Rabble Starkey

by Lois Lowry

  "Well, shoot," I said, "what do you expect? Somebody holds somebody else under water forever and practically drowns them, of course they're going to try all sorts of ways to make amends. Of course they're going to try to act normal."

  Veronica dropped the shingle back on the ground. She looked at me real steady. "She wasn't acting, Rabble. She's really getting better."

  "I'm going back," I said, and turned away. "I have to help Sweet-Ho with her typing tonight. She can do forty words a minute now when I read something to her.

  "My mother is making amazing progress with her studies," I added, with my back to Veronica. "I surely am astounded that you haven't commented on it." I walked away.

  Back home, in the kitchen, I was already dictating stuff to Sweet-Ho when Veronica came through the back door. Mr. Bigelow had brought home an old typewriter from his office and Sweet-Ho was learning to type so's she could write her term papers and such properly. She practiced every night at a table in the corner of the kitchen. Sometimes she let me practice too, though I wasn't much good and went real slow with lots of mistakes.

  "Shoot," Sweet-Ho said, and stopped typing. "I missed the q again. I wish they didn't have the q's in the alphabet. There doesn't seem much need of them."

  "Sure there is," Veronica said, pulling off her coat. "Listen: I think it's quite, quite, quite wonderful that you're doing so well, so quickly, in school, Sweet-Ho. Hear all the q's?"

  Sweet-Ho laughed. "I do. Thank you, Veronica."

  "How about if I make us some hot chocolate, Veronica?" I asked. "It was cold out."

  "Thanks," Veronica said, and I knew we was friends again.

  But things were changing. Now Veronica and Gunther went every Saturday, with their daddy, to Meadowhill. Gunther began to talk about his mama at home.

  One afternoon he was fooling around with his toys on the floor, and suddenly he said, "My mama will be coming home soon."

  Sweet-Ho looked up from where she was sitting with a book, but she didn't say nothing. Veronica looked up, too, but she didn't say nothing either.

  I did. I said, "Big Gun, your mama was sick for a long time. Four whole years, maybe even longer, before it started to show."

  Gunther just grinned. "Uh-huh," he said. He didn't even know what I was talking about, but good old Gunther, he just agreed with everybody.

  "So," I went on, "even though it's real nice that she's getting better, still and all it'll take a long time for her to be entirely well again."

  Gunther smiled happily and ran his truck around, under the legs of a chair.

  "Probably four years at least," I said. "Maybe even five or six."

  Veronica said, "That's not true, Rabble. Really. She's getting well real fast now."

  "I just don't want him to get his hopes up high, Veronica," I explained to her, "because there are always setbacks, you know."

  Gunther hadn't even been listening to me, I guess, because that night at dinner he said it again, when his daddy was there. "My mama's coming home soon," he said. "Isn't that right, Daddy?"

  Mr. Bigelow was busy handing round the plates. "Could be, Big Gun," he said. I was sure glad that he made it uncertain that way so that old Gunther's hopes wouldn't be too high. I said so, later, to Sweet-Ho when we was alone.

  "Don't you think Mr. Bigelow's wise in the way he answers Gunther? Not getting up his hopes and all, about Mrs. Bigelow coming home soon?"

  We was up in our room while Sweet-Ho gathered up her school things because she was about to go to class. "Phil told me that they hope for June, Rabble. They hope she'll come home in June."

  "June? But it's already March! June's only three months away!"

  "That's right," Sweet-Ho said, busying herself with her pens and all.

  "But, Sweet-Ho! What're we going to do, you and me?"

  She looked over at me. "Me, I'm going to be typing sixty words a minute by June, and I'm going to get an A in American Literature, that's what I'm going to do. You—well, I hope you're going to get out your Geography book and do your homework this minute."

  I glared at her. "That's not what I meant."

  She softened her look. "I know it wasn't, honey," she said. "But right now it's the only answer I've got."

  When she had gone, I wandered down to Veronica's room and found her sprawled on her bed with her own Geography book.

  "I hate Uruguay," she said when I went in. "It's too hard."

