Rabble Starkey (15 page)

Well, lord, we went round the table and everybody had a story on somebody else who was there. Some of them was just stupid, like Susan MacReady telling about the time when Diane thought she had chicken pox even though she'd had it already, but it turned out to be poison ivy.

And some was cruel. Norman Cox did a cruel one, telling that Parker Condon had cheated on his history report, copying most of it out of the encyclopedia, so that Mrs. Hindler spoke to him private and made him do it over. Parker got all tensed up while Norman was telling it. He laughed, pretending like he was tough and didn't care. But we all knew how Parker's parents commanded him to get all A's so's he could go to the same college where his brother was, and how Parker
was nervous all the time about it. So it was cruel to tell on him for cheating that wasn't even completely his fault.

After Norman told, Parker yelled out, "Hhhaaaa" and did a fake karate chop across the table at him so's we was all able to start laughing and pretend to forget the cruelness. But I didn't forget. And I thought about a way to get even.

That's why, when it was finally my turn—I was last—I said, "I have one to tell on Norman Cox."

Everybody expected me to say "on Veronica" because Veronica and me has been best friends for so long. So they looked surprised. And Norman sure looked surprised, too.

"On Halloween," I started, trying to make a story out of it the way everybody else had, "me and Veronica took Veronica's little brother out trick-or-treating. He was dressed up like a ballerina, with toe shoes and all."

Everybody started laughing. "
Gunther?
" somebody yelled. "You dressed old Gunther up like a ballerina?"

In the midst of all the laughing and shouting, I saw Veronica's face staring at me. She knew. She knew I was going to tell that Norman hit Millie Bellows in the face with a stone.

I could see she was going to hate me for doing it.

I continued on talking, and I could hear my voice describing how Gunther twirled around, and how he had a magic wand and all. But I was having a whole lot of thoughts at the same time. I was thinking about how Veronica had begun to
like
Norman Cox. And
how her liking him had begun to make Norman act different. He was helping at Millie Bellows's house now, and being faithful to it, showing up every time, even though he complained.

I was thinking, too, about what Norman
could
have told, when it was his turn. He could have told about the day he seen Veronica's mother go crazy and try to baptize Gunther in the creek. But he didn't.

I heard myself say, "and while we was hauling old Gunther around in his ballerina costume, we saw Norman Cox and he didn't even know it. And he was wearing his mama's choir robe. Big man Norman Cox was all dressed up like a Presbyterian lady!"

Everybody laughed, and that was it. I didn't say no more. While I watched, Veronica laughed, too, and started in to tease Norman, sitting next to her. Norman put his hands into a praying position and sang, "Rock of Ages, cleeffft for me—" in a high, girly voice.

"AMEN!" we all sang. Then Mrs. Briggs brought in the birthday cake, and pretty soon the party was over.

Thanksgiving came, and so did Veronica's grandparents, all the way from Tennessee. I had met them before, of course, on other visits, but this was the first time we all sat at the same table together, with us girls wearing our new dresses. Her grandmother told stories about when Mr. Bigelow was a little boy Gunther's size. They called him "Flip" then, short for Philip.

Sweet-Ho had cooked a turkey, and me and Veronica had helped to mash up sweet potatoes and put marshmallows on top. Gunther agreed to taste the sweet potatoes, and he did, too; but I noticed that he only ate one bite and then went back to his Chef Boyardee.

Millie Bellows came to our house for Thanksgiving dinner and even commented nicely on everything as if she was taking real pains not to be a grouch on account of it being a holiday and all. She even told about how we was helping her about the house. And
she told about Thanksgivings when she was a girl and her brother Howard was still alive, how they used to have little mints at the table, set in paper baskets with Thanksgiving decorations painted on.

Millie Bellows had four helpings of stuffing with gravy on top, and me and Veronica had to hold our napkins to our mouths to keep our laughing down, when she took the fourth.

Grandma Bigelow sang a hymn for us, with the words "Sweet Hosanna" in it, and she taught us so we all sang it with her. Sweet-Ho said she remembered it from when she was a girl but she hadn't heard it since.

We held hands around the table when we said grace.

