I noticed Little Jim’s brown envelope, with his awkward handwriting on it, lying on the other end of the ironing board. She’d probably read it, I thought. Then I got a little mixed up in my mind and was sorry for it afterward.
“Bob’s got a nice mother, too,” I said. I knew she knew I was thinking, How could such a nice mother have two boys, one of which was a good boy and the other was a juvenile delinquent?
There were tears in her eyes. She looked at me with a sad smile and answered, “I love them both—and someday God will answer my prayers for them.”
I forgot for a minute that I had actually been thinking Tom was just as bad as his very bad big brother, Bob, because he had stolen my watermelon.
“Where’s Tom now?” I asked.
She said, “I think he’s down along the creek somewhere. If you see him or Bob on your way home, tell them it’s chore time.”
She thanked me again for the oranges, and I swung onto my bike and pedaled through their barnyard, out their open gate, and on toward the creek.
At the bridge I stopped, looked downstream again at the green tent, and, without even straining my eyes, I caught a fleeting glimpse of a boy just my size, wearing a gray-and-maroon-striped T-shirt. He was at the edge of the cornfield behind the green tent and close to the clothesline, which had on it women’s different-colored clothes.
“Right now, Bill Collins,” I heard my harsh voice saying to me through my gritted teeth, “right now, you’re going to find out what is what and why. Right now!”
I was down the embankment and under the bridge in a hurry, then out in the cornfield, scooting along like one of Circus’s dad’s hounds trailing a cottontail—except that my voice was quiet.
Closer and closer I came to the place where I had last seen Tom Till, shading my eyes to see what I could see.
Right then I heard a whirlwind of flying feet coming in my direction straight down the corn row I was stooped over in. In only a few fast-flying seconds, whoever was coming would be storming right into the middle of where I was. And if they didn’t happen to see me and I didn’t get out of the way, they’d bowl me over like a quarterback getting tackled in a football game.
There were sounds other than flying feet and the rustle of the corn blades, though. There was an angry man-sounding voice shouting, “Stop, you little rascal! Come back here with that! Do you hear me! I’ll whip the daylights out of you if I ever catch you!”
There was also a small, half-scared-to-death voice yelling “Help! Help! Help!”
My muddled mind told me the small frightened voice was Tom Till’s and the angry voice was his big brother Bob’s—it sounded just like his—and that Bob was chasing his brother and if he caught up to him he would give him a licking within an inch of his life.
Even as I glimpsed Little Tom flying ahead of whoever was behind him, I noticed again that he was dressed the same way I was. His being dressed like that made us look like twins, although, of course, he looked more like me than I did him, which means he was a better-looking boy than I would have been if I had looked like him.
For some reason, when I realized that Tom was crying and running to get away from having to take a licking, in spite of the fact that I
thought he was a watermelon thief, it seemed I ought to do something to save him.
Closer and closer and faster and faster those flying feet came storming toward me. Then, without warning, Tom swerved to the left and dashed down another corn row. At the same time, part of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address came to life in my mind, and I knew I was really going to do something quick to help save him.
A thought came lightning fast into my mind. I was dressed exactly like Tom, my hair was red like his, and we were the same height. From behind, we would look so much alike that whoever was chasing him wouldn’t know the difference.
I glimpsed Bob coming and waited only until I felt sure he had seen me. Then, like a young deer, I started on a fast gallop down the same corn row. I was sure I could run faster than Tom, because I had beaten him in a few races, and it would be quite a while before Bob could catch up with me. When he did catch up, he’d stop stock-still and stare, and Tom would be safe—for a while anyway.
Well, the chase was on, and I was scooting down the corn row like a cottontail, running and panting and grinning to myself to think what a clever trick I was playing.
But that big lummox Bob seemed to be gaining on me. Within a few minutes he would have me, if I didn’t run faster.
Faster! my excited mind ordered me. But I quickly realized I couldn’t save myself by just being fast. I’d have to be smart too, like a cottontail outsmarting a hound.
Remembering how cottontails disappear into a thicket if they can, then circle and go right back to where they were before, I turned left, as Little Tom had done, and raced madly back toward the tent and the creek and the plastic clothesline.
It wasn’t a good idea. Bob heard me, or saw me, or something. I hadn’t any sooner shot out into the open and dashed between a pair of brown pants and a lady’s pink dress hanging on the line than I heard panting and flying feet behind me and knew I would have to be even smarter than a cottontail.
“You dumb bunny!” a savage voice yelled at me. “I’ll make short work of you. Stop, you little thief! Stop!”
Right then was when my world turned upside down. That fierce, very angry voice yelling at me was not the voice of Big Bob Till, but of somebody else!
And I realized that it was somebody who, if he caught up with me, might not know that I wasn’t Tom Till, and I would get one of the worst thrashings a boy ever got. What, I asked myself, as I panted and dodged and sweated and grunted and hurried and worried, what will happen to me?
I made a dive around the tent, planning to dart into the path that went through the forest of giant ragweeds to the bridge.
At the bridge I would rush up the incline on the other side and gallop across. As soon as I got across the bridge, I’d leap over the rail fence, hurry through the woods to the spring, get onto the path made by barefoot boys’ feet, and in only a little while after that I’d be across the road from our mailbox and would be safe.
