Зенна Гендерсон - Pilgrimage

Mother spoke softly, but her voice came clearly through the tumult.
"Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be up there in the middle of the storm with clouds under your feet and over your head and lightning lacing around you like hot golden rivers?"
Dad rattled his paper. "Sounds uncomfortable," he said. But I sat there and hugged the words to me in wonder. I knew!
l remembered! " 'And the rain like icy silver hair lashing across your lifted face,' " I recited as though it were a loved lesson.
Mother whirled from the window and stared at me. Dad's eyes were on me, dark and troubled.
"How do you know?" he asked.
I ducked my head in confusion. "I don't know," I muttered.
Mother pressed her hands together, hard, her bowed head swinging the curtains of her hair forward over her shadowy face. "'He knows because I know. I know because my mother knew. She knew because our People used to-" Her voice broke. "Those were her words-"
She stopped and turned back to the window, leaning her arm against the frame, her face pressed to it, like a child in tears.
"Oh, Bruce, I'm sorry!"
I stared, round-eyed in amazement, trying to keep tears from coming to my eyes as I fought against Mother's desolation and sorrow.
Dad went to Mother and turned her gently into his arms. He looked over her head at me. "Better run on back to bed, Peter. The worst is over."
I trailed off reluctantly, my mind filled with wonder. Just before I shut my door I stopped and listened.
"I've never said a word to him, honest." Mother's voice quivered. "Oh, Bruce, I try so hard, but sometimes-oh sometimes!"
"I know, Eve. And you've done a wonderful job of it. I know it's hard on you, but we've talked it out so many times. It's the only way, honey."
"Yes," Mother said. "It's the only way, but-oh, be my strength, Bruce! Bless the Power for giving me you!"
I shut my door softly and huddled in the dark in the middle of my bed until I felt Mother's anguish smooth out to loving warmness again. Then for no good reason I flew solemnly to the top of the dresser and back, crawled into bed and relaxed. And remembered. Remembered the hot golden rivers, the clouds over and under and the wild winds that buffeted like foam-frosted waves. But with all the sweet remembering was the reminder, You can't because you're only
eight. You're only eight. You'll have to wait.
And then Bethie was born, almost in time for my ninth birthday. I remember peeking over the edge of the bassinet at the miracle of tiny fingers and spun-sugar hair. Bethie, my little sister. Bethie, who was whispered about and stared at when Mother let her go to school, though mostly she kept her home even after she was old enough. Because Bethie was different-too.
When Bethie was a month old I smashed my finger in the bedroom door. I cried for a quarter of an hour, but Bethie sobbed on and on until the last pain left my finger.
When Bethie was six months old our little terrier, Glib, got caught in a gopher trap. He dragged himself, yelping, back to the house dangling the trap. Bethie screamed until Glib fell asleep over his bandaged paw.
Dad had acute appendicitis when Bethie was two, but it was Bethie who had to be given a sedative until we could get Dad to the hospital.
One night Dad and Mother stood over Bethie as she slept restlessly under sedatives. Mr. Tyree-next-door had been cutting wood and his ax slipped. He lost a big toe and a pint or so of blood, but as Doctor Dueff skidded to a stop on our street it was into our house that he rushed first and then to Mr. Tyree-next-door who lay with his foot swathed and propped up on a chair, his hands pressed to his ears to shut out Bethie's screams.
"What can we do, Eve?" Dad asked. "What does the doctor say?"
"Nothing. They can do nothing for her. He hopes she will outgrow it. He doesn't understand it. He doesn't know that she-"
"What's the matter? What makes her like this?" Dad asked despairingly.
Mother winced. "She's a Sensitive. Among my People there were such-but not so young. Their perception made it possible for them to help sufferers. Bethie has only half the Gift. She has no control."
"Because of me?" Dad's voice was ragged. Mother look at him with steady loving eyes. "Because of us, Bruce. It was the chance we took. We pushed our luck after Peter."
So there we were, the two of us-different-but different in our differences. For me it was mostly fun, but not for Bethie.
We had to be careful for Bethie. She tried school at first, but skinned knees and rough rassling and aching teeth and bumped heads and the janitor's Monday hangover sent her home exhausted and shaking the first day, with hysteria hanging on the flick of an eyelash. So Bethie read for Mother and learned her numbers and leaned wistfully over the gate as the other children went by.
It wasn't long after Bethie's first day in school that I found a practical use for my difference. Dad sent me out to the woodshed to stack a cord of mesquite that Delfino dumped into our back yard from his old wood wagon. I had a date to explore an old fluorspar mine with some other guys and bitterly resented being sidetracked. I slouched out to the woodpile and stood, hands in pockets, kicking the heavy rough stove lengths. Finally I carried in one armload, grunting under the weight, and afterward sucking the round of my thumb where the sliding wood had peeled me. I hunkered down on my heels and stared as I sucked. Suddenly something prickled inside my brain. If I could fly why couldn't I make the wood fly? And I knew I could! I leaned forward and flipped a finger under half a dozen sticks, concentrating as I did so. They lifted into the air and hovered. I pushed them into the shed, guided them to where I wanted them and distributed them like dealing a pack of cards. It didn't take me long to figure out the maximum load, and I had all the wood stacked in a wonderfully short time.
I whistled into the house for my flashlight. The mine was spooky and dark, and I was the only one of the gang with a flashlight.
"I told you to stack the wood." Dad looked up from his milk records.
"I did," I said, grinning.
"Cut the kidding," Dad grunted. "You couldn't be done already." "I am, though," I said triumphantly. "I found a new way to do it. You see-" I
stopped, frozen by Dad's look.
