So that was the way we got Little Jim’s bear back, and we were all happy again.
5
Winter was getting ready to come out of the north to visit us. School was in full swing, and we were all busy with lessons and tests and hard study, and of course a lot of good hard play too. Nothing very important happened for a while until Big Jim and Big Bob Till got into a fierce fight in which Big Jim almost got licked, and maybe would have if—but let me tell you about it.
It happened on the way home from school one afternoon, and it was all on account of Big Bob Till saying some rough words to a new girl who had moved into our neighborhood. As I told you, we had a new minister in our church, and she was his daughter and was almost as good a Christian as Little Jim. And she wasn’t stuck-up, the way some girls are.
Like most boys, none of our gang played with girls much, although we knew they belonged to the human race. And I realized we ought to be kind to them. My mom had been a girl once herself, and if my mom had been one, then girls must be all right.
The new girl was named Sylvia, and she was in the eighth grade and was very smart. She had curly brown hair that hung down the back of her neck.
I could see right away that Big Jim thought Sylvia was pretty nice, because after she started coming to our school I noticed he combed his hair a little straighter. And when we played prisoner’s base, he tried especially hard not to let her be a prisoner very long.
Big Bob Till must have noticed Big Jim being extra courteous to Sylvia, and he didn’t like it. He must have had an awful dirty mind, for half the time his words were even worse than his father’s were. He was always telling bad things about girls, which filthy-minded boys and men sometimes do.
None of our gang ever talked like that, not only because Big Jim wouldn’t stand for it but because we had sense enough not to. We wouldn’t let anybody else do it when they were with us either. In fact, I had a hard time to keep from punching any boy in the nose whenever I heard him using dirty words. As I may have told you once before, all our gang were Christians, and we weren’t ashamed of it, and we felt sorry for any boy who was afraid to be one for fear some ignorant person would make fun of him.
It’s silly to be afraid to be a Christian. If they still burned people alive because they are Christians—the way they used to hundreds of years ago—and if they decided to burn up the Sugar Creek Gang, I’ll bet Little Jim would stand there looking at the great big yellow flames, and, even though he might be scared almost to death, he’d start to sing one of his favorite songs:
“Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone,
Dare to have a purpose true,
Dare to make it known.”
Then if he had to, for Jesus’ sake, he’d say, “All right! Put me into that old fire, if you want to! I won’t deny Jesus!”
Well, when school was out that afternoon, all seventeen students came scrambling out the only door the little red brick schoolhouse had and started home. They scattered like the bird-shot out of my dad’s shotgun—or maybe like honeybees crawling out of a hive and then flying away.
Now, our teacher had a rule that there wasn’t to be any fighting on the way home from school and that all boys had to be courteous to girls.
Sylvia and her little sister, Jeanelle, who was in the third grade, had to walk home on the same road our gang did. They lived farther away from school than any of the rest of us—about a mile up the road from my house. And there weren’t any school buses, so sometimes their parents would come and get them in their car, especially if it was a rainy day.
Our gang always walked home together as far as we could, wrestling and balancing on top of the rail fences and acting like frisky young colts after they had been shut up in a barn all day. Sometimes we’d take a shortcut through the woods so we could be together a little longer. Big Jim and Circus would walk almost all the way home with Poetry and me. We’d all go down Poetry’s lane, and then they’d climb the fence and go through the woods and get home just as quick.
I noticed that Big Jim had been walking with Poetry and me nearly every night since Sylvia started coming to our school. Of course, we didn’t all walk in one bunch like geese or ducks when they’re going someplace but were all strung out, boys walking with boys and girls with girls.
That afternoon we were walking along, Poetry and Big Jim and all the gang and Sylvia and Jeanelle and Circus’s kind of ordinary-looking sister—the one I was going to kill a spider for if I got a chance. It wasn’t because I liked Circus’s sister the way I thought Big Jim did Sylvia, but because there was something inside of me that made me want to be kind to some girl. Her name was Lucille, which wasn’t a bad name.
