Ingathering

by Zenna Henderson

  “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 pretty. 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 table-cloth 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.

  Father drove to Kerry Canyon Sunday night to pick up our new teacher. She was supposed to have arrived Saturday afternoon but she didn’t make bus connections at the county seat. The road ends at Kerry Canyon. I mean for Outsiders. There’s not much of the look of a well-traveled road very far out our way from Kerry Canyon, which is just as well. Tourists leave us alone. Of course we don’t have much trouble getting our cars to and fro, but that’s why everything dead-ends at Kerry Canyon and we have to do all our own fetching and carrying—I mean the road being in the condition it is.

  All the kids at our house wanted to stay up to see the new teacher, so Mother let them, but by seven-thirty the youngest ones began to drop off and by nine there was only Jethro and Kiah, Lizbeth and Jemmy and me. Father should have been home long before and Mother was restless and uneasy. But at nine-fifteen we heard the car coughing and sneezing up the draw. Mother’s wide relieved smile was reflected on all our faces. “Of course!” she cried. “I forgot. He has an Outsider in the car. He had to use the road and it’s terrible across Jackass Flat.”

  I felt Miss Carmody before she came in the door. Already I was tingling all over from anticipation, but suddenly I felt her, so plainly that I knew with a feeling of fear and pride that I was of my grandmother, that soon I would be bearing the burden and blessing of her Gift—the Gift that develops into free access to any mind, one of the People or an Outsider, willing or not. And besides the access, the ability to counsel and help, to straighten tangled minds and snarled emotions.

  And then Miss Carmody stood in the doorway, blinking a little against the light, muffled to the chin against the brisk fall air. A bright scarf hid her hair, but her skin was that luminous matte-cream it had looked. She was smiling a little but scared, too. I shut my eyes and—I went in, just like that. It was the first time I had ever sorted anybody. She was all fluttery with tiredness and strangeness, and there was a question deep inside her that had the wornness of repetition, but I couldn’t catch what it was. And under the uncertainty there was a sweetness and dearness and such a bewildered sorrow that I felt my eyes dampen. Then I looked at her again (sorting takes such a little time) as Father introduced her. I heard a gasp beside me and suddenly I went into Jemmy’s mind with a stunning rush.

  Jemmy and I have been close all our lives and we don’t always need words to talk with each other, but this was the first time I had ever gone in like this and I knew he didn’t know what had happened. I felt embarrassed and ashamed to know his emotion so starkly. I closed him out as quickly as possible, but not before I knew that now Jemmy would never hunt for another Group; Old Ones or no Old Ones, he had found his love.

  All this took less time than it takes to say how-do-you-do and shake hands. Mother descended with cries and drew Miss Carmody and Father out to the kitchen for coffee, and Jemmy swatted Jethro and made him carry the luggage instead of snapping it to Miss Carmody’s room. After all, we didn’t want to lose our teacher before she even saw the schoolhouse.

  I waited until everyone was bedded down. Miss Carmody in her cold cold bed, the rest of us of course with our sheets set for warmth—how I pity Outsiders! Then I went to Mother.

  She met me in the dark hall and we clung together as she comforted me.

  “Oh, Mother,” I whispered, “I sorted Miss Carmody tonight. I’m afraid.”

  Mother held me tight again. “I wondered. It’s a great responsibility. You have to be so wise and clear-thinking. Your grandmother carried the Gift with graciousness and honor. You are of her. You can do it.”

  “But, Mother! To be an Old One!”

  Mother laughed. “You have years of training ahead of you before you’ll be an Old One. Counselor to the soul is a weighty job.”

  “Do I have to tell?” I pleaded. “I don’t want anyone to know yet. I don’t want to be set apart.”

  “I’ll tell the Oldest. No one else need know.” She hugged me again and I went back, comforted, to bed.

  I lay in the darkness and let my mind clear, not even knowing how I knew how to. Like the gentle reachings of quiet fingers I felt the family about me. I felt warm and comfortable as though I were cupped in the hollow palm of a loving hand. Someday I would belong to the Group as I now belonged to the family. Belong to others? With an odd feeling of panic I shut the family out. I wanted to be alone—to belong just to me and no one else. I didn’t want the Gift.

  I slept after a while.

