Dicey’s Song

1. LINGERLE stayed to have supper with them, stayed for music after supper, stayed even after Sammy and Maybeth had gone upstairs to bed. Dicey regretted having built a fire, when she came back into the living room to see him sitting in front of it. He leaned toward the crackling logs with a dreamy expression on his face. Gram was coming out of the kitchen with another cup of coffee for the man. She looked at Dicey and shrugged her shoulders. What did that mean? Dicey wondered.

Mr. Lingerle took the cup and said, for about the tenth time, “I should be going.”

“Have I thanked you properly?” Gram asked him.

“For what? For staying out here today? I enjoyed myself. Didn’t I, James?”

“I think he did,” James assured his grandmother. He and Dicey were playing a game of parchesi on the rug in front of the fire. Dicey’s right side felt hot, and her left side felt cool, and that reminded her of every other time she had sat in front of fires. She kind of liked the way fires went to extremes: either it was too hot or too cold. It had been the same way with the big kerosene stove they used the heat their drafty cabin back up home, in Provincetown. She rattled the dice in her cup and let them roll out onto the board. James looked at her roll and then studied the board to see what moves her men might make.

“James,” Gram spoke. He looked up. “Dicey and I were talking about Maybeth today, and we thought you might have some ideas.”

Mr. Lingerle put down his cup, so fast the china clattered. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize,” he said. He started to push himself up, out of the chair. “I’ve stayed too long, I was just too comfortable, I’d better be going.”

Dicey knew she shouldn’t have been surprised at his quick perception of what Gram was saying; but she was. She kept making the same mistake, she guessed, thinking that because he was heavy and clumsy in his body, he was the same way in his mind. She should have known better, from listening to his piano playing, if for no other reason, or the way he joined in with harmony when they sang. Or the way Maybeth trusted him, she reminded herself.

Gram answered Mr. Lingerle. “You might as well stay. You know Maybeth, so you might be able to help.”

He hesitated, rocking up and back to get out of the chair, then sitting back, then lurching forward again.

“I thought about it, young man, before I brought up the subject.”

“If you wanted me to leave, you’d say so, wouldn’t you?” Mr. Lingerle asked. He answered himself. “Yes, you would. I don’t know you well, but I know you that well.”

Gram just waited for him to finish. “Now, about Maybeth,” she began. She told them what Maybeth’s teacher had said, and the notion she and Dicey shared about Maybeth not being able to learn the way this school taught reading.

While Gram was talking, James quietly picked up the pieces and dice, the cups and the board, and put them back into their box. Dicey didn’t say a word. Neither did Mr. Lingerle.

“She said Maybeth is flunking?” James asked at last. “She said that?”

“Not exactly. She said, at this rate, Maybeth could never complete the work for third grade.”

“It’s only November,” James protested. “How can she know? What’s she like, anyway, this Mrs. Jackson?”

“She’s perfectly ordinary. Except, she’s one of those people who think that if you just work hard enough, everything will go your way,” Gram said. “That’s why Maybeth puzzles her. Upsets her.”

“What’s wrong with Maybeth, anyway?” James demanded.

Dicey thought she knew what he was thinking — that Maybeth was like Momma. “Nothing’s wrong with her,” she said quickly. “You know that and I know that, James.”

“All right,” he agreed, looking down at his hands. “It’s just — besides, she’s making friends, isn’t she?”

“She’s slow,” Dicey said. “We’ve always known that. Slow at school.”

“Because she’s shy,” he pointed out.

“Not only shy,” Gram told him. “But that, too. What we want to know is, do you have any ideas?”

“Ideas?”

“About what to do about Maybeth,” Gram repeated patiently.

“Oh sure, but nothing any good. She could go into a special school. Or, we could take her out of school and have tutors. It’s only seven years until she can quit. We could work harder with her, helping her — but she works so hard already. Poor Maybeth,” he said.

“You can do better than that, James,” Gram snapped at him.

He looked up, hurt and surprised. He started to answer, then stopped himself. His eyes went back to the long shelf of books behind the desk. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry. All right, let’s think about it. The basic problem is reading, isn’t it?”

“Right now, yes,” Gram said.

