Free Burnt Mountain by Anne Rivers Siddons Page B

dawning of the age of Aquarius, the age
     of Aquarius, Aquar… ius….”
    It was years before I considered what a strange song it was for my grandmother to be singing to me on the day of my father’s
     death and how even stranger that she, who had lost both a son and a husband, could comfort me while my mother and sister clung
     together in their prostration and could speak to no one, could see no one but each other.
    Life changed of course, after that, but not so much as it might have. My father’s substantial endowment from his grandparents
     came to my mother, and we stayed in the beautiful old white house by the river, and Nellie and Lavonda andthe grounds people stayed on with us. Once I overheard my mother saying to one of her friends who had come to make a condolence
     call, “At least we still have the house. That’s a great comfort to me, and I know it is for the girls. I can’t think how terrible
     it would be for them if we’d had to move.”
    But I wished we had moved, wished it with all my abraded heart. Our house was terrible beyond words to me without my father.
     Everywhere I was used to seeing him was a howling, empty space. After a while I grew actually afraid of those spaces and would
     not go into them. I would not watch television with my mother and Lily in the big den. He was not there, but his books were,
     shelves and shelves of them reaching from the floor to the ceiling, and they all seemed to me to be threatening to spill over
     and engulf me. I would not eat dinner in the dining room. Eventually we all took our meals at the smaller table in the breakfast
     room, and my mother never ceased telling me and others what a willful child I had become. I absolutely refused to even pass
     the door to my father’s study, and soon that door was closed and never reopened.
    And I was, of course, forbidden to go near the Hamilton school. The new president and his young wife were an attractive couple
     and lived in the private apartment at the school, and my mother was still invited to the big formal evenings. She often went,
     resplendent in her long dresses and her jewelry, still beautiful as ever, perhaps even more so now, with the richness and
     patina of widowhood clinging about her like smoke. Indeed, until I went away to college she was still the Queen Mother of
     the Hamilton school and no decisionwas made without her input. For technically, she as well as my grandmother owned Hamilton now. The school was my mother’s
     calling and her definition. I do not know what would have become of her without its vast presence at her back, like a sheltering
     fortress.
    Lily wore the mantle of bereaved daughter with tremendous grace, and the stream of young men from Hamilton hardly abated.
     But I had neither grace nor fortitude, and my behavior at home and at school crept beyond willfulness into intractability
     and out-and-out anger. I was perpetually furious; I couldn’t have said at whom. The rage was at my father, of course, for
     abandoning me, but no one ever seemed to consider this, least of all me, and my tantrums and sullenness soon strained every
     part of life in the white house on the river.
    I hid from everyone when I could, staying in my room with the door locked or in the underbrush fringing the river. I made
     a small house for myself there, in a hollow between the roots of a great live oak, and thatched it over with broken branches
     and laid an old oilcloth table covering on the ground and took a pillow and blanket into the house, and there I stayed, when
     I was not in my room, until someone sent Lavonda to flush me out. She was the only person in the big house who knew about
     my hideout; at least I think she was. No one else ever came there. When I was in my cave I felt, if still disemboweled with
     grief, at least secure, not called upon to interact with people who did not seem to me to remember that my father had died.
    I felt comforted only by my grandmother Caroline, but after