Summer of the Monkeys Read online

  Summer of the Monkeys

  Wilson Rawls

  Yearling (1976)

  * * *

  Rating: ★★★★☆

  Tags: Historical, Classics, Adventure, Young Adult, Childrens

  The last thing a fourteen-year-old boy expects to find along an old Ozark river bottom is a tree full of monkeys. Jay Berry Lee's grandpa had an explanation, of course--as he did for most things. The monkeys had escaped from a traveling circus, and there was a handsome reward in store for anyone who could catch them. Grandpa said there wasn't any animal that couldn't be caught somehow, and Jay Berry started out believing him . . .

  But by the end of the "summer of the monkeys," Jay Berry Lee had learned a lot more than he ever bargained for--and not just about monkeys. He learned about faith, and wishes coming true, and knowing what it is you really want. He even learned a little about growing up . . .

  This novel, set in rural Oklahoma around the turn of the century, is a heart-warming family story--full of rich detail and delightful characters--about a time and place when miracles were really the simplest of things...

  From the Trade Paperback edition.

  Amazon.com Review

  Jay Berry Lee is happy until the summer he is 14 years old and discovers monkeys living in the creek bottoms near his parents' homestead. Set in the late 1800s, Summer of the Monkeys traces the boy's adventures as he attempts to capture 29 monkeys that have (it turns out) escaped from the circus. With somewhat dubious help from his grandfather, and over the objections of his mother, Jay goes about discovering that monkeys are much smarter and harder to catch than he thought possible. Woven into this story is a second theme about his physically disabled sister and the family's attempts to find money for an operation. As funny and touching as Wilson Rawls's Where the Red Fern Grows, this book will appeal to the young reader who has always wished for the freedom to run wild through the woods with nothing more pressing to do than find another rabbit hole--or escaped monkey. (Ages 12 and older) --Richard Farr

  From the Publisher

  The last thing a fourteen-year-old boy expects to find along an old Ozark river bottom is a tree full of monkeys. Jay Berry Lee's grandpa had an explanation, of course--as he did for most things. The monkeys had escaped from a traveling circus, and there was a handsome reward in store for anyone who could catch them. Grandpa said there wasn't any animal that couldn't be caught somehow, and Jay Berry started out believing him . . .

  But by the end of the "summer of the monkeys," Jay Berry Lee had learned a lot more than he ever bargained for--and not just about monkeys. He learned about faith, and wishes coming true, and knowing what it is you really want. He even learned a little about growing up . . .

  This novel, set in rural Oklahoma around the turn of the century, is a heart-warming family story--full of rich detail and delightful characters--about a time and place when miracles were really the simplest of things . . .

  For more than forty years,

  Yearling has been the leading name in classic and award-winning literature for young readers.

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  OTHER YEARLING BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY

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  ALIDA’S SONG, Gary Paulsen

  BLACKWATER BEN, William Durbin

  HOLES, Louis Sachar

  THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY, Sheila Burnford

  BOYS AGAINST GIRLS, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc., New York

  Copyright © 1976 by Woodrow Wilson Rawls

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Bantam Books.

  Yearling and the jumping horse design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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  eISBN: 978-0-307-78155-0

  Reprinted by arrangement with Bantam Books

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  About the Author

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  one

  Up until I was fourteen years old, no boy on earth could have been happier. I didn’t have a worry in the world. In fact, I was beginning to think that it wasn’t going to be hard at all for me to grow up. But just when things were really looking good for me, something happened. I got mixed up with a bunch of monkeys and all of my happiness flew right out the window. Those monkeys all but drove me out of my mind.

  If I had kept this monkey trouble to myself, I don’t think it would have amounted to much; but I got my grandpa mixed up in it. I felt pretty bad about that because Grandpa was my pal, and all he was trying to do was help me.

  I even coaxed Rowdy, my old bluetick hound, into helping me with this monkey trouble. He came out of the mess worse than Grandpa and I did. Rowdy got so disgusted with me, monkeys, and everything in general, he wouldn’t even come out from under the house when I called him.

  It was in the late 1800s, the best I can remember. Anyhow—at the time, we were living in a brand-new country that had just been opened up for settlement. The farm we lived on was called Cherokee land because it was smack dab in the middle of the Cherokee Nation. It lay in a strip from the foothills of the Ozark Mountains to the banks of the Illinois River in northeastern Oklahoma. This was the last place in the world that anyone would expect to find a bunch of monkeys.

  I wasn’t much bigger than a young possum when Mama and Papa settled on the land; but after I grew up a little, Papa told me all about it. How he and Mama hadn’t been married very long, and were sharecropping in Missouri. They were unhappy, too; because in those days, being a sharecropper was just about as bad as being a hog thief. Everybody looked down on you.

