Sons from Afar (3 page)

“No,” said Sammy.

“I do.” He wasn't about to try to explain to Sammy how true that was.

“Well, if you do find out, don't come telling me about it.”

James guessed he wouldn't. He guessed he was sorry he'd even asked Sammy about it. He guessed—it was a pretty stupid thing, anyway, and impossible anyway, since none of them knew anything about their father, except Gram, who had actually met him. And he couldn't ask Gram about his father because—she wouldn't understand. James didn't know what it was his grandmother wouldn't understand, but he knew she wouldn't understand it. Not because she didn't want to, but because she couldn't. Because she wasn't a teenage boy who needed to have a father. Or, if he couldn't have one, at least needed to know about the one he didn't have. Even Sammy didn't understand.

James sat up. He guessed the whole idea was pretty useless, so he thought he'd go take a look at the three chapters they were going to be tested on in algebra. He didn't think there was anything he didn't understand, but it never hurt to review. It was better to forget about his father and concentrate on his grades.

“There's only one reason I'd ever want to find him,” Sammy said.

“Yeah? What?” James stood by his brother's head, waiting.

“To hurt him.”

“That's weird.” Sometimes, James just didn't know about Sammy.

“Well, it's true,” Sammy said.

James left Sammy to the wind-filled silence of earth and space and went alone up the path to the house. The long path from the dock to the farmhouse wound like a black ribbon. The marsh grasses spread dark and restless on both sides. The pines that
grew in a mass between the marsh and the garden waited ahead, in deeper darkness. The night lay around James as dark and uneasy as his own life. James wasn't used to dreading the school days, but because they ended in baseball practice, he did. He'd been dreading them ever since baseball practice began, in late February.

James knew why he'd gone out for baseball, but he didn't know whether he was right in his analysis of the problem. He hated making himself run laps and do exercises; he did it, of course, but really because he was afraid of the coach noticing him and making him an object of scorn for everybody to enjoy. He knew he'd just sit on the bench all season long. In fact, he was pretty much counting on that. When he was in the outfield, playing, all he could think about was how much he hoped nothing would come his way. He didn't like playing, or even drills; he spent all his time afraid of messing up. James had gone out for baseball because he wasn't about to try lacrosse—and get his teeth knocked out or his bones broken, or something. He went out for baseball because he really wanted to sing with the chorus. Because only dorks sang in chorus.

That was the problem. James thought people thought he was one of the dorks—a wimp, a nerd—whatever—a jerk. A lot of the things he liked were dorky things to like—math and Shakespeare, thinking, and singing stuff like Handel's
Messiah
the way the chorus did at the Christmas assembly. And he was so afraid—name it and he'd get anxious about it, war, any disease, death, people seeing how dorky he really was. He did his best, he did what he could, but what could you do when you were weak and skinny and didn't look cool, and couldn't ever say what you were thinking because people would think you were showing off. He'd learned how to get A's without people minding, or labeling him a brain, without being the kind of student
teachers paid special attention to. Teacher's pet, there was the kiss of death. He knew how to say just so much, and no more, of what he was thinking. A real dork wouldn't figure out how to do that, would he?

James had tried to think things out, figure out why, what there was about him. He knew he didn't fit in. He was wrong, somehow, and he wanted to be all right, but it was almost as if there was some secret nobody would tell him, so he was always going to be stuck outside. For a second, the image of Celie Anderson's face floated in front of him, but it was too painful and he pushed her away; but if he could just once, just for one second, get her to look at him as if he were a human being . . . not the way she did and had done for the two years she'd lived in town, looking through him as if he were invisible, or not even there, the way people looked at dorks. Didn't look at them, that was more accurate.

