Come a Stranger (Volume 5) (The Tillerman Cycle) - Hardcover

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Cynthia Voigt won the Newbery Medal for Dicey’s Song, the Newbery Honor Award for A Solitary Blue, and the National Book Award Honor for Homecoming, all part of the beloved Tillerman Cycle. She is also the author of many other celebrated books for middle grade and teen readers, including Izzy, Willy-Nilly, and Jackaroo. She was awarded the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 1995 for her work in literature, and the Katahdin Award in 2004. She lives in Maine.

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Come a Stranger

CHAPTER 1

Mina jumped out over the back steps and landed in a fifth position demi-plié. Arms out, back straight, she bent her knees into grandplié, and then up, sliding into fourth position. She leaped out, once, twice, three times, high across the yard, to the music that played inside of her head. She raised her arms slowly, lifted her right leg into a passé, and then as slowly straightened it into an arabesque, keeping one arm curved over her head, one curved in front of her. When you felt like this, there was nothing to do but dance.

At the sound of clapping, she turned around. She didn’t mind if someone was watching, nothing like that ever bothered her. “Morning,” she called across to Miz Hunter, who was dressed for services and sitting in the rocker on her front porch. Miz Hunter was a tiny woman, short and small boned. Her toes barely touched the wooden boards.

“Where you going to, Missy?” Miz Hunter summoned Mina over. The old lady knew who everyone was, but had trouble with names these days. Every girl she called “Missy,” every boy “Sonny,” because she just couldn’t fetch up their names. Mina guessed maybe all their faces got jumbled together in Miz Hunter’s memory with all the boys and girls she’d taught for all those years in school. “In such a hurry. And all gussied up for church.”

Mina stood below the porch, looking up. Miz Hunter had her red hat set on her head, bright as cherries. She had her gloves on and held her purse in her lap.

“I’m going to that camp in Connecticut. The dance camp. I got a scholarship.”

“Where in Connecticut is that?”

“Someplace at a college. The town is called New London.”

“I know where that is.”

“You do?”

“You don’t teach school for thirty years and not know where New London, Connecticut, is. I’ve never been there but I know where it is. You don’t know where it is, but you’re going there. It’s surely funny about life sometimes, isn’t it, Missy? Are you going out to tell the news?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Careful you don’t make people jealous,” Miz Hunter advised.

“Kat wouldn’t be jealous,” Mina explained. “She knows how much I want to go.”

“There’s nobody born yet, except maybe the One, who didn’t get jealous now and then. As you well know, Missy. Even that One too, I expect. He wouldn’t be human otherwise, now would He? So you take good care of your friends.”

Mina thought about that. She thought about the camp from Kat’s side. Mina would be gone all of July and most of August, and even the last week in June too. Eight weeks. From Kat’s side, it wasn’t such good news, she guessed. “I will, ma’am,” she told Miz Hunter. “Thank you for the advice.”

“Although if it were up to me, I’m not sure I’d let a girl your age go off among strangers for eight weeks.”

“They’re not strangers,” Mina argued. “They’ll all be dancers.”

“People you don’t know are strangers,” Miz Hunter corrected her, just as if Mina sat at a desk in her classroom. Mina bit back a laugh at how schoolteacherish Miz Hunter was. “Xenophobia, there’s a word for you. It means fear of strangers. From xenos, stranger. That’s Greek,” Miz Hunter instructed. There was nothing wrong with her brain. Nobody could say that.

“I didn’t know that. Thank you.” There was never to be any slightest hint of impoliteness to Miz Hunter, Mina’s parents made that clear to all of them. She’s old, Momma said, and deserves special politeness for that. She’s lived a long, useful life before she came here. For her time, she’s done wonders. So Mina made herself stand patient for however big a bite this conversation might take out of her time with Kat. “Are you afraid of strangers?” Mina asked.

Miz Hunter smiled then, the way old people often did, as if she was remembering something far away, as if she’d like to take Mina into her memory and share it together, almost as if Mina already was a part of whatever she was looking back at. “I can’t barely remember what it felt like to meet a stranger, these days,” Miz Hunter said. “There aren’t any strangers I’ve noticed around here, are there?”

“No, ma’am. My poppa, he doesn’t let people stay strangers.”

“You’d better run along, or you’ll find yourself too late to tell all your good news.”

“Yes, ma’am. Good morning to you. I thank you for the advice.”

Mina walked off sedately enough, remembering now that her Mary Janes weren’t dancing shoes, and it wasn’t good for them, or for her, to try to make them dance. Moist sunlight floated around her. It was a fine morning. She heard Miz Hunter’s rocker start up creaking behind her as she turned down the street. Birds were singing away. A baby wailed, somewhere, and a TV played, but mostly the Sunday morning quiet lay over the whole long street. Everybody was inside, getting ready for church. The porches were empty, the chairs and swings and steps had nobody sitting on them.

Front porches were for daytime sitting, Mina thought, her feet starting to skip and hurry her along. Back porches, which were screened, were for the evenings, for the families to sit together. Especially in the dark nights of deep summer, you’d hear the voices of people talking, the invisible words falling slow through the air. Like rain plopping down, relaxed and sleepy.

Mina guessed there was a lot she’d miss about being gone for the summer. She thought she’d better make Louis a cage for keeping fireflies before she left; a glass jar with wire screen fitted around its top, a preserving jar, and she’d have to wax the inside of the metal ring that would hold the wire top in place. Summer evenings, all the little children caught fireflies, and put them in cages and jars and counted up who had the most. After the children went to bed, the parents set all the fireflies loose to fly away under the dark trees, their funny little lights flicking off, flicking on.

Louis was just big enough now to be able to learn how to catch a firefly without mushing it, how to cup both hands and close them together. The firefly needed room in there to flutter around. Then you had to have someone take the top off your jar for you, so you could put your hands over the open neck and gently open them, like prayer hands unfolding, to get the firefly where you wanted him to go. Louis wasn’t nearly old enough to catch a firefly one-handed; he’d mush it for sure, and then he’d feel so bad he’d cry.

Kat was upstairs, dressing for church. Mina waited by the foot of the stairs while Kat’s father called up. “Katanga? Company for you.”

“Come on up, Mina.”

Mina looked at Mr. Beaulieu. “Go ahead, child,” he said. “Tell her we’d like to get out of the house sometime before Doomsday.”

Mina laughed and Mr. Beaulieu laughed with her, and Mina laughed the harder because Mr. Beaulieu had that kind of chuckling, fat laughter that made you glad to hear it. They were laughing because the...