Homecoming (43 page)

“No.”

The word ballooned out and filled all the air of the kitchen.
Dicey didn’t even try to argue. She just nodded her head and ate her supper in silence
and helped with the dishes, and when the little children went up to bed she went with
them. The
No
filled the whole air of the house. Every time she breathed in she breathed in that
No.
Dicey wasn’t even frightened anymore. She was simply defeated. She fell asleep suddenly
and without any thought.

D
icey awoke to a thick, black silence. She slipped out of bed and went to the window.
Night smothered the land. A dark wind blew clouds over the face of the moon and over
the little stars. This kind of wind blew in clear weather. So tomorrow would be a
good day to begin traveling again.

They had only seven dollars left, but they had bicycles now, and Dicey had her jackknife
and her map. What they didn’t have was any place to go.

Back to Bridgeport, Dicey supposed, the long way back.

Will couldn’t help them. They couldn’t live with the circus. James had to go to school.
And so did Maybeth, but for different reasons.

Could they hide out? Could they find the circus again and travel south and then pitch
a permanent camp somewhere? Dicey thought they could manage that. She could lie to
any school officials. She’d be eighteen in five years. She could say they lived back
in the hills with their momma and their momma couldn’t come in because she was working
the farm. Nobody’d care enough to question, not as long as they showed up in school.
There was a boy Dicey knew in Provincetown who ran away from home and he just kept
on coming to school and nobody knew, not for months.

The plan was possible, Dicey thought. Only she couldn’t get
excited about it. Having someplace in mind that you were traveling to was different
from not having any place.

But it was a plan. She’d ask James what he thought. He might think they should go
back to Bridgeport, and he might be right. One way or the other, north or south, they’d
be moving on.

“Okay,” Dicey said to herself. “Okay, that’s what we’ll do.” She thought she’d go
back to bed and sleep some more, if she could get to sleep again. She took a last
look—seeing in her mind’s eye the things she couldn’t really see, the pines and the
fields, the marshes and the bay beyond, the barn that held the sailboat like a buried
treasure in its dark belly. Dicey belonged here. She belonged here; yet she was being
blown away. Well, it wasn’t her house, that was true. It was their grandmother’s house
and they were not welcome. They would stay together, at least that. She could go along
with Cousin Eunice on everything except about that; she wouldn’t agree to sending
Sammy or Maybeth away. She’d say that right away.

Dicey noticed a yellow light, flowing onto the lawn below the porch. Had somebody
left the kitchen light on? She went downstairs to turn it off.

Her grandmother sat at the kitchen table wearing an old striped cotton bathrobe. She
had a cup of tea before her and a pad of paper on which she was writing. Her hair
was all in tousled curls. She looked up at Dicey when Dicey came in.

“I couldn’t sleep so I’m writing that silly woman, Eunice,” she said.

Dicey stared. Her grandmother was pretty. Her face had delicate straight bones, and
those wide dark eyes.

“What’re you staring at, girl?”

“You. You’re pretty. I never noticed,” Dicey said. “Never mind. I saw the light from
my window. I didn’t know anyone was here. I’m sorry.”

“Sit down,” her grandmother said. “Get a glass of milk first. I wondered who’d taken
that room when I heard you up there. Get your milk and sit—I’ve got something I should
say to you.”

Dicey poured herself a glass of milk and sat down. She had never really looked at
her grandmother before, just at the enemy she had to trick, just at her bare feet.

“It’s okay,” Dicey said. “I’m not going to argue about staying.”

“Wouldn’t do you any good,” her grandmother said. She put the cap on the pen and twisted
it shut. “But I should apologize for yelling at you.”

Her grandmother’s mouth twisted in her sudden smile. “That Will seems a good man.
Could you go to him? Would you rather do that than go back to this woman?”

“I was thinking about that,” Dicey said. “I was going to ask James what he thought.
He’s the one, really, he should go to school. Well, Maybeth should too.”

“Maybeth’s not retarded,” her grandmother said.

“I know that. She is slow though. Not as slow as she seems in school, but . . . ”
Why go over this again? “There was a lady, a nun, in Bridgeport. She might help Maybeth.”

Her grandmother sipped at her cup of tea and Dicey drank at her milk.

