Gib Rides Home

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  Miss Mooney hadn’t changed much either. She was still as warm and welcoming as ever, and still as overworked. Gib could tell she was curious about how his time with the Thorntons had been, but she was way too busy taking care of almost thirty juniors to spend much time talking about it. Too busy to talk and too unwilling to say anything much about the situation at Lovell House.

  And just as it had always been, the nights were the worst. Days were packed full of work and people, but after the silence bell rang there was always lots of lonely time to think and dream, just as he’d done when he was a little kid. But it wasn’t as easy now to conjure up a comforting hope dream because his mind insisted on picturing only one family and one house. And while a hope dream needs to be a soft, hazy possibility, for Gib the Rocking M was far too sharp and clear, and no longer any kind of possibility.

  But there was still the saddle. When nothing else worked and the night dragged on and on, he would pull the saddle out from under his bed and put it across his chest. Somehow the touch and smell of the worn, horse-scented leather made the future seem more like something that might be worth waiting for.

  Chapter 35

  JACOB WENT ON INSISTING that Offenbacher and Harding were just biding their time, but a month went by without any real changes. It was almost October before Jacob’s prediction seemed to be coming true when one day, after he’d dismissed the class, Mr. Harding said, “Take your seat, Gibson. I need to talk to you.”

  Jacob looked back from the doorway, his face showing a lot of sympathy and more than a little bit of “I told you so.” And Gib’s heart missed a few beats as he returned to his desk. But it turned out to be a false alarm. All Mr. Harding wanted was for Gib to write a letter to the Thorntons saying how great everything was at Lovell House.

  “Holy moley,” Jacob said later when Gib told him and Bobby about it. “Did he tell you every word to write?”

  Gib shrugged. “Mighty near. Leastways he had me write it first on a slate and let him check it out before he let me put it on paper.” He grinned. “Said he just wanted to check my grammar. But he made me leave out a part where I said I surely did wish they’d write to me.”

  “Well, anyway,” Bobby said, “you got to write a letter to somebody. How come the rest of us don’t get to write no letters?”

  Jacob snorted. “Because the rest of us don’t know any people who can write big checks to the orphanage. Right, Gib?”

  Gib guessed that Jacob was right about that. It looked like he could write the Thorntons anytime he wanted to, if he said the right things. But if any of them, like Mrs. Thornton or Miss Hooper—or anyone else—ever wrote to him, he probably would never get to see it.

  It wasn’t until almost a month later, on a bitterly cold November day, that it suddenly became clear that Jacob also was right about Mr. Harding just biding his time. It started in the classroom during a geography test, when Gib dropped his pen and Harding accused him of doing it on purpose so he could lean forward and get a look at Albert’s test. It wasn’t true, of course, but there was no use arguing, and that afternoon Gib got reacquainted with Mr. Paddle.

  There were four other rule breakers in the room that day, and afterward they all said that Gib got harder swats and more of them than anyone else. And sure enough, it was the very next day that Miss Offenbacher sent for Gib and, the minute he walked into her office, she told him to go get the saddle.

  “My saddle?” Gib asked.

  “Yes, bring it here to the office,” Miss Offenbacher said, and returned her attention to the papers on her desk.

  Gib was on his way to Senior Hall, wondering what had made Miss Offenbacher change her mind about letting him keep the saddle under his bed and wondering where he would have to keep it now, when he saw Buster on his way down to the laundry room with a big basket of dirty linen. Buster seemed glad of an excuse to put the basket down for a minute and rest his back, and when Gib said he wanted to ask him something Buster immediately guessed what it was about.

  “’Bout that there saddle?” he asked.

  Surprised, Gib said, “Yes. How’d you know?”

  “Because Offenbacher told me I’d be taking it with me when I go to the feed store. Said I was to sell it to Mr. Kelly.”

  “Sell it?” Gib felt like a fist had slammed into his middle. “But she said I could keep it. Why’d she change her mind?”

