said.

  He said, “Nothing, only—”

  “Only what?” I asked.

  “Only—only Bob’s got a terrible temper, and he’s already mad at me.”

  Well, when I saw the scared expression on that little guy’s face, I realized that, if I let Snow-White out of that cage, Tom would maybe get a terrible beating from his big brother, and it’d be my fault.

  At that minute, Dad and Mom came out of the side door of Tom’s house, and it was time for us to go home. Mom was going to hurry with our own dinner, which had nearly all been cooked yesterday, and we were going to bring some nice chicken soup back for Tom’s mom’s dinner, and also some chicken for Tom himself.

  I still didn’t know who was coming to our house for dinner, but whoever did come would have to wait awhile because Mom would have to finish preparing it.

  “Who’s coming to our house for dinner?” I asked.

  Mom said, as we all started down the road toward Little Jim’s house, “A certain very fine gentleman named Little Jim Foote of the Sugar Creek Gang.”

  Was I ever glad! But as the car glided down the white road, I kept thinking of my pretty Snow-White in Bob Till’s cage, and I knew that Bob would maybe kill her along with all the other pigeons and sell her at the Sugar Creek poultry shop.

  Just as we were getting close to Little Jim’s house, he said, “Look, Bill! There goes a white pigeon, flying all by itself.”

  I looked out the car window and saw a snow-white pigeon with its wings flapping, and it was diving along through the sky right past our car and straight for Sugar Creek and in the direction of our house on the other side of the woods.

  All of a sudden I got a choked-up feeling in my throat because I just knew that was my very own Snow-White, and that Tom Till liked me so well he was going to run the risk of getting a terrible beating by his brother by opening their pigeon cage and letting Snow-White out so she could fly home.

  All of a sudden I liked little red-haired Tom Till so well that I wished I could do something very wonderful for him and his sick mother. I kept my eyes strained on the sky above Sugar Creek and the woods where I’d seen Snow-White disappear.

  Then I heard Little Jim say beside me, “Nearly all the snow’s melted off our house now.”

  I looked where he was looking, and he looked at me.

  He said, “‘S’matter, Bill? You got tears in your eyes.”

  “Have I?” I said. “I didn’t know it.”

  Tom Till really was a great little guy, I thought, one of my very best friends; and I remembered that, before he had started coming to our Sunday school and had become a Christian, he had been one of the meanest boys I ever knew.

  I shook my head to knock the tears out of my eyes, the way Little Jim does when for some reason he gets tears in his and doesn’t want anybody to know it. Instead of using his handkerchief to wipe them away, he just gives his head a quick jerk or two and, if you happen to be looking at him, you can see the tears fly off in some direction or other.

  “Well, here we are!” Dad said, stopping at Little Jim’s house. “You’ll probably want your sled. You and Bill will want to coast on Bumblebee Hill after dinner.” And we would.

  One of the first things we did, though, even before we ate dinner, was to go upstairs to my room where both of us put on some play clothes. Little Jim’s mother made him take some clothes with him when we’d stopped at their house a little while ago.

  Right away we were downstairs again and on the way through the kitchen to the back door, ready to dash out to the barn to see if Bob Till and Shorty Long had been there for sure—and to see if Snow-White had come back and was on her nest up in the cupola—and also find out if her babies were cold or had frozen because they didn’t have enough feathers on them to keep them warm.

  But Mom stopped me at the door, saying, “Bill, if you like, you may wash your hands and finish setting the table—put the bread on and pour a glass of water for everyone, and milk for you and Jim.”

  I was surprised at her calling Little Jim just “Jim,” but I sort of felt it was because she thought it made Little Jim sound bigger than he was, and Mom knew it would make him feel good. Mom was a very smart person and knew how to make boys like her.

  “Anything I can do?” Little Jim asked politely.

  Mom let him pour the water into the glasses for me. When we finished helping her, she said we could go out to the barn if we wanted to but to be ready to come running as soon as she called us, which we probably would because the oven was open right that minute and I could smell the baked chicken and knew that it was going to be a wonderful dinner.

  “Hi, Mixy!” Little Jim said to our black-and-white cat, who was l
ying in a cozy nest of her own at the bottom of the ladder that went up to our haymow. He stooped to pet her, and she lifted her head without standing up, rubbed the sides of her pretty black-and-white face against his small hand, and mewed lazily with half-closed, blinking eyes.

