me before I could say another word. “You’re _not_ to say that!” she
ordered me. “We’re going to give that boy a chance. We’re NOT going to
believe he did this, until we have proof.”
“How much more proof do you want?” I asked. “We saw his car parked
here; we saw the watermelon being dragged in the gunny sack along the
fence right over there on the other side, and actually saw it being
dragged through this hole and hoisted into the car and we saw him drive
away--Poetry and I both did.”
“Did you count your melons?” Mom asked. “Were there any missing?”
“Were there any--?” I stopped. I didn’t even know how _many_ melons
we had. I’d never bothered to count them. Those smaller melons hadn’t
seemed as important to me as Ida had, on account of they had grown from
ordinary watermelon seed, and not from the packet of special seed from
the State Experiment Station.
The only way I could know for sure if any were taken would be to look
all over the patch to see if there were any oblong indentations in the
ground where a melon _had_ been. “All right,” I said, “I’ll find out
right now. I _know_ there was a watermelon in that gunny sack. I felt
it with my own hands, and it was long and round and hard.”
Pop let me have his flashlight, and I crawled through the fence and
started looking around all over the truck patch to see if there were
any melons missing, making a beeline first straight for Ida’s vine to
be sure she was there and all right.
Poetry wanted to go with me but he couldn’t get through the small
hole in the fence. “At least that proves _he_ didn’t do it,” Pop said
grimly, and Poetry answered, “If I’d been cutting a hole in a nice
new fence, I’d have made it large enough for a man my size to get
through”--trying to be funny even at a time like that!
In only a few barefoot jiffies, I was standing beside the circular
trough in which Ida’s vine was growing, and my flashlight was making a
circular arc all around the place while my eyes were looking for Ida
herself.
And then, all of a sudden, I felt myself get hot inside, as I heard at
the same time my excited, angry voice almost _screaming_ back across
the moonlit truck patch to Mom and Pop and Charlotte Ann and Poetry,
“She’s _gone!_ _Somebody’s sneaked in while we were away and stolen
her!_”
There in front of my tear-blurred eyes was a long, smooth indentation
in the ground where for the last eighty-five days--which is how long it
takes to mature a melon--Ida Watermelon Collins had made her home. I
was all mixed up with temper and sobs and doubled-up fists, and ready
to explode.
Ida was gone! Ida had been stolen! _My prize watermelon!_ The mother
of my next year’s watermelon children, and the _grand_mother of my
year-after-next’s watermelon _grand_children--and my college education!
I tell you there were a lot of what Pop called “stormy emotions”
whirling around in our minds when, a little later, the five of us got
back into the car and drove on down the lane in the direction of the
Sugar Creek schoolhouse, to find a place in the road large enough to
turn around in.
We talked a lot, and tried to make plans, Poetry and I especially in
the back seat. I simply couldn’t understand my parents’ attitude. There
was Pop’s fence with an ugly hole in it, and Ida was missing, and yet
he was very calm and very set in his mind about what NOT to do. “Like
your mother says, Bill, we don’t know that Bob did it. It won’t cost
much to repair the fence--and next year, we’ll raise another melon
that’ll be even bigger and better.”
I stormed awhile there in the back seat until I got strict orders from
both my parents to calm down--Mom making it easier for me to by adding
as we pulled up to Theodore Collins on our mailbox, “We’re Christians.
We don’t take revenge on people. We’re going to commit this thing to
the Lord and see what good He will bring out of it?”
It was quite awhile before things were quiet around the Collins’ farm,
that night, with Pop and Mom and Charlotte Ann in the house, and Poetry
and I in our hot cots in the tent under the plum tree.
Tomorrow, when the Gang got together at the Little-Jim tree, we’d
decide what to do--only it seemed like Mom’s attitude was going to
be like a lasso on a rodeo steer to keep me from doing what I really
wanted to do, which was to hunt up Bob Till himself and face him with
the question of what he had done with my watermelon.
“Listen,” all of a sudden I hissed to Poetry in his cot, and before
he could answer, I went on, “If we can find out what happened to the
melon, maybe we can still get the seed from it. Anybody he sold it to
wouldn’t eat the _seeds_.”
At breakfast table next morning, Pop’s prayer was a little longer than
usual, and seemed sort of meant for me to hear. Right in the middle
of it, while Charlotte Ann, in the crook of Mom’s arm, was wriggling
and squirming and reaching both hands and half-fussing to get started
eating, Pop said, “... and bless with a very special blessing those
who have sinned against themselves and against Thee by breaking the
commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Help us to love them and to show
them by our lives that the Christian life is the only truly satisfying
life. Keep us under Thy control ...”
