Gib Rides Home (6 page)

They were halfway down the orphanage’s curving driveway at the time, trying to clean up after a medium-sized blizzard that had raged all night and most of the morning. Six senior boys, shoveling and shivering in their thin overcoats and frazzled-out mittens, trying to clear a passageway wide enough for the orphanage buggy and any Lovell House visitors that might happen to show up.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” Gib said between shovelfuls of the heavy, wet snow. Then he stopped long enough to poke Jacob with the handle of his shovel. “Lucky us, huh?”

Jacob laughed and poked back, and all the other shovelers stopped to look at Gib and Jacob expectantly. So they both did their famous dumb-but-happy faces that everybody looked for whenever anybody mentioned the word
lucky
. Looked and fell apart laughing, or, when the situation made laughing too dangerous, tried their best not to look.

The situation at that particular moment hadn’t seemed especially dangerous. Except for the six of them, Gib, Jacob, Luke, Frankie, Abner, and Fred, no one else was in sight and the front windows of Lovell House were a long way away and pretty well frosted over. But the way it turned out, somebody must have been looking, because an hour or so later, when the six of them were in the coatroom cleaning up, Buster came in and handed Gib and Jacob report slips.

“Report?” Jacob squealed. “Where? To who?”

Buster sighed and shook his head. “Harding,” he said. “Harding’s classroom. Soon as you get cleaned up.”

That was the day Gib and Jacob made the acquaintance of Mr. Paddle. On their way upstairs they tried to reassure each other that they had nothing to worry about.

“What did we do, for heaven’s sake?” Jacob said. “I mean, we did the lucky face thing and everybody laughed some, but there was no way anyone could’ve seen that. Was there? You see how anybody could have seen us, Gib?”

Gib agreed. “Leastways not unless they rubbed some frost off a window first.” He put an evil expression on his face and pantomimed the rubbing and peering, and Jacob did manage a weak grin. But when they reached the senior classroom they could tell immediately that they had nothing to grin about. When they walked into the classroom Mr. Harding was in his shirtsleeves, and Mr. Paddle was lying right there on his desk.

“Sir,” Gib said hurriedly when, without a word, Mr. Harding picked up the paddle and headed in his direction. “Sir, could you tell us what we did? I mean, so we’ll know not to do it again.”

Afterward, back in the dorm, Gib and Jacob told an audience of eight or ten other seniors about what happened. “And then old Harding kind of chuckled in that nasty way of his,” Jacob said. “‘Huh! Huh! Huh!’ And he pushed Gib down across a desk and lit into him with the paddle. ‘I—think—you—know.’” Jacob went on being Mr. Harding, showing how he swatted with every word. “‘And if—you—don’t—Mr. Paddle will—teach you.’”

Frankie Elsworth’s face was screwed up like something was hitting him too. “Did it hurt real bad?” he asked in a jittery voice.

Gib was easing himself down onto his cot at the moment and trying not to let his face show what his backside still felt like. But once he was flat down it wasn’t too bad. “Naw,” he said, grinning at Frankie. “It wasn’t too bad.”

“It was
bad
!” Jacob shouted. “Real bad. And badder for Gib than for me. Gib got ten whacks and I only got five.”

“Why? Why was that, Gib?” Frankie’s eyes had the same kind of shamefaced eagerness that he got when people talked dirty. “Why’d you get ten, Gib?”

Gib had to think about that. “I dunno,” he said finally. “Probably because I asked what we’d done. Guess that was it.” He managed the beginning of a grin. “Yep. I guess that’s what Mr. Paddle taught me today. Don’t ever ask questions.”

But a little later, when they thought Gib had gone to sleep, Jacob told Bobby and Luke something different. “It was because Gib wasn’t looking scared enough,” Jacob whispered, pulling the other boys away from Gib’s cot. “That’s what I think, anyway. What I think is, it made old Harding mad when Gib acted so kind of ... calm and collected like.”

“Collected? What you mean by collected, Jacob?”

Jacob sighed impatiently. Impatient with Bobby for asking such a hard question, and impatient with himself for not being able to come up with a better way of explaining what he meant. “You know, dummy,” he said crossly. “Collected means not all scared and jumpy like ... Well, take a good look in the mirror, Whitestone, and you’ll know
exactly
what being
un
collected is like.”

