Ingathering

by Zenna Henderson

  Squatting awkwardly without a milking stool, he managed to half fill the snow cup. He handed it to Eliada. She took it and lifted it to her mouth. She hesitated and smiled at him apologetically. “There have been so many things lately that—” she shuddered a little, then tilted her head and the bowl and drank.

  “It’s good!” Eliada lowered the cup, a little mustache of milk foam at the corners of her mouth.

  “Kelly Cow gives good milk,” said Nathan. “But I gotta go now. It’s settin’ in to snow all night.” He wound the short frazzled end of the old rope around his hand, but something about Eliada kept him from starting. She was standing, staring down at the snow cup. Without moving her head, her eyes lifted to Nathan. The tip of her tongue wiped away the milk smudges on her lip. “We are hungry,” she said. “We are very hungry.”

  “Hungry?” Nathan asked. “How come? You had a good corn crop—”

  “If that is all you have to eat, it does not last until the year turns.” Eliada’s finger tightened on the bowl. “We are trying different barks now. But they are bitter!” Her voice broke. “And we are hungry!”

  “Well, my golly! I don’t have—” Nathan fumbled for words.

  “You have Kelly Cow.” Eliada’s eyes were shut as she forced the words out. “And it has milk—”

  “Yeah, but we have to eat, too!” Nathan defended.

  Eliada drooped from crown to snow, the bowl slipping from her hand and plopping wetly at her feet.

  “All right! All right!” he said gruffly. “I’ll give you some of the milk.” Visions of milkless cornmeal mush streaked through his mind and, even milkless, made him hungry. “I guess a cup of cold—milk—”

  Eliada was suddenly close to him, pinching a fold of his coat between her finger and thumb.

  “You know, too!” She cried softly. “Who feeds the hungry feeds two.”

  Nathan twisted away and thumped the heel of his hand against Kelly Cow’s shoulder. “What you going to put it in?” he asked. “But not all of it! Papa would tan my hide if I brought Kelly Cow home dry!”

  “I will go,” said Eliada eagerly. “I will go quickly. We have a container.” She whirled and fled over the snow, swiftly, lightly, as though the snow were no hindrance to her feet—as though she flew through the deepening snowfall.

  She was back, panting, with her container, its odd misshapenness bending her wrists downward.

  Nathan looked at it dubiously. “Where’d you get that thing?” he asked. “If it’s that heavy empty, how you going to carry it full?”

  “I will carry it,” she said, her eyes shining. “It is made of—of what was left after—after—” She hugged it to her with both arms. “It is not beautiful. We have not had much time for beauty yet. Besides, there is no metaller among us now. But it is loved. It is from Home.”

  “Yeah—well—home,” said Nathan, reaching for the container. “Mama has her little trunk. We couldn’t bring much, either.”

  He took the container and squatted again by Kelly Cow and began milking. White foam backed away from the far edge and the stream of milk rang musically against the metal.

  “Almost a song,” said Eliada. “Can you hear it?” She paced her words to the rhythm of the milking. “Praise—praise—food—food—Sing—sing. Oh, let us sing our praise for food!”

  Her words caught Nathan’s fancy and he tried it. “Praise—God—from—whom—all—blessings—” Then he slipped sideways and almost spilled the milk, righted himself, and ended up triumphantly, though the rhythm was a little muffled because of the level of the milk rising. “Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!” Then he looked a little dismayed at the amount of the milk in the container—and a little dubiously at depleted Kelly Cow. Eliada caught his uncertainty.

  “You have given us too much?” she asked.

  “Naw, guess not. Can’t put it back anyway. If I’m gonna catch it, another cup or two won’t change things. Think you can carry it?” He lifted the awkward, slopping basin up to her hands.

  “Oh, yes!” Her eyes were shining. “I will make it less heavy. This good gift of food you have given us. But the best gift is—well, I knew it was the same everywhere, but to hear you sing to Them—” softly she echoed, “Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—Though you named them other—that is the best gift you have given. Thank you.”

  Nathan wound the tattered rope around his hand again, shy to hear her speak so freely of such things. “You’re welcome. Now you got something to go on your mush.”

