Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  “I don’t even know the name of the Canyon, but I do remember that our ship crashed in the hills and I’m always hoping that someday I’ll find some evidence of it in one of these old ghost towns. It was before the turn of the century that we came, and somewhere, somewhere, there must be some evidence of the ship still in existence.”

  His was a well-grooved story, too, worn into commonplace by repetition as mine had been—lonely aching repetition to himself. I wondered for a moment, in the face of his unhappiness, why I should feel a stirring of pleased comfort, but then I realized that it was because between us there was no need for murmurs of sympathy or trite little social sayings or even explanations. The surface words were the least of our communication.

  “You aren’t surprised?” He sounded almost disappointed.

  “That you are an out-worlder?” I asked. I smiled. “Well, I’ve never met one before and I find it interesting. I only wish I could have dreamed up a fantasy like that to explain me to me. It’s quite a switch on the old ‘I must be adopted because I’m so different.’ But—”

  I stiffened as Low’s surge of rage caught me offguard.

  “Fantasy! I am adopted. I remember! I thought you’d know. I thought since you surely must be one of us that you’d be—”

  “I’m not one of you!” I flared. “Whatever ‘you’ are. I’m of Earth— so much so that it’s a wonder the dust doesn’t puff out of my mouth when I speak—but at least I don’t try to kid myself that I’m normal by any standard, Earth-type or otherwise.”

  For a hostile minute we were braced stonily against each other. My teeth ached as the muscles on my jaws knotted. Then Low sighed and, reaching out a finger, he traced the line of my face from brow to chin to brow again.

  “Think your way,” he said. “You’ve probably been through enough bad times to make anyone want to forget. Maybe someday you’ll remember that you are one of us and then—”

  “Maybe, maybe, maybe!” I slid through my weary shaken breath. “But I can’t any more. It’s too much for one day.” I slammed all the doors I could reach and shoved my everyday self up to the front. As we started off I reopened one door far enough to ask, “What’s this between you and Lucine? Are you a friend of the family or something that you’re working with her?”

  “I know the family casually,” Low said. “They don’t know about Lucine and me. She caught my imagination once last year when I was passing the school. The kids were pestering her. I never felt such heartbroken bewilderment in all my life. Poor little Earth kid. She’s a three-year-old in a twelve-year-old body—”

  “Four-year-old,” I murmured. “Or almost five. She’s learning a little.”

  “Four or five,” Low said. “It must be awful to be trapped in a body—”

  “Yes,” I sighed. “To be shut in the prison of yourself.”

  Tangibly I felt again the warm running of his finger around my face, softly, comfortingly, though he made no move toward me. I turned away from him in the dusk to hide the sudden tears that came.

  ~ * ~

  It was late when we got home. There were still lights in the bars and a house or two when we pulled into Kruper, but the hotel was dark, and in the pause after the car stopped I could hear the faint creaking of the sagging front gate as it swung in the wind. We got out of the car quietly, whispering under the spell of the silence, and tiptoed up to the gate. As usual the scraggly rosebush that drooped from the fence snagged my hair as I went through, and as Low helped free me we got started giggling. I suppose neither of us had felt young and foolish for so long, and we had both unburdened ourselves of bitter tensions, and found tacit approval of us as the world refused to accept us and as we most wanted to be; and, each having at least glimpsed a kindred soul, well, we suddenly bubbled over. We stood beneath the upstairs porch and tried to muffle our giggles.

  “People will think we’re crazy if they hear us carrying on like this,” I choked.

  “I’ve got news for you,” said Low, close to my ear. “We are crazy. And I dare you to prove it.”

  “Hoh! As though it needed any proof!”

  “I dare you.” His laughter tickled my cheek.

  “How?” I breathed defiantly.

  “Let’s not go up the stairs,” he hissed. “Let’s lift through the air. Why waste the energy when we can—?”

  He held out his hand to me. Suddenly sober, I took it and we stepped back to the gate and stood hand in hand, looking up.

  “Ready?” he whispered, and I felt him tug me upward.

  I lifted into the air after him, holding all my possible fear clenched in my other hand.

  And the rosebush reached up and snagged my hair.

  “Wait!” I whispered, laughter trembling again. “I’m caught.”

  “Earth-bound!” he chuckled as he tugged at the clinging strands.

  “Smile when you say that, podner,” I returned, feeling my heart melt with pleasure that I had arrived at a point where I could joke about such a bitterness—and trying to ignore the fact that my feet were treading nothing but air. My hair freed, he lifted me up to him. I think our lips only brushed, but we overshot the porch and had to come back down to land on it. Low steadied me as we stepped across the railing.

  “We did it,” he whispered.

  “Yes,” I breathed. “We did.”

  Then we both froze. Someone was coming into the yard. Someone who stumbled and wavered and smashed glassily against the gatepost.

