Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  “Q.E.D. then,” said the Karen-voice.

  “ ‘Q.E.D.’?”

  “Yes. If we didn’t sense them, then they’re not Outsiders—” There was the sound of a caught breath and then, “Oh, what I said, Valancy! You don’t suppose!” I felt a movement close to me and heard the soft sound of breathing. “Can it really be two more of us? Oh, Valancy, they must be second generation—they’re about our age. How did they find us? Which of our Lost Ones were their parents?”

  Valancy sounded amused. “Those are questions they’re certainly in no condition to answer right now, Karen. We’d better figure out what to do. Look, the girl is coming to.”

  I was snapped out of my detached eavesdropping by a moan beside me. I started to sit up. “Bethie—” I began, and all the knives twisted through my lungs. Bethie’s scream followed my gasp.

  My eyes were open now, but good, and my leg was an agonized burning ache down at the far end of my consciousness. I gritted my teeth but Bethie moaned again.

  “Help her, help her!” I pleaded to the two fuzzy figures leaning over us as I tried to hold my breath to stop the jabbing.

  “But she’s hardly hurt,” Karen cried. “A bump on her head. Some cuts.”

  With an effort I focused on a luminous clear face—Valancy’s—whose deep eyes bent close above me. I licked the rain from my lips and blurted foolishly, “You’re not even wet in all this rain!” A look of consternation swept over her face. There was a pause as she looked at me intently and then said, “Their shields aren’t activated, Karen. We’d better extend ours.”

  “Okay, Valancy.” And the annoying sibilant wetness of rain stopped.

  “How’s the girl?”

  “It must be shock or maybe internal—“

  I started to turn to see, but Bethie’s sobbing cry pushed me flat again.

  “Help her,” I gasped, grabbing wildly in my memory for Mother’s words. “She’s a—a Sensitive!”

  “A Sensitive?” The two exchanged looks. “Then why doesn’t she—?” Valancy started to say something, then turned swiftly. I crooked my arm over my eyes as I listened.

  “Honey—Bethie—hear me!” The voice was warm but authoritative. “I’m going to help you. I’ll show you how, Bethie.”

  There was a silence. A warm hand clasped mine and Karen squatted close beside me.

  “She’s sorting her,” she whispered. “Going into her mind. To teach her control. It’s so simple. How could it happen that she doesn’t know—?”

  I heard a soft wondering “Oh!” from Bethie, followed by a breathless “Oh, thank you, Valancy, thank you!”

  I heaved myself up onto my elbow, fire streaking me from head to foot, and peered over at Bethie. She was looking at me, and her quiet face was happier than smiles could ever make it. We stared for the space of two relieved tears, then she said softly, “Tell them now, Peter. We can’t go any farther until you tell them.”

  I lay back again, blinking at the sky where the scattered raindrops were still falling, though none of them reached us. Karen’s hand was warm on mine and I felt a shiver of reluctance. If they sent us away...! But then they couldn’t take back what they had given to Bethie, even if—I shut my eyes and blurted it out as bluntly as possible.

  “We aren’t of the People—not entirely. Father was not of the People. We’re half-breeds.”

  There was a startled silence.

  “You mean your mother married an Outsider?” Valancy’s voice was filled with astonishment. “That you and Bethie are—?”

  “Yes she did and yes we are!” I retorted. “And Dad was the best—” My belligerence ran thinly out across the sharp edge of my pain. “They’re both dead now. Mother sent us to you.”

  “But Bethie is a Sensitive—Valancy’s voice was thoughtful.

  “Yes, and I can fly and make things travel in the air and I’ve even made fire. But Dad—” I hid my face and let it twist with the increasing agony.

  “Then we can!” I couldn’t read the emotion in Valancy’s voice. “Then the People and Outsiders—but it’s unbelievable that you—” Her voice died.

  In the silence that followed, Bethie’s voice came fearful and tremulous, “Are you going to send us away?” My heart twisted to the ache in her voice.

  “Send you away! Oh, my people, my people! Of course not! As if there were any question!” Valancy’s arms went tightly around Bethie, and Karen’s hand closed warmly on mine. The tension that had been a hard twisted knot inside me dissolved, and Bethie and I were home.

  Then Valancy became very brisk.

  “Bethie, what’s wrong with Peter?”

  Bethie was astonished. “How did you know his name?” Then she smiled. “Of course. When you were sorting me!” She touched me lightly along my sides, along my legs. “Four of his ribs are hurt. His left leg is broken. That’s about all. Shall I control him?”

  “Yes,” Valancy said. “I’ll help.”

  And the pain was gone, put to sleep under the persuasive warmth that came to me as Bethie and Valancy came softly into my mind.

  “Good,” Valancy said. “We’re pleased to welcome a Sensitive. Karen and I know a little of their function because we are Sorters. But we have no full-fledged Sensitive in our Group now.”

  She turned to me. “You said you know the inanimate lift?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know the words for lots of things.”

