Rabble Starkey Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.

    "Don't you dare eat that bug, Gunther," Veronica said. Shoot, she knew he wouldn't. Gunther never ate nothing but bananas and hard-boiled eggs and Chef Boyardee spaghetti. He was just fooling with the beetle, making it walk on his arms and poking it with a twig to change directions.
    Gunther messed with his little pet bug, and me and Veronica with the
Reader's Digests,
and it was hot, one of those real hot days with no air to it except thickness that you breathed in.
    I think Mrs. Bigelow was laying on the glider on the back porch. Sweet-Ho was worried about her because she seemed worse. Maybe the hot weather was doing it. She smiled more and cried more, in her room, and walked around more, in the house, back and forth, back and forth. Sometimes, lately, she'd say things, religious-type things, usually, but they didn't make no sense to anybody. "He who believes in me shall not perish," she'd say to herself again and again. "Blessed be the pure in heart. The pure in heart." Then she would lay down, maybe pick up a book, but she wouldn't read; she'd flip the pages first slow, then faster and faster, and finally get up and walk again, as if she was always looking for something that she couldn't find.
    Anyways, I think she must've been laying there on the porch beyond the kitchen. She was all dressed up
that day in one of them filmy dresses she liked—Sweet-Ho says it's nothing to wash them, right in and out of the washer and dryer in no time, they're all synthetic—and maybe she would've had a book in her hands. But she wouldn't be reading it, only staring at the pages, talking about the pure in heart, as she flipped through. I think she must've been doing that, but I can't say for certain.
    We got bored with the
Reader's Digests,
and Gunther got bored with his bug. But there wasn't much else to