Gib Rides Home

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  So there were things about animals, and stories from his mama’s books, but nothing more about Maggie Ernestine herself. Miss Mooney said that she’d died not long before Gib came to live at Lovell House, but he had no memory of her dying. And nothing at all about his father except his name in the record book. John Wilson Whittaker, deceased 1901.

  And nothing about how he came to be in that shiny buggy on his way to become a Lovell House orphan.

  Chapter 3

  THERE WEREN’T MANY PLACES, no real towns or houses leastways, in Gib’s early memories. Nothing at all that he could put a name to or find on a map. At least not before he came to live at Lovell House. And even his early orphanage memories were never clear and sharp, because all the early thoughts and feelings seemed to come tangled up with ones that came later. Memories, for instance, of crossing the entry hall on his way to the office.

  The entry hall at Lovell House was very grand, with a slippery white stone floor and, on each side, staircases that curved up toward a faraway circle of darkly glowing colored glass. Sometimes it seemed to Gib that he could recall that shiny whitish floor below, and the soaring dome above, from that very first day when the woman in the big hat pulled him through the two sets of double doors and into the huge, dimly lit room. But maybe not. Maybe he was only bringing to mind all the times he’d seen it since.

  Memories of living in Junior Hall were tangled too. Any early recollections of his first few days as a junior blended into the days and months that came later. Being a junior meant that you slept in an enormous half acre of a room that had once been the Lovell family’s private ballroom, with around thirty other four- to eight-year-olds. All the way from four-year-olds who cried in their sleep and wet their beds to eight-year-olds who took the bread you saved from supper and threatened to whup you real good if you told.

  It seemed to Gib that all the best Junior Hall memories centered around Miss Mooney, who was freckle-faced and skinny and just about the busiest person at Lovell House. Besides being a classroom teacher and the housemother for Junior Hall, Miss Mooney was in charge of the house clinic, where she took care of things like smashed fingers and chicken pox. Gib had never minded being a little bit hurt or sick because it gave him a chance to talk to Miss Mooney without thirty other boys trying to horn in. It seemed to Gib that every time he got to talk to Miss Mooney she told him things that made him feel better in places he hadn’t even known were hurting. Like when she told him about hope dreaming, for instance.

  Gib was still pretty new at Lovell House the night Miss Mooney told him how to hope-dream. It was very late and most of the juniors had been asleep for a long time when she came into the hall. But Gib wasn’t sleeping, and neither was a little four-year-old kid named Bertram. Bertie had been crying softly for a long time when Miss Mooney stopped at his bed and talked to him until he went to sleep. Then she came on down the hall and when she saw that Gib was still awake she stopped and asked him why.

  Gib sat up. “I don’t know, ma’am,” he said. “I just can’t get to sleep sometimes. Just thinking too much, I guess.”

  And then she told him about how to do hope dreams when you can’t sleep. A hope dream, Miss Mooney said, was when you make up a long daydream story about something very good happening, the very best thing you could possibly imagine. And you picture all the places and people in the dream very carefully until you can see everything as clear as day. Then she started telling him about the hope dream she’d had when she was a little girl in Omaha, but before she’d finished, just like Bertie, he went off to sleep.

  It was right after that Gib began his own hope dream about living in a family with a father and a mother and lots of kids and animals. His family always lived in the country, but as he got older Gib’s dream pictures of the family and the house changed. At first the mother always looked a lot like Miss Mooney and the father was something like a friendly man Gib had seen once at the Harristown Library. As for the house itself, it started out rather small and vague, but whenever Gib got to go into Harristown, to the library or barbershop, he’d pick out houses to hope his would look like.

  As the months went by, Gib learned how to get along as a six-, and then a seven-, and finally an eight-year-old junior. One thing he learned early on was that it was a good idea to steer clear of certain senior boys who liked to call juniors names like “runt” and “dumb little greenhorn” and even twist their arms just to make them say uncle.

  Sometimes Gib couldn’t wait to be a senior even though some people said that juniors were the lucky ones. “Juniors get all the breaks,” Gib remembered hearing, way back when he was only six or seven. Buster Gray had said it one day when he was in Junior Hall collecting dirty laundry.

