Ingathering - The Complete People Stories

by Zenna Henderson

  But the stranger seemed to know what he was looking for. Suddenly I cried out and twisted my crushed fingers to free them. He let go and gestured toward the darkness, saying something tentative and hopeful.

  “Ron!” I called, trying to see what the man was seeing. “Maybe— maybe he sees something.” There was a stir above me and Jemmy slid down to the floor beside me.

  “A visual sighting?” he whispered tensely.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back. “Maybe he—”

  Jemmy laid his hand on the man’s wrist, and then concentrated on whatever it was out in the void that had caught the stranger’s attention.

  “Ron—” Jemmy gestured out the window and—well, I guess Ron gestured with our craft—because things outside swam a different way until I caught a flick or a gleam or a movement.

  “There, there, there,” crooned Jemmy, almost as though soothing an anxious child. “There, there, there. Lizbeth!”

  And all of us except Ron were crowded against the window, watching a bundle of some sort tumbling toward us. “Shield intact,” whispered Jenny. “Praise the Power!”

  “Oh, Daddy, Daddy!” choked Vincent against his whitened knuckles. Mrs. Kroginold clung to him wordlessly.

  Then Jemmy was gone, streaking through our craft, away outside from us. I saw the glint of his shield as he rounded our craft. I saw him gather the tumbling bundle up and disappear with it. Then he was back in the craft again, kneeling—unglinted—beside Mr. Kroginold as he lay on the floor. Mrs. Kroginold and Vincent launched themselves toward them.

  Our stranger tugged at his half-shed blanket. I shuffled my knees off it and he shivered himself back into it.

  They had to peel Mr. Kroginold’s arms from around the instrument packet before they could work on him—in their odd, undoing way of working. And the stranger and I exchanged wavery smiles of congratulations when Mr. Kroginold finally opened his eyes.

  So that was it. After it was all over, I got the deep, breath-drawing feeling I get when I have finished a most engrossing book, and a sort of last-page-flipping feeling, wistfully wishing there were more—just a little more!

  Oh, the loose ends? I guess there were a few. They tied themselves quite casually and briskly in the next few days.

  It was only a matter of moments after Mr. Kroginold had sat up and smiled a craggy smile of satisfaction at the packet he had brought back with him that Ron said, “Convenient.” And we spiraled down—or so it felt to me—to the Earth beneath while Jemmy, fingers to our stranger’s wrist, communicated to him in such a way that the stranger’s eyes got very large and astonished and he looked at me—at me!—questioningly. I nodded. Well, what else could I do? He was asking something, and, so far, every question around these People seemed to have a positive answer!

  So it was that we delivered him, not to the FBI in Washington, but to his own doorstep at a launching base somewhere deep in his own country. We waited, hovering under our unlight and well flowed, until the door swung open and gulped him in, instrument packet, my blanket, and all.

  Imagination boggles at the reception there must have been for him! They surely knew the capsule had been destroyed in orbit. And to have him walk in—!

  And Mr. Kroginold struggled for a couple of days with “Virus X” without benefit of the company doctor, then went back to work.

  A couple of weeks later they moved away to another lab, half across the country, where Mr. Kroginold could go on pursuing whatever it is he is pursuing.

  And a couple of days before they left, I quite unexpectedly gave Vincent a going-away gift.

  That morning Vincent firmed his lips, his cheeks coloring, and shook his head. “I can’t read it,” he said, and began to close the book.

  “That I don’t believe,” I said firmly, my flare of exasperation igniting into sudden inspiration. Vincent looked at me, startled. He was so used to my acceptance of his reading block that he was shaken a bit.

  “But I can’t,” he said patiently.

  “Why not?” I asked bluntly.

  “I have a block,” he said as flatly.

  “What triggers it?” I probed.

  “Why—why, Mother says anything that suggests unhappy compulsion—”

  “How do you know this story has any such thing in it?” I asked. “All it says in the title is a name—Stickeen. “

  “But I know,” he said miserably, his head bent as he flicked the pages of the story with his thumb.

  “I’ll tell you how you know,” I said. “You know because you’ve read the story already.”

  “But I haven’t!” Vincent’s face puckered. “You only brought this book today!”

  “That’s true,” I said. “And you turned the pages to see how long the story was. Only then did you decide you wouldn’t read it—again!”

  “I don’t understand—” Wonder was stirring in his eyes.

  “Vincent,” I said, “you read this whole story in the time it took you to turn the pages. You gulped it page by page and that’s how you know there’s unhappy compulsion in it. So, you refuse to read it—again.”

  “Do—do you really think so?” asked Vincent in a hopeful half whisper. “Oh, Teacher, can I really read after all? I’ve been so ashamed! One of the People, and not able to read!”

  “Let’s check,” I said, excited, too. “Give me the book. I’ll ask you questions—” And I did. And he answered every single one of them!

  “I can read!” He snatched the book from me and hugged it to him with both arms. “Hey! Gene! I can read!”