  Buster shook his head. “Didn’t say. All she told me was that I should pick it up in the office and take it to Kelly’s Feed and Tack.” He looked hard at Gib and his sharp-boned face twisted with the kind of disgusted anger that Gib remembered from before. Anger mostly at himself when he was about to take a stupid risk by talking too much. Or for worrying about some little kid when he had plenty of worries his own self. “She didn’t tell me anything more, but I heard her and Harding talking about something that was in the paper.”

  “In the newspaper?” Gib was astonished. What could something in the newspaper have to do with Miss Offenbacher’s changing her mind about the saddle?

  Buster was watching Gib closely. “Seems like maybe they ain’t going to get some money they were counting on.” Leaning over to pick up his basket, he looked up at Gib through narrowed eyes and added, “Mighta had to do with somebody dying?”

  It sounded like a question. Like maybe Buster thought Gib would know what he was talking about. Gib shook his head slowly, making his face say that none of it made any sense to him.

  Buster’s shrug looked even more depressed and disgusted than usual. After he headed down the stairs Gib went on up to Senior Hall and sat down on his bed. It was almost time for class to begin, and no one else was in the room. He pulled the saddle out from under the bed and sat for a while with it on his lap. Then he put it over his shoulder and went out into the hall. He stood for a moment looking down toward the main staircase before he turned himself around and headed in the other direction.

  Up on the fourth floor in the deserted servants’ wing were some secret places he’d discovered back when he and Jacob used to get in a quick game of hide-and-seek between chore time and supper, and he remembered one place that was pretty hard to find. He left the saddle there at the back of a tiny closet. Then he went all the way back down to the ground floor and knocked on the door of Miss Offenbacher’s office.

  She was sitting at her desk when he came in, and she looked up sharp and hard as always, but wondering too. Wondering what he was doing there without the saddle.

  “Gibson?” she asked, so he told her straight out. “Ma’am, I just can’t do it. I can’t bring my saddle down here and give it away.” He was talking fast, sure she was going to interrupt him and start yelling, but for a minute she didn’t. Just sat there, she did, looking downright astonished, like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  When you came right down to it, Gib couldn’t either. Couldn’t believe he was standing there in front of Miss Offenbacher trying to tell her why he couldn’t give up the saddle when he didn’t rightly know himself. But he did try. “It used to be Mrs. Thornton’s special saddle that she learned to ride on, ma’am, and my own mother rode on it once. And she said it was mine now. Mrs. Thornton did, that is, and I just feel like ...

  But Miss Offenbacher had stopped listening. Getting to her feet, she stomped toward Gib so that he flinched and turned his face away. But she went right on past him and out the door, and when she came back Mr. Harding was with her.

  That day Mr. Harding beat on Gib until his arm wore out. Not five or ten whacks, as usual, but just on and on, only stopping now and then to ask if Gib was ready to do as he was told. Then he would start up again until finally his face was all red and he was breathing so hard he had to sit down to catch his breath. And then, after his breathing had quieted some, he marched Gib up to the Repentance Room.

  As he shoved Gib through the door he said, in between puffs and gasps, that he’d see him again tomorrow and the day after that and the day after.... Then the door slammed and his voice faded a
way, mingling with the sound of his retreating footsteps. Gib sank down to the floor, coiled himself up into a ball, and buried his face in his arms.

  Chapter 36

  IT WAS COLD IN the Repentance Room. Gib’s back and legs ached from the beating and the rest of him ached from the cold. As suppertime came and went and the hours crawled by, Gib thought mostly about what he had done—and why. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever done before. Always before he’d pretty much gone along with whatever seemed necessary. Not because he was afraid, but mostly because it didn’t seem to matter all that much one way or the other. But this was different. He didn’t know why, but this was really different.

  It wasn’t until sometime in the middle of the night that he gave up on trying to understand why he’d done what he did and began to think some more about why Miss Offenbacher had changed her mind about letting him keep the saddle. Buster had said something about her not getting some money she was expecting. Everyone knew that the orphanage was short of money, but it didn’t seem likely that what they could get for one old saddle was going to make that much difference.

