Homecoming (39 page)

“She didn’t want to,” Sammy said.

“How do you know?” their grandmother said. Then, before he could answer, she said,
“What does it matter anyway?”

“Momma matters to me,” Sammy said, his chin stubborn.

“She went off and left you,” their grandmother said.

“She wanted to come back,” Sammy said.

“How do you know that,” their grandmother said. She didn’t ask it, she said it.

“Because she loved me. Didn’t she, Dicey?”

“Yes, she did. She loved all of us,” Dicey said.

“Humph,” their grandmother said, reaching for another crab.

The Tillermans had won that battle. Dicey knew it. She knew it as close to her bones
as she knew that Momma did always love them. Dicey tried not to grin. It didn’t do
to grin when there was still the whole war to win.

The children washed the dishes while their grandmother watched them and told them
where to put things away. When everything was finished, and Maybeth had scrubbed the
wooden tabletop with mild soap and a stiff brush, Dicey announced that they would
like to go down to the dock, to fish for crab bait and to swim.

“Can Sammy swim?” their grandmother asked.

“We can all swim. We were raised near the ocean,” Dicey said.

“Suit yourselves,” their grandmother said.

At the dock, they took turns fishing and swimming. They stripped down to their underwear
and dove into the quiet water. The bay had no waves and no undertows. It was as calm
as a swimming pool. You could swim miles in this quiet water.

Dicey swam out, away from land, in a slow crawl. Her mind was working fast. There
was a way, if only she could see it. Sammy and James took the few bony fish they had
caught and baited the crab traps. Maybeth jumped off the dock into the water, then
climbed back onto the dock to jump again. When she hit the water, waves surged up
around her and the water she sprayed out turned golden in the setting sun.

Evening fell across the water, toward them. The sky turned twilight purple. A molten
pink band flowed across the horizon, where the sun had been.

The children dashed back to the house, trying to outrun the
mosquitoes that swarmed up from the marshlands. Their grandmother sat in the same
chair in the kitchen. They wished her good night, and she nodded her head but said
nothing to them.

Dicey showed James and Sammy the rooms they could have. She unpacked the toothbrushes
and toothpaste and comb into the bathroom. She put each one’s underwear and clean
clothes into his own room.

They gathered in Sammy’s room, the one with the picture of Indians on the wardrobe,
and sat on his bed. “What’re we going to do tomorrow?” James asked Dicey.

“I dunno yet, James,” she said. “She doesn’t want us to stay. She said so.”

“Well, neither do I,” Sammy announced. He was in bed but sitting up. His hair was
damp. “Even if it is fun.”

“What about you, James?” Dicey asked. “People say she’s crazy.”

“Crazy like a fox,” James said. He dismissed that question, without hesitation. “It
would be okay here. It’s sure big enough.”

“Maybeth?”

Maybeth didn’t answer. She looked down at her hands and across at Sammy. “You want
to,” she said to Dicey. “Don’t you?”

“
That
we’ll talk about in the morning,” Dicey said. “How about a song, how about Peggy-O.”

They sang softly, in case it might bother their grandmother, sitting alone downstairs
at the empty kitchen table.

D
icey woke herself up early the next morning, before the first gray signals of dawn,
when the air outside lay black over fields, marshes and the glistening water she could
just see from her window. For a time, she sat by the window and thought out the plan
she had gone to sleep considering.

It all depended on what their grandmother was really like, inside herself where she
was who she really was. Not outside. Dicey knew about the difference between outside
and inside.

You could assume that everybody wasn’t just the way they seemed. The question was,
in what way was their grandmother not what she seemed. Did she really want the Tillermans
to go away?

Dicey was sure that she didn’t want the Tillermans to stay. But Dicey wasn’t sure
she wanted them to go away. Their grandmother was a Tillerman too, which made everything
contradictory. If she wanted the Tillermans to go, then she wanted herself to go—in
a contradictory way this was true. Dicey’s job was to see through the contradictions
and find out where they made sense together.

Why had their grandmother gone outside to the back when Dicey knocked? She could have
stayed inside and not been found. Why had she asked all those questions at dinner?
Cousin Eunice’s letter would have explained about Momma. And what
did she mean when she said to Dicey that she knew what Dicey was thinking? Unless
it was what she herself was thinking.

