Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6 Read online

  That’s all the thinking I got to do, because when you’re in a fight you can’t think very well. But I’m telling you that was a real battle, and while we were in it, it seemed more important than Waterloo or Gettysburg or any other famous battle.

  The first thing I knew, that little red-haired kid smacked me on the side of the nose and made me grunt. And that was the last of my fuse. Also, that’s when hoeing potatoes and doing a lot of hard farm work came in handy. My muscles felt like the blacksmith’s whose smithy stood under the spreading chestnut tree.

  It was Little Jim who surprised us the most. Once, between blows, I saw him down on top of another little fellow. He had the kid by the wrists and was yelling into his face, “Don’t you know it’s wrong to swear? Don’t you know Jesus is your best friend?”

  I thought Little Jim had just yelled down into that boy’s face the best sermon he’d ever heard.

  Just then I made a quick dive for Tom Till’s knees, and he went down like a tackled football player. Poetry and the boy he was fighting stumbled over us and came down on us kersquash, with Poetry on top of the pile, our arms and legs getting all tangled up. If anybody had seen us just then, he couldn’t have told which one of us any of those eight dirty bare feet belonged to.

  Getting hit doesn’t hurt much when you’re in a fight, and I didn’t know I had a black eye until afterward. I thought the reason I couldn’t see very well was that I was mad.

  Poetry was fighting as if he enjoyed it. All of a sudden I heard him quoting a poem about the village blacksmith. It was a poem we’d had to learn at school. He had his man down and was sitting on him and yelling:

  “Under a spreading chestnut tree

  The village smithy stands;

  The smith, a mighty man is he,

  With large and sinewy hands;

  And the muscles of his brawny arms

  Are strong as iron bands.”

  And then Poetry just yelled it out:

  “He goes on Sunday to the church …”

  He said it over and over. “‘He goes on Sunday to the church! He goes on Sunday to the church!’” every time he gave his man another blow, he said, “‘He goes on Sunday to the church!’”

  There wasn’t a one of our gang that was ashamed of going to church. We knew that if anybody is a sissy, it’s the boy who’s afraid to go to church for fear somebody’ll make fun of him!

  Don’t think it was easy to lick those boys, however. Their muscles were as strong as iron bands too, and some of them had had boxing lessons.

  Dragonfly seemed to be having the hardest time. I looked around once just in time to see somebody’s long arm reach out and a big fist strike him right in the nose. And that was the last of Dragonfly’s fuse too. After that he was a little wildcat. And from then on, the Sugar Creek Gang began to make short work of those fellows.

  I guess Bob Till had never been licked in his life until that day. But then, he’d always been a bully and had probably picked on boys smaller than he was. So when our Big Jim fought a skillful boxing fight, as cool as a cucumber, and licked the stuffings out of him, it was maybe the best thing that ever happened to him.

  And then I heard something buzz around my head and felt a sharp pain in my arm and over my good eye. Somebody had stirred up a bumblebees’ nest! In a jiffy the air was full of black-and-yellow bumblebees that were even madder than we were.

  Those big black-and-yellow buzzers came storming out of their nest like soldiers out of their dugouts, and before we knew it, we were all running to the woods as fast as we could. The fight was over.

  The thing to do if a bee is after you is to run fast and then suddenly drop to the ground and lie still. That’ll lose the bee. He’ll go around in circles above you, and—if you wait long enough without moving—he’ll go away.

  But we didn’t start running soon enough.

  My eye began to swell right away, and before I went to bed that night both eyes were so swollen I could hardly see a thing.

  That didn’t end our trouble with the Till boys, even though it was the end of the fight. That fall we would all have to go to the same little red brick schoolhouse together.

  9

  The first thing I did when I got home was to slip into our bathroom and lock the door and take a good look at myself in the mirror. Or perhaps I should say a bad look. I certainly was a sight. I think I actually looked meaner than the little red-haired, mean-faced Till boy.