“Maybeth isn’t learning how to read. Now, what does that mean? It means —”

Dicey let out a gust of exasperated air. What was James doing now?

He looked at her and shook his head to stop her saying anything. “It means she reads slowly, can’t remember what she has read, out loud or silently — because she hasn’t understood the words — because of her mistakes, and because if you go so slowly —. It must be like, if you try to walk in slow motion. You always lose your balance.”

He stopped speaking then. He was staring hard at his hand spread out on the rug. The light from the flames made shadows that moved across his face. Gram got impatient: “Well?”

“I’m thinking,” James said. “Let me think. Because what all that means — Maybeth sees the words with her eyes, but she doesn’t connect them in her brain right away, the way I do. The question is, why the connection isn’t made. So that, if we want to solve the problem, we have to work on the connection part of it.” He raised his face and smiled at them all.

“I don’t understand,” Dicey said.

“Look. Maybeth can talk, can’t she? So she knows the meanings. She can see, so she can see the words. But she doesn’t make the connection.”

When he put it that way, Dicey thought she could understand. But she didn’t see that it helped them any.

“OK,” James said eagerly. “Now listen. The way Mrs. Jackson teaches, and I guess the whole school system, is to look at a whole word and recognize it. Maybe that’s it, maybe that’s what we should do.”

“What do you mean?” Gram demanded.

“Well, Maybeth sees the whole word, but that doesn’t make sense to her because she can’t remember it, as a word. But we know she can remember the letters. Maybe she should be working on reading the letters, not the whole word.”

“But she can read some whole words,” Dicey protested. “I’ve heard her.”

“Yes, but not as many as the other third-graders can. That’s where the slowness comes in.”

“Do you mean we should go back to the beginning with her?” Gram asked. “Do all the lists again?”

James shook his head, hard. “No. I mean we should try another way. I have to think more about it, I don’t know anything about the subject, I’ll have to go to the library. But that’s what I think would work for Maybeth. Another way.”

“I don’t know,” Gram said doubtfully.

Dicey had a sudden memory, of Millie reading cornflakes for corn chips. “You mean, what Maybeth does is sees — like the beginning of the word, and then she guesses?”

James nodded.

“And she’s not a guesser by nature,” Dicey went on. She didn’t know exactly what James had meant, but she could see how it would work on Maybeth, this guessing. “It would make her nervous, and she’d always be waiting to be caught in a mistake, and she wouldn’t hear what she was reading, so it would be hard for her to understand what she was reading. Maybeth likes — knowing how to do what she’s doing. When she gets nervous, and scared — she can’t think about things.”

Gram looked over at Mr. Lingerle. “Do you have anything to add?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Except to say that I never found Maybeth stupid. But you know that already.”

“We do,” Gram said, “but sometimes we get to doubting. It’s good to hear. All right then, James, you’ll do some reading on the subject. In a hurry.”

“I’ll do it when I can, as soon as I can. I’ve got my job and all,” James said.

Dicey felt her mood of hopefulness fading as she remembered that James was good at ideas but not so good at following them through. She made a mental note to remind him.

The next day was Sunday, and Dicey had a whole afternoon to work on the boat. It was a cool afternoon, but in her new jeans she was warm enough. Sunlight came in through the opened doors, a broad beam of yellow light. Dust motes danced lazily up and down in the light. Dicey stood, pulling the scraper across the curved planks. She was singing to herself, “When first unto this country, a stranger I came.” She wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. She was wondering vaguely how long she should give James before she reminded him and wondering how long Mr. Chappelle would take correcting their essays, how long before she got her essay back. Sammy came in and stood beside her. She broke off the song, and her thoughts. She hoped he wouldn’t stay too long, because she had been enjoying her mood.

“Gram’s teaching Maybeth how to knit,” he reported.

“Is she.”

“I just said so,” Sammy pointed out.

“Yes, you did,” Dicey agreed.

“Can I help you?”

“Isn’t there wood to cut?”

“Gram said Miss Tieds says I’m good.”

“So I heard,” Dicey said. She hadn’t looked at him yet and she didn’t plan to. He stayed for a few seconds, as if waiting for her to say something, or do something, then he turned sharply away. He turned so sharply, his shoulder shoved against Dicey’s. The blade of the scraper dug into the wood.

