Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  “What on earth makes her want to do that?” I said one day. “Doesn’t she have sense enough to stay in bed?”

  “She’s lonesome,” Mom answered. “She’s lonesome, and she has to have lots of attention. You were that way when you were little.”

  “Oh, quit telling me about when I was little years and years ago,” I said, not wanting to even be reminded that I ever had been a baby.

  As I started to say, getting Charlotte Ann to bed was a hard problem. And when Dad had to be away, it got to be my job to help Mom make her go.

  But when Mom and Dad were both away, then I had to do it all by myself—being the baby-sitter.

  One very hot afternoon, Mom and Dad both had to be gone for two or three hours, and so they let me stay home to take care of Charlotte Ann. They gave me orders to see to it that she took her afternoon nap between 1:30 and 2:30, or as near to that as I could get her to. And if it rained, I was to close all the windows—things like that.

  “Take good care of her,” Mom said, as she looked out the car door window, all dressed up in her Sunday dress.

  “I will,” I promised, and she and Dad went spinning out through the front gate, past “Theodore Collins” on the mailbox, and onto the highway. Their car stirred up a big cloud of white dust that moved slowly off in the direction of Bumblebee Hill and the old cemetery.

  10

  I shut the gate after Mom and Dad, and Charlotte Ann and I went hand in hand toward the house to take her nap. That is, her hand was in mine. She didn’t want it to be there because she knew it was nap time, and she didn’t want to take one.

  “It’s not hard to take a nap,” I said to her. “You just lie down and shut your eyes, and that’s all there is to it. I’m the baby-sitter, and you are the baby-lying-downer. My first job is to get you to bed, so here we go.”

  I was using a very cheerful voice, but she seemed to be suspicious of such a voice coming from me. Besides, she was still a little tearful from Mom and Dad’s having gone and leaving her at home with me.

  I realized that I was going to have to use one of Dad’s tricks to get her to want to go to bed, one he used sometimes at night. I had seen him put her to bed maybe a hundred times, so I looked down at her and said cheerfully, “OK, kid. Let’s get going.”

  I was surprised at how easy it was at first. It didn’t take long to get her ready because Mom had said she could rest in her playsuit, which Mom called her sunsuit. Just as Dad does, I pretended to be a poor, crippled, old grandfather, saying to her with a trembling voice as if I was suffering terribly, “I’ve got to get into that other room, and I need somebody to help me walk.”

  I started limping badly toward the room where she was supposed to sleep, going very slowly like a very crippled old man, staggering and limping and whining and complaining.

  If there is anybody Charlotte Ann likes better than anybody else, it is Old Man Paddler. She must have imagined that I was Mr. Paddler, because quick as anything she made a dive in my direction, clasped her small hands around my right knee and held on tight while I limped the best I could with one leg and walked the best I could with the other. We struggled toward the room where her small bed was. All the way there, I kept on complaining with a trembling voice, saying, “Poor old man. How can I walk without a nice little girl to help me?”

  The very minute we got to her bed—the green window shade was down, and it was almost dark—she decided to do as she does at night when she says her prayers before getting into bed. Right away she was down on her knees and making me get down beside her. I bent my poor, old rheumatic knees down to the hard floor.

  Without waiting for me to say anything, she started in her babyish voice trying to say the prayer Dad had been teaching her:

  “Now I lay me down to sleep.

  I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to keep.

  If I should die before I wake,

  I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to take.

  For Jesus’ sake. Amen.”

  It was the same prayer I used to say myself years and years ago. Sometimes even yet when I kneel down to say a good-night prayer to God and I am very tired and sleepy, before I know it I am saying it myself even though I am too big to say just a little poem prayer.

  As soon as her prayer was finished, I swooped her up and flip-flopped her into bed, but for some reason or other she was as wide awake as anything. She didn’t stay lying down but sat straight up in bed with a mischievous grin all over her cute face. She was the most wide-awake baby I ever saw.

  “I want my dolly,” she ordered me in her own language, which is what she always does at night.

  “OK,” I said and got it for her from the other room, where I found it upside down and lying on its face. I handed it to her.

  “I want my rag dolly too,” she said.

  “OK, I’ll get your dirty-faced rag dolly.” I went to the corner of the room, where it was lying on its side with its left foot stuck in its face. I carried it to her and tossed it into the bed with her, where it socked her in the cheek but didn’t hurt. Then I said, “OK, now. Go to sleep.”

  I was halfway to the door when she called again, saying, “I want my ‘puh’”—meaning her little pink doll pillow.

  I came back and sighed down hard at her, then started looking everywhere for her pink pillow, wondering what else she would want and why. I soon found out because next she wanted her hanky, a pretty colored handkerchief that Dad had had to get for her every night all summer and which she always held close to her face when she went to sleep, since it was very soft. Mom said, “She likes to feel secure, and all these things help her to feel that way. She imagines the dollies are honest-to-goodness people, and she feels she isn’t alone when they are with her in bed. They keep her from being afraid.”

  I couldn’t help but think that Poetry—who is always quoting a poem—if he were here, would probably quote one by Robert Louis Stevenson, which goes like this:

  In winter I get up at night

  And dress by yellow candlelight.

