Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  I was working for Dad “on the shares” that spring. That meant I would hoe the whole potato patch all summer and dig the potatoes when they were ready, and then half the potatoes would be mine and the other half Mom and Dad’s. I could do what I wanted to with the money I would get from my half when I sold them.

  I finished hoeing the last row, then stopped, wiped my brow on my red bandana handkerchief, shoved the bandana into my hip pocket, swung the hoe over my shoulder and started for the creek. There was something very important I was going to do—important and also dangerous, only I didn’t know about the danger at the time.

  4

  I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do, but I did know where I was going to do it, if I did it.

  It wouldn’t take me long. I could be back in plenty of time to do the chores. I’d have to do them alone because Dad had gone to attend a farmers’ convention in Memory City, where my aunt lived, and wouldn’t come home till tomorrow. He and Dragonfly’s father had driven there in our car.

  It took me only a little over fifteen minutes to get to the big hollow sycamore tree near the mouth of the cave, which was also near where Dragonfly had buried his imaginary playmate. When I got there, I went inside the cave a few minutes, then came out and lazed around a little, thinking and arguing with the ornery little rascal who was the other me, who didn’t care whether lightning struck a cottonwood tree or not. The place was pretty lonesome, almost like an actual cemetery, I thought.

  Snatzerpazooka’s grave was completely covered with dead leaves, and there was, I noticed, a bed of sweet williams growing where the wooden marker had been.

  I could feel my set face, my pursed lips, and tight jaw muscles as I walked around, thinking and wishing I were a better boy than I was.

  Then all of a sudden I finished making up my mind to do something I’d come down there to do.

  In a minute I had the leaves raked away and, in only a few minutes more, had a hole dug. It was not a big one, only about large enough to bury a cat.

  “And now,” I said to me—not the actual me, but the ornery me—“inside you go!”

  I went through the motions of picking myself up and dropping me inside the hole, saying, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” and also “leaves to leaves.”

  Then, after the hole was filled, I raked the leaves back to make the place look the way it had before.

  I stood for a minute, looking down and all around. Suddenly it was as though I had heard a voice from somewhere, a very different kind of voice and very kind.

  I stood stock-still in my thoughts and listened in every direction, wondering and scared a little. I don’t know why I thought what I did just then, but having lived around Sugar Creek with red-winged blackbirds and squirrels and all the pretty wildflowers and everything in nature, it was easy for me to think about the One who had made everything, how wonderful He was, and how He liked boys and all people enough to give His Son to die for their sins.

  It seemed the heavenly Father was right there and that He was trying to get me to listen to something extraimportant He wanted me to hear.

  After a minute or two had passed and there wasn’t any sound except the piping of the small frogs in the swamp and other nature noises, I decided it had been only my imagination. I hadn’t heard any actual voice. Yet I knew that God Himself was there. He was everywhere anyway, our minister always said, but sometimes He seemed to be in one special place in a very special way.

  My imagination picked me up and whisked me away, over the tops of the trees, high over the woods and the Collins family’s house and farm, up the gravel road two miles to a middle-sized white church on the hill above Wolf Creek, across the road from the Sugar Plain School.

  I was inside the church on a Sunday morning, sitting by the window and hearing again the sermon you already know about. That is, I was hearing part of it. My thoughts that morning had been getting interrupted by two or three meadowlarks that every now and then would let out their whistling mixed-up song, saying, “Spring of the year!” They were outside the east window somewhere, maybe in the meadow on the other side of the graveyard.

  Part of the sermon stuck in my mind. It was, “If you’re having trouble with yourself, be sure not only to reckon yourself to be dead to sin but also alive to God!”

  I didn’t understand it at the time. But the last three words had sort of pounded themselves into my mind like a nail being driven into a board.

  Now as I stood beside the grave in which two Snatzerpazookas had been buried, it seemed I was supposed to get my mind made up that the ornery me was dead and the actual me was alive to God.

  For several minutes there was a very wonderful feeling inside, as though I were up in the air somewhere like a boy’s kite on a strong string.

  And that’s when I heard actual human beings’ voices—boys’ voices. Shorty Long’s and Tom Till’s!

  I looked around for a place to hide. The cave was too far away for me to get to it without being seen. To run toward the swamp wasn’t a good idea either, because that was the direction the voices were coming from.

  Then I caught a glimpse of two straw hats bobbing along the path that leads from the swamp.

  In a minute they would be there. Shorty Long, the worst enemy I had, who, if he found out what I had been doing, would think I was crazy. And Tom Till, the only half-good boy old hook-nosed John Till had, who once had been my friend and almost a member of the Gang, who used to go to Sunday school with me but who now was worse than a slave to bully Shorty himself.

  The very wonderful feeling I had had in my heart flew away like a swallow darting out of our haymow through an open window. In the place where the happiness had been was a scaredy-cat feeling that made me want to hide.

  There wasn’t any sense in being afraid, but for some reason I didn’t want either one of those boys to know I was there. They wouldn’t have understood what I was doing even if they had seen me. But I didn’t want them to see me now.

  The big hollow place in the old sycamore, I thought. I’ll climb up and squeeze myself in, and they’ll go right on past!

