Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  I was thinking of Lucine while I was taking off my torn blouse at home after school. I squinted tightly sideways, trying to glimpse the point of my shoulder to see if it looked as bruised as it felt, when my door was flung open and slammed shut and Lowmanigh was leaning against it, breathing heavily.

  “Well!” I slid quickly into my clean shirt and buttoned it up briskly. “I didn’t hear you knock. Would you like to go out and try it over again?”

  “Did Lucine get hurt?” He pushed his hair back from his damp forehead. “Was it a bad spell? I thought I had it controlled—”

  “If you want to talk about Lucine,” I said out of my surprise, “I’ll be out on the porch in a minute. Do you mind waiting out there? My ears are still burning from Marie’s lecture to me on ‘proper decorum for a female in this here hotel.’ “

  “Oh.” He looked around blankly. “Oh, sure—sure.”

  My door was easing shut before I knew he was gone. I tucked my shirttail in and ran my comb through my hair.

  “Lowmanigh and Lucine?” I thought blankly. “What gives? Mrs. Kanz must be slipping. This she hasn’t mentioned.” I put the comb down slowly. “Oh. ‘He makes it almost straight but it bends again.’ But how can that be?”

  Low was perched on the railing of the sagging balcony porch that ran around two sides of the second story of the hotel. He didn’t turn around as I creaked across the floor toward the dusty dilapidated wicker settle and chair that constituted the porch furniture.

  “Who are you?” His voice was choked. “What are you doing here?”

  Foreboding ran a thin cold finger across the back of my neck. “We were introduced,” I said thinly. “I’m Perdita Verist, the new teacher, remember?”

  He swung around abruptly. “Stop talking on top,” he said. “I’m listening underneath. You know as well as I do that you can’t run away— But how do you know? Who are you?”

  “You stop it!” I cried. “You have no business listening underneath. Who are you?”

  We stood there stiffly glaring at each other until with a simultaneous sigh we relaxed and sat down on the shaky wickerware. I clasped my hands loosely on my lap and felt the tight hard knot inside me begin to melt and untie until finally I was turning to Low and holding out my hand, only to meet his as he reached for mine. Some one of me cried, “My kind? My kind?” But another of me pushed the panic button.

  “No,” I cried, taking my hand back abruptly and standing up. “No!”

  “No.” Low’s voice was soft and gentle. “It’s no betrayal.”

  I swallowed hard and concentrated on watching Severeid Swanson tacking from one side of the road to the other on his way home to the hotel for his garlic, his two vino bottles doing very little to maintain his balance.

  “Lucine,” I said. “Lucine and you.”

  “Was it bad?” His voice was all on top now, and my bones stopped throbbing to that other wave length.

  “About par for the course according to Mrs. Kanz,” I said shallowly. “I just tried to stop a buzz saw.”

  “Was it bad!” His voice spread clear across the band.

  “Stay out!” I cried. “Stay out!”

  But he was in there with me and I was Lucine and he was I and we held the red-and-black horror in our naked hands and stared it down. Together we ebbed back through the empty grayness until he was Lucine and I was I and I saw me inside Lucine and blushed for her passionately grateful love of me. Embarrassed, I suddenly found a way to shut him out and blinked at the drafty loneliness.

  “...and stay out!” I cried.

  “That’s right!” I jumped at Marie’s indignant wheeze. “I seen him go in your room without knocking and Shut the Door!” Her voice was capitalized horror. “You done right chasing him out and giving him What For!”

  My inner laughter slid the barrier open a crack to meet his amusement.

  “Yes, Marie,” I said soberly. “You warned me and I remembered.”

  “Well, now, good!” Half of Marie’s face smirked, gratified. “I knew you was a good girl. And, Low, I’m plumb ashamed of you. I thought you was a cut above these gaw-danged muckers around here and here you go wolfing around in broad daylight!” She tripped off down the creaky hall, her voice floating back up the lovely curved stairway. “In broad daylight! Supper’ll be ready in two jerks of a dead lamb’s tail. Git washed.”

  Low and I laughed together and went to “git washed.”

  I paused over a double handful of cold water I had scooped up from my huge china washbowl, and watched it all trickle back as I glowed warmly with the realization that this was the first time in uncountable ages that I had laughed underneath. I looked long on my wavery reflection in the water. “And not alone,” one of me cried, erupting into astonishment, “not alone!”

  ~ * ~

  The next morning I fled twenty-five miles into town and stayed at a hotel that had running water, right in the house, and even a private bath! And reveled in the unaccustomed luxury, soaking Kruper out of me—at least all of it except the glitter bits of loveliness or funniness or niceness that remained on the riffles of my soul after the dust, dirt, inconvenience, and ugliness sluiced away.

