Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 3

  “Fine,” Dad said. “I was going to ask you at the breakfast table but got sidetracked with happiness.”

  And so our day was started—a day that might be one of the most important days in the history of happiness.

  3

  It turned out that my happiness was born a triplet that day. I not only got to help make Dad happy by helping him patch the roof of Old Red Addie’s apartment house, but I made Addie and her seven little pigs happy by making sure the next rain didn’t turn their home into a shower bath.

  “Don’t I get any happiness break for myself?” I asked Dad when the last shingle had been put in place on the hog house roof.

  “How would you like to dig the dandelions out of the lawn and the dock out of the south pasture?”

  “You call that happiness?” I asked and gave a sharp wham with my hammer against the end of the hog house ridgepole.

  Dad’s answer was in an indifferent voice. “Oh, I just thought maybe while you were digging them, you could earn one cent apiece for the dandelions and two cents for each dock, and in that way earn enough to pay for the new nylon fishing line you’ve been wanting. Also, there might be quite a few fishing worms under the roots.”

  And that is why half of the third part of my happiness break that day was work instead of play. I spent almost two good hours digging dandelions and dock plants. It also took that long to get enough worms to fill a bait can, when I could have gotten enough in maybe seven minutes digging in a special place behind our barn.

  Ho and hum and ho-ho-hum! It was while I was in the south pasture, after finding and digging thirty-seven dandelions out of our lawn, that I came up with the idea that maybe I could dig all the other bad weeds there were around the place for two or maybe three cents apiece and get a new fishing rod as well.

  To show Dad what a good little weed digger I was, I not only looked for and dug out all the dandelions and dock I could find, but I found and dug also many other bad weeds that I ran across in the pasture and along the fence-curly dock, corn cockle, foxtail, Canada thistle, horse nettle, pigweed, and, outside the fence of Addie’s pen, quite a few jimsonweeds. The jimsonweed is one of the worst poisonous weeds in the whole territory. It has rank-smelling leaves and violet trumpet-shaped flowers that wind up their year’s growth with roundish prickly fruit.

  I couldn’t carry all the big weeds in the gunnysack I was dragging, but I did dig them out and carry them to a place in our barnyard where Dad could let them dry so we could burn them.

  I wound up the morning’s hard work with sixty-five fishing worms, seventy-four cents’ worth of dandelions, and forty cents’ worth of dock, but I got nothing at all for the jimsonweeds I dug or for the pigweed, foxtail, or Canada thistle.

  “You’re a very good weed digger,” Dad said. “I didn’t know you had it in you. But I didn’t intend to teach you to become a little gold digger too.” Then he gave me a friendly look, took his billfold out of his pocket, and handed me two one-dollar bills.

  “But I thought you said I didn’t get paid for anything but dandelions and dock.”

  “That’s right,” Dad answered with a grin and with a twinkle in his eyes. “The extra is a tip. Now let’s go in for lunch and after that, no dishes—just take off to your happiness break with the gang.”

  “Yes, sir,” I answered and started to start toward the wash pan at the grape arbor.

  But then I got stopped by Dad’s saying, “One more thing, son.”

  He gave me a level look, putting both hands on my shoulders, and said, “You are going to make a success in life. You’ll always be in demand as a worker, and people will always respect you.”

  That came as a surprise after I’d tried to gold-dig him. I wondered what else he was going to say. But I felt fine when he added, his hands still on my shoulders and his eyes boring into mine, “You always do your work carefully. You do it well, and you do more than is asked of you.”

  “I do?” I asked.

  “You’re not perfect, but you are improving, son. And Mother and I are proud of you. You’re getting to be so polite, and you are growing like a weed.”

  “What kind of weed?” I asked. And then, feeling like a million dollars instead of only two, I whirled and took off toward the kitchen to see if there was anything Mom needed me to do to help her get the table set for lunch-something I could do for her free. As I ran, it seemed that maybe the Collins family was one of the best families in the world to have been born into.

