Homecoming (34 page)

“That’s fine,” Dicey said. “That’s great. But do you have room for us?”

“It’s a bit primitive. We live in trailers—you could go in with Claire.”

“Wouldn’t she mind?”

“I don’t think so. I’ll have to ask her, of course. But she has all
those dogs in there, I don’t see four kids would make such a big difference.”

“We can sleep anywhere,” Dicey said. “As long as we’re together.”

“We’ll have to think some what to do about him,” Will said. “But not now. I’ve got
work to do now. Stick around—hear me? He might come back.”

“I know,” Dicey said. “We’ll stay close.”

They stayed near the tent all that afternoon. Sammy hung around Claire until she finally
let him help her by holding hoops and moving the little stools the dogs perched on.
James went to watch the man with the cigar who operated the ferris wheel. Soon, he
too was working busily, passing tools and squirting oil. Dicey and Maybeth cleared
away litter from the midway. They ate supper back where the trailers were parked,
at a campsite that had only three trailers on it. Each of these had a picture painted
on its side of a lion jumping through a flaming hoop and the words Hawkins Circus
spelled out in bright letters. “But there aren’t any lions,” Dicey said to James.
He shrugged.

At dinner, Maybeth helped with the serving and clearing. Dicey wanted to help too,
but the cook, a tiny black woman with her hair grown out into an Afro, said the two
of them were just fine and she didn’t think she’d ever had a better assistant. When
Will asked them, James told how they met up with Mr. Rudyard. “We were walking down
the road,” James began, “feeling pretty good.” Everybody listened. Dicey sometimes
forgot to eat because she was so interested, as if this was a story that had happened
to somebody else.

That night they went to the circus with Mattie, the cook, who was married to one of
the big men Dicey noticed earlier, a man named Samson whose head was entirely bald
even though he wasn’t at all old. Dicey insisted on paying for all their rides and
games, as if they were real customers. She was through worrying about money. While
she had it she didn’t need to worry. When she ran out, she would earn some more. They
sat in the front row for the show. They clapped for Claire, who looked like the Snow
Queen in the fairy tale, white and glittering. They smiled at Will in his black cape
with red lining and a tall hat he swept off his head. They gasped when the tightrope
walker fell off into a net and cheered when she climbed right back up to try again.

The Tillermans slept in Claire’s trailer, James and Maybeth on the second bunk, Sammy
among the nestled pile of terriers, Dicey on the floor. When Dicey awoke the next
morning, she saw filmy shadows, as if the inside of the trailer was swathed in veils.
She awoke to the quiet sounds of seven creatures deep in sleep. For a while, she lay
and listened.

James turned restlessly, uneasily, and the sheets rustled around him. Maybeth was
still. One of the dogs yipped gently: Dicey raised her head and saw his little legs
moving as he lay on his side with his eyes closed. What did dogs dream? Sammy had
an arm around another of the dogs. All that Dicey could see of Claire was her hair
spread out on the pillow. She snored gently, like the waves on Long Island Sound,
soft and regular.

Making no noise, Dicey slipped out to sit on the metal trailer steps. Animals stirred,
birds and squirrels, two timid rabbits. Distant motors stirred beyond Dicey’s sight.
The branches of the tall pines stirred in a rain bearing wind. These pines were not
like the thick, cone-shaped trees of New England. On these pines, the needles hung
like pompoms in sparse clusters along lank branches. As the trees grew taller, the
lower branches fell off, so they grew into giant lollipops. Loblollies, Will called
them, and it was a good name for them.

Mr. Rudyard could have caught the Tillermans so easily. Were they just more stupid
and helpless than most people? And what
about this farm they were going to, their grandmother’s farm. When you walked down
a road, you could be walking to anything. Anything. What if this grandmother, too . . .

Well then, Dicey thought, they would beg to return to Cousin Eunice, and Dicey would
know enough to be grateful, really grateful, for someone who took them in and meant
to take care of them. Cousin Eunice wasn’t perfect, and she wasn’t Momma, but they
could work things out with Cousin Eunice.

If she would. Maybe she wouldn’t take them back. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

A squirrel up in a tall oak tree set up a terrific chittering. He was furious, frantic.
His tail thrashed up and down.

