Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 2

  The last of him, that is, until a mystery dog began howling in the Sugar Creek swamp and along the bayou at night. And the howling and bawling and baying and squalling sounded exactly like the sounds Alexander the Coppersmith used to make when he ran pell-mell with a pack of hounds on the trail of a coon or fox or other varmint that lived in our neighborhood.

  When you and your parents and your common sense all tell you there isn’t any such thing as a ghost dog—that when an animal dies that is the last of his life on earth or anywhere else—and then all out of nowhere you hear the dog yourself after he is dead, you get a creepy feeling moving like cold chills up and down your spine.

  Was Alexander alive or not? Before the week was over we were going to find out, in one of the strangest adventures that ever happened to the Sugar Creek Gang.

  2

  In the late afternoon of the day we set up Alexander’s epitaph, Little Jim stopped at our house to get his bicycle, which he’d parked against the walnut tree near our front gate only a few feet from our mailbox. Just before he swung onto the seat of his neat blue racer to go flying down the road to the Foote house for supper, he got a faraway look in his eyes and said, “I wonder if there is a heaven for dogs.”

  It was such a surprising thing to say that for a minute I studied his face to see if he really meant it, wishing I could tell him there was but not knowing for sure if there was or wasn’t.

  When there had been quite a few more silent seconds, and still I hadn’t answered, he came out with “Alexander didn’t get to live even half as long as a healthy dog usually does. It seems like he ought to have another chance somewhere.”

  “He will live in our minds,” I thought to say, remembering the epitaph on the grave marker under the elderberry bush.

  “I don’t mean live that way,” he answered and sighed a sad sigh, giving his head a jerk. “I mean I wish he could live somewhere in his own mind and know he is alive.”

  For what felt like maybe three extralong minutes, neither of us said another word. But I had my mind made up to ask my parents about it the first chance I got. Both Mom and Dad were Sunday school teachers and studied the Bible a lot. We also had a special book in our home library that explained every verse in the Bible.

  When I spoke again, I answered Little Jim with “I wish he could, too.” Then I turned to the rope swing that hung from the overhanging branch of the walnut tree. I plopped myself onto the board seat that was the same size and shape as Alexander’s grave marker and started to swing, pumping a little so it would seem that I wasn’t as unhappy as I really did feel.

  That serious-faced friend of mine kept on standing there, his foot on his bike pedal, ready to take off.

  “Do you know what?” I asked him as my swing whizzed past on its way back. When I had swooshed back and forth several times without his answering anything, I let my feet drag me to a stop.

  It seemed that curly-haired littlest member of our gang, whose life had been saved by a dog dying for him, was maybe one of the best and most likable boys in the whole world. It made me proud to have him sometimes tell me his secret thoughts, which he never told anybody else.

  When Little Jim still didn’t answer my “Do you know what?” I said to him, “I’d rather have Little Jim Foote alive and in his own mind.”

  Hearing me say that the very special way I said it, Little Jim gave me a quick, half-bashful glance, then looked away and swallowed a lump in his throat. For a few silent seconds he stared toward the eastern sky beyond the twin hickory nut trees growing at the entrance to the lane leading to Bumblebee Hill, as if maybe he was still thinking about Alexander and wishing there really was a heaven for dogs. Then he cleared his throat, swallowed again, and said, still without looking at me, “I guess maybe you’re my best friend.”

  Saying that, that neat little pal of mine swung himself up onto the seat of his bike, gave the right pedal a push, and as fast as a firefly’s fleeting flash was off down the gravel road toward the Foote house.

  I stood up on the board swing seat and pumped myself into a high, fast, forth-and-back swing. I began to enjoy it as much as I could—the cool wind in my face, my shirt sleeves flapping in the breeze I was making—and thought how good it was to be alive in my own mind. That I was me, Bill Collins, not anybody else or a pig or a cow or any other kind of animal. Certainly I wouldn’t want to be a dead dog buried under an elderberry bush in Old Tom the Trapper’s canine cemetery, not knowing anything at all.

