Nevertheless, he became increasingly uneasy as time passed and we saw no sign of Mother and Aunt Blanche along the road. “Don’t know where they are,” he muttered from time to time, “. . . all going in the same direction on the same highway.”
The late-arriving cousin, Howard Grashel, picked up this mood and kept saying, “Seems like the earth swallowed them up—seem to you like the earth swallowed them up?” till my father finally said, “For heaven’s sake, Howard, shut up. You’ll scare the kids.”
But Louis and I didn’t think there was anything to be scared about, believing, as we did, that grown-ups (even the grown-ups related to Mother) could take care of themselves. Had Mother been riding with Aunt Mildred we might have been scared, for Aunt Mildred passed us—honking and waving and then disappearing in the distance—“Like a bat out of hell,” Howard said.
My father seemed to feel better after that. It reminded him, he said, that it was better to be late to a funeral than to require one.
“What happens when you’re late to a funeral?” Louis asked me, for he was still fearful of public recognition. “Do you just walk in, in the middle of it? Do they stop while you walk in and sit down?”
“We’re not going to be late, Louis,” my father said. “It’s your mother who’s going to be late, unless they stop somewhere and take a taxicab.”
To everyone’s surprise, this was what they did.
At the very last minute, as we stood outside the funeral home, looking up and down the street for any sign of Aunt Blanche’s Ford sedan, a blue-and-yellow taxicab pulled up at the curb and out of it stepped Mother and Aunt Blanche.
“Let’s go right in,” Mother said, hurrying up the steps, “I’ll explain everything later.”
“At least explain the taxicab,” my father said.
“We were so late—it seemed like the best thing to do—Oh! . . .” She smiled. “Look at all these people. Isn’t that nice?”
There were a lot of people, all very old, and all, naturally, strangers to us except for Aunt Mildred and her passengers.
“I hope Mildred thought to tell the minister who we are,” Mother whispered.
It was immediately clear that Aunt Mildred had done so, because the minister based his entire remarks on the fact that so many had come so far to pay final tribute. He talked about life and death, and generations, and the old and the young (here Louis scrunched way down in his seat) . . . “Mildred and Rhoda,” the minister said, “Frank and Grace and their families . . .”
When it was over Mother went to thank the minister, but my father said it ought to be the other way around, that he should thank us. “Makes you wonder what he was going to talk about before we showed up,” he said.
To our surprise Mother came back right away, looking distracted, and hurried Louis and me out ahead of her. “We’re not going to the cemetery,” she said. “I told him we had to get right back. He understood. Where is everybody? Let’s get out of here.”
“They’re outside,” my father said. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Oh!”—Mother rolled her eyes—“I didn’t know what in the world to say! Fred, that’s not Uncle John in there!”
“What do you mean?” My father stared at her. “Who is it?”
“I don’t know!”
“Well, didn’t you ask the minister?”
“Why, I couldn’t say anything to the minister! I couldn’t ask him, ‘Who is this?’ He just preached his whole sermon about us being the family!”
There was a lot of discussion and disagreement: Was this the right funeral home? Had Mother misunderstood the telegram? “How do you know it isn’t him?” Aunt Rhoda demanded. “You never saw him. None of us ever did.”
“I saw pictures,” Mother said. “He was a little, short, bald man, and this is a big tall man with lots of hair and a beard.”
While everyone argued about what, if anything, to do, my father went back in to talk to the minister, who was surprised and puzzled, but found a silver lining to it all. He said that Mr. Johnson (whose funeral we had just attended) had no family at all, that his mourners were simply fellow residents at a nursing home, and that since we were all children of God and therefore kin, our presence was in no way inappropriate.
Aunt Mildred and Aunt Rhoda seemed willing to let it go at that. For one thing, Aunt Blanche was beginning to worry about her car, which was parked at a restaurant called Randolph’s Ribs. “They were all very nice,” she said, “trying to give us directions, and then calling us a cab and all . . . but they’re not going to want my car sitting there all day long.”
Mother said she’d never heard of such a thing, and now that we were here, we were going to locate Uncle John Lane, dead or alive, if it took a week.
Fortunately it only took my father about twenty minutes to figure out, and to confirm, that there had been some mix-up at the nursing home, inhabited by both Uncle John Lane and Mr. Johnson.
“They don’t know much at that place,” he said, “but they do seem to know that one of them is deceased, and the other one isn’t.” He also said that he intended to call someone to account for this outrageous mistake, but Mother wouldn’t let him.
“That sounds as if we’re mad because he isn’t dead,” she said; “and anyway, these things happen all the time.”
“That is simply not true,” my father said—but of course he was in the company of people to whom such things did happen all the time, and they bombarded him with examples: “Remember Pauline . . . took the wrong baby home from the hospital?” “Remember Lloyd’s dog Vergil that got listed in the telephone book, and after that got all the mail and the phone calls?” “Remember Audrey? . . . Calvin? . . . Maxine?”
