Ingathering

by Zenna Henderson

  “Speaking of breathing,” Michal’s voice wasn’t much more than a breath itself, “once at Deega’s it was so hot that I felt as though I’d just melt and run down the steps all red and sticky like strawberry ice cream. It got so hot that I stopped breathing for a little while, but I found out it was cooler to breathe, so I did.”

  “Well, that’s one way to start a bedtime story,” I said. “A trifle above ‘Once upon a time.’ ”

  “Please listen to me with something besides logic,” she said. “I’m hoping so that you’ll be able to help me find—”

  “Find what?” I asked into her silence.

  “Myself, I guess.” Her voice was thoughtful. “I’m here, but I can’t fit myself into any category—”

  “I can,” I grinned. “Human, female, pre-adolescent—”

  “That’s the whole thing!” she cried. “I have only while I am preadolescent to find myself—to find where I belong. That’s the memory that keeps coming into everything I do. I’ve got to find out! I have to get there before—before I mature—”

  “Get where?” I needled her.

  “Get there,” she said with such a desolation in her voice that even in the shadowy darkness the smile slipped from my face. No matter what this was to me, to her it was real and important.

  She spoke into our growing silence, her voice taking on its narrative cadence.

  “That hot evening, Deega and I leaned out of our window on the fifth floor. We could see way down into the airshaft—down to the bottom, where there was all kinds of garbage and junk and one thing that was green and moved a little.

  “ ‘What’s that?’ I asked Deega.

  “ ‘Bless me, if it don’t look like a little tree!’

  “ ‘A tree?’ I asked. ‘What’s that?’

  “ ‘Why, a tree, like at the park,’ said Deega.

  “ ‘What’s a park?’ I asked.

  “ ‘With grass and flowers,’ said Deega. ‘Yes, I know,” she sounded tired. ‘What’s grass and flowers?’ She wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand and said, ‘And to think I thought when you finally learned to talk instead of chattering a lot of no-words, that you’d be as smart as the next one. Well—’ And she went away.

  “That’s how I got to be a Fresh-Air Kid. Miz Teeman’s little girl was supposed to go but she got run over by a truck, so Deega went down and over and told Miz Teeman there wasn’t no use wasting a free vacation, so they gave me two of Miz Teeman’s little girl’s dresses—they almost fit—and pushed me forward when Miz Teeman’s little girl’s name was called and that’s how I got out to Aunt Lydie’s.”

  “When I finally got out into the country, it was like coming home. I knew what everything was—except I didn’t know the right names. I recognized—almost—every bird and beast. I had no names for them either. The first thing I did when we got home from the depot was to kick off my raggedy old sneakers and scuff my feet through the soft silty clean dust by the gate. I squatted down and poured the dirt over my feet and said, ‘Eat, feet, eat!’ I knew then about roots.”

  Michal paused and was silent for a while. Then she said, “I’m almost sure that wherever I came from, it wasn’t from a big, paved city. I needed the earth.”

  “The introduction to your story is overly long,” I said crossly. “When does the plot begin to develop?”

  She was standing by my bed. I was beginning to get used to her no-motion moving. “I had hoped you might help it,” she said. “But I guess I have more waiting yet to do.” She was at the door, then back at my bedside. “You know!” she said, leaning close to me, her eyes shining, “I’ve just remembered something new. The most surprising thing to me was sunrise and sunset. I had no memory of the sun in the sky. I thought when it was morning, someone rolled up a big, big green blind from a big, big window. Degu did at her windows. And at night they just pulled the blind down like Deega. I was so fascinated by the sky that I had a stiff neck for a long time. The sun made my eyes water and I wanted to taste the moon. But—” she paused a moment, “I knew when I saw the clouds, that they were for walking through and rolling under and for hide-and-seek before the thunder.”

  She was gone, easing the door shut, before I had a reply for her. Indeed, I had droned myself into an unusually early sleep with For hide-and-seek before the thunder before I even had a reply for myself.

