Barbara Robinson
For Jack, of course
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Other Books by Barbara Robinson
Read more about the Herdmans
Copyright
About the Publisher
All of a sudden Imogene Herdman dug me in the ribs with her elbow. She has the sharpest elbows of anybody I ever knew. “What’s the pageant?” she said.
“It’s a play,” I said, and for the first time that day (except when she saw the collection basket) Imogene looked interested.
“What’s the play about?” Imogene asked.
“It’s about Jesus,” I said.
“Everything here is,” she muttered, so I figured Imogene didn’t care much about the Christmas pageant.
But I was wrong.
Chapter 1
The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed their teachers and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker’s old broken-down toolhouse.
The toolhouse burned right down to the ground, and I think that surprised the Herdmans. They set fire to things all the time, but that was the first time they managed to burn down a whole building.
I guess it was an accident. I don’t suppose they woke up that morning and said to one another, “Let’s go burn down Fred Shoemaker’s toolhouse” . . . but maybe they did. After all, it was a Saturday, and not much going on.
It was a terrific fire—two engines and two police cars and all the volunteer firemen and five dozen doughnuts sent up from the Tasti-Lunch Diner. The doughnuts were supposed to be for the firemen, but by the time they got the fire out the doughnuts were all gone. The Herdmans got them—what they couldn’t eat they stuffed in their pockets and down the front of their shirts. You could actually see the doughnuts all around Ollie Herdman’s middle.
I couldn’t understand why the Herdmans were hanging around the scene of their crime. Everybody knew the whole thing was their fault, and you’d think they’d have the brains to get out of sight.
One fireman even collared Claude Herdman and said, “Did you kids start this fire, smoking cigars in that toolhouse?”
But Claude just said, “We weren’t smoking cigars.”
And they weren’t. They were playing with Leroy Herdman’s “Young Einstein” chemistry set, which he stole from the hardware store, and that was how they started the fire.
Leroy said so. “We mixed all the little powders together,” he said, “and poured lighter fluid around on them and set fire to the lighter fluid. We wanted to see if the chemistry set was any good.”
Any other kid—even a mean kid—would have been a little bit worried if he stole $4.95 worth of something and then burned down a building with it. But Leroy was just mad because the chemistry set got burned up along with everything else before he had a chance to make one or two bombs.
The fire chief got us all together—there were fifteen or twenty kids standing around watching the fire—and gave us a little talk about playing with matches and gasoline and dangerous things like that.
“I don’t say that’s what happened here,” he told us. “I don’t know what happened here, but that could have been it, and you see the result. So let this be a good lesson to you, boys and girls.”
Of course it was a great lesson to the Herdmans—they learned that wherever there’s a fire there will be free doughnuts sooner or later.
I guess things would have been different if they’d burned down, say, the Second Presbyterian Church instead of the toolhouse, but the toolhouse was about to fall down anyway. All the neighbors had pestered Mr. Shoemaker to do something about it because it looked so awful and was sure to bring rats. So everybody said the fire was a blessing in disguise, and even Mr. Shoemaker said it was a relief. My father said it was the only good thing the Herdmans ever did, and if they’d known it was a good thing, they wouldn’t have done it at all. They would have set fire to something else . . . or somebody.
They were just so all-around awful you could hardly believe they were real: Ralph, Imogene, Leroy, Claude, Ollie, and Gladys—six skinny, stringy-haired kids all alike except for being different sizes and having different black-and-blue places where they had clonked each other.
They lived over a garage at the bottom of Sproul Hill. Nobody used the garage anymore, but the Herdmans used to bang the door up and down just as fast as they could and try to squash one another—that was their idea of a game. Where other people had grass in their front yard, the Herdmans had rocks. And where other people had hydrangea bushes, the Herdmans had poison ivy.
There was also a sign in the yard that said BEWARE OF THE CAT.
New kids always laughed about that till they got a look at the cat. It was the meanest- looking animal I ever saw. It had one short leg and a broken tail and one missing eye, and the mailman wouldn’t deliver anything to the Herdmans because of it.
“I don’t think it’s a regular cat at all,” the mailman told my father. “I think those kids went up in the hills and caught themselves a bobcat.”
“Oh, I don’t think you can tame a wild bobcat,” my father said.
“I’m sure you can’t,” said the mailman. “They’d never try to tame it; they’d just try to make it wilder than it was to begin with.”
If that was their plan, it worked—the cat would attack anything it could see out of its one eye.
One day Claude Herdman emptied the whole first grade in three minutes flat when he took the cat to Show-and-Tell. He didn’t feed it for two days so it was already mad, and then he carried it to school in a box, and when he opened the box the cat shot out—right straight up in the air, people said.
It came down on the top blackboard ledge and clawed four big long scratches all the way down the blackboard. Then it just tore around all over the place, scratching little kids and shedding fur and scattering books and papers everywhere.