  Mama and Papa were young and proud, and to have people look down on them was almost more than they could stand. They stayed to themselves, kept on sharecropping, and saving every dollar they could; hoping that someday they could buy a farm of their own.

  Just when things were looking pretty good for Mama and Papa, something happened. Mama hauled off and had twins—my little sister Daisy and me.

  Papa said that I was born first, and he never
saw a healthier boy. I was as pink as a sunburnt huckleberry, and as lively as a young squirrel in a corn crib. It was different with Daisy though. Somewhere along the line something went wrong and she was born with her right leg all twisted up.

  The doctor said there wasn’t much wrong with Daisy’s old leg. It had something to do with the muscles, leaders, and things like that, being all tangled up. He said there were doctors in Oklahoma City that could take a crippled leg and straighten it out as straight as a ramrod. This would cost quite a bit of money though; and money was the one thing that Mama and Papa didn’t have.

  Mama cried a lot in those days, and she prayed a lot, too; but nothing seemed to do any good. It was bad enough to be stuck there on that sharecropper’s farm; but to have a little daughter and a twisted leg, and not be able to do anything for her, hurt worst of all.

  Then one day, right out of a clear blue sky, Mama got a letter from Grandpa. She read it and her face turned as white as the bark on a sycamore tree. She sat right down on the dirt floor of our sod house and started laughing and crying all at the same time. Papa said that after he had read the letter, it was all he could do to keep from bawling a little, too.

  Grandpa and Grandma were living down in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. They owned one of those big old country stores that had everything in it. Grandpa wasn’t only a storekeeper; he was a trader, too, and a good one. Papa always said that Grandpa was the only honest trader he ever knew that could trade a terrapin out of its shell.

  In his letter, Grandpa told Mama and Papa that he had done some trading with a Cherokee Indian for sixty acres of virgin land, and that it was theirs if they wanted it. All they had to do was come down and make a farm out of it. They could pay him for it any way they wanted to.

  Well, the way Mama was carrying on, there wasn’t but one thing Papa could do. The next morning, before the roosters started crowing, he took what money they had saved and headed for town. He bought a team of big red Missouri mules and a covered wagon. Then he bought a turning plow, some seed corn, and a milk cow. This took about all the money he had.

  It was way in the night when Papa got back home. Mama hadn’t even gone to bed. She had everything they owned packed, and was ready to go. They were both so eager to get away from that sharecropping farm that they started loading the wagon by moonlight.

  The last thing Papa did was to make a two-baby cradle. He took Mama’s old washtub and tied a short piece of rope to each handle. To give the cradle a little bit of bounce, he tied the ropes to two cultivator springs and hung the whole contraption to the bows inside the covered wagon.

  Mama thought that old washtub was the best baby cradle she had ever seen. She filled it about half full of corn shucks and quilts, and then put Daisy and me down in it.

  After taking one last look at the sod house, Papa cracked the whip and they left Missouri for the Oklahoma Territory.

  When Papa told me that part of the story, he laughed and said, “If anyone ever asks you how you got from Missouri to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, you just tell them that you rode a washtub every inch of the way.”

  The day they reached Grandpa’s store, Papa was just about all in and had his mind set on sleeping in one of Grandma’s feather beds. Mama wouldn’t listen to that kind of talk at all. She had waited so long for a farm of her own, she was bound and determined to spend that night on her own land.

  Grandma tried to talk some sense into Mama. She told her that the land was only three miles down the river, and it certainly wasn’t going to run away. They could stay all night with them, rest up, and go on the next day.

  Mama puffed up like a settin’ hen in a hailstorm. Nothing Grandma or Grandpa said changed her mind. She told Papa that he could stay there if he wanted to, she’d just take Daisy and me and go on by herself.

  Papa knew better than to open his mouth, because once Mama had made up her mind like that, she wouldn’t have budged an inch from a buzzing rattler. There wasn’t but one thing he could do. He just climbed back in the wagon, unwrapped the check lines from the brake, and said, “Get up!” to those old Missouri mules.

  It was in the twilight of evening when Mama and Papa reached the land of their dreams. They camped for the night in a grove of tall white sycamores, right on the bank of the Illinois River.

  Papa said that as long as he lived, he would never forget that night. It seemed to him that they were being welcomed by every living thing in those Cherokee bottoms. Whippoorwills were calling, and night hawks were crying as they dipped and darted through the starlit sky. Bullfrogs and hoot owls were jarring the ground with their deep voices. Even the little speckled tree frogs, the katydids, and the crickets were chipping in with their nickel’s worth of welcome music.

