Dicey's Song (13 page)

“I don't see why not. But she tells you what to order.”

“Did she tell you what to order?”

“Yup.”

“What did you do?”

“I ordered it. What do you think I'd do?”

Sammy laughed, a round, tumbling sound. “I think you'd refuse to get it. Because she told you.”

“Gram said you're being an angel at school. Except you don't fly.”

Sammy nodded, looking at Dicey's eyes. “It's all I
can
do, being good. Nobody there's even yelled at me, all this year so far. That's pretty good, wouldn't you say?”

“Are you sure you can't fly?” Dicey teased him. Then she said yes, it was very good, it was better than she had managed. “Do you like any of the kids in your class?” she asked.

Sammy shrugged, his eyes watching where the sandpaper rubbed at the wood. “The guys — well, you know, Dicey, they don't like goody-goodies. It doesn't matter.” He shrugged again. “It's OK with me.”

Dicey looked hard at him. His eyes were flat again. She wondered if that flat, holding-in expression was the one he wore all day long. “Is there anything you like about school?”

“Phys Ed, because we play games. You know, baseball and kickball.”

“Don't you play those at recess too?”

“Not me.”

“Why not?”

“If I did — I'd get angry, and — if I exploded — you see, Dicey, when I get angry I don't know what I'll do. So I watch, and that's OK. Another thing I like.”

“What's that?”

“I like being good. Because Gram will like it. Sometimes, I wish I'd been better, when Momma wanted me to.”

Alarm bells were clanging in Dicey's head. “Sammy Tillerman,” she said, shaking her scraper at him. “You don't think it's your fault, do you? About Momma?”

He didn't answer.

“But that wasn't anybody's fault, not even Momma's. It was just the way things happened.”

“But I didn't help,” he said. “And Dicey — you know what they say about Gram.”

“But we know that's not true,” Dicey said.

“But if Gram —” Sammy said. He stopped himself. “And I like Gram,” he added. “It's not so much trouble to be good in school, if I keep remembering.”

“
Are
you good, Sammy? I mean — you know what I mean. Are you?”

“No a'course not, you know that. But that's OK. If I had a job — but I'm too young, it'll be years before I can help out with a job.”

Dicey thought for a minute. “Cripes,” she finally said, “you've given yourself a pretty hard job as it is, as far as I can see. And you're doing pretty good work at it,” she said.

He nodded, pleased.

“But then, that shouldn't surprise me, because I know how hard you can work,” Dicey said.

“Yeah I can, can't I?”

“Maybe you've outgrown fighting,” she suggested.

He shook his head.

“I used to get in fights,” Dicey told him.

“You never said that,” he protested.

“You never asked me,” Dicey countered. “I used to fight with girls and boys, and just about anyone. I can't even remember how many fights I was in. But I used to win a lot.”

“Of course,” Sammy said.

“And I'll tell you something funny. Not ha-ha funny, but queer. You want to hear it?”

“OK.”

“I used to feel good, after. Even if I lost. As if — I don't know — as if I'd exploded and that was over now.”

He stared up at her. “You never get in trouble,” he told her.

Dicey laughed. “I'm in trouble right now,” she told him, feeling not at all upset about home ec and her apron. “I'm in trouble and I don't even care. Because” — she hadn't thought of this before — “it's my own trouble I made myself.”

Sammy just stared at her. Then he turned back to his work and Dicey went back to hers. They worked without talking for an hour or more. Then Dicey felt a rubbing on her back, going around and around. Sammy was sanding her back. She turned and scraped down the leg of his jeans, but she had to bend over to do that and he started sanding her fanny. He was giggling. Dicey dropped the scraper and grabbed hold of his ankles. Sammy toppled over into the dirt beside her.

Before he could scramble up again, she started to tickle him under the arms. He squirmed and twisted under her hands hammering on the ground with his fists.

Then Sammy twisted around underneath her and wriggled free. He ran over to the workbench, and stood there, poised to fight her if she came near him. Dicey made a growling noise, on her knees like a tiger. She leaped at him. Sammy turned and ran to the dark side of the barn. He scrambled over the doorway into an empty stall.

“Hey, Dicey,” his voice made little echoes from within the darkness.

“You OK?”

“You could keep chickens in one of these, they're huge. Look.”

Dicey came over and unbolted the door. She stepped into the stall. Sammy heaved an armload of dry hay over her head.

Dicey puffed and sneezed and brushed the brittle hay from her face and hair and shoulders. “Just you wait until I get my hands on you, Sammy Tillerman,” she said, trying to keep laughter out of her voice. He dashed past her, through the barn, out into the sunshine.

“Can't catch me!” he called.

“Gram doesn't like chickens anyway,” she answered to his disappearing back.

DICEY WORE her new jumper to school, and the bra of course, but she almost didn't notice that any more. You could get used to just about anything, she thought. Nobody noticed her new clothes, but then nobody noticed her much anyway, so she wasn't surprised. When she left English class to go to home ec, she saw Mina hanging around by the door. “Hey, Dicey,” Mina greeted her.

“Hey,” Dicey answered, walking right on past Mina and her friends. Mina got the message all right. Dicey heard one of the other voices talk as the girls followed her down the hall, falling behind because she was hurrying: “I don't know why you're looking for honky friends,” the voice complained.

Dicey was hurrying to home ec class to get her seat in the back, at a table by herself, and to get her face all set and ready. They were starting a new unit today.

Miss Eversleigh stood in front of the class wearing her usual dark suit and usual nylon blouse with her usual pin on the lapel of her jacket. Nutrition was the new unit. Dicey kept herself from groaning out loud. She could peel potatoes and fry an egg, and that was about it, and she didn't want to learn more. She could also, she reminded herself, figure out things to eat and cook them over an open fire. But still, she wished Maybeth could be here instead of her. Maybeth would like it and be good at it. She hoped Maybeth could get this far in school.

