Зенна Гендерсон - The People

Timmy's fingers were on my wrist again. He sighed. "Then I must just tell and if you do not know, you must believe only because I tell. I tell only to make you know there is water and you must stay.
"My world is another planet. It was another planet. It is broken in space now, all to pieces, shaking and roaring and fire-and all gone." His blind face looked on desolation and his lips tightened. I felt hairs crisp along my neck. As long as he touched my wrist I could see! I couldn't tell you what all I saw because lots of it had no words I knew to put to it, but I saw!
"We had ships for going in Space," he said. I saw them, needlesharp and shining, pointing at the sky and the heavy red-lit clouds. "We went into space before our Home broke. Our Home! Our-Home." His voice broke and he leaned his cheek on the stack of books. Then he straightened again.
"We came to your world. We did not know of it before. We came far, far. At
the last we came too fast. We are not Space travelers. The big ship that found your world got too hot. We had to leave it in our life-slips, each by himself. The life-slips got hot, too. I was burning! I lost control of my life-slip. I fell-" He put his hands to his bandages. "I think maybe I will never see this new world."
"Then there are others, like you, here on Earth," said Father slowly.
"Unless they all died in the landing," said Timmy. "There were many on the big ship."
"I saw little things shoot off the big thing!" I cried, excited. "I thought they were pieces breaking off only they-they went instead of falling!"
"Praise to the Presence, the Name, and the Power!" said Timmy, his right hand sketching his sign in the air, then dropping to my wrist again.
"Maybe some still live. Maybe my family. Maybe Lytha-"
I stared, fascinated, as I saw Lytha, dark hair swinging, smiling back over her shoulder, her arms full of flowers whose centers glowed like little lights. Daggone, I thought, Daggone! She sure isn't his Merry!
"Your story is most interesting," said Father, "and it opens vistas we haven't begun to explore yet, but what bearing has all this on our water problem?"
"We can do things you seem not able to do," said Timmy
"You must always touch the ground to go, and lift things with tools or hands, and know only because you touch and see. We can know without touching and seeing. We can find people and metals and water-we can find almost anything that we know, if it is near us. I have not been trained to be a finder, but I have studied the feel of water and the-the-what it is made of-"
"The composition," Father supplied the word.
"The composition of water," said Timmy. "And Barney and I explored much of the farm. I found the water here by the house."
"We dug," said Father. "How far down is the water?"
"I am not trained," said Timmy humbly. "I only know it is there. It is water that you think of when you say 'Las Lomitas.' It is not a dipping place or-or a pool. It is going. It is pushing hard. It is cold." He shivered a little.
"It is probably three hundred feet down," said Father. "There has never been an artesian well this side of the Coronas."
"It is close enough for me to find," said Timmy. "Will you wait?" "Until our water is gone," said Father. "And until we have decided where to go.
"Now it's time for bed." Father took the Bible from the stack of books. He thumbed back from our place to Psalms and read the "When I consider the heavens" one. As I listened, all at once the tight little world I knew, overtopped by the tight little Heaven I wondered about, suddenly split right down the middle and stretched and grew and filled with such a glory that I was scared and grabbed the edge of the table. If Timmy had come from another planet so far away that it wasn't even one we had a name for-! I knew that never again would my mind think it could measure the world-or my imagination, the extent of God's creation!
I was just dropping off the edge of waking after tumbling and tossing for what seemed like hours, when I heard Timmy.
"Barney," he whispered, not being able to reach my wrist.
"My cahilla-You found my cahilla?"
"Your what?" I asked, sitting up in bed and meeting his groping hands. "Oh! That box thing. Yeah, I'll get it for you in the morning."
"Not tonight?" asked Timmy, wistfully. "It is all I have left of the Home. The only personal things we had room for-"
"I can't find it tonight," I said. "I buried it by a rock. I couldn't find it in the dark. Besides, Father’d hear us go, if we tried to leave now. Go to sleep. It must be near morning."
"Oh yes," sighed Timmy, "oh, yes." And he lay back down. "Sleep well."
And I did, going out like a lamp blown out, and dreamed wild, exciting dreams
about riding astride ships that went sailless across waterless oceans of nothingness and burned with white hot fury that woke me up to full morning light and Merry bouncing happily on my stomach.
After breakfast, Mama carefully oiled Timmy's scabs again. "I'm almost out of bandages," she said.
"If you don't mind having to see," said Timmy, "don't bandage me again. Maybe the light will come through."
We went out and looked at the dimple by the porch. It had subsided farther and was a bowl-shaped place now, maybe waist-deep to me.
"Think it'll do any good to dig it out again?" I asked Father. "I doubt it," he answered heavily. "Apparently I don't know how to set a charge to break the bedrock. How do we know we could break it anyway? It could be a mile thick right here." It seemed to me that Father was talking to me more like to a man than to a boy. Maybe I wasn't a boy any more!
"The water is there," said Timmy. "If only I could 'platt'-" His hand groped in the sun and it streamed through his fingers for a minute like sun through a knothole in a dusty room. I absently picked up the piece of stone I had dumped from the bucket last evening. I fingered it and said, "Ouch!" I had jabbed myself on its sharp point. Sharp point!
"Look," I said, holding it out to Father. "This is broken! All the other rocks we found were round river rocks. Our blasting broke something!"
"Yes." Father took the splinter from me. "But where's the water?"
Timmy and I left Father looking at the well and went out to the foot of the field where the fire had been. I located the rock where I had buried the box. It was only a couple of inches down-barely covered, I scratched it out for him.
"Wait," I said, "it's all black. Let me wipe it off first." I rubbed it in a sand patch and the black all rubbed off except in the deep lines of the design that covered all sides of it. I put it in his eager hands.
He flipped it around until it fitted his two hands with his thumbs touching in front. Then I guess he must have thought at it because he didn't do anything else but all at once it opened, cleanly, from his thumbs up.
He sat there on a rock in the sun and felt the things that were in the box. I couldn't tell you what any of them were except what looked like a piece of ribbon, and a withered flower. He finally closed the box. He slid to his knees beside the rock and hid his face on his arms. He sat there a long time. When he finally lifted his face, it was dry, but his sleeves were wet. I've seen Mama's sleeves like that after she has looked at things in the little black trunk of hers.
"Will you put it back in the ground?" be asked. "There is no place for it in the house. It will be safe here."
So I buried the box again and we went back to the house.
Father had dug a little, but be said, "It's no use. The blast loosened the ground all around and it won't even hold the shape of a well any more."
We talked off and on all day about where to go from here, moneyless and perilously short of provisions. Mama wanted so much to go back to our old home that she couldn't talk about it, but Father wanted to go on, pushing West again. I wanted to stay where we were-with plenty of water. I wanted to see that tide of Time sweep one century away and start another across Desolation Valley! There would be a sight for you!
We began to pack that afternoon because the barrels were emptying fast and the pools were damp, curling cakes of mud in the hot sun. All we could take was what we could load on the hayrack. Father had traded the wagon we came West in for farm machinery and a set of washtubs. We'd have to leave the machinery either to rust there or for us to come back for.
Mama took Merry that evening and climbed the hill to the little grave under the scrub oak. She sat there a long time with her back to the sun, her wistful face in the shadow. She came back in silence, Merry heavily sleepy in her arms.
After we had gone to bed, Timmy groped for my wrist.
"You do have a satellite to your earth, don't you?" he asked. His question was without words.
"A satellite?" Someone turned restlessly on the big bed when I hissed my question.
"Yes," he answered. "A smaller world that goes around and is bright at night."
"Oh," I breathed. "You mean the moon. Yes, we have a moon but it's not very bright now. There was only a sliver showing just after sunset." I felt Timmy sag. "Why?"
"We can do large things with sunlight and moonlight together," came his answer. "I hoped that at sunrise tomorrow-"
"At sunrise tomorrow, we'll be finishing our packing," I said. "Go to sleep."
"Then I must do without," he went on, not hearing me.
"Barney, if I am Called, will you keep my cahilla until someone asks for it? If they ask, it is my People. Then they will know I am gone."
"Called?" I asked. "What do you mean?"
"As the baby was," he said softly. "Called back into the Presence from which we came. If I must lift with my own strength alone, I may not have enough, so will you keep my cahilla?"
"Yes," I promised, not knowing what he was talking about. "I'll keep it."
"Good. Sleep well," he said, and again waking went out of me like a lamp blown out.
All night long I dreamed of storms and earthquakes and floods and tornadoes all going past me-fast! Then I was lying half awake, afraid to open my eyes for fear some of my dreaming might be true. And suddenly, it was!
I clutched my pallet as the floor humped, snapping and groaning, and flopped flat again. I heard our breakfast pots and pans banging on the shelf and then falling with a clatter. Mama called, her voice heavy with sleep and fear, "James! James!"
I reached for Timmy, but the floor bumped again and dust rolled in through the pale squares of the windows and I coughed as I came to my knees. There was a crash of something heavy falling on the roof and rolling off. And a sharp hissing sound. Timmy wasn't in bed. Father was trying to find his shoes. The hissing noise got louder and louder until it was a burbling roar. Then there was a rumble and something banged the front of the house so hard I heard the porch splinter. Then there was a lot of silence.
I crept on all fours across the floor. Where was Timmy? I could see the front door hanging at a crazy angle on one hinge. I crept toward it.
My hands splashed! I paused, confused, and started on again. I was crawling in water! "Father!" My voice was a croak from the dust and shock. "Father! It's water!"
And Father was suddenly there, lifting me to my feet. We stumbled together to the front door. There was a huge slab of rock poking a hole in the siding of the house, crushing the broken porch under its weight. We edged around it, ankle-deep in water, and saw in the gray light of early dawn our whole front yard awash from hill to porch. Where the well had been was a moving hump of water that worked away busily, becoming larger and larger as we watched.
"Water!" said Father. "The water has broken through!"
"Where's Timmy?" I said. "Where's Timmy!" I yelled and started to splash out into the yard.
"Watch out!" warned Father. "It's dangerous! All this rock came out of there!" We skirted the front yard searching the surface of the rising water, thinking every shadow might be Timmy.
We found him on the far side of the house, floating quietly, face up in a rising pool of water, his face a bleeding mass of mud and raw flesh.
I reached him first, floundering through the water to him. I lifted his shoulders and tried to see in the dawn light if he was still breathing. Father reached us and we lifted Timmy to dry land.
"He's alive!" said Father. "His face-it's just the scabs scraped off."
"Help me get him in the house," I said, beginning to lift him.
"Better be the barn," said Father. "The water's still rising." It had crept up to us already and seeped under Timmy again. We carried him to the barn and I stayed with him while Father went back for Merry and Mama.
