Sons From Afar

  “Open the door and let it go,” he called forward. “We’ve got to get back, and pretty fast.” The wind was rising. Robin was having trouble keeping balance as the boat bucked under them.

  “I can’t keep it?”

  Sammy shook his head. Robin wanted to ask again, but Sammy shook his head again. Robin obeyed. He shook the trap out over the water until the downside door opened. The big crab, almost as if he didn’t trust this trick either, clung for a minute, one of his pincers locked around a strand of metal. Then the boat dipped down into the trough of a wave and water splashed up onto the crab, which let go and fell free.

  Robin returned to the middle seat and Sammy opened the throttle. The nose of the boat rose up as they bounced their way home. The wind was against them, the waves were against them, and heavy spray splashed up wildly. Spray rained down over them, cold and wet. Robin’s hair strung down along the side of his face. Sammy’s cheeks stung and his left shoulder was soaked. It was almost dangerous out there, and they looked at one another to laugh out loud together at the wildness of it.

  CHAPTER 16

  Sammy leaned his elbows on the table and rested his chin on the palm of a hand. He yawned. After the confusion of the afternoon, of feelings and thoughts, of weather and people, it was good to sit in his own kitchen, warm, dry, his stomach full. He saw that Maybeth hadn’t taken more than a couple of bites of her cake. “Can I finish that?” he asked her. She passed the plate over to him.

  Sammy wasn’t hungry. In fact, he was full, but he wanted the taste of chocolate in his mouth. James was eating away at his second big piece of cake as if he were still really hungry—maybe he was. Maybe James was the kind of person nothing was enough to satisfy, nothing filled up. Eating lazily, his chin still resting on his hand, Sammy felt sorry for James—because you’d always be hungry, for all kinds of things, for friends and grades and other things to do. You’d always be seeing what might be coming up next and not what was there now.

  Sammy saw what was there now, and he was satisfied. Yeah, but that was why James would always do better than other people. James would always be moving forward, looking at new ideas; he’d keep on discovering things, while Sammy—

  Sammy dropped his fork down on his plate. He’d already swallowed the bite that was too much, the one that turned full into stuffed. He felt heavy and overfed, and as if he’d never be able to move from the table. He envied James his unfillable appetite.

  And his brains, too, the way they kept him out of trouble or got him out of trouble. The chocolate taste in Sammy’s mouth was too sweet now, and bitter. He got up to pour himself a little more milk, to wash it away. Robin had gone home and it was time to tell them about the anchor. He stood at the counter and looked at his grandmother. They’d give him an earful, he knew that. He dove into trouble like going off the dock. “I lost the anchor this afternoon.”

  His grandmother looked at him and he looked right back at her, ready to get angry back. But she didn’t say anything. Maybeth didn’t even raise her head. It was James who jumped in. “You lost the anchor?” James sounded as if he couldn’t believe what he’d heard.

  Sammy nodded his head.

  “How could you do something like that?”

  Sammy shrugged. There was nothing to say. If James had asked how it had happened, that was a question he could answer. But James didn’t want to know that—that was one of the few things in the world James wasn’t curious to know, because all James wanted was to feel superior.

  “Anchors aren’t free,” James pointed out.

  Sammy nodded.

  Gram wasn’t angry after all. She was looking at him as if she were thinking hard. “I set it,” Sammy explained to her, “to show Robin how and because drifting makes him nervous, and there was a wind.” He tried to explain how the anchor had to be left behind, not trying to pretend he hadn’t made any mistakes. He wasn’t trying to convince them he thought he had done something right. When he finished he sat down again.

  James was pretty disgusted with him and Gram was disappointed. The only one who didn’t have anything to say was Maybeth. She’d been pretty quiet, too, all through dinner, but then Maybeth was like Robin in that way, shy, needing to be taken care of. Sometimes, Sammy thought, it was better to be gotten mad at. Sometimes, he stared at Maybeth’s head with its soft, shining golden curls, sometimes he could understand why his father had just taken off.

