“Daddy.” Dena leaned against his knees, her eyes intent on his face. “Were you sorry when they went?”
“Sorry—” Even this long after, he hadn’t been able to change much the way he “remembered it.” He could never forget the quick smother of Eliada’s embrace. And his stiffness that could not relax quickly enough to close his arms around her. There had been a quick, smooth swirl of her hair across his face. And she was gone. Up into the dark yawning of that door that waited, treetop high above the yard. Then the whisperings came—but not through his ears. All the thankings and rememberings and then the final—Rest secure in the Presence through the Name and the Power.
And they were gone—somewhere far. Somewhere west. But—scant comfort—still in this world.
“Don’t cry, Daddy,” said Dena, patting his cheek.
“Men don’t cry!” scoffed Nat.
No, men don’t cry—but boys do. Face-down in the darkness in the grass behind the big tree, wetting huddling sleeves through with hot tears— crying for a magic that was gone and could never come again.
“Yes, I was very sorry,” said Nathan. But—
Nathan looked around the good room, felt the blessed warmth of Miriam, busy in the kitchen, and the wholeness of his life. The tightness inside him began to loosen, as it always finally did.
“We’ll hug you happy,” said Dena. And the three children clustered and climbed on the chair and on his lap—even Nat, who sometimes now was too old to hug people happy.
So—life widens. All kinds of loves come. Others come into the circle to complete it. And someday—maybe Otherside—but someday Eliada would be there again, sitting in the pool of her skirts, her hands lightly folded in her lap, her luminous eyes smiling, and her soft voice saying:
“Tell us a story, Nathan. Tell us all the wonderful story of after we left—”
<
~ * ~
That Boy
There was an evil in the land. Maybe we should have known it, but at first it was sort of like an iceberg, just points and ripples. There was nothing big—nothing to put a name to or to struggle against. Just things like ten-year-old Jareb, rising from baptismal waters with a lie on his tongue. The very first words he spoke, even as he spluttered the creek water from his mouth and nose and shook it off his hair, were a lie. Instead of saying “Hallelujah, amen!” as he had been instructed, he gasped, “There’s a boy down there! He smiled at me!”
Well, Sister Gail, his mother, just plain cried, right there in front of everyone. She had wrestled so long and so hard with the stubborn spirit of untruth that seemed to possess Jareb, and he had promised solemnly that after he was cleansed of his sins in the waters, he’d never lie again, plain or fancy. Jareb sloshed up out of the water and ran to her, all dripping as he was, with the hem of his holy garment trailing in the sand and dust so that it wiped mud against his ankles as he went. “Honest, Mamma! It’s true! There’s a boy down there!”
“Oh, Jareb, Jareb!” Sister Gail hugged him to her, paying no mind to how wet he got her Sunday clothes. She hid her face against his hair so no one could see her tears.
Brother Helon waded out of the pool in the creek. He took hold of Jareb’s shoulders and turned him away from Sister Gail. “Those who mock the Lord shall feel the weight of his mighty wrath!” His voice was like an organ rolling heavy darkness against the granite boulders that backed the pool.
“I’m not mocking the Lord!” Jareb’s eyes were big and shocked. “It’s true! Just think! A boy down there! I didn’t know you could smile under water! Where did—”
“Jareb.” Sister Gail gathered his hand into hers. Her eyes were dry again and her emotions decently tucked away. “Come change your clothes.” They started toward the wagons. She looked back over her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Brother Helon. I thought we had prayed the spirit of untruth from him.”
When they were gone, the rest of us looked uneasily at each other, the solemn joy of Baptism Day sullied by Jareb’s behavior. Then Sister Ruth started the hymn Bringing in the Sheaves, and by the time we got to “—home we come rejoicing—” we were rejoicing and looking forward to the big noontime feed that waited in bulging baskets in the back of the wagons. We were plenty ready for food. We fast on Baptism Day until after the services.
Jareb looked so little and lonesome sitting on a log all by himself, clutching the chunk of corn bread that was all Sister Gail would let him have in the midst of fried chicken and cake, that I stopped by him on my way down to the creek to get the watermelons that had been cooling in the shallows of the creek since the night before.
“Want to come help?” I asked him. He looked up, resigned. “Mamma said to stay here,” he said. I caught Sister Gail’s eye and jerked my thumb over my shoulder. She hesitated, then nodded. She thinks I’m good for the boy, his dad being dead. She doesn’t want him to get too miss-ish.
“She says it’s all right,” I told him. He put the corn bread down carefully on his log and followed me out of the shadows of the huge cottonwood trees into the blaze of sun.
“Do you think I’m lying, Mr. Lambert?” asked Jareb as he trotted along with me. For some reason, everyone Misters me while they Brother and Sister everyone else in the Conclave.
“Well,” I said, “if there’s a boy down there, he sure goes a long time without breathing.”
“Yeah,” said Jareb thoughtfully. “Maybe he doesn’t have to come up—like a frog. Or maybe he went back the other way.”
“Back where?” I asked, scanning the bare hills and the clustered river willows and cottonwoods along the creek.
