Ingathering

by Zenna Henderson

  “Then there is room in this life for inexplicables.” I pleated my skirt between my fingers and straightened it out again.

  “It would be a poor lackluster sort of world if there weren’t,” the doctor said. “I used to rule out anything that I couldn’t explain, but I got cured of that good one time.” He smiled reminiscently. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t. As I said, it can be mighty uncomfortable.”

  “Yes,” I said impulsively. “Like hearing impossible music and sliding down moonbeams—” I felt my heart sink at the sudden blankness of his face. Oh, gee! Goofed again. He could talk glibly of inexplicables but he didn’t really believe in them. “And crutches that walk by themselves,” I rushed on rashly, “and autumn leaves that dance in the windless clearing—” I grasped my crutches and started blindly for the door. “And maybe someday if I’m a good girl and disbelieve enough I’ll walk again—”

  “ ‘And disbelieve enough’?” His words followed me. “Don’t you mean ‘believe enough’?”

  “Don’t strain your pattern,” I called back. “It’s ‘disbelieve.’ ”

  Of course I felt silly the next morning at the breakfast table, but Dr. Curtis didn’t refer to the conversation so I didn’t either. He was discussing renting a jeep for his hunting trip and leaving his car to be fixed.

  “Tell Bill you’ll be back a week before you plan to,” said Ol’ Hank. “Then your car will be ready when you do get back.”

  The Francher kid was in the group of people who gathered to watch Bill transfer Dr. Curtis’ gear from the car to the jeep. As usual he was a little removed from the rest, lounging against a tree. Dr. Curtis finally came out, his .30-06 under one arm and his heavy hunting jacket under the other. Anna and I leaned over our side fence watching the whole procedure.

  I saw the Francher kid straighten slowly, his hands leaving his pockets as he stared at Dr. Curtis. One hand went out tentatively and then faltered. Dr. Curtis inserted himself in the seat of the jeep and fumbled at the knobs on the dashboard. “Which one’s the radio?” he asked Bill.

  “Radio? In this jeep?” Bill laughed.

  “But the music—” Dr. Curtis paused for a split second, then turned on the ignition. “Have to make my own, I guess,” he laughed.

  The jeep roared into life, and the small group scattered as he wheeled it in reverse across the yard. In the pause as he shifted gears, he glanced sideways at me and our eyes met. It was a very brief encounter, but he asked questions and I answered with my unknowing and he exploded in a kind of wonderment—all in the moment between reverse and low.

  We watched the dust boil up behind the jeep as it growled its way down to the highway.

  “Well,” Anna said, “a-hunting we do go indeed!”

  “Who’s he?” The Francher kid’s hands were tight on the top of the fence, a blind sort of look on his face.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “His name is Dr. Curtis.”

  “He’s heard music before.”

  “I should hope so,” Anna said.

  “That music?” I asked the Francher kid.

  “Yes,” he nearly sobbed. “Yes!”

  “He’ll be back,” I said. “He has to get his car.”

  “Well,” Anna sighed. “The words are the words of English but the sense is the sense of confusion. Coffee, anybody?”

  That afternoon the Francher kid joined me, wordlessly, as I struggled up the rise above the boardinghouse for a little wideness of horizon to counteract the day’s shut-in-ness. I would rather have walked alone, partly because of a need for silence and partly because he just couldn’t ever keep his—accusing?—eyes off my crutches. But he didn’t trespass upon my attention as so many people would have, so I didn’t mind too much. I leaned, panting, against a gray granite boulder and let the fresh-from-distant-snow breeze lift my hair as I caught my breath. Then I huddled down into my coat, warming my ears. The Francher kid had a handful of pebbles and was lobbing them at the scattered rusty tin cans that dotted the hillside. After one pebble turned a square corner to hit a can, he spoke.

  “If he knows the name of the instrument, then—” He lost his words.

  “What is the name?” I asked, rubbing my nose where my coat collar had tickled it.

  “It really isn’t a word. It’s just two sounds it makes.”

  “Well, then, make me a word. ‘Musical instrument’ is mighty unmusical and unhandy.”

