10

I tell you it doesn’t feel very good to have something on your mind like I had on mine, knowing that Alexander had been loose part of last night—probably long enough to have killed two innocent lambs in Harm Groenwald’s pasture. If it could be proved that Wally’s dog had actually done it, Wally would have to pay for the loss of both of them—probably twenty-five dollars apiece.

It had been fun teasing Wally about it when Alexander had come galloping back with a lamb’s tail in his mouth, but now it was different. Why, Alexander himself might even have to be killed.

Then I got an idea. If Alexander had actually killed those two lambs, there might be traces of blood in his mouth. There might even be bits of wool caught between his teeth, the way a boy gets bits of fried chicken in his when he eats. He might have gotten so hungry, being tired of no-odor dog biscuits, that he had killed the lambs on purpose to get a taste of fresh mutton.

I coaxed him to let me look at his teeth.

Alexander didn’t like the idea very well, and Wally, who was watching, said, “What are you trying to do to him?”

“Nothing,” I said, “I’m just examining his teeth.”

“They’re all right,” Wally assured me. “I took him to a dentist just before we left Memory City.”

“The dentist!” I had never heard of such a

thing as taking a dog to a dentist.

Well, the day was started, and we had a lot of things to do before another one thousand forty minutes would be gone. Then there would be another day, and after that, Sunday, when Wally would go to Sunday school and church with us. It would probably be his first time to go in a long time because Uncle Amos and my red aunt had quit going, which meant that Wally had been growing up to be an American heathen.

Believe me, we kept Alexander tied up every night. I was especially careful to see to it that he was and also that his collar was good and tight. As the nights passed, and nobody’s dogs or dog bothered Mr. Groenwald’s or anybody else’s sheep, I kept wondering if Alexander really had killed the two lambs between midnight and three o’clock on the one night he had been loose.

I knew that before long—certainly before Wally left—I’d have to tell somebody about it, because if Harm Groenwald’s sheep had been raided on only that one night, then Alexander must have been the guilty dog. I still didn’t want to tell Wally, because he’d think I was a failure as a dog trainer, and he might blame me for the dead lambs. Also, he’d worry because he’d be afraid Alexander might have to be shot. I didn’t like to tell Dad because—well, because I just didn’t. And if I told Mom, she might get hurt in her heart, and that’d make mine hurt even worse. It seemed there wasn’t anybody I could tell.

And as my little polecat clock kept ticking off the minutes, I kept feeling sadder and sadder. Of course, I thought, I could keep still till after Uncle Amos and my red aunt come back from their vacation, and then both Wally and Alexander will be gone, and everything will be all right—or will it?

Then Sunday morning came, and we all went to Sunday school and church, where I got the surprise of my life. Wally, who was in the same class with the rest of the gang, knew the answer to practically every question our teacher asked.

I couldn’t believe my ears. What on earth? I thought. I simply couldn’t understand how a boy who hardly ever went to Sunday school and didn’t know beans about the Bible could, all of a sudden, know practically everything about that rather hard lesson.

During the church service, which followed Sunday school, I learned something that made me feel even worse about Mr. Groenwald’s two dead lambs and Alexander the Coppersmith and Wally. Sylvia’s dad’s sermon—the part of it that was especially for boys and girls—was a true story about Robert Louis Stevenson. As nearly everybody knows, he was a famous writer who lived a long time ago and who wrote a lot of books, such as Treasure Island and a book of poems called A Child’s Garden of Verses.

When Sylvia’s dad mentioned A Child’s Garden of Verses, I looked at Poetry to see if he was listening. He was, with both hands up to his ears. That reminded me of the way Alexander looked when he listened to something, with both of his copper ears standing straight up and with his nose pointing in the direction the sound was coming from.

For a second I imagined myself to be a dog listening with my ears straight up. Then, because I felt myself smiling at myself for being a dog, I frowned instead, because anybody, especially my parents, wouldn’t understand why I was smiling and would think I shouldn’t.

Well, when Robert Louis Stevenson was just a little guy, he had a nurse taking care of him, as small boys did in those days in his country, which was Scotland. First, Sylvia’s dad quoted part of a poem that Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote and which goes like this:

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle light;
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

Poor little Robert Louis Stevenson, I thought and felt sorry for him. It had been so long since I was little and had to go to bed by day that I could hardly remember it. But in the winter I still had to get up before daylight to get breakfast over and the chores done and started off to our one room, red brick school, to get there on time. I had memorized that little poem myself when I was in the second grade.

Sylvia’s dad went on to tell us that one day when it was time for little Robert to go to bed, he didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay outdoors until it got dark. It was almost dark but not quite, and he was sitting out on the steps looking up at the stars. His nurse called him to come in three times, and still he didn’t come. So she went out to get him.

“What are you doing out here? Why didn’t you come when I called you?” she asked.

Little Robert answered, “I’m out here watching God open up lights in the darkness,” meaning he was watching God turn on the stars one at a time.

