Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  “The only way they ever referred to the doctor was just Doctor—”

  He was interrupted by the front door slapping open. Shelves rattled. A can of corn dropped from a pyramid and rolled across the floor. “Dern fool summer people!” trumpeted Dr. Hilf. “Sit around all year long at sea-level getting exercise with a knife and fork, then come roaring up here and try to climb Devil’s Slide eleven thousand feet up in one morning!”

  Then he saw the group at the table. “Well! How’d the hearing go?” he roared, making his way rapidly and massively toward them as he spoke. The three exchanged looks of surprise, then Mark said, “We weren’t in at the verdict.” He started to get up. “I’ll phone—

  “Never mind,” boomed Dr. Hilf. “Here comes Tad.” They made room at the table for Tad and Dr. Hilf.

  “We’re on probation,” confessed Tad. “I felt about an inch high when the judge got through with us. I’ve had it with that outfit!” He brooded briefly. “Back to my bike, I guess, until I can afford my own car. Chee!” He gazed miserably at the interminable years ahead of him. Maybe even five!

  “What about Rick?” asked Mark.

  “Lost his license,” said Tad uncomfortably. “For six months, anyway Gee, Mr. Edwards, he’s sure mad at you now. I guess he’s decided to blame you for everything.”

  “He should have learned long ago to blame himself for his own misdoings,” said Meris. “Rick was a spoiled-rotten kid long before he ever came up here.”

  “Mark’s probably the first one ever to make him realize that he was a brat,” said Dr. Hilf. “That’s plenty to build a hate on.”

  “Walking again!” muttered Tad. “So okay! So t’heck with wheels!”

  “Well, since you’ve renounced the world, the flesh, and Porsches,” smiled Mark, “maybe you could beguile the moments with learning about vintage cars. There’s plenty of them still functioning around here.”

  “Vintage cars?” said Tad. “Never heard of them. Imports?”

  Mark laughed, “Wait. I’ll get you a magazine.” He made a selection from the magazine rack in back of them and plopped it down in front of Tad. “There. Read up. There might be a glimmer of light to brighten your dreary midnight.”

  “Dr. Hilf,” said Johannan, “I wonder if you would help me.”

  “English?” bellowed Dr. Hilf. “Thought you were a foreigner! You don’t look as if you need help! Where’s your head wound? No right to be healed already!”

  “It’s not medical,” said Johannan. “I’m trying to find a doctor friend of mine. Only I don’t know his name or where he lives.”

  “Know what state he lives in?” Laughter rumbled from Dr. Hilf.

  “No,” confessed Johannan, “but I do know he is from this general area and I thought you might know of him. He has helped my People in the past.”

  “And your people are—” asked Dr. Hilf.

  “Excuse me, folks,” said Tad, unwinding his long legs and folding the magazine back on itself. “There’s my dad, ready to go. I’m grounded. Gotta tag along like a kid. Thanks for everything—and the magazine.” And he dejectedly trudged away.

  Dr. Hilf was waiting on Johannan, who was examining his own hands intently. “I know so little,” said Johannan. “The doctor cared for a small boy with a depressed fracture of the skull. He operated in the wilderness with only the instruments he had with him.” Dr. Hilf’s eyes flicked to Johannan’s face and then away again. “But that was a long way from where he found one of Ours who could make music and was going wrong because he didn’t know who he was.”

  Dr. Hilf waited for Johannan to continue. When he didn’t, the doctor pursed his lips and hummed massively.

  “I can’t help much,” said Johannan, finally, “but are there so many doctors who live in the wilds of this area?”

  “None,” boomed Dr. Hilf. “I’m the farthest out—if I may use that loaded expression. Out in these parts, a sick person has three choices— die, get well on his own, or call me. Your doctor must have come from some town.”

  It was a disconsolate group that headed back up-canyon. Their mood even impressed itself on Lala and she lay silent and sleepy-eyed in Meris’s arms, drowsing to the hum of the motor.

