Read My Brother Louis Measures Worms Online
Authors: Barbara Robinson
Louis, still doggedly assembling the puzzle, mentioned what was to him the most interesting feature of the day. “We went to your funeral,” he said; and Uncle John nodded and said, “That's right.”
“He just doesn't remember,” Mother said finally, “and what difference does it make, anyway?” She raised her voice. “We're just all so glad we've found you. My goodness, the oldest member of our family! . . . And from now on, we're going to stay in close touch.”
But as we were leaving we heard Uncle John ask a nurse, “Who in the hell were all those people?”; so my father said he didn't think Mother should count on much correspondence back and forth.
We all had dinner at Randolph's Ribsâ“Seems only fair,” everyone saidâand headed home, after some reshuffling of people.
“I still think I ought to ride with Blanche,” Mother said. “I'm not sure Howard knows the way.”
“I don't know what difference that makes,” my father said. “
You
were supposed to know the way, and look what happened.” He wanted to hear all about what had happened, he said, and Mother could start from the time she stuck her head out the window and said, “We'll see you along the way.”
“Well,” she began, “it was a really pretty ride. . . .”
Louis and I listened for a while to a bewildering account of side trips to get gas and lunch and fresh country eggs, of misinterpreted road signs, of inaccurate directions from people at bus stops and grocery stores, of detoursâ“There were no detours on the highway,” my father said; but it seemed that Aunt Blanche and Mother were not on the highway often, or for very long. It had been an eventful day, though, and Louis and I fell asleep somewhere south of Xenia and didn't wake up again till we were home.
My father was right about Uncle John Lane. He never answered any of Mother's letters, but the director of the nursing home did send monthly reports about his health and well-being. She also sent us a small package containing Mr. Johnson's personal belongings: photographs, Confederate money, five Zane Grey westerns, a collection of travel postcards, and other odds and ends.
My father said this had to be the last straw in confusion, but Mother thought it was nice and eventually came to refer to Mr. Johnson as a distant relative, andâeven more eventuallyâjust seemed to forget that he wasn't one.
Perhaps, in her mind, he took the place of Aunt Blanche's secret post office flame, Clifford Sprague, who got married (to someone else) and moved to Indianapolis, much to Mother's consternation. She wanted to know what went wrong between him and Aunt Blanche but didn't like to ask, until my father pointed out that Aunt Blanche was obviously not heartbroken and, in fact, seemed unmoved about the whole thing.
“Clifford Sprague?” Aunt Blanche said, when she was questioned. “I didn't even know him. Whatever made you think I did?”
When Mother reported this conversation she said everybody was wrongâthat Blanche didn't care who read her postcards, and wasn't about to buy more real estate, when it was all she could do to get the grass cut and the hedge trimmed on the real estate she already had.
“There's a perfectly simple explanation for why she always goes to the post office,” Mother said.
“That's how she learned to drive. She just followed the mailman around his routeâfirst one mailman, and then another one. They always started at the same place and came back to the same place, and they never went very fast. It was perfect for Blanche, and it just got to be a habit.”
“Now let me understand this,” my father said. “Blanche would get in a car, and . . .” But then he stopped. He had finally realized, I guess, that he would never understand this, any more than he ever understood Mother's driving habits, Louis's contest entries . . . Aunt Mildred or Genevieve Fitch or Vergil the dogâany more than he would understand similar events and revelations yet to come.
Instead, he said, “It's the craziest thing I've ever heard . . . so far.”
T
HE
B
EST
C
HRISTMAS
P
AGEANT
E
VER
T
HE
B
EST
S
CHOOL
Y
EAR
E
VER
T
HE
B
EST
H
ALLOWEEN
E
VER
T
he Herdmans were
absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker's old broken-down toolhouse.
The toolhouse burned right down to the ground, and I think that surprised the Herdmans. They set fire to things all the time, but that was the first time they managed to burn down a whole building.
I guess it was an accident. I don't suppose they woke up that morning and said to one another, “Let's go burn down Fred Shoemaker's toolhouse” . . . but maybe they did. After all, it was a Saturday, and not much going on.
It was a terrific fireâtwo engines and two police cars and all the volunteer firemen and five dozen doughnuts sent up from the Tasti-Lunch Diner. The doughnuts were supposed to be for the firemen, but by the time they got the fire out the doughnuts were all gone. The Herdmans got themâwhat they couldn't eat they stuffed in their pockets and down the front of their shirts. You could actually
see
the doughnuts all around Ollie Herdman's middle.
I couldn't understand why the Herdmans were hanging around the scene of their crime. Everybody knew the whole thing was their fault, and you'd think they'd have the brains to get out of sight.
One fireman even collared Claude Herdman and said, “Did you kids start this fire, smoking cigars in that toolhouse?”
But Claude just said, “We weren't smoking cigars.”
And they weren't. They were playing with Leroy Herdman's “Young Einstein” chemistry set, which he stole from the hardware store, and that was how they started the fire.
Leroy said so. “We mixed all the little powders together,” he said, “and poured lighter fluid around on them and set fire to the lighter fluid. We wanted to see if the chemistry set was any good.”
Any other kidâeven a mean kidâwould have been a little bit worried if he stole $4.95 worth of something and then burned down a building with it. But Leroy was just mad because the chemistry set got burned up along with everything else before he had a chance to make one or two bombs.
