Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  Then I felt myself lifted into the air and a corner of the shattered window bruised my shoulder, a shard of broken glass ripped one side of the bedspread from my shoulder level to my ankle level. Around me was the night. Above me, the sky, still innocent of smoke, and below me— below me, nothing! The agonizing wrench of my whole body against the old, old fear of falling shot me right out of the conscious world.

  ~ * ~

  Michal was kneeling by me where I lay on the grass in the shadows of the little maple grove. Her hand, cool but insistent on my cheek, had wakened me.

  “Mr. Evans! Help me! Help me!”

  “Mike!” I muttered dizzily.

  “Help me find him,” she said tensely. “The fire—maybe it hasn’t got to his bed yet. We’ve got to find him or I’ll never find—”

  I felt the movement that signaled our mental hookup, and together we cried, “Mike! Mike! Mike!”

  The leaping flames from the tinder-dry house were flicking the shadows of the tree trunks back and forth across us. Michal crouched close to me. Her gown was grimed and singed, her hair was swinging brightly, darkly free about her bent shoulders. I could smell the fire in her hair and I saw tight charred beads on her brows and lashes.

  “Mr. Evans!” she whispered hoarsely. “Pray! Pray!” And our pulsating repetition of Mike, Mike, Mike was both a prayer and a seeking.

  After an eternity I heard it—Mike’s voice—faintly far away.

  “Michal! Michal!”

  “He’s there!” I cried. “Talk to him, Michal!”

  “I can’t hear him!” Michal’s eyes were anguished. “Are you sure—”

  “Listen!” I cried. “He’s calling you!”

  “I’ll have to read it from you,” she said despairingly. “Listen, oh, listen!”

  I heard the roar of flames in the silence as I waited. Then his voice came again, impossibly faint and remote. And he was talking to me for the first time.

  “I’ll have to talk fast,” he said. “I’ve been Called. You’ll have to tell Michal good-by for me.”

  “Mr. Apfel set the fire. It was a gift for Michal. He wanted to give her a midsummer bonfire. He was only going to try one match to see if it would look as pretty as he thought it would. He sneaked across the hall and stole a book of matches from Mr. Osanti. No one else has died of the fire. The others are safe. Aunt Lydie will be over here in a couple of minutes. I made her know you and Michal were all right.

  “They’re coming for her—people of her own kind—of my kind. They should be here by now. I was gone after them—that’s why I wasn’t here—”

  The voice faded and I struggled upright, straining to find it again. It came loud and clear and triumphant, “By the Presence, the Name, and the Power—”

  Michal’s hands tightened on my arm and relaxed as she slumped beside me.

  “Why didn’t you bring Mike out first?” I fretted, aching for this grieving child.

  “There was time for only one,” she said simply. “Mr. Apfel was already gone. Mike would never awaken to this life again. You—” Her deep, dark eyes were intent on me. “You are alive and conscious—and your days haven’t been totaled yet. No, if I’m to be found, I will be found—someday, maybe in time. Mike—” Her composure broke and she sobbed against my shoulder that forgot to ache under the shaken pressure of her sorrow. “Mike said they’d come. He said!”

  My arm circled her slender shoulders and my eyes blurred. I blinked— and blinked again, past her shoulder. I caught my breath and held it.

  Down from the sky, parting the luridly lit leaves of the trees, they came, two people, dropping down, hand in hand, as casually as if they were on a sidewalk. The man held back a branch until the woman ducked under, and then they were both standing, smiling in the flickering shadows just beyond my feet.

  “Michal!” I gasped. “They’re here—already! Look!”

  Michal spun in my arms, the firelight glinting on the swinging fan of her hair, and knelt, looking up blindly.

  “Michal—” The woman’s voice was gentle and warm. “Michal, Mike told us he’d found you—”

  I felt an incredulous, wildly hopeful exclamation flick past my mind and knew communication had been established. I closed my eyes to shut myself in with my sense of inevitable loss. I heard Michal cry out softly.

  “Karen! Jemmy! I know you! I knew you before! Before Deega—”

  There was a crash and a roar as a wall of the house collapsed. The clustered three moved deeper into the shadows, and I turned to watch the new upsurge of fire.

  “Michal! Mr. Evans!” It was Aunt Lydie, hurrying, an angular, black cartoon of herself, away from the glare. “Are you all right? Are you all right?”

  Michal was back beside me, her hand warmly insistent on my arm. “Here, Aunt Lydie!” Her voice was joyously shaken. “Were all right! Were both all right!”

  I blinked up at the arch of leaves above me. On one side of me, Aunt Lydie was gathering Michal into an unaccustomed warm embrace. On the other side of me, the two strangers—Jemmy and Karen—were waiting patiently in the shadows. I felt the stiff bristle of grass under my cheek and grimaced.

  This was not a situation in which I customarily found myself!

