Poetry showed he hadn’t been asleep at all then, ’cause he rolled over, sat up, swung his feet out over the edge of his cot and onto the canvas floor, and I knew we were both going outside once more—just once more.
What we were going to do was one of the most important things we had ever done—even if it might not seem so to a boy’s father if he should happen to wake up and see us in the melon patch and think we were two strange boys out there actually stealing watermelons.
Poetry and I were pretty soon outside the tent again in the wonderful moonlight where now most of the cicadas had stopped their wild whirrings and the crickets had begun to take over for the rest of the night. Fireflies were everywhere, too. It seemed like there were thousands of fireflies flashing their green lights on and off in every tree in our orchard and in all the open spaces everywhere. The lights of those that were flying were like short yellowish green chalk marks being made on a schoolhouse blackboard.
Poetry, with his flashlight, was leading the way as he and I moved out across our barnyard. When we were passing Old Red Addie’s apartment hog house, I was reminded again that all the smells around a farm are not the kind to write about in a story, so I won’t even mention it but will let you imagine what it was like.
At the wooden gate near the barn, Poetry said, “Listen, will you?”
I listened, but all I could hear was the sound of pigeons cooing in the haymow, which is one of the friendliest sounds a boy ever hears—the low lonesome cooing of pigeons.
There are certainly a lot of different sounds around our farm, nearly all of which I have learned to imitate so well I actually sound like a farmyard full of animals sometimes, Pop says. Mom also says that sometimes I actually look like a red-haired freckle-faced pig—which I probably don’t.
Say, did you ever stop to think about all the different kinds of sounds a country boy gets to enjoy?
While you are imagining Poetry and me cutting across the south pasture to the east side of our melon patch, I’ll mention just a few that we get to hear a hundred times a year, such as the wind roaring in a winter blizzard, Dragonfly’s Pop’s bulls bellowing, Circus’s Pop’s hounds baying or bawling or snarling or growling; Mixy, our black and white cat, meowing or purring; mice squeaking in the corncrib; Old Topsy neighing; Poetry’s Pop’s sheep bleating; all the old setting-hens clucking; the laying hens singing or cackling; Big Jim’s folks’ ducks quacking; honey and bumblebees droning and buzzing; crows cawing; and our old red rooster crowing at midnight or just at daybreak; screech owls screeching; hoot-owls hooting; the cicadas drumming, and the crickets chirping. Yes, and Dragonfly sneezing, especially in ragweed season, which it already was in the Sugar Creek territory.
There are a lot of interesting sounds, too, down along the creek and the bayou, such as water singing in the riffles, the big night herons going “Quoke-quoke,” cardinals whistling, bob-whites calling, squirrels barking—and when the gang is together, the happiest sounds of all with everybody talking at once and nobody listening to anybody.