Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  “There, Jemmy, I seen my duty and I done it. Whose hot little hands hold the next installment?”

  Jemmy smoothed out his crumpled paper. “Well, Peter’s next, I guess. Unless Bethie wants to—”

  “Oh no, oh no!” Bethie’s soft voice protested. “Peter, Peter can do it better—he was the one—I mean—Peter!”

  Everyone laughed. “Okay, Bethie, okay!” Jemmy said. “Cool down. Peter it will be. Well, Peter, you have until tomorrow evening to get organized. I think after the excitement of the day, one—well—installment will be enough.”

  The crowd stood up and swirled and moved. The soft murmur of their voices and laughter washed over Lea like a warm ocean.

  “Lea.” It was Karen. “Here’s Jemmy and Valancy. They want to meet you.”

  Lea struggled to her feet, feeling impaled by their interested eyes. She felt welcome enwrapping her—a welcome far beyond any words. She felt a pang catch painfully somewhere in her chest, and to her bewilderment tears began to wash down her cheeks. She turned her head aside and groped for a handkerchief. Someone tucked a huge white one into her hands and someone’s shoulder was strong and steady for a moment and someone’s arms were deft and sure as they lifted her and bore her, blind with sobless weeping, away from the schoolhouse.

  ~ * ~

  Later—oh, much later—-she suddenly sat up in her bed. Karen was there instantly, noiselessly.

  “Karen, was that supposed to be real?”

  “Was what supposed to be real?”

  “That story you told. It wasn’t true, was it?”

  “But of course. Every word of it.”

  “But it can’t be!” Lea cried. “People from space! Magic people! It can’t be true.”

  “Why don’t you want it to be true?”

  “Because—because! It doesn’t fit. There’s nothing outside of what is— I mean, you go around the world and come back to where you started from. Everything ends back where it started from. There are boundaries beyond which—” Lea groped for words. “Anything outside the bounds isn’t true!” “Who defines the boundaries?”

  “Why, they’re just there. You get trapped in them when you’re born. You have to bear them till you die.”

  “Who sold you into slavery?” Karen asked wonderingly. “Or did you volunteer? I agree with you that everything comes back to where it started, but where did everything start?”

  “No!” Lea shrieked, clenching her fists over her eyes and writhing back on her pillow. “Not back to that muck and chaos and mindless seething!”

  The blackness rolled and flared and roared its insidious whimper— the crowded emptiness, the incinerating cold—the impossibility of all possibilities...

  “Lea, Lea.” Karen’s voice cut softly but authoritatively through the tangled horror. “Lea, sleep now. Sleep now, knowing that everything started with the Presence and all things can return joyfully to their beginning.”

  ~ * ~

  Lea ate breakfast with Karen the next morning. The wind was blowing the short ruffled curtains in and out of the room.

  “No screens?” Lea asked, carrying the armed truce with darkness as carefully as a cup of water, not to brim it over.

  “No, no screens,” Karen said. “We keep the bugs out another way.”

  “A way that works for keeping bugs in, too.” Lea smiled. “I tried to leave yesterday.”

  “I know.” Karen held a slice of bread in her hand and watched it brown slowly and fragrantly. “That’s why I blocked the windows a little more than usual. They aren’t that way today.”

  “You trust me?” Lea asked, feeling the secret slop of terror in the balanced cup.

  “This isn’t jail! Yesterday you were still clinging to the skirts of death. Today you can smile. Yesterday I put the lye up on the top shelf. Today you can read the label for yourself.”

  “Maybe I’m illiterate,” Lea said somberly. Then she pushed her cup back. “I’d like to go outside today, if it’s okay. It’s been a long time since I looked at the world.”

  “Don’t go too far. Most of the going around here is climbing—or lifting. We haven’t many Outside-type trails. Only don’t go beyond the schoolhouse. Right now we’d rather you didn’t—the flat beyond—” She smiled softly. “Anyway there’s lots of other places to go.”

  “Maybe I’ll see some of the children,” Lea said. “Davy or Lizbeth or Kiah.”

  Karen laughed. “It isn’t very likely—not under the circumstances, and ‘the children’ would be vastly insulted if they heard you. They’ve grown up—at least they think they have. My story was years ago, Lea.”

  “Years ago! I thought it just happened!”

  “Oh, my golly, no! What made you think—?”

  “You remembered so completely! Such little things. And the way Jemmy looked at Valancy and Valancy at him—”

  “The People have their special memory. And Jemmy was only looking love at Valancy. Love doesn’t die—”

  “Love doesn’t—” Lea’s mouth twisted. “Come, then, let us define love—” She stood up briskly. “I do want to walk a little—” She hesitated. “And maybe wade a little? In real wet water, free-running—”

  “Why, sure,” Karen said. “The creek is running. Wade to your heart’s content. Lunch will be here for you and I’ll be back by supper. We’ll go to the school together for Peter’s installment.”

  ~ * ~

  Lea came upon the pool, her bare feet bruised, her skirt hem dabbled with creek water, and her stomach empty of the lunch she had forgotten.

