Dicey's Song (4 page)

“I'm sorry,” Dicey said. “I'll go in and see him before work.”

“I'll go,” Gram told her quickly. “I was planning to. I'm the one who should, anyway, I'm the name that's on their thousands of forms.”

Dicey was so relieved she didn't know what to say. Instead, she picked up an ear and started pulling off the leaves. “I'm sorry,” she said again.

“You don't look it,” Gram observed.

Dicey looked up at her grandmother's face. Gram rewarded her with a sudden smile and spoke briskly. “You're not the only one responsible, girl. You've been responsible a long time and done a good job. Take a rest now.”

Dicey nodded her head and that was that. She finished the corn and dropped the husks into the garbage can on her way out to work on the sailboat.

D
ICEY SWALLOWED back a yawn and looked out the window. It was close and hot in the classroom, just like every other classroom she had ever been in. The windows were open, the temperature was almost ninety, the grass on the front lawn of the old brick school building was dry and brown. The building, which housed all the grades from seven through twelve, had been built like a double decker U; from her window Dicey could see the front entrance, the long sidewalk, and the empty street. No breeze stirred the leaves on the big oaks that marked the front of the schoolyard. Their leaves drooped down, dis-spirited by the heat, and hung there. Like dogs' tongues, Dicey thought, and pictured the tree panting with many tiny tongues, maybe even dripping saliva the way a dog's would. She felt a smile wash over her face.

Lazily, she brought her eyes back into the classroom. Like every classroom she had ever been in, it had long, many-paned windows and a wall of green chalkboard at the front. At the back was a wall of bulletin board, so close behind her she could reach back and touch it if she wanted to. The students' desks made a square, six by six, and Dicey was sitting where she always did, back in the far left-hand corner, next to the windows. Her desk had a kind of tray attached to it, to write on, and a rack under the seat for her books. She had an English textbook open in front of her and the teacher, Mr. Chappelle, was introducing the next unit of study. They'd spent the first three weeks on diagramming and now they were going to read some stories. Dicey was sorry the diagramming was finished. She liked the precision of it. Besides, it was easy.

“Conflict,” was written on the board in Mr. Chappelle's square printing. He couldn't write on a straight line. He was young and skinny and had carroty red hair that he kept trying to brush flat with his hands, but it always popped back up. He always wore a suit and tie. He had a pale face: pale blue eyes, pale skin, even his freckles were pale brown. He was one of those teachers who taught standing up, but he didn't move around much, just stood in front of the chalkboard. He had pushed the big teacher's desk over to the side of the room, so there was a clear space in front of the board. He always rolled a piece of chalk in his fingers. On the first day of class, he had introduced himself as the English and Drama teacher. In Dicey's opinion, he wasn't very dramatic.

“If we define conflict as requiring two opposing forces, what might we look for?” he asked the class. “For how conflict might appear,” he added. “In what forms,” he added. “In a story,” he added.

There were always a couple of people who put their hands up right away, usually girls, usually from the town kids who dressed up for school. They sat in the front of every class, boys and girls together. Then, the blacks sat together, some of them at the front and some right behind. The country kids, which included the watermen's families, as far as Dicey could tell from overhead conversations about the crab catchers and the fishing season and oyster beds, sat in the middle and back.

Nobody sat near Dicey, who sat alone. She scratched at the shoulder of her T-shirt and waited to hear how stupid the answers to the question would be. There was only one other person in the class who thought of interesting answers, and that was a black girl who sat in the front row, diagonally across from Dicey. This girl usually waited until all the stupid guesses had been made before she raised her hand. Dicey never raised her hand, but if Mr. Chappelle asked her she'd answer.

The black girl looked about eighteen, with a full bosom and long muscular legs and round hips. She wore a denim jumper, the kind some of the town gifts wore, and different blouses, and stockings with low-heeled shoes. Her hair was a short afro and her face looked lively. The eyes especially, dark brown and liquid, but also her mouth, which was always moving, since she had a lot of friends. Most often she was talking, or laughing. Wilhemina was her name.

