Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  “No,” Bethie murmured. “It can’t be. It’s got to be real.”

  “But, Bethie,” I said, leaning my weary head on the steering wheel, “you know how much I want it to be true, not only for you but for myself, too. But look. What do we have to assume if Mother was right? First, that space travel is possible—was possible nearly fifty years ago. Second, that Mother and her People came here from another planet. Third, that we are, bluntly speaking, half-breeds, a cross between Earth and heaven knows what world. Fourth, that there’s a chance in ten million of our finding the other People who came at the same time Mother did, presupposing that any of them survived the Crossing.

  “Why, any one of these premises would brand us as crazy crackpots to any normal person. No, were building too much on a dream and a hope. Let’s go back, Bethie. We’ve got just enough gas money along to make it. Let’s give it up.”

  “And go back to what?” Bethie asked, her face pinched. “No, Peter. Here.”

  I looked up as she handed me one of her sunlight patterns, a handful of brilliance that twisted briefly in my fingers before it flickered out.

  “Is that Earth?” she asked quietly. “How many of our friends can fly? How many—” she hesitated, “how many can Remember?”

  “Remember!” I said slowly, and then I whacked the steering wheel with my fist. “Oh, Bethie, of all the stupid—! Why, it’s Bub all over again!”

  I kicked the pickup into life and turned on the first faint desert trail beyond the junction. I pulled off even that suggestion of a trail and headed across the nearly naked desert toward a clump of ironwood, mesquite, and catclaw that marked a sand wash against the foothills. With the westering sun making shadow lace through the thin foliage, we made camp.

  I lay on my back in the wash and looked deep into the arch of the desert sky. The trees made a typical desert pattern of warmth and coolness on me, warm in the sun, cool in the shadow, as I let my mind clear smoother, smoother, until the soft intake of Bethie’s breath as she sat beside me sent a bright ripple across it.

  And I remembered. But only Mother-and-Dad and the little campfire I had gathered up, and Glib with the trap on his foot and Bethie curled, face to knees on the bed, and the thin crying sound of her labored breath.

  I blinked at the sky. I had to Remember. I just had to. I shut my eyes and concentrated and concentrated, until I was exhausted. Nothing came now, not even a hint of memory. In despair I relaxed, limp against the chilling sand. And all at once unaccustomed gears shifted and slipped into place in my mind and there I was, just as I had been, hovering over the life-sized map.

  Slowly and painfully I located Socorro and the thin thread that marked the Rio Gordo. I followed it and lost it and followed it again, the finger of my attention pressing close. Then I located Vulcan Springs Valley and traced its broad rolling to the upsweep of the desert, to the Sierra Cobrena Mountains. It was an eerie sensation to look down on the infinitesimal groove that must be where I was lying now. Then I hand-spanned my thinking around our camp spot. Nothing. I probed farther north, and east, and north again. I drew a deep breath and exhaled it shakily. There it was. The Home twinge. The call of familiarity.

  I read it off to Bethie. The high thrust of a mountain that pushed up baldly past its timber, the huge tailings dump across the range from the mountain. The casual wreathing of smoke from what must be a logging town, all forming sides of a slender triangle. Somewhere in this area was the place.

  I opened my eyes to find Bethie in tears.

  “Why, Bethie!” I said. “What’s wrong? Aren’t you glad—?”

  Bethie tried to smile but her lips quivered. She hid her face in the crook of her elbow and whispered, “I saw, too! Oh, Peter, this time I saw, too!”

  We got out the road map and by the fading afternoon light we tried to translate our rememberings. As nearly as we could figure out, we should head for a place way off the highway called Kerry Canyon. It was apparently the only inhabited spot anywhere near the big bald mountain. I looked at the little black dot in the kink in the third-rate road and wondered if it would turn out to be a period to all our hopes or the point for the beginning of new lives for the two of us. Life and sanity for Bethie, and for me... In a sudden spasm of emotion I crumpled the map in my hand. I felt blindly that in all my life I had never known anyone but Mother and Dad and Bethie. That I was a ghost walking the world. If only I could see even one other person that felt like our kind! Just to know that Bethie and I weren’t all alone with our unearthly heritage!

  I smoothed out the map and folded it again. Night was on us and the wind was cold. We shivered as we scurried around looking for wood for our campfire.

  ~ * ~

  Kerry Canyon was one business street, two service stations, two saloons, two stores, two churches, and a handful of houses flung at random over the hillsides that sloped down to an area that looked too small to accommodate the road. A creek, which was now thinned to an intermittent trickle that loitered along, waited for the fall rains to begin. A sudden speckling across our windshield suggested it hadn’t long to wait.

  We rattled over the old bridge and half through the town. The road swung up sharply over a rusty single-line railroad and turned left, shying away from the bluff that was hollowed just enough to accommodate one of the service stations.

  We pulled into the station. The uniformed attendant came alongside.

  “We just want some information,” I said, conscious of the thinness of my billfold. We had picked up our last tankful of gas before plunging into the maze of canyons between the main highway and here. Our stopping place would have to be soon whether we found the People or not.

