Gib Rides Home (3 page)

When Gib grinned and poked Bobby in the ribs he only shrugged, but the next time he told the story, the tornado was back again. Bobby was that kind of kid. The kind who seemed to enjoy thinking that something big and powerful had a grudge against him. A big enough grudge to stir up a whole tornado just to get a little newborn baby, and then, when that didn’t work, to make him grow up to be a homely, knock-kneed, sickly orphan.

But, coyote whine and all, Bobby was mostly a good friend. At least when being friendly wasn’t apt to get him into too much trouble. And Jacob was an even better friend. Jacob was the kind of friend who would stand up for you no matter what. No matter that Elmer Lewis had it in for you.

Elmer Lewis, a thin-headed, sharp-faced kid whose cot in Junior Hall was just three down from Gib’s, was a natural-born tattler. Elmer would tattle on his best friend, and not just to get out of trouble, either. Elmer seemed to tattle just for the feel of it, like a chicken scratching even when there was nothing there to eat, just for the feel of the scratching. There was the time, for instance, when Elmer got Gib sent to the Repentance Room for something he didn’t do at all.

It all started in Junior Hall one night when Elmer was scaring poor little Rabbit Olson to death, telling him how there was a ghost in Lovell House. Rabbit, whose real name was Georgie, had a long upper lip and a turned-up pinkish nose and was scared most of the time, even without any encouragement from the likes of Elmer. One night, when it was almost silence time and Georgie was already in bed, a kerosene lamp near his bed flickered and went out without a soul touching it.

“Hey, Rabbit,” Elmer said, noticing how Georgie was staring at the lamp. “Did you see that? Must be that old ghost again.”

“G-G-Ghost?” Rabbit said, ducking down so just his round rabbity eyes showed above his blankets, and right off starting to wheeze. Poor old Georgie always seemed to have a hard time getting his breath when he got extra tired or scared. “What g-g-ghost, Elmer?”

Elmer came back toward Georgie’s bed, staring down first at him and then at the other boys who had begun to cluster around. “You hear that, men?” he said. “This dummy doesn’t even know about our Lovell House man-eating ghost. What do you think? Maybe I ought to tell him.”

“Yeah, you tell him, Elmer,” someone said with a mean giggle.

“Suppose I should ought to,” Elmer said. He sat down on the edge of Georgie’s cot and, while several other boys from nearby beds crowded around, started in on an awful story about a man in a black cape with long, bloody teeth, who went around Lovell House blowing out lamps to get himself in the mood to do other, even more terrible things.

Gib, who knew Elmer pretty well by that time, listened to the whole story, thinking that he’d have been scared too if he hadn’t heard some of Elmer’s tall tales before. But then, when Elmer was about to run down and poor old Rabbit looked to be about to die of suffocation, Gib walked over to the table and took the lid off the lamp’s kerosene well.

“Well, now,” he said in a loud voice, “if that old ghost had just waited a second before he blew out this here lamp, he might have saved himself the trouble. This thing is plum empty. The wick’s all right but the well is bone dry. Come here, Georgie, and take a look.”

Miss Mooney came in about then and everybody went back to his own bed and got ready to say his prayers. When prayers were over, Miss Mooney reminded them that silence had begun and then she went around turning off all the lamps except for the small night-light near the door. When she got to the lamp near Georgie’s bed she looked around and asked if someone had blown it out.

It was Gib who answered. “No ma’am,” he said. “Nobody blew it out. I guess it just ran out of kerosene.”

Miss Mooney checked the well, nodded, smiled at Gib, and went on out. And then, when the door closed and the huge room was dark and still, Gib broke the silence rule and said, “No sir, Georgie. Nobody and
no ghost
blew out that lamp. And don’t you forget it.”

There were a lot of halfway-smothered snickers before everybody went to sleep and forgot all about Elmer’s man-eating ghost. As usual, Gib didn’t get to sleep right away, but he did stop thinking about Elmer and got back to the latest version of his favorite hope dream. As it turned out later, though, Elmer didn’t forget about Gib’s taking sides with Georgie and making Elmer Lewis look like a fool.

T
HERE WERE TWO CLASSROOMS
at Lovell House, regular classrooms complete with blackboards and real school desks that had slots to hold pens and pencils and, in the right-hand corner, a hole for an ink bottle. Gib had never been to a regular public school, but the boys who had been said the desks looked just about the same.

