Preferring 2B fools.”
I found out later how to spell out the poem when he showed it to me in his mother’s old scrapbook. It was a clever poem, I thought.
Puff, puff, puff, up the hill we went, and at the cemetery stopped. It was a real spooky place, all overgrown with weeds, and choke-berry, and blue vervain, and mullein stalks, the blue vervain being one of the very prettiest wild flowers in all Sugar Creek territory, but which all the farmers called a weed, and which maybe it was. But up real close and under a magnifying glass its flowers are very pretty. Just as I was climbing through the fence beside Little Jim, holding two strands of barbed wire far enough apart for him to slither through and not get his nice pretty new blue shirt caught, Little Jim, who is a sort of a dreamer and is always imagining what something or other looks like, said to me, “They look like upside down candelabrums, don’t they?” Little Jim knew I liked flowers myself, on account of my mom liked them so well, and always wanted me to pick some and set them in vases in different parts of our house.
“What looks like what?” Dragonfly said, and sneezed, and I knew right away that he was allergic to something in the cemetery, he being that way about nearly everything in Sugar Creek in the summertime, and when people are allergic to things like that, they nearly always sneeze a lot.
Little Jim finished getting through without getting his shirt caught and said, “The flower spikes which branch off from the stem of the vervain look like upside down candelabrum,” and I remembered that his mother, besides being the best pianist in all Sugar Creek territory, and taught piano and was maybe the prettiest mom of all the Sugar Creek’s Gang’s moms, also had all kinds of flowers in a special flower garden at their home, and she talked flowers so much that Little Jim probably knew all the different kinds of words that people use when they talk flowers.
Little Jim broke off a stalk of vervain, and I noticed that there was a little purplish ring of small flowers at the very bottom of every one of the very slender flower spikes, which is the way vervain do their flowering. They begin with a little purple ring of flowers at the bottom of the spike about the first of July, and the flowers keep on blooming all summer, the ring creeping up higher and higher until school starts about the first of September, and pretty soon the flowers get clear to the top; then kinda like blue rings slipping off the ends of green fingers, they are all gone.
Well, in a jiffy, there we all were, standing around in a sort of half circle, looking over each other’s shoulders and between each other’s heads, right in front of Old Man Paddler’s dead wife’s tall tombstone. Her name had been Sarah Paddler, and she had died a long time ago. There were a couple of other tombstones there too, for the old man’s two boys who had died about the same time many years ago, and that old kind old man, whom the Sugar Creek Gang loved so well, had maybe been using all the love which he had had left over, when his own boys died, and, instead of wasting it on a dog or a lot of other things, he was pouring it out on us live boys instead.
Carved or chiselled on the tombstone was the figure of a hand with the forefinger pointing up toward the sky, and right below the hand were the words:
“There is Rest in Heaven.”
Standing on a little ledge, and fastened onto the tombstone with what is called scotch tape, was another envelope like the one we had just found and had read down at the Black Widow Stump, and on it it said,