Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  We didn’t spend much time at the skating rink—just took a half-hour’s fast round-and-round skate before going out to our camp on the Roaring Fork, where we built a friendly fire because the mountain night was cool and we wanted to be comfortable for our story time.

  We were all wide awake, talking about the exciting things at the rodeo and what fun we’d have tomorrow on the world’s longest chairlift, when I heard the sound of a galloping horse. I quick looked toward the lane that led into our camping place, and it was Cranberry Jones on his golden palomino!

  The first thing I noticed besides the golden horse with its white tail and mane was that, instead of his black hat, the king of the cowboys was wearing a tan Stetson that was too small in the crown to fit well.

  He swung out of the saddle and handed the hat to Dragonfly, saying, “I thought maybe you’d want it first thing in the morning. You are going on the chairlift, aren’t you?”

  Dragonfly accepted the hat, set it on his head at an “I’m tough” angle, and stepped into the firelight, his hands at his hips. He had a set jaw and a surly expression on his thin face as he looked up toward the king of the cowboys. “Draw, mister!” he demanded.

  Cranberry Jones’s eyes had a twinkle in them in the firelight. He laughed, then said to the grim-faced Dragonfly and to the rest of us, “That’s for the Old West, boys. Nowadays—” He stopped, his eyes searching our faces. Then I noticed he was looking at Little Jim’s father and at the Bible in his hands. “That,” he said, “is what people need. Wicked men don’t need to be shot so much as they need to be changed.”

  It was the same thing I’d heard him say back at the Snow-slide but was so different from what I might have expected an honest-to-goodness cowboy to say that I felt a lump in my throat. All of us must have felt the same way, because not one of us said a word for maybe a long time.

  Circus was the first to say anything. He said, “My father got changed once by the gospel. He was an alcoholic before that.”

  Again I saw the shadow on Cranberry Jones’s face.

  Because Little Jim’s folks asked him to, Cranberry stayed for our good-night devotions. Just before prayer time, Little Jim’s father asked if there were any special requests, and that’s when Poetry and I, who were sitting side by side on a log facing the fire, felt our hands squeezing each other’s and I got cold chills running up and down my spine, because Cranberry Jones’s request for prayer went something like this:

  “Pray for me,” he said, “that God will take the hatred out of my heart for a certain man. It’s not right to feel the way I do, but up to now I can’t help it.”

  7

  For a few seconds there wasn’t a word spoken by anybody, and the only sounds were the crackling of the fire as its long flames leaped up like hounds around a coon tree, the soughing of the breezes in the pines, and the music of the Roaring Fork behind us.

  Little Jim’s mother spoke then, saying to the serious-faced cowboy sitting across the fire from her, “Would you like to tell us about it?”

  Cranberry Jones sighed. His bronze face was very sober in the firelight, as if there was a heavy load of some kind on his heart. When he answered Little Jim’s mother’s question, he didn’t say at all what I expected him to. His voice trembled a little, and his words made Circus clench his fists and set his jaw.

  Here is what he said: “When I saw you all so happy under the Hello Tree and noticed how, before you ate, you bowed your heads, it carried me back to my old home in Michigan and the cranberry farm where I got my nickname. My father and mother used to do that. I guess you all have read in the papers lately how Lindy and I’ve given our lives over to let the Lord run them. I’d been a pretty ornery critter for a long time, but I reckon the Savior just kept on riding sign on me till He tracked me down. Now that He’s got His brand on me, it’s sort of up to me not to be a stray anymore.”

  Cranberry Jones cleared his throat, swallowed, and a few seconds later he changed the subject. “I reckon God knows what’s on my mind, and all you have to do is just ask Him to take the hate out of me.”

  When he stopped again, I knew that whatever was on his mind was going to stay there and that my curiosity wasn’t going to be satisfied.

  After devotions, Cranberry Jones thanked us all and invited us to come to the Snow-slide as his dinner guests again tomorrow evening. “Lindy and I can do with a little more Christian fellowship, I reckon. You boys like to try an Old West chuck-wagon dinner?”

