Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  I was on my way out the kitchen door with my old shirt on my back and my new one on my mind when I saw Mom come out of the barn with a basket of eggs. I met her halfway across the barnyard, just as Dad came out of the west stable door with a pail of milk.

  Mixy, our old black-and-white cat, came out the stable door at the same time and ran all around Dad and the three-gallon milk pail, mewing up at him and making it hard for him to walk straight.

  Just then a rumble of thunder broke into my thoughts, and I noticed the sky had almost twice as many clouds as it had had a little while before.

  It might be a good idea to get my folks’ minds onto the weather, I thought, and yelled to Dad, “Looks like it’s going to rain!”

  He stopped, whirled around with the milk pail in his hand, and yelled down to Mixy, “Scat, cat! Give me a little time! Bill, you run and shut the barn doors, will you? I don’t want that load of hay to get wet!”

  The wind switched directions just then and started blowing hard from the west, and it looked for a few minutes as if the storm would strike before we could get the chores finished.

  Mom, with her basket of eggs, took a worried look at the sky and exclaimed, “They’re green! Green clouds mean hail!” There was excitement in her voice, and she started on a blue-skirted run toward the house, calling back, “I’ll get the upstairs window!”

  The whole Collins family flew into action-Dad getting to the house with the milk in spite of Mixy, I getting the east barn doors shut and bolted and yelling to a barnyard full of hens to hurry up and get into their own house before they got soaking wet, and Mom flying upstairs to get the south bedroom window closed.

  What a storm! The sky was so dark that, when we all got inside the house, Mom turned on the lights in the kitchen and the living room. Then we settled down to a kind of scared wait, while the rain beat on the roof and against the windows. For a while it seemed there never had been so much thunder or so loud.

  Charlotte Ann, who nearly always liked to be on Dad’s lap when we were in the house-when she wasn’t pestering me for a piggyback ride or fussing for attention—made Mom hold her, burying her cute little face against Mom’s breast whenever there was a blinding flash of lightning and a wild clap of thunder that shook the house.

  There was a wild wind too, and we wondered if maybe there would be a tornado.

  After a while, though, the thunder began to sound farther away, and the sky became lighter. A little later, when I looked out the east window, I saw a shaft of sunlight slanting across the cornfield. There were puddles of water everywhere and little rivulets running across the barnyard and in the ditches along the road.

  “Look!” Mom exclaimed from the east window of the living room. “There’s a rainbow!”

  Then she quoted a verse from the Bible, which goes, “I set My bow in the cloud.” I looked at Mom’s face, and all the worry that had been on it was gone. It seemed she wasn’t looking just at the rainbow with its beautiful colored arch hanging over the east, but at something a lot farther away. Maybe she was thinking about the One who gave the world the very first rainbow there ever was.

  While Mom was in such a peaceful frame of mind, and after such a thundery storm, it seemed the wrong time to mention the soiled shirt.

  My mind took a hop, skip, and a jump down to the Sugar Creek bridge and Shorty Long’s tent, and I realized it might not have been necessary for me to put out that fire. The rain would have done it for me—only it might have been too late.

  Neither Mom nor Pop seemed to remember I’d had on my new plaid shirt when I’d left for the Tills’ house with the cake, and, of course, they hadn’t seen me riding home in my bare skin and wondered how come.

  Mom flew into getting supper. Dad and I went out into the cool, rainwashed air to wind up the rest of the chores. It was Saturday, and, as you probably know, the Collins family and nearly every other family in the whole Sugar Creek territory went to town on Saturday nights to buy groceries and to see who else had come to town. Mom always liked to see the different women who were on our party telephone line, in order to finish talking about different things they couldn’t talk about on the phone and also to find out if there were any new babies born anywhere and what their names were.

  On a street corner somewhere, Dad nearly always managed to find quite a few other husbands who were tired of waiting for their wives to finish shopping and talking, and in that way he would catch up with all the farm news in the country.

