Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  A great big glad feeling started racing all through me and up and down my spine. If Dad had called Poetry to come, he had also probably asked all the members of the gang to come. And even with Wally there, it was going to be a lot of fun to be with the gang. I felt so good I could have chased a wildcat across our barnyard myself.

  “Come on,” I said to Wally and Poetry. “Let’s get down and get going. It won’t be so bad after all, maybe. There are only about nine thousand nine hundred and fifty left.”

  “Nine thousand nine hundred and fifty what?” Wally asked.

  I answered, “Nothing,” and swished toward the banister and went downstairs two steps at a time.

  6

  We had a grand time swimming that afternoon, although for some reason I didn’t feel as happy as usual. I kept worrying all the time because of Wally and Alexander the Coppersmith’s not having very good country manners and wondering what the gang would think of me for having such strange relatives.

  I discovered, though, that the dog had already been trained to retrieve a stick Wally would throw. He would race madly after it, catch it up in his mouth, and come galloping proudly back with it, acting as pleased as a boy carrying home a good report card to his parents, who probably didn’t expect him to have even one good grade because of his not being as smart as they remembered they were when they were his age.

  Anyway, it was as easy as pie to teach Alexander to dash wildly out into Sugar Creek after a stick we’d throw in. He acted as if he didn’t even know water was water or that he was getting himself all wet. Of course, he didn’t have to worry about what his mother would think when he got home. But the very second he reached shore, he would shake himself to get the water out of his ears and off him. Anybody and everybody who was near him would get a free shower.

  Once, after Alexander had come splashing back with a stick, he stopped right beside Circus and showered water all over him. That made Circus exclaim, “Hey, you dumb dog, these are my brand-new overalls! Don’t you know anything?”

  I looked at Circus, and he did have on a brand-new pair of blue bib overalls. In fact, I had noticed them when I’d first seen Circus doing handsprings across our yard. I hadn’t said anything and had pretended not to notice, because it might have been embarrassing for him.

  Circus’s parents had so many children, especially girls, to buy clothes for. How they managed to scrape together enough money to get clothes for them all, I don’t know. Anyway, sometimes Circus had patches in a half-dozen places on his clothes, and sometimes there were even patches on the patches themselves. That goes to show that somebody in his family knew how to sew.

  But Dragonfly didn’t always think before he spoke. “Where’d you get the money to pay for them?” he asked.

  If I had known he was going to say that, I’d have clapped my hand over his mouth. Circus was another one of my almost best friends, and I didn’t want him to be embarrassed because his folks were poor.

  But Circus, instead of acting hurt in his heart, just grinned and answered, “Oh, that was easy—I sold my black and white kitty. I got enough to buy a pair of shoes and a Sunday shirt and had enough left to put ten dollars in the bank—all for one black and white woods cat!”

  We had finished swimming and were getting ready to go back through the tall weeds to the little brown footpath that winds along the creek from the swimming hole to the spring. From the spring we were going to the old sycamore tree and on up to Old Man Paddler’s cabin in the hills.

  Wally’s curiosity was so aroused about the black and white kitty that he kept asking questions as we walked along. So Circus told him the whole story about catching the little skunk by the tail, plopping him into a milk can, and taking him to the veterinarian for an operation. He wound up by saying, “A rich lady in the city wanted him for a house pet, so I sold him to her for twenty-five dollars.”

  We’d reached the spring and were lying down resting in the warm sunshine by the old black widow stump before Circus—with Poetry and me helping him—finally finished his kitty story.

  “Want to hear a poem about a polecat?” Poetry asked and was halfway through before Dragonfly, who didn’t like Poetry’s poetry, stopped him.

  But Wally’s curiosity was really aroused. “You mean, all you have to do to catch a skunk is to sneak up on it and pick it up by the tail, and you can sell it for twenty-five dollars?”

  “Bill and Poetry saw me do it—didn’t you?”

  “Sure,” Poetry said and winked across the top of a bell-shaped purplish flower that was growing between our faces—a bluebell, I think it was.

  I caught the meaning of his wink and the mischievous look on his face, and I said to Wally, “Sure.”

  “But didn’t he smell after you caught him?”

  “Oh, maybe a little,” Circus said.

  Well, putting that idea in Wally’s mind was just like planting an onion seed in our garden.

  “I’ve got a whole hundred dollars in the bank at home. I save every cent I can,” he said.

  And I could see that he had his mind made up to make twenty-five dollars himself before his week was up and my Uncle Amos and my red aunt came back from their happy vacation, which would be the end of their carefree life.

  It felt good to lie there in the tall bluegrass in that warm sunshine after staying in the water almost too long and getting cold. Little Jim was getting blue lips and shivering before we’d all decided we had been in long enough.

  So, as we always like to do, we lay there sprawled in a half-dozen different directions, feeling happy.

  While I was stretched out on my back, I sort of let my mind drift away like the big white cumulus cloud that was hanging up there in the blue Sugar Creek sky, just over the top of the leaning linden tree above the spring. It would be nice to have five hundred dollars in the bank, I thought. I already had one hundred dollars but didn’t say so because that was perhaps the first ten dollars Circus had ever saved. It must have seemed pretty wonderful to him.

