Sons from Afar (2 page)

“I do.”

“Not even once.”

“He did me, I guess. I don't remember. Dicey remembers—but even Dicey was just a little kid the last time she probably saw him. I might as well never have had a father.”

“Considering that he blew the scene before I was born, I'd say I didn't have one. So, why worry about him?”

“Haven't you ever heard of genes and chromosomes? Heredity?”

“Don't talk to me like I'm stupid.”

“Look,” James began, leaning forward.

“I can't look. I'm working,” Sammy pointed out. “It's too dark to see anyway.”

“We all have the same eyes,” James went on, ignoring what Sammy said, because it wasn't to the point. The point was heredity. “The particular tones and colors vary, but they're all hazel, because of dominant genes. We've got Tillerman eyes, that's the way genetics work. Have you heard of Mendel's laws of heredity?”

James didn't think Sammy would have, but he waited a minute, anyway, before going on, in case his brother had anything to say.

“Mendel discovered genetics. He worked with beans. To discover what laws inherited characteristics are governed by.”

“What kind of beans? Green beans or pole beans? Lima beans?”

“Don't be ridiculous. What does it matter what kind of beans?”

“I don't know what any of it matters.”

“Because of the law of dominance,” James explained patiently. “Because you get one gene—for eye color, for example—from
each one of your parents. So there are two genes for eye color. If they're different, one of them will be dominant, and that's the color eyes you'll have.”

“Very educational.” Sammy shifted his position, sliding into the boat and hunkering down low next to the backseat, careful to not clunk his shoulder on the motor. The bottom of the bailer scraped along the wooden floor of the boat. Sammy was almost done, which was lucky because it was almost full dark. James continued explaining genetics to his brother.

“So all of our physical characteristics are inherited, according to Mendel's laws. But it's not just physical characteristics. Maybe. That's one thing I'm wondering about. It's like—mental characteristics, too. You know, intelligence, right or left brain dominance, maybe even aptitudes.”

Sammy was looking at him, but he wasn't really listening.

“Integrity, aggression, whether you're an extrovert or an introvert, whether you're psychologically stable or have a tendency to mental disease, like schizophrenia, maybe that kind of thing too,” James went on. “Nobody knows for sure just how much is encoded in DNA, they keep finding out more about it, so it could be that character traits as well are inherited.”

“So what?” Sammy stood up. He dropped the bailer into the bottom of the boat. Reaching up, because the boat sat low on a low tide, he hauled himself onto the dock.

James gave up trying to explain to Sammy, who didn't care about anything that wasn't right under his nose. Intellectual curiosity, that was what Sammy didn't have.

“Thanks for all the help,” Sammy said, sarcastic. He stood next to James, but looking out to where the dark bay moved under the dark sky.

James kept his mind on the important thing. “I mean, we don't even know what color his eyes were. Or are.”

“Whose?”

“Our father's.”

“What does the color of his eyes matter?”

“We don't know anything. We might even be orphans.”

“Come on, James,” Sammy turned to him. “How can we be orphans? We had Momma. And—cripes—we've got mothers coming out our ears, between Gram and Dicey and even Maybeth.” That idea made him laugh and James had to smile, too, in the darkness.

“Yeah, I know, but—”

“Why are you getting hung up on that now?” Sammy asked.

“I don't know,” James said truthfully. “I've just been wondering about him.”

“Seems to me the last thing we need is a father.” Sammy sat down. His legs hung over the edge of the dock. “Besides, I thought you had a big algebra test tomorrow, and a history report to work on.”

James didn't answer. Sammy didn't mind. He lay back and looked at the sky. The stars were coming out, little pale pinpricks of light. He knew they weren't really coming out, that they'd been burning away out in the darkness of space all day long; but it looked like they were coming out, like flowers coming into bloom. Sammy had his head against the stiff splintery boards of the dock, and he was looking out into space so deep it might as well be endless. He thought it would be great to explore space: sailing out among the stars, discovering . . . you couldn't even begin to imagine what you might discover. If there were huge winds that blew across the vast empty reaches, and your ship had a big metal sail . . . but he didn't think there were space winds. He could ask James, but he didn't want to. “I'm good at math and science, I could be an astronaut,” he said to the stars.

