Sons From Afar

by Cynthia Voigt

  “That’s really stupid,” he said.

  “Tell me about it,” she said, and he laughed. “Okay, here’s what I know. It isn’t much. His name was Francis Verricker. He was a sailor, a merchant seaman.”

  “We knew that. They probably called him Frank, don’t you think?”

  “The policeman in Bridgeport—you never met him, did you?”

  “You kept sneaking around,” Sammy reminded her. “You kept putting me to bed, and things.”

  “Cripes, Sammy, you were only six years old. The policeman said, when they were trying to trace him, that he was wanted. By the police. I don’t know what for, but I remember once, in Provincetown, when you were maybe not even born yet or just a baby, some policeman came and asked Momma questions.”

  “What do you think he did?”

  “I never thought about it,” Dicey said. “I never thought about him much, if you want the truth. I never wanted to because—well, it wouldn’t do any good, would it? And if I did . . . it made me angry.”

  “What he did to Momma?” Sammy knew that feeling.

  “He must have been pretty rotten to just—leave her.”

  Sammy agreed. It didn’t bother him, it didn’t have anything to do with him, but he asked, “So you think it’s something James doesn’t really want to know about?”

  “Is there anything James doesn’t want to know? What’s got into him, anyway?”

  Sammy had no idea. “It just came up one night. He brought it up. Maybe it’s been bothering him. Something’s bothering him.”

  “And baseball,” Dicey said. “Who’d ever have thought of James playing baseball. Or going out for any sport.”

  “Sometimes, I think he’s just weird,” Sammy said.

  “With all his life mapped out that way?”

  “No, it’s not that, so much. It’s—” As he spoke, Sammy heard what he was saying, and realized what he had been thinking without really admitting it to himself. “It’s as if he was embarrassed.”

  “Embarrassed? What about?”

  “I dunno. Embarrassed at himself.”

  Now he had Dicey’s full attention. Her dark hazel eyes were fixed on his face. Dicey’s full attention was pretty fierce, but he didn’t mind; he gave her his own full attention back.

  “By embarrassed, do you mean ashamed?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I hope not. I dunno, Dicey. I don’t understand him at all, much.”

  “Me neither, after a point. What does Gram think?”

  “She hasn’t said. She doesn’t trust book learning, she always says that, but—”

  “I should be here. I shouldn’t be away at school.”

  Sammy knew what she meant. But Gram was right, he thought. “No, you should go to college.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re smart.”

  Dicey shook her head; that wasn’t reason enough.

  “And because Gram wants you to,” Sammy said.

  “Yeah,” Dicey admitted. “Look, will you keep an eye on James? I shouldn’t have just dismissed him like that, should I have?”

  “No,” Sammy said.

  “I’ll tell him in the morning,” Dicey said. “He’ll be asleep now. Eating and sleeping, James can always do those.”

  “Me too,” Sammy said.

  “Then why don’t you do that,” his sister said. “And I’ll knock off one of these horrible papers. In peace and quiet. Without being interrupted. Without any little brother here asking me questions.”

  Sammy was giggling as he got up from the bed. “I can take a hint. But Dicey—”

  She was turning herself around again and didn’t want to be interrupted. “What is it now?”

  “Is Mina going to be home?”

  “In a week. Why, what is it, are you looking for some tennis?”

  “She’ll be so much better than I am.”

  “You know that doesn’t matter. She likes playing with you.”

  “Yeah,” Sammy said. “She taught me how, didn’t she. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  He turned at the doorway, to say “See you” because he would, for almost two weeks, and that felt good.

  Dicey would tell James. Like Sammy, she did what she said she’d do. So Sammy forgot about it. He got on with his own life, which he liked just fine. Mina did come home, and after a couple of days Sammy could give her a good game. He went to school, which he didn’t mind. The classes were easy, and never gave him any trouble. During recesses, he played soccer, a pickup game run by his friend Custer. Custer played center forward on one team, and Sammy played center half on the other. As seventh graders, the biggest kids in the school, they claimed the wide center section of the playground. Sammy liked the running in soccer, because he was fast. He liked having the ball at his foot, under control, trapping it, moving it around the opposition, shooting off a pass. Every now and then, when he felt like it, he’d take it on down the field himself and score the goal. Ernie, whom he’d known as long as Custer, since second grade, played goalie. Ernie wasn’t a friend. He’d been a big second grader, a sneak and a bully too; he’d gotten away with that in second grade. But they’d caught up with him in size, most of them, anyway Sammy had, and now Ernie was just an overweight sneak. He pretended to like Sammy, and they hadn’t had any fights since fourth grade. The last time, Sammy had rolled Ernie around in the dirt, had sat on his back and pounded on his shoulders until he quit, almost crying. Ernie never came close to an argument with him after that. Sammy couldn’t even remember what that last fight had been about.