It was lucky that most of our things had been packed on the hayrack the night before. After Mama, a shawl thrown over her nightgown and all our day clothes grabbed up in her arms, came wading out with Father, who was carrying Merry and our lamp, I gave Timmy into her care and went back with Father again and again to finish emptying the cabin of our possessions.
Already the huge rock had gone on down through the porch and disappeared into the growing pond of water in the front yard. The house was dipping to the weight of our steps as though it might float off the minute we left. Father got a rope from the wagon and tied it through the broken corner of the house and tethered it to the barn. "No use losing the lumber if we don't have to," he said.
By the time the sun was fully up, the house was floating off its foundation rocks. There was a pond filling all the house yard, back and front, extending along the hill, up to the dipping place, and turning into a narrow stream going the other way, following the hill for a while then dividing our dying orchard and flowing down toward the dry river bed. Father and I pulled the house slowly over toward the barn until it grated solid ground again.
Mama had cleaned Timmy up. He didn't seem to be hurt except for his face and shoulder being peeled raw. She put olive oil on him again and used one of Merry's petticoats to bandage his face. He lay deeply unconscious all of that day while we watched the miracle of water growing in a dry land. The pond finally didn't grow any wider, but the stream widened and deepened, taking three of our dead trees down to the river. The water was clearing now and was deep enough over the spring that it didn't bubble any more that we could see. There was only a shivering of the surface so that circles ran out to the edge of the pond, one after another.
Father went down with a bucket and brought it back brimming over. We drank the cold, cold water and Mama made a pack to put on Timmy's head.
Timmy stirred but he didn't waken. It wasn't until evening when we were settling down to a scratch-meal in the barn that we began to realize what had happened.
"We have water!" Father cried suddenly. "Streams in the desert!"
"It's an artesian well, isn't it?" I asked. "Like at Las Lomitas? It'll go on flowing from here on out, won't it?"
"That remains to be seen," Father said. "But it looks like a good one. Tomorrow I must ride to Tolliver's Wells and tell them we have water. They must be almost out by now!
"Then we don't have to move?" I asked.
"Not as long as we have water," said Father. "I wonder if we have growing time enough to put in a kitchen garden-"
I turned quickly. Timmy was moving. His hands were on the bandage, exploring it cautiously.
"Timmy," I reached for his wrist. "It's all right, Timmy. You just got peeled raw. We had to bandage you again."
"The-the water-" His voice was barely audible.
"It's all over the place!" I said. "It's floated the house off the foundations and you should see the pond! And the stream! And it's cold!"
"I'm thirsty," he said. "I want a drink, please."
He drained the cup of cold water and his lips turned upward in a ghost of a smile. "Shall waters break out!"
"Plenty of water," I laughed. Then I sobered. "What were you doing out in it, anyway?
Mama and Father were sitting on the floor beside us now.
"I had to lift the dirt out," he said, touching my wrist. "All night I lifted. It was hard to hold back the loose dirt so it wouldn't slide back into the hole. I sat on the porch and lifted the dirt until the rock was there." He
sighed and was silent for a minute. "I was not sure I had strength enough. The rock was cracked and I could feel the water pushing, hard, hard, under. I had to break the rock enough to let the water start through. It wouldn't break! I called on the Power again and tried and tried. Finally a piece came loose and flew up. The force of the water-it was like-like-blasting. I had no strength left. I went unconscious."
"You dug all that out alone!" Father took one of Timmy's hands and looked at the smooth palm.
"We do not always have to touch to lift and break," said Timmy. "But to do it for long and heavy takes much strength." His head rolled weakly.
"Thank you, Timothy," said Father. "Thank you for the well."
So that's why we didn't move. That's why Promise Pond is here to keep the ranch green. That's why this isn't Fool's Acres any more but Full Acres. That's why Cahilla Creek puzzles people who try to make it Spanish. Even Father doesn't know why Timmy and I named the stream Cahilla. The pond had almost swallowed up the little box before we remembered it.
That's why the main road across Desolation Valley goes through our ranch now for the sweetest, coldest water in the Territory. That's why our big new house is built among the young black walnut and weeping willow trees that surround the pond. That's why it has geraniums windowsill high along one wall. That's why our orchard has begun to bear enough to start being a cash crop.
And that's why, too, that one day a wagon coming from the far side of Desolation Valley made camp on the camping grounds below the pond.
We went down to see the people after supper to exchange news. Timmy's eyes were open now, but only light came into them, not enough to see by.
The lady of the wagon tried not to look at the deep scars on the side of Timmy's face as her man and we men talked together. She listened a little too openly to Timmy's part of the conversation and said softly to Mama, her whisper spraying juicily, "He your boy?"
"Yes, our boy," said Mama, "but not born to us."
"Oh," said the woman. "I thought be talked kinda foreign." Her voice was critical. "Seems like we're gettin' overrun with foreigners. Like that sassy girl in Margin."
"Oh?" Mama fished Merry out from under the wagon by her dress tail.
"Yes," said the woman. "She talks foreign too, though they say not as much as she used to. Oh, them foreigners are smart enough! Her aunt says she was sick and had to learn to talk all over again, that's why she sounds like that." The woman leaned confidingly toward Mama, lowering her voice.
"But I heard in a roundabout way that there's something queer about that girl. I don't think she's really their niece. I think she came from somewhere else. I think she's really a foreigner!"
"Oh?" said Mama, quite unimpressed and a little bored.
"They say she does funny things and Heaven knows her name's funny enough. I ask you! Doesn't the way these foreigners push themselves in-"
"Where did your folks come from?" asked Mama, vexed by the voice the lady used for "foreigner."
The lady reddened. "I’m native born!" she said, tossing her head. "Just because my parents-It isn't as though England was-" She pinched her lips together. "Abigail Johnson for a name is a far cry from Marnie Lytha Something-or-other!"
"Lytha!" I heard Timmy's cry without words. Lytha? He stumbled toward the woman, for once his feet unsure. She put out a hasty hand to fend him off and her face drew up with distaste.
"Watch out!" she cried sharply. "Watch where you're going!"
"He's blind," Mama said softly.
"Oh," the woman reddened again. "Oh, well-"
"Did you say you knew a girl named Lytha?" asked Timmy faintly.
"Well, I never did have much to do with her," said the woman, unsure of herself. "I saw her a time or two-"
Timmy's fingers went out to touch her wrist and she jerked back as though burned. "I'm sorry," said Timmy. "Where are you coming from?"
"Margin," said the woman. "We been there a couple of months shoeing the horses and blacksmithing some."
"Margin," said Timmy, his hands shaking a little as he turned away. "Thanks."
"Well, you're welcome, I guess," snapped the woman. She turned back to Mama, who was looking after us, puzzled.
"Now all the new dresses have-"
"I couldn't see," whispered Timmy to me as we moved off through the green grass and willows to the orchard. "She wouldn't let me touch her. How far is Margin?"
"Two days across Desolation Valley," I said, bubbling with excitement. "It's a mining town in the hills over there. Their main road comes from the other side."
"Two days!" Timmy stopped and clung to a small tree.
"Only two days away all this time!"
"It might not be your Lytha," I warned. "It could be one of us. I've heard some of the wildest names! Pioneering seems to addle people's naming sense." "I'll call," said Timmy, his face rapt. "I'll call and when she answers-!"
"If she hears you," I said, knowing his calling wouldn't be aloud and would take little notice of the distance to Margin.
"Maybe she thinks everyone is dead like you did. Maybe she won't think of listening."
"She will think often of the Home," said Timmy firmly, "and when she does, she will hear me. I will start now." And he threaded his way expertly through the walnuts and willows by the pond.
I looked after him and sighed. I wanted him happy and if it was his Lytha, I wanted them together again. But, if he called and called again and got no answer­
I slid to a seat on a rock by the pond, thinking again of the little lake we were planning where we would have fish and maybe a boat-I dabbled my hand in the cold water and thought, this was dust before Timmy came. He was stubborn enough to make the stream break through.
"If Timmy calls," I told a little bird balancing suddenly on a twig, bobbing over the water, "someone will answer!"
Meris leaned back with a sigh. "Well!" she said, "thank goodness! I never would have rested easy again if I hadn't found out! But after Timmy found The People, surely his eyes-"
"Never satisfied," said Mark. "The more you hear the more you want to hear-"
"I've never Assembled much beyond that," said Bethie. Then she held up a cautioning hand. "Wait-"Oh," she said, listening. "Oh dear! Of course." She stood up, her face a pale blur in the darkness of the patio. "That was Debbie. She's on her way here. She says Dr. Curtis needs me back at the Group. Valancy sent her because she's the one who came back from the New Home and 'Peopled all over the place,' as she says. I have to leave immediately. There isn't time for a car. Luckily it's dark enough now. Debbie has her part all Assembled already so she can-"
"I wish you didn't have to leave so soon," said Meris, following her inside and helping her scramble her few belongings into her small case.
"There is so much-There's always so much-You'll enjoy Debbie's story." Bethie was drifting steplessly out the door. "And there are others-" She was a quickening shadow rising above the patio and her whispered "Good-by," came softly down through the overarching tree branches. "Hi!" The laughing voice startled them around from their abstraction. "Unless I've lost my interpretive ability, that's an awfully wet, hungry cry coming from in there!" "Oh, 'Licia, honey!" Meris fled indoors, crooning abject apologies as she went. "Well, hi, to you, then." The woman stepped out of the shadows and offered a
hand to Mark. "I'm Debbie. Sorry to snatch Bethie away, but Dr. Curtis had to have her stat. She's our best Sensitive and he has a puzzlesome emergency to diagnose. She's his court of last resort!" "Dr. Curtis?" Mark returned her warm firm clasp. "That must be the doctor Johannan was trying to find to lead him to the Group." "Is so," said Debbie. "Our Inside-Outsider. He's a fixture with us now. Not that he stays with the Group, but he functions as One of Us." "Come on in," said Mark, holding the kitchen door open. "Come in and have some coffee." "Thank you kindly," laughed Debbie. "It's right sightly of you to ask a stranger to 'light and set a spell.' No," she smiled at Mark's questioning eyes. "That's not the way they talk on the New Home. It's only a slight lingual hangover from the first days of my Return. That's the Assembly Valancy sent me to tell you." She sat at the kitchen table and Mark gathered up his battered, discolored coffee mug and Meris's handleless one and a brightly company-neat cup for Debbie. There wasn't much left of the coffee but by squeezing hard enough, he achieved three rather scanty portions. After the flurry of building more coffee and Meris's return with a solemnly blinking 'Licia to be exclaimed over and inspected and loved and fed and adored and bedded again, they decided to postpone Debbie's installment until after their own supper. "This Assembling business is getting to be as much an addiction as watching TV," said Mark, mending the fire in the fireplace. "Well, there's addiction and addiction," said Meris as Mark returned to the couch to sit on the other side of Debbie. "I prefer this one. This is for real-hard as it is to believe." "For real," mused Debbie, clasping their hands. "I could hardly believe it was for real then, either. Here is how I felt-"
RETURN
I was afraid. When the swelling bulk of the Earth blotted our ports, I was afraid for the first time. Fear was a sudden throb in my throat and, almost as an echo, a sudden throb from Child Within reminded me why it was that Earth was swelling in our ports after such a final good-by. Drawn by my mood, Thann joined me as the slow turning of our craft slid the Earth out of sight.
