Watermelon Mystery at Sugar Creek, Paul Hutchens [ebook reader for laptop TXT] 📗

“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.

“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.

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.

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 Lord 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,” I 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