  Quicker than anything, I circled the base of the tree and in a second was working my way through the opening, which was as wide as a narrow boy and about three times as high. I’d been in it many a time, and so had the rest of the gang, except Poetry, who was too round to squeeze through.

  But getting in today wasn’t easy. It had been a little chilly that afternoon, and I had on my leather jacket. I did some of the quietest grunting I’d ever done in my life as I twisted, squirmed, and shoved myself inside.

  And just in time! One split second after I’d gotten the last of myself squeezed in, the boys were there. Would they go on past? I wondered—and hoped.

  They wouldn’t, I found out another split second later. I saw Shorty Long’s gray-green eyes boring up into mine and heard him exclaim, “Well, well! If it isn’t the little boy who goes around jabbing holes into other people’s cows! Well, well, well!”

  I gritted my teeth in anger. He hadn’t even appreciated what Mom and I had done that other summer when his shorthorn cow had eaten too much ladino clover and had gotten the bloat. I had done what I knew I had to do to save her life. With Mom’s help, I’d plunged a trocar into the paunch of his blue cow to let out the gas, and the cow had lived.

  For a while after that, Shorty Long had seemed to like me a little. But he wasn’t the kind of boy that could really like anybody but himself, Poetry had once told me.

  I looked out and down at him through the narrow opening in the sycamore and answered his accusation. “I saved your cow’s life! The veterinarian said so himself, and you heard him!”

  Just saying “veterinarian” reminded me of horses as well as cows and of Poetry’s folks’ dead horses lying sprawled on and off each other around the base of the sugar tree that had been struck by lightning.

  And that reminded me of Shorty Long’s tent under the extratall cottonwood on the other side of the creek.
“I saved your cow’s life last year, and now I’m going to save yours,” I decided to say. “You boys ought to pitch your tent farther away from the trunk of that old cottonwood so if the lightning ever strikes the tree, you won’t be two dead horses. That tree’s too tall. Lightning strikes tall trees!”

  Shorty’s sarcastic answer through the sycamore tree opening was “And where would you suggest that we poor dumb animals move it?”

  I had a hard time answering through my gritted teeth. But then I remembered something else Dad had told me about lightning. I said, “If you have to have it under a tree, which you don’t because it’s better for a tent to be in the sunshine, then put it under the big old ponderosa.”

  “That, sonny,” Shorty jibed, “is also a tall tree.”

  “It’s tall,” I answered, “but it’s a pine. Pine trees have resin in ’em and—”

  Shorty Long chopped my sentence in two, not letting me finish what I had wanted to say. I was going to quote Dad’s exact words, which were: “The resin in pines interferes with their efficiency as conductors, and makes them more safe!”

  But Shorty’s cut-in words were: “And sycamore trees, my dear, have scared boys in ’em.”

  The smirk on his face when he said that showed that he thought he had thought up a very bright remark. He turned to Tom and ordered, “Come on, let’s get back to camp and get our barbecue supper started.”

  I thought I saw Tom’s jaw set, as if he was being bossed and didn’t want to be. He looked straight into my eyes for a second, then turned as though he was as much a slave as “my man Friday” in the story of Robinson Crusoe.

  Anyway, I thought, as they started up the path toward the mouth of the branch, they didn’t beat up on me, as I had said I’d do to Tom if I ever caught him alone anywhere without his brother or Shorty along.

  From where I was now, I could look out and see Dragonfly’s Snatzerpazooka’s old grave and the place where, with my hoe, I had dug a hole the size of a cat and buried that part of myself that really needed burying.

  Right that minute, though, while my temper was boiling at Shorty Long, it seemed I ought to have kept that part of me alive, so if I ever had to give Shorty a licking, I could do it.

  As soon as I couldn’t hear their voices any longer, I decided they were quite a ways up the creek, and I started to worm myself out of my hiding place. I was going to make a beeline for Poetry’s house, tell him about the word-fight I had just had, then hurry on home to get the chores done. I’d have to do them all by myself tonight because Dad was away, I remembered. Maybe I could get Poetry to come home with me and help.

  I worked my left wrist out to where I could see my watch, and it was almost suppertime that very second.

  “Well, here goes myself out,” I said to myself and started to squeeze sideways through the narrow opening.

  I started to squeeze my way through the narrow opening. I managed to get my right arm and shoulder out, and my head out far enough so that I could see the ground below me, and there I stuck.

  I mean stuck!

  I couldn’t get any farther out. My heavy leather jacket had made me too fat.

  “All right,” I said to myself. “If I can get this far out, I can get back in again. I’ll take my coat off, and it’ll be as easy as pie to get all the way out.”

  It didn’t make sense that I could have worked my way in and now, seven minutes later, couldn’t wriggle out.

  I grunted and twisted and squeezed again and again. I still couldn’t get any farther out, but I was getting back in.

  A minute later I was all the way in. If I was going to escape from my narrow prison, I’d have to use more than muscles. I’d have to use my mind a little. I’d have to be calm, in spite of the scared feeling that was beginning to make me tremble.

  What if I couldn’t get out? There wouldn’t be any supper, and I’d have to stand up all night.