“Sammy!” she yelled. “Watch out what you’re doing!”

He was already by the barn doors, standing in the stream of sunlight. He turned back to face her, and the sunlight glowed around him.

Sammy had gotten taller, in his legs especially, she thought. His hands were on his hips and his face was hard. It was as if he was daring her.

Daring her to do what? Start a fight, probably. She stared at him, and he stared at her.

Then Dicey began to remember. She remembered Sammy’s sturdy brown legs walking, all that long summer long, keeping up with the bigger kids. And she remembered Sammy, memory going backwards, like flipping through a photograph album, until she came to a vague picture of the little baby Momma brought home from the hospital. Their father had walked out by then, he’d left pretty soon after Momma told them that Sammy was coming. Because she was the oldest, Sammy was Dicey’s responsibility. She was the one who changed his diapers and fed him cereal on a spoon when Momma was at work. She was the one who watched him sleeping in the night until Momma got home. She was the one he’d splashed water all over in his baths in the dishpan, slapping at the water with his chubby little hands, and his eyes laughed.

His hands looked strong now, and you could see the bones running from his wrist to his fingers. His eyes weren’t laughing now, they were as flat as his mouth. Their colors didn’t shine out at her.

No wonder, she said to herself, still looking back at his expressionless face, feeling for a minute as if she were Sammy and hearing the conversations they’d just had as he might have heard it. Or, she corrected herself, the conversation they hadn’t just had.

“Can you find me some sandpaper?” she asked him.

“Why?” he asked, without moving. It was as if he wanted to stay angry.

“So I can sand this place smooth. And then” — Dicey thought fast and it seemed like a good plan — “if you really do want to help — ”

“I do!” he cried, running back to the work bench. “I can!” he cried.

“The next thing, after scraping, is sanding. We’ll have to sand it down about three times, three different times. The book said.”

“Why so many?” He passed her a square of sandpaper.

“I dunno, it just said that was the best way to do it. I’m planning to do this job the best way, start to finish.”

“Good-o,” Sammy said. “If you show me, I could sand where you’ve already scraped. I could be careful.”

“Yes, I think you could,” Dicey said. His eyes had colors shooting out of them again, yellow flecks and green, that made up the hazel color when they mixed in with the brown. He hadn’t grown so tall after all, she noticed, measuring him against her body. Not up to her shoulders yet. They settled down to work.

Sammy worked like Dicey did, without hurrying, without dawdling. They got into a kind of rhythm, working together. Dicey told herself, I should have remembered this about Sammy.

“I like these new jeans,” she remarked. “Don’t you?”

“Umhnm,” he said. “I guess you and Gram had a good time. Do you think she’d take me for a bus ride and out to lunch? Ever?”

“I don’t see why not. But she tells you what to order.”

“Did she tell you what to order?”

“Yup.”

“What did you do?”

“I ordered it. What do you think I’d do?”

Sammy laughed, a round, tumbling sound. “I think you’d refuse to get it. Because she told you.”

“Gram said you’re being an angel at school. Except you don’t fly.”

Sammy nodded, looking at Dicey’s eyes. “It’s all I can do, being good. Nobody there’s even yelled at me, all this year so far. That’s pretty good, wouldn’t you say?”

“Are you sure you can’t fly?” Dicey teased him. Then she said yes, it was very good, it was better than she had managed. “Do you like any of the kids in your class?” she asked.

Sammy shrugged, his eyes watching where the sandpaper rubbed at the wood. “The guys — well, you know, Dicey, they don’t like goody-goodies. It doesn’t matter.” He shrugged again. “It’s OK with me.”

Dicey looked hard at him. His eyes were flat again. She wondered if that flat, holding-in expression was the one he wore all day long. “Is there anything you like about school?”

“Phys Ed, because we play games. You know, baseball and kickball.”

“Don’t you play those at recess too?”

“Not me.”

“Why not?”

“If I did — I’d get angry, and — if I exploded — you see, Dicey, when I get angry I don’t know what I’ll do. So I watch, and that’s OK. Another thing I like.”

“What’s that?”

