“What’s the matter? What makes her like this?” Dad asked despairingly.
Mother winced. “She’s a Sensitive. Among my People there were such—but not so young. Their perception made it possible for them to help sufferers. Bethie has only half the Gift. She has no control.”
“Because of me?” Dad’s voice was ragged.
Mother looked at him with steady loving eyes. “Because of us, Bruce. It was the chance we took. We pushed our luck after Peter.”
So there we were, the two of us—different—but different in our differences. For me it was mostly fun, but not for Bethie.
We had to be careful for Bethie. She tried school at first, but skinned knees and rough rassling and aching teeth and bumped heads and the janitor’s Monday hangover sent her home exhausted and shaking the first day, with hysteria hanging on the flick of an eyelash. So Bethie read for Mother and learned her numbers and leaned wistfully over the gate as the other children went by.
It wasn’t long after Bethie’s first day in school that I found a practical use for my difference. Dad sent me out to the woodshed to stack a cord of mesquite that Delfino dumped into our back yard from his old wood wagon. I had a date to explore an old fluorspar mine with some other guys and bitterly resented being sidetracked. I slouched out to the woodpile and stood, hands in pockets, kicking the heavy rough stove lengths. Finally I carried in one armload, grunting under the weight, and afterward sucking the round of my thumb where the sliding wood had peeled me. I hunkered down on my heels and stared as I sucked. Suddenly something prickled inside my brain. If I could fly why couldn’t I make the wood fly? And I knew I could! I leaned forward and flipped a finger under half a dozen sticks, concentrating as I did so. They lifted into the air and hovered. I pushed them into the shed, guided them to where I wanted them, and distributed them like dealing a pack of cards. It didn’t take me long to figure out the maximum load, and I had all the wood stacked in a wonderfully short time.
I whistled into the house for my flashlight. The mine was spooky and dark, and I was the only one of the gang with a flashlight.
“I told you to stack the wood.” Dad looked up from his milk records.
“I did,” I said, grinning.
“Cut the kidding,” Dad grunted. “You couldn’t be done already.”
“I am, though,” I said triumphantly. “I found a new way to do it. You see—” I stopped, frozen by Dad’s look.
“We don’t need any new ways around here,” he said evenly. “Go back out there until you’ve had time to stack the wood right!”
“It is stacked,” I protested. “And the kids are waiting for me!”
“I’m not arguing, son,” said Dad, white-faced. “Go back out to the shed.”
I went back out to the shed-past Mother, who had come in from the kitchen and whose hand half went out to me. I sat in the shed fuming for a long time, stubbornly set that I wouldn’t leave till Dad told me to.
Then I got to thinking. Dad wasn’t usually unreasonable like this. Maybe I’d done something wrong. Maybe it was bad to stack wood like that. Maybe—my thoughts wavered as I remembered whispers I’d overheard about Bethie. Maybe it—it was a crazy thing to do—an insane thing.
I huddled close upon myself as I considered it. Crazy means not doing like other people. Crazy means doing things ordinary people don’t do. Maybe that’s why Dad made such a fuss. Maybe I’d done an insane thing! I stared at the ground, lost in bewilderment. What was different about our family? And for the first time I was able to isolate and recognize the feeling I must have had for a long time—the feeling of being on the outside looking in—the feeling of apartness. With this recognition came a wariness, a need for concealment. If something were wrong, no one else must know—I must not betray...
Then Mother was standing beside me. “Dad says you may go now,” she said, sitting down on my log.
“Peter—” She looked at me unhappily. “Dad’s doing what is best. All I can say is: remember that whatever you do, wherever you live, different is dead. You have to conform or—or die. But Peter, don’t be ashamed. Don’t ever be ashamed!” Then swiftly her hands were on my shoulders and her lips brushed my ear. “Be different!” she whispered. “Be as different as you can. But don’t let anyone see—don’t let anyone know!” And she was gone up the back steps, into the kitchen.
