Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  As we went on toward Poetry’s tent, both he and Alexander had on their faces the same stubborn expression I had seen there before.

  Well, the afternoon passed, and night came, and we all went to church and heard one of Old Man Paddler’s missionaries give a very interesting talk with pictures of his work in a South American mission field. The talk was an especially good one for Wally to hear, because a missionary was as strange to him as an animal in the zoo would be to Alexander the Coppersmith. Wally had never in his life seen a real missionary, and I could tell by looking at his face that he had had another light turned on in his mind.

  Finally the three of us were back at Poetry’s tent getting ready for bed. Poetry and I were inside alone for a few minutes while Wally was out tying up Alexander and giving him final instructions about how to behave when he was away from home, reminding him to use his very best dog manners.

  “That,” I heard him say in no uncertain terms, “is the moon. You are not to bark at it! And that shadow over there by the edge of the garden is a clothesline post. You are not to bark at it! Do you understand?”

  And Alexander was probably saying back to Wally in dog language, “Don’t worry, I won’t bark at anything till Bill Collins gets to sleep. Then I’ll probably find something that’ll make me very nervous, and I’ll start in.”

  I still didn’t have the slightest idea how we could talk Wally into going for a walk at midnight. So while he was still outside, I whispered to Poetry, “Let’s call it off. I’m not in favor of it anyway.”

  “And why not?” he wanted to know. “It’s our last chance—our last night.”

  “That’s just the trouble,” I said. “What if Wally or Alexander gets mixed up with a skunk? They’ll have to stay another week to get the smell off them.”

  “Don’t let that worry you. There isn’t a chance in the world.”

  “There are six little chances and one big one,” I said.

  “Didn’t I tell you? Mama Skunk moved her family out five days ago—clear out of the neighborhood. Circus caught another one of her kittens, and she must have gotten scared she’d lose her whole family, so she moved.”

  “I’m still not in favor of it,” I said firmly.

  “Don’t you believe in majority rule?” he asked.

  “Sure,” I answered, “but there are only two of us, and the vote is one against one.”

  “How much do you weigh?”

  I said, “Eighty-seven.”

  He said, “Then it’s settled. I weigh one hundred forty-nine. So that’s one hundred forty-nine to eighty-seven that we go ahead with our plans.”

  It was silly, but he was so enthusiastic, and so absolutely sure the idea was good, that my eighty-seven gave in to his one hundred forty-nine, and the majority ruled, even though I still didn’t know how he had planned to make Wally want to go.

  “Just trust me,” he said.

  But when you trust one hundred forty-nine pounds of a boy like Poetry, you are trusting one hundred forty-nine pounds of mischief with sixteen ounces to every pound, which is two thousand three hundred fifty-two ounces.

  It took Wally only a few seconds to give his final order to Alexander and to lift the tent flap and come back inside. He looked funny crawling in. The light of Poetry’s lantern made his face look like a ghost’s.

  I wondered what Wally would do when Poetry and I got down on our knees to say our quiet prayers before we tumbled in. But when he saw us kneeling, he got down beside his own cot and stayed there till we got up and crawled into bed. Then he did the same thing without saying a word, which made me wish harder than ever that we weren’t going to be mischievous at midnight. Not that I couldn’t be mischievous when I had to, or wanted to, but I was still thinking of Mr. Groenwald’s lambs.

  Poetry blew out the lantern then, and it was only a little while until Wally was snoring away, and so was Poetry. It was a very interesting duet with Wally snoring bass and Poetry a kind of tenor and both of their snores being a little off pitch.

  I stayed awake, listening to my little polecat clock ticking away the minutes, hurrying as fast as it could toward midnight.

  That was another thing. Poetry had set the clock in the bottom of the utility can that he and I had found at the dump. “It will make more noise,” he had said, “and we’ll be sure to wake up.”

