Rabble Starkey (3 page)

"Shoot, no," Sweet-Ho said. "His mama'll be coming home any day now. We can stand him till then. And you like that girl okay, don't you?"

"Yeah." I had liked Veronica right off. She was kind of shy when her daddy introduced us, but she had piercy eyes and curly hair and I could see she was wearing a big diamond ring, the kind you get from a candy machine if you hit it just right.

"Which bed you want?" Sweet-Ho asked. There were two, side by side, metal frames sagging in the middle and smelling of mildew. One was by the window and I chose that.

Sweet-Ho had the one by the closet then, and she stuck some of her stuff on the wall there for decoration, using thumbtacks that we found in a drawer, and the heel of her waitress shoe for a hammer. She had a
lot of leftover stuff they give her from Buddy Rivet's when she quit:
IN GOD WE TRUST, ALL OTHERS PAY CASH,
for one.
TODAY'S SPECIAL:
SALISBURY STEAK,
$2.99, that was another, and to me it didn't make much sense to put that one on the wall of your home where you live. But Sweet-Ho liked it; she said it made her feel nice memories of her days at Buddy Rivet's, plus a certain satisfaction that she didn't have to be a waitress no more, even though the tips was good. And she had a poster of Willie Nelson in concert.

I didn't have nothing to stick up on the wall by my bed except a Mammoth Caves bumper sticker that my cousin traded me once for a Bible verse card I got at Sunday school. And I had a magazine picture of whales leaping up out of the sea, which I tore out of a magazine Sweet-Ho bought me to read on the bus when she brought me to Highriver. So I stuck that up, too. And after I shook the blankets outside they didn't smell so mildewy when I put them back on the beds. Sweet-Ho covered them each with one of the quilts that Gnomie had made.

About that time there was a funny sort of squealing noise from the sink in the kitchen, and at first Sweet-Ho and I thought, uh-oh, the plumbing's busted. But then we both remembered at about the same time. She went and picked up Gunther from the drainboard, and we noticed that when he was awake he was cross-eyed.

But when Sweet-Ho set down and started to feed him from the bottle Mr. Bigelow had left in the icebox, she said she kind of liked him, even in spite of his homeliness. Gunther, I mean. She set there in an old straggly wicker rocking chair that needed paint, and Gunther lay in her lap, just all relaxed and homely and cross-eyed and sucking away. And she said, "Parable Ann, I do believe I'm settling down for good. I believe this is all I need."

That made sense, because what you got to realize is that by then, with all the traveling around Sweet-Ho had done while I was with my grandma and all, a lot of years had passed and she was middle-aged, or at least almost. Twenty-two is what Sweet Hosanna Starkey was when she brought me to the Bigelows' garage to live.

All those things happened when Veronica and me, we was both eight. I came to Highriver to live, Mrs. Bigelow got herself sewed up tight, and Sweet-Ho decided to give up her waitress life and settle down to take care of Gunther, who had just got born and dumbfounded everybody with his homeliness.

And
loud.
Sweet-Ho was accustomed to loud, working at Buddy Rivet's where they yelled in the orders to the cook through a cutout hole in the wall, like this: "VEAL SPECIAL, GO EASY ON THE GRAVY, AND A DARK BEER!" But even Sweet-Ho, she said she never heard
nothing
like that baby.

"I believe he regrets being born," she told me one afternoon when he was yelling away, with his face all purple.

"Was I like that when I was just born?" I asked her, after I peered into the drawer where we kept him, and observed him all scrunched with his little drum-sticky legs pulled up and his mouth open.

"Shoot, no," Sweet-Ho said, looking at me surprised. "You was a quiet little thing. Sometimes I used to poke you awake just to make sure you was alive. Young as I was, I didn't know how else to tell except to poke till you jumped. And even then, mostly, you didn't cry. You just blinked your eyes like you was startled."

"
I
didn't regret being born, Gunther Bigelow," I told the baby, leaning over the drawer and shouting so that he could hear me above that screaming. "Z was a quiet little thing." I poked him with one finger.

"Me too," announced Veronica Bigelow, who appeared at the top of the stairs. She never knocked, just came up the stairs and right in. Me and Sweet-Ho, we didn't care; we liked Veronica. "I was a quiet little thing, too."