"Apprehensive?" he asked, his arm firm across my shoulders.
"A little." I leaned against him. "This business of trying to go back again is a little disquieting. You can't just slip back into the old mold. Either it's changed or you've changed-or both. I realize that."
"Well, the best we can do is give it the old college try," he said. "And all
for Child Within. I hope he appreciates it." "Or she." I glanced down at my unfamiliar proportions. "As the case may be. But you do understand, don't you?" Need for reassurance
lifted my voice a little. "Thann, we just had to come back. I just couldn't bear the thought of Child Within being born in that strange-tidy-" My voice trailed off and I leaned more heavily, sniffing.
"Listen, Debbie-my-dear!" Thann shook me gently and hugged me roughly. "I know, I know! While I don't share your aching necessity for Earth, I agreed, didn't I? Didn't I sweat blood in that darn Motiver school, learning to manipulate this craft? Aren't we almost there?"
"Almost there! Oh, Thann! Oh, Thann!" Our craft had completed another of its small revolutions, and Earth marched determinedly across the port again. I pressed myself against the pane, wanting to reach-to gather in the featureless mists, the blurred beauties of the world, and hold them so close-so close that even Child Within would move to their wonder.
I'm a poor hand at telling time. I couldn't tell you even to within a year how long ago it was that Shua lifted the Ship from the flat at Cougar Canyon and started the trip from Earth to The Home. I remembered how excited I was. Even my ponytail had trembled as the great adventure began. Thann swears he was standing so close to me at Takeoff that the ponytail tickled his nose. But I don't remember him. I don't even remember seeing him at all during the long trip when the excitement of being evacuated from Earth dulled to the routine of travel and later became resurrected as anxiety about what The Home would be like.
I don't remember him at all until that desolate day on The Home when I stood at the end of the so-precise little lane that wound so consciously lovely from the efficient highway. I was counting, through the blur of my tears, the precisely twenty-six trees interspersed at suitable intervals by seven clumps of underbrush. He just happened to be passing at the moment end I looked up at him and choked, "Not even a weed! Not one!"
Astonished, he folded his legs and hovered a little above eye level.
"What good's a weed?"
"At least it shows individuality!" I shut my eyes, not caring that by so doing the poised tears consolidated and fell "I'm so sick of perfection!"
"Perfection?" He lifted a little higher above me, his eyes on some far sight. "I certainly wouldn't call The Home perfect yet. From here I can see the North Reach. We've only begun to nibble at that. The preliminary soil crew is just starting analysis." He dropped down beside me. "We can't waste time and space on weeds. It'll take long enough to make the whole of The Home habitable without using energy on nonessentials."
"They'll find out!" I stubbornly proclaimed. "Someday they'll find out that weeds are essentials. Man wasn't made for such-such neatness. He has to have unimportant clutter to relax in!"
"Why haven't you presented these fundamental doctrines to the Old Ones?" He laughed at me.
"Have I not!" I retorted. "Well, maybe not to the Old Ones, but I've already expressed myself, and further more, Mr.-Oh, I'm sorry, I'm Debbie-"
"I'm Thannel," he grinned.
"-Thannel, I'll have you know other wiser heads than mine have come to the same conclusion. Maybe not in my words, but they mean the same thing. This artificiality-this-this-The People aren't meant to live divorced from the-the-" I spread my hands. "Soil, I guess you could say. They lose something when everything gets-gets paved." "Oh, I think we'll manage," he smiled. "Memory can sustain."
"Memory? Oh, Thann, remember the tangle of blackberry vines in back of Kroginold's house? How we used to burrow under the scratchy, cool, green twilight in under these vines and hunt for berries-cool ones from the shadows, and warm ones from the sun, and always at least one thorn in the thumb as payment for trespassing. Mmmm-" Eyes closed, I lost myself in the memory.
Then my eyes flipped open. "Or are you from the other Home? Maybe you've never even seen Earth."
"Yes, I have," he said, suddenly sober. "I'm from Bendo. I haven't many happy memories of Earth. Until your Group found us, we had a pretty thin time of it."
"Oh, I'm sorry," I said. "Bendo was our God Bless for a long time when I was little."
"Thank you." He straightened briskly and grinned. "How about a race to the twenty-third despised tree, just to work off a little steam!"
And the two of us lifted and streaked away, a yard above the careful gravel of the lane, but I got the giggles so badly that I blundered into the top of the twenty-first tree and had to be extricated gingerly from its limbs. Together we guiltily buried at its foot the precious tiny branch I had broken off in my blundering, and then, with muffled laughter and guilty back-glances, we went our separate ways.
That night I lay and waited for the pale blue moon of The Home to vault into
the sky, and thought about Earth and the Other Home.
The other Home was first, of course-the beautiful prototype of this Home. But it had weeds! And all the tangled splendor of wooded hillsides and all soaring upreach naked peaks and the sweet uncaring, uncountable profusion of life, the same as Earth. But The Home died-blasted out of the heavens by a cosmic Something that shattered it and scattered the People like birds from a falling tree. Part of them found this Home-or the bare bones of it-and started to remake it into The Home. Others found refuge on Earth. We had it rough for a long time because we were separated from each other. Besides, we were Different, with a capital D, and some of us didn't survive the adjustment period. Slowly though, we were Gathered In until there were two main Groups-Cougar Canyon and Bendo. Bendo lived in a hell of concealment and fear long after Cougar Canyon had managed to adjust to an Outsider's world. Then that day-even now my breath caught at the wonder of that day when the huge ship from the New Home drifted down out of the skies and came to rest on the flat beyond the schoolhouse!
And everyone had to choose. Stay or go. My family chose to go. More stayed. But the Oldest, Cougar Canyon's leader, blind, crippled, dying from what the Crossing had done to him, he went. But you should see him now! You should see him see! And Obla came too. Sometimes I went to her house just to touch her hands. She had none, you know, on Earth. Nor legs nor eyes, and hardly a face. An explosion had stripped her of all of them. But now, because of transgraph and regeneration, she is becoming whole again-except perhaps her heart-but that's another story.
Once the wonder of the trip and the excitement of living without concealment, without having to watch every movement so's not to shock Outsiders, had died a little, I got homesicker and homesicker. At first I fought it as a silly thing, a product of letdown, or idleness. But a dozen new interests, frenzied activities that consumed every waking moment, did nothing to assuage the aching need in me. I always thought homesickness was a childish, transitory thing. Well, most of it, but occasionally there is a person who actually sickens of it and does not recover, short of Return. And I guess I was one of those. It was as though I were breathing with one lung or trying to see with one eye. Sometimes the growing pain became an anguish so physical that I'd crouch in misery, hugging my hurt to me, trying to contain it between my knees and my chest-trying to ease it. Sometimes I could manage a tear or two that relieved a little-such as that day in the lane with Thann.
"Thann!" I turned from the port. "Isn't it about time-"
"One up on you, Debbie-my-dear," Thann called from the Motive room. "I'm just settling into the old groove. Got to get us slowed down before we scorch our little bottoms and maybe even singe Child Within."
"Don't joke about it!" I said. "Remember, the first time the atmosphere gave us too warm a welcome to Earth. Ask the Oldest."
"The Power be with us," came Thann's quick answering thought.
"And the Name and the Presence," I echoed, bowing my head as my fingers moved to the Sign and then clasped above Child Within. I moved over to the couch and lay down, feeling the almost imperceptible slowing of our little craft.
Thann and I started two-ing not long after we met and, at flahmen Gathering time, we Bespoke one another and, just before Festival time, we were married.
Perhaps all this time I was hoping that starting a home of my own would erase my longing for Earth and perhaps Thann hoped the same thing. The Home offered him almost all he wanted and he had a job he loved. He felt the pioneering thrill of making a new world and was contented. But my need didn't evaporate. Instead, it intensified. I talked it over with the Sorter for our Group (a Sorter cares for our emotional and mental problems) because I was beginning to hate-oh, not hate! That's such a poisonous thing to have festering in your mind. But my perspective was getting so twisted that I was making both myself and Thann unhappy. She Sorted me deftly and thoroughly-and I went home to Thann and he started training to develop his latent Motive ability. We both
knew we could well lose our lives trying to return to Earth, but we had to try. Anyway, I had to try, especially after I found out about Child Within. I told Thann and his face lighted up as I knew it would, but­
"This ought to make a bond between you and The Home," he said. "Now you'll find unsuspected virtues in this land you've been spurning."
I felt my heart grow cold. "Oh, no, Thann!" I said. "Now more than ever we must go. Our child can't be born here. He must be of Earth. And I want to be able to enjoy this Child Within-"
"This is quite a Child Without," said Thann, tempering the annoyance in his voice by touching my cheek softly, "crying for a lollipop, Earth flavored. Ah, well!" He gathered me into his arms. "Hippity-hop to the candy shop!"
A high thin whistle signaled the first brush of Earth's atmosphere against our craft-as though Earth were reaching up to scrape tenuous incandescent fingers against our underside. I cleared my mind and concentrated on the effort ahead. I'm no Motiver, but Thann might need my strength before we landed.
Before we landed! Setting down on the flat again, under Old Baldy! And seeing them all again! Valancy and Karen and the Francher Kid. Oh, the song the Kid would be singing would be nothing to the song my heart would be singing! Home! Child Within! Home again! I pressed my hands against the swell of Child Within. Pay attention I admonished. Be ready for your first consciousness of Earth. "I won't look," I told myself. "Until we touch down on the flat. I'll keep my eyes shut!" And I did.
So when the first splashing crash came, I couldn't believe it. My eyes opened to the sudden inrush of water and I was gasping and groping in complete bewilderment trying to find air. "Thann! Thann!" I was paddling awkwardly, trying to keep my head above water. What had happened? How could we have so missed the Canyon-even as inexperienced a Motiver as Thann was? Water? Water to drown in, anywhere near the Canyon?