  “Mush?”

  “Well, porridge.”

  “Porridge?”

  “Gollee! You must be foreigners! Look, have you got any corn left?”

  “Yes.” She shuddered a little. “But, now, our stomachs—”

  “Well, grind some up to make meal, but not as fine as flour—here—” he said to her not-knowing look—“about this coarse.” He held out his hand and the grainy snow began settling on his old green mitten. “See? About that big. And cook it with water and a little salt.” He watched her comprehending nods at each step of the directions. “Stir it good or you’ll get lumps. Then put it in a dish and pour milk on it. If you’ve got any sweetening, put that on, too.” His stomach suddenly spoke to him out of its hunger.

  “Gotta go.” He dragged at Kelly Cow. “I’m late now, and the snow—”

  He looked back from the far side of the thicket and saw only the flick of Eliada’s skirt disappearing among the trees. He became conscious of the warmness against his chest and caught his breath to call out. But, eying the distance, he turned and trudged off with Kelly Cow, the warmness in his cold, free hand.

  “You’re late.” Mama was brisk about the table and didn’t look at Nathan. “Strain the milk into the crock. Supper’s almost ready. Adina, you help him.”

  Adina stretched the strainer doth tight across the top of the heavy crock and watched carefully as Nathan poured the milk, to make sure that the cheese doth didn’t slip.

  “Is that all?” she asked, her dear voice loud in the evening silence.

  “Shush!” Nathan elbowed her sharply.

  “Mama!” came her outraged squawk.

  “Nathan.” Papa’s voice was heavy with weariness.

  “Yes, sir,” said Nathan.

  “Is something wrong with the milk tonight?”

  “No, sir,” said Nathan. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “Is so!” said Adina.

  “Is not!” retorted Nathan. “There’s nothing wrong with the milk. There just isn’t as much as usual.”

  “Oh, dear!” Mama came over to see. “You didn’t throw rocks at her again, and scare her so that—”

  “Rocks scare Kelly Cow—ha!” Adina said pertly, then wilted at Papa’s glance.

  “Wolves might!” Lucas’ eyes were big. “Was it wolves, Nathan?”

  “No,” said Nathan, shortly. “I gave some of the milk away.”

  “Give it away? Who on earth could you meet way out here—?” Mama was anxious to know. Who out here in all this loneliness—?

  “The people on the place where Kelly Cow always goes. You know, the other side of the thicket. That old man that won’t ever talk—only this was a girl from there. We talked.” Nathan was getting more and more uncomfortable. “She said they were hungry.”

  “This was a good year,” said Papa slowly.

  “But I guess they had only corn—and maybe rabbits. She said they were trying different barks to find something they could eat.”

  “Bark?” cried Lucas. “Like the deer do?”

  “They must be very slack, not to have laid in provisions for the winter,” said Papa.

  “I don’t know,” said Nathan, holding the snow bowl tightly in his mind. “Only she tasted the milk and told me they were hungry. I didn’t mean to milk so much for them, but—”

  “Well,” Papa said ponderously. “No matter, for one time. But remember, family must come first.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Nathan. He had a s
udden notion. “She—she gave me something—” He reached into his pocket for the warmness and, with a pang, held it out to Papa on the palm of his hand.

  “A rock,” said Papa, not taking it. “Not much good for supper. Maybe that’s why she gave it to you.”

  Nathan smiled and put the warmness back into his pocket. “Yes, sir,” he said, and the room swept back happily into supper activity. Papa was in a good mood.

  “We called them other?” Adina was shocked. “How could they be anything but Father-Son-and-Holy-Ghost? Maybe they’re bad people!”

  “Adina!” Nathan’s voice came sternly through the dark of the loft. “If you don’t shut up, I won’t ever tell you about the baby again.”

  A rustling plop signified Adina’s lying down again.

  “People don’t all talk the same language. All the languages have a different name for God.”

  “But,” Adina was shaken, “I thought God was always God!”

  “He is!” said Nathan. “But—”

  “If you keep fighting about God,” said Lucas, “you won’t never get to finish what happened.”