  I didn’t like to have my parents see me like that, but of course they did. I washed my hands and face carefully and combed my hair. But when I came out of the bathroom, Mom, who was fixing supper, gasped and said, “What on earth!”

  I hated to mention the fight, so I said, trying to be indifferent, “Oh, I just got too close to a bumblebee who didn’t like me very well.” I knew that before long I’d have to tell her about the fight, though.

  Mom stood there with a teakettle in one hand and a potato peeler in the other and with astonishment all over her face. She said, “It certainly looks like you got too close to two bumblebees!” But there was a twinkle in her eyes. She knew boys pretty well and was used to having me come home with a sore toe or a torn shirt or a new bump on my head where I’d fallen down somewhere.

  She turned around and poured water out of the teakettle into something she was cooking. Then she said, using the same tone of voice I’d been using, “What were you trying to do? Use the bumblebees for binoculars?”

  She didn’t scold me for getting stung. She figured maybe I couldn’t help it. Besides, getting stung and having your eye swell almost shut is enough punishment. I certainly would know enough to be careful next time without being told.

  I went in to see Charlotte Ann, who was getting cuter every day and who had the sweetest smile. We’d do most anything to get her to smile, such as tickling her under the chin or touching her pink toes or making funny faces. Sometimes she wouldn’t smile but would just lie there with her big blue eyes open wide and look innocent. Then her little arms and legs would start going like four windmills, and she would coo and act awfully smart.

  Well, when I came in with my swollen eyes, she started smiling right away.

  “How do you like your big ugly-faced brother?” I asked her, and those four windmills started going, and she looked as if she was so happy she could talk, only she couldn’t.

  I picked her up carefully as Mom had taught me to and held her a while, being especially careful to hold her so her little head wouldn’t bob around too much. Then we went and stood in front of the big mirror in Mom and Dad’s bedroom.

  She was a great little sister. Something in me just bubbled up like the water does down in the spring, and I kissed the top of her curly black head and called her Charlie and said, “We’re going to be pals when you grow up, aren’t we?”

  That bubbling up kept going right on inside of me. Oh, I tell you she was wonderful! Great! Astonishing! Perfectly super!

  I put Charlie down in her crib and went out into the kitchen, gave Mom a hug, and went galloping out of doors, yelling “Whoopie!” forgetting all about my swollen eyes, except that I couldn’t see very well. I started helping Dad with the chores.

  “I don’t see how you can go to the meeting tonight,” Dad said when we were eating supper. “You’ll attract more attention than the minister.”

  I hadn’t thought about that, but all of a sudden I wanted to go more than ever. This was the last week of the Good News Crusade, and I didn’t want to miss a night. I looked at him and suggested, “Maybe I could sit out in front in our car if we can park close enough.”

  That’s one thing I liked about having church in a tent in the summertime. So many people who wouldn’t go to church would listen outside. Besides, it was cool in the tent at night.

  Finally, they decided to let me go but said I’d have to wear dark glasses, which I always liked to do anyway.

  It was great, sitting up there on that platform in the big brown tent with hundreds and hundreds of peopl
e out in front of us and with all the ministers sitting behind the evangelist. There were two choirs, one of older people and the other of boys and girls, called the Booster Chorus, and we were in the Booster Chorus. Little Jim sat on one side of me and Circus on the other.

  Our Booster Chorus platform was over near the tent’s side wall, and I could hear people outside, walking around and talking. All at once I heard a voice I knew. For a minute I forgot all about the meeting, I was so astonished. Would you believe it? It was the voice of that mean-faced Till boy who had smacked me on the side of the nose and given me that black eye.

  “Let’s go in,” I heard him say to somebody.

  “Naw!” another voice said. “People’ll see us.”

  “Fraidy cat!” Tom Till said.

  “If the gang finds out, they’ll make fun of us,” the other boy objected.

  Then Tom Till started quoting a line from one of Poetry’s poems: “‘He goes on Sunday to the church. He goes on Sunday to the church’”—just as Poetry had said it that afternoon to the boy he’d licked.

