Homecoming

  The pancakes looked normal, but they tasted curiously flat. The jam, however, was delicious and the children ate with good appetites.

  Finally their grandmother spoke. “I like that honeysuckle.” She looked at Dicey.

  Dicey’s heart sank.

  “That honeysuckle’s been there a long time. It’s the kind of tenacious plant I have to respect,” their grandmother said.

  “Honeysuckle is parasitic,” James announced. “It can be trained and kept back, but when allowed to proliferate without controls, it chokes out other growth. It’s begun to climb over the small trees out front.”

  His grandmother studied him. James ignored her and slathered jam on his seventh pancake.

  “Where’d you learn a word like proliferate?” she asked him. His mouth was full so he couldn’t answer. “The honeysuckle will take you all day, at least,” their grandmother said.

  Nobody answered. Dicey tried to look unconcerned with what her grandmother would say next.

  “You can’t just leave those vines piled up. They have to go out on the marsh,” was what she said.

  Dicey chewed hard, to keep herself from smiling. This was just a skirmish, not even a real battle. She looked up to meet her grandmother’s eyes and swallowed hastily.

  After the dishes were washed and the beds made, the children went back outside. The temperature had gone up and they stripped down to just their shorts. This meant that as they pulled the vines or piled them up they got mightily scratched, all over their arms and chests and legs, but it was cooler.

  They sang as they worked, sometimes in harmony, sometimes all singing melody.

  Dicey showed Maybeth how to wrap a long vine around her arm and pull back on it, with all her weight, taking the strain in her shoulder. Sammy used both his hands. Half the time he jerked so hard that he fell over backward.

  The overgrowth gradually gave way to a thin layer of the oldest, thickest vines. These had to be worked out of the screen netting, because if you pulled hard on them, the screen ripped out.

  As they stood, patiently unravelling coiled tendrils, Dicey began to sing the song about the wide river and the small boat. She liked the way the melody held its notes and lingered over its phrases. This was a song they all sang together, but each of them sang it his own way, holding the notes and words he liked best.

  The voice came from behind them: “Where’d you hear that song?”

  They turned, wiping back sweat-dampened hair. Their grandmother had a cantaloupe cut up into thick slices. She had arranged the slices on a metal cookie sheet.

  “Momma sang it,” James answered her. “Is that for us?”

  “I don’t have lemons for lemonade,” she said. “Don’t have milk, eggs, butter—it’s melons or nothing.”

  “Melons are fine, thanks,” Dicey said quickly.

  “Did you sing to our momma?” Maybeth asked.

  “I don’t recall,” their grandmother said. She walked away from them, back around the house.

  The children ignored her and fell upon the melons. As they sat and ate, Dicey looked at what they had accomplished. “We can finish the front and clear away around the trees. Then we’ll eat lunch, okay?”

  They agreed.

  “And after that we’ll move that pile of vines down to the marsh. I guess it might be safe to burn them there. And after that—how does a long swim sound?”

  A long swim sounded fine.

  When they went into the kitchen for lunch, their grandmother was not there. They couldn’t call out to her, because they didn’t know what name they were supposed to use. It sounded funny to say “Mrs. Tillerman,” and it sounded just as funny to say “Grandmother.” Dicey knocked on the closed door of the downstairs bedroom, but there was no answer.

  Because Dicey didn’t feel right about going into the refrigerator or the pantry, they ate tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden. As soon as they were finished, they jumped up to carry huge armloads of tangled vines out to the marsh. Dicey decided that the pile should be a good way into the marsh, but next to the path so they didn’t have to tramp through the wet grasses. It made quite a hill, big enough to slide down if it had been hay.

  Dicey didn’t want to light a fire without checking with their grandmother. She didn’t feel sure of what would happen when the leaves caught. So they left the vines and ran down to the water, single-file along the narrow path.

  They tossed their shorts and sneakers on the end of the dock and leaped into the water. It was cool and cleansing. It washed the sweat off their bodies. They stretched muscles that were taut and tired from pulling and carrying. Dicey swam underwater, looking at the muddy bottom. The water soaked through her hair and cooled her head. She rolled and floated under water, as if she were a piece of seaweed.

