Sheri Tepper - Grass

“Miriam hasn’t come home yet, “Joshua said firmly. “We don’t know.” Then he exclaimed in anger as the man pushed past him and came on into the house. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Looking,” the man said. He was a big man. Bigger than Dad.

Dressed in a white uniform with a mask thing around his neck and a green insignia on his shoulders. “Get on with your dinner, kids,” he instructed them. “I’ll only take a moment.” And he went through into the kitchen, then back into the bedrooms. Rillibee heard the closet doors opening and closing, then the man went out the front door and around into the shop. They could hear him banging around out there. Rillibee put down his fork very carefully, looking at his dad, so pale all of a sudden.

When the man came out he stood in the yard for a while, looking around, then he came back to the front door and asked Dad to come out. He talked quietly out there, but Rillibee could hear words, single words, “authority” and “penalty” and “custody.”

Rillibee fell silent.

Brother Mainoa waited awhile, then said, “They talk like that, don’t they. People who get to tell other folks what to do. Full of powerful words, they are. Sometimes I think they have words where most of us have blood.”

Rillibee didn’t say anything.

“Hard for you to talk about?”

Rillibee nodded, gulping, unable to talk at all.

“That’s all right. Wait until you feel better, then tell me.”

They flew, the car bouncing a little on the sun-warmed air. After a time, Rillibee began to tell it again.

Then the big man was gone and Dad was in the common room, sitting down at the table once more, his face like a rock, all frozen and hard.

“Dad?”

“Don’t, Rillibee. Don’t ask me anything right now. The man was looking for your mother and she’s not here. That’s all I know right now.”

“But who was he?”

“A man from Health.”

“Oh, damn. Oh, God,” the parrot said.

Joshua threw a soup spoon at the parrot. It made a splashy red place on the wall and fell on the floor. The parrot just looked at them, its black eyes swiveling back and forth as it whispered to itself.

The man didn’t come back. Mom didn’t come home. Dad paced the room, stopping every now and then to punch up people on the comnet. People Mom knew. Her sister over in Rattlesnake. Her friends. People like that.

When bedtime came, Rillibee looked out of the window of his own room to see the hover parked out on the flat. The man was watching the house. After a long time, Rillibee got into bed, dark all around him, trying to see through it to the ceiling, to the walls, only a splinter of light under the door. Tears. Trying to be quiet so Song wouldn’t hear him through the wall. Finally, sleep.

It had to have been sleep, because he woke up to a strange noise. Scratching, near his head. From under him, under his bed. Under the floor.

He thought about monsters first, not daring to move. Only after it had gone on for some time did he remember the cellar that Dad used to store wood in. A long time ago it had been a root cellar. Joshua had dug it bigger so it extended all the way to the shop. The entrance to it was out there in the shop, behind the woodstacks, but there was a hatch to it under Rillibee’s bed, from long ago. Someone was in there, scratching.

He slipped out of the bed and went to tell Joshua. Then he kept still while Joshua moved the bed, a little at a time, almost silently, and heaved the doorway up and it was Mom down there, white and pale, with her face all streaked and her hair tangled and messy and her clothes dirty as though she’d been crawling, and she was saying, “Josh, oh, God, Josh, they were going to send me away, they were going to send me away, and I went out the window. I ran and ran. I crawled down the creek and came in through the little door behind the shop. Hide me, don’t let them get me, Josh.”

“Never, darling,” he said. “Never.”

Silence again.

Mainoa said, “Your father must have loved her a lot.”

“I’ve never forgotten that,” Rillibee said, his voice liquid and bubbling in his throat. “I think about it at night sometimes, when I’m trying to sleep. I hear their voices. I remember how confused I was. Why had someone wanted to get her? Why had the people wanted to send her away? What had she done? She and Joshua didn’t tell me. They didn’t tell Song. All they had said was to pretend she hadn’t come home, just pretend they hadn’t seen her…”

Mom went to bed in her own bed, with Dad. The next morning, real early, Rillibee had wakened to some unfamiliar sound, something happening on the road. He peeked out at the corner of the shade and saw the man getting out of the white hover, out beyond the baby trees. He woke Dad and Mom just in time. She barely had time to get back down in the wood cellar and have Rillibee’s bed moved back on top of the hatch.

“Lie down there and look sleepy,” Dad commanded on his way to answer the thunder at the door.

Rillibee put his head under the pillow and told himself he was dreaming. The man from Health stamped in and pulled the pillow off, but Rillibee managed to look confused and angry as though the man had wakened him.

After that, Mom slept in the cellar. Dad moved a cot down there and a special kind of toilet he put together in the shop, one that didn’t need water. During the daytime, she came up whenever there was somebody there to watch for the man in the white hover, but if there was no one home, she had to hide.

Joshua bandaged the place on her arm. It was just a little place. About the size of a peach pit. By the end of the week, it had gotten quite a bit bigger, covering the whole elbow. It hurt her, too. Then it began to spread up and down her arm until the whole arm was raw and ugly, like meat. It hurt her to change the bandage, but if it wasn’t changed, it started to smell. They changed the bandage every night. Song held the basin with warm water in it, to wash the raw place. Rillibee handed Dad the bandages. The parrot sat on its perch saying, “Oh, damn, damn. Oh, God,” but none of them paid any attention.

The man came back. Once he brought two other men and they searched the house, but they didn’t find the place under Rillibee’s bed. By this time, Joshua had made the hatch almost invisible, fitting the wood together so you couldn’t see where it joined.

Once in a while, she’d come up in the daytime, while Song and Rillibee were at school. At night, when she came up, she’d tell them what she’d done, where she’d walked. “The leaves are turning,” she’d say. “Did you notice, Rillibee? Heartbreak gold. God, they’re so beautiful.” Then they talked about what they’d have for dinner the next night. She’d tell Joshua what to buy and how much. She’d tell Songbird how to cook it and Rillibee how to help. Then they’d talk awhile, maybe play a game, then change the bandage last thing and she’d go back down.

The bad night was when they were changing the bandage and some pieces came off. Mom made a noise, as though she was going to throw up, as though she was going to scream but couldn’t get enough air.

“Out,” Joshua said to both of them, pointing to the door, his face stretched into some horrible grin, like a pumpkin lantern, the sides of his mouth wide open and tight with all the teeth showing.

They ran into the kitchen. Song was crying and making a little grinding noise, trying to hold it in, and Rillibee was telling himself it was a dream, a bad dream, it wasn’t really happening at all. He had seen the bones in Mom’s hand, where the two fingers had come off, two round, white, slick things. The place wasn’t bleeding, just kind of oozing, slow drops of grayish liquid pushing out from the flesh and running down to make a small stained place on the clean bandages that stank like nothing he could ever have imagined. The smell had settled in the back of his throat as though it would never leave. After that, Dad wouldn’t let either of them be in the room when he changed the bandage. After a while, he wouldn’t let them be in the room with her at all. They could still hear her voice. For a while she sounded just like Mom. Once even they heard her laugh, a high, dreadful laugh. Then, after a while, there was no voice, just this high, whiny sound like a dog that’d been hit by a car, or a rabbit when a hawk takes it.