Homecoming (12 page)

“Four,” Dicey said.

He took out his wallet and gave her two dollars. “That’s fifty cents apiece,” he said.

“It’s too much,” Dicey protested. She would not take the money.

He folded the bills and stuffed them into the pocket of her shorts. “That, young lady,
is for me to say. Now scoot and good luck to you.”

Dicey thanked him and turned to go. By then the little girl had scuffed her way to
the car. She stood up on tiptoe to speak to her grandfather, and he lifted her firmly
into the car, talking to her. He was angry with her, but not rough. He plunked her
down on the seat by the steering wheel.

Dicey and Sammy walked away. “How much did he give you?” Sammy asked, as soon as they
were out of earshot.

Before Dicey could answer, she heard running feet and the little girl caught at her
arm. “Wait,” she said. She held another dollar in her hand. “This is from me. Grandpa
said I could. Mommy gave it to me to buy her a present while I was spending the night
with Grandpa on his boat, but everything was plastic and she doesn’t like plastic.
She says it’s tack-y. She’d rather I wrote her a story anyway, and I can do that tonight.
Grandpa got me some paper and crayons. To keep me quiet, that’s what he said. I talk
a lot. Maybe I’ll write her a poem because that would be shorter. So this is for your
mother. I’m sorry I got mad.”

Dicey hesitated again. “Take it, Dicey,” Sammy urged.

“Please take it.” The little girl smiled. “I want you to, I do. Mommy likes my poems
better than anything. She says they’re
stu
pendous. I’m going to write one about fish, because we’re on a boat. Do you think
fish would eat flowers, because I write good poems about flowers.”

Dicey could barely keep up with the stream of chatter. She grinned and took the dollar.
“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” the little girl said happily. She ran back to the car where her grandfather
waited. Dicey did not watch them drive away.

“Good-o,” was all Sammy said, but he strutted back to his post by the supermarket
doors.

Shortly thereafter, Dicey called James and Sammy together, and they counted the money
they had earned. Five dollars and fifteen cents. Dicey nodded in satisfaction.

“That sure is an improvement,” she said. She went inside to buy peanut butter, bread
and milk. She still had $3.85 when she came out. “And we got a good heavy bag too.”

They returned to their wooded post looking over the winding river. They could see
only two houses, one on each side of where they sat, both built low to the bluff and
designed to face out over
the river, both with those walls of windows that modern houses have. After they had
eaten, Dicey explained the next difficulty, that they couldn’t walk over the river
on the bridge. She no longer felt so hopeless, so she could say it without sounding
defeated. They had earned money, more than enough money. And that grandfather and
the little girl—Dicey didn’t know why they had made her feel better, but they had,
even though it wasn’t going to get any easier.

The Tillermans sat in a row and looked down at the river flowing below. They looked
at boats moored close together in marinas, or alone at the ends of long docks. Overhead,
cars roared across the bridge.

“We could go upriver to the next bridge,” James suggested.

“That’ll take days,” Dicey said. “But we may have to.” She was reluctant to journey
away from the water; she didn’t want to go far from the Sound that was part of the
sea.

“Does the river get narrow enough to swim across?”

“I don’t know,” Dicey said. “It would be too risky to light a fire, wouldn’t it? I
feel like sitting by a fire, don’t you?”

Maybeth snuggled up to Dicey and hummed tunelessly. Dicey sat looking down, not thinking
or worrying, just feeling her full belly and her sister’s warm body, watching the
river water shimmer in the sun, remembering with pride how James and Sammy had worked
that afternoon, wondering which boat the little girl was sleeping on and thinking
those two would remember her. A melody came into her head and she sang one of Momma’s
old, sad songs: “ ‘The water is wide, I cannot get o’er. Neither have I wings to fly.’ ”

The melody floated out over the water, where she could not go.

“ ‘Give me a boat that will carry two, and two shall row—my love and I.’ ”

The setting sun floated gold along the surface of the water.

“ ‘Oh, love is bonny, when it is young,’ ” ’ Dicey sang. “ ‘Fair as a flower when
first it is new.’ ” Then she stopped. “We’ll take a boat,” she said.