  Far down the road I could see Little Jim. His legs seemed to be pumping him faster and faster as he steered past the North Road corner. “There,” I said to myself, “goes a boy who maybe really is your best friend.”

  I gave myself a few more easy pumps, and while I was swinging and thinking, I heard myself whistling the words of a hymn we sometimes sing in the church the gang attends: “What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear …”

  While I was whistling and swinging, my mind took off on a quick journey into the past, and it seemed for a minute that I was standing at the foot of a skull-shaped hill outside Jerusalem. I was looking up at a wooden cross where the Savior was hanging. There were spikes driven through His hands and feet and a crown of thorns on His bleeding forehead.

  As I kept on looking in my mind toward the cross and at the Savior, I began to wonder what if, all of a sudden, He would look straight down at me and say, “In three more days I will be alive again, and I would like to be your best friend, your very, very best!”

  I gave my head a quick jerk and noticed that one or two tears flew out. They fell in a dusty place at the base of the walnut tree, where there were a half-dozen little cone-shaped holes in the sand, which are ant lions’ insect traps for catching flies or ants or the larvae of some small beetle that might accidentally tumble into them—and then the ant lions would have a free supper.

  Just then a friendly little breeze came trembling out across our lawn, carrying with it the smell of frying hashed brown potatoes. Through the kitchen window I could see my grayish brown-haired mother moving around the range, and for some reason it seemed I didn’t need to swing any longer.

  I quick helped the old cat die, meaning I stopped the swing from coming to a slow stop by itself, and followed my nose toward the back door of our house. On the way I stopped at the iron pitcher pump, pumped a pan of clean water, carried it to the stand beside the board walk, then washed my face and hands and dried them on a towel that hung on a nail on the grape arbor post. I dampened my red hair and ran my pocket comb through it enough times to make it look neat in the mirror. Then I followed my nose the rest of the way to the screen door and inside to see whether supper was going to taste as good as my olfactory nerves had promised me it would.

  Olfactory—that’s the name the name of the nerves of smell, and every boy in the world has forty of them, twenty on each side, and they are for making food taste better and for making him sneeze when something tickles them. I’m going to be a doctor someday, maybe, so I’m learning in advance as many things about the human body as I can.

  After supper and after all the chores were finished and I had washed my bare feet as clean as a tired boy can wash them and was upstairs getting ready to tumble into the already turned-down bed, I thought I heard a dog barking. It was a series of short, sharp barks, the kind a dog makes when he has chased a squirrel or a coon up a tree and is bragging on himself as excitedly as he can to let his master know he has done something important and for him to please “Come quick-quick! Come quick-quick! Come. Come quick-quick-quick!”

  I was too tired to say very much of a goodnight prayer to God, and I was glad I knew He would rather have a boy get his needed sleep than to pray a long time when he didn’t feel awake enough to do it. Besides, I had been thinking about God quite a few times that day and had said different things to Him at different times, the way Mom does around the house even when she is ironing or washing or baking a pie or out taking care of the chickens.

  As s
oon as I was between Mom’s nice clean-smelling sheets, I sighed a worn-out sigh and sailed off in a wooden shoe like Wynken, Blynken, and Nod in that poem we have in our school reader.

  Wynken and Blynken, the poem says, are “two little eyes,” and “Nod is a little head.”

  Nearly always when I glide off to sleep like that, the next thing I know it is morning, the sun is shining in our barnyard and garden, and the birds are whooping it up with happiness because they have another day to build nests, eat worms, and have the time of their lives living their bird lives in. I certainly didn’t expect to wake up in the middle of the night—be waked up, I mean—by a strange sound. It was a long, howling squall like a Western coyote wailing at the moon.

