Gib Rides Home (15 page)

“’T
WASN’T NO WAY THE
mare’s fault,” Hy said. “Big part of it was mine. I should have throwed a holy fit when they first started talkin’ about the missus ridin’ in that there parade. I did tell them a Fourth of July parade weren’t no place for a hot-blooded, half-broke filly, but nobody paid me no heed. But a lot more of it was his fault for buying her that death-dealing sidesaddle and telling her she had to use it whenever she went into town.” Hy didn’t say who “he” was, but Gib was pretty sure he knew.

“Silky stood it pretty well, I guess, until they were right downtown. But then the band started up just as some crazy hoodlums ran past real close, yellin’ and whoopin’ and pulling a cart they’d fixed up to look like a fire engine.” Hy stopped and sighed before he went on. “She didn’t buck, she fell. Reared up and slipped on an oily patch and just went on over backwards. Miss Julia could have handled it real easy if she’d been in her regular saddle and wearing trousers—kicked her feet loose and jumped clear, like I taught her when she was just a tyke. But as it was ... His voice trailed off and he went into one of his blank-eyed stares. Gib waited, nudging him now and then with “Hy?” and “What happened then, Hy?”

When he came out of it, Hy’s face had darkened. “Wanted to shoot the mare, he did. Would have, too, ’cept Miss Julia made him promise he wouldn’t. I don’t know how she got him to promise, but he did. But Silky’s been a sore point ever since. I went on with her trainin’ and kept her exercised and all, right up till I busted my leg, but the boss won’t even look at her if he can help it.” Shaking his head, Hy grinned ruefully.

“When he writ out the things you were supposed to do, all the chores he wanted you to handle in one day, there warn’t one word about Black Silk. Everything else on the spread you was supposed to feed and water and clean up after, but he didn’t put down a durn thing about the mare. Like he wouldn’t care if we let her starve to death.”

“But he must know we aren’t letting her starve,” Gib said. “And he knows I’ve been exercising her. He never comes out of the house when I’m riding her, but he must know about it.”

“He knows,” Hy said. “He’s just not going to look at it. The boss handles all kinds of things he don’t like that way. Just kind of looks the other way.”

Gib nodded, thinking how he himself was one of the things Mr. Thornton looked the other way about, pretty much like he did about Black Silk. He didn’t know why, but that surely seemed to be the way things were.

The season changed soft and easy that fall, at least at first. Gib went on with his usual chores and spent a bunch of extra time harvesting in the garden and orchard, bringing in all the fall fruits and vegetables for Mrs. Perry to put up in bottles or store away in the root cellar.

When September came Hy finally got the cast off his leg, but he walked real careful with a cane, as if his leg was still hurting him some. And Gib went on doing most of the chores.

Then school started. No one said a word to Gib about school starting, but Livy began to ride into town with her father again, all dressed up in her school clothes and carrying her book bag. And in bed at night Gib took to thinking about school and the things he’d been pretty good at, like reading and writing, and wondering whether he’d ever have a chance to be good at them again.

But then one day right after breakfast, when no one else happened to be in the kitchen, Miss Hooper asked him to come into the library as soon as he finished his work that afternoon. Gib got all excited, thinking that Mrs. Thornton had finally decided to talk to him again and wondering if she’d tell him some more about his mother. But when he got to the library no one was there except Miss Hooper. When he came into the room she frowned at him the way she always did and told him to turn around.

“Heavens to Betsy, boy,” she said. “You’re growing like a weed. At this rate you’re going to be needing new clothes in no time. And I promised you wouldn’t be needing anything more this year.”

“Promised?” Gib asked.

Miss Hooper put her hands on her hips and frowned harder with her head tipped to one side. “Aren’t you the sly one with your sneaky questions. ‘Promised whom?’ you’re asking.” She sighed and said, “I think you know the answer, and I think you know who thinks you shouldn’t be given the notion an education was any part of that Lovell House contract.”

Gib nodded, and she nodded back. “He says he intends to let you attend school off and on, when things are especially slow here on the ranch, but in the meantime ... Miss Hooper picked up a canvas book bag and handed it to Gib. “In the meantime,” she repeated, “see what you can do with these.”

