Pilgrimage

by Зенна Гендерсон

  "Well," Karen laughed, "don't say I didn't warn you, but look down."

  Lea looked down. And down! And down! Down to the scurrying sparks along a faded ribbon of a road. Down to the dew-jeweled cobweb of street lights stretching out flatly below. Down to the panoramic perfection of the whole valley, glowing magically in the night. Lea stared, unbelieving, at her two

  feet swinging free in the air-nothing beneath them but air-the same air that brushed her hair back and tangled her eyelashes as they picked up speed. Terror caught her by the throat. Her arms convulsed around the two girls' necks.

  "Hey!" Karen strangled. "You're choking us! You're all right. Not so tight! Not so tight!"

  "You'd better Still her," Miriam gasped. "She can't hear you,"

  "Relax," Karen said quietly. "Lea, relax."

  Lea felt fear leave her like a tide going out. Her arms relaxed. Her uncomprehending eyes went up to the stars and down to the lights again. She gave a little sigh and her head drooped on Karen's shoulder.

  "It did kill me," she said. "Jumping off the bridge. Only it's taken me a long time to die. This is just delirium before death. No wonder, with a stub of a tamarisk through my shoulder." And her eyes closed and she went limp.

  Lea lay in the silvery darkness behind her closed eyes and savored the anonymous unfeeling between sleep and waking. Quietness sang through her, a humming stillness. She felt as anonymous as a transparent seaweed floating motionless between two layers of clear water. She breathed slowly, not wanting to disturb the mirror-stillness, the transparent peace. If you breathe quickly you think, and if you think-She stirred, her eyelids fluttering, trying to stay closed, but awareness and the growing light pried them opera She lay thin and flat on the bed, trying to be another white sheet between two muslin ones. But white sheets don't hear morning birds or smell breakfasts. She turned on her side and waited for the aching burden of life to fill her, to weigh her down, to beset her with its burning futility.

  "Good morning." Karen was perched on the window sill, reaching out with one cupped hand. "Do you know how to get a bird to notice you, short of being a crumb? I wonder if they do notice anything except food and eggs. Do they ever take a deep breath for the sheer joy of breathing?" She dusted the crumbs from her hands out the window.

  "I don't know much about birds." Lea's voice was thick and rusty. "Nor about joy either, I guess." She tensed, waiting for the heavy horror to descend.

  "Relax," Karen said, turning from the window. "I've Stilled you."

  "You mean I'm-I'm healed?" Lea asked, trying to sort out last night's memories.

  "Oh, my, no! I've just switched you off onto a temporary siding. Healing is a slow thing. You have to do it yourself, you know. I can hold the spoon to your lips but you'll have to do the swallowing."

  "What's in the spoon?" Lea asked idly, swimming still in the unbeset peace.

  "What have you to be cured of?"

  "Of life." Lea turned her face away. "Just cure me of living."

  "That line again. We could bat words back and forth all day and arrive at nowhere-besides I haven't the time. I must leave now." Karen's face lighted and she spun around lightly.

  "Oh, Lea! Oh, Lea!" Than, hastily: "There's breakfast in the other room. I'm shutting you in. I'll be back later and then-well, by than I'll have figured out something. God bliss!" She whisked through the door but Lea heard no lock click.

  Lea wandered into the other room, a restlessness replacing the usual sick inertia. She crumbled a piece of bacon between her fingers and poured a cup of coffee. She left them both untasted and wandered back into the bedroom. She fingered the strange nightgown she was wearing and then, in a sudden breathless skirl of action, stripped it off and scrambled into her own clothes.

  She yanked the doorknob. It wouldn't turn. She hammered softly with her fists on the unyielding door. She hurried to the open window and sitting on the sill started to swing her legs across it. Her feet thumped into an invisible something. Startled she thrust out a hand and stubbed her fingers. She pressed both hands slowly outward and stared at them as they splayed against a something that stopped them.

