Homecoming (35 page)

Dicey leaned toward him. “It’s not that. It’s—she doesn’t know about us. Not only
that we’re coming, but she doesn’t even know we exist. We didn’t know about her until
our cousin in Bridgeport told us we had a grandmother. And—I don’t know how she’ll
be. There was this priest in Bridgeport. He had somebody here come to see her and
tell her. She wouldn’t let him in, or listen. He said she screamed so she couldn’t
hear what he was saying. So I don’t know how she’ll act. Momma . . . ” Her voice faded
away.

“There’s a lot you haven’t told me, isn’t there?” Will asked.

“Yes.” Dicey thought. “It gets so complicated.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Will said. “How do you want to do it? I’ll go along with you
if you’ll make me one promise. You keep your promises?”

“Yes.”

“If you’ll promise me that you’ll come to me if you need help. We’ll be in Berlin
for a week, four shows and then three days off on the beaches. The police can always
find me if you call. Will you promise?”

Dicey thought about that. “But what could you do?”

“Who knows? What do friends do for each other? Something. Whatever. Will you promise?”

“Okay,” Dicey said. “I promise.”

“We’ll be coming by again in eight months—but anything can happen in eight months.
I can’t just dump you kids off. Not and forget about you. I can’t do that. But I can
let you do it your own way if I know you’ll call me if you need to—if it’s not working
out.”

“Why?” Dicey asked. “I mean, why should you bother? You have your own life.”

“You’re a little bit of my life now. You can’t get away, and I can’t get rid of you.
That’s a fact.”

Dicey understood. A lot of people had little bits of her life now, and they were tied
to her now, or she was tied to them. To some of them, she owed something that she
hadn’t paid yet, like Windy and Stewart, or Cousin Eunice. You didn’t just let people
go, that’s what Will meant. You always did what you could.

Dicey leaned back into her own corner by the door. Well.

“What I thought was,” she said, “we’d go downtown and find out where she lives. Then
just go out there.” That was almost the truth.

“And you want me to leave you off and drive away,” Will said. Dicey had no idea what
he was thinking. “Are you scared?” he asked her.

“Some.”

“Why?”

“It’s a last chance for us,” Dicey said.

“I don’t know about that,” Will said slowly. “You could say all of life is a series
of last chances.”

“Okay,” Dicey said, “but inside of houses—no matter what they look like from outside—even
that one”—the car sped past a tall brick house, surrounded by old elm trees and seeming
serene and wise, as if it had stood there for so many years that nothing could surprise
or hurt it—“you can’t tell what’s inside. You can’t tell what might happen. How do
you know who to trust when you meet people? How can I tell about this grandmother?
I know I can always run, but when there are four of us . . . ”

“Wouldn’t it be easier if I stuck with you?” Will asked.

Dicey shook her head. “Well, yes, of course it would. But I have to know by myself,
for us.”

“Okay,” Will said. “Okay. You can have it your way.”

As they neared Crisfield, entered the town limits, followed the main street, they
all fell silent. Dicey could almost hear the worries that nobody said aloud. The air
inside the car grew thick with them.

The road ran straight and broad until it came to the water. They looked around. Docks,
most of them vacant now on this summer morning, stretched out into the bay. Sheds
lined the land’s edge. Piles of small wire boxes were everywhere, and oyster shells
had been scattered like a layer of earth. A few people, mostly old men, sat in the
sunlight, looking at nothing.

“Well,” Dicey said.

“We’ll meet again.” Will turned to her. “One way or another. Okay?”

“Okay!” Sammy said.

The Tillermans climbed out of the car. They stood at the road’s end by the water’s
edge. Will backed the car, turned it around, looked out the window to give them the
thumbs-up signal, and drove away.

Until the station wagon was out of sight, the Tillermans didn’t move. Dicey held the
grocery bag in one hand, and the other hand she held up in farewell, until she could
no longer see the square back of the car.

They were on their own again.

“Okay,” Dicey said. She passed the bag to James. “You wait here. I’m going to find
a phone book.” She didn’t wait for anything, not even to study the flat expanse of
blue water. She walked back along the docks to the sidewalk and entered a grocery
store. There was a poster in its window advertising Will’s circus.

