Зенна Гендерсон - Pilgrimage

terror-" She dreamed a moment longer, then shook her head and laughed.
"There, Jemmy, I seen my duty and I done it. Whose hot little hands hold the next installment?"
Jemmy smoothed out his crumpled paper. "Well, Peter's next, I guess. Unless Bethie wants to-"
"Oh no, oh no!" Bethie's soft voice protested. "Peter, Peter can do it better-he was the one-I mean-Peter!"
Everyone laughed. "Okay, Bethie, okay!" Jemmy said.
"Cool down. Peter it will be. Well, Peter, you have until tomorrow evening to get organized. I think after the excitement of the day, one-well-installment will be enough."
The crowd stood up and swirled and moved. The soft murmur of their voices and laughter washed over Lea like a warm ocean. "Lea." It was Karen. "Here's Jemmy and Valancy. They want to meet you."
Lea struggled to her feet, feeling impaled by their interested eyes. She felt welcome enwrapping her-a welcome far beyond any words. She felt a pang catch painfully somewhere in her chest, and to her bewilderment tears began to wash down her cheeks. She turned her head aside and groped for a handkerchief. Someone tucked a huge white one into her hands and someone's shoulder was strong and steady for a moment and someone's arms were deft and sure as they lifted her and bore her, blind with sobless weeping, away from the schoolhouse.
Later-oh, much later-she suddenly sat up in her bed. Karen was there instantly, noiselessly.
"Karen, was that supposed to be real?"
"Was what supposed to be real?"
"That story you told. It wasn't true, was it?"
"But of course. Every word of it."
"But it can't be!" Lea cried. "People from space! Magic people! It can't be true."
"Why don't you want it to be true?"
"'Because-because! It doesn't fit. There's nothing outside of what is-I mean, you go around the world and come back to where you started from. Everything ends back where it started from. There are boundaries beyond which-" Lea groped for words. "Anything outside the bounds isn't true!"
"Who defines the boundaries?""
"Why, they're just there. You get trapped in them when you're born. "You have to bear them till you die."
"Who sold you into slavery?" Karen asked wonderingly.
"Or did you volunteer? I agree with you that everything comes back to where it started, but where did everything start?"
"No!" Lea shrieked, clenching her fists over her eyes and writhing back on her pillow. "Not back to that muck and chaos and mindless seething!"
The blackness rolled and flared and roared its insidious whimper-the crowded emptiness, the incinerating cold-the impossibility of all possibilities ….
"Lea, Lea." Karen's voice cut softly but authoritatively through the tangled horror. "Lea, sleep now. Sleep now, knowing that everything started with the Presence and all things can return joyfully to their beginning."
Lea ate breakfast with Karen the next morning. The wind was blowing the short ruffled curtains in and out of the room.
"No screens?" Lea asked, carrying the armed truce with darkness as carefully as a cup of water, not to brim it over.
"No, no screens," Karen said. "We keep the bugs out another. way."
"A way that works for keeping bugs in, too," Lea smiled.
"I tried to leave yesterday."
"I know." Karen held a slice of bread in her hand and watched it brown slowly and fragrantly. "That's why I blocked the windows a little more than usual. They aren't that way today."
"You trust me?" Lea asked, feeling the secret slop of terror in the balanced cup.
"This isn't jail! Yesterday you were still clinging to the skirts of death. Today you can smile. Yesterday I put the lye up on the top shelf. Today you can read the label for yourself."
"Maybe I'm illiterate," Lea said somberly. Then she pushed her cup back. "I'd like to go outside today, if it's okay. It's been a long time since I looked at the world."
"Don't go too far. Most of the going around here is climbing-or lifting. We haven't many Outside-type trails. Only don't go beyond the schoolhouse. Right now we'd rather you didn't-the flat beyond-" She smiled softly. "Anyway there's lots of other places to go."
"Maybe I'll see some of the children," Lea said. "Davy or Lizbeth or Kiah."
Karen laughed. "It isn't very likely-not under the circumstances, and 'the children' would be vastly insulted if they heard you. They've grown up-at least they think they have. My story was years ago, Lea."
"Years ago! I thought it just happened!"
"Oh, my golly, no! What made you think-?"
"You remembered so completely! Such little things. And the way Jemmy looked at Valancy and Valancy at him-"
"The People have their special memory. And Jemmy was only looking love at Valancy. Love doesn't die-"
"Love doesn't-" Lea's mouth twisted. "Come, then, let us define love-" She stood up briskly. "I do want to walk a little-" She hesitated. "And maybe wade a little? In real wet water, free-running-"
"Why, sure," Karen said. "The creek is running. Wade to your heart's content. Lunch will be here for you and I'll be back by supper. We'll go to the school together for Peter's installment."
Lea came upon the pool, her bare feet bruised, her skirt hem dabbled with creek water, and her stomach empty of the lunch she had forgotten.
The pool was wide and quiet. Water murmured into it at one end and chuckled out at the other. In between the surface was like a mirror. A yellow leaf fell slowly from a cottonwood tree and touched so gently down on the water that the resultant rings ran as fine as wire out to the sandy edge. Lea sighed, gathered up her skirts and stepped cautiously into the pool. The clean cold bite of the water caught her breath, but she waded deeper. The water crept up to her knees and over them. She stood under the cottonwood tree, waiting, waiting so quietly that the water closed smoothly around her legs and she could feel its flow only in the tiny crumblings of sand under her feet. She stood there until another leaf fell, brushed her cheek, slipped down her shoulder and curved over her crumpled blouse, catching briefly in the gathered-up folds of her skirt before it turned a leisurely circle on the surface of the shining water.
Lea stared down at the leaf and the silver shadow behind it that was herself, then lifted her face to the towering canyon walls around her. She hugged her elbows tightly to her sides and thought, "I am becoming an entity again. I have form and proportion. I have boundaries and limits. I should be able to learn how to manage a finite being. The burden of being a nothing in infinite nothingness was too much-too much-"
A restless stirring that could turn to panic swung Lea around and she started for shore. As she clambered up the bank, hands encumbered by her skirt, she slipped and, flailing wildly for balance, fell backward into the pool with a resounding splat. Dripping and gasping she scrambled wetly to a sitting position, her shoulders barely out of the water. She blinked the water out of her eyes and saw the man.
He had one foot in the water, poised in the act of starting toward her. He was laughing. She spluttered indignantly, and the water sloshed up almost to her chin.
"I might have drowned!" she cried, feeling very silly and very wet.
"If you go on sitting there you can drown yet!" he called.
"'High water comes in October.'"
"At the rate you're helping me out," she answered. "I'll make it! I can't get up without getting my head all wet."
"But you're already wet all over," he laughed, wading toward her.
"That was accidental," she sputtered. "It's different, doing it on purpose!"
"Female logic!" He grabbed her hands and hoisted her to her feet, pushed her to shore and shoved her up the bank.
Lea looked up into his smiling face and, smiling back, started to thank him. Suddenly his face twisted all out of focus-and retreated a thousand miles away. Faintly, faintly from afar, she heard his voice and her own gasping breath. Woodenly she turned away and started to grope away from him. She felt him catch her hand, and as she tugged away from him she felt all her being waver and dissolve and nothingness roll in, darker and darker.
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