Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24 Page 2

  So we decided to go on home, get secret word to the rest of the gang—Big Jim, Circus, Little Jim, and Little Tom Till—to all meet us at the pine tree beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone tomorrow right after lunch. Then we could look to see if together we could find out what had been going on: why a limping woman in overalls was digging in an old abandoned cemetery, and who had given the bobwhite and turtledove calls and why.

  “Let’s go home and get some sleep,” I said to Dragonfly and Poetry. We would go up the lane to the highway, following the old brown path that, twenty minutes ago, the car had followed.

  Then what to my wondering ears should come, from back in the direction of the open grave and Sarah Paddler’s tombstone, but a quail’s sharp, clear call. “Bob White! Bob White! Poor Bob White!”

  Dragonfly, who had been standing there under the tree with us, his teeth chattering, jumped as if a firecracker had exploded under him. He whirled into fast life, and a second later his spindly legs were flying like a June beetle’s wings, carrying him up the lane toward the road that would lead us home.

  As fast as two other firecrackers getting exploded from the explosion of the first one, Poetry and I dashed madly after him. The faster I ran, the more scared I got. We didn’t stop until, panting and gasping for breath, we got to my house.

  Well, at the very second we came panting into our yard and up to the iron pitcher pump at the end of the board walk about twenty feet from our back door, Dad came sauntering up from the direction of the barn. He was carrying a kerosene lantern and—would you believe it?—a spade and a shovel!

  “Wh-what are you doing?” I said, still panting and a little mixed up in my mind.

  “Oh, just digging around in the earth a little,” Dad said in a lazy, yawning voice. “Been burying something or other.”

  Three boys looked at each other from three different directions and felt terribly disappointed, for it looked as if our mystery was going to explode right in front of our worried faces.

  “Somebody die?” Poetry asked, trying to be mischievous at a time when he shouldn’t have.

  Dad said indifferently, “Just a couple of newborn pigs. Old Red Addie gave us a new family of eight tonight. Two of them didn’t live, so I thought I’d bury them right away.”

  After our having been half scared to death, here our mystery was all solved, I thought. Or was it? How about the woman’s shoe tracks and the mysterious birdcalls and the car?

  Well, we divided our seven fish into three parts. Poetry took three sunfish, Dragonfly three, and I took the big catfish, which I myself had caught using the descendant—or else what might have been the ancestor—of a June beetle. That big, yellow-stomached catfish was as big as three sunfish. It was, in fact, as big as all six of the insignificant fish that Dragonfly and Poetry had pulled in after the fish had accidentally hooked themselves onto their merely worm-baited hooks and gotten themselves pulled in to shore.

  3

  Next day we managed to get the news around quick to all the rest of the gang—but secretly, because it seemed our parents ought not to know what was going on until we ourselves investigated. Anybody knows a mystery isn’t a mystery any longer if someone explains it, and there’s nobody that can spoil a boy’s mystery any quicker than his very bright parents, who always know almost everything anyway—one reason being that our dads used to be boys themselves.

  The very second I finished all of my dinner that day, except my piece of apple pie, I looked past Dad’s overhanging, reddish-brown eyebrows to where Mom sat at the end of the table. “May I be excused and eat my pie outdoors?” I asked.

  You see, if there is anything I would rather do than anything else, it is to leave the table early—before anybody thinks about starting to do the dishes—take my one-sixth of an apple pie, go out our screen door with the pie in one hand and my straw hat in the other, swing out to our grape arbor, step up on a wooden box, reach up, and lay the pie on top of the two-by-four crossbeam at the east end of the arbor, where there isn’t any vine growing.

  Then, I like to climb up and sit on the top with the cool breeze blowing in my freckled face and my two bare feet with their ten stubby toes swinging below me. I hold the nicely crusted pie upside down and eat it that way, while I look around the Sugar Creek territory to where different members of our gang live. I also like to look at our farm and the barn and the chicken house and the big walnut tree with the long rope swing hanging from the first branch, and the plum tree with the robin’s nest in the three-limbed crotch up near the top. Boy oh boy, does it make me feel fine, glad to be alive, and especially glad to be a boy!

