Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 1-6

by Paul Hutchens

  “What’s her name?” Dragonfly wanted to know right away, just as he does whenever any of the gang gets a new sister or brother. We were at the tall iron pump not far from the school-house door when Dragonfly asked the question.

  Little Jim knew the answer, because my mom had already been to see the baby. So he said proudly, “Her name is Jill Nadene.”

  Dragonfly frowned and said, trying to be funny, “I’ll bet she’s only about a Foote long.”

  And Poetry, whose parents had also already been to see the baby, came puffing up just then and said,

  “Little Jim and Jill went up the hill

  To fetch a pail of water;

  Jim fell down and broke his crown,

  And Jill came tumbling after.”

  “It’s a pretty name,” I said to Little Jim, remembering what he’d said last year when my little sister was born and I’d told him her name was Charlotte Ann.

  “Sure it is!” Little Jim said.

  I looked at him standing straight beside the sugar tree, and he actually looked as if he had grown several inches during the night, just like a stalk of corn when it’s had a good rain. Little Jim’s having a baby sister to protect was like a good rain to make him grow. He looked bigger. He felt bigger, which a boy does at a time like that.

  He, Dragonfly, Poetry, and I all went inside the school then to see that the dust was all off the seats, the windows were open, and the blackboard was clean—which it wasn’t very long, because Poetry and Little Jim started playing tic-tac-toe on it. Dragonfly went back to his new hobby, which was looking up words in the dictionary.

  Seeing Dragonfly standing there, I said to him, “Look up the word superstitious, will you?”

  He did. The dictionary said, “Disposed to believe in superstitions,” which didn’t make much sense to our minds, but whatever it was it wasn’t a compliment to be that. And Dragonfly was it.

  In a little while, others of the seventeen children started to come, and soon we were all in our seats again with Miss Lilly standing in her nice dress with the lily designs on it, looking out over the room at us, smiling but also looking sober.

  We came to order, and then she said, “Boys and girls of District Number Nine”—which is the number of our school district in Sugar Creek Township—“I have a serious problem to present to you. As you know, Mr. Foote, our township trustee, has been instrumental in securing the release of—” Miss Lilly’s blue eyes roved the room for a minute and focused on Little Tom Till, then hurried on to me and the rest of us “—the release from boys’ jail of Robert Till. Robert came home Saturday afternoon and then as suddenly disappeared again. That means, of course, that he has done what is called ‘jumped parole,’ or violated his parole. That means plenty of trouble for him—at least a longer sentence for him in reform school.

  “Now …” Miss Lilly looked so pretty standing there beside her desk that I got to thinking about spiders again and wished I could kill one for her. “Now,” she said, “what Mr. Paddler and I are trying to do is to give him still another chance, and we need your cooperation. Robert is afraid to come home and live here now, because he says everybody will make fun of him and have nothing to do with him. I have here a paper which I’d like you all to sign, and as soon as we find Robert, we’ll let him read it. Perhaps he will come back to school again and continue his education. All boys need an education— almost have to have it these days.”

  Pretty soon Miss Lilly’s nice speech was finished, and she read us the paper. It said:

  We, the undersigned members of District No. 9, Sugar Creek Township, want Robert Till to have another chance. We pledge ourselves not to make fun of him or at anytime say anything to make him feel humiliated. We will treat him like one of the rest of us, if he will come back to school.

  Miss Lilly walked straight across to Big Jim on the other side of the room to ask him to sign first.

  Big Jim didn’t bat an eye. He just sat there staring at the paper lying on his desk and at Miss Lilly’s gold pen, which she was holding out for him to sign with. Big Jim’s hands were under his desk with his fists doubled up. I’d seen those same doubled-up fists before in the Battle of Bumblebee Hill when both of them had gone kerwhack, wham against Bob Till’s jaw, paying Big Bob back blow for blow, fighting in self-defense and also fighting what is called an offensive battle, which my dad says is the best defense.

