Of course we had to explain her. There had been no mention of her when we arranged to come, and she had no clothes and I didn't have enough to cover both of us decently. So I listened to myself spin the most outrageous stories to Mrs. Wardlow. Her husband was the schoolmaster-lay-preacher and every other function of a learned man in a frontier settlement. She was the unofficial news spreader and guardian of public morals.
"Marnie is our niece," I said. "She's my younger sister's girl. She is just recovering from typhoid and-and brain fever."
"Oh, my!" said Mrs. Wardlow. "Both at once?"
"No," I said, warming to my task. "She was weakened by the typhoid and went into a brain fever. She lost her hair from all the fever. We thought we were going to lose her, too." It didn't take play acting to shiver, as, unbidden into my mind, came the vision of the smoke pluming slowly up-"My sister sent her with us, hoping that the climate out here will keep Marnie from developing a consumption. She hopes, too, that I can help the child learn to talk again."
"I've heard of people having to learn to walk again after typhoid, but not to talk-"
"The technical name for the affliction is aphasia," I said glibly. "Remember the brain fever. She had just begun to make some progress in talking, but the trip has set her back."
"She-she isn't-unbalanced, is she?" whispered Mrs. Wardlow piercingly.
"Of course not!" I said indignantly. "And, please! She can hear perfectly."
"Oh," said Mrs. Wardlow, reddening, "of course. I didn't mean to offend. When she is recovered enough, Mr. Wardlow would be pleased to set her lessons for her until she can come to school."
"Thank you," I said, "that would be very kind of him." Then I changed the subject by introducing tea.
After she left, I sat down by Marnie, whose eyes brightened for my solitary presence.
"Marnie," I said, "I don't know how much you understand of what I say, but you are my niece. You must call me Aunt Gail and Nils, Uncle Nils. You have been sick. You are having to learn to speak all over again." Her eyes had been watching me attentively, but not one flick of understanding answered me. I sighed heavily and turned away. Marnie's hand caught my arm. She held me, as she lay, eyes closed. Finally I made a movement as if to free myself, and she opened her eyes and smiled.
"Aunt Gail, I have been sick. My hair is gone. I want bread!" she recited carefully.
"Oh, Marnie!" I cried, hugging her to me in delight. "Bless you! You are learning to talk!'" I hugged my face into the top of her curls, then I let her go. "As to bread, I mixed a batch this morning. It'll be in the oven as soon
as it rises again. There's nothing like the smell of baking bread to make a place seem like home."
As soon as Marnie was strong enough, I began teaching her the necessary household skills and found it most disconcerting to see her holding a broom gingerly, not knowing, literally, which end to use, or what to do with it. Anybody knows what a needle and thread are for! But Marnie looked upon them as if they were baffling wonders from another world. She watched the needle swing back and forth sliding down the thread until it fell to the floor because she didn't know enough to put a knot in the end.
She learned to talk, but very slowly at first. She had to struggle and wait for words. I asked her about it one day. Her slow answer came. "I don't know your language," she said. "I have to change the words to my language to see what they say, then change them again to be in your language." She sighed. "It's so slow! But soon I will be able to take words from your mind and not have to change them."
I blinked, not quite sure I wanted anything taken from my mind by anyone!
The people of Margin had sort of adopted Marnie and were very pleased with her progress. Even the young ones learned to wait for her slow responses. She found it more comfortable to play with the younger children because they didn't require such a high performance in the matter of words, and because their play was with fundamental things of the house and the community, translated into the simplest forms and acted out in endless repetition.
I found out, to my discomfort, a little of how Marnie was able to get along so well with the small ones-the day Merwin Wardlow came roaring to me in seven-year-old indignation.
"Marnie and that old sister of mine won't let me play!" he tattled wrathfully.
"Oh, I'm sure they will, if you play nicely," I said, shifting my crochet hook as I hurried with the edging of Marnie's new petticoat.
"They won't neither!" And he prepared to bellow again. His bellow rivaled the six o'clock closing whistle at the mine, so I sighed, and laying my work down, took him out to the children's play place under the aspens.