  “Sure! Sure! Glad to oblige.” The attendant pushed his cap back from his forehead. “How can I help you?”

  I hesitated, trying to gather my thoughts and words—and some of the hope that had jolted out of me since we had left the junction. “We’re trying to locate some—friends—of ours. We were told they lived out the other side of here, out by Baldy. Is there anyone—?”

  “Friends of them people?” he asked in astonishment. “Well, say now, that’s interesting! You’re the first I ever had come asking after them.”

  I felt Bethie’s arm trembling against mine. Then there was something beyond Kerry Canyon!

  “How come? What’s wrong with them?”

  “Why, nothing, Mac, nothing. Matter of fact they’re dern nice people. Trade here a lot. Come in to church and the dances.”

  “Dances?” I glanced around the steep sloping hills.

  “Sure. We ain’t as dead as we look,” the attendant grinned. “Come Saturday night we’re quite a town. Lots of ranches around these hills. Course, not much out Cougar Canyon way. That’s where your friends live, didn’t you say?”

  “Yeah. Out by Baldy.”

  “Well, nobody else lives out that way.” He hesitated. “Hey, there’s something I’d like to ask.”

  “Sure. Like what?”

  “Well, them people pretty much keep themselves to themselves. I don’t mean they’re stuck-up or anything, but—well, I’ve always wondered. Where they from? One of them overrun countries in Europe? They’re foreigners, ain’t they? And seems like most of what Europe exports any more is DP’s. Are them people some?”

  “Well, yes, you might call them that. Why?”

  “Well, they talk just as good as anybody and it must have been a war a long time ago because they’ve been around since my Dad’s time, but they just—feel different.” He caught his upper lip between his teeth reflectively. “Good different. Real nice different.” He grinned again. “Wouldn’t mind shining up some of them gals myself. Don’t get no encouragement, though.

  “Anyway, keep on this road. It’s easy. No other road going that way. Jackass Flat will beat the tar outa your tires, but you’ll probably make it, less’n comes up a heavy rain. Then you’ll skate over half the county and most likely end up in a ditch. Slickest mud in the world. Colder’n hell— beg pardon, la
dy—out there on the flat when the wind starts blowing. Better bundle up.”

  “Thanks, fella,” I said. “Thanks a lot. Think we’ll make it before dark?”

  “Oh, sure. ‘Taint so awful far but the road’s lousy. Oughta make it in two-three hours, less’n like I said, comes up a heavy rain.”

  We knew when we hit Jackass Flat. It was like dropping off the edge. If we had thought the road to Kerry Canyon was bad, we revised our opinions, but fast. In the first place it was choose your own ruts. Then the tracks were deep sunk in heavy clay generously mixed with sharp splintery shale and rocks as big as your two fists that were like a gigantic gravel as far as we could see across the lifeless expanse of the flat.

  But to make it worse, the ruts I chose kept ending abruptly as though the cars that had made them had either backed away from the job or jumped over. Jumped over! I drove, in and out of ruts, so wrapped up in surmises that I hardly noticed the rough going until a cry from Bethie aroused me.

  “Stop the car!” she cried. “Oh, Peter! Stop the car!”

  I braked so fast that the pickup swerved wildly, mounted the side of a rut, lurched and settled sickeningly down on the back tire, which sighed itself flatly into the rising wind.

  “What on earth!” I yelped, as near to being mad at Bethie as I’d ever been in my life. “What was that for?”

  Bethie, white-faced, was emerging from the army blanket she had huddled in against the cold. “It just came to me. Peter, supposing they don’t want us?”

  “Don’t want us? What do you mean?” I growled, wondering if that lace doily I called my spare tire would be worth the trouble of putting it on.

  “We never thought. It didn’t even occur to us. Peter, we—we don’t belong. We won’t be like them. We’re partly of Earth—as much as we are of wherever else. Supposing they reject us? Supposing they think we’re undesirable—?” Bethie turned her face away. “Maybe we don’t belong anywhere, Peter, not anywhere at all.”

  I felt a chill sweep over me that was not of the weather. We had assumed so blithely that we would be welcome. But how did we know? Maybe they wouldn’t want us. We weren’t of the People. We weren’t of Earth. Maybe we didn’t belong—not anywhere.

  “Sure they’ll want us,” I forced out heartily. Then my eyes wavered away from Bethie’s and I said defensively, “Mother said they would help us. She said we were woven of the same fabric—”

  “But maybe the warp will only accept genuine woof. Mother couldn’t know. There weren’t any—half-breeds—when she was separated from them. Maybe our Earth blood will mark us—”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Earth blood,” I said defiantly. “Besides, like you said, what would there be for you if we went back?”

  She pressed her clenched fists against her cheeks, her eyes wide and vacant. “Maybe,” she muttered, “maybe if I’d just go on and go completely insane it wouldn’t hurt so terribly much. It might even feel good.”

  “Bethie!” My voice jerked her physically. “Cut out that talk right now! We’re going on. The only way we can judge the People is by Mother. She would never reject us or any others like us. And that fellow back there said they were good people.”