The fire chief got us all togetherâthere were fifteen or twenty kids standing around watching the fireâand gave us a little talk about playing with matches and gasoline and dangerous things like that.
“I don't say that's what happened here,” he told us. “I don't
know
what happened here, but that could have been it, and you see the result. So let this be a good lesson to you, boys and girls.”
Of course it was a great lesson to the Herdmansâthey learned that wherever there's a fire there will be free doughnuts sooner or later.
I guess things would have been different if they'd burned down, say, the Second Presbyterian Church instead of the toolhouse, but the toolhouse was about to fall down anyway. All the neighbors had pestered Mr. Shoemaker to do something about it because it looked so awful and was sure to bring rats. So everybody said the fire was a blessing in disguise, and even Mr. Shoemaker said it was a relief. My father said it was the only good thing the Herdmans ever did, and if they'd
known
it was a good thing, they wouldn't have done it at all. They would have set fire to something else . . . or somebody.
They were just so all-around awful you could hardly believe they were real: Ralph, Imogene, Leroy, Claude, Ollie, and Gladysâsix skinny, stringy-haired kids all alike except for being different sizes and having different black-and-blue places where they had clonked each other.
They lived over a garage at the bottom of Sproul Hill. Nobody used the garage anymore, but the Herdmans used to bang the door up and down just as fast as they could and try to squash one anotherâthat was their idea of a game. Where other people had grass in their front yard, the Herdmans had rocks. And where other people had hydrangea bushes, the Herdmans had poison ivy.
There was also a sign in the yard that said beware of the cat.
New kids always laughed about that till they got a look at the cat. It was the meanest- looking animal I ever saw. It had one short leg and a broken tail and one missing eye, and the mailman wouldn't deliver anything to the Herdmans because of it.
“I don't think it's a regular cat at all,” the mailman told my father. “I think those kids went up in the hills and caught themselves a bobcat.”
“Oh, I don't think you can tame a wild bobcat,” my father said.
“I'm sure you can't,” said the mailman. “They'd never try to
tame
it; they'd just try to make it wilder than it was to begin with.”
If that was their plan, it workedâthe cat would attack anything it could see out of its one eye.
One day Claude Herdman emptied the whole first grade in three minutes flat when he took the cat to Show-and-Tell. He didn't feed it for two days so it was already mad, and then he carried it to school in a box, and when he opened the box the cat shot outâright straight up in the air, people said.
It came down on the top blackboard ledge and clawed four big long scratches all the way down the blackboard. Then it just tore around all over the place, scratching little kids and shedding fur and scattering books and papers everywhere.
The teacher, Miss Brandel, yelled for everybody to run out in the hall, and she pulled a coat over her head and grabbed a broom and tried to corner the cat. But of course she couldn't see, with the coat over her head, so she just ran up and down the aisles, hollering “Here, kitty!” and smacking the broom down whenever the cat hissed back. She knocked over the Happy Family dollhouse and a globe of the world, and broke the aquarium full of twenty gallons of water and about sixty-five goldfish.
All the time she kept yelling for Claude to come and catch his cat, but Claude had gone out in the hall with the rest of the class.
Later, when Miss Brandel was slapping Band-Aids on everyone who could show her any blood, she asked Claude why in the world he didn't come and get his cat under control.
“You told us to go out in the hall,” Claude said, just as if he were the ordinary kind of first grader who did whatever teachers said to do.
The cat settled down a little bit once it got something to eatâmost of the goldfish and Ramona Billian's two pet mice that she brought to Show-and-Tell. Ramona cried and carried on soâ“I can't even bury them!” she saidâthat they sent her home.
The room was a wreckâbroken glass and papers and books and puddles of water and dead goldfish everywhere. Miss Brandel was sort of a wreck too, and most of the first graders were hysterical, so somebody took them outdoors and let them have recess for the rest of the day.
Claude took the cat home and after that there was a rule that you couldn't bring anything alive to Show-and-Tell.
The Herdmans moved from grade to grade through the Woodrow Wilson School like those South American fish that strip your bones clean in three minutes flat . . . which was just about what they did to one teacher after another.
But they never, never got kept back in a grade.
When it came time for Claude Herdman to pass to the second grade he didn't know his ABC's or his numbers or his colors or his shapes or his “Three Bears” or how to get along with anybody. But Miss Brandel passed him anyway.
For one thing, she knew she'd have Ollie Herdman the next year. That was the thing about the Herdmansâthere was always another one coming along, and no teacher was crazy enough to let herself in for two of them at once.
I was always in the same grade with Imogene Herdman, and what I did was stay out of her way. It wasn't easy to stay out of her way. You couldn't do it if you were very pretty or very ugly, or very smart or very dumb, or had anything unusual about you, like red hair or double-jointed thumbs.
But if you were sort of a medium kid like me, and kept your mouth shut when the teacher said, “Who can name all fifty states?” you had a pretty good chance to stay clear of Imogene.
My Brother Louis Measures Worms
And Other Louis Stories
Copyright © 1988 by Barbara Robinson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robinson, Barbara
   My brother Louis measures worms
   “A Charlotte Zolotow book.”
   Summary: Young Mary Elizabeth relates the humorous misadventures of her brother Louis and the other wacky members of her unpredictable, very odd family.
   ISBN 0-06-076672-7 (pbk.)
   EPub Edition © 2010 ISBN: 9780062077158
   [1. Family lifeâFiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.R5628My 1988
87-45302
[Fic]
CIP
AC