“I thought you were going to play tennis,” James answered.

“I'll do both,” Sammy said. The sky turned darker, and darker still. The stars burned white, making the sky look crowded. You could put a tennis court in a spaceship; the ship would have to be large, anyway, and people would have to have something to do, to fill in the vast stretches of time, and to keep in shape. “Why shouldn't I do both?”

“Because they're both careers for young men—too short-lived,” James's voice informed him. “Be practical.”

That was pretty funny, coming from James, Sammy thought. Now James was getting going on being a lawyer and Sammy was letting his brother's words blow away on the wind. He'd heard it all before, about a 4.0 average so you could get a scholarship to a good college; about the right major, something to do with history or political science, to prepare you for the three-year course in law school; about the best schools and the scholarships they offered to the best students. After that, the voice went on—Sammy had heard it all before—you just chose how you wanted to make your money. Government work was secure but paid the least. If you did corporate law, working for a big corporation, you earned big bucks but the job wasn't that secure. Or you could work for a law firm, criminal law or property law, or handling wills and estates. You could do whatever you wanted, whatever you were good at, in a law firm, as you worked your way up to being a partner and taking a percentage of the firm's earnings. With a law degree you could even go into politics—although Sammy couldn't see anybody voting for James. He didn't think
he
would.

“International law, international banking law,” James's voice said. “I think I'd be good at that.”

“I wouldn't,” Sammy said. “I wouldn't like something where you didn't do anything.”

James sputtered and Sammy was afraid he'd start explaining about how important banking was, but he didn't.

James had heard the boredom in Sammy's voice and reminded himself that Sammy was still young, still just a kid, only twelve. “What about
your
homework?” he asked.

“What I don't get done tonight I can finish on the bus.” James shrugged: Sammy just didn't care about grades. He just didn't know how important they were; he didn't care about knowing things either.

“You know,” Sammy's voice said, “it always looks like the stars are coming out, even though they aren't.”

“They're really suns,” James told him. He looked up at the sky then. It was black, silky black, with no moon yet so the suns burned clear out there. James picked out the constellations he knew: Orion, by his belt, he could always always find Orion; the big dipper, like a geometric figure, like a rhomboid; the little dipper, a smaller rhomboid, his eyes searched it out. Then the North Star, Polaris. The Pleiades, the sisters, crowded together, the seventh sister burning faintly. “Every one of them is a sun, a mass of burning gases. Do you know how hot the sun burns?”

“So what,” Sammy's uninterested voice said.

“Neither do I,” James admitted. He used to know, but he'd forgotten. Sammy's laugh sounded friendly. “Tell you a story,” James offered. “You want to hear a story?” Sammy always liked being told stories.

“Good-o.”

James identified the story's source, first. “This is from Greek mythology. There was an inventor, named Daedalus, a famous inventor. Everybody knew about him. So when King Minos of Crete wanted a labyrinth built—a maze—where he'd keep his son, the Minotaur, in the middle—”

“I remember the Minotaur,” Sammy interrupted. “It was in my book of monsters. It was half man, half bull.”

“Yeah. So Minos hired Daedalus to design and build this
labyrinth. Daedalus took his son Icarus with him to Crete. But when the job was finished, Minos kept them prisoners in a high tower.”

“Why?”

