Gib Rides Home Read online

  “It was bad!” Jacob shouted. “Real bad. And badder for Gib than for me. Gib got ten whacks and I only got five.”

  “Why? Why was that, Gib?” Frankie’s eyes had the same kind of shamefaced eagerness that he got when people talked dirty. “Why’d you get ten, Gib?”

  Gib had to think about that. “I dunno,” he said finally. “Probably because I asked what we’d done. Guess that was it.” He managed the beginning of a grin. “Yep. I guess that’s what Mr. Paddle taught me today. Don’t ever ask questions.”

  But a little later, when they thought Gib had gone to sleep, Jacob told Bobby and Luke something different. “It was because Gib wasn’t looking scared enough,” Jacob whispered, pulling the other boys away from Gib’s cot. “That’s what I think, anyway. What I think is, it made old Harding mad when Gib acted so kind of ... calm and collected like.”

  “Collected? What you mean by collected, Jacob?”

  Jacob sighed impatiently. Impatient with Bobby for asking such a hard question, and impatient with himself for not being able to come up with a better way of explaining what he meant. “You know, dummy,” he said crossly. “Collected means not all scared and jumpy like ... Well, take a good look in the mirror, Whitestone, and you’ll know exactly what being uncollected is like.”

  Bobby got mad at first, which of course was just what Jacob meant for him to do. But then, after he thought a while longer, he said, “Yeah, well, if all being collected gets you is a bunch of extra whacks, I’m just as glad to go right on being uncollected. So there, Mr. Smart Aleck Fetters.”

  But Jacob, who had just finished easing himself down onto his bed, only groaned a little and pretended to go to sleep.

  Chapter 10

  GIB HADN’T REALLY BEEN asleep, or at least not quite, that afternoon when Jacob said that Gib had made Harding angry by being too “calm and collected.” And just like Bobby, Gib was curious about what Jacob meant. Not quite curious enough to admit that he’d been listening under false pretenses, maybe, but enough to give him something to think about besides the ache in his backside. He hadn’t finished figuring it out by the time the supper bell rang, but he’d gotten far enough to agree with Bobby that being collected wasn’t anything to brag about. At least not if you were nothing but a poor old orphan, with nobody to care if somebody like Mr. Harding decided to make you his favorite punching bag. In the weeks that followed, Gib had several other meetings with Mr. Harding and his paddle. For whatever reason, whether it was because he was too “collected” or something entirely different, it was becoming obvious that Gib was well on his way to setting some kind of a record for encounters with Mr. Paddle. One night, the evening after Gib’s fourth or fifth beating, he and Jacob and Bobby had a discussion on the subject.

  “It’s just not fair,” Bobby said. He was sitting on the foot of Gib’s bed at the time, barefooted and in his nightshirt. “You didn’t do anything. Not today, or any of the other times, really. At least nothing more than what other people get away with all the time. He just likes pickin’ on you.”

  “Yeah. Sure seems that way.” Gib shifted his position, trying to put his weight on a less painful part of his backside. “This time I sure didn’t do anything, except maybe smile a little when he broke his old pointer.”

  The pointer, a piece of wood covered with fancy carvings and shaped something like a drummer’s stick was what Mr. Harding used to point to things on maps and the blackboard, and to whack people’s knuckles when they messed up an answer to a question. But that morning he’d tried out a new way to use it, and it hadn’t worked too well. He’d been working himself up into a real tizzy about people who didn’t listen, and all of a sudden he shouted “Attention!” and hit the corner of his desk real hard—and his fancy old pointer almost exploded. Shattered pieces of pointer flew everywhere, and Mr. Harding kind of flinched and muttered something that sounded a lot like the word Elmer had written on Gib’s spelling test.

  Remembering the expression on Harding’s face when the pointer flew apart, Gib’s lips did it again before he managed to straighten them out and say solemnly, “But I didn’t laugh. Not really.”