  I kept on lying there in the half dark, listening to the maple leaves whispering in the branches above our tent and thinking about God again and how He liked Wally as much as He did us. I knew He wouldn’t care if boys had a lot of innocent fun, because He had made us that way and we couldn’t help it. But it didn’t seem the right time to be mischievous. Maybe I should have told Poetry about the night Alexander had been loose and how I had planned to go over and offer Mr. Groenwald fifty dollars to pay for his two dead lambs.

  I thought how easy it would be for me to reach out and shut off the alarm. Then, when midnight came, all of us would sleep right on through till morning. But as I always do at night, I got more and more sleepy, and without knowing it I dropped off and probably began snoring as loud as Poetry or Wally or both.

  All of a sudden I almost jumped off my cot. I was awakened by a terrible jangling noise beside me, which was my little polecat alarm clock going off in the bottom of the utility can, where it had gone off once before when it had a black and white kitty beside it.

  Such a noise! Wally, beside me on his cot, jumped awake and sat straight up. I quickly reached for the can to plunge my hand down inside and shut off the alarm. But in the dark I hit it, knocked it off the table it was on, and it landed with a whammy-sock-bang-bang on the ground. My arm had struck the can so hard that it rolled clear to the end of the tent where the opening was and out-of-doors, with the alarm still in there and ringing like everything.

  Well, that woke up Alexander the Coppersmith, who maybe got as scared as the old wolf in the story of the wolf and the little pig, when a butter churn rolled down the hill and frightened him so badly that he ran home. I suppose if that can had been a snapping turtle or another dog or a car or a lamb or a squirrel, Alexander would have made a dive for it, but instead he made a dive from it.

  Even if I had made up my mind I wanted to stay in my cozy cot and not get up to follow a crazy boy’s idea out into the middle of a crazy adventure, I would have had to get up anyway, because right that minute I discovered that Wally had tied Alexander to one of the main poles of the tent.

  There was a sudden violent shaking of the whole tent, and the next thing I knew the tent pole was yanked loose and my side of the tent came swishing down on top of where I was lying, making me disgusted and wide awake and stirring up my temper so that I was ready to fight anybody or anything.

  In the middle of the confusion, I managed to scramble out into the moonlight to where Alexander was still struggling to get loose and also where my polecat clock was still alarming like mad over near the base of the maple tree, with the utility can on its side beside it.

  Then Poetry’s squawky voice called out beside me, “Hey, you guys! There goes something! Look! Running into the woods!”

  Alexander saw it at the same time and started after it, dragging the tent pole with him.

  “What is it?” I said, and so did Wally, his voice shaking. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but something tall and white galloping through the woods toward Sugar Creek.

  12

  When you’ve been sleeping soundly in a tent in your friend’s yard and all of a sudden are awakened by a noisy alarm clock going off in the bottom of a can—and when you try to turn the alarm off and instead you knock over the can and it rolls outdoors with the clock in it still alarming—and before you can even start to think, your tent begins to reel and rock and stagger and shake as if a tornado has hit it, and then it falls in on your cot, and two boys and a dog turn their voices loose with a lot of excited noise—and when you manage to save your life by crawling out into the moonlit night, only to discover that there has been a ghost
snooping around, and you see the ghost or whatever it is, tall and white, running or floating through the woods—well, when all that happens, you feel you’ve never been in the middle of so much excitement in your life.

  Anyway, that’s the way I felt as three barefoot boys in flapping pajamas, and a dog dragging a tent pole, ran stumblety-sizzle after a ghost in a flapping bed sheet—for that’s what it seemed it was and what it had on.

  “There!” Poetry yelled over his shoulder-he was ahead of the rest of us at the time. “It’s making a beeline for the toolshed.”

  “It’s g–g–g–gone inside!” Wally stuttered beside me, and sure enough it had. Bang! went the toolshed door, loud enough to wake up the neighborhood.

  With the slamming of that door, we all stood still and shook with fear or surprise or something. I did, anyway. Even Alexander the Coppersmith stopped, which gave Wally a chance to catch hold of his leash and to untie him from the tent pole. I decided I’d carry it myself from then on—not that I was so scared I had to have something in my hands, but I thought we might want to go back to the tent to sleep the rest of the night, and we’d need the pole to hold it up.

