Dicey's Song (3 page)

Dicey went to stand behind James, who sat at the big wooden desk reading a thick book. He looked up over his shoulder at her and marked his place on the small print with a finger. “How long do you think it'll take to get the boat fixed up?” Dicey asked him.

“Not now, Dicey, I'm reading.”

“What're you reading?”

“The Bible.”

“Why?”

James sighed. “Mr. Thomas said every educated man should. He said it's one of the underpinnings of western civilization.” His face lit up. “Isn't that an idea? Underpinnings of civilization? As if — civilization were a big building, you know? Besides, there are some good stories in the Bible.”

“And besides,” Gram added in, “it was the fattest book on the shelves and James always likes to read the fattest ones.”

“That's not true,” James said.

“Isn't it,” Gram answered.

“And besides,” James said, “if you have a big idea, you have to write it down in a big book, otherwise you won't be able to explain all the complicated parts.”

“Didn't say there was anything wrong with what you were doing,” Gram remarked.

The piano behind them played on, softly, through all this, as if Maybeth knew that everything was all right in the room.

“And look at this, Dicey,” James said quietly. He turned the heavy pages back to the beginning. There was a long list of names and dates, in different handwritings. Some of the ink was so old it had turned brown. The list went all the way down one page and partway down the next.

James's finger pointed to an entry on the second page.
John Tillerman md. Abigail,
1936, she read. Then there were three names, in a row, in the same handwriting, with dates of birth beside them: John Tillerman, Elizabeth Tillerman, Samuel Tillerman. By Samuel there were two dates, and the last date had been put in later, by a different hand. The same hand that put in a date of death for the first John Tillerman. Dicey touched Momma's name there in the ink and pointed at Samuel's name. “That's Bullet, our uncle.”

“He was only nineteen,” James pointed out. They were talking almost in a whisper.

“It was a war,” Dicey explained.

“Even so,” James said, “that's still young. He was only six years older than you. Only nine older than me.”

We should be written down too, Dicey thought. But maybe Gram didn't want that.

“I can hear what you're thinking, girl,” her grandmother said. Dicey looked up, alarmed. “And you're right,” Gram said. She got up, took James's place at the desk, and pulled an old fountain pen out of the drawer. Slowly, she wrote down their names: Dicey Tillerman. James Tillerman. Maybeth Tillerman. Samuel Tillerman.

They all looked at the names there. At last, Gram said, “That's settled too.” She gave James back his seat.

None of the children said anything. Dicey guessed that, like her, they couldn't think of how to say all the things they were thinking. Finally, Sammy found words. “Good-o,” he declared.

Gram smiled to herself and agreed to play another game of checkers with him. James went back to his reading, Maybeth back to the piano. For a while, Dicey watched them all.

Then she wandered out of the room. She had nothing to do. Her homework she had finished quickly after school on Friday, just some math, and memorizing for science. There weren't any chores she could think of. She decided to go outside.

Outside was better than inside, Dicey always thought that. In Provincetown, where they had lived with their momma, they were always outside, on the dunes and down by the rushing water. Summertimes they would go out early in the morning and stay all day. The rooms in their little cabin were awfully small, especially with four children and one of them Sammy, so they had spent all the time they could outside. But even here, in Gram's house, with its big, boxy rooms, Dicey preferred outside. She liked the water. She liked the stretch of water leading before her and she liked the stretch of sky overhead.

Dicey crossed the lawn at the back, went through the garden, and then headed down the narrow path through the tall marsh grasses. Overhead, the growing darkness turned the sky to the color of blueberries, and long clouds floated gray. The only movement Dicey could see in the Bay, when she sat dangling her feet over the end of the dock, was the turgid, slow sweeping of tide. She wiped sweat off her forehead. She looked out across the flat water. Just a band of burning orange was left from the sunset, but the water caught that and transformed it, lying before Dicey like a field of gold. Like cloth of gold.

Dicey was feeling edgy and not really like herself. Probably, she told herself, it was all these changes that were permanent. The new home and the new school and Gram. But Dicey didn't mind changes, she'd gotten used to them over the summer. For a minute, she unrolled the adventures of the summer out, like ribbons. The ribbons unrolled back until Dicey saw her momma's face. But it wasn't her momma's own face she saw, it was the photograph the police in Bridgeport had shown her for identification, that faraway face lying back against a white pillow, with the golden hair cut short all around it.

The sadness of Momma lost to them, maybe forever, was something Dicey carried around deep inside her all the time, and maybe that explained her edginess. Dicey wasn't used to carrying sadness around. She was used to seeing trouble and doing something about it. She just didn't know anything to do about Momma.

What Dicey was used to, she realized, was things being simple, like a song. You sang the words and the melody straight through. That was the way she had brought her family down here to Crisfield, singing straight through.

Gram probably knew something about carrying sorrow around. However she acted, Dicey knew Gram had cared about her three children who all left her and never came back. She wondered how Gram carried her sorrows. Maybe someday, when they had all got used to one another, she would ask.

The first pale stars were coming out. It was the dark of the moon, so the stars burned brighter, especially the evening star, hanging just over the horizon. Dicey knew she should get back inside and send Maybeth and Sammy up to bed. But she didn't want to and maybe she wouldn't.

She lay on her back along the dock and looked up at the stars. The sky was turning black and the stars burned out there, unchanging. All those stars, and those dark millions of light years . . . Dicey wondered if the space between was to push the stars apart or hold them together.

She jumped up impatiently. That was James's kind of idea, and when she started having ideas like that it was time to get back inside.