  Jacob agreed with him. “You didn’t!” he said. “I was looking, and I saw how hard you didn’t.” He sighed. “What are you going to do, Gib? Rate you’re going, there’s not going to be much left of you to beat on by the time you’re eighteen.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Grimacing, Gib pushed himself to a sitting position. Firming his chin and narrowing his eyes, he said, “But I’m not going to be here that long. I’ve decided I’m going to get myself adopted. No reason I can’t.” He gestured around the room, where about a dozen other boys ranging in age from nine to fifteen were getting ready for bed. “Look, there were more than twice as many of us when we were juniors. And now Herbie’s adopted, and Albert. And Georgie too, when he wasn’t even a senior yet.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Jacob was saying when suddenly he pointed to where Buster Gray had just come in. “Hey, I’m going to ask Buster about it. Bet he’d know.”

  “Buster,” Gib called. “Can you come here a minute? We got to ask you something.”

  Carrying his night monitor’s lantern, Buster limped down the hall and stopped at the foot of Gib’s cot. A thin-lipped grin cut across his lopsided face as he looked from Bobby to Jacob and then on to Gib. “What d’you need to know?” he asked Gib. “Can’t say for sure I can answer, but I’ll give it a try.”

  “I want to know how to get out of here,” Gib said.

  Buster looked startled. He started to back away, shaking his head. “’Fraid I can’t help....

  “I don’t mean run away,” Gib said quickly. “I mean get adopted.” He gestured again to the half-empty room. “You know, like Georgie and Herbie and all the rest of them who were here a while back.”

  Buster still looked worried. He glanced around the room and then sat down on the foot of Gib’s cot, pushing Bobby off onto the floor. Lowering his voice almost to a whisper, he said, “Lookee here. I’m not supposed to answer any questions about things like that. Not about any kind of adoption, but ... He looked around again. “You promise me you won’t tell I told you? Cross your heart and hope to die?”

  Gib and Jacob and Bobby looked at each other, nodded solemnly, and crossed their hearts.

  Still whispering, Buster said, “They didn’t all get adopted, you know. Not all the seniors who left got—”

  “We know that,” Gib interrupted. “Most of them were only half orphans, so they probably just went home to their pa, or whatever family they got left.”

  Jacob looked indignant. “Yeah,” he said, “like their folks dumped them in an orphanage when they were babies and then decided to take them back after they got old enough to be useful.”

  “But the full orphans, like us?” Gib’s nod included Bobby and Jacob. “And Herbie. He was a full orphan, and so was Georgie. They got adopted, didn’t they?”

  Buster shook his head. “Not really. What they got was ... Buster paused and looked around again before he said, “What they got was farmed out.”

  “Farmed out?” All three pairs of his listeners’ lips formed the words in silent unison.

  “That’s right. Farmed out,” Buster said. Then, lowering his voice again so that they had to strain to hear, “Farmed out means they got signed up for by people, farmers usually, who aren’t really looking to adopt at all. All they’re looking for is some good cheap labor. Real cheap. No pay at all till you’re eighteen and then, if you’re lucky, fifty dollars and a suit of new clothes.” Buster’s face was grim as he went on, “Slave labor for eight, maybe ten years, and then out you go.”

  There was a longish silence before Jacob said, “Well, heck. What’s so bad about that? Same as here almost, ’cept for the fifty dollars. You going to get fifty dollars when you leave here, Buster?”

  Buster’s grin had a sarcastic look to it. “Not likely,” he said. “But here you get something to eat and some schooling and—”

>   “You mean farmed-out kids don’t have to go to school?” Jacob was definitely interested.

  “And get starved, maybe?” Bobby whimpered. “Do they get starved, Buster?”

  But Buster was getting to his feet. Holding up his lantern, he looked nervously around the room and started to edge away before he whispered, “Not always.”

  “Not always?” Gib asked. “Not always what?”

  “Not always anything,” Buster answered. “That’s the misery of it. There’s no way of knowing what you’ll run into when you get farmed out.”

  “Buster! Buster!” they called after him, but he only stopped long enough to remind them of their promise.

  “Remember, don’t tell anybody else. Not anyone. And most of all, don’t say who told you,” he demanded, and when they all nodded he turned and limped hurriedly away on his nighttime rounds.

