Their grandmother was coming in from the field, carrying the basket. Maybeth trailed behind her.
“There’s a boat in the barn,” Dicey cried.
“I know that. It’s been there for years. Don’t put those potatoes in the basket. Take ’em to the sink. Don’t you know potatoes have to be scrubbed?”
Dicey hurried ahead. She was so full of questions about the boat, she didn’t care how her grandmother felt about them. She dumped the potatoes in the sink and turned on the water.
Her grandmother put the basket on the table. She took a china platter from the cupboard. “Can she take the ends off beans?” she asked Dicey, referring to Maybeth.
“Sure,” Dicey said.
Maybeth stood across the table from her grandmother and snapped the ends off the green beans. She worked carefully, wasting little of the vegetable, making a neat pile of ends on the table before her. It was as if she knew how suspiciously the woman was watching her.
“Whose boat is it?” Dicey asked.
“Mine,” the woman answered.
“I know that, but whose?” Dicey said.
“My boy built it,” their grandmother said. “He built it and he sailed it.”
“Where are the sails?” Dicey asked. She knew she shouldn’t be asking. “Will it still float?”
“He kept them on the boat, up forward under the bow,” their grandmother said. “They’re still there, far as I know. I don’t know if it’s seaworthy. It doesn’t concern you.”
Her voice was cold and final. Dicey, standing with her back to the room, the cool water running over her hands as she scrubbed the dirt from potatoes, heard that coldness and that finality. Her back stiffened. “Oh doesn’t it,” she said to herself. Here was the place, a farm with plenty of room and plenty of work for them to do, and the bay just beyond the marshes, and a sailboat in the barn. She wasn’t about to let this grandmother keep them from it.
“I can hear what you’re thinking,” her grandmother said.
Dicey swiveled her head around to meet those dark hazel eyes, the sullen, angry eyes she had seen in the photograph Aunt Cilla kept. Could her grandmother know what she was thinking? And so what if she could?
“Maybe you can,” Dicey said, not dropping her glance. She’d think of a way. She’s been thinking up ways to get them in and out of trouble all summer long. As if she had been practicing for this occasion, warming up for this last struggle. Her grandmother didn’t know Dicey. Her grandmother didn’t know the kind of thinking and planning Dicey could do.
A fleeting expression that might have been unaccustomed mirth, or might have been a twinge of pain, went across her grandmother’s face. For a second, the face came alive around the eyes. Then it was all gone.
Dicey turned back to the sink. She didn’t want to be distracted. She had thinking to do.
They had crabs for dinner. It had taken the boys a while to learn how to shake the crabs out of the pots into the basket. The first pot they’d just opened, and the crabs had fled sideways in a turbulence of muddy water. Sammy had tried to grab a couple and been nipped for his pains.
“You should have seen them,” he cried, telling the story. His cheeks were pink and his eyes shone. He was too pleased to let his grandmother’s stony silence quiet him down. “They looked at the door and looked at us and then”—he thrust his arms straight out and waggled his finger—“gone! I didn’t know things could go sideways so fast. Boy are they smart.”
James spoke to their grandmother: “We closed the doors and set the traps back where they were. Is that right?”
“Right enough. What did you use for bait?”
“I didn’t think,” James said. “What should we use?”
“Fish. You have to catch the fish.”
“Good-o,” Sammy said. “Can I go down after dinner? Do you have any line?”
“No point to it,” their grandmother said. She was checking the boiling water in a huge pot on the stove. The potatoes were in the oven, the beans in a covered pan, the table set with forks and a platter of sliced tomatoes and glasses of water.
“So what?” Dicey answered quickly. “I’ll go with you, Sammy. We like fishing,” she said defiantly to her grandmother.
The woman didn’t answer, but instead lifted up the basket and poured the teeming mass of crabs into the water. She slammed the lid down on top of them. You could hear them scrambling around inside the metal pot, scrabbling up to escape the steam. Their grandmother stood with one hand holding the lid down, staring at the children.
