Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6 Read online

  Each of us took a drink of water at the spring, lying down on our stomachs and trying to drink like birds do. They dip their bills in the water, you know, and scoop up a billful and then tip their heads up so the water’ll run down their throats. They keep their bills moving all the time their heads are up, as though they are saying and thinking something cheerful.

  Little Jim was lying on the other side of the spring from me. We could see the reflections of our heads in the pool of water, which looked almost like a mirror. All of a sudden he said, “Do you know what the birds say when they tip their heads up like that when they’re drinking?”

  I said, “No. What?”

  And he said, “They say, ‘Thank You, heavenly Father.’ ”

  Little Jim was always surprising people by saying wise things like that. You never could tell what important thoughts might be hiding just behind those two blue eyes of his.

  I didn’t say anything, but I liked Little Jim better than ever.

  Soon we had our shoes and socks off, which our parents hadn’t said we couldn’t do, and waded down along the creek, skipping rocks and making old Sugar Creek’s face smile or frown, whichever we wanted. We’d throw in two stones at once, one a little farther out than the other, to make eyes; then one in the middle for a nose; then we’d skip another stone, making a long water furrow all the way across for a mouth.

  When we were tired of doing that, we decided to walk past the old swimming hole just to remember the good times we’d had there and to feel sad because the summer was gone. When we got there we stopped a minute, and all of a sudden we heard somebody coming.

  We ducked down behind a bed of wild irises, whose flowers had bloomed last summer from May to July. Dad says the iris gets its name from the Greek word meaning “rainbow,” and its flowers do look a little like rainbows, except there is too much blue. My mom has some all-white and all-yellow irises in our garden.

  Little Jim and I stayed as quiet as we could, and I kept my eyes wide open, looking between two long, sword-shaped leaves to see who was coming. I couldn’t help but think about the time Little Jim’s bear had run away, and I wondered again who had cut his collar and turned him loose. In fact, right that minute we were lying in the very spot where Triangle had been tied.

  Also right that minute I was feeling something hard in the grass under my elbow. While we were keeping quiet, waiting to see who was coming, I looked to see what the hard thing was, and I almost hollered, I was so surprised. For right in front of my astonished eyes and by my shaky right hand was a big jackknife with the blade open. It was rusty, as if it had been lying there all summer in the sun and rain!

  I didn’t have time to think because at that second whoever was coming stopped on the other side of the willow shrub from us and began looking around as if he was trying to find something.

  Little Jim nudged me, and my heart started beating fast because it was Circus himself! I thought something I shouldn’t have thought and couldn’t help thinking. I thought, What if it was Circus who had cut the little bear loose and had lost his knife there and was looking for it now? But that idea was silly because Circus had been in swimming with us at the time.

  Or what if it had been Circus’s dad, who used to do bad things before he was saved? What if that day last summer he had planned to steal Triangle and sell him and then had heard us coming and had to get away quick? But I didn’t like to think that either. When a man gets saved, he doesn’t steal anymore, does he?

  We couldn’t do anything but lie still and wait, not being able to see very well now because Circus was on the other side of the big shrub. Pretty soon he took off his old straw hat and shinnied up a little elm tree. I never saw a boy who could climb a tree so fast.

  The next thing I knew, he was standing on a limb with his back to us, and what do you think he did up there? I couldn’t believe my ears at first, but I had to. Circus began to sing. Sing! And the song he was singing was one of the songs in our hymnbook at church.

  I looked at Little Jim, and he looked at me, and his eyes were shining as if he was very proud of Circus. It was the first time I’d heard Circus sing by himself. He usually sang with some of our gang sitting beside him in church—with maybe Poetry’s squawky voice growling along beside him and keeping anybody from hearing how good Circus’s voice really was. His voice is almost as pretty as a meadowlark’s, I thought, which is as clear as a flute.

  Well, Circus stood up there in that swaying elm sapling, singing and maybe imagining he was standing before a big crowd. His high soprano quavered out across the creek like an owl’s voice does at night.

