Then the memories would come—strange un-Earthlike memories that were like those Mother and I had had when Dad died. Bethie could not remember with me, but she seemed to catch the memories from me almost before the words could form in my mouth.
So this last lovely “holiday” we remembered again our favorite. We walked the darkly gleaming waters of a mountain lake, curling our toes in the liquid coolness, loving the tilt and sway of the waves beneath our feet, feeling around us from shore and sky a dear familiarity that was stronger than any Earth ties we had yet formed.
Before we knew it the long lazy afternoon had fled and we shivered in the sudden chill as the sun dropped westward, nearing the peaks of the Huachucas. We packed the remains of our picnic in the basket, and I turned to Bethie, to lift her and carry her back to the pickup.
She was smiling her soft little secret smile.
“Look, Peter,” she murmured. And flicking her fingers over her head, she shook out a cloud of snowflakes, gigantic whirling tumbling snowflakes that clung feather-soft to her pale hair and melted, glistening, across her warm cheeks and mischievous smile.
“Early winter, Peter!” she said.
“Early winter, punkin!” I cried, and snatching her up, boosted her out of the little canyon and jumped over her, clearing the boulders she had to scramble over. “For that you walk, young lady!”
But she almost beat me to the car anyway. For one who couldn’t fly she was learning to run awfully light.
Twilight had fallen before we got back to the highway. We could see the headlights of the scurrying cars that seldom even slowed down for Socorro. “So this is Socorro, wasn’t it?” was the way most traffic went through.
We had topped the last rise before the highway when Bethie screamed. I almost lost control of the car on the rutty road. She screamed again, a wild tortured cry as she folded in on herself.
“Bethie!” I called, trying to get through to her. “What is it? Where is it? Where can I take you?”
But her third scream broke off short and she slid limply to the floor. I was terrified. She hadn’t reacted like this in years. She had never fainted like this before. Could it be that Reena hadn’t had her child yet? That she was in such agony—but even when Mrs. Allbeg had died in childbirth Bethie hadn’t—I lifted Bethie to the seat and drove wildly homeward, praying that Mother would be...
And then I saw it. In front of our house. The big car skewed across the road. The kneeling cluster of people on the pavement.
The next thing I knew I was kneeling, too, beside Dr. Dueff, clutching the edge of the blanket that mercifully covered Mother from chin to toes. I lifted a trembling hand to the dark trickle of blood that threaded crookedly down from her forehead.
“Mother,” I whispered. “Mother!”
Her eyelids fluttered and she looked up blindly. “Peter.” I could hardly hear her. “Peter, where’s Bethie?”
“She fainted. She’s in the car,” I faltered. “Oh, Mother!”
“Tell the doctor to go to Bethie.”
“But, Mother!” I cried. “You—”
“I am not called yet. Go to Bethie.”
We knelt by her bedside, Bethie and I. The doctor was gone. There was no use trying to get Mother to a hospital. Just moving her indoors had started a dark oozing from the corner of her mouth. The neighbors were all gone except Gramma Reuther, who always came to troubled homes and had folded the hands of the dead in Socorro from the founding of the town. She sat now in the front room holding her worn Bible in quiet hands, after all these years no longer needing to look up the passages of comfort and assurance.
The doctor had quieted the pain for Mother and had urged sleep upon Bethie, not knowing how long the easing would last, but Bethie wouldn’t take it.
Suddenly Mother’s eyes were open.
“I married your father,” she said clearly, as though continuing a conversation. “We loved each other so, and they were all dead—all my People. Of course I told him first, and oh, Peter! He believed me! After all that time of having to guard every word and every move I had someone to talk to—someone to believe me. I told him all about the People and lifted myself and then I lifted the car and turned it in mid-air above the highway—just for fun. It pleased him a lot but it made him thoughtful and later he said, ‘You know, honey, your world and ours took different turns way back there. We turned to gadgets. You turned to the Power.’ ” Her eyes smiled. “He got so he knew when I was lonesome for the Home. Once he said, ‘Homesick, honey? So am I. For what this world could have been. Or maybe—God willing—what it may become.’ “Your father was the other half of me.” Her eyes closed, and in the silence her breath became audible, a harsh straining sound. Bethie crouched with both hands pressed to her chest, her face dead white in the shadows.
