And then almost right away, he went on to say, quoting another verse from the Bible, "Come now, let us reason together, saith the Lord, though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." I had learned that verse by heart once in a summer Bible school. And all of a sudden, my thoughts were flying away, and I was remembering Poetry's pet lamb, which you know about if you've read The Sugar Creek Gang in School,
whose wool was NOT white one morning when the lamb fell down in a mud puddle, and I was remembering Poetry's funny poetry which was,
"Poetry had a little lamb,
Its fleece a dirty black,
The only place its wool was white
Was high up on its back"....
Also I was at that very minute reminded of another poem which I had seen yesterday, which was written on yellow paper and which had been pinned with a brown stick on the white stomach of a snow man.... That poem still didn't seem funny, and for some reason I decided I was going to try to be what is called a gentleman, and try to act like one in school, even if I didn't like my teacher.
I didn't hear any more of Sylvia's pop's sermon for a while, on account of I happened to look out the church window which didn't have stained glass like some of the churches in town did, and I saw somebody's barn just on the other side of the little cemetery, and there were a lot of pigeons flying around over the barn, and in the sky, right away I was remembering Shorty Long and Big Bob Till, and wondering where they were, and what they were doing.
I had a heavy feeling inside of me that they would maybe visit all of the barns of the Sugar Creek Gang's pops, and catch a lot of pigeons, and maybe they'd catch and kill the pretty brown and white pair of pigeons which had their nest in the cupola of our barn, and then what would happen to the baby pigeons?...
Pop didn't come in to church at all on account of deciding to stay with Mom, but he was there in the car right afterward, and all of us including Little Jim and Tom Till and Mrs. Long and Charlotte Ann, shook hands with a lot of people and climbed into our car and drove away. Pop and all of us were talking and listening as our car went purring down the road. We were just stopping at Shorty Long's house to let Mrs. Long out when Little Jim said to me in a half whisper, "Sylvia's pop certainly preached a good sermon. I thought that was why some houses didn't have as much snow on their roofs
as others, and why barns always have more snow than houses that people live in. It was a good sermon."
"What?" I said to Little Jim, not remembering anything in the sermon about snow on people's houses or barns. Sylvia's pop must have said that when I was thinking about snowy white wool on Poetry's lamb—or else about a snow man standing at the bottom of Bumblebee hill....
Pretty soon we came to Tom Till's house. Pop had already told us the doctor had been there, and Mrs. Till didn't have pneumonia, only a bad chest cold.