Rabble Starkey (12 page)

"I wish you could've gone with us. We looked for ducks on the river, and Sweet-Ho let Gunther beep the car horn."

Mr. Bigelow called from the foot of the stairs. "Girls! Time to set the table!"

"Thanks for the toothpicks," Veronica said as we headed down the hall.

"I told the waitress they was for my sister," I said, and Veronica grinned.

Mr. Bigelow gave Gunther his bath while me and Veronica helped Sweet-Ho with the dishes. Then he brought him downstairs in his pj's, with his hair all slicked down and ointment rubbed on his eczema.

Gunther climbed onto the couch with an armload of books, to get his bedtime story.

"Daddy," he asked, "will you take us to Disney World? A big Mickey Mouse comes out and shakes your hand. Sweet-Ho told me to ask if you would take us."

Sweet-Ho came out of the kitchen, laughing and wiping her hands on a towel. "Hold it, Gunther," she said. "Phil, I just told him he'd have to ask his daddy, that's all."

Mr. Bigelow scooped Gunther up onto his lap and turned on the lamp beside the couch. "Tell you what, Big Gun. If I ever sell the Rockwell house, I'll take all of us to Disney World for a whole week. How's that?"

"Okay," Gunther said, and reached for a book.

I looked over at Veronica. Me and Veronica had a secret about the Rockwell house. It was an enormous house set up high on a hill on the side of town, and it had towers and porches sticking out every which way. Nobody had lived in it for as long as I could remember. It looked even more neglected than Millie Bellows's little house, but you could picture how, with new paint and the windows fixed, and all them acres of lawn mowed, it would be like a mansion. Veronica and me planned to buy it when we grew up. We was going to live there together and take in all the orphans we could find. If we had children of our own, of course they would live there, too. In all of them bedrooms there was going to be zillions of cribs and little beds, and we would have one big room full of nothing but toys, and outside there would be swings and seesaws and such.

We would have to hire people to help look after them, of course, but we already figured out how we was going to find them in special places, not just advertising in the dumb old Highriver newspaper where people advertise for clerks and computer technicians. We plotted this out real careful. We was planning to find out where they make those greeting cards, those kind that say, "To a Special Little Boy Who's 2 Today." Hallmark and like that. Then we would go there, to that card factory, and maybe stand out by the gate, like politicians shaking hands at a factory gate, and we'd hand out leaflets. That way all the
people who write them cards? Like the lady who wrote this one, which came to Gunther from his grandma in Tennessee on Easter:

Here's a bunny who hopped your way
And a froggie, come to play
With a special boy so far away
On this Happy Easter Day!

Veronica and me, we figured out that all them ladies in card factories would be the ones we want to work in our orphans home. So we'd offer to pay them more, and give them lots of benefits and such. But the real benefit would be that instead of making up those little poems and thinking about little children far away, they could be right there
with
the little children, caring for them and hugging them all the time.

And here's the real clever thing that Veronica thought up. You know how most ads say "Experience essential"? Or "Minimum two years experience"? Well, our leaflet would say:

Experience not required.
Only LOVE desired.

It was Veronica's idea to make it in rhyme so's it would stand out on the page.

That was our dream, Veronica's and mine, to fill that house up with little orphans and with Hallmark ladies. Her and me would live there too. Sweet-Ho, if she wanted. And Gunther could.

It wouldn't be the Rockwell house anymore after
that. Down at the end of the driveway, there would be a sign, not neon or nothing, but one of them white signs with black letters like you see at the gate to a horse farm. And it would say:
THE VERONICA PARABLE HOME.

I thought about that while Mr. Bigelow read
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
to Gunther. I expect Veronica was thinking about it, too.

When Sweet-Ho was upstairs putting Gunther to bed, Mr. Bigelow gave a big stretch of his arms and said, "I'm bushed."

"Tired," Veronica said.

"Exhausted," I said.

"Fatigued," Mr. Bigelow said.

"Pooped," Veronica said.

"Wait a minute," I said, and I ran up the stairs to my room to get the thesaurus. "Weary!" Mr. Bigelow called up the stairs after me.