“I want to explain,” Dicey’s grandmother said. “I’ve never explained before, to anyone,
but I have to now. Because, in a way, I do want to keep you here. But I can’t.”

Dicey nodded. She could feel how true that was. Her grandmother went on speaking.

“I’m old. Not very old yet, but getting older. You can’t tell what will happen. What
if I fell sick, for instance. And I’ve very little money. When my husband died he
left some insurance. Enough to live on if I live carefully. I don’t mind that. But
it’s expensive with children.” She smiled again. “I’m already going
to have to die a month sooner than I planned, with the food this week.”

“That’s crazy,” Dicey said.

“It’s a joke, girl,” her grandmother said. “I mean to explain that I don’t have the
money. Will said Social Security would give me money for you. But I never took charity.”

“Momma wouldn’t, either. That’s why she was taking us to Aunt Cilla’s house,” Dicey
said. “I understand about that,” she said.

“There’s more too,” her grandmother said. “I don’t know whether you can understand
this now, but if not now there’s always later. I was married for thirty-eight years
and my husband just died these four years ago. Until then, until he died—when you
marry someone you make promises. I kept those promises, love and honor and obey. Even
when I didn’t want to I kept them. I kept quiet when I had things to say. I always
went his way.”

“That’s hard to believe,” Dicey said.

“It is, isn’t it. Since he died, I’ve been different. It took a while, but—it’s my
own life I’m living now. I had a hard time getting it. I don’t want to give it up.
No lies, no pretending, no standing back quiet when I want to fight.”

Dicey thought of Cousin Eunice. She couldn’t picture her grandmother like Cousin Eunice.
It would be awful if her grandmother was like that.

“It’s okay,” Dicey said. “I understand.”

“That’s more than your momma could,” her grandmother said. “She felt sorry for me—do
you know that?”

“No. She never talked about you. Except to Sammy and he couldn’t remember.”

“Your momma stuck around here a long time just because she felt sorry for me. I was
glad when she began seeing Francis.
He was handsome and cheerful. I thought, maybe she’ll be happy, maybe she’ll steady
him down. But do you know what I said to her, just before she left this house? She
was twenty-one then and her father couldn’t stop her. I said—‘We don’t want to hear
anything from you until we hear that you’ve been married.’ He was right beside me
then and I knew it was what he would say. So I was the one to say it, because I didn’t
want her thinking I wouldn’t stand by him. I had to stand by him—he was my husband.
Do you know what she said? She said, ‘I’ll never get married.’ She wasn’t angry. She
never fought, not your mother. She was gentle—like Maybeth. Your father wasn’t a fighter,
either. I don’t know where you get it from because you are.”

Dicey knew where she got it from, but she had a more urgent question. “Why didn’t
Momma want to get married?”

“She had seen what happens. She didn’t want to give her word, like I did. We keep
our promises, we Tillermans. We keep them hard.”

“But I don’t understand. Can’t you love somebody and fight with them? I fight with
Sammy, and with James. I make Maybeth do things she’s scared to do. But that’s because
I love them. If I didn’t love them I wouldn’t bother. And they fight back—like James
walking out here instead of waiting, that’s fighting back. It was okay too, because
it was his own decision. I want him to make his own decisions. Didn’t you love Momma?”

“Oh yes, I loved my children. I had a lot of love to give in those days, to my husband
too. But it got turned around. I got turned around. I let myself get turned around.”
Her grandmother waved her hand, vaguely, to brush away the memories like you brush
away cobwebs. “And it’s all gone now and they’re all gone now. So it’s the past.”

Dicey finished her milk. “Will you tell them about Momma
not marrying? I lied to them about it. It was better then, to lie. Now it isn’t; at
least, I don’t think so. I’ll tell them if you won’t, but if you would they’d understand
better.”

“Maybe. Maybe I’ll try.”

“I saw a picture of you when you were little,” Dicey said. “Cousin Eunice had one.
You looked angry.”

