Also, I noticed they had pitched the tent so that the flap would be open toward the west. Now, anybody who lives at Sugar Creek knows you shouldn’t have the tent flap on the west side, because that is the direction most of our rains come from.
Besides, they would have to go too far to get their drinking and cooking water—clear down to the spring or else in the opposite direction to the Collins family’s iron pitcher pump.
“They certainly don’t know very much about camp life,” Big Jim said, having been a Scout once. He had taught us all the different things about picking the best kind of campsite.
“It’s a good thing they got a shovel,” Tom Till said, seeing one standing against an iron-wood tree by their station wagon.
“Why?” Dragonfly said.
Little Tom Till answered, like a schoolboy who had studied his lesson and knew it by heart, “Because, where the tent’s pitched now, if it rains, the water will run in from all sides and make a lake out of the floor.”
Well, we brought it to a vote to see which one of us would go up and knock on the tent pole and ask if anybody had lost a billfold.
It took only a minute for me to win the election by a six-to-one vote—six for me and one against me, my vote being the one that was against.
So while the rest of the gang kept itself hidden behind some pawpaw bushes, I stepped out into the open and moseyed along as if I was only interested in seeing different things in the woods, such as a red squirrel in a tree or some kind of new beetle. Also I was walking carefully, so as not to awaken them if they were asleep, especially the one who was supposed to take an afternoon nap.
I forgot to tell you that the tent wasn’t any ordinary brown canvas tent, either. It was green and was a sort of three-way tent, shaped like some of the ranch houses that people were building in our town. I could tell just by looking at the tent that it would be wonderful for a gang of boys to go camping in. One of the wings of the tent was only a canvas roof with the sides made out of some kind of netting to keep out different kinds of insects such as houseflies, deerflies, and blowflies. It could even keep out a horsefly or a warble fly if one wanted to get in. It would also keep out June beetles at night.
Right away I saw that somebody was resting on a cot inside one of the wings. I was too bashful to go any closer, because I could tell it was the woman herself lying there. She was maybe asleep, and it isn’t polite to wake anybody out of a nap if you know she is taking one.
My heart was beating pretty fast because I was a little scared to do what I had been voted to do. But the man must have seen me or else heard all of us, because right then he opened the flap of the main part of the tent and came out with the forefinger of one hand up to his lips and the other hand making the kind of motions a person’s hand makes when he wants you to keep still and not say a word.
I noticed that the brown-haired man was about as old as my reddish-haired dad and that he had a magazine in his hand as though he had been reading. He also motioned for me to stop where I was, which I did. He kept on coming toward me with his finger still up to his lips and shaking a warning finger with his other hand, which meant “Shh—don’t say a word.”
The man walked back with me to where the rest of the gang was behind the pawpaw bushes, and I noticed that he had a very nice face. Also he looked like an important city person, who might be extra smart and maybe had charge of a big office or maybe a store or something.
“Is there anything I can do for you boys?” he said in a very deep-sounding voice.
Even though he had a half-sad look in his eyes, I could tell he was a kind person and probably liked boys.
I looked at Big Jim, and he looked at me, and we all looked at different ones of us. Finally the rest of the gang’s twelve eyes focused on my freckled face and red hair, so I looked up at the man and said, “Yes, sir. We found a billfold up along the creek—”
Little Tom Till cut in then, saying, “Little Jim here found it, and it’s brown and has some dollar bills in it and three fives and one ten—”
“Shh!” Big Jim shushed him.
The man grinned, with a twinkle in his eyes, and I saw that the edge of one of his upper teeth had gold on it.
“That’s all right. I can describe it for you,” he said, which he did, giving all the details. “It has a tooled flying horse on the leather on the back, and the initials F. E., and the name Frances Everhard in the inside on the identification card. The license number of our car is 734-567.I was just ready to start looking for it.”
There was something about the man that I liked, although I still thought there was an expression in his eyes that made it seem he was a little worried. I could tell he was the kind of man that would be nice to his wife, as Dad is to Mom. He might even be willing to do the dishes for her without being asked if she was extratired. I also noticed he kept looking at Little Jim as if he thought he was a very wonderful person.
“So you found it, did you, young man?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Little Jim piped up in his mouse-like voice.
“Well, I want to thank you. I have a reward for you. If you boys come back later, say in about an hour, my wife will wish to thank you in person. She has some cookies that she bought on purpose for you, just in case you happened to visit us. She is having her nap now—doctor’s orders are for her to sleep an hour every afternoon, you know.”
We let the man have the billfold, which he took. Without opening it, he shoved it into his hip pocket. “Frances will be so thankful. I think she doesn’t know she lost it yet. Maybe we won’t tell her, eh?”
We promised we wouldn’t, and he started to walk backward a little, which meant he was through visiting and we could go on home or somewhere.
Then, “Wait,” Mr. Everhard said and stopped, as we also did, because we had started off in our own direction. “How would one of you boys like to earn a quarter every day by bringing our drinking water from the spring or from up there at the Collins family house? One of you the Collins boy?”
