Summer of the Monkeys by Wilson Rawls

Author:Wilson Rawls
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Yearling Book
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

eleven

My promise to Grandpa about being ready and waiting for our trip to town got sidetracked during the night. I was sound asleep the next morning when Papa opened the door to my room.

“You’d better get up,” Papa said. “Your grandpa is here and he’s waiting for you.”

“Grandpa’s already here?” I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “What time is it anyway?”

“It’s just breaking daylight,” Papa said. “You’d better hurry now. Your grandpa is raring to go.”

I flew out of bed and jumped into my clothes. As I stepped into the kitchen, I saw to my surprise that everyone in the family was up. Mama was fixing breakfast and Daisy was setting the table. Papa and Grandpa were drinking coffee.

“Boy,” I said, as I poured water into the wash pan, “this early in the morning and everybody stirring around.”

Looking at Grandpa, Mama said, “Papa, this is the silliest thing I ever heard of, an old codger like you, going to town to read monkey books.”

Grandpa snorted and said, “I can’t see anything silly about it. We don’t know anything about catching monkeys. Maybe in the library, we can learn from a book something about how to catch them. It’s worth a try anyway.”

Daisy said, “Grandpa, have you ever been in a library?”

Grandpa squirmed a little and said, “No, I haven’t, but I understand that anyone can go to a library, and there’s always a first time for everything.”

It was twelve miles from where we lived in the hills to the little town of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and it would take a good part of the day to get there. As soon as breakfast was over, Grandpa looked at me and said, “We’d better be on our way. I have a lot of things to do in town.”

Mama, Papa, and Daisy followed us out to Grandpa’s buckboard. Rowdy was sitting in the spring seat, looking at us, whimpering and whining. His old tail was wagging so fast that I just knew it was going to come unscrewed from his body.

Grandpa chuckled and said, “Would you look at that? He knows that we’re going somewhere and he’s bound and determined to go with us.”

“Rowdy,” I said, in a hard voice, “you get down out of that buckboard. You can’t go to town with us. What’s the matter with you anyway?”

Rowdy dropped his old head and wouldn’t even look at me. His tail was the first part of him to die. Very slowly, it stopped wiggling. To make things worse, he squirmed his rear end around until his tail was hanging over the back of the spring seat. It just hung there all limp and lifeless, and looked like a dead grapevine.

Rowdy’s sympathy-getting act melted Grandpa’s heart. He glanced at Rowdy and then turned to me and said, “I don’t see why Rowdy couldn’t go to town with us. Lots of people take their dogs to town.”

“Oh, Grandpa,” I said, “if we took him to town with us, there’s no telling what might happen.

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