Ingathering

by Zenna Henderson

  “I could promise not to breathe, too,” I retorted.

  “But this is insanity—you know it is! Anyone knows it is!”

  “Insane or not, it’s me!” I screamed silently. “It’s me! It’s me!”

  “Stop your arguing,” another of me said. “This is too serious for bickering. We’ve got problems.”

  I took a dry manzanita twig and cleared a tiny space on the gravelly ground, scratching up an old square nail and a tiny bit of sun-purpled glass as I did so. Shifting the twig to my other hand, I picked up the nail and rubbed the dirt off with my thumb. It was pitted with rust but still strong and heavy. I wondered what it had held together back in those days, and if the hand that last held it was dust now, and if whoever it was had had burdens...

  I cast the twig from me with controlled violence and, rocking myself forward, I made a straight mark on the cleared ground with the nail. This was a drearily familiar inventory, and I had taken it so many times before, trying to simplify this complicated problem of mine, that I fell automatically into the same old pattern.

  Item one. Was I really insane—or going insane—or on the way to going insane? It must be so. Other people didn’t see sounds. Nor taste colors. Nor feel the pulsing of other people’s emotions like living things. Nor find the weight of flesh so like a galling straitjacket. Nor more than half believe that the burden was lay-downable short of death.

  “But then,” I defended, “I’m still functioning in society and I don’t drool or foam at the mouth. I don’t act very crazy, and as long as I guard my tongue I don’t sound crazy.”

  I pondered the item awhile, then scribbled out the mark. “I guess I’m still sane—so far.”

  Item two. “Then what’s wrong with me? Do I just let my imagination run away with me?” I jabbed holes all around my second heavy mark. No, it was something more, something beyond just imagination, something beyond—what?

  I crossed that marking with another to make an X.

  “What shall I do about it then? Shall I fight it out like I did before? Shall I deny and deny and deny until—” I felt a cold grue, remembering the blind panic that had finally sent me running until I had ended up at Kruper, and all the laughter went out of me, clear to the bottom of my soul.

  I crosshatched the two marks out of existence and hid my eyes against my knees again and waited for the sick up-gushing of apprehension to foam into despair over my head. Always it came to this. Did I want to do anything about it? Should I stop it all with an act of will? Could I stop it all by an act of will? Did I want to stop it?

  I scrambled to my feet and scurried around the huge stack, looking for the entrance. My feet cried, No no! on the sliding gravel. Every panting breath cried, No no! as I slipped and slithered around the steep hill. I ducked into the shadowy interior of the huge chimney and pressed myself against the blackened crumbling bricks, every tense muscle shouting, No no! And in the wind-shuddery silence I cried, “No!” and heard it echo up through the blackness above me. I could almost see the word shoot up through the pale elliptical disk of the sky at the top of the stack.

  “Because I could!” I shrieked defiantly inside me. “If I weren’t afraid I could follow that word right on up and erupt into the sky like a Roman candle and never, never, never feel the weight of the world again!”

  But the heavy drag of reason grabbed my knees and elbows and rubbed my nose forcibly into things-as-they-really-are, and I sobbed impotently against the roughness of the curving wall. The sting of salty wetness across my cheek shocked me out of rebellion.

  Crying? Wailing against a dirty old smelter wall because of a dream? Fine goings on for a responsible pedagogue!

  I scrubbed at my cheeks with a Kleenex and smiled at the grime that came off. I’d best get back to the hotel and get my face washed before eating the inevitable garlicky supper I’d smelled on my way out.

  I stumbled out into the red flood of sunset and down the thread of a path I had ignored when coming up. I hurried down into the duskiness of the cottonwood thicket along the creek at the bottom of the hill. Here, where no eyes could see, no tongues could clack at such undignified behavior, I broke into a run, a blind headlong run, pretending that I could run away—just away! Maybe with salty enough tears and fast enough running I could buy a dreamless night.

  I rounded the turn where the pinky-gray granite boulder indented the path—and reeled under a sudden blow. I had run full tilt into someone. Quicker than I could focus my eyes, I was grabbed and set on my feet. Before I could see past a blur of tears from my smarting nose, I was alone in the dusk.

