Ingathering

by Zenna Henderson

  Next morning, as though it was our usual task, Father got out the shovels and rigged up a bucket on a rope and he and I and Timmy worked in the well. We called it a well now, instead of a hole, maybe to bolster our hopes.

  By evening we had it down a good twelve feet, still not finding much except hard, packed-down river silt and an occasional clump of round river rocks. Our ladder was barely long enough to help us scramble up out and the edges of the hole were crumbly and sifted off under the weight of our knees.

  I climbed out. Father set the bucket aside and eased his palms against his hips. Timmy was still in the well, kneeling and feeling the bottom.

  “Timmy!” I called. “Come on up. Time to quit!” His face turned up to me but still he knelt there and I found myself gingerly groping for the first rung of the ladder below the rim of the well.

  “Timmy wants me to look at something,” I said up to Father’s questioning face. I climbed down and knelt by Timmy. My hands followed his tracing hands and I looked up and said, “Father!” with such desolation in my voice that he edged over the rim and came down, too.

  We traced it again and again. There was solid rock, no matter which way we brushed the dirt, no matter how far we poked into the sides of the well. We were down to bedrock. We were stopped.

  We climbed soberly up out of the well. Father boosted me up over the rim and I braced myself and gave him a hand up. Timmy came up. There was no jarring of his feet on the ladder, but he came up. I didn’t look at him.

  The three of us stood there, ankle-deep in dust. Then Timmy put his hands out, one hand to Father’s shoulder and one to mine. “ ‘Shall waters break out and streams in the desert,’ ” he said carefully and emphatically.

  “Parrot!” said Father bitterly, turning away.

  “If the water is under the stone!” I cried. “Father, we blasted out the mesquite stumps in the far pasture. Can’t we blast the stone—”

  Father’s steps were long and swinging as he hurried to the barn. “I haven’t ever done this except with stumps,” he said. He sent Mama and Merry out behind the barn. He made Timmy and me stay away as he worked in the bottom of the well, then he scrambled up the ladder and I ran out to help pull it up out of the well and we all retreated behind the barn, too.

  Timmy clung to my wrist and when the blast came, he cried out something I couldn’t understand and wouldn’t come with us back to the well. He crouched behind the barn, his face to his knees, his hands clasped over the top of his head.

  We looked at the well. It was a dimple in the front yard. The sides had caved in. There was nothing to show for all our labor but the stacked-up dirt beside the dimple, our ladder, and a bucket with a rope tied to the bale. We watched as a clod broke loose at the top of the dimple and started a trickle of dirt as it rolled dustily down into the hole.

  “ ‘And streams in the desert,’ ” said Father, turning away.

  I picked up the bucket, dumped out a splinter of stone, and put the bucket carefully on the edge of the porch.

  “Supper,” said Mama quietly, sagging under Merry’s weight.

  I went and got Timmy. He came willingly enough. He paused by the dimple in the front yard, his hand on my wrist, then went with me into the shadowy cabin.

  After supper I brought our evening books to the table, but Timmy put out seeking hands and gathered them to him. He put both hands, lapping over each other, across the top of the stack and leaned his chin on them, his face below the bandage thoughtful and still.

  “I have words enough now,” he said slowly. “I have been learning them as fast as I could. Maybe I will not have them always right, but I must talk now. You must not go away, because there is water.”

  Father closed his astonished mouth and said wearily, “So you have been making fools of us all this time!”

  Timmy’s fingers went to my wrist in the pause that followed Father’s words. “I have not made fools of you,” Timmy went on. “I could not speak to anyone but Barney without words, and I must touch him to tell and to understand. I had to wait to learn your words. It is a new language.”

  “Where are you from?” I asked eagerly, pulling the patient cork out of my curiosity. “How did you get out there in the pasture? What is in the—” Just in time I remembered that I was the only one who knew about the charred box.

  “My cahilla!” cried Timmy—then he shook his head at me and addressed himself to Father. “I’m not sure how to tell you so you will believe. I don’t know how far your knowledge—”

  “Father’s smarter than anyone in the whole Territory!” I cried.

