Sons From Afar

by Cynthia Voigt

  When the sun finally came out, Sammy could get out of the house again, which made life easier for all of them. It was the first of spring and, if you looked, you could see little pale green buds coming out on the trees. In town, on sheltered corners of lawns, crocuses poked up, purple, yellow, and white, nestling up close to bushes, keeping low to the ground. Spring seemed to cheer everybody, give everybody things to do. Everyone, that is, except James, who found himself more and more oppressed by baseball. He wanted to quit the team, badly, but if he did—well, they’d say he was a quitter, and maybe he was, but he didn’t want to be—and besides, you could stand anything for a few months, couldn’t you? Other people could. So James should be able to. Anyway, if he couldn’t, he didn’t want anybody finding that out about him.

  On the last Friday in March, even hunger couldn’t make him hurry up the driveway home. Not on a day that had begun with the sight of Celie Anderson walking down the corridor with Andy Walker, leaning toward him a little as she said something, smiling up at him, wanting him to smile back at her. Not a day that ended with a hard, low hit to the right outfield, a hit that James had seen coming at him and still jumped back from at the last minute. He didn’t trust his glove to catch the ball, to protect his face, and he could imagine how it would feel to be smashed in the face by a ball going that fast. Nobody had said anything to him, and that was worse than if they had. He almost wished, when he thought about it, that they’d cussed him out, even though, at the time, he’d only been hoping maybe nobody had seen what happened.

  It would be, he thought, a good day to get a letter from Provincetown. He made his feet move along the dirt driveway. He needed something good to happen.

  But there was no letter, of course. And at supper Gram started out reminding them that Dicey would be home next week for spring break. Dicey got two weeks, while the public schools only had a long weekend around Easter, a long weekend followed by a string of baseball games. Maybeth and Sammy went on and on about the things they wanted to do when Dicey was home; they wondered if Jeff and Mina would be around as well, and when Dicey would want to get her boat into the water. James ate away at macaroni and cheese, almost without tasting the food. He moved his fork steadily, filling his mouth, swallowing, filling his stomach. Thinking: they’d probably insist on coming to see the games.

  As if she could read his mind, Gram looked down the table at him and asked, “When do the baseball games start?”

  “I’m not sure,” James said carefully. She just looked at him and looked at him. “Second week in April?” he guessed.

  “Pah,” she said, an exasperated noise made by blowing air out through pursed lips. “You can do better than that.”

  No, he couldn’t, James thought. Gram was staring at him, waiting, impatient, but James looked across at Maybeth, who was looking at him too. But Maybeth looked at him as if she knew how much he hated it, as if she understood how, every day, he had to make himself do it.

  “Will you be playing in the games?” Gram asked.

  “I doubt it,” James told her truthfully. That was a more cheerful thought. “Pass me the vegetables?” he asked. In the fall, Gram put up jars of zucchini mixed with tomatoes. When she heated them, she added fresh-cooked onions, which made it like a vegetable stew. James emptied the serving bowl onto his plate.

  “Don’t you want to play?” Sammy asked. He was serious.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” James answered, then filled his mouth with food. Sammy honestly thought everybody liked playing sports. He had no imagination.

  “I got a seventy-one on the science test,” Maybeth said.

  For once, Gram had no opinion. “Well,” she said. “Well.”

  “Good-o,” Sammy said.

  Maybeth always did that, brought her good news to the table and held it out, like a little kid holding out her hand, then unwrapping her fingers to show some treasure, some stone or flower. She held her good news out to them all, giving it to them.

  James was pleased. He just went ahead and let the smile he was feeling spread over his face. If James hadn’t known that his heart was just an organ designed to pump blood around his body, he’d have thought that smile began way down in his heart and blossomed upward. He was just so proud of his sister, and himself, too, as proud as he was of any of his own A’s. They let Maybeth’s news rest in front of them for a couple of minutes. Everybody else had finished eating, and James scraped the last of the vegetables off of his plate. Then Gram turned back to him. “What are we reading next?”

  “Macbeth,” he told her. “Shakespeare.”

  “Good,” she said. Gram had started when he was in seventh grade, reading along with what he was reading. She didn’t read textbooks, except history, although she looked them all over, but she did all the English reading and the outside reading in any course that had outside reading lists, like science and history. She said that when Dicey was going through the grades she hadn’t been settled enough in their life together to keep up, but with James she felt ready. “You’re getting all this stuff put into your heads,” she explained, “and I’m your grandmother.” Whatever she said she was doing, what Gram actually did was get started on something and then read along her own route. When James had read Romeo and Juliet last year, she’d started on that and then hauled down the big Shakespeare books from the shelves and read on through all of them, tragedies, histories, comedies. She would get started with James and then she’d go off in her own direction. He didn’t mind. It meant that if he had any questions, he could always talk things over with her, try out his ideas or listen to hers.

  “I liked Macbeth all right,” Gram said now. “I was thinking—” she started, then she stopped herself. “You won’t want to hear my ideas until you’ve got some of your own ready to match up with.”

  James no longer wondered how she knew things about him. He just kept silent.