  The song he was singing was Dragonfly’s favorite, and I wished he’d been there to hear it. I’ll write down only the first verse for you, because I suppose nearly every boy or girl who goes to Sunday school or church knows it. It starts like this:

  I will sing the wondrous story,

  Of the Christ who died for me,

  How He left His home in glory,

  For the cross of Calvary.

  Little Jim reached his little brown hand over to me and nudged me and whispered, “It’s going to be a surprise for church tomorrow morning. My mother is teaching Circus to sing it.” Little Jim’s mother was a wonderful musician and our church pianist.

  I guess Sylvia’s father had found out right away that Circus had a good voice, so he decided to put it to work. That’s because anybody that has a good voice ought to use it and not let it get rusty like an old knife that’s been lost.

  Well, I had that rusty-bladed knife in my pocket right that minute, and I was wondering whose it was, even while I was listening to Circus sing.

  Then Little Jim and I began to feel that we’d better go away. Circus was just practicing, and he wouldn’t want anybody to listen to him, so we sneaked away through the bushes and the tall weeds.

  Later, while we were walking along, I got to thinking about a story in my Bible storybook about a man named Moses. He saw a bush on fire, which wasn’t burning up because God Himself was right in the middle of it. God’s big, kind voice called to Moses and said for him to take off his shoes because the ground he was standing on was holy ground. It was holy because God was there. I’ll bet I felt the way Moses did.

  My dad says there isn’t any scientist in the world who can explain why the sun doesn’t burn up. There is something in it that makes it keep on just as it is, all the time, like the burning bush in the Bible story. And if there wasn’t any sun, we’d all freeze to death quick, so it’s silly to be like John Till, who couldn’t live a minute by himself if it wasn’t for God keeping him alive.

  Anyway, there was more than one surprise for the people in our church the next Sunday morning.

  I guess Sylvia’s dad knew and liked boys even better than our other minister had. He must have thought boys were important, because he made us feel that he needed us. Just before Circus sang his solo, Mr. Johnson, that being our minister’s last name, gave a fine talk about boys, saying that all the great men in the world had had to be boys first, whether they wanted to or not. Then he asked Little Jim to come up to the platform and tell us a short story, just as teachers do in school, and this is what Little Jim said:

  “Once upon a time there was a man named Peter Bilhorn, who made his living playing the piano in a saloon for the men who bought and drank their whiskey there. One night while Peter was sitting at the piano in the smoky room, some Christian workers came in and gave him a piece of paper called a tract that had the gospel printed on it. Peter got mad and tore it up. They gave him another tract, and he was still madder. He tore that one up too. Then they gave him another, and he folded it and put it in his pocket, because he had had a good Christian mother who wanted him to be saved and who had prayed for him. Then Peter went to a special meeting and let Jesus come into his heart, and after that he became a famous songwriter, and he wrote the song called ‘I Will Sing the Wondrous Story.’ ”

  When Little Jim finished his true story, he stood there a mo
ment like a chipmunk standing on a stump along Sugar Creek just before it makes a dive for the ground and goes whisking away somewhere. Then Little Jim, with his blue eyes looking as innocent as Charlotte Ann’s, came back to our row, squeezed his way past my mom and my dad, and sat down beside me. He was trembling like a scared baby rabbit in a boy’s hand, but he looked happy.

  In a half minute we were all listening to Circus sing Peter Bilhorn’s song while Little Jim’s mom, who had on a new fall hat that looked like a small sunflower upside down, played the piano for him.

  Little Tom Till was sitting on the other side of me, with one eye swollen a little bit as if he’d been in another fight. It made me feel all clean inside when I thought about how I’d invited him to come to church the first time, and he actually seemed to like to come.

  After church and just before we went home, we were out under a big locust tree on our church lawn. I asked Tom where he got his black eye, knowing I hadn’t done it this time.

  At first he didn’t want to tell me. Then he looked around to be sure nobody else could hear, and he said, “Bob gave it to me for fighting on your side after school Friday.”