  Silence came in the loft. Then there was a sound of turning on the rustling, unsoft pallets. Nathan’s voice came again.

  “Then I told her how to make corn-meal mush—”

  “Mush! She didn’t even know that!” Adina was horrified.

  “No,” said Nathan shortly, resenting the criticism. “They’re foreigners. So I told her how and she went away. I forgot to give her back the warmness, and that’s why we’ve still got it.”

  “It isn’t very warm now,” said Lucas, coughing as he squeezed it in his hands. “Bet Adina wore it out before I ever got it.”

  “Did not,” said Adina, too tired to get mad.

  “Eliada said it wouldn’t stay warm very long. It’s little.” Silence grew again in the loft and became very drowsy. Nathan’s voice came sleepily.

  “She said she’d make that bowl thing less heavy to carry it home.” Silence and heavy breathing were his only answer. Then, sharply awake, Nathan’s voice came again. “But she didn’t leave any tracks! Not even in the snow!”

  The weather closed in that night and snow fell on snow and storm followed storm, seemingly endlessly. During those days in the dusky one room that flickered with firelight, the children worked at the lessons set for them by their mother. Lucas struggled with his alphabet and numbers and his name—and the cough that shook his thin body.

  Adina sounded out the stories in Mama’s old Primary reading book that had to be read at the table because it was so fragile and so apart—and so precious. Nathan rather guiltily used part of his time to re-read David and Goliath in the Old Testament part of the Bible. He could have read it with his eyes shut, but he read it again, because it belonged to a time and place like this—shut in, sheltered. The shadowy room swirling with warmth and cold as the fire leaped and sank and the drafts billowed the clothes hanging on pegs against the wall.

  Finally, he set aside the Bible and the pleasant containment of the old story, and got out the box of carefully hoarded pieces of newspapers they had salvaged from wherever they happened to be found. Some made no sense at all when you tried to read what there was of them, but some were exciting and engrossing—and seldom complete. But something to read, words to learn.

  It was a warm, contained sort of time, with no world except the house. Its outside corners shrieked in the wind, but its inside corners were sheltering, though chilly. Outside was lightless tumult. Inside at one or two places beneath the roof, there was the companionable sound of dripping water—the hurried plik, plik, plik intermingling with the deeper, slower plunk-a, plunk-a.

  Papa rocked in his big chair that he had made after they got here. He looked long into the fire or at the dark ceiling, thinking whatever thoughts came to a wilderness farmer in off season. Or he worked on the horses’ harness. Or sat with the Bible on his knees, drowsing, his chair slowing—rousing, his chair picking up tempo.

  Mama never lacked for something to do, but even she arrived at a time when she could sit for long, resting moments, her current task on her lap, with no urgency about it.

  There were no days or nights. Time was kept only by the checking of the stock in the small barn behind the house, and the coming of bedtime and rising and the diminishing of the woodpile beside the fireplace.

  At some point in this timelessness, Nathan glanced up from his reading—bride wore white mowseline de soie—as if someone had called him. No one in the room was even looking at him, and so he bent to his work again. Again the call came, sharply, urgently, with not a sound—not a word. He got up uneasily and went to the fireplace. The woodbox had been refilled recently. The fire was about its secret munching and crunching of the old wood from clearing the land. Even the plunk-a, plunk-a was the same.

  “I think I’ll go check the stock,” he said, trying to sound like Papa.

  “Little early for that,” said Papa, glancing up.

  “I need to stretch my legs,” Nathan said, reaching for his coat. He lighted the small lantern with a splinter blazed from the fire, and turned to the door. Lucas was ahead of him, coughing in his hurry, hacking at the frozen lumps at the bottom of the door with the crowbar.

  “Don’t let go of the rope,” said Mama, anxious because of the wilderness out of doors.

  The call caught Nathan as he opened the door, and he stumbled a little on the uneven floor. What was it? What was urging him? Not out, he realized, just—just listen. No—he wrestled with the problem as he wrestled with closing the door. No—not listen. It was there’s need! Who called?