  “You’ll have to relax completely. We don’t usually use it on people. But if you let go all over, we can manage.”

  They wrapped me warmly in our blankets and lightly, a hand under my shoulders and under my heels, lifted me carrying-high and sped with me through the trees, Bethie trailing from Valancy’s free hand.

  Before we reached the yard, the door flew open and warm yellow light spilled out into the dusk. The girls paused on the porch and shifted me to the waiting touch of two men. In the wordless pause before the babble of question and explanation, I felt Bethie beside me draw a deep wondering breath and merge like a raindrop in a river into the People around us.

  But even as the lights went out for me again, and I felt myself slide down into comfort and hunger-fed belongingness, somewhere deep inside of me was a core of something that couldn’t quite—no, wouldn’t quite dissolve—wouldn’t yet yield itself completely to the People.

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  ~ * ~

  Interlude: Lea 3

  Lea stepped soundlessly toward the door almost before Peter’s last words were said. She was halfway up the steep road that led up the canyon before she heard the sound of Karen coming behind her. Lifting and running, Karen caught up with her.

  “Lea!” she called, reaching for her arm.

  With a twist of her shoulder Lea evaded Karen and wordlessly breathlessly ran on up the road.

  “Lea!” Karen grabbed both her shoulders and stopped her bodily. “Where on earth are you going!”

  “Let me go!” Lea shouted. “Sneak! Peeping Tom! Let me go!” She tried to wrench out of Karen’s hands.

  “Lea, whatever you’re thinking it isn’t so.”

  “Whatever I’m thinking!” Lea’s eyes blazed. “Don’t you know what I’m thinking? Haven’t you done enough scrabbling around in all the muck and mess—?” Her fingernails dented Karen’s hands. “Let me go!”

  “Why do you care, Lea?” Karen’s cold voice jabbed mercilessly. “Why should you care? What difference does it make to you? You left life a long time ago.”

  “Death—” Lea choked, feeling the dusty bitterness of the word she had thought so often and seldom said. “Death is at least private—-no one nosing around—”

  “Can you be so sure?” It was Karen’s quiet voice. “Anyway, believe me, Lea, I haven’t gone in to you even once. Of course I could if I wanted to and I will if I have to, but I never would without your knowledge—if not your consent. All I’ve learned of you has been from the most open outer part of your mind. Your inner mind is sacredly your own. The Pe
ople are taught reverence for individual privacy. Whatever powers we have are for healing, not for hurting. We have health and life for you if you’ll accept it. You see, there is balm in Gilead! Don’t refuse it, Lea.”

  Lea’s hands drooped heavily. The tension went out of her body slowly.

  “I heard you last night,” she said, puzzled. “I heard your story and it didn’t even occur to me that you could—-I mean, it just wasn’t real and I had no idea—” She let Karen turn her back down the road. “But then when I heard Peter—I don’t know—he seemed more true. You don’t expect men to go in for fairy tales—” She clutched suddenly at Karen. “Oh, Karen, what shall I do? I’m so mixed up that I can’t—”

  “Well, the simplest and most immediate thing is to come on back. We have time to hear another report and they’re waiting for us. Melodye is next. She saw the People from quite another angle.”

  ~ * ~

  Back in the schoolroom Lea fitted herself self-consciously into her corner again, though no one seemed to notice her. Everyone was busy reliving or commenting on the days of Peter and Bethie. The talking died as Melodye Amerson took her place at the desk.

  “Valancy’s helping me,” she smiled. “We chose the theme together, too. Remember—?

  “ ‘Behold, I am at a point to die and what profit shall this birthright do to me? And he sold his birthright for bread and pottage.’

  “I couldn’t do the recalling alone, either. So now, if you don’t mind, there’ll be a slight pause while we construct our network.”

  She relaxed visibly and Lea could feel the receptive quietness spread as though the whole room were becoming mirror-placid like the pool in the creek, and then Melodye began to speak...

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  ~ * ~

  Pottage

  You get tired of teaching after a while. Well, maybe not of teaching itself, because it’s insidious and remains a tug in the blood for all of your life, but there comes a day when you look down at the paper you’re grading or listen to an answer you’re giving a child and you get a boinnng! feeling. And each reverberation of the boing is a year in your life, another set of children through your hands, another beat in monotony, and it’s frightening. The value of the work you’re doing doesn’t enter into it at that moment and the monotony is bitter on your tongue.

  Sometimes you can assuage that feeling by consciously savoring those precious days of pseudo freedom between the time you receive your contract for the next year and the moment you sign it. Because you can escape at that moment, but somehow—you don’t.

  But I did one spring. I quit teaching. I didn’t sign up again. I went chasing after—after what? Maybe excitement—maybe a dream of wonder—maybe a new bright wonderful world that just must be somewhere else because it isn’t here-and-now. Maybe a place to begin again so I’d never end up at the same frightening emotional dead end. So I quit.

