Gib Rides Home (19 page)

“Livy,” he said, “he hates me too, doesn’t he? Why does your father hate me?”

She didn’t answer right away. Instead she only frowned and shook her head. After a minute she sighed and said, “He doesn’t hate you. I don’t think he hates you.” But she didn’t sound very certain.

“Well, okay,” Gib said. “But he doesn’t like my being here, does he? He wishes I didn’t have to be here.”

Livy nodded reluctantly. But then suddenly she set her jaw. “I can’t tell you anything more,” she said, “because I promised. We had to promise things before he would go to get you out of the orphanage. And I had to promise and promise I wouldn’t tell you about—about what I promised. But you know what? I don’t think Miss Hooper promised anything.” Jumping to her feet, she grabbed Gib’s sleeve and pulled him toward the house. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s find Miss Hooper.”

T
HEY FOUND MISS HOOPER
on the veranda. She was sitting on the porch swing drinking lemonade and reading a book and when they started up the stairs, she kind of winced and then frowned. “Hello, hello,” she said warily. “What have we here? Why do I have the feeling I’m witnessing a twentieth-century version of the children’s crusade?”

Gib couldn’t help smiling, but Livy just marched on up the stairs and down the veranda. When she was right in front of Miss Hooper she put her hands on her hips and demanded, “You’ve got to tell Gib the truth, Miss Hooper. The truth about why he’s here and why my parents fought about it. I had to promise I wouldn’t tell him anything about it, but he needs to know. Don’t you, Gib?”

Miss Hooper thought for a moment before she carefully moved her bookmark and closed her book. “Is that right, Gibson?” she asked. “And what is it exactly that you want to ask me?”

Gib grinned ruefully. “That’s just it, Miss Hooper,” he said. “I don’t rightly know. Except I guess I just need to find out why I feel like I don’t belong here. Like my being here is why everyone is so—so angry.”

“Would you like to live somewhere else, Gibson?” Miss Hooper’s face looked strangely blank, without even its usual sarcastic frown.

Gib shook his head quickly. “No,” he said. “I wouldn’t. Not unless—that is, not unless there’s no other way to ... He paused. “Not unless there’s no other way to calm things down.” He shrugged and smiled. “Besides, I don’t have anyplace else to go.”

They were both staring at him. “See!” Livy almost shouted at Miss Hooper. “See how he said that. That’s the way he is about everything.”

“What way is that, child?” Miss Hooper asked.

Livy shrugged angrily. “I don’t know. Calm, I guess. He’s just so calm and cheerful about
everything
.” She threw up her hands. “It drives me crazy.”

Miss Hooper frowned at Gib and said, “Pretty serious accusation, Gibson. Do you plead guilty to being calm and cheerful?” One corner of Gib’s mouth began to turn up, but Livy ignored him and went on, “Tell him, Miss Hooper. Tell him what my mother wanted to do after his mother died and—” She stopped then and clenched her lips for a second, and when she opened them she said, “If you don’t, I’m going to. Even if I go straight to hell for it. If you don’t tell him, I’m going to break a promise I made on the Bible and tell him myself.”

“And no doubt make a complete muddle of it,” Miss Hooper said. “All right, I’ll tell him what I know, but on one condition. I want you out of it. If you’ll go into the kitchen and make us up another pitcher of lemonade, I promise to explain everything. As far as it’s explainable, anyway.”

Right at first Livy stomped her foot and said no, she wouldn’t go, but when Miss Hooper just sat there staring at her she finally flounced away and marched off toward the kitchen door.

Miss Hooper sighed and told Gib to pull up a chair, and when he was sitting she started in.

“The quarrel between Henry and Julia started soon after your mother died. At least the part of it that concerned you. Actually it had started long before that. Disagreements over the selling of her parents’ land, and then Julia’s accident and the arguments about the fate of her mare.” She paused, and Gib nodded.

“I’ve heard about that.”

“But then when your mother died, Julia told Henry that she wanted to adopt you.”

“Adopt me?” A strange, hot lump was rising in Gib’s throat.

“Yes. But Henry wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Why?” Gib could manage only a whisper around the lump in his throat. “Why wouldn’t he ... Why did he hate me?”

