Sons from Afar (7 page)

This game was like wild Indians, Sammy thought, flexing his legs, getting ready, watching. Tom fell behind the rushing trio, reeling a little from an impact. Sammy moved up, watching for their pass, ready to intercept. They came at him bunched and he went right for them. He slammed his stick down on the stick that had the ball, at the same time shoving his shoulder into the second player, who might be in a position to scoop the ball up from the ground. Somebody's hip jammed into him, but he had his eye on the ball, rolling along the ground, and he just kept on after it. Running, he scooped it up, cradling it, and fired it off up to Tom, who was back on balance, holding his stick up high, ready. Sammy knew it was a bad pass; he could feel it. He took time to check behind himself, winded by the impact of the body that had flung itself at him. Two of the three attackers were on the ground, scrabbling for their sticks. Sammy watched Tom shoot the ball directly into the bush, making a goal. The buzzer sounded to end recess.

Sammy rested his stick on the ground like a lance, and laughed. He felt the sweat he'd worked up, and an ache on the side of his face. His knuckles, too, on his right hand; somebody had cracked a stick down across Sammy's knuckles. He didn't mind, he thought, flexing his fingers. This lacrosse was great, it was—like wild Indians. He laughed aloud, with his face raised to the sunny sky.

Then he ran back to the kid whose stick he'd borrowed. “Thanks,” he said.

“I didn't know you were going to keep it so long,” the boy said.

“Neither did I, but it was great,” Sammy answered. The kid
wanted to complain. But Sammy Tillerman played to his own rules, and everybody knew that. Sammy knew that about himself, and he liked it. However, this boy, whose name he couldn't remember, was looking at him out of brown eyes that made Sammy feel bad about having kept the kid's stick so long. “I'm sorry,” he said, handing it back. People were moving into the building. You only had five minutes after the bell to get to class.

The brown eyes looked at him, just the way James used to look standing at the edge of the playground, watching.

“C'mon with me while I wash up my face,” Sammy said, “or they'll think I've been in a fight or something.”

“All right.”

“Does it look pretty bad?”

“Yeah.” The boy fell into step beside him.

“My name's Sammy. Tillerman.”

“I know.”

Sammy jostled through the big doors and the boy trailed along. “So,” Sammy said, while he examined the damage to his face in the mirror over the sink in the boy's bathroom, with the usual bathroom noises echoing around him. “What's yours?”

“My what?”

“Name.”

“Oh. Robin.”

He thought Sammy was going to make some crack, and he was waiting not to notice it. Sammy, using warm water to rinse the dirt off his cheek and leaning forward to study the damage close up, didn't say anything.

“My mother named me that,” Robin apologized. “Like Robin Hood,” he explained.

“I'm named after my uncle,” Sammy said. These were just bruises and scrapes. He didn't look too bad. He'd looked a lot worse. “He was killed in Vietnam, but they called him Bullet.”

“Bullet?”

Sammy nodded, turning around. The kid, Robin, stood there, clutching his lacrosse stick.

“That's pretty weird,” Robin said.

“So what,” Sammy said. He walked away, leaving the kid and his lacrosse stick behind.

Sammy was the one who brought James's answer from the Provincetown hospital up from the mailbox, after school. He noticed the return address and figured out what James had probably done. He couldn't figure out why, after what Dicey had told him, James had gone writing off to the hospital, but who knew what went on in James's mind. He left the rest of the mail on the kitchen table; he put James's letter on the desk in his bedroom so he could find it in private, with no questions from Gram.

Sammy waited for James to say something to him about the letter—through dinner, and the long evening, through the next day's dinner too. It wasn't like James not to say anything. Sammy waited for a while and then, finally, he interrupted James at his homework. Maybeth was playing and singing at the piano, music from chorus, he thought. She sounded good, as always, but he didn't like the kinds of songs the chorus sang nearly as much as real songs. The songs chorus sang were either from Broadway musicals, with smooth smooth melodies and smooth smooth lyrics, or odd old-fashioned songs, filled with true-loves and laralaralus. Sammy ignored the music and words and just listened to his sister's honey-colored voice. Then he sat on top of the big desk and put his hand down over the paper James was covering with neat handwriting. It looked like a lab report.