There was a gulp and the last bubble of air belched out of our turning craft. I was belched out through a jagged hole along with the air.
Thann! Thann! I abandoned vocal calling and spread my cry clear across the band of subspeech. No reply-no reply! I bobbed on the surface of the water, gasping. Oh Child, stay Within. Be Careful. Be Careful! It isn't time yet. It isn't time!
I shook my dripping hair out of my eyes and felt a nudge against my knees. Down I went into darkness, groping, groping-and found him! Inert, unresponsive, a dead weight in my arms. The breathless agony of struggle ended in the slippery mud of a rocky shore. I dragged him up far enough that his head was out of the water, listened breathlessly for a heartbeat, then, mouth to mouth, I breathed life back into him and lay gasping beside him in the mud, one hand feeling the struggle as his lungs labored to get back into rhythm. The other hand was soothing Child Within. Not now, not now! Wait-wait!
When my own breathing steadied, I tore strips off my tattered travel suit and bound up his head, staunching the blood that persistently threaded down from the gash above his left ear. Endlessly, endlessly, I lay there listening to his heart-to my heart-too weak to move him, too weak to move myself. Then the rhythm of his breathing changed and I felt his uncertain thoughts, questioning, asking. My thoughts answered his until he knew all I knew about what had happened. He laughed a ghost of a laugh.
"Is this untidy enough for you?" And I broke down and cried.
We lay there in mud and misery, gathering our strength. I started once to a slithering splash across the water from us and felt a lapping of water over my feet. I pulled myself up on one elbow and peered across at the barren hillside. A huge chunk of it had broken off and slithered down into the water. The scar was raw and ragged in the late evening sunshine.
"Where did it come from?" I asked, wonderingly. "All this water! And there is Baldy , with his feet all awash. What happened?"
"The rain is raining," said Thann, his voice choked with laughter, his head
rolling on the sharp shale of the bank.
"The rain is raining-and don't go near the water!" His nonsense ended with a small moan that tore my heart.
"Thann, Thann! Let's get out of this mess. Come on. Can you lift? Help me-"
He lifted his head and let it fall back with a thunk against the rocks. His utter stillness panicked me. I sobbed as I reached into my memory for the inanimate lift. It seemed a lifetime before I finally got him up out of the mud and hovered him hand high above the bank. Cautiously I pushed him along, carefully guiding him between the bushes and trees until I found a flat place that crunched with fallen oak leaves. I "platted" him softly to the ground and for a long time I lay there by him, my hand on his sleeve, not even able to think coherently about what had happened.
The sun was gone when I shivered and roused myself. I was cold and Thann was shaken at intervals by an icy shuddering. I scrambled around in the fading fight and gathered wood together and laid a fire. I knelt by the neat stack and gathered myself together for the necessary concentration. Finally, after sweat had gathered on my forehead and trickled into my eyes, I managed to produce a tiny spark that sputtered and hesitated and then took a shining bite out of a dry leaf. I rubbed my hands above the tiny flame and waited for it to grow. Then I lifted Thann's head to my lap and started the warmth circulating about us.
When our shivering stopped, I suddenly caught my breath and grimaced wryly. How quickly we forget! I was getting as bad as an Outsider! And I clicked my personal shield on, extending it to include Thann. In the ensuing warmth, I looked down at Thann, touching his mud-stained cheek softly, letting my love flow to him like a river of strength. I heard his breathing change and he stirred under my hands.
"Are we Home?" he asked.
"We're on Earth," I said.
"We left Earth years ago," he chided. "Why do I hurt so much?" "We came back." I kept my voice steady with an effort.
"Because of me-and Child Within."
"Child Within-" His voice strengthened. "Hippity-hop to the candy shop," he remembered. "What happened?"
"The Canyon isn't here any more," I said, raising his shoulders carefully into my arms. "We crashed into water. Everything's gone. We lost everything." My heart squeezed for the tiny gowns Child Within would never wear.
"Where are our People?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know."
"When you find them, you'll be all right," he said drowsily.
"We'll be all right," I said sharply, my arms tightening around hi m "In the morning , we'll find them and Bethie will find out what's wrong with you and we'll mend you."
He sat up slowly, haggard and dirty in the upflare of firelight, his hand going to his bandaged head. "I'm broken," he said. "A lot of places. Bones have gone where bones should never go. I will be Called."
"Don't say it!" I gathered him desperately into my arms.
"Don't say it, Thann! We'll find the People!" He crumpled down against me, his cheek pressed to the curve of Child Within.
I screamed then, partly because my heart was being torn shred by shred into an aching mass-partly because my neglected little fire was happily crackling away from me, munching the dry leaves, sampling the brush, roaring softly into the lower branches of the scrub oak. I had set the hillside afire! And the old terror was upon me, the remembered terror of a manzanita slope blazing on Baldy those many forgotten years ago.
I cradled Thann to me. So far the fire was moving away from us, but soon, soon­
"No! No!" I cried. "Let's go home. Thann! I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Let's go home! I didn't mean to bring you to death! I hate this world! I hate it! Thann, Thann!"
I've tried to forget it. It comes back sometimes. Sometimes again I'm so shaken that I can't even protect myself any more and I'm gulping smoke and screaming over Thann. Other times I hear again the rough, disgusted words, "Gel-dinged tenderfoots! Setting fire to the whole gel-dinged mountain. There's a law!"
Those were the first words I ever heard from Seth. My first sight of him was of a looming giant, twisted by flaring flames and drifting smoke and my own blurring tears.
It was another day before I thought again. I woke to find myself on a camp cot, a rough khaki blanket itching my chin. My bare arms were clean but scratched. Child Within was rounding the blanket smoothly. I closed my eyes and lay lapped in peace for a moment. Then my eyes flew open and I called, "Thann! Thann!" and struggled with the blanket.
"Take it easy! Take it easy!" Strong hands pushed me back against the thin musty pillow. "You're stark, jay-nekkid under that blanket. You can't go tearing around that way." And those were the first words I heard from Glory.
She brought me a faded, crumpled cotton robe and helped me into it. "Them outlandish duds you had on'll take a fair-sized swatch of fixing 'fore they're fit t' wear." Her hands were clumsy but careful. She chuckled. "Not sure there's room for both of yens in this here wrapper."
I knelt by the cot in the other room. There were only three rooms in the house. Thann lay, thin and unmoving as paper, under the lumpy comforter.
"He wants awful bad to go home." Glory's voice tried to moderate to a sick room tone. "He won't make it," she said bluntly.
"Yes, he will. Yes, he will! All we have to do is find The People-"
"Which people?" asked Glory.
"The People!" I cried. "The People who live in the Canyon."
"The Canyon? You mean Cougar Canyon? Been no people there for three-four years. Ever since the dam got finished and the lake started rising."
"Where-where did they go?" I whimpered, my hands tightening on the edge of the cot.
"Dunno." Glory snapped a match head with her thumbnail and lighted a makin's cigarette.
"But if we don't find them, Thann will die!"
"He will anyway less'n them folks is magic," said Glory.
"They are!" I cried. "They're magic!"
"Oh?" said Glory, squinting her eyes against the eddy of smoke. "Oh?"
Thann's head moved and his eyes opened. I bent my head to catch any whisper from him, but his voice came loud and clear.
"All we have to do is fix the craft and we can go back Home."
"Yes, Thann." I hid my eyes against my crossed wrists on the cot. "We'll leave right away. Child Within will wait 'til we get Home." I felt Child Within move to the sound of my words.
"He shouldn't oughta talk," said Glory. "He's all smashed inside. He'll be bleeding again in a minute."
"Shut up!" I spun on my knees and flared at her. "You don't know anything about it! You're nothing but a stupid Outsider. He won't die! He won't!"
Glory dragged on her cigarette. "I hollered some, too, when my son Davy got caught in a cave-in. He was smashed. He died." She flicked ashes onto the bare plank floor. "God calls them. They go-"
"I'm Called!" Thann caught the familiar word. "I'm Called! What will you do, Debbie-my-dear? What about Child-" A sudden bright froth touched the corner of his mouth and he clutched my wrist. "Home is so far away," he sighed. "Why did we have to leave? Why did we leave?"
"Thann, Thann!" I buried my face against his quiet side. The pain in my chest got worse and worse and I wished someone would stop that awful babbling and screaming. How could I say good-by to my whole life with that ghastly noise going on? Then my fingers were pried open and I lost the touch of Thann. The black noisy chaos took me completely.
"He's dead." I slumped in the creaky rocker. Where was I? How long had I been
here? My words came so easily, so accustomedly, they must be a repetition of a repetition. "He's dead and I hate you. I hate Seth. I hate Earth. You're all Outsiders. I hate Child Within. I hate myself."
"There," said Glory as she snipped a thread with her teeth and stuck the needle in the front of her plaid shin. My words had no impact on her, though they almost shocked me as I listened to them. Why didn't she notice what I said? Too familiar? "There's at least one nightgown for Child Within." She grinned. "When I was your age, folks woulda died of shock to think of calling a baby unborn a name like that. I thought maybe these sugar sacks might come in handy sometime. Didn't know it'd be for baby clothes."
"I hate you," I said, hurdling past any fingering shock. "No lady wears Levis and plaid shirts with buttons that don't match. Nor cuts her hair like a man and lets her face go all wrinkledy. Oh, well, what does it matter? You're only a stupid Outsider. You're not of The People, that's for sure. You're not on our level."
"For that, thanks be to the Lord." Glory smoothed the clumsy little gown across her knee. "I was taught people are people, no matter their clothes or hair. I don't know nothing about your folks or what level they're on, but I'm glad my arthritis won't let me stoop as low as-" She shrugged and laid the gown aside. She reached over to the battered dresser and retrieved something she held out to me. "Speaking of looks, take a squint at what Child Inside's got to put up with."
I slapped the mirror out of her hands-and the mad glimpse of rumpled hair, swollen eyes, raddled face, and a particularly horrible half sneer on lax lips-slapped it out of her hands, stopped its fight in mid-air, spun it up to the sagging plasterboard ceiling, swooped it out with a crash through one of the few remaining whole windowpanes, and let it smash against a pine tree outside the house.
"Do that!" I cried triumphantly. "Even child's play like that, you can't do. You're stupid!"
"Could be." Glory picked up a piece of the shattered window glass. "But today I fed my man and the stranger within my gates. I made a gown for a naked baby. What have you done that's been so smart? You've busted, you've ruined, you've whined and hated. If that's being smart, I'll stay stupid." She pitched the glass out of the broken window.
"And I'll slap you silly, like I would any spoiled brat, if you break anything else."
