Ingathering

by Zenna Henderson

  Already the huge rock had gone on down through the porch and disappeared into the growing pond of water in the front yard. The house was dipping to the weight of our steps as though it might float off the minute we left. Father got a rope from the wagon and tied it through the broken corner of the house and tethered it to the barn. “No use losing the lumber if we don’t have to,” he said.

  By the time the sun was fully up, the house was floating off its foundation rocks. There was a pond filling all the house yard, back and front, extending along the hill, up to the dipping place, and turning into a narrow stream going the other way, following the hill for a while, then dividing our dying orchard and flowing down toward the dry river bed. Father and I pulled the house slowly over toward the barn until it grated solid ground again.

  Mama had cleaned Timmy up. He didn’t seem to be hurt except for his face and shoulder being peeled raw. She put olive oil on him again and used one of Merry’s petticoats to bandage his face. He lay deeply unconscious all of that day while we watched the miracle of water growing in a dry land. The pond finally didn’t grow any wider, but the stream widened and deepened, taking three of our dead trees down to the river. The water was clearing now and was deep enough over the spring that it didn’t bubble any more that we could see. There was only a shivering of the surface so that circles ran out to the edge of the pond, one after another.

  Father went down with a bucket and brought it back brimming over. We drank the cold, cold water and Mama made a pack to put on Timmy’s head.

  Timmy stirred but he didn’t waken. It wasn’t until evening, when we were settling down to a scratch-meal in the barn, that we began to realize what had happened.

  “We have water!” Father cried suddenly. “Streams in the desert!”

  “It’s an artesian well, isn’t it!” I asked. “Like at Las Lomitas? It’ll go on flowing from here on out, won’t it?”

  “That remains to be seen,” Father said. “But it looks like a good one. Tomorrow I must ride to Tolliver’s Wells and tell them we have water. They must be almost out by now!”

  “Then we don’t have to move?” I asked.

  “Not as long as we have water,” said Father. “I wonder if we have growing time enough to put in a kitchen garden—”

  I turned quickly. Timmy was moving. His hands were on the bandage, exploring it cautiously.

  “Timmy.” I reached for his wrist. “It’s all right, Timmy. You just got peeled raw. We had to bandage you again.”

  “The—the water—” His voice was barely audible.

  “It’s all over the place!” I said. “It’s floated the house off the foundations and you should see the pond! And the stream! And it’s cold!”

  “I’m thirsty,” he said. “I want a drink, please.”

  He drained the cup of cold water and his lips turned upward in a ghost of a smile. “Shall waters break out!”

  “Plenty of water,” I laughed. Then I sobered. “What were you doing out in it, anyway?”

  Mama and Father were sitting on the floor beside us now.

  “I had to lift the dirt out,” he said, touching my wrist. “All night I lifted. It was hard to hold back the loose dirt so it wouldn’t slide back into the hole. I sat on the porch and lifted the dirt until the rock was there.” He sighed and was silent for a minute. “I was not sure I had strength enough. The rock was cracked and I could feel the water pushing, hard, hard, under. I had to break the rock enough to let the water start through. It wouldn’t break! I called on the Power again and tried and tried. Finally a piece came loose and flew up. The force of the water—it was like—like—blasting. I had no strength left. I went unconscious.”

  “You dug all that out alone!” Father took one of Timmy’s hands and looked at the smooth palm.

  “We do not always have to touch to lift and break,” said Timmy. “But to do it for long and heavy takes much strength.” His head rolled weakly.

  “Thank you, Timothy,” said Father. “Thank you for the well.”

  So that’s why we didn’t move. That’s why Promise Pond is here to keep the ranch green. That’s why this isn’t Fool’s Acres any more but Full Acres. That’s why Cahilla Creek puzzles people who try to make it Spanish. Even Father doesn’t know why Timmy and I named the stream Cahilla. The pond had almost swallowed up the little box before we remembered it.

  That’s why the main road across Desolation Valley goes through our ranch now for the sweetest, coldest water in the Territory. That’s why our big new house is built among the young black walnut and weeping willow trees that surround the pond. That’s why it has geraniums windowsill high along one wall. That’s why our orchard has begun to bear enough to start being a cash crop.