  We weren’t any more than fifty feet from the toolshed. I was waiting for Poetry to do or say something or for something to happen. I knew there wasn’t any such thing as a ghost, but Wally didn’t know it, and neither did Alexander, who was so nervous he was trembling all over and, for a change, seemed glad to stay close to his master.

  Then Wally asked in a husky whisper, “Is it a real ghost?”

  “Why not?” Poetry answered in a terribly scared-sounding voice. He sounded so frightened that I thought he really was. “It’s not the way I planned it,” he whispered to me. The way he said it sent cold chills up and down my spine. Maybe it was a ghost, even if there weren’t any such things in the world.

  I had my eyes glued to the closed door of the toolshed. Then I looked at the loft window just above it, and all of a sudden I saw that window move! Move, mind you! It was being opened!

  And then I heard a piercing wail as high-pitched as a woman’s high soprano and sounding like the quavering voice of a screech owl crying, “Shay–a–a–a–a–a! Shay–a–a–a!” followed by actual words as clear as moonlight and also absolutely crazy. The words were “I—am—the—ghost—of—Walford—Sensenbrenner! I—am—Walford—Sensenbrenner’s—ghost!”

  It was the wildest, weirdest cry I had heard in my life.

  Then Poetry yelled a squawky yell toward the shed. “We don’t care who you are. You can’t fool us! There isn’t any such thing as a ghost!”

  The ghost, or whoever or whatever it was, started its piercing wail again, this time crying, “I—am—the—ghost—of—Alexander—the—Coppersmith! I—am—Alexander—the—Coppersmith’s—ghost. I—am—a dead dog!” And immediately the voice changed and began barking a high-pitched excited bark so much like Alexander’s bark that I had to look down to see if he was still with us. He was still trembling beside Wally but growling a deep gruff growl way down in his throat.

  Again Poetry yelled up at the window. “We’re coming in to get you, whoever you are! Follow me,” he ordered Wally and Alexander and me and led the way toward the toolshed door.

  “I’m s–s–scared,” Wally said.

  If I could have seen his face, it would probably have looked worse than his voice sounded, which was pretty bad. But he, Alexander, and I followed anyway to the dark door.

  Poetry yanked the door open and called in a savage voice, “Come on down and out of that loft, whoever you are!”

  The human voice of the ghost answered in a sobbing wail, “All right, I will. But remember I am already dead.”

  Unbelievably quick, there was a sound like a body being dragged across the floor up there, and a moment later something big and awkward and wrapped in a sheet fell down the ladder to the toolshed floor, rolled over, and stopped in a sprawl at our feet.

  “It’s the body of a man!” Wally cried, jumping backward to get out of the way. He let out a scream, and I guess I did myself.

  Then I heard somebody snicker upstairs and somebody else say, “Sh!” And a whole chorus of voices exploded in our direction. “We’re all ghosts! Come on up and get all of us.”

  It was the voices of the rest of the grandest gang of boys there ever was in the world—Big Jim, our leader; Dragonfly, the pop-eyed member; Circus, the monkey-faced mischief maker; and Little Jim himself. Then I knew it was only a joke. The body at our feet was just a sack of straw tied in the middle and wrapped in a sheet.

  There was a flash of light in the attic and the sound of somebody lighting Poetry’s lantern.

  “Let’s go up,” Poetry said.

  We did, first tying Alexander to the spoke of an old cultivator wheel, and then climbing the ladder to the loft.

  “You got here just in time,” Big Jim said to us. “It’s a specially called gang meeting. Something very important has come up, making it necessary.”

  The first thing I said was “How come all your parents allowed you to come to the shed at midnight?”

  Dragonfly, whose crooked nose looked more crooked in the lantern light, sniffed and said, “It’s not midnight. It’s only a little after ten o’clock.”

  “But,” I said to Poetry, “my alarm was set for midnight.”

  “Sure it was, and it went off at midnight too, but it was two hours too fast.”

  “It—what!”

  “I changed it myself one time when you weren’t looking,” Poetry explained.

