Read Online A Blade of Grass by Lewis DeSoto - Free Book Online Page B

this morning?”
    “We have to tell her. Oh God.”
    Ben rises to his feet and touches Märit on the arm again. “Not just yet. I have to go into town first, to the police station. I have to talk to them.”
    “She was going to see her sister—no, her cousin. Who would do such a thing? Oh God, Ben, what can we do?”
    Ben folds her into his arms, stroking her back, lifting the heavy coils of hair from the nape of her neck and stroking the cool skin of her neck. “I’ll talk to the police. We have to be sure it is Grace before we say anything.” He looks at his watch. “I’ll drive in now. I said I’d come immediately.”
    “I’ll come with you.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “I can’t stay here. I have to know.” She walks quietly to the kitchen and sticks her head through the door, but there is no sign of Grace’s daughter.
    “Tembi?” Märit calls softly. Opening the back door she peers out, but does not see the girl.
    When she rejoins Ben, he says, “There is her husband as well. He will have to be contacted.”
    “If it is Grace.”
    Ben nods. “We will have to find out where he works.”
    “In the mines,” Märit says. “Grace said something about him working in the mines in Johannesburg.”
    “We will have to ask the daughter.”
    “If it is Grace.”
    T HEY ARE BOTH SILENT on the first part of the drive as the car takes them along the sandy road towards the junction.
    “Where did it happen?” Märit asks, her eyes on the brush and ditches on the side of the road.
    “The sergeant didn’t say. On the road near the farm is all he told me.”
    “Somewhere along here?”
    “I don’t know.” He concentrates on his driving.
    Two figures appear ahead, two men, one carrying a paper parcel in his hands.
    If he were alone Ben would stop and let them sit in the back of the pickup, as he usually does when he drives into town and sees Africans onthe road. There is no bus between the farms and the towns, and no worker can afford a car. Usually he stops. But not today.
    “Don’t drive so fast,” Märit says as they pass the two men.
    Ben eases his foot off the gas pedal until they turn onto the paved road, then speeds up again without being aware of it.
    Three months on the farm and he feels that he is moving forward at last, and now this. He looks sidelong at Märit. “Did you get to know her at all? Grace, I mean.”
    “Not really.”
    “I just wondered—the two of you together in the house. You know, if you became friendly in any way?”
    “We talked a bit, but I didn’t know her. Or anything much about her. Just that she had a daughter, and that her husband worked in the mines.”
    Her tone is distant, causing Ben to glance at her again. Märit’s own parents passed away not so long ago. Ben remembers this same withdrawn, distant expression on her face in the days afterwards. He wonders if he had proposed marriage impulsively, out of concern, pity even, and the desire to make her happy again after her loss. Sometimes he doubts that he can make her happy. Sometimes it occurs to him that he might have brought her into a place to which she is unsuited. Perhaps he has made a mistake, perhaps they both have.
    In those first months of courtship he had believed she shared his dreams of a farming life, away from the city, away from the prospect of a faceless life in a faceless office, becoming faceless oneself. In those first months of sexual enthrallment perhaps they had both believed the wrong things about each other. What he had taken to be something distant in her, something hidden, is instead something closed. He fears sometimes that he will never know the depths in her.
    “It doesn’t remind you…does it?” Ben says, “The daughter…losing her mother. I understand how it could affect you…”
    She gives him a wan smile and moves closer on the seat. “No, it doesn’t. I’m all right. I just worry about Tembi.”
    The telephone poles spaced along the side of the highway speed past and