by Andre Norton
That was the only time she talked much of what it was like there. Birds and flowers, no noise or cars rushing about nor bulldozers tearing the ground up, everything pretty. It was Lesley who had asked then:
“If it was all that wonderful, why did you want to come back?”
Then she was sorry she had asked because Lizzy's face looked like she was hurting inside when she answered:
“There was Ma and Pa. Matt, he's little, he misses Ma bad at times. Those others, they got their own way of life, and it ain't much like ours. So, we've kept a-tryin’ to get back. I brought somethin'—just for Ma.” She showed them two bags of big silvery leaves pinned together with long thorns. Inside each were seeds, all mixed up big and little together.
“Things grow there,” she nodded toward the field, “they grow strange-like. Faster than seeds hereabouts. You put one of these,” she ran her finger tip in among the seeds, shifting them back and forth, “in the ground, and you can see it grow. Honest-Injun-cross-my-heart-an'-hope-to-die if that ain't so. Ma, she hankers for flowers, loves ‘em truly. So I brought her some. Only, Ma, she ain't here. Funny thing—those over there, they have a feelin’ about these here flowers and plants. They tell you right out that as long as they have these growin’ around they’re safe.”
“Safe from what?” Rick wanted to know.
“I dunno—safe from somethin’ as they think may change ‘em. See, we ain't the onlyest ones gittin’ through to there. There's others, we've met a couple. Susan—she's older'n me and she dresses funny, like one of the real old time ladies in a book picture. And there's Jim—he spends most of his time off in the woods, don't see him much. Susan's real nice. She took us to stay with her when we got there. But she's married to one of them, so we didn't feel comfortable most of the time. Anyway they had some rules—they asked us right away did we have anything made of iron. Iron is bad for them, they can't hold it, it burns them bad. And they told us right out that if we stayed long we'd change. We ate their food and drank their drink stuff—that's like cider and it tastes good. That changes people from here. So after awhile anyone who comes through is like them. Susan mostly is by now, I guess. When you're changed you don't want to come back.”
“But you didn't change,” Lesley pointed out. “You came back.”
“And how come you didn't change?” Rick wanted to know. “You were there long enough—a hundred and ten years!”
“But,” Lizzy had beat with her fists on the floor of the summer house then as if she were pounding a drum. “It weren't that long, it couldn't be! Me, I counted every day! It's only been ten of ‘em, with us hunting the place to come through on every one of ‘em, calling for Ma and Pa to come and get us. It weren't no hundred and ten years—”
And she had cried again in such a way as to make Lesley's throat ache. A moment later she had been bawling right along with Lizzy. For once Rick did not look at her as if he were disgusted, but instead as if he were sorry, for Lizzy, not Lesley, of course.
“It's got to be that time's different in that place,” he said thoughtfully. “A lot different. But, Lizzy, it's true, you know—this is 1971, not 1861. We can prove it.”
Lizzy wiped her eyes on the hem of her long apron. “Yes, I got to believe. ‘Cause what you showed me ain't my world at all. All those cars shootin’ along so fast, lights what go on and off when you press a button on the wall—all these houses built over Pa's good farmin’ land—what I read today. Yes, I gotta believe it—but it's hard to do that, right hard!
“And Matt ‘n’ me, we don't belong here no more, not with all this clatter an’ noise an’ nasty smelling air like we sniffed down there by that big road. I guess we gotta go back there. Leastwise, we know what's there now.”
“How can you get back?” Rick wanted to know.
For the first time Lizzy showed a watery smile. “I ain't no dunce, Rick. They got rules, like I said. You carry something outta that place and hold on to it, an’ it pulls you back, lets you in again. I brought them there seeds for Ma. But I thought maybe Matt an’ me—we might want to go visitin’ there. Susan's been powerful good to us. Well, anyway, I got these too.”
She had burrowed deeper in her pocket, under the packets of seeds and brought out two chains of woven grass, tightly braided. Fastened to each was a small arrowhead, a very tiny one, no bigger than Lesley's little fingernail.