While I was walking along beside Poetry and Big Jim, carrying my lunch bucket, I kept wishing that I could start running as fast as I could and turn a handspring in the grass the way Circus was doing right that minute, but I knew I’d make a fizzle of it and maybe get my nose bumped.
Then I got to thinking. What if some boy would run real fast and grab Lucille’s hair ribbon and throw it away? I could run and pick it up and give it back to her, so she’d smile back at me when I grinned at her across the schoolroom when I wasn’t supposed to.
While I was thinking that, all of a sudden Big Bob Till, who had had to stay in after school because he’d done or said something he shouldn’t have, came running down the road, leaping and yelling. He whizzed right past us boys and made a beeline for Sylvia. Before I could even guess what he was going to do, he snatched away her lunch box and threw it over the fence, where it landed out in the cornfield.
Then he called out to her roughly, “Old smarty! There goes your lunch box and all your brains with it! I wouldn’t have had to stay in after school if you hadn’t told on me!”
In a dignified voice, Sylvia said, “I didn’t tell Miss Mulder anything, although someone should have. Such language! A gentleman wouldn’t say such things as you said to me today!”
Sylvia had a low voice that sounded as if her mother had given her good training. Last Sunday she sang a solo in church, and it had sounded very pretty. The words were:
What a wonderful, wonderful Savior,
Who would die on the cross for me!
Then her father, our new minister, had preached a sermon about the man Lazarus being raised from the dead. Lazarus was buried in a cave, and there was a big stone rolled against the mouth of the cave. Some of Jesus’ friends rolled the rock away, and, just as soon as Jesus called and told Lazarus to come out, all of a sudden there he was, alive and well. Just think of it! And he’d been dead for four days! He was still wrapped up in grave clothes, and Jesus said, “Unbind him, and let him go.”
Well, I thought Sylvia was right. Certainly no gentleman would say and do what Big Bob Till had said and done.
I guess Big Jim was thinking the same thing, only his thoughts must have been boiling hot. When he saw that lunch box sail over the fence into the cornfield, he stopped dead still. His jaw clicked shut, and his fists doubled up, and I knew from the way I’d felt at different times in my life that something was going to happen.
Just then Big Bob Till said something to Sylvia even worse than he had said to her on the school ground. And the next thing I knew I was holding Big Jim’s lunch box in one hand and mine in the other, and Big Jim was shooting like an arrow straight for that big foul-mouthed bully.
Big Bob Till must have been expecting something like that. I suppose he hadn’t forgotten the way Big Jim had licked the daylights out of him last summer on Bumblebee Hill, and maybe he’d been planning to get revenge. He knew a lot of wrestling tricks too. He whirled around and stooped low just as Big Jim got there. He grabbed Big Jim around the knees, turned a backward somersault, and threw him clear over his head.
Big Jim landed with a thud flat on his back in the grass. And before you could say Gingerbernooster, Bob was on top of him, slamming him with his fists and yelling, “You fuzzy-mustached, churchgoing sissy! You’re going to get—” Then Bob
swore, using the same words his father does when he swears.
Little Jim beside me was as white as a sheet. Little Jeanelle was crying. Lucille looked scared. And Sylvia stood looking kind of like a queen who had lost her crown.
I stood watching, with the two lunch boxes in my hands. I kept wondering why Big Jim didn’t turn over and shove that bully off him and fight the way I knew he could. Then I noticed that he had turned pale as though he was sick. Then I heard him groan, and I knew he was already beaten. If somebody didn’t help him, maybe Bob’s hard fists would break his nose.
It didn’t take me long to get rid of those lunch boxes. I didn’t even take time to see where they fell. I made a flying tackle for one of Bob’s legs, got hold of it, shut my eyes, and held on for dear life. I started pulling and yanking and twisting. Whenever I heard Big Jim groan, I felt myself getting madder, because I could still hear Bob’s fists whamming away at him.
