Bonnie’s eyes grew big and round. “But you is his best friend.”
“No more,” I said. “I haven’t been over to his farm for three days.”
“After school on Monday,” said Bonnie, “you come on over to my farm.” Suddenly she pointed a finger at my nose. “You can be my friend, OK?”
“OK,” I said. “OK.”
When the last school bell of the day rang on Monday, Bonnie and I grabbed hands and ran out of Miss Johnson’s classroom. Philip and Gordon were already waiting in the bus line.
“Hey, Beth!” called Philip. “Over here. I saved a place for you.”
Gordon looked shocked. “What are you saving places for girls for?”
Philip looked Gordon straight in the eye. “Because I want to—that’s what for.”
“Is you a sissy?” asked Gordon, suddenly putting his hands on his hips. “With girl friends?”
“Something worse than being a sissy,” said Philip, “is being a ‘fraidy cat. And from this day on, any Tiger Hunter who is afraid of girls ain’t going to be called a Tiger Hunter anymore.” Then Philip stuck his face so close to Gordon’s that their noses touched. “And do you know what we’re going to call them kind of Tiger Hunters?”
Gordon moved his face away while shaking his head no.
“Them kind we call ‘Fraidy Cats,” said Philip, looking from Gordon to me. It was as though he wanted to know if I liked what he was saying.
I felt myself smiling.
Gordon took a couple of steps backward, opening a large space in line. “You girls can get in front of me,” he said.
Philip smiled his happiest smile. Sweet Philip. The cutest boy in the J. T. Williams School and the bravest Tiger Hunter of them all.
Case of the missing turkeys
December
Miss Johnson was telling the class that never in the whole history of schoolteaching had there ever been such a perfectly wonderful number-one best student as me. Philip Hall rushed to congratulate me, “I likes you even better now than I did when you were only number two.”
So much happiness rushed to my heart that it had to expand to mite near twice its usual size just to take it all in. Then Bang! Bang! Bang! My eyes snapped open at the early morning noise outside my bedroom window while at the same moment, Miss Johnson, Philip Hall, and my dream—my beautiful dream-dissolved like a raindrop into a freshly plowed field.
Minutes later I carried my breakfast of a cup of sweet milk and a slab of cornbread to where Pa was hammering one of the steel fence poles deeper into the ground. Even though December had been around for better’n a week, Pa was sweating under the Arkansas sun. His face looked as polished as black shoes on a Sunday morning.
He didn’t answer to “Morning, Pa.” Only muttered that he didn’t know how it was happening, but he didn’t intend for it to continue.
I said, “None of your turkeys disappeared during the night.” But when Pa still didn’t answer, I made a question out of it. “Did any of your turkeys disappear during the night?”
He wiped his forehead with a red bandanna. “Another ten, maybe more.”
“Oh, Pa,” I said, taking on some of the burden. “We were so sure that all those strips of cloths flapping from the fence would scare off the chicken hawks.”
“Ain’t no hawk with the sense God gave him gonna mess around with no twenty-pound turkey.”
I had another idea. “If a hawk won‘t, a fox will. And we got plenty of red foxes slying around these parts.”
His forehead furrowed. “That fox would have to crawl under this fence, which is pretty dang smart seeing as there ain’t no crawl-through space.”
“Maybe he went over?” I suggested.
“Over six-feet-high fencing? Not unless them red foxes is taking flying lessons.”
When I mentioned that there are other ways to get inside a turkey yard—such as climbing over the fence—Pa nodded, threw open the gate, and told me to go inside the yard, get down on all fours, and pretend to be a hungry red fox.
With my height cut in half, the fence looked twice as high. But never mind that. How can I, the fox, get back over that fence with six or more of Farmer Lambert’s plumpest turkeys? Pa watched carefully as I carefully thought. Finally I gave up. “A fox couldn’t get back over that fence with the turkeys so he’d have to do what folks in restaurants do. Eat their turkey dinner on the premises.”