  Saturday night was also a good night for the gang, because nearly always quite a few of us went to town, too, and we liked to eat caramel corn and peanuts and just walk round and round the main block of Main Street.

  Supper was on the table and eaten in a hurry, and still nobody had even thought about my plaid shirt—nobody except me, that is.

  “Hurry up, you two,” Mom ordered us from the front bedroom where she was standing at the large dresser mirror finishing her face and hair. “Bill, you can wear your new plaid shirt, the one you wore over to Tills’ to take the cake.”

  For a half second my mind’s eye looked out across the Collins family sky, and it seemed the clouds were building up for a storm.

  Dad, who right then was in the back bedroom changing his own clothes, called me to hurry and come in and change mine.

  In a few worried minutes, I was in where Dad was. He was standing with his Saturday night pants on but with no shirt, looking into the wardrobe where about seven different colored, freshly laundered shirts were hanging in a row, all fresh from Mom’s iron.

  Selecting one just as I came in, he slipped it off the hanger and started to put it on. Then he stopped and inspected a tiny, very neatly stitched patch near the collar where the collar point had worn it through and Mom had fixed it.

  “Come here, son. Let me show you something,” he ordered.

  I came, looking at the row of shirts and being reminded again that my own shirt was wrapped in a newspaper out in the toolshed. I was seeing it with my imagination and wondering what to say and how to say it.

  “See this neat little patch. Notice how carefully it’s done?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “See all these other shirts, hanging each on its own hanger, perfectly laundered?”

  “Yes, sir,” I answered, looking at still another row of other shirts, belonging to Theodore Collins’s son, all of them also washed and ironed.

  “This,” Dad said, “is only one of the thousands of reasons why I think your mother is a very wonderful person. And just look at this! There are over a score of stitches in this one little patch. Your mother’s hands made every one of them!”

  He stopped talking for a minute, while I stood looking at what he was seeing and trying to think what he was thinking and was remembering that Mom’s same hands had been used not just for stitching but also for switching. And what would she do and say when she found out about my unwashed and unironed shirt out in the toolshed?

  I quoted to Dad an old quote, saying, “‘A stitch in time saves nine.’”

  Dad started swinging himself into the shirt again as he answered me. “Not nine, son. A stitch in time used to save nine, but it doesn’t anymore. Not nowadays. It only saves five in this day and age.” He grinned to let me know he thought he had thought up a pretty bright remark. Then he added in a sober voice, “Your mother, Bill, is a great woman. Truly great!”

  His voice was so serious—in fact, it almost had tears in it, it was so husky—that I found myself swallowing a lump in my throat. He went on to say something else, which was, “You heard what she said back there in the living room when she saw the rainbow. That’s one reason why she’s great. Your mother worships God. And that would make any woman great.”

  I started to say, “Yes sir,” but the words stuck in my throat.

  Just that second there was a sound of somebody’s dress swishing through the door into the room, and Dad’s kind-of-shining eyes left the row of shirts and looked at Mom herself, who had just bre
ezed in.

  “What,” she asked, “are you two youngsters mumbling about?”

  “Secrets,” Dad said and started to button the shirt from the top.

  He got stopped by Mom, saying, “Let me see your neck a minute. You’ve been working in the hay, you know.”

  A small frown crinkled Dad’s forehead just above his nose and his shaggy brows. Then he said, with a grin under his reddish-brown mustache, “I just scrubbed it less than four minutes ago. I’m not even dry behind the ears yet.”

  “That,” Mom answered him, “is what I’ve always thought!”

  Dad let her examine his neck to see if it had hayseed on it, then all of a sudden he whirled around, and before Mom could have said “Jack Robinson Crusoe,” he was giving her a half-savage hug—trying to, anyway. Mom was like a slippery fish that didn’t want to stay caught, and Dad was like a fisherman who wouldn’t give up.

  What was going on didn’t seem any of my business so I went on out to the kitchen and saw a lonely looking towel hanging beside the dish drainer filled with discouraged dishes, just washed but not dry yet. I started drying them.

