“How much more proof do you want?” I asked. “We saw his car parked here; we saw the watermelon being dragged in the gunny sack along the fence right over there on the other side, and actually saw it being dragged through this hole and hoisted into the car and we saw him drive away—Poetry and I both did.”
“Did you count your melons?” Mom asked. “Were there any missing?”
“Were there any—?” I stopped. I didn’t even know how many melons we had. I’d never bothered to count them. Those smaller melons hadn’t seemed as important to me as Ida had, on account of they had grown from ordinary watermelon seed, and not from the packet of special seed from the State Experiment Station.
The only way I could know for sure if any were taken would be to look all over the patch to see if there were any oblong indentations in the ground where a melon had been. “All right,” I said, “I’ll find out right now. I know there was a watermelon in that gunny sack. I felt it with my own hands, and it was long and round and hard.”
Pop let me have his flashlight, and I crawled through the fence and started looking around all over the truck patch to see if there were any melons missing, making a beeline first straight for Ida’s vine to be sure she was there and all right.
Poetry wanted to go with me but he couldn’t get through the small hole in the fence. “At least that proves he didn’t do it,” Pop said grimly, and Poetry answered, “If I’d been cutting a hole in a nice new fence, I’d have made it large enough for a man my size to get through”—trying to be funny even at a time like that!
In only a few barefoot jiffies, I was standing beside the circular trough in which Ida’s vine was growing, and my flashlight was making a circular arc all around the place while my eyes were looking for Ida herself.
And then, all of a sudden, I felt myself get hot inside, as I heard at the same time my excited, angry voice almost screaming back across the moonlit truck patch to Mom and Pop and Charlotte Ann and Poetry, “She’s gone! Somebody’s sneaked in while we were away and stolen her!”
There in front of my tear-blurred eyes was a long, smooth indentation in the ground where for the last eighty-five days—which is how long it takes to mature a melon—Ida Watermelon Collins had made her home. I was all mixed up with temper and sobs and doubled-up fists, and ready to explode.
Ida was gone! Ida had been stolen! My prize watermelon! The mother of my next year’s watermelon children, and the grandmother of my year-after-next’s watermelon grandchildren—and my college education!