Paul Hutchens

“ Because the Swallow Tail is one of the largest kinds of butterflies in our whole territory, I knew Pop would be especially tickled if I could catch one for our collection, so I quick circled the house to the tool shed, swished in, swooped up Pop’s butterfly net—and in a jiffy later was out by the orchard fence where the most beautiful butterfly I had ever seen was acting like the nectar of that big Bull Thistle blossom was about the sweetest thing in the world to eat. ”

“ Just then the June beetle unscrambled himself—or herself,16 whichever it was—spread its shell-like front wings and its reddish-colored back wings and took off again, straight in the direction of my face, but I snapped off the flashlight quick, ducked my head and he missed me and disappeared into the night—on his way, maybe, to the lighted window of somebody’s house. If he should happen to see one somewhere, and if there should be a window open without a screen, some woman or girl would soon be screaming bloody murder for a man or boy to come and save her life. ”

“ Charlotte Ann wasn’t in the barn and neither was Mr. Everhard’s pretty wife.
My conscience was screaming at me for being such a careless baby sitter as to leave a two-year-old baby girl alone in the house and also for not locking the doors when I did leave the house.
Being a boy who believes in God, and also knowing that “Heaven helps them that help themselves” as Pop had told me, some of the stormy thoughts that were whirligigging in my mind were all mixed up with worried prayers and wondering what my parents would think with their baby lost in the storm. ”

“ Imagine coming happily home with two of your best pals, carrying a string of seven fish, and feeling wonderful and proud and then, halfway home, when you are passing an old, abandoned cemetery, seeing a light out there and somebody digging! ”

“ Say, when those fifty or more black, flat, oval whirligig beetles saw or heard or felt us coming in such a noisy, splashy hurry out of our swimming hole toward theirs, they got more scared than a gang of boys would if a dozen cows were stampeding in their direction. In a jiffy, like whirligig beetles do when they are badly frightened, they stopped going around in their fast, excited circles and dived under the water to hide themselves on the bottom of Sugar Creek so that by the time I got there, there wasn’t a one in sight and only the smell of ripe apples was left. ”

“ You don’t feel free to yell and scream and give loon calls and go screeching through the woods, yelling like wild Indians or anything, when somebody strange is camping there. You even have to comb your hair when you are outdoors if there happens to be a city woman around.
I thought and felt all that while we were still lying on the sandy soil of Dragonfly’s pop’s cornfield and the man and the woman were still not more than a few rods up the path on their way towards the spring. ”

“ To get to the swamp at the quickest possible moment was the first and most important thing in the world.
We stumbled our excited, rain-blinded way toward the Sugar Creek bridge where our path crossed the north road. I led the way myself, being careful to keep out in the open so we wouldn’t run the risk of getting struck by falling trees or branches—also staying away from the tallest trees and especially the tall oak trees, which are the kind of trees lightning strikes more than any other kind. ”

“ Then as quick as it is a fly, it crawls out of itself and makes a dive for the first cow it can find, starting to lay eggs as fast as it can before its six short days of noisy, buzzing fly-life are over.
I was remembering all that as I galloped along after Dragonfly’s pop’s stampeding cows. I was also remembering that in the wintertime in some parts of America, starlings, and even magpies light on the backs of cows and start pecking away on them, trying to dig out the warbles with their sharp bills. ”

“ The wing which had had the green canvas roof and the netting sidewalls was all squashed in. A great big, dead branch from the oak tree under which the tent had been pitched—and shouldn’t have been—had fallen on it, smashing the baby play pen and other things in that little room. The rest of the tent was only half standing.
For a minute, I imagined Charlotte Ann and Mrs. Everhard in there somewhere, the big branch having fallen on them, and they might be terribly bad hurt or even worse. They might not even be alive. ”

“ When a warble fly egg hatches, which it does in four or five days after it is laid, the thing that hatches out isn’t a fly at all but is a grub, which quick starts to bore its grubby way right through the cow’s skin and into the cow. Once it gets inside, the dumb thing starts on a chewing journey through the inside, making its own path as it goes and making the cow itch like everything, which is maybe why some cows are not as friendly as other cows at certain times of the year. ”

“ I asked Mom, and she said, “Not with just medicine alone. One thing the doctor has prescribed for her is that she attend some church regularly—a church where the minister believes and preaches the Bible and what it teaches about Heaven and the wonderful place it is, and how people can meet their loved ones there, alive and well—all through trusting in the Saviour. The doctor thinks that if Mrs. Everhard can learn to trust in God and to believe that she will see her baby again, she will be cured.” ”