  Miss Carmody left for the schoolhouse an hour before we did. She wanted to get things started a little before schooltime, her late arrival making it kind of rough on her. Kiah, Jethro, Lizbeth, and I walked down the lane to the Armisters’ to pick up their three kids. The sky was so blue you could taste it, a winy fallish taste of harvest fields and falling leaves. We were all feeling full of bubbly enthusiasm for the beginning of school. We were lighthearted and light-footed, too, as we kicked along through the cottonwood leaves paving the lane with gold. In fact Jethro felt too light-footed, and the third time I hauled him down and made him walk on the ground I cuffed him good. He was still sniffling when we got to Armisters’.

  “She’s pretty!” Lizbeth called before the kids got out the gate, all agog and eager for news of the new teacher.

  “She’s young,” Kiah added, elbowing himself ahead of Lizbeth.

  “She’s littler’n me,” Jethro sniffed, and we all laughed because he’s five six already even if he isn’t twelve yet.

  Debra and Rachel Armister linked arms with Lizbeth and scuffed down the lane, heads together, absorbing the data of teacher’s hair, dress, nail polish, luggage, and night clothes, though goodness knows how Lizbeth found out about all that.

  Jethro and Kiah annexed Jeddy and they climbed up on the rail fence that parallels the lane, and walked the top rail. Jethro took a tentative step or two above the rail, caught my eye, and stepped back in a hurry. He knows as well as any child in the Canyon that a kid his age has no business lifting along a public road.

  We detoured at the Mesa Road to pick up the Kroginold boys. More than once Father has sighed over the Kroginolds.

  You see, when the Crossing was made the People got separated in that last wild moment when air was screaming past and the heat was building up so alarmingly. The members of our Group left their ship just seconds before it crashed so devastatingly into the box canyon behind Old Baldy and literally splashed and drove itself into the canyon walls, starting a fire that stripped the hills bare for miles. After the People gathered themselves together from the life slips and founded Cougar Canyon, they discovered that the alloy the ship was made of was a metal much wanted here. Our Group has lived on mining the box canyon ever since, though there’s something complicated about marketing the stuff. It has to be shipped out of the country and shipped in again because everyone knows that it isn’t found in this region.

  Anyway, our Group at Cougar Canyon is probably the largest of the People, but we are reasonably sure that at least one Group and maybe two survived along with us. Grandmother in her time sensed two Groups but could never locate them exactly, and, since our object is to go unnoticed in this new life, no
real effort has ever been made to find them. Father can remember just a little of the Crossing, but some of the Old Ones are blind and crippled from the heat and the terrible effort they put forth to save the others from burning up like falling stars.

  But getting back, Father often mourned that of all the People who could have made up our Group we had to get the Kroginolds. They’re rebels and were even before the Crossing. It’s their kids who have been so rough on our teachers. The rest of us usually behave fairly decently and remember that we have to be careful around Outsiders.

  Derek and Jake Kroginold were wrestling in a pile of leaves by the front gate when we got there. They didn’t even hear us corning, so I leaned over and whacked the nearest rear end, and they turned in a flurry of leaves and grinned up at me for all the world like pictures of Pan in the mythology book at home.

  “What kinda old bat we got this time?” Derek asked as he scrabbled in the leaves for his lunch box.

  “She’s not an old bat,” I retorted, madder than need be because Derek annoys me so. “She’s young and beautiful.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet!” Jake emptied the leaves from his cap onto the trio of squealing girls.

  “She is so!” Kiah retorted. “The nicest teacher we ever had.”

  “She won’t teach me nothing!” Derek yelled, lifting to the top of the cottonwood tree at the turnoff.

  “Well, if she won’t I will,” I muttered, and reaching for a handful of sun I platted the twishers so quickly that Derek fell like a rock. He yelled like a catamount, thinking he’d get killed for sure, but I stopped him about a foot from the ground and then let go. Well, the stopping and the thump to the ground pretty well jarred the wind out of him, but he yelled:

  “I’ll tell the Old Ones! You ain’t supposed to platt twishers!”

  “Tell the Old Ones,” I snapped, kicking on down the leafy road. “I’ll be there and tell them why. And then, old smarty pants, what will be your excuse for lifting?”