Homecoming (38 page)

Dicey hurried into the room on the right. Here there were some small differences.
There was the same iron bedstead, and the quilt was multicolored, faded but still
cheerful with reds and blues and greens and yellows. The bureau and wardrobe had been
painted white. The desk and chair were plain wood. A picture hung on the wall, a childish
picture of a little boat sailing on blue water. Fish swam in the water, and crabs
ran about the sandy bottom. Gulls wheeled in the air and rode, with folded wings,
on the waves. Dicey snapped up the side shades and held the windows while Maybeth
put the braces under them. These windows looked to the barn. But the other two windows,
as she had hoped, gave out over the marsh and to the bay.

The last bedroom had a ruffled quilt and pictures of ladies in old-fashioned dresses
on the walls, pictures cut out of magazines and pasted on a white background. The
childish painter had put a picture on the wardrobe here too, of a castle and
town and a queen, wearing an impossibly tall crown, walking in the garden.

Dicey hurried to open the windows, one over the backyard, and two to the piney woods
that closed around the house.

She turned to Maybeth. “Well. This isn’t bad, is it?”

Maybeth smiled quietly.

“It’s only for a night. Let’s each take our own room. Which one do you think was Momma’s?”

“This one,” Maybeth said.

“Then you’ll sleep in this one. Okay?”

Maybeth nodded happily. They found the sheets in one of the front bedrooms and made
up the beds together, folding hospital corners, plumping up the pillows. For herself,
Dicey chose the other back bedroom, because it looked to the water.

There was nothing in any of the rooms to show that they had ever been lived in by
anyone. But they must have been lived in by the three children, Momma and her brothers.
None of their personalities had been left in the rooms, except for the two paintings
on the wardrobe doors, the lady cutouts, and the little picture of the boat.

None of the children had wanted to stay here. They had all left home, one way or another.
Except the one who had died, maybe. You couldn’t be sure. He might have wanted to
come back.

They went downstairs. Maybeth followed Dicey like a shadow. The kitchen was empty.
Their grandmother was out in one field, wearing a broad straw hat, picking tomatoes
into another of the bushel baskets.

“We can do that,” Dicey said, coming up behind her.

“And so can I,” she answered without looking up. “They’re coming in too fast. They
always do this time of year. Gotta start canning again. Can she pick beans?” She nodded
toward Maybeth, without looking at her.

“Can you?” Dicey asked Maybeth. Maybeth didn’t answer. “Sure, I guess so,” Dicey said.

“Over there then,” their grandmother said, jabbing with her head to another side of
the field. “Bring ’em back here to me. Take the biggest. You”—this to Dicey—“go into
the barn. There’s a bin of potatoes up against the far wall. Get as many as we need.
Keep your shoes on. I don’t know what-all’s on that floor.”

Hedges of honeysuckle—twisting, strangling vines—had grown over what must once have
been a split rail fence between the house and barn. The big barn door was pulled half
open. Bits had rotted out of the wood at the base of the door, as if someone had kicked
at it in unappeasable anger.

Dicey stood for a minute, letting her eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. A large
shape loomed in the center, and lofts lay in high darkness along both long walls.
She brushed cobwebs away, waiting until she could see enough to go on.

Empty stalls lined one side. The smell of dry hay was in the musty air. The center
shape grew smaller as she found her twilight vision. The thing seemed to hover in
the air above the packed dirt floor.

Something rustled in the lofts. Many things rustled there. Where the boards had fallen
away at the sides of the barn, honeysuckle grew in. Dicey stepped into the dim darkness.

The first thing to do was to define that shape. Whatever creatures were living in
the barn were probably more frightened of her than she would ever be of them, even
if they panicked and touched her.

Dicey approached the shape. It was something long, slightly curved, and resting in
a kind of saw-horse cradle. It was about shoulder height to her, with a flat back.

She approached it with her hands behind her back.

Dicey almost didn’t dare name it, even when she knew
what it was, even after she had raised herself onto tiptoe to peer inside and seen
there a long mast, tied down around the sides, surrounded by tangled ropes and projecting
over the bow.

A sailboat.

It was small, only fourteen or fifteen feet. It had an open cockpit, without any seats
in it. It had a slot in the center of the cockpit, beside which rested a long centerboard.