That last request bothered me a little on account of it seemed like I
wanted to be under my own control all day, and that if I was going to
be under Anybody Else’s control I might not get to help teach Bob Till
or whoever-it-was had cut the hole in Pop’s new fence and stolen that
watermelon, a good-old-fashioned lesson by giving him a licking.
Mom’s buckwheat pancakes were the best Poetry had ever tasted, he
told her--which was probably his excuse for tasting so many of them.
He certainly knew how to make Mom’s eyes twinkle, Mom liking boys so
well. In fact all the boys of the Sugar Creek Gang liked Mom so well
they stopped at our house every chance they got just to make her eyes
twinkle while they ate some of her cookies or a piece of one of her
pies.
Mom surprised us all, right then, by saying, “Last night while I
couldn’t sleep for a while, I got to thinking about whoever took your
melon and cut the hole in the fence, and it seemed the Lord wanted
me to pray for him or them. I feel so sorry for boys who do things
like that.” Mom sighed heavily and I noticed her eyes had a faraway
expression in them. Just looking at her, made me think it would be
pretty hard for me to be a bad boy as long as I had such a wonderful
mother.
After breakfast and before we left the table we passed around what we
call the “Bread Box,” which is a small box of cards, each one about
two inches long with a Bible verse printed on it and, say! Do you know
what? Just like it had been when Pop had prayed, I felt like a frisky
young steer that has just been lassoed, on account of the card I picked
out of the box when it was passed to me, had on it, “Love your enemies;
do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use
you.”
When I got through reading my verse aloud like we all do every time,
I looked across the table toward Pop, and his grey-green eyes were
looking straight into mine. He had a half grin on his face when he
said, just as if there wasn’t anybody else in the room, “_Your_
watermelon, and _my_ fence!” I could tell by the expression in his
voice that he had been lassoed too!
Poetry and I managed to get through the morning all right, but it was
hard to wait until two o’clock in the afternoon. We did quite a little
work around the place, though, such as helping Mom with the dishes,
helping Pop with the chores and running a few errands for each of
them. Once we stopped in the middle of the barnyard, while I pointed
out to Poetry the boss hen of our whole flock--the one Pop has named
Cleopatra. Cleopatra is a very proud, high-combed, very pretty White
Leghorn who, like all boss hens in a hen flock, could peck all the
other hens any time she wanted to but not a one of them ever dared to
peck her back. She had already proved to them who was boss by giving
every one of them a licking one at a time.
“We’ve got a boss hen, too,” Poetry told me as we stood watching
Cleopatra proudly lifting her yellow feet and strutting around to show
how important she was.
“We have a _second_ boss, too; she pecks every other hen except the
boss hen, and Cleopatra is the only one that can peck her,” I said
to Poetry, which anybody who knows anything about what Pop calls the
“social life of a flock of hens” knows is the way they live and get
along with each other. At the very bottom of the social ladder in
the Collins’ chicken yard is a bedraggled-looking hen Mom has named
Marybelle Elizabeth. She gets pecked by every other hen in the barnyard
and can never peck _any_ of them back.
We liked Marybelle Elizabeth, though. She was one of the best laying
hens we had, even though in a fight she wasn’t any good at defending
herself, and always ate her lunch alone when all the others were
through.
I was standing beside Poetry near our garden fence watching Marybelle
as she foraged around by herself like she didn’t have a friend in the
world. I was feeling very sorry for her and thinking how lonely a life
she had to live--how she had to take all the unfair things the other
hens did to her and couldn’t ever fight back.
Poetry moseyed on toward the house then and I kept on standing not
more than fifteen feet from Marybelle. “Here, Marybelle,” I comforted
her, “don’t you feel too bad. I live a kind of henpecked life myself.”
Taking a handful of corn from my pocket, I tossed it to her. She lifted
her head high, twisted her neck in every direction like she wondered
how come anybody wanted to be kind to her, then started in gobbling up
the grains of corn as fast as she could.
“Atta girl,” I said to her. “Go _to_ it!”
Pretty soon, Mom called us that dinner was ready and pretty soon after
dinner--and after Poetry and I had offered to help Mom with the dishes
and she had surprised us by letting us--it was time for the Gang to
meet under the Little-Jim tree.
