Sons From Afar

by Cynthia Voigt

  “We’ve got books at home. My grandfather had a lot of books, I guess he used to read about it,” Sammy said. He didn’t know anything about his grandfather, either, he thought. That was funny, the way Gram almost never talked about him; even when she did, then she didn’t say anything good. His father, his grandfather, that Uncle John—the only one she ever talked about was Bullet, and then not much. What was wrong with the Tillerman men? But he couldn’t stand up there, thinking private thoughts in front of everybody.

  “Sammy?” Shirley had another question. “Why did Apollo let his son drive the chariot? I don’t understand that. He knew—he must have known what would happen. I mean, he was a god, and you said of prophecy, so he knew the future. He must have known Phaëton couldn’t control the horses. Didn’t he? So he shouldn’t have let him do it. He should have stopped him.”

  “Or gone with him,” Robin suggested.

  “He promised,” Sammy explained. “He’d sworn by the Styx.”

  “Yeah, well, my father makes a lot of promises. That doesn’t mean he keeps them,” Jason said.

  “But he was a god,” Sammy argued. “The gods can’t just break their word.”

  “My father thinks he’s God, if you ask me,” Ernie cracked. “Doesn’t everybody’s? Doesn’t yours?” he asked Sammy, grinning at him.

  Sammy couldn’t answer. He had no idea.

  Robin’s hand went up. “What do you think is the moral of the story? I think it’s that he should have listened to his father. Is that what you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Sammy said. “Because—once he’d made up his mind, Phaëton couldn’t change it. He was just thinking about proving to the kids that he was really Apollo’s son.”

  “I think the moral is that he should have listened.”

  “Maybe,” Sammy said. He didn’t think it was as simple as that, but he didn’t know why.

  There were no more questions, but there was one more thing he wanted to say. “I don’t know if anyone noticed, but it sort of struck me that in this story, the father is also the son, because Apollo is the sun.”

  A few groans were the only response he heard.

  The bell rang then, so Sammy didn’t have to say anything else. They all dropped their evaluation sheets on Miss Karin’s desk, and hurried out the door to lunch. The teacher held Sammy back for a minute. She was gathering up the sheets, and Sammy saw that almost no one had given him top marks. And he’d thought it was such a good report.

  “I just want to thank you,” Miss Karin said to him.

  Sammy didn’t know why she said that.

  “I’ve suspected—not that you gave me much reason to hope—but I suspected all year you could do excellent work, and this report was excellent. You really knew your stuff, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Sammy said, his eyes on the sheets. He almost wished he hadn’t done such a good job.

  “Sammy, you know as well as I do that these evaluation sheets are never—or rarely—much more than popularity contests. Believe me, it was excellent.”

  “Thanks.” Sammy didn’t know why he was feeling sorry for himself anyway, and he’d never thought he was the kind of person who did that. But he did do that about playing tennis, didn’t he?—acting as if he wasn’t going to be able to play with a tennis class next year, acting as if he couldn’t wait until then, as if it wasn’t fair that he had to wait.

  “If the written report is nearly as good—”

  “It’s different, it’s a straight report,” Sammy warned her.

  “Good. Because I’d dearly love to give you an A on the project. How’d you like that?”

  Sammy shrugged. He didn’t know. “I never thought about it.”

  That made her smile with her bright-mouth smile, and her eyes smiled too. “All right, Sammy Tillerman, have it your way. I’m just saying thank you for proving to me that I was right all along. There is one thing, though. . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t know Greek, but I don’t think in the original language you’d get that sun-son homonym,” Miss Karin told him.

  Sammy hadn’t even thought of that. “So what?” he said.

  “As you say. Okay, you’re finished, you can go eat your lunch now.”

  Sammy did as he was told, but not because she told him.