Dicey reached her hand into the cockpit. Cobwebs. She touched the long arm of the
tiller, resting against the stern. Where were the sails? Would it still float? Whose
boat was it?

She rushed to the back of the barn. There, three large bins had been built. She opened
one, and little creatures scurried at the bottom. The lid of the second revealed a
mound of potatoes. Dicey put her hand in. The potatoes had begun to sprout. Each eye
of the potato she held had knobbly, pale growth on it. But when she squeezed it with
her hand, it felt firm enough. Dicey took out a dozen potatoes. Of these, she selected
the seven largest (four kids and one woman, and James could eat two or three), cleaned
off the sprouts with her fingers and tossed the remaining five back into the bin.
Her arms were full of potatoes as she hurried back out of the barn.

Their grandmother was coming in from the field, carrying the basket. Maybeth trailed
behind her.

“There’s a boat in the barn,” Dicey cried.

“I know that. It’s been there for years. Don’t put those potatoes in the basket. Take
’em to the sink. Don’t you know potatoes have to be scrubbed?”

Dicey hurried ahead. She was so full of questions about the boat, she didn’t care
how her grandmother felt about them. She dumped the potatoes in the sink and turned
on the water.

Her grandmother put the basket on the table. She took a
china platter from the cupboard. “Can she take the ends off beans?” she asked Dicey,
referring to Maybeth.

“Sure,” Dicey said.

Maybeth stood across the table from her grandmother and snapped the ends off the green
beans. She worked carefully, wasting little of the vegetable, making a neat pile of
ends on the table before her. It was as if she knew how suspiciously the woman was
watching her.

“Whose boat is it?” Dicey asked.

“Mine,” the woman answered.

“I know that, but whose?” Dicey said.

“My boy built it,” their grandmother said. “He built it and he sailed it.”

“Where are the sails?” Dicey asked. She knew she shouldn’t be asking. “Will it still
float?”

“He kept them on the boat, up forward under the bow,” their grandmother said. “They’re
still there, far as I know. I don’t know if it’s seaworthy. It doesn’t concern you.”

Her voice was cold and final. Dicey, standing with her back to the room, the cool
water running over her hands as she scrubbed the dirt from potatoes, heard that coldness
and that finality. Her back stiffened. “Oh doesn’t it,” she said to herself. Here
was the place, a farm with plenty of room and plenty of work for them to do, and the
bay just beyond the marshes, and a sailboat in the barn. She wasn’t about to let this
grandmother keep them from it.

“I can hear what you’re thinking,” her grandmother said.

Dicey swiveled her head around to meet those dark hazel eyes, the sullen, angry eyes
she had seen in the photograph Aunt Cilla kept. Could her grandmother know what she
was thinking? And so what if she could?

“Maybe you can,” Dicey said, not dropping her glance. She’d think of a way. She’s
been thinking up ways to get them in and
out of trouble all summer long. As if she had been practicing for this occasion, warming
up for this last struggle. Her grandmother didn’t know Dicey. Her grandmother didn’t
know the kind of thinking and planning Dicey could do.

A fleeting expression that might have been unaccustomed mirth, or might have been
a twinge of pain, went across her grandmother’s face. For a second, the face came
alive around the eyes. Then it was all gone.

Dicey turned back to the sink. She didn’t want to be distracted. She had thinking
to do.

They had crabs for dinner. It had taken the boys a while to learn how to shake the
crabs out of the pots into the basket. The first pot they’d just opened, and the crabs
had fled sideways in a turbulence of muddy water. Sammy had tried to grab a couple
and been nipped for his pains.

“You should have seen them,” he cried, telling the story. His cheeks were pink and
his eyes shone. He was too pleased to let his grandmother’s stony silence quiet him
down. “They looked at the door and looked at us and then”—he thrust his arms straight
out and waggled his finger—“gone! I didn’t know things could go sideways so fast.
Boy are they smart.”

James spoke to their grandmother: “We closed the doors and set the traps back where
they were. Is that right?”

“Right enough. What did you use for bait?”

“I didn’t think,” James said. “What should we use?”

“Fish. You have to catch the fish.”

“Good-o,” Sammy said. “Can I go down after dinner? Do you have any line?”