“We discussed it and discussed it,” Mother cried. “But we had to decide as we did. We thought I was the last of the People. I had to forget the Home and be of Earth. You children had to be of Earth, too, even if—That’s why he was so stern with you, Peter. Why he didn’t want you to—experiment. He was afraid you’d do too much around other people if you found out—” She stopped and lay panting. “Different is dead,” she whispered, and lay scarcely breathing for a moment.
“I knew the Home.” Her voice was heavy with sorrow. “I remember the Home. Not just because my People remembered it but because I saw it. I was born there. It’s gone now. Gone forever. There is no Home. Only a band of dust between the stars!” Her face twisted with grief and Bethie echoed her cry of pain.
Then Mother’s face cleared and her eyes opened. She half propped herself up in her bed.
“You have the Home, too. You and Bethie. You will have it always.
And your children after you. Remember, Peter? Remember?”
Then her head tilted attentively and she gave a laughing sob. “Oh, Peter! Oh, Bethie! Did you hear it? I’ve been called! I’ve been called!” Her hand lifted in the Sign and her lips moved tenderly.
“Mother!” I cried fearfully. “What do you mean? Lie down. Please lie down!” I pressed her back against the pillows.
“I’ve been called back to the Presence. My years are finished. My days are totaled.”
“But, Mother,” I blubbered like a child, “what will we do without you?”
“Listen!” Mother whispered rapidly, one hand pressed to my hair. “You must find the rest. You must go right away. They can help Bethie. They can help you, Peter. As long as you are separated from them you are not complete. I have felt them calling the last year or so, and now that I am on the way to the Presence I can hear them dearer, and clearer.” She paused and held her breath. “There is a canyon—north. The ship crashed there, after our life slips—here, Peter, give me your hand.” She reached urgently toward me and I cradled her hand in mine.
And I saw half the state spread out below me like a giant map. I saw the wrinkled folds of the mountains, the deceptively smooth roll of the desert up to the jagged slopes. I saw the blur of timber blunting the hills and I saw the angular writhing of the narrow road through the passes. Then I felt a sharp pleasurable twinge, like the one you feel when seeing home after being away a long time.
“There!” Mother whispered as the panorama faded. “I wish I could have known before. It’s been lonely—
“But you, Peter,” she said strongly. “You and Bethie must go to them.”
“Why should we, Mother?” I cried in desperation. “What are they to us or we to them that we should leave Socorro and go among strangers?”
Mother pulled herself up in bed, her eyes intent on my face. She wavered a moment and then Bethie was crouched behind her, steadying her back.
“They are not strangers,” she said clearly and slowly. “They are the People. We shared the ship with them during the Crossing. They were with us when we were out in the middle of emptiness with only the fading of stars behind and the brightening before to tell us we were moving. They, with us, looked at all the bright frosti
ng of stars across the blackness, wondering if on one of them we would find a welcome.
“You are woven of their fabric. Even though your father was not of the People—”
Her voice died, her face changed. Bethie moved from in back of her and lowered her gently. Mother clasped her hands and sighed.
“It’s a lonely business,” she whispered. “No one can go with you. Even with them waiting it’s lonely.”
In the silence that followed we heard Gramma Reuther rocking quietly in the front room. Bethie sat on the floor beside me, her cheeks flushed, her eyes wide with a strange dark awe.
“Peter, it didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt at all. It—healed!”
But we didn’t go. How could we leave my job and our home and go off to—where? Looking for—whom? Because—why? It was mostly me, I guess, but I couldn’t quite believe what Mother had told us. After all, she hadn’t said anything definite. We were probably reading meaning where it didn’t exist. Bethie returned again and again to the puzzle of Mother and what she had meant, but we didn’t go.