  I couldn’t help but remember that this was the place where Circus’s dad—when he was still an alcoholic—had gotten bit by a black widow spider, which is how the stump got its name. He had to go to the hospital and almost died. But while he was there he began to think about the kind of life he had been living, and after that he became a Christian. Ever since, he had been a different person, and he and Circus’s mother and all the rest of the family went to church every Sunday.

  As I kept on looking up toward the sky, I thought for a minute that it was the Lord Himself who had made the sky and the white clouds and the shining green leaves on the trees and such things as bluebells and dogtooth violets. I thought that He must like beautiful things and pretty sounds such as the chattering water in Sugar Creek and the singing birds—and that every so often He gives His world a good washing in rainwater.

  I was also thinking—between the noise of Alexander the Coppersmith trotting around in the leaves all about us and the gang’s chattering—that only a few years ago, if Circus had made twenty-five dollars, most of it would have been put in the bank by the tavern keeper of Sugar Creek.

  Just thinking that made me mad inside. I wished I could make everybody in the world see how silly it was to trade good money for a lot of smelly stuff to pour down one’s throat.

  Well, that was one of the interesting things I did around Sugar Creek—just let my mind drift like a cloud in the sky while my body was lying in the warm sunshine somewhere.

  But a boy’s mind doesn’t get to drift very long when the rest of the gang is around. Just that second, I felt something tickling my nose as if an ant was trying to crawl into one of my nostrils. I brushed at it with my hand, shut my mind’s eye, and opened both my others just in time to see Poetry tickling me with the greenish blue head of a bluegrass stalk.

  That was just like sticking a pin into a balloon and letting all the air out of it. I came down out of my sky to the earth, and there I was, beside the black widow stump.

 
; Before long, all seven of us were playing leapfrog and laughing and telling stories and having fun on our way to the sycamore tree and the mouth of the cave.

  Everything went smoothly until we got to the little flower-bordered lane where Circus and Poetry and I had had our interesting experience with the twenty-five dollar black and white kitty. We had to go past the toolshed on the way to the sycamore tree, and I was already beginning to smell the mother skunk and her family of six kittens who had their summer home under the shed.

  I hoped we could get past without Wally getting any ideas, but we didn’t. The second we got anywhere near the place, he stopped stock-still and sniffed. All of a sudden, Alexander the Coppersmith did the same thing. Then he started acting excited, as though he could hardly stand the strange smell that was coming into the two nostrils of his cold black nose. (All dogs have cold noses when they are in good health and hot ones when they are sick.)

  I don’t know what a skunk smells like to a dog that has never smelled one before—whether it is like perfume is to a lady and he can’t stand not to smell more of it or what. But that dog started acting like a dog that had gone crazy. He had his cold nose to the ground over by the fallen stump and was sniffing all around it and on top of it and was acting wild.

  Then, like a copper flash, he was off on a zigzagging trail in the direction of the tool-shed. He got there in only a few seconds. Then he let loose with his insane voice, which sounded like half an excited bark, about one-third a worried whine, and the rest of it an invitation to whatever he was barking at to just show up once and it would be the last of him forever.

  From behind me, Wally cried, “It’s a skunk! Let’s go see him!” He started on the run toward the toolshed.

  It wasn’t easy to stop what was about to happen. I knew that any minute Alexander would dive under that toolshed and come out with one of the black and white kitties—or else come out the way I had seen Circus’s dad’s hounds do when they accidentally or on purpose got into a scrap with one. They would come out rolling and twisting and turning somersaults in the grass.

  It was Circus who stopped Wally by saying, “We don’t even dare try to catch one of them without putting it in something. They are pretty savage if they get mad at you. You have to have something to put them in.”

  So Wally quickly grabbed Alexander by the collar. With Poetry and me also holding onto his collar, we stopped him from going under the toolshed. But I knew that if the mother skunk happened to be outside and came back and found us there, we might find ourselves in a fight with the whole family!

  Wally wasn’t satisfied, though, and neither was Alexander the Coppersmith. Wally left the toolshed with a stubborn look on his face. He had been stopped from doing something he wanted to do, and I could see he wasn’t used to that.

  “I am going to get me a pet skunk before I leave,” he said. “I want him all nice and tame by the time my folks get back, so they’ll let me take him home.”

  Alexander the Coppersmith’s face was just as stubborn, and I had a feeling that, the very first time he got a chance, he would show everybody he wasn’t afraid of anybody’s black and white kitty out in the woods.

  On we finally went. Nothing exciting happened until after we had had our visit with Old Man Paddler in his Abraham Lincoln style cabin. Something he told us just before we left introduced us to a brand-new danger—one we hadn’t had in the Sugar Creek territory, and it scared me half to smithereens. And if Alexander the Coppersmith hadn’t been along when the new danger happened, if he hadn’t been such a dumb dog and not scared of anything, including fierce four-footed animals, somebody would have been killed for sure. Boy oh boy, talk about hair-raising adventures! I had a little more respect for Alexander the Coppersmith after that experience.

