Ширли Мерфи - The Grass Tower

Bethany fled the kitchen to stand on the back porch; she stared down at the oblong back yard with its high board fence and listened to the distant rumble of the sea, wishing she dared go out on the dunes and miss dinner. Couldn’t Aunt Bett see why Colin hadn’t given her his card! Couldn’t she see she made too much fuss? Like a gigantic I told you so! It seemed to Bethany that Aunt Bett lived on a plane quite removed from Colin’s feelings.

What made people so blind to the needs of others? Aunt Bett pushed and goaded and made Colin shrink away from her. Bethany stood hugging herself. She didn’t understand people, she didn’t understand why they couldn’t see such things. She puzzled, staring at the setting sun, until Aunt Bett called her in for dinner.

Uncle Jimmie was home, but Aunt Bett was still at it. Colin had turned belligerent, and the atmosphere over dinner was as uncompromising as a mortar attack. Uncle Jimmie had the good sense to keep still. A pale, overweight man, he worked in the laundry, and Bethany wondered sometimes if it was the heat and the steam that made him look so sweaty all the time. Marylou, sighing at the tirade, asked for potatoes in a loud voice. “And the butter please.” And, to distract Aunt Bett further, “Aunt Selma has started on the mercantile. She’s going to cover the walls with black cloth. Bethany saw her measuring them.”

This drew Aunt Bett’s attention. “What does she want the black cloth for, how can she… . What were you doing there, Bethany? I don’t think you—”

“To hide the paint—” Bethany said hastily, “I guess she doesn’t like stucco, and the paint is ugly. I wasn’t inside, just looking in the window on the way home.” She didn’t mention Colin. A hard lump was growing in her stomach. Aunt Bett’s voice was so forceful.

“There’s talk it isn’t all Dr. Claybelle’s money, that Aunt Selma put money in, and that other couple, the Blakeys,” Marylou said.

“What in Heaven’s name does Selma think she’s doing with that old place?” Uncle Jimmie offered. “Astrology was one thing, and those tarot cards, but at least she kept it behind her own door.”

“It’s a travesty on the Lord.” Aunt Bett tore her bread in two angrily. “Colin and you girls, you keep away from that place. I don’t know how my own sister could get herself involved in such a thing. Mirror spirits! It’s seances, is what I heard, regular black masses and I don’t want—”

“Oh, not black masses,” Colin grumbled.

“Don’t interrupt, Colin. Every time I start to say something you don’t agree with you interrupt me. I don’t like your interest in this, I want you to remember that!” Colin turned pink. The atmosphere was brittle as glass. Privately, Bethany thought Aunt Bett was right, it was sacrilegious. Then why did Aunt Bett’s talking about it make her so angry when she really agreed with her? And Colin—she felt a sudden quick fury at Colin, he was always so fascinated with offbeat things. Like the comic books he read, he couldn’t just put them aside like other kids. You’d think she’d understand people better when she could see so much more of them, could catch their private thoughts, but her sudden and unasked for insights, her sudden touching of the mind of another, seemed only to confuse her, to make her feel the whole terrible impact of a person’s emotions without giving her the slightest reasons why. She escaped at last to the dishes, though over the running water she could still hear Aunt Bett going on and on about Aunt Selma’s project. When the dishes were finished, she slipped out quickly and fled through the twilight toward the dunes. “Don’t go far, Bethany,” Aunt Bett called after her, “It’ll be dark soon and you—”

“I won’t, Aunt Bett. I’ll be right back.”

She ran headlong between the dunes, hot with anger, with a twisting inside that Aunt Bett’s too-loud, constant pressure always made in her. I should be grateful for a home, she thought ungratefully, and flung herself between the pale dunes toward the sea. A gull flew up, screaming.

In the fading light at the edge of the sea she stopped, breathing hard and trying to collect herself, to let the silence and the space of the sea and dunes soothe her. The sea’s surface was glazed with a coppery sheen over the dark, cold blue. There was not a soul on the shore, there never was except riders until summer, and this time of night the horses would all be bedded and munching hay, warm and fragrant in their stalls. She had a sudden terrible desire to ride—it had been such a long time—to gallop a horse along the shore and into the water. Instead, she stripped out of her clothes— against all Aunt Bett’s orders—and ran into the surf in her pants and bra, belly flopping onto the breakers and swimming violently until she was nearly out of breath, and the freezing cold had turned to a warmth that tingled all through her.

Finally, the tenseness gone, she dressed, her clothes clinging, and went north between the empty, silent dunes that humped pale against the darkening sky. As white as bleached bone they were, and only at one point was the white expanse broken, where the tall, cone-shaped hill pushed high above them like a shaggy pyramid. A monolith, it hurled itself skyward, its dark gold grasses sweeping in the wind like waves tossed on the sea. A sacred, lonely tower.

She pushed the grasses back with a dry, rushing sound, and slipped into her narrow, grass-barred trail so the great fans of grass closed around her shoulders; and she climbed upward in a tangle of itching, warm-smelling dusk; the seeds clung to her sweater and tangled into her hair, and the climbing itself, the rustle and the warmth, were soothing and peaceful.

When she reached the top where the grass lay matted down by the constant wind, she felt as she always did, that she was part of the sky. The golden grasses dropped away from her feet rattling and whispering in the wind, and far below, the bleached dunes were marked with the curving shadows of their cupped forms. She settled into her nest of flattened grass and lay back to watch the night come down around her.

Why had she gotten so angry at Aunt Bett? Colin didn’t seem to mind half as much as she did when Aunt Bett was so unfeeling with him. At least he didn’t go storming off in a temper the way she did. Well, you couldn’t talk to Aunt Bett, that was what made her so mad. At least the family’s private thoughts and angers hadn’t intruded upon her as they sometimes did—as Jack’s had done today.

Before the sky went completely dark, the light from a half-moon began to pour down, silvering the grass blades, and when she stood to look, the dunes were like the silvered naked bodies of sleeping giants clustered beside the sea. She sighed. She needed this peacefulness, this privacy that she could not get at home. Sometimes she felt very close to something, to some presence that she could touch only here, away from the confusion of living so close to others. Didn’t other people have this terrible need for quiet, just to be by themselves? She put her hand out as if she could touch the silvered dunes, and felt the cold night air like clear water.

Maybe other people didn’t worry at things so, trying to sort them into some kind of sense. Maybe that was what made her come away from people feeling so tense and cross.

Chapter 2

Aunt Bett’s back yard was small, and the fence so high the wind did not come in but just flew over: you could see it moving the tips of the branches, running free, plucking feathers from the low cloud of barbeque smoke. Bethany sighed and drew her feet in to avoid the tumbling children. With all the family and three sets of neighbors, the yard was impossibly crowded, but this monthly gathering was important to Aunt Bett. The shouting of the children and the talk and endless talk seemed to push up at the wind, trying in vain to explode outward. Dr. Claybelle laughed stridently—Aunt Selma had brought him uninvited; the voice of the radio plunged; the clatter of laughter and talk gained volume: “He didn’t say—” “I don’t want” “Give it back” “Mama!” The voices clashed, a baby bawled, the heavy box of sound forced in and in.