“ Any boy scout knows that nobody should ever pitch a tent under an oak tree on account of the droppings from an oak tree will make the canvas rot quicker and before you know it, you will have little holes scattered all over your roof, which will make it leak like everything when it rains. Also, I noticed, they had pitched the tent so the flap would be open toward the west and anybody who lives at Sugar Creek knows that you shouldn’t have the tent flap on the west side because that is the direction most of our rains come from. ”

“ While still there, the grub develops into a wiggling, twisting, squirming warble and finally works its way out through the air hole and tumbles off to the ground, and if it is spring and it doesn’t get eaten up by a cowbird or a grackle or some other bird, it gets hard and black and finally changes into a fly on the inside of itself. ”

“ So not getting any peace, those excited cows, still pestered with the flies, started on another stampede and this time it was towards the bayou and I knew that if they came to the weak place in the rail fence, where we sometimes climbed over, they would make a dive through it and rush into the brush and through the bushes and down the hill and in a jiffy would be in one of the sluggish ends of the bayou in the shade, which flies don’t like. ”

“ Over the north-road fence, across the road, up the incline, around the end post of another fence and along the creek we ran. I didn’t even notice the different kinds of bushes and wild flowers that bordered the path like I generally do, such as the purple vervain and skullcap and the red-flowered bee comb, which honeybees and butterflies and especially humming birds like so well—red being the favorite color of all the humming-birds that live around Sugar Creek. ”

“ Poetry asked, even he not knowing that.
“They just make a fierce, buzzing sound and dive in and lay their eggs on the hair of the cows and as fast as the cows run the fly flies just that fast and flits in and out laying eggs on them. Then after six days of that kind of life it dies. It probably starves to death,” I said, “not being able to eat.”
43 “And cows are scared of an innocent egg?” Circus asked, and just then got a little scared himself as did all of us because those twenty milk cows were making a beeline for our fence. ”

“ Spying my personally owned hoe leaning against the tool house on the other side of the grape arbor, an idea popped into my head—and out again quick—to do a few minutes baby-sitting by hoeing a couple of rows of potatoes in the garden just below the pignut trees near which Pop had buried Old Addie’s two red-haired pigs; but for some reason or other I began to feel very tired and I could tell it would be very boring to baby-sit that way. ”

“ Pretty soon we were all standing in front of the cave’s big, wooden door, which Old Man Paddler keeps unlocked when he is at home because the cave is a short-cut to his cabin—the other end of the cave being in the basement of his cabin.
Big Jim seized the white door knob like different ones of us had done hundreds of times. In a jiffy we would be in the cave’s first room and on our way through the long, narrow passage to the cabin itself. ”

“ A little later Mom told me something else about the strange woman and her husband, who were camping down in the Sugar Creek woods—something Little Jim’s mom had just told her over the phone and it was that something had happened to the woman’s mind, which the doctors called by some kind of fancy name, which meant she was mentally ill and maybe would be for a while until she had time to get well again.
“Thousands of people get well from being mentally ill,” Mom explained, “just like children do from such things as chicken pox and whooping cough. ”

“ If the cows would stand up to their sides in the shady water, the warble flies would leave them alone on account of warble flies always lay their eggs on the legs and under parts of a cow.
“Hey!” Dragonfly exclaimed excitedly, being as worried as his pop probably would have been. “They’re going straight for the bayou!”
I knew if they did break through that fence and get into the water, they could also wade across and get into the cornfield on the other side and they might eat themselves to death like cows sometimes do. ”

“ Naturally, there wasn’t anything extra mysterious about a woman wearing overalls around Sugar Creek, especially when she was doing the kind of hard work which men have to do and which some women have to do sometimes, but what would a woman be doing digging in an abandoned cemetery late at night? “What on earth?” I thought and said so.
Not a one of us knew what to do or say next so we decided to go over to the old maple tree. The minute we got there Poetry ordered me to shine my light around the tree trunk while he studied the bark to see if any of it had been freshly knocked off. ”

“ Also, Pop says, a lot of cows’ hides have holes in them when they are butchered and people lose money that way too on account of that part of the cow is where the leather is generally best—and what good is a piece of leather for making shoes or leather goods if it has a hole in it? So a boy ought never to drive a bunch of cows out of a creek or a pond on a hot summer day, but should let them stay there in the shade if they want to. ”

“ So we decided to go on home, get secret word to the rest of the Gang—Big Jim, Circus, Little Jim and Little Tom Till—to all meet us at the old pine tree beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone tomorrow right after lunch. Then we could look to see if we could find out what had been going on: why a limping woman in overalls was digging in an old abandoned cemetery, and who had given the bobwhite and turtledove calls and why? ”