The store was filled with darkness, dust and the smell of the food on its shelves.
Dicey stood inside the screen door for a
minute, while her eyes adjusted to the dim light. The only person in the store was
a woman in a stained apron behind a glass-framed counter. Dicey walked up to her.
The woman had thick, strong arms and her hands were mottled red. Her face was pale
and thick with flesh. Her eyebrows were straight and bushy over little colorless eyes.

“Yeah?” she asked, leaning her elbows on the top of the counter. “What can I get you?”
Her words came thick and slow, like molasses—again, something like Momma.

“I’m looking for a phone book,” Dicey said. “Do you have one I can look at?”

The woman nodded. She plodded out from behind the meat counter and walked heavily
down to the cash register at the front of the store. She pulled out a thin phone book
from underneath the counter there. She watched Dicey open it.

There was a Peter Tillerman on a place called Deal Island, and a G. Ridgely Tillerman
in Princess Anne. There was no Abigail Tillerman. There was no A. Tillerman, either.

Maybe their grandmother didn’t have a phone. Or maybe it was listed under their grandfather’s
name. Only, there was no Tillerman listed for Crisfield.

Dicey looked at the page and chewed on her lip.

None of the Tillermans listed lived in Crisfield. Was her grandmother still here?

Yes, because that priest had gone to see her. He would have told Father Joseph if
she’d moved or died. He knew where she lived.

“Something wrong?” the woman asked.

“I got work to do,” the woman continued, to prod Dicey. She leaned down on the counter
as if she needed the rest.

“I was looking for the telephone number for Abigail Tillerman,” Dicey said.

“Why would you do that?”

“I was going to call her up. To see if she needed some help around the place,” Dicey
said.

“I’ve never seen you before,” the woman remarked.

“We’re new,” Dicey said. “We just moved in.”

“Ab won’t hire you,” the woman said. “She’s letting the farm go.”

“Selling it?” Dicey asked.

“Naw, she’d never sell that place. But she can’t work it by herself.”

“That’s why I thought she might hire me,” Dicey said.

The woman shook her head, closed up the phone book and put it away. “Besides, she
hasn’t had a phone since Bullet died. If you’d asked me I’d of told you. She came
down and threw her phone through the telephone company window. You don’t want to work
for her.”

The woman trudged back down the aisle to the meat counter. Dicey stood where she was,
listening to the hum of a large refrigerator.

“Where is her farm, anyway?” she called to the back of the store.

“Down to the water, south,” the woman answered.

“What road?”

“Landing Neck. It goes off South Main, half a mile inland. Maybe a mile. There’s a
bend on Landing Neck, and a new little house sits right on it. Next mailbox is Ab’s.
But it’s seven miles. I wouldn’t go out there. She’s queer.”

“Queer?”

“Crazy as a coot, that’s my opinion. We leave her alone. You should too.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Dicey said.

“No maybes about it.”

Dicey left the store. She returned to her family. Their eyes held the same question.

Dicey sat on the edge of the dock, hanging her feet over the water. James, Maybeth
and Sammy sat in a line beside her. You couldn’t see the bottom of the water. It was
muddy, so you could only see a little way down into it. The waves gurgled underneath
them.

More bad news, Dicey thought to herself. But why didn’t she feel bad? She looked around
at the docks and the dozing men and the water and the shacks. She picked up an oyster
shell and dropped it into the water.

The air smelled of salt and fish and motor oil.

“You know what this is like?” Dicey asked James. “It’s like Provincetown. Isn’t it?
It smells like it.”

“Yeah. What about our grandmother?”

“She lives seven miles out of town, on Landing Neck Road. She doesn’t have a telephone.”

“How do we get there?”

“I don’t know yet. But I thought . . . James, I want to go out there alone. Just in
case. I want you to stay here with the kids. And I’ll come back for you when I know.”

“Know what?”

“If it’s okay for us there.”

“I don’t like that, Dicey. What if you get in trouble?”