"We don't need any new ways around here," he said evenly.
"Go back out there until you've had time to stack the wood right!"
"It is stacked," I protested. "And the kids are waiting for me!"
"I'm not arguing, son," said Dad, white-faced. "Go back out to the shed."
I went back out to the shed-past Mother, who had come in from the kitchen and whose hand half went out to me. I sat in the shed fuming for a long time, stubbornly set that I wouldn't leave till Dad told me to.
Then I got to thinking. Dad wasn't usually unreasonable like this. Maybe I'd done something wrong. Maybe it was bad to stack wood like that. Maybe-my thoughts wavered as I remembered whispers I'd overheard about Bethie. Maybe it-it was a crazy thing to do-an insane thing.
I huddled close upon myself as I considered it. Crazy means not doing like other people. Crazy means doing things ordinary people don't do. Maybe that's why Dad made such a fuss. Maybe I'd done an insane thing! I stared at the ground, lost in bewilderment. What was different about our family? And for the first time I was able to isolate and recognize the feeling I must have had for a long time-the feeling of being on the outside looking in-the feeling of apartness. With this recognition came a wariness, a need for concealment. If something was wrong no one else must know-I must not betray…
Then Mother was standing beside me. "Dad says you may go now,-" she said, sitting down on my log.
"Peter-" She looked at me unhappily. "Dad's doing what is best. All I can say is: remember that whatever you do, wherever you live, different is dead. You have to conform or-or die. But Peter, don't be ashamed. Don't ever be ashamed!" Then swiftly her hands were on my shoulders and her lips brushed my ear.
"Be different!" she whispered. "Be as different as you can. But don't let anyone see-don't let anyone know!" And she was gone up the back steps, into the kitchen.
As I grew further into adolescence I seemed to grow further and further away from kids my age. I couldn't seem to get much of a kick out of what they considered fun. So it was that with increasing frequency in the years that followed I took Mother's whispered advice, never asking for explanations I knew she wouldn't give. The wood incident had opened up a whole vista of possibilities-no telling what I might be able to do-so I got in the habit of going down to the foot of our pasture lot. There, screened by the brush and greasewood, I tried all sorts of experiments, never knowing whether they would work or not. I sweated plenty over some that didn't work-and some that did.
I found that I could snap my fingers and bring things to me, or send them short distances from me without bothering to touch them as I had the wood. I roosted regularly in the tops of the tall cottonwoods, swan-diving ecstatically down to the ground, warily, after I got too ecstatic once and crash-landed on my nose and chin. By headaching concentration that left me dizzy, I even set a small campfire ablaze. Then blistered and charred both hands unmercifully by confidently scooping up the crackling fire.
Then I guess I got careless about checking for onlookers because some nasty talk got started. Bub Jacobs whispered around that I was "doing things" all alone down in the brush.
His sly grimace as he whispered made the "doing things" any nasty perversion the listeners' imaginations could conjure up, and the "alone" damned me on the spot. I learned bitterly then what Mother had told me. Different is dead-and one death is never enough. You die and die and die.
Then one day I caught Bub cutting across the foot of our wood lot. He saw me coming and lit for tall timber, already smarting under what he knew he'd get if I caught him, I started full speed after him, then plowed to a stop. Why waste effort? If I could do it to the wood I could do it to a blockhead like Bub.
He let out a scream of pure terror as the ground dropped out from under him.
His scream flatted and strangled into silence as he struggled in midair, convulsed with fear of falling and the terrible thing that was happening to him. And I stood and laughed at him, feeling myself a giant towering above stupid dopes like Bub. Sharply, before he passed out, I felt his terror, and an echo of his scream rose in my throat. I slumped down in the dirt, sick with sudden realization, knowing with a knowledge that went beyond ordinary experience that I had done something terribly wrong, that I had prostituted whatever powers I possessed by using them to terrorize unjustly.
I knelt and looked up at Bub, crumpled in the air, higher than my head, higher than my reach, and swallowed painfully as I realized that I had no idea how to get him down. He wasn't a stick of wood to be snapped to the ground. He wasn't me, to dive down through the air. I hadn't the remotest idea how to get a human down.
Half dazed, I crawled over to a shaft of sunlight that slit the cottonwood branches overhead and felt it rush through my fingers like something to be lifted-and twisted-and fashioned and used! Used on Bub! But how? How? I clenched my fist in the flood of light, my mind beating against another door that needed only a word or look or gesture to open, but I couldn't say it, or look it, or make it.
I stood up and took a deep breath. I jumped, batting at Bub's heels that dangled a little lower than the rest of him. I missed. Again I jumped and the tip of one finger flicked his heel and he moved sluggishly in the air. Then I swiped the back of my hand across my sweaty forehead and laughed-laughed at my stupid self.
Cautiously, because I hadn't done much hovering, mostly just up and down, I lifted myself up level with Bub. I put my hands on him and pushed down hard. He didn't move.
I tugged him up and he rose with me. I drifted slowly and deliberately away from him and pondered. Then I got on the other side of him and pushed him toward the branches of the cottonwood. His head was beginning to toss and his lips moved with returning consciousness. He drifted through the air like a waterlogged stump, but he moved and I draped him carefully over a big limb near the top of the tree, anchoring his arms and legs as securely as I could. By the time his eyes opened and he clutched frenziedly for support I was standing down at the foot of the tree, yelling up at him.
"Hang on, Bub! I'll go get someone to help you down!"
So for the next week or so people forgot me, and Bub squirmed under "Who treed you, feller?" and "How's the weather up there?" and "Get a ladder, Bub, get a ladder!"
