Dicey’s Song

DICEY SWALLOWED back a yawn and looked out the window. It was close and hot in the classroom, just like every other classroom she had ever been in. The windows were open, the temperature was almost ninety, the grass on the front lawn of the old brick school building was dry and brown. The building, which housed all the grades from seven through twelve, had been built like a double decker U; from her window Dicey could see the front entrance, the long sidewalk, and the empty street. No breeze stirred the leaves on the big oaks that marked the front of the schoolyard. Their leaves drooped down, dis-spirited by the heat, and hung there. Like dogs’ tongues, Dicey thought, and pictured the tree panting with many tiny tongues, maybe even dripping saliva the way a dog’s would. She felt a smile wash over her face.

Lazily, she brought her eyes back into the classroom. Like every classroom she had ever been in, it had long, many-paned windows and a wall of green chalkboard at the front. At the back was a wall of bulletin board, so close behind her she could reach back and touch it if she wanted to. The students’ desks made a square, six by six, and Dicey was sitting where she always did, back in the far left-hand corner, next to the windows. Her desk had a kind of tray attached to it, to write on, and a rack under the seat for her books. She had an English textbook open in front of her and the teacher, Mr. Chappelle, was introducing the next unit of study. They’d spent the first three weeks on diagramming and now they were going to read some stories. Dicey was sorry the diagramming was finished. She liked the precision of it. Besides, it was easy.

“Conflict,” was written on the board in Mr. Chappelle’s square printing. He couldn’t write on a straight line. He was young and skinny and had carroty red hair that he kept trying to brush flat with his hands, but it always popped back up. He always wore a suit and tie. He had a pale face: pale blue eyes, pale skin, even his freckles were pale brown. He was one of those teachers who taught standing up, but he didn’t move around much, just stood in front of the chalkboard. He had pushed the big teacher’s desk over to the side of the room, so there was a clear space in front of the board. He always rolled a piece of chalk in his fingers. On the first day of class, he had introduced himself as the English and Drama teacher. In Dicey’s opinion, he wasn’t very dramatic.

“If we define conflict as requiring two opposing forces, what might we look for?” he asked the class. “For how conflict might appear,” he added. “In what forms,” he added. “In a story,” he added.

There were always a couple of people who put their hands up right away, usually girls, usually from the town kids who dressed up for school. They sat in the front of every class, boys and girls together. Then, the blacks sat together, some of them at the front and some right behind. The country kids, which included the watermen’s families, as far as Dicey could tell from overhead conversations about the crab catchers and the fishing season and oyster beds, sat in the middle and back.

Nobody sat near Dicey, who sat alone. She scratched at the shoulder of her T-shirt and waited to hear how stupid the answers to the question would be. There was only one other person in the class who thought of interesting answers, and that was a black girl who sat in the front row, diagonally across from Dicey. This girl usually waited until all the stupid guesses had been made before she raised her hand. Dicey never raised her hand, but if Mr. Chappelle asked her she’d answer.

The black girl looked about eighteen, with a full bosom and long muscular legs and round hips. She wore a denim jumper, the kind some of the town girls wore, and different blouses, and stockings with low-heeled shoes. Her hair was a short afro and her face looked lively. The eyes especially, dark brown and liquid, but also her mouth, which was always moving, since she had a lot of friends. Most often she was talking, or laughing. Wilhemina was her name.

Every now and then, this Wilhemina would catch Dicey’s eye in class (they had three classes together, English and home ec and science) and Dicey wondered what she was thinking then. Wondered if she wasn’t thinking something interesting.

Dicey leaned back and waited to see what the answers to Mr. Chappelle’s question would be. Vaguely, she thought about the scraping of the boat she planned to accomplish that afternoon.

“Conflict between two men,” the answers began. Mr. Chappelle wrote two men on the board. Since it was correct, a whole lot of hands went up. “A woman and a woman.” “A man and a woman?” “A boy and a boy?” “A gift and a girl.” The predictable list went on. Mr. Chappelle wrote everything on the board. Dicey made her own list, inside her head, because you could have conflict between someone with power and someone without any, between someone honest and a liar. The voices petered out around her as she continued with her own thoughts. You could even, she realized, have a conflict between somebody and himself: and that was an interesting idea. Like Gram, Gram was like that.