The teacher, Miss Brandel, yelled for everybody to run out in the hall, and she pulled a coat over her head and grabbed a broom and tried to corner the cat. But of course she couldn’t see, with the coat over her head, so she just ran up and down the aisles, hollering “Here, kitty!” and smacking the broom down whenever the cat hissed back. She knocked over the Happy Family dollhouse and a globe of the world, and broke the aquarium full of twenty gallons of water and about sixty-five goldfish.
All the time she kept yelling for Claude to come and catch his cat, but Claude had gone out in the hall with the rest of the class.
Later, when Miss Brandel was slapping Band-Aids on everyone who could show her any blood, she asked Claude why in the world he didn’t come and get his cat under control.
“You told us to go out in the hall,” Claude said, just as if he were the ordinary kind of first grader who did whatever teachers said to do.
The cat settled down a little bit once it got something to eat—most of the goldfish and Ramona Billian’s two pet mice that she brought to Show-and-Tell. Ramona cried and carried on so—“I can’t even bury them!” she said—that they sent her home.
The room was a wreck—broken glass and papers and books and puddles of water and dead goldfish everywhere. Miss Brandel was sort of a wreck too, and most of the first graders were hysterical, so somebody took them outdoors and let them have recess for the rest of the day.
Claude took the cat home and after that there was a rule t
hat you couldn’t bring anything alive to Show-and-Tell.
The Herdmans moved from grade to grade through the Woodrow Wilson School like those South American fish that strip your bones clean in three minutes flat . . . which was just about what they did to one teacher after another.
But they never, never got kept back in a grade.
When it came time for Claude Herdman to pass to the second grade he didn’t know his ABC’s or his numbers or his colors or his shapes or his “Three Bears” or how to get along with anybody. But Miss Brandel passed him anyway.
For one thing, she knew she’d have Ollie Herdman the next year. That was the thing about the Herdmans—there was always another one coming along, and no teacher was crazy enough to let herself in for two of them at once.
I was always in the same grade with Imogene Herdman, and what I did was stay out of her way. It wasn’t easy to stay out of her way. You couldn’t do it if you were very pretty or very ugly, or very smart or very dumb, or had anything unusual about you, like red hair or double-jointed thumbs.
But if you were sort of a medium kid like me, and kept your mouth shut when the teacher said, “Who can name all fifty states?” you had a pretty good chance to stay clear of Imogene.
As far as anyone could tell, Imogene was just like the rest of the Herdmans. She never learned anything either, except dirty words and secrets about everybody.
Twice a year we had to go to the health room to get weighed and measured, and Imogene always managed to find out exactly what everybody weighed. Sometimes she would hang around waiting for the nurse, Miss Hemphill, to give her a Band-Aid; sometimes she would sneak behind the curtain where they kept a folding cot and just stay there the whole time, with one eye on the scales.
“Why are you still here, Imogene?” Miss Hemphill asked one day. “You can go back to your room.”
“I think you better look and see if I’ve got what Ollie has.”
“What does Ollie have?”
Imogene shrugged. “We don’t know. Red spots all over.”
Miss Hemphill looked at her. “What did the doctor say?”
“We didn’t have a doctor.” Imogene began scrunching her back up and down against the medicine cabinet.
“Well, does Ollie have a fever? Is he in bed?”
“No, he’s in the first grade.”
“Right now?” Miss Hemphill stared. “Why, he shouldn’t be in school with red spots! It could be measles or chicken pox . . . any number of things . . . contagious things. What are you doing?”
“Scratching my back,” Imogene said. “Boy, do I itch!”
“The rest of you boys and girls go back to your classroom,” Miss Hemphill said, “and, Imogene, you stay right here.”
So we all went back to our room, and Miss Hemphill went to the first grade to look at Ollie, and Imogene stayed in the health room and copied down everybody’s weight from Miss Hemphill’s records.
Your weight was supposed to be a big secret, like what you got on your report card.
“It’s nobody’s business what you get on your report card,” all the teachers said. And Miss Hemphill said the same thing—“It’s nobody’s business what you weigh.”
Not even the fat kids could find out what they weighed, but Imogene always knew.
“Don’t let Albert Pelfrey on the swing!” she would yell at recess. “He’ll bust it. Albert Pelfrey weighs a hundred and forty-three pounds. Last time he weighed a hundred and thirty-seven.” So right away everybody knew two things about Albert—we knew exactly how fat he was, and we also knew that he was getting fatter all the time.
“You have to go to fat-camp this summer,” Imogene hollered at him. “Miss Hemphill wrote it down on your paper.”
Fat-camp is a place where they feed you lettuce and grapefruit and cottage cheese and eggs for a month, and you either give up and cheat or give up and get skinny.
“I am not!” Albert said. “I’m going to Disneyland with my Uncle Frank.”
“That’s what you think!” Imogene told him.
Albert had to believe her—she was always right about things like that—so all year he had fat-camp to look forward to instead of Disneyland.
