Seventeen Against the Dealer

by Cynthia Voigt

  Dicey shook her head. She let the peace of the room surround her, the big sofa and the enameled woodstove, some European model designed to keep Scandinavian houses warm through a Nordic winter. She let her eyes rest on the scene opening out before her, beyond the expanse of double-paned window, the brief colorless lawn, the tangled woods and motionless creek, the pale stretch of marshes, and the sullen gray sky overhead. From the stereo, orchestral music played quietly, rich, flowing music, Dicey didn’t know the name of it. She went to stand behind Jeff, to put her hands on his shoulders. She looked down at the long yellow sheets of legal paper, but didn’t read what he’d written on them. The opened books looked like poetry.

  A double major, biology and chemistry, with a minor in philosophy, Jeff had taken five years for college, to study everything he wanted to. He also took one English course a semester—for the sake of the professor, he’d explained, because this particular professor really taught you how to read on your own, and meeting his mind was like meeting a good friend. Jeff had the time because he was doing the extra year, and besides, he had no social life to keep up with. “Good” was Dicey’s response to that. She’d never taken a course she didn’t have better things to do than, but she knew Jeff felt differently.

  “No, listen,” Jeff said. The music in the room washed around Dicey, like water at shoulder height, and the iron-gray creek lay looped over the flat, barren landscape like a line of melody. Jeff leaned forward, to read.

  Our indiscretion sometime serves us well,

  When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us

  There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

  Rough-hew them how we will.

  It didn’t seem so great to Dicey. In the first place, it was bad grammar, saying learn instead of teach. In the second place, she didn’t believe that fate decided what was going to happen to you. “I don’t believe in fate,” she told Jeff. “I didn’t think you did, either.”

  “I’m not sure what I believe in,” he said, “but rough-hewing, I know about that.”

  “Like wood?”

  “Like wood. What I can’t figure out about it is, if I’m supposed to take ends as conclusions, the end, death? Or as purposes, like the end justifies the means?”

  Dicey had nothing to say about that.

  “Or probably both. I mean, it’s Shakespeare so probably both are probably right. Isn’t it a great line, though?”

  If it was Shakespeare, it was more than one line, it was three or four lines in Shakespearean verse. Dicey made a noise deep in her throat, and let him take it as he wanted.

  He stood up, smiling. “Okay, okay, I’m ready. We’ll leave right away. No more of this dillydallying in the realms of gold. I’m going to make myself a sandwich. You want one?”

  Dicey shook her head. He knew she was coming to pick him up. He should have eaten before she got there. She didn’t have time to stand around, watching him butter the bread and put slices of ham on it, spread mustard on one slice, then decide that, after all, he’d better make two sandwiches, adding a thin slice of Swiss cheese to the second. Dicey stood by the door, watching, chewing at her lip. She’d made a list of what she needed to get. She’d like to keep the cost at $250, tops, she’d decided that. But she knew she had no idea if that was a reasonable amount or not.

  Eating at one sandwich, holding the other, Jeff turned around to face her. Now what? she wondered. “I’ll get your jacket,” she said.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Don’t get angry, promise?”

  “How can I promise that?”

  “Promise. It’s nothing serious or anything.”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t. I don’t even know what you’re going to say.”

  She wished he’d just spit it out, so they could get into the truck and moving.

  “Tools are likely to be expensive.” Jeff sounded apologetic, as if he was the one sticking the price tags on them. “I was hoping you’d let me buy them for you. Or, it could be a loan and you could just wait to pay me back until whenever you could pay it back.”

  He knew better than that. He knew Dicey wasn’t about to borrow money. That was why she’d worked those two jobs and for so long, so she could pay her own way. If you weren’t paying your own way, then you weren’t earning your own living. “No,” she said.

  “But it doesn’t make sense.”

  Dicey didn’t care. The Tillermans didn’t borrow money, it was as simple as that.