"Oh, Glory, oh Glory!" I squeezed my eyes shut. "I killed him! I killed him! I made him come. If we'd stayed Home. If I hadn't insisted. If-"
"If," said Glory heavily, lifting the baby gown. "If Davy hadn'ta died, this'd be for my grandkid, most likely. If-ing is the quickest way I know to get the blue mullygrubs."
She folded the gown and put it away in the dresser drawer. "You haven't told me yet when Child Within is s'posed to come Without." She reached for the makin's and started to build a cigarette.
"I don't know," I said, staring down at my tight hands. "I don't care." What was Child Within compared to the pain within?
"You'll care plenty," snapped Glory around the smooth curve of the cigarette paper, "if'n you have a hard time and no doctor. You can go ahead and die if you want to, but I'm thinking of Child Within."
"It'd be better if he died, too," I cried. "Better than having to grow up in this stupid, benighted world, among savages-"
"What'd you want to come hack so bad for then?" asked Glory. "You admit it was you wanted to come." "Yes," I moaned, twisting my hands. "I killed him. If we'd only stayed Home. If I hadn't-"
I lay in the dusk, my head pillowed on Thann's grave. Thann's grave-The words had a horrible bitterness on my tongue. "How can I bear it, Thann?" I whimpered. "I'm lost. I can't go Home. The People are gone. What'll I do with Child Within? How can we ever bear it, living with Outsiders? Oh, Call me too,
Call me too!" I let the rough gravel of the grave scratch against my cheek as I cried.
And yet I couldn't feel that Thann was there. Thann was a part of another life-a life that didn't end in the mud and misery of a lakeside. He was part of a happy adventure, a glad welcome back to the Earth we had thought was a thing of the past, a tumultuous reunion with all the dear friends we had left behind-the endless hours of vocal and subvocal news exchange-Thann was a part of that. Not a part of this haggard me, this squalid shack teetering on the edge of a dry creek, this bulging, unlovely, ungainly creature muddying her face in the coarse gravel of a barren hillside.
I roused to the sound of footsteps in the dark, and voices.
"-nuttier than a fruitcake," said Glory. "It takes some girls like that, just getting pregnant, and then this here other shock-"
"What's she off on now?" It was Seth's heavy voice.
"Oh, more of the same. Being magic. Making things fly. She broke that lookin' glass Davy gave me the Christmas before the cave-in." She cleared her throat. "I picked up the pieces. They're in the drawer."
"She oughta have a good hiding!" Anger was thick in Seth's voice.
"She'll get one if'n she does anything like that again! Oh, and some more about the Home and flying through space and wanting them people again."
"You know," said Seth thoughtfully, "I heard stuff about some folks used to bye around here. Funny stuff."
"All people are funny." Glory's voice was nearer. "Better get her back into the house before she catches her death of live-forevers."
I stared up at the ceiling in the dark. Time was again a word without validity. I had no idea how long I had huddled myself in my sodden misery. How long had I been here with Glory and Seth? Faintly in my consciousness, I felt a slight stirring of wonder about Seth and Glory. What did they live on? What were they doing out here in the unfruitful hills? This shack was some forgotten remnant of an old ghost town-no electricity, no water, four crazy walls held together by, and holding up, a shattered roof. For food-beans, cornbread, potatoes, prunes, coffee.
I clasped my throbbing temples with both hands, my head rolling from side to side. But what did it matter? What did anything matter any more? Wild grief surged up in my throat and I cried out, "Mother! Mother!" and felt myself drowning in the icy immensity of the lonely space I had drifted across-Then there were warm arms around me and a shoulder under my cheek, the soft scratch of hair against my face, a rough hand gently pressing my head to warmth and aliveness.
"There, there!" Glory's voice rumbled gruffly soft through her chest to my ear. "It'll pass. Time and mercy of God will make it bearable. There, there!" She held me and let me blot my tears against her. I didn't know when she left me and I slept dreamlessly.
Next morning at breakfast-before which I had washed my face and combed most of the tangles out of my hair-I paused over my oatmeal and canned milk, spoon poised.
"What do you do for a living, Seth?" I asked.
"Living?" Seth stirred another spoonful of sugar into the mush. "We scratch our beans and bacon outa the Skagmore. It's a played-out mine, but there's a few two-bittin' seams left. We work it hard enough, we get by-but it takes both of us. Glory's as good as a man-better'n some."
"How come you aren't working at the Golden Turkey or the Iron Duke?" I wondered where I had got those names even as I asked.
"Can't," said Glory. "He's got silicosis and arthritis. Can't work steady. Times are you'd think he was coughing up his lungs. Hasn't had a bad time though since you came."
"If I were a Healer," I said, "I could cure your lungs and joints. But I'm not. I'm really not much of anything." I blinked down at my dish. I'm nothing.
I'm nothing without Thann. I gulped. "I'm sorry I broke your window and your
mirror, Glory. I shouldn't have. You can't help being an Outsider."
"Apology accepted," Glory grinned dourly. "But it's still kinda drafty."
"There's a whole window in that shack down-creek a ways," said Seth. "When I get the time, I'll go get it. Begins to look like the Skagmore might last right up into winter, though." "Wish we could get some of that good siding-what's left of it-and fill in a few of our holes," said Glory, tipping up the scarred blue and white coffee pot for the last drop of coffee.
"I'll get the stuff soon's this seam pinches out," promised Seth.
I walked down-creek after breakfast, feeling for the first time the sun on my face, seeing for the first time the untidy tangle and thoughtless profusion of life around me, the dream that had drawn me back to this tragedy. I sat down against a boulder, clasping my knees. My feet had known the path to this rock. My back was familiar with its sun-warmed firmness, but I had no memory of it. I had no idea how long I had been eased of my homesickness.
Now that that particular need was filled and that ache soothed, it was hard to remember how vital and how urgent the whole thing had been. It was like the memory of pain-a purely intellectual thing. But once it had been acute-so acute that Thann had come to his death for it.
I looked down at myself and for the first time I noticed I was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt-Glory's, indubitably. The jeans were precariously held together, bulging under the plaid shirt, by a huge blanket pin. I smiled a little. Outsider makeshift-well, let it stay. They don't know any better.
Soon I aroused and went on down-creek until I found the shack Seth had mentioned. It had two good windows left. I stood in front of the first one, reaching into my memory for my informal training. Then I settled to the job at hand.
Slowly, steadily, nails began to withdraw from around the windows. With toil and sweat and a few frustrated tears, I got the two windows out intact, though the walls around them would never be the same again. I had had no idea how windows were put into a house. After the windows, it was fairly simple to detach the few good lengths of siding left. I stacked them neatly, one by one, drifting them into place. I jumped convulsively at a sudden crunching crash, then laughed shakily to see that the poor old shack had disintegrated completely, having been deprived of its few solid members. Lifting the whole stack of my salvage to carrying height, I started back up-creek, panting and sweating, stumbling and pushing the load ahead of me until I got smart and, lifting, perched on the pile of planks, I directed my airborne caravan up-creek.
Glory and Seth were up at the mine. I set the things down by the house and then, suddenly conscious of weariness, made my way to Thann's grave. I patted the gravelly soil softly and whispered, "They'll like it won't they, Thann? They're so like children. Now Glory will forget about the mirror. Poor little Outsider!"
Glory and Seth were stupefied when they saw my loot leaning against the corner of the shack. I told them where I'd got the stuff and how I had brought it back.
Seth spat reflectively and looked sideways at Glory. "Who's nuts now?" he asked.
"Okay, okay," said Glory. "You go tell that Jick Bennett how this stuff got here. Maybe he'll believe you."
"Did I do something wrong?" I asked. "Did this belong to Mr. Bennett?"
"No, no," said Glory. "Not to him nor nobody. He's just a friend of ours. Him and Seth're always shooting the breeze together. No, it's just-just-" She gestured hopelessly then turned on Seth. "Well? Get the hammer. You want her to do the hammering too?"
We three labored until the sun was gone and a lopsided moon had pushed itself up over the shoulder of Baldy. The light glittered on the smug wholeness of
the two windows of the shack and Glory sighed with tired satisfaction. Balling up the rag she had taken from the other broken window, she got it ready to throw away. "First time my windows've been wind-tight since we got here. Come winter that's nothing to sneeze at!"
"Sneeze at!" Seth shook with silent gargantuan laughter.
"Nothing to sneeze at!"
"Glory!" I cried. "What have you there? Don't throw it away!"
"What?" Glory retrieved the wad from the woodpile. "It's only the rags we peeled off'n both of yens before we put you in bed. And another hunk we picked up to beat out the fire. Ripped to tatters. Heavy old canvassy stuff, anyway."
"Give it to me, Glory," I said. And took the bundle from her wondering hands. "It's tekla," I said. "It's never useless. Look." I spread out several of the rags on a flat stone near the creek. In the unreal blend of sunset and moonrise, I smoothed a fingernail along two overlapping edges. They merged perfectly into a complete whole. Quickly I sealed the other rips and snags and, lifting the sheet of tekla shook off the dirt and wrinkles. "See, it's as good as new. Bring the rest in the house. We can have some decent clothes again." I smiled at Glory's pained withdrawal. "After all, Glory, you
must admit this pin isn't going to hold Child Within much longer!"
Seth lighted the oil lamp above the table and I spread tekla all over it, mending a few rips I'd missed.
"Here's some more," said Glory. "I stuck it in that other stovepipe hole. It's the hunk we used to beat the fire out with. It's pretty holey."
"It doesn't matter," I said, pinching out the charred spots.
"What's left is still good." And she and Seth hung fascinated around the table, watching me. I couldn't let myself think of Thann, flushed with excitement, trying to be so casual as he tried on his travel suit to show me, so long-so long ago-so yesterday, really.
"Here's a little bitty piece you dropped:' said Seth, retrieving it.
"It's too little for any good use," said Glory.
"Oh, no!" I said, a little intoxicated by their wonder and by a sudden upsurge of consciousness that I was able to work so many-to them-miracles. "Nothing's too small. See. That's one reason we had it made so thick. To spread it thin when we used it." I took the tiny swatch of tekla and began to stretch and shape it, smoother and farther. Farther and farther until it flowed over the edges of the table and the worn design on the oilcloth began to be visible through it.
"What color do you like, Glory?" I asked.
"Blue," breathed Glory, wonderingly. "Blue."
I stroked blue into the tekla, quickly evened the edges and, lifting the fragile, floating chiffony material, draped it over Glory's head. For a half moment I saw my own mother looking with shining eyes at me through the lovely melt of color. Then I was hugging Glory and saying, "That's for the borrow of your jeans and shirt!" And she was fingering unbelievingly the delicate fabric. There, I thought, l even hugged her. It really doesn't matter to me that she's just an Outsider.
