Gib Rides Home (16 page)

“Oh, Gib,” Livy said. “Did you know him? You did, didn’t you?” And when Gib nodded, “Oh, Gib. I’m sorry.”

After that day Gib and Livy talked to each other whenever they got the chance. Whenever Miss Hooper left for a minute to get tea or a different book, or at the end of the school day, Livy would start right in, talking as hard and fast as she could. So Gib talked too, not quite as fast, maybe, but he had a lot to say as well. At first it was mostly about Georgie.

Gib wanted to know how and why Georgie died. “Miss Offenbacher said he was doing as well as could be expected,” he told Livy. “And then we never heard anything more. We didn’t see any newspapers for a while, but we hardly ever got to see newspapers, so we didn’t know that was why.” He stopped and swallowed hard. “Did they cut off his hands?” he made himself ask as, against his will, his own hands crept up to grasp his wrists. “Is that why he died?”

Livy shook her head. “I’m not sure about his hands. The paper didn’t say. The paper said he died of pneumonia.”

“I hope they didn’t cut off his hands,” Gib said over the hot, throbbing lump in his throat that made it hard for him to say anything at all. “He was so scared they would.”

Livy didn’t talk for a while either. And when Gib looked over to see why, he saw she was crying. He turned his eyes away quickly, but when he got his voice back and began to tell her about how they had found Georgie in Juno’s stall, she cried harder than ever. Then they just sat there for a long time not looking at each other. At least, Gib didn’t look at Livy, because watching her cry made it harder for him to keep from crying, too. She was still crying when they heard the sound of the buggy in the driveway. Livy ran out to wash her face, and Gib hurriedly put on his coat and went out through the kitchen and around to the front of the house to get the team and take them to the barn.

The next day when Miss Hooper went to get tea Livy wanted to hear some more about Georgie, and so Gib told her how he’d always sort of taken care of Georgie because he was kind of helpless, and how some people called him Rabbit Olson. He also told her about the time he’d set Georgie straight when Elmer was trying to scare him to death about a bloodsucking ghost that was supposed to live in Lovell House. And Livy told Gib about how the paper said that a judge had decided that Mr. Bean couldn’t have any more boys from Lovell House or from any other orphanage.

“He’d had a lot of boys working for him before,” Livy said. “Older boys. But they always got fed up and ran away.”

And Gib said that was probably why he’d picked Georgie even though he was pretty young and small to be chosen for a farm-out. Livy agreed with him. “That murdering old slave driver must have thought that poor Georgie would be too scared to run away,” she said.

Livy said that Mr. Bean’s farm was right there in Longford County and that he used to come into town sometimes to buy supplies, but after everyone found out about Georgie, old Bean quit coming because nobody in towns would talk to him.

“Serves him right,” Gib said. And Livy, with her eyes shooting blue fire the way they did when she was really mad, said, “Except not bad enough. What he should have been is
hung
.” So that was one thing they agreed on. That Mr. Bean should have been hung, or at least thrown into prison for life. But that turned out to be one of the few things they agreed on a hundred percent.

As the lessons continued they disagreed on a lot of things, like for instance what was the longest river in the world or the highest mountain. Sometimes it seemed to Gib that whatever answer he gave to one of Miss Hooper’s questions, Livy was bound and determined to give a different one. And when it turned out that he was right, which happened quite a lot, she always had some excuse. One of her excuses was that Gib was older than she was, so she didn’t have a fair chance.

“Not a lot older,” Gib told her once, grinning a little. That was a mistake. The grinning, that is. Livy didn’t like to be grinned at.

She glared at him. “Yes, you are,” she said. “A lot older. You must be. What year were you born?”

And when Gib said he was born in 1897, she said, “See? I wasn’t born until 1898. So you’re a whole year older than I am.”

“What month is your birthday, my dear?” Miss Hooper asked, and when Livy said April, she went on, “And I believe Gibson was born in December. Isn’t that right, Gib? So that makes him about four months older, doesn’t it?”

Livy glared and in her poutiest voice said, “Well, he’s bigger anyhow, and his head’s bigger. So that means he ought to have a lot more room for brains than I’ve got.”

Gib couldn’t help laughing at that, and so did Miss Hooper, and after a while Livy’s lips twitched and she laughed, too.