After I looked it up in the thesaurus, I added, "Prostrate." Then I gave the book to Veronica, and she said, "Spent."

By the time Sweet-Ho had come back down, we had made up the rules of a game. One person chose a word and got to hold the thesaurus. Then the rest of us thought up other words for it in turn, and the one who got the most—they had to be listed in the thesaurus—was the winner of that round.

Veronica took the book and announced: "Untruth!"

I got to go first and I said, "Lie." That was easy. So I got a point.

Then Mr. Bigelow said, "Fib," and got a point.

Sweet-Ho said, "Falsehood," so we were even, one point for each, and it was my turn again.

Shoot, I couldn't think of nothing. Finally I had to pass.

Mr. Bigelow was stuck for a minute, too, but finally he said, "Invention? I seem to remember I had a teacher in school who used to say, 'That's quite an invention' if somebody told a lie."

Veronica moved her finger along the page of words, and found it. "Invention. Two points for you, Daddy. Your turn, Sweet-Ho."

"Fabrication," Sweet-Ho said, quick as anything. Two points for her. And I had to pass again.

Then Mr. Bigelow passed.

"You and Daddy are tied, Sweet-Ho," Veronica said.

Sweet-Ho grinned. "Misrepresentation," she said, and won that round.

Mr. Bigelow took the thesaurus and searched for a word while Sweet-Ho went out to the kitchen and got a pitcher of lemonade and four glasses on a tray. When she got back, we played again. Mr. Bigelow's word was "white"—and shoot, Sweet-Ho won again. Me and Veronica got things like "ivory" and "creamy," but Sweet-Ho, she kept going and said words I never heard of, like "alabaster," and before we knew it, she won again.

And the next time, and the next. Sweet-Ho won every single time, even beating out Mr. Bigelow on business-type words. She was kind of embarrassed,
winning every round, but you could tell she was pleased, too.

We all looked at her, amazed, after we quit the game and put the book down on the table. "I read a lot," she said, explaining why she won.

"Have you ever thought about going to college, Sweet-Ho?" Mr. Bigelow asked.

She busted out laughing. "I never went past eighth grade," she said. "One thing I always wished was that I finished school. Don't you ever even
consider
quitting school, Rabble, or I swear I'll take a stick to your backside." She was joking about the stick, I knew. But she spoke real fierce.

"Wait a minute," Mr. Bigelow said, serious-like. "You could, Sweet-Ho. The community college gives extension courses in the evenings. I don't think you have to have a high school diploma. If you did, it would be easy enough for you to take the equivalency test."

But Sweet-Ho just kept laughing, all embarrassed. "I get all nervous even thinking about a test," she said. "You know I was
shaking
when I took my driver's test?"

Me and Veronica took the tray of glasses and the pitcher out to the kitchen. It was bedtime. Sweet-Ho and Mr. Bigelow said good night, and we went upstairs. From the bedroom, while I put on my nightgown, I could hear them talking. I could hear that Sweet-Ho was still laughing and protesting, and that Mr. Bigelow, in his deep, quiet voice, was explaining about the college courses and reassuring her.

Later, when she came up, I was still awake. While she brushed her hair in the darkness, with only a little light coming in from the hall through the partly open door, I watched her from my bed.

"Phil says that they have all these courses in literature," she said to me. "Like poetry and novels and drama. You remember, Rabble, when we went to see that play where the little girl and her friend hung out in the kitchen all the time, with the cook? Remember that? And she had her hair all chopped off like a boy? Wasn't that something? What was it called?"

Member of the Wedding,
I told her.

She nodded her head and brushed her hair some more, looking at herself in the mirror in the dim light. "That's right.
Member of the Wedding.
I thought about that play for the longest time afterward. Just to see them moving about and speaking, on the stage, as if they were in real life. Wasn't that something, though?"

"Mmmmmm."

"I surely would love to
learn
about those things," Sweet-Ho said softly, almost to herself. "But I know I'd be too scared."

"Only at first," I told her. "At first you'd be scared, but then after a while, it'd be okay. After you got used to it."

