Come a Stranger (27 page)

He was standing there with his arms drawn up in front of him. His fists were all balled up, as if he wanted to push his fingernails into his palms and hurt himself. His mouth was stretching out wide, so that it hurt Mina to look at him, trying to pretend that was a smile. He didn't want to cry, and he wasn't going to—whites didn't, not with the same ease blacks did, and they didn't laugh as easily either, or yell out glad or angry. But this was worse than crying.

Before Mina even had time to finish thinking all this and to wonder what was wrong with him, her mother was up from her chair with the pages of the book flipping over. Momma put her arms around Sammy. “It's all right,” Momma said. “I understand.”

That was more than Mina did, for a minute. Then she realized that she'd forgotten—but Sammy hadn't, and how could he—that his own mother had died. Mina was angry at herself: She should have known better than to forget. Sammy just leaned
up against her mother's body, resting there with his head on her shoulder and his face buried into her neck, not crying, not saying anything, just more tired than a kid should have to be. Momma crooned and cuddled him. Mina stood by the table.

“I'm sorry,” Sammy mumbled, but he didn't move away from Mrs. Smiths's arms.

“Don't be,” she said, wiping her own eyes dry. “There's nothing wrong with sorrow. It's as much a part of God's world as anything else.” She let him go, but kept her dark hand on his yellow head. “Are you a little better now?”

He nodded his head.

“You can come back, anytime, for the same treatment,” Momma said, standing up. “I'm a nurse, you know.”

Sammy thought that was funny, and he looked up at Momma for a while, while she looked down at him. “Good-o,” he finally said.

Mina thought to herself, watching, her momma was the kind of woman she wanted to be, wherever else she got to in her life.

I
t was a warm spring, that year. By early May the magnolias were in full flower. Their heavy waxy leaves spread out like dark green hands, hands without fingers—or maybe fingers without hands, thick flat green fingers. The blossoms within also opened out, thick waxy white cups. There was an old song Jeff had sung for her: “Southern trees bear strange fruit.” The song was talking about blacks hanging from the trees, strung up by the KKK, and Mina couldn't think about that while she went to sleep at night, unless she wanted not to go to sleep. But these magnolia blossoms were pretty strange looking too, she thought, they were strange in their own right. And Crisfield wasn't really southern, because Maryland wasn't. Maryland had been pretty well split in half about what side to fight on in the Civil War.

May set Mina's mind dreaming, like another one of Jeff's old songs. “I know where I'm going, and I know who's going with me.” It was an Irish song, a sad line of melody running through several verses, and when Maybeth sang it
a cappella
it made Mina smile. “I know who I love,” she would sing, “but the dear knows who I'll marry.” It was like May, that song, poignant and lovely.

One warm night in mid-May, Zandor came home unexpectedly, just walking into the kitchen Friday night. He had shaved
his moustache and he wore an ironed cotton shirt, with slacks and polished shoes. Mina took one look at him and asked, “Do you want us kids to clear out of the house?”

“You might as well stick around, you'll hear all about it anyway,” he said. “But thanks.”

He'd been suspended from school for the rest of this semester and through the summer. He could go back in the fall, if he wanted to, but he wouldn't have any scholarship. He'd been caught smoking marijuana in his dormitory room.

Mina had never seen her father so angry. He seemed to swell up with anger and explode it all around the kitchen. Zandor sat up straight and listened to what his father had to say. Every now and then Momma would cut in with some sharp, angry remark, as if she couldn't hold back, but mostly she let her husband speak. He didn't say that much, and he didn't talk for that long, but Mina was impressed with the way Zandor could sit there and hear him. “Now what are you going to do with yourself,” her father thundered. “Now where are you going to go?”

Zandor waited, to be sure that was really a question. Then he answered it: “One of my professors, Sociology, said I can live with his family. He's working on setting up a survival camp, like Outward Bound, for black kids. He'll hire me to be his assistant; he's gotten enough funding and enough people to run one session this summer.”