Maybeth ran out of the room. Dicey felt like following her—she could imagine how those crabs felt, and she had had that feeling herself at times—but she wasn’t going to back down before those eyes. So she stood, and pretty soon there was silence in the pan. She knew they were all dead then.
They ate the crabs from a big plate in the middle of the table. They were served individual plates with potato and beans on them. There was no butter for the potatoes, but there was salt.
The Tillermans had never eaten crabs before. They learned how to rip off the legs first, then lift back the top shell. Then you broke the crab in half, like a turnover, and picked out the meat from between sections of cartilage. Each crab had two larger chunks of meat in it, and an awful lot of stringy little pieces.
It was hard work getting full on the scraps of crabmeat. It took a time to get even a mouthful ready, once you’d taken out the two chunks. But it was a good dinner for talking at, if you wanted to talk. Everybody’s hands were busy, and almost nobody’s mouth was full.
Their grandmother seemed to want to talk, or seemed to want them to talk. She asked questions.
“Where’s your mother?” she asked. She sent the question out to the middle of the table, as if she was asking the platter of crabs.
The children looked to Dicey.
“Momma’s in a mental hospital in Massachusetts,” Dicey said. “She doesn’t recognize anybody. She doesn’t do anything. They don’t think she’s ever going to get well.”
“Who don’t think?” her grandmother asked.
“The doctors,” Dicey said.
“They don’t know,” Sammy said. “She might. Isn’t that right, Dicey?”
Dicey nodded.
“So you know better than the doctors,” his grandmother said to Sammy.
Sammy’s jaw went out and he didn’t answer.
“And you ran away from this silly chit in Bridgeport. You ran away from someone who was willing to take you in and take care of you. Why’d you do that?”
They looked to Dicey again.
“It wasn’t right for us. Especially not for Sammy and Maybeth.”
“Because Maybeth’s retarded?”
The cruel question lay before them.
Dicey looked at Maybeth. Maybe she hadn’t understood. But she had. Well, that was good because if she hadn’t understood that would mean maybe she really was retarded. Maybeth’s eyes filled with tears.
“She’s not,” Dicey said.
“What is it? Can’t she speak for herself? Can’t you?” Her grandmother glared at Maybeth. Maybeth sat staring at her lap. “Can’t you?”
“Yes,” Maybeth said softly.
Dicey fumed. She felt like throwing her plate at her grandmother.
“You keep out of this, girl,” her grandmother said. “You, Dicey.”
Maybeth looked up. Tears rolled out of her eyes, but she stayed at the table. “I don’t think I am,” she said. “I don’t know just what it means, but if it’s such a bad thing to be—why do you want to know?”
Their grandmother nodded once, briskly. She asked another question. “You do a lot of running away. Where’s your father?”
“He’s been gone for years,” James said. James’s voice was tight. “Six years. Longer. Since before Sammy.”
“I remember him,” their grandmother said.
“The police in Bridgeport tried to find him and couldn’t,” Dicey said.
“He was t
he kind of man who always sailed close to the wind,” their grandmother said.
“What does that mean?” James asked. “What do you mean? Did you know him?”
“He used to come around here, whenever he was in the area, when his ship was in Baltimore,” their grandmother said.
“What was he like?” James asked. “Only Dicey remembers him—I don’t. What did he look like?”
“Slim, dark-haired. He was a quick, nervous, darting kind of man. Not steady, but lively. The kind who might cheat at cards if luck wasn’t running his way. And he’d bet too much too, that would be his way. She should have come back here when he ran out on her.”
“She didn’t want to,” Sammy said.
“How do you know?” their grandmother said. Then, before he could answer, she said, “What does it matter anyway?”
“Momma matters to me,” Sammy said, his chin stubborn.
“She went off and left you,” their grandmother said.
“She wanted to come back,” Sammy said.
“How do you know that,” their grandmother said. She didn’t ask it, she said it.