  “What breaks?” Gib had asked.

  “What breaks?” Buster, a scrawny senior boy with a fuzzy upper lip and a crippled foot, looked amazed at Gib’s ignorance. “Well, for one thing you get all the easy indoor chores in the winter time, ’stead of freezing to death shoveling snow or mucking out the cow barn. And you get to live down here in the big hall, ’stead of roastin’ in summertime and freezin’ to death in winter way up there on the third floor. Ol’ furnace don’t do much good way up there.”

  Gib nodded, thinking that Buster sure thought about freezing to death a lot. And noticing, too, that Buster did look kind of frostbitten most of the time, particularly around the ears and nose. “Hadn’t thought of that,” Gib admitted.

  “Yeah.” Buster seemed pleased with Gib’s response. But just as he looked to be winding up to tell Gib a lot more, Miss Mooney came in and Buster picked up his basket of bed-wetter sheets and hobbled on out.

  As Gib went on with his own chore time that day, his own easy indoor chore, dusting the woodwork in Junior Hall, he thought about what he’d just heard. He could see what Buster meant, but at the same time it didn’t seem to Gib that living in Junior Hall was all that easy, either.

  Of course, all the teachers were always saying how lucky all the boys, infants and seniors as well as juniors, were to be living at Lovell House. And what a blessing it was that Mrs. Harriette Lovell, whose little son had died of a fever, had given her beautiful mansion to be used as a home for orphaned and abandoned boys. Gib guessed it was true, that he was lucky to live at Lovell House, but something inside him didn’t seem to believe it.

  The part that didn’t seem lucky was not having a place and people to belong to. It seemed to Gib that not belonging anywhere or to anybody was just about as unlucky as you could get. And Jacob felt the same way.

  Jacob, in fact, said he thought it was kind of funny how everybody wanted them to feel lucky. “Yeah,” he said, “I felt specially lucky last Christmas when all I got was one orange slice and one little bitty peppermint stick. Didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, lucky,” Gib agreed. Holding out both hands, pretending to be holding his slice of orange and piece of candy, he put a dumb grin on his face, and when Jacob did the same thing, everybody laughed. And that started the dumb lucky joke that he and Jacob kept fooling around with.

  Once, even though he could pretty much guess what Bobby would say, Gib asked Bobby if he ever felt lucky.

  “Lucky?” Bobby had said. “Me, lucky?”

  Watching how his lips and eyebrows dipped down at the corners, Gib could just about tell what Bobby was going to say. Or at least just about how whiny it was going to be.

  “You must be fooling. You must think being dumped outside a church in the middle of a twister storm is a real lucky way to start in living.”

  Gib had heard the story before, the one about the basket on the church steps and the twister that had just about carried Bobby away before the preacher came out and found him. But he’d also heard Miss Mooney’s answer when Bobby asked her to tell Gib that it was true.

  Miss Mooney was the only adult at Lovell House who would even try to answer questions like “Where did I live before I came here?” and “How come I’m an orphan?” Sometimes she even looked up your records in t
he head office, if you asked her real nice. After she’d looked up Bobby s records she hadn’t said that he was lying, but she hadn’t exactly agreed with him, either.

  Miss Mooney was smiling as she said, “It was a storm all right, Bobby. The minister who brought you to Lovell House said there was a rainstorm the night they found you.” Noticing Bobby’s disappointment, she hurried on. “A real bad rainstorm, I think, but I don’t think there’s anything about an actual tornado in the record book.”

  When Gib grinned and poked Bobby in the ribs he only shrugged, but the next time he told the story, the tornado was back again. Bobby was that kind of kid. The kind who seemed to enjoy thinking that something big and powerful had a grudge against him. A big enough grudge to stir up a whole tornado just to get a little newborn baby, and then, when that didn’t work, to make him grow up to be a homely, knock-kneed, sickly orphan.

  But, coyote whine and all, Bobby was mostly a good friend. At least when being friendly wasn’t apt to get him into too much trouble. And Jacob was an even better friend. Jacob was the kind of friend who would stand up for you no matter what. No matter that Elmer Lewis had it in for you.

