Rabble Starkey (16 page)

"Mrs. Bellows," I said in a loud voice, "that's downright trashy, and you should switch channels."

She didn't move or look up, and then I realized. Her eyes was partly open, with her glasses tipped a little crooked, and one hand was just dangling down beside the chair. I knew she was dead. I picked up her hand real gentle to put it back in her lap, and it was cold.

Veronica started in trembling and she backed away.

"It's nothing to be scared of, Veronica," I told her. "Turn the TV off and then call your daddy on the phone."

I sat beside Millie while Veronica did those things. I wondered should I do something else, maybe try to lay her down and close her eyes. But I just sat and patted the cold hand.

"Now call Norman," I said, after Veronica told her daddy and he said he would come right away. "Because he's supposed to come over and start working on fixing that loose cellar step. But there's no need for everybody in the world to be here now. Millie wouldn't like it any."

When she had done that, I said, "Now make some tea."

"What for?" Veronica asked. Her voice was still shaky. "She can't—"

"Of course she can't. She's dead as a doornail," I told her. "Make some for you and me."

Mr. Bigelow got there in no time, and he hugged Veronica and me. He said we could go home, and he would take care of everything else.

Before we left Millie's house, I asked Mr. Bigelow something. I asked him if Veronica and me could take a souvenir to keep.

He hesitated. "Did you have something special in mind?" he asked.

I pulled out the old photograph album, the one we had looked at so many times with Millie Bellows.
"Just a photograph," I said. "Could we each have one, from when she was a girl?"

He looked at the little stacks of photographs stuck in every which way between the pages. He nodded his head. "One each," he said. "She wouldn't mind."

So we each chose one. It seemed odd to be turning the pages of the album without her grabbing at our arms and interrupting to say what each thing was, to tell about all the people in her past. I chose one of her all alone, with a big bow in her hair, when she was staring straight into the camera with solemn eyes. She was just my age in that one, and not knowing at all what her future would be, any more than I know mine right now.

Veronica cried some on the way home, and I don't fault her none for that. But I didn't cry. I felt sorry that Millie's old age wasn't real pleasant, and there was times when I liked her okay, and even sometimes when I liked her a whole lot if she forgot her crabbiness and talked about old times. But I didn't love Millie Bellows.

We found Sweet-Ho in the kitchen with her college books all spread out around her on the table. She'd been worrying all week about her very first test, and we'd all been teasing her, Mr. Bigelow and Veronica and me, and even Gunther some, though Gunther didn't understand about college.

When we came through the back door, she looked up and smiled. "You're home early," she said.

"Millie Bellows is dead," I told her. "She died watching game shows, and Mr. Bigelow is taking care
of everything, and don't you dare stay home from school and miss that exam or I'll never forgive you, ever."

Then Sweet-Ho cried some, too. But that night, after supper, she put on her coat and grabbed up her books and went and took the exam, her first one ever since she was thirteen years old. And she got the second highest grade in the class.

Not many people came to Millie's funeral. We were there, of course, and some of the other neighbors, and a nephew from Parkersburg. Mrs. Cox was there with Norman, and Mr. Cox did the service, telling some about Millie's long life and about how helpful she was in the neighborhood, some of which was a lie. But I did think back on the melty Jell-O she brought over the day Mrs. Bigelow went crazy. She
meant
to be helpful sometimes.

It was a cold, murky day, with a gray sky smudged like a chalky blackboard. When we left the church—there was no cemetery to go to, because her nephew was taking her to Parkersburg to be buried there—I marched right over to where Norman Cox was standing with his mother and I asked him could I speak to him private.

He looked some surprised, but he followed me where I led him, over to the edge of the parking lot where there was an icy old mud puddle with a piece of newspaper frozen into it.

"You probably don't even remember that Millie
Bellows's brother Howard died when he was fourteen years old because he acted stupid and show-offy, and she felt bad about it all her life," I told him.

"So?" Norman said. "So what?"

"So here," I said. "I'm going to give you this."

I took the mashed-up old choir hat out of my coat pocket and handed it to him. He took it, but he looked at it like he didn't know what it was.