“Because they knew how to get out of the maze and Minos wanted that to be a secret. In the tower, they had to haul their food up in baskets, and they had candles for light. The only things that could get into the tower were birds. They were prisoners there for a long time. There was no way to escape, but Daedalus figured out a way. See, when the birds flew in they'd shed their feathers. So he and Icarus collected the feathers. They stuck them together with wax, to make huge wings. When they had enough—it must have taken years—they were ready to fly out, away, to fly free. Before they left, Daedalus warned Icarus that he shouldn't fly too close to the sun, because the heat of it would melt the wax that was holding the wings together. But Icarus didn't pay attention. Or he forgot, maybe. Because when they were out and flying, he went up, and up, until the heat was too great. His wings fell apart and he fell—he fell out of the sky into the ocean. He drowned.” James never could tell a story the way it should be told; when he told it, he could hear it sound like a series of facts, like a history book, not like a story.

“I can see why he did that,” Sammy said. “If you could really fly, you'd always want to go higher, once you started flying. Wouldn't you?”

Not if he'd been warned against it he wouldn't, James thought, and explained why. “He should have listened to his father. His father knew.”

“That's an interesting story, even if the air actually gets colder as you go higher, even if they'd need more than wax. Even if—” Sammy sat up suddenly. “Okay, James, what is it? You figure that if we had a father he could tell us what we should do?”

“We have a father,” James said. Now that Sammy was willing to talk about it, and they were facing one another, James wasn't sure he really wanted to talk. He looked over Sammy's shoulder to the night sky.

“You know what I mean,” Sammy said. James guessed he did. “What would a father do, anyway?”

“Fathers are—like a constant,” James tried to explain. “They're always there, they don't change, they know how things go, they have experience, or knowledge, anyway, they're pretty wise—so they can help you decide.”

“Not ours. Not our father.”

“You sound angry.” James thought maybe he shouldn't have brought the subject up.

“When I think about him, I am,” Sammy said. “I mean, you don't go around just starting babies and—ignoring them. Abandoning them. Or their mother, either.”

“That's what our father did,” James pointed out. “We don't know anything about him. Not anything. We should know about him.”

“We do,” Sammy's voice insisted.

“No, we don't. We don't
know
—although, if fathers take responsibility—you know, keep you safe?—because they're bigger and stronger like ‘my-daddy-can-beat-up-your-daddy'—and help you out of trouble.” James made himself draw the logical conclusion: “If that's what fathers do, ours is pretty much of a bust.”

“You can say that again.”

“But maybe he didn't have a chance, or something. We don't know.”

“You mean maybe he died?”

“He could have. We don't know anything about him. Nobody would even know to tell us if he was dead and couldn't have taken care of us anyway.”

“But what difference would that make?” Sammy asked. James waited while Sammy worked it out. “Do you mean a father would be on your side? Like the Professor and Jeff, like the Professor is on Jeff's side? Like, the way the Professor knows what Jeff means, or what he wants.”

“Or what you needed, and he'd want you to have that.”

“Do you think Momma might not have died, if we'd had one?” That thought got Sammy up onto his feet.

“I dunno about that, Sammy.” James kept emotion out of his voice. The trouble with Sammy was, when he did care, he never stopped. He cared too much. “It doesn't do any good to think about that. You can't change what's happened.”

They didn't say anything then, for a while. Sammy lay down on his back again. James moved down the dock, lifting his backside carefully to be sure not to get splinters, and tried his brother's position. His calves dangled down over the water and the boards were uncomfortable against the shoulder bones in his back. That was the place where wings would be attached, if you had a pair of huge wings attached to you, if your father had designed a pair of wings made out of feathers and wax so you could escape. The wind flowed over the water, over the two of them, over the marsh grasses and into the pine trees. The noises of the wind rippling the water and echoing in James's ears, the wind running along the tops of the grass and then tangling itself up in the thick-growing pines—sometimes, what really scared James was the sense that he was being blown along on some wind, and he couldn't do anything about it.

“I thought, maybe we could try to find him. Or find out something about him,” James said.

“Why?”

“Aren't you even curious? I mean, especially if they're right about how much we inherit from our parents, what Mendel discovered
about dominant and recessive genes—don't you want to know?”