The first thing Mom said to me when I got home that late afternoon was “Bill, come in the house a minute. I need a little help!” Her voice sounded as if I wasn’t as good a boy as I hoped I was.
I had just come through the front gate and had shut it, and Poetry and I were standing up in our big rope swing under the walnut tree, swinging and pumping ourselves higher and higher. At the same time we were talking to each other in panting breaths and dreaming out loud to each other about the haunted house and Old Tom the Trapper’s buried body under the maple tree. Poetry and I certainly liked each other a lot and always hated to have to leave each other and come out of our boys’ world and be part of our families again.
So when Mom’s impatient voice called to me from the side porch, it was like having a nice ice cream cone knocked out of my hand just after I’d taken a few bites.
There was something in my mother’s tone of voice that seemed to say that maybe I should have come home sooner and that she had had too many things to do all day while I hadn’t done much of anything except play.
For a second, I was half mad, so I yelled back from away up in the air where I was at the time and said to her, “Can’t a boy have a little time to himself?”
And then all of a sudden, while Poetry and I swooped down with the cool wind blowing in my face and my shirt sleeves and overalls’ legs flapping in the breeze the way they do when I’m swinging in a high swing, I saw Poetry’s forehead get a frown on it. It was as though he was disgusted with my mom for calling me in a scolding voice, and I thought he was going to say something to her himself.
I certainly got a surprise when he said what he did say, which was, “She’s an awfully nice mother. Let’s both go in and help her.”
Back and forth, back and forth, up and down, up and down, whizz, whizz, whee …
I was mad at Poetry for saying that, even though I knew it was the truth. And for a minute what we were doing wasn’t a bit of fun. Mom was an awfully nice mother—in fact, maybe the best mother in all Sugar Creek or the whole world, I thought. But—well. I just didn’t feel very good, so I quit pumping Poetry. He quit pumping me, too, and in a few sad jiffies our swing had stopped enough for us to get off.
I was still mad and mixed up in my mind, so I picked up a rock and threw it at our old red rooster. He was standing on top of a chicken coop in the barnyard, crowing as if he was very happy and also as though he didn’t have a thing in the world to do, such as work, and that he was glad of it.
My rock hit the roof of the coop, glanced off, and went on toward the barn. It bounced along a half-dozen times before it finally hit the side of the barn just below the open window where our cat, Mixy, was sitting sunning herself.
The old red rooster jerked, and his crowing noise ended with a scared squawk. Mixy jumped as though she had been shot and made a dive for inside the barn. And at the same time I heard my dad’s voice thunder at me from the grape arbor on the other side of our iron pitcher pump and say, “How many times have I told you not to throw rocks at Andrew Jackson?”—that being our old red rooster’s name.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Poetry said all of a sudden. He turned and picked up a corncob that was lying there and threw it toward our front gate and then ran to pick it up again and go on through the gate and start down the road toward his house.
Well, it was a sad way to end a very wonderful afternoon, and it seemed my parents were to blame for it. I let myself be pretty mad for a minute. And when a red-haired boy gets mad, it’s hard to get over it for a while. I knew a Bible verse, which I’d learned once in a Bible memory contest in our school, that said, “Do not let the sun go down on your anger,” which means to be sure to get your temper over with before night.
I took a quick look at the sun, which was just above Dad’s head as he stood there by the grape arbor, and I knew I had maybe an hour yet before the sun would go down. The way I felt that very second, it seemed it would take a lot longer than that.
“What time is it?” I yelled to Mom, still thinking about how long it would be before the sun would go down.
And she said from the side porch, “It’s time to gather the eggs,” and Dad said from under the grape arbor, “It’s time to start the chores.”
I picked up another rock, wanting to throw it at something, which is what a boy likes to do when he’s half mad. But I just stood there looking at my dad and also down at my bare feet, which were digging themselves into the sand of the driveway.
And just then I looked down the road toward Poetry. He was walking backward, watching in our direction to see what was going to happen, if anything.
He saw me looking, and I whirled real quick, with my rock still in my hand, made a wide sweep with my arm to throw it across the road into the woods, and—well, it happened again! That crazy rock went low and sailed right straight toward our tin mailbox, which has my dad’s name, “Theodore Collins,” on it. Wham! It struck that box right in the center, making a terribly loud noise.
Then it bounced back toward me, having made a big dent in the box, and there I was—in Dutch with my parents and mad at both of them and at myself.
What can a boy do at a time like that? I certainly didn’t know what, but I had to do something. So I just stood there, looking at the dent in the mailbox and saying and doing nothing until Dad said, “You can come on in the house a minute, William”—William being the name he uses on me instead of Bill whenever I’ve done something I shouldn’t.