And Bethie got paler and thinner, and it was nearly a year later that I came home to find her curled into an impossibly tight ball on her bed, her eyes tight shut, snatching at breath that came out again in sharp moans.
I nearly went crazy before I at last got through to her and uncurled her enough to get hold of one of her hands. Finally, though, she opened dull dazed eyes and looked past me.
“Like a dam, Peter,” she gasped. “It all comes in. It should—it should! I was born to—” I wiped the cold sweat from her forehead. “But it just piles up and piles up. It’s supposed to go somewhere. I’m supposed to do something! Peter Peter Peter!” She twisted on the bed, her distorted face pushing into the pillow.
“What does, Bethie?” I asked, turning her face to mine. “What does?”
“Glib’s foot and Dad’s side and Mr. Tyree-next-door’s toe—” and her voice faded down through the litany of years of agony.
“I’ll go get Dr. Dueff,” I said hopelessly.
“No.” She turned her face away. “Why build the dam higher? Let it break. Oh, soon soon!”
“Bethie, don’t talk like that,” I said, feeling inside me my terrible aloneness that only Bethie could fend off now that Mother was gone. “We’ll find something—some way—”
“Mother could help,” she gasped. “A little. But she’s gone. And now I’m picking up mental pain, too! Reena’s afraid she’s got cancer. Oh, Peter Peter!” Her voice strained to a whisper. “Let me die! Help me die!”
Both of us were shocked to silence by her words. Help her die? I leaned against her hand. Go back into the Presence with the weight of unfinished years dragging at our feet? For if she went I went, too.
Then my eyes flew open and I stared at Bethie’s hand. What Presence? Whose ethics and mores were talking in my mind?
And so I had to decide. I talked Bethie into a sleeping pill and sat by her even after she was asleep. And as I sat there all the past years wound through my head. The way it must have been for Bethie all this time and I hadn’t let myself know.
Just before dawn I woke Bethie. We packed and went. I left a note on the kitchen table for Dr. Dueff saying only that we were going to look for help for Bethie and would he ask Reena to see to the house. And thanks.
I slowed the pickup over to the side of the junction and slammed the brakes on.
“Okay,” I said hopelessly. “You choose which way this time. Or shall we toss for it? Heads straight up, tails straight down! I can’t tell where to go, Bethie. I had only that one little glimpse that Mother gave me of this country. There’s a million canyons and a million side roads. We were fools to leave Socorro. After all, we have nothing to go on but what Mother said. It might have been delirium.”
“No,” Bethie murmured. “It can’t be. It’s got to be real.”
“But, Bethie,” I said, leaning my weary head on the steering wheel, “you know how much I want it to be true, not only for you but for myself, too. But look. What do we have to assume if Mother was right? First, that space travel is possible—was possible nearly fifty years ago. Second, that Mother and her People came here from another planet. Third, that we are, bluntly speaking, half-breeds, a cross between Earth and heaven knows what world. Fourth, that there’s a chance in ten million of our finding the other People who came at the same time Mother did, presupposing that any of them survived the Crossing.
“Why, any one of these premises would brand us as crazy crackpots to any normal person. No, we’re building too much on a dream and a hope. Let’s go back, Bethie. We’ve got just enough gas money along to make it. Let’s give it up.”
“And go back to what?” Bethie asked, her face pinched. “No, Peter. Here.” I looked up as she handed me one of her sunlight patterns, a handful of brilliance that twisted briefly in my fingers before it flickered out.
“Is that Earth?” she asked quietly. “How many of our friends can fly? How many—” she hesitated, “how many can Remember?”
“Remember!” I said slowly, and then I whacked the steering wheel with my fist. “Oh, Bethie, of all the stupid—! Why, it’s Bub all over again!”
I kicked the pickup into life and turned on the first faint desert trail beyond the junction. I pulled off even that suggestion of a trail and headed across the nearly naked desert toward a clump of ironwood, mesquite, and catclaw that marked a sand wash against the foothills. With the westering sun making shadow lace through the thin foliage, we made camp.