“I like being good. Because Gram will like it. Sometimes, I wish I’d been better, when Momma wanted me to.”

Alarm bells were clanging in Dicey’s head. “Sammy Tillerman,” she said, shaking her scraper at him. “You don’t think it’s your fault, do you? About Momma?”

He didn’t answer.

“But that wasn’t anybody’s fault, not even Momma’s. It was just the way things happened.”

“But I didn’t help,” he said. “And Dicey — you know what they say about Gram.”

“But we know that’s not true,” Dicey said.

“But if Gram —” Sammy said. He stopped himself. “And I like Gram,” he added. “It’s not so much trouble to be good in school, if I keep remembering.”

“Are you good, Sammy? I mean — you know what I mean. Are you?”

“No a’course not, you know that. But that’s OK. If I had a job — but I’m too young, it’ll be years before I can help out with a job.”

Dicey thought for a minute. “Cripes,” she finally said, “you’ve given yourself a pretty hard job as it is, as far as I can see. And you’re doing pretty good work at it,” she said.

He nodded, pleased.

“But then, that shouldn’t surprise me, because I know how hard you can work,” Dicey said.

“Yeah I can, can’t I?”

“Maybe you’ve outgrown fighting,” she suggested.

He shook his head.

“I used to get in fights,” Dicey told him.

“You never said that,” he protested.

“You never asked me,” Dicey countered. “I used to fight with girls and boys, and just about anyone. I can’t even remember how many fights I was in. But I used to win a lot.”

“Of course,” Sammy said.

“And I’ll tell you something funny. Not ha-ha funny, but queer. You want to hear it?”

“OK.”

“I used to feel good, after. Even if I lost. As if — I don’t know — as if I’d exploded and that was over now.”

He stared up at her. “You never get in trouble,” he told her.

Dicey laughed. “I’m in trouble right now,” she told him, feeling not at all upset about home ec and her apron. “I’m in trouble and I don’t even care. Because” — she hadn’t thought of this before — “it’s my own trouble I made myself.”

Sammy just stared at her. Then he turned back to his work and Dicey went back to hers. They worked without talking for an hour or more. Then Dicey felt a rubbing on her back, going around and around. Sammy was sanding her back. She turned and scraped down the leg of his jeans, but she had to bend over to do that and he started sanding her fanny. He was giggling. Dicey dropped the scraper and grabbed hold of his ankles. Sammy toppled over into the dirt beside her.

Before he could scramble up again, she started to tickle him under the arms. He squirmed and twisted under her hands hammering on the ground with his fists.

Then Sammy twisted around underneath her and wriggled free. He ran over to the workbench, and stood there, poised to fight her if she came near him. Dicey made a growling noise, on her knees like a tiger. She leaped at him. Sammy turned and ran to the dark side of the barn. He scrambled over the doorway into an empty stall.

“Hey, Dicey,” his voice made little echoes from within the darkness.

“You OK?”

“You could keep chickens in one of these, they’re huge. Look.”

Dicey came over and unbolted the door. She stepped into the stall. Sammy heaved an armload of dry hay over her head.

Dicey puffed and sneezed and brushed the brittle hay from her face and hair and shoulders. “Just you wait until I get my hands on you, Sammy Tillerman,” she said, trying to keep laughter out of her voice. He dashed past her, through the barn, out into the sunshine.

“Can’t catch me!” he called.

“Gram doesn’t like chickens anyway,” she answered to his disappearing back.

• • •

DICEY WORE her new jumper to school, and the bra of course, but she almost didn’t notice that any more. You could get used to just about anything, she thought. Nobody noticed her new clothes, but then nobody noticed her much anyway, so she wasn’t surprised. When she left English class to go to home ec, she saw Mina hanging around by the door. “Hey, Dicey,” Mina greeted her.

“Hey,” Dicey answered, walking right on past Mina and her friends. Mina got the message all right. Dicey heard one of the other voices talk as the girls followed her down the hall, falling behind because she was hurrying: “I don’t know why you’re looking for honky friends,” the voice complained.

Dicey was hurrying to home ec class to get her seat in the back, at a table by herself, and to get her face all set and ready. They were starting a new unit today.