  A big grinning Ozark moon crawled up out of nowhere and seemed to say, “Hi, neighbor! I’ve been looking for you. It gets kind of lonesome out here. Welcome to the land of the Cherokee!”

  Papa said Mama was so taken in by all of that beauty, she seemed to be hypnotized. She just stood there in the moonlight with a warm little smile on her face, staring out over the river, her black eyes glowing like black haws in the morning dew. Finally, she gave a deep sigh, just as if she had dropped something heavy from her shoulders. Then spreading her arms out wide, she said in a low voice, “It’s the work of the Lord—that’s what it is. Just think—all of this is ours—sixty acres of it.”

  Papa said he was feeling so good that he felt he could have walked right out on the waters of the river just as Jesus did when he walked on the waters of the sea.

  Mama was a little woman, barely tipping the scales at a hundred pounds; but what she lacked in height and weight, she made up in strength and spirit. Pulling her end of a crosscut saw, and swinging the heavy blade of a double-bitted ax, she helped Papa clear the land.

  Papa let Mama pick the spot for our log house. This wasn’t an easy chore for her. She walked all over that sixty acres, looking and looking. Finally, she found the very spot she wanted and put her foot down. It was in the foothills overlooking the river bottoms, in the mouth of a blue little canyon.

  I grew up on that Cherokee farm and was just about as wild as the gray squirrels in the sycamore trees, and as free as the red-tail hawks that wheeeeed their cries in those Ozark skies. I had a dandy pocketknife, and a darn good dog; that was about all a boy could hope for in those days.

  My little sister Daisy grew up, too; but not like I did. It seemed as if that old leg of hers held her growing back. Each year it got worse and worse. The foot part kept twisting and twisting, until finally she couldn’t walk on it at all. That’s when Papa made a crutch for her out of a red oak limb with a fork on one end. The way Daisy could zip around on that old home-made crutch was something to see. She could get around on it just about as well as I could on two straight legs.

  It was always a mystery to me how my little sister could be so happy, and so full of life with an old twisted leg like that. She was always laughing and singing and hopping around on that old crutch just as if she didn’t have a worry in the world. Her one big delight was in getting me all riled up by poking fun at me. She never overlooked an opportunity, and it seemed that these opportunities came about every fifteen minutes.

  Up on the hillside from our house, under a huge red oak tree, Daisy had a playhouse. From early spring until late fall, practically all of her time was spent there.

  I didn’t like to mess around Daisy’s playhouse. Every time I went up there, I had a guilty feeling—like maybe I shouldn’t be there. She had all kinds of girl stuff setting around; corn shuck dolls, mud pies, and pretty bottles. She treasured every tin can that came to our home. In each one, some kind of wild flower peeked out.

  At one end of her playhouse, Daisy had built a little altar. She had made a cross by tying two grapevines together and covering them with tinfoil. The face of Christ was there, too. Daisy had molded it from red clay. For the eyes, she had pressed blue shells from a hatched-out robin’s nest into the soft c
lay. She had covered the crown with moss to resemble hair. When Mama discovered that the moss was actually growing in the soft clay, she told everyone in the hills about it. People came from miles around to see the miracle. I never saw anything like it.

  It was pretty around Daisy’s playhouse; especially, in the early spring when the dogwoods, redbuds, and mountain flowers were blooming. Warm little breezes would whisper down from the green, rugged hills; and the air would be so full of sweet smells, it would make your nose tickle and burn. If you closed your eyes, and filled your lungs full of that sweet-smelling stuff, your head would get as light as a hummingbird’s feather and feel as if it was going to sail away by itself.

  Daisy was never alone in her playhouse. She had all kinds of little friends. Big fat bunnies, red squirrels, and chipmunks would come right up to her and eat from her hand. She wouldn’t be in her playhouse five minutes until all kinds of wild birds would come winging in from the mountains. They would sit around in the bushes and sing so happy and loud that the mountains would ring with their birdie songs. Sometimes they would even light on her shoulders.

  I never could understand how my little sister made friends with the birds and the animals. I couldn’t get within a mile of anything that had hair or feathers on it. Daisy said it was because I was a boy and was catching things all the time.

  One morning in the early spring, Papa came in from doing the chores with an empty milk bucket in his hand. He looked grouchy, and didn’t even say “Good morning” to any of us. This was so unusual that right away Mama knew something was wrong.

  From the cook stove where she was fixing our breakfast, Mama smiled and said, “Knowing how desperate you are to get the planting done, I’d say it was going to rain.”

  “No,” Papa said, in a disgusted voice. “It’s not going to rain. Sally Gooden’s gone again.”

  Sally Gooden was our crazy old milk cow.