When she returned to the house, only James was still in the living room. “Where are the little kids?” Dicey asked.

“They went to bed, half an hour ago. They're asleep; Gram tucked them in and went up to check later.”

“You should have called me.”

“Gram said maybe you wanted to be off on your own. She said you put in a long, hard summer with all of us, and we should remember that you might want to get away once in a while.”

Dicey didn't know what to answer. She was surprised to hear that Gram understood that, but still — she almost wished Sammy and Maybeth hadn't wanted to go to bed without saying good night to her.

James had his face back in the book. “Am I bothering you?” Dicey asked. He shook his head, but his eyes were asking her questions. “Is something wrong?”

He put his eyes back on the page. “I'm just wondering how things are going to go for us this year. And for me. I mean, it's not as if we were her real children — and at school too. What if it doesn't work out?”

“She's going to adopt us, you heard her. She wants to, she likes us,” Dicey said. “She put us down in the Bible.”

“I know,” James said. “But Dicey? You never understand, because it's always so easy for you, you just go ahead and do what you want. And Sammy, too, and everybody likes Maybeth. And I think Sammy must remind her of our Uncle Bullet.”

“What are you talking about?” Dicey demanded.

“But I never fit in, not at Provincetown, or coming down here if you think about it. I think about it.”

“But you did, we did it together,” Dicey pointed out. The trouble with James was he thought too much about things.

“Some people, they're always outsiders, wherever they are.”

“So am I,” Dicey told him, finally understanding what he was worrying about.

“Yeah, but you don't care,” James said.

Dicey couldn't argue with him about that. “I wouldn't worry, about it, James,” she advised.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because it won't do any good,” Dicey snapped.

He didn't believe her, she could tell. She didn't let that bother her. She just picked up one of the books on boat building and went up to read in bed.

During the next week, Dicey settled herself into a routine. She rode her bike to school (the little kids took the bus, which stopped for them right by Gram's mailbox), sat through classes, and spent an hour exactly in Millie's store. Except for the windows, the difference Dicey's work made didn't show much the first week. But after she'd spent three hours on Saturday morning washing down the floors, the store really did look cleaner, more like a place where you would like to buy food.

Dicey had planned out her work at the store, what to do first, second, third, during the long, slow school days, going from science to math to social studies to gym to English to home ec. The only class she couldn't think in was home ec, because there you had to do things. Stupid things, Dicey reported to James. They were starting with sewing, buttons first. It wasn't interesting, but you had to watch what you were doing or you attracted Miss Eversleigh's attention and she would come stand behind you at the long table, explaining over again all the boring things you had already listened to, how to thread a needle and tie the knot, how to position the button and lock it in place, boring-boring-boring. Dicey had more important things to think about. Miss Eversleigh might care about that stuff, that was her business, and Dicey guessed the tall, bony, white-haired woman didn't have anything better to do. But Dicey had much better things to do. She had her own routine.

When she rode home from her job, Dicey would work for an hour on the boat, scraping off the old layers of paint, before going inside to help Gram with supper or some other housework. After supper, she would listen to Maybeth read for a while and help her review the lists of words. Then she would dash off the busy work her teachers gave as homework and spend an hour studying the boat books.

On Sunday, Gram asked Dicey to give her some advice about the papers and pamphlets she had been given at the Welfare Office and by the lawyer. “I can't figure these forms out,” Gram said, irritated. She had them all spread in front of her, covering half the long kitchen table. “So you're going to have to put your nose into them and help me, girl.”

If Gram needed her help, that was fine with Dicey. And if she couldn't figure things out, she could always enlist James's aid. “Between us,” she promised Gram, “we can do anything.”

“Humph,” Gram said. “I hope you're not counting on that.”

Dicey met her grandmother's eyes, across the table. “You do it too, don't you?” she asked. “Worrying,” she explained.

“Doesn't hurt to be prepared,” Gram said. “I've never taken charity, never wanted to. I don't expect to enjoy the experience, don't expect it to be easy. I like to be prepared for the worst. It saves trouble.”

Dicey remembered that the next Wednesday, when Maybeth came home from school with a note. As Dicey walked over from putting her bike away in the barn, she saw Gram shucking the last ears of corn from the garden. Gram sat on the back steps with her toes dug into the sun-warmed dirt. “Something on the table you should look at,” Gram told her.

Dicey knew what it was before she picked it up. A note from Maybeth's teacher. Maybeth was always coming home with notes from her teacher, saying could they please have a conference, not saying what they wanted to confer about. In Dicey's experience, what they wanted to talk about was what to do about Maybeth being so slow, about how they wanted to put her back a grade, which wasn't doing anything as far as Dicey could tell. Only the nun at the day camp in Bridgeport that summer had talked about really
doing
something. But what she wanted to do was send Maybeth to a special school for retarded people. Dicey didn't believe Maybeth was retarded, not the way she could learn music, the melodies and the words. But Dicey couldn't be sure; how could she be sure? She made herself pick up the piece of paper from the table.

She took the folded paper outside to sit beside Gram while she read it. It was from Maybeth's music teacher, asking Gram to come in for a meeting, the next day, at three fifteen, as soon as school let out. “But Maybeth can sing,” Dicey protested. “She never had a note from her music teacher before,” Dicey told Gram.

“I don't know,” Gram said. Her fingers pulled the long protective leaves from the ears of corn. This late in the season, half of the ears in her pile were too wormy to eat. Those she tossed into a mound on a brown paper bag. “I don't know what this young man is in such a hurry for.”