What excitement!
“I told you skunks were smart,” Circus said from his perch on the can in the middle of the lane. “Anybody want to know what time it is?” He quickly stood up and turned around as though he was going to take the lid off.
“Hey,” Poetry and I yelled at the same time, “don’t you dare!” and we dove toward him to stop him. “Keep that lid on!”
“What are you scared of?” Circus asked, his monkey face looking more like a monkey than ever. “There is nothing alarming in this innocent little can.”
But that clock must have reminded Circus of what time it really was and of what he ought to do, because he said, “I’ve got to get going. I’ll pay you guys later for your can. How much you want?”
“You pay for my alarm clock too,” I said. “Five dollars.”
“We’ll give you the can, but we want our half of what you get for your kitty,” Poetry said. “Don’t forget you caught him in our woods!”
With his pocketknife, Circus made a couple of holes in the lid of the can so his kitty wouldn’t suffocate. Then, picking up the can in both hands, he started to run toward his house, which is right across the road from Big Jim’s house.
The Sugar Creek veterinarian was at Big Jim’s dad’s farm that afternoon, looking after some of the animals. In fact, he was using an elastrator on the lambs’ tails, which is what veterinarians do when the farmer doesn’t want the tails cut off all at once. The elastrator clamps on a rubber ring very tight, which hurts the lamb a little for a few minutes and then quits hurting. About four weeks later, the tail drops off, wherever the lamb happens to be.
Circus had said he was going to have the veterinarian operate on his kitty so he would smell as fresh as a daisy instead of as fresh as a skunk.
“There are a lot of people who buy skunks for pets and pay big prices for them,” Circus had told us while we were still in the middle of our excitement.
We watched until he disappeared down the lane, carrying his black and white kitty and my alarm clock.
While Poetry and I finished collecting our treasures and our thoughts, I all of a sudden heard the sound of wind in the trees. At the same time there was a roll of thunder, which meant that a Sugar Creek storm was coming up. In fact, it was almost here. The sun slid under a cloud at that very second. Then I heard another roll of thunder, which seemed closer than the other one had been.
“Wonderful!” Poetry exclaimed cheerfully. “That’ll take care of your wet overalls!”
“How?” I asked, looking toward the cloudy sky.
“All you have to do is to try to get home before it rains and not quite make it. After you get yourself wet all over, your parents will blame the rain.”
It was an idea, but for some reason I didn’t like it.
4
There’s nothing much more interesting for a boy to see than a Sugar Creek thunderstorm coming up. The sky that afternoon was wonderful to look at. Great big fierce-looking clouds, some of them almost half as big as the whole northwest part of the sky, were rolling and tumbling and tossing themselves around as if they were terribly angry. Also, savage-looking, pitchfork shaped flashes of yellow lightning were leaping from one cloud to another. Some clouds were blue-green and some were black. In the direction of our house, the sky was still clear and blue, but it wouldn’t be very long.
We didn’t have time to decide what we wanted to do. We had to do something quick or get wetter than two drowned rats—a large roly-poly one and a kind of skinny freckle-faced one. We were closer to Poetry’s house than we were to mine, and a lot closer to their toolshed than to their house or barn.
“Come on,” Poetry ordered. “We can just make it to the toolshed. Let’s get these books in so they won’t get wet.”
A second later, carrying our stuff, we were racing ahead of the storm and through the woods toward the log cabin toolshed. When I got to the fallen log where Circus’s black and white animal had been, I leaped over it and ran even faster than Poetry did, getting to the shed first and shoving the door open. That is, I started to shove the door open—and couldn’t.
“It’s locked,” Poetry puffed behind me. “We keep it locked so people can’t get in and borrow things and never bring them back.”
Just then I felt a drop of rain on my one hand and about six on the other, and I knew the storm was already there. The wind in the trees was louder now, and the thunder was crashing and acting as if it really meant business. In another minute the rain would be pouring down as hard as if Sugar Creek itself was up there in the sky and someone had punched a million holes through its bed and it was leaking through every hole. And we were under it.