  One day about a week later, Dad gave me another compliment about what a good boy I was. He and I were standing out by the grape arbor at the time, looking at and counting the royal blue, trumpet-shaped flowers of the seven morning glory vines that had climbed strings reaching from the ground all the way up to the gutter of the toolshed eaves.

  It seemed as if every morning there were more flowers than the day before. Seventy-seven had been the largest number up to now. But yesterday had been very hot, and it had rained a quiet rain during the night, so today, being sunshiny, the whole side of the toolshed was aflame with what looked like blue fire.

  “… ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred, one hundred one …” Dad was counting out loud, while I was waiting till he got through to tell how many I had already counted, which was one hundred thirteen.

  Dad stopped at one hundred seven, which was pretty good counting for a father. Then he turned to me and, as he had been doing quite a few times lately, took me by the shoulders with his calloused hands. Then he looked me in the eyes and said, “First and worst son, can you take a compliment before breakfast?”

  “If it’s not too long,” I came back with, smelling sausages and pancakes coming from the kitchen door.

  “I just wanted to say …” Dad began. Then he cleared his throat sort of as if what he was going to say needed a very clear voice to come out through. “You’ve been doing a fine job helping your mother and me bring up your sister, and we want you to know we appreciate it. You’re helping her grow up like a morning glory instead of like a wild grapevine. And that reminds me that your mother could stand a few more words of appreciation herself for all the work she does and the way she stands up under so much pressure. It’s not easy to do all the housework, keep her men in clean clothes, cook the meals, look after the chickens, and just everything else a mother has to do. So it’s up to us men to help make her life easier and more interesting. Maybe a little more than we have in the past.”

  “Yes sir,” I said back to him, getting suspicious at all these words and not being able to think of anything especially helpful I had been doing around the place.

  “You and Mom plan to go to town or somewhere together today for a happiness break and want me to baby-sit the rest of the family while you’re gone?”

  “Bright boy,” Dad said. Then he added, “It’s also that your aunt is coming from Memory City today, and she thinks you’re an especially courteous and thoughtful boy, and—”

  “Is Wally coming with her?” I asked, wondering what I would do with my first and worst cousin, who, as you know, had been Alexander the Coppersmith’s owner. And even though I felt very sorry for him that his dog had to die in the battle with the wildcat, Wally had always been kind of hard to get along with.

  “It’s a secret visit,” Dad explained. “Wally and his father are going to the fair, and your aunt is driving here to talk to us about a very special behavior problem she’s been having with Wally since Alexander died. She thinks that her boy ought to be as fine and well behaved as my first and best son, see?”

  Just then Mom rang the small handbell she kept on the corner of the kitchen worktable to call us to breakfast and lunch and supper and at any other time she wanted or needed us for anything. So I twisted out of Dad’s grasp and started toward the board walk that led to the kitchen, saying over my shoulder at him, “You can count on me—if you can count. There were one hundred thirteen morning glories, not just one hundred seven.”

  Mom had taken the phone call from my
aunt early in the morning, so the breakfast dishes were quickly done and the beds made.

  Then we all flew around like chickens with their heads off, cleaning and dusting and straightening and also keeping our eyes peeled for somebody’s car stopping at the front gate.

  After maybe forty minutes of doing what Mom calls “waiting in state,” my aunt came. She and Mom and Dad had a long talk in the living room while I baby-sat and baby-ran and baby-fussed with my little sister, Charlotte Ann.

  Once when I went into the kitchen to get a cookie to help keep her quiet and had just helped myself to two cookies so that she wouldn’t have to eat hers all by herself, I overheard through the partly open living room door my aunt’s worried voice saying, “I wish I knew the Bible as well as my big brother Theodore does. I see the need for it more and more when I am here. I like the way you bring up your children. I’m really afraid Walford is going to grow up to be a little civilized heathen—if you know what I mean—unless Howard and I can get him started going to Sunday school and church. Wally’s been so bitter ever since Alexander died. He just can’t understand why.”

