Rabble Starkey (6 page)

In the morning, me and Veronica helped Sweet-Ho do 52
the breakfast dishes. Mr. Bigelow, in his bathrobe, sat at the kitchen table with his coffee and the newspaper, and he read to Gunther from the funnies. Gunther was still in his pj's, eating his banana real careful-like so's he wouldn't smear it on the paper.

"See?" Mr. Bigelow said, pointing to the pictures for Gunther's eyes to follow. "Here Snoopy's walking down the street, wearing his helmet, and look, Gunther, here in the next picture, he says, 'The Red Baron fearlessly maneuvers his craft.'"

Gunther grinned and reached up with his nonba-nana hand to stroke his daddy's cheek. I watched. I never before saw Mr. Bigelow early in the morning, not shaved yet, and I liked how sweetly Gunther patted his daddy's whiskers.

There was a knock at the kitchen door, and Sweet-Ho wiped her hands dry and went to open it. There was Mrs. Cox, all dressed for church, with an aquamarine hat perched on her head. She was all color-coordinated as if she was an ad for Sears, with aquamarine shoes, too, and a pink suit with aquamarine trim, and a pink ruffled blouse. Her lipstick was the same shade of pink.

Me and Veronica and Sweet-Ho was all dressed—not fancy, but dressed—and I looked over at Mr. Bigelow in his bathrobe, to see if maybe he was embarrassed. But he just looked up at Mrs. Cox and smiled hello.

She came in and laid a basket on the table. "I hope I'm not disturbing you so early," she said. "Norman and I are on our way to church—he's out in the car.
But I wanted to drop this little casserole off for you, Philip. And to say I'm so sorry for your trouble."

"Sorry for your trouble" is what folks in Highriver always say when something has gone wrong. It covers just about everything; me and Veronica even said it to Norman when his dog got squashed by the J. C. Penney's truck. You can say it if somebody's septic tank overflows or if they get the flu real bad and miss a niece's wedding in Clarksburg, as happened to Miss Elizabeth Stevenson over on West Stanley Street last spring.

"Do you have time for coffee, Mrs. Cox?" Sweet-Ho asked. "There's still half a pot hot."

But she said no. "Thank you, dear. But Norman's being obstreperous, as usual. I have to get him down to Sunday school, and the choir's holding an extra rehearsal before this morning's service. So I mustn't be late. You'll let me know if I can be of help?"

When she was gone, me and Veronica lifted the foil on the top of the casserole to peer inside and see what it was before Sweet-Ho put it in the refrigerator.

"Chicken with stuff on it," Veronica announced.

Sweet-Ho leaned over and looked. "It's that
Family Circle
recipe she uses," she said. "She always brings this to PTA potlucks. It's pretty good, too. We can have it for dinner."

"Look!" Veronica said, and she pointed through the kitchen window. "Here comes Millie Bellows!"

We all looked, and it was true. Millie Bellows, wearing the same old housedress she always wore,
hunched over and with her face scrunched into a frown almost as scary as a fist, was inching her way down the road toward the Bigelows' house. She was carrying a plate with a bright red shiny mound on it. The mound was wobbling with each slow step she took.

"Lord, she's bringing us a molded salad, and it'll melt in the sun before she ever gets here," Sweet-Ho said. "I'll go meet her."

She did, and when she came back with the dripping plate of Jell-O—it had marshmallows and grapes in it—she said, "She didn't want to come on in. Had to go home and watch her TV shows. But she says she's sorry for our trouble.

"Maybe this'll harden up some before dinner," she added, and put the salad in the refrigerator. "Don't you worry, Gunther," she said, seeing his face, "you don't have to eat it, or the casserole. I'm going to heat up some nice spaghetti for you."

Later, Veronica and me were sitting up in the oak tree at a place we had where the branches came together in a comfortable way.

"We should call this the Family Tree," I said. "You could fit a whole family right up here."

Veronica laughed. "Can't you just see my mother sitting up here, smiling and talking about the pure in heart?"

It made me feel better, that she was talking about it without that anger. But I didn't know just how to answer, so I just got all jokey. "We could set Millie Bellows up over there on that limb," I said, "and all the Coxes—they could perch over there, even Norman with his supply of paper clips."