  “I think I’m getting too old to enjoy tragedies anyway,” Gram said.

  “You’re not old,” Sammy said.

  “Sixty-four,” she answered.

  “You had a birthday? You know what that means,” Sammy warned her.

  “I know exactly what it means, young man. It means I’m a year older.”

  “C’mon, Gram. You know what I mean. Because the last time, you said you were sixty-three, and that was in September, on my birthday. So your birthday has to be between September and March.”

  “Inclusive,” Gram reminded him.

  Sammy laughed. He was leaning toward his grandmother, teasing her. Gram leaned back, away. James didn’t know why she kept her birthday such a big secret—it wasn’t that she was trying to keep her age a secret—but she had always refused to tell them.

  “Not all inclusive,” Sammy pointed his finger at her. “Because you said the first year we were here, you said there’d never been a Tillerman until Maybeth who was born in February. So, it can’t be February either.”

  “Unless,” Gram countered, her eyes snapping with laughter she wouldn’t let out onto her face, “I don’t count myself a Tillerman because I wasn’t born one.”

  “But you can’t do that,” Sammy protested. “It’s not true anyway, is it? Because you belong with us,” he explained.

  “I’m afraid so,” Gram agreed.

  Sammy watched her silently for a little while. “So, February is out, too, isn’t it. That narrows it down.”

  Sammy could always make Gram laugh. James got up to clear the table, while Maybeth served plates of pie, apple pie made from the apples Gram and Maybeth had put up in the fall. Preserved apples made a juicier pie than fresh apples, so you could soak up juice with the flaky crust. James had two pieces, then a third after they had finished doing the dishes.

  * * *

  James still hadn’t heard from the hospital in Provincetown by the time Dicey came home. Dicey came home and took over again. After a couple of days, it was as if she’d never been away. She was out in the barn, scraping the sailboat and repainting its bottom; s
he was charging around the house emptying all the drawers in James’s room and washing them out, spring cleaning. She didn’t talk much, and never about college. Gram asked her about this over supper, Dicey’s third night home.

  “I wouldn’t call your mood exactly ebullient,” Gram said.

  Dicey shrugged. “I’m okay.” She would be too, James knew, whatever her life was like. At college, she lived with a professor’s family, exchanging room and board for babysitting and household chores, because it was all they could do to scrape up the $2,500 a year for tuition and books. But Dicey was stubborn. She wouldn’t even think of getting a student loan, wouldn’t borrow money from anyone; instead she worked out a way to work off expenses. James guessed—looking at her sharp-featured face, the narrow head and dark hair, noticing how her eyes looked darker than the rest of theirs except Gram’s—he guessed there was nobody he admired as much as Dicey, even though she always made him feel that he wasn’t doing enough, wasn’t doing his life well enough, so he didn’t like her all that much.

  “I’d rather hear the truth,” Gram asked.

  At that, Dicey smiled, and Gram smiled back at her, both smiles flashing across as sudden and brief as falling stars. Those two really were alike, James thought; he saw Sammy and Maybeth, side-by-side listening, and thought, So are those two.

  “Okay,” Dicey said. She leaned forward, elbows resting on the table, ignoring the fried chicken on her plate. “It just—seems like such a waste, my being there. A waste of money. Money that we could put to better use. And a waste of time, too, a waste of my time.”

  “The courses aren’t too hard?” Gram asked.

  “No, it’s nothing like that. I’m getting B’s and A’s. Maybe they’re too easy, but they’re certainly not too hard.”

  “You always are cocksure about things,” Gram remarked.

  “They’re not teaching me anything I need to learn,” Dicey said.

  “Want to learn, maybe. Certainly you can’t speak to need. Not at your age.”

  Dicey took a minute over that one. “But that doesn’t matter. We should be saving that money.”

  “What for?”

  “For James and Sammy, when they go to school,” Dicey said. James approved of that. He wouldn’t mind any money that was available to send him to college with.

  Gram picked up a chicken breast in her fingers, forgetting that she had started eating it with a knife and fork. She took a big bite out of it. While she was thinking, Sammy announced that he didn’t need to go to college if he was going to play tennis, and Dicey started to argue with him then gave it up. James ate and waited.

  “There’s that new expression I keep hearing now. Sexist,” Gram finally said.

  Dicey laughed out loud. “It’s not new,” she pointed out. “What I want to do is build boats,” she told Gram. “That doesn’t take a college degree. It takes—doing it.”

  “I told you, girl, I want you to go to college.” Gram’s mouth set in a stubborn line and her dark eyes looked right at Dicey.

  “Well I am, aren’t I,” Dicey said, looking right back at her grandmother. Gram was the only one who could make Dicey do things, James thought. She was the only one strong and bossy enough to tell Dicey what to do. And vice versa too. He wondered, for a minute, what it would be like to live in a house where the man was the boss. A house with a father.

  He wished the hospital would write to him. Or that he had some memory of his father. It would make a big difference if he had some memory of his own.