  And I knew the Sugar Creek Gang was going to have still more trouble with the oldest Till boy.

  Just then I happened to think about the knife I’d found, so I took it out of my pocket and was starting to scrape one of my fingernails when Little Tom said, surprised, “Where’d you get that knife?”

  I said, “Oh, nowhere. I just found it!”

  “Let me see it,” he said, just as Poetry came over to where we were.

  Tom held the knife a while, turning it over and over, and looking strange. Then he said, “See that little nick in the handle?”

  I said, “Yes.”

  And he said, “I’ll bet it’s the knife Bob lost. His had a nick in the same place.”

  That made it look more than ever as if Bob Till had been the one who’d cut Triangle’s collar that day.

  7

  Fall was coming fast, and all the birds that had gotten married in the spring and their little baby birds that had grown up began to gather in flocks, the way boys do in gangs, only some of them weren’t so noisy, and they didn’t turn somersaults or walk on their hands.

  Blackbirds gathered in one flock, sparrows in another, and crows in another. As soon as the leaves began to fall, about a thousand crows gathered in our woods, and I never heard such noise as when their hoarse voices cawed all day long. They flew around from one place to another and back again and up and down from the trees to the ground, scolding all the time.

  There had been a family of swallows in our garage, having made their nest up on a beam. You know that a pair of swallows sometimes have two or three broods of baby birds in one summer in the same nest. Ours had quadruplets the first time, quintuplets the second, and sextuplets the third, making fifteen new swallow children in one summer! But when fall started to come, they were all gone. I suppose they’d joined a lot of others that were flying up and down Sugar Creek just above the water, up and down, crossing and crisscrossing, their tails shaped like the fork of a boy’s slingshot.

  I knew that Jack Frost would come soon and kill all our garden stuff, and after that old Grandpa Winter himself would come with his snow-white whiskers, and it’d be terribly cold.

  And that reminded me of Old Man Paddler, whose life our gang saved once and who told us that someday when he died there’d be something for each one of us in his will. And that reminds me that pretty soon, just as soon as I get to it, I’d better keep the promise I made in my story The Killer Bear and tell you what happened that winter on a cold—very cold—day when our gang went up to see the old man.

  Fall comes before winter though. In the fall, Jack Frost paints all the leaves in the woods yellow, gold, and red, besides killing all the flowers and garden things. Pretty soon there wouldn’t be any butterflies or caterpillars or spiders. And I got to thinking it was time I killed that spider I’d planned to.

  At last one day I got a chance, although I hadn’t planned on nearly everybody in our school being present when it happened, and I certainly hate to tell you what did happen, but I suppose you’ll want to know—or do you?

  The idea first came to me back in the middle of the summer when Little Jim picked up a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest and very carefully put it back. He wrapped his handkerchief around it first so the mother bird wouldn’t smell where his hand had touched her baby and maybe kill it, as some mother birds do when a boy’s hands have handled their babies. That’s why a boy ought not to take a baby bird out of its nest and play with it.

  When that fuzzy, scrawny, bulging-eyed, big-mouthed cute baby bird was in its nest again beside its brothers and sisters, Little Jim and I watched them a few minutes while the mother bird and her husband and all the neighbor birds scolded in the trees and bushes around us. Then we went away.

  And I thought of Charlotte Ann, who was even more helpless than a baby bird, and I thought I ought to be very kind to her. Then I thought that a boy should be kind to all girls. They are such helpless things and are afraid of mice and spiders and worms and june bugs and caterpillars and centipedes.

  So when school started and I saw that Big Jim was especially kind to Sylvia, I knew it’d be all right for me to be especially courteous to Circus’s kind of ordinary-looking sister, Lucille—who, when she was wearing a blue hair ribbon, didn’t look so ordinary—even though she didn’t exactly act as helpless as a baby bird, and I’d never heard her scream when she saw an ugly caterpillar crawling toward her.