Wilhemina had her hand up, and Mr. Chappelle was waiting until the rest of the class settled down (“A man and his dog?”) to call on her. “Yes, Wilhemina?”

The rich voice spoke out. “What about conflict between an individual and the society he lives in?”

Dicey usually kept her eyes down on the fake wood surface of her desk, but this caused her to swivel her head up. She tried to think out what it might mean. There were questions she would have liked to ask the black girl. She caught Wilhemina’s eyes on her face, as if the girl were aware of Dicey’s reaction. Mr. Chappelle wrote out the letters on the board, slowly, as if he was thinking.

“What do you mean by that, Wilhemina?” Mr. Chappelle asked.

“Well,” the girl began. Dicey couldn’t stop herself from leaning forward in her seat. “A lot of the time, conflicts are between one person and the people he lives with. Or she lives with. If the society thinks one way and the person thinks another.”

Mr. Chappelle was listening carefully, you could tell. Dicey figured, from the way he wrote down everything everybody said, even when it repeated the same basic idea, that his brain didn’t work very fast. “Can you give us any examples?”

The rest of the class shifted in their seats, getting bored. Too bad for them, Dicey thought to herself.

“Jesus, for one,” the girl answered quickly, “and St. Paul, and John the Baptist. St. Joan, maybe. And even Moses, if you think about it.”

“We know your daddy’s the minister,” somebody muttered, and Wilhemina turned around and smiled, not taking offense.

“Then what about the suffragettes?” she suggested. “Everybody laughed at them, and they went to jail and had food pumped into their stomach when they refused to eat and a lot of them were disowned by their families. Or Louis Pasteur, everybody thought he was crazy. Or the people who ran the underground railways.”

Mr. Chappelle seemed to be thinking about all this, maybe trying to figure out what he should say.

“Yeah, but yours are all the good guys,” a boy from the town section called over.

“That’s right, Wilhemina,” Mr. Chappelle agreed. “Is society always wrong and the individual always right?”

“John Wilkes Booth,” Wilhelmina announced triumphantly. Dicey felt herself fill with laughter. Nobody else seemed to find it particularly funny. Mr. Chappelle harrumphed and turned his attention to the class.

“Dicey,” he inquired. “Do you have anything to add?”

Dicey chewed on her bottom lip, and why did he have to notice her. “Between someone and himself,” she said, not bothering to keep the anger at his intrusion out of her voice.

Mr. Chappelle kind of stared at her.

“I mean,” Dicey sat back, to show it couldn’t mean less to her what anybody thought of her idea, “sometimes you want one thing and the opposite at the same time. Or you say one thing when you really mean the opposite. Or there’s something you want to do and something you have to do.” She was getting warmed up, and she liked her idea.

One of the town girls interrupted. “Like there are two boys and you like them both,” she said, then giggled.

Dicey closed her eyes briefly, then turned her attention back outside. If she hadn’t, just then, she would have missed seeing the straight-backed figure emerge from the main doors with a clumsy purse over its shoulder. Gram. Dicey couldn’t mistake that high carriage of the chin, or the unkempt curly gray hair. But her meeting about Maybeth wasn’t until three fifteen. What was Gram doing at Dicey’s school?

Mr. Chappelle, figuring (Dicey guessed) that the argument about whether or not you could like two boys best at the same time had gone on long enough, called on them to open their textbooks and start reading aloud the story that would be their homework. He told them which questions at the end they were supposed to write answers to, and then called on someone to read, one of the worst readers in the class, who stumbled over any word more than two syllables long and made sentences sound senseless because he never paid any attention to punctuation. People groaned and muttered to one another. Dicey looked quickly at the clock behind her. Only ten more minutes. Only one more class after this.

The bike rack was out behind the school building, by the parking lot. Dicey hurried out as soon as the bell released her from home ec class. (Who cared about the right way to pin up a hem, and she didn’t have any skirts anyway.) She was one of the first out. But not the first. A boy sat on the low concrete wall playing a guitar. He had black hair and wore a blue workshirt with its sleeves rolled up. He was playing a melody Dicey didn’t know. Dicey had never seen this boy before. He looked like an upper-classman, maybe a junior or senior. She stopped for a minute, to listen, because it sounded so good to her.