  Even while I was asking to be excused, I was imagining myself already outdoors, sitting up on the flat side of the two-by-four.

  But Dad was as smart as I was—smart enough to read my mind—and he saw things in it that I hardly knew were there. Right that second he looked at Mom and said, “There are some good habits, some bad habits, and some that are in between. The ones in between don’t hurt a boy very much, but they help to make him him.

  “And that’s getting to be quite a habit with you, Bill,” he finished, looking at me with his gray-green eyes.

  I had been looking at the pie, which I already had in my hand, expecting Mom to say yes, as she nearly always does.

  “What habit?” I said innocently.

  “Use plain American, Theodore,” Mom said to Dad. “The boy doesn’t understand philosophy.”

  And Dad said to Mom, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “May I take my pie and go outdoors and eat it upside down on top of our grape arbor?”

  Mom looked up at him with a sort of quizzical expression on her face. There was also a twinkle in her eye that seemed funny to Dad but not to me. Then she said, “Certainly. You can do that while Bill and I do the dishes.”

  Dad said, “Thank you.” Then he took his one-sixth of a pie in his big, hard, suntanned farmer hand and slipped out of his chair and outdoors fast. He let the screen slam hard behind him the way I sometimes do—and shouldn’t. Outside, he let out a bloodcurdling war whoop, and I heard his footsteps running toward the grape arbor.

  A second later I was outdoors too.

  Now, if there is anything that looks ridiculous, it is a boy’s long-legged, red-haired, bushy-eyebrowed father grunting himself into an upside-down knot and out of it again while he climbs up onto a high grape arbor.

  But a jiffy later, there was Dad up there where I should have been, with his heavy work shoes on his large feet swinging, and eating his pie upside down, and panting for breath from all the unnecessary exercise.

  It was funny to Dad, but to me it looked silly. So I sat down on the porch with my back to him and ate my pie right side up, and for some reason it didn’t taste very good.

  It was a scorching hot day, and I was beginning to feel a little better there in the shade, when all of a sudden Mom said from inside the house, using a very cheerful voice, “OK, Bill. The dishes are all ready for you.”

  I always know, when Mom calls me cheerfully like that, that she’s trying to make me want to come.

  But Dad turned out to be a really neat dad after all, or else he was trying to give me a free education. It seemed he was still pretending to be me up there on that grape arbor, so when he heard Mom say “dishes,” he called out cheerfully, “Coming,” and quickly swung around and down off the grape arbor and hurried into the house as if he would rather dry the Collins family dinner dishes than do anything else in the whole world.

  He got stopped at the door by Mom, though, who was maybe trying to play the game with him. She said, “Wipe that dirt off your shoes on the mat there”—which she tells me about thirty-seven times a day, sometimes even while I am already doing it, having thought of it first myself.

  I looked at Dad’s feet, and they did have dirt on them—a yellowish brown dirt on the sides of the soles and heels!

  At the very second I saw Dad’s shoes with that dirt on them instead of the very black dirt I knew was th
e kind that was under the pignut trees, I wondered, What on earth? I certainly didn’t want my dad to be getting mixed up in our mystery, as I had thought for a minute last night he might be.

  Not only that, I didn’t want him to have been the person who had given the bobwhite and turtledove birdcalls, which my discouraged mind was trying to tell me he could have been.

  Not knowing I was going to say what I did, I said, “Dad!” in a loud and astonished voice. “Where did you get that kind of mud on your shoes?” I was using the kind of voice I had heard another member of our family use on me several different times in my life.

  Dad, who was already wiping his shoes on the mat at the door, looked down at them and said, “What dirt?”

  Mom’s astonished voice shot through the screen door. “Why, Theodore Collins! What on earth!”