  I’ll admit that in the days that followed, I became more and more interested in Michal’s story. Mostly, I think, because I was idle and she was an unusual child, though if you had tried to pin me down, I couldn’t have detailed to you the unusualness. Several days later when I was enjoying a brief remission of the pain, I even jotted down, in my own personal shorthand, the highlights of what she had told me. Of course I came to a full stop just beyond the “eat, feet, eat,” and the “hide-and-seek before the thunder.”

  School started for Michal and we didn’t see so much of her. Mr. Apfel missed her and reverted more and more often to his childish patterns of behavior. One day he had been shouting ever since he wakened after his after-breakfast nap. He was a fretful, uncomfortable child and nothing would please him. He threw his pillows on the floor and himself with them and had to be lifted, protesting and kicking, back into bed. Aunt Lydie gathered up his matchstick bundle of arms and legs with practiced ease and reinserted them deftly into the bed, snapped up the side bars, and smiled down at his rage-reddened face. “Be a good boy,” she said, and left him.

  “Damn crib!” he muttered, using bad words as if in defiance of a possible mouth-washing with soap. “Damn crib.”

  It was then that Michal arrived.

  “You’ve been misbehaving again,” she said. He yanked the covers up over his head, uncovering, as usual, his skinny old feet. “How about a remembery, just to smooth things over?”

  “No!” The muffled answer came explosively through feathers and linen.

  “About Hochberg?” she coaxed.

  “Well—” One eye reappeared, then the whole shamefaced countenance. “I’m sorry, Michal.” Mr. Apfel was back. “It’s just—it’s just—”

  “I know.” Michal touched his hand briefly. “Hochberg is always nice. Remember, you were getting ready to climb it and you found you had forgotten—”

  Mr. Apfel, leaning against his pillows, dosed his eyes and smiled softly. “I had forgotten—” and silence came into the room.

  Michal patted the edge of Mr. Apfel’s bed and then was at my bedside. “He’ll be happy and quiet for a while now,” she said. “It doesn’t take much to start him on a remembery, then it only takes a nudge or two to keep him going. He usually falls asleep. I don’t think he’s ever stayed awake until he remembers getting to the top of Hochberg.”

  Her voice was small and tentative. “Maybe you’d like to hear some more about me,” she said. “I find it a very absorbing question, myself, as though I were talking about someone else—not myself. Do you suppose that by going over and over what I do remember, I might eventually remember some more? I did the clouds!”

  “I’m no authority,” I replied, easing myself back among my pillows. “But even if you don’t, you might be happier with the memories you do have.” I customarily use the reflective method when logic makes no impression. Michal was woman enough to be thoroughly illogical. I don’t subscribe to the female super-logic theory.

  “Well, after the two weeks were up,” she went on as though the interruption had been minutes ago, “I didn’t want to go back to the city. I was as rigid as a board and refused to get ready. Aunt Lydie tried to dress me. She shook me impatiently as she tried to bend my arm to put it through my sleeve.

  “ ‘Child! Child! You have to get dressed. You have to go back’

  “ ‘Why?’ I let my arm go so limp it wouldn’t poke through the sleeve. ‘I don’t want to. I don’t want to.’ I didn’t yell. I just melted down through Aunt Lydie’s hands. She sighed sharply down at me, huddled on the floor. Then she gathered me up in her arms and sat down in
the rocking chair. She rocked me and I felt her warmth wrap me around like a soft blanket. “ ‘You have to go back to your family,’ she said calmly and with an unemphatic finality that I recognized and acknowledged. ‘We all have to do things in this world that we don’t want to. And we owe it to folks around us not to bother them with our fussing. Maybe next year we can have you back again.’

  “Next year? An eighth of my lifetime. I didn’t do the math then, but I felt the endlessness of the time to next year.

  “ ‘What if they don’t want me back?’ I asked, my cheek tight against her shoulder.

  “ ‘Of course they want you back.’ Aunt Lydie sat me up and poked my arms into my dress sleeves. ‘You’ll see. When you get home, you’ll be glad.’

  “ ‘Maybe Deega’s letting someone else sleep under the table now,’ I said. ‘Can I come back if she is?’

  “Aunt Lydie laughed. ‘Just push them over,’ she said. ‘There’s room for two.’

  “I knew she didn’t believe me. She thought I was joking. Kids don’t sleep under tables.

