The Green Tent Mystery at Sugar Creek by Paul Hutchens (red white and royal blue hardcover txt) 📕

AT the supper table at our house that night I think I had never heard Mom and Pop laugh so hard as they did. I was still thinking about the warble flies that had scared the living daylights out of Dragonfly’s pop’s cows, I having told them all about it, crowding my words out between bites, and I was sorta crowding the bites in too fast and shouldn’t have, when Pop said, “The heel flies are pretty bad this year. Nearly every farmer in Sugar Creek has been complaining about them. They have been tormenting Old Brindle something fierce today. I don’t dare turn her out into the pasture without leaving the gate into the barnyard open so she can come rushing back in for the protection of the shade anytime she wants to.”

“Speaking of cows,” Mom said, and her voice sorta lit up like her face does when she has thought of something very interesting or funny. “I read something in a farm magazine today that was about the funniest thing I ever read in my life.”

“What was it?” Pop said.

“Yes, what was it?” I said.

Pop and Mom were always reading things in magazines and telling them to each other and I didn’t always get in on their jokes. Sometimes I had to ask them what they were laughing about and it didn’t always seem as funny to me as it did to them. They also talk to each other about things that are not funny—things they have just that day learned about something in the Bible or something they have studied for next Sunday’s Sunday School lesson.

“I’ll get it and read it for you,” Mom said. She excused herself, left the table, went into the other room and came back with a small magazine. “It’s a ten-year-old school girl’s essay on a cow,” Mom said.

Even before she started reading it I wasn’t sure I was going to like it because I am kinda close to being a ten-year-old boy myself and I could imagine what a ten-year-old girl would write on a cow.

Pop cleared his throat like he was going to read himself or else so he would be ready to laugh when the time came, and Mom started reading while Charlotte Ann wiggled and twisted on her highchair, she not being interested in anybody’s essay on a cow. All Charlotte Ann was interested in about cows was the milk she had to drink three times a day and didn’t always want to, so a story about a cow wouldn’t be funny to her.

Even as I looked at Charlotte Ann I was remembering that there were plenty of unsolved things about our mystery. There was the picture of Charlotte Ann in the billfold; the strange-acting woman who had dug holes in a graveyard at night and had permission to dig them all over the Sugar Creek territory, who had to rest every afternoon, and who went barefoot and waded in the riffles all by herself—stuff like that. Why had she had the picture of Charlotte Ann in her lost and found billfold? I knew that the very second Mom got through reading and she and Pop got through laughing that I would ask her about the picture of Charlotte Ann.

Well, this is what Mom read, she not getting to read more than a few lines before Pop interrupted her and the two of them started laughing. Pop stopped her maybe a half-dozen times before she finished and they laughed and laughed and kept on laughing and Mom wiped her tears and held her kinda half-fat sides and Pop held his ordinary ones and I grinned and scowled. This is it:

“The cow is a mammal. It has six sides—right, left, up and below, inside and outside. At the back is a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so they don’t fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow, hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have never realized, but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell, one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.”

Well, that simply doubled up my Mom and Pop in laughter and even Charlotte Ann pounded with her spoon on her ordinary wooden food tray, which I used to pound on years and years ago—the same spoon I had probably pounded with—and she acted like she was having the time of her life.

“What’s the matter, Bill? Isn’t it funny?”

“Not very,” I said. “Anybody who is ten years old ought to know more about cows than that.”

Right away Pop was ready to defend the girl, saying, “She was probably a city girl, who didn’t have any brothers,” which also wasn’t very funny.

“Say, Mom,” I said to Mom, “have you had any new pictures taken of Charlotte Ann lately?”

“Why, no. Why do you ask?”

“You sure you haven’t had one taken of her sitting in that fancy highchair in the Sugar Creek Furniture Store?”

“Why, no. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I just wondered,”—I having made up my mind not to tell her any more.

As soon as supper was over, I started to do the dishes without being asked to, for a change, almost enjoying it on account of I was learning to enjoy doing things for Mom when she was tired. In fact, it makes me feel fine inside—almost as good as I feel when I am eating a piece of ripe watermelon—to do the dishes while she rests, on account of she is a pretty swell mom.

Pop was in the other room with Mom, talking to her while she rested—Mom actually lying down while she was doing it, she being that tired.

“The most friendly couple is camping down in the woods,” I heard Mom say. “They were here this afternoon a little while. She’s the prettiest thing I think I ever saw—kinda fancy though, and was wearing high-heeled shoes—not at all the kind an experienced camper or hiker would wear. They wanted a pail of well-water and I sold them a pound of Old Brindle’s butter, which they are going to keep cool in the spring.”

Hearing Mom say that, I sidled over to the kitchen door with her apron on and with the drying towel in my hands and listened to what else she was saying. I got there too late to get all of it, but part of it was, “She’s just out of the hospital, he told me. She doesn’t look like there’s a thing in the world wrong with her, but her husband—their name is Everhard—says she is under special treatment and she has been released to him. She’s not at all dangerous, but she gets depressed at times, and sometimes right in the middle of the night she gets one of her spells.”

I heard Pop sigh and say, “Being out here in the country with plenty of fresh air and good country food with an understanding husband like that will be good for her. I wonder how long she has been that way.”

And Mom said, “He told me confidentially when she was out in the car that it started about a year ago. She’s all right when she’s all right, but these spells come on and she cries—but she never does anything desperate—only wants to go around digging holes in the ground....”

That was as much as I got to hear right then ’cause the phone rang and when Pop answered, it was Little Jim’s mom, the pianist at the Sugar Creek Church, wanting to talk to Mom about something or other.

Mom was always tickled when it was Little Jim’s mom calling ’cause Little Jim’s mom was her almost best friend and sometimes they talked and talked until one of them had to quit ’cause she smelled something burning on the stove.

Well, I, the maid of the Collins family, went back to the kitchen to slosh my hands around a little longer in the hot sudsy water. Seeing our battery radio on the utility table and wondering what program was on, I wrung the water out of my right hand and turned on the radio, dialing to a station that sometimes had on a story for boys at that time of day. I tuned in just in time to hear the deep-voiced announcer in a terribly excited hurry say something about “those red, dish-pan hands” and then he galloped on to tell all the women listeners to be sure to use a certain kind of fancy-named soap or something that would make their hands soft and pretty almost right away. The soap was also good for washing dishes.

Pop had to come through the kitchen on his way to the barn, so he stopped and listened a jiffy with me. Then he said, “You using the right kind of soap, Son?” and I answered, “I don’t know. I hope so, but I’m afraid I am getting ‘dish-pan hands.’ Look at ’em!” I held my hands out for him to look at and he said with a mischievous grin in his voice, “Looks like you got dish-pan hair too.” Then he turned the radio down a little saying, “Your mother is resting so keep it low.”

“She’s talking on the phone,” I said.

“It’s the same thing. You will find out she will be all full of pep when she gets through,”—which I knew might be the truth because Mom nearly always felt fine when she finished listening and talking to Little Jim’s mom, who was always cheerful on the telephone.

“She smiles with her voice,” Mom always says about Little Jim’s mom.

Pop went on out to the barn with the milk pail to see if the warble flies had tormented Old Brindle so much that day that she didn’t have time to manufacture as much milk as usual and I went on back to my kinda half-cold dishwater.

I was just finishing washing the last dish and was getting ready to start wiping them when Mom finished talking and listening to Little Jim’s mom. But say, when she came in she was still tired. She kinda sighed as she lifted the steaming tea-kettle and poured water over the dishes so she could dry them easier.

All of a sudden I got a half-sad, half-glad feeling in my heart, so I said to her, “You go on back in the other room and rest