  “Big deal!” said Gene, glancing up from his labor on the butcher paper spread on the floor. He was executing a fanciful rendition, in tempera, of the Indians greeting Columbus in a chartreuse, magenta, and shriek-pink jungle. “I learned to read in the first grade. Which way do a crocodile’s knees bend?”

  “All you have to remember,” I said to a slightly dashed Vincent, “is to slow down a bit and be a little less empathetic.” I was as pleased as he was. “And to think of the time I wasted for both of us, making you sound out your words—”

  “But I need it,” he said. “I still can’t spell for sour apples!”

  ~ * ~

  Vincent gave me a going-away present the Friday night that the Kroginolds came to say good-by. We were sitting in the twilight on the school porch. Vincent, shaken by having to leave Rinconcillo and Gene, and still thrilling to knowing he could read, gave me one of his treasures. It was a small rock, an odd crystalline formation that contrived at the same time to be betryoidal. In the curve of my palm it even had a strange feeling of resilience, though there was no yielding in it when I pressed my thumb to it.

  “Daddy brought it to me from the moon,” he told me, and deftly fielded it as my astonishment let it fall. “I’ll probably get another one, someday,” he said as he gave it back to me. “But even if I don’t, I want you to have it.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Kroginold and I talked quietly for a while with no reference to parting. I shook them a little with, “Why do you suppose that stranger could send his thoughts to Vincent? I mean, he doesn’t pick up distress from everyone, very apparently. Do you suppose that man might be from People like you? Are there People like you in that part of the world?”

  They looked at each other, startled. “We really don’t know!” said Mr. Kroginold. “Many of our People were unaccounted for when we arrived on Earth, but we just assumed that all of them were dead except for the groups around here—”

  “I wonder if it ever occurred to Jemmy,” said Mrs. Kroginold thoughtfully.

  After they left, disappearing into the shadows of the hillside toward MEL, I sat for a while longer, turning the moon-pebble in my hands. What an odd episode! In a month or so it would probably seem like a distant dream, melting into my teaching years along with all the other things past. But it still didn’t seem quite finished to me. Meeting people like the Kroginolds and the others, makes an indelible impression on a person. Look what it did for that stranger—


  What about that stranger? How was he explaining? Were they giving him a hard time? Then I gulped. I had just remembered. My name and address were on a tape on the corner of that blanket of mine he had been wrapped in. If he had discovered it—! And if things got too thick for him—

  Oh, gollee! What if some day there comes a knock on my door and there—!

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Katie-Mary’s Trip

  See—we’ve got this pad, like—you know?—an old farmhouse with a broad porch all around it. The local yokels call it the hippy-joint, and when the local fuzz need something to fill out a shift, they cruise up and down in front of the place and make like busy.

  Now, I know it’s not for real—this hippy bit. Not here. Lots of dudes and chicks stop here on their way to the Coast where the Real is. But they never stay here—not the McCoy. They all drift on in a day or two except the ones that can’t or won’t conform. They can’t buy the whole bit and so they drop out—too individual. Listen, if you think conforming is for squares or the establishment—think twice. You conform to the hippy thing or, brother, you’re out!

  Take the language, for one. I’ve had drop-ins wrinkle foreheads at me, trying to understand me. So once I listened to myself for a while and found that I’m pretty much of a polyglot. Any form of language that pleases me, I adopt it. Warum nicht? But if you don’t have the vocabulary of a movement—you aren’t with it. You know?

  No, the ones that stay on here for any time at all are the individualists—the loners who have no pack to run with, who are looking for something and think maybe if they stay in one place long enough, like here where the stream of transients flows, whatever they’re looking for will come by.

  And me? I’ve been waiting here the longest. It hasn’t come by yet. Or maybe that’s what passed me by.

  I started this joint. Unintentionally. When I first found this place— way back there when I was still struggling, thinking maybe that was the way—I walked through its empty, echoing, dust-cloud-spawning rooms. Nothing—lovely nothing—all around, bracketed by walls and floor and roof to italicize this particular bit of nothing. I looked out the windows. On three sides—nothing, to the edge of the sky. No hills or mountains to hold up the sky, and so the peak of the roof was all that kept the sky from being flat to the ground. On the other side, the barnyards and beyond— the beginning of town. I wouldn’t need to look that way.

  So I square-pointed the silt out of the rooms, swept the dust out, then mopped down to the bare boards. I straightened the stove pipe and lighted a fire in the potbelly. Then, for a long, satisfying evening, I sat on my bedroll on the floor and watched the fire flicker and glow behind the splintery isinglass in the cast-iron door.

  I don’t know who or what started it, but a couple of months later, people began drifting in to doss down on my floor. I never bothered with furniture. There were a few empty apple boxes around to put our lights on, or if someone had to sit high. I finally put up a couple more potbellied stoves and got the kitchen range—Kalamazoo Direct to You—in working order, the water reservoir and all, and nailed a slotted box inside by the front door. If someone wanted to drop a bit of bread in it as they drifted in or out—okay. If not, Ça ne fait rien.