"Magic!" said Glory. "Don't touch it!" she cried, as Seth reached a curious hand toward it.
"He can't hurt it," I laughed. "It's strong enough to use for a parachute-or a trampoline!"
"How did you do it?" asked Seth, lifting another small patch of tekla, his lingers tugging at it.
"Well, first you have to-" I groped for an explanation.
"You see, first-Well, then, after that-Oh, I don't know!" I cried. "I just know you do it." I took the piece from him and snatched it into scarf length, stroking it red and woolly, and wound it around his neck and bewildered face.
I slept that night in a gown of tekla, but Glory stuck to her high-necked crinkle-crepe gown and Seth scorned night-clothes. But after Glory blew out the light and before she disappeared behind the denim curtain that gave me
part of the front room for a bedroom of my own, she leaned over, laughing in the moonlight, to whisper, "He's got that red thing under his pillow. I seen it sticking out from under!"
Next morning I busied myself with the precious tekla, thinning it, brushing up a soft nap, fashioning the tiny things Child Within would be needing some day. Glory stayed home from the mine and tried to help. After the first gown was finished, I sat looking at it, dreaming child-dreams any mother does with a first gown. I was roused by the sound of a drawer softly closing and saw Glory disappear into the kitchen. I went over and opened the drawer. The awkward little sugar-sack gown was gone. I smiled pityingly. She realized, I said to myself. She realized how inappropriate a gown like that would be for child of The People.
That night Seth dropped the lamp chimney and it smashed to smithereens.
"Well, early to bed," sighed Glory. "But I did want to get on with this shirt for Seth." She smoothed the soft, woolly tekla across her lap. We had figured it down pretty close, but it came out a dress for each of us and a shirt for Seth as well as a few necessities for Child Within. I blessed again the generousness of our travel clothes and the one small part of a blanket that had survived.
"If you've got a dime," I said, returning to the problem of light, "I haven't a cent-but if you've got a dime, I can make a light-"
Seth chuckled. "If we've got a dime, I'd like to see it. We're 'bout due for a trip into town to sell our ore. Got any change, Glory?"
Glory dumped her battered purse out on the bed and stirred the contents vigorously. "One dollar bill," she said.
"Coffee and sugar for next week. A nickel and three pennies. No dime-"
"Maybe a nickel will work," I said dubiously. "We always used dimes or disks of argen. I never tried a nickel." I picked up the coin and fingered it. Boy! Would this ever widen their eyes! If I could remember Dita's instructions. I spun the coin and concentrated. I spun the coin and frowningly concentrated. I spun the coin. I blushed. I sweated. "It'll work," I reassured the skeptical side glances of Seth and Glory. I dosed my eyes and whispered silently, "We need it. Bless me.
Bless me."
I spun the coin.
I saw the flare behind my eyelids and opened them to the soft, slightly blue handful of fight the nickel had become.
Seth and Glory said nothing, but their eyes blinked and were big and wondering enough to please anyone, as they looked into my cupped hand.
"A dime is brighter," I said, "but this is enough for here, I guess. Only thing is, you can't blow it out."
The two exchanged glances and Seth smiled weakly. "Nutty as a fruitcake," he said. "But don't it shine pretty!"
The whole room was flooded with the gentle light. I put it down in the middle of the table, but it was too direct for our eyes, so Seth balanced it on the top of a windowsill and Glory picked up the half-finished shirt from the floor where it had fallen and asked in a voice that only slightly trembled, "Could you do this seam right here, Debbie? That'll finish this sleeve."
That night we had to put the light in a baking powder can with the lid on tight when we went to bed. The cupboard had leaked too much light and so had the dresser. I was afraid to damp the glow for fear I might not be able to do it again the next night. A Lady Bountiful has to be careful of her reputation.
I sat on the bank above the imperceptibly growing lake and watched another chunk of the base of Baldy slide down into the water. Around me was the scorched hillside and the little flat where I had started the fire. Somewhere under all that placid brown water was our craft and everything we had of The Home. I felt my face harden and tighten with sorrow.
I got up awkwardly and made my way down the steep slant of the bank. I leaned
against a boulder and stirred the muddy water with one sneaker-clad toe. That block of tekla, the seed box, the pictures, the letters. I let the tears wash downward unchecked. All the dreams and plans. The pain caught me so that I nearly doubled up. My lips stretched thinly. How physical mental pain can be! If only it could be amputated like-Pain caught me again. I gasped and clutched the boulder behind me. This is pain, I cried to myself. Not Child Inside! Not out here in the wilds all alone! I made my way back to the shank in irregular, staggering stages and put myself to bed. When Glory and Seth got back, I propped up wearily on one elbow and looked at them groggily, the pain having perversely quitted me just before they arrived.
"Do you suppose it is almost time? I have no way of knowing. Time is-is different here. I can't put the two times together and come out with anything. I'm afraid, Glory! I'm afraid!"
"We shoulda taken you into Kerry to the doctor a long time ago. He'd be able to tell you, less'n-" she hesitated "-less'n you are different, so'st he'd notice-"
I smiled weakly. "Don't tiptoe so, Glory. I won't be insulted. No, he'd notice nothing different except when birth begins. We can bypass the awfullest of the hurting time-" I gulped and pressed my hands to the sudden emptiness that almost caved me in. "That's what I was supposed to learn from our People here!" I wailed. "I only know about it. Our first child is our learning child. You can't learn it ahead."
"Don't worry," said Glory dryly. "Child Within will manage to get outside whether you hurt or not. If you're a woman, you can bear the burden women have since Eve."
So we planned to go into town the next day and just tell the doctor I hadn't been to a doctor yet-lots of people don't, even today. But it started to rain in the night. I roused first to the soft sound of rain on the old tin roof of the kitchen-the soft sound that increased and increased until it became a drumming roar. Even that sound was music. And the vision of rain failing everywhere, everywhere, patting the dusty ground, dimpling the lake, flipping the edges of curled leaves, soothed me into sleep. I was wakened later by the sound of Seth's coughing. That wasn't a soothing sound. And it got worse and worse. It began to sound as though he actually were coughing up his lungs as Glory had said. He could hardly draw a breath between coughing spasms. I lay there awake in the dark, hearing Glory's murmurs and the shuff-shuff of her feet as she padded out to the kitchen and back to the bedroom. But the coughing went on and on and I began to get a little impatient. I tossed in bed, suddenly angrily restless. I had Child Within to think of. They knew I needed my rest. They weren't making any effort to be quiet-Finally I couldn't stand it any longer. I padded in my turn to their bedroom and peered in. Seth was leaning back against the head of the iron bedstead, gasping for breath. Glory was sitting beside him, tearing up an old pillowcase to make handkerchiefs for him. She looked up at me in the half light of the uncovered baking powder can, her face drawn and worn. "It's bad, this time," she said. "Makin' up for lost time, I guess."
"Can't you do something to stop his coughing?" I asked. I really hadn't meant it to sound so abrupt and flat. But it did, and Glory let her hands fall slowly to her lap as her eyes fixed on me.
"Oh," she said. "Oh." Then her eyes fairly blazed and she said, "Can't you?"
"I'm not a Healer," I said, feeling almost on the defensive.
"If I were, I could give-"
"Yon wouldn't give anybody anything," said Glory, her face closed and cold. "Less'n you wanted to show off or make yourself comfortable. Go back to bed."
I went, my cheeks burning in the dark. How dare she talk to me like this! An Outsider to one of The People! She had no right-My anger broke into tears and I cried and cried on my narrow Outsider bed in that falling down Outsider house, but under all my anger and outrage, so closely hidden that I'd hardly admit it to myself even, was a kernel of sorrow. I'd thought Glory liked me.
Morning was gray and clammy. The rain fell steadily and the bluish light from
the baking powder can was cold and uncheerful. The day dragged itself to a watery end, nothing except a slight waning and waxing of the light outdoors to distinguish one hour from the next. Seth's coughing eased a little and by the second rain-loud morning it had finally stopped.
Seth prowled around the cramped rooms, his shoulders hunched forward, his chest caved in as though he had truly coughed out his lungs. His coughing had left him, but his breath still caught in ragged chunks.
"Set," said Glory, tugging at his sleeve. "You'll wear yourself and me out too, to-ing and fro-ing like that."
"Don't ease me none to set," said Seth hoarsely. "Leave me be. Let me move while I can. Got a hunch there won't be much moving for me after the next spell."
"Now, Seth." Glory's voice was calm and a little reprimanding, but I caught her terror and grief. With a jolt I realized how exactly her feelings were mine when I had crouched beside Thann, watching him die. But they're old and ugly and through with life! I protested. But they love came the answer, and love can never be old nor ugly nor through with life.
"'Sides, I'm worried," said Seth, wiping the haze of his breath off the newly installed window. "Rain like this'll fill every creek around here. Then watch the dam fill up. "They told us we'd be living on an island before spring. When the lake's full, we'll be six foot under. All this rain-" He swiped at the window again, and turning away, resumed his restless pacing. "That slope between here and the highways getting mighty touchy. Wash it out a little at the bottom and it'll all come down like a ton of bricks. Dam it up there, we'd get the full flow right across us and I ain't feeling much like a swim!" He grinned weakly and leaned against the table.
"Glory." His breathing was heavy and ragged. "Glory, I'm tired."
Glory put him to bed. I could hear the murmur of her voice punctuated at intervals by a heavy monosyllable from him.
I shivered and went to the little bandy-legged cast-iron stove. Lifting one of its four lids, I peered at the smoldering pine knot inside. The heaviness outside pushed a thin acrid cloud of smoke out at me and I clattered the lid back, feeling an up-gush of exasperation at the inefficiency of Outsiders. I heated the stove up until the top glowed dull red, and reveled in the warmth.
Glory came back into the kitchen and hunched near the stove, rubbing her hands together.
"How'd you get the wood to burn?" she finally asked. "It was wet. 'S'all there is left."
"I didn't," I said. "I heated the stove."
"Thanks," said Glory shortly (not even being surprised that I could do a thing like that!).
We both listened to the murmur of the rain on the roof and the pop and creak of the expanding metal of the stovepipe as the warmth reached upward.
"I'm sorry," said Glory. "I shouldn'ta spoken so short the other night, but I was worried."
"It's all right," I said magnanimously. "And when my People come-"
"Look, Debbie." Glory turned her back to the stove and clasped her hands behind her. "I'm not saying you don't have folks and that they won't come some day and set everything right, but they aren't here now. They can't help now, and we got troubles-plenty of troubles. Seth's worrying about that bank coming down and shifting the water. Well, he don't know, but it came down in the night last night and we're already almost an island. Look out the window."
