Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 5

  “What my mother heard and saw last night wasn’t any old mother hog and her litter of grunting pigs, because six pigs don’t sound like one dog howling! Anyway, what she saw skimming through the woods was above the ground, not lying on it. It was snow-white and had green lights that went on and off and—”

  “Old Whitey is snow-white,” Poetry countered.

  I decided to defend Dragonfly, maybe because I liked red mother hogs better than white ones. I said, “You mean she’s supposed to be white—if only she’d take a bath in anything other than a mud puddle and sleep in a nice, clean, modern hog house like any ordinary hog!”

  Poetry, in one of his anytime mischievous moods, began quoting the words to a little singsong tune most of us knew. The poem was:

  Six little pigs in the straw with their mother, Bright eyes, curly tails, tumbling on each other;

  Bring them apples from the orchard trees And hear those piggies say, “Please, please, please!”

  “Seven little pigs,” Little Jim suddenly corrected, counting them again to be sure he was right. “And they’re not in the straw!”

  I guess one of the most interesting things a boy ever sees around a farm or ranch is a brand-new pig family having breakfast or dinner or supper. As I once heard my father say to Mom when they didn’t know I was up in the haymow sort of accidentally listening, “It makes a man believe in God and love Him a little more when he sees how He works in nature.”

  I never did forget Dad’s words. After that, every time we had any kind of newborn life around our place, such as a calf or colt or lamb, and even when all of a sudden some morning I saw five or six baby birds in a nest where the night before there had been five or six eggs, I’d been saying—sort of half to myself and half to God—“It makes a man believe in God and love Him a little more.”

  Right that second, while the gang was being entertained by those wriggling, bright-eyed, curly-tailed, pinkish white little squealers, I was remembering what Dad had said to Mom. And for some reason a very glad feeling splashed into my mind, making me want to leap up and catch hold of an overhanging branch of the ash sapling I was standing under—which also right that minute I did. I chinned myself three times and swung myself up and over, doing what is called “skinning the cat.”

  While I was upside down, looking at the upside-down pigs and their mother in their house in the trunk of the tree, Poetry said again, “Your howling dog was our old Whitey! Now are you satisfied, Dragonfly, my friend?”

  Circus answered Poetry by correcting him, saying, “Howling dogs don’t squeal, and squealing pigs don’t howl.”

  “Besides,” Dragonfly whined, ignoring Circus’s correction, “the dog my mother heard last night was copper-colored, and this old mother hog is a dirty white.”

  “How did she know it was copper-colored? You can’t even see copper color in the dark. Anyway I thought you said it was a white dog!”

  Dragonfly’s face went into a tailspin again, as if he was about to sneeze. Then it went set, and he answered, “It had to be copper-colored because that’s the color Alexander the Coppersmith is.”

  “Was,” I put in. “And ghosts are white, you know—or don’t you?”

  Well, we weren’t getting anywhere trying to change anybody’s mind, so we decided to leave the seven little pigs in the straw—or whatever it was they were tumbling in—and go on up to the cemetery, as we had planned, to let Little Jim put his flowers on the grave. We also wanted to let Dragonfly see for himself that the mound of yellowish brown earth was still there, just as we had left it a month ago—except that, of course, there’d be a few dandelions or other weeds growing on it and maybe some wild grass.

  As we ambled along, I happened to think that if there were a dozen or more dandelions in the cemetery, I could dig a few of them with my knife and take them back to our place to sell them for a cent apiece to Dad. Well, I could try to sell them anyway.

  Even though I knew there wouldn’t be any hole in the ground under the elderberry bush, I also thought, it seemed I was wondering if there would be and almost hoping there would be.

  Little Jim, I noticed, was gripping his stick as if he would be ready to use it to defend himself if we did run into a ghost—either animal or human. He was still carrying the jar of black-eyed Susans in his left hand, and every now and then, as we pell-melled ourselves along beside, behind, and in front of each other, I caught a whiff of their scent. It wasn’t one of the sweetest flower smells in the whole world.

