Come a Stranger

  May set Mina’s mind dreaming, like another one of Jeff’s old songs. “I know where I’m going, and I know who’s going with me.” It was an Irish song, a sad line of melody running through several verses, and when Maybeth sang it a cappella it made Mina smile. “I know who I love,” she would sing, “but the dear knows who I’ll marry.” It was like May, that song, poignant and lovely.

  One warm night in mid-May, Zandor came home unexpectedly, just walking into the kitchen Friday night. He had shaved his moustache and he wore an ironed cotton shirt, with slacks and polished shoes. Mina took one look at him and asked, “Do you want us kids to clear out of the house?”

  “You might as well stick around, you’ll hear all about it anyway,” he said. “But thanks.”

  He’d been suspended from school for the rest of this semester and through the summer. He could go back in the fall, if he wanted to, but he wouldn’t have any scholarship. He’d been caught smoking marijuana in his dormitory room.

  Mina had never seen her father so angry. He seemed to swell up with anger and explode it all around the kitchen. Zandor sat up straight and listened to what his father had to say. Every now and then Momma would cut in with some sharp, angry remark, as if she couldn’t hold back, but mostly she let her husband speak. He didn’t say that much, and he didn’t talk for that long, but Mina was impressed with the way Zandor could sit there and hear him. “Now what are you going to do with yourself,” her father thundered. “Now where are you going to go?”

  Zandor waited, to be sure that was really a question. Then he answered it: “One of my professors, Sociology, said I can live with his family. He’s working on setting up a survival camp, like Outward Bound, for black kids. He’ll hire me to be his assistant; he’s gotten enough funding and enough people to run one session this summer.”

  “I’m amazed he’ll trust you,” Mina’s father said.

  “Luckily, I had him for Soc One last year. He seems to like me. I talked it over with Charles Stuart. CS said I should tell you it sounds all right to him. CS said pretty much what you said to me too,” Zandor told his parents. “It was stupid. It was a stupid thing for me to do.”

  Zandor had about grown up over this, Mina thought.

  “I should be able to go back in the fall. It won’t cost me anything to live there, because I’m going to do housekeeping for them, in exchange for room and board; his wife works too. I’ve got a job at one of the McDonald’s and I think I’ll be able to pick up another part-time job on weekends, especially if I can learn how to run a cash register. If I’m careful, I can save enough. This has fairly well shot my chances for student loans, as well as everything else.”

  “I would think,” Mina’s father said.

  “I told the dean I wanted to tell you myself, but he’s going to call on Monday morning, to be sure you know.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “CS said I should tell you about this too,” Zandor said. He looked from his mother to his father. “There were maybe half a dozen of us on my corridor who were smoking. I know that doesn’t make any difference, not really. But I’m the only one they suspended.”

  “Why?” Momma wondered.

  “And I was pretty angry, because—well, probably because it was the only thing I could blame on somebody else.” He smiled at Mina, getting more relaxed now that the worst was behind him. “I mean, it’s not as if I could blame it on racial prejudice or anything. They’re as black as I am, all of them. I guess that’s one advantage of a black college. Anyway, CS pointed out to me the others are all local kids, and one of them’s father has a good dry cleaning business, two of them are lawyers, one of them’s a union official. Since ministers don’t have very much clout, the school could make its point on me. They’d figure that the ministerial minority wouldn’t raise too big a stink—you’d have more invested in being on the side of law and order, and all that. It doesn’t mean I didn’t do it, but—it makes a difference to me. In how I feel about myself. So I can’t see there’s any need for you to . . . do any apologizing to him, Pop.”

  Mina’s father nodded his head slowly a couple of times, then excused himself from the table. They heard him leave the house. He was probably, Mina thought, going to church.

  “Well,” Momma said. “So much for your news. How is your brother?”

  “I think he’s serious about this girl, and I don’t blame him. She’s cool, and she’s nice too. You’ll like her, Momma. I think he’s going to be calling you up soon to say he wants to get married. How’d you like to be a bridesmaid, Belle?”