Even with worries like that it was mostly fun for me. Why couldn't it be like that for Bethie? Why couldn't I give her part of my fun and take part of her pain?
Then Dad died, swept out of life by our Rio Gordo as he tried to rescue a fool Easterner who had camped on the bone-dry white sands of the river bottom in cloudburst weather. Somehow it seemed impossible to think of Mother by herself. It had always been Mother and Dad. Not just two parents but Mother-and-Dad, a single entity. And now our thoughts must limp to Mother-and, Mother-and. And Mother-well, half of her was gone.
After the funeral Mother and Bethie and I sat in our front room, looking at the floor. Bethie was clenching her teeth against the stabbing pain of Mother's fingernails gouging Mother's palms.
I unfolded the clenched hands gently and Bethie relaxed.
"Mother," I said softly, "I can take care of us. I have my part-time job at the plant. Don't worry. I'll take care of us."
I knew what a trivial thing I was offering to her anguish, but I had to do something to break through to her.
"Thank you, Peter," Mother said, rousing a little. "I know you will-" She bowed her head and pressed both hands to her dry eyes with restrained
desperation. "Oh, Peter, Peter! I'm enough of this world now to find death a despair and desolation instead of the solemnly sweet calling it is. Help me, help me!" Her breath labored in her throat and she groped blindly for my hand.
"If I can, Mother," I said, taking one hand as Bethie took the other. "Then help me remember. Remember with me."
And behind my closed eyes I remembered. Unhampered flight through a starry night, a flight of a thousand happy people like birds in the sky, rushing to meet the dawn-the dawn of the Festival. I could smell the flowers that garlanded the women and feel the quiet exultation that went with the Festival dawn. Then the leader sounded the magnificent opening notes of the Festival song as he caught the first glimpse of the rising sun over the heavily wooded hills. A thousand voices took up the song. A thousand hands lifted in the Sign ….
I opened my eyes to find my own fingers lifted to trace a sign I did not know. My own throat throbbed to a note I had never sung. I took a deep breath and glanced over at Bethie. She met my eyes and shook her head sadly. She hadn't seen. Mother sat quietly, eyes closed, her face cleared and calmed.
"What was it, Mother?" I whispered.
"The Festival," she said softly. "'For an those who had been called during the year. For your father, Peter and Bethie. We remembered it for your father."
"Where was it?" I asked. "Where in the world-?"
"Not in this-" Mother's eyes flicked open. "It doesn't matter, Peter. You are of this world. There is no other for you."
"Mother," Bethie's voice was a hesitant murmur, "what do you mean, 'remember'?"
Mother looked at her and tears swelled into her dry burned-out eyes.
"Oh, Bethie, Bethie, all the burdens and none of the blessings! I'm sorry, Bethie, I'm sorry." And she fled down the hall to her room.
Bethie stood close against my side as we looked after Mother.
"Peter," she murmured, "what did Mother mean, 'none of the blessings'?"
"I don't know," I said.
"I'll bet it's because I can't fly like you."
"Fly!" My startled eyes went to hers. "How do you know?"
"'I know lots of things," she whispered. "But mostly I know we're different. Other people aren't like us. Peter, what made us different?"
"Mother?" I whispered. "Mother?"
"I guess so," Bethie murmured. "But how come?"
We fell silent and then Bethie went to the window where the late sun haloed her silvery blond hair in fire.
"I can do things, too," she whispered. "Look."
She reached out and took a handful of sun, the same sort of golden sun-slant that had flowed so heavily through my fingers under the cottonwoods while Bub dangled above me. With flashing fingers she fashioned she sun into an intricate glowing pattern. "But what's it for?" she murmured, "except for pretty?"
"I know," I said, looking at my answer for lowering Bub. "I know, Bethie." And I took the pattern from her. It strained between my fingers and flowed into darkness.
The years that followed were casual uneventful years. I finished high school, but college was out of the question. I went to work in the plant that provided work for most of the employables in Socorro.
Mother built up quite a reputation as a midwife-a very necessary calling in a community which took literally the injunction to multiply and replenish the earth and which lay exactly seventy-five miles from a hospital, no matter which way you turned when you got to the highway.
Bethie was in her teens and with Mother's help was learning to control her visible reactions to the pain of others, but I knew she still suffered as much as, if not more than, she had when she was smaller. But she was able to go to
school most of the time now and was becoming fairly popular in spite of her quietness.
So all in all we were getting along quite comfortably and quite ordinarily except-well, I always felt as though I were waiting for something to happen or for someone to come. And Bethie must have, too, because she actually watched and listened-especially after a particularly bad spell. And even Mother. Sometimes as we sat on the porch in the long evenings she would cock her head and listen intently, her rocking chair still. But when we asked what she heard she'd sigh and say, "Nothing. Just the night." And her chair would rock again.
Of course I still indulged my differences. Not with the white fire of possible discovery that they had kindled when I first began, but more like the feeding of a small flame just "for pretty." I went farther afield now for my "holidays," but Bethie went with me. She got a big kick out of our excursions, especially after I found that I could carry her when I flew, and most especially after we found, by means of a heart-stopping accident, that though she couldn't go up she could control her going down. After that it was her pleasure to have me carry her up as far as I could and she would come down, sometimes taking an hour to make the descent, often weaving about her the intricate splendor of her sunshine patterns.
It was a rustling russet day in October when our world ended-again. "We talked and laughed over the breakfast table, teasing Bethie about her date the night before. Color was high in her usually pale cheeks, and, with all the laughter and brightness the tingle of fall, everything just felt good.