His fingers continued playing the song even though he sensed Dicey and looked up at her. He had wide gray eyes and dark, straight eyebrows, and a straight mouth. His thin face had a light tan. His eyes questioned Dicey.

“I never heard that song,” she said, to explain why she was standing staring.

He started to sing, in a thin, soft voice. “When first unto this country, a stranger I came. And I cour —” his voice held the note high and round, for three beats ” — ted a young girl, and Nancy was her name.” He kept singing, and Dicey kept listening, trying to memorize the melody, while the song told the story of how the man was rejected by the girl and arrested and put in jail and had “a coat of many colors.” What did that mean, a coat of many colors? Dicey hummed the melody inside her head, concentrating on it.

When he finished, he strummed a couple of chords. “Have a sit, kid.”

Dicey shook her head and turned away. She heard the guitar begin another melody as she unlocked her bike and rode off downtown.

That day, Dicey began on the shelves. She’d done a quick surface dusting, just so things wouldn’t look so old, the week before. Now, she took a bucket of warm water and a sponge and began washing down the long shelves. Millie was behind the meat counter, cutting up a side of beef that had been delivered that morning. When Dicey said hello, she saw the huge knives and cleavers, the thick-bladed saw, all laid out on the butcher block table. Millie had wrapped a bloodstained apron around her. When she cut into the beef, she leaned all her weight against the knife and the muscles worked in her arms.

Millie’s cuts were sure and straight. Even when she hacked at a bone with the cleaver, she always hit the same spot. Dicey would have liked to stay and watch her, but she had money to earn.

Often, as she methodically moved cans of soup off the shelf, washed down the bottom and sides and back, then replaced the cans, washing each one off with a damp sponge. Dicey heard someone come in and interrupt Millie at her work. The store owner would give the customer what she or he wanted, then plod down to the counter and patiently add up the bill. Nobody said how much better the store looked and smelled. But Dicey figured maybe her plan was working out the way she hoped.

When she finished her hour she was about halfway down the long shelf. She replaced the unwashed cans, making a mental note that she should begin the next day at chicken noodle soup. She went back to the meat counter to say she was leaving.

There, she lingered for a few minutes. Millie was cutting out a roast with what looked like rib bones in it. She used a thick, cutlass-shaped knife to go through the meat between two ribs, then whacked once with the cleaver before taking the saw and cutting through bone with five strong strokes. Then she took a short, slim knife and cut off large pieces of fat, tossing them without looking into a lined trash barrel beside her. All of her movements were confident. Her little eyes concentrated on what she was doing. It was like watching somebody good play a sport, Dicey decided. A couple of odd scraps of meat went onto a growing pile beside the carcass. Stew beef?

“I’m off now,” Dicey said.

“Is it an hour already?” Millie asked. She turned over a fat wrist to look at her watch. “I’m being awful slow with this.”

“You had interruptions,” Dicey reminded her.

“That’s right.” Millie sounded surprised. She couldn’t have forgotten, Dicey knew. She’d heard her employer talking with the customers, about the weather and the hog market. “That would slow me down back here, wouldn’t it,” Millie asked, as if she had just realized the connection.

It was getting on to five when Dicey rode her bike up the overgrown driveway. She decided she didn’t have time for a snack, not if she wanted to get some scraping done on the boat. She dropped her books on the desk in the living room and asked James, who sat reading the Bible again, if he didn’t have homework. “Some, not much,” he told her. Maybeth was in the kitchen with Gram, reading a list of vocabulary words aloud while Gram listened and peeled potatoes for supper. Sammy she saw spading fiercely at the garden.

Dicey pulled the barn doors wide, for maximum light, and settled down to work. For scraping the old paint off she had a special tool Gram found for her, a kind of spatula with its tip bent back. It was slow work. The first couple of strokes over a place were the easiest, then you had to scrape away at old paint layers that had been smoothed down by the first couple of scrapes and were, thus, harder to get off. From this tedious point of view, the twelve-foot boat didn’t look so little to Dicey.