  "Me too," I told her. "I'm just bored silly by South America. I can't spell any part of it except Peru."

  "You want to play cards or something instead of homework? Daddy wouldn't know. He's watching TV."

  I shook my head. "Veronica," I said, "I got to speak to you about something serious. I got to tell you that Sweet-Ho said your mother's probably coming home in June—"

  "I know," she said. "Daddy told me."

  "Well," I said, "I'm scared about that."

  "Me too."

  I was surprised. "You are? But I thought you was glad."

  "Were. 1 thought you were glad.'"

  "Okay, were. But don't correct me now, Veronica. Talk to me about being scared."

  Veronica fiddled with the pages in her notebook. "I am glad. But I'm scared because what if she gets sick again? What if she doesn't remember to take her medicine? Daddy says she won't, but I keep thinking what if—"

  "What about me and Sweet-Ho, Veronica? That's what I'm scared of!"

  "What do you mean?"

  I looked down at her bedspread and plucked at the little bumpy parts that made a pattern in it. "I can't go back and live in a garage again, Veronica. I just can't. Not after being a family altogether. Not after us being like sisters all this time."

  "That won't change, Rabble. You can still live here. It'll be just the same."

  I looked up. "It will? Are you sure?"

  She giggled. "Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye," she said, like we used to when we was little kids.

  But later, when I lay in bed, with Uruguay all closed up on the floor beside me, I began to see it all in my head and I knew that Veronica was wrong. What I saw was our whole family with somebody added to it. That somebody was Veronica's mother. I saw her sitting there at the dinner table, in the chair where Sweet-Ho was accustomed to sitting. I saw her in the living room on the couch beside Veronica's daddy, while he would be reading out loud from a book, maybe The Red Pony, and I couldn't see where Sweet-Ho would be, or how she would look. I couldn't feel how Sweet-Ho would feel.

  Outside, against the window, I could hear the oak tree—the one we called the Family Tree—brush against the window in the breeze. Its leaves would be coming back soon, with spring. Each spring it was the same, but changed, like every family tree, with things dropped off, things added. Millie Bellows: we had pictured her perched up there, quarrelsome as always. Now she was gone. Norman Cox: he wouldn't be up in that tree the way we had pretended, zinging stones and paper clips no more. That Norman Cox was gone, and in his place was someone nicer, someone more grown up. And Mrs. Bigelow: we had laughed, thinking of her sitting up there in her gauzy dress, calling out baptisms. She had been gone, and now she'd be back, but different, maybe a real mother again. And me and Sweet-Ho, we were different, too.

  Veronica said it would be the same for us all, in the Bigelows' house. But I knew she was wrong. I remembered the private thing I had never told nobody, the night that I stood in the hall looking down, and saw Sweet-Ho kiss Veronica's father. I knew that that one night had made everything different, had made it so that things would have to change.

  It scared me, knowing.

  18

  One Saturday morning at the end of April I woke up and heard birds singing so loud that I looked out the window to see if maybe there were five thousand of them in the yard all of a sudden, like in that old movie on TV, the scary one that you don't want to watch all alone.

  But this wasn't scary. It was just noisy, all that singing and chirping. It had rained some, in the night. Now the
sun was shining, and the yard was full of spring.

  The whole world seemed changed. There were flowers coming up everywhere, the tips of daffodils and hyacinths bursting from the ground. The grass was green, the air was warm, and the trees were weighted with wet shiny buds the color of limes.

  Down in the kitchen, Sweet-Ho was singing, too, and I could hear Gunther scampering about, maybe even dancing, for all I knew. Gunther was that sort, the sort that might dance if he felt like it, and not even caring that he might look foolish.

  From my window I could see Norman Cox come along on his bike, skittering pebbles from his rear tire, same as always. No jacket, no hat, just his old jeans and T-shirt, and his big feet in those crummy old sneakers. He skidded to a stop right below our windows and put down one foot to balance hisself.