As I grew further into adolescence I seemed to grow further and further away from kids my age. I couldn’t seem to get much of a kick out of what they considered fun. So it was that with increasing frequency in the years that followed I took Mother’s whispered advice, never asking for explanations I knew she wouldn’t give. The wood incident had opened up a whole vista of possibilities—no telling what I might be able to do—so I got in the habit of going down to the foot of our pasture lot. There, screened by the brush and greasewood, I tried all sorts of experiments, never knowing whether they would work or not. I sweated plenty over some that didn’t work—and some that did.
I found that I could snap my fingers and bring things to me, or send them short distances from me without bothering to touch them as I had the wood. I roosted regularly in the tops of the tall cottonwoods, swan-diving ecstatically down to the ground, warily, after I got too ecstatic once and crash-landed on my nose and chin. By headaching concentration that left me dizzy, I even set a small campfire ablaze. Then blistered and charred both hands unmercifully by confidently scooping up the crackling fire.
Then I guess I got careless about checking for onlookers because some nasty talk got started. Bub Jacobs whispered around that I was “doing things” all alone down in the brush. His sly grimace as he whispered made the “doing things” any nasty perversion the listeners’ imaginations could conjure up, and the “alone” damned me on the spot. I learned bitterly then what Mother had told me. Different is dead—and one death is never enough. You die and die and die.
Then one day I caught Bub cutting across the foot of our wood lot. He saw me coming and hit for tall timber, already smarting under what he knew he’d get if I caught him. I started full speed after him, then plowed to a stop. Why waste effort? If I could do it to the wood, I could do it to a blockhead like Bub.
He let out a scream of pure terror as the ground dropped out from under him. His scream flatted and strangled into silence as he struggled in midair, convulsed with fear of falling and the terrible thing that was happening to him. And I stood and laughed at him, feeling myself a giant towering above stupid dopes like Bub.
Sharply, before he passed out, I felt his terror, and an echo of his scream rose in my throat. I slumped down in the dirt, sick with sudden realization, knowing with a knowledge that went beyond ordinary experience that I had done something terribly wrong, that I had prostituted whatever powers I possessed by using them to terrorize unjustly.
I knelt and looked up at Bub, crumpled in the air, higher than my head, higher than my reach, and swallowed painfully as I realized that I had no idea how to get him down. He wasn’t a stick of wood to be snapped to the ground. He wasn’t me, to dive down through the air. I hadn’t the remotest idea how to get a human down.
Half dazed, I crawled over to a shaft of sunlight that slit the cottonwood branches overhead and felt it rush through my fingers like something to be lifted—and twisted—and fashioned and used! Used on Bub! But how? How? I clenched my fist in the flood of light, my mind beating against another door that needed only a word or look or gesture to open, but I couldn’t say it, or look it, or make it.
I stood up and took a deep breath. I jumped, batting at Bub’s heels that dangled a little lower than the rest of him. I missed. Again I jumped and the tip of one finger flicked his heel and he moved sluggishly in the air. Then I swiped the back of my hand across my sweaty forehead and laughed—laughed at my stupid self.
Cautiously, because I hadn’t done much hovering, mostly just up and down, I lifted myself up level with Bub. I put my hands on him and pushed down hard. He didn’t move.
&nb
sp; I tugged him up and he rose with me. I drifted slowly and deliberately away from him and pondered. Then I got on the other side of him and pushed him toward the branches of the cottonwood. His head was beginning to toss and his lips moved with returning consciousness. He drifted through the air like a waterlogged stump, but he moved and I draped him carefully over a big limb near the top of the tree, anchoring his arms and legs as securely as I could. By the time his eyes opened and he clutched frenziedly for support, I was standing down at the foot of the tree, yelling up at him.
“Hang on, Bub! I’ll go get someone to help you down!”
So for the next week or so people forgot me, and Bub squirmed under “Who treed you, feller?” and “How’s the weather up there?” and “Get a ladder, Bub, get a ladder!”
Even with worries like that it was mostly fun for me. Why couldn’t it be like that for Bethie? Why couldn’t I give her part of my fun and take part of her pain?