  After a while, she climbed out and sat on the dock. It was then she realized that the boat was gone. What was their grandmother up to?

  The children lay on the dock, letting the hot sun dry them.

  “We ought to trim back that honeysuckle by the barn,” James said. He was lying on his back in the puddle made by the water dripping off of him. His eyes were closed tight against the bright sunlight. “She said she likes honeysuckle, didn’t she? If we trimmed it, it would make a kind of hedge, and it wouldn’t harm anything.”

  “We don’t have anything to cut it with,” Dicey said.

  “You could ask.”

  “No, I can’t. Don’t you see? We can’t ask, we just have to do things. We can’t give her a chance to say no, because if we do then that’s what she’ll say. And we’ve got to get back to work. There are still the side porches. I’ve got to look in the barn for tools because the next job is to fix the screens on the porches.” Dicey sprang up and put on her shorts. She hurried her family along.

  James and Maybeth and Sammy pulled at the honeysuckle on the side near the barn, while Dicey explored the cobwebby barn inside. She forced the doors wide apart, so she would have enough light to see. She found a small workshop opposite the empty stalls. The tools looked clean and well-oiled, saws, hammers, pliers, axes, mallets, planes, drills, screwdrivers, a level. No cobwebs had been spun around the workbench, so she figured her grandmother kept it in order. Nearby, garden tools hung on the wall and lay on a long shelf, clippers in four different sizes, shovels, hoes, stiff metal rakes and long-fingered leaf rakes. A tiny cupboard with three dozen small drawers held nails and screws of every size.

  Dicey did not let herself linger by the boat. The boat was the prize. Unless they could stay, she wouldn’t think about fixing it up or sailing it. She hoisted herself up onto the side and checked under the bow to be sure the sails in a canvas bag were there. Then she picked out the two largest pairs of clippers and ran outside.

  James and Maybeth began the slow task of trimming back the honeysuckle hedge. Sammy didn’t want to. He enjoyed tearing down the vines, grabbing at them with both hands and holding hard, as his hands slipped down, ripping off the leaves. Then, when his grip held, he would lean back on the vine and swing his weight against it. He grunted as he pulled. He braced his sturdy little legs against the ground. Sammy was hard to stop once he’d made up his mind to do a job.

  Dicey saw their grandmother walking through the vegetable fields carrying two large grocery bags. She called to James to go take them, or at least one, and continued pulling. The next time she looked, her grandmother was walking along, still carrying two bags, and James was nowhere in sight. Dicey let go of the vine in exasperation and ran to help.

  She met her grandmother at the end of the lawn. She didn’t even ask, she just took a bag. “Front must be clear, by the size of that pile out in the marsh,” the woman said.

  Their grandmother came around the side to inspect the work. Sammy decided he should show off. He leaned back and grunted, to show how hard he was working. He jerked his arms. His whole body pulled back against the vine.

  The vine snapped free of the roof.

  Sammy tumbled backward onto his fanny. H
is feet flew up in the air. The vine came after him and wrapped around him, as if it had a life of its own, as if it was a boa constrictor attacking its dinner.

  Their grandmother laughed, a thin, rusty sound. Sammy struggled to free his head and arms from the snaky leaves.

  “What’s so funny?” he demanded.

  “You are,” his grandmother said.

  And Sammy laughed too.

  James came up from the marsh, carrying two more bags of groceries.

  “Can she use clippers?” the woman asked Dicey when she saw Maybeth. “Is it safe for her?”

  This irritated Dicey. “Ask her yourself. She’s not deaf. If you can’t see for yourself.”

  “Well, you’d better rub the tools down carefully with the tack cloth before you put them away. Or they’ll rust. I have groceries to put away.”

  They swam again before dinner. They came to the table with wet heads and shining faces. Their grandmother had fried pieces of chicken in a thin cornbread batter. She served mashed potatoes with butter in pools on the top, and green beans. She even had dessert, a store cake with stiff, over-sweet chocolate frosting, and a bowl of apples and bananas. By each child’s place stood a tall glass of milk.