And then Poetry and Circus were in the fight, and somebody else too. A little later, when we got ourselves untangled, what do you suppose we found out? At first I couldn’t believe my eyes, but the reason we could finally pull Bob Till off Big Jim was not only because Poetry and Circus had helped but because Little Tom had gotten hold of his brother’s other leg and was fighting on our side!
Now we had Bob down on his stomach with Poetry sprawled across his shoulders, and the rest of us holding his arms and legs. On the ground beside us was Big Jim, with Little Jim and Dragonfly trying to help him sit up. You see, when Big Jim landed on his back, there’d been a rock in the grass that had hurt his back so much he hadn’t been able to fight at all.
In a minute Little Tom Till got up and climbed over the fence and got Sylvia’s lunch box. He came back and handed it to her bashful-like, without looking up, so he didn’t see her smile.
But we all heard her say, “Thank you, Tom. You’re a gentleman.”
And I wished I’d been Tom myself. From that minute on, I knew Tom and I were going to be good friends, and maybe he’d even belong to the Sugar Creek Gang someday.
6
We didn’t dare let Bob Till up, because he was still angry and might do something desperate, so we kept on holding him down. It was especially easy because there were so many of us.
But it was hard for Poetry to stay angry very long. Nearly everything anybody said or did reminded him of a poem. So while he was still holding Bob’s shoulders down, he lifted his head and saw all of us with our arms and legs tangled up. It must have made him think of a centipede, which is a many-legged insect, so he began to quote:
“A centipede was happy quite
Until a frog, in fun,
Said, ‘Pray, which leg comes after which?’
This roused his mind to such a pitch,
He lay distracted in the ditch,
Considering how to run.”
Bob Till, lying there in the ditch, did have a lot of legs on him, only they were boys’ legs, and they weren’t all his own. He had Poetry’s, mine, and Circus’s, plus his own, which is eight, and if you counted each arm for a leg, that’d make sixteen.
Well, we had to do something with our centipede, so we decided to ask Big Jim.
Big Jim still looked pale. He struggled to his feet and stood looking down at us as though he thought we were worth a million dollars. Then he turned to Sylvia and said, “He’s your prisoner, Sylvia. What shall we do with him?”
I don’t know what I expected her to say, but I thought he ought to have some kind of punishment, such as being thrown into Sugar Creek with his clothes on.
Sylvia looked like a queen again. I felt proud that Big Jim liked her. She not only got good grades in school, but if the church gave grades for the ones that were the best Christians, she would have had an “A” in everything. Someday we might even decide to let her belong to our gang, I thought. Big Jim could be the king and she the queen.
Sylvia stood there in the road with the September wind blowing some of her hair across her forehead, and she said—and I guess she must have heard her dad say it first—“Bob doesn’t need to be punished. He needs to be changed.” Her voice was so kind it sounded as if she was sorry for him.
Bob squirmed and begged us to let him up so he could breathe, so we made Poetry get off his shoulders, but we wouldn’t let him up yet.
Do you know what Sylvia decided to do with Bob? I guess she knew that his dad was not a Christian and that Bob had never been to church in his life, so she decided that now would be as good a time as any for him to hear his first sermon.
When Little Jim saw what was going to happen, his eyes got all shiny. Circus’s monkey face looked kind of like Sugar Creek’s face does when there isn’t any wind. Big Jim’s eyes were looking at Sylvia.
She started talking, and that was the grandest “church service” I ever went to in my life, even if it did last only seven or eight minutes. We didn’t have any piano or organ or hymn-books or choir, and nobody said “Amen” out loud. But I kept thinking all the time, “Attagirl, Sylvia!” which is about the same as “Amen,” only it isn’t quite as reverent, and people don’t say it in church. But I’ll bet Jesus knew what I was thinking and was glad.
We had flowers though, as churches generally have. All along the rail fence were beautiful goldenrod that nodded their heads in the wind every now and then as if they were saying the same thing I was thinking.