Rick held out his hand. “Let's see.”
But Lizzy kept them out of his reach.
“Them's no Injun arrowheads, Rick. Them's what they use for their own doin's. Susan, she calls them ‘elf-shots.’ Anyway, these here can take us back if we wear ‘em. And we will tomorrow, that's when we'll go.”
They had tried to find out more about there, but Lizzy would not answer most of their questions. Lesley thought she could not for some reason. But she remained firm in her decision that she and Matt would be better off there than here. Then she had seemed sorry for Lesley and Rick and Alex that they had to stay in such a world, and made the suggestion that they link hands and go through together.
Rick shook his head. “Sorry—no. Mom and Dad—well, we belong here.”
Lizzy nodded. “Thought you would say that. But—it's so ugly now, I can't see as how you want to.” She cupped the tiny arrowheads in her hand, held them close. “Over there it's so pretty. What are you goin’ to do here when all the ground is covered up with houses and the air's full of bad smells, an’ those cars go rush-rush all day and night too? Looky here—” She reached for one of the magazines. “I'm the best reader in the school house. Miss Jane, she has me up to read out loud when the school board comes visitin’.” She did not say that boastfully, but as if it were a truth everyone would know. “An’ I've been readin’ pieces in here. They've said a lot about how bad things are gittin’ for you all—bad air, bad water—too many people—everything like that. Seems like there's no end but bad here. Ain't that so now?”
“We've been studying about it in school,” Lesley agreed, “Rick and me, we're on the pick-up can drive next week. Sure we know.”
“Well, this ain't happening over there, you can bet you! They won't let it.”
“How do they stop it?” Rick wanted to know.
But once more Lizzy did not answer. She just shook her head and said they had their ways. And then she had gone on:
“Me an’ Matt, we have to go back. We don't belong here now, and back there we do, sorta. At least it's more like what we're used to. We have to go at the same hour as before—noon time—”
“How do you know?” Rick asked.
“There's rules. We were caught at noon then, we go at noon now. Sure you don't want to come with us?”
“Only as far as the field,” Rick had answered for them. “It's Saturday, we can work it easy. Mom has a hair appointment in the morning, Dad is going to drive her ‘cause he's seeing Mr. Chambers, and they'll do the shopping before they come home. We're supposed to have a picnic in the field, like we always do. Being Saturday the men won't be working there either.”
“If you have to go back at noon,” Lesley was trying to work something out, “how come you didn't get here at noon? It must have been close to five when we saw you. The school bus had let us off at the corner and Alex had come to meet us—then we saw you—”
“We hid out,” Lizzy had said then. “Took a chance on you ‘cause you were like us—”
Lesley thought she would never forget that first meeting, seeing the fair haired girl a little taller than she, her hair in two long braids, but such a queer dress on—like a “granny” one, yet different, and over it a big coarse-looking checked apron. Beside her Matt, in a check shirt and funny looking pants, both of them barefooted. They had looked so unhappy and lost. Alex had broken away from Lesley and Rick and had run right over to them to say “Hi” in the friendly way he always did.
Lizzy had been turning her head from side to side as if hunting for something which should be right there before her. And when they had come up she had
spoken almost as if she were angry (but Lesley guessed she was really frightened) asking them where the Mendal house was.
If it had not been for the stone and Rick doing all that hunting down of the story behind it, they would not have known what she meant. But Rick had caught on quickly. He had said that they lived in the old Mendal house now, and they had brought Lizzy and Matt along with them. But before they got there they had guessed who Lizzy and Matt were, impossible as it seemed.
Now they were gone again. But Lizzy, what had she done just after she had looped those grass strings around her neck and Matt's and taken his hand? First she had thrown out all those seeds on the ground. And then she had pointed her finger at the bulldozer, and the other machines which were tearing up the rest of the farm she had known.
Lesley, remembering, blinked and shivered. She had expected Lizzy and Matt to disappear, somehow she had never doubted that they would. But she had not foreseen that the bulldozer would flop over at Lizzy's pointing, the other things fly around as if they were being thrown, some of them breaking apart. Then the seeds sprouting, vines and grass, and flowers, and small trees shooting up—just like the time on TV when they speeded up the camera somehow so you actually saw a flower opening up. What had Lizzy learned there that she was able to do all that?