  After maybe fifteen minutes of speeding along, part of the time almost like six little pigs tumbling on each other—stumbling, though, not tumbling—we came to within sight of the haunted house. That was the thick-walled stone house that had once been the home of Old Tom the Trapper, who many years ago had gotten shot through with an Indian arrow.

  And there, all of a sudden, we stopped, scared, because again, as clear as a school bell on an early September morning, we heard from above us or from in front or behind us—we couldn’t tell for sure—the long, eerie wailing squall of some kind of animal.

  “It’s him!” Dragonfly cried. “I knew it! It’s his ghost! My mother was right! Come on, everybody, let’s go see the empty grave!”

  Twelve flying bare feet racing toward the old stone house and the canine cemetery behind it—that was us.

  Running like that, so fast and almost blindly, somebody in a gang of boys is bound to trip over something, which right then Little Jim did. As he reached out to stop himself from falling too hard, his bouquet of black-eyed Susans flew out of his hand, and it took several nervous minutes for him to gather them up again. The rest of the gang didn’t stop, because Little Jim and I were behind them and maybe they didn’t know what had happened.

  As you probably remember, Little Jim was the only one of the gang who sometimes talked with me about things in the Bible. Maybe that was because he thought I was his best friend, which maybe I was. So, while I was helping him pick up his scattered flowers, he said, “There won’t be any dogs in heaven. My mother just read in the Bible where it was talking about heaven, and it says, ‘Outside are the dogs.’”

  I shook off a half-dozen black carpenter ants, which I had picked up with one of the black-eyed Susan stalks. Part of his bouquet had landed on a half-rotten log, the very log he had stumbled over in the first place. “Where’d she read that in the Bible—what verse?” I asked, as we took off after the gang.

  Little Jim panted back an answer, “Revelation 22:15. She read it this morning.”

  Our feet were plop-plopping faster and faster as we raced after the others, trying to catch up with them. “Maybe it doesn’t mean animal dogs,” I said over my shoulder to him. “Maybe it means people dogs—people who keep their hearts’ doors shut against the Savior and maybe wouldn’t even enjoy heaven if they got there—unless they got their hearts changed before they died.” I’d once heard our pastor say something like that in a sermon.

  We caught up with the gang just as they reached the cemetery fence.

  The first thing I noticed, as we stood panting and sweating and looking in, was the mound of yellow earth and, at the end of it, Little Jim’s grave marker that said:

  ALEXANDER THE COPPERSMITH

  Long may he live in our hearts.

  But there wasn’t any hole in the ground like the kind a butterfly or moth leaves when it changes from a caterpillar, crawls out of its cocoon, and flies away.

  “See there,” Poetry said to Dragonfly with a sharp arrow in his voice, “he’s still buried down there, two feet deep, so nobody could have heard him last night.”

  “Then how come we all heard him ourselves in broad daylight less than ten minutes ago?” Big Jim surprised us by saying.

  Dragonfly was staring at the overhanging flowers of the elderberry bush, and it seemed he was going to cry, because he was sniffling a little. But I should have known better. The weeds lining the fence were ragweeds in full pollen, and right away our crooked-nosed little guy let out a high-pitc
hed, long-tailed sneeze as he likes to do, maybe to get attention.

  Poetry came in then with a sarcastic “Now that did sound like a howling dog howling!”

  “Ragweeds!” Dragonfly exclaimed. “Let’s get out of here!”

  There was a whole fencerow of them with their deeply lobed leaves. And without being allergic to them myself, I could tell that the air was heavy with thousands of sharp-edged pollen grains—which any boy who is going to be a doctor someday knows is the way ragweed pollen grains are, even though you’d have to use a microscope to see how sharp they really are.

  As soon as Little Jim had placed his bouquet where he’d set it before—he had filled his quart jar from the old wooden pump near the haunted house—we went into the house through the secret cellar entrance we knew about, just to sort of look around a little the way we nearly always do when we’re there.