Veronica grinned. "Norman could pelt people with paper clips, and Millie could grumble, and Mr. Cox could give a sermon, and Gunther could hiccup—"

"Mrs. Cox could sing that horrible solo she always does at weddings," I added.

"And my crazy mother could baptize everyone, and you and me, Rabble—"

"We could laugh," I suggested.

We did. We started in giggling.

"It sure wouldn't be an apple tree," Veronica said. "A
nut
tree, that's what it would be."

Secretly I was glad that Veronica was laughing again, same as before, because I surely didn't know what to do when she cried.

I find it powerfully amazing how things go on just the same even after some enormous change has taken place.

Places where they have great earthquakes, when skyscrapers and hotels fall down and holes open up in the ground and swallow cows and cars? People go on living there, and after a while they build other buildings and buy new cows and cars, and talk about gossip and weather and such. Just as if the thing never happened.

When Dorothy got back to Kansas after being in Oz? She probably just went back to school, same as always, and took spelling tests and played kickball at recess, I expect.

I bet anything she had nightmares now and then, though.

Me and Veronica, we went back to school on Monday morning, and she even handed in her original family tree with her mother's name. Nobody—not
even Norman Cox—said nothing about what had happened, though they all knew. In Highriver, when there's trouble, everyone knows.

Mrs. Hindler hung all the family trees around the room, right out there for everyone to see. Nobody objected, but I thought it was real tasteless to do that, exposing everybody's family like that. Maybe there was stuff people didn't want anyone to know. I didn't go up close to examine them or nothing, but just from my desk I could see some stuff I hadn't known before—like Diane Briggs had one time had a sister who died. There it was, on her tree: Shirley Ann, Dec., age 1.

And over on the other wall—I couldn't see it real plain from my desk, and I surely didn't want to go up and peer intently at it—but it appeared that Parker Condon's grandmother had been married two times. Now wouldn't you think that should be kept private?

I like Mrs. Hindler a lot, but I believe she doesn't understand about privacy very well. All those secrets were there hanging around the sixth grade room exposed, and for all I could tell, she planned to let them hang there all year.

Corrine Foster's mother was expecting a baby around Thanksgiving.
That
surely wasn't a secret, what with all the baby showers people was giving for her already. Fifty people came to the one down at the Presbyterian church, and she got so many little jumpsuits that Sweet-Ho said she wouldn't even need to wash them, she could throw them away after each wearing, though of course it would be wasteful. I
wondered if Corrine would climb on a chair with a crayon to add a new little-bitty apple to her tree when the baby came.

There hung Mrs. Bigelow, the mother apple on Veronica's tree. Of course no one sneaked over to climb up and pencil in "Crazy" after her name, but I wondered if the thought might be in people's heads.

There hung my tree, with the father apple crayoned in "Ginger Starkey" with his date of birth, and no one asked "Who's he?" (course they could see, he was my father) or worse: "
Where's
he?" I wondered if people thought it should be penciled in: Gone. Which is, of course, a form of dec.

It was time for English, and we all sat there at our desks, expecting that Mrs. Hindler would say, same as always, "Get out your
Understanding Grammar
books, people." But she didn't. Instead, she picked up a fat book off her own desk and held it up.

"Who here has heard of a thesaurus?" she asked.

Stupid old Roger Watkins shot up his hand fast as anything. I laughed inside myself. Roger Watkins never
listened;
he always just shot up his hand and gave wrong answers.

Mrs. Hindler looked around to see if anybody else wanted to answer. But Roger Watkins was the only one, and finally she called on him, though you could tell she didn't want to. He was waving and waving his grubby old hand in the air.

"Our bull is named that," he said. Everybody in the class burst out laughing, all but Mrs. Hindler.

"Your
what?
" she asked, with her face all puzzled.

"Our bull is named Taurus," Roger said. Everybody screamed with laughing. Dumb old Roger. That big old Taurus, he was the meanest thing. Once he bashed a dent in Roger's daddy's pickup; of course it was stupid as anything that Mr. Watkins drove the pickup right into the pasture where Taurus was laying in wait.

Mrs. Hindler nodded politely. "Quiet, people," she said. "Roger, you weren't listening carefully. Class, what did I say?"