In the denser air of the belt of pines, James admitted to himself that they might be right about him; if that was true, it wouldn't do much good to try to change their minds. He stopped walking and let the darkness come up over him like water. He was so embarrassed about himself, so ashamed. When he thought about it, there wasn't much he was proud of in his life. One thing was the way he'd always helped Maybeth with school, first reading and then math, too, whatever she needed. He did a good job of helping his younger sister, he knew that. He should probably be a teacher, or something, some no-money job where it didn't matter if you were a wimp. Also, he sometimes had good ideas, like when he suggested to Gram that she rent out the acreage of the farm, so the land would earn them some money. Now the fields were planted every spring, with soybeans, and Gram and James had negotiated a deal with Mr. Hitchins, the farmer, to take some of the
rent in cash in the spring, and the rest in a percentage of the net profit. So James wasn't a total loss. He thought.

But he really didn't understand—they'd been here for five years, now, five and a half, and all the rest of them had done all right. Even Dicey, who was the most different of all the Tillermans, had a couple of friends; Dicey didn't care much about people, what they thought, but she had Jeff who probably wanted to marry her, and Mina, who was popular with everyone because she was such a terrific person. James figured that Dicey was probably out there at college right now, finding one or two really good friends. Maybeth, for all that she was so slow at school, which usually guaranteed unpopularity, was always getting phone calls, getting invited to parties or to do things. People liked Maybeth. She was like their Momma had been, just a good person, and when you heard her singing around the house it made the whole day better. That was another reason James couldn't sign up for chorus, because Maybeth was in it, and nobody was as good as Maybeth. Then Sammy, who was—if anybody thought about it—almost as stubborn and cranky as Dicey; everybody thought Sammy was cool, a cool dude. He was a natural athlete, and good-looking, and he didn't care about people so people cared about him.

Which left James. A real lunch-pail. Maybe, he thought, making his feet start moving again, knowing it did no good to hang around in the darkness thinking about himself, maybe he'd end up like Gram, the way she lived before they all dropped down on her, all the Tillermans. Maybe that was the way he'd end up living—everybody thinking he was crazy and leaving him alone—except he would go to law school and get a good job, and make money. He wasn't the kind of person who got physical work done, he knew that, but he'd get his scholarships and his education, he'd make good money.

His father had been the kind of man who just—had these children and then disappeared, not even giving them his name, not even marrying Momma. And his grandfather, on his mother's side, had read all of the books on the shelves in the living room, read Aristotle and Gibbon and just about everything and he'd just—stayed there on the farm, maybe trapped, but to hear Gram talk it sounded like he'd choked to death on his own life, or his own brains, or something. Gram might be weird, but she was nobody's fool, and she had courage. James almost wished he'd gotten his grandmother's courage instead of his grandfather's brains.

James heard running footsteps and waited in the middle of the garden for Sammy to catch up with him. The house, a black square with light the color of melted butter pouring out of its windows, lay ahead of him. Sammy was running fast, but easily—How did the kid get the energy, James wondered.

“Good, you waited,” Sammy said. He wasn't even breathing heavily. “I figured, we should go in together, because we went out together. Or Gram might worry.”

James hadn't even thought of that, and he was supposed to be so smart.

“With Dicey away,” Sammy explained, “Gram does the worrying for both of them. I liked it better when they split it up, didn't you? Sometimes they overlooked things that way.”

They walked together back to the house. Sometimes, James really liked the way Sammy saw things.

“I wish Dicey was here,” Sammy said.

“I kind of like not having her telling me how to run my life,” James admitted.

Sammy ignored that. “Anyway, how would you go about finding him, tracking him down?” he asked.

“I don't know,” James said, as if he wasn't interested.

“Yes you do. You always have ideas. And some of them are even good ones.” Sammy seemed to catch on that James didn't think his teasing was any too funny. He ran ahead, up the steps and into the kitchen.

James came more slowly, watching. Maybeth sat at the wooden table, reading something, a textbook, her lips moving the way they still did when the material was confusing to her, her finger pointing under the words. She looked up at Sammy, and smiled. “Hi. Where's James?” Pretty, she was pretty, as pretty as Momma, James thought, stepping into the doorway.

“Hey,” Sammy said. “Is there anything to eat?”

“Cookies,” Maybeth told him, her voice soft and low; even when she was just talking, Maybeth sounded like she was singing. “There was a phone call for you, a girl. She didn't leave her name. She said she'll call back later maybe.”