  Suddenly Johannan leaned forward and put his hand on Mark’s shoulder. “Would you stop, please?” he asked. Mark pulled off the road onto the nearest available flat place, threading expertly between scrub oak and small pines. “Let me take Lala.” And Lala lifted over the back of the seat without benefit of hands upon her. Johannan sat her up on his lap. “Our People have a highly developed racial memory,” he said. “For instance, I have access to the knowledge any of our People have known since the Bright Beginning, and, in lesser measure, to the events that have happened to any of them. Of course, unless you have studied the technique of recall—it is difficult to take knowledge from the past, but it’s there, available. I am going to see if I can get Lala to recall for me. Maybe her precocity will include recollection also.” He looked down at his nestling child and smiled. “It won’t be spectacular,” he said. “No eyeballs will light up. I’m afraid it’ll be tedious for you, especially since it will be subvocal. Lala’s spoken vocabulary lags behind her other Gifts. You can drive on, if you like.” And he leaned back with Lala in his arms. The two to all appearances were asleep.

  Meris looked at Mark and Mark looked at Meris, and Meris felt an irrepressible bubble of laughter start up her throat. She spoke hastily to circumvent it.

  “Your manuscript,” she said.

  “I got a box for it,” said Mark, easing out onto the road again. “Chip found one for me when you took Lala to the rest room. Couldn’t have done better if I’d had it made to measure. What a weight—” he yawned in sudden release— “What a weight off my mind. I’ll be glad when it’s off my hands, too. Thank God! Thank God it’s finished!”

  The car was topping the Rim when Johannan stirred, and a faint twitter of release came from Lala. Meris turned sideways to look at them inquiringly.

  “May I get out?” asked Johannan. “Lala has recalled enough that I think my search won’t be too long.”

  “I’ll drive you back,” said Mark, pulling up by the road.

  “Thanks, but it won’t be necessary.” Johannan opened the door and, after a tight embrace for Lala and an un-English word or two, stepped out. “I have ways of going. If you will care for Lala until I return.”

  “Of course!” said Meris, reaching for the child, who flowed over the back of the seat into her arms in one complete motion. “God bless, and return soon.”

  “Thank you,” said Johannan and walked into the roadside bushes. They saw a ripple in the branches, the turn of a shoulder, the flick of a foot, one sharp startling glimpse of Johannan rising against the blue and white of the afternoon sky, and then he was hidden in the top branches of the trees.

  “Shoosh!” Meris slumped under Lala’s entire weight. “Mark, is this a case of folie à deux, or is it really happening?”

  “Well,” said Mark, starting the car again, “I doubt if we two could achieve the same hallucinations simultaneously, so let’s assume it’s really happening.”

  When they finally reached the cabin and stopped the motor, they sat for a moment in the restful, active silence of the hills. Meris, feeling the soft warmth of Lala against her and the precious return of things outside herself, shivered a little, remembering her dead self who had stared so blankly so many hours out of the small windows, fearlessly crying, soundlessly wailing, wrapped in misery. She laughed and hugged Lala. “Maybe we should get a leash for this small person,” she said to Mark. “I don’t think I could follow in Johannan’s footsteps.”

  “Supper first,” said Mark as he fumbled with the padlock on the cabin door. He glanced, startled, back over his shoulder at Meris. “It’s broken,” he said. “Wrenched open—” He flung the door open hastily, and froze on the doorstep. Meris pushed forward to look beyond him.

  Snow had fallen in the room—snow covered eve
rything—a smudged, crumpled snow of paper, flour, sugar, and detergent. Every inch of the cabin was covered by the tattered, soaked, torn, crumpled snow of Mark’s manuscript! Mark stooped slowly, like an old man, and took up one page. Mingled detergent and maple syrup clung, clotted, and slithered off the edge of one of the diagrams that had taken two days to complete. He let the page fall and shuffled forward, ankle-deep in the obscene, incredible chaos. Meris hardly recognized the face he turned to her.