What good did it do, worrying and making plans, and more plans, if the first plans
failed. It was like money. If you had it, good. If you didn’t, then you had to find
a way to earn it. There was nothing to be gained by fretting over maybes.

Dicey took a deep breath, which tasted of dampened sunlight and moist earth. They
were living with a circus for a day or so. For a day or so they were safe. Something
would happen after, but that was after. You had to keep alert and watchful, she’d
learned that. You had to be ready to run. But if you wasted every day worrying about
the next . . . And you never knew what was coming, anyway.

After breakfast, Will took Dicey into town. “To get some stuff,” he said, “and see
someone.” The stuff, as it turned out, was clothing for the Tillermans, underpants
(three new pairs each, because they came in packets of three), T-shirts, and shorts.
Will also got toothbrushes, toothpaste and a comb. They dropped the packages in the
windows of Claire’s big white station wagon. Then Will insisted on buying Popsicles,
which they ate as they walked to visit the somebody, a friend of his who was a reverend.
Will explained to the reverend about Mr. Rudyard, and Dicey
listened. The reverend said he thought he could speak a word to the sheriff about
it. He asked Dicey if she was sure she didn’t want to speak to the sheriff herself.
“She can’t,” Will said, and the reverend didn’t ask any more questions.

As they walked back to the car, Dicey said, “I used to think that everyone was the
same, pretty much like us. They’re not though, are they?”

“Not a bit of it,” Will answered. A minute later he added, “Everybody’s different,
and everybody thinks everybody else is the same and they’re the only one different.”
He smiled at Dicey then. “We’ve done the most we can, just about,” he told her.

Back at the circus, Sammy dashed up to tell Dicey that he was going to be in the show
with Claire, helping, as long as they stayed with the circus, that Claire thought
he would be funny and he thought so too, that Maybeth and Mattie were making him a
costume with spangles on it, like Claire’s. James was busy with the machinery that
ran the carousel. Dicey spent the day drifting around. She had passing, lazy conversations
with people. After a conversation, she would walk away slowly and sit somewhere private
to think over what she’d heard. She would sit and watch the people moving about, like
characters on a TV screen with the sound off.

She was alone all afternoon. The sky got heavier with rain, but no rain fell. It was
a gray afternoon, the kind of gray that darkens and deepens the greens of leaves and
grasses. She had nothing to do, and she didn’t want anything to do. Her thoughts whirled
among bits of information and ideas that crowded into her brain, and blew about there,
like dry leaves in a storm.

Sammy came to find her late in the afternoon. She was sitting in the grass by the
playground, pulling out the blades and looking at them. But she wasn’t seeing them,
she was seeing the windy dunes at Provincetown and all the days they had lived there.

“Time for supper, Dicey,” Sammy said. “What’re you doing?”

“Thinking.” He hadn’t entirely awakened Dicey from her reverie. He stood in front
of her, and she saw him and did not see him.

“Thinking what?”

“About Momma.”

“We gotta go now.” He tugged at her hand. He had already forgotten about Momma, Dicey
thought, and probably that was better for him.

“I dream about her,” Sammy said, hurrying Dicey back to Claire’s station wagon. “A
lot.”

So he hadn’t forgotten: and Dicey knew that, whatever anyone wiser or smarter might
say, she didn’t want him to forget. “What do you dream?” she asked.

“Nothing special. She’s just there, in the dreams.” He ran ahead.

That night, the tightrope lady fell off the wire in the same way, and the audience
gasped in the same way and applauded with the same enthusiasm when she climbed back
up the tall ladder. Dicey realized then that the fall was part of the act. The fall
was as flawless as all the rest of the steps. It was a fake. Like the lion on the
poster and the glittering costumes that made everybody look beautiful. Like the way
everyone laughed at Sammy because they thought he was making mistakes with the dogs,
when it was really part of the act. Like the way Maybeth looked like a princess when
she circled under the cascading lights of the carousel. Fake.

Dicey looked at James. He shrugged his shoulders at her. He didn’t care. But Dicey
did, she discovered. It wasn’t that she minded, exactly. Not exactly—because she had
done too much lying of her own to mind about this. But—they didn’t need to lie, did
they?

