Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Read online

  Also—and maybe most important of all—we couldn’t let a boy like that pal around with us unless he could learn to talk respectfully about girls. That is why I had had the fierce, fast fistfight with him beside the elderberry bushes across the gravel road from “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox. It was especially something he had said about Lucille Browne, Circus’s ordinary-looking sister, who sometimes smiles at me across the schoolroom and who can knock a home run and kill a spider or a snake without batting an eye.

  After the cookies, Big Jim unfolded his homemade map, spread it out on the flat surface of the stump, and began to point out to the Fenwicks the places of special interest.

  “Here, beginning at the mouth of the branch—over there by the big pine tree—is the path that leads to the sycamore tree near the entrance of the cave. And right here is the trail leading into the swamp and onto the muskrat pond. On your left, as you walk along a ways is the beginning of the quagmire and the quicksand. There’s a barbed-wire fence and a sign to warn you—”

  Dragonfly put in a few stammering words right there, saying, “One n–n–night we saw old John Till’s head lying out there right in the middle of it. Its eyes were open, and its voice was calling, ‘H–h–h–help!’”

  John Fenwick looked from the map to Dragonfly’s pinched, mischievous little face and said, “You’re kidding!”

  “It was John Till himself,” Big Jim explained. “He had been drinking and strayed off the path and had sunk all the way down to his chin. There was a rock down there, and he was standing on it and struggling to keep from sliding off into still deeper mire—”

  “And–and we saved him,” Dragonfly said proudly.

  “The grace of God,” John Fenwick said. “He used you boys to rescue him.”

  Then the powerful-muscled missionary asked us what at first sounded like a foolish question. It was, “And I suppose you saved him by standing on safe ground yourself and telling him that, if he wanted to get home, all he would need to do would be to follow you in the path and he’d get there all right?”

  “No sir,” Little Jim said. “We got a homemade rope out to him and pulled him in.”

  “Oh, I see,” John said. “You thought he needed more than a good example. He needed to be saved before he could follow you home.”

  I knew he was trying to tell us something important, though I wasn’t sure just what. But I happened just then to think of a Bible verse we’d had at our table one morning that says, “For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.” My own father had said that morning, “No one can go to heaven by following Jesus as a good example. He needs to be saved first. Then he can follow Him.”

  For some reason my eyes began to sting a little, so I looked toward the Maple Leaf to see what Mrs. Fenwick was doing. She was looking up into the lower branches of the tree the cabin was named after, her eyes searching in as many different directions as there are. She brought her eyes back when Big Jim went on explaining the map.

  “Right at this place marked with the red X is where you can leave the swamp and go on up to Old Man Paddler’s cabin …”

  It didn’t take long to show the Fenwicks all the places of special interest in the area—though we had to watch that everything Big Jim pointed out didn’t start Dragonfly on a stammering story of something exciting or dangerous that had happened there.

  “As for the creek itself, you’ll want to watch especially close to the island, where the water is shallow. There are hidden rocks that could damage your propeller. And up here just below the bridge is the big rock, with its wide flat surface, where the soft-shelled turtles take their afternoon naps.

  “To the left of the rock,” he went on “—you can see it as you look down from the bridge—is the deep pool where Old Whopper hangs out. That’s the oldest and biggest bass in the creek. Every fisherman who comes here has tried to land him, but the old boy is too smart for them, and—”

  Big Jim stopped and looked away from the map toward the big rock itself. “And if you don’t mind our saying so, we hope he’ll always be here. The creek wouldn’t be the same if we couldn’t stand on the bridge and toss a stone down into the water near his hiding place and see him go charging out after it like a dog chasing a stick, then stare at it and give a disgusted flip of his tail and sink back into his hideout again.”

  Elona Fenwick let out a little squeal right then and said, “Look! There’s our first hummingbird!”

  We all looked where she was looking, which was toward a hummingbird feeder, filled with what I supposed was red sweetened water. There was one of nature’s finest sights, a ruby-throated hummingbird, its wings beating the air as fast and furious as the feathery wings of the giant sphinx moth that darts around our house at twilight and at night, sipping nectar out of the heart of Mom’s petunias.

