Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  Suddenly there was a rumble from inside the hill—a cracking crash and a yellow billow of dust from the entrance.

  There was an animal howl that cut off sharply and then a scream of pure pain and terror—a child’s terrified cry, a horrified awakening in the darkness, a cry for help—for light!

  “It’s Lucine!” I half sobbed. “She’s back. What happened?”

  “Cave-in!” the sheriff said, his jaws working. “Shoring gone—rotted out years ago. Gotter for sure now, I guess.”

  “But it’s Lucine again,” Low said. “We’ve got to get her out.”

  “If that cave-in’s where I think it is,” the sheriff said, “she’s a goner. There’s a stretch in there that’s just silt. Finest slitheriest stuff you ever felt. Comes like a flood of water. Drowns a feller in dirt.” His lips tightened. “First dead man I ever saw I dragged out of a silt-down in here. I was sixteen, I guess—skinniest feller in the batch, so they sent me in after they located the body and shored up a makeshift drift. Dragged him out feet first. Stubborn feller—sucked out of that silt like outa mud. Drownded in dirt. We’ll sweat getting this body out, too.

  “Well,” he hitched up his Levi’s, “might as well git on back to town and git a crew out here.”

  “She’s not dead,” Low said. “She’s still breathing. She’s caught under something and can’t get loose.”

  The sheriff looked at him through narrowed eyes. “I’ve heard you’re kinda tetched,” he said. “Sounds to me like you’re having a spell yourself, talking like that.

  “Wanta go back to town, ma’am?” His voice gentled. “Nothing you can do around here any more. She’s a goner.”

  “No, she isn’t,” I said. “She’s still alive. I can hear her.”

  “Gaw-dang!” the sheriff muttered. “Two of them. Well, all right then. You two are deppytized to watch the mine so it don’t run away while I’m gone.” Grinning sourly at his own wit, he left, taking the deputy with him.

  We listened to the echoes of the engine until they died away in the quiet, quiet upsurging of the forested hills all around us. We heard the small wind in the brush and the far cry of some flying bird. We heard the pounding of our own pulses and the frightened bewilderedness that was Lucine. And we heard the pain that began to beat its brassy hammers through her body, and the sharp piercing stab of sheer agony screaming up to the bright twanging climax that snapped down into unconsciousness. And then both of us were groping in the darkness of the tunnel. I stumbled and fell and felt a heavy flowing something spread across my lap, weighting me down. Low was floundering ahead of me. “Go back,” he warned. “Go back or we’ll both be caught!”

  “No!” I cried, trying to scramble forward. “I can’t leave you!”

  “Go back,” he said. “I’ll find her and hold her until the men come. You’ve got to help me hold the silt back.”

  “I can’t,” I whimpered. “I don’t know how!” I scooped at the heaviness in my lap.

  “Yes, you do,” he said down under. “Just look and see.”

  I scrambled back the interminable distance I hadn’t even been conscious of when going in, and crouched just outside the mine entrance, my dirty hands pressed to my wet face. I looked deep, deep inside me, down into a depth that suddenly became a height. I lifted me, mind and soul, up, up, until I found a new Persuasion, a new ability, and slowly, slowly, stemmed the creeping dry tide inside the mine—slowly began to part the black flood that had overswept Lucine so that only the arch of her arm kept her mouth and nose free of the invading silt.

  Low burrowed his way into the mass, straining to reach Lucine before all the air was gone.

  We were together, working such a work that we weren’t two people any more. We were one, but that one was a multitude, all bound together in this tremendous outpouring of effort. Since we were each other, we had no need for words as we worked in toward Lucine. We found a bent knee, a tattered hem, a twisted ankle—and the splintery edge of timber that pinned her down. I held the silt back while Low burrowed to find her head. Carefully we cleared a larger space for her face. Carefully we worked to free her body. Low finally held her limp shoulders in his arms— and was gone! Gone completely, between one breath and another.

  “Low!” I screamed, scrambling to my feet at the tunnel’s mouth, but the sound of my cry was drowned in the smashing crash that shook the ground. I watched horrified as the hillside dimpled and subsided and sank into silence after a handful of pebbles, almost hidden in a puff of dust, rattled to rest at my feet.

  I screamed again and the sky spun in a dizzy spiral rimmed with sharp pine tops, and suddenly unaccountably Severeid Swanson was there joining the treetops and the sky and spinning with them as he said, “Teesher! Teesher!”

  The world steadied as though a hand had been put upon it. I scrambled to my feet.

  “Severeid!” I cried. “They’re in there! Help me get them out! Help me!

  “Teesher,” Severeid shrugged helplessly, “no comprendo. I bring a flying one. I go get him. You say you gotta find. I find him. What you do out here with tears?”

  Before I was conscious of another person standing beside Severeid, I felt another person in my mind. Before I could bring my gasping into articulation, the words were taken from me. Before I could move, I heard the rending of rocks, and turning I sank to my knees and watched, in terrified wonder, the whole of the hillside lift itself and arch away like a furrow of turned earth before a plowshare. I saw silt rise like a yellow-red fountain above the furrow. I saw Low and Lucine rise with the silt. I saw the hillside flow back upon itself. I saw Low and Lucine lowered to the ground before me and saw all the light fading as I fell forward, my fingertips grazing the curve of Low’s cheek just before I drank deeply of blackness.