“Good-o,” Sammy said.

“Where will we get a boat?” asked James. “Where could we get a boat?”

“All these yachts have little dinghys that go with them, so the people on the yachts
can get to and from their moorings. We’ll take a dinghy and row across and tie it
up on the other side. I can row and so can you, James, if you have to.”

She led them down the steep bluff, clutching the bag with leftover food and the map
in it. She wouldn’t leave food or map behind again, no matter what. They slid most
of the way down, bouncing on their fannies, giggling. At the foot of the bluff, Dicey
turned upriver.

They found a rowboat easily. It was upended on the ground beside a long private dock.
Waiting for dark, they watched nervously up the cliff to the house whose lighted windows
looked out over the silver river. When full dark came, somebody inside pulled curtains
over the long windows. Then the children stealthily approached the boat.

James and Dicey carried it down to the end of the dock and lowered it noiselessly
into the water. James held the painter while Dicey went back for the bag, the oars
and Maybeth and Sammy. They were accustomed to boats, so they had no trouble getting
into it quietly. Maybeth sat at the bow, Sammy and James at the stern. Dicey shipped
the oars and James pushed off. The boat slid away from the dock.

Dicey lifted the oars in their oarlocks. She brought them down cautiously, unused
to their weight. The oars bit into the black water, and the boat shot ahead.

The current carried them slightly downstream, Dicey’s strokes
carried them across, the smooth water eased their passage. The bridge loomed overhead.
Its thick pilings caused races in the current that could trap a small boat and maybe
even overturn it. Dicey knew enough to simply follow these races until the boat had
floated out of their currents. Then she dipped the oars once again into the dark water.

The sky was dark. The air was dark, so dark that they could barely make out one another’s
faces. The water flowed beneath them, black and bottomless.

Dicey headed for the lights on the opposite shore. It felt good to stretch the muscles
in her back and arms, to lean back and then pull forward against the oars.

In the middle of the river the current eased and the boat shot straight ahead. Then,
as they drew near the far bank, Dicey felt the twists and eddies begin again. James
directed her to a huge marina, where lights burned in many buildings and in many of
the small windows of the boats tied in rows along the docks. It looked sort of like
a parking lot. They pulled up beside a boat that was dark and empty and tied their
dinghy to its stern. Dicey thought that if she left the dinghy there it had a good
chance of being claimed or returned.

They had come down close to the mouth of the river, where its water flowed out into
the Sound. A small town lay on the low flatlands. They walked through the town, to
the south. It was late at night and the houses became fewer, but there was no safe
place to sleep. After an hour, they were all tired, and Sammy stumbled with every
third step. Dicey put him on her back, giving James the grocery bag. She discovered
then how much the long rowing had strained her muscles.

They came to a church, shining white in the dark air. Behind it stretched a graveyard,
with groves of trees planted among the tombstones. Dicey turned toward the graveyard.

Behind her, James drew in his breath.

At the first grove of trees, Dicey put Sammy down. He was already half-asleep and
just curled up on the ground. Maybeth settled beside him without a word. Dicey stood,
looking at James.

“It’s a graveyard, Dicey,” James said.

“I know,” she said. “But we’re tired.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.

“I never saw one,” Dicey said. She sat down. James sat down right beside her. They
could see tombstones placed in neat rows. Some of them had statues on top.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” James said. “All the same, I don’t like this place. It’s—too
quiet.”

Indeed, the silence was thick as fog around them. The silence vibrated, as if with
things beneath it struggling to break through.

Dicey yawned. She was too tired, the day had been too long, for this kind of worrying.
“I like quiet.”

James flicked his eyes over the cemetery. “We’re all gonna die, you know.”

Dicey nodded. “Not for a long time.”

“Do you think Momma’s dead?”

“I don’t know. How could I know that?”

“No matter what, we’re all gonna die,” James remarked. “So it doesn’t matter what
we do, does it?”

Dicey was thinking about other things, about maps and food. She didn’t answer.