But between one joke and another the laughter drained out of Bethie's face and the pinched set look came to her lips.
"Mother!" she whispered, and then she relaxed.
"Already?" asked Mother, rising and finishing her coffee as I went to get her coat. "I had a hunch today would be the day. Reena would ride that jeep up Peppersauce Canyon this close to her time."
I helped her on with her coat and hugged her tight.
"Bless-a-mama," I said, "when are you going to retire and let someone else snatch the fall and spring crops of kids?'"
"When I snatch a grandchild or so for myself," she said, joking, but I felt her sadness. "Besides she's going to name this one Peter-or Bethie, as the case may be." She reached for her little black bag and looked at Bethie. "'No more yet?"
Bethie smiled. "'No," she murmured.
"Then I've got plenty of time. Peter, you'd better take Bethie for a holiday. Reena takes her own sweet time and being just across the road makes it bad on Bethie."
"Okay, Mother," I said. "We planned one anyway, but we hoped this time you'd go with us."
Mother looked at me, hesitated and turned aside. "I-I might sometime."
"Mother! Really?" This was the first hesitation from Mother in all the times we'd asked her.
"Well, you've asked me so many times and I've been wondering. Wondering if it's fair to deny our birthright. After all there's nothing wrong in being of the People."
"What people, Mother?" I pressed, "Where are you from? Why can-?"
"Some other time, son," Mother said. "Maybe soon. These last few months I've begun to sense-yes, it wouldn't hurt you to know even if nothing could ever come of it; and perhaps soon something can come, and you will have to know. But no," she chided as we clung to her. "There's no time now. Reena might fool us after all and produce before I get there. You kids scoot, now!"
"We looked back as the pickup roared across the highway and headed for Mendigo's Peak. Mother answered our wave and went in the gate of Keena's yard, where Dalt, in spite of this being their sixth, was running like an anxious puppy dog from Mother to the porch and back again.
It was a day of perfection for us. The relaxation of flight for me, the
delight of hovering for Bethie, the frosted glory of the burning-blue sky, the russet and gold of grasslands stretching for endless miles down from the snow-flecked blue and gold Mendigo.
At lunchtime we lolled in the pleasant warmth of our favorite baby box canyon that held the sun and shut out the wind. After we ate we played our favorite game, Remembering. It began with my clearing my mind so that it lay as quiet as a hidden pool of water, as receptive as the pool to every pattern the slightest breeze might start quivering across its surface.
Then the memories would come-strange un-Earthlike memories that were like those Mother and I had had when Dad died. Bethie could not remember with me, but she seemed to catch the memories from me almost before the words could form in my mouth.
So this last lovely "holiday" we remembered again our favorite. We walked the darkly gleaming waters of a mountain lake, curling our toes in the liquid coolness, loving the tilt and sway of the waves beneath our feet, feeling around us from shore and sky a dear familiarity that was stronger than any Earth ties we had yet formed.
Before we knew it the long lazy afternoon had fled and we shivered in the sudden chill as the sun dropped westward, nearing the peaks of the Huachucas. We packed the remains of our picnic in the basket, and I turned to Bethie, to lift her and carry her back to the pickup.
She was smiling her soft little secret smile.
"Look, Peter," she murmured. And flicking her fingers over her head she shook out a cloud of snowflakes, gigantic whirling tumbling snowflakes that clung feather-soft to her pale hair and melted, glistening, across her warm cheeks and mischievous smile.
"Early winter, Peter!" she said.
"Early winter, punkin!" I cried and snatching her up, boosted her out of the little canyon and jumped over her, clearing the boulders she had to scramble over. "For that you walk, young lady!"
But she almost beat me to the car anyway. For one who couldn't fly she was learning to run awfully light.
Twilight had fallen before we got back to the highway. We could see the headlights of the scurrying cars that seldom even slowed down for Socorro. "So this is Socorro, wasn't it?" was the way most traffic went through.
We had topped the last rise before the highway when Bethie screamed. I almost lost control of the car on the rutty road. She screamed again, a wild tortured cry as she folded in on herself.
"Bethie!" I called, trying to get through to her. "What is it? Where is it? Where can I take you?"
But her third scream broke off short and she slid limply to the floor. I was terrified. She hadn't reacted like this in years. She had never fainted like this before. Could it be that Reena hadn't had her child yet? That she was in such agony-but even when Mrs. Allbeg had died in childbirth Bethie hadn't-I lifted Bethie to the seat and drove wildly homeward, praying that Mother would be…
And then I saw it. In front of our house. The big car skewed across the road. The kneeling cluster of people on the pavement.
The next thing I knew I was kneeling, too, beside Dr. Dueff, clutching the edge of the blanket that mercifully covered Mother from chin to toes. I lifted a trembling hand to the dark trickle of blood that threaded crookedly down from her forehead.
"Mother," I whispered. "Mother!"
Her eyelids fluttered and she looked up blindly. "Peter." I could hardly hear her. "Peter, where's Bethie?"
"She fainted. She's in the car," I faltered. "Oh, Mother!"
"Tell the doctor to go to Bethie."
"'But, Mother!" I cried. "You-"
"I am not called yet. Go to Bethie."
We knelt by her bedside, Bethie and I. The doctor was gone. There was no use
trying to get Mother to a hospital. Just moving her indoors had started a dark oozing from the corner of her mouth. The neighbors were all gone except Gramma Reuther who always came to troubled homes and had folded the hands of the dead in Socorro from the founding of the town. She sat now in the front room holding her worn Bible in quiet hands, after all these years no longer needing to look up the passages of comfort and assurance.