Five days a week, from seven to eleven-thirty, every Lovell House boy five years old and up went to school. That was another lucky thing for Lovell House orphans, Miss Mooney said. Some orphans in other institutions had very little schooling or even none at all, which, according to Miss Mooney, meant that later in life they would never be able to make anything of themselves.

Sometimes Jacob, who hated school a lot, said he never did know what to make of himself, and if learning to do long division was what it took, he never was going to.

But Gib didn’t mind school all that much; at least he didn’t when Miss Mooney was his teacher. He particularly liked the parts about reading and writing. “Reading and writing,” he told Jacob, “is a lot more interesting than scrubbing floors and washing pots and pans. And if we didn’t have to go to school in the mornings, chore time would last all day, like as not.”

Jacob could see the truth in that. “Yeah,” he said. “I reckon you’re right. ’Cept sometimes chores aren’t too bad. Like weeding in the garden in the summertime. I’m pretty good at weeding, but I just can’t get the hang of reading. It’s easy for you. I remember how last year, when you first came, you took to it real quick. Like maybe you been to school before?”

Gib knew it was a question, but he didn’t know the answer. He was pretty sure he’d never been in a schoolroom before he came to Lovell House, but he could recall how the letters started right in making themselves into words for him, without his even knowing how he knew. He was pretty fair at spelling too. And that was one reason he’d known for sure that Elmer had been lying when he claimed Gib wrote a dirty word on his spelling test.

It wouldn’t have happened if Miss Mooney had been giving the spelling test that day. In the first place, Miss Mooney probably wouldn’t have fallen for Elmer’s trick, and even if she did, she might have settled things herself instead of putting anybody on report.

But it was Miss Berger, a nervous, twitchy part-time teacher with a delicate, ladylike voice, who was giving the second-grade spelling test that morning. “And just for today, gentlemen,” she said in her highfalutin voice, “we will write the test in pencil rather than ink.”

Gib had to smile a little, remembering how the last time she had taught the class she’d been showing how easy it was to use an ink pen, and the sharp old nib stuck into the paper and spattered ink all over her frilly white blouse. So he hadn’t really blamed Miss Berger for letting the test be written in pencil, even though that was what got him into such a mess of trouble.

When the test was over, Miss Berger had everybody exchange papers before she read off the correct spellings. “It’s not that I would even imagine that any of you would erase your own mistakes,” she said, fluttering her ladylike hands. “I refuse to believe that any Lovell House boy would resort to such evil behavior. It’s just that I’ve found that exchanging papers does make for more careful correcting.”

Which was probably true. Like as not, Miss Berger really didn’t believe that any Lovell House boy would erase his own mistakes. Particularly since she knew that their pencils didn’t have erasers. But what she didn’t know, and what Gib himself had forgotten for the moment, was that Elmer Lewis had one. A big, square reddish one he’d lifted off a new boy just a few days before.

Gib didn’t exchange with Elmer. Even though he had just turned seven at the time and was still pretty much of a Lovell House greenhorn, he wasn’t as dumb as all that. Particularly not after he’d spoiled Elmer’s fun by keeping Georgie Olson from dying of fright. But after Gib’s paper wound up with Frankie Elsworth, Elmer managed to get Frankie to exchange again.

The test words were all about farming that day. Words like
barn
and
plow
and
horse
and
chicken
and
duck
and
pig
. Gib liked words about farming and he was pretty sure he’d spelled them all right. But when Miss Berger asked for the papers to be handed in, Elmer raised his hand and asked if he could show her something.

Gib knew right away that Elmer was up to no good, because of the look on his face. A phony sorry-faced look, like he’d pulled when Miss Mooney caught him picking the wings off flies and he’d excused himself by saying he hated doing it but felt he ought to because flies were mean, dirty critters. Gib couldn’t hear what Elmer whispered to the teacher that day, but Jacob, whose desk was closer, heard the whole thing.

“Ma’am,” Elmer whispered, “I just thought you ought to know the kind of words Gibson’s been using lately.”

According to Jacob, Miss Berger looked downright shocked when she saw what Elmer was pointing to. Too shocked to let Gib tell her what had really happened or even to take another look at the paper. Not even when he tried to point out the brownish red smear where one letter had been erased and written over. And the first thing Miss Berger said, as soon as she quit blushing and fluttering enough to say anything, was that Gibson Whittaker was on report.

