breathing of seven half-dressed, half-undressed boys.
“What on _earth?_” I said using my nervous voice before any of the rest
of the gang did.
Circus, trying to be funny, said, “Seven boys are.”
We would have to go in swimming now to get the sand of Dragonfly’s
cornfield off ourselves. Besides I had some dirt in my red hair too and
it would have to be dived out.
It was a not-very-happy gang of boys that sneaked back to our green,
leaf-shaded, dressing room and went in swimming.
“Did any of you guys hear him say ‘Let’s get back to the tent’?” I
asked.
“Sure,” Poetry said, “what of it?”
“What _of_ it?” I exclaimed. “Why, that means they are camping up there
in the woods, somewhere, and we’ll have to be half-scared half to death
every time we go in swimming for fear some woman and her husband will
hear or see us, or else we’ll have to wear bathing suits,”--which none
of our gang had ever worn in our whole lives.
In fact, the only people who ever used bathing suits around Sugar
Creek were people who came from far away who went swimming near the
bridge--and maybe had to ’cause it was a public place. Hardly anybody
knew about our swimming hole.
I had just come up from diving and was shaking the water out of my ears
and rubbing it out of my eyes so I could hear and see, when our mystery
came to an even livelier life than before.
It happened like this. Little Jim had already finished swimming and
was dressing over by the willow where he always dresses and where the
whirligig beetles were still in swimming having a sweet time going
round and round on the surface of the water like as many boys and girls
on skates can do on Sugar Creek in the wintertime.
Little Jim had just finished shoving his head through the neck of his
shirt and was reaching for his overalls that were hanging on the willow
when all of a sudden he let out another excited yell like he had done
before. “Hey, Bill! Circus! Poetry! Everybody! Come here quick! Hurry!
Look what I found. It’s somebody’s billfold!”
By the time I got the water out of my ears and eyes and could see, I
saw him holding up for us to look at a very pretty, brown billfold like
the kind Mom carries in her handbag.
Not waiting to finish getting the water out of my ears and eyes, I
went splashety-gallop straight for Little Jim, who was on the shore by
the willow still holding up for us to see, the brown leather billfold.
Nearly all the rest of the gang were already splashing their different
ways toward Little Jim and almost all of us got there at the same time.
Say, when those fifty or more black, flat, oval whirligig beetles saw
or heard or felt us coming in such a noisy, splashy hurry out of our
swimming hole toward theirs, they got more scared than a gang of boys
would if a dozen cows were stampeding in their direction. In a jiffy,
like whirligig beetles do when they are badly frightened, they stopped
going around in their fast, excited circles and dived under the water
to hide themselves on the bottom of Sugar Creek so that by the time
I got there, there wasn’t a one in sight and only the smell of ripe
apples was left.
Say, that was one of the prettiest billfolds I had ever seen. I
noticed it was made out of a very rich-looking leather that could have
been goat’s skin, although maybe it was what leather workers call
saddle leather and it had a very pretty tooled design on it which was a
galloping horse with wings.
On the other side of the billfold were the initials “F.E.”
* * * * *
Well, what do you do with a fancy, woman’s billfold when you find
it on the ground in a boys’ outdoor dressing room? Do you open the
billfold to see what’s in it or do you just open it to see if a name
is on the identification card in one of its clearview windows, which
most billfolds have in them for the owner’s name and address and for
pictures of different members of the family or favorite friends?
Since Big Jim was the leader of our gang, Little Jim handed the
billfold to him and right away Big Jim said, “It probably belongs
to the turtledove that was here a little while ago looking for her
high-heeled shoes. We’d better get dressed quick and take out after her
and her bobwhite husband or brother, and see if we can find her and
give the billfold back to her.”
“What’s her name?” Little Tom Till wanted to know, crowding in between
Little Jim and me and turning his face sidewise so as soon as Big Jim
would open it, he could read the name on the identification card in one
of the windows.
“We don’t need to know that,” Big Jim said, but I noticed he decided
to unzip the three-way zipper, and when he did the billfold flopped
open like a four-page, leather-covered book. There were four swinging
windows with a picture on each side of three of them. One of the
windows had a card and the name on it was Frances Everhard. Then I
got one of the most astonishing surprises I ever got in my life when
Dragonfly, who was closest to Big Jim and looking on over his elbow,
exclaimed, “Why, she’s got a picture of Charlotte Ann, Bill’s baby
sister!”