Then Dad died, swept out of life by our Rio Gordo as he tried to rescue a fool Easterner who had camped on the bone-dry white sands of the river bottom in cloudburst weather. Somehow it seemed impossible to think of Mother by herself. It had always been Mother and Dad. Not just two parents but Mother-and-Dad, a single entity. And now our thoughts must limp to Mother—and, Mother—and. And Mother—well, half of her was gone.
After the funeral Mother and Bethie and I sat in our front room, looking at the floor. Bethie was clenching her teeth against the stabbing pain of Mother’s fingernails gouging Mother’s palms.
I unfolded the clenched hands gently and Bethie relaxed.
“Mother,” I said softly, “I can take care of us. I have my part-time job at the plant. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of us.”
I knew what a trivial thing I was offering to her anguish, but I had to do something to break through to her.
“Thank you, Peter,” Mother said, rousing a little. “I know you will—” She bowed her head and pressed both hands to her dry eyes with restrained desperation. “Oh, Peter, Peter! I’m enough of this world now to find death a despair and desolation instead of the solemnly sweet calling it is. Help me, help me!” Her breath labored in her throat and she groped blindly for my hand.
“If I can, Mother,” I said, taking one hand as Bethie took the other. “Then help me remember. Remember with me.”
And behind my closed eyes I remembered. Unhampered flight through a starry night, a flight of a thousand happy people like birds in the sky, rushing to meet the dawn—the dawn of the Festival. I could smell the flowers that garlanded the women and feel the quiet exultation that went with the Festival dawn. Then the leader sounded the magnificent opening notes of the Festival song as he caught the first glimpse of the rising sun over the heavily wooded hills. A thousand voices took up the song. A thousand hands lifted in the Sign....
I opened my eyes to find my own fingers lifted to trace a sign I did not know. My own throat throbbed to a note I had never sung. I took a deep breath and glanced over at Bethie. She met my eyes and shook her head sadly. She hadn’t seen. Mother sat quietly, eyes closed, her face cleared and calmed.
“What was it, Mother?” I whispered.
“The Festival,” she said softly. “For all those who had been called during the year. For your father, Peter and Bethie. We remembered it for your father.”
“Where was it?” I asked. “Where in the world—?”
“Not in this—” Mother’s eyes flicked open. “It doesn’t matter, Peter. You are of this world. There is no other for you.”
“Mother,” Bethie’s voice was a hesitant murmur, “what do you mean, ‘remember’?”
Mother looked at her and tears swelled into her dry burned-out eyes.
“Oh, Bethie, Bethie, all the burdens and none of the blessings! I’m sorry, Bethie, I’m sorry.” And she fled down the hall to her room.
Bethie stood close against my side as we looked after Mother.
“Peter,” she murmured, “what did Mother mean, ‘none of the blessings’?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I’ll bet it’s because I can’t fly like you.”
“Fly!” My startled eyes went to hers. “How do you know?”
“I know lots of things,” she whispered. “But mostly I know we’re different. Other people aren’t like us. Peter, what made us different?”
“Mother?” I whispered. “Mother?”
“I guess so,” Bethie murmured. “But how come?”
We fell silent and then Bethie went to the window, where the late sun haloed her silvery blond hair in fire.
“I can do things, too,” she whispered. “Look.”
She reached out and took a handful of sun, the same sort of golden sun-slant that had flowed so heavily through my fingers under the cottonwoods while Bub dangled above me. With flashing fingers she fashioned the sun into an intricate glowing pattern. “But what’s it for?” she murmured, “except for pretty?”
“I know,” I said, looking at my answer for lowering Bub. “I know, Bethie.” And I took the pattern from her. It strained between my fingers and flowed into darkness.
The years that followed were casual uneventful years. I finished high school, but college was out of the question. I went to work in the plant that provided work for most of the employables in Socorro.
