Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  It wasn’t a very kind thing to say. Extra-heavy people shouldn’t be made fun of unless they do it themselves. My parents had taught me that. They were always careful not to hurt anybody’s feelings.

  I untied the stringer from the willow, hardly able to see it on account of the crazy tears that were in my eyes. Now I was really angry at my best friend—not so much because he was making fun of me but because I couldn’t prove to him there had been a wildcat eating a bunny, which there actually had been, and because there wasn’t even any whopper of a large-mouth bass on the stringer, which I myself had caught and put there.

  Well, it was time for me to go home and start the evening chores, and it was also time for Poetry to go home. I knew it was for sure when I heard, from away up near their house, his mother’s voice calling in a high-pitched tremolo that sounded like Ichabod’s long wail. The way her call echoed through the woods sent chills up and down my spine. For a second it seemed I was running with the gang, following the hounds on a hot wildcat trail.

  Always mischievous-minded, Poetry swung his periscope up to his eyes and looked into the small round hole at the bottom, saying at the same time, “Maybe I can see your little kitty by looking in here.”

  Of course, he couldn’t.

  His mother called again, and this time her tremolo sounded as if she was on a hot trail.

  Poetry let out a yell back and started on a fast run along the wet path toward the branch bridge and on toward home.

  I myself went on toward the Theodore Collins house, carrying the sad-looking empty stringer and my long cane fishing pole—and with an empty feeling in my heart.

  It was a sad, wet walk. The rain had poured down so hard that little rivulets were running in the gravel road. There was muddy water everywhere. There were green leaves all over, too, blown from the trees, and quite a few fallen branches. The storm must have been even worse than it had seemed while we were in the cave.

  Inside the house, I took a quick half-sad, half-glad look up at Betty Lizzie on her rack above the closed east door. I was certainly glad I had left that door closed, and also the window by the phone, because the wind had come from the east and we would have had water all over the floor. It wasn’t any credit to me, though, since the door and that east window had already been closed when I’d gone fishing.

  I took a quick look-run-see all over the house upstairs and down to be sure there wasn’t any water on the floor anywhere or on the beds, and I felt a little better that there wasn’t any.

  While I was still upstairs, our phone rang one long and one short. It was our ring.

  That’ll be Poetry, I thought. He wants to make up. He’s sorry he teased me.

  But instead, it was long distance. Dad was calling from Memory City. The celebration at Wally’s house hadn’t started yet. There also had been a bad electrical storm there, and several bridges were out. He wanted to know if I was all right.

  I was glad to tell Dad I was and that the rain hadn’t rained into the house anywhere.

  Mom got on the phone then. There’d been a little change in their plans. She told me I could either stay all night at Poetry’s or he could come and stay with me, because Dad was going to wait till morning to start home.

  My heart was pounding because I wasn’t used to long-distance phone calls. But a little later when I hung up, I felt good inside—as if I’d done something important.

  I picked up the receiver again, took hold of the crank handle of the phone with my other hand, and got ready to ring two shorts and a long to ask Poetry to come and stay all night at my house.

  I got the two shorts rung before I remembered I was still mad at him, and I quick hung up. I didn’t need any barrel-shaped baby-sitter to look after me. Any boy who was old enough to own a rifle and could catch a whopper of a bass and—my thoughts stopped bragging on me when I remembered the bass had been off the stringer instead of on it.

  Had I actually been dreaming? I wondered for the first time.

  Right now, as I stood again in the kitchen looking up at Betty Lizzie, it seemed there had not only been a wildcat on the leaning tree eating a rabbit and a big bass running wild on the other end of my line, but there had also been a wooden shoe as big as a boat. I’d been in it, sailing in a sea of dew past the moon, and there had been an escalator with angels and wildcats riding up and down on it.

  Good sense, if I really had any, told me the wooden-shoe boat and the angels on the escalator had been only a dream, but the wildcat and the bunny and the whopper of a large-mouth bass had been real.

  But I did have to get the chores done, so I put myself to work doing them.