  “Ay! Ay! Madre mia!” Severeid Swanson fell to his knees beside the smashed bottle. “Ay, virgen purisima!”

  “Did he see us?” I whispered on an indrawn breath.

  “I doubt it.” His words were warm along my cheek. “He hasn’t seen anything outside himself for years.”

  “Watch out for the chair.” We groped through the darkness into the upper hall. A feeble fifteen-watt bulb glimmered on the steady drip of water splashing down into the sagging sink from the worn faucets that blinked yellow through the worn chrome. By virtue of these two leaky outlets we had bathing facilities on the second floor.

  Our good nights were subvocal and quick.

  ~ * ~

  I was in my nightgown and robe, sitting on the edge of my bed, brushing my hair, when I heard a shuffle and a mutter outside my door. I checked the latch to be sure it was fastened, and brushed on. There was a thud and a muffled rapping and my doorknob turned.

  “Teesher!” It was a cautious voice. “Teesher!”

  “Who on earth!” I thought, and went to the door. “Yes?” I leaned against the peeling panel.

  “Lat—me—een.” The words were labored and spaced.

  “What do you want?”

  “To talk weeth you, teesher.”

  Filled with astonished wonder, I opened the door. There was Severeid Swanson swaying in the hall! But they had told me he had no English... He leaned precariously forward, his face glowing in the light, years younger than I’d ever seen him.

  “My bottle is broken. You have done eet. It is not good to fly without the wings. Los dngeles santos, si, pero not the lovers to fly to kiss. It makes me drop my bottle. On the ground is spilled all the dreams.”

  He swayed backward and wiped the earnest sweat from his forehead. “It is not good. I tell you this because you have light in the face. You are good to my Esperanza. You have dreams that are not in the bottle. You have smiles and not laughing for the lost ones. But you must not fly. It is not good. My bottle is broken.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said through my astonishment. “I’ll buy you another.”

  “No,” Severeid said. “Last time they tell me this, too, but I cannot drink it because of the wondering. Last time, like birds, all, all in the sky— over the hills—the kind ones. The ones who also have no laughter for the lost.”

  “Last time?” I grabbed his swaying arm and pulled him into the room, shutting the door, excitement tingling along the insides of my elbows. “Where? When? Who was flying?”

  He blinked
owlishly at me, the tip of his tongue moistening his dry lips.

  “It is not good to fly without wings,” he repeated.

  “Yes, yes, I know. Where did you see the others fly without wings? I must find them—I must!”

  “Like birds,” he said, swaying. “Over the hills.”

  “Please,” I said, groping wildly for what little Spanish I possessed.

  “I work there a long time. I don’t see them no more. I drink some more. Chinee Joe give me new bottle.”

  “Por favor, señor,“ I cried, “dónde—dónde—?”

  All the light went out of his face. His mouth slackened. Dead eyes peered from under lowered lids.

  “No comprendo. “He looked around, dazed. “Buenas noches, señorita. “ He backed out of the door and closed it softly behind him.

  “But—!” I cried to the door. “But please!”

  Then I huddled on my bed and hugged this incredible piece of information to me.

  “Others!” I thought. “Flying over the hills! All, all in the sky! Maybe, oh maybe one of them was at the hotel in town. Maybe they’re not too far away. If only we knew...!”

  Then I felt the sudden yawning of a terrifying chasm. If it was true, if Severeid had really seen others lifting like birds over the hills, then Low was right—there were others! There must be a Canyon, a starship, a Home. But where did that leave me? I shrank away from the possibilities. I turned and buried my face in my pillow. But Mother and Dad! And Granpa Josh and Gramma Malvina and Great-granpa Benedaly and— I clutched at the memories of all the family stories I’d heard. Crossing the ocean in steerage. Starting a new land. Why, my ancestors were as solid as a rock wall back of me as far back as—as Adam, almost. I leaned against the certainty and cried out to feel the stone wall waver and become a curtain stirring in the winds of doubt.

  “No, no!” I sobbed, and for the first time in my life I cried for my mother, feeling as bereft as though she had died.

  Then I suddenly sat up in bed. “It might not be so!” I cried. “He’s just a drunken wino. No telling what he might conjure out of his bottle. It might not be so! “

  “But it might,” one of me whispered maliciously. “It might!”

  ~ * ~

  The days that followed were mostly uneventful. I had topped out onto a placid plateau in my battle with myself, perhaps because I had something new to occupy my mind or perhaps it was just a slack place since any emotion has to rest sometime.

  However, the wonder of finding Low was slow to ebb. I could sense his “Good morning” with my first step down the stairs each day, and occasionally roused in the darkness to his silent “Good night.”

  Once after supper Marie planted herself solidly in front of me as I rose to leave. Silently she pointed at my plate, where I had apparently made mud pies of my food. I flushed.

  “No good?” she asked, crossing her wrists over the grossness of her stomach and teetering perilously backward.