  The Francher kid listened, his head tilted, his lips moving. “I suppose you could call it a ‘rappoor,’ ” he said, softening the a. “But it isn’t that.”

  “ ‘Rappoor,’ ” I said. “Of course you know by now we don’t have any such instrument.” I was intrigued at having been drawn into another Francher-type conversation. I was developing quite a taste for them. “It’s probably just something your mother dreamed up for you.”

  “And for that doctor?”

  “Ummm.” My mental wheels spun, tractionless. “What do you think?”

  “I almost know that there are some more like Mother. Some who know ‘the madness and the dream,’ too.”

  “Dr. Curtis?” I asked.

  “No,” he said slowly, rubbing his hand along the boulder. “No, I could feel a faraway, strange-to-me feeling with him. He’s like you. He—he knows someone who knows, but he doesn’t know.”

  “Well, thanks. He’s a nice bird to be a feather of. Then it’s all very simple. When he comes back you ask him who he knows.”

  “Yes—” The Francher kid drew a tremulous breath. “Yes!”

  We eased down the hillside, talking money and music. The Francher kid had enough saved up to buy a good instrument of some kind—but what kind? He was immersed in tones and timbres and ranges and keys and the possibility of sometime finding a something that would sound like a rappoor.

  We paused at the foot of the hill. Impulsively I spoke.

  “Francher, why do you talk with me?” I wished the words back before I finished them. Words have a ghastly way of shattering delicate situations and snapping tenuous bonds.

  He lobbed a couple more stones against the bank and turned away, hands in his pockets. His words came back to me after I had given them up.

  “You don’t hate me—yet.”

  I was jarred. I suppose I had imagined all the people around the Francher kid were getting acquainted with him as I was, but his words made me realize differently. After that I caught at every conversation that included the Francher kid, and alerted at every mention of his name. It shook me to find that to practically everyone he was still juvenile delinquent, lazy trash, no-good off-scouring, potential criminal, burden. By some devious means it had been decided that he was responsible for all the odd happenings in town. I asked a number of people how the kid could possibly have done it. The only answer I got was, “The Francher kid can do anything—bad.”

  Even Anna still found him an unwelcome burden in her classroom despite the fact that he was finally functioning on a fairly acceptable level academically.

  Here I’d been thinking—heaven knows why!—that he was establishing himself in the community. Instead he was doing well to hold his own. I reviewed to myself all that had happened since first I met him, and found hardly a thing that would be positive in the eyes of the general public.

  “Why,” I thought to myself, “I’m darned lucky he’s kept out of the hands of the law!” And my stomach knotted coldly at what might happen if the Francher kid ever did step over into out-and-out lawlessness. There’s something insidiously sweet to the adolescent in flouting authority, and I wanted no such appetite for any My Child of mine.

  Well, the next few days after Dr. Curtis left were typical hunting-weather days. Minutes of sunshine and shouting autumn colors—hours of cloud and rain and near snow and raw aching winds. Reports came of heavy snow across Mingus Mountain, and Dogietown was snowed in for the winter, a trifle earlier than usual. We watched our own first flakes idle down, then whip themselves to tears against the huddled houses. It looked as
though all excitement and activity were about to be squeezed out of Willow Springs by the drab grayness of winter.

  Then the unexpected, which sometimes splashes our grayness with scarlet, happened. The big dude-ranch school, the Half Circle Star, that occupied the choicest of the range land in our area, invited all the school kids out to a musical splurge. They had imported an orchestra that played concerts as well as being a very good dance band, and they planned a gala weekend with a concert Friday evening followed by a dance for the teeners Saturday night. The ranch students were usually kept aloof from the town kids, poor little tikes. They were mostly unwanted or maladjusted children whose parents could afford to get rid of them with a flourish under the guise of giving them the advantage of growing up in healthful surroundings.

  Of course the whole town was flung into a tizzy. There were the children of millionaires out there and famous people’s kids, too, but about the only glimpse we ever got of them was as they swept grandly through the town in the ranch station wagons. On such occasions we collectively blinked our eyes at the chromium glitter, and sighed—though perhaps for different reasons. I sighed for thin unhappy faces pressed to windows and sad eyes yearning back at houses where families lived who wanted their kids.