Besides, their grandmother had taken the boat to town to find James and Maybeth and
Sammy. That was something she wouldn’t have done if she’d really wanted them to go
away.

Maybe their grandmother didn’t know just what she wanted. Or maybe she didn’t really
want anything, except to be left alone. Four kids, they were an awful bother. Cousin
Eunice said so, again and again. And an expense.

Dicey could manage the bother and they’d figure out a way to cover the expenses. She
was sure they could do that. They could leave their grandmother pretty much alone.
It was the place Dicey wanted, the big house, the acres of farmland, the barn, the
water and the boat. It didn’t have anything to do with the woman.

The sky lightened. Over in the east, behind the house, the last star would be fading
as the sun surged up. Above the marshes, a pale quarter moon waited in a light blue
sky, with mares’ tails clouds brushing against it. Time to get moving.

Dicey woke James and Sammy and Maybeth. They all met in Dicey’s room over the kitchen,
so that any noise they made wouldn’t waken their grandmother. Dicey explained her
plan:

“We have to get started on something useful before she wakes up. That way, she’ll
keep us here today. Or if she tells us to go, we can say we will, as soon as we finish
the job.”

“But—” James said.

“But what?”

“What if she means it?”

“She does mean it,” Dicey said. “That’s the trouble, isn’t it? I figure, if we get
her to put it off she’ll get used to us and forget that she wants us to go away. We
pretend we’re not even thinking about staying here. But every day we do something
that needs to be done so it’s worth her while to keep us.”

“She could call the police,” James said.

“She doesn’t have a phone. But if she does then we will go, I promise. If she really
means it. Can’t you tell? She doesn’t want us to stay, but she doesn’t want us to
go, either.”

“I don’t think she likes me,” Sammy said.

“That doesn’t matter, Sammy. It’s not her I’m thinking about. It’s us.”

“She’s mean,” Sammy said. “She’s not like Momma at all.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Dicey repeated. “Besides, she’s not really mean, not like Mr.
Rudyard. Is she?”

“How do you know?” Sammy demanded.

“Remember when James took that money?” Maybeth asked him. “Remember how Dicey’s face
got all red and hot and she told us we had to go, and she told James he had to obey.
Remember? That was like our grandmother. Mr. Rudyard was cold.”

Sammy subsided. Dicey took advantage of the moment to announce their project for the
day: honeysuckle.

They dressed quietly, used the bathroom quickly and tiptoed down the stairs into the
dark hall. The kitchen lay in shadows.

They began with the honeysuckle growing up around the front porch. It had formed a
massed wall that wove around itself and clung to itself with tiny tendrils. The tendrils
looped and looped around anything that would hold them up.

The Tillermans had no plan. They just reached into the plants and pulled. The honeysuckle
vines emerged in long stringers, unwoven from the mass.

By the time the sun had risen and only the shadow of the paper mulberry tree kept
an early morning coolness over the yard, they had a large mound of honeysuckle branches
at the foot of the lawn. Dicey didn’t know how they were going to get rid of it. In
some patches, she could see the screen on the porch, but they hadn’t gotten a quarter
of the growth yet.
Maybe it would burn, but she doubted that; it was lush summer growth, tensile vines
and green leaves.

“I’m hungry,” James said. “This is going to take all day.”

“I hope so,” Dicey grunted, jerking back on a fat vine. “Anyway, let’s see what there
is to eat.”

They trooped around the side of the house and across the porch. At the kitchen door,
they stopped. Their grandmother was up. She was at the stove, making pancakes on a
griddle so large it covered two burners on the stove. She turned around when she heard
them coming in.

“Wash your hands. I see that you don’t make your beds.”

“I’ll do that,” Dicey offered.

“No, you’ll each do your own,” their grandmother said. She turned her back on them.
She was wearing another shapeless blouse over another long, shapeless skirt. Her feet
were bare and clean. She had set the table.

When the children sat down, two platters of pancakes waited for them. There was no
syrup or butter, but quart jars of strawberry jam were set out. Their grandmother
didn’t say a word. She just served herself two pancakes and spread jam over them.

