It had been a wonderful fishing trip and we couldn’t afford to cry over a lost northern pike, which is what we all decided the big fish was. So after the other boat had pulled anchor, we started our motors, steered around the island and toward camp, with our caught fish lying in the bottom of the boat.
Little Jim was sitting in the seat in front of me, facing me as we roared along with Poetry running the motor. Different ones of us were talking and yelling to each other about all the different things that had happened,—all except Little Jim who, I noticed, was extra quiet and his eyes still had that saddish look in them.
Pretty soon I leaned over and half whispered to him, “’Smatter?” and he swallowed, then said, “Nothing.”
“There is too,” I said, just as he turned his head, gave it a quick shake, and when he looked back in my direction the tears that’d been in his eyes a second before, were gone, which is the way Little Jim gets tears out of his eyes—he just turns his head away, jerks it real quick, and that shakes the tears out.
Dragonfly, who knew Little Jim had that cute little way of getting tears out without using a handkerchief, so nobody would know he had had tears in the first place, saw Little Jim do that and said to him from behind me, “Don’t you know tears are salty? Fresh water fish that live in lakes don’t like salt water.”
“That’s not funny,” I said to Dragonfly over my shoulder, and was mad at him for not having more respect for Little Jim’s hurt heart. I knew Little Jim’s heart was hurt, when he said to me, “That wasn’t much of a reward for Wally, after all he did for us.”
Then just like it sometimes happens to my mother back at Sugar Creek, when she says something that has a sad thought mixed up with it, Little Jim’s eyes got a couple of new tears in them, which he quickly shook out into the lake, and then he said, as he reached his smallish cute hands toward me, “Let me hold the balloon fish a while.”
I pushed the yellowish rubber balloon toward him, and the way he took it, made me think of the way my little two-year-old baby sister, Charlotte Ann, would reach out her chubby little hands for it when I got home and showed it to her.
For a minute, while our two boats plowed along through the water, which, with the sunlight shining on the moving waves, looked like a great big lakeful of live silver, my thoughts took a hop, skip and a jump out across the lake to the shore, leaped over the Chippewa forest, and high up over a lot of other lakes, like I was Paul Bunyan himself; and all of a sudden I landed right inside our kitchen at Sugar Creek, where I knew I’d be in just a few days. In my mind’s eye, I saw Mom standing by our kitchen stove near the east window which has a green ivy vine trailing across the top of the outside of it. I could smell the smell of raw-fried potatoes frying, and see the steam puffing up from the hooked spout of our kinda oldish teakettle. If, when I came in, I accidently carried in a little mud on my shoes or bare feet, Mom would say like she nearly always does, “Would you like to get the broom, Bill, and sweep out that mud which, a little while ago, came walking in on two feet?” I would know whose two feet she meant, and grin, and right away I’d step to the place where we kept our broom, which is behind the east kitchen door which also has our roller towel rack on it, and I wouldn’t any more than get started with the dust pan and broom when Mom would say, “Be careful not to sweep hard, or we’ll have dust in our fried potatoes.”
While I was doing that, all of a sudden, I’d get tangled up and, turning around, I’d see my swell little sister Charlotte Ann, with her tiny toy broom, sweeping it around awkwardly like girls do when they’re just learning how to sweep, which is what Charlotte Ann does at our house. Now that she’s learned to walk, she tries to do everything any of the rest of us do. She follows Mom around sweeping when Mom does, washing her hands when Mom does, and when my grayish-brown-haired mom or my reddish-brown-mustached pop sits down to read a book or a magazine she actually gets a book or a magazine and tries to read, nearly always getting the magazine upside down when she does it. In fact, she wants to do everything we do while we are doing it, and sometimes when Mom is getting supper and Charlotte Ann can’t see high enough to see what Mom is doing, she gets cross and whines and fusses and pulls at Mom’s dress or apron and makes a nuisance out of herself, only she doesn’t know she’s a nuisance but maybe thinks Mom is making a nuisance of herself, instead, for not letting her help get supper.