  I mopped my nose tenderly. “Well,” I said aloud, “that’s one way to knock the nonsense out of me.” Then immediately began to wonder if it was a sign of unbalance to talk aloud to yourself.

  I looked back uphill when I came out of the shadow of the trees. The smelter stack was dark against the sky, massive above the remnants of the works. It was beautiful in a stark way, and I paused to enjoy it briefly. Suddenly there was another darkness up there. Someone had rounded the stack and stood silhouetted against the lighter horizon.

  I wondered if the sound of my sorrow was still echoing up the stack, and then I turned shamefaced away. Whoever it was up there had more sense than to listen for the sounds of old sorrows.

  That night, in spite of my outburst of the afternoon, I barely slipped under the thin skin of sleep and, for endless ages, clutched hopelessly for something to pull me down into complete forgetfulness. Then despairingly I felt the familiar tug and pull and, hopelessly, eagerly, slipped headlong into my dream that I had managed to suppress for so long.

  There are no words—there are no words anywhere for my dream. Only the welling of delight, the stretching of my soul, the boundless freedom, the warm belongingness. And I held the dearness close to me—oh, so close to me!—knowing that awakening must come...

  And it did, smashing me down, forcing me into flesh, binding me leadenly to the earth, squeezing out the delight, cramping my soul back into finiteness, snapping bars across my sky and stranding me in the thin watery glow of morning so alone again that the effort of opening my eyes was almost too much to be borne.

  Lying rigidly under the press of the covers, I gathered up all the tatters of my dream and packed them tightly into a hard little knot way back of my consciousness. “Stay there. Stay there,” I pleaded. “Oh, stay there!”

  Forcing myself to breakfast, I came warily into the dining room at the hotel. As the only female-type woman guest in the hotel, I was somewhat disconcerted to walk into the place when it was full and to have every hand pause and every jaw still itself until I found my way to the only empty seat, and then to hear the concerted return to eating, as though on cue. But I was later this morning, and the place was nearly empty.

  “How was the old stack?” Half of Marie’s mouth grinned as she pushed a plate of hotcakes under my nose and let go of it six inches above the table. I controlled my wince as it crashed to the table, but I couldn’t completely ignore the sooty thumbprint etched in the grease on the rim. Marie took the stiffly filthy rag she had hanging as usual from her apron pocket, and smeared the print around until I at least couldn’t see the whorls and ridges any more.

  “It was interesting,” I said, not bothering to wonder how she knew I’d been there. “Kruper must have been quite a town when the smelter was going full blast.”

  “Long’s I’ve been here it’s been dyin’,” Marie said. “Been here thirty-five years next February and I ain’t never been up to the stack. I ain’t lost nothing up there!”

  She laughed soundlessly but gustily. I held my breath until the garlic went by. “But I hear there’s some girls that’s gone up there and lost—”

  “Marie!” Old Charlie bellowed from across the table. “Cut out the chatter and bring me some grub. If teacher wants to climb up that dadang stack leave her be. Maybe she likes it!”

  “Crazy way to waste time,” Marie muttered, teetering out to the kitchen, balancin
g her gross body on impossibly spindly legs.

  “Don’t mind her,” Old Charlie bellowed. “Only thing she thinks is fun is beer. Why, lots of people like to go look at worthless stuff like that. Take—well—take Lowmanigh here. He was up there only yesterday—”

  “Yesterday?” My lifted brows underlined my question as I looked across the table. It was one of the fellows I hadn’t noticed before. His name had probably been thrown at me with the rest of them by Old Charlie on my first night there, but I had lost all the names except Old Charlie and Severeid Swanson, which was the name attached to a wavery fragile-looking Mexicano, with no English at all, who seemed to subsist mostly on garlic and vino and who always blinked four times when I smiled at him.

  “Yes.” Lowmanigh looked across the table at me, no smile softening his single word. My heart caught as I saw across his cheek the familiar pale quietness of chill-of-soul. I knew the look well. It had been on my own face that morning before I had made my truce with the day.

  He must have read something in my eyes, because his face shuttered itself quickly into a noncommittal expression and, with a visible effort, he added, “I watched the sunset from there.”

