“Of course!” said Meris, reaching for the child, who flowed over the back of the seat into her arms in one complete motion. “God bless, and return soon.”
“Thank you,” said Johannan and walked into the roadside bushes. They saw a ripple in the branches, the turn of a shoulder, the flick of a foot, one sharp startling glimpse of Johannan rising against the blue and white of the afternoon sky, and then he was hidden in the top branches of the trees.
“Shoosh!” Meris slumped under Lala’s entire weight. “Mark, is this a case of Jolie à deux, or is it really happening?”
“Well,” said Mark, starting the car again, “I doubt if we two could achieve the same hallucinations simultaneously, so let’s assume it’s really happening.”
When they finally reached the cabin and stopped the motor, they sat for a moment in the restful, active silence of the hills. Meris, feeling the soft warmth of Lala against her and the precious return of things outside herself, shivered a little, remembering her dead self who had stared so blankly so many hours out of the small windows, tearlessly crying, soundlessly wailing, wrapped in misery. She laughed and hugged Lala. “Maybe we should get a leash for this small person,” she said to Mark. “I don’t think I could follow in Johannan’s footsteps.”
“Supper first,” said Mark as he fumbled with the padlock on the cabin door. He glanced, startled, back over his shoulder at Meris. “It’s broken,” he said. “Wrenched open—” He flung the door open hastily, and froze on the doorstep. Meris pushed forward to look beyond him.
Snow had fallen in the room—snow covered everything—a smudged, crumpled snow of paper, flour, sugar, and detergent. Every inch of the cabin was covered by the tattered, soaked, torn, crumpled snow of Mark’s manuscript! Mark stooped slowly, like an old man, and took up one page. Mingled detergent and maple syrup dung, dotted, and slithered off the edge of one of the diagrams that had taken two days to complete. He let the page fall and shuffled forward, ankle-deep in the obscene, incredible chaos. Meris hardly recognized the face he turned to her.
“I’ve lost our child again,” he said tightly. “This—” he gestured at the mess about them, “—this was my weeping and my substitute for despair. My creation to answer death.” He backhanded a clutter of papers off the bunk and slumped down until he lay, face to the wall, motionless.
Mark said not a word nor turned around in the hours that followed. Meris thought perhaps he slept at times, but she said nothing to him as she cautiously scrabbled through the mess in the cabin. She found, miraculously undamaged, a chapter and a half of pages under the cupboard. With careful hands she salvaged another sheaf of papers from where they had sprayed across the top of the cupboard. All the time she searched and sorted through the mess in the cabin, Lala sat, unnaturally well behaved and solemn, and watched her, getting down only once to salvage Deeko from a mound of sugar and detergent, ducking unhappily as she dusted the doll off.
It was late and cold when Meris put the last ruined sheet in the big cardboard box they had carried groceries home in, and the last salvageable sheet on the desk. She looked silently the clutter in the box and the slender sheaf on the desk, shivered, and turned to build up the dying fire in the stove. Her mouth tightened and the sullen flicker of charring, wadded paper in the stove painted age and pain upon her face. She stirred the embers with the lid-lifter and rebuilt the fire. She prepared supper, fed Lala, and put her to bed. Then she sat on the edge of the lower bunk by Mark’s rigid back and touched him gently.
“Supper’s ready,” she said. “Then I’ll need some help in scrubbing up—the floor, the walls, the furniture.” She choked a sound that was half laughter and half sob. “There’s plenty of detergent around already. We may bubble ourselves out of house and home.”
For a sick moment she was afraid he wouldn’t respond. Just like I was, she thought achingly. Just like I was! Then he sat up slowly, brushed his arm back across his expressionless face and his rumpled hair, and stood up.
When they finally threw out the last bucket of scrub water and hung out the last scrub rag, Meris rubbed her water-wrinkled hands down her weary sides and said, “Tomorrow we’ll start on the manuscript again.”
“No,” said Mark. “That’s all finished. The boys got carbon-copy and all. It would take weeks for me to do a rewrite if I could ever do it. We don’t have weeks. My leave of absence is over, and the deadline for the manuscript is this next week. We’ll just have to chalk this up as lost. Let the dead past bury the dead.”