“No point to it,” their grandmother said. She was checking the boiling water in a
huge pot on the stove. The potatoes were in the oven, the beans in a covered pan,
the table set with forks and a platter of sliced tomatoes and glasses of water.

“So what?” Dicey answered quickly. “I’ll go with you, Sammy. We like fishing,” she
said defiantly to her grandmother.

The woman didn’t answer, but instead lifted up the basket and poured the teeming mass
of crabs into the water. She slammed the lid down on top of them. You could hear them
scrambling around inside the metal pot, scrabbling up to escape the steam. Their grandmother
stood with one hand holding the lid down, staring at the children.

Maybeth ran out of the room. Dicey felt like following her—she could imagine how those
crabs felt, and she had had that feeling herself at times—but she wasn’t going to
back down before those eyes. So she stood, and pretty soon there was silence in the
pan. She knew they were all dead then.

They ate the crabs from a big plate in the middle of the table. They were served individual
plates with potato and beans on them. There was no butter for the potatoes, but there
was salt.

The Tillermans had never eaten crabs before. They learned how to rip off the legs
first, then lift back the top shell. Then you broke the crab in half, like a turnover,
and picked out the meat from between sections of cartilage. Each crab had two larger
chunks of meat in it, and an awful lot of stringy little pieces.

It was hard work getting full on the scraps of crabmeat. It took a time to get even
a mouthful ready, once you’d taken out the two chunks. But it was a good dinner for
talking at, if you wanted to talk. Everybody’s hands were busy, and almost nobody’s
mouth was full.

Their grandmother seemed to want to talk, or seemed to want them to talk. She asked
questions.

“Where’s your mother?” she asked. She sent the question out to the middle of the table,
as if she was asking the platter of crabs.

The children looked to Dicey.

“Momma’s in a mental hospital in Massachusetts,” Dicey said. “She doesn’t recognize
anybody. She doesn’t do anything. They don’t think she’s ever going to get well.”

“Who don’t think?” her grandmother asked.

“The doctors,” Dicey said.

“They don’t know,” Sammy said. “She might. Isn’t that right, Dicey?”

Dicey nodded.

“So you know better than the doctors,” his grandmother said to Sammy.

Sammy’s jaw went out and he didn’t answer.

“And you ran away from this silly chit in Bridgeport. You ran away from someone who
was willing to take you in and take care of you. Why’d you do that?”

They looked to Dicey again.

“It wasn’t right for us. Especially not for Sammy and Maybeth.”

“Because Maybeth’s retarded?”

The cruel question lay before them.

Dicey looked at Maybeth. Maybe she hadn’t understood. But she had. Well, that was
good because if she hadn’t understood that would mean maybe she really was retarded.
Maybeth’s eyes filled with tears.

“She’s not,” Dicey said.

“What is it? Can’t she speak for herself? Can’t you?” Her grandmother glared at Maybeth.
Maybeth sat staring at her lap. “Can’t you?”

“Yes,” Maybeth said softly.

Dicey fumed. She felt like throwing her plate at her grandmother.

“You keep out of this, girl,” her grandmother said. “You, Dicey.”

Maybeth looked up. Tears rolled out of her eyes, but she stayed at the table. “I don’t
think I am,” she said. “I don’t know just what it means, but if it’s such a bad thing
to be—why do you want to know?”

Their grandmother nodded once, briskly. She asked another question. “You do a lot
of running away. Where’s your father?”

“He’s been gone for years,” James said. James’s voice was tight. “Six years. Longer.
Since before Sammy.”

“I remember him,” their grandmother said.

“The police in Bridgeport tried to find him and couldn’t,” Dicey said.

“He was the kind of man who always sailed close to the wind,” their grandmother said.

“What does that mean?” James asked. “What do you mean? Did you know him?”

“He used to come around here, whenever he was in the area, when his ship was in Baltimore,”
their grandmother said.

“What was he like?” James asked. “Only Dicey remembers him—I don’t. What did he look
like?”

“Slim, dark-haired. He was a quick, nervous, darting kind of man. Not steady, but
lively. The kind who might cheat at cards if luck wasn’t running his way. And he’d
bet too much too, that would be his way. She should have come back here when he ran
out on her.”