Still trying to remember it all, Lesley wiped the dishes. Rick and Alex came in.
“Everything's put away,” Rick reported. “And Alex, he understands about not talking about Matt.”
“I sure hope so, Rick. But—how did Lizzy do that—make the machines move by just pointing at them? And how can plants grow so quickly?”
“How do I know?” he demanded impatiently. “I didn't see any more than you did. We've only one thing to remember, we keep our mouths shut tight. And we've got to be just as surprised as anyone else when somebody sees what happened there—”
“Maybe they won't see it—maybe not until the men come on Monday,” she said hopefully. Monday was a school day, and the bus would take them early. Then she remembered.
“Rick, Alex won't be going to school with us. He'll be here with Mom. What if somebody says something and he talks?”
Rick was frowning. “Yeah, I see what you mean. So—we'll have to discover it ourselves—tomorrow morning. If we're here when people get all excited we can keep Alex quiet. One of us will have to stay with him all the time.”
But in the end Alex made his own plans. The light was only grey in Lesley's window when she awoke to find Rick shaking her shoulder.
“What—what's the matter?”
“Keep it low!” he ordered almost fiercely. “Listen, Alex's gone—”
“Gone where?”
“Where do you think? Get some clothes on and come on!”
Gone to there? Lesley was cold with fear as she pulled on jeans and a sweat shirt, thrust her feet into shoes. But how could Alex—? Just as Matt and Lizzy had gone the first time. They should not have been afraid of being disbelieved, they should have told Dad and Mom all about it. Now maybe Alex would be gone for a hundred years. No—not Alex!
She scrambled down stairs. Rick stood at the back door waving her on. Together they raced across the backyard, struggled through the fence gap and—
The raw scars left by the bulldozer were gone. Rich foliage rustled in the early morning breeze. And the birds—! Lesley had never seen so many different kinds of birds in her whole life. They seemed so tame, too, swinging on branches, hopping along the ground, pecking a fruit. Not the sour old apples but golden fruit. It hung from bushes, squashed on the ground from its own ripeness.
And there were flowers—and—
“Alex!” Rick almost shouted.
There he was. Not gone, sucked into there where they could never find him again. No he was sitting under a bush where white flowers bloomed. His face was smeared with juice as he ate one of the fruit. And he was patting a bunny! A real live bunny was in his lap. Now and then he held fruit for the bunny to take a bite too. His face, under the smear of juice, was one big smile. Alex's happy face which he had not worn since Matt left.
“It's real good,” he told them.
Scrambling to his feet he would have made for the fruit bush but Lesley swooped to catch him in a big hug.
“You're safe, Alex!”
“Silly!” He squirmed in her hold. “Silly Les. This is a good place now. See, the bunny came ‘cause he knows that. An’ all the birds. This is a good place. Here—” he struggled out of her arms, went to the bush and pulled off two of the fruit. “You eat—you'll like them.”
“He shouldn't be eating those. How do we know it's good for him?” Rick pushed by to take the fruit from his brother.
Alex readily gave him one, thrust the other at Lesley.
“Eat it! It's better'n anything!”
As if she had to obey him, Lesley raised the smooth yellow fruit to her mouth. It smelled—it smelled good—like everything she liked. She bit into it.
And the taste—it did not have the sweetness of an orange, nor was it like an apple or a plum. It wasn't like anything she had eaten before. But Alex was right, it was good. And she saw that Rick was eating, too.
When he had finished her elder brother turned to the bush and picked one, two, three, four—
“You are hungry,” Lesley commented. She herself had taken a second. She broke it in two, dropped half to the ground for two birds. Their being there, right by her feet, did not seem in the least strange. Of course one shared. It did not matter if life wore feathers, fur, or plain skin, one shared.
“For Mom and Dad,” Rick said. Then he looked around.