Then Sylvia’s dad explained that every Christian ought to do more than just watch God turn on lights in people’s hearts—we ought to help Him do it. “Have you turned on the light in anybody’s heart this week?” he asked.

I couldn’t think of anybody I had done that to. I had been trying to turn on a few lights in a dog’s mind. But so far, Alexander had turned most of them off again.

When we got home and Dad and I were out by the garden waiting for dinner to be ready, I told him about Wally being able to answer practically every question the teacher asked. Dad said, “You can give your mother credit for that. She spent all week opening up lights in his mind.”

“She what?” I asked.

So Dad explained that at the beginning of the week Wally had told Mom he didn’t want to go to Sunday school because he didn’t want to seem like a dumbbell in class. So she had taught him the lesson ahead of time—which explains what he and Mom were doing nearly every day while she baked pies or cakes and did other things in the kitchen. And he helped her by sitting on the bench behind the table, listening—and also eating cookies, which was the way Mom got him to sit still long enough for her to turn the lights on, since his mind was a pretty dark place.

Then Dad and I went in to dinner.

But I didn’t feel very good. It seemed God was trying to turn on a light somewhere, and He wanted me to help Him do it. I kept thinking about it all through dinner, not eating as much as I usually do, and I excused myself before the rest of the family and Wally were done.

I went outdoors to Alexander’s cedar-treated mattress, where he had just finished his dinner of no-odor dog biscuits. He was standing up in his bed, looking hungrily at the kitchen door and probably smelling our fried chicken and wishing he could have some.

I stooped down and hugged him. “Listen, little dog friend,” I said to him, “I know all about what you did last Wednesday night. But it’s all my fault. I’m to blame. I didn’t do it on purpose but was only trying to turn on a light in your mind. And now Wally, or I, or somebody, owes Harm Groenwald about fifty dollars, and maybe you’ll have to be shot to death.”

He touched my cheek with his cold nervous nose and, before I could get away, licked my face with his long red tongue.

Then I got another idea. I moseyed on out to the barn and went inside and climbed the ladder to the alfalfa-smelling haymow. That was where I used to keep my little New Testament in a crack in a log away up on top of a hill of hay near the roof. I used to kneel down there in the hay and tell the One who made the stars practically all the troubles I ever had. And nearly always He would take them away or make me think of something I could do to get rid of them myself.

“Hi, old Bentcomb,” I said to my favorite hen.

She was sitting on her favorite nest, waiting till she could get her daily egg laid and then get out with the rest of the hens in the barnyard. She didn’t answer but sort of ducked her head, as much as to say, “Don’t bother me. I’m busy.”

Then I went on up to my corner.

Even before I started to pray, it seemed I knew what I was supposed to do. I had one hundred dollars in the bank, I thought, and would still have fifty dollars left if I went to Mr. Groenwald and gave him twenty-five for each dead lamb. Also, if I took Alexander with me and let him see what a fine dog he was, what a pretty half-long nose he had, how active he was, how he would sit up and bark for a biscuit you offered him and would chase after a stick and bring it galloping back to you, and how he had learned not to bark at night (not as bad as he used to, anyway), and explain how he was a city dog and not used to country life and didn’t know any better—then maybe Mr. Groenwald would like Alexander and forgive him and everything would be all right.

I wouldn’t even need to tell Mom or Dad or Wally or anybody at all, although I supposed Dad would find out about my taking fifty dollars from my savings account and want to know why. But I wouldn’t mind telling him after Wally’s ten thousand minutes were over and he was gone.

When I got through praying, I stood up, for a minute looking down at the place where my two knees had been. I felt very happy inside, as if I had maybe done one of the most important things in the world.

Of course, my prayer hadn’t sounded much like Old Man Paddler’s had, but it did seem I had been talking to the same wonderful Person he had. And it didn’t make any difference where anybody was when he talked to Him—in an old Abraham Lincoln style cabin in the hills, or in the moonlight that filtered in through a boy’s bedroom window, or on a hill of alfalfa hay in the haymow of a Sugar Creek barn. He was always glad to listen.

Then I climbed down the haymow ladder and went outdoors again. Old Mixy spied me and started meowing toward me, and I knew that she was in a hurry to rub her innocent sides against my pant legs. Her tail was straight up in the air, the way it always is when she walks like that. It was just like the tail of the little black and white animal out in the woods, except that her tail didn’t mean the same thing because she wasn’t that kind of a kitty.

She followed all around me till she got almost to the grape arbor. There she stopped stock-still and spit, arching her back at the same time toward Alexander, who growled back at her from the end of his tight leash. Then she decided to go on back to the barn and did.

I stopped beside Alexander, who, as soon as he stopped looking at Mixy, pushed a friendly nose into my hand as if we were good friends.

“Well, old pal,” I said, “it’s all set. The first chance we get, we’re going to take a walk through the woods, just the two of us.”