  <>

  ~ * ~

  The Indelible Kind

  I’ve always been a down-to-earth sort of person. On re-reading that sentence, my mouth corners lift. It reads differently now. Anyway, matter-of-fact and just a trifle sceptical—that’s a further description of me. I’ve enjoyed—perhaps a little wistfully—other people’s ghosts, and breathtaking coincidences, and flying saucer sightings, and table tiltings and prophetic dreams, but I’ve never had any of my own. I suppose it takes a very determined, or very childlike—not childish—person to keep illusion and wonder alive in a lifetime of teaching. “Lifetime” sounds awfully elderly-making, doesn’t it? But more and more I feel that I fit the role of observer more than that of participant. Perhaps that explains a little of my unexcitement when I did participate. It was mostly in the role of spectator. But what a participation! What a spectacular!

  But, back to the schoolroom. Faces and names have a habit of repeating and repeating in your classes over the years. Once in a while, though, along comes one of the indelible kind—and they mark you, happily or unhappily beyond erasing. But, true to my nature, I didn’t even have a twinge or premonition.

  The new boy came alone. He was small, slight, and had a smooth cap of dark hair. He had the assurance of a child who had registered many times by himself, not particularly comfortable or uncomfortable at being in a new school. He had brought a say-nothing report card, which, I noted in passing, gave him a low grade in Group Activity Participation and a high one in Adjustment to Redirective Counseling—by which I gathered that he was a loner but minded when spoken to, which didn’t help much in placing him academically.

  “What book were you reading?” I asked, fishing on the shelf behind me for various readers in case he didn’t know a specific name. Sometimes we get those whose faces overspread with astonishment and they say, “Reading?”

  “In which of those series?” he asked. “Look-and-say, ITA, or phonics?” He frowned a little. “We’ve moved so much and it seems as though every place we go is different. It does confuse me sometimes.” He caught my surprised eye and flushed. “I’m really not very good by any method, even if I do know their names,” he admitted. “I’m functioning only on about a second-grade level.”

  “Your vocabulary certainly isn’t second grade,” I said, pausing over the enrollment form.

  “No, but my reading is,” he admitted. “I’m afraid—”

  “According to your age, you should be third grade.” I traced over his birthdate. This carbon wasn’t the best in the world.

  “Yes, and I suppose that counting everything, I’d average out about third grade, but my reading is poor.”

  “Why?” Maybe knowing as much as he did about his academic standing, he’d know the an
swer to this question.

  “I have a block,” he said. “I’m afraid—”

  “Do you know what your block is?” I pursued, automatically probing for the point where communication would end.

  “I—” his eyes dropped. “I’m not very good in reading,” he said. I felt him folding himself away from me. End of communication.

  “Well, here at Rinconcillo, you’ll be on a number of levels. We have only one room and fifteen students, so we all begin our subjects at the level where we function best—” I looked at him sharply. “And work like mad!”

  “Yes, ma’am.” We exchanged one understanding glance; then his eyes became eight-year-old eyes and mine, I knew, teacher eyes. I dismissed him to the playground and turned to the paper work.

  Kroginold, Vincent Lorma, I penciled into my notebook. A lumpy sort of name, I thought, to match a lumpy sort of student—scholastically speaking.

  Let me explain Rinconcillo. Here in the mountainous West, small towns, exploding into large cities, gulp down all sorts of odd terrain in expanding their city limits. Here at Winter Wells, city growth has followed the three intersecting highways for miles out, forming a spidery, six-legged sort of city. The city limits have followed the growth in swatches about four blocks wide, which leaves long ridges, and truly ridges—mountainous ones—of non-city projecting into the city Consequently, here is Rinconcillo, a one-roomed school with only 15 students, and only about half a mile from a school system with eight schools and 4800 students. The only reason this school exists is the cluster of family units around the MEL (Mathematics Experimental Laboratory) facilities, and a half dozen fiercely independent ranchers who stubbornly refuse to be urbanized and cut up into real estate developments or be city-limited and absorbed into the Winter Wells school system.

  As for me—this was my fourth year at Rinconcillo, and I don’t know whether it’s being fiercely independent or just stubborn, but I come back each year to my “little inside corner” tucked quite literally under the curve of a towering sandstone cliff at the end of a box canyon. The violently pursuing and pursued traffic, on the two highways sandwiching us, never even suspects we exist. When I look out into the silence of an early school morning, I still can’t believe that civilization could be anywhere within a hundred miles. Long shadows under the twisted, ragged oak trees mark the orangy gold of the sand in the wash that flows—dryly mostly, wetly tumultuous seldomly—down the middle of our canyon. Manzanitas tangle the hillside until the walls become too steep and sterile to support them. And yet, a twenty-minute drive—ten minutes out of here and ten minutes into there—parks you right in front of the MONSTER MERCANTILE, EVERYTHING CHEAPER. I seldom drive that way.

  Back to Kroginold, Vincent Lorma—I was used to unusual children at my school. The lab attracted brilliant and erratic personnel. The majority of the men there were good, solid citizens and no more eccentric than a like number of any professionals, but we do get our share of kooks, and their sometimes twisted children. Besides the size and situation being an ideal set-up for ungraded teaching, the uneven development for some of the children made it almost mandatory. As, for instance, Vincent, almost nine, reading, so he said, on second-grade level, averaging out to third grade, which implied above-age excellence in something. Where to put him? Why, second grade (or maybe first) and fourth (or maybe fifth) and third—of course! Perhaps a conference with his mother would throw some light on his “block.” Well, difficult. According to the enrollment blank, both parents worked at MEL.

