Well, there we were in the Rio Grande Valley, all six of the Sugar Creek Gang and four of our parents, and I just knew something absolutely very, very different was going to happen to us. We were going fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and visit Old Point Lighthouse at Port Isabel. Also we were going to cross over the Rio Grande to Old Mexico and see different things there. Why, we might run into some kind of a dangerous experience with an illegal immigrant or a criminal of some kind.
That night when the gang was sitting and lying and sprawling around on bunks and chairs and gliders on our upstairs apartment porch, chattering about our trip and the wonderful warm weather and planning tomorrow’s adventures, Poetry was on the glider beside me helping me make it swing. He sort of leaned his head over next to my shoulder and whispered, saying, “If we expect to really have an exciting adventure down here, we may have to go out and look for one. Adventures are funny things. They don’t come hunting you up—you have to go where they happen.”
I was kind of sleepy and not too interested in having any kind of adventure right that minute. Certainly I didn’t want to start out that night in a new place like Texas, especially when our apartment wasn’t too far from a regular jungle of strange trees, bushes, prickly pear cactus, which is called “cat’s claw,” and mesquite, and stuff. It was the kind of growth you have to watch out for all the time when you walk through it, or you’ll get scratched or stuck or clawed. Definitely I didn’t want to look for any adventures in the dangerous dark, which it probably would be, that close to the Mexican border.
So I grunted and answered Poetry, saying, “Let’s all get to bed so we’ll feel like a million dollars in the morning and be ready for our trip into Old Mexico.”
“Sh!” Poetry said. “Don’t mention money out here on this open porch. You remember they throw dead bodies in the Rio Grande River after they have robbed and killed them.”
“They just do that to illegals,” I said.
Little Jim heard me say that and spoke up and said, “What’s an illegal?”
I remembered then that Little Jim had not been in the car with us when we had talked about them. So pretty soon all of us were discussing illegal immigrants. I explained to Little Jim and the others that they are Mexican citizens who, because they can make more money working in the United States or maybe because they don’t have any work in their hometowns, wade or swim or maybe row across the Rio Grande to get a job here.
“Why don’t they just go right down to the bridge and walk across?” Little Jim asked.
“Because they aren’t supposed to work in the United States unless they are American citizens,” Big Jim said, “which you aren’t if you are born in Mexico. If the United States let all of the Mexicans who wanted to come over here, there wouldn’t be any jobs left for the people who are already citizens. And maybe the Mexicans would work all summer and make a lot of money and just take it all back to Mexico and spend it there instead of here in our country.”
I didn’t understand it very well myself. It sounded like some things we were supposed to study in our history and civics books in school, and I wasn’t very good in those subjects. But I remembered what Dad had said in the car that afternoon, so I kept on explaining it.
“Sometimes when they try to go back across the river at night, robbers waylay them and take their money. Sometimes they kill them and throw their bodies in the Rio Grande. One year the police found thirty-eight different bodies of people who—” That was as far as I got.
Big Jim interrupted me then. “Let’s don’t talk about stuff like that before going to bed, or somebody will have a nightmare.”
Well, if there is anything I don’t like more than I don’t like anything else it is to be shushed right in the middle of something I am saying, so I said to Big Jim, “Oh, of course, if you’re scared or nervous or—”
Then Big Jim shushed me again and said, “Listen, everybody. Somebody’s singing or something.”
So I shushed myself and listened, expecting to hear some pretty Mexican music, but instead it was a quartet of men’s voices singing a very cheerful gospel song, which we sometimes sing on Sunday in the Sugar Creek church. It was:
“I won’t have to cross Jordan alone—
Jesus died for my sins to atone.”
“It’s a sound truck,” Big Jim said. “It’s coming nearer”—which it was.
Because every single one of the Sugar Creek Gang liked to hear gospel songs and hymns, we all kept still and listened. As quick as the quartet finished, I heard a loud, amplified voice say:
“Beginning Sunday night in the big tent on the highway between Donna and Pharr, be sure to hear the Rio Grande quartet and the boy evangelist David Mulder. Everyone is invited. See also the Christian motion picture Dust or Destiny. Admission free.”
All of a sudden I got a warm feeling in my heart. My folks had taken me to church ever since I was old enough to be carried there, and I was glad the people way down here, halfway to the bottom of the world, were going to hear the gospel, too. I had never heard a “boy preacher,” and I wished the gang could get to go tomorrow night to hear him.