It was one of the nicest dog days days I ever saw, with the heat waves
dancing above the fields, short-horned grasshoppers springing up along
the sunny path as Poetry and I moseyed along, not wanting to run and
get hot on such a hot day. I felt kind of sad because of the watermelon
and also on account of our boys’ world had been invaded by a flock of
girl campers. Girls in our woods would be a lasso on a boy’s fun. He
couldn’t go racing wildly among the trees playing leapfrog and yelling
and whooping it up like a wild Indian on account of he would be afraid
they would think he was a wild Indian.
As I was saying, the short-horned grasshoppers were springing up all
along the path, making their funny little rattling sounds during the
short time they were in the air, the rattling stopping the very second
they landed which they generally did only a few yards from where they
took off. Butterflies of a half-dozen families were tossing themselves
about in the air above the wild rose bushes and here and there and
everywhere in the yellow afternoon.
“Hey, look!” Poetry exclaimed. “There goes a milkweed butterfly! I’ve
got to have him for my collection!”--and he started to start on a fast
run after him, but I stopped him with “_Quiet! The girls will hear
you!_”
He stopped stock-still and scowled and the beautiful Monarch butterfly
swung proudly away in the air, starting to stop every now and then and
not doing it, but lifting itself on the breeze and floating away to
another place.
It wouldn’t be long until fall now, I thought, when all the Monarchs
in the Sugar Creek territory would gather themselves into flocks like
blackbirds and crows do, and before winter they would migrate to the
South, flying all the way down to the bottom of the United States and
even into Mexico or South America. Then next spring they would be back
at Sugar Creek to lay their eggs on the milkweeds which grow in the
fence rows or wherever a farmer doesn’t cut them down.
The larva that hatches from the milkweed or Monarch butterflies is
one of the prettiest a boy ever sees, being a long greenish-yellow
caterpillar with crow-black rings around it all along its body from
its head to its tail--only it is hard to tell which end is its head on
account of it has two short black horns on each end of itself.
You can see a greenish-yellow-and-black Monarch larva hanging from a
milkweed leaf most any time in the late summer, if you stop and look
close enough.
Dragonfly was the only one of the Gang who didn’t come to our meeting
that day, and Poetry and I thought we knew why.
We all plumped ourselves down on the grass under the Little-Jim tree
and relaxed awhile, each of us lying in a different direction like we
nearly always do. Big Jim looked around at the rest of us, letting his
stern eyes stop on each of our faces for a flash of a second--Poetry’s
fat mischievous face, Little Jim’s mouselike innocent face, Circus’s
monkey-shaped face, and my freckle-faced face.
Big Jim’s own face was more sober than it is sometimes and I noticed
his almost mustache on his upper lip was _really_ almost now. If it
should keep on growing as fast as it had the last two or three years,
pretty soon, he would actually have to start shaving. For a second my
mind wandered a little and I was thinking if Big Jim should ever need
a razor strap I would very gladly offer him Pop’s discarded one which
Pop hardly ever used anymore except for some unnecessary reason. There
really wasn’t any sense in having a piece of leather like that lying
around our house cluttering up the place and giving a boy’s father the
kind of ideas it’s not good for a son for his father to have.
“Anybody know where Dragonfly is?” Big Jim asked.
And Poetry answered, saying, “He had asthma last night; maybe his
mother wouldn’t let him come today.”
Big Jim’s stern face probably meant he was remembering his resolution
not to fight Bob Till any more, unless he was forced to in
self-defense. Of course, if Bob himself started a fight we’d have to
defend ourselves.
I got an idea then, and it was, “Bob Till has already started a fight
by stealing our watermelons last night. That’s the same as whamming me
in the stomach--on account of that’s where the watermelons would have
been if I had eaten them. And since he’s already _started_ the fight,
I’ve got a right to defend myself, haven’t I?”
“It’s not the same,” Big Jim said grimly, his jaw muscles still
working. His fists were doubled up though, I noticed, and I could see
he didn’t like the lasso with which he had lassoed himself.
Little Jim spoke up then and said, “How’d we feel in Sunday school
tomorrow if Bob came in with a black eye and a smashed nose?”
