I was halfway across the long bridge—hoping any second I would meet a car or see somebody I could stop and tell what was happening down by the big rock—when I got a feeling in my mind that I ought to look back downstream.
I didn’t stop running but looked on the run. By the shore I saw Big Jim and Circus, already stripped to their shorts, beginning to wade toward where we’d last seen John alive.
Little Jim was on the beach, still dressed, his ash stick in his hands, and I knew he was thinking that if John was still alive and he could reach out his cane to him, he would use all the strength his smallish muscles had to help pull him in.
I was still running and was almost to the other end of the bridge, when something else I had seen came into my mind. I stopped like a car having its four-wheel brakes slammed on and looked back. The wind or something had turned the boat so that its prow was headed upstream. And on the side next to the mouth of the branch, close to the boat and floating, I saw what looked like the body of a man.
In that second I knew John’s body was not somewhere up near the big rock, deep down in Old Whopper’s home territory, but that he had already drowned and had come to the surface and was floating on his back alongside the boat, the way drowned bodies sometimes do.
I quickly let loose a wild yell to Big Jim and Circus and Little Jim and to anybody else who could hear me. “Hey! Big Jim! Circus! Everybody! I see him! He’s floating with the boat—on the other side of it!”
Circus and Big Jim had been spared a long underwater search for the body. Now they could go racing down to the Maple Leaf dock, swim out, drag John’s body to shore, and maybe even get him revived.
But if they couldn’t, maybe the fire department could.
At a time like that, you don’t have time to stop and listen to all the happy birds singing in the trees along the roadside or to the angry birds scolding if you happen to scare them off their nests. You just run and run and run and pant and hope and pray and keep on running and dodging briars and shrubbery and brush piles. The shortest way home was through the woods, and I was taking it.
The long, green, flat leaves of the papaw bushes hung like lazy half-closed umbrellas that didn’t have a care in the world and had nothing to do but shade the papaw fruit from the hot sun. The wood thrush, when I went charging past her nest, broke out into a mad “Prut-prut-prut!” Even as I swished past, I called out to her, “You don’t need to lose your temper over anything! You’ve already hatched your eggs, and your thrush babies have learned to fly already.”
On and still on. Fire department. Fire department. Fire department. Maybe the fire department can help.
I was getting close to the Black Widow Stump, where I would make the last turn before flying up the long slope to our house, when Chippy-chip-chee, who had been taking his afternoon nap, reared up in a quick freeze. Then, when I didn’t stop, he dropped out of sight on the other side.
That’s when I saw and heard somebody coming from the direction of the swimming hole and the bayou. It was a big boy, panting and running and crying—actually crying! It was Shorty Long, and he was soaking wet!
“John! Uncle John!” he was calling. “I found your pills! I found your pills!”
I stopped and yelled to Shorty, “What on earth?”
But all I got out of him was a mumbled “We caught a bass out in front of our dock. I fell out of the boat, and he reached for me and dropped his pills in the water. We couldn’t find ’em. He was racing home to get some more. I saw his boat hit the big rock.”
And then, as Shorty swung into a sobbing, soaking, splashety run for the bridge, and as I swerved south toward our house, I thought I heard him crying out something else. Exactly what, I didn’t know, but part of it sounded like “Please, God, help me get there in time.”
As I charged up the slope, it seemed I was doing and saying the same thing my enemy was—crying and praying, “Please, God, help me to get there in time!”
Every step I took, my mind’s eye was seeing one of the worst boys who had ever lived in Sugar Creek territory, running and praying and hoping, carrying with him a little bottle of lifesaving pills. And I was glad that I hadn’t told Shorty it was already too late, that big John Fenwick was already drowned and his body was floating alongside the Vida Eterna.
It just didn’t seem right—a kind, wonderful man such as John, who had given his life in Central America to preach and teach the only gospel there ever was to people who would be lost without it—having to die when he wasn’t any older than my father. A man like John ought to live forever.
I was at the elderberry bushes now, where once, a long time ago, which also seemed like yesterday, two boys had had a fistfight, and a hot-word fight. As I went flying over the rail fence and scooting across the dusty road to “Theodore Collins” on our mailbox, I heard a song in my mind. It was: “Yo tengo vida eterna en mi corazon.” And I knew that no matter what happened to John’s body, after the muscles that had been as strong as iron bands were buried somewhere, his soul had eternal life and would live forever!
I gulped and shot through the gate, leaving it open so that, when I came back from phoning the fire department, I could fly through and be on my way to the Maple Leaf to do anything I could to help Big Jim and Circus.
I was surprised that Charlotte Ann didn’t come racing across the yard to meet me, wanting to be lifted and carried into the house. She nearly always does that when it is Dad coming home, and she was beginning to try to get me to do the same thing.
At the back screen door, there was a note from Mom fastened to the knob, which said:
Bill, there has been an emergency, and I have gone to the hospital with Little Jim’s mother. If I’m late for supper, help yourself to anything you can find. There is cold chicken and apple pie. Your father phoned that he will be late, too. I’ve taken Charlotte Ann, so you’re the man of the house. Old Bent Comb is getting a little stubborn about going into the coop behind the grape arbor, so let her take her babies anywhere she wants to.