  I sat straight up in bed, my heart pounding. That bawling was the same kind of wail I’d heard many a night when Alexander had been alive and was on a red-hot coon chase with Circus’s dad’s hounds. Even when they were in full cry, my ears could always pick out Alexander the Coppersmith’s higher-pitched bawl, just as you can hear Circus’s mother singing higher and prettier than any of the other voices in the Sugar Creek Church choir.

  I felt a cold cringing in my mind and chills up and down my spine. The sound of that squalling bawl was coming in through the north window of our upstairs, which is in the direction of the creek, the bayou, and the leaning linden tree.

  I kept on sitting tense and even scared a little. It seemed Alexander the Coppersmith might actually still be alive—not in his copper-colored body away up in the hills in Old Tom the Trapper’s dog cemetery but in his mind, racing through the woods and along the bayou and the creek bottoms, living a happy-go-lucky dog’s life the way he had lived before.

  I kept on sitting up in bed and listening and wondering, What on earth? Then, after a few half-scared minutes, there wasn’t any sound of a howling dog, and I began to get sleepy. “Look,” I scolded myself, “you’re just hearing things! There isn’t any such thing as a ghost dog!”

  I sighed again a few times, plopped down on my pillow, and was just sailing off again with Wynken and Blynken and their dopey little Nod when the sound came again—a moaning, quavering wail. This time it sounded as if it was coming from the direction of the tall pignut trees that grow near our chicken house at the other end of the long garden.

  Quick as you can say scat to a cat, I was out of bed and looking under the ivy leaves that cover the upper half of our upstairs south window. I was expecting to see in the moonlit barnyard or garden the shadow of some animal, sitting on its haunches, looking up and baying at the moon.

  I also was wishing for Little Jim’s sake that his wish could come true—that Alexander the Coppersmith was dead only in the body he had lived and died in and that he was alive again in some kind of ghost body he could run and play and bark and bawl and squall in.

  To make it easy for me to see out the low window, I was on my knees with my nose pressed against the screen, and that’s when I was startled half out of my wits by the sound coming again. It was a lonely, sad, quavering wail. “Shay-shay-shay-a-a-a!” It wasn’t very loud but was as sharp as a worried mother calling her son to answer her when he has already heard her call twice without answering.

  That “shay-a-a-a” told me the disappointing truth: I hadn’t heard a howling dog at all but one of the half-dozen screech owls that live around our place and in the woods across the road. A second later I knew for sure it was an owl when, from one of our garden fence posts, there was movement as if the top of the post had come alive. Then a wing-shaped shadow sailed out across the chicken yard, over Dad’s apiary, and disappeared among the orchard trees.

  Even though I was disappointed and disgusted with a rusty red night bird for waking me out of a sound sleep and deceiving me into feeling scared, I remembered Dad’s firm order to me and to some of the rest of the gang not to kill the screech owls because, as he put it: “They eat a lot of pests like English sparrows, which clutter up our garages and barns and spoil our haymow hay, and they also like cutworms better than a boy likes blueberry pie, which saves the farmers a lot of new corn—as much, maybe, as hundreds of dollars’ worth in one county alone.”

  As I plopped back into bed again, I must have been a little mixed up in my mind, because I started dreaming about somebody’s mother baking a cutworm pie that looked like blueberry pie. And when the pie was opened, four-and-twenty blackbirds spread their wings and took off, sailing higher and higher into the sky, each bird the size and shape of a wooden shoe with wings.

  Anyway, the next thing I knew it was morning, and there was the smell of frying bacon and pancakes coming up the stairs. I quick rolled over and out of bed, shoved myself into my clothes, and, not being quite awake, sort of staggered past the big Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary on its stand at the head of the banister. Then I followed my olfactory nerves down to the kitchen.

  That was one thing I always liked to do—be on time for breakfast—partly because, if I missed it, I’d get too hungry before lunch, which I had done only twice in my half-long life.

  We were right in the middle of breakfast when Mom surprised Dad and me by saying, “There’s something special our family is going to do this summer. I just got the idea yesterday from a magazine article I read. It sounded so good I decided it was something our family was going to do.”

