Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  Dad rattled his paper. “Sounds uncomfortable,” he said.

  But I sat there and hugged the words to me in wonder. I knew! I remembered! “ And the rain like icy silver hair lashing across your lifted face,’ “ I recited as though it were a loved lesson.

  Mother whirled from the window and stared at me. Dad’s eyes were on me, dark and troubled.

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  I ducked my head in confusion. “I don’t know,” I muttered.

  Mother pressed her hands together, hard, her bowed head swinging the curtains of her hair forward over her shadowy face. “He knows because I know. I know because my mother knew. She knew because our People used to—” Her voice broke. “Those were her words—”

  She stopped and turned back to the window, leaning her arm against the frame, her face pressed to it, like a child in tears.

  “Oh, Bruce, I’m sorry!”

  I stared, round-eyed in amazement, trying to keep tears from coming to my eyes as I fought against Mother’s desolation and sorrow.

  Dad went to Mother and turned her gently into his arms. He looked over her head at me. “Better run on back to bed, Peter. The worst is over.”

  I trailed off reluctantly, my mind filled with wonder. Just before I shut my door I stopped and listened.

  “I’ve never said a word to him, honest.” Mother’s voice quivered. “Oh, Bruce, I try so hard, but sometimes—oh sometimes!”

  “I know, Eve. And you’ve done a wonderful job of it. I know it’s hard on you, but we’ve talked it out so many times. It’s the only way, honey.”

  “Yes,” Mother said. “It’s the only way, but—oh, be my strength, Bruce! Bless the Power for giving me you!”

  I shut my door softly and huddled in the dark in the middle of my bed until I felt Mother’s anguish smooth out to loving warmness again. Then for no good reason I flew solemnly to the top of the dresser and back, crawled into bed, and relaxed. And remembered. Remembered the hot golden rivers, the clouds over and under, and the wild winds that buffeted like foam-frosted waves. But with all the sweet remembering was the reminder, You can’t because you’re only eight. You’re only eight. You’ll have to wait.

  ~ * ~

  And then Bethie was born, almost in time for my ninth birthday. I remember peeking over the edge of the bassinet at the miracle of tiny fingers and spun-sugar hair. Bethie, my little sister. Bethie, who was whispered about and stared at when Mother let her go to school, though mostly she kept her home even after she was old enough. Because Bethie was different—too.

  When Bethie was a month old I smashed my finger in the bedroom door. I cried for a quarter of an hour, but Bethie sobbed on and on until the last pain left my finger.

  When Bethie was six months old our little terrier, Glib, got caught in a gopher trap. He dragged himself, yelping, back to the house dangling the trap. Bethie screamed until Glib fell asleep over his bandaged paw.

  Dad had acute appendicitis when Bethie was two, but it was Bethie who had to be given a sedative until we could get Dad to the hospital.

  One night Dad and Mother stood over Bethie as she slept restlessly under sedatives. Mr. Tyree-next-door had been cutting wood and his ax slipped. He lost a big toe and a pint or so of blood, but as Doctor Dueff skidded to a stop on our street it was into our house that he rushed first and then to Mr. Tyree-next-door, who lay with his foot swathed and propped up on a chair, his hands pressed to his ears to shut out Bethie’s screams.

  “What can we do, Eve?” Dad asked. “What does the doctor say?”

  “Nothing. They can do nothing for her. He hopes she will outgrow it. He doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t know that she—”

  “What’s the matter? What makes her like this?” Dad asked despairingly.

  Mother winced. “She’s a Sensitive. Among my People there were such—but not so young. Their perception made it possible for them to help sufferers. Bethie has only half the Gift. She has no control. “

  “Because of me?” Dad’s voice was ragged.

  Mother looked at him with steady loving eyes. “Because of us, Bruce. It was the chance we took. We pushed our luck after Peter.”

  So there we were, the two of us—different—but different in our differences. For me it was mostly fun, but not for Bethie.

  We had to be careful for Bethie. She tried school at first, but skinned knees and rough rassling and aching teeth and bumped heads and the janitor’s Monday hangover sent her home exhausted and shaking the first day, with hysteria hanging on the flick of an eyelash. So Bethie read for Mother and learned her numbers and leaned wistfully over the gate as the other children went by.

  It wasn’t long after Bethie’s first day in school that I found a practical use for my difference. Dad sent me out to the woodshed to stack a cord of mesquite that Delfino dumped into our back yard from his old wood wagon. I had a date to explore an old fluorspar mine with some other guys and bitterly resented being sidetracked. I slouched out to the woodpile and stood, hands in pockets, kicking the heavy rough stove lengths. Finally I carried in one armload, grunting under the weight, and afterward sucking the round of my thumb where the sliding wood had peeled me. I hunkered down on my heels and stared as I sucked. Suddenly something prickled inside my brain. If I could fly why couldn’t I make the wood fly? And I knew I could! I leaned forward and flipped a finger under half a dozen sticks, concentrating as I did so. They lifted into the air and hovered. I pushed them into the shed, guided them to where I wanted them, and distributed them like dealing a pack of cards. It didn’t take me long to figure out the maximum load, and I had all the wood stacked in a wonderfully short time.

