Ingathering

by Zenna Henderson

  “I am not crying for the mine,” said Marnie and I felt an illogical stab of resentment that she wasn’t. “It is a year,” she went on. “Just a year.”

  “A year?” Then remembrance flooded in. A year since the sullen smoke plumed up from the burning shed, since I felt the damp curling of freshly cut hair under my fingers—since Nils grimly dug the multiple grave. “But it should be a little easier now,” I said.

  “It’s only that on the Home it would have been Festival time—time to bring our flowers and lift into the skies and sing to remember all who had been Called during the year. We kept Festival only three days before the angry ones came and killed us.” She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “That was a difficult Festival because we were so separated by the Crossing. We didn’t know how many of us were echoing our songs from Otherside.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I said. “But go on—cry for your dead. It will ease you.”

  “I am not crying for those who have been Called,” said Marnie. “They are in the Presence and need no tears. I am crying for the ones—if there are any—who are alive on this Earth we found. I am crying because—Oh, Aunt Gail!” She clung to me. “What if I’m the only one who was not Called? The only one!”

  I patted her shaking shoulders, wishing I could comfort her.

  “There was Timmy,” she sniffed and accepted the handkerchief I gave her. “He—he was in our ship. Only at the last moment before Lift Off was there room for him to come with us. But when the ship melted and broke and we each had to get into our life-slips, we scattered like the baby quail Kenny showed me the other day. And only a few life-slips managed to stay together. Oh, I wish I knew!” She closed her wet eyes, her trembling chin lifting. “If only I knew whether or not Timmy is in the Presence!”

  I did all that I could to comfort her. My all was just being there.

  “I keep silent Festival tonight,” she said finally, “trusting in the Power—”

  “This is a solemn night for us, too,” I said. “We will start packing tomorrow. Nils thinks he can find a job nearer the Valley—” I sighed. “This would have been such a nice place to watch grow up. All it lacked was a running stream, and now we’re even getting that. Oh, well—such is life in the wild and woolly West!”

  And the next morning, she was gone. On her pillow was a piece of paper that merely said, “Wait.”

  What could we do? Where could we look? Footprints were impossible on the rocky slopes. And for a Marnie, there could well be no footprints at all, even if the surroundings were pure sand. I looked helplessly at Nils.

  “Three days,” he said, tightly angry. “The traditional three days before a funeral. If she isn’t back by then, we leave.”

  By the end of the second day of waiting in the echoless ghostiness of the dead town, I had tears enough dammed up in me to rival the new little stream that was cutting deeper and deeper into its channel. Nils was up at the mine entrance watching the waters gush out from where they had oozed at first. I was hunched over the stream where it made the corner by the empty foundation blocks of the mine office, when I heard—or felt—or perceived—a presence. My innards lurched and I turned cautiously. It was Marnie.

  “Where have you been?” I asked flatly.

  “Looking for another mine,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Another mine?” My shaking hands pulled her down to me and we wordlessly hugged the breath out of each other. Then I let her go.

  “I spoiled the other one,” she went on as though uninterrupted. “I have found another, but I’m not sure you will want it.”

  “Another? Not want it?” My mind wasn’t functioning on a very high level, so I stood up and screamed, “Nils!”

  His figure popped out from behind a boulder and, after hesitating long enough to see there were two of us, he made it down the slope in massive leaps and stood panting, looking at Marnie. Then he was hugging the breath out of her and I was weeping over the two of them, finding my tears considerably fewer than I had thought. We finally all shared my apron to dry our faces and sat happily shaken on the edge of our front porch, our feet dangling.

  “It’s over on the other side of the flat,” said Marnie. “In a little canyon there. It’s close enough so Margin can grow again here in the same place, only now with a running stream.”

  “But a new mine! What do you know about mining?” asked Nils, hope, against his better judgment, lightening his face.

  “Nothing,” admitted Marnie. “But I can identify and I took these—” She held out her hands. “A penny for copper. Your little locket,” she nodded at me apologetically, “for gold. A dollar—” she turned it on her palm, “for silver. By the identity of these I can find other metals like them. Copper—there is not as much as in the old mine, but there is some in the new one. There is quite a bit of gold. It feels like much more than in the old mine, and,” she faltered, “I’m sorry, but mostly there is only silver. Much, much more than copper. Maybe if I looked farther—”

  “But, Marnie,” I cried, “silver is better! Silver is better!”