  Different ones of us said we would, Poetry saying it first.

  “Enjoy yourselves on the chairlift tomorrow,” Cranberry Jones said, just as he started to move out of our fire-lighted circle to where his palomino was tethered to a pine branch. He looked up toward a white moon the shape of the crescent on the throat of a back-home meadowlark and said, “I reckon that’s the biggest stadium in the world up there. As Lindy says, your eyes’ll be taking a lot of pictures your minds can look at the rest of your lives.”

  He swung his right arm wide as though he was trying to lasso something high in the sky—something a boy’s eyes couldn’t see but his heart could feel; something more important, maybe, than anything else in the whole world.

  “Let me walk out to the road with you,” Little Jim’s father said then.

  Little Jim himself was quick on his feet to go with them but got stopped by his mother. “They might want to talk a little,” she explained.

  Also, it was our bedtime, and we had to get into our pajamas and sleeping bags. Poetry and I got to sleep in the back of the station wagon. The rest of the gang would be just outside the tent in which Little Jim’s parents were going to sleep. Tomorrow night two others of the gang would get the station wagon.

  It was maybe fifteen minutes before I heard galloping hooves going down the road and saw Little Jim’s father coming back.

  Poetry, beside me on our air mattress, peeked out the station wagon’s back window and said, “He walks like he’s worried about something.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered back. “I wish I could have heard what they talked about,” not knowing that a few minutes later I was going to hear Cranberry Jones’s whole sad story as Little Jim’s folks talked it over in the tent.

  This is how come I got to.

  In spite of the fact that I had a lot of things on my mind, just lying on the extra soft air mattress, covered over with a warm blanket, made me sleepy, so when a little later Poetry wakened me with an idea, I was half mad.

  “Sh!” I said to him

  But he wouldn’t be shushed. “I’m thirsty,” he whispered back.

  “Oh no, you don’t!” I answered and covered my ears with my pillow. There went fleeting through my mind the tangled-up story of the watermelon mystery and all the excitement Poetry had gotten into by being thirsty in the middle of the night.

  A second later he was sitting up. “Let’s go get a bottle of pop,” he whispered.

  “We’ll wake everybody up,” I protested.

  But there wasn’t any use to protest, not when anybody as stubborn as Poetry wanted you to do something. So, as sleepy as I was and as foolish as I thought what we were going to do was, I let myself be coaxed out of my nice warm bed into a stealthy late-at-night sneak through the shadows to the Cola cooler behind the tent. I certainly didn’t expect to stumble over a root and fall and land not more than inches from the tent wall, with my left ear even closer—just close enough to hear Mrs. Foote say to her husband, “The poor boy! It’s enough to make him lose his mind—having her disappear like that.”

  I didn’t have time to wonder who could lose his mind over who disappeared, because Little Jim’s pop answered, saying, “A tragedy like that happening to a new Christian could make him bitter …”

  I won’t take the space to tell you everything I heard while lying on the pine-needle-covered ground in my night clothes between the Cola cooler and the tent, but here in as few words as I can write it for you is most of the sad, mysterious, exciting story:

  La
st December when Cranberry Jones was down in Arizona performing in a rodeo, he met and spent a lot of time with a lady sportswriter named Connie Mae Spruce. Connie Mae wanted to write a story to be called “Cranberry Jones at Home,” so he sent her up to the Snow-slide to meet his sister, Lindy, and to wait till he finished his next performance at Tucson. Then he would fly home, and they’d spend the week after New Year’s together.

  While Connie Mae was here waiting, she decided to write a special story of the Ski Festival. To know what she was writing about, she began to take ski lessons.

  “That’s where the trouble began,” Little Jim’s pop’s gruff voice said to his wife. “Her ski instructor—the man who is the engineer at the base station this summer—was a social drinker and kept trying to get Connie Mae, who was an alcoholic, to drink with him. And on New Year’s Eve he succeeded. She drank all evening at the Wild Horse Tavern, left there about midnight for her room at the Snow-slide, got lost in the storm—and just disappeared.”

