Homecoming

  “Time for supper, Dicey,” Sammy said. “What’re you doing?”

  “Thinking.” He hadn’t entirely awakened Dicey from her reverie. He stood in front of her, and she saw him and did not see him.

  “Thinking what?”

  “About Momma.”

  “We gotta go now.” He tugged at her hand. He had already forgotten about Momma, Dicey thought, and probably that was better for him.

  “I dream about her,” Sammy said, hurrying Dicey back to Claire’s station wagon. “A lot.”

  So he hadn’t forgotten: and Dicey knew that, whatever anyone wiser or smarter might say, she didn’t want him to forget. “What do you dream?” she asked.

  “Nothing special. She’s just there, in the dreams.” He ran ahead.

  That night, the tightrope lady fell off the wire in the same way, and the audience gasped in the same way and applauded with the same enthusiasm when she climbed back up the tall ladder. Dicey realized then that the fall was part of the act. The fall was as flawless as all the rest of the steps. It was a fake. Like the lion on the poster and the glittering costumes that made everybody look beautiful. Like the way everyone laughed at Sammy because they thought he was making mistakes with the dogs, when it was really part of the act. Like the way Maybeth looked like a princess when she circled under the cascading lights of the carousel. Fake.

  Dicey looked at James. He shrugged his shoulders at her. He didn’t care. But Dicey did, she discovered. It wasn’t that she minded, exactly. Not exactly—because she had done too much lying of her own to mind about this. But—they didn’t need to lie, did they?

  The circus days floated by. They drove through the rain to Salisbury and set up the tent and booths in the rain. Dicey didn’t do anything much, she didn’t even go to the shows after the second night. James and Maybeth and Sammy were busy and contented.

  Contentment was too small a word for what Dicey was feeling. They had food and a warm place to sleep, and Dicey had money in her pocket. They were traveling and had purpose and destination, but no conclusion. Dicey had nothing to worry about. Nothing except what lay ahead, in Crisfield, and she didn’t want to think about that anymore. She had thought all she could about that. You couldn’t know what lay ahead. How could you know that? How could Dicey expect herself to know what this grandmother would be like? She couldn’t; she realized that at last. She would have to wait and see. That part was easy, the waiting and the seeing.

  These circus days drifted slowly. It would be something to live in a circus, Dicey thought, always moving around, always heading for somewhere new. If it was Dicey’s circus, she would go everywhere. She planned it out to herself, alone in Claire’s trailer at night, with the noise from the fairgrounds behind her. First, all around the United States, then up to Canada and down to Mexico. She would make her circus get famous and get jobs in Europe, and maybe even China or Japan. They’d have trailers for land travel and a ship of their own for sea travel. She would have real lions.

  Day after lazy day, night after long dreaming night passed Dicey by.

  CHAPTER 7

  Late one morning, as Dicey stood in a blazing sunlight where the tent had been the night before coiling up the long ropes so that Samson could stack them evenly on the truck and find them when he needed to stake down the sides of the tent that evening in Berlin, James and Maybeth and Sammy approached her.

  “Hey,” James said.

  “I don’t need any help,” Dicey told him. “Go on and do what you like.”

  “Are we going to go to Crisfield?” James asked. “We’re all ready. We packed our things into a paper bag and your map too. Will says he can take us now, in Claire’s car.”

  “Is it time?” Dicey asked.

  “Will says so,” James said.

  “Let me just finish this, okay?”

  More good-byes, Dicey thought to herself, coiling up the last rope into a dark brown hoop, piling loop upon loop. “I am unfond of good-byes,” she said to herself. All of their good-byes lay like the coiled ropes on the ground, connected and unconnected, curling silently, finished things.

  But the kids were right, and Will was right. It was time.

  Dicey took a deep breath. Time to get moving.

  She sat beside Will in the front seat. James and the little kids sat behind them. Dicey took out her map. Time to put the circus behind them.