The pancakes looked normal, but they tasted curiously flat. The jam, however, was
delicious and the children ate with good appetites.

Finally their grandmother spoke. “I like that honeysuckle.” She looked at Dicey.

Dicey’s heart sank.

“That honeysuckle’s been there a long time. It’s the kind of tenacious plant I have
to respect,” their grandmother said.

“Honeysuckle is parasitic,” James announced. “It can be trained and kept back, but
when allowed to proliferate without controls, it chokes out other growth. It’s begun
to climb over the small trees out front.”

His grandmother studied him. James ignored her and slathered jam on his seventh pancake.

“Where’d you learn a word like proliferate?” she asked him. His mouth was full so
he couldn’t answer. “The honeysuckle will take you all day, at least,” their grandmother
said.

Nobody answered. Dicey tried to look unconcerned with what her grandmother would say
next.

“You can’t just leave those vines piled up. They have to go out on the marsh,” was
what she said.

Dicey chewed hard, to keep herself from smiling. This was just a skirmish, not even
a real battle. She looked up to meet her grandmother’s eyes and swallowed hastily.

After the dishes were washed and the beds made, the children went back outside. The
temperature had gone up and they stripped down to just their shorts. This meant that
as they pulled the vines or piled them up they got mightily scratched, all over their
arms and chests and legs, but it was cooler.

They sang as they worked, sometimes in harmony, sometimes all singing melody.

Dicey showed Maybeth how to wrap a long vine around her arm and pull back on it, with
all her weight, taking the strain in her shoulder. Sammy used both his hands. Half
the time he jerked so hard that he fell over backward.

The overgrowth gradually gave way to a thin layer of the oldest, thickest vines. These
had to be worked out of the screen netting, because if you pulled hard on them, the
screen ripped out.

As they stood, patiently unravelling coiled tendrils, Dicey began to sing the song
about the wide river and the small boat. She liked the way the melody held its notes
and lingered over its phrases. This was a song they all sang together, but each of
them sang it his own way, holding the notes and words he liked best.

The voice came from behind them: “Where’d you hear that song?”

They turned, wiping back sweat-dampened hair. Their grandmother had a cantaloupe cut
up into thick slices. She had arranged the slices on a metal cookie sheet.

“Momma sang it,” James answered her. “Is that for us?”

“I don’t have lemons for lemonade,” she said. “Don’t have milk, eggs, butter—it’s
melons or nothing.”

“Melons are fine, thanks,” Dicey said quickly.

“Did you sing to our momma?” Maybeth asked.

“I don’t recall,” their grandmother said. She walked away from them, back around the
house.

The children ignored her and fell upon the melons. As they sat and ate, Dicey looked
at what they had accomplished. “We can finish the front and clear away around the
trees. Then we’ll eat lunch, okay?”

They agreed.

“And after that we’ll move that pile of vines down to the marsh. I guess it might
be safe to burn them there. And after that—how does a long swim sound?”

A long swim sounded fine.

When they went into the kitchen for lunch, their grandmother was not there. They couldn’t
call out to her, because they didn’t know what name they were supposed to use. It
sounded funny to say “Mrs. Tillerman,” and it sounded just as funny to say “Grandmother.”
Dicey knocked on the closed door of the downstairs bedroom, but there was no answer.

Because Dicey didn’t feel right about going into the refrigerator or the pantry, they
ate tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden. As soon as they were finished, they jumped
up to carry huge armloads of tangled vines out to the marsh. Dicey decided that the
pile should be a good way into the marsh, but next to the
path so they didn’t have to tramp through the wet grasses. It made quite a hill, big
enough to slide down if it had been hay.

Dicey didn’t want to light a fire without checking with their grandmother. She didn’t
feel sure of what would happen when the leaves caught. So they left the vines and
ran down to the water, single-file along the narrow path.

They tossed their shorts and sneakers on the end of the dock and leaped into the water.
It was cool and cleansing. It washed the sweat off their bodies. They stretched muscles
that were taut and tired from pulling and carrying. Dicey swam underwater, looking
at the muddy bottom. The water soaked through her hair and cooled her head. She rolled
and floated under water, as if she were a piece of seaweed.