“No, child, he didn’t hate you. I’m not sure if he’d ever actually seen you at that time, although I know Julia had seen you several times when you were an infant.” She paused again, nodding thoughtfully. “In fact,” she finally went on, “to be fair to Henry, he had some fairly sensible reasons for the stand he took. You weren’t yet recovered from a very close call with typhoid yourself and there was some doubt if you would ever be quite well again, physically and mentally too. And of course Julia was an invalid herself by then. Then Julia became ill—not typhoid, as it turned out, but probably quite a severe case of influenza. And while she was still in the hospital in Harristown you had recovered enough to be sent to the orphanage. Henry was a member of a group of city officials who made the decision. By the time Julia was well again you had been at the orphanage for some time, and Julia eventually accepted the situation. For a time she believed that leaving you at Lovell House couldn’t be any worse than bringing you up in a home where there was so much disagreement and unhappiness.” Miss Hooper paused and sipped her lemonade before she went on. “At least that was how she was feeling until the furor over the Bean case.”

“The Bean case? Oh, you mean about Georgie Olson?” Gib whispered.

“Yes indeed. Folks around here knew old Bean’s reputation, and there was a great deal of anger over the fact that the orphanage would indenture another child to that cruel old man. Julia was particularly upset. She wrote to Lovell House to know if you were still there and when she found you were, she began to press for adoption again. But Henry wouldn’t hear of it. His point was that there was no telling what all those years in an institution might have done to you emotionally, and what diseases you might have been exposed to.”

Miss Hooper shrugged and circled her right hand in an “on and on forever” gesture. “So the argument went on for months, and then Hy’s broken leg tipped the scale. Henry was faced with hiring a full-time salaried replacement or, as we all pointed out to him—yes, Julia, Hy, and even I myself were involved in the argument at that time—taking on an indentured orphan.”

Suddenly Gib knew what Hy had meant when he’d said his broken leg had turned out to be a “bargaining chip.” He was still thinking about how Hy’s poor old broken leg had helped Gib Whittaker when he realized Miss Hooper was still talking.

“But as always, Henry had the last word,” she was saying. “Apparently promises were demanded of Julia and Olivia, and I think of Hy too, before Henry agreed to go to Lovell House and sign the papers. But only such papers that would be necessary to bring you to the Rocking M as hired help. And he insisted that you were to be treated as such.”

There was a long silence before Gib swallowed hard, tried to speak, and then tried again. “Are they still fighting about—about what to do with me?”

Miss Hooper looked at him for a long time, and there was a different kind of frown on her face. An angry frown, but one that somehow made it clear that the anger wasn’t meant for Gib Whittaker.

“Not exactly fighting,” she said. “Not recently, at least. Perhaps you’ve noticed that Henry hasn’t been too well recently. He’s had other things to worry about.”

“He doesn’t ever seem to see me,” Gib said.

Miss Hooper made a snorting noise. “Well, don’t let that worry you, child. There’s a whole world of important things that Henry Thornton manages not to see. And don’t blame yourself, Gibson Whittaker. You’re only one of a hundred things Henry and Julia have found to torment each other about.”

N
O MORE THAN A
minute after Miss Hooper stopped talking, Livy appeared on the veranda carrying a tray. Watching her make her way toward them, Miss Hooper sighed and said, “Perfect timing.” Then she leaned back in the swing and closed her eyes. Livy set the pitcher and glasses down on one of the veranda’s little round tables, filled Miss Hooper’s glass, and poured two more for herself and Gib before she said, “Well, I guess you know all about that ancient history now, so let’s talk about something more cheerful.” And then she began to tell about a fight two fifth-grade boys had had on the front steps of Longford School on the last day of school, and how, before it was over, they’d both had black eyes and bloody noses and one of them had a broken front tooth.

When Livy had finished, Miss Hooper opened her eyes and said, “Well, I must say I’m glad you explained you were going to tell us something cheerful, Olivia. Otherwise I might have taken that little tale for a bloody tragedy.”

So then Olivia explained that it
was
a cheerful story because Rodney and Alvin were both horrid and it would have been even more cheerful if they’d broken each other’s necks.

