Homecoming (44 page)

Dicey couldn’t see her face, but her voice sounded pleasant enough.

“I’ve written to your cousin. We have to wait and see what she answers. You’ll stay
here until then. I’ll mail the letter Tuesday. We’re going to town Tuesday, for food
and to talk to the people at the school. What grade are you in?”

“Going into eighth,” Dicey said. “But why?”

“Do you know how long it’ll take that dithering woman to get advice from all the people
she talks to and arrange to come and get you? You may, but I don’t. Children should
be in school. School starts Tuesday, or so James tells me and I have no reason to
disbelieve him. Those bikes will give some trouble—I have no idea how to ship bicycles
and I won’t have them here, rusting in the barn.”

“What if we don’t want to go back to Bridgeport?” Dicey asked.

“First we find out if you can. For today, while the bread is rising, we might go take
a look at Janes Island. It’s all marsh and you can’t land there. Don’t know why they
call it an island.”

“Where are the little kids?” Dicey asked.

“Down by the dock, bailing out the boat.
They
have all agreed.
They
want to see the island.” Her hands slapped at the bread. She poked at it with a finger,
then began kneading it again. “I told them, what you wanted me to. Sammy”—she shook
her head and slapped the dough down on the table—“he said I was lying and he said
he didn’t care. Then he said he was sorry, he knew I wasn’t lying, but he still didn’t
care. Maybeth didn’t say a word. But James—he told Sammy he did care, and if it was
what your momma wanted then that was okay with him because she might have been crazy
in some ways but she was never crazy when it came to loving her kids. I asked him
where he got ideas like that and he looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘From
books.’ ” She laughed briefly. “Yes, I told them, I also told them they ought to think
twice before they held that lie against you.”

Dicey ran down to the dock. The bay was lively, with crisp-topped blue waves under
a steady breeze. Her family had bailed out the boat and now they were swimming.

“What’s going on, James?” Dicey called. He swam over to her.

“I dunno, Dicey. We’ll be here a little longer, that’s all I know.”

“We’re going to an island!” Sammy called. “It’s okay about Momma. She didn’t want
to get married. Did you know?” Dicey nodded.

They motored over to the stretch of marshland just off the town shore. There, they
dropped an anchor on the bay side. Birds lived on Janes Island, but nothing else could.
One snowy heron soared down, folding its wings in at the last minute, returning to
its nest deep in the marsh grass. A few ducks wandered along the muddy shore, in and
out of the tall grasses. They saw flocks of gulls, gossiping, bickering, bobbling
on the waves, flying in noisy swarms.

Their grandmother had packed a bag of fruit and some cold crab, left over from yesterday’s
lunch. As they ate, she asked them about their travelings, so James and Dicey took
turns telling her. “Well,” she kept saying. And, “That was a piece of luck.” She didn’t
ask them about Bridgeport.

Back at the farm, Dicey took Sammy to the barn to begin patching, while James and
Maybeth rode their bikes up and down the driveway. “You don’t have to do that,” their
grandmother said to Dicey.

“I know,” she said.

The patched places showed up bleak against the wasted pink paint of the barn. They
would hold, Dicey knew; they had been nailed into place firmly and the edges were
sealed against the weather. If she’d had time, she would have liked to paint the whole
barn. Just so there would be something here to say, “Dicey Tillerman stayed here awhile
and she made a difference.” Dicey
figured they had a week, maybe two, before they had to go back to Bridgeport, to the
little house and the fussing and fretting. She planned to enjoy the time and not worry
about the future. Her grandmother seemed to feel the same way. It was as if now everything
was decided, they could both relax.

So they passed two quiet days, hammering, bike riding (except Sammy), swimming, weeding,
picking, fixing the mailbox—just living together. In the evenings, they went onto
the back porch or into the living room. Their grandmother found an old checkers set,
somewhere deep in a closet. Maybeth picked out tunes on the piano. Some of the songs
they sang, the songs Momma had sung, their grandmother knew. Some of them she had
to learn, and she wasn’t very good at it.