Right then as I looked into that cute little guy’s cute little
mouse-shaped face and saw how innocent he was, and realized he was so
tender-hearted he’d even hate to swat a fly and wouldn’t if he didn’t
think the fly needed to be swatted--I say, right then was when I
noticed for the first time the rectangular manila envelope Little Jim
had brought with him. It looked about five inches wide and nine inches
long, and had something in it. I couldn’t tell what it was and didn’t
get to find out until later in the afternoon.
Little Jim’s question, “How’d we feel in Sunday school tomorrow morning
if Bob came in with a black eye and a smashed nose?” took some of the
fight out of me, ’cause I knew Bob _had_ to be in church tomorrow--that
being one of the things the judge who had put him on probation had said
he had to do--he had to go to Sunday school and church at least once
every Sunday for a whole year.
I spoke up then with a half-mischievous voice saying, “The judge told
him he had to go every Sunday unless he is sick and unable to. He might
_not_ be able to if--”
“Stop!” Big Jim cut in. “The thing is not funny!”
Not a one of us said a word for a second. Then Big Jim told us in a
serious voice, “We can’t let Bob break his parole. If he does he’ll
have to go to Reform School for from one to ten years, and we wouldn’t
want that.”
“Hasn’t he already broken it, by stealing my watermelons?” I asked.
Again Big Jim cut in on me almost savagely, “You don’t know that. It
could have been somebody else.”
“It was _his_ car,” I countered. “I’d know it anywhere.”
Just thinking about that burlap bag with the stolen watermelon in it
and Ida herself being gone, stirred me all up inside again, and I was
in a whirlwind of a mood to do something about it. I thought about poor
old Marybelle Elizabeth out by our garden fence all alone at the very
bottom of our chicken yard’s social ladder, and how she had to take
all the pecks of all the other hens and didn’t dare fight back. I felt
sorry for her having to live such a henpecked life, ’cause right that
minute if I had been her, I’d have felt in a mood to start in licking
the feathers off every other hen in the whole Sugar Creek territory.
But we couldn’t just lie around and talk all afternoon, and _do_
nothing. _Nothing_ is something a boy can do for only a few minutes at
a time, anyway.
“Let’s go swimming,” Little Jim suggested.
“Can’t,” I said crossly. “We don’t have our bathing suits.”
“_Bathing suits!_” Circus exclaimed. “Who ever heard of the Sugar Creek
Gang using bathing suits in our own swimming hole!”
Nobody ever had, on account of our swimming hole was quite a ways up
the creek and was well protected on both sides by bushes and shrubbery,
and nobody lived anywhere near the place.
“There are guests in our woods,” Big Jim said. And my sad heart told me
he was right. We _couldn’t_ go swimming.
“Girls!” Poetry grunted grouchily and got shushed by Big Jim who asked,
“They’re human beings, aren’t they?”
“Are they?” Poetry asked with an innocent voice.
Big Jim sighed, looked around at all of us again and said, “Little Jim
here has something he has to do this afternoon and it might be pretty
dangerous. He might need our help. You guys want to go along with him
and me?”
“I,” I said, “am going to do something dangerous myself before the
afternoon is over--but I don’t suppose any of you would care to go with
me. You don’t care whether my prize watermelon was stolen or not. But
_I_ do, and I’m going to do something about it!” My own words sounded
hot in my ears and made me a little braver than I had been--reminded
me of Marybelle Elizabeth at the bottom of our chickenyard’s social
ladder, living a henpecked life and not daring to fight back at all at
any time.
“What you goin’ to do?” Circus asked. “I’m willing to go along and help
save your life if you need any help.”
“Yeah, what _are_ you going to do?” Poetry asked me, and I answered:
“First, I’m going down to the spring to see if Ida is there. If she’s
not, I’m going down to the bridge, and across it, and straight to Bob
Till’s house and ask him straight out if he knows anything about a
watermelon thief.”
I caught Big Jim’s and Little Jim’s eyes meeting and thought I saw some
kind of message pass between them.
“You guys don’t have to go along if you don’t want to,” I said,
beginning to feel a little less brave, now that it seemed like I was
doing more than just talking, but was actually going to do what I said
I was going to do.
“We can’t let you be killed,” Circus said. “Maybe we _all_ ought to go
along!”
Pretty soon we were on our way--to the spring first, of course. As we
moved grimly along, I noticed my teeth were clenched, my lips were
pressed together in a straight line, my eyebrows were down. I was
remembering last night’s ridiculous ride on the melon in the spring
reservoir, the screaming girls, and especially what had happened in
our truck patch near the elderberry bushes. But right in the front
of my mind’s eye was the oblong indentation in the sandy loam where
Ida Watermelon Collins had spent all the eighty-five days of her life
from a tiny quarter of an inch long green baby to the huge, dark green
watermelon she now was if she was. Where, I asked myself, was Ida now?