  But that got him to thinking about the other things Buster had said, and it wasn’t until then that he came up with a strange and shocking idea about what might have happened.

  Buster had said that Offenbacher wasn’t going to get the money she was expecting because somebody had died. So what if that somebody was Mr. Thornton? Mr. Thornton, who had like enough promised Miss Offenbacher more checks if Gib kept writing letters saying he was doing just fine.

  Right at first Gib couldn’t believe it could be true, but the more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed. Other memories came up. Memories of how Mr. Thornton had come home sick so often last summer, and of how bad he’d looked that day in the Model T when he stopped to take his medicine.

  It was a strange and worrisome thing to think about there in the lonely darkness of the Repentance Room. There he had been, Mr. Thornton, the banker, Mrs. Thornton’s husband, Livy’s father, and Hy’s boss, a part of everybody’s life at the Rocking M. Gib could bring him to mind as clear as day, reading his papers at the kitchen table, driving Caesar and Comet or the Model T to work every day. And now he was gone forever.

  After a while Gib tried to make himself feel better by remembering all the hard, mean things about Mr. Thornton. How he had not wanted to adopt Gib and had not even wanted him as a farm-out until he had to, because of Hy’s broken leg. And how he managed not to see things or animals or people he didn’t like. But Gib’s mind kept slipping around to how Mr. Thornton had let him keep his saddle, even though he’d had to pay Miss Offenbacher something extra to get her to say yes.

  But that brought up why Gib was where he was at the moment—back in the Repentance Room. It looked like Miss Offenbacher must have decided that now that Mr. Thornton was dead, nobody else had enough interest, or maybe enough money, to do anything to help Gibson Whittaker. It was a bitter thing to think about, but it did seem to be the sorry truth.

  By the time a sleepy-eyed, grumpy Buster came to let him out, Gib had decided that whatever happened, he could not give up. Now more than ever he couldn’t let them take away his saddle. Jacob, who had waited up for Gib as usual with a chunk of dried-out bread, was shocked when Gib told him. “You can’t mean that, Gibby,” Jacob said. “They’ll beat the life out of you. You’d have been better off to have just up and run away.”

  “Maybe so,” Gib said. “I thought about it. Yesterday when I went up to get the saddle, I really did think about just walking out of here. But with winter coming on and ... He stopped and they both sighed, and Gib knew they were both thinking about Georgie.

  “But what you’re doing won’t do any good,” Jacob said. “They can find your old saddle if they really set out to do it. They must know it’s here in the building. You didn’t have time to take it anywhere else.”

  Gib nodded. “I know,” he said, “but what matters is that I can’t just give it up to them. I can’t just hand it over, like it was their right to have it and decide what happens to it. It’s like—it would be like I might as well give up on living.”

  So Jacob threw up his hands and said he gave up on trying to save Gib’s neck, and stomped off to bed. And sure enough, the next morning they had hardly finished eating breakfast when the monitor came in with a notice for Gib to report to Miss Offenbacher’s office immediately.

  Gib went down the stairs to the grand entrance hall of Lovell House slowly, keeping his mind on what his feet were doing so he wouldn’t be able to think too far ahead. Just one foot in front of the other, until he came to the office door, knocked, went in—and saw that there were two people in the room.

  Another person, a woman, was seated across the desk from Miss Offenbacher. Her back was to Gib and she was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, but her voice was strangely familiar. And even before Gib’s eyes told him who it was, he suddenly felt himself grinning.

  “Good,” the woman was saying. “I’m glad we’re beginning to understand each other.”

  Miss Offenbacher’s flushed and scowling face didn’t look all that understanding. “I won’t—you can’t—I did not say that I would allow—”

  “Oh, but I’m sure you will,” Miss Hooper interrupted, “when you consider what Mrs. Thornton’s continued patronage can do for Lovell House.” She turned then and said, “Run and get your things, Gibson. I’ll be waiting out front in the buggy.”