I could feel myself blushing all over my freckled face, clear up to the roots of my red hair. I started to say yes, but Dragonfly beat me to it by saying, “He is,” jerking his thumb in my direction.
The man came back to us, going on to explain. “This isn’t the best place to pitch a tent—so far from a water supply. But somebody told us the spring was your gang’s meeting place, so we decided to let you have your privacy.”
Big Jim was pretty smart, I thought, when he spoke up politely and said, “That was very thoughtful of you.” Then he added with a Big Jim grin, “You’ll probably have more privacy yourself up here away from the noisy spring”—meaning us. Then he said, “Sure, we will be glad to bring your drinking water every day, won’t we, Bill?”
“Sure,” I said to Big Jim. “I’ll even help you carry it.”
The man was almost halfway back to his tent when he stopped and hurried back to us again. “Mr. Paddler has given us permission to dig a few holes around here in the woods,” he said, “so don’t be too surprised if you find a new one every now and then.”
I started to say, “What are you digging them for?” But I didn’t because Big Jim scowled and shook his head at me.
A little later we stopped for a drink at the spring, and Circus said, “Old Man Paddler doesn’t own the cemetery. Who would give them permission to dig out there in the cemetery at night? And why would they want to do it?”
“Maybe they’re studying different kinds of soil. Maybe they have a lot of glass jars full of different kinds of dirt in the tent or in the station wagon,” Poetry suggested.
“They wouldn’t need to dig such deep holes just to get soil samples,” Big Jim said, and I noticed he had a bit of a worried look on his face.
Poetry had another thought. “How are we going to spend our quarter every day—the one Bill is going to earn for us?” That wasn’t funny.
Well, our mystery wasn’t any nearer to being solved than it had been. One reason I felt quite
disappointed was because I was sort of hoping that whoever had been digging in the cemetery the night before was what the police and detectives call a ghoul. That is a person who robs graves. And I was hoping that if it was such a person, maybe the gang could have a chance to help capture him or her.
We had done all we could that afternoon, although I was still wondering about the bob-white whistle and the turtledove call. We talked that over while we were still at the spring and decided that maybe it was the way the man and his wife had of calling to each other—a sort of code such as we ourselves had. Whenever he wanted to call her, he could use the quail call, and she could answer it by cooing like a turtledove. If that was the meaning of it, it was kind of nice, and it showed that even married people could have fun together as my own mom and dad do a lot of times, in fact almost every day.
8
At the supper table at our house that night, I thought I’d never heard Mom and Dad laugh so hard. I was still thinking about the warble flies that had scared the living daylights out of Dragonfly’s dad’s cows. I told them all about it, crowding my words out between bites, and I was crowding the bites in too fast.
Dad said, “The heel flies are pretty bad this year. Nearly every farmer in Sugar Creek has been complaining about them. They were tormenting Old Brindle something fierce today. I didn’t dare turn her out into the pasture without leaving the gate into the barnyard open so she could come rushing back in for the protection of the shade anytime she wants to.”
“Speaking of cows,” Mom said, and her voice lit up the way her face does when she has thought of something very interesting or funny. “I read something in a farm magazine today that was about the funniest thing I ever read.”
“What was it?” Dad asked.
“Yes, what was it?” I said.
Dad and Mom were always reading things in magazines and telling them to each other, and I didn’t always get in on their jokes. Sometimes I had to ask them what they were laughing about, and it didn’t always seem as funny to me as it did to them. They also talked to each other about things that were not funny—things they had just that day learned about something in the Bible or something they had studied for next week’s Sunday school lesson.
“I’ll get it and read it for you,” Mom said. She excused herself, left the table, went into the other room, and came back with a small magazine. “It’s a ten-year-old schoolgirl’s essay on a cow.”
Even before she started reading it, I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. I am close to being a ten-year-old boy myself, and I could imagine what a ten-year-old girl would write about a cow!
Dad cleared his throat as if he was going to read it himself or else so that he would be ready to laugh when the time came.
Mom started reading, while Charlotte Ann wiggled and twisted in her high chair. She was not interested in anybody’s essay on a cow. All Charlotte Ann was interested in about cows was the milk she drank three times a day. So a story about a cow wouldn’t be funny to her.
Even as I looked at Charlotte Ann, I was remembering that there were still plenty of unsolved things about our mystery. There was the picture of Charlotte Ann in the billfold; the strange-acting woman who dug holes in a graveyard at night and had permission to dig them all over the Sugar Creek territory, who had to rest every afternoon, and who went barefoot and waded in the riffles all by herself—stuff like that.
Why did she have the picture of Charlotte Ann in her billfold? The very second Mom got through reading and she and Dad got through laughing, I would ask her about Charlotte Ann’s picture.
Well, this is what Mom read, not getting to read more than a few lines before Dad interrupted her and the two of them started laughing. Dad stopped her maybe a half-dozen times before she finished, and they laughed and laughed and kept on laughing, and Mom wiped her tears and held her sides, and Dad held his, and I grinned and scowled.