“Unless there’s a Hell, to punish us. But I don’t think there is. I really don’t.
Or Heaven. Or anything. Dicey?”

“Yeah?”

“You know the only thing you can count on, the only thing that’s always true? It’s
the speed of light. Louis told me Einstein figured it out, 186,000 miles per second.
That’s the only sure
thing. Everything else—changes. I was proud of Sammy for stealing that food, you know
that?”

“So was I.”

“You were? You sure didn’t act it. You acted angry.”

“Well, I was.”

“Dicey, that doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m too tired to make sense, James. I’m trying to figure out where we might be. We
came way downriver. We’ll have sandwiches for breakfast and finish the food up so
we don’t have to carry it.” Dicey let her mind wander. “Did you ever hear Momma talk
about her father, James? We had to have a grandfather, you know.”

“Probably dead,” James said. “Everyone’s either dead or dying.”

“Go to
sleep
, James,” Dicey said. “That’s just morbid. You’ll make yourself crazy.”

“I make myself crazy when I try to figure out a good reason why I
shouldn’t
be morbid,” James answered.

“Go to sleep.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Go to sleep, please. You’re not crazy. You’ll never be crazy. You’re just too smart
for your own good. Anyone who stays awake so he can have ideas like that . . . well,
he ought to be going to sleep.”

Dicey lay back and closed her eyes resolutely. James sighed.

M
orning broke low and cloudy. Streaks of smudged gray clouds covered the sky. “It’s
still true,” James said. He looked out over the cemetery, where bright green grass
contrasted with the faded marble of tombstones, and the tombstones reflected the cold
gray of the sky.

“Some of them are bent over,” James said. “I bet they’re old, really old. Hundreds
of years.”

After breakfast, while Dicey gathered together their litter and packed it into the
paper bag to be discarded at the first trash can they saw, the little ones explored
the graveyard. Sammy stayed with James, because James could read everything to him.
Maybeth wandered among the rows, studying the statues of angels and lambs.

Dicey had a sudden fear that she had forgotten where they were going, so she recited
Aunt Cilla’s address to herself. Mrs. Cilla Logan, 1724 Ocean Drive, Bridgeport. She
ought to make the others memorize it. She made a mental note to do that as they walked
that day.

Then she studied the map and admitted that they would have to go back to Route 1.
She didn’t want to. She wanted to stay among big houses and tall trees, on the shore
road that would keep her close to the water. But Route 1 was the shorter way, even
though it looped up north of the Thruway before entering New Haven.

Those decisions made, Dicey went to call the others. They had to start. They had money
and a map, their stomachs were full—it wasn’t a bad way to begin.

While she waited for Maybeth to return and for James and Sammy to finish working out
what was written on a cracked stone that slanted back toward the earth, Dicey looked
at the gravestones about her. She read an inscription:
Home is the hunter, home from the hill, and the sailor home from the sea.

What a thing to put on a grave.

As if to say that being dead was home. Home, for Dicey, was their house in Provincetown,
where the wind made the boards creak in a way that was almost music. Or Aunt Cilla’s
big white house that faced over the water, the one she had dreamed about. Being dead
wasn’t going home, was it? Unless—and she remembered what James had been saying last
night—home was the place where you finally stayed, forever and ever. Then this person
was home, and nobody would be truly home until he, or she, died. It was an awful thought.

Only living people had homes. That was the difference.

(If Momma was dead, where was her grave? What was written on it? Nobody would even
know her name or who she was or when she was born.)

If you took home to mean where you rested content and never wanted to go anywhere
else, then Dicey had never had a home. The ocean always made her restless; so even
Provincetown, even their own remembered kitchen, wasn’t home. That was why Dicey always
ran along the sand beside the ocean, as if she had to race the waves. The ocean wasn’t
home, then, and neither was anyplace else. Nobody could be home, really, until he
was in his grave. Nobody could rest, really, until then.

It was a cold, hard thought written on that cold, hard stone. But maybe true.

If Dicey died, she guessed she wouldn’t mind having this poem on her tombstone, now
that she thought about it. She was the hunter and the sailor, and she guessed dead
people did lie quietly in their graves.