  He got the door shut and clung firmly to the rope stretched from house to barn, while he caught his balance against the howling fury of the wind and the knifing of the snow against the exposed parts of his face. He hugged the lantern to him, under his coat, to keep it from being blown out—and away.

  It seemed like a hundred miles and a hundred years before he half stumbled, half fell into the barn. The animals swung drowsy faces to look at him, their eyes catching, with unexpected brightness, what little light came from the lantern that flared smokily, then settled to its small glow.

  The snow had housed the animals completely against the wind. Their own bodies had warmed the place and melted some of the snow that had sifted in at the top of the rough walls. The moisture had run down the logs to freeze smoothly again near the floor. The water trough was partly frozen, and Nathan hacked at the thin ice with his heel.

  There’s need! It was words now, that came so shocking loud inside his head that Nathan whirled, his elbow going up defensively. No one was in the half-light of the chilly stillness except the huddled animals who rippled across with small movement. Then they swung about to stare at the wall opposite the door. Nathan went to the wall and rested his hands against it, his eyes fanning a scared look over the rough logs.

  There’s need! There’s need! The soundless words sobbed into the silence.

  “El—” His voice wouldn’t work. He tried again. “Eliada?”

  Nathan! Nathan! Relief cried in every syllable.

  “You can’t get in that way,” Nathan called foolishly to the rough wall and the quiet stock. “The door is around two corners from you.”

  The animals blinked their eyes and came apart from their concerted staring, and swung slowly away from each other, unpatterned. There was a thud on the door, and Nathan moved to it quickly, pushing out against the frantic pushing in, and Eliada fell into the barn.

  “Nathan! Nathan!” she cried from the floor, reaching blindly.

  Nathan knelt and reached a hand to help her up. His fingertips rapped and his fingers bent and slid away with no touch of Eliada.

  “Oh!” She drew a sobbing breath. “I’m shielding.” Then she reached out for Nathan’s hand and clung. “Oh, Nathan,” she cried as he pulled her, shivering, to her feet. She sagged and almost fell before he caught and held her. “We’re dying! There is nothing to eat! Not anything! And
no small creatures in the forest because of the—the falling whiteness.”

  “Snow,” said Nathan, wondering that his face was slowly warming to a tingle and that water on the walls was sliding liquidly down to the floor.

  “You don’t have a coat,” he said blankly.

  “A—a coat?” Eliada sank down on a hump of hay near the wall. “Oh—oh. No—no coat. I can warm without, and my—Oh, but, Nathan! You don’t understand? We are being Called. We are—dying of—of hunger! There is nothing. Oh, Nathan, to have nothing! To put out your hand and there is nothing to fill it. To swallow nothing and hurt and hurt—!” She curled herself down on the hay and cried.

  Nathan looked around at the dim animals, their eyes taking turns at catching the light as their jaws crunched, wondering what on earth he could do.

  “Come on,” he said. “Come to the house. We’ll tell Mama and Papa. How—how many people? I mean, how big a family do you have?” He helped Eliada up from the hay.

  “We are only six—now,” she said, a great sorrow filling the room. “All the others—all those I could see from my slip—went in flicks of brightness—back to the Presence. But what was left—we finally found each other, and we are six. But soon our bodies will not be able to contain us—unless we can find food—” She sagged down against his holding hand.

  “We can share,” said Nathan. “But for how long—” He used two hands trying to hold the weight.

  “Only until the—the snow goes,” she said. “We found roots to eat and food even inside the hard round black things under the trees—”

  “Walnuts,” said Nathan. “Why didn’t you gather them last fall? Not much meat for a lot of work but—”

  “But we didn’t know!” cried Eliada. “We don’t know this new world. We came so far—And now to die—” Her eyes closed and she floated, slowly down—not quite to the floor—and hovered there in a small unconscious heap. Nathan grabbed clumsily for her, rapping his knuckles against her shoulder. And she slid slowly—inches above the barn floor—away from him to bump softly against Kelly Cow’s winter shaggy legs. Kelly Cow backed up a step, and went on chewing her cud, her eyes large and luminous in the half dark.