He went to bed, his face turned again from the light. Meris, through the blur of her slow tears, gathered up the crumpled pages that had pulled out with the blankets from the back of the bunk, smoothed them onto the salvage pile, and went to bed, too.
For the next couple of days Mark was like an old man. He sat against the cabin wall in the sun, his arms resting on his thighs, his hands dangling from limp wrists, looking at the nothing that the senile and finished find on the ground. He moved slowly and reluctantly to the table to push his food around, to bed to lie, hardly breathing, but wide-eyed in the dark, to whatever task Meris set him, forgetting in the middle of it what he was doing.
Lala followed him at first, chattering un-English at her usual great rate, leaning against him when he sat, peering into his indifferent face. Then she stopped talking to him and followed him only with her eyes. Then the third day she came crying into Meris’s arms and wept heart-brokenly against her shoulder.
Then her tears stopped, glistened on her cheeks a moment, and were gone. She squirmed out of Meris’s embrace and trotted to the window. She pushed a chair up close to the wall, climbed up on it, pressed her forehead to the chilly glass, and stared out into the late afternoon.
Tad came over on his bike, bubbling over with the new idea of old cars.
“Why, there’s parts of a whole bunch of these cars all over around here—” he cried, fluttering the tattered magazine at Mark. “And have you seen how much they’re asking for some of them! Why, I could put myself through college on used parts out of our old dumps! And some of these vintage jobs are still running around here! Kiltie has a model A—you’ve seen it! He shines it like a new shoe every week! And there’s an old Overland touring car out in back of our barn, just sitting there, falling apart—”
Mark’s silence got through to him then, and he asked, troubled, “What’s wrong? Are you mad at me for something?”
Meris spoke into Mark’s silence. “No, Tad, it’s nothing you’ve done—” She took him outside, ostensibly to help bring in wood to fill the woodbox, and filled him in on the events. When they returned, loaded down with firewood, he dumped his armload into the box and looked at Mark.
“Gee, whiz, Mr. Edwards. Uh—uh—gee whiz!” He gathered up his magazine and his hat and, shuffling his feet for a moment, said, “Well, ‘bye now,” and left, grimacing back at Meris, wordless.
Lala was still staring out the window. She hadn’t moved or made a sound while Tad was there. Meris was frightened.
“Mark!” She shook his arm gently. “Look at Lala. She’s been like that for almost an hour. She pays no attention to me at all. Mark!”
Mark’s attention came slowly back to the cabin and to Meris.
“Thank goodness!” she cried. “I was beginning to feel that I was the one that was missing!”
At that moment, Lala plopped down from the chair and trotted off to the bathroom, a round red spot marking her forehead where she had leaned so long.
“Well!” Meris was pleased. “It must be suppertime. Everyone’s gathering around again.” And she began the bustle of supper-getting. Lala trotted around with her, getting in the way, hindering with her help.
“No, Lala!” said Meris. “I told you once already. Only three plates. Here, put the other one over there.” Lala took the plate, waited patiently until Meris turned to the stove, then, lifting both feet from the floor, put the plate back on the table. The soft click of the flatware as she patterned it around the plate caught
Meris’s attention. “Oh, Lala!” she cried, half-laughing, half-exasperated. “Well, all right. If you can’t count, okay. Four it will be.” She started convulsively and dropped a fork as a knock at the door roused even Mark. “Hungry guest coming,” she laughed nervously as she picked up the fork. “Well, stew stretches.”
She started for the door, fear, bred of senseless violence, crisping along her spine, but Lala was ahead of her, fluttering like a bird, with excited bird cries against the door panels, her hands fumbling at the knob and the night chain Meris had insisted on installing. Meris unfastened and unlocked and opened the door.
It was Johannan, anxious-eyed and worried, who slipped in and gathered up a shrieking Lala. When he had finally un-Englished her to a quiet, contented clinging, he turned to Meris. “Lala called me back,” he said. “I’ve found my Group. She told me Mark was sick—that bad things had happened.”