  “The Territory—” Timmy paused, measuring Territory. “I was thinking of your world—this world—”

  “There are other planets—” I repeated Father’s puzzling words.

  “Then you do know other planets,” said Timmy. “Do you—” he groped for a word. “Do you transport yourself and things in the sky?”

  Father stirred. “Do we have flying machines?” he asked. “No, not yet. We have balloons—”

  Timmy’s fingers were on my wrist again. He sighed. “Then I must just tell and if you do not know, you must believe only because I tell. I tell only to make you know there is water and you must stay.

  “My world is another planet. It was another planet. It is broken in space now, all to pieces, shaking and roaring and fire—and all gone.” His blind face looked on desolation and his lips tightened. I felt hairs crisp along my neck. As long as he touched my wrist I could see! I couldn’t tell you what all I saw because lots of it had no words I knew to put to it, but I saw!

  “We had ships for going in Space,” he said. I saw them, needlesharp and shining, pointing at the sky and the heavy red-lit clouds. “We went into space before our Home broke. Our Home! Our—Home.” His voice broke and he leaned his cheek on the stack of books. Then he straightened again.

  “We came to your world. We did not know of it before. We came far, far. At the last we came too fast. We are not Space travelers. The big ship that found your world got too hot. We had to leave it in our life-slips, each by himself. The life-slips got hot, too. I was burning! I lost control of my life-slip. I fell—” He put his hands to his bandages. “I think maybe I will never see this new world.”

  “Then there are others, like you, here on Earth,” said Father slowly.

  “Unless they all died in the landing,” said Timmy. “There were many on the big ship.”

  “I saw little things shoot off the big thing!” I cried, excited. “I thought they were pieces breaking off, only they—they went instead of falling!”

  “Praise to the Presence, the Name, and the Power!” said Timmy, his right hand sketching his sign in the air, then dropping to my wrist again.

  “Maybe some still live. Maybe my family. Maybe Lytha—”

  I stared, fascinated, as I saw Lytha, dark hair swinging, smiling back over her shoulder, her arms full of flowers whose centers glowed like little lights. Daggone, I thought, Daggone! She sure isn’t his Merry!

  “Your story is most interesting,” said Father, “and it opens vistas we haven’t begun to explore yet, but what bearing has all this on our water problem?”

  “We can do things you seem not able to do,” said Timmy. “You must always touch the ground to go, and lift things with tools or hands, and know only because you touch and see. We can know without touching and seeing. We can find people and metals and water—we can find almost anything that we know, if it is near us. I have not been trained to be a finder, but I have studied the feel of water and the—the—what it is made of—”

  “The composition,” Father supplied the word.

  “The composition of water,” said Timmy. “And Barney and I explored much of the farm. I found the water here by the house.”

  “We dug,” said Father. “How far down is the water?”

  “I am not trained,” said Timmy humbly. “I only know it is there. It is water that you think of when you say ‘Las Lomitas.’ It is not a dip
ping place or—or a pool. It is going. It is pushing hard. It is cold.” He shivered a little.

  “It is probably three hundred feet down,” said Father. “There has never been an artesian well this side of the Coronas.”

  “It is close enough for me to find,” said Timmy. “Will you wait?”

  “Until our water is gone,” said Father. “And until we have decided where to go.

  “Now it’s time for bed.” Father took the Bible from the stack of books. He thumbed back from our place to Psalms and read the “When I consider the heavens” one. As I listened, all at once the tight little world I knew, overtopped by the tight little Heaven I wondered about, suddenly split right down the middle and stretched and grew and filled with such a glory that I was scared and grabbed the edge of the table. If Timmy had come from another planet so far away that it wasn’t even one we had a name for—! I knew that never again would my mind think it could measure the world—or my imagination, the extent of God’s creation!

  I was just dropping off the edge of waking after tumbling and tossing for what seemed like hours, when I heard Timmy.

