Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  “What shall we do about the doctor?” I asked. “Will he have to know?”

  “Yes,” said Valancy. “We can help him but we can’t do the actual work. Can we trust him?”

  I hesitated, remembering the few scanty glimpses I’d had of him. “I—,” I began.

  “Pardon me,” Karen said. “I wanted to save time. I went in to you. We know now what you know of him. We’ll trust Dr. Curtis.”

  I felt an eerie creeping up my spine. To have my thoughts taken so casually! Even to the doctor’s name!

  Bethie stirred restlessly and looked at Valancy. “He’ll be in convulsions soon. We’d better hurry.”

  “You’re sure you have the knowledge?” Valancy asked.

  “Yes,” Bethie murmured. “If I can make the doctor see— if he’s willing to follow.”

  “Follow what?”

  The heavy tones of the doctor’s voice startled us all as he stepped out on the porch.

  I stood aghast at the impossibility of the task ahead of us and looked at Karen and Valancy to see how they would make the doctor understand. They said nothing. They just looked at him. There was a breathless pause. The doctor’s startled face caught the glint of light from the open door as he turned to Valancy. He rubbed his hand across his face in bewilderment and, after a moment, turned to me.

  “Do you hear her?”

  “No,” I admitted. “She isn’t talking to me.”

  “Do you know these people?”

  “Oh, yes!” I cried, wishing passionately it were true. “Oh, yes!”

  “And believe them?”

  “Implicitly.”

  “But she says that Bethie—who’s Bethie?” He glanced around.

  “She is,” Karen said, nodding at Bethie.

  “She is?” Dr. Curtis looked intently at the shy lovely face. He shook his head wonderingly and turned back to me.

  “Anyway this one, Valancy, says Bethie can sense every condition in the child’s body and that she will be able to tell all the injuries, their location and extent without X rays! Without equipment?”

  “Yes,” I said. “If they say so.”

  “You would be willing to risk a child’s life—?”

  “Yes. They know. They really do.” And I swallowed hard to keep down the fist of doubt that clenched in my chest.

  “You believe they can see through flesh and bone?”

  “Maybe not see,” I said, wondering at my own words. “But know with a knowledge that is sure and complete.” I glanced, startled, at Karen. Her nod was very small but it told me where my words came from.

  “Are you willing to trust these people?” The doctor turned to Abie’s parents.

  “They’re our People,” Mr. Peters said with quiet pride. “I’d operate on him myself with a pickax if they said so.”

  “Of all the screwball deals—!” The doctor’s hand rubbed across his face again. “I know I needed this vacation, but this is ridiculous!”

  We all listened to the silence of the night and—at least I—to the drumming of anxious pulses until Dr. Curtis sighed heavily.

  “Okay, Valancy. I don’t believe a word of it. At least I wouldn’t if I were in my right mind, but you’ve got the terminology down pat as if you knew something—. Well,

  I’ll do it. It’s either that or let him die. And God have mercy on our souls!”

  ~ * ~

  I couldn’t bear the thought of shutting myself in with my own dark fears, so I walked back toward the school, hugging myself in my inadequate coat against the sudden sharp chill of the night. I wandered down to the grove, praying wordlessly, and on up to the school. But I couldn’t go in. I shuddered away from the blank glint of the windows and turned back to the grove. There wasn’t any more time or direction or light or anything familiar, only a confused cloud of anxiety and a final icy weariness that drove me back to Abie’s house.

  I stumbled into the kitchen, my stiff hands fumbling at the doorknob. I huddled in a chair, gratefully leaning over the hot wood stove that flicked the semidarkness of the big homey room with warm red light, trying to coax some feeling back into my fingers.

  I drowsed as the warmth began to penetrate, and then the door was flung open and slammed shut. The doctor leaned back against it his hand still clutching the knob.

  “Do you know what they did?” he cried, not so much to me as to himself. “What they made me do? Oh, Lord!” He staggered over to the stove, stumbling over my feet. He collapsed by my chair, rocking his head between his hands. “They made me operate on his brain! Repair it. Trace circuits and rebuild them. You can’t do that! It can’t be done! Brain cells damaged can’t be repaired. No one can restore circuits that are destroyed! It can’t be done. But I did it! I did it!”

  I knelt beside him and tried to comfort him in the circle of my arms.

  “There, there, there,” I soothed.

  He clung like a terrified child. “No anesthetics!” he cried. “She kept him asleep. And no bleeding when I went through the scalp! They stopped it. And the impossible things I did with the few instruments I have with me! And the brain starting to mend right before my eyes! Nothing was right!”

  “But nothing was wrong,” I murmured. “Abie will be all right, won’t he?”

  “How do I know?” he shouted suddenly, pushing away from me.

  “I don’t know anything about a thing like this. I put his brain back together and he’s still breathing, but how do I know!”