  In summer quite the other way

  I have to go to bed by day.

  For some reason or other as I looked down at her cuddling her dollies, I had never liked her so well in my whole life—even though I was still half disgusted with her for making me bring her so many things. I guess I was also a little worried too, which probably helped me to like her better. I kept thinking about the woman who had been digging holes in the earth, the one who thought Charlotte Ann looked enough like her own dead Elsa to be her twin—in fact, enough like her to be her. I wished the woman would hurry up and get well, but she didn’t seem to be improving very much, because the gang had kept on finding new holes all around Sugar Creek.

  Pretty soon Charlotte Ann’s eyes went shut and stayed shut, and her regular breathing showed that she was asleep.

  Realizing that at last she was asleep, I went out through the living room into the kitchen and through that. Out of doors, I closed the screen door more quietly than it had been closed for a long time and went on out toward the iron pitcher pump—suddenly being very thirsty.

  Halfway to the pump I stopped on the board walk and turned around to see if anything was wrong. I felt that something was. Nearly always by the time I got that far out of doors, I heard the screen door slam behind me. This time it hadn’t done it, and it was a bit confusing to me not to hear it.

  Baby-sitting was hard work, I thought, and it would be silly to do two long hours of it actually sitting down.

  A few minutes later I was up on our grape arbor in a perfect position for eating a piece of pie upside down. But I didn’t have any pie, so I couldn’t baby-sit that way.

  Pretty soon I was tired of being up on that narrow two-by-four, so I wriggled myself down and walked over to the water tank on the other side of the pump where a lot of yellow butterflies, seeing me come, made a scramble in different fluttering directions. Then right away the air was quiet again as they settled themselves down all around the edge of a little water p
uddle.

  Maybe I could get Dad’s insect book and look up a new insect for him. Maybe I could look up something about yellow butterflies, which laid their eggs on Mom’s cabbage plants, and also the green larvae, which hatched out and ate the cabbages. But I wasn’t interested in getting any more education just then.

  When I spied my personally owned hoe leaning against the toolhouse on the other side of the grape arbor, an idea popped into my head to do a few minutes’ baby-sitting by hoeing a couple rows of potatoes in the garden just below the pignut trees near which Dad had buried Old Addie’s two red-haired pigs. But for some reason or other I began to feel very tired, and I could tell it would be very boring to baby-sit that way.

  I moseyed along out to where Old Addie was doing her own baby-sitting near a big puddle beside her apartment house, lying in some straw that was still clean. She was acting very lazy and sleepy and grunting while her six red-haired, lively youngsters were having a noisy afternoon lunch.

  “Pretty soft,” I said down to her, but she didn’t act as if she even recognized me.

  I remembered a silly little rhyme, which I had heard in school when I was in first grade:

  Six little pigs in the straw with their

  mother,

  Bright-eyed, curly-tailed, tumbling on

  each other.

  Bring them apples from the orchard

  trees,

  And hear those piggies say, “Please,

  please, please.”

  That gave me an idea. I scrambled out to the orchard, picked up six apples, and brought them back. Leaning over the fence, I called out, “Here, piggy, piggy, piggy. Here are some nice apples. Say please, and you can have them.”

  But they ignored me, not only not saying please but probably not even saying thank you in pig language to their mother.

  So I tossed my six apples over into the hog lot, where they rolled up to the open door of Addie’s apartment. And that was the end of her six babies’ afternoon lunch. She shuffled her heavy body to her feet, swung it around, and started in on those apples as though she was terribly hungry.

  Well, what next? I thought. I wondered if old Bentcomb, my favorite white hen, who always laid her egg in the nest up in our haymow, had laid her egg yet today. It was too early to gather the eggs, but I could get hers if she had it ready.

  Into the barn and up the ladder I went, and there she was with her pretty white neck and head. Her long, red bent comb hung down over her right eye like a lock of brown hair drops down over the right eye of one of Circus’s many sisters, who, even though she is ordinary-looking, doesn’t act as though she thinks I am a dumbbell, the way some girls do that go to the Sugar Creek School.

  “Hi, old Bentcomb,” I said, but she ducked her head and ignored me.

  “Pretty soft life,” I said. “You don’t have to worry about taking care of a baby sister while your parents are away.”

  Down the ladder I went and shuffled back across the barnyard, thinking maybe it would be a good idea to peek in under the window shade to see if Charlotte Ann was still asleep.

  11

  As I told you, it was one of those terribly hot afternoons. The Collins family had been hoping for a week that it would rain, because our crops needed a real soaker. Just to find out for sure if it was going to, I lifted up a little wooden step at the door on the north side of our house to see if a smooth, round stone that was half buried there was wet. It always is when it is going to rain. Dad looks there himself when he wants to find out whether it will rain. Mom teases him about it.

  The minute the daylight streamed into where the dark had been under that step, a lot of different kinds of bugs scrambled for a place to hide. I noticed especially a big, black cricket, maybe the very one that sings every night just outside Mom’s and Dad’s bedroom window, which Mom says sings her to sleep. She likes to hear crickets but isn’t interested in looking at them or touching them.