  I had all the plates dried before Mom came swishing into the kitchen, and I heard her grumbling something to herself about having to put her face back on again. Then her tone of voice changed, and she exclaimed to me, “Your hands! You’re sure you washed them before—”

  She needn’t have worried. I knew from having been told maybe a thousand times in my life that a boy’s hands had to be washed before he ate, after he ate, and again before he dried dishes. My hands were all right.

  But for some reason, my neck wasn’t—not the back of it or the place behind my ears, which a boy never sees and his mother does. It wasn’t any ordinary farm dirt Mom discovered, so when I started to explain what it was and how come, I found myself in the middle of the story of the shirt in the newspaper in the toolshed.

  “I got my shirt dirty putting out the fire,” I started.

  “What fire?” Dad came in with his shirt half buttoned to ask, and the look of his face and also of Mom’s made me feel the way a mouse in a corner probably feels when a woman with a broom is after it.

  “I can explain it better by telling you a story,” I said, and before they could stop me, I was off, talking kind of fast. “It might even be our minister’s fault,” I said, “because ever since that sermon on how to rule your spirit, I’ve been trying to be kind to Shorty Long and not fight with him anymore, and—”

  Before I had the story finished, we were all outdoors by the iron pitcher pump, and the new, wrinkled, smudged plaid shirt was lying unwrapped on the newspaper on the pump platform. Mom’s elbows were on her hips, and the tail of Dad’s clean, freshly ironed shirt with the neat little patch on its collar wasn’t even tucked in.

  I got my spirit under control as I explained—so calmly that it didn’t seem like me. “This red-haired boy who was trying to control his spirit thought he could heap coals of fire on his enemy’s head by putting out the fire that was about to burn up the enemy’s tent. When he couldn’t find anything to use to beat out the flames—and there wasn’t any time to lose—he sacrificed his nice, clean, new plaid shirt.”

  I wound up by saying, “So the red-haired, freckle-faced boy was so happy he had ruled his spirit by not letting the fire burn up the tent, that he jumped on his bicycle and pedaled home as fast as he could. He wanted his parents to be happy, too, which he knew they would be if they ruled their own spirits when they found out about the … about—” I stopped for a second and pointed down to the wet mess on the pump platform, then finished “—about that down there!”

  My story was over. I looked at Mom and Dad’s faces, and there wasn’t any thunder or lightning on either one of them.

  I don’t know why I thought what I thought right then, but I thought it anyway, and it was “I set My bow in the cloud.”

  The only thing was that honest-to-goodness rainbows nearly always came after there had been a storm. But the way my folks looked at me and then at each other, there not only wasn’t any storm, but there wasn’t even going to be any.

  All Dad said was, “We’ll send it to the cleaners. If they can’t get the smudge out, you can wear it for everyday.”

  Just then we heard a noise out by the small wooden gate that leads into old Red Addie’s hog lot, then a baby’s all-of-a-sudden howling cry. It was Charlotte Ann, my cute little baby sister, whom, for a few minutes, we had forgotten. I saw her lying upside down with her chubby little legs waving in the air and her chubby arms doing the same thing. Her very pretty, freshly laundered pink dress, which she was going to wear to town, was still on her, but it was also in the rain-made mud puddle by the gate.

  Just one second before both Mom and Dad started on a dash across the barnyard, I heard Dad grumble under his breath the Bible verse that begins, “He who rules his spirit …”

  I stooped, picked up the unwrapped, unwashed, unironed plaid shirt and carried it back to the toolshed. I’d have to hurry to get my neck and ears washed and dried and my clothes changed so that, when Charlotte Ann and the rest of the family were ready, we could start to town. Before I could get to the toolshed door, though, the phone rang in the house, and I had to run to answer it.

  On the other end of the line Poetry’s excited voice exclaimed, “Lightning struck the big sugar tree down by the north road and killed all our horses! It killed Thunderball too!”

  Then Poetry broke into sobs and couldn’t talk.

  His mother’s voice cut in then and said, “That you, Bill?”