Boy, oh boy, you should have seen me crowd my way into the middle of
our huddle to Big Jim’s side to see what Dragonfly had thought he saw,
and to my whirligigging surprise I saw what looked like one of the
cutest pictures of my baby sister, Charlotte Ann, I had ever seen. In
fact, it was one I had never seen before and I wondered when Mom had
had it taken and how on earth a barefoot woman, who dug holes in a
cemetery at night, had gotten it.
Charlotte Ann in the picture was sitting in a fancy-looking highchair
that had what looked like an adjustable footrest like they sell in the
Sugar Creek Furniture Store. The food tray looked like it was shiny and
was maybe made out of chrome. I remembered Mom had looked at one like
that once in town and had wanted to buy it special for Charlotte Ann,
but Pop had said the old one I had used when I was a baby, which was
years and years ago, was good enough. It had made a husky boy out of me
and besides he couldn’t afford it--like he can’t a lot of things Mom
would like to buy and maybe knows she shouldn’t on account of Pop is
still trying to save money so he can buy a new tractor.
Also Charlotte Ann was wearing a very cute baby bonnet and a
stylish-looking coat with a lot of lacy stuff around the collar. I
didn’t remember her having any outfit like that at all, although Mom
could have bought it and had her picture taken one day in town when I
hadn’t known it.
She certainly had a cute expression on her face, which I had seen her
have one like hundreds of times in my life. It looked like she was
thinking some very mischievous thoughts and was trying to tell somebody
what she was thinking and couldn’t on account of she couldn’t talk yet.
“It’s _not_ a picture of Charlotte Ann,” Little Jim said, who managed
to get his small, curly head in close enough to take a look. “She’s got
more hair than that.”
Circus spoke up then and said, “Maybe it was taken about a year ago
when she was a little littler. She’s bigger than that now.”
There were other pictures of different people in the little, clearview
windows. Little Jim noticed there were several different sized bills
in the bill compartment--in fact, three fives and a ten and several
ones, each one of the ones having on it a picture of George Washington,
the first President of United States; the fives, a picture of Abraham
Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States, and the tens,
one of Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States.
Well, we brought it to a quick vote and the decision was to take the
billfold up the path and start looking for the tent, which the man and
woman were camping in and ask them if they had lost it.
As we moved along in a sorta half-worried hurry up the path toward the
spring, I couldn’t for the life of me think how on earth the barefoot
woman could have gotten a picture of my baby sister. What would she
want with it, anyway?
Well, maybe in the next fifteen minutes or so I would find out but
I was worried a little, ’cause, even as I followed along behind
Poetry--all of us having to walk single file on account of the path
through the tall weeds was narrow, just wide enough for one barefoot
boy at a time--I was remembering that the woman was probably the same
person who last night had been digging a hole in the old cemetery under
the big pine tree beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone. What on _earth?_
What had she been digging in the earth for? I wondered.
6
As I told you, it was a terribly hot, sultry day, and over in the
southwest sky a great big yellowish, cumulus cloud was building itself
up into a thunderhead. I knew from having lived around Sugar Creek
for years and years that maybe before the day was over we would find
ourselves in the middle of a whopper of a thunderstorm on account of
that is the way the southwest part of the sky looks when it is getting
ready to pour out about a million gallons of nice, clean rain water all
over the farms around Sugar Creek.
Because Charlotte Ann’s picture was in the pretty, brown, four-windowed
billfold which Big Jim had zipped shut again, he let me carry it, which
I did in the pocket of my overalls, where I also carried a buckeye
like some people do who want to keep away the rheumatism. I carried a
buckeye only because other people did--I not having any rheumatism to
keep away.
Boy, oh boy, it was hot and sultry even in the footpath, which was
mostly shaded, on the way to the spring. Pretty soon we came to the
spring itself, which as you know is at the bottom of an incline and has
an old linden tree leaning out over it and shading it. Pop had made a
cement reservoir for the spring water, which was always full of the
clearest water you ever saw. The water itself came singing out of an
iron pipe, the other end of which Pop had driven away back into the
rocky hillside.