After dinner, Grandpa Bigelow lit up his pipe, and Millie Bellows fluttered her hands a bit in the air to indicate that the smoke was in her eyes and probably causing her to get cancer, but he didn't notice. Then Millie's head nodded while we was sitting there at the table after dessert, and she fell sound asleep and even snored some.

Veronica told her grandparents about how their names was on her family tree at school, in the form of apples.

"I hope I'm a Mcintosh apple," Grandma Bigelow said. "It's my favorite kind. Mcintosh makes the best pies."

We all laughed because Grandma Bigelow was somewhat round and pink-colored, like a Mcintosh apple; and when we laughed Millie Bellows snorted a
bit in her sleep and her eyelids fluttered, but she didn't wake up.

"When Mrs. Hindler gives the family trees back," Veronica said to her grandma, "I'll send you mine in the mail, so you can see your apple."

"School sounds more interesting these days than it was when I was young," Grandpa Bigelow said, puffing on his pipe. "What were your school days like, Sweet Hosanna?"

Sweet-Ho looked somewhat rueful. She stood up and began to collect the dessert plates. "I didn't go very far in school, Mr. Bigelow," she said. "I liked school, but I got married when I was very young."

Veronica's father was looking at her. "WTiy don't you tell everyone, Sweet-Ho, what you've decided?"

Sweet-Ho stood there for a minute with the plates in her hands. She smiled. "Well, I was going to tell Rabble first. I didn't plan on an announcement or anything. But since it's Thanksgiving, and everybody's here together, and I guess Rabble won't mind if I didn't have a chance to tell her in private—"

"I don't mind," I said, puzzled. "What did you decide?"

Sweet-Ho leaned over and took Millie Bellows's plate, real quiet, so as not to disturb her nap. "I've decided to go to college," she said. "Only at night, so I can still get my work done, of course. But Phil talked to the people at the community college for me, and helped me fill out the application, and—well, it still makes me nervous, thinking about it. But they've said
I can start in the new semester after Christmas. I can study literature."

She stood there, smiling, looking at all of us. "Maybe someday I can be a teacher," she said, kind of shy.

Me and Veronica and Gunther all clapped our hands. "Yaaayyy!" Gunther said, forgetting Millie Bellows's nap. But she didn't wake.

Grandma Bigelow stood up and said, "I declare, if I hadn't drunk all of my coffee, I'd make a toast. You just put those plates right back down on the table, Sweet Hosanna, so I can give you a kiss."

And she did. A big kiss on Sweet-Ho's cheek first, and then one for me, too. "You can be real proud of your mother, Parable," she said.

I was. I am.

Veronica's father helped Grandma and Grandpa Bigelow get their suitcases into the trunk of the car the day after Thanksgiving. They was going on from Highriver to Baltimore to visit a niece.

Grandpa Bigelow was leaning over the kitchen table where he had a map all spread out. He was following the road with his finger, peering at it through his glasses. "Look at this, Parable," he said. "She wants to take this scenic route through the mountains. But you look here, now, how much shorter it would be if we just went on the interstate like normal folk."

Well, he was right, of course. Anybody could see that. But I kind of liked the way them little roads
curled through the mountains. One of them went real close to Collyer's Run, where I lived with Gnomie when I was a little girl.

"See this here?" I told him. I pointed with my fingertip. "Right here is where Sweet-Ho was born, and where I lived when I was little."

"Is that a fact?"

I nodded. "It surely is pretty there. Even this time of year, when the trees is mostly bare. I bet anything you'd see deer if you went that way."

"Antique shops, too, I suppose. She always wants to go where the antique shops are," he said in a gruff voice, pretending it made him mad.

"I expect you're right. There's antique shops. When Gnomie—that's my grandma—died, somebody came and bought some of her old stuff. We didn't even know it would be worth money. Some quilts, and a table, and some of her kitchen stuff she'd always had, and nobody in the family wanted it, it was all so old-fashioned. So I expect it ended up in an antique shop."

He folded up the map. "Well, I'll humor her and go the scenic route, on your advice, Parable. Where do you suppose she's gone to now? We'll never get on the road at this rate."