“Spoken like a true fox,” said Pa. “Which proves it wasn’t no fox ‘cause there ain’t no blood or bones—no turkey remains of any kind in this here yard.”
The next thing I thought of was a groundhog who tunnels his way inside the fencing and then drags off the turkeys through miles and miles of winding underground passageways.
“It makes about as much sense as any other explanation,” said Pa as we walked across every foot of the turkey yard in search of the mouth to the passageway.
I found the blue button missing from my winter coat and Pa found Luther’s nineteen-cent mechanical pencil, but nobody found no tunnel opening.
He leaned back against the range shelter and sighed. “Don’t make no more sense suspecting a groundhog than it do in suspecting the Easter bunny.”
I sighed back, when suddenly an idea struck with such force that I knew that the mystery wasn’t going to be a mystery no more. Pointing toward the turkey compound, I said, “An airplane!”
Pa looked. “Where?”
“Nowhere there. I’m saying an airplane is making our birds disappear.”
“An airplane,” he repeated, laughing first a little and then harder and harder. Every time I told him to quit his laughing and let me explain, he’d only laugh harder. I gave him a little poke to the ribs.
“Now you listen to me, Pa! I might know something that can save our turkeys.”
And when I said that, Pa seemed to lose his laughter. “Then speak on, Beth girl, speak on.”
“Well, pretend this plane has left New York City and is flying west. The pilot has to take his plane up higher to get over our Ozark Mountains, but once over the mountains, the plane swoops back down low, right over this farm. Right over this turkey yard!”
“So-o-o,” said Pa. “You is think—”
“I is thinking,” I said, interrupting, “that some mighty low-flying airplanes is scaring our poultry into taking to the air.”
I watched Pa’s lips shape themselves into a near perfect O. “Scared-enough turkeys could have flown over that fence —sure could—and come to roost in some nearby trees.”
We searched the branches of every tree from here to the highway. I found a bees’ nest in one and Pa found one of Ma’s missing facecloths in another, but neither of us found a single turkey resting on a single limb.
“Should ‘ave known better’n blaming some airplane,” said Pa, rubbing the back of his neck. “ ’Cause even if planes had scared them into some nighttime tree roosting, by morning feeding time they’d be knocking the compound’s fence down trying to get back in.”
When we came in to eat, Ma was already putting chicken salad (always made with turkey in our house), sliced tomatoes, cornbread, and tall glasses of cold, fresh buttermilk on the table. She took one look at Pa and reminded him that he ain’t the first farmer to spoil a crop or lose a bird. “So wash up and eat up,” she said. “ ‘Cause we’re going into town for some trading and socializing.”
On Pocahontas’s Main Street, Pa angle-parked directly in front of Calvin’s Meat Market, where Calvin Cook, his fat son Calvin Junior, Miss Elinor Linwood, and Sheriff Nathan Miller weren‘t, truth to tell, arguing so much as they were engaged in spirited conversation. The sheriff shook his head as though he was trying to shake off the nonsense. “I ain’t for a moment doubting that you saw something, Miss Linwood. I’m only doubting that what you saw was the Monster of the Mountain.”
Miss Linwood’s eyes seemed to be lit from inside. “He was half again as tall as any man. Eight, maybe nine feet tall. I never saw his face, but I saw his hands,
and they were big enough for carrying all manner of things.”
Ma pushed me on. “Listening in on other folks’ conversation ain’t considered proper. Didn’t I learn you that?”
But proper or not, everybody all up and down Main Street seemed to be talking about nothing but Miss Linwood’s sighting of the Monster of the Mountain. Over the years very few people have claimed seeing him, but there wasn’t hardly nobody that didn’t have a favorite Monster of the Mountain story to tell.
Our minister, the Reverend Ross, was remembering the night way back in 1938 when the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus train derailed five miles west of Pocahontas. “State police from three states searched the Ozarks for miles around without letting any of us home folks know what it was they were searching for.”
“Reckon that’s where the Monster of the Mountain came from?” I asked.