Bobby got mad at first, which of course was just what Jacob meant for him to do. But then, after he thought a while longer, he said, “Yeah, well, if all being collected gets you is a bunch of extra whacks, I’m just as glad to go right on being uncollected. So there, Mr. Smart Aleck Fetters.”

But Jacob, who had just finished easing himself down onto his bed, only groaned a little and pretended to go to sleep.

G
IB HADN’T REALLY BEEN
asleep, or at least not quite, that afternoon when Jacob said that Gib had made Harding angry by being too “calm and collected.” And just like Bobby, Gib was curious about what Jacob meant. Not quite curious enough to admit that he’d been listening under false pretenses, maybe, but enough to give him something to think about besides the ache in his backside. He hadn’t finished figuring it out by the time the supper bell rang, but he’d gotten far enough to agree with Bobby that being collected wasn’t anything to brag about. At least not if you were nothing but a poor old orphan, with nobody to care if somebody like Mr. Harding decided to make you his favorite punching bag. In the weeks that followed, Gib had several other meetings with Mr. Harding and his paddle. For whatever reason, whether it was because he was too “collected” or something entirely different, it was becoming obvious that Gib was well on his way to setting some kind of a record for encounters with Mr. Paddle. One night, the evening after Gib’s fourth or fifth beating, he and Jacob and Bobby had a discussion on the subject.

“It’s just not fair,” Bobby said. He was sitting on the foot of Gib’s bed at the time, barefooted and in his nightshirt. “You didn’t do anything. Not today, or any of the other times, really. At least nothing more than what other people get away with all the time. He just likes pickin’ on you.”

“Yeah. Sure seems that way.” Gib shifted his position, trying to put his weight on a less painful part of his backside. “This time I sure didn’t do anything, except maybe smile a little when he broke his old pointer.”

The pointer, a piece of wood covered with fancy carvings and shaped something like a drummer’s stick was what Mr. Harding used to point to things on maps and the blackboard, and to whack people’s knuckles when they messed up an answer to a question. But that morning he’d tried out a new way to use it, and it hadn’t worked too well. He’d been working himself up into a real tizzy about people who didn’t listen, and all of a sudden he shouted “Attention!” and hit the corner of his desk real hard—and his fancy old pointer almost exploded. Shattered pieces of pointer flew everywhere, and Mr. Harding kind of flinched and muttered something that sounded a lot like the word Elmer had written on Gib’s spelling test.

Remembering the expression on Harding’s face when the pointer flew apart, Gib’s lips did it again before he managed to straighten them out and say solemnly, “But I didn’t laugh. Not really.”

Jacob agreed with him. “You didn’t!” he said. “I was looking, and I saw how hard you didn’t.” He sighed. “What are you going to do, Gib? Rate you’re going, there’s not going to be much left of you to beat on by the time you’re eighteen.”

“Yeah, I know.” Grimacing, Gib pushed himself to a sitting position. Firming his chin and narrowing his eyes, he said, “But I’m
not
going to be here that long. I’ve decided I’m going to get myself adopted. No reason I can’t.” He gestured around the room, where about a dozen other boys ranging in age from nine to fifteen were getting ready for bed. “Look, there were more than twice as many of us when we were juniors. And now Herbie’s adopted, and Albert. And Georgie too, when he wasn’t even a senior yet.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jacob was saying when suddenly he pointed to where Buster Gray had just come in. “Hey, I’m going to ask Buster about it. Bet he’d know.”

“Buster,” Gib called. “Can you come here a minute? We got to ask you something.”

Carrying his night monitor’s lantern, Buster limped down the hall and stopped at the foot of Gib’s cot. A thin-lipped grin cut across his lopsided face as he looked from Bobby to Jacob and then on to Gib. “What d’you need to know?” he asked Gib. “Can’t say for sure I can answer, but I’ll give it a try.”

“I want to know how to get out of here,” Gib said.

Buster looked startled. He started to back away, shaking his head. “’Fraid I can’t help....

“I don’t mean run away,” Gib said quickly. “I mean get adopted.” He gestured again to the half-empty room. “You know, like Georgie and Herbie and all the rest of them who were here a while back.”

Buster still looked worried. He glanced around the room and then sat down on the foot of Gib’s cot, pushing Bobby off onto the floor. Lowering his voice almost to a whisper, he said, “Lookee here. I’m not supposed to answer any questions about things like that. Not about any kind of adoption, but ... He looked around again. “You promise me you won’t tell I told you? Cross your heart and hope to die?”