  For a second, I liked Elona Fenwick even better because she liked birds.

  Back again to the map, Big Jim had just started talking when Dragonfly cut in again to exclaim, “Look, everybody! There’s old Long Neck Blue, down by the island!”

  Big Jim frowned a little, but he joined the rest of us in looking toward the island below us, maybe two hundred yards away. And we all got a fine look at a great blue heron. It was the only one we’d ever seen in the territory, unless part of the time we saw him, he was not him but her. His very beautiful blue heron wife would look exactly like him.

  Old Long Neck’s upper parts are a slate-colored blue. His stomach, I remembered from having seen him up close once, is streaked with black and white. His long, sharp bill is part yellow, and the one long leg he was standing on right that minute in the shallow water at the island’s edge was as black as coal soot.

  We knew that when old Long Neck Blue was standing like that, he wasn’t asleep, as it says in a certain poem about horses, which “hang their sleepy heads and stand still in a stall.” But the heron’s sharp eyes were watching for a fish or frog to get too close or for a dobsonfly to accidentally light in the water in front of him. Or maybe the larva of a dobsonfly would wriggle a little from under a rock.

  Then like a streak of gray, blue, and yellow lightning, his long, sharp bill would shoot into the water, and the minnow or frog or the dobsonfly’s larva would go on the “long, long trail a-winding” down old Long Neck’s long neck into his first stomach. Then, a little later, nature would empty it into his second stomach, which is called the gizzard, where it would be ground into digestible size, and—well, that would be the end of the frog or minnow or anything else old Long Neck’s long neck could swallow whole.

  I don’t know what happened right then. Maybe it was another one of Elona’s squeals about the hummingbird. Anyway, all of a sudden, old Blue came to awkward life. He swooshed up into the air and took off, his long, angular wings taking him in the direction of the swamp and the mouth of the cave. Both long, thin legs were dangling, their claws spread like the roots of a giant ragweed a boy has just pulled out of a fencerow and shaken the dirt off of.

  It seemed we had maybe stayed long enough at the Maple Leaf, and after saying and getting quite a few friendly good-byes, we left, going past the dock to the path that led to the bridge.

  Back on the other side, we took off on the run to the spring for a drink, then hurried on to the swimming hole. We would have just time for a good swim before having to go home and report to our folks.

  Big Jim stopped in the middle of taking off his T-shirt and asked, “Well, gang, what do you think of our new neighbors?”

  Knowing no one could hear us except ourselves, I came out with, “Anybody who likes birds, might like boys. And anybody who likes boys, and understands them, is a human being. Did you see the way her eyes lit up when the hummingbird took his first drink of nectar from her feeder?”

  Dragonfly, his own T-shirt already off and his bare white chest exposed to the breeze from the creek, sneezed. Then he surprised us by saying, “She’s the prettiest missionary I ever saw.” And then his dragonfly-like ey
es looked away bashfully, as though what he had said was a secret in his own mind and he was sorry he had let anybody else know it.

  Poetry had been chinning himself on a branch of the Snatzerpazooka tree on which we were hanging our clothes. He puffed out his thoughts, which were, “She bakes wonderful cookies.”

  “Cookies!” Little Jim squeaked. “My own mother baked those cookies!”

  Big Jim broke into the conversation, reminding us, “Up to now, nobody has said anything about Mr. Fenwick,” which up to now no one had.

  Circus was the first to say what he thought. “I’m not sure how smart they are—to be taken in by a boy we all know is an ornery rascal.”

  “Shorty’s smart,” I put in. “He can be polite when he wants to.”

  Big Jim flexed his biceps, opened and closed his large fists a few times, admired the brown muscles below his elbows, and ventured, “Did you see his arm and shoulder muscles—strong enough to bend an iron rod into a hoop.”

  Dragonfly was looking down at his own thin, white straight muscles when he thought to say, “He didn’t look like anything was wrong with him. How come his doctor told him he had to take a vacation and not work for a long time?”