Everybody called out different stuff. "Thossrus!" someone called, like a rhyme with rhinoceros. "Thorrus!" "Trocerus!" "Triceratops!" someone yelled, and we all laughed, because we remembered triceratops from third grade when we all studied dinosaurs.

She wrote it on the board in her neat printing. "Thesaurus." She pronounced it slowly and we all said it after her.

Then she explained how it worked. I was some startled that I never knew about a thesaurus before, because I've always been interested in words. I was only nine the year that I told Sweet-Ho the only thing I wanted for Christmas was a dictionary, and I wasn't showing off, either. She gave me a good one and I keep it right there on the table beside my bed, and consult it from time to time, or sometimes just read through it a bit for extra knowledge.

But I have to confess that a thesaurus beats a dictionary, and now I know for sure that I want one of my own, to keep. Mrs. Hindler passed them out to the
class, but just old cheap paperback ones, and we would have to give them back after we got finished with learning about them.

Then, holding hers up with her pointy fingernails, she showed us how we could choose a word—almost any word—and look it up, and find all the other words we could use in its place.

"Who would like to choose a word?" she asked, and lots of hands shot up, including mine and Veronica's. Mrs. Hindler called on Corrine Foster.

"Love," Corrine said, and everybody laughed. Corrine blushed. She blushes real easy.

Mrs. Hindler told us all to turn to the index in the back and look up "love".

Right away I could see that it was an amazing thing, because I could see that there are all kinds of love.

Desire.

Courtesy.

Affection.

Those were just some.

"Let's look at 'affection', class," Mrs. Hindler said. And she showed us how to find the number, and turn there in the thesaurus.

Well, that was even more amazing. There was a
whole page.
You could hear everybody in the class murmuring out loud, reading all the words.

Not me. I read them to myself, feeling something like a shiver up my back at all the affection on that page.

Fondness. Tenderness. Regard. Admiration. Devotion. Infatuation. Rapture. And those were only a few.

Brotherly love. Maternal love. All different kinds.

I felt a real true fondness and devotion to Mrs. Hindler for showing me this.

We did a couple more words—though none was as exciting as love and affection—and then she gave us an assignment for homework. She handed back the compositions that we wrote last week. She had given us a choice for that assignment, and it had been a hard choice, at least for me. "My Ambition." Or "My Home."

Veronica had chosen "My Ambition" and had written her two pages about ballet dancing. She had confided to me that she wasn't real entirely sure that ballet dancing was her ambition, even though she went to Miss Charisse Balfour's classes every Thursday after school for four years, and had done a solo called "Sleeping Beauty Awakes" at the recital last spring. She didn't say so in her composition, but Veronica had told me that the toe shoes hurt and she didn't really think she wanted to spend her whole entire adult life with mashed-in toes.

Me, I have some ambitions, but they're all private ones, not things I want to tell the whole entire sixth grade. I was tempted to make one up, like "Female Spy" or maybe "Lady-in-waiting to the Queen of England." But I didn't want to appear foolish. So I wrote about "My Home," which was tough since my home was somewhat unusual, being a garage. But Sweet-Ho had explained to me, when I was biting on my pencil eraser and complaining about how hard the
writing was, that "home" doesn't necessarily mean "place". It means feelings, Sweet-Ho said, about family. Realizing that made it easier for me to write those two pages.

Now Mrs. Hindler handed all the compositions back, but they didn't have any grades on them, not even the usual comments about neatness and spelling.

"I want you each to choose ten words that you've used in these compositions," Mrs. Hindler said, "and change them, using your thesaurus. See if you can make your writing more powerful, more colorful, more interesting."

Of course lots of kids, mostly boys, felt compelled to call out dumb stuff. Sometimes I wonder how Mrs. Hindler manages to keep her patience.

"Can we change 'and'?" yelled Norman Cox, the idiot.

Albert Washington raised his hand and asked, "What if nothing needs changing? What if it's just right the way we wrote it?" Everybody laughed, even Mrs. Hindler. Albert Washington is this black kid with glasses, and he always has the highest marks in the class. He's the youngest one in sixth grade, too, because he skipped second and fourth both. Albert Washington could read when he was three years old.