  In the cafeteria, he went to sit with Custer, although he saw that Robin had saved him a place. He didn’t want anything to change, he thought, taking his sandwiches out of the brown bag. He wanted things to stay the way they had been. He had a terrible feeling that they weren’t going to, but he sat down next to Custer the way he had for years and years, as if things hadn’t changed a bit. The trouble was, he thought, nodding his head while Custer said he liked Sammy’s report, the way friends were supposed to whether it had been a good one or not—the trouble was that he would really rather have sat with Robin. But was that because he wanted to be invited back to Robin’s house? Or because he felt sort of sorry for the kid? Or because he wanted to talk about the real moral of the story? Sammy didn’t know, and he wanted to know. Not knowing made him feel helpless, and angry. But he didn’t even know whom he was angry at. And he wasn’t helpless, was he?

  Ernie leaned over from behind him, his potato face grinning. “Hey, Tillerman, you never said whether your father thinks he’s God.”

  He was doing it on purpose. Sammy knew that now. Knew it for sure. Knowing it for sure made him feel good; it made things clear.

  “Why it’s Ernie, Mr. Baseball Expert,” Sammy started. He waited for the laughs to die down. He knew how to handle this. “I get the feeling that you’re trying to pick a fight with me.” He grinned back up at Ernie’s stupid face. He looked—he knew it—all friendly and joky, which was a lie.

  Ernie hadn’t expected such a direct attack. “Now that you’re going to go getting smart on us,” he muttered.

  “Do you remember the last time Ernie and I had a fight?” Sammy asked Custer, keeping his voice loud so everyone could hear. “I kind of enjoyed that, didn’t you?”

  Custer was laughing.

  “He looked so cute with all that mud all over his face. Sort of like a pile of mashed potatoes with lots of gravy. Remember that fight, Ernie?” Sammy asked, still smiling away.

  “I didn’t say anything about a fight,” Ernie’s eyes looked around.

  “Gee, you could have fooled me,” Sammy answered. Poor Ernie, Sammy was twisting the words so he had to either fight or look stupid; he could almost feel sorry for Ernie.

  “But if you want one,” Ernie’s voice tried to sound threatening.

  “Hey, sure. It would be fun,” Sammy said. Then he started laughing and his words came struggling out because when he thought of it, it just made him laugh. “As long—” he gulped in air, trying to finish—“as long—as long as you don’t—fall on me.”

  The laughter—Sammy’s and everybody else’s—drove Ernie away from their table to the far side of the big room. Sammy almost fell over, he was laughing so hard.

  CHAPTER 12

  James didn’t know what had gotten into Sammy. Sammy was suddenly coming at him, and coming back at him, about their father. “Did he steal that money from Mrs. Rottman’s purse? I bet he did,” he’d say, and “What about that gambling, do you think that was crooked? How would you go about fixing a high school game? Would you make a lot of money that way? Would he have been poor, do you think, would a candymaker have made much money?”

  James didn’t know any of the answers, but Sammy just kept asking anyway. “If you never graduated from high school, could you get a job as a sailor?”

  “Merchant seaman,” James corrected, his mind elsewhere.

  “Whatever. Do you think that requires a high school diploma? There’s more ways of being smart than in school you know.”

  “I know,” James said, trying to keep his ideas for the French report clear, while Sammy talked.

  “But he was smart in school, too, wasn’t he? He must have loved Momma, do
n’t you think? Because he kept coming back. I mean, I never saw him so I don’t remember, but there are the four of us. That proves something, doesn’t it?”

  James guessed it did, but he had decided to forget about it, to forget about wondering about it. It wouldn’t do any good to wonder, or worry, and besides, he didn’t know that he cared anymore about his father. Whoever he was. It wouldn’t make any difference, it wouldn’t bring back those years when he hadn’t been there. James was busy, anyway, between school and work. “Let it lie until summer,” he finally asked.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Sammy demanded. “You were all hot to find out not so long ago.”

  James shrugged. He didn’t know what was the matter with him. If anything was. He was feeling mostly content these days—he was always busy, and he was doing things the way he wanted to do them, even when it meant he didn’t get the grades he was used to. Like in English, where she gave him a B- because he didn’t do the assigned topic. He thought he had done it, and he knew why he thought so; but she didn’t ask him what he thought, she told him it was wrong. James knew he’d be singing with the chorus next year, instead of trying to play baseball and prove he wasn’t a dork, if playing baseball had anything to do with that. It wasn’t as if you had all the time in the world, it wasn’t as if you were going to live a hundred years, it wasn’t as if anybody guaranteed you any amount of time at all. James figured he’d spend his time the way he wanted to. Figuring that—it was as if a dark shadow that had been riding around on his back all of his life had floated away. There was a dark clinging thing and he had unwrapped its fingers from his throat and tossed it back into the darkness it had come from. That wasn’t exactly true, he knew, but it was the way he felt.

