Homecoming Page 3

  It was hard to start off again. Sammy lagged back on Dicey’s hand and she snapped at him time and again to keep up. He didn’t like being snapped at, so he pulled back a little more, while pretending to be hurrying as fast as he could. Dicey turned her head and saw Maybeth and James trudging along. Traffic passed them, roaring and honking. They passed building after building, and an occasional vacant stretch where wispy trees looked like weeds grown up. Dicey’s fingers cramped from holding on to the bag, so she moved it under her armpit, holding it by a hand across the base.

  The minutes stretched out. Dicey checked the time at every garage they passed. At noon, she began looking for a place to buy lunch, and at the next shopping center they turned off the highway and walked to the front of a supermarket that was open for business on Sundays. Dicey left the little ones with James, sitting on a curb off around to one side, and entered the market alone.

  The electric eye door swung open before her. Dicey headed for the produce aisle, not even bothering to take a cart. If she could spend just fifty cents for lunch, they’d have a dollar fifty for dinner. She picked out four apples, then searched for the kind of rack they have in every supermarket, a place where they offered items that were damaged or old. She found it back by the meat department. She stood before it a minute, selecting a box of doughnuts at half price. That would be three doughnuts and an apple apiece.

  It cost eighty-eight cents.

  They ate sitting on the curb, with the sun hot overhead. Sammy couldn’t eat his third doughnut but he didn’t want to give it away, so Dicey put it into their bag. They trooped by pairs into the market, first James and Sammy, then Dicey and Maybeth, to drink water from the fountain and use the toilets. The pair waiting outside watched the bag while the other pair was inside.

  “Now we rest,” Dicey said.

  “How much longer is it?” asked Sammy.

  “I told you. More than today.”

  “Where are we going to camp?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you when we get there,” she said.

  “I haven’t seen any place that looks good for sleeping,” James said.

  “I figure we’ll have to get off this road to find something, otherwise the cars would keep us awake. I figure we’ll turn off the road and see what we find. There was that woods this morning. That would have been all right. So there are bound to be others. Don’t you think?”

  “Walking is no fun,” Sammy said.

  “Think about the soldiers who had to march everywhere,” Dicey said.

  “We could pretend to be soldiers,” James said. His eyes lit up. “You could be the general and I could be the major, and Sammy and Maybeth could be the army. And we could sing songs while we walk, so it would be like marching, and maybe give drill orders. We could be Revolutionary soldiers, going to Concord.”

  Dicey didn’t say that wouldn’t make any difference, they’d still be walking. She agreed to go along with it.

  “Everybody who talks to you has to say sir.” James elaborated the plan. “And you two have to say sir to me. We should have a drum.”

  When they set off again, they sang a song about marching to Pretoria and pretty Peggy-O running down the stairs, letting down her golden hair. It was a song Momma sang. It even had a line in it, “What will your momma think,” because in the song Pretty Peggy-O ran away with the captain.

  The afternoon wore on, wore away. Each rest period got longer, each walking period got shorter. At midafternoon they lay back in an overgrown lot next to two tiny houses, the only houses they’d seen that afternoon.

  “I wouldn’t want to live on this road, would you?” Dicey said, to nobody in particular.

  “I bet it wasn’t always like this,” James answered. “It might have been a nice road once. A country road. And these people might be old people, or poor people, who can’t afford to move. Like us.”

  “Yeah, but our house was out in the dunes. We had the ocean. Our house was nicer than the ones other people wanted.”

  “The bathtub was in the kitchen,” James reminded her. “It was small, even smaller than these houses.”

  “So what?”

  “Nobody else would have lived in it. Only us. Some of the kids said their parents thought it should be torn down.”

  “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 s
iding 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.

  CHAPTER 3

  Dicey 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.”