  By any method we tried, Vincent was second grade—or less—in reading.

  “I’m sorry.” He stacked his hands on the middle page of Through Happy Hours, through which he had stumbled most woefully. “And reading is so basic, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I said, fingering his math paper—above age-level. And the vocabulary check test—”If it’s just words, I’ll define them,” he had said. And he had. Third year of high school worth. “I suppose your math ability comes from your parents,” I suggested.

  “Oh, no!” he said, “I have nothing like their gift for math. It’s— it’s—I like it. You can always get out. You’re never caught—”

  “Caught?” I frowned.

  “Yes—look!” Eagerly he seized a pencil. “See! One plus one equals two. Of course it does, but it doesn’t stop there. If you want to, you can back right out. Two equals one plus one. And there you are—out! The doors swing both ways!”

  “Well, yes,” I said, teased by an almost grasping of what he meant. “But math traps me. One plus one equals two whether I want it to or not. Sometimes I want it to be one and a half or two and three-fourths and it won’t—ever!”

  “No, it won’t.” His face was troubled. “Does it bother you all the time?”

  “Heavens, no, child!” I laughed. “It hasn’t warped my life!”

  “No,” he said, his eyes widely on mine. “But that’s why—” His voice died as he looked longingly out the window at the recess-roaring playground, and I released him to go stand against the wall of the school, wistfully watching our eight other boys manage to be sixteen or even twenty-four in their wild gyrations.

  So that’s why? I doodled absently on the workbook cover. I didn’t like a big school system because its one-plus-one was my one and one-half—or two and three-fourths? Could be—could be. Honestly! What kids don’t come up with! I turned to the work sheet I was preparing for consonant blends for my this-year’s beginners—all both of them—and one for Vincent.

  My records on Vincent over the next month or so were an odd patchwork. I found that he could read some of the articles in the encyclopedia, but couldn’t read Billy Goats Gruff. That he could read What Is So Rare as a Day in June, but couldn’t read Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater. It was beginning to look as though he could read what he wanted to and that was all. I don’t mean a capricious wanting-to, but that he shied away from certain readings and actually couldn’t read them. As yet I could find no pattern to his un-readings; so I let him choose the things he wanted and he read— oh, how he read! He gulped down the material so avidly that it worried me. But he did his gulping silently. Orally, he wore us both out with his stumbling struggles.

  He seemed to like school, but seldom mingled. He was shyly pleasant when the other children invited him to join them, and played quite competently—which isn’t the kind of play you expect from an eight-year-old.

  And there matters stood until the day that Kipper—our eighth grade—dragged Vincent in, bloody and battered.

  “This guy’s nearly killed Gene,” Kipper said. “Ruth’s out there trying to bring him to. First aid says don’t move him until we know.”

  “Wait here,” I snapped at Vincent as I headed for the door. “Get tissues for your face!” And I rushed out after Kipper.

  We found Gene crumpled in the middle of a horrified group gathered at the base of the canyon wall. Ruth was crying as she mopped his muddy forehead with a soggy tissue. I checked him over quickly. No obvious bleeding. I breathed a little easier as he moaned, moved, and opened his eyes. He struggled to a sitting position and tenderly explored the side of his head.

  “Ow! That dang rock!” He blinked tears as I parted his hair to see if he had any damage besides the egg-sized lump. He hadn’t. “He hit me with that big rock!”

  “My!” I giggled, foolish with relief. “He must have addled your brains at the same time. Look at the size of that rock!” The group separated to let Gene look, and Pete scrambled down from where he had perched on the rock for a better look at the excitement.

  “Well.” Gene rubbed his head tenderly. “Anyway, he did!”

  “Come on inside,” I said, helping him up. “Do you want Kipper to carry you?”

  “Heck no!” Gene pulled away from my hands. “I ain’t hurt. G’wan— noseys!” He turned his back on the staring children.

  “You children stay out here.” I herded Gene ahead of me. “We have things to settle inside.”

  Vincent was waiting q
uietly in his seat. He had mopped himself fairly clean, though he still dabbled with a tissue at a cut over his left eye. Two long scratches oozed redly down his cheek. I spent the next few minutes rendering first aid. Vincent was certainly the more damaged of the two, and I could feel the drumming leap of his still-racing heart against me as I turned his docile body around, tucking in his shirt during the final tidying up.

  “Now.” I sat, sternly teacher, at my desk and surveyed the two before me. “Gene, you first.”

  “Well.” He ruffed his hair up and paused to finger, half proudly, the knot under his hair. “He said let my ground squirrel go and I said no. What the heck! It was mine. And he said let it go and I said no and he took the cage and busted it and—” Indignation in his eyes faded into defensiveness. “—and I busted him one and—and— Well, then he hit me with that rock! Gosh! I was knocked out, wasn’t I?”