  “It’s fine, Marie,” I managed. “I’m just not hungry.” And I escaped through the garlicky cloud of her indignant exhalation and the underneath amusement of Low. How could I tell her that Low had been showing me a double rainbow he had seen that afternoon and that I had been so engrossed in the taste of the colors and the miracle of being able to receive them from him that I had forgotten to eat?

  Low and I spent much time together, getting acquainted, but during most of it we were ostensibly sitting with the others on the porch in the twilight, listening to the old mining and cattle stories that were the well-worn coins that slipped from hand to hand wherever the citizens of Kruper gathered together. A good story never wore out, so after a while it was an easy matter to follow the familiar repetitions and still be alone together in the group.

  “Don’t you think you need a little more practice in lifting?” Low’s silent question was a clarity behind the rumble of voices.

  “Lifting?” I stirred in my chair, not quite so adept as he at carrying two threads simultaneously.

  “Flying,” he said with exaggerated patience. “Like you did over the canyon and up to the porch.”

  “Oh.” Ecstasy and terror puddled together inside me. Then I felt myself relaxing in the strong warmth of Low’s arms instead of fighting them as I had when he had caught me over the canyon.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I answered, quickly shutting him out as much as I could. “I think I can do it okay.”

  “A little more practice won’t hurt.” There was laughter in his reply. “But you’d better wait until I’m around—just in case.”

  “Oh?” I asked. “Look.” I lifted in the darkness until I sat gently about six inches above my chair. “So!”

  Something prodded me gently and I started to drift across the porch. Hastily I dropped back, just barely landing on the forward edge of my chair, my heels thudding audibly on the floor. The current story broke off in mid-episode and everyone looked at me.

  “Mosquitoes,” I improvised. “I’m allergic to them.”

  “That’s not fair!” I sputtered silently to Low. “You cheat!”

  “All’s fair—he answered, then shut hastily as he remembered the rest of the quotation.

  “Hmm!” I thought. “Hmm! And this is war?” And felt pleased all out of proportion the rest of the evening.

  Then there was the Saturday when the sky was so tangily blue and the clouds so pufflly light that I just couldn’t stay indoors scrubbing clothes and sewing on buttons and trying to decide whether to repair my nail polish or take it all off and start from scratch again. I scrambled into my saddle shoes and denim skirt, turned back the sleeves of my plaid shirt, tied the sleeves of my sweater around my waist, and headed for the hills. This was the day to follow the town water pipe up to the spring that fed it and see if all the gruesome stories I’d heard about its condition were true.

  I paused, panting, atop the last steep ledge above the town and looked back at the tumbled group of weathered houses that made up this side of Kruper. Beyond the railroad track there was enough flatland to make room for the four new houses that had been built when the Golden Turkey Mine reopened. They sat in a neat row, bright as toy blocks against the tawny red of the hillside.

  I brushed my hair back from my hot forehead and turned my back on Kruper. I could see sections of the town water pipe scattered at haphazard intervals up among the hills—in some places stilted up on timbers to cross from one rise to another, in other places following the jagged contour of the slopes. A few minutes and sections later I was amusing myself trying to stop with my hands the spray of water from one of the numerous holes in one section of the rusty old pipe and counting the hand-whittled wooden plugs that stopped up others. It looked a miracle that any water at all got down to town. I was so engrossed that I unconsciously put my hand up to my face when a warm finger began to trace...

  “Low!” I whirled on him. “What are you doing up here?”

  He slid down from a boulder above the line.

  “Johnny’s feeling porely today. He wanted me to check to see if any of the plugs had fallen out.”

  We both laughed as we looked up-line and traced the pipe by the white gush of spray and the vigorous greenness that utilized the spilling water.

  “I’ll bet he has at least a thousand plugs hammered in,” Low said.

  “Why on earth doesn’t he get some new pipe?”

  “Family heirlooms,” Low said, whittling vigorously. “It’s only because he’s feeling so porely that he even entertains the thought of letting me plug his line. All the rest of the plugs are family affairs. About three generations’ worth.”

  He hammered the plug into the largest of the holes and stepped back, reaming the water from his face where it had squirted him.

  “Come on up. I’ll show you the spring.”

  We sat in the damp coolness of the thicket of trees that screened the cave where the spring churned and gurgled, blue and white and pale green before it lost itself in the battered old pipes. We were sit
ting on opposite sides of the pipe, resting ourselves in the consciousness of each other, when all at once, for a precious minute, we flowed together like coalescing streams of water, so completely one that the following rebound to separateness came as a shock. Such sweetness without even touching one another...?

  Anyway we both turned hastily away from this frightening new emotion, and, finding no words handy, Low brought me down a flower from the ledge above us, nipping a drooping leaf off it as it passed him.

  “Thanks,” I said, smelling of it and sneezing vigorously. “I wish I could do that.”