Marnie was playing with five-year-old Tessie Wardlow. They were engrossed in building a playhouse. They had already outlined the various rooms with rocks and were now furnishing them with sticks and stones, shingles, old cans and bottles, and remnants of broken dishes. Marnie was arranging flowers in a broken vase she had propped between two rocks. Tessie was busily bringing her flowers and sprays of leaves. And not one single word was being exchanged! Tessie watched Marnie, then trotted off to get another flower. Before she could pick the one she intended, she stopped, her hand actually on the flower, glanced at Marnie's busy back, left that flower and, picking another, trotted happily back with it. "Marnie," I called, and blinked to feel a wisp of something say Yes? inside my mind. Marnie!" I called again. Marnie jumped and turned her face to me. "Yes, Aunt Gail," she said carefully.
"Merwin says you won't let him play."
"Oh, he's telling stories!" cried Tessie indignantly. "He won't do anything Marnie says and she's the boss today."
"She don't tell me nothing to do!" yelled Merwin, betraying in his indignation, his father's careful grammar.
"She does so!" Tessie stamped her foot. "She tells you just as much as she tells me! And you don't do it."
I was saved from having to arbitrate between the warring two by Mrs. Wardlow's calling them in to supper. Relieved, I sank down on the southwest corner of the parlor-a sizable moss-grown rock. Marnie sat down on the ground beside me.
"Marnie," I said. "How did Tessie know what flowers to bring you?"
"I told her," said Marnie, surprised. "They said I was boss today. Merwin just wouldn't play."
"Did you tell him things to do?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," said Marnie. "But he didn't do nothing."
"Did nothing," I corrected.
"Did nothing," she echoed.
"The last flower Tessie brought," I went on. "Did you ask for that special one?"
"Yes," said Marnie. "She started to pick the one with bad petals on one side."
"Marnie," I said patiently, "I was here and I didn't hear a word. Did you talk to Tessie?"
"Oh, yes," said Marnie.
"With words? Out loud?" I pursued.
"I think-" Marnie started, then she sighed and sagged against my knees, tracing a curve in the dirt with her forefinger. "I guess not. It is so much more easy ("Easier," I corrected.) easier to catch her thoughts before they are words. I can tell Tessie without words. But Merwin-I guess he needs words."
"Marnie," I said, taking reluctant steps into the wilderness of my ignorance of what to do with a child who found "no words more easy," "you must always use words. It might seem easier to you-the other way, but you must speak. You see, most people don't understand not using words. When people don't understand, they get frightened. When they are frightened, they get angry. And when they get angry, they-they have to hurt." I sat quietly watching Marnie manipulate my words, frame a reply, and make it into words for her stricken, unhappy lips.
"Then it was because they didn't understand, that they killed us," she said. "They made the fire."
"Yes," I said, "exactly.
"Marnie," I went on, feeling that I was prying, but needing to know. "You have never cried for the people who died in the fire. You were sad, but-weren't they your own people?"
"Yes," said Marnie, after an interval. "My father, my mother, and my b
rother-" She firmed her lips and swallowed. "And a neighbor of ours. One brother was Called in the skies when our ship broke and my little sister's life-slip didn't come with ours."
And I saw them! Vividly, I saw them all as she named them. The father, I noticed before his living, smiling image faded from my mind, had thick dark curls like Marnie's. The neighbor was a plump little woman.
"But," I blinked, "don't you grieve for them? Aren't you sad because they are dead?"
"I am sad because they aren't with me," said Marnie slowly. "But I do not grieve that the Power Called them back to the Presence. Their bodies were so hurt and broken." She swallowed again. "My days are not finished yet, but no matter how long until I am Called, my people will come to meet me. They will laugh and run to me when I arrive and I-" She leaned against my skirt, averting her face. After a moment she lifted her chin and said, "I am sad to be here without them, but my biggest sorrow is not knowing where my little sister is, or whether Timmy has been Called. We were two-ing, Timmy and I." Her hand closed over the hem of my skirt. "But, praise the Presence, I have you and Uncle Nils, who do not hurt just because you don't understand."