Gib and Jacob and Bobby looked at each other, nodded solemnly, and crossed their hearts.

Still whispering, Buster said, “They didn’t all get adopted, you know. Not all the seniors who left got—”

“We know that,” Gib interrupted. “Most of them were only half orphans, so they probably just went home to their pa, or whatever family they got left.”

Jacob looked indignant. “Yeah,” he said, “like their folks dumped them in an orphanage when they were babies and then decided to take them back after they got old enough to be useful.”

“But the full orphans, like us?” Gib’s nod included Bobby and Jacob. “And Herbie. He was a full orphan, and so was Georgie. They got adopted, didn’t they?”

Buster shook his head. “Not really. What they got was ... Buster paused and looked around again before he said, “What they got was farmed out.”

“Farmed out?” All three pairs of his listeners’ lips formed the words in silent unison.

“That’s right. Farmed out,” Buster said. Then, lowering his voice again so that they had to strain to hear, “Farmed out means they got signed up for by people, farmers usually, who aren’t really looking to adopt at all. All they’re looking for is some good cheap labor. Real cheap. No pay at all till you’re eighteen and then, if you’re lucky, fifty dollars and a suit of new clothes.” Buster’s face was grim as he went on, “Slave labor for eight, maybe ten years, and then out you go.”

There was a longish silence before Jacob said, “Well, heck. What’s so bad about that? Same as here almost, ’cept for the fifty dollars. You going to get fifty dollars when you leave here, Buster?”

Buster’s grin had a sarcastic look to it. “Not likely,” he said. “But here you get something to eat and some schooling and—”

“You mean farmed-out kids don’t have to go to school?” Jacob was definitely interested.

“And get starved, maybe?” Bobby whimpered. “Do they get starved, Buster?”

But Buster was getting to his feet. Holding up his lantern, he looked nervously around the room and started to edge away before he whispered, “Not always.”

“Not always?” Gib asked. “Not always what?”

“Not always anything,” Buster answered. “That’s the misery of it. There’s no way of knowing what you’ll run into when you get farmed out.”

“Buster! Buster!” they called after him, but he only stopped long enough to remind them of their promise.

“Remember, don’t tell anybody else. Not anyone. And most of all, don’t say who told you,” he demanded, and when they all nodded he turned and limped hurriedly away on his nighttime rounds.

I
N THE DAYS THAT
followed, the short dark days of a bitterly cold January, Gib spent a lot of time wondering about what Buster had said, even though it was the kind of thinking that always made him miserable. Not just sad and gloomy miserable, either, but angry too, as if someone had lied to him or maybe broken a promise. And he went on feeling that way for a while, even after it came to him that no one had lied about Lovell House adoptions. No one except himself. He himself had made up a lying dream, a hope dream, and dreamt it over and over again until he’d come to depend on it. And losing it left him feeling lost and deserted.

Bobby said they should have known all along. They should have known that nothing good could come of being adopted, and that staying at Lovell House, as bad as it was now that Miss Offenbacher and Mr. Harding were running things, was probably the best they could ever hope for in their whole lives.

But Gib couldn’t quite give up hope. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said one night when Bobby was being particularly gloomy. “But you gotta remember what Buster said about ‘not always.’”

Jacob nodded. “Yeah, I remember. But I’m not sure what he meant. He didn’t tell us, and now he probably won’t, not ever. He’s been acting kind of nervous and jumpy since he told us all that stuff. Like maybe Miss Offenbacher would kick him out if she knew he’d been spilling the beans. When I tried to talk to him the other day he just said, ‘Hush up that kind of talk!’ and skittered off in a big hurry.”

But Gib had thought a lot about what Buster meant about “not always.” “I bet I know,” he said. “He just meant that being farmed out is not always so bad, or so good either. Just depends on who gets you, I guess.”

Gib wanted his guess to be true. If even that much was true, maybe it meant you could go on hoping. Hoping for Herbie and Georgie, and for yourself too, if it should happen to. you. Maybe it was enough, Gib told himself, if you could at least go on hoping.

But it was only a few days later, on a Friday near the end of that same mean, bitter January, that Gib found out that hoping wasn’t enough. At least not for everyone.