“Here’s a woman’s tracks again,” Dragonfly said, looking down at the
mud on the west side of the spring. My eyes followed his, expecting to
see the print of a woman’s high-heeled shoes. Instead I saw the print
of a very small, bare foot with a narrow heel and five small toes, one
of the toes being bigger than the rest, which meant that the woman had
been still carrying her shoes when she had walked along here on the
way back to her tent.
I noticed there was also a closed glass fruit jar in the spring
reservoir with what looked like maybe a pound of yellow butter in it
like the kind we churned ourselves at our house using an old-fashioned
dasher churn, which I nearly always had to churn myself. I was even a
better churner than Pop because sometimes Pop would churn for twenty
minutes and not get any butter and I could come in and churn for five
minutes and it would be done that quick.
Say, that butter in the fruit jar meant that the man and woman were
using our spring to get their drinking water and also to keep their
butter from getting too soft--like Mom herself does at our house, only
we keep ours in a fruit jar or a crock in the cellar instead.
Anyway, I thought, they wouldn’t have to come to our house to get their
drinking water out of our iron, pitcher-pump.
From the spring we went up the incline past the elm sapling where
Circus always likes to swing, and the linden tree and the friendly,
lazy drone of the honeybees getting nectar from the sweet smelling
flowers--a linden tree as you know being the same as a basswood, and
honeybees have the time of their lives when the clusters of creamy
yellow flowers scatter their perfume all up and down the creek.
Going west from the tree, we followed a well-worn path toward the
Sugar Creek bridge. Somewhere along that path off to the left we would
probably find the tent because Old Man Paddler sometimes lets people
camp there for a few nights or a week if they wanted to under one of
the spreading beech trees near the pawpaw bushes.
I kept my eyes peeled for the sight of a brown tent, which as soon as
we would see it we would go bashfully up to it and ask if anybody had
lost a billfold. Then we would have them describe it to us and if it
was like the one we had, we would give it to them. While we were there
we would get a closer look at the small-footed woman, who had been
wearing overalls last night and had been digging in the cemetery. There
would probably be an automobile also, since there had been one last
night.
But say, we walked clear to the bridge and there wasn’t even a sign of
a tent anywhere.
Poetry got an idea then and it was, “Let’s go down to the old sycamore
tree and through the cave up to Old Man Paddler’s cabin and ask him.
He’ll know where their camp is. They couldn’t camp here anyway without
his permission.”
So away we went on across the north road and along the creek till we
came to the sycamore tree, which as you know is at the edge of the
swamp not far from the cave. Pretty soon we were all standing in front
of the cave’s big, wooden door, which Old Man Paddler keeps unlocked
when he is at home because the cave is a short-cut to his cabin--the
other end of the cave being in the basement of his cabin.
Big Jim seized the white door knob like different ones of us had done
hundreds of times. In a jiffy we would be in the cave’s first room and
on our way through the long, narrow passage to the cabin itself.
“Hey!” Big Jim exclaimed in a disappointed voice, “It’s locked!”
“What on earth?” I thought, but I remembered that sometimes the old
man had the door closed and locked for quite a while when he was going
to be away, or when he was on a vacation, or maybe when he was writing
something or other and didn’t want any company.
So we turned and went back to the spring again and on up the creek in
the other direction to see if we could find the tent we were looking
for.
After walking and looking around for maybe ten minutes without finding
any tent, we came to another of Circus’ favorite elm saplings near the
rail fence, which, if you follow it, leads to Strawberry Hill. On the
other side of the fence was Dragonfly’s pop’s pasture where there were
nearly always a dozen cows grazing.
It was while we were waiting for Circus to get up the tree and down
again that I heard a rumbling noise a little like thunder mixed up
with the sound of wind blowing. I looked up quick to the southwest
sky expecting to see a rain cloud already formed and the storm itself
getting ready to come pouring down upon us. But the big, yellow,
cumulus cloud was still where it had been, only it seemed a lot bigger,
and some other queer-shaped clouds had come from somewhere to hang
themselves up there beside it to keep it company. Those other clouds
had probably carried a lot of their own rain water to give to it so it
would have enough to give our Sugar Creek farms a “real soaker,” as Mom
always called a big rain.