  “I’ve lost our child again,” he said tightly. “This—” he gestured at the mess about them, “—this was my weeping and my substitute for despair. My creation to answer death.” He backhanded a clutter of papers off the bunk and slumped down until he lay, face to the wall, motionless.

  Mark said not a word nor turned around in the hours that followed. Meris thought perhaps he slept at times, but she said nothing to him as she cautiously scrabbled through the mess in the cabin. She found, miraculously undamaged, a chapter and a half of pages under the cupboard. With careful hands she salvaged another sheaf of papers from where they had sprayed across the top of the cupboard. All the time she searched and sorted through the mess in the cabin, Lala sat, unnaturally well behaved and solemn, and watched her, getting down only once to salvage Deeko from a mound of sugar and detergent, clucking unhappily as she dusted the doll off.

  It was late and cold when Meris put the last ruined sheet in the big cardboard box they had carried groceries home in, and the last salvageable sheet on the desk. She looked silently the clutter in the box and the slender sheaf on the desk, shivered, and turned to build up the dying fire in the stove. Her mouth tightened and the sullen flicker of charring, wadded paper in the stove painted age and pain upon her face. She stirred the embers with the lid-lifter and rebuilt the fire. She prepared supper, fed Lala, and put her to bed. Then she sat on the edge of the lower bunk by Mark’s rigid back and touched him gently.

  “Supper’s ready,” she said. “Then I’ll need some help in scrubbing up—the floor, the walls, the furniture.” She choked a sound that was half laughter and half sob. “There’s plenty of detergent around already. We may bubble ourselves out of house and home.”

  For a sick moment she was afraid he wouldn’t respond. Just like I was, she thought achingly. Just like I was! Then he sat up slowly, brushed his arm back across his expressionless face and his rumpled hair, and stood up.

  When they finally threw out the last bucket of scrub water and hung out the last scrub rag, Meris rubbed her water-wrinkled hands down her weary sides and said, “Tomorrow we’ll start on the manuscript again.”

  “No,” said Mark. “That’s all finished. The boys got carbon-copy and all. It would take weeks for me to do a rewrite if I could ever do it. We don’t have weeks. My leave of absence is over, and the deadline for the manuscript is this next week. We’ll just have to chalk this up as lost. Let the dead past bury the dead.”

  He went to bed, his face turned again from the light. Meris, through the blur of her slow tears, gathered up the crumpled pages that had pulled out with the blankets from the back of the bunk, smoothed them onto the salvage pile, and went to bed, too.

  For the next couple of days Mark was like an old man. He sat against the cabin wall in the sun, his arms resting on his thighs, his hands dangling from limp wrists, looking at the nothing that the senile and finished find on the ground. He moved slowly and reluctantly to the table to push his food around, to bed to lie, hardly breathing, but wide-eyed in the dark, to whatever task Meris set him, forgetting in the middle of it what he was doing.

  Lala followed him at first, chattering un-English at her usual great rate, leaning against him when he sat, peering into his indifferent face. Then she stopped talking to him and followed him only with her eyes. Then the third day she came crying into Meris’s arms and wept heart-brokenly against her shoulder.

  Then her tears stopped, glistened on her cheeks a moment, and were gone. She squirmed out of Meris’s embrace and trotted to the window. She pushed a chair up close to the wall, climbed up on it, pressed her forehead to the chilly glass, and stared out into the late afternoon.

  Tad came over on his bike, bubbling over with the new idea of old cars.

  “Why, there’s parts of a whole bunch of these cars all over around here—” he cried, fluttering the tattered magazine at Mark. “And have you seen how much they’re asking for some of them! Why, I could put myself through college on used parts out of our old dumps! And some of these vintage jobs are still running around here! Kiltie has a model A— you’ve seen it! He shines it like a new shoe every week! And there’s an old Overland touring car out in back of our barn, just sitting there, falling apart—”

  Mark’s silence got through to him then, and he asked, troubled, “What’s wrong? Are you mad at me for something?”

