It sounded crazy, but Poetry read an awful lot of the many books his pop and mom were always buying for him, and he was as smart as anything.
Little Tom spoke up then and said, “A ghost wouldn’t know that Bumblebee Hill had had its name changed from Strawberry Hill to Bumblebee Hill, would it?” And right away I was remembering that hill, where the gang had had a fierce fight with a town gang when Little Tom had still belonged to that other gang, and we had all of us stirred up a bumblebee’s nest on that hillside and gotten stung in different places, which had hurt worse than each other’s fists had, and the fight had broken up, and we’d given that hill a new name. In that fight as you maybe know, two red-haired boys had had a terrible battle and one of the red-haired freckled-faced boys had licked the other one all to smithereens for awhile, until I had started fighting a little harder and then I’d licked him even worse, all in the same fight.
Big Jim spoke up then and said, “A ghost probably couldn’t spell our names. Anyway, let’s get going to the old cemetery and see what happens.”
With that, Circus was already on his way, running like a deer, with all of us right at his heels as fast as we could go. Talking about spelling must have reminded Poetry of a poem, for, as you know, he was always learning new poems by heart and quoting them to us, he knowing maybe a hundred of them, and you never knew when he was going to start one of them at the wrong time. He hardly ever got to finish one, though, on account of the gang’s stopping him, or else it was too long to finish it before we all thought of something we all’d rather do than listen to his poem.
Anyway, while he and I were puffing along with the rest of the gang toward Bumblebee Hill, he started in puffing out a new one I’d never heard before, and this is the way it went:
“The teacher has no E Z time To teach his A, B, C’s: It per C V rance takes sublime, And all his N R G’s. In K C doesn’t use the birch All kindness does S A, The scholars who X L at church, In school will ½ to pay ...”
“Don’t use the word _birch_,” I panted to Poetry, and he panted back at me, “Why?”
“’Cause it reminds me of _beech_, and _beech_ reminds me of a beech switch which reminds me of a schoolteacher and that reminds me of school, and----”