Gib Rides Home (2 page)

Sometimes the bits and pieces came with a good warm feeling, but others had the look and feel of a bad dream. Like the sneaky one that usually came in the middle of the night, where he suddenly was watching a little boy riding in a buggy. A skinny-faced kid, with bony legs hanging out from too-short pants. He would be watching the kid in the buggy and then suddenly he, Gibson Whittaker, would be that little boy. Dressed in a dark blue suit with a big square collar he would be the one riding in a shiny new buggy behind a high-stepping dapple gray mare.

It was a good dream at first because someone, a big man in a scratchy wool coat, was letting him hold the reins and telling him how easy it was for good hands to talk to the gray mare. The big man didn’t seem to be his father or even anyone he knew real well, but he had a kindly face, and knew how to make his hands tell the mare to step lively or slow down without using a whip or even a hard slap of the reins. And Gib was feeling happy because he could feel, plain as day, the talking between his own good hands and the gray’s mouth.

But then the buggy was stopping in front of a huge building. A big old stone building that rose up like a mountain, with high gray walls that went on and on forever and, way down at the end, round towers that seemed to stretch up almost to the clouds. A castle, it surely was, like the one in the fairy-tale story about an evil king who killed everybody who opened secret doors or asked forbidden questions.

And then a woman in a big feathery hat was lifting him down from the buggy and he was holding back and trying to tell the woman about the castle and how he had seen it before in a book and how an evil king lived there. He seemed to know the woman a little bit, but not enough to know her name except for Ma’am. “No Ma’am. No!” he kept saying. “Please don’t take me there. Please don’t.”

Then Gib seemed to be just watching again, and the woman was pulling the little boy up a long, curving road toward the huge building. It seemed like a nightmare all right. The castle was way too big and grand to be anything like a regular house for living in. And even though it sometimes seemed he was just standing off and watching what was happening, Gib did have a notion that part of it might have been a true remembering of the day he’d come to live at Lovell House.

The rest of what happened that day had faded away, like everything and everybody who’d come before.

Even the memory of his mother, whose name had been Maggie—Maggie Ernestine Whittaker, according to Miss Mooney—was the same way, nothing but broken-off, senseless pieces. Nowadays all he could recollect for certain was the way her hair had wisped around her face on hot days, some parts from her songs and stories, and how her soft eyes went hard and sparkly when she got mad.

Remembering Mama’s angry eyes always brought back one memory picture, sharp and whole as yesterday. The part that always seemed to come out the clearest was the old man and the horse.

Gib could recollect that old man plain as anything. Could even see his long, dirty coat, and how it flapped around while he beat on a poor old horse with a two-by-four.

He could see that horse real clear, too, a skinny little swaybacked buckskin. He didn’t know for sure just where the horse beating happened, but it might have been in a town because other people were in the picture, too. Maybe five or six men, who seemed to be just standing around watching the horse beater, and Mama and Gib in their buckboard. And then, all of a sudden, when the man was fixing to swing the two-by-four again, Mama kind of flew out of the buckboard and hollered right in his mean old face.

Gib could bring back the whole thing sharp as could be, most anytime he tried—the buckboard and the team Mama was driving, too, a big bay gelding and a sorrel mare. He was pretty sure the bay’s name was Amos, but he wasn’t sure about the mare’s. He could remember how she looked, though, plain as anything. A dark sorrel she was, with a pretty blaze face and a spooky disposition. He seemed to recollect things like that real easy.

Sometimes he could even see how the old horse beater’s straggly beard quivered when Mama yelled at him. And how he, Gibson, could only watch from the buckboard, because he was too little to get down by himself. Could only sit there crying while the old man stood glaring at Mama and holding the two-by-four up over her head. But finally the horse beater backed off and put his club back in his wagon. Gib could even remember how Mama’s eyes had sparkled in a different way when some of the men who were watching waved their hats and cheered.

That seemed to be his clearest memory of all, which was a puzzling thing when you came right down to it. Why would a person remember his mother hollering at a dirty old stranger when he had so few other memories of those years before he came to Lovell House?

