Free Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons Page A

waving the drawings in the air for Lavonda to see, but it was not Lavonda who came out of the kitchen
     to meet me. It was my grandmother Caroline, customarily elegant in a jade suit.
    “Grand,” I shouted, “look what I—”… and stopped. Her face was blotched and swollen, and tears ran down her cheeks.
    I stared, terror rising in my throat like bile.
    “Come here, darling,” she said in a wet, rough voice, and held out her arms. I flew into them. I dug my face as hard as I
     could into her soft woolen shoulder. My own tears began. Whatever it was that could so twist and smear my grandmother, it
     could only be beyond bearing.
    I don’t remember what she said to me. I couldn’t seem to hear her clearly. I pulled back and stared into her face for a long
     time, registering the tracks the tears had made through her mascara and the soft rose blush on her cheeks. The rest of her
     face was bone white, and her lipstick was bitten away from her mouth so that only a ragged rim of coral remained, outlining
     her lips. They were as white as her face. The amber eyes were dull and red and swollen.
    Suddenly I couldn’t remember who she was and broke away from her and ran into the kitchen, sobbing and hiccupping. Nellie
     was there, sitting on the kitchen stool with her face covered by her work-gnarled black hands, but my mother was not.
    “Where is my mama?” I sobbed. “Where is my daddy?”
    “Oh, baby, you come here to Nellie,” she said, reaching out for me, but the silver snail’s track of tears down her furrowed
     face frightened me even more, and I turned and ran up the stairs two at a time, stumbling, weeping. My mother’s bedroom door
     was closed, and when I hammered on it my sister’s thin, high voice called out, “Go away! You can’t come in here now!”
    My mother cried out something to me, but by that time I was back down the stairs, dodging my grandmother, and out the door
     and across the front lawn running for the school as hard as I could.
    I burst in through the front door and down the short hall to my father’s office. I jerked the door open and stood in the doorway,
     gasping in great swallows of air. A man sat at my father’s desk, his head down, talking on the desk telephone, but he was
     not my father. I did not know this man. He looked up and saw me, and his face blanched, and he rose and made as if to come
     around the desk toward me, but I was frightened of him, too, and turned to run back home. My grandmother’s arms closed around
     me again. As she led me from the school I heard the man say, “We’re so terribly sorry, Mrs. Wentworth.” But I did not hear
     what she said in return. Outside, on the still, sunny lawn, a man was lowering the flag to half-staff.
    “Why is he doing that?” I croaked to my grandmother. It seemed to me that if only people would stop doing strange things the
     day would right itself back into its proper fading after-school somnolence.
    “He’s doing that for your daddy and your granddaddy,” she said. “To show respect for their memories.”
    Her voice was still trembling, but it was stronger.
    “I want my daddy. I want him to come home right now. Where is he?”
    She stooped down so that she was kneeling in the gravel of our driveway and put her hands on my shoulders and looked into
     my face. I saw as if for the first time how very much like her my father looked.
    “Thayer. He isn’t coming home. He and your granddaddy died. I told you that. Their car ran off Burnt Mountain. It was very,
     very quick and it couldn’t have hurt them at all. But your daddy can’t come home anymore. You mustn’t think he will.”
    I cried all that afternoon, lying on my bed with my flowered comforter drawn up over me and my grandmother’s arms tightly
     around me. She pressed her face into my hair, but she said very little. Sometimes she rocked me, and sometimes she hummed
     into my ear. Once she sang, so softly that I could scarcely hear her, “This is the