Gib and the Gray Ghost (7 page)

A tall, slender woman wearing a dark skirt and white blouse and a no-nonsense frown was standing in front of the room. As Gib watched she rapped on her desk again with a long wooden pointer. The silence deepened.

“Boys and girls,” Miss Elders said, “I’d like you to meet your new fellow student ... She looked down at a paper on her desk. “Your fellow student Gibson Whittaker. Please tell Gibson hello, and then get out your readers. And Gibson, take the empty desk there on your left.”

The hellos were loud and soft, and they came with friendly smiles, blank stares, and mean, sarcastic grins. Among the blank-eyed faces there was, near the front of the room, a familiar one, surrounded by yellow-brown curls. Familiar but not particularly welcoming. Among her Longford friends Livy, it seemed, had other fish to fry.

Trying to return the greetings, Gib stretched his lips in a counterfeit grin before he folded his long legs under a smallish desk and began one of the longest days he’d ever spent.

T
HAT NIGHT, BACK IN
his own room, Gib closed the door firmly and got into bed. But the door to his mind, the door that let in unwelcome recollections, was harder to close.

Classroom recollections kept sneaking in. The constant curious stares that were there whether the new boy was trying to answer a question about the U.S. Constitution or just working quietly on long division. Some of the stares might have been just curiosity, but there were others that were downright mean. And the note that somebody put in his lunch pail was even meaner. A note that said, “Hey, orfan. Hope you like to fight.” There was no signature.

Nothing much more than stares and notes went on in the classroom. Miss Elders saw to that. But once in a while some other things happened. A push or two and a tripping attempt when someone, probably Rodney, or else Alvin, stuck out a foot as Gib was walking down the aisle.

Gib had met Rodney and Alvin, all right, and they were as bad as Livy said they were. Rodney was big and heavyset with a sharp-boned face that might have been good-looking if it weren’t for his squinty, snake-eyed stare. Looked like a city slicker, Gib thought. A city slicker dressed up in flashy store-bought clothes and patent leather shoes. His pal, Alvin, was taller and not as well turned out. Alvin was wearing a cowhide vest and big, scuffed-up boots. With his woolly reddish hair and ornery stare, he put Gib in mind of a bad-natured Hereford bull. Gib could see, right off, that the two of them weren’t going to be a bit friendly, but during the noon recess a couple of other people were. One of the friendly ones was a boy named Graham, who stopped by Gib’s desk to tell him about lunch recess.

The noon hour, Graham told Gib, was the best part of the day. In the fall and spring you could play games in the school yard, and even when you had to stay in because of bad weather you were allowed to do what Miss Elders called “civilized socializing.” Which simply meant visiting with friends. As long as it was very quiet socializing, Graham said.

That sounded fine to Gib. So after he’d finished the lunch Mrs. Perry had packed for him, he looked around for someone to socialize with. But Livy was real busy talking to a bunch of her girlfriends and Graham was back at his desk reading a book. Gib didn’t feel like horning in on any of the other socializers, so he put on his mackinaw and went outside. But that didn’t last long either. The snow-covered playground was deserted, not to mention freezing cold.

Back in the classroom Miss Elders was at her desk correcting some papers, and everything was pretty quiet and orderly. Gib put away his mackinaw and sat down at his desk with a history book. He read a little, but mostly he watched and listened. He didn’t hear much, though, because people kept their voices down. The bunch of girls standing around Livy’s desk even managed to giggle quietly. The noontime recess was more than half over when Bertie Jameson came over to Gib’s desk and started talking about Josephine.

Bertie was a scrawny little fifth-grader who talked so softly that Gib only got about half of what he was saying, but after a while he made out that Josephine was probably Bertie’s riding horse.

“Come out to the stable with me and I’ll let you see her,” Bertie whispered. Gib had been wanting to see the schoolhouse stable, so he got into his mackinaw again and out they went. The stable was maybe a hundred yards from the schoolhouse and it looked and smelled pretty bad, all right; just a row of muddy tie stalls under a saggy roof. Two of the stalls were occupied by donkeys and in the third was an enormous dirty brown critter that turned out to be Josephine.