  Everything was so quiet in the tent for a few seconds that I could hear myself breathing. I didn’t dare move, because I didn’t want them to know I was six inches away, listening. Poetry himself was as quiet as a sleeping possum beside me.

  Then Little Jim’s mother said back to her husband, “And Cranberry loved Connie Mae and was trying to win her to Christ—that’s why he sent her to Lindy—and you think maybe he would have married her if she’d gotten over her alcoholism?”

  “That’s what he just told me,” Little Jim’s father said.

  Little Jim’s mother sighed heavily, and again she said, “The poor boy!”

  Little Jim’s pop’s story to Little Jim’s mom there in the dark tent ended something like this: “The thing has built up in Jones’s mind to a terrible hatred for the man who gave her that fatal drink. Last week, Cranberry got a license to carry a gun because there’s been a mountain lion snooping around the corral where he keeps Pal—and that could be dangerous. I’m terribly afraid of what would happen if the two ever meet alone and get into a quarrel.”

  That was as much as I managed to hear. I’d been lying so long beside the tent wall that when I tried to change my cramped position a little so my arm wouldn’t go to sleep, my foot accidentally struck the tent rope and shook the whole tent.

  “What was that?” Little Jim’s mother’s worried voice exclaimed. “Maybe the mountain lion’s hanging around our camp!”

  I crouched there, cringing, waiting for them to start talking again, so I could sneak away. It seemed I had heard things they might not have wanted me to but which Poetry and I almost had to know to solve the jigsaw puzzle mystery we were working on.

  A little later, when we were back in the station wagon, Poetry whispered, “Do you know what?”

  “No, what?” I asked.

  “I’m still thirsty. We forgot what we went after.”

  Well, I told Poetry everything I had heard, he told me everything he had heard, and we talked until we were sleepy again. Something was really worrying me. Cranberry Jones has hate in his heart for somebody. Cranberry Jones has a special permit to carry a gun.

  But the next thing I knew it was morning on the Roaring Fork. The gang was making a lot of boy noise. There was the smell of breakfast cooking on the camp stove, and in a little while it’d be time to hurry over to the base station and begin having the time of our lives riding the world’s longest chairlift.

  8

  Riding the world’s longest chairlift was a little disappointing at first. It wasn’t half as exciting as riding a roller coaster, and there wasn’t anybody yelling and screaming with excitement.

  But it was kind of scary as the chair I was riding alone in swung out over the tops of the trees. I could tell I was a little frightened when I noticed I was holding onto the bar in front of me so tightly my knuckles were white. Maybe it was partly because every now and then the wind would change into a strong gust that would sway my chair and blow the hair on my hatless head into my eyes. It was a sunshiny day, though.

  In my left hand was an illustrated folder with information about the different ski runs, but it wasn’t easy to read with the wind ruffling the pages and the treetops below swaying dizzily.

  About sixty feet ahead of me, in a chair all by himself, was Little Jim. From behind he looked like a small brown mouse. Even as far away as I was, I could tell he was looking down, studying the terrain below, maybe trying to see if he was riding high over any new kinds of wildflowers.

  The higher my chair went on its steeply sloping cable, the more wind there was, since there wasn’t anything up here to break it. I kept wondering how Dragonfly was getting along. He had decided to wear his swept-brim Stetson—“to keep the sun out of my eyes,” he had explained. I turned around to look and, after watching only a few seconds, could see he was scared half to death. He was all hunched up, holding onto the bar in front of him with one hand and onto his hat with the other.

  I yelled back down to him, “Why didn’t you leave your hat in the station wagon like I said?”

  But he didn’t answer, not even a word. He just held on.

  Behind him, in his own chair, was Big Jim and behind him Circus and last of all Poetry. Little Jim’s folks had taken the first two chairs and were way up ahead of their small son.

  There was another cable to my left, and on it were other people in chairs coming down. Every few minutes one would pass me.