Miss Eversleigh stood in front of the class wearing her usual dark suit and usual nylon blouse with her usual pin on the lapel of her jacket. Nutrition was the new unit. Dicey kept herself from groaning out loud. She could peel potatoes and fry an egg, and that was about it, and she didn’t want to learn more. She could also, she reminded herself, figure out things to eat and cook them over an open fire. But still, she wished Maybeth could be here instead of her. Maybeth would like it and be good at it. She hoped Maybeth could get this far in school.

Miss Eversleigh began to lecture about nutrition and food groups. Dicey sighed, opened her notebook, and began drawing a picture. In her picture, there was a little boat on an ocean, without any land around. The boat’s sails puffed out. Dicey put some high-headed clouds in the sky. She grinned and put a crab at the bottom, under the water. The crab was staring up at the boat. Dicey decided not to put in anybody steering the boat; she knew who it was anyway. Miss Eversleigh’s voice droned on.

Later, Jeff was waiting by the bicycle rack. Dicey thought he noticed her jumper, but he didn’t say anything. He had a song for her, he said. Dicey stood in front of him, holding her books. He looked quizzically at her, as if there was something he wanted her to say, but when she didn’t he began to sing right away. The song he had that day was called “Pretty Polly.” Dicey had heard this cruel song, once before.

“Polly, pretty Polly, won’t you come and go with me,” he sang. His hands brought music out of the guitar. The story went on, and the man — Handsome Willy — killed Polly and rode away, “over mountains so steep and the valleys so wide.”

Jeff looked at Dicey, waiting. Finally, he asked, pushing his dark hair from his forehead: “What do you think”?

Dicey shrugged.

“But don’t you wonder? Why he killed her? What happened to him?” Jeff asked.

“Yeah, I do,” Dicey admitted.

“So what do you think?” Jeff asked again.

“I gotta go,” Dicey said.

Jeff shrugged. He was wearing a brown sweater with the kind of softly mixed greens and whites that was in the wool Gram bought for Dicey. Heather. “See you tomorrow, maybe.” His gray eyes were concentrating on the face of his guitar.

“Sure,” Dicey said.

Millie noticed her jumper and liked it and made a kind of fuss about it. Dicey thought, after all, she’d rather not be noticed. That afternoon there was another letter for Gram from the doctors in Boston, but this one was thin. Dicey wondered if Gram wrote answers to these letters. She wished she could read them, but she figured, if it was anything important — especially good news — Gram would tell them about it.

Sammy came out to sand with her while she scraped. He told her about a couple of boys in his class who had to stay in the principal’s office almost all afternoon. They had tried to walk tightrope over the top of the swings, he reported. Everyone, he said (meaning all the teachers), got angry and scared. His own opinion was that since they had talked so much about it before they tried and had gathered a huge audience before they started shinnying up the tall poles, they planned to get caught.

“I wonder if I could do it,” he wondered. “I’ve got pretty good balance. Don’t you think I do?”

“I think,” Dicey said, picturing the fifteen-foot metal swing sets, “that if you ever talk like that again I’ll have a heart attack.” She could see how it would look, Sammy’s sturdy body and his head of yellow hair, with his arms out to keep his balance. And falling onto the packed dirt. “Seriously.”

“OK, Dicey,” he said, with a smile in his voice. “We had a math test this afternoon,” he added.

Dicey took in the information. “They didn’t do it on purpose, did they? To get out of the test?”

“I think so,” Sammy answered. “They’re pretty tricky.”

“Did you ask them?”

“Yep. After school. Ernie — he’s the one who has all the ideas — didn’t say yes. But he didn’t say no either. He’s bigger than the rest of us. Miss Tieds never even caught on,” Sammy said.

“How was the test?”

“Easy,” Sammy reported.

Just before supper, Dicey asked James when he was going to begin working with Maybeth. James pulled his eyes up from a book he was reading, as if he couldn’t remember what she was talking about.

“James,” Dicey said.

“I’ll do it,” he said. “Cripes, Dicey, give me a chance. I’ve got the paper route and school and all. There’s no hurry.”

The phone rang during dinner — in the middle of a big conversation about chickens. Sammy was trying to persuade Gram that they would be smart to get some chickens. “I’d feed them and everything. I’d collect the eggs,” he promised. “They could stay in one of those empty stalls. The chickens, not the eggs.”