  “Barney,” he whispered, not being able to reach my wrist. “My cahilla—You found my cahilla?”

  “Your what?” I asked, sitting up in bed and meeting his groping hands. “Oh! That box thing. Yeah, I’ll get it for you in the morning.”

  “Not tonight?” asked Timmy, wistfully. “It is all I have left of the Home. The only personal things we had room for—”

  “I can’t find it tonight,” I said. “I buried it by a rock. I couldn’t find it in the dark. Besides, Father’d hear us go, if we tried to leave now. Go to sleep. It must be near morning.”

  “Oh, yes,” sighed Timmy, “oh, yes.” And he lay back down. “Sleep well.”

  And I did, going out like a lamp blown out, and dreamed wild, exciting dreams about riding astride ships that went sailless across waterless oceans of nothingness and burned with white-hot fury that woke me up to full morning light and Merry bouncing happily on my stomach.

  After breakfast, Mama carefully oiled Timmy’s scabs again. “I’m almost out of bandages,” she said.

  “If you don’t mind having to see,” said Timmy, “don’t bandage me again. Maybe the light will come through.”

  We went out and looked at the dimple by the porch. It had subsided farther and was a bowl-shaped place now, maybe waist-deep to me.

  “Think it’ll do any good to dig it out again?” I asked Father.

  “I doubt it,” he answered heavily. “Apparently I don’t know how to set a charge to break the bedrock. How do we know we could break it anyway? It could be a mile thick right here.” It seemed to me that Father was talking to me more like to a man than to a boy. Maybe I wasn’t a boy any more!

  “The water is there,” said Timmy. “If only I could ‘platt’—” His hand groped in the sun and it streamed through his fingers for a minute like sun through a knothole in a dusty room. I absently picked up the piece of stone I had dumped from the bucket last evening. I fingered it and said, “Ouch!” I had jabbed myself on its sharp point. Sharp point!

  “Look,” I said, holding it out to Father. “This is broken! All the other rocks we found were round river rocks. Our blasting broke something!”

  “Yes.” Father took the splinter from me. “But where’s the water?”

  Timmy and I left Father looking at the well and went out to the foot of the field where the fire had been. I located the rock where I had buried the box. It was only a couple of inches down—barely covered. I scratched it out for him. “Wait,” I said, “it’s all black. Let me wipe it off first.” I rubbed it in a sand patch and the black all rubbed off except in the deep lines of the design that covered all sides of it. I put it in his eager hands.

  He flipped it around until it fitted his two hands with his thumbs touching in front. Then I guess he must have thought at it, because he didn’t do anything else but all at once it opened, cleanly, from his thumbs up.

  He sat there on a rock in the sun and felt the things that were in the box. I couldn’t tell you what any of them were except what looked like a piece of ribbon, and a withered flower. He finally closed the box. He slid to his knees beside the rock and hid his face on his arms. He sat there a long time. When he finally lifted his face, it was dry, but his sleeves were wet. I’ve seen Mama’s sleeves like that after she has looked at things in the little black trunk of hers.

  “Will you put it back in the ground?” he asked. “There is no place for it in the house. It will be safe here.”

  So I buried the box again and we went back to the house.

  Father had dug a little, but he said, “It’s no use. The blast loosened the ground all around and it won’t even hold the shape of a well any more.”

  We talked off and on all day about where to go from here, moneyless and perilously short of provisions. Mama wanted so much to go back to our old home that she couldn’t talk about it, but Father wanted to go on, pushing West again. I wanted to stay where we were—with plenty of water. I wanted to see that tide of Time sweep one century away and start another across Desolation Valley! There would be a sight for you!

  We began to pack that afternoon because the barrels were emptying fast and the pools were damp, curling cakes of mud in the hot sun. All we could take was what we could load on the hayrack. Father had traded the wagon we came West in for farm machinery and a set of washtubs. We’d have to leave the machinery either to rust there or for us to come back for.