  I was lying there drowsing Sunday afternoon, postponing until the last possible moment the gathering of myself together for the bus trip back to Kruper. Then suddenly, subtly, between one breath and the next, I was back into full wary armor, my attention twanged taut like a tightened wire, and I sat up stiffly. Someone was here in the hotel. Had Low come into town? Was he here? I got up and finished dressing hastily. I sat quietly on the edge of the bed, conscious of the deep ebb and flow of something. Finally I went down to the lobby. I stopped on the last step. Whatever it had been, it was gone. The lobby was just an ordinary lobby. Low was nowhere among the self-consciously ranch-style furnishings. But as I started toward the window to see again the lovely drop of the wooded canyon beyond the patio, he walked in.

  “Were you here a minute ago?” I asked him without preliminaries.

  “No. Why?”

  “I thought—” I broke off. Then gears shifted subtly back to the commonplace and I said, “Well! What are you doing here?”

  “Old Charlie said you were in town and that I might as well pick you up and save you the bus trip back.” He smiled faintly. “Marie wasn’t quite sure I could be trusted after showing my true colors Friday, but she finally told me you were here at this hotel.”

  “But I didn’t know myself where I was going to stay when I left Kruper!”

  Low grinned engagingly. “My! You are new around here, aren’t you? Are you ready to go?”

  ~ * ~

  “I hope you’re not in a hurry to get back to Kruper.” Low shifted gears deftly as we nosed down to Lynx Hill bridge and then abruptly headed on up Lynx Hill at a perilous angle. “I have a stop to make.”

  I could feel his wary attention on me in spite of his absorption in the road.

  “No,” I said, sighing inwardly, visualizing long hours waiting while be leaned over the top fence rail exchanging long silences and succinct remarks with some mining acquaintance. “I’m in no hurry, just so I’m at school by nine in the morning.”

  “Fine.” His voice was amused, and, embarrassed, I tested again the barrier in my mind. It was still intact. “Matter of fact,” he went on, “this will be one for your collection, too.”

  “My collection?” I echoed blankly.

  “Your ghost-town collection. I’m driving over to Macron, or where it used to be. It’s up in a little box canyon above Bear Flat. It might be that it—” An intricate spot in the road—one small stone and a tiny pine branch—broke his sentence.

  “Might be what?” I asked, deliberately holding onto the words he was trying to drop.

  “Might be interesting to explore.” Aware amusement curved his mouth slightly

  “I’d like to find an unbroken piece of sun glass,” I said. “I have one old beautiful purple tumbler. It’s in pretty good condition except that it ha
s a piece out of the rim.”

  “I’ll show you my collection sometime,” Low said. “You’ll drool for sure.”

  “How come you like ghost towns? What draws you to them? History? Treasure? Morbid curiosity?”

  “Treasure—history—morbid curiosity—” He tasted the words slowly and approved each with a nod of his head. “I guess all three. I’m questing.”

  “Questing?”

  “Questing.” The tone of his voice ended the conversation. With an effort I detached myself from my completely illogical up-gush of anger at being shut out, and lost myself in the wooded wonder of the hillsides that finally narrowed the road until it was barely wide enough for the car to scrape through.

  Finally Low spun the wheel and, fanning sand out from our tires, came to a stop under a huge black-walnut tree.

  “Got your walking shoes on? This far and no farther for wheels.”

  Half an hour later we topped out on a small plateau above the rocky pass where our feet had slid and slithered on boulders grooved by high-wheeled ore wagons of half a century ago. The town had spread itself in its busiest days, up the slopes of the hills and along the dry creeks that spread fingerlike up from the small plateau. Concrete steps led abortively up to crumbled foundations, and sagging gates stood fenceless before shrub-shattered concrete walks.

  There were a few buildings that were nearly intact, just stubbornly resisting dissolution. I had wandered up one faint street and down another before I realized that Low wasn’t wandering with me. Knowing the solitary ways of ghost-town devotees, I made no effort to locate him, but only wondered idly what he was questing for—carefully refraining from wondering again who he was and why he and I spoke together underneath as we did. But even unspoken, the wonder was burning deep under my superficial scratching among the junk heaps of this vanished town.

  I found a white button with only three holes in it and the top of a doll’s head with one eye still meltingly blue, and scrabbled, bare-handed, with delight when I thought I’d found a whole sun-purpled sugar bowl—-only to find it was just a handle and half a curve held in the silt.

  I was muttering over a broken fingernail when a sudden soundless cry crushed into me and left me gasping with the unexpected force. I stumbled down the bank and ran clattering down the rock-strewn road. I found Low down by the old town dump, cradling something preciously in the bend of his arm.

  He lifted his eyes blindly to me.

  “Maybe—!” he cried. “This might be some of it. It was never a part of this town’s life. Look! Look at the shaping of it! Look at the flow of lines!” His hands drank in the smooth beauty of the metal fragment. “And if this is part of it, it might not be far from here that—” He broke off abruptly, his thumb stilling on the underside of the object. He turned it over and looked closely. Something died tragically as he looked. “ ‘General Electric,’ “ he said tonelessly. “ ‘Made in the USA.’ “ The piece of metal dropped from his stricken hands as he sagged to the ground. His fist pounded on the gravelly silt. “Dead end! Dead end! Dead—”

  I caught his hands in mine and brushed the gravel off, pressing Kleenex to the ooze of blood below his little finger.