She flopped herself down on a kitchen chair and fanned herself with a magazine that was lying on the table. It was hot. Already Gunther had heat rash across his scrawny shoulders even though Sweet-Ho sprinkled him three times every day with cornstarch. "My mama's home," Veronica said. "My father brought her home from the hospital, so I came to tell you to bring Gunther over to the house so Mama can see he's okay and begin to take care of him herself."

We all stared at the drawer where Gunther was. It was jiggling, he was screeching so hard. Sweet-Ho went over and looked in and made some kissing noises at him. "Shhhhhh, you sweet thing," Sweet-Ho said. "You're going home to your mama." And sure enough, Gunther shushed some at the sound of her
voice. He was getting to know her a little even though he'd only been around for two weeks. He liked Sweet-Ho. Everybody did.

But it was a mistake, sending him back home to his mama. Turned out that Gunther didn't like his mama much. Or maybe she didn't like him. She shook all over when she held him, and commenced to cry, Veronica said. So Gunther ended up back in his dresser drawer next to Sweet-Ho's bed and disrupted my sleeping habits for months on end, screeching as he did. But one night when Gunther was about seven months old I woke up like a shot in the middle of the night and saw through the dark that Sweet-Ho, she was sitting up too. But Gunther just lay there. He was too big for a drawer by then, and Mr. Bigelow had brought a crib down to the garage and wedged it in between Sweet-Ho and the wall. Gunther was laying silent in that crib with his backside sticking up in the air and his eyes were squinched closed tight.

"Well, shoot, Sweet-Ho," I whispered. "He's dead. We're really in for it now. What're we going to tell the Bigelows?"

But Sweet-Ho said, "Shhhh," and she got up on her knees so's she could lean over and peer into the crib, through the dark, at Gunther. "He's breathing," she whispered. "He's asleep, Rabble. It's three in the morning and he's asleep." She said it in a voice of awe, as if some miracle had appeared standing at the foot of her bed, maybe Jesus all aglow and with his hands bloody and a forgiving smile, you know?

And I didn't blame her none because I felt the same
way myself. Gunther Bigelow, asleep; that's the kind of thing that "Hallelujah!" should be cried out loud for. For seven months he'd been screeching off and on through the night so that Sweet-Ho and me, we took turns jiggling his crib. Some mornings at school I'd be half-asleep during spelling practice, and it was because Gunther had been so wakeful all night.

But after that spooky quiet night when I thought at first he must be dead, Gunther always slept. Sweet-Ho and me, we could even eat Fritos and talk to each other after we went to bed, and giggle and sometimes sing, and Gunther never woke.

He grew. He increased in homeliness and had every ailment known to man or boy or beast: diaper rash and impetigo and pinkeye and allergies to everything, so that when he drank milk he sneezed and when he ate vegetables he puked and when he ate Gerber Junior dinners his eyes got all swole up and itchy.

He could eat bananas okay, and hard-boiled eggs, and Chef Boyardee spaghetti. So he ate those three things, and grew. He hiccuped all the time, but we got used to that and even appreciated it after he started to walk, because it meant we could hear him coming.

When he was two years old, he moved back to his own house. His mama hadn't changed none, couldn't manage any better, but Gunther was old enough to fend for hisself at night, and during the day Sweet-Ho was there to hand him his bananas and such. Mrs. Bigelow didn't even seem to take no notice that he was living there. It wasn't like when I was little and
went to Gnomie's to live. Even though I don't remember it, Sweet-Ho said that everybody just fitted me in and made me part of the family. But it wasn't like they didn't notice. It was that their loving came so natural.

Me and Sweet-Ho and Veronica and her daddy all tried to be extra-loving to Gunther so's he wouldn't be aware that his mama's smile didn't mean nothing at all. By the time me and Veronica was twelve and doing the family trees, Gunther was four years old and was the sweetest little boy in Highriver even despite his homeliness and the fact that he had ringworm that September to boot.

Mrs. Hindler gave us a week to work on family trees. Me and Veronica, we got done real quick because we could work together in the evenings, and because I could loan her my cousins and all. We was all done by the weekend, but we didn't have to hand them in until Monday.