Miss Hooper sighed again and said, “Oh, I see.” Then she waved them away and went back to her book. Gib and Livy headed for the barn, where Gib finished grooming Black Silk and Livy went on talking. At one point she asked if he felt better or worse now that he’d heard everything, and he said he didn’t know yet. “Not until I have a chance to think about it some more. Besides,” he wanted to know, “how do you know how much I heard?”

“Oh, I heard it, too,” Livy said. “I got Mrs. Perry to make the lemonade and then I went into the parlor and—”

“Listened at the window.” Gib grinned. “Thought so. I thought I saw something behind the curtains.”

But Livy had stopped paying attention. “Shhh,” she said, and then Gib heard it too, the distant chug and clank of the Model T. A second later Livy was on her way back to the house and Gib was putting away the grooming tack and heading for the milking barn.

That night at supper Gib watched Henry and Julia Thornton in a different way and thought about what his life would have been like if Mrs. Thornton had won the argument and they had really adopted him right after his mother died. It would have been a true adoption, not a farming out; he would have lived in a big, beautiful house; and there would have been other good things about it. But he knew now that it wouldn’t have been very much like his old dream.

That night on his cot in the cabin loft, Gib’s mind ran in circles, going back over everything he’d learned that day and trying to decide how he ought to feel about it. It wasn’t until Bobby the field mouse showed up, checking out pockets, racing around the bed, and sniffing accusingly at Gib’s hands and face that he was able to get his mind to stop whirling long enough to realize that he’d forgotten to bring anything at all for Bobby. But then he remembered seeing a piece of dried-up venison in one of Hy’s cupboards, and after he’d been down to get it, both he and Bobby were able to settle down some, Bobby to start the hard work of making a meal out of a strip of tough old venison, and Gib to start drifting uncertainly in the general direction of sleep.

In the days that followed, even though Livy went on spending quite a lot of time in the barn, she and Gib didn’t talk much about her father and mother, or about any of Gib’s other problems. Instead they talked mostly about horses in general, and Black Silk in particular.

It was becoming more and more obvious that Olivia Thornton, like her mother, loved horses, and that she was absolutely crazy about Black Silk. She had a lot to learn, however, and for the first time ever, she was willing to listen to Gib’s opinions and advice without disagreeing with everything he said. At least not very often.

Gib taught her the right way to use the brush and currycomb and hoof pick, and how to take care of a sweated-up horse after a hard workout. How to saddle and bridle too, and keep your tack clean and neat. Most of it was what he’d learned from Hy, and it was stuff that Hy could have taught Olivia years ago if she’d known that she wanted to learn.

Years ago—but perhaps not now. Neither Gib nor Livy knew how Hy would react if he knew how much time Livy was spending in the barn. At least they didn’t until one day in August when they were both in the stall. Livy was braiding Silky’s mane while Gib brushed her tail. And suddenly someone said, “Would you look at that.” And there Hy was, at the stall door.

Livy got down off the grooming stool and started telling Hy about all the things she had been learning, and for a while he only listened with a disapproving expression on his face. Gib was watching him closely, and it was quite some time before Hy’s worried frown wrinkles began to rearrange themselves into a grin.

“Well now, young lady, I can see you’ve had a mighty fine teacher. I’d give you a job on a spread of mine any day of the week.”

He went on to ask Livy questions about the things she’d learned to do, and it wasn’t until he was about to leave that he said, “Don’t see any harm in what you’re doing, Livy, but I can’t help thinkin’ it would be a good thing if you washed up real good before your father gets home. And maybe put on a dash of that flowery-smelling stuff you ladies wear.” And when Livy asked if he meant that she smelled like a horse, he said, “Well, just a bit. Smells right good to me, but we don’t know what your father would say. Do we? We surely don’t know what your father would say.”

They both knew what he meant, and Livy said she’d take his advice about washing up. Hy went on back to his cabin then, but that night after supper he talked to Gib some more about what Livy had been doing.

“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” Hy said. “Don’t matter what the boss tried to drum into her. Horses are in her blood natural as runnin’s in the blood of that black mare. Sooner or later Livy’s blood would have found her out.” He grinned at Gib. “Your comin’ along just hurried things up a little.”

Gib said he was sure Hy was right about that. “You could see it plain as day the first time she was up on Silky,” he told Hy. “Just the way she looked sitting there.”