  “An hour later I pressed my whole crying face against the train window, my eyes squeezed shut as the train gathered speed. I felt Aunt Lydie’s distress follow the train until a curve in the tracks swung us out of sight. I pulled my feet up on the seat and buried my face on my knees, my brown paper bag luggage bumping softly against my shins. I wouldn’t talk with the excited kids and I couldn’t let them see me cry. After a while I slept. “I thought it was a bad dream when we were herded out of the train and into the huge echoing train station. I forgot to use the little steps the man put by the door, but drifted down to the cold concrete floor without stepping. One of the big girls from our block—her name was Velia—grabbed me and yanked me down to my feet.

  “ ‘Hurry up!’ she cried. ‘We’re almost home!’

  “My toes were curling away from the cold concrete that bit through my sneakers and shriveled my new roots, so I just lifted my feet off the floor and let Velia tow me along in the air until she swatted me and said, ‘You’re too heavy to drag—walk!’

  “They herded us around some more and separated us and put us together again. We rode some more and the noise around us was so big that I could hardly see anything. And then we were being checked off one by one in front of the building and Velia’s mother was crying all down her rippling chins and hugging Velia almost out of sight in her doughy arms. I watched them with my eyes wide. I wondered who decided who got mothers and who didn’t, and, absorbed in the question, found my way back to my own building. I peered up past the grimy ugly old walls. No sky up there. No more sun or moon. Only the old green blind rolling up and pulling down. I went in and looked up in the bad-smelling darkness. I held my breath. How quickly my nose had forgotten. As I looked up into the darkness, a sudden empty feeling caught my breath. Something was wrong—was gone. Deega? No Deega? No Deega?

  “Suddenly I was stumbling down to the floor on the fifth-floor landing with no memory whatsoever of any steps leading up. All I had was a blurred impression of myself shooting up past the landings, curving narrowly to thread from one flight to another until my staggering arrival.

  “I hammered on the door. ‘Deega!’ I yelled. ‘Deega! Deega!’

  “The door was flung open with a familiar yelp of hinges.

  “ ‘Stop yer yellin, I ain’t deef.’ A huge, strange woman filled the door, except for the spot over her right hip where a small dirty boy face was peering out, making faces at me.

  “ ‘Where’s Deega?’ I asked, my mouth cottony with foreknowledge.

  “ ‘Dunno,’ said the woman. ‘Don’ know nobody round here. On-y been here a week. Git back in there, Chuck,’ and she yanked the boy in and shut the door.

  “It’s hard to remember what happened next. I remember being at Miz Teeman’s place. I heard Velia’s happy chatter next door as Miz Teeman edged her door shut, glaring at me resentfully. ‘Guv’er my own little girl’s two dresses and my own little girl’s vacation and what she want? More! More! Why ain’t she dead? Who wants her?’

  “Who wants her? Who wants her? Who wants her?

  “The frightening, unanswered words pushed me back again to my building, shot me up the stairwell past the fifth landing and out onto the roof. I ran to the edge of the roof and clutched the parapet with cold shaking hands, straining towards my last memory of warmth. I closed my eyes against the smudged, lightless sky and leaned outwards into emptiness.

  “ ‘Aunt Lydie! Aunt Lydie! Where are you?’ I couldn’t even cry because of the terror that was over-flooding me. I quested around me in a tight circle, like a blind dog, inside my head. Then, all at once, I found the right direction and scrambled up over and stepped out into the nothingness beyond the edge of the roof. Someone behind me screamed, then the wind was roaring past my ears. My hair was snapping in an icy slipstream and my eyes were held shut by the pressure of speed. I was cold. I was shaken. I was going to Aunt Lydie!”

  “Michal!” It was Mrs. Norwich’s voice cutting through the enchantment of Michal’s story. I drew a deep breath and stepped mentally down out of my voluntary suspension of disbelief, a little ashamed to have been so caught up into this wand-less fairytale.

  “Yes, Aunt Lydie.” Michal’s voice had no hint of impatience in it. She was down from her chair and to the door with her smooth movement. “I’m in here.”