I took a fleeting glance over my shoulder to see who was chasing me, and—can you believe this?—my pursuer was not only not Bob Till but wasn’t a boy at all. Instead he was a woman wearing brown pants and a woman’s hat!
Boy oh boy, was I ever in the middle of a situation!
In that quick over-the-shoulder glance I noticed that her hat was straw-colored and looked a lot like the kind Little Jim’s mom wears to church. Even in that quarter of a second I was seeing her over my shoulder, I saw that the hat was also the same color as the ripe wheat on Big Jim’s dad’s farm and that there were several heads of wheat slanted across its left side instead of a feather as lots of women’s hats have on them.
What on earth! Why was I, Bill Collins, a husky, hardworking farm boy with muscles like those of the Village Blacksmith—“as strong as iron bands”—running from one helpless woman, just one?
But I hardly had time even to wonder what on earth, because in that fleeting glance my eyes had seen something else. I’d seen Little Tom Till storm out of the cornfield behind the forest green tent, shoot like a blue-jeaned arrow toward the tent opening, and disappear inside.
Glancing over my shoulder like that was one of the worst things I could have done. I had seen one red-haired boy dashing into a tent, and I knew where he was right that very second, but I didn’t know where I, myself, was. When my eyes got back to the path I was supposed to be running in, I wasn’t running in it at all. I had swerved aside, stumbled over a log, and now was making a head-over-heels tumble in the direction of the creek.
If the red boat hadn’t been there, I’d have landed in the water. Instead, I fell sprawling into the boat—that is, that’s where I finally landed when I came to a stop after rolling down the incline.
Looking up from my upside-down position, I saw the woman. Her face was
hard and had an angry scowl on it. I realized with a gasp that in a minute she would be down the slope herself and I would be caught in what I could see were very large, very strong hands. Even though I was saving Tom Till from getting the daylights whaled out of him, I probably would get the double-daylights thrashed out of me.
If it had been winter and Sugar Creek frozen over, I could have leaped out of the boat and raced across the ice to the other side, but there isn’t a boy in the world who can run or walk on water in the summertime. There was only one way for me to escape that fierce-faced woman, who in another few jiffies would be down that incline herself and into the boat and have me in her clutches.
Quick as a flash I was up and in the prow of the boat, unfastening the guy rope. Then, with one foot in the boat and the other against the bank, I gave the boat a hard shove, and out I shot into the stream.
“You come back here, you—you little redheaded rascal!” the woman’s gruff, angry voice demanded.
I was in such a worried hurry to save myself that for the moment I had forgotten Tom Till. But then, what to my wondering ears should come sailing out over the water but Tom’s own excited voice, calling, “Hey! Wait for me! Wait!”
Tom’s high-pitched voice coming from behind her must have astonished the scowling woman. She turned her head quick in the direction of the tent, and her eyes landed on Tom, who was waving at me and yelling and running toward the creek, looking exactly like me in his blue jeans and maroon-and-gray-striped T-shirt.
She must have thought she was seeing double or that there were two of me. I was out in the nervous water in her red rowboat, floating downstream toward the Sugar Creek island. But I was also on dry land, running like a deer toward the creek, waving my arms and yelling to me in the boat to “Wait for me!”
The situation certainly couldn’t have made sense to her. For a moment she just stood still and stared, while Tom scurried down the shore to a place ahead of me where there was a little open space. Then he half climbed and half skidded down the embankment, plunged into the water, and came splashety-sizzle toward the boat.
It was then that I noticed he was carrying something, which was making it hard for him to make fast progress. If my mind had had a voice, I think I could have heard it screaming an exclamatory sentence: He’s got another water jug with a burlap bag wrapped around it! What on earth!
The woman wearing the straw hat with the little bundle of imitation wheat straw across its right side started on a fast run toward the place where Tom had plunged in, as though she was going to splash in after him and try to get to the boat first or else to stop him.
But in almost less than no time, Tom had hoisted his water jug over the gunwale and set it down into the boat at my feet. Then he swung himself alongside and climbed in over the stern, which is the way to climb into a boat without upsetting it.
“Hurry!” Tom Till panted to me. “Let’s get across to the other side!”
I didn’t know why he had been running, but I figured he would tell me as soon as he could—that is, if he wanted to. Besides, I was in a hurry to get across myself.
I reached for the oars, and that’s when I got one of the most startling surprises of my life. There weren’t any oars in the boat—not even one! Not even a board to use for a paddle! All there was in the boat was a water jug with burlap bags wrapped around it, one very wet red-haired, blue-jeaned, maroon-and-gray T-shirted boy, and one dry one. And all the time our boat was drifting farther downstream toward the island.
In fact, right that very minute, the boat, which I had discovered was an aluminum boat painted red and was very light, was caught in the swift current where the creek divides and half of its current goes down one side of the island and the other half down the other side. There wasn’t a thing we could do to stop ourselves from going one way or the other.
Swooshety-swirlety-swishety! Also hiss-ety! Those half-angry waters took hold of our boat, and away we went down the north channel between the island and the shore.