T
HAT WINTER THERE WAS
a terrible blizzard in the month of December. It started on the fifteenth and raged all day on the sixteenth, which was Gib’s birthday. Early in the morning of the fifteenth there had been only a cold, gray hush in the air, but Hy had seen what was coming. “A real ripsnorter’s blowin’ up,” he told Gib.

They were on their way to the barn at the time and Gib asked, “Is it because of the color of the sky? Is that how you know?”

And Hy said, “Well, that too, but mostly because my busted bones start achin’. When a blizzard’s blowin’ up, every durned bone of mine that ever got busted goes to achin’ like a bad tooth.”

Gib looked at Hy and shook his head, thinking about all those aching bones. Not just the ones the team ran over, either. According to Hy, nearly every bone in his body had been busted at one time or another. Mostly when he was a young cowhand and his job had been to green-break wild mustangs for the Rocking M. “Right in off the open range,” he always said. “Some of them never had a hand laid on them afore. Wild as a bunch of antelopes, but a whole lot bigger and stronger. What I had to do was to let them know that I warn’t plannin’ to eat them alive, and then to learn them that everythin’ would be fine if they’d just quit fightin’ for their lives and start cooperatin’.”

Hy always got that backward-looking drift in his eyes when he started thinking about all those beautiful, brave horses, snorting and squealing and showing the whites of their eyes. After he’d drifted awhile he’d chuckle and say something like, “Some of them ponies was just real determined to learn the hard way. Hard on them, and hard on my poor old bones, too.” And then he’d start pointing out all the breaks he’d had and what year the accident had “took place.” Gib liked listening to Hy’s stories about his days as a rip-roaring wild-horse wrangler, but at the moment he was also concerned about the rip-roaring weather that looked to be headed right in their direction.

At breakfast that morning Hy broke his rule about not talking unless he was spoken to and tried to help Mrs. Thornton convince the boss that he’d better not try to go into Longford. But Mr. Thornton wouldn’t listen. He especially refused to listen when Mrs. Thornton tried to remind him what the doctors at Harristown Hospital had told him. “Nonsense,” he said sharply. “There’s nothing wrong with my health.” He went to the window and said, “See, there’s not a breath of wind at the moment. And if a storm should blow in during the day, I’ll just put up overnight at the hotel.”

So Gib harnessed up the bays as usual, and Mr. Thornton went off into the stiffening wind, but without Livy, of course. And sure enough, he didn’t get back until two days later. In the meantime it was Gib’s eleventh birthday.

Just getting to the big house that second night of the storm hadn’t been easy. The blizzard was going full blast by then and the wind-driven snow bit into your cheeks and blinded your eyes. Leaning forward, propped up against the wind, Gib and Hy clung to each other and plunged toward the glowing windows of the big house. Once into the snowshed Hy had set up around the back door, they beat the snow off each other the best they could before they staggered into the kitchen—and into a real birthday party.

It must have been Mrs. Thornton who’d spilled the beans, because Gib hadn’t told anybody it was his birthday, not even Hy. For some reason he didn’t want anyone to know. He wasn’t sure why, although it might have been because it seemed like he wouldn’t care so much when nobody mentioned his birthday if the reason was that they just didn’t know about it. But Mrs. Thornton must have found out somehow.

Not that a nothing birthday would have been all that much different from the way it had been at Lovell House. Except that Miss Mooney always kept track of birthdays and asked everyone to be extra nice to the birthday person all day long, as a kind of gift. Often as not, that was all the gift you got. But that night when Gib, half frozen and still pretty well coated with snowflakes, pushed open the kitchen door, the first thing he saw was the crepe-paper decorations and the Thorntons’ good china on the table.

There were presents, too. Miss Hooper gave Gib a fancy leather jacket she’d cut down from a man-sized one she’d inherited from a dead uncle. And Mrs. Thornton gave him a new book, a copy of Jack London’s
Call of the Wild
. Hy had made him a bootjack, and even Livy had a present for him, a cardboard bookmark on which she had painted a picture of a horse’s head. A beautiful head with flaring nostrils, wild, white-rimmed eyes, and a black mane that flowed out right to the edge of the cardboard. And down at one end of the table was a big chocolate birthday cake that turned out to be Mrs. Perry’s present.