  I’d seen those same Big Jim fists after he had split open his knuckles on a bank robber’s jaw. Also, in Chicago, I’d seen his arm stretched out with a hollow needle in one of the veins. Then I’d seen the red blood of Big Jim flowing out to save Big Bob Till’s life by giving a transfusion.

  Now as I looked, I saw the muscles on Big Jim’s jaw working. I knew he knew Bob was his worst enemy and that Bob hated him like poison and would do anything—any low-down trick —to get the best of him. And Big Jim was supposed to sign that paper?

  Big Jim still just sat there, staring at the paper and not taking the pen Miss Lilly was holding out to him. I tell you, his face looked grim, and his lips were pressed firmly together. I knew he liked Miss Lilly and would maybe do anything in the world to please her if he could, but—well, what was he going to do? Sign or not?

  Then Big Jim looked at me, and his steel-blue eyes were set and hard and also kind of sad. He looked around the room and then back again to the paper, and I thought he had made up his mind to sign. If he did, all the rest of us would.

  Then just as quick as a chipmunk along Sugar Creek can make an almost invisible movement when he picks up a nut or something else to eat, Big Jim’s writing hand reached out for the pen.

  I sighed with relief, because I felt sorry for Bob Till in spite of his meanness and his swearing, foul-mouthed dad. I felt especially sorry for his sad-faced mother, who had never had a chance to be happy and never would have unless things were changed—or unless she let the One who had made her come into her life and make her happy inside, as my mom once told me.

  But wait! Big Jim wasn’t signing that paper!

  He had the pen in his hand all right, then in both hands, and then, with his eyes still staring at the paper or else at his desk in front of him, he took the cap off the end of the pen and slowly pushed it onto the other end, where the pen point was. Looking up at Miss Lilly with his face set, he said, “I’m sorry, Miss Lilly. The Sugar Creek Gang can’t sign that paper. We’d like to, but we can’t!”

  He made a quick gesture with the closed pen and handed it back to her.

  11

  The Sugar Creek Gang can’t sign that paper!” That’s what my unbelieving ears had heard Big Jim, our leader, say.

  The atmosphere in that room was thick as smoke for a while, until Miss Lilly sort of came to herself, probably feeling as if Big Jim had struck her. She stood in front of his desk with the pen in her hand and with a hurt expression on her face. Then she turned to the rest of us, a little like a fish that was out of the water, gasping for air, and as though she wanted us to sympathize with her or something.

  She picked up the paper from Big Jim’s desk and went up and laid it on her own. To all of us, she said in a friendly voice, “Let us all be thankful that we live in America, a country where men and women and boys and girls can be free to follow the dictates of their own consciences, without being compelled by some dictator.”

  Then she smiled in every direction, even in Big Jim’s, and announced, “Will the first grade reading class please pass?”

  And all the little girls in the small front seats scrambled from different directions and went up to the front bench, which is called a “recitation” bench, and the rest of us got busy on our own work.

  My very first arithmetic problem was about a grocer who was counting the money in his cash register, and I couldn’t help but think of Bob Till again. That was the reason he was in trouble in the first place—he had broken into Mr. Simondson’s store and taken some money out of the cash register. And Big Jim had seen him break in through a back door in an al
ley.

  Anyway, Miss Lilly didn’t say anything more about the paper, and we didn’t either, although at recess time I noticed that, when she started to pump herself a drink at the long-handled iron pump, Big Jim ran lickety-sizzle across the schoolyard and offered to pump the water for her.

  She let him do it and said, “Thank you, Jim.” She also smiled at him.

  That day passed, and the next, and the next, but nobody saw Bob Till, and nobody said anything to us about him. He had just dropped out of sight as if a hole had opened in the earth and he had fallen in and disappeared.

  Then came Friday night, when Dragonfly saw the ghost, which we saw too.

  It had been a simple matter to convince our parents to let us sleep in the cave. Of course, some of our dads had gone down to look at it and to go inside and see how dry it was and that it had safe walls and a safe ceiling that wouldn’t cave in.