  Just looking at Dragonfly’s spindly arms was enough to make a boy sneeze, which he did right then, looking south toward the sun to help him get the sneeze out into the open. At the end of his long-tailed sneeze, he raised his voice to say, “Look! There’s Old Granny Woody, frozen stiff!”

  We all looked where Dragonfly was looking, across the narrow neck of red clover to a little brown knoll near the thicket that borders the bayou. Sure enough, there was Old Granny Woody, the biggest, grizzliest groundhog there ever was, maybe. She was one of our best animal brothers, though we could never get very close to her because she wouldn’t let us.

  There were maybe twenty groundhogs in the neighborhood. But they never seemed to do anybody any real harm, except that once in a while, when they were hungry, they would sneak into somebody’s garden and eat a few beans and peas.

  Nearly every February 2, which is Groundhog Day all over America, some of the gang would get up before sunrise and sneak down along the bayou, hide behind the thicket, and watch to see if Granny would come out of her burrow to see her shadow. Groundhogs, like bears, are hibernators. They sleep all winter and wake up and come out only after a long winter’s nap.

  Granny had lived in her network of tunnels by the bayou for as far back as I can remember. She was as much a part of the territory as the squirrels and rabbits or mayapples or wild rosebushes or even as Old Whopper, Chippy-chip-chee, and Long Neck Blue. She was just like one of the family.

  What Dragonfly meant when he said Old Granny was “frozen stiff” was that she had reared up on her haunches and was standing as straight and stiff as the stump of a willow or elm sapling after a beaver has cut down its tree. Like a gopher or chipmunk, when Granny gets scared or suspicious of something or somebody, she will do that and will stay “frozen” until she is sure it is safe to move. Or if she is really scared, she will drop to the ground and scramble like a grizzly brown streak of scared lightning for her den or to some other place of safety.

  Granny, standing now like a statue, thinking and maybe wondering what on earth, would never get killed or hurt by any of us. Her one short ear, nipped off once when she got caught in somebody’s sharp-jawed trap, would always let us know who she was, if we happened to see her playing with a lot of other wood-chucks anywhere.

  “Good Old Granny Woody!” Little Jim said. “She’s my very best woodchuck friend.”

  And then, then, and double then! That is when we heard the sharp crack of a rifle and saw a puff of blue smoke rise from behind the thicket. At that same instant, Granny Woody leaped up into the air and spun around. Then she dropped to the grassy knoll she had been frozen on and began to twist and writhe and go into a tangled-up spasm like a cat having a fit, crashing all around, clawing the air, and twitching.

  At almost the same time, a boy’s high-pitched excited voice yelled from the thicket, “I’ve got ’im! I’ve killed a groundhog!”

  Hearing that piercing, screaming voice, which I’d heard too many times in my half-long life, and knowing whose bragging voice it was, I felt my teeth clamp shut and my temple muscles harden. “Shorty Long!” I exclaimed. “He’s killed Granny!”

  Like a big, two-legged, giant-sized wood-chuck, my worst enemy dashed out from behind the bushes and streaked toward the knoll, where Granny was giving the last few sad twitches of her dying body. He grabbed her up by the tail and, with his rifle in one hand and the limp groundhog in the other, came dragging her toward us.

  4

  I stood as stock-still as a frozen woodchuck, wondering what on earth and why.

  It took only a few seconds for Shorty Long to drag Granny to where we were. Quicker than a referee blowing a whistle when he sees a foul in a basketball game, he stood his .22 against the trunk of the Snatzerpazooka tree. Then, before any of us could have stopped him, even if we had known what he was going to do, he grabbed Granny Woody’s tail with both hands. He half dragged and half carried her to the creek, spun around twice in a wide circle like a discus thrower in a track meet, and hurled that heavy, short-tailed “terrestrial squirrel”—which is what the dictionary says a woodchuck really is—up and out and out and out and out, where she landed with a noisy splash right in the middle of our swimming hole.

  The waves from the splash spread into a widening circle, leaving Granny floating in the middle like flotsam from a shipwreck. Her own happy life was the ship. Her dead body was all that was left of it.