  “Are you serious?” asked Nils, the planes of his face stark and bony in the sunlight. “Do you really think you have found a possible mine?”

  “I don’t know about mines,” repeated Marnie, “but I know these metals are there. I can feel them tangling all over in the mountainside and up and down as the ground goes. Much of it is mixed with other matter, but it’s like the ore they used to send out of Margin in the wagons with the high wheels. Only some of it is penny and locket and dollar feeling. I didn’t know it could come that way in the ground.”

  “Native silver,” I murmured, “native copper and gold.”

  “I—I could try to open the hill for you so you could see,” suggested Marnie timidly to Nils’s still face.

  “No,” I said hastily. “No, Marnie. Nils, couldn’t we at least take a look?”

  So we went, squeezing our way through the underbrush and through a narrow entrance into a box canyon beyond the far side of the flat. Pausing to catch my breath, almost pinned between two towering slabs of tawny orange granite, I glanced up to the segment of blue sky overhead. A white cloud edged into sight and suddenly the movement wasn’t in the cloud, but in the mountain of granite. It reeled and leaned and seemed to be toppling. I snatched my eyes away from the sky with a gasp and wiggled on through, following Marnie and followed by Nils.

  Nils looked around the canyon wonderingly. “Didn’t even know this was here,” he said. “No one’s filed on this area. It’s ours—if it’s worth filing on. Our own mine—”

  Marnie knelt at the base of the cliff that formed one side of the canyon. “Here is the most,” she said, rubbing her hand over the crumbling stone. “It is all through the mountain, but there is some silver very close here.” She looked up at Nils and read his skepticism.

  “Well,” she sighed. “Well—” And she sank down with the pool of her skirts around her on the sandy ground. She clasped her hands and stared down at them. I could see her shoulders tighten and felt something move—or change—or begin. Then, about shoulder high on the face of the rock wall, there was a coloring and a crumbling. Then a thin, bright trickle came from the rock and ran molten down to the sand, spreading flowerlike into a palm-sized disk of pure silver!

  “There,” said Marnie, her shoulders relaxing. “That was close to the outside—”

  “Nils!” I cried. “Look!” and snatching up the still-hot metallic blossom, I dropped it again, the bright blood flowing across the ball of my thumb from the gashing of the sharp silver edge.

  It doesn’t take long for a town to grow. Not if there’s a productive mine and an ideal flat for straight, wide business streets. And hills and trees and a running stream for residential areas. The three of us watch with delighted wonder the miracle of Margin growing and expanding. Only occasionally does Marnie stand at the window in the dark and wonder if she is the only one—the last one—of her People left upon Earth.
And only occasionally do I look at her and wonder where on Earth—or off it—did this casual miracle, this angel unawares, come from.

  Interlude: Mark & Meris 3

  “This angel unawares,” Bethie’s whisper echoed the last phrase of the Assembly.

  “Why, I’ve been in Margin!” cried Meris. “I was there their last Founding Day and I didn’t hear a word about Marnie!”

  “What did you hear?” asked Bethie, interested.

  “Well, about the first mine collapsing and starting the creek and about the new mine’s being found—”

  “I suppose that’s enough,” said Bethie. “How would you have included Marnie?”

  “At least mention her name!” cried Meris. “Why, even the burro a prospector hit with a piece of ore and found Tombstone or Charleston or wherever is remembered. And not word one about Marnie—”

  “Maybe,” suggested Bethie, “maybe because that wasn’t her real name.”

  “It wasn’t!” Meris’s eyes widened.

  “Do you think she was called Marnie on the Home?” teased Mark. “Look at what we did to Lala’s name. At least ‘Marnie’ couldn’t be that bad a miss.”

  “Who was she then?” asked Meris. “What was her real name?”

  “Why, I thought you knew—” Bethie started.

  “Marnie was Lytha. She used both names later on—Marnie Lytha.”