  After an initial period of revulsion, I began not to mind having strangers—none of my responsibility—around me. And, finally, I rather enjoyed it.

  The other regulars?

  Well, there’s this chick, Katie-Mary. She’s weird. Always spouting about Doing Her Thing. And keeping her area of floor on the chick side clean—bone clean—clear down to the grain of the shreddy old boards. Even to pushing and scraping out the long gray plugs of dirt and fuzz that took years to petrify between the planks. So when it’s windy, the draft comes up through all those emptinesses from the crawl space under the joint and sets the edges of her blankets rippling all around her. She nearly froze last winter. The rippling scared another steady chick, Doos, into screaming half of one night because she could see the Serpent undulating around Katie-Mary—The Rosy Serpent of Contemplation who is unique among serpents in that he has a navel. But Katie-Mary’d get up each morning, stiff with the cold, and work up a sweat scrubbing her bit of floor again.

  She had to carry the water from outside—no plumbing. There’s a handpump standing up on a bare pipe in the back yard. We wrap it with burlap when freezing time comes-—if we remember. And there’s two outhouses—male and female, we created them.

  Sometimes we’re crowded—but Katie-Mary’s not. We shove over and make room, but no one wants to step into that tawny white rectangle of Katie-Mary’s. Which brings up another bit that bugs the transients. We operate dormwise—segregated. No cohabiting. Weird, man, weird!

  Well, to get on, some night last spring, this dude came roaring in on his chopper. Young kid—the whole cycle bit—black leather, spaceman helmet, the kind that reflects so you can’t see through it. Kinda filled the joint that first night, you know? There you’d be, rapping with someone, and there he’d be, listening like—like—well, like a thirsty guy drinks. But some of the congregation began to get real uptight, and he nearly got clobbered a couple of times—just for listening. But remember, his listening was like the sucking of a vacuum. Finally I decided I’d better point out to him the error of his ways, not wanting open warfare. I stopped at his shoulder—and for a minute there I thought I was having a delayed replay of a bad trip. It was like—like, well, like a drift of Something curling around the cerebellum, poking in long question marks and raking at the roots of me, trying to find—to know—

  Then he grinned at me lazylike over his shoulder and said, “Yeah, I’ll cool it, Frederic—no open warfare.”

  And he went looking for a place to doss down, while I stood blinking, wondering, my unused words drying my mouth out, hearing my right name for the first time since—

  He ended up in what used to be a pantry, barely large enough to lie down in, and you’d rap your knuckles on two walls if you stretched too quickly.

  “Central,” he answered—before I asked. “Easy reaching.”

  I thought he’d be long gone come morning, but he wasn’t. He stayed— a dropout.

  He never had much to say, but there seemed always to be someone rapping with him. His thing was listening, except it seemed to me that his listening was asking. He was a Hunter, too, a Waiter. But sometimes he’d break in and start asking questions, out loud. But, then, he wasn’t the Listener any more. So the other dude—or chick, maybe— ‘d split, and the Listener would roar off on that Pollution Producer (Noise) and manage to come back sometime after the last candle or lamp—no electricity—was doused, without waking me. And I’m a light sleeper.

  Don’t know the rationale, but there for a while several months ago, we were bulging. Must have been a wholesale migration to the Coast— maybe the lemming syndrome?

  The pump in the yard squeaked at all hours. There were lines forming to the two-holer outhouses. Matches flared fitfully from every corner.

  Candles, sure! But this lamp bit! Lookit the damn thing smoke! Yiy! That glass thing’s hot! Hey, it does give light! What they won’t think of next!

  Separate? Man, I can’t sleep without my old lady! I mean, like the eyes won’t close—

  Happy insomnia. My thing is running this joint—the way I want to. You’re free to split.

  Yeah. Free. The next pad eighty miles down the pike!

  So, for a while there, the joint filled and emptied like it was breathing, and the slotted box by the front door filled and emptied too. Bread stacked up until I thought maybe of electricity—but unthought it in a hurry. First thing I knew about Katie-Mary’s trip was in the lovely lull after all the crowdedness. Guesky, another stayer—ostensibly, his thing is contemplating, which looks on him about the same as sleeping, if you ask me. I think his real thing is seeing how little activity he can get along with, this side of dying. So it was a real departure for him to climb all the way up to my pad in the unfi
nished attic that spread blankly across the top of the whole house, dust undisturbed except immediately around me. He nudged me awake with his foot. He sleeps on a bench. Can’t get up and down good enough for the floor. His meat’s in his way.

  “Hey, man—shake it!” he said. “Katie-Mary’s back. Got back’s evening. Man, she had a bad trip. Still freakin’ out. She’s down there shrieking and hammering the floor. Doos don’t wanta touch her. Says she sees alienation all around her—”

  “Nothing I can do,” I yawned, scratching me where the blankets had been scratching too long.

  “Stop her mouth or something,” said Guesky, “till she shakes the trip.”

  “What she on?” I asked. “I thought her thing was the next-to-godliness bit—”