  The smooth, round stone was wet, I noticed, which meant that there was a lot of humidity in the air. Then I put the step back down again and went to the corner of the house to see if there was a big yellowish cloud in the southwest, and there was. So it might rain before night, I thought.

  Just that second I saw a large, tiger-colored swallowtail butterfly out by the orchard fence, fluttering around a red thistle blossom. Because the swallowtail is one of the largest butterflies in our whole territory, I knew Dad would be especially pleased if I could catch one for our collection. So I quickly circled the house to the toolshed, scooped up Dad’s butterfly net, and a minute later was out by the orchard fence where one of the most beautiful butterflies I had ever seen was acting as if the nectar of that big bull thistle blossom was about the sweetest thing in the world to eat.

  Generally we didn’t allow any bull thistles to grow on our farm. But because Dad knew that swallowtail butterflies like milkweed and thistle flowers better than any others, we had let this one grow, hoping a swallowtail would decide to live around our place. One of the prettiest sights a boy ever sees on a farm is a beautiful butterfly drifting around and lighting on the flowers, its different-colored wings folding and unfolding and making a boy feel all glad inside.

  The swallowtail was on the other side of the woven wire fence, which was very hard to climb over, so I hurried to the orchard gate near the cherry tree. I got to the thistle just as the gorgeous yellow and black swallowtail decided to leave, floating lazily along like a feather in the wind, with me right after it, swinging my net and missing it and running and getting hot and still not catching it.

  Then all of a sudden I heard a quail’s whistle. I stopped and looked all around, expecting to see either Mr. Everhard or his wife. A second later I saw which one it was, and it was Mr. Ever-hard. I wanted to give a mournful turtledove call to answer him, but instead I listened for his wife to answer. But she didn’t.

  Seeing me, he called, “Have you seen anything of Mrs. Everhard?”

  “No, I haven’t,” I called back, deciding to forget about the swallowtail I was after. Besides, when I had taken my eye off the butterfly, I had lost it.

  “She was taking her afternoon nap,” Mr. Everhard said, “so I went to the creek a while, but when I came back she was gone. You sure she’s not up at your house?”

  “I’m sure,” I said, suddenly remembering that it had been a long time since I was inside our house. Also, for some reason I decided I had better go quick to see if Charlotte Ann was still asleep or if she had waked up and maybe had gone somewhere herself.

  “Let’s go look,” I said to Mr. Everhard and started to run fast, with him right after me.

  All the way through the orchard to the big bull thistle and the gate, not bothering to wait for Mr. Everhard, I was thinking over and over, Mrs. Everhard had been taking a nap while her husband was away, and when he came back she was gone, and he couldn’t find her—gone, and he couldn’t find her. And she was crazy—no, emotionally ill—and our Charlotte Ann looked enough like her dead baby, Elsa, to be her twin. Enough like her to be her.

  I tried to run faster and couldn’t. Instead of flying along like a bird in a hurry, I felt that I was just crawling like a swallowtail butterfly’s reddish-brown larva crawling along a parsnip leaf in our garden, which is the kind of leaf a swallowtail’s larva likes to eat best.

  Hurry! Hurry! Hurry! If ever I hurried, I hurried then.

  I darted past the big red thistle blossom, not even stopping to glance at it to see if there might be another swallowtail fluttering around it. I darted through the still-open gate and past the front doorstep, around the house, past the grape arbor to the back screen, which I remembered now I hadn’t locked from the outside as I should have.

  She’s got to be there, I thought. Why, she could have toddled out that door and gone to the barn or even through the front gate and across the dusty road and through the woods to the spring and the creek, and she doesn’t know how to swim!

  She didn’t know how to swim!

  Then I
thought, what if Mrs. Everhard had gotten one of her spells and decided that Charlotte Ann really was her baby and had come to get her and had run away with her—kidnapped her? She had to be there in her crib asleep—had to be!

  I made a barefoot dash through the kitchen and the living room and into the dark bedroom, not being able to see in the almost dark because I had been out in the bright sunlight and my eyes were not adjusted yet. I ran to her bed.

  “Charlotte Ann,” I exclaimed, “are you here?” and I thrust my hands down into her crib to see if she was.

  Then I got the most terrible feeling I’d had in my life. I just felt terrible. Awful! A million worried thoughts went whirling around in my mind, for Charlotte Ann wasn’t there. She was gone!

  Gone! Gone away somewhere, and I didn’t know where.

  Just then I heard a heavy rumbling noise outside the house like the noise a wagon makes going across the Sugar Creek bridge. It also sounded a little like a powerful car starting. But, of course, it couldn’t be that, because any car outside wouldn’t be just starting; it would be stopping instead.

  Charlotte Ann wasn’t in her crib. I hurried out of the room, calling her name and looking in every other room in the house, upstairs and down and up again, calling and looking frantically. She had to be in the house. Had to be!

  But she wasn’t. I dashed back downstairs and out through the back screen door just as Mr. Everhard got there. He didn’t act as worried as I felt, but the fleeting glimpse I got of his face when I told him, “There’s nobody here,” didn’t make me feel any better.