Then I looked over the rail fence into Dragonfly’s pop’s pasture and
saw what looked like twenty scared cows racing furiously across the
field, their tails up over their backs and also switching fiercely like
the cows were terribly excited.
“It’s a _stampede!_” Dragonfly cried excitedly.
Say, those cows acted like they were blind and deaf and dumb and scared
out of what few wits a cow has and were all running wildly to get away
from something--only I couldn’t see anything for them to run away from.
“I’ll bet it’s a lot of warble flies after them,” I said, remembering
quick what Pop and I had been studying that week while we were looking
up June beetles.
“What’s a warble fly?” Little Tom Till wanted to know, his folks not
having any cows--and they always got the milk they drank at their house
from Dragonfly’s folks or mine.
Well, anybody who knows anything about a warble fly knows that it is a
noisy, buzzing fly about half as big as a big, black horse-fly and it
only lives six days after it is born.
“A warble fly doesn’t have any mouth and can’t sting or bite a cow or
anything,” I said, feeling all of a sudden quite proud of myself that I
had learned so much about a lot of important things such as flies and
beetles and other insects.
“Then why are cows scared of them?” Poetry asked, even he not knowing
that.
“They just make a fierce, buzzing sound and dive in and lay their eggs
on the hair of the cows and as fast as the cows run the fly flies just
that fast and flits in and out laying eggs on them. Then after six days
of that kind of life it dies. It probably starves to death,” I said,
“not being able to eat.”
“And cows are scared of an innocent egg?” Circus asked, and just then
got a little scared himself as did all of us because those twenty milk
cows were making a beeline for our fence. “They’re coming for the
shade,” I said. “Warble flies don’t like shade.”
And I was right, for a jiffy later in a cloud of whirling dust those
twenty cows came to an excited halt under the maple tree just over the
fence from us--only they didn’t stay stopped but kept milling around,
stamping their forty front feet and switching their twenty tails madly,
also doing the same kind of stamping with their forty back feet. It
seemed like there were a lot of warble flies and I saw and heard some
of them diving in and out under the cows, which kept on switching their
tails fiercely and stamping their feet, which meant that if a boy had
been there trying to milk one of them, he would have gotten the living
daylights kicked out of him and his pail of milk spilled all over the
ground or all over his clothes--and his parents would wonder what on
earth if they saw him like that.
So not getting any peace, those excited cows, still pestered with the
flies, started on another stampede and this time it was towards the
bayou and I knew that if they came to the weak place in the rail fence,
where we sometimes climbed over, they would make a dive through it and
rush into the brush and through the bushes and down the hill and in a
jiffy would be in one of the sluggish ends of the bayou in the shade,
which flies don’t like. If the cows would stand up to their sides in
the shady water, the warble flies would leave them alone on account of
warble flies always lay their eggs on the legs and under parts of a cow.
“Hey!” Dragonfly exclaimed excitedly, being as worried as his pop
probably would have been. “They’re going straight for the bayou!”
I knew if they did break through that fence and get into the water,
they could also wade across and get into the cornfield on the other
side and they might eat themselves to death like cows sometimes do.
Dragonfly grabbed up a stick and started out after the cows as fast as
his spindling legs could carry him, which wasn’t too fast. Circus who
was faster, was already dashing fiercely down the other side of the
fence to get to the place which the cows were headed for.
I was running as fast as I could, following the gang--some of the gang
following me--when I stepped into a brand new ground-hog den, which I
had never seen before, and down I went kerplop onto the ground. I was
certainly surprised ’cause there hadn’t been any hole there before. I
knew every ground-hog den there was for a mile in every direction from
our house.
Then I noticed the hole wasn’t a ground-hog den at all but was
another kind of hole. You could tell it hadn’t been dug by any live,
heavy-bodied, short-tailed, blunt-nosed, short-haired, short-legged,
coarse-haired, grizzly-brown animal with four toes and a stubby thumb
on its two front feet and five toes on its two hind feet--which is
what a ground-hog is. Besides there wasn’t any ground-hog odor coming
out of the hole, which my freckled nose was very close to right that
second--and also besides, there were the marks of a shovel and a
woman’s high-heeled shoes in the freshly dug soil.