  “A big wedding?” Belle asked.

  “He can’t afford marriage. Does he even have a job lined up?” Momma worried.

  In May, Mina’s father also learned that he wouldn’t have to go away that summer, or ever again. He had done it for so many years, the board wrote to him, and it was exhausting work. They felt he had done enough. Mina had a hard time feeling good about that, because she didn’t know what Mr. Shipp would do when he came to Crisfield.

  Then she learned, when Mr. Shipp telephoned her father, that he wasn’t coming to Crisfield at all. He called at night from New York, when rates were cheaper. Mina listened to half the phone conversation. As she listened, wishing she wasn’t hearing what she was hearing, she learned that he had taken a new job, not with the church at all. It would be good for the children. The pay would be better. It would have duties.

  Mina sat back on the sofa, eavesdropping, feeling heavier and heavier. She felt like she’d swallowed a big black stone and it was sinking in the pit of her stomach.

  “Mina? They want to talk to you.” Her father handed her the phone.

  The stone disappeared like magic. If they wanted her to go with them for the summer? Or even if he just wanted to say a special good-bye to her?

  “Mina?” Alice’s butterfly voice said. “I passed. Can you believe it?”

  “Passed?”

  “The equivalency test. I have a high school diploma with my name on it and all. Tamer took me out for dinner to celebrate, and dancing after. Aren’t you proud of me?”

  “It’s wonderful, Alice,” Mina said. She made her voice sound glad, because she was glad. It was just this stone, settled in her stomach. “How are the kids?”

  “They’re properly impressed with me. Tamer’s having it framed. Dream gave me a picture—a drawing of me teaching school, isn’t that silly? Selma doesn’t understand, really. But even my mother-in-law has to admit it’s something I’ve done right. It’s lucky I decided to get it, because with this new job of Tamer’s I’d be really stupid if I didn’t have it. Well, this is running up a big bill, I just wanted to tell you.”

  “Thanks, and—I’m really pleased for you. Congratulations.”

  She hung up, then turned around and waited for her father to tell her the bad news, the worst of it. He was already back reading the Bible, looking for the text he’d want to speak on.

  “Dad,” she demanded. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. It’s pretty good news. Tamer’s taken a job at a college, somewhere in the Midwest. I’ve never heard of the place. He’s going to be the assistant chaplain. He can maintain his church affiliation, that’s no problem. I think he’s pleased to get his family out of New York. I would be.”

  Mina turned away. She didn’t know if she could stand this. She knew she could stand knowing that Tamer Shipp was married and too old anyway ever to love her back. She knew she could stand only seeing him in the summers and even then not really seeing very much of him. She didn’t think she could stand never seeing him again.

  “He wanted to know if he could come down for a few days after school gets out. He’s going to stay in Miz Hunter’s house with just Samuel. Alice has to stay in New York because they’ll move out to—it’s in Ohio, Mina, did I tell you that?”

  So she would see him, just once again.

  At least nobody knew how she felt, really, inside herself. Mina thought she was glad of that, but once or t
wice she thought it would feel so good just to talk to somebody. Dicey maybe might understand, even though the way Dicey talked to Jeff (who was head over heels about her, if ever Mina had seen anybody head over heels with anyone) showed Mina that Dicey hadn’t ever thought about this kind of loving. She was tempted to talk to Dicey, who thought about things so differently, who thought about things.

  In the end, only her mother said anything, and all Momma said was, “It’s hard for you, isn’t it. There aren’t too many people in this world who have the capacity to love deeply. It’s a mixed blessing to be one of them.” Mina nodded. She thought Jeff too was one of them, and she knew what her mother meant.

  But if she was going to have to say good-bye to Tamer Shipp forever, Mina thought, then there was something she was going to give him too. The trouble was, she didn’t know how to go about doing the one thing she wanted to have done, before she said good-bye to him. Forever.