  “Aw, shut up!” the other voice said, and I decided maybe he was the one Poetry had licked.

  I didn’t hear anything more for a while, but pretty soon the tent’s side wall was lifted a little, and two boys in overalls crawled in and sat down in the grass behind a big tent pole. One of the boys was redheaded Tom Till, and the other was the one Poetry had licked that afternoon.

  Tom Till had a black eye like mine, and I knew where he’d gotten it.

  Those two boys listened like everything and didn’t act disgusted with the meeting at all.

  Once Little Jim nudged me to let me know he’d seen the boys too. He asked for my pencil and wrote a little note and slipped it to me, and the note said in Little Jim’s awkward writing, “I don’t hate them anymore. I’m going to pray for them.”

  For a minute I couldn’t see the words because of some crazy tears that got mixed up with my swollen eyes, but I scribbled on the bottom of his note, “Me too,” and handed it back to him.

  He slipped it over to Circus.

  After all, I decided, Jesus had died for all the red-haired, mean-faced boys in the world, hadn’t He?

  I hadn’t known Circus could sing, but he actually had a beautiful voice. I decided when I heard it that I was going to tell Little Jim’s mother, and maybe she’d give him voice lessons free. Or maybe I could even take some money out of my bank and pay for them.

  I could tell by the way Circus was watching the song leader, who had the cornet, that he was thinking that some day he was going to be an evangelistic singer. Wouldn’t that be great? Maybe Little Jim could be the evangelist, and I’d be a Christian doctor who lived in their town and made a lot of money. I’d help pay the rent on the tent and things.

  Out in the main part of the tent, not far from the front, sat Circus’s folks. It felt good to see them there, all in a row, with his dad dressed up and his mom looking happy with their new baby in her lap and three kind of ordinary-looking girls between them.

  One of the girls was about my age and had wavy brown hair and a nice face. And I thought that maybe, when school started next fall, if a boy stood on his head in front of her, or walked a rail fence without falling off, or killed a spider for her, or something like that, she’d smile back at him.

  All through the sermon I kept looking down at the Till boy and thinking how maybe if he’d had my parents he’d have been a different boy. And I felt sorry for him.

  After the meeting, Little Jim and I edged over in his direction, but before we could get there, he and the other boy had ducked under the tent and were gone.

  10

  Now for the bear story!

  I guess you know that if there is anything a bear likes better than pork, it’s honey. It even eats bees.

  Black bears can climb a tree almost as well as Circus can. Whenever they find a bee tree, they climb right up and take all the honey, if they can. They don’t seem to mind getting stung, and they can smell honey a long way off.

  Baby bears can climb trees too, that is, baby black bears. Grizzly bears can’t. The first thing a black mother bear does when there’s danger is to make the little bear children climb a tree.

  Well, the Sugar Creek Gang liked honey too, bumblebee honey especially—except that you have to kill all the bumblebees before you can rob their nest. I know boys shouldn’t kill bumblebees. The red clover that makes such sweet hay for horses and cows and is so good for a farmer’s land couldn’t be pollenated without the bumblebees going from flower to flower gathering honey, and at the same time carrying pollen, which sticks to their legs.

  But we didn’t know that at first. And besides, when you get stung by a bumblebee, you can’t exactly be expected to like them.

  Anyway, the next day we decided to go back and rob that bumblebees’ nest. We met at the spring right after the noon meal and were all there except Poetry and Circus. We knew Circus couldn’t come because his mother was sick, and he didn’t think he ought to leave home.

  Big Jim had brought along his rifle, and it was leaning against a beech tree, in the bark of which we all had carved our initials.

  I don’t know what there is about a rifle that makes a boy feel like a man when he’s carrying one. Big Jim hardly ever had his rifle when we were together, except in the winter when we sometimes went hunting. But when he did, we all begged to be allowed to carry it because it made us feel so important. We were very, very careful the way we carried it, so there wouldn’t be any danger to the rest of the gang.