  When I went to bed in my upstairs south room, I lay there for a few minutes listening to the whispering of the ivy leaves at the window and the different night sounds in the woods, I was feeling quite a bit better in my mind. There was an ache in my heart, though, that my best friend hadn’t believed me and also that he hadn’t called up to tell me he was sorry and that he did believe me.

  Something was pulling at me to get out of bed, go down to the phone, and ring two shorts and a long for Poetry to come over and stay with me. It was still early enough, I thought, and there was moonlight enough for him to bike his way over.

  But I was stubborn, so I lay there on my soft white pillow and felt disgusted and worried a little. I wondered if any of the usual night sounds outside in the woods were unusual and if any of them were made by Old Stubtail, who wasn’t there.

  In the middle of the night I was awakened by something. I didn’t know what. But I was so startled by whatever it was that I was sitting up in bed before I knew it, my heart pounding. Out in our chicken house there was such a squawking and cackling that I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.

  5

  I had no sooner sprung from my bed to see what was the matter out in our chicken house than I thought I heard a different kind of noise near Red Addie’s apartment. I strained my eyes into the shadowy moonlight. The moon was in its last quarter so was only a silvery sliver hanging in the sky over the south pasture. The shadow of the barn covered all of Addie’s pig house and lot and part of the chicken yard, so I couldn’t really see what was the matter.

  My mind’s eye was seeing right through the chicken house wall, though, and imagining a tufted-eared, leering-eyed, stub-tailed wildcat making short work of one of Mom’s best laying hens. He might even be eating Old Bentcomb herself, my favorite white leghorn, who always made her nest under a log up in our haymow. She would make a tasty midnight snack for a hungry forty-five-pound monster of a cat, I thought.

  Since Dad was away in Memory City and wouldn’t be home till tomorrow sometime, it’d be up to me, Bill Collins, to save our flock of hens. Also, it would give me a chance to use Betty Lizzie for something besides target practice.

  The excitement in the henhouse was getting noisier every second, which meant the whole flock was scared half to death about something.

  I shoved myself into my overalls and, without bothering to put on a shirt over my pajama top, scurried down the stairs and into the kitchen.

  I would light my way with Dad’s powerful flashlight. It’d be silly to run any real risk, I thought. Old Stubtail, seeing me, might decide a red-haired boy would be just right for dessert. In a jiffy I had Betty Lizzie down and loaded. I eased my way out the back screen door and onto the board walk.

  And then I heard a sound that made me stop stock-still and cringe. It was the harsh scream of a hen, sounding as if she was being murdered.

  That settled that. I, Bill Collins, the head of our empty house, was going into action. I held Betty Lizzie ready to shoot if I had to. Any minute now, some wild animal might come charging out of the henhouse in my direction. But even in the middle of all that excitement, I remembered rules seven and eight of the Ten Commandments for Hunting Safety: “Be sure of your target before you fire; never point a gun at anything you don’t intend to shoot. Make sure of your partner’s location before firing at anything. Do
n’t hunt with more than one companion.”

  I was as far as the grape arbor when the harsh-screaming hen’s voice stopped as though it had been choked off, which probably meant one of our hens was dead. But the excited cackling of the other chickens was still going on.

  I shot a beam from the flashlight straight toward the open henhouse door. Open! And I had been ordered by Theodore Collins to close it!

  I swung the flashlight back toward Addie the pig’s apartment and thought I saw—I couldn’t tell for sure—a long, gray-brown shadow stalking the pen. Then for sure I saw a pair of fiery eyes, like two small flashlights, shining back on me.

  Just to be sure it wasn’t two flashlights, I turned mine off and those two went out. That meant I actually had seen the two eyes of some kind of animal reflected in my flashlight’s light.

  The gray-brown shadowy thing went slinking along the garden fence toward the pignut trees and disappeared in the direction of Poetry’s dad’s woods.

  I had seen Old Stubtail again! I was positively, absolutely sure of it! I, myself, Bill Collins, who was absolutely wide awake and not dreaming, had seen him with my own wide-awake eyes!