“To wherever he came from,” said Jareb. “We didn’t see him get in—”
“We didn’t see him at all,” I reminded him.
Silently we went on down the slope to the creek edge. I fished the watermelons out of the water, spanking them with satisfaction as I handled them. Fine melons! As soon as we got settled down, we’d raise just as good or better. Then there’d be no need to cart all our kitchen truck fifteen miles over the hills from Everly, our closest neighboring settlement.
Jareb spanked the melons too, his head bent to hear the hollow, ripe echoes.
“Listen, Jareb,” I said. “Folks are going to expect you to be different, now that you’ve been baptized. I don’t think you’d better go on with this story about a boy. It just makes your mother feel bad and gets you corn bread instead of fried chicken.” He opened his mouth to protest. “Wait,” I said. “If you think you’ll bust if you don’t finish talking it out of you, come to the shop and talk to me. I’ve got big ears.” I grinned at him. After a frowning moment, he grinned too.
We both started back, a melon under each arm. Halfway up the slope, I paused to get a better grip on one of the melons and looked back. “—Four, five, and two’s seven,” I counted to myself. “Hmm. Someone got hungry. I brought eight.” Then I shrugged and followed Jareb up the slope.
That shrieking kid, Jobie, met us halfway, skidding excitedly down the gravel slope. “Hurry up!” he yelled. “Ever-body’s waiting.”
“Don’t yell,” I told him automatically. “We’re coming. You go on down and get a couple more. Save us a trip.”
“Mom dint tell me to work!” yelled Jobie. “She owny told me to tell you—
“I’m telling you,” I said. “Stop yelling and go get a couple more melons. There are a couple about your size down there.”
He glared at me and opened his mouth. I looked at him. He shut his mouth and skidded on down toward the creek. Jareb juggled his melons for a minute and followed me back to the flat. Jobie was as fast as he was loud, and as we laid the melons in the middle of the crowd, Jobie elbowed importantly through with his load. Jareb watched me cut the first one—so crisply ripe that it split ahead of the knife all the way across. The insides glowed as red as campfire coals, and that smell of watermelon—like nothing else on earth!—made us all breathe deeper. Jareb, gulping down his mouth-water, resolutely turned away.
&nbs
p; “I’ll go get the other one,” he said. He didn’t whine, not even with his eyes. Punishment was punishment and he accepted it.
A while later he came back, a melon under each arm. “Two?” I asked. “I thought there was only one left.” His mouth opened but he reddened and closed it again. He went back to his log and his chunk of corn bread that by this time was swarming with ants. I glanced at him several times while the rest of us ate the melons, but he seemed absorbed in watching what was going on with his bread.
It was time to pack up for home after we finished the melons; so while the women were clearing the tarps we had eaten on and the men were getting the horses, I strolled over to Jareb and his log.
“What happened down at the creek?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, reddening again.
“Come on. Out with it.” I sat down far enough from the corn bread not to get me any ants. “There was just one melon left.”
“There’s still a melon left,” he said.
“Can’t be,” I said, tallying again in my head. “I only got eight from Everly.”
“There’s still one,” he persisted. “The—” he paused, gulped, and went on. “That boy just brought back two because last night he took one of ours and he figgered that wasn’t very fair so he brought one back and an extra one to make up for it.” Jareb’s eyes were pleading. “You said—” He gulped again. “You said talk to you—” His eyes dropped and he clasped his hands between his pressing knees. “You said—” His shoulders sagged.
My besetting sin flared up in me, shaking my insides. I can be patient without end with dumb brutes that you can’t reason with. I handle plenty in my smithy, but human beings who are given the power of reasoning and won’t use it—- When I felt that I could control my voice, I said, “You’re right. I told you to talk to me, but that doesn’t mean I intend to countenance your lying—”
“I’m not lying.” Tears welled up in his eyes. “I thought you believed me.” He flipped the ant-crowded corn bread to the ground and left me sitting alone.
I looked after him—wondering, with one corner of my mind, how long it’d be before I got over wanting to reach for my pipe at times like this. I gave it up along with strong drink when I joined the Conclave. I shook my head and stood up. Then, feeling foolish, instead of going to help with the hitching-up, I went back down to the creek.
There was another watermelon, wavering wet-green under the quiet waters of the creek. The ninth melon.
~ * ~
As our short line of wagons curled around the foothills back to the settlement, I wondered again about the wisdom of our choosing this place. It was just another of those points of uneasiness that plagued me. True, there was the year ‘round creek. Maybe that was it. There was the creek. After the endless dusty miles with the sun glaring in our eyes and heavy on our laps until the days spun around us in a never-ending glare of weight and heat, the sight of the flowing waters had been like sighting the gates of the Eternal City. So we chose to accept this second of the three places recommended by the scouts the Conclave sent out when we all voted to move West to free ourselves of a world that grinned or frowned or sneered when the Conclavers were mentioned. You can’t serve God with one eye on the world and a shoulder always hunched against the next attack. At least so most of the Conclavers thought.
