Homecoming (4 page)

“What do I care what people say?” Dicey asked.

“They called it a shack,” James went on.

“I liked it,” Dicey said. “The ocean’s better than fancy bathrooms, any day.”

In the little one-story house next door, a door slammed. They turned their heads to
watch as an energetic old woman came out, waving a broom over her head and shouting
something.

She was shouting at them. Dicey couldn’t hear the words, but she understood the expression
of fierce anger on the woman’s face. As she came closer, they could hear her voice.
“Get out of
here, get out. Go on, get! I’m counting to ten and then I’m calling the police. I’ve
had it with you kids hanging around and taking down clean laundry and dumping it in
the dirt and tossing your trash and bottles into my lawn and throwing rocks at my
door and your cars and your noise. One—” She shrieked, her chin wagging up and down.

The four children sprang to their feet. “Here we go,” Dicey said.

“I can’t,” Sammy said. “I’m tired.”

“You’ve got to,” James said.

“No, I can’t.”

Dicey tried to persuade him. “We’re soldiers, remember?”

“No, we’re not. That’s just pretend. You have to carry me. Piggyback.”

Dicey also was tired. “I’ll just leave you here,” she said.

“Okay.” Sammy sat down.

The old woman shrieked anew.

“I’ve got to carry the bag,” Dicey pleaded.

His eyes regarded her calmly.

“Okay, okay.” She gave in. James took the paper bag. Sammy jumped up onto Dicey’s
back. They set off, to the accompaniment of the old woman’s voice: “And don’t come
back. Ever!”

“We won’t,” Dicey muttered. “Don’t worry.”

The afternoon was bleached hot white, hotter and whiter for Dicey with Sammy on her
back. The air tasted bad in her mouth, as she gasped for breath. The raucous cars
roared past, unheeding. Dicey forced her feet to move, and her legs, and her hands
to hold tight on to Sammy’s feet, and her back to stay straight because in the long
run that would hurt less.

It was only four when they stopped at a light, waiting for it to turn green, so they
could cross the road. “Off,” Dicey said to Sammy. He slid down.

There were at least three more hours of daylight. But Dicey could go no farther. She
turned around and saw Maybeth’s eyes big with unshed tears.

The light changed and they crossed. Dicey stopped on the other side. “Okay,” she said.
“The next grocery store I’ll get food. Then, we’ll have to get off this road to find
a place to sleep. It’ll be hard, because it’s got to be private enough.”

Three faces nodded at her, eyes blank with exhaustion.

It was a small market where Dicey stopped next. Again she went in alone. She bought
bananas (they were cheapest by pound) and a package of hot dogs and a loaf of bread
(you could wrap a slice of bread around a hotdog, like a roll) and a half-gallon of
milk (it was a little cheaper that way). It cost almost three dollars, but she couldn’t
think of what to do about the expense. They were running out of money.

When a narrow road ran off of Route 1, marked by a sign that said:
PHILLIP’S BEACH 6 MILES
, Dicey led them across the four-lane highway and onto it. She chose the road because
of the Dead End sign, which, she reasoned, meant that there wouldn’t be many cars
on the road. It turned out to have been good thinking. The blacktop twisted through
a wooded area like a river and soon the sound of the highway had faded away behind
them.

The road made two sweeping curves before Dicey saw a ramshackle house with a “For
Sale” sign in front of it. The house had such a small front lawn it sat almost on
the road. It looked abandoned, its clapboard siding faded to splintery gray. “Stay
here,” Dicey said.

She walked across the front of the house, where tall grass on the short driveway told
her no car had driven, not for a long time. She walked around to the back, alert to
run should a face appear in the empty windows.

The yard, overgrown and long neglected, stretched out behind the house to a large
tree, and beyond that to woods. The quiet stretched out, over the long grass and distant
trees. An unscreened porch opened along the back of the worn house. That meant they
could have some shelter.

Dicey trotted back and called her family to join her.

The yard was like a private park, without swings of course, but green, and scattered
with trees. Dicey sat down in the middle of it between two brown bags, one holding
clothes, one food. The others sat facing her.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” James asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Maybe we should
just stay here and live here. It wouldn’t be too bad. I bet we can find a way into
the house.”

