Just then Poetry yelled to me, “Penny for your thoughts, Bill!” I started, and looked at him and said, “Look at that reddish sky, will you?” and Poetry looked and said, “Kinda pretty, isn’t it?”
6
WE docked at Santa’s dock, and went into his log cabin with him. It was cozy inside. First he lit two old-fashioned kerosene lamps, then ’cause it might get cold pretty soon, we helped him start a fire in his small wood stove in a corner; Tom pumped a pail of water from the pitcher pump inside the cabin. Santa even had an icebox with ice in it, and in another small room, twin beds; and back in a tiny room away back in the back, there was a bathtub and beside it a very old-fashioned trunk that for some reason made me think of Robinson Crusoe and buried treasure. I wished harder than ever that we would run into a mystery up here in the North.... I was all tingling inside, wanting one so bad. But, of course, I wouldn’t want the kind that would half scare a boy half to death, like the ones that sometimes happened to the Sugar Creek Gang, but I wanted an ordinary mystery anyway.
Pretty soon it would be time to go back to camp and get to sleep. I was wondering how we could keep warm in our cold wall tents—which was the kind ours were—when there wouldn’t be any fires inside and we didn’t have any heaters. Of course I knew I’d be pretty warm myself, after I’d crawled into my sleeping bag, which is a waterproof bed made out of khaki drill. It had a soft kapoc filled mattress, and I would just crawl into it, zip up the zipper slide fastener on the side, and there I’d be, but it’d be cold to get undressed and before getting into my pajamas.
Santa showed us different things in his cottage, such as a large mounted fish on the wall which Mrs. Santa had caught, and also a great big bearskin rug which was on the floor and had a fierce bear’s head with wide open red mouth on one end of it; also there was a snake skin on the wall, which a missionary in Africa had sent him.
Well, it was soon time to go home. Poetry looked at Santa’s wood box and said all of a sudden, “You need a load of wood—better let Bill carry one in for you.”
“Fine,” I said, “I’ll hold the flashlight for you.” I took a flashlight off the table, and started toward the door with Poetry right after me.
Outside, we looked back through the window at the pretty little cabin and at Santa and Tom standing by the fire warming themselves, and all of a sudden Poetry said, “I wish Tom had a pop like—I wish Santa was Tom’s daddy.”
I thought of old hook-nosed John Till at Sugar Creek and knew that maybe right that very minute he was probably standing at the bar in a beer joint sousing his fat stomach with beer, and that Tom’s mother was maybe not even going to have enough money to buy groceries for the family the rest of that week.