The doctor had quieted the pain for Mother and had urged sleep upon Bethie, not knowing how long the easing would last, but Bethie wouldn't take it.
Suddenly Mother's eyes were open.
"I married your father," she said clearly, as though continuing a conversation. "We loved each other so, and they were all dead-all my People. Of course I told him first, and oh, Peter! He believed me! After all that time of having to guard every word and every move I had someone to talk to-someone to believe me. I told him all about the People and lifted myself and then I lifted the car and turned it in mid-air above the highway-just for fun. It pleased him a lot but it made him thoughtful and later he said, 'You know, honey, your world and ours took different turns way back there. We turned to gadgets. You turned to the Power.' "
Her eyes smiled. "He got so he knew when I was lonesome for the Home. Once he said, "Homesick, honey? So am I. For what this world could have been. Or maybe-God willing-what it may become." "Your father was the other half of me." Her eyes closed, and in the silence her breath became audible, a harsh straining sound. Bethie crouched with both hands pressed to her chest, her face dead white in the shadows.
"We discussed it and discussed it," Mother cried. "But we had to decide as we did. We thought I was the last of the People. I had to forget the Home and be of Earth. You children had to be of Earth, too, even if-That's why he was so stern with you, Peter. Why he didn't want you to-experiment. He was afraid you'd do too much around other people if you found out-" She stopped and lay panting. "Different is dead," she whispered, and lay scarcely breathing for a moment.
"I knew the Home." Her voice was heavy with sorrow.
"I remember the Home. Not just because my People remembered it but because I saw it. I was born there. It's gone now. Gone forever. There is no Home. Only a band of dust between the stars!" Her face twisted with grief and Bethie echoed her cry of pain.
Then Mother's face cleared and her eyes opened. She half propped herself up in her bed.
"You have the Home, too. You and Bethie. You will have it always. And your children after you. Remember, Peter? Remember?"
Then her head tilted attentively and she gave a laughing. sob. "Oh, Peter! Oh, Bethie! Did you hear it? I've been called! I've been called!" Her hand lifted in the Sign and her lips moved tenderly.
"Mother!" I cried fearfully. "What do you mean? Lie down. Please lie down!" I pressed her back against the pillows.
"I've been called back to the Presence. My years are finished. My days are totaled."
"But Mother," I blubbered like a child, "what will we do without you?"
"Listen!" Mother whispered rapidly, one hand pressed to my hair. "You must find the rest. You must go right away. They can help Bethie. They can help you, Peter. As long as you are separated from them you are not complete. I have felt them calling the last year or so, and now that I am on the way to the Presence I can hear them clearer, and clearer." She paused and held her breath. "There is a canyon-north. The ship crashed there, after our life slips-here, Peter, give me your hand." She reached urgently toward me and I cradled her hand in mine.
And I saw half the state spread out below me like a giant map. I saw the wrinkled folds of the mountains, the deceptively smooth roll of the desert up to the jagged slopes. I saw the blur of timber blunting the hills and I saw the angular writhing of the narrow road through the passes. Then I felt a
sharp pleasurable twinge, like the one you feel when seeing home after being away a long time.
"There!" Mother whispered as the panorama faded. "I wish I could have known before. It's been lonely-"But you, Peter," she said strongly. "You and Bethie must go to them." "Why should we, Mother?" I cried in desperation. "What are they to us or we to them that we should leave Socorro and go among strangers?'"
Mother pulled herself up in bed, her eyes intent on my face. She wavered a moment and then Bethie was crouched behind her, steadying her back.
"They are not strangers," she said clearly and slowly. "They are the People. "We shared the ship with them during the Crossing. They were with us when we were out in the middle of emptiness with only the fading of stars behind and the brightening before to tell us we were moving. They, with us, looked at all the bright frosting of stars across the blackness, wondering if on one of them we would find a welcome.
"You are woven of their fabric. Even though your father was not of the People-"
Her voice died, her face changed. Bethie moved from in back of her and lowered her gently. Mother clasped her hands and sighed.
"It's a lonely business," she whispered. "No one can go with you. Even with them waiting it's lonely."
In the silence that followed we heard Gramma Reuther rocking quietly in the front room. Bethie sat on the floor beside me, her cheeks flushed, her eyes wide with a strange dark awe.
"Peter, it didn't hurt. It didn't hurt at all. It healed!"
But we didn't go. How could we leave my job and our home and go off to-where? Looking for-whom? Because-why? It was mostly me, I guess, but I couldn't quite believe what Mother had told us. After all she hadn't said anything definite. We were probably reading meaning where it didn't exist. Bethie returned again and again to the puzzle of Mother and what she had meant, but we didn't go.
And Bethie got paler and thinner, and it was neatly a year later that I came home to find her curled into an impossibly tight ball on her bed, her eyes tight shut, snatching at breath that came out again in sharp moans.
I nearly went crazy before I at last got through to her and uncurled her enough to get hold of one of her hands. Finally, though, she opened dull dazed eyes and looked past me.
"Like a dam, Peter," she gasped. "It all comes in. It should-it should! I was born to-" I wiped the cold sweat from her forehead. "But it just piles up and piles up. It's supposed to go somewhere. I'm supposed to do something! Peter Peter Peter!" She twisted on the bed, her distorted face pushing into the pillow.
"What does, Bethie?" I asked, turning her face to mine.
"What does?"
"Glib's foot and Dad's side and Mr. Tyree-next-door's toe-" and her voice faded down through the litany of years of agony.
"'I'll go get Dr. Dueff," I said hopelessly.
"No." She turned her face away. "Why build the dam higher? Let it break. Oh, soon soon!"