Gram teased Sammy. “You’d give them names,” she told him, “and then when it came time to eat one you’d say, ‘We can’t eat Hercules!’”

Sammy laughed. “I wouldn’t name a chicken Hercules,” he said. “I’d name it — Miss Tieds. I wouldn’t mind eating that chicken.”

“I couldn’t ever eat any creature named Miss anything. Or Mister. You can’t give chickens titles, boy. It’s like — naming one Queen Elizabeth, or President Johnson.”

“Johnson’s not President any more, Gram,” James informed her. She fixed him with a beady glance, and her mouth twitched. Before he could say anything, the phone rang and he ran to answer it. When he returned, he was running. “It’s Toby, and he wants me to spend the night on Friday, and can I?”

Gram asked him if he wanted to, and he said yes. She asked him where Toby lived, and he lived downtown. She asked him about what time, and he told her after school on Friday and Toby’s mother would bring him home Saturday afternoon. All the time, he was almost jumping with excitement. Gram asked him about his paper route. “Sammy’ll do it, won’t you, Sammy?”

“Sure,” Sammy said.

“Sammy’s too little,” Dicey protested.

Both James and Sammy protested that. Dicey looked at Gram for advice.

Gram apparently agreed with the boys, and she gave James permission. He ran back down the hall to tell Toby, and then ran back to the table, full of plans for what he’d take and what they might do. Dicey looked at him and couldn’t tell what to think. She was glad he had a friend, but she had the feeling that he wasn’t going to do much to help Maybeth, feeling the way he did.

Her foreboding was correct. Dicey knew she was impatient for Maybeth. She tried not to nag at James. But she couldn’t help asking him, about every time she saw him, whether he had figured out how to teach Maybeth. “What’s the big hurry?” he asked her.

“The year’s a quarter through,” Dicey said. Their report cards were due out next week. They would get them handed out in a special homeroom at the end of the day next Tuesday.

“So what else is new?” James asked. His question was impatient, but his eyes shone with an excitement inside him, as if nothing could really disturb him, not even Dicey’s nagging.

“But even if you can find a way to teach her, she’ll go slowly. You know that, James. There’s no time to waste.”

“I’m not wasting time. I’m thinking,” he told her.

“Yeah, but what are you thinking about?” Dicey snapped. and walked away before he could answer. She knew what he was thinking about that made him so happy, and she was glad for him. But.

This holding on that Gram had talked about was more complicated than she’d thought. She had to hold on to James, for what he wanted, and hold on to Maybeth for what she needed. That was fine, except for when the wants and needs were at cross purposes. At least Sammy seemed more cheerful and was talking more and more about the kids in his class, as if he had time to notice them now.

When Dicey returned from work on Thursday, her whole family except for James was in the kitchen. A thick silence lay all over the room. Gram sat quietly at the end of the big wooden table, her hands busy with yellow wool. She was rolling it up into balls, and Sammy was helping her by holding the wool. Maybeth had her head down and her shoulders were shaking. Dicey dumped her books and asked, “What’s the matter?”

Maybeth kept her head down. Gram looked at Dicey and said, “She won’t say.” Sammy answered at the same time, “I dunno, she started crying when we got off the bus.”

Dicey went to kneel before Maybeth. “Maybeth? What’s the matter? Whatever it is, it’s all right.”

Maybeth raised her face. Her hair hung down wet at the side of her face. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks were wet, her mouth quivered. She threw herself into Dicey’s arms and kept on crying.

Dicey patted her shoulder and rumpled the hair at the top of her round little head. “I promise, it’s OK, whatever. I promise, Maybeth,” she said. “You believe me, don’t you? You know you can believe me.”

Maybeth’s head nodded. She took a big, shuddering breath and got up. She went to stand beside Gram, where she could look at all of them. She twisted her hands in front of her.

“They all —” she said in a voice so low and little Dicey almost couldn’t hear. “I didn’t want — to have to tell twice,” she wailed. Her voice got stronger, but her words came out choked and uneven. She was crying so hard, she gulped in air and gulped out words that shuddered with her breath. “When I read, they all, every one, they laughed at me. And Mrs. Jackson couldn’t make them stop. And I forgot everything. And she said they were unkind. And I couldn’t make any words come out. And it was horrible, I don’t know what to do — I don’t ever want to go back there.”