  I whistled into the house for my flashlight. The mine was spooky and dark, and I was the only one of the gang with a flashlight.

  “I told you to stack the wood.” Dad looked up from his milk records.

  “I did,” I said, grinning.

  “Cut the kidding,” Dad grunted. “You couldn’t be done already.”

  “I am, though,” I said triumphantly. “I found a new way to do it. You see—” I stopped, frozen by Dad’s look.

  “We don’t need any new ways around here,” he said evenly. “Go back out there until you’ve had time to stack the wood right!”

  “It is stacked,” I protested. “And the kids are waiting for me!”

  “I’m not arguing, son,” said Dad, white-faced. “Go back out to the shed.”

  I went back out to the shed—past Mother, who had come in from the kitchen and whose hand half went out to me. I sat in the shed fuming for a long time, stubbornly set that I wouldn’t leave till Dad told me to.

  Then I got to thinking. Dad wasn’t usually unreasonable like this. Maybe I’d done something wrong. Maybe it was bad to stack wood like that. Maybe—my thoughts wavered as I remembered whispers I’d overheard about Bethie. Maybe it—it was a crazy thing to do—an insane thing.

  I huddled close upon myself as I considered it. Crazy means not doing like other people. Crazy means doing things ordinary people don’t do. Maybe that’s why Dad made such a fuss. Maybe I’d done an insane thing! I stared at the ground, lost in bewilderment. What was different about our family? And for the first time I was able to isolate and recognize the feeling I must have had for a long time—the feeling of being on the outside looking in—the feeling of apartness. With this recognition came a wariness, a need for concealment. If something were wrong, no one else must know—I must not betray...

  Then Mother was standing beside me. “Dad says you may go now,” she said, sitting down on my log.

  “Peter—” She looked at me unhappily. “Dad’s doing what is best. All I can say is: remember that whatever you do, wherever you live, different is dead. You have to conform or—or die. But Peter, don’t be ashamed. Don’t ever be ashamed!” Then swiftly her hands were on my shoulders and her lips brushed my ear. “Be different!” she whispered. “Be as different as you can. But don’t let anyone see—don’t let anyone kno
w!” And she was gone up the back steps, into the kitchen.

  ~ * ~

  As I grew further into adolescence I seemed to grow further and further away from kids my age. I couldn’t seem to get much of a kick out of what they considered fun. So it was that with increasing frequency in the years that followed I took Mother’s whispered advice, never asking for explanations I knew she wouldn’t give. The wood incident had opened up a whole vista of possibilities—no telling what I might be able to do— so I got in the habit of going down to the foot of our pasture lot. There, screened by the brush and greasewood, I tried all sorts of experiments, never knowing whether they would work or not. I sweated plenty over some that didn’t work—and some that did.

  I found that I could snap my fingers and bring things to me, or send them short distances from me without bothering to touch them as I had the wood. I roosted regularly in the tops of the tall cottonwoods, swan-diving ecstatically down to the ground, warily, after I got too ecstatic once and crash-landed on my nose and chin. By headaching concentration that left me dizzy, I even set a small campfire ablaze. Then blistered and charred both hands unmercifully by confidently scooping up the crackling fire.

  Then I guess I got careless about checking for onlookers because some nasty talk got started. Bub Jacobs whispered around that I was “doing things” all alone down in the brush. His sly grimace as he whispered made the “doing things” any nasty perversion the listeners’ imaginations could conjure up, and the “alone” damned me on the spot. I learned bitterly then what Mother had told me. Different is dead—and one death is never enough. You die and die and die.

  Then one day I caught Bub cutting across the foot of our wood lot. He saw me coming and hit for tall timber, already smarting under what he knew he’d get if I caught him. I started full speed after him, then plowed to a stop. Why waste effort? If I could do it to the wood, I could do it to a blockhead like Bub.

  He let out a scream of pure terror as the ground dropped out from under him. His scream flatted and strangled into silence as he struggled in midair, convulsed with fear of falling and the terrible thing that was happening to him. And I stood and laughed at him, feeling myself a giant towering above stupid dopes like Bub.

  Sharply, before he passed out, I felt his terror, and an echo of his scream rose in my throat. I slumped down in the dirt, sick with sudden realization, knowing with a knowledge that went beyond ordinary experience that I had done something terribly wrong, that I had prostituted whatever powers I possessed by using them to terrorize unjustly.

  I knelt and looked up at Bub, crumpled in the air, higher than my head, higher than my reach, and swallowed painfully as I realized that I had no idea how to get him down. He wasn’t a stick of wood to be snapped to the ground. He wasn’t me, to dive down through the air. I hadn’t the remotest idea how to get a human down.

  Half dazed, I crawled over to a shaft of sunlight that slit the cottonwood branches overhead and felt it rush through my fingers like something to be lifted—and twisted—and fashioned and used! Used on Bub! But how? How? I clenched my fist in the flood of light, my mind beating against another door that needed only a word or look or gesture to open, but I couldn’t say it, or look it, or make it.