Yet, the feelings in the air were not all placid. Dicey disagreed with her grandmother
whenever she thought her grandmother was being unfair. “Ah-ummm,” she would say, because
they still had no name to call their grandmother, “Cousin Eunice tried to do her best.
Sure she’s silly, but that’s not her fault, is it?”

“Well, whose fault is it then?” their grandmother would answer sharply. “If it’s not
her own fault for what she’s like, I’d like to know whose fault it is.”

“Okay,” Dicey would say, giving ground because privately she thought her grandmother
was right, “but she’s not bad.”

“Who mentioned bad?” their grandmother would say. “James? Did I? Maybeth, did I say
bad? I said silly and I meant silly.” Their grandmother would rush on before they
could answer. “And there’s an end on it.”

“Dicey’s the one who said silly,” James would say.

“Aha!” their grandmother would say. “I told you, Dicey, it’s all your fault.”

Then Dicey would swallow her disappointment and enjoy this temporary haven. For these
two days, she stopped thinking
ahead. She learned how to put the bandage on Maybeth’s arm, which Maybeth said was
better, but their grandmother said should be supported for two full weeks, especially
since Maybeth was riding her bike so much.

They took one long ride, James and Dicey and Maybeth. They saw several farmhouses.
Some of them had cows and horses. All of them had chickens. Most of them had fields
of corn and tomatoes.

Dicey made herself stop thinking about the sailboat in her grandmother’s barn. That
was to have been the prize, her prize, if they had stayed. She wouldn’t go near it
now. She knew that if she did she’d begin planning again, and she’d get it down to
the water, somehow. Once the boat was in the water, they could take it away and sail
south, and hide. But they didn’t have any place left to go to. She had been beaten
this time, down to her bones beaten. She had fought her hardest and her smartest,
and she had lost. She could take that, and she could understand the whys of it. But
not if the boat was in the water, and the sails fitted to the mast, and the wind blowing
little clouds along the sky. So she shut the sailboat out of her mind, just as she
shut out hoping and caring and the disappointment that waited for her to relax her
guard so it could leap out and get its teeth into her. She just lived through the
hours, taking them as they came, knowing they would never come again.

O
n Tuesday morning, their grandmother started another batch of bread, then told them
to take baths and put on fresh shorts and shirts. When the children came downstairs,
their grandmother was waiting in the kitchen. She had combed her curly hair with water,
but it wouldn’t lie flat. She was wearing a dark blue suit, with her blouse tucked
in, and lipstick, stockings and loafers.

“You’re all dressed up,” Dicey said.

“It’s old,” her grandmother said. “But I’m old. Or do you mean the shoes? I hope you
children appreciate what I’m going through for you.” But she said that as if it was
a joke.

“I don’t care if you have bare feet,” Sammy said, very serious.

“Neither do I,” his grandmother said, “but there are them that do.”

Maybeth stood shyly beside Dicey. “You look different,” she said to the woman. “Pretty.”

Their grandmother blushed. The dark red came up under her tanned cheeks. “I’ll be
getting vain the next thing you know. And that’s a vice I never had. Let’s go.” She
picked up a worn black purse from the table. “I’m bound to leave this behind somewhere.
Keep an eye on it, somebody. James, you’re reliable, will you?”

“I’ll try,” James said.

The wind blew their carefully combed hair all out of order, and the salt spray covered
their bodies, so they arrived at the dock looking as they ordinarily did, except their
grandmother. She led them down the main street, and then down a side street, to a
long, low building that had windows over most of its walls.

Inside, the air was noisy with children’s voices. The halls were made of white-painted
concrete blocks. A long dim, windowless hallway went down the center of the building,
with classrooms on both sides. It smelled like a school, of chalk and children’s sweat,
and warm food from the lunchroom. A teacher told their grandmother where the registration
office was. The sign over the door said
Guidance.
In the tiny office, they found a fat young woman seated behind a big wooden desk.

“My name is Abigail Tillerman,” their grandmother announced. “These children will
be in Crisfield temporarily and they ought to be in school until they go back. What’s
your name?”

Their grandmother sounded nervous.