"It's the hat you was wearing Halloween night, when you acted stupid and show-offy and chunked the stone that blacked Millie Bellows's eye," I said.

"I didn't mean to hit her," Norman muttered. "I was only—"

"I know," I interrupted. "You was only trying to call attention to yourself. But it was stupid and show-offy."

Norman stuffed the hat into the pocket of his jacket. He didn't even look at me. He didn't say nothing. I didn't expect him to.

"By the time she died, she thought you was a nice boy. She told me and Veronica so," I said. "I was just thinking that probably she never got around to telling you."

He still didn't say nothing.

"So I'm telling you on her behalf," I said. "The newspaper said she was ninety-three years old. I hope you don't ever forget that once you blacked the eye of a ninety-three-year-old lady. But at least I think you ought to know she never realized it was you who done it, and before she died she said you were a nice young man.

"That's all I wanted to say," I told him, and I walked away.

Just before our February school vacation Mrs. Hindler took down the family trees from the classroom wall and gave them back to us. The colors in them had begun to fade, hanging there in the sunshine all those months, though there was a small new brighter spot on Corrine Foster's where just after Thanksgiving she had climbed on a chair to paste up a new apple for her newborn baby sister. "Sarah Hope," it said, "born November 29."

I stood mine up on my dresser, right next to Millie Bellows's girlhood picture.

"Sometimes I remember Millie Bellows with a kind of fondness," I told Sweet-Ho one night while I was getting ready for bed. "But I really
love
my memories of Gnomie."

"Me too," Sweet-Ho said. "When I think of her I always think of the smell of cinnamon cookies."

"I think of big blue delphiniums."

"And her aprons. I remember the aprons, all starched and ironed."

"Once," I said, "when I was little, there was a big rainstorm at night. Gnomie and me was watching it through the window. And then she got the idea to go outside and stand right in it. So we did that, laughing and laughing. The wind was blowing the trees every which way, and our nightgowns, too. When we came in she dried my hair in front of the wood stove."

Sweet-Ho smiled. "Sometimes I miss all of that, just a little."

"Me too, I guess. But it doesn't make me sad, because I love our life now. Anyways, I expect it wouldn't be the same if we was to go back, not with Gnomie gone."

"And not with us so different now," Sweet-Ho said.

"Are we? Are we different now?"

"Of course. Nobody stays the same."

"Especially not
you
, Sweet-Ho. Shoot, you're a college student now! Isn't that the most amazing thing?"

"It surely is," Sweet-Ho said. "And I'd better go and get some studying done. You get to sleep, Rabble. Dream of wind and rain."

"I will," I told her, as I snuggled down. "If I set my mind to it, I can dream anything I want."

One evening Veronica's father said that it was time, next Saturday, for Veronica to go with him to Meadowhill again, and that this time Gunther was to go, too.

Veronica didn't say nothing, but old agreeable Gunther, he looked up and said, "Sure thing!" Then he hiccuped and grinned. He didn't know nothing about Meadowhill, what it was, what it meant.

Saturday afternoon me and Sweet-Ho went off together to the movies. We ate popcorn and ice cream sandwiches and laughed at a dumb old comedy, and we didn't talk, neither one of us, about Meadowhill at all.

They got back late in the afternoon, and that night me and Veronica took a walk after supper, all bundled up against the cold. We walked over to where Millie Bellows's house stood empty. In the spring they was to paint it and sell it.

"They'll have to cut all them old vines down before they paint," I said.

"They'll grow back good as new. I hope they paint it gold."

"I hope white," I said, just to be ornery. Something inside me was making me feel fretful.

"Well, white would be nice, too. When the yard is all cleaned up, it'll be pretty. By next summer maybe there'll be a new family living here. I wonder if they'll have kids."

"I hope not," I said, knowing I was acting just as grouchy as Millie Bellows used to. "There's enough kids in this neighborhood."

Veronica started in to laugh. "Rabble, that's silly! There's only you and me and Gunther and Norman! And before long, you and me and Norman won't even be kids, we're all growing up so fast."

"How's your mother?" I asked all of a sudden. Not knowing about the afternoon at Meadowhill was what was making me so crabby.