  Dicey, being the oldest, did remember. Once, she’d even talked about him. With that idea in his mind, James knocked on the door to her room when he’d finished his homework. Dicey was sitting at her desk, reading an open book, writing down notes. “What do you want?” she asked, still writing.

  “What are you doing?” James wasn’t so sure now that he wanted to ask her to tell him anything, if that was the way she was feeling.

  “Papers, I’ve got two papers. One for English, on symbolism in The Old Man and the Sea—”

  “But that’s an easy book. I did a book report on that. What are you going to talk about?”

  “And one for history, on Hobbes.”

  “What’s Hobbes?”

  “A man who wrote a book,” Dicey dismissed the subject. “So what is it?”

  Sammy, wearing just pajama bottoms on his way back from his final trip to the bathroom, stood in the doorway. “What’re you two talking about?” he asked.

  “Ask James. He won’t tell me.”

  “Nothing,” James told Sammy. “We’re not talking about anything.” That was true. He tried to think of some excuse for having come in, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t even think up any excuse, and besides, what did it matter if Dicey didn’t think much of him anyway. She didn’t think much of most people. Since it didn’t matter and she’d never tell him anyway, he went ahead and asked. “Remember in Bridgeport? I was wondering. Because you talked to the police there, didn’t you? When they were trying to find Momma.” He got his words out fast because Dicey’s impatience was about to shut off his question. “Did they tell you anything about our father?”

  “For pete’s sake, James,” Dicey said. “What kind of a flea have you got up your nose now? How am I supposed to remember something that wasn’t even important then?”

  Defeated, James went past Sammy and back to his own room, where he turned out the light and got into bed. He lay there in the darkness, with his eyes open. He couldn’t see anything.

  CHAPTER 3

  Sammy watched James leave the room. He listened to the way James’s feet scuffed along the hall floor and the careful way he closed his bedroom door. Poor old James. Sammy leaned his naked shoulder against the doorframe. Dicey was ignoring him. He folded his arms and waited. James just didn’t know how to deal with Dicey.

  She was leaning back in her chair, with her legs stretched out on the desk. Her bare feet were crossed at the ankles. She didn’t look at Sammy.

  Sammy grinned. She’d get the message pretty soon.

  He watched her face get the message, until she couldn’t stop herself from smiling and turned to look at him. “Okay. What do you want?”

  “Why didn’t you tell him? He only wanted to know.”

  “Because I don’t feel like talking about it. I don’t feel like talking. I’ve got these two stupid papers to write.”

  “So what,” Sammy said, “But—”

  “But what?”

  Sammy didn’t want to say what he was thinking. He was thinking, But what about poor old James? He didn’t know why James was suddenly so interested in this father of theirs, but there was no way for him to find out anything. If Dicey did know something, Sammy didn’t think she ought to just brush James off like that. If she stopped to think about it, she wouldn’t think she ought to either. Sammy went across the room and sat on the bed. Dicey pulled her feet down and turned around in her chair. She sat backward in it, with her arms resting along the top, her chin resting on her arms. “I’ve got papers to write, Sammy.”

  “I don’t care,” Sammy said. “Just telling me won’t take long, and then I’ll go away. That would be the quickest way.”

  She chewed on her lower lip, deciding whether to be angry with him. He didn’t let any expression onto his face. He figured she’d see the sense of it and tell him. He knew she’d rather talk than work on her papers anyway, which was why she was trying to get out of talking. That was the way Dicey treated herself. “Oh, all right,” she said. “Give me a minute to remember.”

  Sammy gave her all the time she wanted. She was looking at him but not seeing him, remembering. He looked at his sister, at Dicey: He knew she wasn’t perfect, but there wasn’t anything he’d change about her. Most people wouldn’t agree, but he thought she was fine looking; he liked the way her eyes saw things and reacted, he liked the way she held her chin high, he liked the way her body looked, lots of angles. Her desk was set right below a window that faced east, so that in daylight
she could look over to the pines, beyond which the water lay. He liked the way Dicey liked the water.

  On one wall, she had a big bulletin board. Before she went away to college, that bulletin board had been filled, with notes and reminders from Dicey to herself—about what hours she was supposed to work at Millie Tydings’s grocery store, what school-work was due, things she wanted to be sure not to forget. There were also pictures on it: a photograph Jeff had taken of her moored sailboat; a couple of magazine pictures of big ocean-racing yachts, their sails trimmed against an ocean wind; and an old cartoon Jeff had given to her, years ago, its paper turning brown with age, as if it had coffee stains on it. In the cartoon, there was a maze built in a box, but the mouse that was supposed to run around the maze to find food, or something, had chewed a hole in the floor and was busy tunneling its way to freedom. Sammy liked that cartoon. There were no pictures of people on Dicey’s bulletin board. Sammy knew why, whatever other people might think. He knew that Dicey carried her people close in her heart, and didn’t need any photographs to remind her. He looked back at her face. It was good to have Dicey home again.

  “And what’s so funny?” she asked him.

  “Nothing, I’m just feeling good,” he said.

  “Yeah. It’s so good to be here—” and her quick smile washed over her face. “I think, it feels so good I’m trying to make it feel bad with these papers. You know?”