  “How are you going to earn the money to replace it without the anchor to have in the boat so you can go out crabbing?” James asked, being logical.

  James didn’t need to say that; Sammy could think of that all by himself without anybody telling him. He’d already thought of that difficulty.

  “We’ll replace it,” Gram told James. “You’ll have to reimburse us,” she told Sammy.

  As if Sammy didn’t already know that. As if he wasn’t planning to.

  “You should have waited for a calm day, anyway,” James pointed out. “You didn’t have to go out this afternoon. You knew Robin didn’t know anything about boats. Or taken someone else along with you,” he suggested.

  Yeah, but it was too late now.

  “Or tied a life preserver to the line. Then we could have gone back and had a chance of recovering the anchor,” James went on.

  “Or one of the bailers, which are easy to replace,” Gram suggested.

  Sammy couldn’t say anything because everything they were saying was right. But he wished they’d stop talking at him. What was done was done. He was sorry. He’d said he was sorry. There wasn’t anything else he could do. So why did they have to keep blaming him? They were acting as if he were the kind of person who didn’t care what he did, or always went around losing anchors and things. It made him angry and he wished they would just let the subject go.

  “Anyway, who could I take?” he defended himself. “You weren’t around,” he reminded James.

  Nobody had any answer to that. Suddenly, nobody had anything to say.

  Sammy had said something wrong, something awfully wrong, and Gram and James knew what, but he didn’t. If they didn’t tell him, how was he supposed to know? How was he supposed to guess, without being told? And then, the way they were looking at him—like he should know, like they couldn’t believe he didn’t know. They were blaming him now for not knowing. It made him angry, even though he maybe ought to know whatever it was he didn’t.

  Sammy just looked around the table, feeling helpless, and wrong, and angry, and sorry for whatever it was. He looked at Gram, who didn’t look any too pleased with him. He looked at James, who looked like Sammy had done something incredibly stupid. He looked at Maybeth, at the top of her bent head.

  “May I be excused, please?” Maybeth asked, her voice soft.

  “Yes, of course,” Gram said.

  Without raising her face, Maybeth left the table, left the room. She moved so gently, Sammy wasn’t sure whether she had gone upstairs or not. “What’s wrong with Maybeth?” he asked his brother.

  James just shook his head at Sammy.

  “You haven’t helped her one bit, young man,” Gram said to Sammy.

  “What did I do? I didn’t do anything. It’s only an anchor,” he reminded her.

  Gram just shook her head at Sammy. “And this business, going off to Baltimore to get in a brawl about your father.”

  “That wasn’t why—” Sammy started to say, but she cut him off.

  “I don’t know why you couldn’t just ask me. And now your sister—maybe I’m just not used to having someone around who cares about dances, maybe that’s why I’m feeling so inadequate.”

  Sammy wanted to tell Gram that she wasn’t inadequate, but he didn’t know whether to say anything to her or not.

  “What’s the problem with the dance?” James asked. “She has that green dress to wear, is there something wrong with it?”

  “The problem is, she doesn’t have a date,” Gram said, pronouncing the word “date” as if it were something in a foreign lan
guage, a foreign language she didn’t like.

  “But she’s popular,” James said. “She’s sure to be asked.”

  “Why does she need a date?” Sammy asked his grandmother.

  “Don’t ask me. She says she does, because of the kind of dance it is, some sort of beginners’ prom. Don’t ask me to explain—I can’t make sense out of it myself. A couple of boys did ask her, but they weren’t boys she wanted to go with, so now she’s not going at all.”

  That all sounded pretty clear to Sammy. Maybeth had made her decision. It had nothing to do with him.

  “And I think I shouldn’t have told Dicey she could take that job in Annapolis,” Gram said. “I’m not sure it’s good for her always to be trading off housework and babysitting for her living quarters, even if she can learn ships’ carpentry there.”