Sammy wandered in behind her. Dicey greeted him. He was carrying the shovel and he cleaned it off with his hands before setting it back in its place against the dark wall. Dicey, leaning her weight into her work, trying to find just the right amount of pressure so that she would scrape off the paint without gouging the wood beneath, forgot he was there. Until he spoke into her ear.

“I could help.”

Dicey grunted and shook her head.

“Why not?”

“There’s no tool.” Dicey gave the first excuse she could think of. Sammy went to the workbench and began rummaging around.

After a while he came up to her again, holding a rat-tailed chisel. “What’s this for?” Dicey didn’t answer. “Dicey, do you know?”

“Nope,” Dicey said. “Better put it back.”

She heard him rummaging around behind her. With an angry sigh, she turned to see what he was doing. He was pulling out the little drawers from the miniature cupboard where Gram stored nails and screws of different sizes. “Better not mess around with that.”

“Why not?” Sammy demanded, ready for a fight. And dropped one of the little drawers, scattering thin nails along the surface of the bench and onto the dirt floor.

“Oh, Sammy,” Dicey said. She only had a little time for this work, and she didn’t want to have to interrupt it to help him pick up after himself.

“I’ll fix it,” Sammy told her. He bent down and began to pick up the nails from the floor.

“Don’t get dirt or straw mixed in there,” Dicey warned him.

“I won’t,”Sammy said. “I said I’d pick it up.”

Dicey turned her attention back to the job. But she couldn’t concentrate, because she was waiting for the sounds Sammy would make putting the little drawer back in, so she could take a quick look to be sure he cleaned off all the nails before replacing them.

Sammy seemed to understand that, because he brought the little drawer over for her to check it. She nodded and he went away again. She heard him climbing around.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

“Bet you can’t see me,” he answered.

Dicey looked around quickly, and she couldn’t. “C’mon, Sammy,” she pleaded.

“I told you,” he said, pleased with himself.

Dicey felt anger spurt up her spine. “Wherever you are, get back where I can see you,” she said, tossing the scraper into the ground like a jackknife. “I’ve about had it, you hear me? There’s almost no time for me to work on the boat, and you’re interrupting me. You know the lofts aren’t safe to play in.”

Sammy stepped out of the shadows beside an old stall. He looked chastened and sulky. “We don’t know that. We just haven’t checked them yet. You said you’d check them,” he reminded her.

“I will,” Dicey told him, bending down to fetch the scraper, wiping it clean on her pants. “I will. But not right now, please, Sammy?” She felt desperate.

Sammy went back to the workbench and began to fiddle with the paintbrush soaking in its can of turpentine.

Dicey gave up. “OK,” she said, feeling in him the kind of unused energy her frustration was giving her. “Tell me about school today. How was it?”

“I already told Gram.”

“So tell me. I wasn’t there, remember?”

“It’s boring,” Sammy said.

“All right,” Dicey said. “Suit yourself.”

He watched her work.

“Why won’t you let me help?” he asked.

He was too little, he wouldn’t be sure to do it right, and Dicey wanted some time at least to herself. She wanted the boat to herself. But she couldn’t say that, so instead she asked him, “Do you know fractions yet?”

“Naw, not until spring.”

“Tell me something, Sammy,” Dicey began.

He sat down. Contented now.

“If you had an apple and you cut it up, what would be bigger, the half or the quarter?”

“The half, a’course,” he said. “Why?”

“And if you cut the quarter in half, what would you have?”

This he had to think about. “An eighth?”

Dicey nodded. “If you cut the half into eighths, how many pieces would you have?”

“You mean, if I had half an apple?”

Dicey nodded.

“I think four. Why?”

“No reason, I was just wondering. You already understand fractions,” Dicey said.

“Then why doesn’t Maybeth?” Sammy asked.

“I don’t know,” Dicey answered.

After supper, they did homework. James was usually finished first, but that night he worked as long as Dicey, doodling on a piece of lined paper. He had a report to do, on the pilgrims, and he was trying to pick a subject, he told Dicey. He didn’t want any help, he had lots of ideas, it was just a matter of finding the right one. What did he mean the right one, Dicey asked. James explained that he wanted one the other kids would enjoy, because they were going to read them out loud in front of the class. He wanted them to like his. Dicey said she thought the kids in his special class were all smart. “They’re OK,” James said.