The bag was full of books. Books on history and geography and arithmetic, and even some storybooks, like
Tom Sawyer
by Mark Twain and
Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson. Gib had read
Tom Sawyer
before but would be glad to read it over and over again, and he’d never before read
Treasure Island
. At the bottom of the sack there were some tablets and pencils and a big bag of candles.

Almost every night from then on Gib read and studied for at least an hour or two by candlelight. He worked at the table until Hy began to grumble about the light, saying it was “way past bedtime for workin’ folks.” And then he went on reading up in the loft with the candle on a box near the head of his cot.

He liked reading in the loft for a lot of reasons. For one thing, he could read until he was already nearly asleep, so all he had to do was blow out the candle and he was dead to the world in half a minute, instead of going through a long spell of thinking and worrying about one thing and another. About what was happening to Georgie and Jacob and Bobby, for instance, or about why Mrs. Thornton hadn’t let him visit her again to talk about who Gib Whittaker was and where he came from.

Another reason he liked studying in the loft was a little brown field mouse who’d started hanging around because of the crumbs in Gib’s pockets. Crumbs that came from the cookies Mrs. Perry gave Gib to “hold him over.” “Here, take these,” Mrs. Perry had taken to saying when Gib was leaving the kitchen after breakfast. “Hardworking boy like you needs something to hold him over.”

So the mouse started hanging around looking for cookie crumbs, and before long Gib had him tamed and trained to eat right out of his hand. He named the mouse Bobby, after nervous, skittery old Bobby Whitestone, and he was real good company.

So Gib studied an hour or two every night, at Hy’s table first and then up in the loft with the Bobby mouse. Mostly he worked through the hard parts of the arithmetic by himself, but two or three times, when there was something that he just couldn’t figure out, he managed to let Miss Hooper know and she arranged a quick meeting in the library to put him on the right track.

It was a strange thing, but somehow the late-night studying was—well, maybe not fun exactly, but a little bit exciting. A lot more exciting, for instance, than studying at Lovell House had ever been. Gib didn’t know why, except there was something secret and risky about learning up there in the loft. After he’d learned each new thing he felt a kind of sneaky satisfaction that, even if he had to stop tomorrow, he’d gotten one more little bit stashed away where no one could ever take it from him.

So the days passed and the first killing frost came and there was no more to be done in the garden, but work in the barn and chicken house and cow shed went on, and Gib went on riding Lightning or Silky almost every afternoon, and reading and studying almost every night. Hy grumbled a lot about the waste of candles, but he did start doing the morning milking so Gib could sleep in a little longer after a late night with his books.

And Miss Hooper went on providing Gib not only with books, but also with other things like a heavy coat and some warmer gloves. The gloves were thick and soft and Gib took extra good care of them, putting them away in a safe place every night, and thinking about Georgie every time he pulled them on over his cold hands before he went out into the freezing air.

It wasn’t until early in December that the cold turned really hard and mean. In the chicken house the old hens huddled together and roused themselves only to eat and then drink hastily when Gib broke the ice on their water pans. And in the barns the horses nickered plaintively, as if blaming their human caretakers for their discomfort. Even old Bessie, the milk cow, got cross and nervy, shaking her horns at Gib as if to scold him for the awful weather.

Hy got out horse blankets for Silky and Lightning. For Silky because she was a fine lady, he said, and for Lightning because he was an old man. But Caesar and Comet had to do without. There weren’t any more blankets, and besides, the bays were prairie stock and they could take it.

Mr. Thornton went on driving through the bitter cold to Longford almost every day, but Livy had quit going in with him. Instead she was going to school in the library, and starting on a Monday in early December, Gib was too.

That first day when Livy came into the library carrying her book bag she was wearing a plain gingham dress instead of one of the fancy things she wore on Longford school days, and her golden brown hair was braided in pigtails instead of twisted into long corkscrew curls. Gib glanced at her out of the corner of his eye; she did the same at him, and then she marched up to where Miss Hooper was sitting and whispered in her ear. Gib didn’t hear exactly what she said, but it looked to be some kind of question.

