After the water, I had to read Elsie a bedtime story about a little dragonfly, the kind that is called a darning needle dragonfly. Everywhere it flew down along the creek or when it was skimming over the surface of the muskrat pond in the swamp, it would say with its widespread buzzing wings, “Be kind! Be kind!” Then the big green darner would spot a mosquito, make a dive for it, and gobble it up—not being kind to the mosquito but only to boys, which mosquitoes are always unkind to.
“The green darning needle dragonfly,” I said to Charlotte Ann’s heavy eyelids, while Elsie Jo’s eyes were already closed, “is supposed to watch when a boy plays hooky from school. And when it gets a chance, it comes in for a quick landing like an airplane, lights on the boy’s ears, and sews them up tight. But it never, never sews up a little girl’s ears …”
I knew it was only a story people tell about the Aeshnid dragonfly, and everybody knows it’s not a true story but only a tale children like to hear, and it doesn’t hurt them to hear it—if their ears haven’t been sewed up yet.
Anyway, this past year especially, I had come to realize that Elsie Jo was a real person in my cute little sister’s mind and not just a cuddly doll. So while I was standing by the grape arbor drying my hands—and in my mind was out in the boat and the captain of it—and my sister screamed for me to “come quick! Elsie Jo’s drowning!” for a second, I was actually scared myself.
Like a boy making a reverse turn in a basketball game, I whirled, made a dash to the water trough on the other side of the pump, reached in, scooped up Elsie Jo, shook the water off her soaking-wet pink dress, and handed her to Charlotte Ann.
“There you are—all safe and sound.”
But in Charlotte Ann’s mind, that dripping wet, real live doll wasn’t safe, and she wasn’t sound. Not yet.
There were tears in Charlotte Ann’s voice and actual ones in her eyes as she sobbed, “She’s drowned! You have to call the fire department!”
Now where in the world did she get an idea like that? How did she know about calling the fire department? Then I remembered the true story of the little boy over in Brown County who had nearly drowned in a bathtub, and the fire department had come and revived him. Dad had read it to us from the paper.
“OK,” I said, “you keep her warm.”
I dashed to the grape arbor, picked up an imaginary phone like the one we have by the east window of our living room, and called an imaginary fire department. Then, making my voice sound like a siren and a fire engine motor, I came charging in from town. Then I—an imaginary fireman who knew all about first aid for drowning people—stretched little Elsie Jo out on her doll blanket on the pump platform.
It was going to be as easy as eating one of Mom’s hot rolls to revive Elsie Jo. Before beginning, I looked across to Charlotte Ann’s serious face and asked, “How old is she? Is she under three or over?”
My little sister held up three fingers, which was how old she herself was. So I began to give Elsie mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I could have given her mouth-to-nose respiration, which is also a good way, but she didn’t have any open nostrils.
I could feel Charlotte’s worried eye watching me, so I kept a straight face, not blowing hard into Elsie Jo’s imaginary lungs but using puffs of air from my cheeks, which is what you do for a child under three years of age. Elsie was actually only two.
In almost no time, the victim of the water trough drowning was breathing, maybe even better than she had been when she was alive. I was giving a sixth or seventh puff from my cheeks when Elsie Jo’s mother stopped me, saying crossly, “Stop! She’s already saved, and she has to put on a dry dress!”
While I was back again at the grape arbor, still thinking about the captain of the boat needing a new tackle box, my small sister was looking after her alive-again doll. And almost before I could get my hands dry on the roller towel, she was out in the barnyard wheeling her baby around like an old mother hen with one tiny baby chicken.
Even though it had only been an imaginary lifesaving experience, I did feel proud of myself in the right way that I had had good self-control and had remembered especially about using only cheek puffs for children under three.
I might never in all my life have to give a real person artificial respiration, but it felt good to know that, if I ever did have to, I would know all the rules.