“Yes,” said Meris, stirring the stew and moving it to the back of the stove. “The boys came while we were gone and ruined Mark’s manuscript beyond salvage. And Mark—Mark is crushed. He lost all those months of labor through senseless, vindictive—” She turned away from Johannan’s questioning face and stirred the stew again, blindly.
“But,” protested Johannan, “if once it was written, he has it still. He can do it again.”
“Time is the factor.” Mark’s voice, rusty and harsh, broke in on Johannan. “And to rewrite from my notes—” He shook his head and sagged again.
“But—but—!” cried Johannan, still puzzled, putting Lala to one side, where she hovered, sitting on air, crooning to Deeko, until she drifted slowly down to the floor. “It’s all there! It’s been written! It’s a whole thing! All you have to do is put it again on paper. Your word scriber—”
“I don’t have total recall,” said Mark. “Even if I did, just to put it on paper again—come see our ‘word scriber.’ ” He smiled a small bent smile as Johannan poked fingers into the mechanism of the typewriter and clucked unhappily, sounding so like Lala that Meris almost laughed. “Such slowness! Such complications!”
Johannan looked at Mark. “If you want, my People can help you get your manuscript back again.”
“It’s finished,” said Mark. “Why agonize over it any more?” He turned to the blank darkness of the window.
“Was it worth the effort of writing?” asked Johannan.
“I thought so,” said Mark. “And others did, too.”
“Would it have served a useful purpose?” asked Johannan.
“Of course it would have!” Mark swung angrily from the window. “It covered an area that needs to be covered. It was new—the first book in the field!” He turned again to the window.
“Then,” said Johannan simply, “we will make it again. Have you paper enough?”
Mark swung back, his eyes glittering. Meris stepped between his glare and Johannan. “This summer I have come back from the dead,” she reminded. “And you caught a baby for me, pulling her down from the sky by one ankle. Johannan went looking for his people through the treetops. And a three-year-old called him back by leaning against the window. If all these things could happen, why can’t Johannan bring your manuscript back?”
“But if he tries and can’t—” Mark began.
“Then we can let the dead past bury the dead,” said Meris sharply, “which little item you have not been letting happen so far!”
Mark stared at her, then flushed a deep, painful flush. “Okay, then,” he said. “Stir the bones again! Let him put meat back on them if he can!”
The next few hours were busy with patterned confusion. Mark roared off through the gathering darkness to persuade Chip to open the store for typing paper. And people arrived. Just arrived, smiling, at the door, familiar friends before they spoke, and Meris, glancing out to see if the heavens themselves had split open from astonishment, saw, hovering tree-top high, a truly vintage car, an old pickup that clanked softly to itself, spinning a wheel against a branch as it waited. “If Tad could see that!” she thought, with a bubble of laughter nudging her throat.
She hurried back indoors further to make welcome the newcomers—Valancy, Karen, Davy, Jemmy. The women gathered Lala in with soft cries and shining eyes and she wept briefly upon them in response to their emotions, then leaped upon the fellows and nearly strangled them with her hugs.
Johannan briefed the four in what had happened and what was needed. They discussed the situation, glanced at the few salvaged pages on the desk, and sent, eyes closed briefly, for someone else. His name was Remy and he had a special “Gift” for plans and diagrams. He arrived just before Mark got back, so the whole group of them confronted him when he flung the door open and stood there with his bundle of paper.
He blinked, glanced at Meris, then, shifting his burden to one arm, held out a welcoming hand. “I hadn’t expected an invasion,” he smiled. “To tell the truth, I didn’t know what to expect.” He thumped the package down on the table and grinned at Meris. “Chip’s sure now that writers are psychos,” he said. “Any normal person could wait till morning for paper or use flattened grocery bags!” He shrugged out of his jacket. “Now.”
Jemmy said, “It’s really quite simple. Since you wrote your book and have read it through several times, the thing exists as a whole in your memory, just as it was on paper. So all we have to do is put it on paper again.” He gestured.
“That’s all?” Mark’s hands went back through his hair. “That’s all? Man, that’s all I had to do after my notes were organized, months ago! Maybe I should have settled for flattened grocery bags! Why, the sheer physical—” The light was draining out of his face.
