Ingathering

by Zenna Henderson

  “Yes,” said Eliada. “I can come. If I may hold—” She reached out and took Papa’s hand where it drooped down, and Nathan started on, carrying the too-light Papa. Feeling a tug, he looked back to see Eliada, trailing like a limp scarf after him, holding fast to Papa’s hand.

  Adina came running to meet them.

  “Is that Eliada? Oh, Eliada!” Then they got close enough for her to see, and her happy call fell silent and her two hands clasped over her open mouth. Her eyes looked again at Nathan, sagging to a stop under the bulk of Papa. And Papa, white and dead-looking, with blood dripping down over one shoe. And Eliada, a pool of limpness at Nathan’s feet. And her eyes filled with frightened tears.

  “Oh, Nathan! What’s the matter with Papa? And Eliada? There’s just us kids, because Mama can’t—Oh, Nathan! What are we going to do? What are we going to do?”

  Papa was lying on the bed, damply clean, his cream-colored night shirt pulled smoothly and decently down to the folded-back quilt covering him to the waist. His eyes were open and wary, watching as Eliada’s hair shook itself in a swirly cloud until it was dry and smoothed itself decorously down against her head, only to lift again into exuberant curls and waves.

  “Oh, it is good to be clean again,” she said. “Pain is twice as much when there is dirt and confusion—and blood!” Her finger touched her head where the flesh had closed itself to a thin, red line.

  “You sure get well fast,” said Adina, engrossed in curling a strand of Eliada’s hair around her hand and letting it spring free.

  “It was small,” said Eliada, smiling at her. Then she went over to the bed and melted down upon herself until she was eye to level eye with Papa, straight across.

  “But yours is not small,” she said. “Your bone is broken. And there is a—a—the flesh is torn to show the bone. It will be long for it to get well after it is put right again. Do you have those whose gift is to put right?”

  Papa looked at her for a long moment, then he said, “Doctors. None closer than the county seat. Six days’ horseback.”

  “Then—” Eliada’s face pinked a little. “Then will you let us help you? My People? We can make your leg more right so it will get well and be straight, but I cannot do it alone. Will you let us?”

  “Evil,” said Papa, but slowly, not so quickly sure any more.

  “Evil,” said Eliada, thoughtfully, twisting her hand in her hair. “I am not sure I know this evil you know so well—”

  “Badness,” said Nathan. “Disobeying God. Sometimes it seems good, but only to lead you astray. Thou shalt not—”

  “Oh,” said Eliada after searching somewhere inside herself. “Separation. Oh, but we would do nothing to separate anyone from the Presence!” She was astonished. “We want to help you, but not if you feel it would separate—”

  Papa looked at Eliada for a sharp, short moment. Then he turned his face away. “No,” he said. “Get thee behind me, Satan.”

  Eliada toiled to her feet wearily, her face drawn and unhappy, one foot caught in her skirt. Adina, with a sharp little cry, rushed to hinder by trying to help. Nathan lifted Eliada free of her skirts’ tangle and of Adina.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Papa sees so much evil—”

  “It’s because Lucas is dead,” said Mama. “That’s why he won’t let you help. He was so sure that Lucas died because of—of you, that he can’t let you help him now, because, if he gets well—And Lucas is dead.”

  Eliada’s head turned alertly. “Roth is here,” she said, moving to the door. “We had hoped—”

  The tall man who had skated so happily with the small child on his shoulders—so long, oh, so long ago—moved into sight at the door.

  “But you said he was blind,” said Nathan.

  “Yes,” said Eliada. “But he has learned to move freely in many places. And there is Moorma—”

  A shy, smiling face peered from behind Roth’s right leg. Then dodged away, only to peek again from behind his left leg. Nathan felt a smile crack through his tired face, and looked at Eliada. She was smiling, too, as Moorma disappeared again. Adina’s giggle was smothered behind quick hands and even Mama’s face lightened.

  “Moorma is like that,” said Eliada. “Smiles come with her always, but she is shy with new people. She sees for Roth, when Roth requires it.” She went to the door and put her hand into Roth’s reaching hand.