Three days later, just one week before the Fenwicks’ time in the cabin would be up and they would move to Colorado where John would be a “missionary in residence” and teach missions in a seminary, the gang had a get-together at the Black Widow Stump. In another month, our wonderful summer would be over, and we would be back in school again.
As we do sometimes when we are together, we stretched out on our backs on the ground in what we called our wagon-wheel business meeting. That meant all our heads would be close together, making the hub of the wheel, and our feet would be stretched out in six directions—our legs spread a little so that we would make twelve different-length spokes instead of just six.
There wasn’t any rim on our wheel, but that didn’t matter, just so we had a good hub. That way we could hear each other without having to say, “What?”
Big Jim opened the meeting. “Well, gang, we learned a lot this summer—”
But that was as far as he got, because Little Jim cut in with, “We’re getting to be smart like the birds. The robins, the catbirds, the bluebirds, thrushes, and even the crows build their nests in the same woods, like my mother says.”
That started all the spokes to talking, and when we had finished our ideas—some of which didn’t amount to much—Big Jim came out with some pretty good boy wisdom when he said, “We have learned that one of the best rules of life is to live and help live, not just live and let live. We’ve found there is enough water in the creek for two boats, enough fish for everybody, enough air to breathe, and that the same birds sing for everybody—”
I couldn’t resist putting in a kind of ornery thought right then, and it was, “But there are not enough groundhogs for everybody to shoot!”
I was surprised that there was as much fire in my voice as there was, and I didn’t realize that some of the gang’s tempers against Shorty Long were still as tinderbox-like as mine. In seconds we had unrolled ourselves from ourselves and were talking like a flock of blackbirds getting ready to fly South for the winter.
Big Jim took command of our boat then, saying, “All right, now. Everybody!” He raised his voice. “We don’t hate Shorty Long! Is that clear?”
And it was.
“Next week, the white boat will be gone. We’ll have to get used to using our own, and we’re not ashamed of ours. Is that clear?”
And it was.
“And now,” Big Jim ordered us, not bothering to ask anybody if anybody wanted to do it, “we’re going to get our own boat ready for use. We’re going to wash it, drag it up on the shore, paint it, build some Styrofoam into the seats, and be proud of it. Is that clear?”
And it was.
First we went down the incline to the spring to get a drink. There was not a single honeybee interested in the small, brown, nutlike seeds hanging from the middle of a bract.
Pretty soon we had all had a drink, kneeling down and drinking like cows. Then the gang started toward where we had our boat chained to its maple sapling.
Little Jim and I stayed behind for a while, because he had a secret he wanted to tell me. It was, “We’re going to get a new baby at our house—a little brother.”
We were standing near the Black Widow Stump at the time, and Chippy-chip-chee was acting the way a chipmunk acts when it is half afraid of you but is begging for anything you might have to offer.
“A little girl baby would be better, if she was as nice as Charlotte Ann,” I suggested.
Little Jim stooped, held out his hand to Chippy-chip-chee, called him to come, then tossed a peanut toward the stump. And Chippy took off after it, getting to it and scooping it up in his paws just as I said, “We might get
a baby brother at our house too!”
Big Jim called us then, and we went on the run to catch up with the rest of the gang and to help them drag the boat up onto the beach.
Even as I ran, I didn’t have any idea why I had just said that to Little Jim, but it seemed like a good idea. It would be good for Charlotte Ann to have a little brother to play with and to share her toys with. We hadn’t had a new baby at our house for more than three years.
We pulled the boat up on the sand and left it upside down in the sun to dry, which it would have to do before we could paint it. Besides, we didn’t have the paint for it yet.
Then we went back to the spring, filled several glass jugs with water, and started to take them to the Maple Leaf, thinking that Elona maybe needed fresh springwater for making Costa Rican punch for anybody who might like to drink some.
Before starting to cross the bridge, Poetry and I stopped to pick up a few stones and sticks to throw down the creek near the big rock—just to see if Old Whopper was still there and all right and hadn’t been fooled by some fancy lure into getting himself hooked and into somebody’s frying pan.