“Quick,” Poetry puffed again. “Around on the other side there is a hole where we can crawl under. Mama Skunk and her family will be happy to have company. Come on!” He grabbed me by an arm and started to pull me along after him.
“Stop!” I thundered at the same time the sky did and jerked myself loose. If I could have seen Poetry’s face, I would have known he was only fooling. A second later he shoved one of his roly-poly hands into one of his pockets, pulled out a key on a little chain, and with it unlocked the toolshed door—just in time.
The minute we were inside that dark log house, it began to rain hard and to hail. The sound was as though a hundred carpenters were up on that clapboard roof driving nails with two hundred hammers—one hammer in each hand.
I was surprised that there wasn’t a bad odor inside, but there wasn’t, maybe because most of the time skunks don’t smell like skunks. They belong to the cat family and, like house cats and raccoons, like to keep themselves as clean as they can. In fact, they are so clean that when they get through digging up a nice fat grub—or a june bug, while it is still a grub—they stop and shake themselves to get the dirt or dust off their pretty, glossy fur before they dig again.
Well, while the rain was coming down like that and we couldn’t do anything else, we looked around at Poetry’s dad’s farm machinery, such as an oat seeder, a drill, a cultivator, and other different things farmers use.
“Abraham Lincoln was born in a house like this,” Poetry said. “Let’s go up in the loft and imagine ourselves to be part of the Lincoln family.”
I remembered an old joke and said, “Abe was a wonderful man; he was so wonderful he even built the house he was born in.”
But Poetry didn’t get the joke. He’d put down his stuff and was already on his way up a little ladder to the loft. The ladder was only a row of stout sticks driven into the wall. Pretty soon we were both up there in the half dark. There was only one window, and it wasn’t very clean.
“I’ve been waiting for a chance to show you something. Wait until I get a light,” Poetry said. With that, he shoved his hand into his pocket again and brought out the waterproof matchbox he nearly always carried. He struck a match and went to a table where there was an old-fashioned kerosene lantern, which he quickly lighted. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but a nice little loft room all fixed up like a boy’s den.
“Sh!” Poetry said. “This is a secret; don’t tell anybody. It’s just for you and me.”
There was a neat little wood table and beside it a four-shelf bookcase with a lot of old books. Also there were a few pictures on the wall and two rocking chairs that he had probably gotten out of the attic of his grandmother’s house. On the floor was a rug that I remembered having seen at their house just before it got too worn for his mother to want it anymore.
Against one of the log walls was an army cot with an Indian blanket on it and a red leather cushion and a lot of other things such as an old hand-wind phonograph and a few records. On the table beside it was his green fishing tackle box, which had more lures in it than any box I ever saw.
We had to yell to each other to be heard above the rain and the hail on the roof, but being in a place like that gave me a great feeling.
Poetry, being my almost best friend, made me solemnly promise I wouldn’t tell even one of
the rest of the gang about it, and I promised.
“But how about Wally?” I asked. “He’ll be here a whole week—he and Alexander the Coppersmith.”
I don’t know how long we stayed in the old house, talking and planning things to do when Wally came, while it still rained.
Before we left, Poetry got what he said was a wonderful idea. “It’s the best idea I ever had in my life,” he said. He wouldn’t tell me what it was—just that it was an idea and I’d have to trust him.
“Remember, it’s a secret,” he said, “so don’t tell a soul.” But all he would tell me anyway was that he and Wally and I would all sleep in his tent some night, and at midnight we’d go on a little visit to the log cabin loft.
When I got home that afternoon I felt pretty bad that my new overalls had gotten all wet, but there wasn’t a thing I could do except hope Mom or Dad or both wouldn’t say very much about it.
I started to whistle as I came up to “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox and was still whistling when I got to Theodore Collins at the barn, where he had just finished milking old Brindle, our one-eared cow.
