Dicey's Song: Prologue–Chapter 3

And the moon too, the moon would swell and dwindle, go dark and swell again.

She stepped into the darkness and placed both her hands flat against the rough hull of the boat.

Imagining how it would feel when the little boat rode on the water, how it would respond to the wind in its sails, to the waves sliding by, to her hand on the tiller.

She guessed she’d better get to bed, but she guessed she knew why she didn’t want to: this happiness blew through her like wind, buoyed her up like water, and she wanted to float along on it.

Sammy was out back, on the other side of the old farmhouse, spading up fallow land to increase the size of the vegetable garden.

So except for the children’s bicycles, the overgrown tracks that led off from the front of the house, through a stand of pines and between two long barren fields to the road, were unmarked.

Dicey stared at the woman, at the heavy mottled flesh of her face.

You know, we all—all of us in school—hankered after John Tillerman. He was so handsome and dignified, you know?

“Mr. Thomas said every educated man should. He said it’s one of the underpinnings of western civilization.” His face lit up. “Isn’t that an idea? Underpinnings of civilization? As if—civilization were a big building, you know? Besides, there are some good stories in the Bible.”

The only movement Dicey could see in the Bay, when she sat dangling her feet over the end of the dock, was the turgid, slow sweeping of tide.

“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.”

Dicey couldn’t mistake that high carriage of the chin, or the unkempt curly gray hair.

Even when she hacked at a bone with the cleaver, she always hit the same spot.

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.

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.

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.

He looked chastened and sulky.

“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.

Dicey could have throttled him.

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.

The children were settling in, just as fall was settling in, over the farm and the water, into shades of brown: the harrowed soil, the dried summer grasses, the broken stalks of corn, and the long golden bars of sunlight from a sun setting closer to seven now than eight.

Some came because they had to, like wives, children, and indentured servants.

Contradictory expressions were on Mina’s face, a little confusion and some anger and some laughter.

She would saunter over.

He turned back to the piano. His hands, poised above the keys, as if he was thinking about what to play.

Mr. Lingerle gave Dicey a curious look, then he gave Gram a curious look, and his eyes became less wary.

"I wasn’t asking for money,” Mr. Lingerle cried, exasperated.

I guess you can’t know—how exhilarating it is to teach someone like Maybeth.

When they had sung themselves out, Mr. Lingerle thanked them for a pleasant evening and left, getting himself, somehow, into a little Volkswagen that jounced off down the driveway, following its thin beams of light.