“Mrs. Jenkins,” the woman said. “I’m the guidance counselor.” She told them to come
in and sit down. The room was so crowded with filing cabinets and plants and her big
desk, there was room only for two straight chairs for visitors. Dicey and her grandmother
sat in those. James and Maybeth and Sammy crowded into the corners of the room.

“What do you mean by temporarily?” Mrs. Jenkins asked.

“For a short time. I’m not sure how long exactly,” their grandmother said. “If I could
tell you I would.”

Mrs. Jenkins asked their names and ages, and Dicey told her. She asked for their address,
and Dicey looked at her grandmother, who told Mrs. Jenkins. Mrs. Jenkins asked what
the last school they had been in was; her grandmother looked at Dicey, and Dicey told
her.

“Parents?” Mrs. Jenkins asked.

“Not noticeably,” their grandmother said. James gave a short snort of laughter.

“What then is your relationship to them, Mrs. Tillerman? I assume you will be responsible
for them while they are attending school here.”

“I am their mother’s mother,” their grandmother said.

Mrs. Jenkins looked at her for a long moment. Dicey watched her write down,
grandmother.

“All right then. I will call the Provincetown school to have your records sent to
us. I think it would be well to do that now, before we assign the children to classes.
Would you like to walk around the school for a bit? Come back, in half an hour, I
think.”

They trooped out of the office. All the classroom doors were closed, so they went
outside. The playground was a huge field of short grass. Scattered over it were jungle
gyms and tall swings, sandboxes, slides and a baseball diamond. It was empty now,
with the children inside. The equipment gleamed, as if it had never been played on.

“It looks brand-new,” Dicey said. “The whole school does.”

“I should think it is,” her grandmother said. Sammy and Maybeth ran off to the swings.

“Who pays for it?” Dicey asked.

“Me,” her grandmother said.

Dicey stared at her.

“Taxes, girl.”

“Do you pay taxes?”

“Indeed I do. Taxes on land, taxes on my house, death taxes, life taxes. I even pay
taxes on the money I keep in the bank.”

Dicey hadn’t known that. “No wonder you’re worried about money,” she said.

“But with a farm, there must be ways to get money,” James said. “Did you ever think
of growing trees?”

His grandmother just looked at him.

“No, Christmas trees, on those front fields. There are pine seedlings already there.”

Dicey chimed in. “It shouldn’t be hard to grow them and people always buy Christmas
trees. Even we did, in Provincetown.”

“Why should anyone buy what they can walk outside and cut down for free?”

“In many places,” James said, as if he were talking to somebody a little stupid, “like
Annapolis—there they can’t just walk outside and cut down a tree.”

“How would I get trees to Annapolis?”

“There must be ways.” He dismissed that problem. “You could earn money that way. Or
you could sell land—”

“No,” their grandmother said.

“Or chickens—why don’t you have chickens? A lot of other farms do.”

“I don’t care for the company of chickens.”

“Maybe,” James said. He leaned toward her, earnestly trying to explain his ideas.
“But you can sell eggs. You could sell some of your vegetables, too, if you had a
stand out front by the driveway. Or you could rent out your fields to some other farmer
who wants more land. Or butter.” His ideas dashed on. “People will pay for good butter,
won’t they? You’d need cows, but you’ve already got stalls in the barn. What about
pigs?”

Their grandmother was looking at him, with a contradictory expression, half amusement
and half interest.

“You’ve got to be careful with money and earn it whenever you can,” Dicey said.

Her grandmother shook her head, as if Dicey didn’t know
what she was talking about. Maybe she didn’t, Dicey thought. But maybe she did.

“I know what you’re thinking, girl,” her grandmother said.

“Then you know I might be right,” Dicey answered.

Her grandmother humphed.

“She is,” James said. “With inflation, and if you’re on fixed income—you could lose
the farm if you can’t pay taxes.”

“Could you?” Dicey asked. “Could that happen?”

“What’s that to you?” her grandmother demanded.

“I guess nothing. But if we can’t be there I want you to be. So it matters something.
And you can’t change that.”

Her grandmother humphed again.

When they returned to Mrs. Jenkins’s office, the counselor was waiting for them. She
had papers on her desk, and a pad with notes all over it. She waited until they were
all in, all five of them, before she said anything.