by Lisa Yaszek
Anyway, I was awake and leaning on my window sill in the darkness. They stopped on the porch—Jemmy is bunking at the mine during his stint there. I didn’t have to guess or use a Gift to read the pantomime before me. I closed my eyes and my mind as their shadows merged. Under their strong emotion, I could have had free access to their minds, but I had been watching them all Fall. I knew in a special way what passed between them, and I knew that Valancy often went to bed in tears and that Jemmy spent too many lonely hours on the Crag that juts out over the canyon from high on Old Baldy, as though he were trying to make his heart as inaccessible to Outsiders as the Crag is. I knew what he felt, but oddly enough I had never been able to sort Valancy since that first night. There was something very un-Outsiderish and also very un-Groupish about her mind and I couldn’t figure what.
I heard the front door open and close and Valancy’s light steps fading down the hall and then I felt Jemmy calling me outside. I put my coat on over my robe and shivered down the hall. He was waiting by the porch steps, his face still and unhappy in the faint moonlight.
“She won’t have me,” he said flatly.
“Oh, Jemmy!” I cried. “You asked her—”
“Yes,” he said. “She said no.”
“I’m so sorry.” I huddled down on the top step to cover my cold ankles. “But Jemmy—”
“Yes, I know!” He retorted savagely. “She’s an Outsider. I have no business even to want her. Well, if she’d have me, I wouldn’t hesitate a minute. This Purity-of-the-Group deal is—”
“. . . is fine and right,” I said softly, “as long as it doesn’t touch you personally? But think for a minute, Jemmy. Would you be able to live a life as an Outsider? Just think of the million and one restraints that you would have to impose on yourself—and for the rest of your life, too, or lose her after all. Maybe it’s better to accept No now than to try to build something and ruin it completely later. And if there should be children . . .” I paused. “Could there be children, Jemmy?”
I heard him draw a sharp breath.
“We don’t know,” I went on. “We haven’t had the occasion to find out. Do you want Valancy to be part of the first experiment?”
Jemmy slapped his hat viciously down on his thigh, then he laughed.
“You have the Gift,” he said, though I had never told him. “Have you any idea, sister mine, how little you will be liked when you become an Old One?”
“Grandmother was well-liked,” I answered placidly. Then I cried, “Don’t you set me apart, darn you, Jemmy. Isn’t it enough to know that among a different people, I am different? Don’t you desert me now!” I was almost in tears.
Jemmy dropped to the step beside me and thumped my shoulder in his old way. “Pull up your socks, Karen. We have to do what we have to do. I was just taking my mad out on you. What a world.” He sighed heavily.
I huddled deeper in my coat, cold of soul.
“But the other one is gone,” I whispered. “The Home.”
And we sat there sharing the poignant sorrow that is a constant undercurrent among The People, even those of us who never actually saw The Home. Father says it’s because of a sort of racial memory.
“But she didn’t say no because she doesn’t love me,” Jemmy went on at last. “She does love me. She told me so.”
“Then why not?” Sister-wise I couldn’t imagine anyone turning Jemmy down.
Jemmy laughed—a short, unhappy laugh. “Because she is different.”
“She’s different?”
“That’s what she said, as though it was pulled out of her. ‘I can’t marry,’ she said. ‘I’m different!’ That’s pretty good, isn’t it, coming from an Outsider!”
“She doesn’t know we’re The People,” I said. “She must feel that she is different from everyone. I wonder why?”
“I don’t know. There’s something about her, though. A kind of shield or wall that keeps us apart. I’ve never met anything like it in an Outsider or in one of The People either. Sometimes it’s like meshing with one of us and then bang! I smash the daylights out of me against that stone wall.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “I’ve felt it, too.”
We listened to the silent past-midnight world and then Jemmy stood.
“Well, g’night, Karen. Be seeing you.”
I stood up, too. “Good night, Jemmy.” I watched him start off in the late moonlight. He turned at the gate, his face hidden in the shadows.
“But I’m not giving up,” he said quietly. “Valancy is my love.”
*
The next day was hushed and warm—unnaturally so for December in our hills. There was a kind of ominous stillness among the trees, and, threading thinly against the milky sky, the thin smokes of little brush fires pointed out the dryness of the whole country. If you looked closely you could see piling behind Old Baldy an odd bank of clouds, so nearly the color of the sky that it was hardly discernable, but puffy and summer-thunderheady.
All of us were restless in school, the kids reacting to the weather, Valancy pale and unhappy after last night. I was bruising my mind against the blank wall in hers, trying to find some way I could help her.
Finally the thousand and one little annoyances were climaxed by Jerry and Susie scuffling until Susie was pushed out of the desk onto an open box of wet water colors that Debra for heaven only knows what reason had left on the floor by her desk. Susie shrieked and Debra sputtered and Jerry started a high silly giggle of embarrassment and delight. Valancy, without looking, reached for something to rap for order with and knocked down the old cracked vase full of drooping wildflowers and three-day-old water. The vase broke and flooded her desk with the foul-smelling deluge, ruining the monthly report she had almost ready to send in to the County School Superintendent.