But Miss Hooper’s answer was right out loud even though Livy shook her head and glared, trying to make her shush. “Why, I guess it was my idea, my dear,” she said. “But your mother agreed that as long as I was going to have to spend my days playing schoolmarm again I might as well have two students instead of just one. Make myself twice as useful.”

Still glaring at Miss Hooper, Livy flounced into a chair at the other end of the library table from Gib and began to take out her books and bang them down. She didn’t say anything at all to Gib during the lessons, but when he answered some of Miss Hooper’s questions about the Constitutional Convention and got the right answer to a real doozy of a long division problem, he noticed she was staring at him in a puzzled way.

Gib tried not to grin, but he felt like it, especially when he looked at Miss Hooper and she gave him the especially fierce frown that always had some kind of joke behind it. This time the joke was that the Constitution questions came from the chapter Miss Hooper had had him read just the night before, and the arithmetic problem was one she’d just helped him with. They had geography next, which had always been one of Gib’s favorite subjects. Gib was sorry when Miss Hooper gave out the homework assignments and said, “Well, I don’t know about you infants, but the old schoolmarm’s worn to a frazzle. Class dismissed. Teacher’s off to have herself a nap.” When she left the room Gib was still copying the homework page numbers and Livy was standing at her end of the table staring at him. He finished packing up his books before he looked back.

She wasn’t smiling. Just that round-eyed stare, but as he turned to go she said, “You’re smart.”

It was the first time she’d spoken to him since she’d yelled she hated him that day in the barn.

A
FTER THAT FIRST DAY
in what Miss Hooper had started calling “The Rocking M Institution of Higher Learning,” things began to change a bit. Once Livy got started speaking to Gib she kind of overdid it. Especially when Miss Hooper asked Gib a question and Miss Olivia Thornton thought she knew a better answer.

“Miss Hooper, Miss Hooper,” she’d say, shaking her hand in the air, “that’s not right. I know the answer. Let me tell it.”

Sometimes Miss Hooper would let them argue it out, like the time Gib said that the Civil War was about saving the union and Livy said, “No it wasn’t. It was about freeing the slaves.” Livy started quoting Miss Albert, her teacher at the Longford School, and so Gib quoted Miss Mooney. He was glad when Miss Hooper said they were both partly correct, but he could tell Livy didn’t like it much. Livy was partial to winning arguments outright. But she only pouted for a few minutes before she got over it and went back to being her normal self. And later, when Miss Hooper had gone out to get herself a cup of tea, Livy asked Gib about Miss Mooney.

“What was her name, that teacher you had at the orphanage?”

Gib got up to put away the encyclopedia he’d been using. “Miss Mooney,” he said over his shoulder.

“Oh yes, Miss Mooney.” Livy scribbled something down in her notebook, as if she was making sure to remember Miss Mooney’s name. When she had finished she asked, “Did she whip you a lot? I mean, did she whip all the kids?”

Gib shook his head, grinning at the thought of Miss Mooney whipping anybody. “No,” he said. “She didn’t whip anybody.”

Livy’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I thought all the teachers whipped people at that orphanage. I heard all the boys at Lovell House got whipped every day.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

Livy shrugged. “Oh, everywhere. The kids at school said so. They said that all you orphans got whipped and starved and frozen and—”

She paused suddenly and stared at Gib. “What?” she asked. “What is it?”

“Frozen?” Gib said. His face had a stiff feel to it, as if it had suddenly frozen, too. “Where’d you hear about somebody getting frozen?”

Livy looked at him sharply, and when she spoke, her voice had a different sound to it. Softer and more serious. “It was in the paper. In
The Longford Journal
and the Harristown papers too. About the boy from the orphanage who got loaned out to a mean old man who sent him out in a blizzard without any gloves. They talked about it at our church a lot. Our Sunday school class prayed for him and when he died we took up a collection to ... She stopped. “Gib? Gib? What’s the matter?”

He was sitting at the table again without knowing how he got there, his head on his arms, while a painful tornado of grief and pity whirled through his head. “Georgie,” he said. “He died? Georgie’s dead?”