  She went back to the bed and stared at it. She made it up, quickly, meticulously, mitering the corners of the sheets precisely and plumping the pillow. She melted down to the edge of the bed and stared at her tightly clasped hands. Then she slid slowly down, turning and catching herself on her knees. She buried her face in her hands and whispered into the arid grief that burned her eyes, "Oh, God! Oh, God! Are You really there?"

  For a long time she knelt there, feeling pressed against the barrier that confined her, the barrier that, probably because of Karen, was now an inert impersonal thing instead of the malicious agony-laden frustrating, deliberately evil creature it had been for so long.

  Then suddenly, incongruously, she heard Karen's voice. "You haven't eaten." Her startled head lifted. No one was in the room with her. "You haven't eaten," she heard the voice again, Karen's matter-of-fact tone. "You haven't eaten."

  She pulled herself up slowly from her knees, feeling the smart of returning circulation. Stiffly she limped to the other room. The coffee steamed gently at her although she had poured it out a lifetime ago. The bacon and eggs were still warm and uncongealed. She broke the warm crisp toast and began to eat.

  "I'll figure it all out sometime soon," she murmured to her plate. "And then I'll probably scream for a while."

  Karen came back early in the afternoon, bursting through the door that swung open before she reached it.

  "Oh, Lea!" she cried, seizing her and whirling her in a mad dance. "You'd never guess-not in a million years! Oh, Lea! Oh, Lea!" She dumped the two of them onto the bed and laughed delightedly. Lea pulled away from her.

  "Guess what?" Her voice sounded as dry and strained as her tearless eyes.

  Karen sat up quickly. "Oh, Lea! I'm so sorry. In all the mad excitement I forgot.

  "Listen, Jemmy says you're to come to the Gathering tonight. I can't tell you-I mean, you wouldn't be able to understand without a lengthy explanation, and even then-" She looked into Lea's haunted eyes. "It's bad, isn't it?" she asked softly. "'Even Stilled, it comes through like a blunt knife hacking, doesn't it? Can't you cry, Lea? Not even a tear?"

  "Tears-" Lea's hands were restless. " 'Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.' " She pressed her hands to the tight constriction in her chest. Her throat ached intolerably. "How can I bear it?" she whispered. "When you let it come back again how can I even bear it?"

  "You don't have to bear it alone. You need never have borne it alone. And I won't release you until you have enough strength.

  "Anyway-" Karen stood up briskly, "food again-then a nap. I'll give sleep to you. Then the Gathering. There will be your new beginning."

  Lea shrank back into her corner, watching with dread as the Gathering grew. Laughter and cries and overtones and undercurrents swirled around the room.

  "They won't bite!" Karen whispered. "They won't even notice you, if you don't want them to. Yes," she answered Lea's unasked question. "You must stay-like it or not, whether you can see any use in it or not. I'm not quite sure myself why Jemmy called this Gathering, but how appropriate can you get-having us meet in the schoolhouse? Believe it or not, this is the where that I got my education-and this is where-Well, teachers have been our undoing-or doing according to your viewpoint. You know, adults can fairly well keep themselves to themselves and not let anyone else in on their closely guarded secrets-but the kids-" She laughed. "Poor cherubs-or maybe they're wiser. They pour out the most personal things quite unsolicited to almost any adult who will listen-and who's more apt to listen than a teacher? Ask one sometime how much she learns of a child's background and everyday family activities from just what is let drop quite unconsciously. Kids are the key to any community-which fact has never been more true than among us. That's why teachers have been so involved in the affairs of the People. Remind me sometime when we have a

  minute to tell you about-we
ll, Melodye, for instance. But now-" The room suddenly arranged itself decorously and stilled itself expectantly and waited attentively.

  Jemmy half sat on one corner of the teacher's desk in front of the Group, a piece of paper clutched in one hand. All heads bowed. "We are met together in Thy Name," Jemmy said. A settling rustle filled the room and subsided. "Out of consideration for some of us the proceedings here will be vocal. I know some of the Group have wondered that we included all of you in the summons. The reasons are twofold. One, to share this joy with us-" A soft musical trill of delight curled around the room, followed by faint laughter. "Francher!" Jemmy said.

