For a while after I said that, and thought that, I was lonesome for my folks—for my grayish-brown-haired mother and my swell baby sister, Charlotte Ann, and our black and white cat and our kind of oldish house and our big gray barn, and Pop’s beehives and our potato patch, and also I wished, for just a second, that I could stand and take just one big happy look at Sugar Creek itself, with the weedy riffle just below the old swimming hole and the old leaning linden tree above the spring, and Bumblebee Hill, where we’d first met Little red-haired Tom Till and his big brother, Bob, and had had a fight and I licked Tom, and at the bottom of that hill we had run kersmack into the fierce old mad old mother bear and her cub, and to save himself and all of us Little Jim had shot her.
Well, that was all our prayer requests, except Little Tom’s, and Big Jim was going to be courteous enough not to ask him again, so he wouldn’t be embarrassed, but right away Little Tom spoke up and said, “Pray for my daddy, that he’ll come home again, and will get a good job.”
Then that little guy picked up a stick that was in front of him and reached out and shoved the end of it into the fire, where it sent up a lot of pretty yellow sparks toward the blue smoke cloud up there; and for some reason there was a thought flashed into my mind like somebody had turned on a light in my head, and it was that Little Tom’s request was already on its way up to God, just like the sparks had shot up toward the sky, and I felt that sometime God was going to answer and give him a swell daddy just like Circus’s daddy was, after he was saved, and his mother would be happy and the whole family could go to church together. They would have enough to eat, and better clothes to wear, and everything.
But it certainly didn’t look like the answer was going to come very soon, though—what with John Till being described by a radio announcer as maybe the one who had helped the kidnapper, and right now maybe John Till knew where the ransom money was buried, if it was—and if he got caught, I thought, he’d have to go to jail and this time maybe he’d have to stay a terribly long time—years and years.
Well, Eagle Eye gathered up all our requests like a boy gathering up an armload of wood, and took them to God in some very nice friendly words, and handed them to Him to look over and to answer as soon as He could and in the best way.
I felt good inside watching Eagle Eye pray—although I shut my eyes almost right away. First he took off his big Indian hat and I noticed he had a haircut like ordinary white men. He left his blanket wrapped around him and shut his eyes, and just stood there with his brownish face kinda lit up by the fire, and he talked to the heavenly Father like they were good friends....
Then the meeting broke up, and pretty soon it was time for us to go to bed. I had a chance to talk with Tom alone a minute, though, just before we went to our separate tents. All of us were as noisy as usual at bedtime, except Tom, and I noticed he still had a sad expression on his face, so when I got a chance, I walked with him to the end of the dock where we stood looking out over the pretty shimmering waves of the lake under the half moon that was shining on it, and I said, “’Smatter, Tom? Something the matter?”
He just stood there, not saying a word for a minute until I said, “You’re one of my best friends, Tom.” Then he answered me very sadly, saying, “The mail boat brought a letter from Mother, and she’s worried about Dad. He’s gone again and nobody knows where he is.”
I didn’t know what to say for a jiffy, so I just stood beside him thinking and feeling sorry for him, wishing his pop could be saved like Circus’s pop and that the Till family would all be Christians and go to church. I don’t know why I thought what else I thought just then, but this is what I thought—something I’d heard Old Man Paddler, back at Sugar Creek, say once, and it was, “A lot of husbands are murdering their wives a little at a time. Some day a lot of mean husbands are going to look down into the coffins at their wives’ funerals and realize that by making them sorry and not being kind to them, their wives died ten years sooner than they should have—and that’s the same as murder.”
Old hook-nosed John Till was a murderer, too, I thought, as well as a drunkard, and it made me feel more sorry for the grand little red-haired freckle-faced guy who stood beside me.