  “What have you lost?” I asked softly.

  “Myself,” he whispered. “I’m lost and I can’t find my way back.”

  He took no notice of our getting up and my leading him to the fragment of a wall that kept a stunted elderberry from falling into the canyon. We sat down and for a while tossed on the ocean of his desolation as I thought dimly, “Too. Lost, too. Both of us.” Then I helped him channel into speech, though I don’t know whether it was vocal or not.

  “I was so little then,” he said. “I was only three, I guess. How long can you live on a three-year-old’s memories? Mom told me all they knew, but I could remember more. There was a wreck—a head-on collision the other side of Chuckawalla. My people were killed. The car tried to fly just before they hit. I remember Father lifted it up, trying to clear the other car, and Mother grabbed a handful of sun and platted me out of danger, but the crash came and I could only hear Mother’s cry ‘Don’t forget! Go back to the Canyon,’ and Father’s ‘Remember! Remember the Home!’ and they were gone, even their bodies, in the fire that followed. Their bodies and every identification. Mom and Dad took me in and raised me like their own, but I’ve got to go back. I’ve got to go back to the Canyon. I belong there.”

  “What Canyon?” I asked.

  “What Canyon?” he asked dully. “The Canyon where the People live now—my People. The Canyon where they located after the starship crashed. The starship I’ve been questing for, praying I might find some little piece of it to point me the way to the Canyon. At least to the part of the state it’s in. The Canyon I went to sleep in before I woke at the crash. The Canyon I can’t find because I have no memory of the road there.

  “But you know!” he went on. “You surely must know! You aren’t like the others. You’re one of us. You must be!”

  I shrank down into myself.

  “I’m nobody,” I said. “I’m not one of anybody. My mom and dad can tell me my grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grand-parents, and they used to all the time, trying to figure out why they were burdened with such a child, until I got smart enough to get ‘normal.’

  “You think you’re lost! At least you know what you’re lost from. You could get un-lost. But I can’t. I haven’t ever been un-lost!”

  “But you can talk underneath.” He blinked before my violence. “You showed me Lucine—”

  “Yes,” I said recklessly. “And look at this!”

  A rock up on the hillside suddenly spurted to life. It plowed down the slope, sending gravel flying, and smashed itself to powder against a boulder at the base.

  “And I never tried this before, but look!”

  I stepped up onto the crumbling wall and walked away from Low, straight on out over the canyon, feeling Earth fall away beneath my feet, feeling the soft cradling sweep of the wind, the upness and outness and unrestrainedness. I cried out, lifting my arms, reaching ecstatically for the hem of my dream of freedom. One minute, one minute more and I could slide out of myself and never, never, never...

  And then...

  Low caught me just before I speared myself on the gaunt stubby pines below us in the canyon. He lifted me, struggling and protesting, back up through the fragile emptiness of air, back to the stunted elderberry tree.

  “But I did! I did!” I sobbed against him. “I didn’t just fall. For a while I really did! “

  “For a while you really did, Dita,” he murmured as to a child. “As good as I could do myself. So you do have some of the Persuasions. Where did you get them if you aren’t one of us?”

  My sobs cut off without an after-echo, though my tears continued. I looked deep into Low’s eyes, fighting against the anger that burned at this persistent returning to the wary hurting place inside me. He looked steadily back until my tears stopped and I finally managed a ghost of a smile. “I don’t know what a Persuasion is, but I probably got it the same place you got that tilt to your eyebrows.”

  He reddened and stepped back from me.

  “We’d better start back. It’s not smart to get night-caught on these back roads.”

  We started back along the trail.

  “Of course you’ll fill in the vacancies for me as we go back,” I said, barely catching myself as my feet slithered on a slick hump of granite. I felt his immediate protest. “You’ve got to,” I said, pausing to shake the gravel out of one shoe. “You can’t expect me to ignore today, especially since I’ve found someone as crazy as I am.”

  “You won’t believe—” He dodged a huge buckbrush that crowded the narrow road.

  “I’ve had to believe things about myself all these years that I couldn’t believe,” I said, “and it’s easier to believe things about other people.”

  So we drove through the magic of an early twilight that deepened into a star-brilliant night,
and I watched the flick of the stars through the overarching trees along the road and listened to Low’s story. He stripped it down to its bare bones, but underneath, the bones burned like fire in the telling.

  “We came from some other world,” he said, wistful pride at belonging showing in his “we.” “The Home was destroyed. We looked for a refuge and found this Earth. Our ships crashed or burned before they could land. But some of us escaped in life slips. My grandparents were with the original Group that gathered at the Canyon. But we were all there, too, because our memories are joined continuously back into the Bright Beginning. That’s why I know about my People. Only I can’t remember where the Canyon is, because I was asleep the one time we left it, and Mother and Father couldn’t tell me in that split second before the crash.

  “I’ve got to find the Canyon again. I can’t go on living forever limping.” He didn’t notice my start at his echoing of that thought of mine when I was with Lucine. “I can’t achieve any stature at all until I am with my People.