"Bethie, don't talk like that," I said, feeling inside me my terrible aloneness that only Bethie could fend off now that Mother was gone. "We'll find something-some way-"
"Mother could help," she gasped. "A little. But she's gone. And now I'm picking up mental pain, too! Reena's afraid she's got cancer. Oh, Peter Peter!" Her voice strained to a whisper. "Let me die! Help me die!"
Both of us were shocked to silence by her words. Help her die? I leaned against her hand. Go back into the Presence with the weight of unfinished years dragging at our feet? For if she went I went, too.
Then my eyes flew open and I stared at Bethie's hand. What Presence? Whose ethics and mores were talking in my mind?
And so I had to decide. I talked Bethie into a sleeping pill and sat by her
even after she was asleep. And as I sat there all the past years wound through my head. The way it must have been for Bethie all this time and I hadn't let myself know.
Just before dawn I woke Bethie. We packed and went. I left a note on the kitchen table for Dr. Dueff saying only that we were going to look for help for Bethie and would he ask Reena to see to the house. And thanks.
I slowed the pickup over to the side of the junction and slammed the brakes on.
"Okay," I said hopelessly. "You choose which way this time. Or shall we toss for it? Heads straight up, tails straight down!
I can't tell where to go, Bethie. I had only that one little glimpse that Mother gave me of this country. There's a million canyons and a million side roads. We were fools to leave Socorro. After all we have nothing to go on but what Mother said. It might have been delirium."
"No," Bethie murmured. "'It can't be. It's got to be real."
"But, Bethie," I said, leaning my weary head on the steering wheel, "you know how much I want it to be true, not only for you but for myself, too. But look. What do we have to assume if Mother was right? First, that space travel is possible-was possible nearly fifty years ago. Second, that Mother and her People came here from another planet. Third, that we are, bluntly speaking, half-breeds, a cross between Earth and heaven knows what world. Fourth, that there's a chance-in ten million-of our finding the other People who came at the same time Mother did, presupposing that any of them survived the Crossing.
"Why, any one of these premises would brand us as crazy crackpots to any normal person. No, we're building too much on a dream and a hope. Let's go back, Bethie. We've got just enough gas money along to make it. Let's give it up."
"And go back to what?" Bethie asked, her face pinched. "No, Peter. Here."
I looked up as she handed me one of her sunlight patterns, a handful of brilliance that twisted briefly in my fingers before it flickered out.
"Is that Earth?" she asked quietly. "How many of our friends can fly? How many-" she hesitated, "how many can Remember?"
"Remember!" I said slowly, and then I whacked the steering wheel with my fist. "Oh, Bethie, of all the stupid-! Why, it's Bub all over again!"
I kicked the pickup into life and turned on the first faint desert trail beyond the junction. I pulled off even that suggestion of a trail and headed across the nearly naked desert toward a clump of ironwood, mesquite and catclaw that marked a sand wash against the foothills. With the westering sun making shadow lace through the thin foliage we made camp.
I lay on my back in the wash and looked deep into the arch of the desert sky. The trees made a typical desert pattern of warmth and coolness on me, warm in the sun, cool in the shadow, as I let my mind clear smoother, smoother, until the soft intake of Bethie's breath as she sat beside me sent a bright ripple across it.
And I remembered. But only Mother-and-Dad and the little campfire I had gathered up, and Glib with the trap on his foot and Bethie curled, face to knees on the bed, and the thin crying sound of her labored breath.
I blinked at the sky. I had to Remember. I just had to. I shut my eyes and concentrated and concentrated, until I was exhausted. Nothing came now, not even a hint of memory. In despair I relaxed, limp against the chilling sand. And all at once unaccustomed gears shifted and slipped into place in my mind and there I was, just as I had been, hovering over the life-sized map.
Slowly and painfully I located Socorro and the thin thread that marked the Rio Gordo. I followed it and lost it and followed it again, the finger of my attention pressing close. Then I located Vulcan Springs Valley and traced its broad rolling to the upsweep of the desert, to the Sierra Cobrena Mountains. It was an eerie sensation to look down on the infinitesimal groove that must be where I was lying now. Then I hand-spanned my thinking around our camp spot. Nothing. I probed farther north, and east, and north again. I drew a
deep breath and exhaled it shakily. There it was. The Home twinge. The call of familiarity.
I read it off to Bethie. The high thrust of a mountain that pushed up baldly past its timber, the huge tailings dump across the range from the mountain. The casual wreathing of smoke from what must be a logging town, all forming sides of a slender triangle. Somewhere in this area was the place.
I opened my eyes to find Bethie in tears.
"Why, Bethie!" I said. "What's wrong? Aren't you glad-?"
Bethie tried to smile but her lips quivered. She hid her face in the crook of her elbow and whispered. "I saw, too! Oh, Peter, this time I saw, too!"
We got out the road map and by the fading afternoon light we tried to translate our rememberings. As nearly as we could figure out we should head for a place way off the highway called Kerry Canyon. It was apparently the only inhabited spot anywhere near the big bald mountain. I looked at the little black dot in the kink in the third-rate road and wondered if it would turn out to be a period to all our hopes or the point for the beginning of new lives for the two of us. Life and sanity for Bethie, and for me . . . In a sudden spasm of emotion I crumpled the map in my hand. I felt blindly that in all my life I had never known anyone but Mother and Dad and Bethie. That I was a ghost walking the world. If only I could see even one other person that felt like our kind! Just to know that Bethie and I weren't all alone with our unearthly heritage!
I smoothed out the map and folded it again. Night was on us and the wind was cold. We shivered as we scurried around looking for wood for our campfire.