Oh, there were some other small scenes all right, ones he couldn’t recall on purpose but that sneaked up on him now and then when he wasn’t trying. Memories of hearing books read and songs sung at bedtime, and even parts of the stories and a few of the pictures in the storybooks.

And other times different bits and pieces came back, everyday things mostly, like gathering eggs, and feeding chickens, and other critters too. Lots of little bits of memory about feeding animals—particularly the horses.

Feeding the horses and riding them, too. At least riding gentle old Amos bareback, sometimes with just a hackamore on his long, bony head. Gib seemed to remember the riding, not just in his head but in other parts of his body, too. As if his legs and his backside could remember Amos’s trot in the same way maybe that Miss Mooney’s fingers remembered the keys on the piano. Another thing his backside seemed to recall was a spanking he’d gotten for trying to ride the other one—the spooky, hard-mouthed sorrel mare.

So there were things about animals, and stories from his mama’s books, but nothing more about Maggie Ernestine herself. Miss Mooney said that she’d died not long before Gib came to live at Lovell House, but he had no memory of her dying. And nothing at all about his father except his name in the record book. John Wilson Whittaker, deceased 1901.

And nothing about how he came to be in that shiny buggy on his way to become a Lovell House orphan.

T
HERE WEREN’T MANY PLACES
, no real towns or houses leastways, in Gib’s early memories. Nothing at all that he could put a name to or find on a map. At least not before he came to live at Lovell House. And even his early orphanage memories were never clear and sharp, because all the early thoughts and feelings seemed to come tangled up with ones that came later. Memories, for instance, of crossing the entry hall on his way to the office.

The entry hall at Lovell House was very grand, with a slippery white stone floor and, on each side, staircases that curved up toward a faraway circle of darkly glowing colored glass. Sometimes it seemed to Gib that he could recall that shiny whitish floor below, and the soaring dome above, from that very first day when the woman in the big hat pulled him through the two sets of double doors and into the huge, dimly lit room. But maybe not. Maybe he was only bringing to mind all the times he’d seen it since.

Memories of living in Junior Hall were tangled too. Any early recollections of his first few days as a junior blended into the days and months that came later. Being a junior meant that you slept in an enormous half acre of a room that had once been the Lovell family’s private ballroom, with around thirty other four- to eight-year-olds. All the way from four-year-olds who cried in their sleep and wet their beds to eight-year-olds who took the bread you saved from supper and threatened to whup you real good if you told.

It seemed to Gib that all the best Junior Hall memories centered around Miss Mooney, who was freckle-faced and skinny and just about the busiest person at Lovell House. Besides being a classroom teacher and the housemother for Junior Hall, Miss Mooney was in charge of the house clinic, where she took care of things like smashed fingers and chicken pox. Gib had never minded being a little bit hurt or sick because it gave him a chance to talk to Miss Mooney without thirty other boys trying to horn in. It seemed to Gib that every time he got to talk to Miss Mooney she told him things that made him feel better in places he hadn’t even known were hurting. Like when she told him about hope dreaming, for instance.

Gib was still pretty new at Lovell House the night Miss Mooney told him how to hope-dream. It was very late and most of the juniors had been asleep for a long time when she came into the hall. But Gib wasn’t sleeping, and neither was a little four-year-old kid named Bertram. Bertie had been crying softly for a long time when Miss Mooney stopped at his bed and talked to him until he went to sleep. Then she came on down the hall and when she saw that Gib was still awake she stopped and asked him why.

Gib sat up. “I don’t know, ma’am,” he said. “I just can’t get to sleep sometimes. Just thinking too much, I guess.”

And then she told him about how to do hope dreams when you can’t sleep. A hope dream, Miss Mooney said, was when you make up a long daydream story about something very good happening, the very best thing you could possibly imagine. And you picture all the places and people in the dream very carefully until you can see everything as clear as day. Then she started telling him about the hope dream she’d had when she was a little girl in Omaha, but before she’d finished, just like Bertie, he went off to sleep.

It was right after that Gib began his own hope dream about living in a family with a father and a mother and lots of kids and animals. His family always lived in the country, but as he got older Gib’s dream pictures of the family and the house changed. At first the mother always looked a lot like Miss Mooney and the father was something like a friendly man Gib had seen once at the Harristown Library. As for the house itself, it started out rather small and vague, but whenever Gib got to go into Harristown, to the library or barbershop, he’d pick out houses to hope his would look like.