“Because she loved me. Didn’t she, Dicey?”
“Yes, she did. She loved all of us,” Dicey said.
“Humph,” their grandmother said, reaching for another crab.
The Tillermans had won that battle. Dicey knew it. She knew it as close to her bones as she knew that Momma did always love them. Dicey tried not to grin. It didn’t do to grin when there was still the whole war to win.
The children washed the dishes while their grandmother watched them and told them where to put things away. When everything was finished, and Maybeth had scrubbed the wooden tabletop with mild soap and a stiff brush, Dicey announced that they would like to go down to the dock, to fish for crab bait and to swim.
“Can Sammy swim?” their grandmother asked.
“We can all swim. We were raised near the ocean,” Dicey said.
“Suit yourselves,” their grandmother said.
At the dock, they took turns fishing and swimming. They stripped down to their underwear and dove into the quiet water. The bay had no waves and no undertows. It was as calm as a swimming pool. You could swim miles in this quiet water.
Dicey swam out, away from land, in a slow crawl. Her mind was working fast. There was a way, if only she could see it. Sammy and James took the few bony fish they had caught and baited the crab traps. Maybeth jumped off the dock into the water, then climbed back onto the dock to jump again. When she hit the water, waves surged up around her and the water she sprayed out turned golden in the setting sun.
Evening fell across the water, toward them. The sky turned twilight purple. A molten pink band flowed across the horizon, where the sun had been.
The children dashed back to the house, trying to outrun the mosquitoes that swarmed up from the marshlands. Their grandmother sat in the same chair in the kitchen. They wished her good night, and she nodded her head but said nothing to them.
Dicey showed James and Sammy the rooms they could have. She unpacked the toothbrushes and toothpaste and comb into the bathroom. She put each one’s underwear and clean clothes into his own room.
They gathered in Sammy’s room, the one with the picture of Indians on the wardrobe, and sat on his bed. “What’re we going to do tomorrow?” James asked Dicey.
“I dunno yet, James,” she said. “She doesn’t want us to stay. She said so.”
“Well, neither do I,” Sammy announced. He was in bed but sitting up. His hair was damp. “Even if it is fun.”
“What about you, James?” Dicey asked. “People say she’s crazy.”
“Crazy like a fox,” James said. He dismissed that question, without hesitation. “It would be okay here. It’s sure big enough.”
“Maybeth?”
Maybeth didn’t answer. She looked down at her hands and across at Sammy. “You want to,” she said to Dicey. “Don’t you?”
“That we’ll talk about in the morning,” Dicey said. “How about a song, how about Peggy-O.”
They sang softly, in case it might bother their grandmother, sitting alone downstairs at the empty kitchen table.
CHAPTER 9
Dicey woke herself up early the next morning, before the first gray signals of dawn, when the air outside lay black over fields, marshes and the glistening water she could just see from her window. For a time, she sat by the window and thought out the plan she had gone to sleep considering.
It all depended on what their grandmother was really like, inside herself where she was who she really was. Not outside. Dicey knew about the difference between outside and inside.
You could assume that everybody wasn’t just the way they seemed. The question was, in what way was their grandmother not what she seemed. Did she really want the Tillermans to go away?
Dicey was sure that she didn’t want the Tillermans to stay. But Dicey wasn’t sure she wanted them to go away. Their grandmother was a Tillerman too, which made everything contradictory. If she wanted the Tillermans to go, then she wanted herself to go—in a contradictory way this was true. Dicey’s job was to see through the contradictions and find out where they made sense together.
Why had their grandmother gone outside to the back when Dicey knocked? She could have stayed inside and not been found. Why had she asked all those questions at dinner? Cousin Eunice’s letter would have explained about Momma. And what did she mean when she said to Dicey that she knew what Dicey was thinking? Unless it was what she herself was thinking.