I looked around quick for something to pick up and carry with me, such as a stick or a twig—not to protect myself but to have something to hold onto. I felt maybe like a drowning person feels when he looks around in the water for something to hold onto and, seeing a little stick or even a floating straw, makes a grab for it.
My eyes spied a branch about two feet long, and I quick picked it up and carried it with me, swishing it around and striking at a swarm of gnats that were in front of my face.
The sun was getting lower, I thought, and there were three tempers that would have to hurry up and get over with before it went down—Mom’s and Dad’s and mine.
All of a sudden, I thought I saw a way to help Dad’s temper and maybe Mom’s too, so I said quicklike and as cheerfully as I could, “I’ll get the eggs as fast as I can!” Whirling around, I made a dive out across the barnyard for the barn, dodging the chicken coop where old Andrew Jackson had been crowing a little while before.
But I was like one of Circus’s hounds on a leash, which tries to run but gets stopped quickly when it gets to the end of the leash. My dad’s voice was like a leash when he said. “Stop! Come here!”
For some reason I did, all of a sudden realizing that the branch in my hand would make a fine switch for Dad to use on me and dropping it as if it had been a very hot potato.
Well, it’s the most terrible feeling in the world to be on the “outs” with your parents. I’d been that way a few times in my life, and I didn’t know what to do. I actually hadn’t done anything wrong on purpose, but all of a sudden I realized I had been thinking only about myself and what fun I could have and not about how tired Mom might be and how she might need help. Even though I hated to admit it, I knew I was wrong.
“Bring the switch with you,” Dad said.
I stooped, picked it up, and carried it to him, walking sideways and striking at different things and not looking at his gray eyes below his shaggy reddish-brown eyebrows or at his reddish-brown mustache.
I knew I was in for something. I had been told plenty of times not to throw rocks at our chickens or any of our cows or pigs or sheep or horses and also not at Theodore Collins’s name on our mailbox.
Suddenly Dad said in a very pleasant voice, “You’re getting to be a good shot, Bill. You going to be a pitcher on the Sugar Creek School ball team this fall when school starts?”
What on earth? I thought. Why such a kind voice?
“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I said. “I just wanted to throw a rock. I—”
“I know it,” Dad said. “I used to feel like that myself when I was a boy.”
For some reason, though, I still didn’t feel good. It seemed Dad thought Mom was to blame for calling me in such a scolding voice, and I didn’t like Mom to have to feel sad. I looked quick at her, and—would you believe it? —she had a smile on her face. She looked at Dad a minute; their eyes just looked and looked at each other. It was as though they were thinking kind of friendly things to each other and also liked each other a lot. My grayish-brown-haired mom and my reddish-brown-haired dad were wonderful parents, I thought, and I was awfully glad they liked each other.
In minutes the storm I had thought was coming was all over, and we were a happy family again. Neither one of my parents even mentioned the chicken coop or the mailbox. All of us were working like a house afire to get the chores done.
I helped Mom awhile first because my sister, Charlotte Ann, was too terribly little to do housework. First, I did one of the most important chores Mom ever lets me do around the house, which was to water her African violets-pretty green-leafed plants with bluish-purple flowers, which she grows in some very rich soil in a dish and keeps on the window ledge in our north window. An African violet is the kind of flower that has to grow in the shade without any direct sunshine on it. When you water it, you don’t dare put even a drop on its leaves unless the water and the air in the room are about the same temperature. You have to very carefully pour the water on the soil itself or down where the roots are.
Even while I was squirting in a little water at a time with the eye dropper that I always used, I heard Mom humming a song of some kind in the kitchen. It was one we sometimes used in church, and the chorus goes: “Wonderful, wonderful Jesus, in the heart He implanteth a song …”
For some reason, as I looked down at the pretty bluish-purple flowers with their gold centers, I felt very happy. It seemed my parents were treating me like an African violet. Instead of putting cold water on me by scolding me and punishing me a lot, they were sort of watering my heart. I don’t know how to explain it, but I could feel that they were pretty smart parents, and I liked them a terrible lot.
Next day, when Little Jim and I were talking, he said to me, “Mom lets me water her Saintpaulia, too.”
“Let’s you do what to her what?” I said.
And he said, “That’s the Latin name of the African violet. I saw it in a book—Saintpaulia.”
Well, pretty soon most of the chores were done, and we were having supper while it was still daylight, and the sun was still not down. It was what Dad said at the table when he asked the blessing that got me started to thinking again about the stone house and Old Tom the Trapper and ghosts.
This is what Dad said in his big, deep-toned voice, “Please bless Old Man Paddler as he writes his book on ‘The Christian After Death.’”
For a minute my thoughts left Dad and the kitchen table filled with our good supper. I was again thinking about a dead red fox and an arrow sticking through Old Tom’s chest. I thought of the stone house and of how wild Circus’s dad’s new bluetick hound had acted when he first smelled the strange-looking tracks at the spring.