  “It’s what Dicey wants,” Sammy said. He’d rather have had Dicey around for himself, too, but that wasn’t going to happen. “Dicey is going to school most of the year, which is what you want her to do,” he reminded his grandmother.

  “I know,” she said, “and I don’t know about that, either.”

  “We could use her around here,” James said.

  “And that can’t be good for the girl,” Gram said. “I wish I knew.”

  “Yeah,” James said, meaning something more than what Sammy could figure out. Gram could figure it out, because she gave James one of her quick smiles. They’d left Sammy out, left him behind.

  “Then, the way you two never even asked me,” Gram said.

  James looked at Sammy, but Sammy didn’t know what she was talking about either.

  “Asked you what, Gram?” James asked.

  “And I’d guess you were right not to,” Gram went on. “Because I only know what he wanted me to know. He was like that.”

  “Our father,” Sammy told James. “Asked her about our father she means.”

  “I’d have told you he was a charmer, and I’d have been misleading you—but you never asked.”

  Sammy looked at James: Neither of them had ever thought she’d feel that way.

  “Sammy was afraid you’d think we thought you weren’t doing a good job,” James explained.

  “And James wanted to do it himself,” Sammy added. “Well, that’s true,” he told his brother.

  “We didn’t want to worry you,” James said.

  “That’s the only reason why,” Sammy echoed.

  “Ah,” Gram said, and she laughed. “I see.”

  Sammy laughed too, with James, but he was laughing for more than the reason of Gram’s joke. He was laughing because he guessed his father hadn’t wanted them to know anything about him. They only found out what the man wanted other people to know. They hadn’t found out anything, and they’d worried Gram, and the whole thing had been a mistake. Sammy, for one, was finished with this father business.

  “I can get a newspaper route again, to pay for the anchor,” Sammy offered.

  “There’s no need for that,” Gram stopped that suggestion dead. “We need you around here.” She looked at him then, making up her mind.

  “Maybeth thought she was going to work with you this summer. The anchor business is settled, but—she was counting on it, that’s my guess.”

  “But I never said she was,” Sammy protested.

  Gram didn’t say anything.

  “Maybeth never said so,” Sammy protested.

  “Yes, she did,” Gram corrected him.

  She had, yes, but it wasn’t anything exactly. Nothing like, Can I be the one to work with you, giving Sammy a chance to say exactly yes or exactly no.

  “But—” Sammy tried to think of something. He knew there was a reason.

  “But I didn’t know,” he said. That was true. He was sorry, and he thought maybe he should have known, but he hadn’t.

  “I didn’t say you did,” Gram said, as if that was even worse.

  James got up and started clearing the dishes. Sammy couldn’t move. He felt—terrible. If he had known, if he’d paid enough attention to notice, he’d have asked Maybeth. He should have noticed. He was sorry he hadn’t. He was nothing but sorry these days, it felt like.

  “It’s too late now, isn’t it?” he asked. He didn’t know why he asked, since he already knew the answer. Maybeth would have liked to help out, to be helping out. She wouldn’t have figured out, either, that Sammy had just forgotten about her. And he didn’t know why he had. He didn’t even know why he hadn’t done something he hadn’t done.

  Sammy wanted to get up from the table and—and go outside into the night, maybe ride his bike fast and dangerously in the dark. He felt so bad, though, that he didn’t even have the energy to get up from the table and wash dishes.

  Maybe he’d just let James wash the dishes by himself, since James was so perfect. Maybe, since he got everything going wrong, he’d just plan to be that way. Maybe that was just the way he was and there wasn’t anything he could do about that. And maybe he didn’t even want to.

  Sammy got up from the table, then, and set his chair neatly, precisely, back into place. He didn’t say a word. He just walked out the door, across the porch, down the steps, and away.

  * * *

  Sammy lay on the dock, out at the end of the wooden platform. In a while he’d go back inside, he guessed, but he didn’t know what he’d say to them, if he’d say anything. He was flat on his back, his legs dangling down from the knees. He had his eyes open, staring up at the darkness overhead, staring into it.