Aunt Mildred summed it up. “Happens all the time, Fred.”
“Not to me,” my father said . . . but he had no wish to sue the nursing home, or to take Uncle John Lane out of it—for it proved to be a bright and homey place—so he settled for firm assurances that such a thing would never happen again.
Uncle John Lane turned out to be just what Mother said he was—a little, short, bald man: very old, very cheerful and very deaf, who said he was glad to see us and invited Louis to help him do his jigsaw puzzle. “It’s a picture of some dogs,” he said, “or the Rocky Mountains—hard to tell.”
After a flurry of explanations and introductions, Mother and Aunt Rhoda tried to decipher the mystery of Uncle John, but they didn’t have much luck. They had to yell, and neither one really wanted to yell about family matters for everyone to hear—and besides, Uncle John said yes to everything.
“I hope it wasn’t a misunderstanding about money,” Mother said, and Uncle John nodded. “That’s right.” “Political argument?” “That’s right.” “Heard you just never came home after the war. . . .” “That’s right.”
Louis, still doggedly assembling the puzzle, mentioned what was to him the most interesting feature of the day. “We went to your funeral,” he said; and Uncle John nodded and said, “That’s right.”
“He just doesn’t remember,” Mother said finally, “and what difference does it make, anyway?” She raised her voice. “We’re just all so glad we’ve found you. My goodness, the oldest member of our family! . . . And from now on, we’re going to stay in close touch.”
But as we were leaving we heard Uncle John ask a nurse, “Who in the hell were all those people?”; so my father said he didn’t think Mother should count on much correspondence back and forth.
We all had dinner at Randolph’s Ribs—“Seems only fair,” everyone said—and headed home, after some reshuffling of people.
“I still think I ought to ride with Blanche,” Mother said. “I’m not sure Howard knows the way.”
“I don’t know what difference that makes,” my father said. “You were supposed to know the way, and look what happened.” He wanted to hear all about what had happened, he said, and Mother could start from the time she stuck her head out the window and said, “We’ll see you along the
way.”
“Well,” she began, “it was a really pretty ride. . . .”
Louis and I listened for a while to a bewildering account of side trips to get gas and lunch and fresh country eggs, of misinterpreted road signs, of inaccurate directions from people at bus stops and grocery stores, of detours—“There were no detours on the highway,” my father said; but it seemed that Aunt Blanche and Mother were not on the highway often, or for very long. It had been an eventful day, though, and Louis and I fell asleep somewhere south of Xenia and didn’t wake up again till we were home.
My father was right about Uncle John Lane. He never answered any of Mother’s letters, but the director of the nursing home did send monthly reports about his health and well-being. She also sent us a small package containing Mr. Johnson’s personal belongings: photographs, Confederate money, five Zane Grey westerns, a collection of travel postcards, and other odds and ends.
My father said this had to be the last straw in confusion, but Mother thought it was nice and eventually came to refer to Mr. Johnson as a distant relative, and—even more eventually—just seemed to forget that he wasn’t one.
Perhaps, in her mind, he took the place of Aunt Blanche’s secret post office flame, Clifford Sprague, who got married (to someone else) and moved to Indianapolis, much to Mother’s consternation. She wanted to know what went wrong between him and Aunt Blanche but didn’t like to ask, until my father pointed out that Aunt Blanche was obviously not heartbroken and, in fact, seemed unmoved about the whole thing.
“Clifford Sprague?” Aunt Blanche said, when she was questioned. “I didn’t even know him. Whatever made you think I did?”
When Mother reported this conversation she said everybody was wrong—that Blanche didn’t care who read her postcards, and wasn’t about to buy more real estate, when it was all she could do to get the grass cut and the hedge trimmed on the real estate she already had.
“There’s a perfectly simple explanation for why she always goes to the post office,” Mother said.
“That’s how she learned to drive. She just followed the mailman around his route—first one mailman, and then another one. They always started at the same place and came back to the same place, and they never went very fast. It was perfect for Blanche, and it just got to be a habit.”
“Now let me understand this,” my father said. “Blanche would get in a car, and . . .” But then he stopped. He had finally realized, I guess, that he would never understand this, any more than he ever understood Mother’s driving habits, Louis’s contest entries . . . Aunt Mildred or Genevieve Fitch or Vergil the dog—any more than he would understand similar events and revelations yet to come.
Instead, he said, “It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard . . . so far.”
Other Books by Barbara Robinson
THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER
THE BEST SCHOOL YEAR EVER
THE BEST HALLOWEEN EVER
For another hilarious story by Barbara Robinson, read
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
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 that 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.
My Brother Louis Measures Worms Page 10