“It’s the sound the water makes running over stones,” she said. “I heard it the night before you were born.”
How could you yell at somebody over that? She just stood there, smiling at him, taking hot cookies out of the oven, piling them onto a plate for him, getting him a cup of the milk she’d put in the stream to cool. “Rillibee,” she said, so that he heard the water sound in it. “Rillibee.”
“The kids at school think it’s funny,” he muttered, mouth full.
“I suppose,” she agreed. “They’d think Miriam is funny, too. What are they all called now? Brom. And Bolt. And Rym. And Jolt.”
“Not Jolt.”
“Oh. Excuse me. Not Jolt.” She was laughing at him. “They all sound like laundry sonics.”
He had to agree they did. Bolt sounded like something that would shake the donkey hair out of your socks. Jolt sounded even more so.
One day Joshua brought a parrot home. It was a small gray parrot with some green feathers on it.
“What on earth?” Miriam asked. “Joshua?”
“Those cabinets I built for the Brants, you know?”
“Of course I know.”
“He really liked them. He gave me the bird as a bonus.”
Miriam shook her head, annoyed. Rillibee knew she was thinking about the mess the bird would make. “Wanted to get rid of it, most likely”
Joshua put his hands in his pockets and stood there, looking at the bird where he’d set it on its perch at one side of the fire. “He said it was valuable.”
Miriam was looking at the bird with her lips tight together as though she wanted to say something nasty.
“Shit,” said the bird clearly. “Excrement.” Then it shit on the floor.
Miriam laughed. She couldn’t help herself. She was all bent over giggling.
Joshua was red in the face, mad, not able to say a thing.
“Well, he certainly talks,” Miriam said.
“I’ll take him back! Right after supper.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Josh, leave him. We’ll teach him some better language. You know, the bird doesn’t know what he’s saying. It isn’t as though there’s a brain there, telling him to talk dirty. He’s just imitating sounds he hears.”
“He didn’t hear that!”
“Sounds he remembers.”
So they’d kept the parrot. It never learned any nicer words about anything, though it didn’t talk much; but every time Miriam got mad and acted like she’d like to say something but couldn’t, darned if that bird didn’t. Rillibee noticed it right away. Every time Miriam got really mad, here was the parrot saying “Shit” in this dreamy voice, or “Dammit” or once, “Fuckit” Joshua hadn’t heard that one, or there’d probably have been a dead parrot.
Rillibee moved into the fifth category when he was eleven, becoming a five-cat before most of his age-mates. That hadn’t made them any easier to get along with. His mentors were old lady Balman and old man Snithers. Balman taught programming and information. Snithers taught retrieval skills. The older kids in five called her Ballsy because, so they said, she had more than Sniffy did. Rillibee had no idea what that meant until he asked Joshua, and then he got about an hour’s lecture on sexuality as metaphor in dominance. The truth of it was that Snithers was an old lady, all fussy and picky, while Balman had a fine the-hell-with-it attitude that all the kids liked, which was more or less what Joshua said only in different words.
There had been one particular day. an unremarkable day, with nothing much happening at school except that Wurn March told them goodbye because he was going to Sanctity for five years as a pledged acolyte. Wurn had looked confused about it. When they asked him if he wanted to go, he’d looked like he was about to cry.
Out in the corridor. Ballsy told Sniffy that Sanctity could have him and welcome, and then they both laughed and got red when they saw that Rillibee had heard them talking. He’d been on his way back from the toilets, and they sent him back to retrieval practice in a hurry. Rillibee agreed with Ballsy that nobody would miss Wurn March. Wurn had been in five for longer than he should have. He was larger than most of the boys, and louder, and he liked to hit smaller kids, and he always borrowed stuff and didn’t give it back.