  At school one day we were sitting out behind the woodshed at noon, eating our lunch. Sylvia and another girl and Lucille were on one end of a long log, and Poetry and Dragonfly and I were sitting on the other end, with about three feet between Lucille and me.

  I had three apples in my lunch box. All of a sudden I thought of the baby bird Little Jim had put back in the nest, and how helpless it was, and how mother birds bring worms and caterpillars and things and feed their bird babies. That made me think of how girls are afraid of caterpillars and spiders. So when nobody was looking, I slipped my reddest, shiniest apple over into Lucille’s lunch box.

  She smiled just the way Charlotte Ann does when Mom gives her a bite of spinach, which she likes very much. Then her face turned redder than our old red rooster’s comb had been before he got killed.

  I kept on eating and was talking to Poetry when all of a sudden Big Bob Till came walking past, swinging a baseball bat. He stopped and looked at Dragonfly and Poetry and me and said to us, “Will you girls hurry up and get through eating so we can play ball?”

  It didn’t take me even a tenth of a minute to get angry at being called a girl, so I shouted at Big Bob Till to go and tend to his own business. With Lucille sitting beside me, not more than three feet away, I even felt big enough to give Big Bob a licking.

  “My business,” Bob Till said sarcastically, “is to upset the log you’re sitting on!” And with that remark he shoved his baseball bat under the log and gave a mighty heave.

  Over went the log and three boys and three girls and six lunch boxes, each one going in a different direction.

  Then, out from under the log scrambled a big, long-legged brown spider that started straight toward Lucille! As mad as I was, I didn’t forget what I wanted to do.

  Lucille saw the spider at the same time I did, but she didn’t act a bit scared.

  So I grabbed a stick and started yelling, “Look out, Lucille! There’s a spider! It’ll bite you!”

  I thought if I could get her really scared, I’d seem more like a hero to her when I killed the spider. So I yelled again, still louder, “Lucille! Quick! Get out of the way! There’s a great big, ugly, long-legged spider about to eat you up!”

  Well, this is the part of the story I hate to tell anybody, but I may as well get it over with. That helpless girl grabbed the stick out of my hand, which was Little Jim’s stick anyway, and she swooped down on that spider
and whacked it with the stick and jumped on it with her shoes and killed it herself!

  Then she looked at me, disgusted, and said, “Fraidycat! What is there about a dumb old spider to be afraid of? Did you think it was going to bite you?”

  Then Lucille threw the stick across the playground, and she and Sylvia and the other girl swished around, gathering up their scattered lunch boxes, and went in the schoolhouse.

  After that I was more disgusted with girls than ever, and for some reason I didn’t like Bill Collins very well either. Not for a long time.

  8

  Winter in our country meant a lot of snow and plenty of wind. Snowdrifts were sometimes higher than our heads. We made snow forts in our school yard and had snow battles, all in fun. We even got my coaster wagon and made an armored tank out of it, which we filled full of snow cannonballs and bombs, and we charged on each other like modern armies.

  Only we didn’t like to play army very well because real war is so terrible and so many people get killed or have to leave their homes. We decided to quit playing war and played other snow games, such as fox and geese. We made snowmen and snow caves and had a lot of fun.

  Of course, we did our chores at night, and I kept right on helping Mom with the dishes at different times. I kept on learning to hang up my clothes on a hanger and always to wipe my shoes on a mat outside the door or take off my boots before I went into the house, so our house would look like a house instead of a barn.

  All the time Charlotte Ann kept growing fatter and prettier, and Dad kept doing all kinds of antics to get her to smile, such as making funny faces, tickling her chin or cheeks or pink toes, or twisting his bushy blackish-red eyebrows. In November when she was six months old, two little white baby teeth stuck their edges up through the lower gums of her mouth.

  Was she ever fussy while those teeth were pushing through! I was as disgusted as anything with her until Mom reminded me that I’d been even fussier when I was little. I was surprised when I heard that, and I didn’t like to believe it, but Dad said it was true. So after I’d frowned a while, I quit and forgave Charlotte Ann.