  ~ * ~

  The sun was all. Through the thin blanket I could feel the cushioning of the fine sand under my cheek. I could hear the cold wind blowing overhead through the sighing trees, but where we were the warmth of the late-fall sun was gathered between granite palms and poured down into our tiny pocket against the mountain. Without moving I could reach Low and Valancy and Jemmy. Without opening my eyes I could see them around me, strengthening me. The moment grew too dear to hold. I rolled over and sat up.

  “Tell me again,” I said. “How did Severeid ever find you the second time?

  I didn’t mind the indulgent smile Valancy and Jemmy exchanged. I didn’t mind feeling like a child—if they were the measure of adults.

  “The first time he ever saw us,” Jemmy said, “was when he chose to sleep off his vino around a boulder from where we chose to picnic. He was so drunk, or so childlike, or both, that he wasn’t amazed or outraged by our lifting and tumbling all over the sky. He was intrigued and delighted. He thought he had died and by-passed purgatory, and we had to restrain him to keep him from taking off after us. Of course, before we let him go we blocked his memory of us so he couldn’t talk of us to anyone except others of the People.” He smiled at me. “That’s why we got real shook when we found that he’d told you and that you’re not of the People. At least not of the Home. You’re the third blow to our provincialism. Peter and Bethie were the first, but at least they were half of the People, but you—” he waggled his head mournfully, “you just didn’t track.”

  “Yes,” I shivered, remembering the long years I hadn’t tracked with anyone. “I just didn’t track—” And I relaxed under the triple reassurance that flooded in from Low and Jemmy and his wife Valancy.

  “Well, when you told Severeid you wanted to find us, he stumbled as straight as a wino string back to our old picnic grounds. He must have huddled over that tiny fire of his for several days before we found him— parched with thirst and far past his last memory of food.” Jemmy drew a long breath.

  “Well, when we found out that Severeid knew of what we thought were two more of us—we’ve been in-gathering ever since the ships first arrived—well! We slept him all the way back. He would have been most unhappy with t
he speed and altitude of that return trip, especially without a car or plane.

  “I caught your struggle to save Lucine when we were still miles away, and, praise the Power, I got there in time. “

  “Yes,” I breathed, taking warmth from Low’s hand to thaw my memory of that moment.

  “That’s the quickest I ever platted anything,” Jemmy said. “And the first time I ever did it on a scale like that. I wasn’t sure that the late sunlight, without the moonlight, was strong enough, so I was openmouthed myself at the way the mountain ripped open.” He smiled weakly. “Maybe it’s just as well that we curb our practice of some of our Persuasions. It was really shake-making!”

  “That’s for sure!” I shivered. “I wonder what Severeid thought of the deal?”

  “We gave Severeid forgetfulness of the whole mine episode,” Valancy said. “But, as Jemmy would say, the sheriff was considerably shook when he got back with the crew. His only articulate pronouncement was, ‘Gaw-dang! Cleo II’s finally gone!’ “

  “And Lucine?” I asked, savoring the answer I already knew.

  “And Lucine is learning,” Valancy said. “Bethie, our Sensitive, found what was wrong and it is mended now. She’ll be normal very shortly.”

  “And—me?” I breathed, hoping I knew.

  “One of us!” the three cried to me down under. “Earth born or not— one of us!”

  “But what a problem!” Jemmy said. “We thought we had us all catalogued. There were those of us completely of the People and those who were half of the People and half of Earth like Bethie and Peter. And then you came along. Not one bit of the People!”

  “No,” I said, comfortably leaning against my ancestral stone wall again. “Not one bit of the People.”

  “You look like confirmation of something we’ve been wondering about, though,” Valancy said. “Perhaps after all this long time of detour the people of Earth are beginning to reach the Persuasions, too. We’ve had hints of such developments but in such little bits and snippets in these research deals. We had no idea that anyone was so far along the way. No telling how many others there are all over the world waiting to be found.”

  “Hiding, you mean,” I said. “You don’t go around asking to be found. Not after the first few reactions you get. Oh, maybe in the first fine flush of discovery you hurry to share the wonder, but you learn quickly enough to hide.”

  “But so like us!” Valancy cried. “Two worlds and yet you’re so like us!”

  “But she can’t inanimate-lift,” Low teased.

  “And you can’t glow,” I retorted.

  “And you can’t sun-and-moonlight-platt,” Jemmy said.

  “Nor you cloud-herd,” I said. “And if you don’t stop picking on me I’ll do just that right now and snatch that shower away from—from Morenci and drench you all!”

  “And she could do it!” Valancy laughed. “And we can’t, so let’s leave her alone.”

  We all fell silent, relaxing on the sun-warmed sand until Jemmy rolled over and opened one eye.