  “There, there,” I soothed. “It’s over now.”

  “It’ll never be over!” With an effort he calmed himself, and we helped each other up from the floor. “You can’t forget a thing like this in a lifetime.”

  “We can give you forgetting,” Valancy said softly from the door. “If you want to forget. We can send you back to the Tumble A with no memory of tonight except a pleasant visit to Bendo.”

  “You can?” He turned speculative eyes toward her. “You can,” he amended his words to a statement.

  “Do you want to forget?” Valancy asked.

  “Of course not,” he snapped. Then, “I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t often work miracles in the wilderness. But if I did it once, maybe—”

  “Then you understand what you did?” Valancy asked smiling.

  “Well, no, but if I could—if you would— There must be some way—”

  “Yes,” Valancy said, “but you’d have to have a Sensitive working with you, and Bethie is it as far as Sensitives go right now.”

  “You mean it’s true what I saw—what you told me about the—the Home? You’re extraterrestrials?”

  “Yes,” Valancy sighed. “At least our grandparents were.” Then she smiled. “But we’re learning where we can fit into this world. Someday—someday we’ll be able—” She changed the subject abruptly.

  “You realize, of course, Dr. Curtis, that we’d rather you wouldn’t discuss Bendo or us with anyone else. We would rather be just people to Outsiders.”

  He laughed shortly, “Would I be believed if I did?”

  “Maybe no, maybe so,” Valancy said. “Maybe only enough to start people nosing around. And that would be too much. We have a bad situation here and it will take a long time to erase—” Her voice slipped into silence, and I knew she had dropped into thoughts to brief him on the local problem. How long is a thought? How fast can you think of hell—and heaven? It was that long before the doctor blinked and drew a shaky breath.

  “Yes,” he said. “A long time.”

  “If you like,” Valancy said, “I can block your ability to talk of us.”

  “Nothing doing!” the doctor snapped. “I can manage my own censorship, thanks.”

  Valancy flushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be condescending.”

  “You weren’t,” the doctor said. “I’m just on the prod tonight. It has been a day, and that’s for sure!”

  “Hasn’t it, though?” I smiled and then, astonished, rubbed my cheeks because tears had begun to spill down my
face. I laughed, embarrassed, and couldn’t stop. My laughter turned suddenly to sobs and I was bitterly ashamed to hear myself wailing like a child. I clung to Valency’s strong hands until I suddenly slid into a warm welcome darkness that had no thinking or fearing or need for believing in anything outrageous, but only in sleep.

  ~ * ~

  It was a magic year and it fled on impossibly fast wings, the holidays flicking past like telephone poles by a railroad train. Christmas was especially magical because my angels actually flew and the glory actually shone round about because their robes had hems woven of sunlight—I watched the girls weave them. And Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, complete with cardboard antlers that wouldn’t stay straight, really took off and circled the room. And as our Mary and Joseph leaned raptly over the manger, their faces solemn and intent on the miracle, I felt suddenly that they . were really seeing, really kneeling beside the manger in Bethlehem.

  Anyway the months fled, and the blossoming of Bendo was beautiful to see. There was laughter and frolicking and even the houses grew subtly into color. Green things crept out where only rocks had been before, and a tiny tentative stream of water had begun to flow down the creek again. They explained to me that they had to take it slow because people might wonder if the creek filled overnight! Even the rough steps up to the houses were becoming overgrown because they were seldom used, and I was becoming accustomed to seeing my pupils coming to school like a bevy of bright birds, playing tag in the treetops. I was surprised at myself for adjusting so easily to all the incredible things done around me by the People, and I was pleased that they accepted me so completely. But I always felt a pang when the children escorted me home—with me, they had to walk.

  But all things have to end, and one May afternoon I sat staring into my top desk drawer, the last to be cleaned out, wondering what to do with the accumulation of useless things in it. But I wasn’t really seeing the contents of the drawer, I was concentrating on the great weary emptiness that pressed my shoulders down and weighted my mind. “It’s not fair,” I muttered aloud and illogically, “to show me heaven and then snatch it away.”

  “That’s about what happened to Moses, too, you know.”

  My surprised start spilled an assortment of paper clips and thumbtacks from the battered box I had just picked up.

  “Well, forevermore!” I said, righting the box. “Dr. Curtis! What are you doing here?”

  “Returning to the scene of my crime,” he smiled, coming through the open door. “Can’t keep my mind off Abie. Can’t believe he recovered from all that—shall we call it repair work? I have to check him every time I’m anywhere near this part of the country—and I still can’t believe it.”

  “But he has.”

  “He has for sure! I had to fish him down from a treetop to look him over—” The doctor shuddered dramatically and laughed. “To see him hurtling down from the top of that tree curdled my blood! But there’s hardly even a visible scar left.”