“ After walking and looking around for maybe ten minutes without finding any tent, we came to another of Circus’ favorite elm saplings near the rail fence, which, if you follow it, leads to Strawberry Hill. On the other side of the fence was Dragonfly’s pop’s pasture where there were nearly always a dozen cows grazing. ”

“ Long before we got there nearly everyone of us had his shirt off—so that by the time we should get there all we would have to do would be to wrestle ourselves out of our overalls and in a jiffy we would be out in the middle of the swellest water to swim in in the whole world. Everyone of us knew how to swim like a fish, our parents having made us learn as soon as we were old enough to—like everybody in the world should. ”

“ Dragonfly said.
“Why, Dragonfly Gilbert!” I said. “Go on home yourself if you are scared! Poetry and I have got to investigate!”
“I’m not s-s-s-scared,” Dragonfly said—and was.
As quick as we were sure the car was really gone, I turned on my Pop’s big, long, three-batteried flashlight—I having had it with me—and Poetry, Dragonfly and I started to climb through the rail fence to go toward the mound of yellowish-brown earth beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone. ”

“ And if it was a man human being, we would all want to scramble ourselves out of there and hide somewhere so that whoever he was wouldn’t see us; but if it was a woman human being, who had made the quail call—which it might have been, I thought, on account of the woman’s shoes lying there in the sand beside Little Jim—then every single one of us ought to make a headfirst dive toward getting his clothes on. ”

“ There wasn’t a thing to see in the hole except a lot of fresh dirt—in fact, there wasn’t a thing of any interest whatever to a guy like Poetry who was the kind of boy that was always looking for a clue of some kind—and especially a mystery—to jump out at him like a jack-in-the-box does in a toy store when you press a spring. ”

“ I was still thinking about the warble flies that had scared the living daylights out of Dragonfly’s pop’s cows, I having told them all about it, crowding my words out between bites, and I was sorta crowding the bites in too fast and shouldn’t have, when Pop said, “The heel flies are pretty bad this year. Nearly every farmer in Sugar Creek has been complaining about them. They have been tormenting Old Brindle something fierce today. ”

“ You see, if there is anything I would rather do than anything else it is to leave the table early before anybody thinks about starting to do the dishes, and take my three-cornered, one-sixth of an apple pie, and go out our east screen door with the pie in one hand and my straw hat in the other, swing out to our grape arbor, step up on a strong, wooden box, which is always there, reach up and lay the pie on top of the two-by-four crossbeam at the east end of the arbor where there isn’t any vine growing. ”

“ I’ll bet if I were a cow, I wouldn’t be worth a whoop to a farmer or anybody who owned me because I would probably feel the grub and maybe a half-dozen or more of his grubby relatives working their way all through me, some of them stopping like grubs do, right in my throat and staying a while just above where I would be chewing my cud. ”

“ Cows don’t give as much milk while they are worrying about noisy, whining flies, either, and beef cattle don’t get fat as fast, it not being easy to get fat if you worry a lot, which is maybe why some people are too thin.
Anyway that is how come we didn’t get to look for the tent of the “turtledove” and the “bobwhite” until quite a while later. ”

“ Mom finished, “is what is wrong with the dear little mother who is camping down there in the woods. You boys be very careful to be very kind and—”
“Is she an honest-to-goodness crazy woman?” I asked and shouldn’t have, not knowing I wasn’t supposed to say it, and Mom replied, “Thoughtful people never say that any more about a person who is ill in the way Mrs. Everhard is. They always say that they are not well emotionally. ”

“ Mom said—she having been reading a book on how to take care of babies at that age—“they are great imitators. Whatever they see you do they want to do too. They like to do grown-up things before they are old enough or strong enough or have sense enough to.”
“Or sense enough not to,” Pop said and Mom agreed with him, both of them seeming to think it was funny, but I couldn’t understand what they meant. ”

“ Say, you should have seen Dragonfly’s pop’s cows ignore the few rails on the fence when they got to it. They broke right through without stopping and disappeared in a tail-swishing hurry into the brush. By the time we got to the fence ourselves, those cows were down in the sluggish water of the pond at the east end of the bayou.
Maybe I’d better tell you that Pop says that every year American meat packers throw away enough grubby meat to feed47 eighty-three thousand people for a whole year—all on account of the crazy warble flies. ”

“ The minute the daylight streamed into where the dark had been under that step, a lot of different kinds of bugs scrambled for a dark place to hide. I noticed especially that there was a big, black cricket, maybe the very one that sings every night just outside Mom’s and Pop’s bedroom window—which Mom says sings her to sleep, Mom liking to hear crickets but not being interested in looking at them or touching them. ”