"But where on Earth-" I began.
"Is this called Earth?" Marnie looked about her. "Is Earth the place we came to?"
"The whole world is Earth," I said. "Everything-as far as you can see-as far as you can go. You came to this Territory-"
"Earth-" Marnie was musing. "So this refuge in the sky is called Earth!" She scrambled to her feet. "I'm sorry I troubled you, Aunt Gail," she said. "Here, this is to promise not to be un-Earth-" She snatched up the last flower she had put in the playhouse vase and pushed it into my hands. "I will set the table for supper," she called back to me as she hurried to the house. "This time forks at each place-not in a row down the middle."
I sighed and twirled the flower in my fingers. Then I laughed helplessly. The flower that had so prosaically grown on, and had been plucked from our hillside, was glowing with a deep radiance, its burning gold center flicking the shadows of the petals across my lingers, and all the petals tinkled softly from the dewdrop-clear bits of light that were finely pendant along the edges of them. Not un-Earth! But when I showed Nils the flower that evening as I retold our day, the flower was just a flower again, limp and withering.
"Either you or Marnie have a wonderful imagination," Nils said.
"Then it's Marnie," I replied. "I would never in a million years think up anything like the things she said. Only, Nils, how can we be sure it isn't true?"
"That what isn't true?" he asked. "What do you think she has told you?"
"Why-why-" I groped, "that she can read minds, Tessie's anyway. And that this is a strange world to her. And-and-"
"If this is the way she wants to make the loss of her family bearable, let her. It's better than hysterics or melancholia. Besides, it's more exciting, isn't it?" Nils laughed.
That reaction wasn't much help in soothing my imagination! But he didn't have to spend his days wrestling hand to hand with Marnie and her ways. He hadn't had to insist that Marnie learn to make the beds by hand instead of floating the covers into place-nor insist that young ladies wear shoes in preference to drifting a few inches above the sharp gravel and beds of stickers in the back yard. And he didn't have to persuade her that, no matter how dark the moonless night, one doesn't cut out paper flowers and set them to blooming like little candies around the comers of the rooms. Nils had been to the county seat that weekend. I don't know where she was from, but this was a New World to her and whatever one she was native to, I had no memory of reading about or of seeing on a globe.
When Marnie started taking classes in Mr. Wardlow's one-room school, she finally began to make friends with the few children her age in Margin. Guessing at her age, she seemed to be somewhere in her teens. Among her friends were Kenny, the son of the mine foreman, and Loolie, the daughter of the boardinghouse cook. The three of them ranged the hills together, and Marnie picked up a large vocabulary from them and became a little wiser in the ways of behaving unexceptionally. She startled them a time or two by doing impossible things, but they reacted with anger and withdrawal which she had to wait out more or less patiently before being accepted back into their companionship. One doesn't forget again very quickly under such circumstances.
During this time, her hair grew and she grew, too, so much so that she finally had to give up the undergarment she had worn when we found her. She sighed as she laid it aside, tucking it into the bottom dresser drawer. "At Home," she said, "there would be a ceremony and a pledging. All of us girls would know that our adult responsibilities were almost upon us-" Somehow, she seemed less different, less, well I suppose, alien, after that day.
It wasn't very long after this that Marnie began to stop suddenly in the middle of a sentence and listen intently, or clatter down the plates she was patterning on the supper table and hurry to the window. I watched her anxiously for a while, wondering if she was sickening for something, then, one night, after I blew out the lamp, I thought I heard something moving in the other room. I went in barefootedly quiet. Marnie was at the window.
"Marnie?" Her shadowy figure turned to me. "What's troubling you?" I stood close beside her and looked out at the moonlight-flooded emptiness of hills around the house.
"Something is out there," she said. "Something scared and bad-frightened and evil-" She took the more adult words from my mind. I was pleased that being conscious of her doing this didn't frighten me any more the way it did the first few times. "It goes around the house and around the house and is afraid to come."