  “I bet if we could find out something about the boats he sailed on, I bet we could find someone who knew him. Or maybe him. Do you think?” Sammy asked.

  James nodded, his mind on the fairy-tale aspects of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which was like Beauty and the Beast, only without any magic spells or happy-ever-after ending.

  “Do you think you have to join a union? To be a merchant seaman. Where would you have to go to do that?”

  “I don’t know, Sammy. Look, I’ve got work to do. Why don’t you ask Gram?”

  “I can’t,” Sammy said. “She’d think I wasn’t happy to be living here. She wouldn’t understand.”

  “She might. Don’t underestimate her.”

  Sammy shook his head, his face serious, his hair, bleached to white-gold from the hours outside, falling into his eyes. “Maybe, if I can find him, then I’ll tell her. But it would be different if I ask. She wouldn’t know what I need to know, anyway. Did I tell you that Robin Kelly can work this summer, with me?”

  James tried not to get impatient, or look too obviously at the door of his room. He really wanted to get back to work. He really wanted this year to be over—so he could begin forgetting it. He wanted to give a report that was as good as he could make it, as good as he could make it, working as hard as he could—to make up for Andy Walker’s Camus report. Nobody but James would know, but James would, and he’d feel a little better about himself if he’d done his own work as well as he possibly could.

  “Anyway, I thought Maybeth—”

  Sammy shook his head. “She was just being nice. She works around the house, and Gram needs her.”

  “How do you know she didn’t mean it?” James wasn’t so sure, but Sammy was usually right about Maybeth.

  “It makes sense,” Sammy said, as if that was an explanation.

  James didn’t want to worry about it. “Go away, Sammy. I’ve got mountains of work to do.”

  “So you can get A’s and be a lawyer?”

  “I’m not so sure about that any more,” James admitted.

  “I don’t believe you,” Sammy said, but he did go away, leaving James alone. James had been almost hoping Sammy would ask why he wasn’t sure, so he could talk with his brother about maybe being a doctor. But Sammy wasn’t interested, apparently. Sammy believed what he’d always believed about James, as if he didn’t know people could change.

  Within a few days, Sammy had found out that the merchant seamen had a union, that you had to belong to it to be anything higher than a sailor, and that the union headquarters were in Baltimore. “So we have to go to Baltimore. But I can’t figure out how to get there. Will they be open on a weekend? Are there buses? How long would it take us to hitchhike up there do you think?”

  “Hitchhiking is pretty stupid,” James told his brother.

  “Oh yeah?” Sammy asked. He was weeding the garden again, and he’d called James over when James arrived home from work. “So what?”

  “People sometimes—especially with kids, they think kids are helpless so if they mean harm they’ll go for kids. You know that. Why do you think Dicey never tried hitchhiking, when we came down here?” Sammy thought a lot of Dicey. He thought everything Dicey did was about perfect.

  “Jeff’s father goes up to Baltimore to teach,” was Sammy’s answer. James didn’t let his face show the smile he was feeling, at the way Sammy wouldn’t admit that James had convinced him. He didn’t know what had gotten into Sammy, but he knew that if Sammy thought James thought he’d won, then Sammy would make sure to correct that impression. Even if he had to do something stupid to prove it. Sammy went on, thinking out loud.

  “He goes on school days and Gram wouldn’t get us out of another school day. Besides, he stays up two or three days, anyway. I could ask the Professor, he likes me.”

  “Everybody likes you,” James reminded his brother, who was hunched there among the spreading zucchini plants, his hands working away, working without even thinking about it.

  “Yeah, sure,” Sammy said. He was pleased James thought, even if he was trying to sound sarcastic. “I’m Mr. Popularity.”