  "Veronica? Rabble? You up?" he yelled, and when I poked my head out the window I could look over and see Veronica's head poke out of hers, too.

  "Come on down!" Norman called. "Somebody's moving into Millie Bellows's house today!"

  I knew that the house had been sold because Mr. Bigelow had told us. It was freshly painted—dark gray, with shiny new black shutters at each window—and the vines were trimmed, the lawn mowed, the plumbing fixed, and the floors polished. Millie Bellows's nephew had sold it to a family that was moving to Highriver all the way from Vermont. The father was going to teach at the college, the mother had red hair, and there was a little kid. That's all Mr. Bigelow knew.

  Me and Veronica and Norman—no, wait. Veronica and Norman and I (I'm working on my grammar) headed on over just in time to see the Mayflower guys start to unload the van. Norman parked his bike against a tree and we all stood there at the edge of the lawn, watching. It gives you a funny feeling to see somebody's furniture standing about in a yard, and being carried into a house, as if you're spying on something private. Like you don't have no right—no, wait. Like you haven't any right to know that they own a yellow couch and a Posturepedic mattress since they haven't invited you to know those things. But there it all is, offered up for viewing.

  After a while a station wagon with a Vermont license plate and a CHILD ON BOARD sticker drove up, and there were our new neighbors: a woman with red hair, a man, and a little kid, just like Mr. Bigelow said. The woman lifted the kid out of a car seat and I could see he was just the size of Gunther, though better-looking, with more meat on his bones, and curly red-blond hair. He was wearing a shirt with a picture of Winnie-the-Pooh, and he was grouchy as all get-out, whining and rubbing his eyes. I expect he had been asleep so I didn't fault him any for the grouchiness. He blinked his eyes, looking around, and spied us standing there.

  "It's okay, Johnny," I heard his mother say. "Go on over and say hello." She smiled at us.

  So the little kid wandered over to where we were. Veronica knelt down and tied one of his sneakers, which was dragging its laces. "Hi," she said.

  He rubbed his eyes again. His cheek had a zigzag wrinkle on it, all pressed in from where his head had been laying while he slept. "Hi," he said, and yawned.

  "How old are you?" Veronica asked.

  He thought, and then he held up one hand with his thumb tucked in and four fingers sticking up.

  "Four?" Veronica asked, and he nodded sleepily.

  "I have a brother four years old," she told him. "His name is Gunther."

  "Here comes Gunther now," Norman said, looking over toward our house. And sure enough, here came Gunther, trotting through the yard, with his sneakers untied, too. Next thing we knew, Gunther and Johnny were running about together, saying silly four-year-old things to each other and getting in the way of the moving men so that the lady—she told us her name was Mrs. Elliot—had to remind them now and then to watch out. But she said it real nice, and smiling the whole time; you could tell she was pleased that her little boy had a friend right off, their first day here.

  All the while the furniture was going in, and some porch stuff, chairs and a settee, were left on the porch, so that the house was taking on the look of a new family, and the feeling of Millie Bellows was disappearing like wind blowing away. So that was another way the world had changed.

  Norman offered to help with some small stuff, lifting boxes that had been piled in the yard, taking the ones marked "Tools" to the shed out back, and telling the Elliots some things about the house: how the shed door needed tightening up, how the cherry tree ought to be pruned and sprayed so they could get some good cherries off it next summer. Norman Cox, smiling, being pleasant and helpful—that was one more change that had come on gradual-like, so that suddenly in the spring you could see it full-blown, same as a daffodil bulb coming up in the yard, and it took you by surprise because you forgot that you had planted it there.

  Before a week passed, old Gunther and Johnny was—no, wait— were best friends, off together prowling about the neighborhood. Next thing we knew, a couple of weeks later, they both of them had poison ivy something fierce, from playing back at the edge of Millie Bellows's old yard where the brush needed to be cleared. They were both of them smeared head to toe with calamine lotion and itching to beat the band. Gunther was some delighted about that. "I never knew anybody else who itched," he said, with a look of surprise. I thought to myself that there are all sorts of reasons for friendships and itching might be just as good as any of the rest of them.