Dad was coming out the door at the time. His gray eyes under his bushy eyebrows swept over me from the top of my bare red head to the toes of my bare feet, then stopped at my wrinkled still-wet new overalls.
I was trying to act very businesslike, as if I was in a hurry to get the eggs gathered. I would have to go past him to get through the barn door. Once inside, I would climb the ladder to the haymow where old Bentcomb, my favorite hen, always laid her egg in a special nest under a log. She laid three hundred eggs last year, which is almost one a day.
But for some reason Dad’s eyes were just like a pair of strong arms holding me, and I couldn’t move.
I could talk, though, and did, saying, “It’s Wally’s fault. I did it for him.”
“Your cousin Wally hasn’t arrived yet. He won’t be here for four weeks.”
“He’s here in my mind. He’s been on my mind all day.”
Well, Dad was sometimes a very mischievous dad, and he was always surprising me by hardly noticing something I did that was wrong, especially if he knew it was an accident. His eyes let loose of my overalls and caught me again by my own eyes, as he said with a little sarcastic mischief in his voice, “So Wally’s been on your mind all day?”
“Yes,” I said.
Then Dad chuckled a friendly chuckle and in a deep, friendly voice said, “Well, son, don’t let him fall off. That’s a pretty small place for a boy to be.” Right that second his eyes stopped looking at me, and his nose started sniffing the air. “There’s a skunk around here somewhere, I think. Smell it?” he asked.
I quickly turned my head in several directions, sniffing with each turn.
Then he said, “Let’s be sure to close the chicken house door tonight. We can’t afford to lose any of our nice laying hens.”
I answered, “I smelled one of them myself about an hour ago, just before the storm. Everything smells worse when there’s humidity in the air.” I had heard Mom say that maybe a hundred times when the wind blew some of the barnyard odors toward our house.
“Well, you hurry up and get your eggs gathered. Mother will have supper ready pretty soon.”
He started toward the house, and Mixy, who probably couldn’t smell polecats as well as she could milk, followed along behind and beside and in front of him, meowing hungrily all the way.
Watching her, I thought, Go on, little innocent cat, enjoy your happy-go-lucky life while you can. Pretty soon your fun will be over, and you’ll have to watch every minute to keep from being chewed to pieces by a city dog.
As I went into the barn and started up the ladder to the haymow, I thought I smelled a black and white kitty myself. I knew I had when, twenty minutes later, I went into the house with the eggs.
Mom, who had the kitchen full of the wonderful odor of freshly baked baking powder biscuits and raw-fried potatoes, whirled around as if a polecat had suddenly walked in. She came sniffing straight toward me. “Bill Collins!” she exclaimed. “Where have you been? You’ve got polecat all over you! Outside with you, young man! I don’t want my house all smelled up, with your Aunt Belle coming.”
“They aren’t coming for four weeks yet. Four whole weeks.”
“Quick! Outside! Eggs and all, until we see whether you have contaminated them too!”
And with Mom helping me by opening the door with her hands and pushing me with her voice, I started out. Then I caught one of my toes in one of my overall legs. A second later, when I came to, I was half on and half off the board walk that runs from the house to the iron pitcher pump. There were scrambled eggs all around me and on me. There were transparent whites and orange yolks and white and brown shells scattered in a mixed-up mess everywhere—on the walk, on the ground, some of them on the pump platform seven feet away. But it seemed most of them were on me—on my hands and face and all over the front of my new, wrinkled, wet overalls.
And that was how I got to take off those wet wrinkled overalls and put on a clean pair without Mom even finding out what had happened. Also, that’s why, for some reason, I got to take a bath before supper, not getting to take it in the bathtub but in a washtub in our toolhouse. Dad helped me by using a special no-odor soap, which made me smell almost as bad as I did before.