  But by late August the emptiness inside me was bigger than boredom, bigger than monotony, bigger than lusting after freedom. It was almost terror to be next door to September and not care that in a few weeks school starts— tomorrow school starts—first day of school. So, almost at the last minute, I went to the placement bureau. Of course it was too late to try to return to my other school, and besides, the mold of the years there still chafed in too many places.

  “Well,” the placement director said as he shuffled his end-of-the-season cards, past Algebra and Home EC and PE and High-School English, “there’s always Bendo.” He thumbed out a battered-looking three-by-five. “There’s always Bendo.”

  And I took his emphasis and look for what they were intended and sighed.

  “Bendo?”

  “Small school. One room. Mining town, or used to be. Ghost town now.” He sighed wearily and let down his professional hair. “Ghost people, too. Can’t keep a teacher there more than a year. Low pay—fair housing—at someone’s home. No community activities—no social life. No city within fifty or so miles. No movies. No nothing but children to be taught. Ten of them this year. All grades.”

  “Sounds like the town I grew up in,” I said. “Except we had two rooms and lots of community activities.”

  “I’ve been to Bendo.” The director leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head. “Sick community. Unhappy people. No interest in anything. Only reason they have a school is because it’s the law. Law-abiding anyway. Not enough interest in anything to break a law, I guess.”

  “I’ll take it,” I said quickly before I could think beyond the feeling that this sounded about as far back as I could go to get a good running start at things again.

  He glanced at me quizzically. “If you’re thinking of lighting a torch of high reform to set Bendo afire with enthusiasm, forget it. I’ve seen plenty of king-sized torches fizzle out there.”

  “I have no torch,” I said. “Frankly I’m fed to the teeth with bouncing bright enthusiasm and hugs PTA’s and activities until they come out your ears. They usually turn out to be the most monotonous kind of monotony. Bendo will be a rest.”

  “It will that,” the director said, leaning over his cards again. “Saul Diemus is the president of the board. If you don’t have a car the only way to get to Bendo is by bus—it runs once a week.”

  ~ * ~

  I stepped out into the August sunshine after the interview and sagged a little under its savage pressure, almost hearing a hiss as the refrigerated coolness of the placement bureau evaporated from my skin.

  I walked over to the quad and sat down on one of the stone benches I’d never had time to use, those years ago when I had been a student here. I looked up at my old dorm window and, for a moment, felt a wild homesickness—not only for years that were gone and hopes that had died and dreams that had had grim awakenings, but for a special magic I had found in that room. It was a magic—a true magic—that opened such vistas to me that for a while anything seemed possible, anything feasible—if not for me right now, then for others, someday. Even now, after the dilution of time, I couldn’t quite believe that magic, and even now, as then, I wanted fiercely to believe it. If only it could be so! If only it could be so!

  I sighed and stood up. I suppose everyone has a magic moment somewhere in his life and, like me, can’t believe that anyone else could have the same—but mine was different! No one else could have had the same experience! I laughed at myself. Enough of the past and of dreaming. Bendo waited. I had things to do.

  ~ * ~

  I watched the rolling clouds of red-yellow dust billow away from the jolting bus, and cupped my hands over my face to get a breath of clean air. The grit between my teeth and the smothering sift of dust across my clothes was familiar enough to me, but I hoped by the time we reached Bendo we would have left this dust plain behind and come into a little more vegetation. I shifted wearily on the angular seat, wondering if it had ever been designed for anyone’s comfort, and caught myself as a sudden braking of the bus flung me forward.

  We sat and waited for the dust of our going to catch up with us, while the last-but-me passenger, a withered old Indian, slowly gathered up his gunny-sack bundles and his battered saddle and edged his Levied velveteen-bloused self up the aisle and out to the bleak roadside.

  We roared away, leaving him a desolate figure in a wide desolation. I wondered where he was headed. How many weary miles to his hogan in what hidden wash or miniature greenness in all this wilderness.

  Then we headed straight as a die for the towering redness of the bare mountains that lined the horizon. Peering ahead I could see the road, ruler straight, disappearing into the distance. I sighed and shifted again and let the roar of the motor and the weariness of my bones lull me into a stupor on the border between sleep and waking.

  A change in the motor roar brought me back to the jouncing bus. We jerked to a stop again. I looked out the window through the settling clouds of dust and wondered who we could be picking up out here in the middle of nowhere. Then a clot of dust dissolved and I saw

  B
ENDO POST OFFICE

  GENERAL STORE

  Garage & Service Station

  Dry Goods & Hardware

  Magazines

  In descending size on the front of the leaning, weather-beaten building propped between two crumbling smoke-blackened stone ruins. After so much flatness it was almost a shock to see the bare tumbled boulders crowding down to the roadside and humping their lichen-stained shoulders against the sky.

  “Bendo,” the bus driver said, unfolding his lanky legs and hunching out of the bus. “End of the line—end of civilization—end of everything!” He grinned and the dusty mask of his face broke into engaging smile patterns.