  Later, she could almost have regretted that, writing the last of three checks at the last of three hardware stores. The figures lined up, inexorable as armies: 193.25, 210.22, 87.63. Total: 491.10. Dollars. And that didn’t even include an adze. They couldn’t find an adze anywhere—one store had once had a supplier in Kentucky, but that company had gone out of business; maybe she should try some of the antique shops? Nobody had seen an adze for years, but had she ever seen a drawl knife?

  She bought the short-handled knife, not that it was a good substitute, but it would rough out the cut for her, she guessed, more slowly than an adze and without the smooth finish an adze—well swung—could give you. An adze you used standing up, with the length and strength of your arms and back, your feet straddling the wood. This knife you had to crouch over a board and pull at, little chopping strokes. Dicey didn’t let herself think about the differences. She just wrote the checks.

  She had spent almost $600 in one day and hadn’t done a lick of work, either. All she’d done was get ready to work. If she didn’t start working . . . she finished subtracting, down to $615.77 . . . and folded the checkbook back over itself, fast . . . in two or three months she’d have nothing but a big fat zero in that checkbook.

  She declined Jeff’s help, dropped him off at the end of his driveway, and unloaded her purchases into the shop herself. It wasn’t as if what she’d bought was anything as good as what she’d lost. For all that money, you’d think she’d have something really good. The new wood was pale, unfinished, and even imperfectly sanded. She felt the roughness of sloppily sanded wood against her palms. Of everything she’d gotten the only thing she positively liked was the forty-eight-inch level—the several little glass tubes set horizontally and vertically into waxed pieces of wood, all the joints tight, the weight balancing in her hand—she would enjoy setting that level, reading it. But the rest were second-rate—and they’d cost her $491.10 of her hard-earned money.

  She didn’t have time for regret. As she’d said to Jeff when he asked her what she’d be doing that evening and the next day, all she had time to do was work. “If I don’t get working,” she’d said, but wasn’t able to think of anything bad enough to explain what would happen.

  Jeff understood. He never asked Dicey to be anything other than what she was; he never had. He was going back to school on Sunday, anyway. That was probably good, because the only thing for Dicey to do now was work hard, and harder, if she was going to have any chance at the business. At the thought of the jobs ahead, finishing the maintenance, figuring out how to build a rack to store the larch so there would be maximum working space left clear, starting in on Claude’s boats, writing to Mr. Hobart to say she’d build his boat and then getting to work making some drawings: Thinking about what she was going to do, Dicey felt better. For the first time since she had opened the shop door and seen what had happened to her, she felt as if she knew what she was going to do about things.

  It was always like that for her. She’d always had to decide what to do, then stick to doing it no matter what, no matter how difficult it would be. Things weren’t easy, they never had been; in fact, things were often pretty hard. But Dicey was harder.

  CHAPTER 8

  First thing Saturday morning, Dicey wrote to Mr. Hobart. The address on the check was a post office box in Annapolis, as if he didn’t want people to know which house was his. Before she could have second thoughts, she pushed the letter into a downtown mailbox. Then she drove on to the shop.

  To hold the larch, she c
obbled together a rack out of old pieces of wood she’d found in their barn. The best place to put the rack was in front of the big metal door that opened out to the water. In winter, she wouldn’t be needing that exit. She could haul Claude’s rowboats in sideways through the shop door if she lined the floor with plastic sheets so it wouldn’t splinter the wood.

  Dicey put off going to see Claude until just before lunch. If he had a meal waiting for him, he wouldn’t spend so much time talking at her, giving her advice about things she already knew but not thinking of what she didn’t know and could really use advice on. Like insuring the contents of your shop, for one example. All she planned to do at Claude’s was pick up the key, take a look at the storeroom to find out which paint she should be using, and make sure his boat-trailer would hook up to the truck. Everything always took longer than you planned for, she had learned that, but then she’d learned how to plan for that. By midafternoon, she had the lumber stacked up high and neat, where it would keep safe and ready until she could start building Mr. Hobart’s boat. Then she got to work finishing up the last dinghy.