I couldn’t be bothered with worrying about a choosy old setting hen and her chicks when there was an emergency that had to have the fire department.
I was surprised to find our party line not busy, so I quickly had Sam LaRue, the fire chief, on the phone. I told him what had happened and where, and he said not to worry—just do what we could—and he’d get Dr. Basset if he could and would bring the inhalator.
“Dr. Basset’s at the hospital right now,” Sam said to me, “but I’ll get him. And the ambulance.”
In almost no time I was out of the house, racing across the yard, through the gate, and on my way to the Maple Leaf to tell everybody that help would soon be coming at seventy-five miles an hour.
I guess my heart had never had a bigger ache than it had right that minute as I flew, flew, flew through the woods, across the bridge, down the embankment, and along the narrow path to where the rest of the gang was. I was worrying about Elona, whose heart would be broken if John had really drowned and couldn’t be revived.
She and their little foreign car were gone, I found out, and she had left a note on the dock post that said.
Dear John, I’ve gone to the drugstore for a new supply of medicine. Did you realize you were out, and all we had was in the little bottle you carry with you?
Even as I saw what was going on, I thought it was better that Elona was not there in case—just in case—John could not be revived before his spirit had left his body for good.
The boat, I noticed, was out where it had been when I’d seen it from the bridge, still with its prow pointed upstream.
“The anchor got thrown out of the boat when it hit Old Whopper’s rock,” Little Jim explained, “and the boat floated this far before the anchor struck the bottom.”
But it wasn’t the boat or the anchor I was interested in but what was happening on the beach beside the dock, where Big Jim and Circus were working over John’s body. Big Jim himself was giving mouth-to-mouth respiration.
Big Jim had his ear close to John’s open mouth now, listening to see if the air he had just blown into it and down into his lungs was coming back out. But it seemed it wasn’t, because he kept on doing it—blowing in hard, then stopping to listen, doing it over and over again. It seemed we had never had a better captain of the ship than Big Jim or a better first mate than Circus. They were keeping their heads and working like doctors during an operation.
Big Jim looked up at us then and shook his head. “Nothing yet, but he’s not dead. His heart is still beating.”
While he was still speaking, I saw the fingers of John’s right hand twitch. Then—even from as far away as I was—I heard a sighlike gasp.
Again Big Jim blew in a lungful of air, and again he listened. And this time for sure, something happened. There was the sound of air coming out. And I saw the short, sharp rise and fall of John Fenwick’s chest as he began to breathe without help.
That’s when the lesson we had passed the examination on really came in handy, because John seemed to regain consciousness and want to sit up. But Big Jim and Circus held him down. They did let him have his head as high as a folded shirt for a pillow would raise it but no higher.
“A drowning victim can stop breathing again soon after he starts.” That had been part of the lesson. “So watch every second, and be ready to start artificial respiration again.”
We didn’t even have time to relax, for in only a few minutes John’s old heart trouble started again. He began to breathe fast and hard, and his face showed he was having a lot of pain.
Then there was the sound of shuffling feet in the sand beside me as Shorty Long hurried to where John was. He dropped onto his knees beside the man who had adopted him for the summer. He slipped a nitroglycerin tablet under John’s tongue. And the life of one of the finest persons who had ever lived was saved.
And then there was the sound of car wheels on the board bridge and a siren and, behind the car, an ambulance.
Dr. Basset took charge the minute he was there, getting a cup of hot coffee into John and keeping him wrapped in a warm blanket until they could get him into the ambulance. They would watch over him all the way to the hospital, where they were going to take him for a few days for what is called “observation,” just to be sure there wouldn’t be a relapse.
Elona came driving in then, worried and scared when she saw all the people and her husband on the ambulance stretcher. But when Dr. Basset told her there’d been a little accident and her husband was all right, just needed hospital rest a few days, she dropped on her knees beside the stretcher and cried a little to John the way wives do to their husbands—anyway, as Mom does to Dad once in a while.
Dr. Basset turned now to look at Shorty Long and the rest of us, asking, “Which one of you is Jimmy Foote?”
Little Jim stood up proud at that and said, “I am.” He said it kind of bashfully though.
“Well, I’ve just come from the hospital, and you have a beautiful, brand-new baby brother!”
You never in your life saw such a happy grin on a little guy’s face. Little Jim quickly looked over at me and said, “What’d I tell you?”
Then he whirled and, spying a three-foot-tall milkweed stalk near the barbecue pit, he swung at it with a fierce, powerful swing as though the muscles of his slender arms were strong as iron bands. His stick knocked off a cluster of lilac-colored flowers and scared half out of its butterfly wits the monarch butterfly that had been sipping nectar there, sending it loping off across the open space between us and the Maple Leaf.
All of a sudden I was remembering not only what Little Jim had told me when we had been alone near the Black Widow Stump but also what I had told him. Then with my mind’s eye I saw Mom’s note on the kitchen door about an “emergency” and that she had gone to the hospital with Little Jim’s mother. I quickly looked at Dr. Basset and said, “My name is Collins—Bill Collins.”