  * * *

  Two days before he was due to arrive, Mina rode her bike out to the Tillermans’. It was the first Wednesday after school got out, and she knew that Dicey would be at home that afternoon. Dicey worked mornings during the summer, while James and Sammy went crabbing with Jeff. Mina rode her bike around to the back of the house. Maybeth and her grandmother were in the vegetable garden, weeding and loosening up the soil after the night’s heavy rain. Dicey was in the barn, painting her sailboat. Mina walked into the shadowy barn. “Hey,” she said.

  Dicey had paint spattered all over her T-shirt and shorts, all over her arms and legs, all over her hair. “Hi. What’s up?” she asked. Mina knew nothing would budge Dicey from finishing the job she was working on—although why Dicey cared so much about learning how to sail, she couldn’t understand. She leaned against one of the stall doors and said, “I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  “Not this afternoon,” Dicey said.

  “What if it was,” Mina demanded, half teasing. “What if it was a matter of life and death, and this afternoon?”

  “It isn’t, though, is it?” Dicey asked, turning around to look at Mina, worried that it might be and she would have to make a choice.

  “No. It’s for next Sunday morning. I want you to come to our church.”

  Most people would have asked why, but not Dicey. “I’ve never been to church,” she said.

  “That’s all right.”

  “You know, you never do ask anybody for anything,” Dicey said.

  Mina hadn’t realized that, but she guessed it was true. “Neither do you,” she pointed out, in case Dicey missed that similarity.

  “What time is church?”

  “Ten-thirty.”

  “Okay,” Dicey said.

  “Good,” Mina said. “And who else can come?”

  “Who else?”

  “I thought—maybe Sammy?”

  Dicey lay the brush across the top of the paint can, then wiped her hands on the seat of her shorts. “I can’t go—”

  “You have to,” Mina interrupted. She really didn’t want to have to explain herself. “Or if you can’t—” She wanted Dicey there for her own sake, but Sammy for being Samuel Tillerman. Sammy was the one who mattered.

  “Not without asking Gram,” Dicey said, before Mina finished her sentence. “I keep forgetting—she says we decide things together, and she’d be angry if I went ahead, and she’d be right. I’m sorry, Mina, I’ll ask her right now.”

  Mrs. Tillerman didn’t say anything when Dicey asked if she and Sammy could go to Mina’s church. Mrs. Tillerman stayed crouched by a row of tomato plants, working the soil with a claw-fingered hand tool. Maybeth worked on quietly, and Mina studied the way her cheeks got dusted with a golden tan color. Every time she saw Maybeth, for some reason, Mina felt good about the whole world. It made no sense, which didn’t bother her.

  “Is it all right if we all come?” Mrs. Tillerman asked.

  “Of course. I’d like that. I would have asked but I didn’t want to impose.”

  “I’ll just bet you didn’t,” Mrs. Tillerman said, knowing better.

  Mina grinned.

  “It’s no imposition,” Mrs. Tillerman said.

  “I know,” Mina answered back.

  * * *

  She was in the choir when they entered the church. They had all of them come: Mrs. Tillerman with her chin up high and an old-fashioned blue straw hat on her head, Dicey with Maybeth, both wearing denim jumpers, then James and Sammy. James looked around him, curious and alert. Mina smiled at them once they’d gotten themselves seated, about halfway up the aisle. Hearing the talk, Momma turned around once, briefly, then looked at Mina with an eyebrow raised, and then concentrated on worship.

  When the service started, nobody talked anymore and only a few people kept staring at the Tillermans. They started off with a traditional hymn, “The son of man goes off to war, a golden crown to win.” Mr. Shipp and Mina’s father were at the front of the church, facing the choir. Mina sang out her harmony line. She could hear Maybeth singing among the congregation and saw that the people around could hear it too. They liked what they heard, and they wanted to turn around, but they didn’t. Mina watched. The bubbles in her stomach just bounced around and there was devilment all over her face that she couldn’t keep hidden. This was, she thought, sitting down again, much better than standing around feeling dismal about the last time Mr. Shipp would speak a sermon in their church.