“Better just me than all of us, right? Will said we could call the Berlin police to
get him if we need help. So if I don’t come back then you can call him. Here’s the
money, for lunch and anything. Can you keep an eye on Maybeth and Sammy?”

“Yeah, but I don’t like it.”

“I’m in charge, James. Remember.”

“Okay. But . . . ”

Dicey gave him the money she had left, nine dollars. She
leaned over to talk to Maybeth and Sammy. “You do what James says. You hear?”

They both nodded.

“That’s all right then,” Dicey said. She stood up quickly and hurried away, without
looking back.

The business section of Crisfield lay next to the water, low buildings with big plate
glass windows. The business section crowded as close as it could to the bay and looked
out over the docks, as if that was where its real interest lay. Beyond that, residential
streets branched out, circling around the town itself.

There seemed to be three kinds of houses. There were lots of churches, even on the
one street Dicey followed out of town. These were mostly small stucco or clapboard
buildings with short steeples. Then, there were the usual narrow clapboard houses
on little handkerchief lawns, two stories high, two rooms wide. The third kind were
large wooden houses with broad porches that ran around the buildings; they had odd
shapes, round towers, octagonal bays, balconies. These houses had paint that had faded
and peeled. Often, their screens were ripped or doors hung askew. But they spoke clearly
of what they had once been: once they had been homes for large, rich families; once
the spiraled pillars that held up the veranda roofs had gleamed with white paint;
once the tall windows of the ground floors had opened into rooms crammed with plush
furniture and oriental rugs, and the large trees in the yards had swarmed with climbing
children. These were the kind of houses that might have treasures in the attic, or
ghosts in the cellar. These were the kinds of houses that could burst with life. Now
they rotted quietly, neglected, sad, but filled with mysterious memories.

Dicey walked on, walking fast. She turned at the second stop sign and found herself
on Landing Neck Road, in farm country,
where broad fields burgeoned with corn or barbed wire contained cows and horses, where
chickens and ducks wandered around the yards. The farmhouses sat next to the road,
quiet and clean, secretive.

How would she know if their grandmother’s house was safe for them? What questions
did you ask a person to find out if you could like one another? If she could be trusted?

Dicey’s sneakers made no noise on the roadway. No cars overtook her. There was no
sound at all, except the occasional distant barking of a dog or lowing of a cow. The
silence wrapped around her like a quilt, a silence made up of trees growing and corn
ripening, of the bright sky glowing and the distant water following its tides. This
was not an empty silence.

Six miles outside of town, Dicey came to the expected bend in the road. A low, one-story
white house looked out from a stand of pines. Behind it were stables. Two pastures,
where long-legged horses grazed, came next.

Half a mile down the road, Dicey saw the mailbox, dented, rusted, its post awry;
llerma
was all that remained of sloppily painted black letters. The little door hung open,
like a dog’s tongue. Two or three old leaves lay inside, and a plastic glass with
a straw sticking out of its cover.

Across the road, where the farm itself lay, overgrown fields stretched back to meet
a thick woods of pine trees, oaks and tall, topheavy loblollies. The fields had small
trees scattered over them, pine and maple saplings, and the grass was thick and tangled,
as tall as Dicey’s waist.

The driveway ran straight between the fields. It too was overgrown. You could barely
make out the ruts where car wheels would fit.

The sun had risen high into the sky. Dicey turned into the driveway, walking slowly
now, even reluctantly. She did not look
ahead, but at the ground before her feet. Abandoned, that was the word this farm said
to her.

She couldn’t even see the house until she had passed under the pines, walking now
on a thick carpet of needles that seemed never to have been disturbed. The air under
the pines was thick and shady.

The house sat behind a small orchard, and beyond it, a barn was slowly falling down.
The house was faded white clapboard, two stories high, and had a screened porch all
along the front that ran around the sides. The roof, gray slate, slanted down in four
directions from a central peak. Two chimneys stuck up through the roof.

The house was silent, vacant, neglected. Long weedy grass grew up, as high as the
porch floor. Honeysuckle spread over the screens of the porch, and its long fingers
reached for the trees in the yard. Most of the trees were short, heavily leaved. Some
had tiny apples growing on them. They had the rough bark of fruit trees.