  Mrs. Hindler singled me out in the classroom one day, calling attention to the way my grammar had improved. She did it in a nice way so I didn't feel embarrassed or nothing—no, wait—or anything is what I meant. She just said to me and to the whole class, in a friendly way, that it proved you could do anything you set your mind to.

  And that was true, because I had set my mind to it, to talking right, to making Sweet-Ho and all the Bigelows proud. Parker Condon had even told me that he hoped we could go to the same college, and I acted agreeable and polite, though I didn't have my heart set on it the way he seemed to.

  Sometimes, though, I missed my old way of talking. It was because my Gnomie had talked in a country way, and when I left off talking like Gnomie, I felt as if she was disappearing, same as Millie Bellows when her house was changed.

  But Sweet-Ho, when I told her that, said, "Rabble, I expect wherever she is, your Gnomie's looking down and feeling downright contented to see you growing up so educated."

  "You too," I pointed out.

  Sweet-Ho laughed. "I expect she'd faint to see me!" she said.

  Sweet-Ho had just finished her final exams, and school was ending for me, too, when Mr. Bigelow took his pen one night and drew a circle around the twenty-first on the calendar page for June. He told us that on that day he would be bringing Veronica's mother home. A nurse would come with her, and stay for a while, but that didn't worry me. There was still the little apartment over the garage, where the nurse could stay, I figured.

  That night, and the next, he and Sweet-Ho stayed up late, talking and talking. I could hear their voices from my bed, and sometimes it seemed as if they were arguing. But I never sneaked to the railing to listen. I knew that it was theirs to decide, and that it wouldn't be easy, and that when the deciding was done, Sweet-Ho would tell me.

  Still, when she did, I wasn't ready to hear what she had to say.

  We were alone in the house on a Saturday afternoon when Veronica and Gunther and their daddy had gone to Meadowhill.

  "I want to show you something, Rabble," Sweet-Ho said. She took some papers from her desk. I could see where she had typed in her name, SWEET HOSANNA STARKEY, at the top, after the place where it said "Name" and left a space.

  "What's that?" I asked her.

  "It's my application blank for college next year," she said. "I'm going to be going full-time. They've already told me they'll accept me, but I have to send the forms in by next week."

  "But who'll—"I interrupted myself and laughed. "I started to say, 'Who'll look after Gunther?' but I forgot that of course his mama will be home. And Veronica and I can help, too."

  "No,
Rabble, it won't be that way," Sweet-Ho said, and held the paper out to me. "Look. This isn't Highriver Community College. This is the Clarksburg branch of the university."

  "I don't understand." I took the paper and held it, reading her name again, and all the other things she had filled in. "How can you go to Clarksburg? That's eighty miles away."

  "Rabble," she said, "I don't want to be a babysitter and a housekeeper all my life. I want to be a teacher. I can't do that by just taking courses here at night. So I'm going to be a real, honest-to-goodness student at the university. I've been saving most of my pay for four years now, and I can afford the tuition. I've figured and figured, and it won't be easy, but I can do it. I know I can."

  "Sweet-Ho, you can't drive that far every day. Not in the winter, when the weather's bad. I just don't see how—"

  "Listen to me, Rabble, honey. This is hard for you, I know, but I want you to listen. We have an apartment in Clarksburg. You and me, starting June fifteenth. Phil is giving me the old car—I've promised to pay him back someday, when I can—and he helped me find a job in a real estate office there, so I can work part time and afford our rent. It's going to be tough, Rabble, working and going to school, but you know I'm not afraid of hard work. I never have been before and I won't be now."

  "You mean we're leaving here?" I was only just beginning to understand. "Is Mr. Bigelow making us go away?"

  "No. I've decided to go away."

  I turned on her in anger. "You can't do that! This is our home! This is our family!"

  But Sweet-Ho shook her head. "You and me, Rabble, we are our family. Not the Bigelows. Now that their family's back together, it's time for you and me to move on." She took the papers back from me, folded them, and put them on her desk.