  I could hardly wait till we got up in the haymow and could climb Dad’s new ladder to the cupola to see if Snow-White was home again. So I started up the first ladder, noticing that there was dirt on the rungs, made by somebody with boots or shoes that had dirty snow on them, and I knew Bob Till and Shorty Long had been there.

  How many pigeons had they caught? I wondered and felt an angry feeling inside of me because, if there was anything the boys of the Sugar Creek Gang didn’t do, it was we didn’t go into anybody’s barn and catch pigeons without the farmer’s asking us to—or without us first asking the farmer if we could.

  While Little Jim was stroking Mixy and I had my hand and one foot on the ladder ready to start up, I heard Dad’s voice calling from somewhere up in the haymow, “Bill! Are you down there?” His voice had a worried sound in it but also sounded as if maybe I had done something I shouldn’t have or else had maybe left something undone which I should have done.

  “Yeah,” I yelled back up to him, “Little Jim and I are both here. We’re coming up!”

  Then Dad’s voice called down again, and this time it sounded even more the way I thought it had. He said, “Where’d you put my new ladder? I can’t find it anywhere.”

  New ladder! I thought and wondered, What on earth! Why, just yesterday I’d used it to climb up to Snow-White’s nest and had left it right there, with the top of it resting on the beam on the south side of the cupola.

  “It’s right there!” I yelled. “Right there in the center of the haymow, going up into the cupola.”

  “It is not!” he yelled back. “And I’ve looked all over the haymow for it.”

  I looked at Little Jim, and he was still stooped over, stroking Mixy, who was standing up now and stretching herself and reaching up with her front claws and doing some kind of monkey business with Little Jim’s trousers, taking hold and letting go, taking hold and letting go, and acting very contented.

  Then I went lickety-sizzle up the ladder to the haymow. Sure enough, Dad was right! The pretty new ladder, which he had bought and which I’d left right where I’d told him I’d left it, was gone.

  “I left it right here,” I told him, and then I had a strange feeling inside of me as I thought about those two boys and wondered if they had stolen it. There wasn’t a sign of the ladder anywhere in the whole haymow, and I was looking in every direction.

  “’S’matter?” Little Jim asked, when his head appeared at the top of the ladder beside where I was standing. He looked up at our astonished faces.

  “Somebody’s stolen our ladder,” I said. “A brand-new one Dad just bought last week.”

  “Stolen it?” Little Jim asked. He had a puzzled expression on his face, and I knew what he was going to say before he said, “Are you sure?” Little Jim always had a hard time believing anybody was bad or would do anything wrong, because he hardly ever did anything wrong himself and, also, because he liked everybody.

  Dad said, “No, we’re not sure till Bill has tried first to remember if maybe he moved it somewhere else.”

  I looked all around the haymow in a quick circle, and I thought that if Bob Till and Shorty Long had been there, they might have hidden it under some hay just for meanness. So I got a pitchfork and started to jab it into the hay in different places in the haymow. Dad looked in a tunnel under a long beam, and we all looked all around downstairs. Once I glanced up at the cupola and had a glad feeling in my heart when I saw Snow-White’s white head peeking out over the edge of the beam she had her nest on, as though she had just come back and was wondering what on earth anybody wanted with a ladder anyway, she not needing any herself.

  Just then we heard Mom calling for dinner, and we had to go, all of us being very hungry. I knew Dad was having a hard time believing that I hadn’t moved the ladder, because many times when he missed something around the farm, later he or I or somebody had found it where I’d been using it or playing with it, in some place I’d forgotten all about.

  This time it was really gone, and not a one of us knew where—but I was absolutely sure that Bob Till and Shorty Long had hidden it somewhere. I told Mom and Dad what I thought had happened, and we all talked it over pretty excitedly at the dinner table.

  After dinner we looked all around the barn again, inside and out, jabbing forks and shovels into the biggest piles of snow around the barn to see if maybe it had been covered up with snow, and still we couldn’t find it.

  Dad was pretty mad, too, because about six of our pigeons were missing, and it looked as if somebody had been jumping and running all over the alfalfa hay, which we fed to our cows. “How would you like to eat a piece of pie that some boy’s dirty boots had walked all over?” Dad asked.

  That tickled Little Jim, and he giggled.

  Mom and Dad said Little Jim and I could go over to Poetry’s house if we wanted to, and we could play in Poetry’s nice new basement.