Dicey looked up into his narrow, thoughtful face. She could hear Gram and Maybeth working in the kitchen. It sounded like Maybeth was stumbling through the same list of words she’d been reading that afternoon.

“I thought they were smart,” Dicey insisted. “Like you.”

He shook his head. “Not like me,” he said. “I thought they might be, but they aren’t. They’re OK,” he repeated. His eyes slid away from hers and back to the boxes he was drawing on his paper.

When Gram and Maybeth came into the living room, Dicey asked Gram if she’d ever heard the song the guitarist had played that day. Gram said she hadn’t. Dicey hummed the tune, and Maybeth hummed it with her. So Dicey taught Maybeth the first verse, which was the only one she could remember.

“I like it,” Maybeth said. Her eyes had little bags under them, and no wonder, Dicey thought, since she spent most of her days bending her face over one book or another. Trying to catch up and keep up. They sang the verse together, twice. Maybeth went to the piano to pick out the tune. Dicey made a mental note to find out the rest of the words, if she could see that boy again. “It has something about a coat of many colors,” she told her family, who were kind of half-listening, the way families do.

“Joseph’s coat,” James said. “Right Gram?”

Gram agreed, and told how Joseph’s father had given him that coat because he was the favorite of twelve sons, in Israel.

“But this was about a man who went to jail,” Dicey said. “It sounded American.”

“There’s gotta be a book, somewhere, where somebody’s written down these songs,” James remarked. “I bet there is.”

Gram cleared her throat. “I have a question to ask you all. Maybeth? You too,” she called.

They waited.

“I went to see Maybeth’s teacher today,” Gram began. James caught Dicey’s eye. “Her music teacher, a Mr. Lingerle,” Gram said. “A pleasant young man. Well — he wouldn’t seem young to you. He told me — are you all listening? Sammy? — he told me that he thought Maybeth should have lessons.”

“She doesn’t need lessons,” Dicey said hotly.

“Take it easy, girl,” Gram said. Her eyes were laughing at Dicey. “The kind of lessons he was talking about were special lessons.”

The children were puzzled, and she let them sit in their puzzlement for a long minute.

“Lessons for someone who is talented.”

Dicey felt a smile begin and she looked at Maybeth. Maybeth’s face hadn’t changed, as if she hadn’t yet understood that this teacher note was different from all the other ones she had carried home.

“Piano lessons are what he suggested,” Gram said.

“Can I too?” Sammy asked.

Gram shook her head at him. “Just Maybeth. What do we think of that?”

“Terrific,” Dicey said.

“But how can we pay for them?” James asked.

“Do you think I can?” Maybeth asked Dicey.

“Do you want to? It would mean even more work, practicing. You have to practice piano, don’t you Gram?” Dicey asked.

“Mr. Lingerle said he would be happy to give Maybeth the lessons, once a week, after school, and he would drive her home afterwards,” Gram announced. “He said he would charge five dollars a lesson, which isn’t unreasonable in my opinion.” She sat back then to let them think about that.

Maybeth was on the piano bench, her hands clasped tight together, not looking at anyone.

“He said,” Gram added, “that in over ten years of teaching, Maybeth is the most exciting student he has ever had.”

“If, instead of having allowances, I’m earning seven dollars a week at Millie’s and it looks like I’ll be able to keep the job —” Dicey rushed out the words because she was so glad for Maybeth and because, if she rushed them out and committed herself to them, it wouldn’t do any good to think about how she was going to be able to buy caulking material and paint, if she ever got through the job of scraping the boat.

“But I want an allowance,” Sammy protested. “You said.”

Dicey could have throttled him.

“There’ll still be two dollars left,” Gram told him. She didn’t even sound angry. “You could each have fifty cents.”

“I wouldn’t need any,” Maybeth spoke softly.

At fifty cents, it would take twice as long to save up, Dicey thought. “But then we couldn’t give any to you,” she told Gram.

“Let me worry about that,” Gram said.

Dicey was willing to go along with that.

“Maybeth, do you want to take piano lessons?” Gram asked. “Even if it means another lot of work for you?”