  For what seemed several minutes, nobody in the other room said a word, and I didn’t know I was going to push the door open and walk in and say what I said until I did it. I was right in the middle of saying it before I saw Mom’s eyebrows drop to let me know I had been eavesdropping and had come in to interrupt a private talk.

  This is what my aunt heard me say: “Alexander died to save Little Jim’s life, just like the Savior—” and then I choked up and couldn’t even finish the sentence I had started. But if I had finished, I’d have wound up with “… just like the Savior died on the cross two thousand years ago for everybody.”

  My aunt looked at me, and there were tears in her eyes. She smiled in my direction. “Thank you, Bill. Thank you so very much. That helps a great deal.”

  “It’s about time for me to go gather the eggs,” I thought to say, then remembered it was still only ten o’clock in the morning. But I left the living room anyway and went outdoors to take Charlotte Ann her cookie.

  After lunch, my aunt had to hurry back to Memory City to get home before her men came back from the fair. We all were at the front gate to tell her good-bye, and I was standing beside Theodore Collins, my first and worst father, when she said to him, “Our psychologist thinks if we could get Wally another pet as nearly like Alexander as possible, it might help. But where in the world could one ever find a dog like that one?”

  My mind agreed with that, all right. There never was and never would be another like Alexander—never and never and never—as you know if you’ve read the stories The Bull Fighter and The Killer Cat.

  Dad answered his only sister by saying, “Couldn’t you just stop at the animal shelter on the way home and get some fluffy, cuddly little dog and take him home with you?”

  “It wouldn’t work,” my aunt said from behind the steering wheel of her car, where she was at the time, ready to take off through the front gate. “He wants a homely, ridiculous dog like Alexander was, not some little lapdog type.” She glanced down at the dainty wrist-watch on her arm and said in a serious voice, “You pray for me, will you? I think maybe I’m getting too much on my mind—what with all the troubles in the world and getting worse with every newspaper. Sometimes I get to wondering if maybe God has sort of left us all to get along the best we can and doesn’t care anymore what happens to us.”

  For a few seconds nobody said a word, and I looked up at Dad’s serious face to see if I could read how he was going to answer her. I was surprised at what he did say.

  “Troubles can be good for us sometimes,” he said. “Depending on how we use them. I read the other day where a man was in a far country, out of work, hungry and terribly homesick. He let his troubles start him on a fast run toward home. Long before he got there, his father saw him coming and ran and kissed him and gave him a royal welcome.”

  Dad’s sister swallowed a lump in her throat and stared ahead across the road. Her almost lily-white hands gripped the steering wheel as though she was holding onto it to keep from falling. Then she said to my parents, “There are prodigal daughters too. This one is going to start for home herself as soon as she finds out how.”

  What happened right then was one of the most wonderful things that could ever happen to anybody. My father’s only sister decided she wanted to become a Christian right then.

  As soon as Dad had opened and read a special verse from the little Bible he always carried, we had an outdoor prayer meeting, with my aunt sitting in the car and Mom and Dad and Charlotte Ann and I standing outside. It was while Dad was in the middle of his prayer that Charlotte Ann interrupted him by pounding on his knees and whining, saying, “I want to be up where the heads are!”

  Mom quickly stooped and lifted my heavy sister.

  As soon as I could, I got my own red head in a little corner of the prayer circle while Dad finished his prayer, part of which was “… and be with Wally. Help him to learn how a boy can be happy without having everything. Help my dear sister to believe that You do care what happens to us and that You would rather have us love You than anything else. Give her a safe journey back to Memory City …”

  When Dad finished, Wally’s mother started to pray. Her prayer was extrashort because it was interrupted by tears getting into her throat. But I never will forget part of it: “Thank You, heavenly Father, for bringing me back to Yourself. It’s been so lonely out in the far country.” That’s when the tears stopped her.