  Meris spoke into Mark’s silence. “No, Tad, it’s nothing you’ve done—” She took him outside, ostensibly to help bring in wood to fill the woodbox, and filled him in on the events. When they returned, loaded down with firewood, he dumped his armload into the box and looked at Mark.

  “Gee, whiz, Mr. Edwards. Uh—-uh—gee whiz!” He gathered up his magazine and his hat and, shuffling his feet for a moment, said, “Well, ‘bye now,” and left, grimacing back at Meris, wordless.

  Lala was still staring out the window. She hadn’t moved or made a sound while Tad was there. Meris was frightened.

  “Mark!” She shook his arm gently. “Look at Lala. She’s been like that for almost an hour. She pays no attention to me at all. Mark!”

  Mark’s attention came slowly back to the cabin and to Meris.

  “Thank goodness!” she cried. “I was beginning to feel that I was the one that was missing!”

  At that moment, Lala plopped down from the chair and trotted off to the bathroom, a round red spot marking her forehead where she had leaned so long.

  “Well!” Meris was pleased. “It must be suppertime. Everyone’s gathering around again.” And she began the bustle of supper-getting. Lala trotted around with her, getting in the way, hindering with her help.

  “No, Lala!” said Meris. “I told you once already. Only three plates. Here, put the other one over there.” Lala took the plate, waited patiently until Meris turned to the stove, then, lifting both feet from the floor, put the plate back on the table. The soft click of the flatware as she patterned it around the plate caught Meris’s attention. “Oh, Lala!” she cried, half-laughing, half-exasperated. “Well, all right. If you can’t count, okay. Four it will be.” She started convulsively and dropped a fork as a knock at the door roused even Mark. “Hungry guest coming,” she laughed nervously as she picked up the fork. “Well, stew stretches.”

  She started for the door, fear, bred of senseless violence, crisping along her spine, but Lala was ahead of her, fluttering like a bird, with excited bird cries against the door panels, her hands fumbling at the knob and the night chain Meris had insisted on installing. Meris unfastened and unlocked and opened the door.

  It was Johannan, anxious-eyed and worried, who slipped in and gathered up a shrieking Lala. When he had finally un-Englished her to a quiet, contented clinging, he turned to Meris. “Lala called me back,” he said. “I’ve found my Group. She told me Mark was sick—that bad things had happened.”

  “Yes,” said Meris, stirring the stew and moving it to the back of the stove. “The boys came while we were gone and ruined Mark’s manuscript beyond salvage. And Mark—Mark is crushed. He lost all those months of labor through senseless, vindictive—” She turned away from Johannan’s questioning face and stirred the stew again, blindly.

  “But,” protested Johannan, “if once it was written, he has it still. He can do it again.”

  “Time is the factor.” Mark’s voice, rusty and harsh, broke in on Johannan. “And to rewrite from my notes—” He shook his head and sagged again.

  “But—but—!” cried Johannan, still puzzled, putting Lala to one side, where she hovered, sitting on a
ir, crooning to Deeko, until she drifted slowly down to the floor. “It’s all there! It’s been written! It’s a whole thing! All you have to do is put it again on paper. Your word scriber—”

  “I don’t have total recall,” said Mark. “Even if I did, just to put it on paper again—come see our ‘word scriber.’ “ He smiled a small bent smile as Johannan poked fingers into the mechanism of the typewriter and clucked unhappily, sounding so like Lala that Meris almost laughed. “Such slowness! Such complications!”

  Johannan looked at Mark. “If you want, my People can help you get your manuscript back again.”

  “It’s finished,” said Mark. “Why agonize over it any more?” He turned to the blank darkness of the window.

  “Was it worth the effort of writing?” asked Johannan.

  “I thought so,” said Mark. “And others did, too.”

  “Would it have served a useful purpose?” asked Johannan.