“I'm amazed he'll trust you,” Mina's father said.

“Luckily, I had him for Soc One last year. He seems to like me. I talked it over with Charles Stuart. CS said I should tell you it sounds all right to him. CS said pretty much what you said to me too,” Zandor told his parents. “It was stupid. It was a stupid thing for me to do.”

Zandor had about grown up over this, Mina thought.

“I should be able to go back in the fall. It won't cost me anything to live there, because I'm going to do housekeeping for them, in exchange for room and board; his wife works too. I've got a job at one of the McDonald's and I think I'll be able to pick up another part-time job on weekends, especially if I can learn how to run a cash register. If I'm careful, I can save enough. This has fairly well shot my chances for student loans, as well as everything else.”

“I would think,” Mina's father said.

“I told the dean I wanted to tell you myself, but he's going to call on Monday morning, to be sure you know.”

“I'll be here.”

“CS said I should tell you about this too,” Zandor said. He looked from his mother to his father. “There were maybe half a dozen of us on my corridor who were smoking. I know that doesn't make any difference, not really. But I'm the only one they suspended.”

“Why?” Momma wondered.

“And I was pretty angry, because—well, probably because it was the only thing I could blame on somebody else.” He smiled at Mina, getting more relaxed now that the worst was behind him. “I mean, it's not as if I could blame it on racial prejudice or anything. They're as black as I am, all of them. I guess that's one advantage of a black college. Anyway, CS pointed out to me the others are all local kids, and one of them's father has a good dry cleaning business, two of them are lawyers, one of them's a union official. Since ministers don't have very much clout, the school could make its point on me. They'd figure that the ministerial minority wouldn't raise too big a stink—you'd have more invested in being on the side of law and order, and all that. It doesn't mean I didn't do it, but—it makes a difference
to me. In how I feel about myself. So I can't see there's any need for you to . . . do any apologizing to him, Pop.”

Mina's father nodded his head slowly a couple of times, then excused himself from the table. They heard him leave the house. He was probably, Mina thought, going to church.

“Well,” Momma said. “So much for your news. How is your brother?”

“I think he's serious about this girl, and I don't blame him. She's cool, and she's nice too. You'll like her, Momma. I think he's going to be calling you up soon to say he wants to get married. How'd you like to be a bridesmaid, Belle?”

“A big wedding?” Belle asked.

“He can't afford marriage. Does he even have a job lined up?” Momma worried.

In May, Mina's father also learned that he wouldn't have to go away that summer, or ever again. He had done it for so many years, the board wrote to him, and it was exhausting work. They felt he had done enough. Mina had a hard time feeling good about that, because she didn't know what Mr. Shipp would do when he came to Crisfield.

Then she learned, when Mr. Shipp telephoned her father, that he wasn't coming to Crisfield at all. He called at night from New York, when rates were cheaper. Mina listened to half the phone conversation. As she listened, wishing she wasn't hearing what she was hearing, she learned that he had taken a new job, not with the church at all. It would be good for the children. The pay would be better. It would have duties.

Mina sat back on the sofa, eavesdropping, feeling heavier and heavier. She felt like she'd swallowed a big black stone and it was sinking in the pit of her stomach.

“Mina? They want to talk to you.” Her father handed her the phone.

The stone disappeared like magic. If they wanted her to go with them for the summer? Or even if he just wanted to say a special good-bye to her?

“Mina?” Alice's butterfly voice said. “I passed. Can you believe it?”

“Passed?”

“The equivalency test. I have a high school diploma with my name on it and all. Tamer took me out for dinner to celebrate, and dancing after. Aren't you proud of me?”

“It's wonderful, Alice,” Mina said. She made her voice sound glad, because she was glad. It was just this stone, settled in her stomach. “How are the kids?”

“They're properly impressed with me. Tamer's having it framed. Dream gave me a picture—a drawing of me teaching school, isn't that silly? Selma doesn't understand, really. But even my mother-in-law has to admit it's something I've done right. It's lucky I decided to get it, because with this new job of Tamer's I'd be really stupid if I didn't have it. Well, this is running up a big bill, I just wanted to tell you.”