Every now and then, this Wilhemina would catch Dicey's eye in class (they had three classes together, English and home ec and science) and Dicey wondered what she was thinking then. Wondered if she wasn't thinking something interesting.

Dicey leaned back and waited to see what the answers to Mr. Chappelle's question would be. Vaguely, she thought about the scraping of the boat she planned to accomplish that afternoon.

“Conflict between two men,” the answers began. Mr. Chappelle wrote
two men
on the board. Since it was correct, a whole lot of hands went up. “A woman and a woman.” “A man and a woman?” “A boy and a boy?” “A gift and a girl.” The predictable list went on. Mr. Chappelle wrote everything on the board. Dicey made her own list, inside her head, because you could have conflict between someone with power and someone without any, between someone honest and a liar. The voices petered out around her as she continued with her own thoughts. You could even, she realized, have a conflict between somebody and himself: and that
was
an interesting idea. Like Gram, Gram was like that.

Wilhemina had her hand up, and Mr. Chappelle was waiting until the rest of the class settled down (“A man and his dog?”) to call on her. “Yes, Wilhemina?”

The rich voice spoke out. “What about conflict between an individual and the society he lives in?”

Dicey usually kept her eyes down on the fake wood surface of her desk, but this caused her to swivel her head up. She tried to think out what it might mean. There were questions she would have liked to ask the black girl. She caught Wilhemina's eyes on her face, as if the girl were aware of Dicey's reaction. Mr. Chappelle wrote out the letters on the board, slowly, as if he was thinking.

“What do you mean by that, Wilhemina?” Mr. Chappelle asked.

“Well,” the girl began. Dicey couldn't stop herself from leaning forward in her seat. “A lot of the time, conflicts are between one person and the people he lives with. Or she lives with. If the society thinks one way and the person thinks another.”

Mr. Chappelle was listening carefully, you could tell. Dicey figured, from the way he wrote down everything everybody said, even when it repeated the same basic idea, that his brain didn't work very fast. “Can you give us any examples?”

The rest of the class shifted in their seats, getting bored. Too bad for them, Dicey thought to herself.

“Jesus, for one,” the girl answered quickly, “and St. Paul, and John the Baptist. St. Joan, maybe. And even Moses, if you think about it.”

“We know your daddy's the minister,” somebody muttered, and Wilhemina turned around and smiled, not taking offense.

“Then what about the suffragettes?” she suggested. “Everybody laughed at them, and they went to jail and had food pumped into their stomach when they refused to eat and a lot of them were disowned by their families. Or Louis Pasteur, everybody thought he was crazy. Or the people who ran the underground railways.”

Mr. Chappelle seemed to be thinking about all this, maybe trying to figure out what he should say.

“Yeah, but yours are all the good guys,” a boy from the town section called over.

“That's right, Wilhemina,” Mr. Chappelle agreed. “Is society always wrong and the individual always right?”

“John Wilkes Booth,” Wilhelmina announced triumphantly. Dicey felt herself fill with laughter. Nobody else seemed to find it particularly funny. Mr. Chappelle harrumphed and turned his attention to the class.

“Dicey,” he inquired. “Do you have anything to add?”

Dicey chewed on her bottom lip, and why did he have to notice her. “Between someone and himself,” she said, not bothering to keep the anger at his intrusion out of her voice.

Mr. Chappelle kind of stared at her.

“I mean,” Dicey sat back, to show it couldn't mean less to her what anybody thought of her idea, “sometimes you want one thing and the opposite at the same time. Or you say one thing when you really mean the opposite. Or there's something you want to do and something you have to do.” She was getting warmed up, and she liked her idea.

One of the town girls interrupted. “Like there are two boys and you like them both,” she said, then giggled.

Dicey closed her eyes briefly, then turned her attention back outside. If she hadn't, just then, she would have missed seeing the straight-backed figure emerge from the main doors with a clumsy purse over its shoulder. Gram. Dicey couldn't mistake that high carriage of the chin, or the unkempt curly gray hair. But her meeting about Maybeth wasn't until three fifteen. What was Gram doing at Dicey's school?