  “I couldn’t have guessed.” Aunt Lydie’s voice was amused under its brusqueness. “Would you go out and tell Arn I’ll need the car this afternoon to go to East Medbury? Tell him to clean out that back seat. Fishing equipment I have no use for, and it’s been in there for three weeks.”

  “Okay.”

  Michal was gone—she was gone down the stairs and out of the house, but her voice was telling me the rest of the story! Her words were speaking inside my head and I had to fight to keep myself from trying to wrench nonexistent earphones off my astonished ears, as I heard,

  “Time started again when I stumbled across Aunt Lydie’s porch and fell against the door with a clatter that brought her and Unc Arn out to see what was the matter.

  “ ‘They weren’t there!’ I wailed into Aunt Lydie’s arms. ‘Deega’s gone! Chuck’s sleeping under the table! I’m not Miz Teeman’s little girl! I’m Michal—without an e! Let me stay! Let me stay!’

  “And they did! They took me in! They didn’t have to. There was no reason why they should. They only did because they—they love. They love clear down to the middle of their hearts. And it’s the kind of love that doesn’t have to do anything. It does it because that’s what love does.”

  That evening Michal put her head in at the door. “I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes glowing. “I didn’t mean to without asking you, but I’ve got so used to it with the patients that I forgot you were different. You can tell whether I’m vocalizing or not. Most of them can’t.”

  “Come in,” I said sternly.

  She slipped in, very slender, very quiet, her hands tightly clasped behind her, her eyes very shining. “I admit nothing,” I said. “I ignore the whole incident. But finish the episode. I do not enjoy loose ends.”

  “Yes, Mr. Evans.” She was perched on the chair again. “I heard Unc and Aunt talking once about how I came back. It sounded as if they were going over an old, smooth-worn argument.

  “ ‘Then how did she get back?’ asked Unc Arn.

  “ ‘Came back,’ said Aunt Lydie shortly.

  “ ‘She didn’t have any money,’ he persisted. ‘Nobody I talked to in town gave her any. And anyway, how could a kid her age figure out how to get all the way back here, money or no money? That far? So fast?’

  “ ‘Look here, Arn,’ said Aunt Lydie crisply. ‘She came back. We tried to find her Deega and couldn’t. Everyone said Miz Teeman’s little girl was dead. We said we’d keep her. She’ll be a help when she gets older. You can rack your brains trying to figure out how-come, but I don’t ever expect to find out and I’m not so sure I want to find out. You can ask he
r if she flew back if you want to. I won’t.’ ”

  “But he never did, though I could read the question in his face for a long time after that.”

  Michal leaned forward from the chair. “You see? They have question marks and I have question marks and you have question marks, and, so far, no one has the answers. I’ve been hoping that you might—”

  “I’ve got questions, too,” piped up Mr. Apfel from his bed. “When’s supper?”

  “Pretty soon,” laughed Michal. “I’ll go down and see if I can hurry it up a little.”

  With her gone, I eyed Mr. Apfel, and Mr. Apfel eyed me.

  “Half the time,” he said matter-of-factly, “no one will listen to a word I say. That is because this body of mine is running down and half the time it talks nonsense. But you’re still young enough to have your mind more or less in one piece. If I were even sixty again, I’d do something for Michal. I think that Deega person found her someplace. If she was lost, she must have been lost from someone or somewhere. And if anyone ever had Michal and lost her, they’re still looking for her.”

  “I’m nowhere near sixty yet,” I said crossly. “And, one mind or a dozen, I can’t take her story at face value. You don’t know how many people liven up their drab existences with fanciful tales like this.”

  Mr. Apfel blinked at me a couple of times. “What color is Michal’s hair?” he asked and went to sleep, bolt upright against his pillows.

  I turned his question over in my mind. Light running along—light splintering—light—What color was Michal’s hair?

  After supper was over and the calmness of night was pouring in through the windows, darkening the rooms, Michal came back, wistfully.

  “Do you believe me a little?” she asked.

  “Believe you!” I exploded. “That you can mind-read? That you can teleport? That you can home in on a geographical point like a pigeon? That you can gather up light as if it were daisies? That you can stop breathing, except that it’s cooler not to! Oh, I’ll enjoy your story and listen to each new development you dream up, but don’t ask me to believe!”