Miss Eversleigh began to lecture about nutrition and food groups. Dicey sighed, opened her notebook, and began drawing a picture. In her picture, there was a little boat on an ocean, without any land around. The boat's sails puffed out. Dicey put some high-headed clouds in the sky. She grinned and put a crab at the bottom, under the water. The crab was staring up at the boat. Dicey decided not to put in anybody steering the boat; she knew who it was anyway. Miss Eversleigh's voice droned on.

Later, Jeff was waiting by the bicycle rack. Dicey thought he noticed her jumper, but he didn't say anything. He had a song for her, he said. Dicey stood in front of him, holding her books. He looked quizzically at her, as if there was something he wanted her to say, but when she didn't he began to sing right away. The song he had that day was called “Pretty Polly.” Dicey had heard this cruel song, once before.

“Polly, pretty Polly, won't you come and go with me,” he sang. His hands brought music out of the guitar. The story went on, and the man — Handsome Willy — killed Polly and rode away, “over mountains so steep and the valleys so wide.”

Jeff looked at Dicey, waiting. Finally, he asked, pushing his dark hair from his forehead: “What do you think”?

Dicey shrugged.

“But don't you wonder? Why he killed her? What happened to him?” Jeff asked.

“Yeah, I do,” Dicey admitted.

“So what do you think?” Jeff asked again.

“I gotta go,” Dicey said.

Jeff shrugged. He was wearing a brown sweater with the kind of softly mixed greens and whites that was in the wool Gram bought for Dicey. Heather. “See you tomorrow, maybe.” His gray eyes were concentrating on the face of his guitar.

“Sure,” Dicey said.

Millie noticed her jumper and liked it and made a kind of fuss about it. Dicey thought, after all, she'd rather not be noticed. That afternoon there was another letter for Gram from the doctors in Boston, but this one was thin. Dicey wondered if Gram wrote answers to these letters. She wished she could read them, but she figured, if it was anything important — especially good news — Gram would tell them about it.

Sammy came out to sand with her while she scraped. He told her about a couple of boys in his class who had to stay in the principal's office almost all afternoon. They had tried to walk tightrope over the top of the swings, he reported. Everyone, he said (meaning all the teachers), got angry and scared. His own opinion was that since they had talked so much about it before they tried and had gathered a huge audience before they started shinnying up the tall poles, they planned to get caught.

“I wonder if I could do it,” he wondered. “I've got pretty good balance. Don't you think I do?”

“I think,” Dicey said, picturing the fifteen-foot metal swing sets, “that if you ever talk like that again I'll have a heart attack.” She could see how it would look, Sammy's sturdy body and his head of yellow hair, with his arms out to keep his balance. And falling onto the packed dirt. “Seriously.”

“OK, Dicey,” he said, with a smile in his voice. “We had a math test this afternoon,” he added.

Dicey took in the information. “They didn't do it on purpose, did they? To get out of the test?”

“I think so,” Sammy answered. “They're pretty tricky.”

“Did you ask them?”

“Yep. After school. Ernie — he's the one who has all the ideas — didn't say yes. But he didn't say no either. He's bigger than the rest of us. Miss Tieds never even caught on,” Sammy said.

“How was the test?”

“Easy,” Sammy reported.

Just before supper, Dicey asked James when he was going to begin working with Maybeth. James pulled his eyes up from a book he was reading, as if he couldn't remember what she was talking about.

“James,”
Dicey said.

“I'll do it,” he said. “Cripes, Dicey, give me a chance. I've got the paper route and school and all. There's no hurry.”

The phone rang during dinner — in the middle of a big conversation about chickens. Sammy was trying to persuade Gram that they would be smart to get some chickens. “I'd feed them and everything. I'd collect the eggs,” he promised. “They could stay in one of those empty stalls. The chickens, not the eggs.”

Gram teased Sammy. “You'd give them names,” she told him, “and then when it came time to eat one you'd say, ‘We can't eat Hercules!'”

Sammy laughed. “I wouldn't name a chicken Hercules,” he said. “I'd name it — Miss Tieds. I wouldn't mind eating that chicken.”

“I couldn't ever eat any creature named Miss anything. Or Mister. You can't give chickens titles, boy. It's like — naming one Queen Elizabeth, or President Johnson.”

“Johnson's not President any more, Gram,” James informed her. She fixed him with a beady glance, and her mouth twitched. Before he could say anything, the phone rang and he ran to answer it. When he returned, he was running. “It's Toby, and he wants me to spend the night on Friday, and can I?”

Gram asked him if he wanted to, and he said yes. She asked him where Toby lived, and he lived downtown. She asked him about what time, and he told her after school on Friday and Toby's mother would bring him home Saturday afternoon. All the time, he was almost jumping with excitement. Gram asked him about his paper route. “Sammy'll do it, won't you, Sammy?”

“Sure,” Sammy said.

“Sammy's too little,” Dicey protested.

Both James and Sammy protested that. Dicey looked at Gram for advice.

Gram apparently agreed with the boys, and she gave James permission. He ran back down the hall to tell Toby, and then ran back to the table, full of plans for what he'd take and what they might do. Dicey looked at him and couldn't tell what to think. She was glad he had a friend, but she had the feeling that he wasn't going to do much to help Maybeth, feeling the way he did.

Her foreboding was correct. Dicey knew she was impatient for Maybeth. She tried not to nag at James. But she couldn't help asking him, about every time she saw him, whether he had figured out how to teach Maybeth. “What's the big hurry?” he asked her.