  I opened the door. “You better try to get some kinks out of your legs while I change the tire. By the looks of the sky we’ll be doing some skating before we get to Cougar Canyon.”

  But for all my brave words it wasn’t just for the tire that I knelt beside the car, and it wasn’t only the sound of the lug wrench that the wind carried up into the darkening sky.

  ~ * ~

  I squinted through the streaming windshield, trying to make out the road through the downpour that fought our windshield wiper to a standstill. What few glimpses I caught of the road showed a deceptively smooth-looking chocolate river, but we alternately shook like a giant maraca, pushed out sheets of water like a speedboat, or slithered aimlessly and terrifyingly across sudden mud flats that often left us yards off the road. Then we’d creep cautiously back until the soggy squelch of our tires told us we were in the flooded ruts again.

  Then all at once it wasn’t there. The road, I mean. It stretched a few yards ahead of us and then just flowed over the edge, into the rain, into nothingness.

  “It couldn’t go there,” Bethie murmured incredulously. “It can’t just drop off like that.”

  “Well, I’m certainly not dropping off with it, sight unseen,” I said, huddling deeper into my army blanket. My jacket was packed in back and I hadn’t bothered to dig it out. I hunched my shoulders to bring the blanket up over my head. “I’m going to take a look first.”

  I slid out into the solid wall of rain that hissed and splashed around me on the flooded flat. I was soaked to the knees and mud-coated to the shins before I slithered to the drop-off. The trail—call that a road?—tipped over the edge of the canyon and turned abruptly to the right, then lost itself along a shrub-grown ledge that sloped downward even as it paralleled the rim of the canyon. If I could get the pickup over the rim and onto the trail, it wouldn’t be so bad. But—I peered over the drop-off at the turn. The bottom was lost in shadows and rain. I shuddered.

  Then quickly, before I could lose my nerve, I squelched back to the car.

  “Pray, Bethie. Here we go.”

  There was the suck and slosh of our turning tires, the awful moment when we hung on the brink. Then the turn. And there we were, poised over nothing, with our rear end slewing outward.

  The sudden tongue-biting jolt as we finally landed, right side up, pointing the right way on the narrow trail, jarred the cold sweat on my face so it rolled down with the rain.

  I pulled over at the first wide spot in the road and stopped the car. We sat in the silence, listening to the rain. I felt as though something infinitely precious were lying just before me. Bethie’s hand crept into mine and I knew she was feeling it, too. But suddenly Bethie’s hand was snatched from mine and she was pounding with both fists against my shoulder in most un-Bethie-like violence.

  “I can’t stand it, Peter!” she cried hoarsely, emotion choking her voice. “Let’s go back before we find out any more. If they should send us away! Oh, Peter! Let’s go before they find us! Then we’ll still have our dream. We can pretend that someday we’ll come back. We can never dream again, never hope again!” She hid her face in her hands. “I’ll manage somehow. I’d rather go away, hoping, than run the risk of being rejected by them.”

  “Not me,” I said, starting the motor. “We have as much chance of a welcome as we do of being kicked out. And if they can help you—say, what’s the matter with you today? I’m supposed to be the doubting one, remember? You’re the mustard seed of this outfit!” I grinned at her, but my heart sank at the drawn white misery of her face. She almost managed a smile.

  The trail led steadily downward, lapping back on itself as it worked back and forth along the canyon wall, sometimes steep, sometimes almost level. The farther we went the more rested I felt, as though I were shutting doors behind or opening them before me.

  Then came one of the casual miracles of mountain country. The clouds suddenly opened and the late sun broke through. There, almost frighteningly, a huge mountain pushed out of the featureless gray distance. In the flooding light the towering slopes seemed to move, stepping closer to us as we watched. The rain still fell, but now in glittering silver-beaded curtains; and one vivid end of a rainbow splashed color recklessly over trees and rocks and a corner of the sky.

  I didn’t watch the road. I watched the splendor and glory spread out around us. So when, at Bethie’s scream, I snatched back to my driving, all I took down into the roaring splintering darkness was the thought of Bethie and the sight of the other car, slanting down from the bobbing top branches of a tree, seconds before it plowed into us broadside, a yard above the road.

  ~ * ~

  I thought I was dead. I was afraid to open my eyes because I could feel the rain making little puddles over my closed lids. And then I breathed. I was alive, a
ll right. A knife jabbed itself up and down the left side of my chest and twisted itself viciously with each reluctant breath I drew.

  Then I heard a voice.

  “Thank the Power they aren’t hurt too badly. But, oh, Valancy! What will Father say?” The voice was young and scared.

  “You’ve known him longer than I have,” another girl-voice answered. “You should have some idea.”

  “I never had a wreck before, not even when I was driving instead of lifting.”

  “I have a hunch that you’ll be grounded for quite a spell,” the second voice replied. “But that isn’t what’s worrying me, Karen. Why didn’t we know they were coming? We always can sense Outsiders. We should have known—”