  And that’s why, too, that one day a wagon coming from the far side of Desolation Valley made camp on the camping grounds below the pond. We went down to see the people after supper to exchange news. Timmy’s eyes were open now, but only light came into them, not enough to see by.

  The lady of the wagon tried not to look at the deep scars on the side of Timmy’s face as her man and we men talked together. She listened a little too openly to Timmy’s part of the conversation and said softly to Mama, her whisper spraying juicily, “He your boy?”

  “Yes, our boy,” said Mama, “but not born to us.”

  “Oh,” said the woman. “I thought he talked kinda foreign.” Her voice was critical. “Seems like we’re gettin’ overrun with foreigners. Like that sassy girl in Margin.”

  “Oh?” Mama fished Merry out from under the wagon by her dress tail.

  “Yes,” said the woman. “She talks foreign too, though they say not as much as she used to. Oh, them foreigners are smart enough! Her aunt says she was sick and had to learn to talk all over again, that’s why she sounds like that.” The woman leaned confidingly toward Mama, lowering her voice. “But I heard in a roundabout way that there’s something queer about that girl. I don’t think she’s really their niece. I think she came from somewhere else. I think she’s really a foreigner!”

  “Oh?” said Mama, quite unimpressed and a little bored.

  “They say she does funny things and Heaven knows her name’s funny enough. I ask you! Doesn’t the way these foreigners push themselves in—”

  “Where did your folks come from?” asked Mama, vexed by the voice the lady used for “foreigner.”

  The lady reddened. “I’m native born!” she said, tossing her head. “Just because my parents—It isn’t as though England was—” She pinched her lips together. “Abigail Johnson for a name is a far cry from Marnie Lyrha Something—or—other!”

  “Lytha!” I heard Timmy’s cry without words. Lytha? He stumbled toward the woman, for once his feet unsure. She put out a hasty hand to fend him off and her face drew up with distaste.

  “Watch out!” she cried sharply. “Watch where you’re going!”

  “He’s blind,” Mama said softly.

  “Oh,” the woman reddened again. “Oh, well—”

  “Did you say you knew a girl named Lytha?” asked Timmy faintly.

  “Well, I never did have much to do with her,” said the woman, unsure of herself. “I saw her a time or two—”

  Timmy’s fingers went out to touch her wrist and she jerked back as though burned. “I’m sorry,” said Timmy. “Where are you coming from?”

  “Margin,” said the woman. “We been there a couple of months shoeing the horses and blacksmithing some.”

  “Margin,” said Timmy, his hands shaking a little as he turned away. “Thanks.”

  “Well, you’re welcome, I guess,” snapped the woman. She turned back to Mama, who was looking after us, puzzled. “Now all the new dresses have—”

  “I couldn’t see,” whispered Timmy to me as we moved off through the green grass and willows to the orchard. “She wouldn’t let me touch her. How far is Margin?”

  “Two days across Desolation Valley,” I said, bubbling with excitement. “It’s a mining town in the
hills over there. Their main road comes from the other side.”

  “Two days!” Timmy stopped and clung to a small tree. “Only two days away all this time!”

  “It might not be your Lytha,” I warned. “It could be one of us. I’ve heard some of the wildest names! Pioneering seems to addle people’s naming sense.”

  “I’ll call,” said Timmy, his face rapt. “I’ll call and when she answers—!”

  “If she hears you,” I said, knowing his calling wouldn’t be aloud and would take little notice of the distance to Margin. “Maybe she thinks everyone is dead like you did. Maybe she won’t think of listening.”

  “She will think often of the Home,” said Timmy firmly, “and when she does, she will hear me. I will start now.” And he threaded his way expertly through the walnuts and willows by the pond.

  I looked after him and sighed. I wanted him happy and if it was his Lytha, I wanted them together again. But, if he called and called again and got no answer—

  I slid to a seat on a rock by the pond, thinking again of the little lake we were planning where we would have fish and maybe a boat—I dabbled my hand in the cold water and thought, this was dust before Timmy came. He was stubborn enough to make the stream break through.