  I had my outdoor sleeping bag and my nightclothes all ready, because even though we were going to sleep in a cave, I had to wear pajamas. I walked into our living room after supper and took a look at Charlotte Ann, who was asleep in her crib. She had one cute little fist doubled up and pressed against her nose and the other was down under the blankets somewhere. She was lying on her side, breathing noisily and fast the way babies do when they’re asleep.

  “Well, little sister,” I said, “you’re still too small to know what it is to be a man and sleep out in the wild.” Then I turned around and looked toward our kitchen to say good-bye to Mom.

  She turned away quick with a funny smile on her face and a small chuckle.

  “’S’matter?” I asked. “What’s so funny?”

  “Everything’s fine, Billy-boy.” She picked up a chair and moved it over against the kitchen wall, then straightened a curtain, and finally went to the sink, turned on a faucet, and got herself a drink.

  At the kitchen door I stopped, turned around, and said, “Well . .?”

  Mom didn’t say anything but set the glass she had been drinking out of in its place.

  “Well,” I said, wondering why she didn’t say anything. “I’m going away for the night.”

  “What time will you want breakfast?” she asked. “Or will you boys eat at the cave?”

  She didn’t seem to realize how important it was for me to sleep away from home in a dangerous cave, just like a wild man, so I said, “Oh, maybe about half past seven.”

  “We’ll have it at seven as usual,” Mom said and went on working.

  Outdoors, I called to Dad, who was at the barn, and said, “Good night, Dad. I’m going now.”

  He looked up. In his hand was a pail of mixed skim milk and bran, which he had been pouring into a long trough where about seventeen pigs were trying to eat out of a trough only long enough for twelve.

  “So long, Bill,” he hollered to me and turned to his work.

  “So long,” I called back.

  Just that minute Dragonfly came whizzing up to our gate on his bicycle, and also just that minute Dad said, “I’ll leave the back door open, Bill, in case for any reason you decide you’d rather sleep the rest of the night in your own warm, safe bed.”

  That made me angry. Imagine my dad thinking I’d be scared of anything, or couldn’t rough it, or wouldn’t be safe in an innocent cave!

  “Hello, Dragonfly,” I said. “Ready?”

  “Mom won’t let me.”

  “Won’t let you what?” I asked.

  “Mom won’t let me sleep in the cave.”

  “I thought you said your dad said you could.”

  And Dragonfly said, “I have two parents, and Mom says the cave is too close to the cemetery.”

  “Too close to a place where there are a lot of dead people?” It was disgusting to hear talk like that. “You’re too superstitious,” I said. “That’s what you get for studying the dictionary so much. You know there isn’t any such thing as a ghost, and—”

  “You know it, and I know it, but my mother doesn’t know it,” Dragonfly said, the same thing he was always saying. “There was a great big black cat ran right across the road in front of me less than six minutes ago,” he finished.

  “He probably ran because he was afraid of you,” I said, kidding him.

  “But doesn’t that mean bad luck?”

  “Only to people who are dumb enough to believe it,” I told him.

  Well, the cave was on the way to Dragonfly’s house, as was the old abandoned cemetery, so I rode to his house on the handlebars of his bike to help him convince the other side of his parents that it was perfectly safe for a strong boy to sleep in an innocent cave.

  When we got to Dragonfly’s house, his mom was as worried as anything. “You boys aren’t really going to try to sleep in that old cave, are you?” she asked, and I looked at her worried face.

  “Certainly,” I said politely, “and I’ve come to ask special permission for Dragonfly. We need him. He’s almost the most important member of the gang. Besides,” I said, “there isn’t any such thing as a ghost—Old Man Paddler says so.”

  Dragonfly’s mom was just taking a pie out of the oven. She set it on a breadboard on the table and said slowly, “Well, I suppose I’ll have to let him go. Would you like a piece of blueberry pie?”

  And that settled that. We ate the pie. It also settled something else in my mind, because when we got through eating that blueberry pie, Dragonfly’s teeth looked as if they had indelible pencil stains on them.

  Pretty soon Dragonfly’s mom had a blanket ready for him, and we rode away.