The first place was out in the middle of the prairies and fair to see for all its wide miles and farmable land. We could have pastures aplenty for the herds we hoped to build to begin us on our cheese-making, which was to be our special ministry to the world. But there were no hills—or trees—or flowing water, except during rainstorms. And because of where we came from, we all felt we’d rather lift up our eyes unto the hills—
We were all fixed to call this green and wet and tall country Gates Ajar. Or Edenside. Or Maketh Glad. Then we found in the land office that it was already named Hellesgate, and no matter what we chose to call it, the red tape was too tangled for them ever to change it. Even finding that it was named for Omer Hellesgate, because he mapped it first, didn’t cleanse it in our minds. Some wanted to move on, but already we had started putting down roots. And besides, we were so tired—so absolutely worn out. So we stayed. And now I half wondered if the name of the place had anything to do with Jareb’s rising from baptism with a lie on his lips—and his persisting in his error. But then—there was the ninth melon. Even a half lie couldn’t account for a melon.
~ * ~
My smithy was the first thing finished in the settlement. It wasn’t much more than a lean-to. I had the big idea of digging out a room in the hillside and then having a shed out front, but after I saw how the point of the pick merely whitened a pockmark on the hard surface and scaled off only a pinch of a dust, I gave up. Four notched tree trunks help up my roof of branches and brushwood. The open-faced lean-to that protected the forge was made of the branches lopped from the four trees, the chinks mud-filled. Before I became a Conclaver, I wouldn’t have been caught dead in such a shop, but I left my worldly pride behind—far behind—on the other side of my baptismal waters. If only I had been cleansed also of my besetting sin! But hearing the ring of the anvil again and having the echo of my hammering coming back to me multiplied from the red and grey mountain walls of Hellesgate, made the thin-with-strangeness country around me begin to fatten up into familiarity. Home was beginning.
~ * ~
Well, the other kids wouldn’t let Jareb forget his baptismal day. When there weren’t any adults close enough to interfere, they called him Ananias. He mostly shrugged and took it. But one day I had to pull him out from under a whole pile of flailing younguns. I set them skittering with a backhand whack or two and set about sorting Jareb out. He was intact, though considerably roughed up.
“What happened?” I asked him.
“They called her Sapphira,” he explained. “They can call me Ananias all they want to, but they can’t get away with calling Mamma Sapphira. Why’d you chase them off? I was beating up on them!”
“Are you sure they knew that?” I asked, whacking the seat of his overalls to jar the dirt off. “I think they thought they were beating up on you!”
“Jobie knows!” said Jareb, spitting blood from a split lip. “He started it. I knocked his teeth out for him!” He caught my skeptical eye. “Well, one tooth. It was loose already.”
I took him back to the smithy to wash off the worst of his battle.
“Hey!” he said past his shirttail he was using for a towel. “That boy—”
“What boy?” I asked, setting to work shearing nails from the slender rod of iron.
“That watermelon boy,” he offered.
“I thought we’d decided you’d give up your lying—” I paused in my work.
“I’m not lying!” he protested.
“Well, making up tales, then,” I said. “If that suits you better.”
“I’m not making it up neither! I went back there that night to see about that watermelon, and so did he. And we decided since my mamma told me not to eat any, he wouldn’t either. So we buried it under a tree.”
I searched his troubled face for a moment. It was plainly real to him, whatever it was. I sighed. Well, so long as it did no evil—
“That boy—” I left the sentence open for him.
“He doesn’t have to stay in the water.” Jareb’s words poured out happily. “ ‘Member, I thought maybe he was like a fish, but he ain’t— isn’t. N’en I thought maybe he was like a frog—you know, living in the water and out, but he ai—isn’t. He’s just a boy.”
“Just a boy!” I said. “Down in a pond and never coming up for air— or have you changed that?”
“Oh, but he does come up,” protested Jareb. “I asked him. Every half hour, he says, but when he gets big, it will be only every hour. It takes time to learn. Like lifting does. He sure likes to lift.”
“Mountains, of course!” I grinned, hard-pressed to keep my patience with his fancy tales. “Or maybe he lifts the pon
d like a pitcher and pours the water on his garden. Wonderful! Saves ditch-digging.”
“No,” said Jareb thoughtfully. “Not mountains. I asked him, on account of faith doing it, you know. But that’s for grownups and they haven’t done any of that since they got here. They’re scared to. No, he lifts himself.”
“Himself? Well, well!” my voice jeered. “Like a bird, I suppose. Flip-flap she flied, huh?”
“No,” said Jareb. “He doesn’t have to flap to fly. He just—” he waved his hand, “lifts off the ground and goes along. It sure looks fun.” He was wistful. “I wish I could.”
“Now, listen, Jareb,” I said, waiting to catch his eye to make sure I had his whole attention. “You can’t go on making things up like this. The more you do, the more likely you are to forget and start one of your tales around some of the others. You’ve got enough to live down now. Better you and your mother concentrate on truth a little more and grammar a little less. Better pray out this spirit of untruth before it becomes a devouring monster in you.”
Ingathering - The Complete People Stories Page 67