“Thanks, and—I'm really pleased for you. Congratulations.”

She hung up, then turned around and waited for her father to tell her the bad news, the worst of it. He was already back reading the Bible, looking for the text he'd want to speak on.

“Dad,” she demanded. “What's going on?”

“Nothing. It's pretty good news. Tamer's taken a job at a college, somewhere in the Midwest. I've never heard of the place. He's going to be the assistant chaplain. He can maintain his church affiliation, that's no problem. I think he's pleased to get his family out of New York. I would be.”

Mina turned away. She didn't know if she could stand this. She knew she could stand knowing that Tamer Shipp was married and too old anyway ever to love her back. She knew she could stand only seeing him in the summers and even then not really seeing very much of him. She didn't think she could stand never seeing him again.

“He wanted to know if he could come down for a few days after school gets out. He's going to stay in Miz Hunter's house with just Samuel. Alice has to stay in New York because they'll move out to—it's in Ohio, Mina, did I tell you that?”

So she would see him, just once again.

At least nobody knew how she felt, really, inside herself. Mina thought she was glad of that, but once or twice she thought it would feel so good just to talk to somebody. Dicey maybe might understand, even though the way Dicey talked to Jeff (who was head over heels about her, if ever Mina had seen anybody head over heels with anyone) showed Mina that Dicey hadn't ever thought about this kind of loving. She was tempted to talk to Dicey, who thought about things so differently, who thought about things.

In the end, only her mother said anything, and all Momma said was, “It's hard for you, isn't it. There aren't too many people in this world who have the capacity to love deeply. It's a mixed blessing to be one of them.” Mina nodded. She thought Jeff too was one of them, and she knew what her mother meant.

But if she was going to have to say good-bye to Tamer Shipp forever, Mina thought, then there was something she was going to give him too. The trouble was, she didn't know how to go about doing the one thing she wanted to have done, before she said good-bye to him. Forever.

*   *   *

Two days before he was due to arrive, Mina rode her bike out to the Tillermans'. It was the first Wednesday after school got out, and she knew that Dicey would be at home that afternoon. Dicey worked mornings during the summer, while James and Sammy went crabbing with Jeff. Mina rode her bike around to the back of the house. Maybeth and her grandmother were in the vegetable garden, weeding and loosening up the soil after the night's heavy rain. Dicey was in the barn, painting her sailboat. Mina walked into the shadowy barn. “Hey,” she said.

Dicey had paint spattered all over her T-shirt and shorts, all over her arms and legs, all over her hair. “Hi. What's up?” she asked. Mina knew nothing would budge Dicey from finishing the job she was working on—although why Dicey cared so much about learning how to sail, she couldn't understand. She leaned against one of the stall doors and said, “I've got a favor to ask.”

“Not this afternoon,” Dicey said.

“What if it was,” Mina demanded, half teasing. “What if it was a matter of life and death, and this afternoon?”

“It isn't, though, is it?” Dicey asked, turning around to look at Mina, worried that it might be and she would have to make a choice.

“No. It's for next Sunday morning. I want you to come to our church.”

Most people would have asked why, but not Dicey. “I've never been to church,” she said.

“That's all right.”

“You know, you never do ask anybody for anything,” Dicey said.

Mina hadn't realized that, but she guessed it was true. “Neither do you,” she pointed out, in case Dicey missed that similarity.

“What time is church?”

“Ten-thirty.”

“Okay,” Dicey said.

“Good,” Mina said. “And who else can come?”

“Who else?”

“I thought—maybe Sammy?”

Dicey lay the brush across the top of the paint can, then wiped her hands on the seat of her shorts. “I can't go—”

“You have to,” Mina interrupted. She really didn't want to have to explain herself. “Or if you can't—” She wanted Dicey there for her own sake, but Sammy for being Samuel Tillerman. Sammy was the one who mattered.