"Perhaps an animal," I suggested.
"Perhaps," she conceded, turning away from the window.
"I don't know your world. An animal who walks upright and sobs, 'God have mercy!'"
Which incident was startling in itself, but doubly so when Nils said casually next day as he helped himself to mashed potatoes at the dinner table, "Guess who I saw today. They say he's been around a week or so." He flooded his plate with brown meat gravy. "Our friend of the double mind."
"Double mind?" I blinked uncomprehendingly.
"Yes." Nils reached for a slice of bread. "To burn or not to burn, that is the question-"
"Oh!" I felt a quiver up my arms. "You mean the man at Grafton's Vow. What was his name anyway?" "He never said, did he?" Nils's fork paused in mid-air as the thought caught him.
"Derwent," said Marnie shortly, her lips pressing to a narrow line. "Caleb Derwent, God have mercy."
"How do you know?" I asked. "Did he tell you?"
"No," she said, "I took it from him to remember him with gratitude." She pushed away from the table, her eyes widening. "That's it-that's the frightened evil that walks around the house at night! And passes by during the day! But he saved me from the fire! Why does he come now?"
"She's been feeling that something evil is lurking outside," I explained to Nils's questioning look.
"Hmm," he said, "the two minds. Marnie, if ever he-"
"May I go?" Marnie stood up. "I'm sorry. I can't eat when I think of someone repenting of good." And she was gone, the kitchen door clicking behind her.
"And she's right," said Nils, resuming his dinner. "He slithered around a stack of nail kegs at the store and muttered to me about still compromising with evil, harboring a known witch. I sort of pinned him in the corner until he told me he had finally-after all this time-confessed his sin of omission to his superiors at Grafton's Vow and they've excommunicated him until he redeems himself-" Nils stared at me, listening to his own words. "Gail! You don't suppose he has any mad idea about taking her back to Grafton's Vow, do you!"
"Or killing her!" I cried, clattering my chair back from the table. "Marnie!" Then I subsided with an attempt at a smile.
"But she's witch enough to sense his being around," I said.
"He won't be able to take her by surprise."
"Sensing or not," Nils said, eating hastily, "next time I get within reach of this Derwent person
, I'm going to persuade him that he'll be healthier elsewhere."
In the days that followed, we got used to seeing half of Derwent's face peering around a building, or a pale slice of his face appearing through bushes or branches, but he seemed to take out his hostility in watching Marnie from a safe distance, and we decided to let things ride-watchfully.
Then one evening Marnie shot through the back door and, shutting it, leaned against it, panting.
"Marnie," I chided. "I didn't hear your steps on the porch. You must remember-"
"I-I'm sorry, Aunt Gail," she said, "but I had to hurry. Aunt Gail, I have a trouble!" She was actually shaking. "What have you done now to upset Kenny and Loolie?" I asked, smiling.
"Not-not that," she said. "Oh, Aunt Gail! He's down in the shaft and I can't get him up. I know the inanimate lift, but he's not inanimate-"
"Marnie, sit down," I said, sobering. "Calm down and tell me what's wrong."
She sat, if that tense tentative conforming to a chair could be called sitting.
"I was out at East Shaft," she said. "My people are Identifiers, some of them are, anyway-my family is especially-I mean-" She gulped and let loose all over. I could almost see the tension drain out of her, but it came flooding back as soon as she started talking again. "Identifiers can locate metals and minerals. I felt a pretty piece of chrysocolla down in the shaft and I wanted
to get it for you for your collection. I climbed through the fence-oh, I know I shouldn't have, but I did-and I was checking to see how far down in the shaft the mineral was when-when I looked up and he was there!" She clasped her hands. "He said, 'Evil must die. I can't go back because you're not dead. I let you out of a little fire in this life, so I'll burn forever. "He who endures to the end-"' Then he pushed me into the shaft-"
"Into the-" I gasped.
"Of course, I didn't fall," she hastened. "I just lifted to the other side of the shaft out of reach, but-but he had pushed me so hard that he-he fell!"
The People Page 12
