Sheri Tepper - Grass

“The kids at school think it’s funny,” he muttered, mouth full.

“I suppose,” she agreed. “They’d think Miriam is funny, too. What are they all called now? Brom. And Bolt. And Rym. And Jolt.”

“Not Jolt.”

“Oh. Excuse me. Not Jolt.” She was laughing at him. “They all sound like laundry sonics.”

He had to agree they did. Bolt sounded like something that would shake the donkey hair out of your socks. Jolt sounded even more so.

One day Joshua brought a parrot home. It was a small gray parrot with some green feathers on it.

“What on earth?” Miriam asked. “Joshua?”

“Those cabinets I built for the Brants, you know?”

“Of course I know.”

“He really liked them. He gave me the bird as a bonus.”

Miriam shook her head, annoyed. Rillibee knew she was thinking about the mess the bird would make. “Wanted to get rid of it, most likely.”

Joshua put his hands in his pockets and stood there, looking at the bird where he’d set it on its perch at one side of the fire. “He said it was valuable.”

Miriam was looking at the bird with her lips tight together as though she wanted to say something nasty.

“Shit,” said the bird clearly. “Excrement.” Then it shit on the floor.

Miriam laughed. She couldn’t help herself. She was all bent over giggling.

Joshua was red in the face, mad, not able to say a thing.

“Well, he certainly talks,” Miriam said.

“I’ll take him back! Right after supper.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Josh, leave him. We’ll teach him some better language. You know, the bird doesn’t know what he’s saying. It isn’t as though there’s a brain there, telling him to talk dirty. He’s just imitating sounds he hears.”

“He didn’t hear that!”

“Sounds he remembers.”

So they’d kept the parrot. It never learned any nicer words about anything, though it didn’t talk much; but every time Miriam got mad and acted like she’d like to say something but couldn’t, darned if that bird didn’t. Rillibee noticed it right away. Every time Miriam got really mad, here was the parrot saying “Shit” in this dreamy voice, or “Dammit” or once, “Fuckit” Joshua hadn’t heard that one, or there’d probably have been a dead parrot.

Rillibee moved into the fifth category when he was eleven, becoming a five-cat before most of his age-mates. That hadn’t made them any easier to get along with. His mentors were old lady Balman and old man Snithers. Balman taught programming and information. Snithers taught retrieval skills. The older kids in five called her Ballsy because, so they said, she had more than Sniffy did. Rillibee had no idea what that meant until he asked Joshua, and then he got about an hour’s lecture on sexuality as metaphor in dominance. The truth of it was that Snithers was an old lady, all fussy and picky, while Balman had a fine the-hell-with-it attitude that all the kids liked, which was more or less what Joshua said only in different words.

There had been one particular day. an unremarkable day, with nothing much happening at school except that Wurn March told them goodbye because he was going to Sanctity for five years as a pledged acolyte. Wurn had looked confused about it. When they asked him if he wanted to go, he’d looked like he was about to cry.

Out in the corridor. Ballsy told Sniffy that Sanctity could have him and welcome, and then they both laughed and got red when they saw that Rillibee had heard them talking. He’d been on his way back from the toilets, and they sent him back to retrieval practice in a hurry. Rillibee agreed with Ballsy that nobody would miss Wurn March. Wurn had been in five for longer than he should have. He was larger than most of the boys, and louder, and he liked to hit smaller kids, and he always borrowed stuff and didn’t give it back.

Other than that happening, it was just a day. It was the first day Rillibee had ever heard about pledged acolytes, but it was just a day.

When he got home, Miriam was in the kitchen, as usual at that time of afternoon. There were a lot of good smells in there with her, and Rillibee threw his arms around her, for once not caring what anybody else thought. She was his mom and if he wanted to hug her, so what.

So what happened was she gasped and pulled away. “Ouch,” she said, smiling so he’d know it wasn’t his fault. “I’ve got a sore place on my arm, Rilli. You kind of whacked it when you grabbed me.”

He had been sorry, insisting on examining the sore place, which looked terrible, all gray and puffy. Joshua came in behind him and looked at it, too.

“Miriam, you’d better go to the Health Office about that. It looks infected.”

“I thought it was getting better.”

“Worse, if anything. You’ve probably got a splinter of something in there. Have it seen to.” Then Joshua kissed her and the parrot said, “Oh, hell,” which set everyone off, and that was all.

The next afternoon when Rillibee got home, Songbird was there but Miriam wasn’t. Song was looking for the cake Miriam had baked the night before and hidden from them.

“Where’s Mom?” he wanted to know.

“She went to the Health,” his sister reminded him, burrowing in the cold cupboards.

He nodded, remembering. “When’ll she be home?” He wanted to tell her about Wurn March and what the teacher said and ask her about pledged acolytes.

“When she’s finished, dummo,” Song said. “You ask the dumbest questions.” She opened the side door and went outside to peer down the road.

Rillibee followed her. “You wanna hear a dumb question? When are you going to grow up? That’s a dumb question, ’cause the answer is never.”

“Brat,” she said. “Dumb little brat. Still suck your thumb.”

“Stop it,” Joshua said, coming across the yard from his workshop. “The two of you! Song, there’s no excuse for talking like that I don’t want to hear another word out of either of you. Song, go in and set the table. Rillibee, go pick up that junk you left scattered all over the common room last night. Put the rug back down, too. I’m going to start supper so your mother won’t have to do it when she comes home.”

There was quiet then, quiet for several hours. Rillibee remembered the quiet as a prelude to what happened later. Much later that quiet came to stand for tragedy, so that he would be uncomfortable with too much tranquility, too much silence. The evening sun slanting into the living room through the tall windows made pools of gold on Dad’s wide-planked floor and on the castle Rillibee had built the night before. He destroyed it and all its battlements, picked up the pieces, packed up his warriors, and put the rug back down, taking time to comb out the fringes with his fingers so they laid straight, like soldiers. Above him, on the perch, the parrot shifted. Rillibee looked up at it, and it whispered, “Oh, damn. Damn. Oh, God. Oh, no.” It sounded almost like Miriam’s voice.

Time went on until the sunlight vanished and his stomach gave an unmistakable signal. He went to the kitchen to find his father and Song waiting and Mom not home. “It’s time to eat,” he complained.

“So, we’ll eat,” his father said in a worried voice. “Your mom wouldn’t want us to wait for her. She’s been held up or something.” They were just sitting down at the table when the door-signal went. Somebody coming through the gate. Dad got up and went to the door, a smile on his face. Rillibee relaxed. She probably had stopped to buy groceries. Or sometimes she took a sample of her pottery to someone she thought might like to buy it. It was probably something like that that had kept her so long. But the voice at the front door wasn’t Mom’s voice. Somebody loud, a man, demanding to know where she was.