And if you take a look at a goldenrod up close, it looks like the chandelier that hangs from the ceiling in the middle of our church, with maybe eight or ten different lights fastened to one stem. Only the goldenrod doesn’t hang down but holds its head up toward the sky, as Sylvia’s dad says Christians can do when their sins are all forgiven.
While she was talking, a flock of noisy blackbirds flew over the cornfield and started holding a convention in the old hickory tree across the road. They made me think again of the black notes on Little Jim’s music sheets—so we had music even if it was out of tune.
Pretty soon the blackbirds got so noisy that we couldn’t hear Sylvia very well. And that broke up our meeting, but not till Bob had heard enough to know that he was lost and could be saved—if he wanted to be and would repent of his sins and believe that Jesus Christ had come out of the grave after dying for all our sins and was alive now and would come into any boy’s heart if he wanted Him to.
When Sylvia finished telling Bob what everybody in the world ought to know, she said to us, “Unbind him, and let him go,” which we did.
The minute Big Bob was free, he looked around as if he couldn’t see very well, and I thought I saw a tear trying to get out of one of his eyes, a little like the moon trying to get out from behind a big black cloud. And then he was on his feet and over the fence and running toward home without saying a word.
I guess maybe he was pretty surprised that we didn’t give him some hard punishment. I also decided maybe he was in a hurry to get away, so that in case the tear got bigger and fell out of his eye, it would fall where nobody could see it.
When I got home that afternoon a little later than usual, I set my lunch box on our kitchen table, ate the sandwich Mom had left for me, and went out to gather the eggs, which was one of my chores and a lot of fun.
One of our old white hens always laid her egg in a nest in the haymow, so I had to climb up there each day to get it, that is, unless she didn’t happen to lay an egg that day. Sometimes hens don’t.
When I was up there that afternoon, I got to thinking about the time I’d tucked my little New Testament in a crack away up in a corner and decided to leave it until Circus’s father would get saved. I’d gone up there every day and read it because that was one of my rules—to read the Bible every day.
Well, I thought, if Circus’s dad could be saved, then why not Big Bob Till? I stood there on a pile of alfalfa hay, which cows like so well, and I listened. Nobody seemed to be downstairs. At least not any people. I did hear old Mixy, our black-and-white cat, mewing as if she was lonesome. I took my New Testamen
t out of my pocket and read a very interesting chapter.
The Bible has some places that even grownups can’t understand without studying them. My dad has a lot of different books that help to explain these places, which is what all boys’ parents should have so they can answer all the hard questions that come popping into a boy’s head—and just as quick come tumbling out of his mouth.
I finished reading my chapter. Then I climbed over the hay to the place where the crack was in the log, and there was a spiderweb right across the crack. Then I put both knees down on the hay and prayed for Bob Till, even if I didn’t like him very well. Then I left the New Testament and climbed down and went on gathering eggs.
Pretty soon I came to the ladder that leads up, higher and higher, all the way up to the cupola—the tiny room on the tip-top of our barn. I always liked to climb up there and look out the glass windows across the cornfields and up along Sugar Creek. There were a lot of spiderwebs up there too, so I couldn’t help but remember that I’d planned to kill a spider for Lucille Browne, Circus’s kind of ordinary-looking sister. In fact, she was more than kind of ordinary-looking. Anyway, I decided if I was to kill a spider for her, I’d better hurry up and do it, or pretty soon it’d be winter and there wouldn’t be any spiders to kill.
After supper, while the sun was still up pretty high, Little Jim’s mom sent him over to our house on an errand and told him he could stay a while and play. Then, just before dark, I could ride him home on the back of my bicycle. I asked Dad if we could go down to the spring and get a drink, and he said we could but not to go in swimming, which we didn’t want to do anyway.
Pretty soon away we went as fast as we could run, Little Jim running like a little cottontail and I like a big long-legged jackrabbit. I guess I’d grown about two inches that summer and was beginning to be all hands and feet, which made me look more and more like Bill Collins, which wasn’t much. But Little Jim liked me and didn’t care how I looked on the outside.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6 Page 18