  “Lytha!” Meris sat down absently, almost off the chair, and scooted back slowly. “Lytha and Timmy. Oh! Of course! Then Eva-lee’s promise to them must have come true—”

  “She didn’t promise them each other,” reminded Mark. “Only love.”

  “Only love!” mocked Meris. “Oh, Mark! Only love?”

  “I was just thinking,” said Mark slowly. “If Marnie was Lytha, then all those people who died in the fire—”

  “Oh, Mark!” Meris drew a breath of distress. “Oh, Mark! But Eve wasn’t one of them. Bethie’s mother escaped!”

  “Others did, too,” said Bethie. “The flow of Assembling about Marnie kept right on in the same general area and I didn’t stop when Marnie’s segment was finished. The next part—” She hesitated. “It’s hard to tell what is bright and happy and what is dark and sad. I’ll let you decide. The boy—well, he wasn’t sure either—”

  Bethie gathered up the two willing hands gently and began—

  Troubling of the Water

  Sometimes it’s like being a castaway, being a first settler in a big land. If I were a little younger, maybe I’d play at being Robinson Crusoe, only I’d die of surprise if I found a footprint, especially a bare one, this place being where it is.

  But it’s not only being a castaway in a place, but in a time. I feel as though the last years of the century were ruffling up to my knees in a tide that will sweep me into the next century. If I live seven more years, I’ll not only be of age but I’ll see the Turn of the Century! Imagine putting 19 in front of your years instead of 18! So, instead of playing Crusoe and scanning the horizon for sails, I used to stand on a rock and measure the world full circle, thinking—the Turn of the Century! The Turn of the Century! And seeking and seeking as though Time were a tide that would come racing through the land at midnight 1899 and that I could see the front edge of the tide beginning already!

  But things have happened so fast recently that I’m not sure about Time or Place or Possible or Impossible any more. One thing I am sure of is the drought. It was real enough.

  It’s the responsibility of the men of the house to watch out for the welfare of the women of the house, so that day I went with Father up into the hills to find out where Sometime Creek started. We climbed up and up along the winding creek bed until my lungs pulled at the hot air and felt crackly clear down to their bottoms. We stopped and leaned against a boulder to let me catch my breath and cool off a little in what shadow there was. We could see miles and miles across the country—so far that the mountains on the other side of Desolation Valley were swimmy pale against the sky. Below us, almost at our feet because of the steepness of the hill, was the thin green line of mesquites and river willows that bordered Chuckawalla River and, hidden in a clump of cottonwoods down to our left, was our cabin, where Mama, if she had finished mixing the bread, was probably standing in the doorway with Merry on her hip, looking up as I was looking down.

  “What if there isn’t a spring?” I asked, gulping dryly, wanting a drink. I thought Father wasn’t going to answer. Sometimes he doesn’t—maybe for a day or so. Then suddenly, when you aren’t even thinking of the same thing, he’ll answer and expect you to remember what you’d asked.

  “Then we’ll know why they call this Sometime Creek,” he said. “If you’ve cooled down some, go get a drink.”

  “But we’ve always got the river,” I said, as I bellied down to the edge of the plunging water. It flowed so fast that I couldn’t suck it up. I had to bite at it to get a mouthful. It was cold and tasted of silt. It was shallow enough that I bumped my nose as I ducked my hot face into its coldness.

  “Not always.” Father waited until I finished before he cupped his hands in a small waterfall a step upstream and drank briefly. “It’s dropped to less than half its flow of last week. Tanker told me yesterday when he stopped for melons that there’s no snow left in the Coronas Altas, this early in the summer.”

  “But our orchard!” I felt dread crawl in my stomach. “All our fields!”

  “Our orchard,” said Father, no comfort or reassurance in his voice. “And all our fields.”

  We didn’t find a spring. We stood at the bottom of a slope too steep to climb and watched the water sheet down it from the top we couldn’t see. I watched Father as he stood there, one foot up on the steep rise, his knee bent as if he intended to climb up sheer rock, looking up at the silver falling water.

  “If the river dries up,” I offered, “the creek isn’t enough to water everything.”

  Father said nothing but turned back down the hill.

  We went down in half the time it took us to climb. Part way down I stumbled and fell sideways into a catclaw bush. Father had to pull me out, the tiny thorns clinging to my clothes like claws and striping the backs of my hands and one of my cheeks with smarting scratches.