  The circus people stood around and waved and made jokes. Dicey looked around at them, gathered together there in the fairground, their hands held high, their friendly wishes for good luck floating around the car still, like cherry blossoms blowing down to the ground. The car pulled out of the fairgrounds. “Good-bye,” everybody called. “Good-bye, goodbye.”

  After a while, Dicey turned to the map. There was nothing to look at on the road. It was just like Route 1. “What route are we on?” she asked Will.

  “Thirteen. We follow that to just south of a place called Princess Anne, then get onto Three-thirteen,” Will said. “How do you figure to find her?”

  “Look up the address in a phone book,” Dicey answered. “Then we’ll ask directions.”

  “We’ve got lots of time,” Will assured her. “All I have to do is go back, pick up Claire and the beasts and the trailer and make it to Berlin in time for supper.”

  “Are you going to take us right there?” Dicey asked.

  He didn’t turn his head. His profile was smooth lines, slightly curved except where his nose jutted out and his beard jutted out at the end of his chin. His skin was smooth and brown, like silk. He didn’t answer, he just nodded.

  “But why?” Dicey asked.

  “To make sure you’re okay,” he said.

  Dicey looked out the window. City clutter had fallen behind and now there was country clutter, junkyards, a trailer park, billboards advertising dog food and faraway hotels. Beyond these the land stretched away to low, flat country. The fields and woods all had shallow ditches dug around them to drain away water. Most of the land was being used for farms, interspersed with patches of loblollies and other trees.

  “Crisfield’s a small town,” Dicey said to Will. “We’ll be okay.”

  “You don’t want me to take you right there, do you?”

  Dicey leaned toward him. “It’s not that. It’s—she doesn’t know about us. Not only that we’re coming, but she doesn’t even know we exist. We didn’t know about her until our cousin in Bridgeport told us we had a grandmother. And—I don’t know how she’ll be. There was this priest in Bridgeport. He had somebody here come to see her and tell her. She wouldn’t let him in, or listen. He said she screamed so she couldn’t hear what he was saying. So I don’t know how she’ll act. Momma . . . ” Her voice faded away.

  “There’s a lot you haven’t told me, isn’t there?” Will asked.

  “Yes.” Dicey thought. “It gets so complicated.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Will said. “How do you want to do it? I’ll go along with you if you’ll make me one promise. You keep your promises?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you’ll promise me that you’ll come to me if you need help. We’ll be in Berlin for a week, four shows and then three days off on the beaches. The police can always find me if you call. Will you promise?”

  Dicey thought about that. “But what could you do?”

  “Who knows? What do friends do for each other? Something. Whatever. Will you promise?”

  “Okay,” Dicey said. “I promise.”

  “We’ll be coming by again in eight months—but anything can happen in eight months. I can’t just dump you kids off. Not and forget about you. I can’t do that. But I can let you do it your own way if I know you’ll call me if you need to—if it’s not working out.”

  “Why?” Dicey asked. “I mean, why should you bother? You have your own life.”

  “You’re a little bit of my life now. You can’t get away, and I can’t get rid of you. That’s a fact.”

  Dicey understood. A lot of people ha
d little bits of her life now, and they were tied to her now, or she was tied to them. To some of them, she owed something that she hadn’t paid yet, like Windy and Stewart, or Cousin Eunice. You didn’t just let people go, that’s what Will meant. You always did what you could.

  Dicey leaned back into her own corner by the door. Well.

  “What I thought was,” she said, “we’d go downtown and find out where she lives. Then just go out there.” That was almost the truth.

  “And you want me to leave you off and drive away,” Will said. Dicey had no idea what he was thinking. “Are you scared?” he asked her.

  “Some.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a last chance for us,” Dicey said.

  “I don’t know about that,” Will said slowly. “You could say all of life is a series of last chances.”

  “Okay,” Dicey said, “but inside of houses—no matter what they look like from outside—even that one”—the car sped past a tall brick house, surrounded by old elm trees and seeming serene and wise, as if it had stood there for so many years that nothing could surprise or hurt it—“you can’t tell what’s inside. You can’t tell what might happen. How do you know who to trust when you meet people? How can I tell about this grandmother? I know I can always run, but when there are four of us . . . ”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier if I stuck with you?” Will asked.