“Yes, please,” Maybeth answered quickly. “If it was all right with everybody. If Dicey doesn’t mind and Sammy can still have an allowance.”

“That’s decided then,” Gram decided.

“You talked to a lawyer too, today, didn’t you?” Dicey asked.

“It was a busy day,” Gram agreed.

“Anything else?” Dicey asked. Gram shook her head.

Dicey guessed that whatever it was that took her to Dicey’s school, she wasn’t going to say anything about it.

James was looking at Dicey curiously, as if he suspected there was something she was thinking about. “I have a report due in three weeks,” he told Gram. “Something on the pilgrims. So Mr. Thomas will have something to show parents at the conferences.”

“What conferences?” Gram asked, startled. “What parents?”

“You don’t have to come in,” James assured her. “There are conferences when we’ve finished six weeks of school, so the teachers can talk about how the kids are doing, and the parents can meet the teachers. Lots of classes have special projects due just before then, so the parents have something to look at.”

“We’re going to make a bulletin board with poems on it,” Sammy said. “Poems,” he repeated, without pleasure. “We’re going to vote,” he added, with more enthusiasm.

Dicey could figure out what he meant, probably vote on the poems to be put up on the bulletin board. “I bet you can write poems all right,” she told Sammy. He shrugged.

“I’d like to write something the kids in my class will be interested in,” James said. Dicey wasn’t sure who he was talking to, and what he wanted to be answered.

“I’d think you’d want to write something you would be interested in,” Gram said.

“I wanna play checkers,” Sammy announced.

James shrugged his shoulders. Gram began setting out checkers on the board. “I would,” Gram said to James.

“Yeah, but you —” James started to say, then didn’t finish. Dicey knew what he was thinking, that Gram wasn’t like other people, she was different, an oddball. A lot of people in town thought she was just plain crazy. Dicey had found that out the first day they arrived in Crisfield, before she even walked out to her grandmother’s farm. It was what Millie said. But Millie didn’t seem to really think that. At least, not now, not any more.

James was squirming in his chair. Gram just looked at him, waiting, and didn’t say a word. “Let’s play,” Sammy demanded.

Dicey thought maybe James and Gram should have this conversation. “I’ll play with you, Sammy,” she said.

“No, her, she’s more fun anyway.” He rejected Dicey’s offer without a thought.

“Then I can hear Maybeth read,” Dicey said.

“I already did that,” Gram told her, ignoring James. So all Dicey had to do in the time before the little kids went up to bed was sit with Maybeth on the piano bench and sing. That was OK with her. James came over to join in, and she could hear Sammy’s voice sometimes too.

That Friday, when the science teacher announced that they would need partners for the next two weeks, which would be laboratory work classifying rocks, Dicey felt a moment of unease. There were thirty-seven kids in the class, so probably one person wouldn’t have a partner, and probably that would be her. That was OK, she liked working alone, she was used to it; but she wanted to be sure everybody knew that she didn’t care about not having a partner. She stared down at the notebook opened before her on the high table, pretending to read what was in it, to show she wasn’t interested in the babbling of voices. When she felt someone standing beside her, she thought probably it was the teacher and didn’t look up, as if she was too engrossed to notice.

“Wanna work together?” A ringing voice spoke.

It was Wilhemina. Dicey was too surprised to do anything but nod. The big black girl put her notebook and textbook down beside Dicey’s. She dropped a half-dozen pens and pencils beside it. She hoisted herself up onto the stool beside Dicey. “I’m Wilhemina Smiths, Smiths with an s at both ends,” she told Dicey. “My friends call me Mina. You’re Dicey Tillerman.”

Dicey nodded and stared. She was pleased to have this girl for a partner, but she wondered at the buzzings of conversation around them, and she wondered if Mina had felt sorry for her, the new kid, and that was why she chose Dicey.

“We’re the smartest ones in here,” Mina said, lowering her voice so that nobody would hear. She smiled at Dicey, and her teeth flashed white and her round cheeks got rounder. Her skin was smooth and milk-chocolate brown. Her hands, arranging things on the table top, were large and quick.

“How do you know that?” Dicey asked.