They could not see the whole of the field, the growth was too thick. And it was reaching out to the boundaries. Even as Lesley looked up a vine fell like a hand on their own fence, caught fast, and she was sure that was only the beginning.
“I was thinking Les,” Rick said slowly. “Do you remember what Lizzy said about the fruit from there changing people? Do you feel any different?”
“Why no.” She held out her finger. A bird fluttered up to perch there, watching her with shining beads of eyes. She laughed. “No, I don't feel any different.”
Rick looked puzzled. “I never saw a bird that tame before. Well, I wonder—Come on, let's take these to Mom and Dad.”
They started for the fence where two green runners now clung. Lesley looked at the house, down the street to where the apartment made a monstrous outline against the morning sky.
“Rick, why do people want to live in such ugly places. And it smells bad—”
He nodded. “But all that's going to change. You know it, don't you?”
She gave a sigh of relief. Of course she knew it. The change was beginning and it would go on and on until here was like there and the rule of iron was broken for all time.
The rule of iron? Lesley shook her head as if to shake away a puzzling thought. But, of course, she must have always known this. Why did she have one small memory that this was strange? The rule of iron was gone, the long night of waiting over now.
THROUGH THE NEEDLE'S EYE
* * *
* * *
It was not her strange reputation which attracted me to old Miss Ruthevan, though there were stories to excite a solitary child's morbid taste. Rather it was what she was able to create, opening a whole new world to the crippled girl I was thirty years ago.
Two years before I made that momentous visit to Cousin Althea I suffered an attack of what was then known as infantile paralysis. In those days, before Salk, there was no cure. I was fourteen when I met Miss Ruthevan, and I had been told for weary months that I was lucky to be able to walk at all, even though I must do so with a heavy brace on my right leg. I might accept that verdict outwardly, but the me imprisoned in the thin adolescent's body was a rebel.
Cousin Althea's house was small, and on the wrong side of the wrong street to claim gentility. (Cramwell did not have a railroad to separate the comfortable, smug sheep from the aspiring goats.) B
ut her straggling back garden ran to a wall of mellow, red brick patterned by green moss, and in one place a section of this barrier had broken down so one could hitch up to look into the tangled mat of vine and brier which now covered most of the Ruthevan domain.
Three-fourths of that garden had reverted to the wild, but around the bulk of the house it was kept in some order. The fat, totally deaf old woman who ruled Miss Ruthevan's domestic concerns could often be seen poking about, snipping off flowers or leaves after examining each with the care of a cautious shopper, or filling a pan with wizened berries. Birds loved the Ruthevan garden and built whole colonies of nests in its unpruned trees. Bees and butterflies were thick in the undisturbed peace. Though I longed to explore, I never quite dared, until the day of the quilt.
That had been a day of disappointment. There was a Sunday school picnic to which Ruth, Cousin Althea's daughter, and I were invited. I knew that it was not for one unable to play ball, race or swim. Proudly I refused to go, giving the mendacious excuse that my leg ached. Filled with bitter envy, I watched Ruth leave. I refused Cousin Althea's offer to let me make candy, marching off, lurch-push to perch on the wall.
There was something new in the garden beyond. An expanse of color flapped languidly from a clothes line, giving tantalizing glimpses of it. Before I knew it, I tumbled over the wall, acquiring a goodly number of scrapes and bruises on the way, and struggled through a straggle of briers to see better.
It was worth my struggle. Cousin Althea had quilts in plenty, mostly made by Grandma Moss, who was considered by the family to be an artist at needlework. But what I viewed now was as clearly above the best efforts of Grandma as a Rembrandt above an inn sign.
This was appliqué work, each block of a different pattern; though, after some study, I became aware that the whole was to be a panorama of autumn. There were flowers, fruits, berries, and nuts, each with their attendant clusters of leaves, while the border was an interwoven wreath of maple and oak foliage in the richest coloring. Not only was the appliqué so perfect one could not detect a single stitch, but the quilting over-pattern was as delicate as lace. It was old; its once white background had been time-dyed cream; and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.