“I was angry—most of my life,” her grandmother said. “Not anymore—if you can believe
that. Just crazy now, and that’s an improvement. Not really crazy. Eccentric. But
those years, morning to night. All that anger—you can choke swallowing back anger.
And it still sneaks out, in little ways, and everybody knows although nobody says
anything. So they left, every one. They couldn’t stay here. All of my children, they
ran as fast and as far as they could. My Sammy, he died of it, and that was hard.
Hard. And your poor momma—they shamed me. And I shamed myself.” She chewed on her
lip. Then she looked Dicey full in the eyes and said:

“I failed them. I let them go. I told them to go. There were times I could have killed
him. He’d sit chewing and the anger and shame were sitting at the table with us. Chew
and swallow, so sure he was right. But I’d promised him—and he didn’t know why they
each left. I did. So, I’m responsible. I won’t have that responsibility again. Not
to fail again.”

“Are you sure you’d fail?” Dicey asked in a low voice. “We can’t stay here, I know.
Don’t worry about that. But I don’t think you’d fail with us. We had Momma. And I
wouldn’t let those things happen.” That was true, Dicey knew it. They were safe, safer
than her grandmother, even though her grandmother had this big house and what remained
of the farm to keep her fed.

Her grandmother nodded. “You’ve got determination,” she said.

“Momma said it was in my blood,” Dicey answered. “I never knew what she meant before.”

“Your momma was a kind child,” her grandmother said. “But she never forgave her father.”

“Did you?” Dicey asked.

“No. Yes.”

Somehow, this made sense to Dicey. It let her know that she would be all right, and
her family would be all right. They wouldn’t be children forever. They didn’t have
to have a place, they just had to have themselves. She yawned, fighting it off and
losing.

“You’d better get back to bed. I’ll finish this letter to that Eunice now. I’ll try
to tell her about Maybeth—but she’s such a silly woman I doubt she’s got two ounces
of common sense rattling around in her head. Your cousin doesn’t care much for you.”

This didn’t surprise Dicey. “That’s okay,” she said.

“Well, I do,” her grandmother said. “I care for all of you. Now get to bed. I’ll wash
out your glass. Scat!”

Dicey ran upstairs. She ran into her bed and pulled the covers up over her head. Cousin
Eunice didn’t want them, but she would take them in. Her grandmother wanted them,
but wouldn’t let them stay. And they, she, James, Maybeth and Sammy—they were the
losers. Dicey cried herself to sleep. She couldn’t stop. She tried, but she couldn’t.
She didn’t know if she was crying for her family, or for herself, or for her grandmother—or
for all of them, all the Tillermans, Momma too, lost up in Massachusetts, and Bullet
lost in Vietnam. They were all lost. Dicey promised herself this was the last time
she’d cry, ever, and wept until her eyes were swollen shut and she slept.

Sunlight was pouring over the house and yard and through the windows when Dicey awoke
the next morning. She pulled on shorts and a shirt and looked into three empty bedrooms
before she came downstairs.

Her grandmother was alone in the kitchen. She was kneading dough. “What’s that?” Dicey
asked.

“Bread. I haven’t made it for years. You slept late.”

Dicey nodded, without apologizing. She looked at her grandmother. She had gray splotches
under her eyes, and the fine wrinkles that came out from the edges of her eyes and
her mouth seemed deeper this morning. This was not quite the same woman Dicey had
talked with in the dead of night; but this was not a different woman, either.

Dicey poured herself a glass of milk and took an apple from the bowl of fruit. She
stood by the sink, drinking and chewing, and watching her grandmother knead the pale
dough. Push-pull, slap, push-pull. Her grandmother leaned into the dough with her
shoulders, but handled it gently at the same time.

Her grandmother was contradictory. Except for the fatigue, her grandmother looked
perfectly ordinary this morning. Only now Dicey knew better.

There was a warm feeling in her stomach, as if she had swallowed sunshine. At least
now, everything was settled, she wasn’t battling anymore. She liked her grandmother,
her momma’s mother. She liked her all prickly and contrary. She liked the way her
grandmother said one thing and then the opposite, because it made sense to Dicey,
the same kind of sense Dicey made to herself. She liked the way the woman had watched
Sammy roll naked in the grass. She liked her bare feet.

This was a good way to feel to say good-bye.

“We’ll be moving on today,” Dicey said. “I wanted to thank you for letting us stay
so long.”

“Not today, you won’t,” her grandmother said. “You can’t just bolt off like that.
You’ve done enough running away, don’t you think?”