Mother built up quite a reputation as a midwife—a very necessary calling in a community which took literally the injunction to multiply and replenish the earth and which lay exactly seventy-five miles from a hospital, no matter which way you turned when you got to the highway. Bethie was in her teens and with Mother’s help was learning to control her visible reactions to the pain of others, but I knew she still suffered as much as, if not more than, she had when she was smaller. But she was able to go to school most of the time now and was becoming fairly popular in spite of her quietness.
So all in all we were getting along quite comfortably and quite ordinarily except—well, I always felt as though I were waiting for something to happen or for someone to come. And Bethie must have, too, because she actually watched and listened—especially after a particularly bad spell. And even Mother. Sometimes as we sat on the porch in the long evenings she would cock her head and listen intently, her rocking chair still. But when we asked what she heard, she’d sigh and say, “Nothing. Just the night.” And her chair would rock again.
Of course I still indulged my differences. Not with the white fire of possible discovery that they had kindled when I first began, but more like the feeding of a small flame just “for pretty.” I went farther afield now for my “holidays,” but Bethie went with me. She got a big kick out of our excursions, especially after I found that I could carry her when I flew, and most especially after we found, by means of a heart-stopping accident, that though she couldn’t go up she could control her going down. After that it was her pleasure to have me carry her up as far as I could and she would come down, sometimes taking an hour to make the descent, often weaving about her the intricate splendor of her sunshine patterns.
It was a rustling russet day in October when our world ended—again. We talked and laughed over the breakfast table, teasing Bethie about her date the night before. Color was high in her usually pale cheeks, and, with all the laughter and brightness, the tingle of fall, everything just felt good.
But between one joke and another the laughter drained out of Bethie’s face and the pinched set look came to her lips.
“Mother!” she whispered, and then she relaxed.
“Already?” asked Mother, rising and finishing her coffee as I went to get her coat. “I had a hunch today would be the day. Reena would ride that jeep up Peppersauce Canyon this dose to her time.”
I helped her on with her coat and hugged her tight.
“Bless-a-mama,” I said, “when are you going to retire and let someone else snatch the fall and spring crops of kids?”
“When I snatch a grandchild or so for myself,” she said, joking, but I felt he
r sadness. “Besides she’s going to name this one Peter—or Bethie, as the case may be.” She reached for her little black bag and looked at Bethie. “No more yet?”
Bethie smiled. “No,” she murmured.
“Then I’ve got plenty of time. Peter, you’d better take Bethie for a holiday. Reena takes her own sweet time and being just across the road makes it bad on Bethie.”
“Okay, Mother,” I said. “We planned one anyway, but we hoped this time you’d go with us.”
Mother looked at me, hesitated, and turned aside. “I—I might sometime.”
“Mother! Really?” This was the first hesitation from Mother in all the times we’d asked her.
“Well, you’ve asked me so many times and I’ve been wondering. Wondering if it’s fair to deny our birthright. After all, there’s nothing wrong in being of the People.”
“What people, Mother?” I pressed. “Where are you from? Why can we—?”
“Some other time, son,” Mother said. “Maybe soon. These last few months I’ve begun to sense—yes, it wouldn’t hurt you to know even if nothing could ever come of it; and perhaps soon something can come, and you will have to know. But no,” she chided as we clung to her. “There’s no time now. Reena might fool us after all and produce before I get there. You kids scoot, now!”
We looked back as the pickup roared across the highway and headed for Mendigo’s Peak. Mother answered our wave and went in the gate of Reena’s yard, where Dalt, in spite of this being their sixth, was running like an anxious puppy dog from Mother to the porch and back again.
It was a day of perfection for us. The relaxation of flight for me, the delight of hovering for Bethie, the frosted glory of the burning-blue sky, the russet and gold of grasslands stretching for endless miles down from the snow-flecked blue and gold Mendigo.
At lunchtime we lolled in the pleasant warmth of our favorite baby box canyon that held the sun and shut out the wind. After we ate we played our favorite game, Remembering. It began with my clearing my mind so that it lay as quiet as a hidden pool of water, as receptive as the pool to every pattern the slightest breeze might start quivering across its surface.
Ingathering Page 7