  Chapter 11

  IN THE DAYS THAT followed, the short dark days of a bitterly cold January, Gib spent a lot of time wondering about what Buster had said, even though it was the kind of thinking that always made him miserable. Not just sad and gloomy miserable, either, but angry too, as if someone had lied to him or maybe broken a promise. And he went on feeling that way for a while, even after it came to him that no one had lied about Lovell House adoptions. No one except himself. He himself had made up a lying dream, a hope dream, and dreamt it over and over again until he’d come to depend on it. And losing it left him feeling lost and deserted.

  Bobby said they should have known all along. They should have known that nothing good could come of being adopted, and that staying at Lovell House, as bad as it was now that Miss Offenbacher and Mr. Harding were running things, was probably the best they could ever hope for in their whole lives.

  But Gib couldn’t quite give up hope. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said one night when Bobby was being particularly gloomy. “But you gotta remember what Buster said about ‘not always.’”

  Jacob nodded. “Yeah, I remember. But I’m not sure what he meant. He didn’t tell us, and now he probably won’t, not ever. He’s been acting kind of nervous and jumpy since he told us all that stuff. Like maybe Miss Offenbacher would kick him out if she knew he’d been spilling the beans. When I tried to talk to him the other day he just said, ‘Hush up that kind of talk!’ and skittered off in a big hurry.”

  But Gib had thought a lot about what Buster meant about “not always.” “I bet I know,” he said. “He just meant that being farmed out is not always so bad, or so good either. Just depends on who gets you, I guess.”

  Gib wanted his guess to be true. If even that much was true, maybe it meant you could go on hoping. Hoping for Herbie and Georgie, and for yourself too, if it should happen to. you. Maybe it was enough, Gib told himself, if you could at least go on hoping.

  But it was only a few days later, on a Friday near the end of that same mean, bitter January, that Gib found out that hoping wasn’t enough. At least not for everyone.

  When Mr. Harding read off the chore assignments that morning, Gib and Bobby, just the two of them, had been assigned the job of mucking out the dairy barn and Juno’s box stall. On an ordinary day taking care of the orphanage’s buggy horse and two Jersey milk cows was Gib’s favorite chore. Of course, shoveling out old, dirty bedding and replacing it with clean straw and sawdust was a lot less fun when the temperature was way below freezing. Particularly when you were shorthanded because half the senior boys were sick with colds and fever.

  “Those fakers aren’t the only sick ones,” Bobby whimpered as he and Gib shoveled endlessly at frozen clumps of cow manure and dirty straw, piled them into a wheelbarrow, and then took turns trundling the barrow way out across the frozen back pasture to the manure pile. “I got me a terrible case of the grippe coming on. I can tell.”

  Gib threw another shovelful onto the load and then stopped long enough to stare at Bobby. “You getting a sore throat?” he asked.

  Bobby swallowed thoughtfully. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Real raw like. And a fever too.” Yanking off a mitten, he felt his forehead with his bare fingers. “Burning up,” he confirmed.

  Gib put down his shovel, took off one glove, felt Bobby’s face, and shook his head. “Feels pretty cold to me,” he said.

  “No it don’t. Not inside, anyways. Inside I’m just about to burn up.”

  Gib grinned. “Burning up inside, huh?” Pulling on his glove, he slapped his hands together before he picked up his shovel. “Lucky you. Might keep you from freezing solid on the outside.” He’d meant it as a joke, but it sure didn’t cheer Bobby up a whole lot. He went right on groaning and sighing as they finished the cow barn, pushed the final wheelbarrow load out of the milking stall, and started to scatter the fresh straw.

  Interrupting a particularly mournful sigh, Gib said, “Look here, Bobby. I’ll dump the last load.” Actually it wasn’t his turn, and Bobby knew it. “You go ahead and finish spreading the straw, then take the lantern and shovels over to Juno’s stall. I’ll be along soon as I dump this one.” Grabbing the handles of the wheelbarrow, he headed out across the frozen field to the manure heap.

  It had been bad enough in the cow barn, but outside it was worse. A lot worse. The wind-driven sleet beat against Gib’s face and seemed to cut directly to the center of his bones. But even with his eyes squinted half shut against the wind, and with a lot of slipping and sliding on the ice-crusted snow, he covered the distance to the manure heap in record time.