  “We will help—when you will accept it,” she said. “Take comfort in the Presence.” And the three of them were gone.

  Adina ran out of the door after them crying, “Goodbye! Goodbye!”

  She came back into the cabin with a happy little skip. “They’re flying,” she said. “I knew they would! And Moorma—Moorma’s doing it best—holding onto Roth!”

  Nathan straightened his weary back by the bed, which had been pulled to the middle of the room, and looked across it at Mama. Mama, her hand holding the wet, folded cloth on Papa’s briefly quiet forehead, looked across it at Nathan. Adina wept quietly in the far corner in her shadowy refuge behind hanging clothes.

  “He isn’t getting better,” said Nathan.

  “No,” said Mama. “He is getting worse. The poultice isn’t doing any good at all. The infection is spreading. And we can’t keep the splint straight, the way he tosses—”

  Papa jerked away from Mama’s hand. “Hell’s fires! Hot! Warm warm warm warm—Lucas—!”

  Then his eyes opened to look into Nathan’s, too close for comfort at the edge of the bed. “It hurts!” His voice was thin and young and painfully surprised. The shadowy little boy again looked through the thicket of pain and whiskers and age. Then his eyes closed and his body twisted as he cried out in a ragged shaken voice.

  And Adina wailed from her corner.

  Mama straightened up, her hand pressing the swell of her side. She smoothed her hair back with both hands, her eyes shut, her chin tightly lifted. Then she shrugged herself wearily, twisting to ease her own aching.

  “Go get them,” she said. “He can die if he wants to, but not like this. Not to kill us all with him. Go get Eliada and that man—”

  “And Moorma!” Adina was prancing at Mama’s elbow. “Get Moorma.”

  “Get them all,” said Mama. “He can talk about evil, but by their fruits ye shall know them—”

  Nathan heard the last words fade as he pounded across the front yard. Why it’s daylight, he thought, astonished. The sun is shining!

  Halfway across the ruined field, he faltered and stumbled. They were coming! All of them! Fast! Don’t ask how they come. Don’t think of how they come! A band of angels, coming—

  Three grown-ups and Eliada and the little girl and a cradle-the cradle-tell me a story—

  “We have waited,” said Eliada, taking Nathan’s hand to hurry him back to the cabin. “Each day we have been renewing our strength through the Power, and we have waited. We can help! Oh, truly, Nathan, we can help!”

  Mama and Nathan hunched under the tree across the flat from the cabin. Adina had slipped sideways across Mama’s lap, and slept, her hands still tightly interlaced under her chin.

  Eliada had told them when they were banished from the cabin: “If you have a way of coming into the Presence—to speak the Name—”

  “We can pray,” he told her.

  “Pray,” she said. “Help us with your prayers.”

  And the family had prayed—aloud and silently—until the words blurred and Adina could only remember Now I lay me. Now Mama’s head was leaning back against the tree trunk, her eyes closed, her breath coming quietly.

  Nathan looked around. It is a good country, he thought. Everything about it is good—now. If only we could—could be more like the country. Open—busy—growing—His head drooped with his heavy eyes. With singing and wings and how big the snowflakes are—the stars—and he slept.

  He woke, too warm in the late afternoon sun, his neck aching, his mouth dry. He straightened his neck cautiously with the pressure of one hand—and his whole body
throbbed with alarm before he knew it was Eliada. She was sitting quietly in the pool of her skirts, her hands loosely clasped in her lap.

  She smiled and said quietly, “He is sleeping.”

  Mama woke to the strange voice.

  “We have done what we could—the Power helping,” said Eliada. “His leg—” she faltered. “It was bad. We got it straight again, and secured, and have started it back from the—the—”

  “Infection,” supplied Mama. “The infection—” She was getting awkwardly to her feet, leaving Adina fisting weary eyes.

  “Yes, the infection.” Eliada drifted up to her feet. “It will be long, but it will get well. Already we are planning a Rejoice for when he walks again—our first Rejoice since—”

  “Moorma—where’s Moorma?” Adina grabbed at Mama’s skirt and hugged a handful of it tightly to her face before Mama broke away to hurry stiffly toward the cabin.