Dad had finished his prayer, and he and Mom were talking about Old Man Paddler, before I interrupted them with an important question. Mom had just said, “You know, I think that old man is a genius. It’s almost uncanny the things he knows about the Bible and everything else. I’ll bet it’ll be a wonderful book.”
“You know what James Russell Lowell said a genius is, don’t you?” Dad said to her.
Mom said, “No, what?”
Dad said, “Talent is that which is in a man’s power; genius is that in whose power a man is” —something like that. I couldn’t understand it, but I knew it was important.
Anyway, I piped up and said, “Our gang is going to visit Old Tom the Trapper’s grave next week—can we?”
Dad came out of his grown-up world quick and said, “You’re going to visit Old Tom the Who’s what?”
“Old Tom the Trapper’s grave under the big maple tree beside the old haunted house.”
Dad quickly looked at Mom, and Mom at Dad, and both of them at me. I looked down at my plate and scooped my fork under a pile of raw-fried potatoes and started to take a bite. Some of the thin slices fell off the fork on the way up to my mouth.
“Too big a bite, Bill,” Mom said, and I frowned, knowing it before she told me.
Just that second, Charlotte Ann made a whimpering noise in the other room—she’d been napping. Mom excused herself, got up from the table to go in and see what was wrong, and Dad and I were alone for a minute.
“Who told you about Old Tom?” Dad asked.
“Old Man Paddler,” I answered. “We were up to see him today.”
Dad sipped his coffee, then said, “Well, if he told you, it must be all right for you to know. You going to take Dragonfly along?”
“Sure,” I said, “that’s one reason why we’re going—to prove to him there isn’t any such thing as a ghost. He’s afraid of ghosts.”
“You know what Sophocles said about fear, don’t you?” Dad said.
I looked at Dad’s eyes and grinned. He was always quoting what some famous somebody said about something. He was always reading and remembering things, and he and Mom often talked about them to each other.
I answered him by saying, “Who said what about what?”
He grinned. “What Sophocles said about fear. Didn’t you say Dragonfly was afraid of ghosts?”
“Who’s Sopho—what’s his name?”
“Sophocles? He was a Greek poet.”
“What’s he got to do with Dragonfly?” I asked, feeling rather important because Dad was talking to me as if I were a grown-up.
“Nothing except that Sophocles said, ‘To him who is in fear, everything rustles.’”
“I still don’t see what that’s got to do with Dragonfly and ghosts,” I said, just as Mom came in with my little sister on her arm.
Charlotte Ann was yawning and acting as if she had just waked up. She was as cute as anything. Her small ears looked like a couple of little dried peaches glued onto the sides of her head.
Dad answered me by saying, “Nothing in particular, except that when you get to the haunted house, everything Dragonfly hears will sound like a ghost—the wind in the leaves, the rubbing of a tree branch against another, the snapping of a twig, everything.”
Well, supper was soon over, and I felt wonderful inside. Both my parents liked me and didn’t hold it against me that I had talked sassy to Mom, and Dad acted as though it was all right for the gang to go see the haunted house.
Just as I was passing Mom’s chair to go outdoors awhile, I stopped and looked down at Charlotte Ann’s pretty soft pink cheeks and said to her, “You’re a nice little girl. I hope when you grow up you won’t talk back to your mother like your big, ugly, freckled-faced brother did today.”
Mom, without looking at me at all, reached out and caught me by my overalls’ suspender and pulled me a little closer. For a minute I stood there beside her with her arm around me. Well, it was the most wonderful feeling in the world to feel the way I felt right then.
Almost right away I was out the kitchen door, dashing toward the barn, picking up sticks and rocks and things and throwing them in different directions but not hitting anything, because I was especially careful not to throw them at anything.
Next week, I thought, when the gang had its next meeting, we’d all go up past Old Man Paddler’s cabin and on down the creek into a territory we’d never visited before. I’d make certain Dragonfly was with us, so we could prove to him that there wasn’t any such thing as a ghost. There we’d finish playing the game of Old Tom the Trapper.
That night, just before I crawled into my upstairs bed, I looked out under the rustling leaves of the ivy that hangs across the upper half of my window. Looking out into the garden with the moon shining on it, I thought about what a pretty moonlight night it was. It felt good to think that God had made such a pretty world, and it seemed for a minute that I liked Him even better than I did my parents. I quickly dropped on my knees the way my parents had taught me to do when I was little and said a short prayer.
Then I crawled into bed and went to sleep.
I had a crazy kind of dream, though, and part of it was about Circus’s new bluetick hound. Dragonfly was picking at all those little blue spots on him, and in my dream each spot was a small blue wood tick that Dragonfly was picking off.
And the next thing I knew it was morning.