  We were maybe all thinking different things about the exciting things that had happened there—such as the one you read about in the story called The Haunted House. It was a kind of dreary place today, so we pretty soon went outside again into the sunlit woods. All of us were still feeling sad because, in spite of Poetry’s mischievous mood, we were thinking seriously about things. I myself was remembering Little Jim’s quoted Bible verse about heaven, which says, “Outside are the dogs.”

  In a little while we were at the farther edge of the woods and at the beginning of the path that skirts the swamp. There Dragonfly helped us decide to take the shortcut to Old Man Paddler’s cabin by going through the swamp.

  “We might see a man from Mars or some other planet, like my mother says was driving the flying saucer last night. There was a UFO above the swamp at the same time Alexander was howling.”

  Hearing that serious-faced little member of our gang say that, I knew he hadn’t given up his belief, so I said, “OK, gang, let’s do it! Maybe we will see a little green man from Mars.”

  The rest of the gang decided it was a good idea, especially since we did want to go past Old Man Paddler’s vacant cabin, so we swung into the path and were soon ambling along in one of the coolest places in the whole territory. We went right past the place where we had once seen a big old mother bear wallowing in the mud—which fierce, mad mother bear Little Jim himself had shot with Big Jim’s rifle, and which you know about from the story The Killer Bear.

  Pretty soon we reached the grassy knoll near the muskrat pond where Alexander had had his underwater battle with a savage mud turtle half as big in diameter as a large wash-tub.

  And then, all of a sudden, and from so close to my ear it made me jump, Dragonfly hissed, “Sh-h! Somebody’s coming!”

  6

  The minute Dragonfly scared us with his hissing, we stopped stock-still and stared, then took a hurried look in a quick circle of directions. We saw that he was right. Along the winding path ahead, somebody was coming toward us—a man or woman or maybe a girl, we couldn’t tell for sure at first.

  The man or woman or girl was carrying what looked like a traveling man’s attaché case and also a camera.

  Big Jim took charge of us by ordering, “Down, everybody!”

  And down we dropped, sheltering ourselves behind a drift from last spring’s heavy rains that had made the creek overflow the bayou and Dragonfly’s dad’s cornfield. There were large drifts of cornstalks and straw, from barnyards and fields upstream, piled up in quite a few different places.

  Behind one of those drifts we crouched, tense and waiting—I in my still-wet clothes, thinking that when the rest of the gang stood up, they could just dust off their clothes and they’d be as clean as any boy can make them for inspection by his parents. But I, Bill Collins, whose mother had ordered to be careful, would be covered with damp dirt you couldn’t just brush off.

  “What’re we hiding from?” Poetry wanted to know.

  Big Jim turned to shush him, saying in a tense whisper, “I don’t know yet—not till we find out who it is and what he is doing.”

  “What she is doing, you mean. It’s a girl,” Circus said, he having six sisters and maybe knowing better than any of the rest of us what a girl looked like.

  “How can you tell this far away?” Poetry asked.

  “Circus is right,” I answered, peeking through a crack in the edge of the drift. “She’s wearing gray pants, a bright red blouse, a Western-style belt, sunglasses, and wading boots.”

  Some one of us must have made too much noise right then, for Big Jim waved his hand behind him for us to keep still, which, for a few nervous seconds most of us managed to do. It’s maybe as hard on a boy’s nerves to have to keep still as it is on his mother’s nerves when he doesn’t. Dad sometimes says, “It’s good for a tired-out mother and a nervous, fidgety child to get away from each other every once in a while.”

  Well, that girl in the gray pants, red blouse, and wading boots was certainly acting mysterious. It looked as if she was trying to sneak up on something at or near or in the muskrat pond.

  Poetry, whose face was close to my ear, whispered, “Look! She’s set her briefcase down! She’s got her camera and is going to take a picture of something.”

  My eyes were seeing what he was seeing. The girl was creeping closer and closer to the cottonwood log that runs from the shore quite a ways out into the pond.

  Dragonfly, whose face was close to my other ear, and who was trying to look through the same crack in the drift I was looking through, whispered, “She’s balancing herself on the log.”

  She was easing herself along, getting slowly closer and closer to the end, out where the water was deeper and where also, about ten feet from the very end, was an old raft we boys had made. And on that raft were about nine soft-shelled turtles taking an afternoon sunbath.