  It was while we were at Poetry’s house that we saw the ladder! And you’d never in the world guess where it was, and most certainly you’d never in the world guess all the excitement we were going to get mixed up in before the afternoon was over.

  9

  We’d been having a wonderful time playing Ping Pong in Poetry’s basement. Little Jim was playing the organ while Poetry and I were making a lot of noise playing off a tie game, when we heard a door open at the head of the stairway leading down into the basement. Somebody sneezed, and we knew it was Dragonfly who had come over to play.

  Poetry’s parents had gone visiting some sick people in the Sugar Creek hospital, so we could make noise, and it wouldn’t disturb any grown-up people’s nerves. It would also be good for ours, since it’s almost as hard on a boy’s nerves to be quiet as it is on a grown-up person’s nerves when a boy is noisy.

  Poetry and I stopped our game and yelled up to Dragonfly to come on down and play the winner, which meant either Poetry or me.

  Dragonfly sneezed twice on his way down, maybe being allergic to something he’d smelled when he came in, or else it was the change from the cold outside air to the warm inside air.

  Poetry won the last game, and that meant he was the champion, so he and Dragonfly started in like a house afire, batting the ball back and forth, back and forth, bang, sock, whiz, sizzle, ping-ping-ping-ping, pong-pong-pong-pong …

  That little spindle-legged Dragonfly was good. He won the first game right off the bat. He really was a good athlete for such a thin little kid.

  “Hey, you guys!” he said, pretending to be very proud of himself. “Isn’t there a window somewhere we can open? I want to throw out my chest.” That was an old joke, but it sounded funny for Dragonfly to say it, his chest being very flat.

  “Sure,” Poetry said, “but we can get air quicker by opening the door at the top of the stairs,” and with that he shuffled up the steps and opened the door.

  As he did so, I heard a horse sneeze and then a man’s voice saying, “Whoa, there, Prince! Stand still!” and I knew it was our new teacher, Mr. Black.

  Dragonfly sneezed again and said to Poetry, “I’m allergic to horses. Shut that door!”

  “Hello!” a voice called. “Anybody at home?”

  Well, I can’t tell you all that happened for the next fifteen minutes, because I have to hurry with the rest of this story, but Mr. Black was very kind to us boys. He came down into the basement and took a flashbulb picture of us with our Ping Pong balls and paddles and with Little Jim at the organ. He didn’t say a word about the snowman we knew he’d seen yesterday, or the book, or anything. He was very nice, and a little later when he rode away on his great big beautiful prancing saddle horse, I thought maybe he was going to be a good teacher after all.

  The last thing he said just before he swung prancing
Prince around and jogged up Poetry’s lane was, “Well, I’ll see you boys in the morning at school. I’m going to ride over now and get the fire started. I let it go out over Saturday to save fuel. But the weather report is for a cold wave tonight, so I think I’ll get the fire going good, and it’ll be cozy as a bug in a rug tomorrow morning when everybody comes.”

  He certainly had a pretty horse, and he certainly knew how to ride him. The beautiful brown saddle and Mr. Black’s riding outfit made me wish I had a big brown horse and a riding outfit and could go galloping around all over Sugar Creek territory.

  Almost right away, we decided to play outdoors awhile, because if there was going to be a cold wave tonight, it meant that tomorrow we’d all have to stay inside the school most of the time. Sometimes a cold wave in Sugar Creek territory meant twenty degrees below zero.

  After awhile Poetry went in the house and got his binoculars, and we all climbed up on their chicken house, which didn’t have any snow on its roof, and started to look around Sugar Creek at different things.

  Little Jim grinned when he noticed there wasn’t any snow on the roof of the chicken house. He said, “That certainly was a good sermon this morning.” Then he grunted and sat down astride the chicken-house roof, right close to a little tin chimney out of which white smoke was coming. There must have been a kerosene heater inside the chicken house.

  “It sure was,” Poetry said. He focused the binoculars in the direction Mr. Black had gone.

  “Here, Bill, look at him, will you? Now he’s stopping at Circus’s house. Suppose maybe he’s going to take a picture of one of Circus’s sisters?”

  Dragonfly giggled when Poetry said that.

  And I felt hot inside, because Circus had a lot of sisters, and one of them was a real honest-to-goodness girl who wasn’t afraid of mice or spiders, and sometimes I carried her lunch box to school. I knew Dragonfly was trying to tease me, so I said, “Here, let me see.” And almost right away I was looking at Mr. Black stopping his big horse at Circus’s house.