  Actually he was hurrying for two reasons. Not only to escape from the wind, but also because Juno and her box stall came next, and he liked being around the old chestnut mare. Liked listening to her soft, eager nicker as he fetched her hay and oats, and the smell of her horsey warmth as he brushed her mane and tail and, standing on a grooming stool so he could reach, ran the currycomb down her strong, wide back. He liked the currying and he could tell that Juno did too. And he also liked knowing that for once he wouldn’t have to argue with Bobby to get the best job, because Bobby was sure that Juno, like everything else big and powerful, was out to get him.

  “She’s getting ready to bite me,” he’d told Gib at least half a dozen times. “I can tell.” Just thinking about Bobby being so scared of gentle old Juno that he’d do all the shoveling while Gib did the fun part made Gib smile, even though stretching his lips made painful prickles across his half-frozen face.

  Back inside, out of the storm, Gib was struggling to shove the barn door shut against the push of the wind when Bobby suddenly appeared beside him. A bulgy-eyed Bobby, whose arms flailed wildly in pointless gestures and whose mouth gasped and flapped and made senseless sounds. A threatening shiver started up Gib’s back, and something hard and heavy seemed to fall from a great distance and crash into the pit of his stomach.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Bobby? What’s the matter? You seen a ghost or something?”

  Bobby gulped again, grabbed Gib’s arm, and turned back to point in the direction of Juno’s stall. “Somebody’s in there,” he gasped. “In the stall. I think it’s ... He stared at Gib with wide, unbelieving eyes. “It might be—it might be Georgie and ... His voice rose to a wail. “... and I think he’s dead.”

  It was Georgie Olson all right, or all that was left of him, lying in a filthy, ragged heap in a corner of Juno’s stall, where it looked like he’d tried to make a bed for himself of straw and gunnysacks and the torn scraps of an old horse blanket. Had made himself a bed, curled up in it, and was now asleep. Or dead?

  “Did Juno kill him?” Bobby was whimpering from outside the stall door. “Look, she’s looking at him.”

  Juno, who was standing quietly on the other side of the stall, was indeed looking at Georgie curiously, her ears pricked forward.

  Gib shook his head. “No, ’course not,” he said, and, dropping to his knees, he grabbed Georgie’s shoulder and shook him. “Georgie,” he said, and then more loudly, “come on, Georgie, wake up.”

  Georgie wasn’t dead after all. At least not quite. Sudd
enly awake, he cowered away from Gib, covering his head and face with his arms and making a strange squeaking noise like an injured animal.

  “Hush. Stop that,” Gib whispered. “Be still, Georgie. It’s just us. Gib and Bobby. We won’t hurt you.”

  The squeaking stopped. Georgie’s arms, heavily bandaged like his hands, came down slowly, away from his face. And suddenly Gib was struggling to keep his own face from showing his shock and horror. Georgie was almost unrecognizable. If it hadn’t been for his long rabbity upper lip and pale white-lashed blue eyes, Gib might have taken him for a stranger. A stranger whose face had shriveled to a sharp-edged skull except where swollen, scaly patches of frostbite blotched his nose and cheeks.

  “Gib? Bobby? Oh, Gib, please help me. Help me hide.” Georgie’s high-pitched voice quavered tearfully and he reached out toward Gib with both bandaged arms.

  Before Gib could respond, Bobby asked, “What happened, Georgie? What’s wrong with your hands?”

  Georgie looked down at his own outstretched arms and a new kind of horror crept across his face. “They’re going to cut them off,” he whispered. “Both of them. Mister said they were going to cut off both my hands. So when he stopped at the store I jumped out and ran. I didn’t know where to go so I came here and ...

  “Why?” Gib tried to keep the horror out of his voice. “Why would they cut off your hands?”

  Georgie stared at his hands and tried to answer, but at first his chattering teeth and trembling lips blurred the sounds. As his voice steadied, Gib was able to make out what he was saying. “... Mister said he’d learn me to take care of my mittens. Said I always lose them, but I don’t. The dog took them. I know he did, but Mister wouldn’t believe me. He whipped me like always, and then he said I had to do the east pasture anyways. Mittens or no mittens.”

  Gib shook his head in wonder. “Do the east pasture?” he asked.