  “You decided what our family was going to do?” Dad said from under his reddish brown mustache, which he had just wiped with a napkin after finishing his first cup of coffee.

  I was looking at him over the top of the mug of milk I had just reached the bottom of.

  “Certainly,” Mom answered. “Don’t you know that I always make up our minds?” There was a mischievous tone in her voice, though, and a twinkle in her eye. Before Dad or his son could laugh at a joke we had laughed at quite a few times before, Mom explained what she had made up her mind we were going to do.

  “The magazine article said that life was so full of worries and troubles that we all need a change now and then. The family in the story called it ‘taking a happiness break,’ just like office workers and others take a coffee break. Every day each person in the family gets to do one thing he especially wants to do to make himself happy.”

  Dad came out then with an idea that wasn’t in the magazine. He said, “Wouldn’t it make a person happier if he did something to make someone else happy? I just read the other day in a poem by Byron that ‘he who joy would win must share it, for happiness was born a twin.’”

  For a minute it looked as if Mom was going to lose the happiness that had been in her eyes. Then she took a sip of her second cup of coffee, set the cup in its saucer, and said, “Why didn’t the article mention that? I think I’ll write the editor and tell him. Maybe somebody’ll read the letter and decide to help somebody else to be happy.”

  For a few minutes my parents sort of forgot about their son and talked back and forth about happiness. Dad wound up with a Bible verse, “‘Give, and it will be given to you … good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over.’ We all know who said that, don’t we?”

  I watched for a chance to get in one of yesterday’s leftover questions, which was: “Does anybody know whether there is a heaven for dogs?”

  Two coffee cups went down in their saucers at the same time, and two voices, one from the end of the table and the other at the side next to the range, asked, “Whatever makes you ask a question like that?”

  “Little Jim,” I said. “He doesn’t want Alexander to be dead in his mind—only in his body in Old Tom the Trapper’s cemetery.”

  That question upset Mom’s happiness-break plans, because all of a sudden it seemed she would be happier if the breakfast dishes were washed and Dad would be happier if the outdoor chores were finished.

  But before ten more minutes had passed, we had come up with a plan to let each one of us have his own happiness break at least once a day—to do anything he wanted to if it didn’t break any family rules or make anybody else in the family unhapp
y. Also Dad said he would look in the Bible for an answer to Little Jim’s question, since the Bible is the only book in the world that has all the right answers about life and death and afterward.

  “My happiness break this summer,” Mom announced from the dishpan, where her hands were getting their three-times-a-day beauty treatment with her favorite detergent, “is to set those three old hens we’ve got out there in the break-up pen.”

  I looked out the screen door to the breakup pen by the garden gate, where three of our best laying hens were in our chicken jail. The break-up pen was where we always put any of our laying hens when they stopped laying and went cluck-cluck-clucking around the barnyard all day, cranky-fussy because they wanted to sit on a nest of eggs for three weeks and raise a family of little chickens. One week in the pen, and they would always be cured and go back to laying again.

  “Hey!” I said to Mom. “What’s old Bent Comb doing in there?” Bent Comb was my favorite mother hen. When she had been a little chicken, I had saved her life after her foot had been stepped on by a horse. Instead of letting Dad kill her because he thought she would die anyway, I had begged him to let me nurse her back to health. She did get well, though she always walked and ran with a limp.

  Looking out at the three hens in the chicken jail, I saw old Bent Comb limping around from one end of the pen to the other, her feathers ruffled like those of her other two hen friends. She was cluck-cluck-clucking as if the only way in the world she could ever be happy would be to go cluck-clucking around the place with a family of cheeping little chickens running all over everywhere after her.

  “My happiness break,” Dad announced, “is to patch the roof on Old Addie’s hog house. We don’t want her seven little pigs to get wet.”

  I finished wiping a plate and looked at Dad.

  He was getting ready to go out to the iron pitcher pump and pump a pail of water to carry out to the hog trough.

  “I’ll help,” I said.