Mr. Chappelle, figuring (Dicey guessed) that the argument about whether or not you could like two boys best at the same time had gone on long enough, called on them to open their textbooks and start reading aloud the story that would be their homework. He told them which questions at the end they were supposed to write answers to, and then called on someone to read, one of the worst readers in the class, who stumbled over any word more than two syllables long and made sentences sound senseless because he never paid any attention to punctuation. People groaned and muttered to one another. Dicey looked quickly at the clock behind her. Only ten more minutes. Only one more class after this.

The bike rack was out behind the school building, by the parking lot. Dicey hurried out as soon as the bell released her from home ec class. (Who
cared
about the right way to pin up a hem, and she didn't have any skirts anyway.) She was one of the first out. But not the
first.
A boy sat on the low concrete wall playing a guitar. He had black hair and wore a blue workshirt with its sleeves rolled up. He was playing a melody Dicey didn't know. Dicey had never seen this boy before. He looked like an upper-classman, maybe a junior or senior. She stopped for a minute, to listen, because it sounded so good to her.

His fingers continued playing the song even though he sensed Dicey and looked up at her. He had wide gray eyes and dark, straight eyebrows, and a straight mouth. His thin face had a light tan. His eyes questioned Dicey.

“I never heard that song,” she said, to explain why she was standing staring.

He started to sing, in a thin, soft voice. “When first unto this country, a stranger I came. And I cour —” his voice held the note high and round, for three beats ” — ted a young girl, and Nancy was her name.” He kept singing, and Dicey kept listening, trying to memorize the melody, while the song told the story of how the man was rejected by the girl and arrested and put in jail and had “a coat of many colors.” What did that mean, a coat of many colors? Dicey hummed the melody inside her head, concentrating on it.

When he finished, he strummed a couple of chords. “Have a sit, kid.”

Dicey shook her head and turned away. She heard the guitar begin another melody as she unlocked her bike and rode off downtown.

That day, Dicey began on the shelves. She'd done a quick surface dusting, just so things wouldn't look so
old,
the week before. Now, she took a bucket of warm water and a sponge and began washing down the long shelves. Millie was behind the meat counter, cutting up a side of beef that had been delivered that morning. When Dicey said hello, she saw the huge knives and cleavers, the thick-bladed saw, all laid out on the butcher block table. Millie had wrapped a bloodstained apron around her. When she cut into the beef, she leaned all her weight against the knife and the muscles worked in her arms.

Millie's cuts were sure and straight. Even when she hacked at a bone with the cleaver, she always hit the same spot. Dicey would have liked to stay and watch her, but she had money to earn.

Often, as she methodically moved cans of soup off the shelf, washed down the bottom and sides and back, then replaced the cans, washing each one off with a damp sponge. Dicey heard someone come in and interrupt Millie at her work. The store owner would give the customer what she or he wanted, then plod down to the counter and patiently add up the bill. Nobody said how much better the store looked and smelled. But Dicey figured maybe her plan was working out the way she hoped.

When she finished her hour she was about halfway down the long shelf. She replaced the unwashed cans, making a mental note that she should begin the next day at chicken noodle soup. She went back to the meat counter to say she was leaving.

There, she lingered for a few minutes. Millie was cutting out a roast with what looked like rib bones in it. She used a thick, cutlass-shaped knife to go through the meat between two ribs, then whacked once with the cleaver before taking the saw and cutting through bone with five strong strokes. Then she took a short, slim knife and cut off large pieces of fat, tossing them without looking into a lined trash barrel beside her. All of her movements were confident. Her little eyes concentrated on what she was doing. It was like watching somebody good play a sport, Dicey decided. A couple of odd scraps of meat went onto a growing pile beside the carcass. Stew beef?

“I'm off now,” Dicey said.

“Is it an hour already?” Millie asked. She turned over a fat wrist to look at her watch. “I'm being awful slow with this.”

“You had interruptions,” Dicey reminded her.

“That's right.” Millie sounded surprised. She couldn't have forgotten, Dicey knew. She'd heard her employer talking with the customers, about the weather and the hog market. “That would slow me down back here, wouldn't it,” Millie asked, as if she had just realized the connection.