  “You know, Valancy, Dita and Low can communicate more freely than you and I. With them it’s sometimes almost involuntary.”

  Valancy rolled over, too. “Yes,” she said. “And Dita can block me out, too. Only a Sorter is supposed to be able to block a Sorter and she’s not a Sorter.”

  Jemmy waggled his head. “Just like Earthlings! Always out of step. What a problem this gal is going to be!”

  “Yep,” Low cut in underneath. “A problem and a half, but I think I’ll keep her anyway.” I could feel his tender laughter.

  I closed my eyes against the sun, feeling it golden across my lids.

  “I’m un-lost,” I thought incredulously, aching with the sudden joy of it. “I’m really un-lost!”

  I took tight hold of the hem of my dream, knowing finally and surely that someday I would be able to wrap the whole fabric of it not just around me but around others who were lost and bewildered, too. Someday we would all be what was only a dream now.

  Softly I drowsed, Low’s hand warm upon my cheek—drowsed finally, without dreading an awakening.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Interlude: Lea 5

  “Oh, but! Oh, but!” Lea thought excitedly. “Maybe, maybe—!” She turned at the pressure of a hand on her shoulder and met Melodye’s understanding eyes.

  “No,” she said, “we’re still Outsiders. It’s like the color of your eyes. You’re either brown-eyed or you’re not. We’re not the People. Welcome to my bakery window.”

  “Seems to me you’re fattening on just the sight and smell then.” It was Dr. Curtis.

  “Fattening!” Melodye wailed. “Oh, no! Not after all my efforts—”

  “Well, perhaps being nourished would be a more tactful way of saying it, as well as being more nearly exact. You don’t seem to be wasting away.”

  “Maybe,” Melodye said, sobering, “maybe it’s because knowing there can be this kind of communication between the People, and trying to reach it for myself, I have made myself more receptive to communication from a source that knows no Outsiders—no East or West—no bond or free—”

  “Hmm,” Dr. Curtis said. “There you have a point for pondering.”

  ~ * ~

  Karen and Lea separated from the happily chattering groups as they passed the house. The two girls lingered, huddling in their jackets, until the sound of the other voices died in shadowy echoes down-canyon. Lea lifted her chin to a sudden cool breeze.

  “Karen, do you think I’ll ever get straightened out?” she asked.

  “If you’re not too enamored of your difficulties,” Karen said, her hand on the doorknob. “If you’re not too firmly set on remodeling ‘nearer to your heart’s desire.’ We may think this is a ‘sorry scheme of things’ but we have to learn that our own judgment is neither completely valid nor the polestar for charting our voyage. Too often we operate on the premise that what we think just has to be the norm for all things. Really, you’d find it most comforting to admit that you aren’t running the universe— that you can’t be responsible for everything, that there are lots of things you can and must relinquish into other hands—”

  “To let go—” Lea looked down at her clenched hands. “I’ve held them like this so much it’s a wonder my nails haven’t grown through my palms.”

  “Sneaky way to keep from having to use nail polish!” Karen laughed. “But come—to bed, to bed. Oh, I’ll be so glad when I can take you over the hill!” She opened the door and went in, tugging at her jacket. “I just ache to talk it over with you, good old Outsider-type talking. I acquired quite a taste for it that year I spent Outside—” Her voice faded down the hall. Lea looked up at the brilliant stars that punctuated the near horizon.

  “The stars come down,” she thought, “down to the hills and the darkness. The darkness lifts up to the hills and the stars. And here on the porch is a me-sized empty place trying to Become. It’s so hard to reconcile darkness and the stars—but what else are we but an attempt at reconciliation?”

  ~ * ~

  Night came again. It seemed to Lea that time was like a fan. The evenings were the carefully carved, tangible bones of the fan that held their identity firmly. The days folded themselves meekly away between the nights—days containing patterns only in that they were bounded on each side by evenings—folded days scribbled on unintelligibly. She held herself carefully away from any attempt to read the scrawling scribbles. If they meant anything she didn’t want to know it. Only so long as she could keep from reading meanings into anything or trying to relate one thing to another—only that long could she maintain the precarious peace of the folded days and active evenings.

  She settled down almost gladly into the desk that had become pleasantly familiar. “It’s rather like drugging myself on movies or books or TV,” she thought. “I bring my mind empty to the Gatherings, let the stories flow through and take my mind empty home again.” Home? Home? She felt the fist clench in her ches
t and twist sharply, but she stubbornly concentrated on the lights that swung from the ceiling. Her attention sharpened on them. “Those aren’t electric lights,” she whispered to Karen. “Nor Coleman lanterns. What are they?”

  “Lights,” Karen smiled. “They cost a dime apiece. A dime and Dita. She glowed them for us. I’ve been practicing like mad and I almost glowed one the other day.” She laughed ruefully. “And she an Outsider! Oh, I tell you, Lea, you never know how much you use pride to keep yourself warm in this cold world until someone tears a hole in it and you shiver in the draft. Dita was a much-needed rip to a lot of us, bless her pointed little ears!”