  My wet clothes were like a boy’s voice in my mind, making me want to call out to her, “Look, lady! Be careful. That log’s slippery! Any second, you’ll step on something slimy and down you’ll go!” But I made myself keep still.

  She raised her camera now, focused it on the raft and the turtles, just as Poetry whispered, “It’s a movie camera!”

  And that made me think that, if it had a zoom lens, she’d be getting a picture of one of nature’s finest sights—a close-up of nine or maybe ten or twelve spiny, soft-shelled turtles, which, as any boy around Sugar Creek knows, are olive green with a narrow yellow border all the way around. Also, when a spiny, soft-shelled turtle is still young and not more than ten inches across, its green carapace is spotted all over with black rings the size of a boy’s big toenail.

  If all of a sudden those nine turtles would wake up, scramble into turtle life, and take nine nosedives in nine different directions into and under the water, which turtles nearly always do whenever anything startles them—if that happened, it would certainly be something to see it in a movie.

  As you maybe know, turtle’s feet are like fins, which help make them some of nature’s best skin divers.

  I’d no sooner thought all that than it began to happen. The turtles did wake up scared and began to make nine four-legged scrambles for the water, trying to get away from what they maybe thought was some terrible red-bloused monster about to murder them and make turtle soup out of them. If turtles could think and talk to each other, once they were safe under the water, one of the smallest turtles might say to his mother, “Did you see her three big eyes?” And his mother could answer, “What three eyes?” And her turtle husband might answer, “Two in her head and another great big one on the end of her long right fin.”

  Anyway, one of the smallest turtles was in such a hurry to get away from what he maybe thought was some terrible danger, that he got tangled up in the mad rush for the water, upped himself on top of a larger, awkward-moving turtle, tumbled off onto the raft, and for a second was upside down, waving his excited fins in the air, and giving us—and the camera—a glimpse of his snowy white plastron, almost as white as the front of one of Dad’s dress shirts.

  I was just thinking up a joke for Dragonfly
when something else began to happen.

  It was in my mind to say to him, “There, my friend, is your flying saucer—nine of them in fact, green just like the ones your mother said she saw last night. And their undersides are a clean, white white.”

  But just then the girl began to lose her balance.

  When you are wearing wading boots and trying to balance yourself on a slippery, narrow cottonwood log, it’s easier to lose your balance than it is to keep it. A certain all-wet boy I know knows that.

  In less time than it would take me to tell it, and almost as fast as it took me to think it, the girl in the gray pants and red blouse did lose her balance. Her arms with the camera in one hand waved in a dozen excited directions up and down and sideways. Then ker-splashety-plop, she was off the end of the log and into the water—red blouse, silver-gray slacks, wading boots, brown hair, pretty face and all. Almost all, I mean. She was careful to hold up her camera so that it wouldn’t get wet.

  “What if she can’t swim!” Dragonfly worried out loud.

  “She won’t have to,” I answered. “The water’s only about three feet deep there!”

  Still holding her camera high enough to keep it from getting wet, the girl looked around to get her bearings, then started toward the shore, which was in our direction.

  At first it was a little disappointing that we didn’t get to rescue a helpless girl, and that she seemed as much at home in a muskrat pond as a boy would have been.

  No sooner had she sloshed her way up the gravelly bank than she began looking around for something else interesting and alive to take a picture of. I watched her inch her way toward an overhanging willow, whose lacy green branches extended about ten feet out over the water. Creeping up slowly, she started her camera again, aiming at three or four water snakes basking there in the dappled sunlight.

  Seeing those snakes reminded me that there are maybe a dozen different kinds of snakes living in our neighborhood. Some of them are friends of a farmer or rancher, and only a few are dangerous. Some of the friendly ones that won’t hurt a boy, or even a fly if they don’t happen to like to eat flies, are the hog-nose snakes, like the one you read about in Lost in the Blizzard, and the innocent garter snakes, which eat fishing worms, snails, small frogs, mice, and other stuff a boy wouldn’t eat anyway.