  “She is waiting for you,” Eliada said, smiling. “She found a—a play—people of yours. It looks like a little girl—”

  “My doll!” cried Adina. “Where did she find it? I lost it—”

  “It’s in the green growth by the animals’ house. She would not touch it until you came—but she is singing to it.”

  “Moorma!” called Adina. “Moorma!” as she ran toward the lean-to, makeshift barn.

  Eliada and Nathan went toward the cabin to meet Mama. Her face was smoother and younger. “He’s sleeping,” she said. And the breath she took seemed to push away all the burdens she had been carrying.

  “Before he slept,” said Eliada, “he was much troubled because of—of the fields. That, we think we know. And the—the crops. That we do not know. We must know to put it right so that his rest will not be broken by worry.”

  Mama turned to Nathan. He felt suddenly grown up.

  “Our field was practically ruined by the floods,” he said. “We were trying to clear another field to get ready to plant. The crops are what we grow—” he half smiled at Eliada. “And we grow things besides corn, too. If we are too late with the planting, we’ll have nothing to eat when winter comes.”

  “Oh! We know crops!” said Eliada happily. “We know growing and harvesting! At Home—at Home!—”

  “Roth—” she called. “Marilla—Dor—”

  They came sedately, quickly across the yard to meet Mama and Nathan halfway. Marilla held the baby with the wild-rose-pink dress against her shoulder, and Dor’s arm across her back steadied her in case of roughness.

  The two groups looked at each other. Then smiled. Then they were strangers no more.

  “Roth,” said Eliada eagerly. “The crops are the things—” She and the men—Nathan grew up some more—huddled under the tree to plan.

  Marilla and Mama—who was now holding the baby and smiling—went back toward the cabin, talking supper and baths for a weary, hungry family.

  There was never a happier made field in all the world, Nathan thought in the days that followed. Laughter and foolishness and fun—except when Papa came to watch the world, helped by Roth and Dor. Slowly out into the thin shadows near the field he would come, not knowing that even his one good leg never took all his weight. Then, settled cautiously in his big chair, sometimes with Mama sitting near him, he watched the effort and the sweating, the blister-raising labor that went with clearing and leveling the field.

  Papa was satisfied when the men individually came to the shade to drink great, dribbling drinks of the spring water and to splash their sweating faces and heads with coolness, then pause briefly to catch their breaths. Papa could accept chis, Nathan knew, because—by the sweat of your brows thou shalt—whatever you had to do to get things to eat. Papa distrusted anything that was too easy. But he could accept the neighborly help in time of need. He felt bound to do the same for those who had a need.

  The making of the field was a long, hot, hard job—when Papa was watching. But, oh! when Papa had been helped back into the cabin! It was still hard and hot and heavy—but not blister-making. And Nathan had learned to laugh and he laughed often—with surprise and pleasure and astonishment—and just sheer enjoyment. And his ribs never quite broke—it only felt that way. They weren’t used to laughter movements.

  He saw, one day, the reason why the roots around Eliada’s field looked like radishes. They had been pulled up, bodily, like radishes.

  “Together like that, at the Home,” said Eliada as they watched Marilla, Dor, and Roth, hovering in a handholding circle above the last big tree to be uprooted. “Making the Circle. Remembering, ‘We are gathered in Thy Name,’ then the Power arrives to be used. That’s the way they sealed the ships, on the Home, before we left—”

  Nathan turned, thoughtfully, away from her struggle with tears, to watch the tree. It lurched and creaked and lifted, rocks and dirt jolting off in chunks from its roots as it rose. It shook the roots free and drifted over to the edge of the field. And the three workers drifted down to a far shade, thinly, wearily still against the ground.

  “But you didn’t pull up the ships,” said Nathan, wondering if he was just helping Eliada make up a story. But the stories she told—

  “No,” said Eliada. “But I watched while the Old Ones finished our craft. The outside of it was made in pieces, you know, as the cabin is made of individual logs. So, to finish it, they made the Circle and—and the whole outside of the craft wrinkled and flowed and stilled and became one, a shell for all the craft.” Eliada was sadly-happy, back on the Home.