Besides, their grandmother had taken the boat to town to find James and Maybeth and Sammy. That was something she wouldn’t have done if she’d really wanted them to go away.
Maybe their grandmother didn’t know just what she wanted. Or maybe she didn’t really want anything, except to be left alone. Four kids, they were an awful bother. Cousin Eunice said so, again and again. And an expense.
Dicey could manage the bother and they’d figure out a way to cover the expenses. She was sure they could do that. They could leave their grandmother pretty much alone. It was the place Dicey wanted, the big house, the acres of farmland, the barn, the water and the boat. It didn’t have anything to do with the woman.
The sky lightened. Over in the east, behind the house, the last star would be fading as the sun surged up. Above the marshes, a pale quarter moon waited in a light blue sky, with mares’ tails clouds brushing against it. Time to get moving.
Dicey woke James and Sammy and Maybeth. They all met in Dicey’s room over the kitchen, so that any noise they made wouldn’t waken their grandmother. Dicey explained her plan:
“We have to get started on something useful before she wakes up. That way, she’ll keep us here today. Or if she tells us to go, we can say we will, as soon as we finish the job.”
“But—” James said.
“But what?”
“What if she means it?”
“She does mean it,” Dicey said. “That’s the trouble, isn’t it? I figure, if we get her to put it off she’ll get used to us and forget that she wants us to go away. We pretend we’re not even thinking about staying here. But every day we do something that needs to be done so it’s worth her while to keep us.”
“She could call the police,” James said.
“She doesn’t have a phone. But if she does then we will go, I promise. If she really means it. Can’t you tell? She doesn’t want us to stay, but she doesn’t want us to go, either.”
“I don’t think she likes me,” Sammy said.
“That doesn’t matter, Sammy. It’s not her I’m thinking about. It’s us.”
“She’s mean,” Sammy said. “She’s not like Momma at all.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Dicey repeated. “Besides, she’s not really mean, not like Mr. Rudyard. Is she?”
“How do you know?” Sammy demanded.
“Remember when James took that money?” Maybeth asked him. “Remember how Dicey’s face got all red and hot
and she told us we had to go, and she told James he had to obey. Remember? That was like our grandmother. Mr. Rudyard was cold.”
Sammy subsided. Dicey took advantage of the moment to announce their project for the day: honeysuckle.
They dressed quietly, used the bathroom quickly and tiptoed down the stairs into the dark hall. The kitchen lay in shadows.
They began with the honeysuckle growing up around the front porch. It had formed a massed wall that wove around itself and clung to itself with tiny tendrils. The tendrils looped and looped around anything that would hold them up.
The Tillermans had no plan. They just reached into the plants and pulled. The honeysuckle vines emerged in long stringers, unwoven from the mass.
By the time the sun had risen and only the shadow of the paper mulberry tree kept an early morning coolness over the yard, they had a large mound of honeysuckle branches at the foot of the lawn. Dicey didn’t know how they were going to get rid of it. In some patches, she could see the screen on the porch, but they hadn’t gotten a quarter of the growth yet. Maybe it would burn, but she doubted that; it was lush summer growth, tensile vines and green leaves.
“I’m hungry,” James said. “This is going to take all day.”
“I hope so,” Dicey grunted, jerking back on a fat vine. “Anyway, let’s see what there is to eat.”
They trooped around the side of the house and across the porch. At the kitchen door, they stopped. Their grandmother was up. She was at the stove, making pancakes on a griddle so large it covered two burners on the stove. She turned around when she heard them coming in.
“Wash your hands. I see that you don’t make your beds.”
“I’ll do that,” Dicey offered.
“No, you’ll each do your own,” their grandmother said. She turned her back on them. She was wearing another shapeless blouse over another long, shapeless skirt. Her feet were bare and clean. She had set the table.
When the children sat down, two platters of pancakes waited for them. There was no syrup or butter, but quart jars of strawberry jam were set out. Their grandmother didn’t say a word. She just served herself two pancakes and spread jam over them.