Our minister, who knows almost all the Bible by heart, tells the people that come to our church that there isn’t any other way for anybody to be saved except just like I told you.
So I knew that Old Man Paddler, who was saved himself and was the kindest old, long-whiskered old man that ever was a friend to a boy, would see his wife, Sarah, again—maybe the very minute he got to Heaven.
For a fast jiffy, while I was standing by the hole which the June beetle had tumbled into last night, and was looking up at that carved hand on the tombstone, my mind sort of drifted away on a friendly little journey clear up into Heaven—past the great big white cumulus cloud that was piling itself up in the southwest right that minute above the tree-covered hills where I knew Old Man Paddler’s cabin was, and I imagined how that somewhere in Heaven maybe there was a very nice little cabin waiting for that kind old man, and that his wife, Sarah, was out there in the garden somewhere looking after the flowers for him. Every now and then she would stop doing what she was doing and look toward a little white gate like the one we have at our house by the big swing near the walnut tree to see if she could see her husband coming. Then all of a sudden I imagined she did see him and her kinda oldish face lit up like Mom’s does sometimes when she sees Pop coming home from somewhere and she started quick on a half walk and half run out across the yard to meet him, calling “Hi there! I’ve been waiting for you a long time....”
It was a terribly nice thought to think, I thought. Only I knew that if that old man ever left Sugar Creek, it would be awful lonesome around here for a long time, and it sorta seemed like we needed him here even worse than his wife did up there.
From Sarah Paddler’s grave in the shade of the big pine tree, we went all the way across the cemetery, winding around a little to get to the old maple where last night I had shone my flashlight all around looking for signs of a human quail or a human turtledove.
There we stopped in the friendly shade and lay down in the tall grass to hold a meeting to help us decide what to do next. While we were lying there in seven different directions, chewing the juicy ends of bluegrass and timothy and wild rye, Big Jim gave a special order which was, “I would like each of us except Poetry and Dragonfly to give a quail whistle.”
“Why?” Little Tom Till wanted to know.
“I want to find out if any of you were out here last night making those calls. I also want to know if any of you guys were out here dressed in overalls and wearing a woman’s high-heeled shoes.”
Little Jim and Little Tom Till and Circus and Big Jim himself did the best they could making bobwhite calls and Circus was the only one of us whose whistle sounded like the quail whistle we had heard last night.