  "The other is because of the project we want to begin tonight. "In the last few days it has become increasingly evident that we all have a most important decision to make. Whatever we decide there will be good-bys to say. There will be partings to endure. There will be changes."

  Sorrow was tangible in the room, and a soft minor scale mourned over each note as it moved up and down, just short of tears. "The Old Ones have decided it would be wise to record our history to this point. That's why all of you are here. Each one of you holds an important part of our story within you. Each of you has influenced indelibly the course of events for our Groups. We want your stories. Not reinterpretations in the light of what you now know, but the original premise, the original groping, the original reaching-" There was a murmur through the room. "Yes," Jemmy answered. "Live it over, exactly the same-aching and all.

  "Now," he smoothed out his piece of paper, "chronologically –Oh, first, where's Davey's recording gadget?"

  "Gadget?" someone called. "What's wrong with our own memories?"

  "Nothing," Jemmy said, "but we want this record independent of any of us, to go with whoever goes and stay with whoever stays. We share the general memories, of course, but all the little details-well, anyway. Davey's gadget." It had arrived on the table unobtrusively, small and undistinguished. "Now chronologically-Karen, you're first-"

  "Who, me?" Karen straightened up, surprised. "Well, yes," she answered herself, settling back, "I guess I am."

  "Come to the desk," Jemmy said. "Be comfortable." Karen squeezed Lea's hand and whispered, "Make way for wonder!" and, after threading her way through the rows of desks, sat behind the table.

  "I think I'll theme this beginning," she said. "We've remarked on the resemblance before, you know.

  " 'And the Ark rested . . . upon the mountains of Ararat.' Ararat's more poetical than Baldy, anyway!

  "And now," she smiled, "to establish Then again. Your help, please?"

  Lea watched Karen, fascinated against her will. She saw her face alter and become younger. She saw her hair change its part and lengthen. She felt years peel back from Karen like thin tissue and she leaned forward, listening as Karen's voice, higher and younger, began ….

  ARARAT

  WE'VE HAD trouble with teachers in Cougar Canyon. It's just an accommodation school anyway, isolated and so unhandy to anything. There's really nothing to hold a teacher. But the way the People bring forth their young, in quantities and with regularity, even our small Group can usually muster the nine necessary for the county superintendent to arrange for the schooling for the year.

  Of course I'm past school age, Canyon school age, and have been for years, but if the tally came up one short in the fall I'd go back for a postgraduate course again. But now I'm working on a college level because Father finished me off for my high-school diploma two summers ago. He's promised me that if I do well this year I'll get to go Outside next year and get my training and

  degree so I can be the teacher and we won't have to go Outside for one any more. Most of the kids would just as soon skip school as not, but the Old Ones don't hold with ignorance and the Old Ones have the last say around here.

  Father is the head of the school board. That's how I get in on lots of school things the other kids don't. This summer when he wrote to the county seat that we'd have more than our nine again this fall and would they find a teacher for us, he got back a letter saying they had exhausted their supply of teachers who hadn't heard of Cougar Canyon and we'd have to dig up our own teacher this year. That "'dig up" sounded like a dirty crack to me since we have the graves of four past teachers in the far corner of our cemetery. They sent us such old teachers, the homeless, the tottering, who were trying to piece out the end of their lives with a year here and a year there in jobs no one else wanted because there's no adequate pension system in the state and most teachers seem to die in harness. And their oldness and their tottering were not sufficient in the Canyon where there are apt to be shocks for Outsiders-unintentional as most of them are.

  We haven't done so badly the last few years, though. The Old Ones say we're getting adjusted, though some of the nonconformists say that the Crossing thinned our blood. It might be either or both or the teachers are just getting tougher. The last two managed to last until just before the year ended. Father took them in as far as Kerry Canyon and ambulances took them on in. But they were all right after a while in the sanatorium and they're doing okay now. Before them, though, we usually had four teachers a year.

  Anyway Father wrote to a teachers' agency on the coast, and after several letters each way he finally found a teacher.

  He told us about it at the supper table.

  "'She's rather young," he said, reaching for a toothpick and tipping his chair back on its hind legs.