  “If Timmy calls,” I told a little bird balancing suddenly on a twig, bobbing over the water, “someone will answer!”

  Interlude: Mark & Meris 4

  Meris leaned back with a sigh. “Well!” she said, “thank goodness! I never would have rested easy again if I hadn’t found out! But after Timmy found The People, surely his eyes—”

  “Never satisfied,” said Mark. “The more you hear the more you want to hear—”

  “I’ve never Assembled much beyond that,” said Bethie. Then she held up a cautioning hand. “Wait—”

  “Oh,” she said, listening. “Oh, dear! Of course.” She stood up, her face a pale blur in the darkness of the patio. “That was Debbie. She’s on her way here. She says Dr. Curtis needs me back at the Group. Valancy sent her because she’s the one who came back from the New Home and ‘Peopled all over the place,’ as she says. I have to leave immediately. There isn’t time for a car. Luckily it’s dark enough now. Debbie has her part all Assembled already so she can—”

  “I wish you didn’t have to leave so soon,” said Meris, following her inside and helping her scramble her few belongings into her small case.

  “There is so much—There’s always so much—You’ll enjoy Debbie’s story.” Bethie was drifting steplessly out the door. “And there are others—” She was a quickening shadow rising above the patio and her whispered “Good-by” came softly down through the overarching tree branches.

  “Hi!” The laughing voice startled them around from their abstraction. “Unless I’ve lost my interpretive ability, that’s an awfully wet, hungry cry coming from in there!”

  “Oh, ’Licia, honey!” Meris fled indoors, crooning abject apologies as she went.

  “Well, hi to you, then.” The woman stepped out of the shadows and offered a hand to Mark. “I’m Debbie. Sorry to snatch Bethie away, but Dr. Curtis had to have her stat. She’s our best Sensitive and he has a puzzlesome emergency to diagnose. She’s his court of last resort!”

  “Dr. Curtis?” Mark returned her warm firm clasp. “That must be the doctor Johannan was trying to find to lead him to the Group.”

  “Is so,” said Debbie. “Our Inside-Outsider. He’s a fixture with us now. Not that he stays with the Group, but he functions as One of Us.”

  “Come on in,” said Mark, holding the kitchen door open. “Come in and have some coffee.”

  “Thank you kindly,” laughed Debbie. “It’s right sightly of you to ask a stranger to ‘light and set a spell.’ No.” She smiled at Mark’s questioning eyes. “That’s not the way they talk on the New Home. It’s only a slight lingual hangover from the first days of my Return. That’s the Assembly Valancy sent me to tell you.”

  She sat at the kitchen table, and Mark gathered up his battered, discolored coffee mug and Meris’s handleless one and a brightly company-neat cup for Debbie. There wasn’t much left of the coffee, but by squeezing hard enough, he achieved three rather scanty portions.

  After the flurry of building more coffee and Meris’s return with a solemnly blinking ’Licia to be exclaimed over and inspected and loved and fed and adored and bedded again, they decided to postpone Debbie’s installment until after their own supper.

  “This Assembling business is getting to be as much an addiction as watching TV,” said Mark, mending the fire in the fireplace.

  “Well, there’s addiction and addiction,” said Meris as Mark returned to the couch to sit on the other side of Debbie. “I prefer this one. This is for real—hard as it is to believe.”

  “For real,” mused Debbie, clasping their hands. “I could hardly believe it was for real then, either. Here is how I felt—”

  Return

  I was afraid. When the swelling bulk of the Earth blotted our ports, I was afraid for the first time. Fear was a sudden throb in my throat and, almost as an echo, a sudden throb from Child Within reminded me why it was that Earth was swelling in our ports after such a final good-by. Drawn by my mood, Thann joined me as the slow turning of our craft slid the Earth out of sight.

  “Apprehensive?” he asked, his arm firm across my shoulders.

  “A little.” I leaned against him. “This business of trying to go back again is a little disquieting. You can’t just slip back into the old mold. Either it’s changed or you’ve changed—or both. I realize that.”

