7
IN almost less time than it has taken me to write these few paragraphs, we were in the cemetery at the top of Bumblebee Hill, and sprawled out on the grass near Sarah Paddler’s tombstone—the one that has the carved hand on it with the forefinger pointing toward the sky and the words that say, “There is rest in heaven.”
Every time we had a meeting there, I would read those words, and look at the other tombstone exactly the same size, which had on it Old Man Paddler’s name and the date the old man was born, with a blank place after it, meaning he was still alive—and nobody would put on the date of his death until after his funeral. Also I would always remember that that kind old long-whiskered old man was an honest-to-goodness Christian who loved the heavenly Father and His only begotten Son. He trusted in the Saviour for the forgiveness of his sins, so I was sure that when he did die his soul would go sailing out across the Sugar Creek sky to heaven itself where his wife Sarah and his two boys already were—and the whole family would be together again.
That old cemetery was certainly an interesting place and was very pretty. I hoped that nobody would ever try to make it look like the well-kept other cemeteries around the country. It’d be nice if people would let the wild rosebushes and the chokecherries and the sumac and the elderberries and the wild grapevines keep on growing there. Of course, it would be all right to keep the weeds away from the different markers and to keep the grass cut, but I liked the little brown paths that wound around from one to the other—and it always seemed like God was there in a special way.
You get a kind of saddish happy feeling in your heart when you think about Him, when all your sins are forgiven and you and your parents like each other. It seems as if maybe He likes boys especially well, on account of He made such a pretty boys’ world for them to live in.
There was purple vervain all over the place and tall mullein stalks—and already the sumac was turning red. I hadn’t any more than thought all these things than from behind the sumac on the other side of Sarah Paddler’s tall tombstone I heard a long-tailed sneeze and knew Dragonfly was there. A jiffy later he came pouting into the little circular open place we were in, saying, “How come you didn’t wait for me?”
He looked a little guilty, I thought, as, panting and wheezing a little, he plumped himself down on the ground between Poetry and me.
Everything was so quiet for a minute that he must have guessed we had been talking about him. “Are the—are the girls still camping up in the woods?” he asked—and I knew he was remembering last night’s dunking in the spring and also probably never would forget it.
There was an interrogatory sentence in my mind, right that minute. So I exploded at Dragonfly, “What were you doing in the middle of the night down there at the spring?”
My question probably sounded pretty saucy to him.