  It was long dark when she got home. Jeff had come for supper, and they’d kept a plate warm for her. Dicey was too tired for talk, but she sat up in the living room, listening, with a good day’s work behind her and good company all around her. Jeff was going to drive James up to Baltimore with him the next day so James could catch a train back to New Haven. James and Sammy were looking over what Maybeth would have to study for her mid-year exams. Dicey listened, sitting close to Jeff on the sofa, until her head slipped down onto his shoulder and she heard Sammy say, as if from very far away, “They’re both falling asleep.”

  Her eyes snapped open in time to see Gram’s eyes snap open. “Go to bed, both of you,” Sammy ordered them.

  Dicey, who planned to be up by five-thirty the next morning and at work by six, didn’t protest.

  The cold, gray Sunday went by the same way, except that when Dicey got home Gram was with Maybeth and Sammy in the living room, taking down the Christmas tree, and she ate alone in the kitchen. Monday, school started and so did rain, a cold winter rain that slanted steadily down. But by Monday she was ready for the first of Claude’s boats, right on schedule.

  Gram drove Maybeth and Sammy to school Monday morning and then brought the truck over to the shop. Together Gram and Dicey went over to Claude’s, hooked up the trailer, and brought over three of the rowboats, one after the other. They covered each boat with plastic sheeting for the short trip, then worked it sideways through the doorway to lay it on the floor of the shop. There, they would put more logs into the stove and warm their hands before setting out for the next boat. On the third trip back, they loaded the back of the truck with cans of paint. Gram set a stack of sandpaper beside her on the seat.

  When the last can of paint had been set into its row beside the rack that held Mr. Hobart’s wood, it was almost time for Gram to go fetch Sammy and Maybeth. Neither Gram nor Dicey had eaten lunch. Dicey didn’t know about Gram, but she was hungry, and cold, and the only dry part of her was her waist. They stood by the tin stove, looking around at the cluttered shop. “I could happily kill whoever made off with your tools,” Gram said. “And I think I’d better find you a kettle.”

  Too tired to figure out how her grandmother’s mind was working, Dicey just asked, “Why?”

  “Hot chocolate,” Gram said impatiently. Then she sneezed. “I could use a cup of cocoa, or tea—even hot water—before I go back out into this weather.” Gram hadn’t even taken off her poncho. The bottom of her long skirt was dark with wetness. “We’d better get one of these boats set out so you can begin work on it. How desperate are things?” Gram asked.

  “I’m okay,” Dicey said.

  “Don’t sidle away from questions,” Gram snapped.

  “I wouldn’t mind something hot myself,” Dicey admitted. She should have thought of that, too. Water dripped down the side of Gram’s face. “Moderately desperate,” she said.

  “Or you wouldn’t be working on these”—Gram gestured at the rowboats they’d set along the shop floor, looking for the right phrase—“these boats no self-respecting rat would make a home in.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I like to think you know what you’re doing, girl.”

  “Claude’s paying good money, and I’ll be building Mr. Hobart’s at the end of it,” Dicey reminded her grandmother. And reminded herself, too.

  “There’s only the one more boat to be hauled over tomorrow,” Gram said. “That’s a blessing.” She sneezed again.

  “Are you wearing socks?” Dicey demanded. Sometimes Gram stuck to her principles beyond common sense.

  “What kind of a fool do you take me for?” Gram answered.

  “No kind of fool at all. Just stubborn.”

  “Well, I am, two pair,” Gram said. “For all the good that does in this weather. I’m going to send Maybeth with the truck to fetch you home, so don’t think of riding that bike today. You hear me, girl? Can we unhook the trailer now?”

  The rain held for two more days, but Dicey barely noticed. The sound of water drumming on the tin roof was soothing, joining in with the sound of the wood crackling in the stove and the sound of the sandpaper smoothing off the worst of the rough places on Claude’s boats. She did the boats in pairs, inside first, then outside, sanding one down completely and painting it before starting the sanding of the second. The only human voice the shop heard that week was her own, yelling at Claude when a particularly bad join snagged the paintbrush.