We tossed rock after rock and stick after stick, scaring the turtles into scrambling for safety into their underwater hideaways, and not even once did Old Whopper bother to dash out to see what was going on.
“He’s getting lazy,” Little Jim suggested.
Big Jim solved the problem by reminding us in a teacher voice, “In the middle of the afternoon, bass are sleepy. Remember?”
And with that, Poetry raised his own voice in a teacher tone, announcing, “Class is dismissed!”
I quickly looked at Big Jim’s lowered eyebrows as he reminded us, “We agreed, didn’t we, back there at the stump that we don’t hate Shorty Long!”
And it was clear again.
“Listen,” Dragonfly exclaimed. “Here comes the Vida Eterna!”
Looking upstream in the direction of the spring, our swimming hole, and on farther toward where Shorty Long lived, I saw a flash of sunlight glancing from the white boat.
In a little while the boat reached the narrows below the swimming hole, where the water was too shallow for the motor’s propeller. There the driver shut it off, and I could see that whoever was in the boat was using the oars for a while until he would reach deeper water.
Then the motor started again. In a little while, big John Fenwick’s voice would be singing a song he nearly always sang when he was coming in for a landing at the Maple Leaf dock: “Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main …” And away down at the Maple Leaf, Elona would hear the song and come hurrying out and down to the dock to meet him.
Only a few more days and we’d maybe never again get to hear his booming voice singing and never again get to see Elona hurrying out to help him beach the boat.
Just then something happened! The motor came to startling roaring life just as if it was at full throttle. And the Vida Eterna came zooming toward us—faster and faster and still faster.
“Shorty Long!” a chorus of voices all around me called. “He’s all alone!”
It had to be Shorty. Maybe he was taking a last, fast, mad ride before having to give up the ship. John Fenwick himself would never drive the boat that fast. He would be more thoughtful of the underwater wildlife, not wanting to scare the sunfish, bluegills, bass, goggle-eyes, suckers, and other peace-loving fish half out of their fish wits.
But the boat was near enough now for me to see who was in it—and it was not Shorty Long. It was John Fenwick himself! He was leaning forward, his left hand on the steering handle of the outboard motor, his right hand on his chest, and he was not singing. He was calling, “Elona! Elona! Elona!”
I felt a creeping in my spine, and my heart pounded with fear. Something was wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong!
On and on and still on, nearer and nearer, the white boat thundered toward us. It shot under the bridge below us and out on the other side. And all the time, John was calling his wife’s name as though he wanted her to know he was coming and to be ready for something terrible that was about to happen.
All of us scrambled to the other side of the bridge, watching the boat go flying toward the Maple Leaf.
And that’s when the something I was afraid was going to happen did happen. John Fenwick slipped forward and sideways in the boat. His heavy body, with muscles as strong as iron bands, slumped over against the gunwale. At the same time, his left hand let go the steering handle.
The boat swerved toward the right and headed straight for the big rock, where two or three turtles had decided their world hadn’t come to an end after all and were starting to crawl back onto their sundeck.
It was Big Jim who first guessed out loud what was happening. “A heart attack! He’s having a heart attack!”
Dragonfly began to stammer out something or other. But before he could even get his idea started, the wild-running boat was in the middle of its accident. Its shining prow with Vida Eterna on it crashed head-on into the big rock. Then it lifted, shot up over it, and came down with a boiling of waves and scraping of its metal sides against the rock as the turtles turned turtle and shot back into their shelter again.
I saw the boat’s life preserver fly into the air and land about fifteen feet away. The tackle box flew also, and they both started jouncing along on the widening waves.
John Fenwick himself was tossed out into the deep water about ten feet from Old Whopper’s hiding place. As he went down, he called out in a gasping, terrified voice, “Elona! Elona!”