Everybody talked and talked that night, mostly about old times when the Rocking M Merrills had owned three thousand acres and run their herds on a lot more land besides. And in between the olden-days stories they stopped to listen to the raging wind and talk about the weather. It must have been talking about the blizzard that made Mrs. Perry bring up the subject of the awful storm they’d had a while back—“when old Jebidiah Bean sent that boy out into the cold without his mittens and—”

“Don’t!” Livy cried, and when they all looked at her she had her hands over her ears and a tragic expression on her face. “Can’t you talk about something more cheerful?” she said.

Mrs. Thornton looked puzzled. “Why, of course we can, dear,” she said. “But I didn’t know you felt so strongly about it. As I recall, you talked about it a great deal last winter.” Livy only ducked her head and, without looking at Gib, said, “That was because I didn’t know then how—how sad it was.”

When Gib realized what Livy was doing, he thought it was like she wanted to give him another present, besides the bookmark, by keeping anyone from talking about something that would make him feel bad. But when he tried to give her a look that said he understood, she only tossed her head and looked away. And later, when he tried to thank her for the bookmark, she did the same thing.

Lying in bed that night in Hy’s loft, under five or six extra blankets, Gib watched Bobby eating birthday cake crumbs, listened to the muted roar of the snow-choked wind, and thought about the birthday party.

The day, in a lot of ways, had been just about the best one of his whole life. The chicken-and-dumplings supper, the chocolate cake that had been made especially for him, and the presents were very much like one of his old hope dreams come to life. Only better. Back then, he never would have been able to even make a dream picture of anything quite so good as that cake. What he’d told everybody as he and Hy were getting ready to head out through the storm was the absolute truth, for sure and certain—that it had been the very best birthday he’d ever had.

But birthdays were one thing, and girls were something else again. Where girls were concerned, at least where Livy Thornton was concerned, there didn’t seem to be anything you could call “for sure and certain.” It seemed to Gib that just when you thought you had a girl figured and pretty much knew where she was going to head next, she shied off in some other direction entirely.

Thinking about Livy always seemed to bring up problems that, unlike long division and fractions, didn’t have any one right answer. Problems without any right answer had always given Gib an uneasy feeling, but as his cold feet warmed up and his thoughts began to drift toward sleep, he came up with a comforting answer. The answer was that not being able to understand girls wasn’t really his fault.

After having lived so long at Lovell House, where even laying eyes on a girl was a rare event, it wasn’t surprising if the first one he really got acquainted with turned out to be pretty mysterious.

T
HAT NIGHT, THE NIGHT
of the big blizzard and birthday party, Gib had gone to sleep thinking about how changeable females could be, and a few hours later, when the raging storm wakened him, he found himself thinking about other puzzling changes. Like, for instance, how much everything changed when Mr. Thornton was away from home.

Anytime the rest of them, Gib and Hy and any of the women, were in the kitchen together, things were very different than when Mr. Thornton was there too. Gib wondered if Mr. Thornton had always been so stern and silent and busy with his newspapers, or if having Gib there was what made him act that way. But if he really hated having Gib around, why had he come to Lovell House and signed the papers to take him out of the orphanage?

Perhaps the hatred had come later, after Gib had arrived at the Rocking M. But what had he done to cause it? Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of thing you could go around asking about. Mrs. Thornton would know the answer, of course, but asking her was out of the question.

“Mrs. Thornton,” he imagined himself saying, “could you tell me why your husband hates me?” Not likely. And asking Livy ... ? Probably not, unless she happened to be in a question-answering frame of mind. Gib went back to sleep wondering how you could tell if a girl was in a question-answering frame of mind. He would, he decided, keep his eyes open and try to find out, and if the opportunity arose, he would ask Livy to tell him why her father hated him.

But the opportunity didn’t arise right away. Christmas came and went without much change in Gib’s life. The Thorntons had two Christmas dinners, one in the kitchen, as usual, and one in the dining room with a bunch of banking friends. Gib thought the kitchen dinner with its roast chickens and pumpkin pies was fine enough to suit anybody, but Livy had insisted on telling him what the menu would be for the company dinner and sneaking him into the dining room just before the guests arrived so he could see how grand the table looked with its china and crystal and silver candlesticks. Gib was impressed all right, and just a little bit envious. After all, eating
was
one of his favorite occupations.