Gib’s guess was about right. Josephine was what you might call a riding horse if you weren’t too particular. A huge old swaybacked mare, she was rawboned and Roman-nosed, with a skimpy mane and tail and such outsized hooves that you had to figure there’d been a Clydesdale somewhere in her family tree. But Bertie insisted that she was fast as a Thoroughbred. “And she’s a real good foul-weather horse too,” he whispered eagerly. “Me and Josephine got here every day during the blizzard last week. You should ought to see how she plows right through them three-foot drifts like they warn’t there ’tall.”

Gib could believe it. He thought of saying that hooves that big must be almost as good as snowshoes. But he didn’t because he was afraid Bertie might think he was making fun of Josephine.

Bertie was still fussing over his big mare, moving her to another stall that wasn’t quite as muddy, when Gib decided to head back to the schoolroom. And that was when the trouble began. Rodney and his buddy, Alvin, were waiting just outside the stable, and when Gib came around the corner they stepped in front of him, blocking his path. Rodney’s mouth was stretched into an angry-dog grin. “Howdy there, orphan,” he snarled. “You get my note?”

Gib’s heart did an extra beat or two but he tried to ignore it. He knew what Rodney and Alvin were up to. One thing you learned early on in a Home for Boys was what a bully looked like. And also how to spoil their fun by not letting them see how scared you were.

Taking a deep breath, Gib grinned back. Not a “dare you” grin but a slow, easy one. “Note?” he asked. “You wrote that note in my lunch pail?”

“Yeah,” Rodney said. “I wrote it.”

Gib nodded slowly before he reached into his pocket and pulled out the wrinkled scrap of paper. A scrap on which someone had written “Hey, orfan. Hope you like to fight.” Unfolding it carefully, he studied it for a moment before he said, “You wrote this here note that says, ‘Howdy Gibson Whittaker. Welcome to Longford School’?”

Rodney’s angry glare changed to confusion. He was reaching out to take the note out of Gib’s hand when the sound of running feet made him whirl around. All three of them turned just in time to see Bertie Jameson dash out from the other end of the stable and head for the schoolhouse steps at a dead run. Bertie was obviously a fast runner, skimming over the icy ground like a water bug on a pond. It occurred to Gib that scrawny little boys like Bertie who had classmates like Rodney and Alvin probably learned to be fast runners in order to stay alive.

Grabbing hold of Gib’s coat, Rodney yelled, “Catch him, Al.” Bowlegged old Alvin gave it a try. But Bertie had a good head start, and after a short dash and two or three stumbles on the icy snow, Alvin gave up and came panting back.

“Never mind.” Rodney was still holding on to the front of Gib’s mackinaw. “We got this one.”

Alvin looked uneasy. “But Bertie’s going to tell,” he said. “He’s going to go in there and tell Miss Elders.”

“Naw, he won’t,” Rodney said. “Bertie knows better than to tell on me.” Turning back to Gib, Rodney went on, “You hear me, orphan. Nobody tells on Rodney Martin if they know what’s good for them. You hear me?” He jerked Gib toward him with one hand and swung his other fist, hard and fast, right at Gib’s face.

But Gib saw it coming. Ducking his head, he butted it into Rodney’s chest, grabbed him with both arms, and shoved hard. Gib had done his share of shoveling and hoeing and had the strong arm muscles to prove it. So when he grabbed and held on, Rodney had a hard time shaking him loose. A split second later the two of them were rolling around on the icy ground.

The rolling lasted for quite a while without much damage being done. Rodney kept trying to use his fists, but with Gib plastered to his chest there wasn’t much room for a backswing. The few punches he managed to land didn’t hurt Gib all that much. But then Alvin got in on the action.

He’d been prancing around Gib and Rodney for quite a while, yelling things like “Hit him, Rod. Hit the dirty farm-out.” And Rodney had gone on trying to, without much success. But then Alvin stopped yelling and started kicking.

The first kick hit Gib in the ribs. It hurt real bad and, for a second or two, pretty near knocked the breath clean out of him. He was still holding on, struggling to breathe and closing his eyes against the pain, when a second kick hit his left leg up near the thigh. That one hurt too.

But then, just as Gib was beginning to feel pretty desperate, things started changing. The first change was that Alvin stopped kicking and yelling. Gib was aware of a sudden silence and then a loud metallic noise, a sharp clanging thud, and then another one. And now it was Rodney who was yelling. Right in Gib’s ear Rodney was yelling, “Ow. Hey. Stop that.”

