Shenanigans at Sugar Creek

by Paul Hutchens

I knocked at Tom's door, and waited and nobody answered, and Little Jim and I listened to see what we could hear, but all I could hear was somebody moving around inside like whoever it was was in a hurry—like maybe there had been some things on the floor and they were in a hurry to straighten up the room or the house on account of company was coming.

Then I heard a door shutting somewhere in the house, and I knew it was the door between their living-room and kitchen, then I heard footsteps coming toward our door, and I wondered what was wrong. I was sure something was, but didn't know what.

The next thing I knew the door opened in front of me and there stood Little red-haired Tom, with his hair mussed up, and his old clothes on, and his eyes were kinda reddish, and it looked like he had been crying. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I can't go. Mother's got the flu, and I have to take care of her, and keep the fires going."

"Can't your daddy do that?" Little Jim asked in a disappointed voice, and Little Tom swallowed hard like there was a tear in his throat and said, "Daddy's not home again. He—he's—not home," Tom finished, and I knew what he meant, but he was ashamed to say it, and it probably was that his pop had got drunk again and was maybe right that very minute in the Sugar Creek jail.

"Where's Bob?" Little Jim wanted to know, and Tom stood there in the half-open kitchen door and said, "He got up early and went over to Shorty Long's; they're going to hunt pigeons."

I knew what that meant, 'cause sometimes some of the farmers in our neighborhood had too many pigeons, and the Sugar Creek Gang would go to their different barns and shut all the doors and windows quick and help catch the pigeons for them, and you could get sometimes fifteen cents apiece for them if you sold them.

If Shorty Long and Bob had gone hunting pigeons together, it meant that Shorty Long wouldn't want to go to Sunday School with us when we stopped at their house after awhile to get his mother to take her to church with us. It also meant that Shorty and Bob had maybe decided to like each other, since neither one of them liked the Sugar Creek Gang.

Little Tom didn't know what I'd been thinking, so he piped up and said to Little Jim, "I'm sorry I can't go, but I can't. You tell Teacher I'll try to come next week, and tell her I studied my Sunday School lesson, and—wait a minute!" Tom turned and, leaving the door open, hurried back inside the house, opened the door to their living-room and went in, like he had gone after something. He shut the door after him real quick, like he was trying to keep the cold air in the kitchen from getting into that other room.

In that split minute while the door was open, though, I saw that they had a big double bed in their living-room and that Tom's mother was in it, all covered up, and that there was a small table beside her bed with a glass half full of water, but that the room looked kinda topsyturvy like the housekeeping was being done by a boy instead of a mother.

A second later Tom was out again, shutting the door behind him, and coming right straight to Little Jim and me, and holding out his hand and saying, "Here—here's my offering." He handed me a small offering envelope like the ones we used in our church, and without trying to, I noticed it had two very small coins in it, and I guessed they were dimes, which maybe Tom himself had saved from catching pigeons.