  Well, it was a wonderful way for a mystery to turn out.

  Circus, who had been the ghost, was still dressed in his bedsheet. “It was nice of your mother to let me have these old sheets of hers, wasn’t it?” he said. “One for me and one for the dummy downstairs.”

  “You mean my mother knew all about this?”

  “Sure,” Poetry said. “That’s why she was so willing to let you and Wally come to sleep in my tent tonight.”

  “It’s hard to believe,” I said.

  Poetry said, “Oh, I had to talk her into it. I ate a whole piece of blackberry pie while I was doing it.”

  A minute later Big Jim called the meeting to order. In another minute, as soon as we were quiet, he said in a very dignified voice, “This meeting is called in honor of Walford Sensenbrenner, who has been spending the week with us, helping us have a good time. It is in honor of Alexander the Coppersmith also, without whom we couldn’t have had half as much fun. He’s a great dog. Isn’t that right, gang?”

  “Right!” a chorus of different pitched voices said.

  “And we want them both to come back again, don’t we?”

  “Right!” all of us, including Bill Collins, said.

  I watched the mustache on Big Jim’s face and wondered how long it would be before I could grow that much fuzz on my own upper lip and be able to make as nice a talk as he was making right that second.

  “We like you, Walford,” he went on, “and we think you are a great guy. Also, we want you to know we would like to make you an associate member of the Sugar Creek Gang, if you are interested. That’s why this meeting was called tonight. All you have to do is to promise to read your Bible every day and pray every day and go to Sunday school and church every Sunday and try to live a clean, honest life.”

  Big Jim stopped, and you could feel question marks floating all around the dimly lit attic room. You could see a question mark on every one of the gang members’ faces.

  Everything was very quiet for a minute. Even Alexander the Coppersmith downstairs was quiet. I saw Wally’s freckled face flush, and he swallowed hard a couple of times before he answered. “Y–y–yes, sir, I’d like to try.”

  Right away there was a feeling running up and down my spine that was better than being scared by any imaginary ghost.

  “And now,” Big Jim stated, “your membership token.” He nodded to Little Jim, who reached out and took a small white package off the table where it had been lyin
g beside the lantern and handed it to Big Jim.

  “It’s from all of us—from you, too, Bill. We kept the secret from you till tonight so it would be easier for you to keep it from Wally.”

  He handed the little white package to Wally, who gulped and said, “Thank you.”

  When Little Jim said, “Open it,” he did. It was a beautiful little reddish brown leather New Testament like the kind all the gang owned and every one of us read every day of our lives.

  Then Poetry, who was sitting beside his old-fashioned phonograph, all of a sudden turned it on. Right away there was music—a whole chorus of bird voices, beginning with the juicy notes of the kind of red-winged blackbird that sings in the bayou. A second later it was joined by a half-dozen other birds all singing at once. That sounded like the house wren that has its nest in a little brown house on our clothesline post and the wood thrush that builds its nest in the papaw bushes not far from the Sugar Creek bridge and a dozen mockingbirds and canaries all at once, all sounding very happy. In the loft of the old toolshed, with seven boys’ faces all lighted by the light of Poetry’s lantern, it was a wonderful sound.

  Then, almost before I knew what was happening, there was actual harp music and a violin and a marimba and a male quartet singing a song we sometimes sang on Sunday morning in the Sugar Creek church. It was a song called “Carry Your Bible with You.” The chorus of it went:

  Take it wherever you go,

  Take it wherever you go.

  God’s message of love,

  Sent down from above,

  Oh, take it wherever you go.

  Some crazy tears got mixed up in my eyes just then, and for a minute I couldn’t see very well. But I knew if I could have looked carefully in the dim lantern light, I’d have seen a few tears shining in the rest of the gang’s eyes.

  And that was that, and a very wonderful that at that. It was a surprise the way things had turned out. Poetry himself got a surprise, because he hadn’t counted on Alexander’s being tied to the tent pole and having the tent pulled down at midnight—or rather, at ten o’clock.