  A little later her car took off and disappeared in a cloud of dust as it swooshed up the road past the hickory nut trees to Memory City. I stood beside the mailbox looking until the cloud had drifted all the way to Bumblebee Hill, which is halfway to the bayou. And that, I remembered, was where Dragonfly’s mother thought she had seen a flying saucer and also had heard a dog howling.

  “I like your sister better every time I see her,” Mom right then said to Dad. “I think I married into a very nice family.”

  “Including even her red-mustached brother?” Dad asked her.

  “Even,” Mom said and slipped her arm through his as they started to walk slowly toward the house.

  I felt Charlotte Ann’s small hand tug at mine. Looking down into her shining eyes, I quick said, “Even,” and she and I walked side by side, following Mom and Dad. “We were born into a pretty nice family—both of us,” I said down to her just as Mixy came running from the grape arbor to let us know that she belonged, too.

  At supper that night, Mom said from across the table, “Mrs. Gilbert called this afternoon. She’s sure she saw something last night hovering above the island below the Thompson place. That woman’s really worried!”

  “Worry,” Dad said, “is contagious like the measles. Let one person begin to worry on a party phone line, and the first thing you know, every husband in the neighborhood has a worried wife to worry about.”

  I didn’t sleep too well that night, because worry is contagious. Once or twice I woke up and went to look out the south window, where a screech owl had fooled me the night before. For a few minutes I strained my eyes to see if I could make them see a flying saucer landing in the barnyard. If I could, I would have something exciting to tell people, just as Dragonfly’s mother had.

  But there wasn’t even a whisper in the wind, and the Milky Way, stretching across the sky like a pale, star-sprinkled road, didn’t have even one lazy white cloud to shadow it.

  I got to thinking about my cousin Wally and wishing something could happen to make him happy again. After all, he couldn’t help it that he had been born with a different father and mother and was a city boy instead of a country boy and had had only one pet to play with. He could never get the wonderful feeling a boy gets when there is wildlife all around that he can call his brothers and when he has so much work to do that he doesn’t have time to get lonesome. I had almost too much work, sometimes.

  Maybe my aunt was right. Maybe if they would sta
rt taking their son to church, it would give him respect for God, and he might not feel mad at Him for letting his dog get killed in battle.

  As soon as I had satisfied myself that no flying saucer was going to land in the barnyard or in the south pasture, and was too sleepy to care anyway, I crawled back into bed, pulled one thin sheet over me, and set sail for the land of Nod.

  The next day and the next and the next and twenty or more days went past, taking our short summer with them. Nothing very important happened, except that once a week there was a letter from Wally’s mother telling us that her son was still having problems and still wouldn’t even look at any other dog, no matter how many different kinds they tried to get for him.

  One thing kept bothering me, and that was that the newspapers kept telling about different people in different parts of our nation seeing flying things at night. And right in our own neighborhood, Dragonfly’s mother still kept seeing things nobody else saw, and her own first and worse boy was getting more and more mixed up in his mind about them.

  One whole month had passed since we’d been up to Alexander’s grave, and it was time to go again. As I already started to tell you in the first chapter of this story, it was a very hot day. And nearly always on a hot day, when I’ve had to eat a big dinner to keep me from starving and to help me keep growing the way my father says—like some kind of weed—I am especially sleepy right after dinner. And that is why I was so dopey-sleepy under the beechnut tree that afternoon when the mystery of the howling dog in the Sugar Creek Swamp really came to life in our minds and also in honest-to-goodness life.

  The first thing Poetry had said to me when I got there was “Where’d you get that citified short-sleeved shirt? Boy, do you look cool!”

  I gave his round-in-the-middle body and well-worn blue jeans a lazy once-over. In spite of being sleepy, I managed to think to say, “You don’t look so hot yourself.” But maybe my just-made-up joke wasn’t funny, because there was no one there to laugh at it except Poetry, and he didn’t seem to think it was very funny.