  “Well, the best we can do is give it the old college try,” he said. “And all for Child Within. I hope he appreciates it.”

  “Or she.” I glanced down at my unfamiliar proportions. “As the case may be. But you do understand, don’t you?” Need for reassurance lifted my voice a little. “Thann, we just had to come back. I just couldn’t bear the thought of Child Within being born in that strange—tidy—” My voice trailed off and I leaned more heavily, sniffing.

  “Listen, Debbie-my-dear!” Thann shook me gently and hugged me roughly. “I know, I know! While I don’t share your aching necessity for Earth, I agreed, didn’t I? Didn’t I sweat blood in that dern Motiver school, learning to manipulate this craft? Aren’t we almost there?”

  “Almost there! Oh, Thann! Oh, Thann!” Our craft had completed another of its small revolutions, and Earth marched determinedly across the port again. I pressed myself against the pane, wanting to reach—to gather in the featureless mists, the blurred beauties of the world, and hold them so close—so close that even Child Within would move to their wonder.

  I’m a poor hand at telling time. I couldn’t tell you even to within a year how long ago it was that Shua lifted the Ship from the flat at Cougar Canyon and started the trip from Earth to The Home. I remembered how excited I was. Even my ponytail had trembled as the great adventure began. Thann swears he was standing so close to me at Takeoff that the ponytail tickled his nose. But I don’t remember him. I don’t even remember seeing him at all during the long trip when the excitement of being evacuated from Earth dulled to the routine of travel and later became resurrected as anxiety about what The Home would be like.

  I don’t remember him at all until that desolate day on The Home when I stood at the end of the so-precise little lane that wound so consciously lovely from the efficient highway. I was counting, through the blur of my tears, the precisely twenty-six trees interspersed at suitable intervals by seven clumps of underbrush. He just happened to be passing at the moment and I looked up at him and choked, “Not even a weed! Not one!”

  Astonished, he folded his legs and hovered a little above eye level.

  “What good’s a weed?”

  “At least it shows individuality!” I shut my eyes, not caring that by so doing the poised tears consolidated and fell. “I’m so sick of perfection!”

  “Perfection?” He lifted a little higher above me, his eyes on some far sigh
t. “I certainly wouldn’t call The Home perfect yet. From here I can see the North Reach. We’ve only begun to nibble at that. The preliminary soil crew is just starting analysis.” He dropped down beside me. “We can’t waste time and space on weeds. It’ll take long enough to make the whole of The Home habitable without using energy on nonessentials.”

  “They’ll find out!” I stubbornly proclaimed. “Someday they’ll find out that weeds are essentials. Man wasn’t made for such—such neatness. He has to have unimportant clutter to relax in!”

  “Why haven’t you presented these fundamental doctrines to the Old Ones?” He laughed at me.

  “Have I not!” I retorted. “Well, maybe not to the Old Ones, but I’ve already expressed myself, and furthermore, Mr.—Oh, I’m sorry, I’m Debbie—”

  “I’m Thannel,” he grinned.

  “—Thannel, I’ll have you know other wiser heads than mine have come to the same conclusion. Maybe not in my words, but they mean the same thing. This artificiality—this—this—The People aren’t meant to live divorced from the—the—” I spread my hands. “Soil, I guess you could say. They lose something when everything gets—gets paved.”

  “Oh, I think we’ll manage.” He smiled. “Memory can sustain.”

  “Memory? Oh, Thann, remember the tangle of blackberry vines in back of Kroginold’s house? How we used to burrow under the scratchy, cool, green twilight under those vines and hunt for berries—cool ones from the shadows, and warm ones from the sun, and always at least one thorn in the thumb as payment for trespassing. Mmmm—” Eyes closed, I lost myself in the memory.

  Then my eyes flipped open. “Or are you from the other Home? Maybe you’ve never even seen Earth.”

  “Yes, I have,” he said, suddenly sober. “I’m from Bendo. I haven’t many happy memories of Earth. Until your Group found us, we had a pretty thin time of it.”