The circus days floated by. They drove through the rain to Salisbury and set up the
tent and booths in the rain. Dicey didn’t do anything much, she didn’t even go to
the shows after the second night. James and Maybeth and Sammy were busy and contented.

Contentment was too small a word for what Dicey was feeling. They had food and a warm
place to sleep, and Dicey had money in her pocket. They were traveling and had purpose
and destination, but no conclusion. Dicey had nothing to worry about. Nothing except
what lay ahead, in Crisfield, and she didn’t want to think about that anymore. She
had thought all she could about that. You couldn’t know what lay ahead. How could
you know that? How could Dicey expect herself to know what this grandmother would
be like? She couldn’t; she realized that at last. She would have to wait and see.
That part was easy, the waiting and the seeing.

These circus days drifted slowly. It would be something to live in a circus, Dicey
thought, always moving around, always heading for somewhere new. If it was Dicey’s
circus, she would go everywhere. She planned it out to herself, alone in Claire’s
trailer at night, with the noise from the fairgrounds behind her. First, all around
the United States, then up to Canada and down to Mexico. She would make her circus
get famous and get jobs in Europe, and maybe even China or Japan. They’d have trailers
for land travel and a ship of their own for sea travel. She would have real lions.

Day after lazy day, night after long dreaming night passed Dicey by.

L
ate one morning, as Dicey stood in a blazing sunlight where the tent had been the
night before coiling up the long ropes so that Samson could stack them evenly on the
truck and find them when he needed to stake down the sides of the tent that evening
in Berlin, James and Maybeth and Sammy approached her.

“Hey,” James said.

“I don’t need any help,” Dicey told him. “Go on and do what you like.”

“Are we going to go to Crisfield?” James asked. “We’re all ready. We packed our things
into a paper bag and your map too. Will says he can take us now, in Claire’s car.”

“Is it time?” Dicey asked.

“Will says so,” James said.

“Let me just finish this, okay?”

More good-byes, Dicey thought to herself, coiling up the last rope into a dark brown
hoop, piling loop upon loop. “I am unfond of good-byes,” she said to herself. All
of their good-byes lay like the coiled ropes on the ground, connected and unconnected,
curling silently, finished things.

But the kids were right, and Will was right. It was time.

Dicey took a deep breath. Time to get moving.

She sat beside Will in the front seat. James and the little kids
sat behind them. Dicey took out her map. Time to put the circus behind them.

The circus people stood around and waved and made jokes. Dicey looked around at them,
gathered together there in the fairground, their hands held high, their friendly wishes
for good luck floating around the car still, like cherry blossoms blowing down to
the ground. The car pulled out of the fairgrounds. “Good-bye,” everybody called. “Good-bye,
goodbye.”

After a while, Dicey turned to the map. There was nothing to look at on the road.
It was just like Route 1. “What route are we on?” she asked Will.

“Thirteen. We follow that to just south of a place called Princess Anne, then get
onto Three-thirteen,” Will said. “How do you figure to find her?”

“Look up the address in a phone book,” Dicey answered. “Then we’ll ask directions.”

“We’ve got lots of time,” Will assured her. “All I have to do is go back, pick up
Claire and the beasts and the trailer and make it to Berlin in time for supper.”

“Are you going to take us right there?” Dicey asked.

He didn’t turn his head. His profile was smooth lines, slightly curved except where
his nose jutted out and his beard jutted out at the end of his chin. His skin was
smooth and brown, like silk. He didn’t answer, he just nodded.

“But why?” Dicey asked.

“To make sure you’re okay,” he said.

Dicey looked out the window. City clutter had fallen behind and now there was country
clutter, junkyards, a trailer park, billboards advertising dog food and faraway hotels.
Beyond these the land stretched away to low, flat country. The fields and woods all
had shallow ditches dug around them to drain
away water. Most of the land was being used for farms, interspersed with patches of
loblollies and other trees.

“Crisfield’s a small town,” Dicey said to Will. “We’ll be okay.”

“You don’t want me to take you right there, do you?”