  “Oh?” My hand went thoughtfully to my nose.

  “Sunsets!” Marie was back with the semiliquid she called coffee. “More crazy stuff. Why waste good time?”

  “What do you spend your time on?” Lowmanigh’s voice was very soft.

  Marie’s mind leaped like a startled bird. “Waiting to die!” it cried.

  “Beer,” she said aloud, half of her face smiling. “Four beers equal one sunset.” She dropped the coffeepot on the table and went back to the kitchen, leaving a clean, sharp, almost visible pain behind her as she went.

  “You two oughta get together,” Old Charlie boomed. “Liking the same things like you do. Low here knows more junk heaps and rubbish dumps than anybody else in the county. He collects ghost towns.”

  “I like ghost towns,” I said to Charlie, trying to fill a vast conversational vacancy. “I have quite a collection of them myself.”

  “See, Low!” he boomed. “Here’s your chance to squire a pretty schoolmarm around. Together you two oughta be able to collect up a storm!” He choked on his pleasantry and his last gulp of coffee and left the room, whooping loudly into a blue bandanna.

  We were all alone in the big dining room. The early-morning sun skidded across the polished hardwood floor, stumbled against the battered kitchen chairs, careened into the huge ornate mirror above the buffet, and sprayed brightly from it over the cracked oilcloth covering on the enormous oak table.

  The silence grew and grew until I put my fork down, afraid to click it against my plate any more. I sat for half a minute, suspended in astonishment, feeling the deep throbbing of a pulse that slowly welled up into almost audibility, questioning, “Together? Together? Together?” The beat broke on the sharp edge of a wave of desolation, and I stumbled blindly out of the room.

  “No!” I breathed as I leaned against the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. “Not involuntarily! Not so early in the day!”

  With an effort I pulled myself together. “Cut out this cotton-pickin’ nonsense!” I told myself. “You’re enough to drive anybody crazy!”

  Resolutely I started up the steps, only to pause, foot suspended, halfway up. “That wasn’t my desolation,” I cried silently. “It was his!”

  “How odd,” I thought when I wakened at two o’clock in the morning, remembering the desolation.

  “How odd!” I thought when I wakened at three, remembering the pulsing “Together?”

  “How very odd,” I thought when I wakened at seven and slid heavy-eyed out of bed—having forgotten completely what Lowmanigh looked like, but holding wonderingly in my consciousness a better-than-three-dimensional memory of him.

  School kept me busy all the next week, busy enough that the old familiar ache was buried almost deep enough to be forgotten. The smoothness of the week was unruffled until Friday, when the week’s restlessness erupted on the playground twice. The first time I had to go out and peel Esperanza off Joseph and pry her fingers out of his hair so he could get his snub nose up out of the gravel. Esperanza had none of her Uncle Severeid’s fragility and waveriness as she defiantly slapped the dust from her heavy dark braid.

  “He calls me Mexican!” she cried. “So what? I’m Mexican. I’m proud to be Mexican. I hit him some more if he calls me Mexican like a bad word again. I’m proud to be—”

  “Of course you’re proud,” I said, helping her dust herself off. “God made us all. What do different names matter?”

  “Joseph!” I startled him by swinging around to him suddenly. “Are you a girl?”

  “Huh?” He blinked blankly with dusty lashes, then, indignantly: “ ’Course not! I’m a boy!”

  “Josephs a boy! Joseph’s a boy!” I taunted. Then I laughed. “See how silly that sounds? We are what we are. How silly to tease about something like that. Both of you go wash the dirt off.” I spatted both of them off toward the schoolhouse and sighed as I watched them go.

  The second time the calm was interrupted when the ancient malicious chanting sound of teasing pulled me out on the playground again.

  “Lu-cine is crazy! Lu-cine is crazy! Lu-cine is crazy!”

  The dancing taunting group circled twelve-year-old Lucine where she stood backed against the one drooping tree that still survived on our playground. Her eyes were flat and shallow above her gaping mouth, but smoky flames were beginning to flicker in the shallowness and her muscles were tightening.

  “Lucine!” I cried, fear winging my feet. “Lucine!”