“Wait—wait!” Jemmy’s hand closed warmly over his sagging shoulder. “Let me finish.”
“Davy, here, is our gadgeteer. He dreams up all kinds of knick-knacks and, among other things, he has come forth with a word scriber. Even better”—he glanced at Johannan— “than the ones brought from the New Home. All you have to do is think and the scriber writes down your thoughts. Here—try it—” he said into Mark’s very evident skepticism.
Davy put a piece of paper on the table in front of Mark and, on it, a small gadget that looked vaguely like a small sanding block in that it was curved across the top and flat on the bottom. “Go on,” urged Davy, “think something. You don’t even have to vocalize. I’ve keyed it to you. Karen sorted your setting for me.”
Mark looked around at the interested, watching faces, at Meris’s eyes, blurred with hesitant hope, and then down at the scriber. The scriber stirred, then slid swiftly across the paper, snapping back to the beginning of a line again, as quick as thought. Davy picked up the paper and handed it to Mark. Meris crowded to peer over his shoulder.
Of all the dern-fool things! As if it were possible—Look at the son-a-gun go!
All neatly typed, neatly spaced, appropriately punctuated. Hope flamed up in Mark’s eyes. “Maybe so,” he said, turning to Jemmy. “What do I do, now?”
“Well,” said Jemmy, “you have your whole book in your mind, but a mass of other things, too. It’d be almost impossible for you to think through your book without any digressions or side thoughts, so Karen will blanket your mind for you except for your book—”
“Hypnotism—” Mark’s withdrawal was visible.
“No,” said Karen. “Just screening out interference. Think how much time was taken up in your original draft by distractions—”
Meris clenched her hands and gulped, remembering all the hours Mark had had to—to baby-sit her while she was still rocking her grief like a rag doll with all the stuffings pulled out. She felt an arm across her shoulders and turned to Valancy’s comforting smile. “All over,” said her eyes, kindly, “all past.”
“How about all the diagrams—” suggested Mark. “I can’t vocalize—”
“That’s where Remy comes in,” said Jemmy. “All you have to do is visualize each one. He’ll have his own scriber right here and he’ll take it from there.”
The cot was pulled up near the table and Mark disposed himself comfortably on it. The paper was unwrapped and stacked all ready. Remy and Davy arranged themselves strategically. Surrounded by briefly bowed heads, Jemmy said, “We are met together in Thy name.” Then Karen touched Mark gently on the forehead with one fingertip.
Mark suddenly lifted himself on one elbow. “Wait,” he said, “things are going too fast. Why—why are you doing this for us, anyway? We’re strangers. No concern of yours. Is it to pay us for taking care of Lala? In that case—”
Karen smiled. “Why did you take care of Lala? You could have turned her over to the authorities. A strange child, no relation, no concern of yours.”
“That’s a foolish question,” said Mark. “She needed help. She was cold and wet and lost. Anyone—”
“You did it for the same reason we are doing this for you,” said Karen. “Just because we had our roots on a different world doesn’t make us of different flesh. There are no strangers in God’s universe. You found an unhappy situation that you could do something about, so you did it. Without stopping to figure out the whys and wherefores. You did it just because that’s what love does.”
Mark lay back on the narrow pillow. “Thank you,” he said. Then he turned his face to Meris. “Okay?”
“Okay.” Her voice jerked a little past her emotion. “Love you, Mark!”
“Love you, Meris!”
Karen’s fingertip went to Mark’s forehead again. “I need contact,” she said a little apologetically, “especially with an Outsider.”
Meris fell asleep, propped up on the bunk, eyes lulled by the silent sli-i-i-ide, flip! sli-i-i-ide, flip! of the scriber, and the brisk flutter of finished pages from the tall pile of paper to the short one. She opened drowsy eyes to a murmur of voices and saw that the two piles of paper were almost balanced. She sat up to ease her neck where it had been bent against the cabin wall.
“But it’s wrong, I tell you!” Remy was waving the paper. “Look, this line, here, where it goes—”
Ingathering Page 33