  And for a few minutes I was in the history section of my imagination, remembering the Bible story of Jacob’s ladder, the dream a boy once had when he was asleep in a very rocky place with only a stone for a pillow. In the dream, the boy saw a long ladder—or maybe it was a stairway—reaching all the way up to heaven. And there were angels going up and down on it.

  It was easy for my mind’s eye to imagine the members of the Sugar Creek Gang, with Little Jim’s parents leading us, on our way up to heaven. Except that not one of us looked like an angel, and I happened to know that most of the time not a one of us acted like one.

  I was exploded off my dream ladder right then by a wild yell behind me. Dragonfly’s high-pitched tremulous voice sounded like a hound breaking out in full cry on a hot coon trail. I quick turned, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but something flying through the air to the left of our chairlift, sailing high like a giant bird toward the Little Nell T-Bar slope, where beginners learn to ski.

  Whatever it was, it zoomed into the sky, darting wildly, dropping a few dozen feet, then whirling up and away again. I needn’t have wondered what it was, though, because below me in his swaying chair was a spindle-legged little guy with his hair in his eyes, and there wasn’t any hat on his head.

  Dragonfly’s Stetson had been whipped off by a fierce, fast gust of wind and already was far away, flying along a lot faster and with a lot more ease than a man on a flying trapeze. I was too far away to see the little guy’s expression, but I could feel the worried wind that must have been blowing in his mind. I quick yelled to him, “Let it go! You can’t stop it, anyway! We’ll go get it when we come back down!”

  Nothing important happened the rest of the way up. There wasn’t anybody to talk to-only to yell at, and that would have been unfair to the people riding down on the chairlift.

  As I kept on riding and looking at the scenery, I had my mind on Dragonfly’s hat sailing out into the wild blue yonder, wondering where it would land and would we ever find it.

  I was also studying the folder in my hand. Maybe sometime when I got older I could come to Aspen in the winter and go swishing down the different runs: The Dipsy Doodle, Ruthie’s Run, The Silver Queen, and all the others.

  At a place called Midway, which was the upper end of the lower lift, we all got off one at a time and changed to the chairs on the upper lift, the way people in the city change buses. Then away we went, on and on, up and up, till we got to Sundeck Cafe at the very top. There we swung out of our chairs to relax awhile before taking the long ride back down to the base station.


  Little Jim had brought along his flower guide. While we were having our lunch in the 11,300-foot-high restaurant with other people eating all around us, he had it open and was studying it.

  Dragonfly was still worried about his lost hat, and the rest of us were a lot more quiet than we would have been swimming and diving in Sugar Creek.

  After lunch, we took a sightseeing hike up the ridge, higher and still higher, and I realized my eyes were writing things and taking colored pictures I could look at the rest of my life whenever I was in my mind’s special world.

  When we were halfway back to Sundeck, all of a sudden Dragonfly exclaimed, “Hey! Where’s Circus?”

  I looked back up the ridge we had just hiked down and saw a boy’s blue shirt sleeve. The rest of the boy was behind a twisted, dead juniper trunk. “I’ll go back and get him,” I volunteered and started.

  I found Circus sitting on a rock, looking out over the thousands of acres of fir and pine and spruce and millions of wildflowers of many varieties.

  He must have been concentrating on something far away, because he didn’t hear me until I was only a few yards from him. Or maybe the wind up there was blowing the sound I was making down the hill rather than toward him.

  Anyway, I heard him before he saw me, for the wind was blowing his words down into my ears. I didn’t get any whole sentence, but he wasn’t talking to me anyway. I guess maybe he hadn’t intended any human being to hear him. What he said was a Bible verse I knew: “The devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory; and he said to Him, ‘All these things I will give You, if You fall down and worship me.’”

  I was hardly breathing, because I didn’t want to interrupt whatever Circus was thinking about.

  He finally heard me, though. He quick stood up, looked at me maybe thirty feet down below him, and called, “Be there in a minute!”

  He had a faraway expression in his eyes as we walked down the ridge together, and I knew his mind was back up where he had been.