"She's getting well," Veronica said. She leaned down and picked up a broken shingle from Millie Bellows's yard, where it had fallen from the roof.

"How can you even tell, if she don't talk any, or even comb her hair?"

Veronica looked startled. "Rabble, that was way back in the fall when she didn't comb her hair! That was months ago! This afternoon she looked just as pretty as anything, and she talked a whole lot. She sat with Gunther on her lap and we talked about all sorts of things, all four of us."

"Well, shoot," I said, "what do you expect? Somebody holds somebody else under water forever and practically drowns them, of
course
they're going to try all sorts of ways to make amends. Of
course
they're going to try to act normal."

Veronica dropped the shingle back on the ground. She looked at me real steady. "She wasn't acting, Rabble. She's really getting better."

"I'm going back," I said, and turned away. "I have to help Sweet-Ho with her typing tonight. She can do forty words a minute now when I read something to her.

"My mother is making amazing progress with her studies," I added, with my back to Veronica. "I surely am astounded that you haven't commented on it." I walked away.

Back home, in the kitchen, I was already dictating stuff to Sweet-Ho when Veronica came through the back door. Mr. Bigelow had brought home an old typewriter from his office and Sweet-Ho was learning to type so's she could write her term papers and such properly. She practiced every night at a table in the corner of the kitchen. Sometimes she let me practice too, though I wasn't much good and went real slow with lots of mistakes.

"Shoot," Sweet-Ho said, and stopped typing. "I missed the
q
again. I wish they didn't have the
q's
in the alphabet. There doesn't seem much need of them."

"Sure there is," Veronica said, pulling off her coat.
"Listen: I think it's quite, quite, quite wonderful that you're doing so well, so quickly, in school, Sweet-Ho. Hear all the
q's?
"

Sweet-Ho laughed. "I do. Thank you, Veronica."

"How about if I make us some hot chocolate, Veronica?" I asked. "It was cold out."

"Thanks," Veronica said, and I knew we was friends again.

But things were changing. Now Veronica and Gunther went every Saturday, with their daddy, to Meadowhill. Gunther began to talk about his mama at home.

One afternoon he was fooling around with his toys on the floor, and suddenly he said, "My mama will be coming home soon."

Sweet-Ho looked up from where she was sitting with a book, but she didn't say nothing. Veronica looked up, too, but she didn't say nothing either.

I did. I said, "Big Gun, your mama was sick for a long time. Four whole years, maybe even longer, before it started to show."

Gunther just grinned. "Uh-huh," he said. He didn't even know what I was talking about, but good old Gunther, he just agreed with everybody.

"So," I went on, "even though it's real nice that she's getting better, still and all it'll take a long time for her to be entirely well again."

Gunther smiled happily and ran his truck around, under the legs of a chair.

"Probably four years at least," I said. "Maybe even five or six."

Veronica said, "That's not true, Rabble. Really. She's getting well real fast now."

"I just don't want him to get his hopes up high, Veronica," I explained to her, "because there are always setbacks, you know."

Gunther hadn't even been listening to me, I guess, because that night at dinner he said it again, when his daddy was there. "My mama's coming home soon," he said. "Isn't that right, Daddy?"

Mr. Bigelow was busy handing round the plates. "Could be, Big Gun," he said. I was sure glad that he made it uncertain that way so that old Gunther's hopes wouldn't be too high. I said so, later, to Sweet-Ho when we was alone.

"Don't you think Mr. Bigelow's wise in the way he answers Gunther? Not getting up his hopes and all, about Mrs. Bigelow coming home soon?"

We was up in our room while Sweet-Ho gathered up her school things because she was about to go to class. "Phil told me that they hope for June, Rabble. They hope she'll come home in June."

"June? But it's already March! June's only three months away!"

"That's right," Sweet-Ho said, busying herself with her pens and all.

"But, Sweet-Ho! What're we going to do, you and me?"

She looked over at me. "Me, I'm going to be typing sixty words a minute by June, and I'm going to get
an A in American Literature, that's what I'm going to do. You—well, I hope you're going to get out your Geography book and do your homework this minute."