  James turned away. Sammy just didn’t know and couldn’t imagine how things could be for other people.

  When Mr. Lingerle left after dinner that Thursday, Sammy followed him out the door. It was only a few minutes later that he came running up the stairs, his feet pounding as he took them two at a time, and burst into James’s room. “He’ll take us, this Saturday, he’ll take us to Easton and we can get a bus, and he can spend the night with his friend who has an antique store and so can we. He’ll drive us home Sunday.”

  James didn’t know what to say. He had to go to work Saturday. He had the final draft of his report to write, because it was due to be given next week. He didn’t want his life interrupted.

  Sammy stood in the doorway, his eyes eager and his jeans filthy. His feet were bare, because once the weather got warm, Sammy stopped wearing shoes except to school. James looked at his brother’s feet, and his ankles. Those bones fitted together like a beautifully made machine, to enable walking, running, turning corners—all kinds of positions worked in the ankles. They were pretty incredible, if you thought about them. “You need a bath,” James said.

  Sammy just laughed. When Sammy laughed, it made you smile; there was something about Sammy. “How did you get him to agree?” James asked. “What did you tell him?”

  “The truth,” Sammy said, as if there were no other possible answer. “So, will you? I’ll go by myself, but I’d rather have you with me. With the twenty dollars I’ve got, and the money you’ve been making, we can stay in a cheap hotel or something if it takes too long and we miss the bus back. I called the bus company.”

  That was what convinced James, that and seeing how young his brother looked, for all his stocky strong body—he still looked like a kid. If Sammy was going to go up there, regardless, James thought he’d better go with him.

  “We can just ask Gram if we can go to Easton with Mr. Lingerle,” Sammy said. “We won’t have to tell her anything. She’ll say yes. I’ll ask her.”

  “Okay,” James said. He could call Dr. Landros, that would be all right. He could do his report on Friday evening. “I guess you’ve got this all planned out.”


  “You don’t think you got all the brains in this family, do you?”

  James didn’t know what the answer to that question was.

  Things certainly went smoothly for Sammy. Mr. Lingerle got them to a noon bus in Easton, and then gave them a slip of paper with the name and phone number of where he could be reached. “Call me about meeting you,” he said, his round face looking a little worried. James suspected that the man hadn’t thought very hard before he answered yes when Sammy asked; now Mr. Lingerle was thinking of all the bad things that might happen, and he was worried. “Call me, collect, if you need anything.”

  “Sure,” Sammy said, putting the paper into his pocket.

  “We’ll be all right,” James told the piano teacher. “We’ve got enough money for a hotel and all if we miss the last bus.” There were three buses on Saturday, at morning, noon, and evening, from Easton to Baltimore, and three back.

  “I know you’re all much more independent and self-reliant than I was,” Mr. Lingerle said, almost as if he were talking to himself, convincing himself. “Probably more than I am even now,” he added. “Take care, then. And good luck.” He reached out to shake their hands, which was a little weird, James thought. Then he went back to his car, hitching his trousers up, his gait rolling and slow, relaxed.

  “Is he losing weight?” James asked Sammy. They hadn’t talked about diets at all since that one night, but now James wondered.

  Sammy was staring at the piece of paper, which he’d taken out of his pocket to read. “It’s a woman. Her name’s Mary Millay.”

  “Women own businesses,” James reminded Sammy. “Especially antique stores. Or clothing.”

  “But his friend is a woman,” Sammy said. He looked at James, and he looked a little angry.

  “Is there a law that says men and women can’t be friends?” James asked.

  “But what about Maybeth?” Sammy asked.

  James didn’t even bother answering that. Sammy really was just a kid.

  The bus cost them thirty-six dollars for two round-trip tickets. Sammy hadn’t expected them to be so expensive. When he called to find out about if the buses ran, he hadn’t asked how much the tickets were. He wanted to just get one-way tickets, but James wouldn’t do that. James wanted his return ticket safe in his pocket. If the bus hadn’t been about to arrive, Sammy would have quarreled; but he had to either give in or miss the bus. He gave in.