  One Friday noon, a couple of days before Dicey had to go back to school, Sammy drifted out to the playground after lunch. Sunlight washed over the scene—the little kids digging in the sandbox or riding on the swings or just running around after each other, some older girls walking and talking, as if they were already ladies going shopping, the soccer game at the center. Off against the cyclone fence, behind the tall swings, a few kids worked with lacrosse sticks. Sammy didn’t feel like soccer, so he drifted over to watch the lacrosse. The sun felt warm on the top of his head, and the fence was hung with bright sweaters kids had peeled off in the warm noon air. With the sweaters hung over it, or tied through it, the fence looked like some kind of cartoon clothesline.

  “Hi, Sammy, how are you,” some girl’s voice called behind him, but he ignored that. There were maybe ten seventh graders playing with the long-handled lacrosse sticks, scooping up the ball and then cradling it before making a pass. Sammy moved up beside another kid who stood watching, holding a stick. Sammy didn’t even look at the kid, because he was interested in the game. There didn’t seem to be any positions. People ran around, crashed into one another, caught and cradled, and swung their sticks almost like broadswords to knock the ball out of the shallow net of an opponent’s stick. “Where are the goals?” Sammy asked, his eyes on the moving figures.

  “That bush,” the kid waved a hand to the right, then to the left, “and they’ve got a sweatshirt on the ground.”

  Sammy turned to look at the boy. He was a skinny kid, with brown hair flat on his head, and brown eyes that kept looking at Sammy and then away, as if he was nervous. “Are you using that stick?” Sammy asked.

  “Not right now,” the boy said. He’d come new to school in February, Sammy remembered, but he wasn’t in any of Sammy’s classes so Sammy had no idea what his name was.

  “Could I try it for a minute?” Sammy asked.

  The kid didn’t want to give it to him but didn’t know how to say no. He handed it over without a word.

  Sammy held the stick in his hands for a minute, getting the feel of it, getting the balance of it. He wrapped his hands around the long octagonal handle, imitating the way the players held theirs. He practiced cradling the empty pocket, elbows in, shoulders moving. “Looks easier than it is,” he remarked to the kid.

  “Umnnh,” the boy answered, the way you do when you know you have to say something but don’t know wha
t the right thing to say is.

  There was a lull in the scrimmage. “Hey!” Sammy called over. He picked out Tom Childress to ask. “Can I come in?”

  Tom was breathing hard, and sweat ran down his chocolate-colored skin. “Yeah, sure. Make it fast.”

  “I never played before,” Sammy told them.

  They didn’t mind. Tom said he should play defense, told him what team he was on, and the game started up again. Sammy missed a couple of catches before he figured out how to handle the stick, how to hold it out and scoop up a rolling ball, how to swoop it sideways to pick up a pass and be already cradling when the ball came into the pocket. He played back, at first, and then—the ball safely held—he charged up the center, watching for someone to break free to receive a pass. “Move up!” he called to Tom. Tom started moving, while Sammy twisted around an attacker. He brought his stick around to his right, to toss the ball to Tom, but there was a cracking sound before he could throw it. The stick was jerked out of his hands at the same time that he careened into somebody. Sammy fell pretty hard, fell over sideways, scraping his face into the ground. As soon as he hit, he rolled over and jumped up, bending down to pick up the stick. The play had gone on back toward the sweatshirt, which was their goal. While he ran back to try and stop the attack, Sammy wiped dirt off his cheek with his left hand. His right hand held the stick up, and ready. The goal was scored before he got there.

  As play started again, Sammy watched the way the sticks could be used to check an opponent’s progress, crashing down from behind to dislodge the ball, as had happened to him, or swinging straight across someone’s chest. Three of the opponents charged toward him, passing the ball back and forth, making another run down the field. They didn’t run in a straight line, but wavered back and forth. Tom Childress moved in to stop their progress, using his body and his stick.

  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.”