  Mother gave Jethro another helping of pie and picked up her own fork again. "Youth is no crime," she said, "and it'll be a pleasant change for the children."

  "Yes, though it seems a shame." Father prodded at a back tooth and Mother frowned at him. I wasn't sure if it was for picking his teeth or for what he said. I knew he meant it seemed a shame to get a place like Cougar Canyon so early in a career. It isn't that we're mean or cruel, you understand. It's only that they're Outsiders and we sometimes forget-especially the kids.

  "She doesn't have to come," Mother said. "She could say no."

  "Well, now-" Father tipped his chair forward. "Jethro, no more pie. You go on out and help Kiah bring in the wood. Karen, you and Lizbeth get started on the dishes. Hop to it, kids."

  And we hopped, too. Kids do to fathers in the Canyon, though I understand they don't always Outside. It annoyed me because I knew Father wanted us out of the way so he could talk adult talk to Mother, so I told Lizbeth I'd clear the table and then worked as slowly as I could, and as quietly, listening hard.

  "She couldn't get any other job," Father said. "The agency told me they had placed her twice in the last two years and she didn't finish the year either place."

  "Well," Mother said, pinching in her mouth and frowning.

  "If she's that bad why on earth did you hire her for the Canyon?"

  "We have a choice?" Father laughed. Then he sobered. "No, it wasn't for incompetency. She was a good teacher. The way she tells it they just fired her out of a clear sky. She asked for recommendations and one place wrote, 'Miss Carmody is a very competent teacher but we dare not recommend her for a teaching position.' "

  " 'Dare not'?" Mother asked.

  " 'Dare not,' " Father said; "The agency assured me that they had investigated thoroughly and couldn't find any valid reasons for the dismissals, but she can't seem to find another job anywhere on the coast. She wrote me that she wanted to try another state."

  "Do you suppose she's disfigured or deformed?" Mother suggested.

  "Not from the neck up!" Father laughed. He took an envelope from his pocket. "Here's her application picture."

  By this time I'd got the table cleared and I leaned over Father's shoulder.

  "Gee!" I said. Father looked back at me, raising one eyebrow. I knew then that he had known all along that I was listening.

  I flushed but stood my ground, knowing I was being granted admission to adult affairs, if only by the back door.

  The girl in the picture was lovely. She couldn't have been many years older than I and she was twice as prett
y. She had short dark hair curled all over her head and apparently that poreless creamy skin which seems to have an inner light of its own. She had a tentative look about her as though her dark eyebrows were horizontal question marks. There was a droop to the corners of her mouth-not much, just enough to make you wonder why, and want to comfort her.

  "She'll stir the Canyon for sure," Father said.

  "I don't know" Mother frowned thoughtfully. "What will the Old Ones say to a marriageable Outsider in the Canyon?"

  "Adonday Veeah!" Father muttered. "That never occurred to me. None of our other teachers was ever of an age to worry about."

  "'What would happen?" I asked. "I mean if one of the Group married an Outsider?"

  "Impossible," Father said, so like the Old Ones that I could see why his name was approved in Meeting last spring.

  "Why, there's even our Jemmy," Mother worried. "Already he's saying he'll have to start trying to find another Group. None of the girls here pleases him. Supposing this Outsider-how old is she?"

  Father unfolded the application. "Twenty-three. Just three years out of college."

  "Jemmy's twenty-four." Mother pinched her mouth together. "Father, I'm afraid you'll have to cancel the contract. If anything happened-well, you waited overlong to become an Old One to my way of thinking and it'd be a shame to have something go wrong your first year."

  "I can't cancel the contract. She's on her way here. School starts next Monday." Father ruffled his hair forward as he does when he's disturbed. "We're probably making a something of a nothing," he said hopefully.

  "Well, I only hope we don't have any trouble with this Outsider."

  "Or she with us," Father grinned. "Where are my cigarettes?"

  "On the bookcase," Mother said, getting up and folding the tablecloth together to hold the crumbs.

  Father snapped his fingers and the cigarettes drifted in from the front room. Mother went on out to the kitchen. The tablecloth shook itself over the wastebasket and then followed her.