  “People have to drink,” said Father. “And the animals.”

  We were leveling out on the flat by the house when I finally figured out what Father meant. He had already given our young orchard back to the wilderness and turned his back on the vegetable crops that were our mainstay and on the withering alfalfa fields. He was measuring water to keep us alive and still clinging to Fool’s Acres Ranch.

  Mama and Merry met us as we came down the path. I took the burden of Merry and carried her on down to the house. I wasn’t supposed to know that Mama was going to have a baby in a couple of months. Boys aren’t supposed to notice such things—not even boys who are past fifteen and so almost men.

  That night we sat around the table as usual and read to each other. I read first. I was reading Robinson Crusoe for the second time since we came to the ranch, and I had just got to where he was counting his wheat seeds and figuring out the best way to plant them. I like this part better than the long, close pages where he talks philosophy about being alone and uses big, hard-to-pronounce words. But sometimes, looking out across the plains and knowing there is only Father and Mama and Merry and me as far as my eye can reach, I knew how he felt. Well, maybe the new baby would be a boy.

  I read pretty well. Father didn’t have to correct my pronunciation very often. Then Mama read from Sense and Sensibility and I listened even if it was dull and sleepy to me. You never know when Father is going to ask you what a word means and you’d better have some idea!

  Then Father read from Plutarch’s Lives, which is fun sometimes, and we ended the evening with our Bible verses and prayers.

  I was half asleep before the lamp was blown out, but I came wide awake when I heard Mama’s low carrying voice.

  “Maybe mining would have been bet
ter. This is good mining country.”

  “Mining isn’t for me,” said Father. “I want to take living things from the earth. I can feel that I’m part of growing things, and nothing speaks to me of God more than seeing a field ripening ready for harvest. To have food where only a few months before was only a handful of seed—and faith.”

  “But if we finally have to give the ranch up anyway—” Mama began faintly.

  “We won’t give it up.” Father’s voice was firm.

  Father and I rode in the supply wagon from Raster Creek Mine over the plank bridge across the dwindling thread of the river to our last gate. I opened the gate, wrestling with the wire loop holding the top of the post, while Father thanked Mr. Tanker again for the newspapers he had brought us. “I’m sorry there is so little for you this time,” he said, glancing back at the limp gunny sacks and half-empty boxes. “And it’s the last of it all.”

  Mr. Tanker gathered up the reins. “Reckon now you’re finding out why this is called Fool’s Acres Ranch. You’re the third one that’s tried farming here. This is mining country. Never be nothing else. No steady water. Shame you didn’t try in Las Lomitas Valley across the Coronas. Artesian wells there. Every ranch got two-three wells and ponds with trees and fish. Devil of a long way to drive for fresh garden truck, though. Maybe if we ever get to be a state instead of a Territory—”

  Father and I watched him drive away, the wagon hidden in dust before it fairly started. We walked back to the planks across the stream and stopped to look at the few pools tied together with a thread of water brought down by Sometime Creek that was still flowing thinly. Father finally said, “What does Las Lomitas mean in English?” And I wrestled with what little Spanish I had learned until that evening at the table. I grinned to myself as I said, “It means ‘The Little Hills,’ ” and watched Father, for a change, sort through past conversations to understand what I was talking about.

  Mama’s time was nearing and we were all worried. Though as I said, politeness had it that I wasn’t supposed to know what was going on. But I knew about the long gap between Merry and me—almost fourteen years. Mama had borne and buried five children in that time. I had been as healthy as a horse, but after me none of the babies seemed able to live. Oh, maybe a week or so, at first, but finally only a faint gasp or two and the perfectly formed babies died. And all this back East where there were doctors and midwives and comfort. I guess Mama gave up after the fifth baby died, because none came along until after we moved to Fool’s Acres. When we knew Merry was on the way, I could feel the suspense building up. I couldn’t really remember all those other babies because I had been so young. They had come each year regularly after me. But it had been ten years between the last one and Merry. So when Merry was born out in the wilderness with Father for midwife, none of us dared breathe heavily for fear she’d die. But she was like me—big lungs, big appetite, and no idea of the difference between day and night.