  Anyway the consensus of opinion was that it would be worth suffering through a “music concert” to get to go to a dance with a real orchestra, because only those who attended the concert were eligible for the dance.

  There was much discussion and much heartburning over what to wear to the two so divergent affairs. The boys were complacent after they found out that their one good outfit was right for both. The girls discussed endlessly, and embarked upon a wild lend-borrow spree when they found that fathers positively refused to spend largely even for this so special occasion.

  I was very pleased for the Francher kid. Now he’d have a chance to hear live music—a considerable cut above what snarled in our staticky wave lengths from the available radio stations. Now maybe he’d hear a faint echo of his rappoor and in style, too, because Mrs. McVey had finally broken down and bought him a new suit, a really nice one by the local standards. I was as anxious as Twyla to see how the Francher kid would look in such splendor.

  So it was with a distinct shock that I saw the kid at the concert, lounging, thumbs in pockets, against the door of the room where the crowd gathered. His face was shut and dark, and his patched faded Levi’s made a blotch in the dimness of the room.

  “Look!” Twyla whispered. “He’s in Levi’s!”

  “How come?” I breathed. “Where’s his new suit?”

  “I don’t know. And those Levi’s aren’t even dean!” She hunched down in her seat, feeling the accusing eyes of the whole world searing her through the Francher kid.

  The concert was splendid. Even our rockin’est rollers were caught up in the wonderful web of music. Even I lost myself for long lovely moments in the bright melodic trails that led me out of the gray lanes of familiarity. But I also felt the bite of tears behind my eyes. Music is made to be moved to, and my unresponsive feet wouldn’t even tap a tempo. I let the brasses and drums smash my rebellion into bearable-sized pieces again and joined joyfully in the enthusiastic applause.

  “Hey!” Rigo said behind me as the departing stir of the crowd began. “I didn’t know anything could sound like that. Man! Did you hear that horn! I’d like to get me one of them things and blow it!”

  “You’d sound like a sick cow,” Janniset said. “Them’s hard to play.”

  Their discussion moved on down the aisle.

  “He’s gone.” Twyla’s voice was a breath in my ear.

  “Yes,” I said. “But we’ll probably see him out at the bus.”

  But we didn’t. He wasn’t at the bus. He hadn’t come out on the bus. No one knew how he got out to the ranch or where he had gone.

  Anna and Twyla and I piled into Anna’s car and headed back for Willow Creek, my heart thudding with apprehension, my thoughts busy. When we pulled up at Somansons’ there was a car parked in front.

  “The McVey!” Anna sizzled in my ear. “Ah ha! Methinks I smell trouble.”

  I didn’t even have time to take my coat off in the smothery warmth of the front room before I was confronted by the monumental violence of Mrs. McVey’s wrath.

  “Dress him!” she hissed, her chin thrust out as she lunged forward in the chair. “Dress him so’s he’ll feel equal to the others!” Her hands flashed out, and I dodged instinctively and blinked as a bunch of white rags fluttered to my feet. “His new shirt!” she half screamed. Another shower of tatters, dark ones this time. “His new suit! Not a piece in it as big as your hand!” There was a spatter like muffled hail. “His shoes!” Her voice caught on the edge of her violence, and she repeated raggedly, “His shoes!” Fear was battling with anger now. “Look at those pieces—as big as stamps—shoes!” Her voice broke. “Anybody who can tear up shoes!”

  She sank back in her chair, spent and breathless, fishing for a crumpled Kleenex to wipe the spittle from her chin. I eased into a chair after Anna helped me shrug out of my coat. Twyla huddled, frightened, near the door, her eyes big with fascinated terror.

  “Let him be like the others,” McVey half whispered. “That limb of Satan ever be like anyone decent?”

  “But why?” My voice sounded thin and high in the calm after the hurricane.