  “There, you thief!” Shorty Long shouted in the direction of Granny Woody’s gray-haired body. “That’ll teach you to keep your ornery little family out of our garden, eating up my mother’s peas and beans and lettuce!”

  With that, Shorty Long strutted back toward us, reached for his rifle, and started down the path that goes toward the spring. There was a smirk on his face that said, “I think a lot of myself! I’m a very important person!”

  “Stop!” Big Jim’s voice barked.

  And Shorty Long did. He swung around with his rifle raised—though not pointing toward any of us, because no person who knows how to handle guns would ever let his gun be pointed on purpose or even accidentally toward anything or anybody he doesn’t intend to shoot.

  “Did you say,” Big Jim’s voice asked accusingly, “that you knew Granny had a family of groundhog babies?”

  “Certainly!” Shorty called back in short, sharp words. “Four of ’em! I’ve got four traps set at the place where she always led them through the fence. She taught them to be thieves!”

  Little Jim, who hardly ever gets his temper up, came to fiery life with his voice right then, yelling, “They’re not thieves! They don’t know it’s wrong! They’re just hungry, that’s all!”

  Shorty shrugged his shoulders, smirked a sideways smirk, and barked back to us, “Your old Granny is not the only varmint that’s going to get shot this summer. The pigeons that keep nesting in our barn and scatter their droppings all over our alfalfa hay, the rats that steal corn out of our corncrib, the squirrels that steal our walnuts, the coons that steal our eggs and chickens, the weasels and owls and—”

  “Owls,” I cut in on him to disagree, “are a farmer’s best friend. They eat cutworms, mice, and—”

  “Also, little old Daisy Lee here”—Shorty cut me short, lifting his rifle and patting its walnut-colored stock—“is going to protect me in case one of your bigger ‘brothers’ gets too friendly, such as a wildcat or a bear. Remember, you killed a bear once yourselves. So you needn’t be so uppity about a boy protecting himself!”

  And with that, Shorty Long took a parting shot at us. “I’ll have to hurry on down to the Maple Leaf. Uncle John’s expecting me. He’s going to teach me to run the outboard this morning, and I’m going to show him and Aunt Elona all around—all the good fishing places and where the dangerous underwater rocks are. W
e might even catch Old Whopper. Who knows?”

  Big Jim called after him again, “What do you mean—‘Uncle John’?”

  Shorty Long answered in a scornful voice, “Didn’t you know? Uncle John and Aunt Elona have adopted me. I’m going to be their nephew while they’re here!”

  And then, in a teacher tone, he called back to us, “Class is dismissed!” He turned and, carrying his rifle as if he was looking for anything that moved so that he could shoot it, he swung into the path that leads to the spring and the leaning linden tree, on his way to take a ride in the Vida Eterna.

  I stood with set jaw and tense temple muscles, watching the movement of the tall weeds that bordered the path Shorty Long was working his way along. All of us were still standing frozen, our eyes and minds on fire with anger and with what my mother sometimes calls “frustration.” That was her “word for the day” one day last week. It’s the feeling a dog gets when it is trailing a fox or coon and accidentally loses the scent and goes running all over everywhere trying to find it and can’t and finally has to give up.

  There wasn’t a thing we could do about Shorty Long. Not one single thing. Now that he had a new rifle, he felt very brave and a very important person, and he had his mind made up to keep on being the kind of a boy he was. What could you do with a boy like that?

  I didn’t know I was humming a tune in my mind, or that the words were going to ooze out and be heard by anybody, until Little Jim, who was closest to me at the time, said, “My mother listens to that program every morning. It helps her have a good day.”

  “What program?” I asked. Then I heard the words that were tumbling over each other in my mind. They were “Every day’s a wonderful day,” which this day wasn’t!

  It wasn’t even a wonderful minute, because from the direction of the linden tree right that very minute there was another rifle shot. And with my mind’s eye I saw a red squirrel or maybe a flying squirrel or a cottontail lying dead on the ground.