He pulled a flat toothpick from his black suit and stuck it between his front teeth. “Don’t know that for bible-preaching sure, but I do know this: Gorilla Man was the circus’s feature attraction before the derailment, but afterwards he was never exhibited again.”
When we got back to the farm, Ma and Anne went right into the house saying they was too tired to do anything but fall into bed while Luther did exactly what he always does when he hasn’t seen his precious pigs in a few hours. “Got to go ask them if they missed me,” Luther said with his grin.
Lots of times I’ve asked my brother whether he sure-to-goodness believes that pigs could miss any human person. And he always answers, “Shore,” while holding onto his little grin. And then I’d say, “Now, Luther, you tell me the God’s honest truth. Do you really, really believe that?”
Tonight when I asked him, Luther pointed a finger at me, which suddenly made him look a lot older than fourteen. “When you is old enough to know, Miss Beth baby, I’m going to tell you.”
“I’m old enough to know right now,” I said, suddenly hearing the sounds of smart aleck in my voice.
As he walked toward the pig pen, he called over his shoulder, “When you is really old enough to know, you already will.”
The night was cold and morning a long time coming. Once during my sleep I woke, thinking I heard the untamed cry of Gorilla Man.
At the breakfast table Pa, already Sunday-dressed in his good suit and polka-dot tie, sat smiling like he was real pleased with himself as he dropped spoons of sugar on top of a huge steaming bowl of oatmeal. As I sat down, he was too busy explaining how he outwitted the low-down turkey thief with a few well-placed kerosene lanterns to take any notice.
Ma noticed though and right away went to the pot to ladle me out a bowl before she turned to look at Pa. “Eugene Lambert, you haven’t been out to check on your flock yet and you, of all folks, oughta know better’n counting your turkeys before they is counted.”
“Even the devil don’t go messing around no place that’s light,” said Pa, already beginning to back out the kitchen door.
Just as I began thinking that at last Pa had put a stop to the disappearings, he came back through the back door looking as strange as he would if a dozen men from a far-off planet came floating through our kitchen to ask directions.
“Eugene,” shouted Ma, rushing to his side. “Are you ailing?”
He shook his head with such force that I was sure he was only trying to shake off his troubles. “Another six—maybe more—missing!”
Ma clasped her hands. “Lord, don’t tell me.”
“How’s a man suppose to earn a living?” asked Pa, making it sound more like a complaint than a question. “ ‘Cause the chicken hawk, red fox, groundhog, airplane, or whatever the critter calls himself, ain’t one bit fooled by me. So . what’s a man to do?”
As soon as we came home from church, Pa took out his letter paper and wrote to the Answer Man at his favorite magazine, Turkey World. As he licked the envelope closed, he spoke directly to me, “I gave them folks at the magazine all the facts I know. Reckon they can figger out what’s happening?”
“Sure, Pa. Ever know the Answer Man not to have the answers?”
“Never,” said Pa, perking up. “I don’t remember there ever being a question that the Answer Man couldn’t answer, not in all the fifteen years that I’ve had a prescription.”
“Subscription,” I corrected. “Prescription is what Doc Brenner gives you when you’re ailing.”
He stood up to give me little pitty-pats to the top of my head. “Ooooo—eeee, ain’t I got me some smart girl? Is you sure that Hall boy is the number-one best student?”
But by the time I answered No, sir, that I wasn’t sure, not completely, Pa had already turned his attention to Ma, saying, “I’m going to spend this night guarding the turkey range. Only thing I know to do until the Answer Man tells me better.”
At daybreak I woke when Pa came into the house mumbling, “Safe tonight. I kept them safe tonight.” Then he dropped to his bed so hard that I heard the bedsprings strike the floor. And it was then that I heard my mother’s voice saying, “That’s the last time you is going to do that, Mister Eugene Lambert.”
But the closest Pa came to answering was a steady ZZZZ zzzz ZZZZZZ zzz.
The next day at recess I got Philip Hall aside and begged him to help me this very night to solve the mystery of the missing turkeys. He shook his head saying, “We’ll have to put it off for a spell. Some things ain’t safe to do so soon after the Monster of the Mountain has been seen about.”