This is what Mom read:
The cow is a mammal. It has six sides—right, left, up and below, inside and outside. At the back is a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so they don’t fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with, and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, the milk comes, and there is never an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have never understood, but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell. You can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.
Well, that simply doubled up Mom and Dad in laughter, and even Charlotte Ann pounded with her spoon on her ordinary wooden food tray, which I used to pound on years and years ago. It was probably the same spoon I had pounded with. She acted as if she was having the time of her life.
“What’s the matter, Bill? Isn’t it funny?”
“Not very,” I said. “Anybody who is ten years old ought to know more about cows than that.”
Right away Dad was ready to defend the girl by saying, “She was probably a city girl who didn’t have any brothers,” which also wasn’t very funny.
“Say,” I said to Mom, “have you had any new pictures taken of Charlotte Ann lately?”
“Why, no. Why do you ask?”
“You haven’t had one taken of her sitting in that fancy high chair in the Sugar Creek Furniture Store?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I just wondered.” I had made up my mind not to tell her any more.
As soon as supper was over, I started to do the dishes without being asked to for a change. I almost enjoyed it, because I was learning to enjoy doing things for Mom when she was tired. In fact, it makes me feel fine inside—almost as good as I feel when I am eating a piece of ripe watermelon—to do the dishes while she rests, because she is a pretty neat mom.
Dad was in the other room with her, talking to her while she rested. Mom was actually lying down while she was doing it, she was that tired.
“The most friendly couple is camping down in the woods,” I heard her say. “They were here this afternoon a little while. She’s the prettiest thing I think I ever saw. Kind of fancy, though, and wearing high-heeled shoes—not at all the kind an experienced camper or hiker would wear. They wanted a pail of well water, and I sold them a pound of Old Brindle’s butter, which they are going to keep cool in the spring.”
Hearing her say that, I sidled over to the kitchen door with Mom’s apron on and the drying towel in my hands and listened to what else she was saying. I got there too late to get all of it.
“She’s just out of the hospital, he told me. She doesn’t look like there’s a thing in the world wrong with her, but her husband—their name is Everhard—says she is under special treatment and she has been released to him. She’s not at all dangerous, but she gets depressed at times, and sometimes right in the middle of the night she gets one of her spells.”
I heard Dad sigh and say, “Being out here in the country with plenty of fresh air and good country food and with an understanding husband like that will be good for her. I wonder how long she has been that way.”
Mom said, “He told me confidentially, when she was out in the car, that it started about a year ago. She’s all right when she’s all right, but these spells come on, and she cries. She never does anything desperate—only wants to go around digging holes in the ground.”
That was as much as I got to hear right then because the phone rang. When Dad answered, it was Little Jim’s mom, the pianist at the Sugar Creek church, wanting to talk to Mom about something or other.
Mom was always pleased when it was Little Jim’s mom calling. Little Jim’s mom was her best friend, and sometimes they talked and talked until one of them had to quit because she smelled something burning on the stove.
Well, I, the maid of the Collins family, went back to slosh my hands around a little longer in the hot sudsy water. Seeing our radio on the utility table and wondering what program was on, I wip
ed the water from my right hand and turned on the radio, dialing to a station that sometimes had a story for boys at that time. I tuned in just in time to hear the deep-voiced announcer in a terribly excited hurry say something about “those red dishpan hands,” and then he galloped on to tell all the women listeners to be sure to use a certain kind of soap that would make their hands soft and pretty almost right away. The soap was also good for washing dishes.
Dad had to come through the kitchen on his way to the barn, so he stopped and listened with me. Then he said, “You using the right kind of soap, son?”
“I don’t know. I hope so, but I’m afraid I am getting dishpan hands. Look at ’em!”
I held out my hands for him to look at, and he said with a mischievous grin in his voice, “Looks like you got dishpan hair too.” Then he turned the radio down a little saying, “Your mother is resting, so keep it low.”
“She’s talking on the phone,” I said.
“It’s the same thing. You will find out she will be all full of pep when she gets through,” which I knew might be the truth. Mom nearly always felt fine when she finished listening to and talking to Little Jim’s mom, who was always cheerful on the telephone.
“She smiles with her voice,” Mom always said about Little Jim’s mom.
Dad went on out to the barn with the milk pail to see if the warble flies had tormented Old Brindle so much that day that she didn’t have time to manufacture as much milk as usual, and I went on back to my half-cold dishwater.
I was just finishing washing the last dish and was getting ready to start drying them when Mom finished talking with and listening to Little Jim’s mom. But when she came in, she was still tired. She sighed as she lifted the steaming teakettle and poured water over the dishes so she could dry them easier.
All of a sudden I got a half-sad, half-glad feeling in my heart, so I said to her, “You go on back in the other room and rest some more. I’m getting along fine.” I suppose I was glad because for a change I actually wanted to help her, and maybe I was sad because Mom’s sighs nearly always make me feel that way for some reason. She sighed again and started helping me. I decided to let her, because I didn’t want to discourage her from helping a tired-out son with his work.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24 Page 5