“Cut it out,” James said, looking up, annoyed. He picked up Sammy's hand and set it down off of the paper.

Sammy kept his voice low, although when Maybeth was singing she didn't hear much of anything else going on. He had his
back to her and his voice low, so he just asked James outright, “What was in that letter from Provincetown?”

James's eyes were medium hazel, like creeks muddy after spring rains. They flickered at the question, as if Sammy had just pasted James a good one, in the belly. “What letter?”

“C'mon, James.” Sammy didn't like this kind of lying. If he hadn't known about the letter, he wouldn't have known to ask what it said. James was too smart not to figure that out. “Who do you think put it on your desk?” He pointed out the favor he'd done James: “So nobody else would see it and ask questions.”

“Oh. Thanks.” James turned his attention back to his paper. “It didn't say anything.”

James was about the worst liar Sammy had ever seen. But he was also behaving strangely, strange even for James which was strange enough at the best of times. Usually, if James had an idea he was working on, and you gave him any hint that you were willing to listen, he was off and away talking, as if he had to get everything said at once, as if, if he didn't get it said the world would end, or something. But this time—it wasn't like James. “What anything didn't it say?” Sammy asked.

“I told you, nothing.”

Because Dicey had asked him to keep an eye on James, Sammy insisted. “I figured out, you probably wrote for your birth certificate.” James looked up again, surprised. Which was pretty insulting, if you thought about it. “That makes sense, it's the only reason you'd write. So what did they say?”

“Just a form letter. You have to send in four dollars to get a copy.”

“Have you done that?”

“I don't have four dollars.”

“Why not?” Sammy asked. He had twenty-one dollars left of the hundred dollars he'd started off what James called their fiscal
year with. They had a summer crabbing business, he and James, and Jeff helped out when he wanted to, which was pretty regularly. They kept the first money they made for themselves, for a year's allowances, a hundred dollars apiece. Jeff didn't keep any, but James and Sammy did. At first, Jeff had agreed to split the earnings three ways, for the days he worked along with them, but then he'd stopped, refusing to take his share. He'd told them to put his share into a college fund, or get something they needed. Usually, Jeff did what he thought you wanted him to do, but about the money he wouldn't budge. So James and Sammy started out the summer with a hundred dollars and the rest of the profits they gave to Gram. It wasn't a fortune, but it helped. “You had twenty dollars after Christmas,” Sammy reminded his brother.

“I had to buy a glove.”

Sammy opened his mouth to ask what James was doing playing baseball anyway. Then he closed it. “I'll give you the money.”

“Never mind. Dicey already told me anyway. What his name is. So I didn't need to write.”

“Is that all a birth certificate tells you, just someone's name?”

“How should I know?” James asked. “I never saw one. I'd think so, though. I mean, sometimes there isn't even any father's name at all, if the father doesn't want to acknowledge the baby. I bet. Or if he says it isn't his.”

Sammy grinned. “I guess there's never any mistake about who the mother is.”

“That strikes you as funny?” James asked him. Sammy cleared all expression from his face. “I wonder why she named me James though.”

“You wouldn't want to be Francis, would you?”

“I dunno. It would be something, at least. Unless that wasn't his real name.”

“Do you think he would have lied to Momma about his name?” Sammy hadn't ever thought of that.

“If he had, she never would have caught him. She'd have been easy to lie to. Like Maybeth.”

They looked at their sister, at her straight back and her golden hair. Her voice wound around the room. Sammy kept his voice pitched under the music.

“But that's just why you don't ever lie to people like that,” Sammy argued. “Because they are so easy.”

“That's why
you
might not,” James countered. “So—” He waved his hand, dismissing Sammy, giving up. When he smiled, his eyes looked hungry.

“I'm going to ask Gram,” Sammy decided, sliding off the desktop.