  The pool was wide and quiet. Water murmured into it at one end and chuckled out at the other. In between the surface was like a mirror. A yellow leaf fell slowly from a cottonwood tree and touched so gently down on the water that the resultant rings ran as fine as wire out to the sandy edge. Lea sighed, gathered up her skirts, and stepped cautiously into the pool. The clean cold bite of the water caught her breath, but she waded deeper. The water crept up to her knees and over them. She stood under the cottonwood tree, waiting, waiting so quietly that the water closed smoothly around her legs and she could feel its flow only in the tiny crumblings of sand under her feet. She stood there until another leaf fell, brushed her cheek, slipped down her shoulder, and curved over her crumpled blouse, catching briefly in the gathered-up folds of her skirt before it turned a leisurely circle on the surface of the shining water.

  Lea stared down at the leaf and the silver shadow behind it that was herself, then lifted her face to the towering canyon walls around her. She hugged her elbows tightly to her sides and thought, “I am becoming an entity again. I have form and proportion. I have boundaries and limits. I should be able to learn how to manage a finite being. The burden of being a nothing in infinite nothingness was too much—too much—”

  A restless stirring that could turn to panic swung Lea around and she started for shore. As she clambered up the bank, hands encumbered by her skirt, she slipped and, flailing wildly for balance, fell backward into the pool with a resounding splat. Dripping and gasping, she scrambled wetly to a sitting position, her shoulders barely out of the water. She blinked the water out of her eyes and saw the man.

  He had one foot in the water, poised in the act of starting toward her. He was laughing. She spluttered indignantly, and the water sloshed up almost to her chin.

  “I might have drowned!” she cried, feeling very silly and very wet.

  “If you go on sitting there you can drown yet!” he called. “High water comes in October.”

  “At the rate you’re helping me out,” she answered, “I’ll make it! I can’t get up without getting my head all wet.”

  “But you’re already wet all over,” he laughed, wading toward her.

  “That was accidental,” she sputtered. “It’s different, doing it on purpose!”

  “Female logic!” He grabbed her hands and hoisted her to her feet, pushed her to shore and shoved her up the bank.

  Lea looked up into his smiling face and
, smiling back, started to thank him. Suddenly his face twisted all out of focus—and retreated a thousand miles away. Faintly, faintly from afar, she heard his voice and her own gasping breath. Woodenly she turned away and started to grope away from him. She felt him catch her hand, and as she tugged away from him she felt all her being waver and dissolve and nothingness roll in, darker and darker.

  “Karen!” she cried. “Karen! Karen!” And she lost herself.

  ~ * ~

  “I won’t go.” She turned fretfully away from Karen’s proffered hand. The bed was soft.

  “Oh, yes, you will,” Karen said. “You’ll love Peter’s installment. And Bethie! You must hear about Bethie.”

  “Oh, Karen, please don’t make me try any more,” Lea pleaded. “I can’t bear the slipping back after—after—” She shook her head mutely.

  “You haven’t even started to try yet,” Karen said, coolly. “You’ve got to go tonight. It’s lesson two for you, so you’ll be ready to go on.”

  “My clothes,” Lea groped for an excuse. “They must be a mess.”

  “They are,” Karen said, undisturbed. “You’re about Lizbeth’s size. I brought you plenty. Choose.”

  “No.” Lea turned away.

  “Get up.” Karen’s voice was still cool but Lea got up. She fumbled wordlessly into the proffered clothes.

  “Hmm! “ Karen said. “You’re taller than I thought. You slump around so since you gave up.”

  Lea felt a stir of indignation but stood still as Karen knelt and tugged at the hem of the dress. The material stretched and stayed stretched, making the skirt a more seemly length for Lea.

  “There,” Karen said, standing and settling the dress smoothly around Lea’s waist by pinching a fullness into a pleat. Then, with a stroke of her hand, she deepened the color of the material. “Not bad. It’s your color. Come on now or we’ll be late.”

  ~ * ~

  Lea stubbornly refused to be interested in anything. She sat in her corner and concentrated on her clasped hands, letting the ebb and flow of talk and movement lap around her, not even looking. Suddenly, after the quiet invocation, she felt a pang of pure homesickness—homesickness for strong hands holding hers with the coolness of water moving between them. She threw back her head, startled, just as Jemmy said, “I yield the desk to you, Peter. It’s yours, every decrepit splinter of it.”

  “Thanks,” Peter said. “I hope the chair’s comfortable. This’ll take a while. I’ve decided to follow Karen’s lead and have a theme, too. It could well have been my question at almost any time in those long years.

  “ ‘Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?’ “

  In the brief pause Lea snatched at a thought that streaked through her mind. “I forgot all about the pond! Who was it? Who was it?” But she found no answer as Peter began...

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Gilead

  I don’t know when it was that I found out that our family was different from other families. There was nothing to point it out. We lived in a house very like the other houses in Socorro. Our pasture lot sloped down just like the rest through arrowweed and mesquite trees to the sometime Rio Gordo that looped around town. And on occasion our cow bawled just as loudly across the river at the Jacobses’ bull as all the other cows in all the other pasture lots. And I spent as many lazy days as any other boy in Socorro lying on my back in the thin shade of the mesquites, chewing on the beans when work was waiting somewhere. It never occurred to me to wonder if we were different.