Kerry Canyon was one business street, two service stations, two saloons, two stores, two churches and a handful of houses flung at random over the hillsides that sloped down to an area that looked too small to accommodate the road. A creek which was now thinned to an intermittent trickle that loitered along, waited for the fall rains to begin. A sudden speckling across our windshield suggested it hadn't long to wait.
We rattled over the old bridge and half through the town. The road swung up sharply over a rusty single-line railroad and turned left, shying away from the bluff that was hollowed just enough to accommodate one of the service stations.
We pulled into the station. The uniformed attendant came alongside.
"We just want some information," I said, conscious of the thinness of my billfold. We had picked up our last tankful of gas before plunging into the maze of canyons between the main highway and here. Our stopping place would have to be soon whether we found the People or not.
"Sure! Sure! Glad to oblige." The attendant pushed his cap back from his forehead. "How can I help you?"
I hesitated, trying to gather my thoughts and words-and some of the hope that had jolted out of me since we had left the junction. "We're trying to locate some-friends-of ours. We were told they lived out the other side of here, out by Baldy. Is there anyone-?"
"Friends of them people?" he asked in astonishment. "Well, say, now, that's interesting! You're the first I ever had come asking after them."
I felt Bethie's arm trembling against mine. Then there was something beyond Kerry Canyon!
"How come? What's wrong with them?"
"Why, nothing, Mac, nothing. Matter of fact they're dern nice people. Trade here a lot. Come in to church and the dances."
"Dances?" I glanced around the steep sloping hills.
"'Sure. We ain't as dead as we look," the attendant grinned.
"Come Saturday night we're quite a town. Lots of ranches around these hills. Course, not much out Cougar Canyon way. That's where your friends live, didn't you say?"
"Yeah. Out by Baldy."
"Well, nobody else lives out that way." He hesitated. "Hey, there's something
I'd like to ask."
"Sure. Like what?"
"Well, them people pretty much keep themselves to themselves, I don't mean they're stuck-up or anything, but-well, I've always wondered. Where they from? One of them overrun countries in Europe? They're foreigners, ain't they? And seems like most of what Europe exports any more is DP's. Are them people some?"
"Well, yes, you might call them that. Why?"
"Well, they talk just as good as anybody and it must have been a war a long time ago because they've been around since my Dad's time, but they just-feel different." He caught his upper lip between his teeth reflectively. "Good different. Real nice different." He grinned again. "Wouldn't mind shining up to some of them gals myself. Don't get no encouragement, though.
"Anyway, keep on this road. It's easy. No other road going that way. Jackass Flat will beat the tar outa your tires, but you'll probably make it, less'n comes up a heavy rain. Then you'll skate over half the county and most likely end up in a ditch. Slickest mud in the world. Colder'n hell-beg pardon, lady-out there on the flat when the wind starts blowing. Better bundle up."
"Thanks, fella," I said. "Thanks a lot. Think we'll make it before dark?"
"Oh, sure. 'Tain't so awful far but the road's lousy. Oughta make it in two-three hours, less'n like I said, comes up a heavy rain."
We knew when we hit Jackass Flat. It was like dropping off the edge. If we had thought the road to Kerry Canyon was bad we revised our opinions, but fast. In the first place it was choose your own ruts. Then the tracks were deep sunk in heavy clay generously mixed with sharp splintery shale and rocks as big as your two fists that were like a gigantic gravel as far as we could see across the lifeless expanse of the flat.
But to make it worse, the ruts I chose kept ending abruptly as though the cars that had made them had either backed away from the job or jumped over. Jumped over! I drove, in and out of ruts, so wrapped up in surmises that I hardly noticed the tough going until a cry from Bethie aroused me.
"Stop the car!" she cried. "Oh, Peter! Stop the car!"
I braked so fast that the pickup swerved wildly, mounted the side of a rut, lurched and settled sickeningly down on the back tire which sighed itself flatly into the rising wind.
"What on earth!" I yelped, as near to being mad at Bethie as I'd ever been in my life. "What was that for?"
Bethie, white-faced, was emerging from the army blanket she had huddled in against the cold. "It just came to me. Peter, supposing they don't want us?"
"Don't want us? What do you mean?" I growled, wondering if that lace doily I called my spare tire would be worth the trouble of putting it on.
"We never thought. It didn't even occur to us. Peter, we-we don't belong. We won't be like them. We're partly of Earth-as much as we are of wherever else. Supposing they reject us? Supposing they think we're undesirable-?" Bethie turned her face away. "Maybe we don't belong anywhere, Peter, not anywhere at all."
I felt a chill sweep over me that was not of the weather. We had assumed so blithely that we would be welcome. But how did we know? Maybe they wouldn't want us. We weren't of the People. We weren't of Earth. Maybe we didn't belong-not anywhere.
"Sure they'll want us," I forced out heartily. Then my eyes wavered away from Bethie's and I said defensively, "Mother said they would help us. She said we were woven of the same fabric-"
"But maybe the warp will only accept genuine woof. Mother couldn't know. There weren't any-half-breeds-when she was separated from them. Maybe our Earth blood will mark us-"
"There's nothing wrong with Earth blood," I said defiantly.
"Besides, like you said, what would there be for you if we went back?"
She pressed her clenched fists against her cheeks, her eyes wide and vacant. "Maybe," she muttered, "'maybe if I'd just go on and go completely insane it
wouldn't hurt so terribly much. It might even feel good."
"Bethie!" my voice jerked her physically. "Cut out that talk right now! We're going on. The only way we can judge the People is by Mother. She would never reject us or any others like us. And that fellow back there said they were good people."
