an excitement like the one we were splashing around in—squawky-voiced, barrel-shaped poetry; red-striped pajama-clad dragonfly; night-gown-dressed mom; crying charlotte ann; my confused father, and his actual son—couldn’t last forever, and this one didn’t!
in not too long a while, pop began to get things clear in his usually bright mind, as poetry and i managed to squeeze in a few words of explanation, keeping some of the mystery to ourselves to talk over with the gang tomorrow, when we would have our meeting at the little-jim tree at the bottom of bumblebee hill. the little-jim tree, as you know, is the name we had given the tree under which little jim had killed the fierce old mad old mother bear, which you know about if you’ve read the book, “we killed a bear.”
it seemed we ought to tell pop and mom why poetry and i had been running around in a beautiful moonlit dog days night in our night clothes, so as soon as we could, we explained about the watermelon in the burlap bag and the noisy old car racing down the lane and coming back a little later.
pop really fired up when i mentioned how the thief had managed to get the watermelon through the fence. “you mean somebody cut a hole in my new woven-wire fence!” he half shouted. “we’ll go down there right now and have a look at it!” he was more angry, it seemed, that his fence had been cut than that one of our watermelons had been stolen.
dragonfly broke in then saying, “i’ve got to get home,” and the way he said it made me wonder if he knew all about the whole thing and wanted to get away from us.
mom decided what we were going to do first, by saying, “i promised roy’s mother we’d drive him home right away.”
that did seem like the best thing to do and so in a little while53 all of us including mom and charlotte ann, were in our car driving up the road to dragonfly’s house. it took quite a few minutes for mom and pop and me to calm dragonfly’s mother down—she was so upset. i helped as much as i could, taking as much blame as i thought would be safe—not wanting pop to start wondering where his razor strap was. but i didn’t want that little spindle-legged, crooked-nosed little guy to have to have a licking for doing practically nothing, which it looked like maybe his mother was excited enough and nervous enough to give him.
“you know how boys are,” mom said. “they get ideas of things they want to do, and they think afterwards.”
pop helped a little by saying, “even our own son does unpredictable things once in awhile. isn’t that right, bill?”
it was too dark there in the shadow of the big cedar tree that grows close to dragonfly’s side door, for pop to see me frown, but i decided to look up the word “unpredictable” in our dictionary as soon as i got a chance, just to see what kind of things i did once in awhile, hoping they weren’t as bad as such a long word made them sound.
“it’s my fault, he got his pajamas all wet,” i thought it was safe to say to dragonfly’s worried mother. then i told her a little about the girls at the spring and how they probably thought dragonfly was me. i didn’t tell her i thought maybe her innocent son was mixed up in our watermelon mystery, or she might have had insomnia that night even worse than another pajama-dressed boy’s mother.
from dragonfly’s house we drove back toward ours, turned into the lane that goes down the south side of our farm and stopped at the place in the fence where the elderberry bushes were, the very same place where not more than two hours ago the noisy oldish car had been parked.
say, when pop’s flashlight showed him the hole in the fence under the elderberry bushes, he was as angry as i have ever seen him get. he just stood there at the side of our car, with the moonlight shining on his stern face, his jaw muscles working, and i knew every other muscle in his body was tense.
54 “it’s hard to believe anybody would be that mean,” he said.
“bob till is mean enough to do anything,” i answered, but mom stopped 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.
55 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 grandmother of my year-after-next’s watermelon grandchildren—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.
56 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 lord57 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,” i58 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 indian59 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.
60 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 little61 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.
62 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.
63 “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.
64 “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.”