  I sent me ahead of myself and caught at the ponderous murderous massiveness of her mind. Barely I slowed her until I could get to her.

  “Stop it!” I shrieked at the children. “Get away, quick!”

  My voice pierced through the mob-mind, and the group dissolved into frightened individuals. I caught both of Lucine’s hands and for a tense moment had them secure. Then she bellowed, a peculiarly animal-like bellow, and with one flip of her arm sent me flying.

  In a wild flurry I was swept up almost bodily, it seemed, into the irrational delirium of her anger and bewilderment. I was lost in the mazes of unreasoning thoughts and frightening dead ends, and to this day I can’t remember what happened physically.

  When the red tide ebbed and the bleak gray click-off period came, I was hunched against the old tree with Lucine’s head on my lap, her mouth lax and wet against my hand, her flooding quiet tears staining my skirt, the length of her body very young and very tired.

  Her lips moved.

  “Ain’t crazy.”

  “No,” I said, smoothing her ruffled hair, wondering at the angry oozing scratch on the back of my hand. “No, Lucine. I know.”

  “He does, too,” Lucine muttered. “He makes it almost straight but it bends again.”

  “Oh?” I said soothingly, hunching my shoulder to cover its bareness with my torn blouse sleeve. “Who does?”

  Her head tensed under my hand, and her withdrawal was as tangible as the throb of a rabbit trying to escape restricting hands. “He said don’t tell.”

  I let the pressure of my hand soothe her and I looked down at her ravaged face. “Me,” I thought. “Me with the outside peeled off. I’m crippled inside in my way as surely as she is in hers, only my crippling passes for normal. I wish I could click off sometimes and not dream of living without a limp—sweet impossible dream.”

  There was a long moist intake of breath, and Lucine sat up. She looked at me with her flat incurious eyes.

  “Your face is dirty,” she said. “Teachers don’t got dirty faces.”

  “That’s right.” I got up stiffly, shifting the zipper of my skirt around to the side where it belonged. “I’d better go wash. Here comes Mrs. Kanz.”

  Across the play field the classes were lined up to go back inside. The usual scuffling horseplay was going on, but no one even bothered to glance our wa
y. If they only knew, I thought, how close some of them had been to death...

  “I been bad,” Lucine whimpered. “I got in a fight again.”

  “Lucine, you bad girl!” Mrs. Kanz cried as soon as she got within earshot. “You’ve been fighting again. You go right in the office and sit there the rest of the day. Shame on you!”

  And Lucine blubbered off toward the school building.

  Mrs. Kanz looked me over. “Well,” she laughed apologetically, “I should have warned you about her. Just leave her alone when she gets in a rage. Don’t try to stop her.”

  “But she was going to kill someone!” I cried, tasting again the blood lust, feeling the grate of broken bones.

  “She’s too slow. The kids always keep out of her way.”

  “But someday—”

  Mrs. Kanz shrugged. “If she gets dangerous she’ll have to be put away.”

  “But why do you let the children tease her?” I protested, feeling a spasmodic gush of anger.

  She looked at me sharply. “I don’t ‘let.’ Kids are always cruel to anyone who’s different. Haven’t you discovered that yet?”

  “Yes, I have,” I whispered. “Oh, yes, yes!” And huddled into myself against the creeping cold of memory.

  “It isn’t good but it happens,” she said. “You can’t make everything right. You have to get calluses sometimes.”

  I brushed some of the dust off my clothes. “Yes,” I sighed. “Calluses come in handy. But I still think something should be done for her.”

  “Don’t say so out loud,” Mrs. Kanz warned. “Her mother has almost beat her own brains out trying to find some way to help her. These things happen in the best of families. There’s no help for them.”

  “Then who is—?” I choked on my suppressed words, belatedly remembering Lucine’s withdrawal.

  “Who is who?” asked Mrs. Kanz over her shoulder as we went back to the schoolhouse.

  “Who is going to take care of her all her life?” I asked lamely.

  “Well! Talk about borrowing trouble!” Mrs. Kanz laughed. “Just forget about the whole thing. It’s all in a day’s work. It’s a shame your pretty blouse had to get ruined, though.”