“That’s trespassing,” Dicey said severely.

“It’s empty,” Sammy pointed out.

“I’m just daydreaming,” James said. He lay back on the long grass and spread out his
arms and legs. He closed his eyes. A lazy smile floated over his narrow face. “It’s
a bed. Better than a bed. A cloud.”

They all fell asleep. When they woke, long bars of sunlight lay across the lawn. Sammy
woke up first and roused the rest of them by calling back from the far end of the
yard, “Hey! It’s a brook back here! James! Wake up and come see.” Dicey, her back
too stiff to jump up as the others had, stayed put and rolled over on her stomach
to watch them run to join Sammy. They’d be okay for a while. She didn’t have to worry
about water. They could all swim, and they had good sense about water. Living next
to the ocean, they had to.

She wondered what time it was, and how much daylight was left. The sun was still above
the horizon. Maybe seven? That seemed about right. But she wanted to look at her map
to see where they were before the light got bad, and they would need to
gather some wood. She listened to the splashing and calls while she traced her finger
down the map.

One day should put them about halfway there. She started at a dot named Madison and
began moving her finger backward. She saw no marking for Phillip’s Beach.

She called to James. He had noticed a sign saying they were near Stonington. “What?”
she called back. He spelled it for her.

But Stonington was almost next to Peewauket and they hadn’t gone any distance at all.
She called to James again. He was quite sure. Stonington. Then they had traveled maybe—Dicey
measured with her finger from the legend at the bottom corner of the map—eight miles?
Maybe ten. At that rate—she walked off sections of road with her fingers—it would
be days. More than a week. Two weeks.

They’d have to conserve money, and food. Quickly she calculated a way to eat only
half of the food tonight and the rest for their next dinner. No more Cokes, either;
they’d cost sixty cents. No more small markets; they were more expensive. They could
fish in Long Island Sound or the rivers (string and a hook, they’d have to buy those),
and why didn’t she have a knife? None of them did, not even a jackknife.

They hadn’t planned this properly. They hadn’t planned it at all. Dicey couldn’t see
how they’d make it to Bridgeport, and a cold panic settled in her stomach. There was
nothing for it though, was there? Just going ahead. People might give them food. She
might be able to earn food or money, somehow. She couldn’t think how they’d manage
it. But they would have to manage it, somehow. Then she didn’t think any more about
it. She couldn’t.

They gathered wood, some twigs, and handfuls of dried leaves. Accustomed to building
fires on the beach, they found it easy to light the small starting pile of leaves
and twigs with the
matches Dicey had taken from the counter in the store. They skewered hot dogs on green
branches, and when they were cooked wrapped them in slices of bread. They passed the
milk container around and around. Each had a half a banana for dessert, and a quarter
of Sammy’s doughnut. The fire, fed with the bigger branches, burned brightly in the
darkening air. Dicey wanted them to sleep on the porch. “It’s more hidden away,” she
explained.

“I’m going to sleep by the fire where it’s warm,” Sammy said.

“We’re not going to put any more wood on the fire,” Dicey told him.

“Why not?”

“Dangerous. It could spread. It could burn you.”

“I’d wake up first,” Sammy said. “It couldn’t burn me.”

“Well I’m not going to take a chance,” Dicey said.

“Well I’m going to sleep here anyway,” Sammy said. He lay on his stomach facing the
fire, with the light drifting over his stubborn face.

“We’ve gotta sleep together,” Dicey said.

“I don’t see why,” he answered and yawned.

“We’ve gotta stick together,” she repeated.

“Momma didn’t,” he said.

“Well, we have to,” Dicey said.

“Well, I don’t care,” he said. He refused to speak again and was soon asleep.

Maybeth curled up next to Dicey, resting her head against her sister’s thigh. “It’s
all right, Dicey,” she said. “I’m going to sing. Doesn’t the fire make you feel like
singing?”

Dicey would have said no, but after Maybeth had sung through one verse of Momma’s
song about the cherry that has no stone, she joined in, and James did too. The song
put Maybeth to sleep.

“You tired?” Dicey asked James.

“Yeah, but not tired enough to sleep yet,” he said.