I did, cold apprehension clutching at my insides. The creek had water in it. Not a trickle, but a wide, stainless-steel roadbed of water that was heavy with red silt where it escaped the color of the down-pressing clouds. I ran to the other window. A narrow hogback led through the interlacing of a thousand converging streams, off into the soggy grayness of the mountain beyond us. It was the trail-the hilltop trail Glory and Seth took to Skagmore.
"I hate to ask it of you," said Glory. "Especially after telling you off like I did, but we gotta get outa here. We gotta save what we can and hole up at
the mine. You better start praying now that it'll be a few days more before the water gets that high. Meanwhile, grab your bedroll and git goin'."
I gaped at her and then at the water outside and, running to my cot, grabbed up the limp worn bedding and started for the door.
"Hold it. Hold it!" she called. "Fold the stuff so you can manage it. Put on this old hat of Seth's. It'll keep the rain outa your eyes for a while, maybe. Wait'll I get my load made up. I'll take the lead."
Oh not Oh no! I cried to myself as panic trembled my hands and hampered nay folding the bedclothes. Why is this happening to me? Wasn't it enough to take Thann away? Why should 1 have to suffer any more?..
"Ready?" Glory's intent eyes peered across her load.
"Hope you've been praying. If you haven't, you better get started. We gotta make it there and back. Seth's gotta rest some before he tackles it."
"But I can lift!" I cried. "I don't have to walk! I have my shield. I don't have to get wet! I can go-"
"Go then," said Glow, her voice hard and unfriendly. "Git goin'!"
I caught at my panic and bit my lips-I needed Glory. "I only mean I could take your load and mine, too," I said, which wasn't what I had originally meant at all. "Then you could take something else. I can transport all this stuff and keep it dry."
I lifted my own burden and hovered it while I took hers from her reluctant arms. I lifted the two together and maneuvered the load out the door, extending my personal shield to cover it all. "How-how do I get there?" My voice was little and scared.
"Follow the hogback," said Glory, her voice still unwarmed, as though she had been able to catch my hidden emotion, as the People do. "You'll see the entrance up the hill a ways soon as you top out on the ridge. Don't go too far inside. The shoring's rotted out in lots of places."
"Okay," I said. "I'll come back."
"Stay there," said Glory. "Git goin'. I gotta get Seth up." My eyes followed hers and recoiled from the little brown snake of water that had welled up in one corner of the room. I got going.
Even inside my shield, I winced away from the sudden increased roar of descending rain. I couldn't see a yard ahead and had to navigate from boulder to boulder along the hogback. It was a horrible eternity before I saw the dark gap of the mine entrance and managed to get myself and my burden inside. For several feet around the low irregular arch of the entrance, the powdery ground was soggy mud, but farther back it was dry and the roof vaulted up until it was fairly spacious.
I put the bedding down and looked around me. Two narrow strips of rail disappeared back into the mine and an ore car tilted drunkenly off one side, two wheels off and half covered with dirt on the floor beside it. I unearthed one wheel and tugging it upright, rolled it, wobbling and uncooperative, over to the stack of bedding. I started heating the wheel, making slow work of so large a task because I had done so little with the basic Signs and Persuasions-the practices of my People.
Suddenly it seemed to me a long time since I'd left the shack. I ran to the entrance and peered out. No Glory or Seth! Where could they be! I couldn't be all alone here with no one around to help me! I swished out into the storm so fast my face was splattered with rain before my shielding was complete. Time and again I almost lost the hogback. It was an irregular chain of rocky little islands back toward the shack. I groped through the downpour, panting to Child Within, Oh wait! Oh wait! You can't come now! And tried to ignore a vague, growing discomfort.
Then the miracle happened! High above me I heard the egg-beater whirr of a helicopter! Rescue! Now all this mad rush and terror and discomfort would be over. All I had to do was signal the craft and make them take me aboard and take me somewhere away-I turned to locate it and signal it to me when I suddenly realized that I couldn't lift to it I couldn't lift around Outsiders who would matter. This basic rule of The People was too deeply engrained in
me. Hastily I dipped down until I perched precariously on one of the still-exposed boulders of the trail. I waved wildly up at the slow swinging 'copter. They had to see me! "Here I am! Here I am!" I cried, my voice too choked even to carry a yard.
"Help me! Help me!" And, in despair as the 'copter slanted away into the gray falling rain, I slid past vocal calling into subvocal and spread my call over the whole band, praying that a receptor somewhere would pick up my message.
"There's need!" I sobbed out the old childish distress cry of the Group. "There's need!"
And an answer came!
"One of us?" The thought came startled. "Who are you? Where are you?"
"I'm down here in the rain!" I sobbed, aloud as well as silently. "I'm Debbie! I used to live in the Canyon! We went to the Home. Come and get me! Oh, come and get me!"
"I'm coming," came the answer. "What on Earth are you doing on Earth, Debbie? No one was supposed to return so lightly-"
"So lightly!" Shattered laughter jabbed at my throat. All the time I'd spent on Earth already had erased itself, and I was caught up by the poignancy of this moment of meeting with Thann not here-this watery welcome to Earth with no welcome for Thann. "Who are you?" I asked. I had forgotten individual thought patterns so soon.
"I'm Jemmy," came the reply. "I'm with an Outsider Disaster Unit. We've got our hands full fishing people out of this dammed lake!" He chuckled. "Serves them right for damming Cougar Creek and spoiling the Canyon. But tell me, what's the deal? You shouldn't be here. You went back to the Home, didn't you?"
"The Home-" I burst into tears and all the rest of the time that the 'copter circled back and found a settling-down space on a flat already awash with two inches of water, Jemmy and I talked. Mostly I did the talking. We shifted out of verbalization and our thoughts speeded up until I had told Jemmy everything that had happened to me since that awful crashing day. It was telling of someone else-some other far, sad story of tragedy and graceless destitution-Outsider makeshifts. I had just finished when the 'copter door swung open and Jemmy stepped out to hover above the water that was sucking my sneakers off the slant of the boulder I was crouched on.
"Oh, thanks be to The Power," I cried, grabbing for Jemmy's hands, but stubbing my own on my personal shield.
"Oh take me out of this, Jemmy! Take me back to The People! I'm so sick of living like an Outsider! And Child Within doesn't want to be born on a dirt floor in a mine! Oh, Jemmy! How horrible to be an Outsider! You came just in time!" Tears of thankfulness wet my face as I tried to smile at him.
"'Debbie!"
Surely that couldn't be my name! That cold, hard, accusing word! That epithet-that­
"Jemmy!" I collapsed my shield and reached for him. Unbelievably, he would not receive me. "Jemmy!" I cried, the rain wetting my lips. "What's the matter? What's wrong?"
He floated back so I couldn't reach him. "Where are Glory and Seth?" he asked sternly.
"Glory and Seth?" I had to think before I could remember them. They were another life ago. "Why back at the cabin, I guess." I was bewildered. "Why?"
"You have no concern of them?" he asked. "You ask for rescue and forget them? What did The Home do to you? You're apparently not one of Us any more. If you've been infected with some sort of virus, we want no spreading of it."
"You don't want me?" I was dazed. "You're going to leave me here! But-but you can't! You've got to take me!"
"You're not drowning," he said coldly. "Go back to the cave. I have a couple of blankets in the 'copter I can spare. Be comfortable. I have other people who need rescue worse."
"But, Jemmy! I don't understand. What's wrong? What have I done?" My heart
was shattering and cutting me to pieces with its razor-sharp edges.
He looked at me coldly and speculatively. "If you have to ask, it'd take too long to explain," he said. He turned away and took the blankets from the 'copter. He aimed them at the mine entrance and, hovering them, gave them a shove to carry them through into the mine.
"There," he said, "curl up in your comfort. Don't get your feet wet."
"Oh, Jemmy, don't leave me! Help me!" I was in a state of almost complete collapse, darkness roaring over me.
"While you're curled up, all nice and safe," Jemmy's voice came back to me from the 'copter, "you might try thinking a little on 'Just who on Earth do you think you are!' And if you think you have the answer to that, try, 'I was hungry-'"
I didn't hear him go. I sat hunched in my sodden misery, too far gone even to try to puzzle it all out. All my hopes had been built on when my People would find me. They'd set everything right. I would be freed from all my worry and hardships-and now-and now­
A wave of discomfort that had been building up slowly for some time suddenly surged over me and my fingers whitened as I clutched the rock. How could I have mistaken that other pain for this? "Glory!" I whimpered. "It's Child Within!" Now I could remember Glory and Seth. I was back in the miserable half-life of waiting for my People. I scrambled to my feet and closed my shield, setting it to warmth to counteract the chill that stuck to my bones. "I can't face it alone! Anything, anything is better than being alone!"
I streaked back along the hogback that had almost disappeared under the creeping muddy tide. The cabin was in a lake. The back door was ajar. The whole thing tilted slightly off true as though it were thinking of taking off into the roar of the incredible river that swept the creek bed from bank to bank. I staggered against the door as another hard surge of pain lightened my hands and wrung an involuntary cry from me.
When it subsided, I wiped the sweat from my upper lip and pushed the door further open. I stepped into the magnified roaring of the rain on the roof. Blue light was flooding serenely from the baking powder can on the table in the empty kitchen. I snatched it up and ran to the bedroom.
Seth lay white and unmoving on his bed, his eyes sunken, his chest still. I pressed the back of my clenched hand hard against my mouth, feeling the bruise of my teeth. "Oh, no!" I whispered, and gasped with relief as a quick shallow breath lifted the one thin quilt Glory had left him from the bundle of bedding.
"You came back."
My eyes flew to Glory. She sat on the other side of the bed, a shoe box in her lap, one hand clutching a corner of the battered old quilt.
"You didn't come," I whispered. "I waited."
"No need to whisper." Her voice was quite as usual except for a betraying catch on the last word. "He can't hear you."
"But you must come!" I cried. "The house will go in a minute. The creek's already-"
"Why should I come," she asked without emphasis. "He can't come."
We both watched another of the shaken breaths come and go.
"But you'll be washed away-" "So'll you if you don't git goin'." She turned her face away from me.
"But Glory-" Her name came, but twisted-a muffled cry of pain. I clenched both hands on the doorjamb and clung until the pain subsided.
"Child Within," said Glory-her eyes intent on me.
"Yes," I gasped. "I guess so."