  When I said yes—gulped yes, rather, because my mind’s eye saw Poetry’s beautiful pinto pony lying dead along with all their other horses under the big sugar tree—Poetry’s mother said with tears in her voice, “Will you call your mother to the phone?”

  It was a sad sight. All the Thompsons’ horses, roan and sorrel and black and brown, were lying sprawled in different directions, half off and half on each other all around under the tree.

  Poetry’s folks and mine and Little Jim’s father stood looking at the dead horses and at the long ugly gash on the tree’s trunk where the lightning had struck and run all the way down to the ground.

  Poetry and I were by ourselves about ten feet from the other horses, where Thunderball himself was lying. “I’ll bet he didn’t want to die,” Poetry gulped and said. “See? He got this far away after he was struck, trying to keep from dying, and he couldn’t.”

  “He knew we needed him,” I said sadly.

  How many times that spring Poetry had come galloping up the road on him and stopped in a cloud of dust at “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox. How many times he had let me ride Thunderball, too. It was a wonderful feeling, riding like a Western marshal after a horse thief or a cattle rustler, my shirt sleeves flapping in the wind, my mind imagining I was living in America’s Old West, bringing law and order to the country.

  Poetry’s getting the paint pony had been one of the things that had started the gang playing different cowboy games. It had seemed for a while that the whole Sugar Creek territory was changed from an ordinary playground to a Wild West ranch.

  But now Thunderball was dead, killed by lightning! Never again would I look down the road and see a streak of yellow and black and white, with a boy riding it, come flying like the wind toward our house. Never again would I feel as if I were riding a thundercloud across a windy sky.

  After that terrible electrical storm I was a little more afraid of lightning than I had been, although Dad explained that there wasn’t more than one chance in a million that any human being would ever be struck by it.

  “It does strike tall trees more often than low ones,” he also explained one day. “So if you boys ever get under a tree for shelter from the rain, be sure it’s a low tree, not a tall one.”

  Hearing that, my mind took a worried leap down to Shorty Long’s new tent, which I’d kept from getting burned by putting out a fire with my new plaid shirt. That tent was pitched not
more than a few feet from the base of the giant cottonwood! What if there’d come up a terrible electrical storm sometime when Shorty and Tom were in the tent? What if lightning would strike the tall cottonwood, and after the storm we’d find two dead boys inside the tent!

  Somebody ought to tell those ornery boys to move the tent farther from the tree.

  As soon as I found out just who that somebody was—the actual person who was supposed to warn the boys about the danger they were in—I began having more trouble with myself again. One of Poetry’s favorite poems, which he had given in a reading once at the Sugar Creek Literary Society, kept going round and round in my mind.

  Part of the poem wouldn’t leave my mind night or day and was the cause of my getting into a very dangerous problem that spring. It started out:

  The good little boy and the bad little boy

  Both live in the house with me,

  But it is quite strange—I can look and look,

  Yet only one boy I see.

  The poem hadn’t made much sense to me when Poetry had first quoted it, and it still didn’t. Yet I knew that whoever wrote it must have understood what a boy feels like when he wants to do right and there is something inside him that tells him not to.

  I kept remembering Dragonfly’s Snatzerpazooka, whom Dragonfly pretended was an actual person outside himself. But my Snatzerpazooka was inside me. And he wasn’t only just a part of me but was me—actually myself.

  I wanted to tell Shorty Long to move his tent away from the tall cottonwood, but my stubborn little Bill Snatzerpazooka Collins wouldn’t let me do it.

  “You just plain shut up!” I yelled to me one afternoon. “I’m going to do it if I want to!”

  The fight between me and me was going to have to stop, and I was going to stop it!

  I never will forget a very important afternoon and night about a week after the storm that killed Thunderball and the other horses. I was still having trouble with Shorty and Tom on the outside and with myself on the inside. I knew the Bible verse “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer,” and I didn’t want to be that, even if Shorty Long had stolen Tom from our gang and was making him into a meaner and meaner boy.