7
I couldn’t let myself stay there on the ground all sprawled out in
five different directions wondering what had happened to me, because
the gang had already gone and left me, running as fast as they could
to catch up with and head off Dragonfly’s pop’s cows to keep them from
breaking through the fence into the bayou, so I unscrambled myself,
rolled over and up onto my feet and in a jiffy was helping the gang by
running and yelling and screaming to the cows to obey us--which they
didn’t.
Even as I ran, I was remembering what Pop and I had learned about
warble flies--or _heel_ flies, as some folks call them--and I thought
what if I was a real cow instead of merely being as awkward as one
part of the time? If I had my own brain with what it knew about warble
flies, I would have the living daylights scared out of me, my cow-self,
on account of even though a warble fly doesn’t have any mouth and never
eats any food during the six days of its short life, it does lay eggs
all over the legs and lower part of the cow.
When a warble fly egg hatches, which it does in four or five days after
it is laid, the thing that hatches out isn’t a fly at all but is a
grub, which quick starts to bore its grubby way right through the cow’s
skin and into the cow. Once it gets inside, the dumb thing starts on a
chewing journey through the inside, making its own path as it goes and
making the cow itch like everything, which is maybe why some cows are
not as friendly as other cows at certain times of the year. I’ll bet if
I were a cow, I wouldn’t be worth a whoop to a farmer or anybody who
owned me because I would probably feel the grub and maybe a half-dozen
or more of his grubby relatives working their way all through me, some
of them stopping like grubs do, right in my throat and staying a while
just above where I would be chewing my cud.
During the whole five or six months while a grub is still inside of a
cow, it travels all around and finally chews a tunnel along the edges
of the cow’s spinal column and at last it stops and makes its home
right under the skin of the back. There it chews a small hole all the
way through the cowhide so it can breathe, which it does with its tail,
getting good fresh country air through the hole, staying there nearly
through the winter.
While still there, the grub develops into a wiggling, twisting,
squirming warble and finally works its way out through the air hole and
tumbles off to the ground, and if it is spring and it doesn’t get eaten
up by a cowbird or a grackle or some other bird, it gets hard and black
and finally changes into a fly on the inside of itself. Then as quick
as it is a fly, it crawls out of itself and makes a dive for the first
cow it can find, starting to lay eggs as fast as it can before its six
short days of noisy, buzzing fly-life are over.
I was remembering all that as I galloped along after Dragonfly’s pop’s
stampeding cows. I was also remembering that in the wintertime in some
parts of America, starlings, and even magpies light on the backs of
cows and start pecking away on them, trying to dig out the warbles with
their sharp bills.
Boy, oh boy, if I was a cow and one or a half-dozen of those very
high-voiced, buzzing flies was trying to lay her eggs on me and I knew
what would happen if they did, I would most certainly beat it for the
shade, which warble flies don’t like. Or if I could, I would find
somebody’s bayou or a little stream somewhere, splash myself out into
it and stand in the water up to my sides like I had seen cows do all
around Sugar Creek for years without knowing before why they did it.
Say, you should have seen Dragonfly’s pop’s cows ignore the few rails
on the fence when they got to it. They broke right through without
stopping and disappeared in a tail-swishing hurry into the brush. By
the time we got to the fence ourselves, those cows were down in the
sluggish water of the pond at the east end of the bayou.
Maybe I’d better tell you that Pop says that every year American meat
packers throw away enough grubby meat to feed eighty-three thousand
people for a whole year--all on account of the crazy warble flies.
Also, Pop says, a lot of cows’ hides have holes in them when they are
butchered and people lose money that way too on account of that part
of the cow is where the leather is generally best--and what good is a
piece of leather for making shoes or leather goods if it has a hole in
it? So a boy ought never to drive a bunch of cows out of a creek or a
pond on a hot summer day, but should let them stay there in the shade
if they want to.
Cows don’t give as much milk while they are worrying about noisy,
whining flies, either, and beef cattle don’t get fat as fast, it not
being easy to get fat if you worry a lot, which is maybe why some
people are too thin.