Our family doctor looked at me with twinkling brown eyes. Then he said, “Oh, yes, I remember. You have a little sister. I helped bring her into the world, too!” He stopped, frowning as if trying to remember something.
I felt myself staring, getting topsy-turvy in my mind. “You mean …”
“I was just trying to recall her name. It’s Charlotte Ann, I believe.”
And that was that—a disappointing, mixed-up that, at that.
After the ambulance had taken John, and Elona with him, to the hospital, the gang was left alone to close the cottage, beach the boat, and be sure the fire in the barbecue pit was completely out.
Then we had to save another life—and right there in the same place, in front of the Maple Leaf dock.
9
After the ambulance had been gone maybe seven minutes, and the gang and Shorty Long were still at the dock feeling happy and sad at the same time, there was a problem in my mind.
“How,” I asked Big Jim, “could his body float when it had just been drowned? I thought there would have to be a search for the body underwater. That’s what we learned in Uncle John’s lessons.”
Circus had an answer ready. “Remember the fishnet he always drags alongside the boat? Well, he was trying to save himself from drowning—at least that’s the way we figured it out—and his hand got tangled in it. Then he had his heart attack blackout and lost consciousness, but he floated because his hand was caught in the net.”
It made sense, I thought, and wondered if, after John was 100 percent well and we could talk to him, he would remember all the things that had happened.
A saucy little wind came up right then, ruffling the water and turning the Vida Eterna this way and that. It was still anchored where it had been when I’d seen it from the bridge about an hour before. There was also a rumble of thunder like an automobile crossing the bridge.
“We’d better hurry up and get the boat beached,” Big Jim said, “or the wind could whip her around against the dock and bang her up—or maybe blow her downstream to deeper water or all the way to the island. The anchor rope might even break.”
“Let me go get her,” I offered. I was quickly half out of my clothes, planning to swim out, pull up the anchor and row her in. Or, maybe—maybe—if the wind would blow a little harder, I’d have to start the motor and drive her in!
But it was an empty dream, which a certain poem says life is not. Instead, Circus and Big Jim, still in their shorts, waded out to the Vida Eterna. There wasn’t going to be any need for the motor at all.
Circus had caught hold of the anchor rope and was starting to lift the anchor off the bottom when he let out a yell. “It’s caught on something! There’s something alive on it. It’s pulling and jerking and trying to get away!”
What on earth? I thought. A crazy mixed-up idea flooded into my mind. There was a legend about a place at the bottom of the sea that is supposed to be the grave of all drowned persons. Some drowned person down there had hold of the anchor rope and wanted to be pulled out!
Big Jim knew what was happening, though. He told us, “The anchor, dragging along between here and the big rock, caught on Elona’s trotline, and we’ve got a fish or two or more.”
With that, he and Circus began to pull on the anchor rope, dragging it and the boat toward the end of the dock, where I saw to it that I was in a hurry, ready to help and to get in on the excitement of seeing what we had caught.
In only a few half minutes more, the boat was all the way to the dock, and we were busy pulling in the trotline.
“Looks like we’ve caught the biggest catfish in the creek,” Big Jim said, and I saw the muscles of his brawny arms and shoulders rippling like ropes as he dragged the trotline toward the side of the dock where the water was only two or three feet deep.
It looked like we were catching not only the biggest catfish there ever was but three or four of them
, the way the line was slicing the surface of the water this way and that.
And then, out about fifteen feet from the stern of the Vida Eterna there was an explosion of the surface of the water like a volcano erupting in Davy Jones’s locker. Up into the air shot the biggest bass any boy ever saw, shaking its body savagely and trying to get unhooked from one of Elona’s trotline hooks.
“Old Whopper!” a half-dozen boys’ voices cried. “We’ve caught Old Whopper!”
“He’ll get himself killed!” Little Jim cried beside me.
“He’ll tear his mouth out!” Poetry exclaimed. “We’d better net him.”
And that is what we did do. Instead of playing Old Whopper the way you do an ordinary bass until he wears himself out or tears his mouth and gets away, we got John’s landing net from the cabin. And, as soon as we had a chance, we had Old Whopper, gasping and as excited and wild-eyed as a pony somebody was trying to break to ride, in the center of the net. Big Jim held onto him with a damp cloth while Circus tried to carefully work the hook out of his mouth. But he couldn’t. It wouldn’t come out.
“Pliers,” Big Jim said. “We need a pair of pliers. We can cut the shank and slide it out.” The shank was the straight part of the hook.
“John’s got a pair of pliers in the tackle box,” Shorty Long said, beginning to look all around, even under the Styrofoam seats of the Vida Eterna.
But of course the box wasn’t there. I had seen it floating away with the boat after the upset.
We had to keep Old Whopper wet or, even when we would let him loose, he might die. We all knew that if you catch a fish and don’t plan to keep it and want it to live, you handle it with wet hands and you release it underwater. You never toss it back in—never!
But Dragonfly was using his head too. Everybody else was being a hero, and he and Little Jim hadn’t had a chance to do anything important. All of a sudden, he called from down the shore, “Look, everybody! I found the tackle box!” It had lodged against a willow on the shore.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 17