In the middle of this, James came bursting into the doorway. His cheeks were red from the long ride in the cool air, his eyes shone. As he listened, his face got quiet, thoughtful.

“They were all — all laughing — whenever I made a mistake — and I kept making mistakes. I couldn’t help it.”

James met Dicey’s eyes. Dicey expected him to stick out his lower lip and look away. But he didn’t. He nodded at her, just once. She could see him thinking. She could see him beginning to understand how it was for Maybeth, and how she had to feel. She could see him being angry at himself for thinking it wasn’t important. She could see him wondering what to say, to Maybeth.

“Because I can’t,” Maybeth wailed. “I can’t — read, and I — can’t learn.”

“Who says?” James’s cool voice cut across her tears.

“Everyone,” Maybeth told him. She stood there, her shoulders heaving. You could see her stomach going in and out. She looked so fragile Dicey was frightened and wanted to run out of the room. Gram and Sammy were sitting with frozen, unhappy faces. Only James looked unconcerned, but that was an act, Dicey knew.

“Who’s smarter?” James demanded of Maybeth. “Everyone? Or me?”

“I don’t know,” Maybeth mumbled. At least her sobs were dying down. James had her attention.

“Well, I know. It’s me. And do you know what I say?” James asked her.

Dicey wanted to hiss at James, Get to the point. But part of holding on was letting him do things his own way. Maybe, after all, he was right, because Maybeth looked up at him and shook her head, no. Tears had stopped oozing out of her eyes, too.

“I say — you can learn. I say, I can teach you. And you know what else?”

Maybeth shook her head again.

“I’m going to. Whether you want me to or not, so you better say yes.”

A little smile lifted the corners of Maybeth’s mouth, like a wave licking at the shore.

“Have you ever known me to be wrong?” James asked. He sounded so confident, Dicey almost believed him.

“Yes!” Sammy shrieked, unable to bear the tension any more. “Lots and lots!”

At that, James grinned and shrugged. He kept his eyes on Maybeth, and she smiled back at him.

“Dicey thinks I can,” he said.

“Do you?” Maybeth asked. “Really?”

Dicey nodded.

“All right,” Maybeth said, in a little voice.

“That’s settled then,” Gram announced. She began winding the wool again.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” James told Maybeth. “On Saturday morning, because I’ll be in town, or maybe tomorrow night — if I ask I bet Toby’ll want to. We’ll go to the library and I’ll take out all their books on reading. Did you know there are dozens of different ways to teach it?”

Maybeth shook her head, no.

“I asked Mr. Thomas. The reason there are so many ways is because there are so many different kinds of brains, to learn. I think we’ll have our first lesson on Monday, Monday after school.”

“I have piano lesson Monday,” Maybeth protested, softly. But her hands had stopped twisting.

“OK, Sunday afternoon. And Monday afternoon after piano,” James agreed. He looked around at all of them and added: “Sammy will have to take over my paper route. He can do it, Dicey. Better than me, because he’s more careful.”

“That’s true,” Sammy told her. He turned his face back to look at Gram. “It is.”

“Sounds all right to me. How’s it sound to you, girl?” Gram asked.

“Fine,” Dicey said. She hoped James would be able to do what he had said he could. She could tell, watching him, that he was having the same doubts, and the same hopes.

Holding on was time-consuming, Dicey discovered. Well, she said to herself — pedaling out behind Sammy on Friday afternoon, watching him carefully throw the carefully folded papers onto doorsteps, noticing how he talked to barking dogs and rode alertly, using his ears as well as his eyes to watch traffic — you knew that. It was, after all, only what she had been doing as long as she could remember. It was, also, what she wanted to do.

James returned late Saturday, with reports of what a good time he had had and how they wanted him to come back — and they said soon. After supper, he settled down to read through a huge pile of books he had taken out of the library. They had lit a fire again, as they did most evenings now. Gram had gone up to the attic and brought down piles of warm socks, half-a-dozen pairs of workboots and a pair of red rubber boots for Maybeth. There were also a couple of rough, heavy sweaters for the boys. Dicey decided she would be glad to wear one of the old boys’ sweaters on cold mornings, so Gram was knitting Maybeth’s yellow sweater first.