  I hadn’t realized it, but I had Betty Lizzie pointed toward Addie’s home. I’d swung the rifle in an arc, following the flight of the shadow. My arms were tired of holding it in a pointing position. I was trembling all over.

  But I was glad I hadn’t pulled the trigger, for when I sent a beam of light in the direction of the pignut trees, it came to focus on old Jersey, our milk cow, lying on her side there, chewing her cud. We might have had a dead milk cow instead of a stub-tailed wildcat.

  Well, there was still a lot of excitement in the henhouse, so I decided to go over and shut the door, hoping the chickens would calm down a little and I could go back to bed and try to go to sleep.

  First, I shone my light through the open door and onto the four-foot-high roosts. “Listen, girls,” I said in a half-comforting, half-scolding voice, “there’s nothing more to worry about. Go on back to sleep! Old Stubtail’s gone, and I’m going to shut your door and latch it.”

  But the whole flock seemed still to be nervous. Maybe my light was bothering them, I thought. I turned it off and spoke again. “Calm down! There’s nothing to be afraid of. Here, I’ll prove it to you.”

  I swung the light in a circle all around the ceiling and the roosts and then onto the dirt floor under the old walnut table on which Mom had placed a few nests in little square boxes.

  And that was when I saw what was causing all the excitement. There, in a corner under the table, was a long, gray animal the size of a house cat. It had a long, gray-brown, naked tail. Its head was long too, and slender, its eyes beady, its large ears without fur on them, and it was gnawing away on a bloody-necked white leghorn pullet.

  “Possum!” I exclaimed. It wasn’t a very big one and wasn’t anything to be scared of—not for a boy with a gun. The gang had caught quite a few of them when we’d been hunting with Circus’s dad’s hounds. The dogs hardly ever trailed one but sometimes did and got scolded for it if they had already been on a coon trail and had gotten off. I had even picked up a half-dozen possums by their long, prehensile tails.

  I shone Dad’s flashlight full into Opi’s grinning face—Opi was the name the gang had for any possum we happened to see. True to a possum’s nature at a time like that, he curled himself up into a ball, opened his mouth, showed a long row of pretty, white teeth, and lay on his side, absolutely still.

  I quickly stooped, lifted him by his tail, and carried him outside.

  He didn’t seem to like that. He came to life for a minute, struggled to get his head up to bite my hand, then gave up and went back to his pretended sleep.

  It was only a possum, and it wasn’t possum hunting season anyway, so I carried him to the orchard fence, dropped him over on the other side, and ordered him, “You stay out of our chicken house, do you hear!”

  And that was that.

  I went back, got what was left of Opi’s midnight lunch, and carried it to the orchard fence, too. I tossed it over, where it fell under one of Dad’s Early Elberta peach trees. Tomorrow I would bury it somewhere so that the bluebottle flies wouldn’t come and lay their eggs all over it.

  Even though I knew that the screwworms that would hatch from the bluebottle eggs were what Dad called “scavengers” and if given enough time would eat up the whole chicken carcass, the larvae would grow into more bluebottle flies—and there were already too many of those.

  Besides, I remembered that sometimes bluebottle flies laid their eggs in a cut or open sore of farm animals, and then the larvae ate the living tissues as well as the dead and caused a lot of deaths in cattle country, especially in the southern part of the United States.

  So it’s a good thing to kill or trap every bluebottle fly you can. Don’t even let even a housefly live if you can help it.

  Back to the chicken house door I went again and shut it tight and bolted it.

  Still worried about what I’d seen—or thought I’d seen—at Addie’s gate, I shot my light out there again. And what to my wondering eyes should appear but two fiery eyes again! It was something with black and white fur this time, though! It was Mixy nosing around the gate and arching her lazy back against the post.

  What a disappointment!

  First, I had thought there was a wildcat in the chicken house, and it had turned out to be a possum eating a leghorn pullet. And now the wildcat I thought I’d seen at Addie’s pig house had turned out to be a tame house cat that was wild only when in a hissing, spitting, scratching fight with a dog.