And now all my warm feeling for big John Fenwick melted my whole heart, and I started thinking about Elona. Her husband might be dying, and she would be left alone in the world without her John, as all alone and brokenhearted as my own mother would be without Dad.
But I was daydreaming when I should have been doing something. There was a flurry of action now beside me, and the sound of a boy’s bare feet on the wooden bridge. I quick looked, and there was Circus, the fastest runner of all of us, flying like a curly-headed arrow for the other end of the bridge, calling over his shoulder to us, “Come on, gang! Let’s go save him!”
8
And now there were twelve flying feet racing for the north end of the long bridge. Twelve plop-plopping feet and six minds, all of us thinking and worrying and planning and hoping, wondering how we were going to help, and if we could help, and what if we couldn’t!
As I ran, my feet seemed to drag like lead, the way they do sometimes in a dream when I am trying to get away from something or somebody and can’t.
Down the steep embankment on the other side, through the thicket of shrubbery that sheltered the shore, at last we broke out into the open space on the beach itself. I saw the aluminum boat, upright again like a weighted saltshaker and empty except for the water that was in it. Already it had floated downstream a ways, and beside it was the life preserver, like a baby chicken staying close to its mother in a time of danger.
The tackle box and the oars weren’t anywhere in sight, and neither was big John Fenwick. My mind told me the terrible truth—John had had a heart attack, and, even though he was a good swimmer, he hadn’t been able to swim a stroke! He was already drowned!
All the things John had taught us about life- saving seemed to jam up in my mind. This wasn’t any Elsie Jo rescue, where all you had to do was reach into a water tank, pull the doll out, and give her mouth-to-mouth artificial respiration until your kid sister decided her doll was alive again.
But the different methods of water rescue were in my mind, piled up like driftwood on the Sugar Creek island during a spring flood:
Reaching rescue was out, because there wasn’t a thing to reach out to John with—no branches or sticks or paddles or bath towels or anything. Besides, there wasn’t anybody to reach them to!
Throwing rescue couldn’t even be considered, because how could we throw a life preserver when the only one in Sugar Creek was by now sixty yards downstream?
Boat rescue was alr
eady too late. The only boat anywhere nearby wasn’t near and was drifting farther away each second. The only other boat was upstream farther than that!
The floating device rescue method was also no good, because we didn’t have an air mattress or anything to float out to him on …
All four plans were out, simply out!
Reach—Throw—Row—Go. These were the four best methods of rescue for a drowning person, and not a one of them would work. Not even the Go method, because where could we go?
If John was already drowned, then all that would be left would be an underwater search for the body. If we found it, we could bring it to the surface and to the shore. And if he was still alive, or even if he seemed to be dead, we could try artificial respiration.
There was only one thing left to do, and I was going to do it. For a minute it seemed I was the only member of the gang there. I could get my clothes off in less than ten seconds flat and be stripped to my shorts. I could go rushing out through the shallow water toward the big rock and make a dive underwater there to see if I could find John Fenwick down there somewhere.
But I guess I wasn’t really using my head. I was already half out of my clothes when Big Jim’s captainlike voice stopped me. “Bill,” he shouted, “you run home and telephone the fire department, and maybe your dad can come and help. Get your mother on the phone for all the Sugar Creek dads. Poetry, you and Dragonfly go down and tell Elona to pray. And Little Jim, you stay here with Circus and me. We’ll search for his body and bring it in and start artificial respiration. And, listen, everybody! Everybody pray on the run! Run and pray and work! We’re the only guys God has right now to save the life of one of the best friends He ever had! Go on, Bill! Get going!”
And I got going! My clothes were back on in seconds. Big Jim’s thundering orders were like strong hands helping me dress.
Back through the dense thicket I worked my way. Up the steep incline to the bridge I raced, panting, hurrying, worrying, thinking, hoping—and praying. I seemed to be the only boy the Lord had at the time to do what I had to do. I was helping Him, and He was helping me.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 16