For a stricken moment there wasn’t a sound in the room, then Valancy burst into half-hysterical laughter and the whole room rocked with her. We all rallied around doing what we could to clean up Susie and Valancy’s desk and then Valancy declared a holiday and decided that it would be the perfect time to go up-canyon to the slopes of Baldy and gather what greenery we could find to decorate our school room for the holidays.
We all take our lunches to school, so we gathered them up and took along a square tarp the boys had brought to help build the dam in the creek. Now that the creek was dry, they couldn’t use it and it’d come in handy to sit on at lunch time and would serve to carry our greenery home in, too, stretcher-fashion.
Released from the school room, we were all loud and jubilant and I nearly kinked my neck trying to keep all the kids in sight at once to nip in the bud any thoughtless lifting or other Group activity. The kids were all so wild, they might forget.
We went on up-canyon past the kids’ dam and climbed the bare, dry waterfalls that stair-step up to the Mesa. On the Mesa, we spread the tarp and pooled our lunches to make it more picnicky. A sudden hush from across the tarp caught my attention. Debra, Rachel and Lizbeth were staring horrified at Susie’s lunch. She was calmly dumping out a half dozen koomatka beside her sandwiches.
Koomatka are almost the only plants that lasted through The Crossing. I think four koomatka survived in someone’s personal effects. They were planted and cared for as tenderly as babies and now every household in The Group has a koomatka plant growing in some quiet spot out of casual sight. Their fruit is eaten not so much for nourishment as Earth knows nourishment, but as a last remembrance of all other similar delights that died with The Home. We always save koomatka for special occasions. Susie must have sneaked some out when her mother wasn’t looking. And there they were—across the table from an Outsider!
Before I could snap them to me or say anything, Valancy turned, too, and caught sight of the softly glowing bluey-green pile. Her eyes widened and one hand went out. She started to say something and then she dropped her eyes quickly and drew her hand b
ack. She clasped her hands tightly together and the girls, eyes intent on her, scrambled the koomatka back into the sack and Lizbeth silently comforted Susie who had just realized what she had done. She was on the verge of tears at having betrayed The People to an Outsider.
Just then ’Kiah and Derek rolled across the picnic table fighting over a cupcake. By the time we salvaged our lunch from under them and they had scraped the last of the chocolate frosting off their T-shirts, the koomatka incident seemed closed. And yet, as we lay back resting a little to settle our stomachs, staring up at the smothery low-hanging clouds that had grown from the milky morning sky, I suddenly found myself trying to decide about Valancy’s look when she saw the fruit. Surely it couldn’t have been recognition!
At the end of our brief siesta, we carefully buried the remains of our lunch—the hill was much too dry to think of burning it—and started on again. After a while, the slope got steeper and the stubborn tangle of manzanita tore at our clothes and scratched our legs and grabbed at the rolled-up tarp until we all looked longingly at the free air above it. If Valancy hadn’t been with us we could have lifted over the worst and saved all this trouble. But we blew and panted for a while and then struggled on.
After an hour or so, we worked out onto a rocky knoll that leaned against the slope of Baldy and made a tiny island in the sea of manzanita. We all stretched out gratefully on the crumbling granite outcropping, listening to our heart-beats slowing.
Then Jethro sat up and sniffed. Valancy and I alerted. A sudden puff of wind from the little side canyon brought the acrid pungency of burning brush to us. Jethro scrambled along the narrow ridge to the slope of Baldy and worked his way around out of sight into the canyon. He came scrambling back, half lifting, half running.
“Awful!” he panted. “It’s awful! The whole canyon ahead is on fire and it’s coming this way fast!”
Valancy gathered us together with a glance.
“Why didn’t we see the smoke?” she asked tensely. “There wasn’t any smoke when we left the school house.”
“Can’t see this slope from school,” he said. “Fire could burn over a dozen slopes and we’d hardly see the smoke. This side of Baldy is a rim fencing in an awful mess of canyons.”
“What’ll we do?” quavered Lizbeth, hugging Susie to her.
Another gust of wind and smoke set us all to coughing and through my streaming tears, I saw a long lapping tongue of fire reach around the canyon wall.
Valancy and I looked at each other. I couldn’t sort her mind, but mine was a panic, beating itself against the fire and then against the terrible tangle of manzanita all around us. Bruising against the possibility of lifting out of danger, then against the fact that none of the kids was capable of sustained progressive self-lifting for more than a minute or so and how could we leave Valancy? I hid my face in my hands to shut out the acres and acres of tinder-dry manzanita that would blaze like a torch at the first touch of fire. If only it would rain! You can’t set fire to wet manzanita, but after these long months of drought—!
I heard the younger children scream and looked up to see Valancy staring at me with an intensity that frightened me even as I saw fire standing bright and terrible behind her at the mouth of the canyon.
Jake, yelling hoarsely, broke from the group and lifted a yard or two over the manzanita before he tangled his feet and fell helpless into the ugly, angled branches.
“Get under the tarp!” Valancy’s voice was a whip-lash. “All of you get under the tarp!”
“It won’t do any good,” bellowed ’Kiah. “It’ll burn like paper!”