When I told him that I didn’t think that Tiger Hunters were supposed to be afraid of monsters, Philip seemed to remember that that was true. Then he even reminded me that he himself wasn’t afraid. “Not a bit.”
I waited until our house darkened and filled with sleep sounds before getting out of bed. Outside the air felt as though it had been refrigerated, and an orange ball of a moon looked just about perfect for throwing illumination on Barnum & Bailey’s long-lost Gorilla Man.
That thought made me want to rush back into the house, but other thoughts kept me from doing it. Thoughts about what would happen to all us Lamberts if Pa’s turkeys went on disappearing, thoughts about brave Philip waiting for me down by the turkey compound, and there was still one more thought. And this was the cheeriest one of all: Sheriff Miller saying right out loud that the only place the Monster of the Mountain lived was in some folks’ imagination.
But just to be on the safe side, I crossed everything that it was possible to cross as I tiptoed deeper into the darkness toward the poultry range gate. When I reached the thick- trunked tree, Philip wasn’t waiting there. I told myself not to fret as I climbed up the tree. He’ll be along directly. Didn’t he promise me, not once but twice, that he’d sneak out just as soon as everybody in his house was asleep?
As I began to find comfort in believing that sweet Philip was right now on his way over, it happened. God switched off his nightlight and the whole earth was plunged from moonlight to nolight. Fear struck against the inside of my chest like a fighter’s fist.
I held my hand over my heart as I looked to the sky. Only a black rain cloud passing before the moon. When the moonlight returned, I felt better. You is some baby, Beth Lambert, I told myself.
Then from over Philip’s way, a light—it was a flashlight poking bright spots into the darkness. I was at a far enough distance from the house to give out one of my tongue-curled-behind-my-front-teeth whistles. He heard because right away he flashed the light onto his face and body. Philip was wearing the complete Boy Scout uniform, even down to the sash that crossed his chest and served as a showplace (as well as a sticking place) for all six of his merit badges.
When he reached my tree, he handed up his flashlight and his battered BB gun for me to hold until he seated himself into the Y-shaped branch opposite mine. “Your pa’s turkeys are going to sleep tight tonight,” he said, patting the barrel of his gun. “ ‘Cause I’m a-going to shoot anything that moves.”
After a while the snug branches that cradled me began to feel more
like a branch than a cradle. Philip didn’t seem to mind the hardness, though; maybe it was because he was all the time complaining another complaint. He was real cold. I didn’t blame him much. The wind was whipping through the ice-glazed branches. But wouldn’t you think that silly Scout would have known enough to wear a coat?
Suddenly a wild OHHHhh-ooooo shattered and splat tered the quiet. OHHhhh—oooooo.
Philip grabbed my arm. “G-G-G-Gorilla Man?”
“No, only a love-sick coyote,” I told him, wondering if there would ever come a time when he’d hold onto my arm without being frightened into it.
“I guess I know that!” he said, releasing my arm. Then he warned me that I was going to have to stay calm and collected.
“I’ll try.”
“Good,” he said. “ ‘Cause I can shoot any chicken hawk or fox that gets behind that fence.”
I asked, “That the same gun that couldn’t knock over a tin can?”
“It did too!”
“Yeah, but not until you were so close your breath could have done it.”
Philip began telling me that I didn’t know nothing, “Nothing at all!” But he stopped fussing the moment I touched his arm and pointed to a moving vehicle that had just turned off the main highway onto the dirt road dividing the Lambert Pig and Poultry Farm from the Hall Dairy Farm. And since the only place the old rutted road could take a person is to our farm or Philip‘s, I asked him if his folks were expecting visitors.
“Our house been sleeping for quite a spell,” he answered, turning to look at our lightless house. “Yours too?”
I nodded yes, wondering if nods can be seen by moonlight.
The vehicle, which began to look more and more like a truck, cut its lights while continuing to move through the darkness.
“Why—why—?” Philip asked, as he began squeezing the blood from my hand. “Why, why did ... why did... why—”