5
The morning finally came when Wally and Alexander the Coppersmith arrived. I hadn’t known that long-handled name was the name Wally had given to his mongrel dog until my red aunt called him that in a letter to Mom. My “red aunt” was my red-haired dad’s only sister, who was also Wally’s mother. We always called her my “red aunt” when we talked about her at our house. She liked that name herself, since she was a very human being, like my parents, and wasn’t too dignified or stuck-up or anything.
I was standing near the walnut tree beside the mailbox when I saw their car coming down the gravel road, stirring up clouds of white dust, which the wind carried out across Dragonfly’s dad’s cornfield toward Bumblebee Hill. (That was Strawberry Hill’s other name, and on the top of it was the old abandoned cemetery where we had so many of our gang meetings and where Old Man Paddler’s wife and his boys were buried.)
It was almost noon, and Mom had lunch ready, and I was as hungry as a bear. That means I was as hungry as a boy who is in good health and has had an early breakfast and nothing to eat since—except for maybe a few strawberries he has found on Strawberry Hill, a few wild raspberries from a row of bushes along the border of Dragonfly’s cornfield, and maybe a slice of bread and butter and grape jam that he has talked his mother into letting him have.
I was feeling pretty sad, as well as hungry, still thinking about my week of torture that was just ahead and still remembering the last time my dad and I had talked it over, which was that very morning. We had been out by the grape arbor at the time, where we had stretched a little canvas for Alexander the Coppersmith to sleep under at night.
“After all, William,” Dad began, calling me by my hated name, “Wally’s parents are entitled to a little vacation. Every husband and his wife ought to have at least a week each year somewhere away from their children, if they want it, just to give themselves a little variety in life and a little rest. Your Aunt Belle has never seen the Black Hills nor the Rockies, and so, since your Uncle Amos has his vacation at this time, we are cooperating with them and taking Wally off their hands.”
“And putting him on my hands,” I said.
“You forget,” Dad explained, and again he was using friendly sarcasm, “your mother and I have on our hands a red-haired freckle-faced boy of our own all year, so we can sympathize with Wally’s parents.”
I knew he was only joking, but not being in the mood for a joke when I was in the middle of it, I didn’t laugh.
As I told you, we were standing beside the grape arbor at the time. I looked away and up and, seeing the two-by-four crossbeam just above my head, jumped up, caught it in both hands, swung myself into
a skin-the-cat movement, and in a jiffy was sitting on top, feeling a little better because I had used my muscles to let off a little red-haired steam.
“You may discover that Wally is a pretty good boy after all,” he said. “You have to get acquainted with people to understand them. You have to get into their minds to do that.”
Well, when the Sensenbrenners’ car came swinging in through the gate I had opened for them, stopped beside the plum tree, and Wally and his dog came tumbling out, I knew that my time of reckoning had come. He and Alexander the Coppersmith had been riding in the backseat. The very second the car stopped, the back door was thrust open, and both he and his mongrel dog came tumbling out at the same time. They got tangled up with each other as they came, and Wally stumbled and fell and rolled out onto the lawn.
One reason he had a hard time getting out was that he was trying to bring out with him a twenty-four- by thirty-six-inch mattress, which accidentally fell under him. That was the reason he didn’t get hurt the very first minute he was on our farm.
“What on earth?” I exclaimed.
My red aunt, hearing me, said, “My son and your cousin are on the earth,” and she laughed a musical laugh. In spite of her being a woman, her laugh reminded me of Dad’s, and I could tell they were brother and sister.
Just that minute, from the direction of the house I heard Mom’s voice calling a cheerful welcome. A second after that, the side door slammed as loud as I sometimes let it slam myself when I go out in a hurry on my way to somewhere or other. Then I heard Mom say what she nearly always says when we have company she likes and hasn’t seen for a while: “Well, well, my, my, and for land’s sakes! Come on in!”
I couldn’t resist saying mischievously to Mom, “You can go back and shut that door like a gentleman,” quoting what I had heard Dad say quite a few hundred times in my life. But Mom was too pleased to see Uncle Amos and Aunt Belle to care what I said.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24 Page 12