“Get—under—the—tarp!” Valancy’s spaced, icy words drove us to unfolding the tarp and spreading it to creep under. I lifted (hoping even at this awful moment that Valancy wouldn’t see me) over to Jake and yanked him back to his feet. I couldn’t lift with him so I pushed and prodded and half-carried him back through the heavy surge of black smoke to the tarp and shoved him under. Valancy was standing, back to the fire, so changed and alien that I shut my eyes against her and started to crawl in with the other kids.
And then she began to speak. The rolling, terrible thunder of her voice shook my bones and I swallowed a scream. A surge of fear swept through our huddled group and shoved me back out from under the tarp.
Till I die, I’ll never forget Valancy standing there tense and taller than life against the rolling convulsive clouds of smoke, both her hands outstretched, fingers wide apart as the measured terror of her voice went on and on in words that plague me because I should have known them and didn’t. As I watched, I felt an icy cold gather, a paralyzing, unearthly cold that froze the tears on my tensely upturned face.
And then lightning leaped from finger to finger of her lifted hands. And lightning answered in the clouds above her. With a toss of her hands she threw the cold, the lightning, the sullen shifting smoke upward, and the roar of the racing fire was drowned in a hissing roar of down-drenching rain.
I knelt there in the deluge, looking for an eternal second into her drained, despairing, hopeless eyes before I caught her just in time to keep her head from banging on the granite as she pitched forward, inert.
Then as I sat there cradling her head in my lap, shaking with cold and fear, with the terrified wailing of the kids behind me, I heard Father shout and saw him and Jemmy and Darcy Clarinade in the old pick-up, lifting over the steaming streaming manzanita, over the trackless mountain side through the rain to us. Father lowered the truck until one of the wheels brushed a branch and spun lazily, then the three of them lifted all of us up to the dear familiarity of that beat-up old jalopy.
Jemmy received Valancy’s limp body into his arms and crouched in back, huddling her in his arms, for the moment hostile to the whole world that had brought his love to such a pass.
We kids clung to Father in an esctasy of relief. He hugged us all tight to him, then he raised my face.
“Why did it rain?” he asked sternly, every inch an Old One while the cold downpour dripped off the ends of my hair and he stood dry inside his Shield.
“I don’t know,” I sobbed, blinking my streaming eyes against his sternness. “Valancy did it . . . with lightning . . . it was cold . . . she talked. . . .” Then I broke down completely, plumping down on the rough floor boards and, in spite of my age, howling right along with the other kids.
It was a silent, solemn group that gathered in the school house that evening. I sat at my desk with my hands folded stiffly in front of me, half scared of my own People. This was the first official meeting of the Old Ones I’d ever attended. They all sat in desks, too, except the Oldest who sat in Valancy’s chair. Valancy sat stony-faced in the twin’s desk, but her nervous fingers shredded one kleenex after another as she waited.
The Oldest rapped the side of the desk with his cane and turned his sightless eyes from one to another of us.
“We’re all here,” he said, “to inquire——”
“Oh, stop it!” Valancy jumped up from her seat. “Can’t you fire me without all this rigmarole? I’m used to it. Just say go and I’ll go!” She stood trembling.
“Sit down, Miss Carmody,” said the Oldest. And Valancy sat down meekly.
“Where were you born?” asked the Oldest quietly.
“What does it matter?” flared Valancy. Then resignedly, “It’s in my application. Vista Mar, California.”
“And your parents?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a stir in the room.
“Why not?”
“Oh, this is so unnecessary!” cried Valancy. “But if you have to know, both my parents were foundlings. They were found wandering in the streets after a big explosion and fire in Vista Mar. An old couple who lost everything in the fire took them in. When they grew up, they married. I was born. They died. Can I go now?”
A murmur swept the room.
“W
hy did you leave your other jobs?” asked Father.
Before Valancy could answer, the door was flung open and Jemmy stalked defiantly in.
“Go!” said the Oldest.
“Please,” said Jemmy, deflating suddenly. “Let me stay. It concerns me too.”
The Oldest fingered his cane and then nodded. Jemmy half-smiled with relief and sat down in a back seat.
“Go on,” said the Oldest One to Valancy.
“All right then,” said Valancy. “I lost my first job because I—well—I guess you’d call it levitated—to fix a broken blind in my room. It was stuck and I just . . . went up . . . in the air until I unstuck it. The principal saw me. He couldn’t believe it and it scared him so he fired me.” She paused expectantly.
The Old Ones looked at one another and my silly, confused mind began to add up columns that only my lack of common sense had kept from giving totals long ago.
“And the other one?” The Oldest leaned his cheek on his doubled-up hand as he bent forward.
Valancy was taken aback and she flushed in confusion.
“Well,” she said hesitantly, “I called my books to me—I mean they were on my desk. . . .”
“We know what you mean,” said the Oldest.
“You know!” Valancy looked dazed.
The Oldest stood up.
“Valancy Carmody, open your mind!”
Valancy stared at him and then burst into tears.
“I can’t, I can’t,” she sobbed. “It’s been too long. I can’t let anyone in. I’m different. I’m alone. Can’t you understand? They all died. I’m alien!”