  “You did a good day’s work,” their grandmother said. “I suppose you’ll be moving on tomorrow.”

  Dicey took a deep breath. “There’s still honeysuckle to be pulled.”

  “Don’t know why you carried it so far into the marsh,” their grandmother said. “You could leave it up to the near end, and it’ll rot away by spring. James, you look like you could use another piece of chicken.”

  It was not what she said, but what she didn’t say, that Dicey heard. The Tillermans had won another day.

  After supper, the children washed up the dishes and their grandmother went out to the fields. As Maybeth soaped and rinsed, and the boys dried, and Dicey put away the glasses, dishes, knives, forks, pots and pans, they sang. Maybeth scrubbed down the wooden table and Dicey polished it dry. Maybeth sang the song about the man who sang for his dead friends. The others had forgotten the words, so she taught them again. Their voices blended in the yellow kitchen light, and filled the empty house as the world outside darkened into twilight. “‘When I come to the cross of that silent sea, who will si-ing for me?’”

  They let the echoes of melody fade away before they moved again.

  “I’ll give you this much,” their grandmother said from the doorway. “Your momma taught you how to sing.” She stood with darkness behind her. Dicey couldn’t read her expression. “Where’d you hear that song?”

  “A friend taught it to us. Someone we met when we were going to Aunt Cilla’s house,” Dicey said.

  “Stewart,” Maybeth said.

  “Stewart who?” their grandmother asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dicey said. “It was at a college.”

  “What were you doing at a college?” their grandmother asked.

  James told her about their time in New Haven. He started with the rain and the hunger. He even told about stealing the money. He finished it at the beach in Fairfield.

  Their grandmother had stood silent in the doorway while he told it. “You’re not helpless infants,” she remarked. Then she added quickly, “If you want to wash anything, tonight’s the time. I’m canning tomorrow and the next week.”

  Dicey washed out their dirty underwear in the sink. She stumbled through the dark outside to the far side of the house, the side they hadn’t yet pulled honeysuckle from, to find the clothesline. Mosquitoes bit at her, but she lingered outside anyway, listening to the wind in the pines and the frogs croaking across the marsh. Overhead, between the branches of the trees, stars shone. Clouds drifted across the moon’s partial face. When she returned to the kitchen, it was dark and empty. She ran up the stairs two at a time to join her family.

  That was how the first day went.

  On the second day they pulled down the rest of the honeysuckle on both sides of the house and gathered all the piles together near the edge of the marsh. In the afternoon, James and Dicey started patching up the holes in the porch screens, where the screens had pulled out of the wood or just ripped.

  Their grandmother spent the whole day in the kitchen, canning batches of tomatoes and carrying them out to cool on the back porch. Sammy and Maybeth emptied the crab pots for supper, and they ate at the trestle table on the porch. Some crabs were left over. Even James couldn’t fit any more in. So Maybeth picked out the meat and put it in a bowl in the refrigerator, for lunch the next day.

  “I guess you’ll be moving on tomorrow,” their grandmother said again.

  “There’s still screens to be patched,” Dicey said.

  “Did you bait the traps?” the woman asked Sammy and Maybeth. They had.

  That was how the second day went.

  On the third day they finished the screens and James set to work mending the front steps, with Maybeth to give him an extra hand. Sammy and Dicey mopped and waxed the floors inside. They even went into the dark dining room (which had a big table and eight chairs, and a fireplace at one end) and the living room. Dicey snapped up the shades and looked around there.

  This room too had a fireplace, and a sofa in front of it, and a huge wooden desk and walls full of books. Dicey called James in to see it. A few of the books he’d read. Some he’d heard of. The rest he stood and looked at. “You could read for years,” he said.

  “Who wants to?” Sammy asked him. “Hurry up, so I can go swimming.”

  At dinner, James asked their grandmother about the books.

  “My husband was a reading man,” she said. “For all the good it did him.”