  A shout across the field brought them to their feet.

  “The last one!” shouted Roth. “Oh, rejoice—rejoice!” And the three grown-ups shot across the field, tumbling and soaring, diving and twisting like young wild things set free, up and up!

  And Eliada was gone, romping in the air over the field, joining in the song that lifted brightly, dearly. Nathan heard the high, thin piping of Moorma’s voice, as she lifted jerkily, uncertainly, up from the edge of the field, to be gathered in by the others and tossed, with laughter and delighted shrieking, from one to another of the laughing, singing group.

  Adina came through the underbrush and stood by Nathan, watching with longing, as Nathan was.

  “I wish I could,” she said, lifting her arms and rising on her tiptoes. Then she sighed and lowered her arms. “Well, anyway, the baby can’t yet. I’ll go play with her.”

  When she was safely gone on her way back to the shade where the baby lay in the cradle, Nathan lifted his arms and came, clumsily, to tip-toe. He gave a longing little hop. Then hunkered down on a fallen log, hunched over his soundless, welling cry—Oh, if only I could! If only I could!

  Then the plows came! Theirs and Papa’s, snicking past the idle, astonished horses, slicing through the field, each with one of the workers hovering as an attendant, who at the first click of a rock, whisked it out of the way, arching through the air, to the rock pile filling in one of the gashes across the land.

  Then, the first plowing done, came the rippling of the land as though it were a quilt on a bed, shaking across, filling hollows and smoothing humps, until the whole field lay smooth and dark and ready.

  Papa watched some of the furrowing. And some of the planting. And said, heavily pleased, to Mama one evening, “Many hands make light work.”

  And Mama’s eyes crinkled at Nathan as she snipped off her sewing thread with her front teeth and snapped another knot in her sewing thread and bent again to a wild-rosebud-pink ruffle for Adina’s new Sunday dress.

  “Tell us a story, Eliada,” said Adina, softly, in the darkness of the loft. Because, in and out of the hours and days and the long evenings, Eliada had told Adina and Nathan much of the Home. She sighed for the lostness of the Home. They sighed for the wonder of her stories.

  “Story!” Moorma’s voice was high and clear.

  “Story!”

  “Shh!” said Adina. “Don’t wake Papa and Mama!”

  “Don’t wake Papa and Mama.” Moorma’s voice was as light as a breath.
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br />   Eliada and Moorma were staying the night at the cabin because their folks had gone somewhere, at sunset, their eyes excited and hopeful, their attention long gone ahead of their last goodbyes.

  “Tell us a story, Eliada,” Nathan repeated from his far, alone corner. “About the Crossing again.” If only Lucas could hear her! Oh, if only!

  “—so when we found the Home would be destroyed, we made ships to take us away. There were three in our valley and we were assigned to one of them. And my cousin was filled with sorrow—”

  “Because her love had to go in another ship—” Adina’s voice mourned for them.

  “Yes,” said Eliada. “And then, at the last moment, Eva-lee was Called, so she left the ship—”

  “Called?” asked Adina, knowing the answer—

  “Called back to the Presence,” said Eliada. “Her days totaled. Always, at Home, we were Called before we went back into the Presence. So we had time for our farewells and to put things in order and to give our families and friends the personal things we wanted them to have. And, most important, time to cleanse ourselves of anything that might make it hard to return to the Presence that sent us forth.” Eliada sighed deeply. “At Home—at Home—there was time. We could go quietly Otherside, loving hands holding ours, back into the Presence, and have our cast—asides put in some shadowy place among the growing things, in the cool, growing soil—but—but here—we were so snatched—”

  “So snatched—” Moorma parroted in her light, now-yawning voice.

  “Tell about the moon,” said Nathan, to turn Eliada’s thoughts.

  “The moon—” Eliada’s voice crinkled a little in the darkness. “When we first saw the moon, we hoped it was our new Home, because we knew we could not go as far as another sun. But when we skimmed just above its surface for all those miles and saw it all dead and dry and pocked with holes and not a blade of green and with only a thin slice of shadow far on the horizon, we were afraid it would be our new Home!

  “Then we swept to the other side, and saw—”