E
VERY LOVELL HOUSE BOY
knew about being put on report. So everyone in Miss Berger’s spelling class knew that as soon as chore time was over, Gib Whittaker would have to come back to Miss Berger’s room and then be taken to the headmistress’s office. What might happen after that varied according to who was telling it, but it was generally agreed that Gib would at least get a good scolding by Mrs. Hansen, and then probably he’d be sent to bed without any supper.

Gib didn’t much like the thought of missing supper, but except for that, he wasn’t too upset. Not right at first, anyway. He’d never been on report before, and actually he was kind of curious to see what it would be like. New experiences were pretty hard to come by at Lovell House, and being put on report was at least something out of the ordinary. And besides, he had a feeling that old Mrs. Hansen, who had been headmistress practically forever, was pretty fair-minded and sensible. Too sensible to go all red and fluttery and refuse to even take a close look at a dirty word to see if it had been erased and written over.

“I’ll bet Mrs. Hansen will see those eraser marks,” Gib told Jacob. “So I can’t see how she could blame me. I mean, after she hears about Elmer swiping the eraser and all.”

Jacob was worried, though. During chore time, while he and Gib were in the pantry peeling a wheelbarrowful of potatoes that some farmer had donated to the orphanage, Jacob couldn’t seem to think about anything else. “What if you get sent to the Repentance Room?” he kept asking Gib.

“I don’t know,” Gib said, shrugging. “What if? What’s supposed to happen in there, anyway?”

Jacob widened his pale blue eyes. “I dunno for sure. Something awful, I guess. No junior’s ever been there, far as I know. And not many seniors either, at least not for a long time. Buster says Mrs. Hansen used to send some of the big guys there, but she pretty much quit after something real bad happened.”

“Real bad?” Gib asked, and Jacob nodded, rolling out his under lip significantly.

“Bad as can be, I guess,” Jacob said. “Buster said some kid had an attack while he was locked up there and when they went to find him he was a goner.”

“A goner?” Gib whispered.

“Yep. Dead as a doornail,” Jacob said. “And anyways, Mrs. Hansen stopped sending boys up there after that. But just lately it’s been happening again.”

“Just lately?” Gib cut the last bad spot off the potato he was peeling, dropped it in the bucket, and reached for another.

Jacob nodded. “Yep. That’s what Buster says, anyways.”

“Yeah? Well, I reckon it’s true, then,” Gib said. Buster, who at fifteen was Lovell House’s oldest resident, was an accepted authority on everything about Lovell House.

“Anyway, the whole thing is just no fair, Gib.” Jacob was working himself up into a twitchy, red-faced anger fit. “It’s just no fair to get put on report for doing something you didn’t do.” He bunched his thick blond eyebrows into a bristly scowl, sighed angrily, and threw a potato into the bucket of water so hard it splashed them both.

“Hey, look out,” Gib said, glancing over to where Mrs. Romer, the crabbiest of Lovell House’s cooks, was shoving chunks of firewood into one of the ranges. “You’ll be repenting too if you don’t watch out.”

After Jacob finally hushed, Gib went back to keeping his mind off
reporting
and
repenting
by thinking about potatoes. About how many potatoes he and Jacob had finished, and how many were still left to be peeled, and which of them was the faster peeler. But concentrating on potatoes only brought to mind the soup Mrs. Romer was getting ready to make, and the fact that nice thick potato soup was one of his favorite suppers. Realizing that he might miss out on potato soup because of Elmer’s dirty trick, he was suddenly right on the edge of getting angry enough to make his stomach ache. But then Jacob started in again.

“Lookee here, Gib.” This time Jacob’s whisper squeaked with excitement. “I just got this great idea. Maybe you could cut yourself real good and ... He swished his knife hand in the air, just missing his own fingers. “See, like that. If you give yourself a good enough whack to bloody up some potatoes, Cook might send you to Miss Mooney to get bandaged up. And if you asked her to, I bet she’d tell Miss Berger you were hurt so bad you had to go straight up to bed.”

But Gib just laughed and said he’d never heard anything about being on report, or even being sent to the Repentance Room, that made it bad enough to be worth losing blood over. Then, nodding toward where Mrs. Romer was regarding them suspiciously, he added out of the corner of his mouth, “Besides, Cook’s watching us. You better just shut up and peel.”