  Dad grinned back through the screen at her and said, “No, not what on earth but earth on what?” which I could tell he thought was funny.

  Mom didn’t think it was, very. She went on in her same astonished, accusing voice. “Those are the very same muddy shoes you ate dinner with!”

  “I never ate dinner with muddy shoes in my life,” Dad said with a grin in his voice. “I always use a knife and fork and spoon,” which was supposed to be extrafunny, and it was to Dad and me, but for some reason Mom only smiled rather than laughed and looked as though she was trying to keep herself from even smiling.

  “Go get your father’s house slippers,” she ordered me, and I obeyed her in a hurry.

  Dad slipped his feet out of his shoes and left them on the porch. Then he put his feet into his slippers and ordered me to follow him into the house, which I also did with a little less speed, because I could tell by the tone of his voice that he had some work for me to do, which I found out was the truth.

  It wasn’t too bad though, for Dad and I played a little game while we did the dishes. He called me “Dad,” and I called him “Bill.” He also ordered Mom to go into the front room to look after my baby sister, Charlotte Ann.

  Well, we dived headfirst—or rather, hands first—into the sudsy dishwater and made short work of those dishes, getting them done a lot faster than if a mother and daughter had done them. Also we hurried to be sure to get through before Mom might come out into the kitchen and look over our work and decide we were not using the right kind of soap or something.

  It really was fun. I kept giving orders to my red-haired, awkward son, giving him commands every few minutes, such as “Keep your mind on your work, Bill!” and “Hey, that plate has to be wiped over again!” or “Your mother likes to have the glasses polished a little better than that, son. We never know when there might be company from somewhere and those glasses have to shine like everything”—unnecessary things a father nearly always says to a boy.

  Well, those dishes got done in about half the usual time.

  As soon as they were finished, I thought I was free to start to do what I really wanted to do in just the way I wanted to do it, but I got stopped by Dad’s big, gruff voice. I had just tossed the drying towel toward the rack beside the stove. I missed the rack and made a dive to pick it up quickly before Dad, or especially Mom, might see it. I was still in a bent-over position—just right for a good spank from somebody—when Dad’s voice socked me. His words were “Which one of us is Bill, and which is your father now—for the rest of the afternoon, I mean?”

  “I am,” I said. In a second the towel was on the rack, nice and straight, and I was over by the washstand, stooping to get my straw hat, which was beside Dad’s big work shoes.

  “Bring the gang home sometime this afternoon,” Dad said. “I want to show them Addie’s nice, new red-haired family.”

  “I will,” I answered, having seen the six cute little quadrupeds myself that morning.

  By that time I was already outdoors and ten feet from the slammed screen door. The door had slammed itself because of a strong coiled spring.

  Then Dad called again and stopped me stock-still. “If I am your father again and you are Bill Collins, you had better stay home and mow the lawn and let me go to meet the gang.”

  But I could tell he didn’t mean it. Dad looked awfully cute, I thought, with Mom’s big apron on, his blue shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and his slippers still on, standing in the open screen door.

  I called back saying, “I am still Theodore Collins, and you are Bill, and you are letting flies in. Shut the door quick—and quietly!”

  As I hurried away, my mischievous dad called after me, “So long, Mr. Collins! Have a nice time, and don’t forget to find a new beetle for our collection.”

  “So long, Bill!” I yelled from the front gate, which I had just opened and gone through and shut after me.

  Then, as I dashed past “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox, I was myself again. I swished across the dusty road and vaulted over the lichen-covered rail fence. Soon I was running in the path that had been made by barefoot boys, down through the woods as fast as I could go to the spring, where the gang was going to meet before going up to the top of Strawberry Hill to the cemetery.

  4

  Boy oh boy! I never felt better in my life than I did when I was galloping through that woods to meet the gang. First I was in the sunlight and then in the shade as I raced along on that winding little brown path, swishing by maple, beech, ash, and oak trees and dodging chokecherry shrubs and wild rosebushes with roses scattered all around among their thorns and dogwood shrubs and all kinds of wildflowers that grew on either side of the path.