  Dicey shook her head. “Well, yes, of course it would. But I have to know by myself, for us.”

  “Okay,” Will said. “Okay. You can have it your way.”

  As they neared Crisfield, entered the town limits, followed the main street, they all fell silent. Dicey could almost hear the worries that nobody said aloud. The air inside the car grew thick with them.

  The road ran straight and broad until it came to the water. They looked around. Docks, most of them vacant now on this summer morning, stretched out into the bay. Sheds lined the land’s edge. Piles of small wire boxes were everywhere, and oyster shells had been scattered like a layer of earth. A few people, mostly old men, sat in the sunlight, looking at nothing.

  “Well,” Dicey said.

  “We’ll meet again.” Will turned to her. “One way or another. Okay?”

  “Okay!” Sammy said.

  The Tillermans climbed out of the car. They stood at the road’s end by the water’s edge. Will backed the car, turned it around, looked out the window to give them the thumbs-up signal, and drove away.

  Until the station wagon was out of sight, the Tillermans didn’t move. Dicey held the grocery bag in one hand, and the other hand she held up in farewell, until she could no longer see the square back of the car.

  They were on their own again.

  “Okay,” Dicey said. She passed the bag to James. “You wait here. I’m going to find a phone book.” She didn’t wait for anything, not even to study the flat expanse of blue water. She walked back along the docks to the sidewalk and entered a grocery store. There was a poster in its window advertising Will’s circus.

  The store was filled with darkness, dust and the smell of the food on its shelves. Dicey stood inside the screen door for a minute, while her eyes adjusted to the dim light. The only person in the store was a woman in a stained apron behind a glass-framed counter. Dicey walked up to her. The woman had thick, strong arms and her hands were mottled red. Her face was pale and thick with flesh. Her eyebrows were straight and bushy over little colorless eyes.

  “Yeah?” she asked, leaning her elbows on the top of the counter. “What can I get you?” Her words came thick and slow, like molasses—again, something like Momma.

  “I’m looking for a phone book,” Dicey said. “Do you have one I can look at?”

  The woman nodded. She plodded out from behind the meat counter and walked heavily down to the cash register at the front of the store. She pulled out a thin phone book from underneath the counter there. She watched Dicey open it.

  There was a Peter Tillerman on a place called Deal Island, and a G. Ridgely Tillerman in Princess Anne. There was no Abigail Tillerman. There was no A. Tillerman, either.

  Maybe their grandmother didn’t have a phone. Or maybe it was listed under their grandfather’s name. Only, there was no Tillerman listed for Crisfield.

  Dicey looked at the page and chewed on her lip.

  None of the Tillermans listed lived in Crisfield. Was her grandmother still here?

  Yes, because that priest had gone to see her. He would have told Father Joseph if she’d moved or died. He knew where she lived.

  “Something wrong?” the woman asked.

  “I got work to do,” the woman continued, to prod Dicey. She leaned down on the counter as if she needed the rest.

  “I was looking for the telephone number for Abigail Tillerman,” Dicey said.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I was going to call her up. To see if she needed some help around the place,” Dicey said.

  “I’ve never seen you before,” the woman remarked.

  “We’re new,” Dicey said. “We just moved in.”

  “Ab won’t hire you,” the woman said. “She’s letting the farm go.”

  “Selling it?” Dicey asked.

  “Naw, she’d never sell that place. But she can’t work it by herself.”

  “That’s why I thought she might hire me,” Dicey said.

  The woman shook her head, closed up the phone book and put it away. “Besides, she hasn’t had a phone since Bullet died. If you’d asked me I’d of told you. She came down and threw her phone through the telephone company window. You don’t want to work for her.”

  The woman trudged back down the aisle to the meat counter. Dicey stood where she was, listening to the hum of a large refrigerator.