On Saturday, it was hot, like it always is in September. September's a funny time of year, because school starts but the weather still feels like summer. We was lounging around out in the yard, all bored and lazy. We had a stack of old
Reader's Digests
that Mr. Bigelow had brung home from his real estate office. He said his customers was starting to complain that the reading material was old. And it was; some of them magazines dated back four or five years, but shoot, a
Reader's Digest
don't suffer much by age. Me and
Veronica, we was reading all the "Life in These United States" out loud, taking turns.

Gunther was with us. I looked over at him and smiled—he had purple medicine smeared on his ringworm, so he looked odd—and he grinned his sweet little grin back at me.

"Sometimes it seems like Gunther's my brother instead of yours," I told Veronica.

"Hey, Gunther, what's your full name?" Veronica called. He was just sitting there in the grass nearby, hiccuping and playing with a bug.

"Gunther Philip Bigelow," Gunther said, and hiccuped. He could talk real good for his age, and had been saying his whole name out full like that from the time he was only one year old.

"See, he's my brother," Veronica said. "If he were your brother, his name would be Gunther Starkey."

"Well, shoot, Veronica, I
know
that. I just meant it
seems
like he's a Starkey because he stayed at our place so long when he was little, and Sweet-Ho is motherly to him, and all."

"Sweet-Ho is a motherly sort of person," Veronica pointed out, even though I knew it already and she
knew
I knew it already. "And my mother doesn't seem to be, not anymore anyway."

She said it all matter-of-fact, but I knew what a sorrow it was to her. Veronica's mother was just about the biggest failure of a mother I ever knew, except for a black-and-brown spotted dog my Uncle Furlow had once when I was little. That dog had three puppies and squashed every one of them dead by laying down
right on top of them after they was born, and then pretended it was an accident. Me and Uncle Furlow knew better, though, 'cause we seen her do it, and we seen that she looked around real careful, arranging herself just right, then
squash.
So fast there wasn't nothing we could do, it took us by surprise even though we was watching.

I don't mean to say that Mrs. Bigelow would ever squash anybody, child or grown-up, or even want to, not even Gunther, whose looks was understandably a disappointment.

It was just that she didn't care about nothing, but pretended she did by that smile, which made it worse. Veronica told me that it wasn't always that way. When Veronica was little, her mama was normal-like, motherly same as Sweet-Ho for example, hugging and whispering and singing and patting, pouring cream and brown sugar over oatmeal, brushing Veronica's hair real careful so the snarls came out easy. Same as all mothers. And grandmothers too, I know for a fact, since I lived with my Gnomie all those years.

"It happened sort of gradually. The doctor calls it depression," is the way Veronica explained it to me. "Maybe it'll go away just as mysteriously as it began."

I didn't have much faith in it going away, though I didn't say so to Veronica. To tell the truth, to me it seemed as if it was getting worse, and Sweet-Ho agreed.

She looks okay, Mrs. Bigelow does, combs her hair and all and keeps herself neat. Lately she cries some, in her room, and maybe she smiles while she cries, we
don't know. She don't talk. And she don't do much—Sweet-Ho cleans the house and cooks the meals—but shoot, lots of people don't like to do much. My grandma had a sister, my Great-aunt Patsy, used to just sit in a chair and read the Bible all the time, moving her finger along the page and saying all the chapters aloud in a mumble. But she was
normal,
just Bible-oriented, and didn't much care for housework.

Mrs. Bigelow wouldn't be called normal. Depression, that don't seem the right word. Shoot, everybody gets depression now and again, even me, especially if it's raining out or if I didn't do my homework. I think
empty
is what you'd have to call her, and isn't that the saddest thing, her with that smile and all?

She does empty things. Things that don't hurt nobody but at the same time don't mean nothing. Things like—well, here's one: Sweet-Ho told me that Mrs. Bigelow goes around the house smoothing the beds all the time. You know how a bedcover sometimes get wrinkled up, or maybe it has a bump in it, like if someone set something down and then took it away? So you smoothe it over with your hand.

Mrs. Bigelow smoothes all the beds, again and again, all day, even in the guest room, and no guest has been in that house, ever, as long as I've been living in the Bigelows' garage.

There was that one time after Gunther was born, and they thought Mrs. Bigelow was acting normal. But when she asked to have him back, and tried to care for him herself, she smiled and smiled and shook
all over and then cried, Veronica said, when they put him in her arms.