We weren’t in any actual danger as far as the water was concerned. It was a safe boat. And after a while we’d probably drift close enough to an overhanging willow or other tree, and we could catch hold, swing ourselves out, and climb to safety—or to the shore anyway.
But we were in danger for another reason.
That woman wasn’t going to let us get away as easily as that. I saw her begin to race down the shore after us, yelling for us to stop, which we couldn’t.
“What’s she so mad about, anyway?” I asked Little Tom Till.
His answer astonished me so much I almost lost my balance and fell out of the boat: “There’s hundreds and hundreds of dollars in this water jug. It’s the stolen money from the supermarket!”
Boy oh boy! No wonder there was a tornado in that woman’s mind! And no wonder she didn’t want two redheaded boys in blue jeans and gray-and-maroon-striped shirts in a rowboat to get away!
“She’s sure mad as a hornet!” I said to Tom when, like a volley of rifle and shotgun shots, a splattering of very angry, very filthy words fell thick and fast all around on us and on our ears from the woman’s very angry, very harsh man-sounding voice.
“She’s not a she,” Little Tom Till answered. “She’s a he. He’s been hiding out in the tent pretending to be a woman, wearing women’s clothes and earrings and hats and using fancy perfumes and stuff.”
Every second, the fast current was swirling us downstream closer and closer to an overhanging elm, one that had fallen into the water from the last Sugar Creek storm. Its top extended almost all the way across the channel from the north shore to the island. I could see that our boat was going to crash into its leafy branches and we’d be stopped.
I also knew that if we could manage to steer around the tree’s top, we’d be safe for quite a while, because a thicket came all the way down to the water’s edge over there. And if the fierce-faced woman—man—wanted to follow us any farther, he would have to leave the shore and run along the edge of the cornfield for maybe fifty yards before he could get back to the creek again.
If only we had even one oar, we could steer the boat near the island where there was open water. We could miss the fallen elm’s bushy top and—
But then, all of a sudden we went crashing into the branches, and there we stopped!
That was when Little Tom Till proved that he had been created as equal as I had and maybe even more so. The very second we struck the tree, he scrambled to his feet, grabbing up the jug and the coil of clothesline that was fastened to it and yelling to me, “Come on! Let’s get onto the island!”
It certainly was a bright idea. When our boat hit the tree, the current had whirled it around, and one end struck the sandy bank of the island and stuck against it. All we had to do was to use the boat as an aluminum-floored bridge, which in an awkward hurry we did. In a minute we were across and out and clambering up the rugged shore of the island into its thicket of willows and tall weeds and wild shrubbery.
“We’re straight across from the sycamore tree and the cave!” Little Tom Till cried. “If we can get across the channel on the other side of the island, and into the cave, and go through it to Old Man Paddler’s cabin, we’ll be safe. Bob’s up there helping him cut wood this afternoon—only he’s mad at me about something.”
The trouble was, the boat that had made such a nice bridge for us to cross on would make the same kind of aluminum-floored bridge for the woman—the man, I mean. He could climb out onto the elm’s horizontal trunk, drop down into the boat, and get across as quick as anything.
Even as I scrambled up the bank behind my gray-and-maroon-shirted friend, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the brown pants with the woman in them—the man, I mean—on the trunk of the tree, working his way along through the branches toward the boat. In another second he would drop down into it, and in another he would be across and onto the island, racing after us.
Soon, the chase was on again—a wild-running, scared, barefoot-boys’ race
ahead of a short-tempered thief dressed in women’s pants and wearing a woman’s straw-colored hat. We dodged our way across that island, which was just a thicket of willow and wild shrubbery with here and there a larger tree and dozens of little craters hollowed out by the floodwaters that went racing across it nearly every spring. Banked against nearly every larger tree trunk were piles of driftwood and cornstalks and other stuff the creek had carried from different farmers’ fields farther upstream and deposited there.
I guess I never had realized what a jungle that island was. I had been on it many a time when I was just monkeying around, looking for shells or studying birds with my binoculars. Once in a while at night in the spring or summer when it was bullfrog season, we would wade in the weedy water along the edge of the riffles with lanterns and flashlights, looking for the giant-sized brown and dark green monsters whose eyes in the light were like the headlights of toy automobiles. Bullfrogs, as you probably know, have long hind legs with bulging muscles, which, when they are skinned, are snow-white. When Mom fries them, they taste even better than fried chicken.
But such a wilderness! And so many rough-edged rocks for a boy’s bare feet to get cut or bruised on, so many briers to scratch him, and so many branches to fly back and switch him in the face when another boy has just gone hurrying through ahead of him.
If we had been running from a real woman, or if only he had been wearing a dress instead of pants, he wouldn’t have been able to take such long steps. And there would have been the chance he might get the skirt caught on a branch or a brier and be slowed down while we dodged our way ahead of him in our mad race to the other side.
“We’re almost there!” Tom Till cried, panting hard from carrying the jug as well as himself.
I could see the other side of the island now and the nervous, excited water in the riffle racing between the island and the other shore. I could see the sycamore tree at the top of the bank and the mouth of the cave just beyond.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 25-30 Page 35