  “I know,” I said, jabbing my finger as I started to gather up the tacks. “I looked last night. I’m leaving tomorrow, you know.” I kept my eyes resolutely down to the job at hand. “I have this last straightening up to do.”

  “It’s hard, isn’t it?” he said, and we both knew he wasn’t talking about straightening up.

  “Yes,” I said soberly. “Awfully hard. Earth gets heavier every day.”

  “I find it so lately, too. But at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that you—”

  I moved uncomfortably and laughed.

  “Well, they do say: those as can, do; those as can’t, teach.”

  “Umm,” the doctor said noncommittally, but I could feel his eyes on my averted face and I swiveled away from him, groping for a better box to put the clips in.

  “Going to summer school?” His voice came from near the windows.

  “No,” I sniffed cautiously. “No, I swore when I got my Master’s that I was through with education—at least the kind that’s come-every-day-and-learn-something.”

  “Hmm!” There was amusement in the doctor’s voice. “Too bad. I’m going to school this summer. Thought you might like to go there, too.”

  “Where?” I asked bewildered, finally looking at him.

  “Cougar Canyon summer school,” he smiled. “Most exclusive.”

  “Cougar Canyon! Why that’s where Karen—”

  “Exactly,” he said. “That’s where the other Group is established. I just came from there. Karen and Valancy want us both to come. Do you object to being an experiment?”

  “Why, no—” I cried, and then, cautiously, “What kind of an experiment?” Visions of brains being carved up swam through my mind.

  The doctor laughed. “Nothing as gruesome as you’re imagining, probably.” Then he sobered and sat on the edge of my desk. “I’ve been to Cougar Canyon a couple of times, trying to figure out some way to get Bethie to help me when I come up against a case that’s a puzzler. Valancy and Karen want to try a period of training with Outsiders—” that’s us—he grimaced wryly, “to see how much of what they are can be transmitted by training. You know Bethie is half Outsider. Only her mother was of the People.”

  He was watching me intently.

  “Yes,” I said absently, my mind whirling, “Karen told me.”

  “Well, do you want to try it? Do you want to go?”

  “Do I want to go!” I cried, scrambling the clips into a rubber-band box. “How soon do we leave? Half an hour? Ten minutes? Did you leave the motor running?”

  “Woops, woops!” The doctor took me by both arms and looked soberly into my eyes.

  “We can’t set our hopes too high,” he said quietly. “It may be that for such knowledge we aren’t teachable—”

  I looked soberly back at him, my heart crying in fear that it might be so.

  “Look,” I said slowly. “If you had a hunger, a great big gnawing-inside hunger and no money and you saw a bakery shop window, which would you do? Turn your back on it? Or would you press your nose as close as you could against the glass and let at least your eyes feast? I know what I’d do.” I reached for my sweater.

  “And, you know, you never can tell. The shop door might open a crack, maybe—someday—”

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Interlude: Lea 4

  “I’d like to talk with her a minute,” Lea said to Karen as the chattering group broke up. “May I?”

  “Why, sure,” Karen said. “Melodye, have you a minute?”

  “Oh, Karen!” Melodye threaded the rows back to Lea’s corner. “That was wonderful! It was just like living it for the first time again, only underneath I knew what was coming next. But even so my blood ran cold when Abie—” She shuddered. “Bro—ther! Was that ever a day!”

  “Melodye,” Karen said, “this is Lea. She wants to talk with you.”

  “Hi, fellow alien,” Melodye smiled. “I’ve been wanting to meet you.”

  “Do you believe—” Lea hesitated. “Was that really true?”

  “Of course it was,” Melodye said. “I can show you my scars—mental, that is—from trying to learn to lift.” Then she laughed. “Don’t feel funny about doubting it. I still have my 3 A.M.-ses when I can’t believe it myself.” She sobered. “But it is true. The People are the People.”

  “And even if you’re not of the People,” Lea faltered, “could they— could they help anyway? I don’t mean anything broken. I mean, nothing visible—” She was suddenly covered with a sense of shame and betrayal as though caught hanging out a black line of sins in the morning sun. She turned her face away.

  “They can help.” Melodye touched Lea’s shoulder gently. “And, Lea, they never judge. They mend where mending is needed and leave the judgment to God.” And she was gone.

  “Maybe,” Lea mourned, “if I had sinned some enormous sins I could have something big to forgive myself so I could start over, but all these niggling nibbling little nothingnesses—”

  “All
these niggling little, nibbling little nothingnesses that compounded themselves into such a great despair,” Karen said. “And what is despair but a separation from the Presence—”

  “Then the People do believe that there is—?”

  “Our Home may be gone,” Karen said firmly, “and all of us exiles if you want to look at it that way, but there’s no galaxy wide enough to separate us from the Presence.”