  “Where is her farm, anyway?” she called to the back of the store.

  “Down to the water, south,” the woman answered.

  “What road?”

  “Landing Neck. It goes off South Main, half a mile inland. Maybe a mile. There’s a bend on Landing Neck, and a new little house sits right on it. Next mailbox is Ab’s. But it’s seven miles. I wouldn’t go out there. She’s queer.”

  “Queer?”

  “Crazy as a coot, that’s my opinion. We leave her alone. You should too.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Dicey said.

  “No maybes about it.”

  Dicey left the store. She returned to her family. Their eyes held the same question.

  Dicey sat on the edge of the dock, hanging her feet over the water. James, Maybeth and Sammy sat in a line beside her. You couldn’t see the bottom of the water. It was muddy, so you could only see a little way down into it. The waves gurgled underneath them.

  More bad news, Dicey thought to herself. But why didn’t she feel bad? She looked around at the docks and the dozing men and the water and the shacks. She picked up an oyster shell and dropped it into the water.

  The air smelled of salt and fish and motor oil.

  “You know what this is like?” Dicey asked James. “It’s like Provincetown. Isn’t it? It smells like it.”

  “Yeah. What about our grandmother?”

  “She lives seven miles out of town, on Landing Neck Road. She doesn’t have a telephone.”

  “How do we get there?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I thought . . . James, I want to go out there alone. Just in case. I want you to stay here with the kids. And I’ll come back for you when I know.”

  “Know what?”

  “If it’s okay for us there.”

  “I don’t like that, Dicey. What if you get in trouble?”

  “Better just me than all of us, right? Will said we could call the Berlin police to get him if we need help. So if I don’t come back then you can call him. Here’s the money, for lunch and anything. Can you keep an eye on Maybeth and Sammy?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t like it.”

  “I’m in charge, James. Remember.”

  “Okay. But . . . ” br />
  Dicey gave him the money she had left, nine dollars. She leaned over to talk to Maybeth and Sammy. “You do what James says. You hear?”

  They both nodded.

  “That’s all right then,” Dicey said. She stood up quickly and hurried away, without looking back.

  The business section of Crisfield lay next to the water, low buildings with big plate glass windows. The business section crowded as close as it could to the bay and looked out over the docks, as if that was where its real interest lay. Beyond that, residential streets branched out, circling around the town itself.

  There seemed to be three kinds of houses. There were lots of churches, even on the one street Dicey followed out of town. These were mostly small stucco or clapboard buildings with short steeples. Then, there were the usual narrow clapboard houses on little handkerchief lawns, two stories high, two rooms wide. The third kind were large wooden houses with broad porches that ran around the buildings; they had odd shapes, round towers, octagonal bays, balconies. These houses had paint that had faded and peeled. Often, their screens were ripped or doors hung askew. But they spoke clearly of what they had once been: once they had been homes for large, rich families; once the spiraled pillars that held up the veranda roofs had gleamed with white paint; once the tall windows of the ground floors had opened into rooms crammed with plush furniture and oriental rugs, and the large trees in the yards had swarmed with climbing children. These were the kind of houses that might have treasures in the attic, or ghosts in the cellar. These were the kinds of houses that could burst with life. Now they rotted quietly, neglected, sad, but filled with mysterious memories.

  Dicey walked on, walking fast. She turned at the second stop sign and found herself on Landing Neck Road, in farm country, where broad fields burgeoned with corn or barbed wire contained cows and horses, where chickens and ducks wandered around the yards. The farmhouses sat next to the road, quiet and clean, secretive.

  How would she know if their grandmother’s house was safe for them? What questions did you ask a person to find out if you could like one another? If she could be trusted?

  Dicey’s sneakers made no noise on the roadway. No cars overtook her. There was no sound at all, except the occasional distant barking of a dog or lowing of a cow. The silence wrapped around her like a quilt, a silence made up of trees growing and corn ripening, of the bright sky glowing and the distant water following its tides. This was not an empty silence.