I lay on my back in the wash and looked deep into the arch of the desert sky. The trees made a typical desert pattern of warmth and coolness on me, warm in the sun, cool in the shadow, as I let my mind clear smoother, smoother, until the soft intake of Bethie’s breath as she sat beside me sent a bright ripple across it.
And I remembered. But only Mother-and-Dad and the little campfire I had gathered up, and Glib with the trap on his foot and Bethie curled, face to knees on the bed, and the thin crying sound of her labored breath.
I blinked at the sky. I had to Remember. I just had to. I shut my eyes and concentrated and concentrated, until I was exhausted. Nothing came now, not even a hint of memory. In despair I relaxed, limp against the chilling sand. And all at once unaccustomed gears shifted and slipped into place in my mind and there I was, just as I had been, hovering over the life-sized map.
Slowly and painfully I located Socorro and the thin thread that marked the Rio Gordo. I followed it and lost it and followed it again, the finger of my attention pressing close. Then I located Vulcan Springs Valley and traced its broad rolling to the upsweep of the desert, to the Sierra Cobreña Mountains. It was an eerie sensation to look down on the infinitesimal groove that must be where I was lying now. Then I hand-spanned my thinking around our camp spot. Nothing. I probed farther north, and east, and north again. I drew a deep breath and exhaled it shakily. There it was. The Home twinge. The call of familiarity.
I read it off to Bethie. The high thrust of a mountain that pushed up baldly past its timber, the huge tailings dump across the range from the mountain. The casual wreathing of smoke from what must be a logging town, all forming sides of a slender triangle. Somewhere in this area was the place.
I opened my eyes to find Bethie in tears.
“Why, Bethie!” I said. “What’s wrong? Aren’t you glad—?”
Bethie tried to smile but her lips quivered. She hid her face in the crook of her elbow and whispered, “I saw, too! Oh, Peter, this time I saw, too!”
We got out the road map and by the fading afternoon light we tried to translate our rememberings. As nearly as we could figure out, we should head for a place way off the highway called Kerry Canyon. It was apparently the only inhabited spot anywhere near the big bald mountain. I looked at the little black dot in the kink in the third-rate road and wondered if it would turn out to be a period to all our hopes or the point for the beginning of new lives for the two of us. Life and sanity for Bethie, and for me...
In a sudden spasm of emotion I crumpled the map in my hand. I felt blindly that in all my life I had never known anyone but Mother and Dad and Bethie. That I was a ghost walking the world. If only I could see even one other person that felt like our kind! Just to know that Bethie and I weren’t all alone with our unearthly heritage!
I smoothed out the map and folded it again. Night was on us and the wind was cold. We shivered as we scurried around looking for wood for our campfire.
Kerry Canyon was one business street, two service stations, two saloons, two stores, two churches, and a handful of houses flung at random over the hillsides that sloped down to an area that looked too small to accommodate the road. A creek, which was now thinned to an intermittent trickle that loitered along, waited for the fall rains to begin. A sudden speckling across our windshield suggested it hadn’t long to wait.
We rattled over the old bridge and half through the town. The road swung up sharply over a rusty single-line railroad and turned left, shying away from the bluff that was hollowed just enough to accommodate one of the service stations.
We pulled into the station. The uniformed attendant came alongside.
“We just want some information,” I said, conscious of the thinness of my billfold. We had picked up our last tankful of gas before plunging into the maze of canyons between the main highway and here. Our stopping place would have to be soon whether we found the People or not.
“Sure! Sure! Glad to oblige.” The attendant pushed his cap back from his forehead. “How can I help you?”
I hesitated, trying to gather my thoughts and words—and some of the hope that had jolted out of me since we had left the junction. “We’re trying to locate some-friends-of ours. We were told they lived out the other side of here, out by Baldy. Is there anyone—?”
“Friends of them people?” he asked in astonishment. “Well, say now, that’s interesting! You’re the first I ever had come asking after them.”
Ingathering Page 8