  I stood up and took a deep breath. I jumped, batting at Bub’s heels that dangled a little lower than the rest of him. I missed. Again I jumped and the tip of one finger flicked his heel and he moved sluggishly in the air. Then I swiped the back of my hand across my sweaty forehead and laughed—laughed at my stupid self.

  Cautiously, because I hadn’t done much hovering, mostly just up and down, I lifted myself up level with Bub. I put my hands on him and pushed down hard. He didn’t move.

  I tugged him up and he rose with me. I drifted slowly and deliberately away from him and pondered. Then I got on the other side of him and pushed him toward the branches of the cottonwood. His head was beginning to toss and his lips moved with returning consciousness. He drifted through the air like a waterlogged stump, but he moved and I draped him carefully over a big limb near the top of the tree, anchoring his arms and legs as securely as I could. By the time his eyes opened and he clutched frenziedly for support, I was standing down at the foot of the tree, yelling up at him.

  “Hang on, Bub! I’ll go get someone to help you down!”

  So for the next week or so people forgot me, and Bub squirmed under “Who treed you, feller?” and “How’s the weather up there?” and “Get a ladder, Bub, get a ladder!”

  Even with worries like that it was mostly fun for me. Why couldn’t it be like that for Bethie? Why couldn’t I give her part of my fun and take part of her pain?

  ~ * ~

  Then Dad died, swept out of life by our Rio Gordo as he tried to rescue a fool Easterner who had camped on the bone-dry white sands of the river bottom in cloudburst weather. Somehow it seemed impossible to think of Mother by herself. It had always been Mother and Dad. Not just two parents but Mother-and-Dad, a single entity. And now our thoughts must limp to Mother-and, Mother-and. And Mother—well, half of her was gone.

  After the funeral Mother and Bethie and I sat in our front room, looking at the floor. Bethie was clenching her teeth against the stabbing pain of Mother’s fingernails gouging Mother’s palms.

  I unfolded the clenched hands gently and Bethie relaxed.

  “Mother,” I said softly, “I can take care of us. I have my part-time job at the plant. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of us.”

  I knew what a trivial thing I was offering to her anguish, but I had to do something to break through to her.

  “Thank you, Peter,” Mother said, rousing a little. “I know you will—” She bowed her head and pressed both hands to her dry eyes with restrained desperation. “Oh, Peter, Peter! I’m enough of this world now to find death a despair and desolation instead of the solemnly sweet calling it is. Help me, help me!” Her breath labored in her throat and she groped blindly for my hand.

  “If I can, Mother,” I said, taking one hand as Bethie took the other. “Then help me remember. Remember with me.”

  And behind my closed eyes I remembered. Unhampered flight through a starry night, a flight of a thousand happy people like birds in the sky, rushing to meet the dawn—the dawn of the Festival. I could smell the flowers that garlanded the women and feel the quiet exultation that went with the Festival dawn. Then the leader sounded the magnificent opening notes of the Festival song as he caught the first glimpse of the rising sun over the heavily wooded hills. A thousand voices took up the song. A thousand hands lifted in the Sign....

  I opened my eyes to find my own fingers lifted to trace a sign I did not know. My own throat throbbed to a note I had never sung. I took a deep breath and glanced over at Bethie. She met my eyes and shook her head sadly. She hadn’t seen. Mother sat quietly, eyes closed, her face cleared and calmed.

  “What was it, Mother?” I whispered.

  “The Festival,” she said softly. “For all those who had been called during the year. For your father, Peter and Bethie. We remembered it for your father.”

  “Where was it?” I asked. “Where in the world—?”

  “Not in this—” Mother’s eyes flicked open. “It doesn’t matter, Peter. You are of this world. There is no other for you.”

  “Mother,” Bethie’s voice was a hesitant murmur, “what do you mean, ‘remember’?”

  Mother looked at her and tears swelled into her dry burned-out eyes.

  “Oh, Bethie, Bethie, all the burdens and none of the blessings! I’m sorry, Bethie, I’m sorry.” And she fled down the hall to her room.

  Bethie stood close against my side as we looked after Mother.

  “Peter,” she murmured, “what did Mother mean, ‘none of the blessings’?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I’ll bet it’s because I can’t fly like you.”

  “Fly!” My startled eyes went to hers. “How do you know?”

  “I know lots of things,” she wh
ispered. “But mostly I know we’re different. Other people aren’t like us. Peter, what made us different?”

  “Mother?” I whispered. “Mother?”

  “I guess so,” Bethie murmured. “But how come?”

  We fell silent and then Bethie went to the window, where the late sun haloed her silvery blond hair in fire.

  “I can do things, too,” she whispered. “Look.”

  She reached out and took a handful of sun, the same sort of golden sun-slant that had flowed so heavily through my fingers under the cottonwoods while Bub dangled above me. With flashing fingers she fashioned the sun into an intricate glowing pattern. “But what’s it for?” she murmured, “except for pretty?”