  Elmer Lewis, a thin-headed, sharp-faced kid whose cot in Junior Hall was just three down from Gib’s, was a natural-born tattler. Elmer would tattle on his best friend, and not just to get out of trouble, either. Elmer seemed to tattle just for the feel of it, like a chicken scratching even when there was nothing there to eat, just for the feel of the scratching. There was the time, for instance, when Elmer got Gib sent to the Repentance Room for something he didn’t do at all.

  It all started in Junior Hall one night when Elmer was scaring poor little Rabbit Olson to death, telling him how there was a ghost in Lovell House. Rabbit, whose real name was Georgie, had a long upper lip and a turned-up pinkish nose and was scared most of the time, even without any encouragement from the likes of Elmer. One night, when it was almost silence time and Georgie was already in bed, a kerosene lamp near his bed flickered and went out without a soul touching it.

  “Hey, Rabbit,” Elmer said, noticing how Georgie was staring at the lamp. “Did you see that? Must be that old ghost again.”

  “G-G-Ghost?” Rabbit said, ducking down so just his round rabbity eyes showed above his blankets, and right off starting to wheeze. Poor old Georgie always seemed to have a hard time getting his breath when he got extra tired or scared. “What g-g-ghost, Elmer?”

  Elmer came back toward Georgie’s bed, staring down first at him and then at the other boys who had begun to cluster around. “You hear that, men?” he said. “This dummy doesn’t even know about our Lovell House man-eating ghost. What do you think? Maybe I ought to tell him.”

  “Yeah, you tell him, Elmer,” someone said with a mean giggle.

  “Suppose I should ought to,” Elmer said. He sat down on the edge of Georgie’s cot and, while several other boys from nearby beds crowded around, started in on an awful story about a man in a black cape with long, bloody teeth, who went around Lovell House blowing out lamps to get himself in the mood to do other, even more terrible things.

  Gib, who knew Elmer pretty well by that time, listened to the whole story, thinking that he’d have been scared too if he hadn’t heard some of Elmer’s tall tales before. But then, when Elmer was about to run down and poor old Rabbit looked to be about to die of suffocation, Gib walked over to the table and took the lid off the lamp’s kerosene well.

  “Well, now,” he said in a loud voice, “if that old ghost had just waited a second before he blew out this here lamp, he might have saved himself the trouble. This thing is plum empty. The wick’s all right but the well is bone dry. Come here, Georgie, and take a look.”

  Miss Mooney came in about then and everybody went back to his own bed and got ready to say his prayers. When prayers were over, Miss Mooney reminded them that silence had begun and then she went around turning off all the lamps except for the small night-light near the door. When she got to the lamp near Georgie’s bed she looked around and asked if someone had blown it out.

  It was Gib who answered. “No ma’am,” he said. “Nobody blew it out. I guess it just ran out of kerosene.”

  Miss Mooney checked the well, nodded, smiled at Gib, and went on out. And then, when the door closed and the huge room was dark and still, Gib broke the silence rule and said, “No sir, Georgie. Nobody and no ghost blew out that lamp. And don’t you forget it.”

  There were a lot of halfway-smothered snickers before everybody went to sleep and forgot all about Elmer’s man-eating ghost. As usual, Gib didn’t get to sleep right away, but he did stop thinking about Elmer and got back to the latest version of his favorite hope dream. As it turned out later, though, Elmer didn’t forget about Gib’s taking sides with Georgie and making Elmer Lewis look like a fool.

  Chapter 4

  THERE WERE TWO CLASSROOMS at Lovell House, regular classrooms complete with blackboards and real school desks that had slots to hold pens and pencils and, in the right-hand corner, a hole for an ink bottle. Gib had never been to a regular public school, but the boys who had been said the desks looked just about the same.

  Five days a week, from seven to eleven-thirty, every Lovell House boy five years old and up went to school. That was another lucky thing for Lovell House orphans, Miss Mooney said. Some orphans in other institutions had very little schooling or even none at all, which, according to Miss Mooney, meant that later in life they would never be able to make anything of themselves.