When Gram entered the living room with the armload of clothes, James lifted his head from the book and exchanged a glance with Dicey. She knew he was thinking about what else was up there, in the attic.

After the little kids had been put to bed, James insisted that Dicey confer with him. What he really meant was that she should listen to him, but that was OK with Dicey. He talked and talked, about the different ways of teaching and the theories behind them. He used words she’d never heard before: dyslexia, dysgraphia, remediation, word recognition, effective learning, affective learning. Dicey didn’t bother to ask him what everything meant. She just listened and nodded her head whenever he seemed to want her to. Finally he told her, “There’s a lot I can’t understand yet. People have such different theories about education, and they’ve studied them.”

Dicey nodded.

“And I haven’t had very much experience myself. I never paid too much attention to what other people were doing in class. You know?”

Dicey nodded again. Now she really was listening, however, because she wondered what James was leading up to. It wasn’t like him to talk about what he didn’t understand. He preferred to talk about what he knew.

“But here’s what I think. Gram? Are you listening? If you think I’m wrong, I want you to tell me. Because I just don’t know enough. But I think — for years and years they taught using the phonic method. Remember Dicey? Where you learn what the letters and phonemes and blends say, and you sound out words.”

Dicey didn’t remember, but that didn’t matter.

“My guess is, that if they’ve used it for years — and it’s the way we learned, and Massachusetts has one of the oldest public school systems in the country, and it’s a good one too — that’s the one I want to use with Maybeth. What do you think? Because if it wasn’t good it wouldn’t have lasted so long.”

Gram answered. “It’s sound reasoning. But you haven’t read all those books, have you?”

“No, how could I? Some I just looked over to see what the chapters were about.”

“But if it’s the way Maybeth was taught in Provincetown,” Dicey said — then she stopped, noticing that she didn’t even think to say back home. James waited, so she went on. “Maybe it doesn’t work for Maybeth.”

James’ face was serious, and it was almost as if he was looking inside of his own head for the words he was going to speak, even though his eyes rested on Dicey. “Yeah, but listen. There’s what they call the emotional overlay, when someone has reading problems. Like — I dunno, maybe like layers of paint and you have to scrape it off before you can get to the real problem. Like a kid who always gets in trouble in class, so he’s always being punished and never gets his work done. That way he avoids looking stupid. Because he’d rather be bad than stupid. And Maybeth is better here — we all know that, don’t you, Gram? She’s not nearly so scared of things. Of people. It’s not so complicated for her here. Without Momma to worry about, and what people say. My theory is, all that stuff interfered with her before and it won’t interfere now. What do you think?”

“You could be right,” Gram said.

“What are you going to do next?” Dicey asked James.

“Tomorrow, I’ll study this book on the phonics method and then we’ll start.”

“Is that enough time?” Gram asked.

“Sure. And if I’m wrong, I know what method to try next. It’s interesting, you know?” James told them, his eyes bright. “I had no idea it was so interesting. It’s made me curious about what Maybeth thinks. I mean, I don’t think she’s got a reading disorder, it’s just slowness. But I wonder. . . . “ His voice drifted off. Dicey looked at Gram and grinned. Gram smiled back and reversed her needles to begin another row.

Dicey hung around quietly in the background during Maybeth’s first lesson with James. She had her own books open in front of her, and she was sort of doing her assignments, but mostly she listened to James and Maybeth working. The two heads bent together over a pad of paper on which James wrote letters. Then he asked Maybeth what the letters said. Maybeth understood this, and Dicey thought she did pretty well at it. James’ brown hair looked darker next to Maybeth’s yellow curls; and her hair seemed to shine brighter next to his dark head. Dicey listened hard, not to hear precisely what they were saying, but to hear what the two speakers were like. If she was going to hold on, then she wanted to have a clear idea of who she was holding on to. So she could get a good grip.

Besides, she admitted to herself, if she could learn how James did it, then she could help him out if he needed it. If it worked for Maybeth.