  “What do you mean?” James asked.

  “He got all of his answers out of books,” their grandmother said. “Books don’t change, and he liked that. They made him feel right.”

  “What’s the matter with that?” James wanted to know. “You can study books and think about what’s in them. People put down what happened before you were even born, and you can understand and not make the same mistakes. Like history.”

  “The past is gone,” their grandmother said.

  “But it shouldn’t be forgotten,” James said. “Should it?”

  “Sometimes,” their grandmother said. “Sometimes it’s better. My husband used his books to build a wall to keep things out. Oh I know.” She cut off James’s answer. “I know it doesn’t have to be that way. But that’s the way it was.”

  “Books let things in,” James said.

  His grandmother studied him. “I guess they could. For some. They didn’t, not for him. But he knew a lot about history and ideas and the way things should be.” James was listening carefully, but she changed the subject. “Will you be moving on tomorrow?”

  “When the front hinges are set in,” Dicey said. “Your mailbox needs bracing, and there’s some patching to be done on the barn. You do have lumber in there, don’t you?”

  “It’s going to rain,” their grandmother said. “There’s storms brewing.”

  Dicey’s heart fell.

  That night, Dicey was awakened by thunder roaring about the house. Lightning snaked down out of a black sky. She started counting at the end of the thunder, and barely got to two when the lightning flashed again.

  Maybeth entered her room. “Dicey?”

  “Climb in.”

  “It’s right over our heads,” Maybeth said.

  It certainly seemed to be. Thunder growled just outside the window, trying to get in. Lightning flashed down and cracked like a whip. Dicey reached for Maybeth’s hand and they tiptoed down the hallway and down the stairs.

  In the kitchen, Dicey turned on the light. Maybeth stood by the door, pale. “Come on. Sit down,” Dicey urged her. “I didn’t know you were afraid of thunderstorms. Don’t worry. Lightning goes for the highest thing, so it’ll hit a tree or one of the chimneys. Not us.” She reached out and pulled at Maybeth’s right hand.

  The little girl winced and
turned paler. She pulled back and rubbed at her arm, up by the elbow. The arm hung down by her side, as if it were a broken wing.

  “Maybeth?” Dicey asked. “What’s wrong with your arm?”

  “It hurts. It hurts when I close my hand into a fist or try to hold something. Sometimes it just hurts when I don’t do anything. It woke me up. I don’t know what’s wrong, Dicey.”

  “Maybe it’ll go away by itself,” Dicey said. She poured Maybeth a glass of milk and got one for herself. They sat and drank quietly. Maybeth held the glass awkwardly in her left hand.

  The sky outside exploded with rain. It pounded on the tin roof of the porch. After a while the two girls went quietly upstairs again.

  There was a bar of light under their grandmother’s bedroom door. Dicey wondered if she was afraid of storms. Momma wasn’t.

  The morning of the fourth day dawned low and dark. The thunderstorm had passed, but the rain poured steadily down. It drummed on the roof, it splattered on the ground, it rattled softly among the trees. Dicey stood by the window, looking west. A low gray mist covered the marshes and you couldn’t see the bay.

  They couldn’t work outside in the rain. But surely their grandmother wouldn’t ask them to leave on a day like this. But then why shouldn’t she? What did she care? Dicey stood, watching rain fall in sheets. The barn. They could clean out the barn.

  She woke her brothers and sister. They dressed quietly. Quietly, they went to the bathroom and washed the sleep from their eyes and brushed their teeth. Quietly, they went down the stairs and into the kitchen.

  Their grandmother, already dressed in shirt and skirt, stood by the sink. She was running water into a canning pot. Glass jars stood on the draining board. A bushel basket of tomatoes was on the kitchen table. The woman’s hair was damp and curled wildly. Her feet were caked with mud.

  Caught, the children could only wait.

  “You can help me,” the woman said. Her eyes were bright, but her face sagged with fatigue. “I need the ripe tomatoes picked, and the squashes and cukes that are along the ground. Drainage is so bad they’ll rot if we don’t get them in.”