  “For no reason at all,” she gasped, pressing her hand to her panting ribs. “I gave all them brand-new clothes to him to try on, thinking he’d be pleased. Thinking—” her voice slipped to a whining tremolo, “thinking he’d see how I had his best interest at heart.” She paused and sniffed lugubriously. No ready sympathy for her poured into the hiatus, so she went on, angrily aggrieved. “And he took them and went into his room and came out with them like that!” Her finger jabbed at the pile of rags. “He—he threw them at me! You and your big ideas about him wanting to be like other kids!” Her lips curled away from the venomous spate of words. “He don’t want to be like nobody ’cepting hisself. And he’s a devil!” Her voice sank to a whisper and her breath drew in on the last word, her eyes wide.

  “But why did he do it?” I asked. “He must have said something.”

  Mrs. McVey folded her hands across her ample middle and pinched her lips together. “There are some things a lady don’t repeat,” she said prissily, tossing her head.

  “Oh, cut it out!” I was suddenly dreadfully weary of trying to be polite to the McVeys of this world. “Stop tying on that kind of an act. You could teach a stevedore—” I bit my lips and swallowed hard. “I’m sorry, Mrs. McVey, but this is no time to hold back. What did he say? What excuse did he give?”

  “He didn’t give any excuse,” she snapped. “He just—just—” Her heavy cheeks mottled with color. “He called names.”

  “Oh.” Anna and I exchanged glances.

  “But what on earth got into him?” I asked. “There must be some reason—”

  “Well.” Anna squirmed a little. “After all, what can you expect—?”

  “From a background like that?” I snapped. “Well, Anna, I certainly expected something different from a background like yours!”

  Anna’s face hardened and she gathered up her things. “I’ve known him longer than you have,” she said quietly.

  “Longer,” I admitted, “but not better. Anna,” I pleaded, leaning toward her, “don’t condemn him unheard.”

  “Condemn?” She looked up brightly. “I didn’t know he was on trial.”

  “Oh, Anna.” I sank back in my chair. “The poor kid’s been on trial, presumed guilty of anything and everything, ever since he arrived in town, and you know it.”

  “I don’t want to quarrel with you,” Anna said. “I’d better say good night.”

  The door dicked behind her. Mrs. McVey and I measured each other with our eyes. I had opened my mouth to say something when I felt a whisper of a motion at my elbow. Twyla stood under the naked flood of the overhead light, her hands clasped i
n front of her, her eyes shadowed by the droop of her lashes as she narrowed her glance against the glare.

  “What did you buy his clothes with?” Her voice was very quiet.

  “None of your business, young lady,” Mrs. McVey snapped, reddening.

  “This is almost the end of the month,” Twyla said. “Your check doesn’t come till the first. Where did you get the money?”

  “Well!” Mrs. McVey began to hoist her bulk out of the chair. “I don’t have to stay here and have a sassy snip like this—”

  Twyla swept in closer—so close that Mrs. McVey shrank back, her hands gripping the dusty overstuffed arms of the chair.

  “You never have any of the check left after the first week,” Twyla said. “And you bought a purple nylon nightgown this month. It took a week’s pay—”

  Mrs. McVey lunged forward again, her mouth agape with horrified outrage.

  “You took his money,” Twyla said, her eyes steely in her tight young face. “You stole the money he was saving!” She whirled away from the chair, her skirts and hair flaring. “Someday—” she said with clenched teeth, “someday I’ll probably be old and fat and ugly, but heaven save me from being old and fat and ugly and a thief!”

  “Twyla!” I warned, truly afraid that Mrs. McVey would have a stroke then and there.

  “Well, she is a thief!” Twyla cried. “The Francher kid has been working and saving almost a year to buy—” she faltered, palpably feeling the thin ice of betraying a confidence, “to buy something. And he had almost enough! And she must have gone snooping around—”

  “Twyla!” I had to stop her.

  “It’s true! It’s true!” Her hands clenched rebelliously.

  “Twyla.” My voice was quiet but it silenced her.

  “Good-by, Mrs. McVey,” I said. “I’m sorry this happened.”

  “Sorry!” she snorted, rearing up out of her chair. “Sour old maids with never a chick or child of their own sticking their noses into decent people’s affairs—” She waddled hastily to the door. She reached for the doorknob, her eyes narrow and venomous over her shoulder. “I got connections. I’ll get even with you.” The door shuddered as it emphasized her departure.