As the months went by, Gib learned how to get along as a six-, and then a seven-, and finally an eight-year-old junior. One thing he learned early on was that it was a good idea to steer clear of certain senior boys who liked to call juniors names like “runt” and “dumb little greenhorn” and even twist their arms just to make them say uncle.

Sometimes Gib couldn’t wait to be a senior even though some people said that juniors were the lucky ones. “Juniors get all the breaks,” Gib remembered hearing, way back when he was only six or seven. Buster Gray had said it one day when he was in Junior Hall collecting dirty laundry.

“What breaks?” Gib had asked.

“What breaks?” Buster, a scrawny senior boy with a fuzzy upper lip and a crippled foot, looked amazed at Gib’s ignorance. “Well, for one thing you get all the easy indoor chores in the winter time, ’stead of freezing to death shoveling snow or mucking out the cow barn. And you get to live down here in the big hall, ’stead of roastin’ in summertime and freezin’ to death in winter way up there on the third floor. Ol’ furnace don’t do much good way up there.”

Gib nodded, thinking that Buster sure thought about freezing to death a lot. And noticing, too, that Buster did look kind of frostbitten most of the time, particularly around the ears and nose. “Hadn’t thought of that,” Gib admitted.

“Yeah.” Buster seemed pleased with Gib’s response. But just as he looked to be winding up to tell Gib a lot more, Miss Mooney came in and Buster picked up his basket of bed-wetter sheets and hobbled on out.

As Gib went on with his own chore time that day, his own easy indoor chore, dusting the woodwork in Junior Hall, he thought about what he’d just heard. He could see what Buster meant, but at the same time it didn’t seem to Gib that living in Junior Hall was all that easy, either.

Of course, all the teachers were always saying how lucky
all
the boys, infants and seniors as well as juniors, were to be living at Lovell House. And what a blessing it was that Mrs. Harriette Lovell, whose little son had died of a fever, had given her beautiful mansion to be used as a home for orphaned and abandoned boys. Gib guessed it was true, that he was lucky to live at Lovell House, but something inside him didn’t seem to believe it.

The part that didn’t seem lucky was not having a place and people to belong to. It seemed to Gib that not belonging anywhere or to anybody was just about as unlucky as you could get. And Jacob felt the same way.

Jacob, in fact, said he thought it was kind of funny how everybody wanted them to feel lucky. “Yeah,” he said, “I felt specially lucky last Christmas when all I got was one orange slice and one little bitty peppermint stick. Didn’t you?”

“Yeah,
lucky
,” Gib agreed. Holding out both hands, pretending to be holding his slice of orange and piece of candy, he put a dumb grin on his face, and when Jacob did the same thing, everybody laughed. And that started the dumb lucky joke that he and Jacob kept fooling around with.

Once, even though he could pretty much guess what Bobby would say, Gib asked Bobby if he ever felt lucky.

“Lucky?” Bobby had said. “Me, lucky?”

Watching how his lips and eyebrows dipped down at the corners, Gib could just about tell what Bobby was going to say. Or at least just about how whiny it was going to be.

“You must be fooling. You must think being dumped outside a church in the middle of a twister storm is a real lucky way to start in living.”

Gib had heard the story before, the one about the basket on the church steps and the twister that had just about carried Bobby away before the preacher came out and found him. But he’d also heard Miss Mooney’s answer when Bobby asked her to tell Gib that it was true.

Miss Mooney was the only adult at Lovell House who would even try to answer questions like “Where did I live before I came here?” and “How come I’m an orphan?” Sometimes she even looked up your records in the head office, if you asked her real nice. After she’d looked up Bobby s records she hadn’t said that he was lying, but she hadn’t exactly agreed with him, either.

Miss Mooney was smiling as she said, “It was a storm all right, Bobby. The minister who brought you to Lovell House said there was a rainstorm the night they found you.” Noticing Bobby’s disappointment, she hurried on. “A real bad rainstorm, I think, but I don’t think there’s anything about an actual tornado in the record book.”