  A few minutes before, when I had seen the fiery eyes of that gray something-or-other stealing along the garden fence toward the pignut trees, I’d felt almost happy in spite of being scared. I was sure there was a wildcat in the neighborhood, that Old Stubtail had come back from Parke County. In the afternoon, when I was down at the mouth of the branch, I hadn’t been dreaming when I saw a rabbit being eaten by a tufted-eared, angry-eyed wild animal of the cat family.

  I called Mixy, and she came running toward me in a half-awkward lope the way cats do. I looked down at her blinking eyes and growled at her grumpily, “It’s your fault for scaring me! I’m disgusted!”

  She meowed a lazy meow up at me, arched her back, pushed against my pant leg, and walked past. Then she started off on a cat trot toward the iron pitcher pump and the place where she knew her milk pan was, inviting me to come and feed her a midnight lunch.

  I stood awhile, thinking while feeling the cool night breeze on my pajama-clad arms. I sighed heavily, took a squint at the moon, felt sleepy, and thought for a second about the poem “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.” I yawned my way through one of the stanzas I had memorized, which was:

  “‘Where are you going, and what do you wish?’

  The old moon asked the three.

  ‘We have come to fish for the herring fish

  That live in this beautiful sea.’”

  There was another line that started out “The old moon laughed and sang a song …” I couldn’t remember the rest of it. But as I kept on looking at the little sliver of a moon, it seemed it was shaped like a silver mouth that was laughing at me for being such a scared goose.

  Disappointed and sleepy, I carried Betty Lizzie into the house, unloaded her, went back upstairs, undressed, and was soon in bed with Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

  I tried to remember the whole poem, saying it over in my mind. But I didn’t get very far—only about as far as the place where it says.

  “Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes

  [fiery eyes, I thought]

  And Nod is a little head.”

  The next thing I knew it was morning, and the telephone downstairs was ringing one long and one short, the number everybody on the party line knew was ours.

  6

  For a second I thought the ringing phone was Dad’s alarm clock and that I’d have a while to sleep before he’d start calling me to come dow
n to help him with the chores.

  I was back with Wynken, Blynken, and Nod in a sea of dew, when the phone rang again. In a flash I realized nobody was home except me, and it’d be up to me to go down and answer it—which I did.

  It wasn’t anything very important, except that I was supposed to go over to Poetry’s house for the noon meal that day. Dad was invited, too.

  “He’s not home yet,” I said to Poetry’s mother.

  “Not home yet!” she exclaimed. “I thought he was coming back last night!”

  “He phoned me he’d not be here till today sometime,” I answered her.

  Then her voice sounded really astonished. “You mean you stayed all night alone there—all by yourself?”

  Because I always liked to have a girl or a woman feel worried about me or think I was brave, I said, “Well, not exactly alone. I had our old cat, six little pigs, a possum, and a wildcat. But don’t worry. I’m all right.”

  “Oh, you!” she said, then added, “I’ll send Poetry over right away to help with the chores.”

  “No, don’t!” I said. “I can get along very nicely without—” I wanted to say, “I can get along very nicely without a barrel-shaped boy who thinks I’m an idiot and won’t believe what I say.” But I remembered Dad’s and Mom’s ideal never to hurt people’s feelings if you could help it, so I added into the phone, “Thank you very much for the invitation. I’ll tell Dad as soon as he gets here.”

  I did feel a little better toward Mrs. Thompson’s barrel-shaped son, though. So a little later, when he actually did come over to help me with the chores, we started acting as if we liked each other again.

  I told him all about Opi and the other excitement I’d had. Then I began to feel him doubting me again.

  Since he was so mischievous most of the time anyway, I couldn’t tell whether he was joking or not when he said, “Yesterday it was a wildcat eating a rabbit. Last night it was a possum eating a chicken under the table in the henhouse. How come he didn’t put his food on the table instead of under it? Show me what’s left of the carcass, and I’ll believe you.”