  I suppose my first realization came soon after I started to school and fell in love—with the girl with the longest pigtails and the widest gap in her front teeth of all the girls in my room. I think she was seven to my six.

  My girl and I had wandered down behind the school woodshed, under the cottonwoods, to eat our lunch together, ignoring the chanted “Peter’s got a gir-ul! Peter’s got a gir-ul!” and the whittling fingers that shamed me for showing my love. We ate our sandwiches and pickles and then lay back, arms doubled under our heads, and blinked at the bright sky while we tried to keep the crumbs from our cupcakes from falling into our ears. I was so full of lunch, contentment, and love that I suddenly felt I just had to do something spectacular for my lady love. I sat up, electrified by a great idea and by the knowledge that I could carry it out.

  “Hey! Did you know that I can fly?” I scrambled to my feet, leaving my love sitting gape-mouthed in the grass.

  “You can’t neither fly! Don’t be crazy!”

  “I can too fly!”

  “You can not neither!”

  “I can so! You just watch!” And lifting my arms, I swooped up to the roof of the shed. I leaned over the edge and said, “See there? I can, too!”

  “I’ll tell teacher on you!” she gasped, wide-eyed, staring up at me. “You ain’t supposed to climb up on the shed.”

  “Oh, poof,” I said. “I didn’t climb. Come on, you fly up, too. Here, I’ll help you.”

  And I slid down the air to the ground. I put my arms around my love and lifted. She screamed and wrenched away from me and fled shrieking back to the schoolhouse. Somewhat taken aback by her desertion, I gathered up the remains of my cake and hers and was perched comfortably on the ridgepole of the shed, enjoying the last crumbs, when teacher arrived with half the school trailing behind her.

  “Peter Merrill! How many times have you been told not to climb things at school?”

  I peered down at her, noting with interest that the spit curls on her cheeks had been jarred loose by her hurry and agitation and one of them was straightening out, contrasting oddly with the rest of her shingled bob.

  “Hang on tight until Stanley gets the ladder!”

  “I can get down,” I said, scrambling off the ridgepole. “It’s easy.”

  “Peter!” teacher shrieked. “Stay where you are!”

  So I did, wondering at all the fuss.

  By the time they got me down and teacher yanked me by one arm back up to the schoolhouse, I was bawling at the top of my voice, outraged and indignant because no one would believe me, even my girl denying obstinately the evidence of her own eyes. Teacher, annoyed at my persistence, said over and over, “Don’t be silly, Peter. You can’t fly. Nobody can fly. Where are your wings?”

  “I don’t need wings,” I bellowed. “People don’t need wings. I ain’t a bird!”

  “Then you can’t fly. Only things with wings can fly.”

  So I alternately cried and kicked the schoolhouse steps for the rest of the noon hour, and then I began to worry for fear teacher would tattle to Dad. After all, I had been on forbidden territory, no matter how I got there.

  As it turned out she didn’t tell Dad, but that night after I was put to bed I suddenly felt an all-gone feeling inside me. Maybe I couldn’t fly. Maybe teacher was right. I sneaked out of bed and cautiously flew up to the top of the dresser and back. Then I pulled the covers up tight under my chin and whispered to myself, “I can so fly,” and sighed heavily. Just another fun stuff that grownups didn’t allow, like having cake for breakfast or driving the tractor or borrowing the cow for an Indian-pony-on-a-warpath.

  And that was all of that incident except that when teacher met Mother and me at the store that Saturday she ruffled my hair and said, “How’s my little bird?” Then she laughed and said to Mother, “He thinks he can fly!”

  I saw Mother’s fingers tighten whitely on her purse, and she looked down at me with all the laughter gone from her eyes. I was overflooded with incredulous surprise mixed with fear and dread that made me want to cry, even though I knew it was Mother’s emotions and not my own that I was feeling.

  Mostly Mother had laughing eyes. She was the laughingest mother in Socorro. She carried happiness inside her as if it were a bouquet of flowers, and she gave part of it to everyone she met. Most of the other mothers seemed to have hardly enough to go around to their own families. And y
et there were other times, like at the store, when laughter fled and fear showed through—and an odd wariness. Other times she made me think of a caged bird, pressing against the bars. Like one night I remember vividly.

  Mother stood at the window in her ankle-length flannel nightgown, her long dark hair lifting softly in the draft from the rattling window frames. A high wind was blowing in from a spectacular thunderstorm in the Huachucas. I had been awakened by the rising crescendo and was huddled on the sofa wondering if I was scared or excited as the house shook with the constant thunder. Dad was sitting with the newspaper in his lap.

  Mother spoke softly, but her voice came clearly through the tumult.

  “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be up there in the middle of the storm with clouds under your feet and over your head and lightning lacing around you like hot golden rivers?”