  Sometimes Jacob, who hated school a lot, said he never did know what to make of himself, and if learning to do long division was what it took, he never was going to.

  But Gib didn’t mind school all that much; at least he didn’t when Miss Mooney was his teacher. He particularly liked the parts about reading and writing. “Reading and writing,” he told Jacob, “is a lot more interesting than scrubbing floors and washing pots and pans. And if we didn’t have to go to school in the mornings, chore time would last all day, like as not.”

  Jacob could see the truth in that. “Yeah,” he said. “I reckon you’re right. ’Cept sometimes chores aren’t too bad. Like weeding in the garden in the summertime. I’m pretty good at weeding, but I just can’t get the hang of reading. It’s easy for you. I remember how last year, when you first came, you took to it real quick. Like maybe you been to school before?”

  Gib knew it was a question, but he didn’t know the answer. He was pretty sure he’d never been in a schoolroom before he came to Lovell House, but he could recall how the letters started right in making themselves into words for him, without his even knowing how he knew. He was pretty fair at spelling too. And that was one reason he’d known for sure that Elmer had been lying when he claimed Gib wrote a dirty word on his spelling test.

  It wouldn’t have happened if Miss Mooney had been giving the spelling test that day. In the first place, Miss Mooney probably wouldn’t have fallen for Elmer’s trick, and even if she did, she might have settled things herself instead of putting anybody on report.

  But it was Miss Berger, a nervous, twitchy part-time teacher with a delicate, ladylike voice, who was giving the second-grade spelling test that morning. “And just for today, gentlemen,” she said in her highfalutin voice, “we will write the test in pencil rather than ink.”

  Gib had to smile a little, remembering how the last time she had taught the class she’d been showing how easy it was to use an ink pen, and the sharp old nib stuck into the paper and spattered ink all over her frilly white blouse. So he hadn’t really blamed Miss Berger for letting the test be written in pencil, even though that was what got him into such a mess of trouble.

  When the test was over, Miss Berger had everybody exchange papers before she read off the correct spellings. “It’s not that I would even imagine that any of you would erase your own mistakes,” she said, fluttering her ladylike hands. “I refuse to believe that any Lovell House boy would resort to such evil behavior. It’s just that I’ve found that e
xchanging papers does make for more careful correcting.”

  Which was probably true. Like as not, Miss Berger really didn’t believe that any Lovell House boy would erase his own mistakes. Particularly since she knew that their pencils didn’t have erasers. But what she didn’t know, and what Gib himself had forgotten for the moment, was that Elmer Lewis had one. A big, square reddish one he’d lifted off a new boy just a few days before.

  Gib didn’t exchange with Elmer. Even though he had just turned seven at the time and was still pretty much of a Lovell House greenhorn, he wasn’t as dumb as all that. Particularly not after he’d spoiled Elmer’s fun by keeping Georgie Olson from dying of fright. But after Gib’s paper wound up with Frankie Elsworth, Elmer managed to get Frankie to exchange again.

  The test words were all about farming that day. Words like barn and plow and horse and chicken and duck and pig. Gib liked words about farming and he was pretty sure he’d spelled them all right. But when Miss Berger asked for the papers to be handed in, Elmer raised his hand and asked if he could show her something.

  Gib knew right away that Elmer was up to no good, because of the look on his face. A phony sorry-faced look, like he’d pulled when Miss Mooney caught him picking the wings off flies and he’d excused himself by saying he hated doing it but felt he ought to because flies were mean, dirty critters. Gib couldn’t hear what Elmer whispered to the teacher that day, but Jacob, whose desk was closer, heard the whole thing.

  “Ma’am,” Elmer whispered, “I just thought you ought to know the kind of words Gibson’s been using lately.”

  According to Jacob, Miss Berger looked downright shocked when she saw what Elmer was pointing to. Too shocked to let Gib tell her what had really happened or even to take another look at the paper. Not even when he tried to point out the brownish red smear where one letter had been erased and written over. And the first thing Miss Berger said, as soon as she quit blushing and fluttering enough to say anything, was that Gibson Whittaker was on report.