  Now to get my heavy leather jacket off. Down with the zipper, which wasn’t easy, because I had to keep my elbows clamped to my side to do it.

  And then’s when I felt myself sweating and really scared. My prison was too narrow for me to work myself out of my coat. I wasn’t going to be able to get it off!

  It’s a terrible feeling to be in a tight place, not able to get out, to be all alone without anybody there to talk to, to know suppertime has come and gone, and your parents don’t know where you are, or any of your friends. And nobody comes to rescue you, and your voice gets hoarse from yelling, and you’re tired standing in such a cramped place and are sleepy. And you know your mother is worrying, and that worries you even more.

  I couldn’t even bend my knees enough to slump down a little to rest my tired leg muscles.

  After a while the night noises from the swamp—the nicest noises a boy ever hears when there isn’t anything to worry about—began to get on my nerves.

  Fireflies were flashing their green lights on and off in the willows, the pickerel frogs sounded like a hundred boys snoring and the bullfrogs like calves learning to bawl, making the whole place seem like a ghosts’ cemetery.

  Every now and then a screech owl would let out a long, trembling “Sha–a–a–a–ay!” It was enough to scare the living daylights out of a boy.

  Just then a night heron let out a squawking “Quoke … quoke!” as if he had been trying to swallow a frog and it had stuck in his throat. The heron was one of my favorite night birds. In the daytime the black-crowned night heron acts dopey, and if you happen to stumble onto his roost, he hardly knows you are there. He is a greenish black, his tail and wings and neck are the color of a field mouse, and his stomach and throat are whiter than the ivory keys on Mom’s organ in our living room.

  I stared into the moonlight in the direction of the dark swamp, and then all of a sudden there were what sounded like a dozen night herons all quoking at once.

  I’ll bet there are a hundred of them, I thought; and for a few seconds I wasn’t worried but was myself again, enjoying nature as I always do when I’m where nature has a chance to prove how wonderful it is.

  Then, for a few moments it was quiet, deathly quiet. What, I wondered, had stopped the frogs from piping and bellowing and the herons from quoking? What kind of fierce, savage-toothed, long-clawed, hungry wild animal might be stealing along through the swamp in the direction of a hollow sycamore tree with a boy in it?

  There were different things I could have worried about, such as: Was anybody out hunting for me? Had anybody told anybody on our party line phone that I was missing? One thing was pretty clear in my dumb mind right then, and that was that whenever a boy is going anywhere away from home, he ought to tell one of his parents or a neighbor or somebody where he is going.

  I worked my hands into my different pockets to see if I had anything in the collection of stuff I usually carry to give me an idea how I could get out of my narrow prison. But there wasn’t a thing that could help.

  I could feel everything there was: a buck-eye, which I always carried with me; a little ball of string, maybe ten feet of it; a couple of fishing sinkers; several nails; eight Lincoln pennies I’d been collecting; two nickels and a dime; a stub of a pencil …

  If I had a piece of paper, I could write a note, I started to think, then stopped. Who could carry a note to anybody?

  I also had a key to our toolshed, and in my jacket pocket were two matches. My mind tried to figure out some way to use the matches to get a message to somebody. I knew that just inside the mouth of the cave were two or three candles on little rock ledges along the walls. If I had a candle, I could light it and could wave it back and forth outside the opening and yell, and maybe somebody would see it and wonder what on earth and come and help me out. But, of course, if I could get to the cave to get the candles, I would already be out!

  Another crazy idea struck me. It was to light a match, toss it out into the dry leaves on the two Snatzerpazookas’ grave, and there might be quite a brushfire. Neighbors might see it, Poetry’s folks especially,
come down to put out the fire, and would find me.

  But a brushfire could also spread to some of the evergreens and burn up a lot of good timber. Also, and maybe even more important, because there were leaves all around the tree I was in, I might get smothered with smoke. I couldn’t even use the knife I had in my right pants pocket—or could I?

  An idea shot a thrill through me. I could whittle my way out. I could whittle and whittle and whittle away on one side or both sides of the entrance until it was large enough for me to squeeze through.

  Poor Mom! I kept thinking. She must be nearly wild with worry.

  I was almost frantic with worrying about Mom’s worrying. She might even telephone Dad long distance and get him worried and make him come driving like mad through the night to join the search for me.

  All the time, while I’d been thinking and trying to plan how to get out, I’d been sort of listening for the special Voice I thought I’d heard before I’d squeezed myself into the tree. I kept thinking about the boy Samuel in the Bible, who had heard an actual voice from God calling him by name. That was one of my favorite Old Testament stories.

  And the Voice didn’t come. Instead, all the time I’d been there, I’d just had to look out onto the moonlit covering of leaves on the small cat-sized grave I’d dug. But when I got the exciting idea of whittling myself out, I knew I had thought of a way of saving myself. God had used my own mind to give me the idea.

  Hardly knowing I was going to do it—in fact, I didn’t know it until afterward—I said, “Thank You for putting the thought in my mind. Now help me to make it work!”

  I managed to get my knife out and the blade open. In the moonlit dark I started to work, slicing off small, thin slices of the entrance where it was too narrow.