  The only difference the weekend made, besides occasional breaks in the rain, was that she could take the truck. She had time—because with the air so damp a coat of paint dried more slowly than she’d planned—to stop by the library and take out a couple of boat-building books. She had the first coat of paint on the second pair of rowboats, she had a kettle heating water on the stove for a cup of hot chocolate, and she had her notebook open in front of her, copying sketches to study proportions, on Sunday afternoon. At the end of the two hours, she raised her head from the papers she’d been concentrating on, and smiled.

  It was as if all the long hours of work, all week long, had been to earn these two hours. And they were all worth it.

  She rinsed out her mug in the bathroom sink and ran her fingertips along the side of a rowboat. She almost wished it wouldn’t be quite dry enough, but it was. She pried the top off yet another gallon of paint, stirred it, dipped the brush into it, and got back to work.

  What with the three storage boats racked up along the wall, the four rowboats, and the stacked pile of building wood, the little shop was almost impassably crowded. The days, too, felt crowded. Dicey worked through them. Her arms ached from the circular motion of sanding and the stroking motion of painting. Her shoulders ached from the hefting around of plywood boats. Her back and the backs of her legs, too, ached—from bending over, to sand and paint, long hour after long hour. She lost track of the days. She’d been this tired before—so tired you’d almost rather sleep than feed your hunger, tired with worry as much as from the mental exhaustion of cooking up ways to get what you needed and the physical exhaustion of following through on your own plans. That’s what it had been like the summer she had brought her brothers and sister down to Crisfield, and this kind of tiredness was how tired she’d been, all that summer, all the long way from Connecticut to Crisfield. Like that previous time, Dicey had a place to get to. Knowing the place—what it was, this time, rather than where it was on a map—kept Dicey going.

  She gave Mr. Hobart a week to answer her letter. When she noticed that a week and more had gone by, she figured that he’d been serious about the order. So the money in the bank was hers to spend. Gram caught a cold, probably from helping out those two rainy days. Dicey, eating breakfast alone in the six-o’clock kitchen, heard her grandmother, coughing away, behind the bedroom door. When Dicey opened the door, Gram was sitting up in bed, drinking a cup of hot tea. “I’m getting better,” she a
nnounced.

  “You don’t sound it,” Dicey countered. “You ought to spend a day or two in bed.”

  “You just worry about what you’ve undertaken, girl. I’ll take care of myself.”

  Maybeth and Sammy were studying for exams, mostly for Maybeth’s exams: science, math, American history, English—neither art nor chorus had an exam. History and English were the courses she absolutely had to pass, and Sammy, as a tenth grader, hadn’t taken them. Dicey wasn’t much help, either. She couldn’t remember the things you had to know for American history. She could barely remember two days ago. She wasn’t even sure whether it had been a week, or more, and if so how much more, that Gram’s deep cough had lingered on, after the stuffed nose and runny eyes of the cold itself. Dicey kept forgetting exactly when it was that the exams would start. She kept forgetting in the evenings to return Jeff’s phone calls, and not remembering that she’d forgotten until the next evening, when she was too tired to remember not to forget again.

  She measured time in work accomplished. After she finished the first four rowboats, she spent a day hauling—hauling the painted boats back to Claude’s shop, hauling back the next set of four. While she had the truck, she hauled a load of firewood from the farm, and stacked it wherever she could—in the bathroom, under the worktable, outside the door. The acrid, headache-inducing, lung-clogging, nose-offending smell of paint would fill the room if she didn’t keep windows open. So she was burning a lot of wood, to keep warm. She couldn’t afford to get sick.

  Two of the monthly storage bills got paid. The third was a dentist in Salisbury who had said he wanted to be billed monthly. Dicey sent him a second bill. If she didn’t have his money, she wouldn’t be earning the seventy-five dollars for Gram.