  Mama took Merry that evening and climbed the hill to the little grave under the scrub oak. She sat there a long time with her back to the sun, her wistful face in the shadow. She came back in silence, Merry heavily sleepy in her arms.

  After we had gone to bed, Timmy groped for my wrist. “You do have a satellite to your earth, don’t you?” he asked. His question was without words.

  “A satellite?” Someone turned restlessly on the big bed when I hissed my question.

  “Yes,” he answered. “A smaller world that goes around and is bright at night.”

  “Oh,” I breathed. “You mean the moon. Yes, we have a moon but it’s not very bright now. There was only a sliver showing just after sunset.” I felt Timmy sag. “Why?”

  “We can do large things with sunlight and moonlight together,” came his answer. “I hoped that at sunrise tomorrow—”

  “At sunrise tomorrow, we’ll be finishing our packing,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

  “Then I must do without,” he went on, not hearing me. “Barney, if I am Called, will you keep my cahilla until someone asks for it? If they ask, it is my People. Then they will know I am gone.”

  “Called?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  “As the baby was,” he said softly. “Called back into the Presence from which we came. If I must lift with my own strength alone, I may not have enough, so will you keep my cahilla?”

  “Yes,” I promised, not knowing what he was talking about. “I’ll keep it.”

  “Good. Sleep well,” he said, and again waking went out of me like a lamp blown out.

  All night long I dreamed of storms and earthquakes and floods and tornadoes all going past me—fast! Then I was lying half awake, afraid to open my eyes for fear some of my dreaming might be true. And suddenly, it was!

  I clutched my pallet as the floor humped, snapping and groaning, and flopped flat again. I heard our breakfast pots and pans banging on the shelf and then falling with a clatter. Mama called, her voice heavy with sleep and fear, “James! James!”

  I reached for Timmy, but the floor humped again and dust rolled in through the pale squares of the windows and I coughed as I came to my knees. There was a crash of something heavy falling on the roof and rolling off. And a sharp hissing sound. Timmy wasn’t in bed. Father was trying to find his shoes. The hissing noise got louder and louder until it was a burbling roar. Then there was a rumble and something banged the front of the house so hard I heard the porch splinter.
Then there was a lot of silence.

  I crept on all fours across the floor. Where was Timmy? I could see the front door hanging at a crazy angle on one hinge. I crept toward it.

  My hands splashed! I paused, confused, and started on again. I was crawling in water! “Father!” My voice was a croak from the dust and shock. “Father! It’s water!”

  And Father was suddenly there, lifting me to my feet. We stumbled together to the front door. There was a huge slab of rock poking a hole in the siding of the house, crushing the broken porch under its weight. We edged around it, ankle-deep in water, and saw in the gray light of early dawn our whole front yard awash from hill to porch. Where the well had been was a moving hump of water that worked away busily, becoming larger and larger as we watched.

  “Water!” said Father. “The water has broken through!”

  “Where’s Timmy?” I said. “Where’s Timmy?” I yelled and started to splash out into the yard.

  “Watch out!” warned Father. “It’s dangerous! All this rock came out of there!” We skirted the front yard searching the surface of the rising water, thinking every shadow might be Timmy.

  We found him on the far side of the house, floating quietly, face up in a rising pool of water, his face a bleeding mass of mud and raw flesh.

  I reached him first, floundering through the water to him. I lifted his shoulders and tried to see in the dawn light if he was still breathing. Father reached us and we lifted Timmy to dry land.

  “He’s alive!” said Father. “His face—it’s just the scabs scraped off.”

  “Help me get him in the house,” I said, beginning to lift him.

  “Better be the barn,” said Father. “The water’s still rising.” It had crept up to us already and seeped under Timmy again. We carried him to the barn and I stayed with him while Father went back for Merry and Mama.

  It was lucky that most of our things had been packed on the hayrack the night before. After Mama, a shawl thrown over her nightgown and all our day clothes grabbed up in her arms, came wading out with Father, who was carrying Merry and our lamp, I gave Timmy into her care and went back with Father again and again to finish emptying the cabin of our possessions.