Also, I would like to see an honest-to-goodness Christian movie in a big tent. None of the Collins family ever went to the Sugar Creek theater, because Dad and Mom both have told me so many times I can quote it from memory, “The motion picture industry as a whole is rotten, Bill, and even though there may be a good picture once in a while, we do not believe we should support it.” Also our minister says that people who go to shows all the time never care very much about getting anybody to become a Christian. So if I got to see an honest-to-good-ness Christian picture, it would be fine.
The sound of the sound truck faded away as it went on down the street.
“What’s the Jordan?” Dragonfly asked all of a sudden, as if he had just that second heard the quartet singing “I Won’t Have to Cross Jordan Alone.”
Poetry said, “That’s the name of a river in Palestine.”
“Was somebody afraid he would have to go across all by himself?” Dragonfly asked, being slower even than I am to understand things like that.
All of us were quiet for a while. Even though every single one of us liked to listen to other people talk about things the Bible teaches, still we were kind of bashful about doing it ourselves. But I knew that if our minister had been with us and Dragonfly had asked that question, he’d probably have said, “In the song, ‘the Jordan’ means death. The man who wrote it meant that, when he died, the Savior would meet him on the bank of the river of death and go across with him.”
In fact, Big Jim himself said that very thing a minute later.
Then Dragonfly asked an ignorant question that got me started thinking about the Rio Grande and illegals again. “When we die, will we wade across or swim across or will there be a boat or a canoe?”
Even Little Jim knew better than to ask a dumb question like that. He piped up right then in his small friendly voice and said, “It’s not an actual river!”—which anybody knows it isn’t.
Anyway, it was time for us all to get into our nightclothes and also into our bunks. I was so sleepy by that time that I was sure, if my eyes ever went shut without my knowing it, it would be morning before I opened them again.
But right after I had finished saying a quiet good-night prayer and just as Poetry finished his, he and I slipped out onto the moonlit porch again. The weather was so warm that we could be out there in our pajamas without even feeling chilly. I noticed that the moon’s round face was as clean and white as it had been in Houston last night. It seemed wonderful to think that right below us on the lawn was an honest-to-goodness orange tree with honest-to-goodness oranges on it. Tomorrow maybe we could pick one apiece and eat them.
A warm breeze was blowing, and the extra-long branches of the palm tree in the center of the lawn swung from side to side, making a very happy swishing sound as they rubbed together. It was like the sound the waves of a lake make, washing and washing against a sandy shore.
I had heard that same friendly over-and-over-again sound many a summer moonlit night on vacations the gang had taken in northern Minnesota, which I have told you about in some of the other Sugar Creek Gang books.
All of a sudden Poetry said, “Listen.”
I listened but couldn’t hear anything except the wind. “It’s the wind in the palm tree,” I said.
And he said, “I know it.”
Because nearly everything Poetry ever saw or heard or tasted or smelled or felt reminded him of a poem, he started quoting part of one we had all memorized from one of our Sugar Creek schoolbooks. It went something like this:
The husky, rusty rustle
Of tassels of the corn …
For the first time in my life I realized that whoever wrote that poem had made a mistake. Anybody who knows anything about a cornfield knows it isn’t the tassels of the corn that make the rustling sounds in the wind, because they are too far apart to rub against each other. But it is the big, long, sword-shaped blades brushing against each other that make the noise.
So I said to Poetry, “If James Whitcomb Riley had lived down here, he could have said, ‘The husky, rusty rasping of the palm leaves of the palm’—or something.”
Just thinking about the tall, dark-green grown-up corn that lives in the fields up North in the summer, and also thinking about the woods where maple, elm, ash, walnut, linden, and all kinds of other friendly trees grow, the kind a boy can climb and have fun in, made me lonesome for home. It didn’t seem right for it to be summer weather in the winter.
But the moon looked just the way it did back home, and also it felt the same way to be sleepy down along the Rio Grande as it did along Sugar Creek. So Poetry and I left the moon to take care of itself and went inside, where most of the rest of us were asleep already.
In what seemed like only minutes, it was morning again, our first morning in the Rio Grande Valley. Right in the middle of the kind of noise a gang of boys makes when it starts waking up and getting up, I heard a bird outside making a very friendly, cheerful bird call. “Cheo. Cheo. Cheo …”
Little Jim, who was already up and out on the porch, called back in to us, “Hey, you guys, it’s a cardinal!”
In a jiffy I was out there with him with only one shoe on and still wearing my green-striped pajamas. I got there just in time to see what looked like a flash of red fire in the top of the orange tree before it shot like an arrow right through the warm blue-skied weather straight toward some other kind of tree in the direction of the brush, which was also in the direction of the Rio Grande River.