  A few minutes later Gib walked back down the grand marble staircase and out through the wintry air to where Miss Hooper and Hy were waiting in the buggy. Hy in the driver’s seat and, back in the buggy, Miss Hooper, wrapped in a heavy cloak and lap robe. Gib was putting his saddle on the backseat when Miss Hooper handed him a package and an envelope. There was a heavy mackinaw in the package and Gib put it on before he climbed up to sit with Hy.

  “Storm coming?” he asked, looking at Hy’s bad leg, and Hy rubbed his knee and grinned and said how it surely was beginning to feel that way.

  Gib opened the envelope then and took out a bookmark. Another narrow piece of heavy cardboard with a picture painted on it, much like the one Livy had given him for his birthday. Only this time the picture wasn’t just of a black horse’s head. Instead it was a really well-done painting of the whole horse—and of a rider who was sitting on its back. The rider hadn’t turned out quite as well. The arms were too long and seemed to bend in the wrong places and the face was a kind of lopsided circle. Could have been a picture of most anybody, except for the long brownish yellow curls that corkscrewed out from the lopsided head in every direction.

  Down at the bottom in little tiny writing it said, “We missed you.” Gib was still looking at the bookmark when Caesar and Comet trotted smartly into a sharp turn and picked up the pace as they headed toward home.

  Afterword

  William Solon Keatley 1878–1955

  Gibson Whittaker’s history is not the same as that of my father, but many of the events in Gib’s story were inspired by tales my father told of his early life in a Nebraska orphanage and as a farm-out on neighboring ranches. Required to do a man’s work when he was eight years old, beaten, mistreated, and, yes, sent out into a blizzard without his mittens, causing his hands to be so severely frostbitten that they very nearly had to be amputated, he survived to become a kind-hearted, patient man with an unquenchable sense of humor and an uncanny ability to communicate with horses.

  But while he spoke only sparingly and with an amazing lack of bitterness about his terrible childhood, my father would talk endlessly about his life as a wrangler whose job it was to green-break wild mustangs fresh from the open range. Roundups, stampedes, rustlers, and rattlesnakes played minor roles in a continuing epic whose major theme was horses he had known and loved. I grew up loving his stories, his horses, and him, and Gib Rides Home is my tribute to his memory.

  Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  A Biography of Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  Zilpha Keatley Snyder (b. 1927
) is the three-time Newbery Honor–winning author of classic children’s novels such as The Egypt Game, The Headless Cupid, and The Witches of Worm. Her adventure and fantasy stories are beloved by many generations.

  Snyder was born in Lemoore, California, in 1927. Her father, William Keatley, worked for Shell Oil, but as a would-be rancher he and his family always lived on a small farm. Snyder’s parents were both storytellers, and their tales often kept their children entertained during quiet evenings at home.

  Snyder began reading and telling stories of her own at an early age. By the time she was four years old she was able to read novels and newspapers intended for adults. When she wasn’t reading, she was making up and embellishing stories. When she was eight, Snyder decided that she would be a writer—a profession in which embellishment and imagination were accepted and rewarded.

  Snyder’s adolescent years were made more difficult by her studious country upbringing and by the fact that she had been advanced a grade when she started school. As other girls were going to dances and discovering boys, Snyder retreated into books. The stories transported her from her small room to a larger, remarkable universe.

  At Whittier College, Zilpha Keatley Snyder met her future husband, Larry Snyder. After graduation, she began teaching upper-level elementary classes. Snyder taught for nine years, including three years as a master teacher for the University of California, Berkeley. The classroom experience gave Snyder a fresh appreciation of the interests and capabilities of preteens.

  As she continued her teaching career, Snyder gained more free time. She began writing at night, after teaching during the day; her husband helped by typing out her manuscripts. After finishing her first novel, she sent it to a publisher. It was accepted on her first try. That book, Season of Ponies, was published in 1964.