  Even though I had been delayed unnecessarily because of the dishes, I got to the spring about the same time Little Jim and Poetry did. Circus was already there in his favorite place, where he usually waits for us when he gets there first, which is in the top branches of a little elm sapling that grows at the top of the steep bank. As you know, at the bottom of that bank is the spring itself, but we always meet in a little shaded, open space at the top. Circus was swinging and swaying and looked really like a chimpanzee, hanging by his hands and feet and everything except his tail, which he didn’t have anyway.

  As soon as Big Jim, with his almost mustache, and Little Tom Till, with his freckled face and red hair, and Dragonfly, with his goggle-eyes and spindly legs got there, that was all of us.

  Poetry, Dragonfly, and I told everybody what had happened last night, but I didn’t tell them about Dad’s having had yellowish-brown dirt on his shoes. And with my eyes I kept Poetry and Dragonfly from telling them about the two baby pigs Dad had buried somewhere, because I felt sure Dad wouldn’t bury two baby pigs in a cemetery that had been reserved for human beings only.

  A little later, after a loafing ramble along the bayou and a climb to the top of Strawberry Hill, we scrambled over the rail fence and reached the place where the woman had been digging last night, not more than ten feet from Sarah Paddler’s tombstone. Well, we all stood around in a barefoot circle, looking down into the hole. Sure enough—just as we had seen last night, there was the print of a high-heeled shoe. There were also other high-heeled shoe tracks all around, but none of the others were as clear as the one we were all studying that very minute.

  “What on earth do you suppose she was digging here for?” Little Tom Till asked in his high-pitched voice.

  Big Jim answered him, saying, “If we knew that, we would know what we want to know.”

  For a minute I focused my eyes on the hand that somebody had chiseled on Sarah Paddler’s tombstone. One finger pointed toward the sky. I had read the words just below the hand maybe a hundred twenty times in my life. They were: “There is rest in heaven,” which I knew there was for anybody who got to go there.

  When I was in a cemetery, it was easy to think about things like that. I was sort of dreamily remembering that our minister in the Sugar Creek church says there is only one way for a boy to get to heaven. First, the boy has to believe that he is an honest-to-goodness sinner and needs to be saved. Then he has to believe that Jesus, who is the Savior,
came all the way from heaven a long time ago to die for him and to save him from his sins. Then if the boy will open the door of his heart and let the Savior come in, that will settle it.

  Our minister, who knows many Bible verses by heart, tells the people who come to our church that there isn’t any other way for anybody to be saved except just the way I told you.

  So I knew that Old Man Paddler, who was saved himself and was the kindest long-whiskered old man that ever was a friend to a boy, would see his wife Sarah again—maybe the very minute he got to heaven.

  While I was standing there by the hole the June beetle had tumbled into last night and was looking up at that carved hand on the tombstone, my mind sort of drifted away on a friendly little journey clear up into heaven. It went past the great big white cumulus cloud that right that minute was piling itself up in the southwest above the tree-covered hills where I knew Old Man Paddler’s cabin was.

  I imagined that somewhere in heaven maybe there was a very nice little cabin waiting for that kind old man, and that his wife, Sarah, was out there in the garden looking after the flowers for him. Every now and then she would stop doing what she was doing and look toward a little white gate, like the one we have at our house by the walnut tree, to see if she could see her husband coming. Then I imagined that all of a sudden she did see him, and her kind, oldish face lit up the way Mom’s does sometimes when she sees Dad coming home from somewhere. And she started quickly on a half-walk and half-run out across the heavenly yard to meet him, calling, “Hi there! I’ve been waiting for you a long time.”

  It was a terribly nice thought. But I knew that if the old man ever left Sugar Creek, it would be awfully lonesome around here for a long time. It sort of seemed we needed him here even more than his wife did up there.