“I hope she doesn't,” Sammy answered, taking the top off the glass jar where they kept cookies. “Girls are a pain.”

James stood by the door. Those two, they'd gotten their Momma's good looks, her golden good looks, and he'd gotten—he didn't know what he'd gotten. He'd gotten lost and helpless and confused. He'd gotten the bad differences. No wonder he was such a dork. But maybe he would do it, anyway, maybe he
would
try to trace their father and find out something about him. Maybe he'd just go ahead and do it.

J
ames did know that they had all been born in the same place, the hospital back in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they used to live. He sat down that night and wrote a letter to the hospital, saying who he was, the date of his birth, and who his mother was. He asked for a copy of his birth certificate. Birth certificates had both the mother's and the father's names on them. When he was satisfied with it, he typed up a copy of his letter on the old office-style manual typewriter Gram had gotten for them. He didn't remember the name of the hospital, or its street address, although he had a vague memory of a building he knew was the hospital where he'd been born. He figured Provincetown was small enough so the letter would get there addressed to Provincetown Hospital, Provincetown, Mass.

When he had folded his letter and sealed it into the envelope, he spent some time sitting back, trying to remember the place where he had spent the first ten years of his life. The pictures his memory came up with were blurry at the edges, and faded quickly into one another—he remembered the children's room at the library, the way it filled with sunlight, the way motes of dust floated in that sunlight; he remembered the way their little house was hidden among sand dunes with long sparse beach grass to cut at your bare feet; he remembered the store where Momma had worked, and being given chunks of fried bread by
the owner's wife, thick, hot, chewy chunks of sweet dough, dusted over with confectioner's sugar. He remembered a map of the original thirteen colonies he'd done in third grade. His mother—with a terrible rush like a wind rising up suddenly across the night, he remembered the kind of worry he'd lived with that last year or so with Momma, not knowing what to say because you never knew what she'd answer, because her answers didn't make any sense to him. He remembered pretending not to hear the other kids calling him names, especially bastard, even though he had no idea of what the word really meant then, he just knew it was a name they said to hurt him. He remembered sitting there at a blue desk, pretending he was deaf, and the way they got bolder because he didn't dare get up and look at them. Dicey had always hit out at anyone trying to pick on her, like Sammy did, but James didn't know how to fight. He'd seen the bloody noses and swollen faces, the cut knuckles, after fights; he could imagine how that felt, he could almost see how bad the flesh and bones looked, under the bruised skin. He remembered—he stopped remembering because it hurt him, the confusion of feelings toward his Momma, he'd felt so sorry for her and been so angry, and he didn't know how to do anything more than be as smart as he could in school. What they would have done without Dicey, he didn't know. She had herded them all down to Gram's house that summer, when Momma left; no matter what got in their way she kept on going. And then James remembered—as if it was just happening—how it felt when Gram said they could stay, stay here, stay home with her. It had felt as if the sun was rising up inside of him, as if magic had happened, better than magic, a miracle. Sitting at his desk in his bedroom on the second story of the old farmhouse, with the wind whispering outside his open windows, remembering, James felt again the sudden joy when Gram said it was okay for them to stay. Like the whole school
chorus singing out the “Hallelujah Chorus,” it was that kind of feeling.

James looked out of the window at the night, where he couldn't see anything. He'd used to think that Maybeth was the one who might, like Momma, slip away into depression and quiet lunacy. But now he thought, probably he was the one who might, because he was the one who was so different from the rest of them. Dicey and Sammy never seemed to be afraid. James was the one it was so easy to make afraid, who could make himself afraid by just thinking. Even Maybeth, who was the shy one, timid, could withdraw into herself, and not be afraid. James had thought about them: Maybeth was almost exactly like Momma, and not just in her looks; Sammy and Dicey, for all they looked so different, were a similar mix of Tillerman and whoever their father was. James figured, he was probably the exact opposite of Maybeth, so he was probably like his father. Whoever that was.