  A rising wind was breaking up the cloud cover, blowing it away over the land, blowing it east to the ocean. As the clouds separated they revealed the night sky waiting behind them. The dark wind filled his ears, blowing over above him. Beneath him, waves rushed up to the shore, slapping against the sides of the little boat. Beyond all of it, in distant silences, he could catch glimpses of black fields of space, scattered with stars.

  Each star was a sun, and who was to say what planets whirled around their suns out there. The clouds broke up, blew away, and the whole endless starry landscape of space opened up before him. There might be life out there. The same logic that pointed out what a strange and singular event the coming of life to earth was—using that argument to say combinations of circumstance couldn’t happen again—had to admit that strange and singular things were not impossible. What had happened once could happen again. Not in the same way, probably. Even people—who were pretty much the same stuff, made out of the same stuff to the same basic design—people never exactly duplicated one another. Sammy let his mind wander out there, moving among the possibilities the stars might offer. A kind of explorer, a kind of pioneer, adventurer—he’d like that.

  You couldn’t just go out into space because you wanted to, though. If he wanted to do that, he’d have to learn to be more like James. You’d have to be able to do things and have ideas. He wouldn’t mind learning from James, anyway. James, at least, when he did things, like that French report he’d told them about, he went ahead and did something to correct it.

  But Sammy couldn’t think of anything to do to correct the things he’d done. The anchor was gone, lost. You couldn’t find things you’d lost overboard. The bottom shifted, mud and sand moved constantly, covering up anything that fell in; and then, it was almost impossible to pinpoint any particular spot on the water, because there were no stable landmarks. You couldn’t mark anything by a wave. A wave just moved on away; it was just part of a moving pattern.

  There wasn’t anything he could do about Maybeth, either. He’d already asked Robin. He was sorry, so sorry it squeezed at his heart, but he couldn’t think of any way to fix things up. Sammy sat up to swing his legs over the dark water. He couldn’t see anything except the massed shadowy shapes of things. Even with his eyes accustomed to the dark, he couldn’t pick out much of anything.

  When he heard somebody walking along the dock, he knew it was James. Maybeth wouldn’t be coming down to find him; Maybeth never pressed a person. Gram’s bare feet
would have moved soundlessly, imperceptible under the sounds of wind and waves. These were sneakers he heard, at the ends of cautious legs which moved slowly because of the blindness of dark. Sammy wished James had left him alone out here.

  James sat down. Sammy waited.

  “From here,” James said, “the stars look close together, the sky looks crowded. It looks like you could just step from star to star, doesn’t it? I know that’s not true, but it really looks that way.”

  Sammy didn’t say anything. Old James couldn’t even see something as ordinary as the night sky without starting to think about it. James was—always so unexpected.

  “Do you ever wonder . . . ?” James’s voice drifted off.

  Sammy waited, then asked, “Wonder what?”

  “Oh, about how things look not being the same as how they are. That difference. It makes everything so complicated and hard to figure out. Do you ever wonder about that?”

  No, Sammy hadn’t. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. “Not yet,” he said.

  Their voices didn’t blow away on the wind. Because they were sitting side by side on the narrow dock, their voices just floated between them, back and forth.

  “Besides,” Sammy pointed out, “they don’t always.” Which made things even more complicated.

  “Anyway,” James said. “I was wondering how you feel. How are you feeling, Sammy?”

  For a minute, Sammy didn’t answer anything, because he was wondering how James knew to ask that question. Then he said what was true. “Bad. About—everything. About myself, too. And angry.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Sammy couldn’t see how that was true. “You don’t even know how to get angry.”

  “Not that, but—feeling trapped, trapped in someone you don’t want to be—and it isn’t what you’re like, but everybody keeps you there, so—you figure you might as well really be that person.”

  Sammy turned his head to stare at James’s profile. If he looked, he could see his brother, even in this dark light. That idea pleased him and he wanted to tell it to James. “It’s like a dark light out here.”