  7

  Old Man Paddler must have been expecting us. He had his little two-burner folding camp stove already going, and steam was pouring from the teakettle. He used a little gasoline stove in the summertime instead of heating up his big, old-fashioned, wood-and-coal-burning range.

  In only a minute or two, we would all be drinking sassafras tea, which is what the kind old man always made for us when we came to see him. Little Jim liked it better than any other drink. “It’s just like melted lollipops,” he always said.

  While we were waiting for the little red chips of sassafras roots to boil a while longer in a white enamel stewpan, Wally kept looking all around the room, letting his eyes stop for a second or two on the different things that a city boy hardly ever gets to see.

  Without looking myself, I knew just what he was seeing, because I had been in the old man’s house so many times. He was seeing the old-fashioned stairs leading up to the loft, the big embossed motto on the wall above the fireplace with the Bible verse on it that said, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.”

  Also he was probably seeing the little hospital-type bed against the wall and the old-fashioned kerosene lamp and the new gas lamp on the shelf above the fireplace. On another wall was a muzzle-loading gun, which the old man had probably used when he was a boy or a young man, and just below it was a beautiful walnut-stocked bolt-action Winchester .22 rifle with a checkered butt plate.

  I looked at Wally’s face just about the time his eyes hit that rifle, and I saw them light up. I guessed that he was wishing he had one like that himself, which is what nearly every boy in the world wishes he could have.

  Pretty soon the tea and cookies were ready. The cookies were the ones Mom had me take to Old Man Paddler a few days ago, and the cooky jar was one the gang had given him on his birthday. I will never forget how pleased he was when he unwrapped that cooky jar. His gray eyes had twinkled as he said, “If your mothers will keep it filled, it will always have cookies in it when you come to see me.” And, for some reason, nearly every week some of our mothers baked a batch of cookies for him, which we took up to his cabin. Imagine that! Having to walk all the way up into the hills just to take a batch of cookies to an old man who probably didn’t eat even half of them himself!

  Knowing that he always asked the blessing before he ate anything, even if it was only an afternoon snack, all the gang quieted down from what we were saying and doing and were as still as six mice. Wally, not expecting anything like that and noticing how quiet we were, looked around at our half-sober faces with his puzzled one and said, “What’s the matter?”

  The old man must have been expecting such a question. Anyway, he said, “I suppose God knows we are thankful for what He has done for us, but I expect to go up to see Him before long, and there’s something special I want to mention to Him right away.” Then he bowed his grizzled head, and Wally got a little more education that didn’t hurt him any.

  Just a second before I shut my eyes, I took a look at the white-whiskered old head and thought what a nice man he was.

  Right away his trembling voice started praying a quiet prayer. He thanked the Lord for the Sugar Creek Gang and the food and for everything in the out-of-doors such as the birds and trees and flowers and the creek itself. As he always did, he mentioned the gang by our nicknames—Big Jim, Little Jim, Circus, Dragonfly, Poetry, and me, Bill Collins—figuring probably the Lord knew us by those names as well as the ones our parents had given us. And not knowing Wally’s real name, he just called him Wally.

  For a few seconds then, it seemed Old Man Paddler forgot we were there. He began to talk to the Lord about a book he was writing, which he was trying to get finished that summer, and which I knew he had already named The Christian After Death. Part of his prayer about the book was “Help me to leave behind something that will point a lot of other people to the Savior.”

  Then he did forget we were there and said, “If You happen to see my wife, Sarah, or either one of my boys who are up there somewhere, just tell them that I am all right and feeling fine and will be up as soon as You are through with me down here.”

  I thought I heard Wally gasp when the o
ld man’s quiet voice said that. I felt very sad for a minute myself, for if there was anything I hated to even think about, it was that the time should ever have to come when Seneth Paddler would move away from Sugar Creek. I mean when his soul would go to heaven and they would bury his body in the cemetery at the top of Bumblebee Hill.

  As much as I knew he would enjoy heaven, we would miss him down here terribly. Imagine the gang’s going up to his cabin on a summer day and finding the door locked and nobody home and weeds growing all around the path from the house to the spring where he got his drinking water. Or imagine going up on a winter day, and seeing no blue wood smoke coming out of the chimney and no Moseslike old man standing in the open door calling us to come on in and get warm. And nobody to make sassafras tea for us or to tell us stories about the Sugar Creek of long ago.

  It certainly wouldn’t seem right on Sunday morning to look across the church from where I always sat with my parents and not see his fine old head as he sat down near the front, just three rows behind the piano, which Little Jim’s mom played. And Sylvia’s dad couldn’t call on him to pray or anything. Maybe a lot of people in the world wouldn’t be as good as they were if he weren’t here to pray for them.

  My mind started to drift again like a cloud in a sad Sugar Creek sky, but almost right away it came back to earth because something in Old Man Paddler’s prayer woke me up. It was “Don’t let any serious accidents happen to the boys. Protect them all while they play and work together and while they grow toward manhood.”