Sometimes Imogene would blackmail the fat kids if they had anything she wanted . . . like Wanda Pierce’s charm bracelet.
Wanda Pierce weighed about a ton—she even had fat eyes—and her hobby was this charm bracelet. It had twenty-two charms and every single one did something: the little wheels turned, or the little bitty piano keys went “plink,” or the little tiny drawers opened and closed.
Besides being a fat kid, Wanda was also a rich kid, so every time you turned around she had a new charm.
“Look at my new charm,” she would say. “It cost $6.95 without the tax. It’s a bird, and when you push this little knob, its wings flutter. It cost $6.95.”
They were great charms, but everybody got sick of hearing about them, so it was almost a relief when Imogene blackmailed her out of it.
“I know how much you weigh, Wanda,” Imogene told her. “I wrote it down on this piece of paper. See?”
It must have been an awful amount, because even Wanda looked horrified. So Imogene got her charm bracelet, and she got Lucille Golden’s imitation alligator pocketbook with “Souvenir of Florida” written on it. For a while she got ten cents a week from Floyd Brush, till Floyd caught double pneumonia and lost fifteen pounds and didn’t care anymore.
My friend Alice Wendleken was so nasty-clean that she had detergent hands by the time she was four years old. Just the same, Alice picked up a case of head lice when she was at summer camp, and somehow Imogene found out about that. She would sneak up on Alice at recess and holler “Cooties!” and smack Alice’s head. She nearly knocked Alice cross-eyed before one of the teachers saw her and took both of them in to the principal.
“Now, what’s this all about?” the principal wanted to know, but Alice wouldn’t say.
“I had to hit her,” Imogene told him. “She’s got cooties, and I saw one crawling in her hair, and I don’t want them on me.”
“You did not see one!” Alice said. “I don’t have them anymore!”
“What do you mean, you don’t have them anymore?” the principal said. “Did you have them lately?” It really shook him up—he didn’t want a whole school full of kids with cooties. So he sent Alice to the health room and the nurse went all through her head with a fine-tooth comb and a magnifying glass, and finally said it was all right.
But it was too late—everybody called Alice “Cooties” the whole rest of the year.
If Imogene didn’t know a secret about a person, she would make one up. She would catch you in the girls’ room or out in the hall and whisper, “I know what you did!” and then you’d go crazy trying to figure out what it was you did that Imogene knew about.
It was no good trying to get secrets on the Herdmans. Everybody already knew about the awful things they did. You couldn’t even tease them about their parents, or holler “Your father’s in jail!” because they didn’t care. Actually, they didn’t know what their father was or where he was or anything about him, because when Gladys was two years old he climbed on a railroad train and disappeared. Nobody blamed him.
Now and then you’d see Mrs. Herdman, walking the cat on a length of chain around the block. But she worked double shifts at the shoe factory, and wasn’t home much.
My mother’s friend, Miss Philips, was a social-service worker and she tried to get some welfare money for the Herdmans, so Mrs. Herdman could just work one shift and spend more time with her children. But Mrs. Herdman wouldn’t do it; she liked the work, she said.
“It’s not the work,” Miss Philips told my mother, “and it’s not the money. It’s just that she’d rather be at the shoe factory than shut up at home with that crowd of kids.” She sighed. “I can’t say I blame her.”
So the Herdmans pretty much looked after themselves. Ralph looked after Imogene, and Imogene looked after Leroy, and
Leroy looked after Claude and so on down the line. The Herdmans were like most big families—the big ones taught the little ones everything they knew . . . and the proof of that was that the meanest Herdman of all was Gladys, the youngest.
We figured they were headed straight for hell, by way of the state penitentiary . . . until they got themselves mixed up with the church, and my mother, and our Christmas pageant.
Chapter 2
Mother didn’t expect to have anything to do with the Christmas pageant except to make me and my little brother Charlie be in it (we didn’t want to) and to make my father go and see it (he didn’t want to).
Every year he said the same thing—“I’ve seen the Christmas pageant.”
“You haven’t seen this year’s Christmas pageant,” Mother would tell him. “Charlie is a shepherd this year.”
“Charlie was a shepherd last year. No . . . you go on and go. I’m just going to put on my bathrobe and sit by the fire and relax. There’s never anything different about the Christmas pageant.”
“There’s something different this year,” Mother said.
“What?”
“Charlie is wearing your bathrobe.”
So that year my father went . . . to see his bathrobe, he said.
Actually, he went every year but it was always a struggle, and Mother said that was her contribution to the Christmas pageant—getting my father to go to it.
But then she got stuck with the whole thing when Mrs. George Armstrong fell and broke her leg.
We knew about this as soon as it happened, because Mrs. Armstrong only lived a block and a half away. We heard the siren and saw the ambulance and watched the policemen carry her out of the house on a stretcher.
“Call Mr. Armstrong at his work!” she yelled at the policemen. “Shut off the stove under my potatoes! Inform the Ladies’ Aid that I won’t be at the meeting!”
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever Page 1