She sighed and went to the dresser for her nightgown. "It takes me so long to get used to things, Rabble," she said.

***

Mr. Bigelow, once he got an idea, never let go of it, not if it was a good idea. For example, once, a couple of years ago, he started getting after Veronica for biting her fingernails. First he just lectured her a bit, saying as how it made her hands look ugly, which was true, but that didn't seem to work on her, because she had the habit already and couldn't break herself of it, even though she wanted pretty hands. Most people would just give up after that. But Mr. Bigelow, he went down to Woolworth and came back with a little bag filled with fingernail stuff. I was some astounded that a
man
would go right in there to the cosmetics counter and buy that stuff, but he wasn't even embarrassed or nothing. He laid it all out on the kitchen table for Veronica: nail files and little brushes and tools for keeping your hands nice, and the best part was three bottles of polish—one pink, and one bright red, and one real special, glittery silver.

And he told her she could use the polish, even could wear it to
school
, once she got her hands looking nice. She could even wear the
silver
to school if she wanted, he said, though she may not want to look that fancied-up in fourth grade.

And it worked. After that, if she started in to bite her nails, she had only to be reminded in a nice way of all those fancy polishes, waiting for proper hands to put them on. By the time a couple of months had passed, she had normal-looking fingernails, and her daddy made a big celebration of it, and he even helped her paint them pink.

After a little while she didn't wear the polish to
school no more, just kept it in her room to fool with on weekends. But her nails stayed nice.

And once when Gunther just couldn't keep from scratching at his old eczema, Mr. Bigelow got him a giant box of Band-Aids, the kind with stars and hearts in different colors, and stuck them on Gunther's arms in the places Gunther chose, to remind him not to scratch.

I always think on that nail polish celebration, and the Band-Aids, when I need to remember that the best way to get people to change their ways, or change their minds, is to treat them nice about it.

It was the same thing Mr. Bigelow began to do with Sweet-Ho. First he came home from work one evening with some catalogues, and said he had just happened along past the college building where they had these out on a table, and he thought she might like to read through them sometime. One of the catalogues described all the evening courses, and sure enough, they were like he had said: courses teaching about poetry and plays and such. And there were other courses, too.

We read about them out loud at dinner. "Here's one for you, Gunther," Mr. Bigelow said, and then read a whole paragraph about Biochemistry, which sounded like the most mystifying thing in the entire world. We all laughed and hooted.

"My turn!" Veronica said, and took the book. She read about Accounting Procedures, and we all made faces.

Sweet-Ho read about the course in the art department called Intermediate Ceramics, and we all busted out laughing when she got to the part in the description where it said, "pot-throwing."

"We could do that right here at home," Mr. Bigelow said. "We could just open up the kitchen cupboard and throw pots all over the house."

"Don't you dare," Sweet-Ho said sternly.

When it was my turn, I found the one called Introduction to American Literature, and read about that. At the end of the paragraph it said, "Included in the semester's reading will be Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter,
Twain's
Huckleberry Finn,
Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath,
and—"

Sweet-Ho interrupted me. "Does it really say that, Rabble?
The Grapes of Wrath?
"

I leaned over and showed her, on the page.

She looked up all amazed, when she realized I didn't make it up. "I already read that," she said. "I read it on my own, from the library. I believe it's the most wonderful book I ever read."

She took the catalogue from me and peered at the page again. "But I can't think what they might
teach
you about it. Wouldn't reading it be enough? Look here, it says: characterization, theme, plot structure. I don't even know what that means. You think if they taught you about that stuff, then you could read a book again, and you could enjoy it even
more?
I don't see how that could be."

She closed up the catalogue, shaking her head, all
puzzled. Later in the evening, while we was all watching TV, I saw her reach over and pick it up again and turn to that page. She still had it in her lap when I went to kiss her good night, and that night she stayed downstairs till late.

A couple of nights later, Mr. Bigelow brought a book home. At first I thought it was from the library because it was a real hardcover book, not just a paperback like we buy all the time down at Highriver Cards and Books. And also it wasn't new. You could tell it had been read a whole lot already.