“We’ll let the fire go out, then carry them to the porch.”

“If you say so, but I don’t see why,” James said.

“It’ll be safer out of sight.”

The fire crackled and spat. Its light made a hemisphere of warmth across which Dicey
looked to see her small sleeping brother. “James? Do you remember Sammy at the beach?”

James grinned. “I do. That was some fun, wasn’t it?”

They gathered up the two sleepers and carried them back to the porch. Sammy half-awoke,
to protest, but slept again. He was too tired even to quarrel. Poor kid, Dicey thought.
James lay down with them, but Dicey returned to the dying fire, to be sure it burned
out entirely.

. . . Sammy at the beach, when he was only a year and a half old, and running. Summer
days, eight-year-old Dicey was responsible for taking them all down to the beach.
Sammy wore an old bathing suit of James’s over his diapers. The first thing he’d do,
every time, was take off his clothes. Then he’d turn to see their expressions and
laugh and clap his hands together with a smile spread all over his face. He had a
little noise he made, to go with the clapping: “Aaayy.” He’d learned that from them,
because they would applaud his mistakes and his learnings and cry, “Yeaayy,” as they
clapped.

Dicey could still remember his short, plump little body, sturdy legs and round blond
head, and his tiny penis that bobbled up and down as he ran. He had a game he played
with the waves, of going down to them, then turning to run back. Usually he tripped
and fell, and the tip of the wave would wet him as it washed up the beach. He would
raise a dripping face and laugh, then elevate his fanny, put his feet under him, and
totter erect again. He would clap and cry, “Aaayy,” and they all giggled and clapped
back at him.

Sammy had been such a cheerful baby. He had been able to bring laughter even to Momma’s
face. They would watch him move around and explore, the way other people watched television.
When had Sammy changed?

His first words were “hot” (he would grab out for anything) and “no” (“Doe,” he would
cry, waving his arms, his face dreadfully earnest). He emptied cupboards and drawers,
he unmade his bed, he grabbed homework papers and ran away, laughing. He was naughty,
but not mean. Not selfish. And he was stubborn, even then when he was a baby. Dicey
had watched him learn to turn around in a circle, patiently practicing, tumbling over
his own feet, falling in a heap, sitting down in surprise. It took him days to do
it, but he learned.

He was no less stubborn now, no less determined to have his own way—but what had happened
to that happiness? Could anyone change that much? It must have been gradual, or they
would have noticed. Dicey tried to remember the last time she heard Sammy laugh, and
that had been laughing at Maybeth because a doll she made out of sea grass had been
washed away by a wave. But Dicey also remembered Sammy’s merry eyes, and his mouth
with only ten teeth, opened wide in the kind of laughter that took over his whole
body and made him stumble and fall down laughing.

The fire was out. She stamped on it, just to be safe, and retired to the porch.

D
icey woke from a dream about a big white house that faced the ocean. Aunt Cilla’s
house.

The sun was rising over the trees behind the brook, rising in waves of molten pink.
James lay sprawled on his back. Sammy was curled up into a ball, and Maybeth had thrown
one of her arms over him. Dicey tiptoed off the porch and down to the brook for a
quiet wash.

Maybeth and James woke up immediately when she spoke their names. “It’s still true
then,” James said.

Sammy moaned and turned away, burying his head under his arms. “It’s time to get up,
Sammy,” Dicey said.

“’Tisn’t,” he answered, squinching his eyes closed.

“You all go down and wash now. I’m going to check the map. We’ll eat when you’re ready.”

Dicey tried to look at the map realistically. She considered the lines that were roads,
the green patches that were parks, and the flat blue of the sound, so different from
the tumultuous, gray-faced ocean, where she had grown up.

They ate half a banana apiece and finished the milk. Afterward, prepared to set out
but reluctant to leave their sanctuary, they sat in a row on the porch.

“There’s a park, maybe two or three days down the road. We’ll stay there for a couple
of nights,” Dicey offered. She
showed them where it was marked on the map, Rockland State Park, with a tent to show
there was camping. “It’ll have a beach. We’ve got three dollars and eighty cents left.
We’re gonna have to think up some ways of getting money.”