Maybe she was in the spring reservoir. Maybe whoever stole her had sold
her to the girl scouts. When we got there, would we run into a flock of
perfumed guests, and would they recognize a zebra who had changed his
color and shape since last night?
* * * * *
Well, we didn’t find any girls there, and we didn’t find any watermelon
either. All there was in the big cement pool was a glass fruit jar
filled with butter, a half dozen cartons of milk and there were girls’
shoe tracks all around the place.
There weren’t any boys’ tracks--not even barefoot ones.
Big Jim wanted to look around where the boat had been moored, so we all
gathered in a huddle by the maple tree, keeping as quiet as we could so
if anyone did come to the spring we wouldn’t be seen or heard.
For a jiffy, Little Jim slipped out of our huddle and began nosing
around over by the board fence where last night Poetry and I had
crawled through in such a fast hurry.
“Hey, everybody!” all of a sudden Little Jim’s excited, mouse-like
voice squeaked to us. “Look what I found! A note of some kind!”
I looked quick in his direction and he was holding up a piece of paper.
I remembered then that that was the exact place where Poetry and I had
been when we had unfolded the oiled paper which said on it:
“Eat more Eatmore.”
Poetry’s and my eyes met and we grunted to each other. “That’s only an
old bread wrapper. We threw it away last night,” I said to Little Jim.
“You shouldn’t have,” Little Jim answered, and came loping over to
where we were, with the happiest grin on his face you ever saw. He held
the oiled paper out to us. “Look! There’s a note in it. See!” he cried.
You could have knocked me over with a watermelon seed, I was so
astonished. The oiled paper said, “Eat more Eatmore,” all right, but
as plain as day there was something sealed in between two layers of
the wrapping paper. The thought hit my mind with a thud--there was
something _very_ important in that paper!
“Let’s get out of here quick,” Big Jim said. Taking the paper and
ordering: “Follow me!” he started on a fast run up the path which led
through the forest of giant ragweed toward the old swimming hole.
Zippety-zip-zip, plop-plop-plop, my bare feet went in the cool damp
winding path through the ragweed following along with the rest of the
Gang.
The minute we reached the place where we had had so many happy times
each summer, we heard voices from up the creek.
“Girls!” Circus exclaimed disgustedly. “Let’s get out of here!”
I looked in the direction the sounds came from and saw a boat with
three or four girls in it. In less than a firefly’s fleeting flash, we
were up and gone, scooting through the rows of tall corn headed for the
east end of the bayou.
“We’ll have our meeting in the graveyard,” Big Jim said. “They’ll be
afraid to come there.”
7
In almost less time than it has taken me to write these few paragraphs,
we were in the cemetery at the top of Bumblebee Hill, and sprawled
out on the grass near Sarah Paddler’s tombstone--the one that has the
carved hand on it with the forefinger pointing toward the sky and the
words that say, “There is rest in heaven.”
Every time we had a meeting there, I would read those words, and look
at the other tombstone exactly the same size, which had on it Old Man
Paddler’s name and the date the old man was born, with a blank place
after it, meaning he was still alive--and nobody would put on the date
of his death until after his funeral. Also I would always remember
that that kind old long-whiskered old man was an honest-to-goodness
Christian who loved the heavenly Father and His only begotten Son.
He trusted in the Saviour for the forgiveness of his sins, so I was
sure that when he _did_ die his soul would go sailing out across the
Sugar Creek sky to heaven itself where his wife Sarah and his two boys
already were--and the whole family would be together again.
That old cemetery was certainly an interesting place and was very
pretty. I hoped that nobody would ever try to make it look like the
well-kept other cemeteries around the country. It’d be nice if people
would let the wild rosebushes and the chokecherries and the sumac and
the elderberries and the wild grapevines keep on growing there. Of
course, it would be all right to keep the weeds away from the different
markers and to keep the grass cut, but I liked the little brown paths
that wound around from one to the other--and it always seemed like God
was there in a special way.
You get a kind of saddish happy feeling in your heart when you think
about Him, when all your sins are forgiven and you and your parents
like each other. It seems as if maybe He likes boys especially well, on
account of He made such a pretty boys’ world for them to live in.