  “Circus’s mother is pretty sick,” Big Jim said, and that made us all feel bad. Then he added, “She likes squirrel soup better than anything else. So if any of you boys see a squirrel, be sure to tell me. My mother’ll make the soup and take it over to her.”

  Big Jim, you know, lived right across the road from Circus’s house.

  Maybe I ought to tell you that Dragonfly and Little Jim both owned guns that shoot BB shot and aren’t as dangerous as real guns. Little Jim could shoot almost as straight as Circus, whose dad had a lot of guns, and Circus could shoot even better than Big Jim. Sometimes Little Jim would shoot Big Jim’s rifle too, when we were shooting at targets.

  We waited for Poetry, and pretty soon he came along, carrying a big brown jug.

  “What’s the jug for?” we asked.

  He just looked mysterious and said, “I’m going to put the bumblebees in it so we can get the honey.”

  “You’re crazy!” Dragonfly said.

  But Poetry had a wise look on his face. He went straight to the spring and began filling the jug with water, saying,

  “The bees are flying and humming,

  Why are they all coming?

  Honey to seek,

  Honey to seek,

  Bzz, bzz, bzzzz.”

  When the jug was about half full, he stopped, straightened up, and said, “Now we are ready to go.”

  So we started, all of us keeping our eyes open for squirrels.

  Pretty soon we were at the little border of bushes that skirts the hill where the strawberries were.

  “Now you boys wait a minute,” Poetry said, “until I get the bees all in the jug.”

  So we waited, still thinking he was foolish.

  He took Little Jim’s stick in one hand and the jug in the other and crept along like a warrior getting ready to spring upon an enemy.

  Once he stopped and turned around and grinned at us, saying, “Anybody that wants to can have fried bumblebees for supper. They make the nicest gravy.”

  Then we knew he was crazy.

  He found the nest and quick as a flash sloshed the jug down right beside it. Then he shoved Little Jim’s stick into the middle of the nest, gave the stick a twist or two, and came flying down the hill to where we were Iying in the bushes.

  Those bees came swarming out, madder than anything, dozens of them, hundreds of them. And would you believe it? They started going into the mouth of that water jug, just tumbling in
like a lot of black-and-yellow Santa Clauses going down a chimney. Of course, with all the water in there, they got their wings wet and couldn’t get out.

  After a while, when the bees were all in, we walked up and dug out our honey. Yum! Yum! Was it ever good! We smacked our lips—keeping on the lookout for any stray bees that had been away from home gathering honey. Every now and then one came back, disgusted as anything. But when they came one at a time like that, it was easy for us to kill them with our straw hats.

  There were a lot of bee cells that had larvae in them. And we had to leave some of the honey that was all mixed up with bees that were in what is called the chrysalis stage. We’d learned about that in school.

  Pretty soon we went swimming again. Then, as we’d done the day before, we started back to get some strawberries, wondering if the Till boys would be there again.

  Suddenly Dragonfly said, “Pssst! There he is!” he cried. “The little red-haired one!”

  I looked quick, and so did everyone else, but we didn’t see anything. Sometimes Dragonfly was wrong, you know. Anyway, he didn’t see him again either.

  “Maybe they’re in our strawberry patch,” Dragonfly said, looking disappointed that he’d been mistaken.

  Just to make sure, we sneaked up carefully behind the bushes, and then all of a sudden Dragonfly said, “Pssst!” again.

  We all saw it at once—them, rather; for right there where the bumblebees’ nest had been was a big black mother bear and a brown-nosed baby bear! They were eating bee bread and larvae and everything else we’d left. The mother had dried mud all over her sides as though she’d been wallowing in the swamp.

  “It’s a b-bear!” Dragonfly whispered. “A sure enough wild bear!”

  You could have knocked me over with a dandelion.

  11

  I couldn’t believe it at first—that it was a bear—but I had to. Just that second the little brown-nosed cub must have done something his mother didn’t like, because she whirled around and whacked him with her powerful forepaw and sent him tumbling over the grass and down the hill toward us. But he shuffled to his feet and went back for more honey.