  The church was filled with people who wanted to say goodbye and good luck to Mr. Shipp. Samuel sat next to Louis, looking serious, watching his father come up to read the text. Mina sat up, ready to listen, thinking that she couldn’t hear a thing because her own thoughts were all tangled up and, deep under the dark surface of her, mixed together. She could barely wait for the moment when she introduced Sammy to Tamer Shipp. She wanted to slow down every second that was ticking past.

  Mr. Shipp stood at the lectern and opened the book. He read from Isaiah, the Old Testament prophet, but he had a way of skipping back and forth in his mind between the Old and New Testaments, so Mina couldn’t predict what his sermon would be about. He read the text like a poem: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.” When he finished, he closed the Bible and looked up.

  He couldn’t help but notice the Tillermans then. Mina saw his eyes briefly on them, and his eyebrows went up. Nobody was staring. It would be bad manners to stare at people just because they were the only whites in the room. But everybody was so carefully not noticing, you could see how much they noticed.

  He didn’t talk for long, and he was talking about the Prince of Peace from Isaiah, but his idea was that the people at Jesus’ time didn’t want a prince of peace at all. “They wanted a prince for war, a hero who would scourge out the oppressors, a man invincible in battle with mighty armies to come behind him where he rode over the earth, burning the earth clean for God. But God sent them a man of peace, a man of sorrows, a man of righteousness, instead. I think, if we think about it, we can understand why the people wanted a man of war—their anger, the injustices of oppression, the sufferings they had lived with. We can understand the desire for a burning out of the oppressor. But”—Mr. Shipp changed the note-cards from which he was speaking—“I think we have also lived close enough to a war to glimpse God’s purposes. How many of us still carry grief for our sons, our brothers, sweethearts and husbands, grief for friends forever lost,” he said in his bassoon voice. The congregation murmured agreement, and a few people called out, answering him with names. Mrs. Tillerman sat there with her face unreadable, but Dicey was looking at her grandmother. “So God sent us a man of peace, knowing that what we wanted was not what we needed,” Mr. Shipp said.

  After the service, Mina made the Tillermans wait, standing out under a tall pin oak, with its narrow leaves and its bark that twisted up along the trunk and branches. “He used to come down and minister for the summers,” she explained. “He’s got a new job, so this is his last sermon. His name is Tamer Shipp,” she said. “His new job’
s at a college in Ohio. So everybody’s saying good-bye. I want you to meet him,” she finished, not looking at anybody in particular.

  “It was an interesting sermon,” Mrs. Tillerman said. She didn’t say any more.

  “I liked the singing. I’d like singing in your choir,” Maybeth told Mina.

  Mina thought she was asking. “You can’t, even though I’d sure like to sing in a choir with you.”

  “I know, I’m the wrong color,” Maybeth explained.

  Mina couldn’t help it, she got a fit of the giggles. People were walking by, carefully not staring at the strangers as they went by, returning to their houses and their dinners. Mina’s parents had come to be introduced and to ask the Tillermans back for lemonade. “I haven’t seen you for an age,” Momma said to Sammy.

  “I love lemonade,” Sammy told her. Mrs. Tillerman, as wary as Mina’s father, watched all this, and every now and then her eye would come back to Mina, but she didn’t ask any questions.

  Finally, Tamer Shipp was free and Mina waved him over. Samuel trailed behind his father.

  Mina took a deep breath. “Mr. Shipp,” she said. “I want you to meet some friends of mine.”

  “I did notice you all, in there,” he said, laughter in his voice.

  Mrs. Tillerman flashed one of her sudden smiles at that, a smile that flickered on and off across her face.

  Then Mina didn’t know what to say or how to say it. She felt so much, all at once, all she felt was big and clumsy. “Mrs. Abigail Tillerman,” she said, starting with the oldest.