“If a cardinal flies across the river into Mexico, will somebody make him fly back again and live here?” Dragonfly asked.
Circus heard him say that and answered, “Birds don’t have any nationality. They just belong to the world.”
“Where do we eat?” Poetry wanted to know, and so did the rest of us.
Big Jim had a map of the town, so pretty soon we were on our way to the hotel, where we were supposed to meet the four parents, who were our chaperons while we were down there.
While we were half walking and half running beside and behind and in front of one another through the very interesting townful of Americans and Mexicans, I thought how much Mexicans just seemed like suntanned white people, except that they had the kind of a tan that would not have to have sunshine all the time or it would fade.
Then I was remembering Mom’s last words to me yesterday when I had told her good night at the hotel before the gang left for our apartment: “Be a good boy, Bill—like you sometimes are when you don’t have a chaperon.”
There had been a twinkle in her eye, which meant she liked me but didn’t quite trust me 100 per cent.
“What’s a chaperon?” Dragonfly had asked.
And Poetry, trying to be funny, answered for me, saying, “It’s what the rest of us are glad we don’t have two apiece of.”
When we got to the hotel desk, I asked the clerk to phone the room of Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Collins of Sugar Creek to tell them there were six boys in the lobby.
The friendly, middle-aged woman who was the telephone operator pressed a buzzer, waited for Dad or Mom to answer, and said, “There are six hungry boys waiting for you in the lobby.”
“Terribly hungry,” Poetry said.
“Terribly hungry,” the middle-aged woman repeated into the telephone.
And Poetry’s face turned as red as the red side of a maiden blush apple from the tree in his backyard at home.
“They will be down in about ten minutes,” the telephone operator said. “You are to wait outside in the patio.”
“Would you please call Dragonfly’s parents too?” I asked, and the woman’s mischievous eyes flashed from one to the other of our kind of homely faces as though she had never seen such different-looking faces in her life.
Maybe she hadn’t, and she hadn’t missed much either. There was Big Jim’s face, which was the oldest-looking one with an almost mustache on his upper lip. Circus’s face looked like one of the chimpanzees in the Hermann Park Zoo at Houston. Poetry’s face looked like a full moon with a fat nose in the middle and with eyebrows that grew together in the center, just above the bridge of his nose. Dragonfly’s face had a crooked nose, which he could see the south end of without looking in the mirror if he would shut his right eye. Little Jim’s friendly, innocent face was mouse shaped. And finally there was mine with its very ordinary nose, which even in the winter had a lot of unnecessary freckles on it.
“Are you Dragonfly?” the telephone operator asked, looking straight at Dragonfly himself.
He grinned with a scowl on his forehead and answered, “Yes, ma’am,” and swallowed as if he had a big lump in his throat.
“Your chaperons’ names are Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert, aren’t they?”
Pretty soon, while we were still waiting for the Gilbert and Collins parents, the gang was walking around on one of the hotel patios. It was like a large lawn with lawn furniture and colored outdoor umbrellas. But, where the grass was supposed to be, there was beautifully designed tiled flooring like the kind Poetry’s parents had in the recreation room in the basement of their house.
“Look,” Little Jim said, “yonder is a whole lot of live fishing poles.”
We all looked where he was pointing. And, sure enough, at the farther end of the tiled patio, on the back side of what looked like the latticed backdrop of a stage, was a cluster of maybe thirty tall, green bamboo stalks, most of them just the right size for fishing poles.
There were a lot of flowers and trees and shrubs on a pretty lawn on the other side of the hotel. And across the paved street in a park, which had a bandstand in the middle, there were many more flowers such as oleander, bougainvillea, roses, and poinsettias.
“Look,” Circus said, “there are a lot of melons growing on that tree.”
They weren’t melons. They only looked like it, and we found out later they were called papaya. About fifteen of the green-and-orange fruits were hanging in a large cluster about eight feet from the ground.
Pretty soon Dad came out onto the patio.
Boy oh boy! Whew! Land sakes! I thought. Who was that tall woman in the extrapretty summer suit walking along with her hand resting in the crook of his arm? It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t be, and yet it had to be because it was! It was my very own mom dressed up in a brand-new toast-colored suit with a daffodil-colored blouse and a frilly collar, which had a neck shaped like the letter V. Also she was wearing a new perky hat with flowers on it, which made her look even more than ever special. She was wearing high-heeled green shoes too.