“I know about me,” Mina answered, “and I’ve been keeping an eye on you. Don’t worry, I won’t eat you,” she told Dicey, grinning.

Dicey looked at the girl, grinned back at her. Did she think that just because Dicey was scrawny and small, and she was so large and strong-looking, that Dicey would be scared of her?

“I’m not worried,” Dicey said. If Mina knew the kind of things Dicey had done all her life and especially last summer, she wouldn’t think Dicey could be scared. The teacher called the class to attention and began to dictate the background information.

At the end of that day, Dicey came home to see three boy’s shirts lying on the kitchen table. They didn’t look new. When Gram and Sammy came in, Dicey asked about them: “Where’d you get these?”

“From the attic,” Gram said. Dicey drank a glass of cold milk and picked up the top shirt. It was plain white cotton, with a collar that buttoned down.

“I didn’t know you had an attic,” she remarked.

“They’re for you; I altered them to fit,” Gram said. “You’re too old for T-shirts, and it may be weeks before we see any money from the Welfare Office.”

“I didn’t know you could sew,” Dicey said. For her? She unfolded the shirt and touched the material. It had been worn down soft. She could see tucks along the sides, where it had been recently stitched.

“I’ve got an old treadle machine in my room,” Gram said. “Aren’t you going to try it on?”

Dicey peeled off her T-shirt and put on the boy’s shirt. She buttoned it up, until the top button, which she left open. She pulled the sleeves straight and buttoned the wrists. It felt good, cool and cottony, freshly ironed. Gram watched her and nodded her head. Dicey tucked the shirt in at the waist of her cutoffs. Looking down, she saw that her bosom pushed the front of the shirt out a little. She quickly pulled it out again, so it would hang loose.

“Thank you,” she said. There was a white shirt and two blue ones. She didn’t know what more she was supposed to say, although she felt like there was more to say. She wanted to ask whose shirts these had been.

“It suits you,” Gram said.

James agreed, when he came in later. “Much better than the T-shirts,” he approved. “Is the attic that trap door upstairs in the ceiling?”

Gram nodded.

What’s up there?” James asked.

“Nothing much.”

James stared at his grandmother. Then he decided not to pester her. “I got a job,” he announced.

“You what? How did you do that?” Dicey demanded. She had never thought of James getting a job.

“There’s a kid in my class, he had a newspaper route for Baltimore and Annapolis papers. He was griping about it and I said I’d do it. It gets him twelve dollars a month,” James said.

He looked at Dicey and then at Gram. Neither of them said anything.

“It’s OK,” he explained to Gram. “I haven’t told him yes for sure yet, I said I had to check with my family.”

James was always the one who did things right, Dicey thought. She wished that he would make some mistakes, just once or twice. He did make mistakes, she knew that, but he always seemed to be the one the grown-ups approved of.

Sammy came bowling into the room and ran smack into Dicey. She wheeled around, ready to yell at him. His eyes were already angry, she noticed, and his color was high.

“I rode a mile as fast as I could, all the way,” he declared. “I’m not even tired. So I’ll help James.” Gram smiled at him and kept herself from laughing.

They were all turning away from her, Dicey thought. When this had happened before, at Cousin Eunice’s house in Bridgeport, it had been bad for the little kids. But here, with Gram, on the farm, with a home, it wasn’t bad for them. She wasn’t sure James was old enough for a job, or reliable enough for it in how much he knew about hard work (and carrying newspapers around, even on a bicycle, was hard work). Sammy hadn’t been in any fights at school, and that was good; but she didn’t understand why he got weepy when he was losing at checkers or parchesi. Maybeth seemed contented, and pleased with her first piano lesson. Maybeth didn’t seem to mind all the schoolwork.

Anyway, nobody was talking to Dicey, so she guessed they were doing all right without her.

“I’m going out to the barn for a while, if that’s OK,” she said. Nobody answered her. Maybe they didn’t even hear her. She put her glass into the sink and went on out. It was a relief, in a way, not to have all that responsibility. It felt pretty good to be able to do things without worrying about the little kids. And if Sammy was going to be Gram’s favorite, and James was going to do everything right, and Maybeth was going to get caught up in school, so everybody could be proud of her, and with piano lessons too, why should Dicey mind?