Glory stood up and laid the shoe box on the corner of the sagging dresser. She leaned over and smoothed the covers under Seth's chin. "I'll be back," she told him. She waded through the ruffle of water that covered the floor ankle-deep and rounded the bed.
"We better go," she said. "You'll have to point me the way. The trail's gone-"
"You mean you'd leave him here alone!" I was stunned.
"Your own husband!"
She looked back at Seth and her lips tightened. "We all die alone, anyway," she said, "He'd tell me to go, if'n he could."
Then I was still as I caught the passionate outpouring of her grief and love-her last, unspoken farewell to Seth. With an effort she turned her eyes back to me. "Our duty's to the living," she said. "And Child Within won't wait."
"Oh, Glory!" Anguish of sorrow filled my chest till I could only gasp again. "Oh, Glory! We can't, we can't!" My throat ached and I blinked against tears of quite a different sort than those I'd been shedding since Thann died.
I snatched the glowing nickel out of the baking powder can and shoved it into my pocket. "Tuck him in good," I said, nodding at Seth. "Bring whatever you need."
Glory looked at me briefly, hope flaring in her eyes, then, with hasty shaken hands, she tucked the covers tight around Seth and, grabbing up her shoe box, she pushed it under the covers next to him. There was a grating grind and the whole shack swung a quarter circle around.
"Can we get the bed through the doors?" I asked shrilly.
"Not unless we take it apart," said Glory, the quietness of her voice steadying me, "and there isn't time."
"Then-Then-"
"The mattress will bend," she said. "If both of us-"
With all my faith and power I withdrew into the Quiet within me. Help me now, I prayed. I can do nothing of myself. Strengthen me, guide me, help me­
The last words came audibly as I clutched the foot of the bed, waiting until the wave subsided. Then, slowly, deliberately, quietly and unhurried, I lifted the mattress Seth lay on and bent its edges enough to get it out of the bedroom. I hovered it in the kitchen. Glory and I both staggered as the house swayed underfoot-swayed and steadied.
"Have you something to put over him to keep the rain off?" I asked, "I can't extend my shield that far and lift that much at the same time."
"Our slickers," said Glory, her eyes intent on me with that different took in them. "They'll help a little.'’ "Get them then," I said, "and you'll have to get on the mattress, too, to keep him covered."
"But can you-" Glory began.
"I will," I said, holding my Quietness carefully in my mind. “ Hurry-the house is going.”
Hastily, Glory snatched the two yellow slickers from the nails behind the front door. She scrambled into one and spread the other over Seth. "His head, too," I said, "or he'll nearly drown. You'd better cover your head, too. It'll be easier to take. Hurry! Hurry!"
Glory gave one look at the hovering mattress and, setting her lips grimly, crawled on and lay beside Seth, one arm protectively across his chest. She'd hardly closed her eyes before I started the mattress out the door. The house began spinning at the same time. By the time we got outside, it had turned completely around and, as we left it, it toppled slowly into the creek and was lost in the tumult of the waters.
It's no more than the windows and siding, I whispered to myself. In fact, it's less because there's no glass to break. But all my frantic reassurances didn't help much. There were still two olives hanging on my ability to do the inanimate lift and transport them: Doggedly I pushed on, hardly able to see beyond the cascade of rain that arched down my shield. Below me the waters were quieting because they were getting so deep that they no longer quarreled with the boulders and ridges. They smothered them to silence. Ahead and a little below me, rain ran from Glory and Seth's slickers, and the bed, other than where they lay, was a sodden mess.
Finally I could see the entrance of the mine, a darker blot in the pervading grayness. "There it is, Glory!" I cried.
"We're almost there. Just a little-" And the pain seized me. Gasping, I felt myself begin to fall. All my power was draining out thinly-my mind had only room for the all-enveloping anguish. I felt the soggy end of the mattress under one arm, and then two strong hands grabbed me and began to tug me onto the bed. "Try-" Glory's voice was almost too far away. "Help yourself! Onto the bed! Help yourself!"
Deliberately I pushed all thought of pain aside. As though in slow. motion I felt myself lift slightly and slide onto the end of the bed. I lay half on half off and tried to catch my breath.
"Debbie," Glory's voice came calmly and deliberately.
"We're almost in the water. Can you lift us up a little?"
Oh no, I thought. It's too much to ask! Let me rest.
Then for no reason at all I heard Jemmy's voice again.
"Where's Glory and Seth?" as though in some way I were responsible. 1 am! I cried to myself. I am responsible for them. 1 took their lives in my hands when we left the bedroom. Even before that! 1 made myself responsible for them when they took me in­
With infinite effort I pushed myself into the background and reached out again to lay hold on The Power and, slowly, the bed rose from the lapping of the waters and, slowly, it started again toward the mine entrance and I held Glory's hand in such a bruising grasp you would have thought I was birthing something or someone out there in the pelting rain.
The events of the next few minutes ran hurriedly and clear, but as far removed from me as though I were watching everything through the wrong end of binoculars. I settled the mattress near the glowing wheel. Glory was off in unflurried haste. She spread my bedclothes and got me undressed by the light of the nickel she had propped up on a ledge on the wall. I cried out when I felt the warmth of my tekla nightgown gliding over my head. I'd forgotten the clothes for Child Within! The muddy waters were tumbling all their softness and smallness now.
Another pain came and when it subsided, Glory had brought a coffee pot from somewhere-one of those huge enameled camp pots-and had filled it from somewhere and put it on the wheel-stove to heat. The cases were gone from our pillows and they lay beside my bed torn into neat squares in a little heap, topped by a battered old jackknife with one sharp blade open. One of the thin blankets had been ripped in four.
Glory's face appeared over me, rugged, comforting.
"We're doin' fine," she said. "Me and Seth had a few things stashed here in the mine. Seth's breathing better. You got nothing to worry about now 'ceptin' Child Within. Nothing to worry about there neither 'ceptin' what you'll name him now that he won't be within any more." "Oh, Glory!" I whispered and turned my cheek to press against her hand.
From there on, I was three people-one who cried out and gasped and struggled with the pain and against the pain and was bound up in the blindness of complete concentration on the task at hand, and an accusing one-one sitting in judgment. And the third me was standing before the bar of that judgment, defenseless and guilty.
The indictment was read from the big Book.
"I was hungry," came the accusation, "'and they fed me."
"I ate their food," I admitted. "Unearned-"
"I was naked and they clothed me-"
"'Now we can have decent clothes,'" I heard myself saying again.
"I was a stranger and they took me in-"
"I condescended to let them care for me," I admitted.
"I was in the prison of my grief and they visited me."
"And I accepted their concern and care of me as an unquestioned right. I took and took and took and gave nothing-" Remorse was sharper than the pain that made the other cry out and struggle on the thin bedclothes.
Think no more highly of yourself than you should. The voice had stopped. Now
the words ran in ribbons of flames, wavering before my closed eyes, searing the tears dry.
To whom much is given, much is expected. Who would be first must be last. Who would be greatest must be the servant of all.
Whatsoever you do unto the least of these­
Then suddenly the separation was over and the three of me coalesced in a quick blind rush and I listened blissfully to the lusty, outraged cry of My Child.
"Oh, Thann!" I whispered as I slid into a cloud of comfort and relaxation. "Oh, Thann, he's here. Our child-our Thann-too."
"You're mighty sure, aren't you?" Glory's voice was amused. "But you're right. He's a boy."
I pushed sleep away from me a little to fret, "Let .me see my poor naked baby. All his little clothes-"
"Not so naked," said Glory. "Here, hold him while I get things squared around." She laid the blanket-wrapped bundle beside me and I lifted up on one elbow to look down into the miracle of the face of my child. I brushed my forefinger across the dark featherdown of his damp hair and lost myself in the realization that here was Child Within. This was what had been Becoming, serenely untouched, within me during all the tumultuous things that had happened. I protested from my half sleep when Glory came back for my child.
"Just going to dress him," said Glory. "You can have him back." .
"Dress him?" I asked fuzzily.
"Yes," said Glory, unwrapping the blanket. "I had that sugar-sack gown in my shoe box and them old pillowcases make pretty soft diapers. Not very wetproof though, I'm afraid."
"A boy?" It was Seth's voice, shaken but clear-his first words since the cabin.
"A boy!" Glory's voice was a hymn of thankfulness. "Want to see him?"
"Sure. Us men gotta stick together!"
I lay and smiled to keep from crying as I heard their murmuring over my child.
"Dark like Davy," Glory finally said softly. "Well, better give him back, I guess." She laid him beside me.
"Glory," I said, "the gown could have been for Davy's child. So you and Seth must be grandparents for my Thann-too."
"I-" Glory bit her lips and smoothed his blanket with a trembling hand. "We-" She swallowed hard. "Sure. It's a pleasure."
"Hey, Grandma," called Seth, hardly above a whisper. "I could do with some coffee!"
"Okay, Grampa, keep your shirt on," said Glory. "One coffee coming up!"
That night after Glory had got us all settled and the nickel light was tucked under a rusty tin can and sleep was flowing warmly around us all, I roused a little and leaned up on one elbow, instinctively curving myself around the precious bundle of my child. The wheel-stove glowed on, taking a little of the raw chill off the rocky room. Glory and Seth were sleeping on the other side of the wheel, their bedding augmented by one of the blankets Jemmy had left. When I told Glory where they were, but not where they came from, she got them and, looking at me over the folded bulk of them, opened her mouth, closed it again, and silently spread one blanket for me and one fur them. Now they were both asleep and I was awake listening to the "voice of many waters, praising-" and added my praise to theirs. Outside, the sky was clearing, but the murmuring lap of the waters reminded that the numberless creeks in the hills had not yet emptied themselves and the tide was rising higher.
I turned over in my mind the odd duality of events of the night. I heard and saw again all the accusations, all the admonitions. They must have all been waiting for just such a chance when the Distorted Me wasn't watching, to break through and confront me with myself. I had known all the words before. Their pertinent wisdom had been familiar to The People before they ever arrived on
Earth and it was one of the endearing things of Earth that we had there found such beautifully rhythmic paraphrases of them.
As I had laid down the burden of Child Within only to assume the greater burden of Thann-too, so also must I lay down the burden of my spoiled-brat self and take up the greater burden of my responsibility as one of The People toward Glory and Seth and whatever the Power sent into my life. Jemmy had been right. I wasn't of The People. I had made myself more of an Outsider than an Outsider, even. Well, remorse is useless except insofar as it changes your way of doing things. And change I would-the Power being my helper.
Then I closed my eyes and felt them begin to dampen a little, as I wondered wistfully how long it would be before Jemmy would come again. Thann-too stirred in the curve of my arm. I looked down into the shadow that held him. "But I Читать дальше