  At the end of their lane, all of a sudden a big black cat darted out from behind a hedge and tried to dash across the road in front of us. Dragonfly and I were both on the bike, and the cat and both of us got tangled up. Dragonfly stepped on the brakes quick, skidded the back tire, and we both turned upside down in the ditch, on top of each other and the bicycle and also the cat, which hissed at us and beat it in some direction or other.

  “What did I tell you?” Dragonfly cried from under me somewhere.

  I answered from somewhere over him and the bicycle, “It wasn’t the cat’s fault. It’s only people that believe in superstitious things that have accidents like this and get banged up.”

  “Do you believe in them?” Dragonfly asked, which was a sarcastic question.

  The bicycle was still all right, so we got up and rode on. We left the bike not far from the cave and got there ahead of some of the gang. Big Jim and Circus were already there, arranging things and driving a stick or two into cracks in the wall for us to hang our clothes on.

  It wasn’t quite dark, but there were several hundred dozen mosquitoes around, which would want to eat us up if they could, so we gathered firewood. After a while, we’d have a fire to help keep the mosquitoes away.

  In a short while, Little Jim and Poetry came along. Tom Till couldn’t come, because his parents would not let him. We all sat around the mouth of the cave and talked and looked into the fire, which we had built against a rock not far from the entrance.

  Time flew past, and soon it was nine o’clock and time to go to bed. We sat around inside the cave, with the two candles lit, one on a shelf on one side and one on the other, and the firelight making us feel sure no wild animal out there would dare try to get in.

  Big Jim took out his New Testament and read to us a fine chapter from the book of John. The story was about a fire that the Lord Himself had built on the shore of Lake Galilee one morning, and how the Lord and Peter had a talk about how much Peter loved Him. I felt myself wishing I had been Peter and had loved the Lord as much as he did. I even wished maybe sometime I’d get to see Jesus just the way He looked when He was here on earth.

  After that, each one said his own prayers, most of us saying them quietly, and then we were ready to go to sleep.

  We drew straws to see who got to blow the candles out, and Poetry and I got the job, which we did in two breaths at the same time just as we’d done before.

  Then we lay down, and at once
Dragonfly was squirming and saying, “Ouch! What in the world?”

  “’S’matter?” most of us whispered and told him to keep still.

  “I’m lying on something hard. I can feel it through my blanket.”

  I turned on my flashlight, and he dug down under him and pulled something out, and— would you believe it?—it was a cuff link like Old Man Paddler used in his shirts. Imagine, a cuff link in a cave!

  “How’d that get here?” he asked.

  By that time we were all sitting up and blinking our eyes and looking at the cuff link and at each other.

  “Aw, that’s nothing to get worried about,” Poetry said sleepily, but he nudged me and put his forefinger up to his lips, which meant “Ssh!” “It might have gotten tangled up in some of our clothes, and we brought it from home. Let’s go to sleep.”

  With that remark and explanation, which seemed to satisfy all of us, Poetry turned back to his sleeping bag.

  I snapped off my flashlight, and we all were trying to sleep again. Just as I was about to doze off, and after everybody else seemed asleep, I felt Poetry nudge me gently and whisper close to my ear, “Psst, Bill. Are you awake?”

  I was, but I didn’t want to be, I was so sleepy.

  “’S’matter?” I asked.

  And he whispered, “Feel this.” He shoved something into my hand.

  I could feel right away what it was. It was a little bottle with a nipple on it, like the kind Charlotte Anne used to use, and was what Poetry had used to get his lamb to follow him to school that Monday morning.

  What in the world? I thought but got my thoughts interrupted when Poetry whispered to me, “There’s a ghost tied out there in the bushes waiting for you and me to go and get it.”

  12

  I still didn’t want to wake up, but Poetry was already fumbling himself out of his blanket and crawling toward the cave’s exit. So I did the same thing, and the next I knew we were both far enough outside not to be heard by anybody. I wasn’t interested in being mischievous at that time of night, but Poetry had everything all planned to half scare the daylights out of the gang, so I had to listen to him.