Another heavy thud, and Rodney yelled again. Suddenly releasing his grip on Gib, he rolled quickly away, and as Gib struggled to his feet he found himself face to face with, of all people, Livy Thornton. A coatless, red-faced Livy whose unbonneted head was a mass of windblown curls, and in whose hands was a badly dented lunch bucket. As Gib watched in astonishment Livy walked toward Rodney, swinging the lunch pail by its handle. She missed that time as Rodney, on his feet now, jumped back out of range, but it was easy to tell that she hadn’t missed every time. Easy to guess when you saw the dents in her lunch bucket, as well as a bloody cut on Rodney’s forehead.

For a moment all four of them stood in a panting, gasping circle, with Rodney holding his forehead and Gib his ribs, while Livy went on clutching her lunch pail. Alvin was in the circle too, jittering around in his big clumsy boots and jumping back out of range when Livy looked in his direction.

“Come on, Gib, let’s go in.” Livy started back toward the schoolhouse and Gib limped after her. Rodney and Alvin stayed right where they were.

Gib followed as well as he could but because he was limping a little on his left leg and holding his aching ribs, it wasn’t easy to keep up. Halfway back to the school building, Livy slowed down and watched him for a moment. “You all right?” she asked.

“Been better. But I’d have been a lot worse if you hadn’t showed up.” He grinned. “You and that two-barreled lunch bucket.”

Livy tossed her head and went on, walking more slowly now. When Gib caught up he asked, “How’d you know what was going on? Did Bertie tell you?”

“No,” she said, “he didn’t have to. I saw the two of you go out. I knew where you were going. Bertie’s always taking people to meet Josephine. I was on my way to the cloakroom to put my pail away when he came running back in looking like ... She stopped and made a terrified face, big-eyed and openmouthed. “Bertie didn’t say anything to anybody,” she said. “But I knew.”

They grinned at each other and then laughed out loud. But back in the classroom Livy went straight over to her giggling girlfriends.

L
YING IN BED THAT
night, Gib did a lot of careful tossing and turning while he waited for his mind to shut off and let him go to sleep. Careful tossing because his leg, and especially his ribs, were still remembering Alvin’s big old boots. But even though he was feeling tired and sore, nothing, not the ticking clock that kept reminding him how late it was, not even his aches and pains, could keep his mind from shuffling through the things that had happened that day, like a gambler shuffling through a deck of cards.

Some of the memories were pretty painful, but some others weren’t, except when they made him laugh. Laughing was out because right at the moment a real hard belly laugh didn’t do his ribs any good at all. But even aching ribs couldn’t keep him from chuckling a little over what had happened during elocution class.

The bell for the end of lunch hour was still ringing when Miss Elders started writing on the blackboard. “Elocution Class,” she wrote. “Recitations from the Romantic Poets.” And after that in large print, “
LAST CHANCE
!!!”

“Your very last chance,” she told the class. Then she paused and added, “Except for Olivia and Gibson, of course. Olivia,” she went on, “and you too, Gibson. See me after class for your assignment and we’ll expect to hear from you next week.”

Then Miss Elders went on to explain that everyone had been given a poem to memorize and recite before the class. Your final grade, she explained to Gib and Livy, would be based not only on how thoroughly you had memorized your material, but also on pronunciation and projection, and most of all on stage presence and dramatic presentation. The four P’s, Miss Elders called them—Pronunciation, Projection, stage Presence, and dramatic Presentation. She went on to explain why the four P’s were so important when you had any sort of public speaking to do. “As most of you will, at some point in your life,” the teacher told the class. Gib’s mind wandered for a moment while he considered what kind of public speaking an orphan farm-out might be expected to do. But he pricked up his ears in time to listen to Miss Elders tell about how well everyone had done. Nearly everyone, at least.

Actually, Miss Elders said, the recitations had been due last week and nearly everyone had been well prepared. Except for a few people who’d needed more time to complete their memorization, or because they’d forgotten to bring a stage prop they needed for their presentation.

She looked then at a paper on her desk before she said, “Matilda. I trust you’ve not forgotten your skylark again?”

Matilda Reed, a big blond girl with a twitchy smile, jumped to her feet. “No, Miss Elders. Got it right here.” Reaching into her desk, she brought out what looked to Gib like a stuffed crow. Then she scurried to the front of the room and began to recite. Matilda’s poem was by a poet named Shelley, and it was a long one. Every time Matilda mentioned the word
skylark
she held the stuffed bird way over her head and gazed up at it.