We found Grandma Bigelow in the living room with her tape measure out, measuring skinny old Gunther so's she could knit him a sweater. None of us told her that he was allergic to wool, and even Gunther was polite and said he wanted a blue one.

Grandpa Bigelow gave Veronica and me each a fivedollar bill, and a crisp new dollar to Gunther. We all hugged goodbye.

"You give Alice our love, Philip," I heard Grandma Bigelow say to Veronica's daddy, and he nodded his head. Then they were gone.

Mr. Bigelow went every Saturday to Meadowhill. Every Saturday when he came back, he said that Veronica's mother was a little better. I always smiled and said, "That's nice," and so did Sweet-Ho. But it got so's it was just something we said with no meaning, something like you might say politely to the mailman, and two minutes later you would forget you even said it. She's a little better. That's nice. She seems better. That's nice. Somewhat better. That's nice.

It got much colder, and Norman Cox put salt on the steps and front walk at Millie Bellows's house, where sometimes it was icy in the morning. Millie didn't go out none, though, not in the cold. She sat huddled up in front of her TV, watching game shows, drinking tea, and dozing off. Mr. Bigelow checked her furnace now and again to be sure there was always plenty of oil, and Sweet-Ho brought her groceries a couple of times a week.

We invited her for Christmas dinner, but she said no, she wasn't feeling real good. So it was just us, just our family, at Christmas. Gunther played like he believed in Santa Claus even though he'd spied his train set in its box on the hall closet shelf the week before.
So when Veronica and me opened up our biggest boxes and found velveteen bathrobes, we pretended that Mrs. Santa Claus had stitched them up on her sewing machine, and we said we was amazed that she even got our sizes just right.

We decorated the whole downstairs, with popcorn strings and holly and pine boughs on the mantelpiece. Veronica hung mistletoe from the ceiling light in the hall, and we all grabbed Gunther and gave him big juicy kisses every time he walked through. After a while we noticed that he was hanging about the hall a whole lot, just waiting and hoping.

Christmas night me and Veronica went to bed early because we both had got new books and we wanted to curl up in our beds to read. My book was called
The Yearling,
and lord, when I opened it up and began to read I found that it had another Jody, same as
The Red Pony.
But this Jody was different. He lived with his mama and daddy in a place that was all woods and swamps, and when I read I felt as if I was right there, too, where it was quiet but for birds and growing things. I began to see Jody's home as being somewhat like Gnomie's, not fancy or nothing, but so filled up with hard work and hopes and haves and haven'ts all tangled there together in ways that tugged and ached.

I was in my new green bathrobe—it was as soft as the moss that grows down by the creek in summer—and after a while I marked my place in the book and got up to go brush my teeth. In the hall, all of a sudden, I felt an urge to go and peer over the stair railing, just to look one more time at the decorations and the
lights on the tree, just to see it again while it was still Christmas, before the time was past. Each year it goes by too quick, and you got to try to make it last however which way you can. My way was to take one more look before I went to sleep.

So I tiptoed over to the place where you can stand against the upstairs railing and look down the curving stairs and beyond, into the hall and through the archway into the living room.

There was only the light of the fireplace, the Christmas candles in each window, and the lights on the tree. There was the sound of Christmas music coming from the radio. And there was the smell of pine.

Then I seen something that was supposed to be private. I didn't mean to. I only wanted to make the feeling of Christmas last for one more long look that I could store in my memory.

But then I had this, to store in my memory, too, and it was so private that I knew I couldn't even tell Veronica, though I had always told her everything. Mr. Bigelow and Sweet-Ho, while I watched, they was standing there beside the Christmas tree, and he was fixing one of the little lights. Then he turned around to her—she was laughing in her low voice—and all of a sudden she was quiet, and they kissed for a long time.

Millie Bellows died the day of Sweet-Ho's first exam.

Me and Veronica found her, huddled there in her afghan with a cup of tea on the table not even touched. We thought she was asleep, same as usual. The TV was blaring. It was the middle of
The Newlywed Game.
The guy was asking all the wives: "What farm animal best describes your husband on your wedding night—a stallion, a chicken, or a jackass?" and all the wives were giggling while they tried to answer.