“Ask her what? Don't you do that,” James warned him.

But James couldn't stop Sammy. “Don't worry, I know how to keep a secret.” Even if it wasn't a secret he thought was worth keeping, he'd keep it. “When she adopted us, maybe they found out something more, because they'd be so cautious about letting her adopt us. The lawyers.”

“I never thought of that,” James said. “How'd you think of that?”

“It just makes sense,” Sammy told him. “Go back to work, I'll take care of it. Do your lab, or whatever it is. Otherwise, how'll you keep your perfect grade-point average?” He felt so good, he stood behind Maybeth with his hand on her shoulder for a minute, to say, without interrupting her, that he liked the way she played and sang. Because he did.

Gram was sitting at the kitchen table, studying an old notebook that was filled with pale brown writing. Sammy sat down across from her. He waited until she looked up.

“I'm not going to tell you,” she said, figuring she knew what he was after.

“So you've said. Over and over,” he answered. “I'm not asking,” he told her.

“That's what I figured.” He waited for her smile before he let himself laugh, the way he wanted to. He'd find out when her birthday was. She'd get careless again sometime. He'd keep narrowing it down, she'd forget and let something slip: but he'd remember.

“What is it then,” she asked.

“What're you reading?”

“An old recipe book. I am bored with what we've been eating. Bored stupid. But I can't find anything new that doesn't make my stomach turn. Barley soup with sliced hotdogs floating in it? Feeds ten for fifty cents a person. Did you ever think how many dinners I've cooked?”

“No,” he said. He hadn't. Now he did. “A lot,” he suggested.

“A lot.”

“Too many?”

“Maybeth helps me out, and frequently.”

“Dicey did too, when she had to. We wash the dishes,” he reminded her.

“Yes. That's all true. Then what is it you want?” She knew there was something.

“If I knew when your birthday was, I could give you a cookbook for your birthday.”

That made her smile again. “Yes, you could,” she agreed again, but didn't say anything more, which made him smile.

“You have my birth certificate, don't you?” he asked her.

“Your birth certificate?” It wasn't often anybody surprised Gram, and he enjoyed having done it. “I guess I do at that. It's in with all the papers the lawyers collected.”

“Where?”

“In the desk, of course.” He watched her face, as she decided
whether or not she needed to ask him why he was asking. He knew what he'd answer, if she did: I just want to see it. But he didn't want to answer that, because it wasn't entirely true. He would answer that, if he had to, but he didn't want to have to. But he didn't think Gram would ask him why, and he was right.

“Thanks,” he said, getting up from the table. “Does the library have cookbooks?”

“How would I know that?”

“Ask James. I bet he'll know. Because you could get some from the library. But I'm not bored,” he told her, leaving the room.

It was so simple, Sammy thought, going back down the hallway to the living room. He didn't know why James found things so difficult when they were so simple. He suspected that James manufactured difficulties, that he did it because he liked things more complicated than they were. He heard the piano playing softly, and two voices singing. James's voice had settled to a light baritone, which made a good contrast to Maybeth's full soprano, like a thin gold chain.

Sammy stood in the doorway, watching James standing there beside the piano bench, bent over to read the music and pick out his part from the piano background. “Full fathom five thy father lies,” they sang. “Of his bones are coral made.” Maybeth's voice sang to the melody, but James sang to the words. “Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth change.” When they got to the ding-dong bell chorus, they needed another voice, so Sammy stepped up and put one in. He couldn't read the music, but he could hear in the chords the notes he was supposed to sing, the tenor part. “So sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,” he read, because Maybeth started on the refrain again when he joined in. “Hourly ring, hourly ring” the line repeated, in that irritating way old-fashioned songs had. Sammy sang along, getting impatient for it to finish. “Ding-dong bell, ding-dong bell.”
Ding-dong bell,
he thought,
kitty's in the well.
He knew James didn't care about the ding-dong bell part of the song; James liked the father part, the bones turned to coral and pearls for eyes, the water-changes.