I opened the door. "You better try to get some kinks out of your legs while I change the tire. By the looks of the sky we'll be doing some skating before we get to Cougar Canyon."
But for all my brave words it wasn't just for the tire that I knelt beside the car, and it wasn't only the sound of the lug wrench that the wind carried up into the darkening sky.
I squinted through the streaming windshield, trying to make out the road through the downpour that fought our windshield wiper to a standstill. What few glimpses I caught of the road showed a deceptively smooth-looking chocolate river, but we alternately shook like a giant maraca, pushed out sheets of water like a speedboat, or slithered aimlessly and terrifyingly across sudden mud flats that often left us yards off the road. Then we'd creep cautiously back until the soggy squelch of our tires told us we were in the flooded ruts again.
Then all at once it wasn't there. The road, I mean. It stretched a few yards ahead of us and then just flowed over the edge, into the rain, into nothingness.
"It couldn't go there," Bethie murmured incredulously. "It can't just drop off like that."
"Well, I'm certainly not dropping off with it, sight unseen," I said, huddling deeper into my army blanket. My jacket was packed in back and I hadn't bothered to dig it out. I hunched my shoulders to bring the blanket up over my head. "I'm going to take a look first."
I slid out into the solid wall of rain that hissed and splashed around me on the flooded flat. I was soaked to the knees and mud-coated to the shins before I slithered to the drop-off. The trail-call that a road?-tipped over the edge of the canyon and turned abruptly to the right, then lost itself along a shrub-grown ledge that sloped downward even as it paralleled the rim of the canyon. If I could get the pickup over the rim and onto the trail it wouldn't be so bad. But-I peered over the drop-off at the turn. The bottom was lost in shadows and rain. I shuddered.
Then quickly, before I could lose my nerve, I squelched back to the car.
"Pray, Bethie. Here we go."
There was the suck and slosh of our turning tires, the awful moment when we hung on the brink. Then the turn. And there we were, poised over nothing, with our rear end slewing outward.
The sudden tongue-biting jolt as we finally landed, right side up, pointing the right way on the narrow trail, jarred the cold sweat on my face so it rolled down with the rain.
I pulled over at the first wide spot in the road and stopped the car. We sat in the silence, listening to the rain. I felt as though something infinitely precious were lying just before me. Bethie's hand crept into mine and I knew she was feeling it, too. But suddenly Bethie's hand was snatched from mine and she was pounding with both fists against my shoulder in most un-Bethie-like violence.
"I can't stand it, Peter!" she cried hoarsely, emotion choking her voice. "Let's go back before we find out any more. If they should send us away! Oh, Peter! Let's go before they find us! Then we'll still have our dream. We can pretend that someday we'll come back. We can never dream again, never hope again!" She hid her face in her hands. "I'll manage somehow. I'd rather go away, hoping, than run the risk of being rejected by them."
"Not me," I said, starting the motor. "We have as much chance of a welcome as we do of being kicked out. And if they can help you-say, what's the matter with you today? I'm supposed to be the doubting one, remember? You're the
mustard seed of this outfit!" I grinned at her, but my heart sank at the drawn white misery of her face. She almost managed a smile.
The trail led steadily downward, lapping back on itself as it worked back and forth along the canyon wall, sometimes steep, sometimes almost level. The farther we went the more rested I felt, as though I were shutting doors behind or opening them before me.
Then came one of the casual miracles of mountain country. The clouds suddenly opened and the late sun broke through. There, almost frighteningly, a huge mountain pushed out of the featureless gray distance. In the flooding light the towering slopes seemed to move, stepping closer to us as we watched. The rain still fell, but now in glittering silver-beaded curtains; and one vivid end of a rainbow splashed color recklessly over trees and rocks and a corner of the sky.
I didn't watch the road. I watched the splendor and glory spread out around us. So when, at Bethie's scream, I snatched back to my driving all I took down into the roaring splintering darkness was the thought of Bethie and the sight of the other car, slanting down from the bobbing top branches of a tree, seconds before it plowed into us broadside, a yard above the road.
I thought I was dead. I was afraid to open my eyes because I could feel the rain making little puddles over my closed lids. And then I breathed. I was alive, all right. A knife jabbed itself up and down the left side of my chest and twisted itself viciously with each reluctant breath I drew.
Then I heard a voice.
"Thank the Power they aren't hurt too badly. But, oh, Valancy! What will Father say?" The voice was young and scared.
"You've known him longer than I have," another girl-voice answered. "You should have some idea."
"I never had a wreck before, not even when I was driving instead of lifting."
"I have a hunch that you'll be grounded for quite a spell," the second voice replied. "'But that isn't what's worrying me, Karen. Why didn't we know they were coming? We always can sense Outsiders. We should have known-"
"Q. E. D. then," said the Karen-voice. "'Q. E. D.'?"
"Yes. If we didn't sense them, then they're not Outsiders-" There was the sound of a caught breath and then, "Oh, what I said, Valancy! You don't suppose!" I felt a movement close to me and heard the soft sound of breathing. "Can it really be two more of us? Oh, Valancy, they must be second generation-they're about our age. How did they find us? Which of our Lost Ones were their parents?"
Valancy sounded amused. "Those are questions they're certainly in no condition to answer right now, Karen. We'd better figure out what to do. Look, the girl is coming to."
I was snapped out of my detached eavesdropping by a moan beside me. I started to sit up. "Bethie-" I began, and all the knives twisted through my lungs. Bethie's scream followed my gasp.
My eyes were open now, but good, and my leg was an agonized burning ache down at the far end of my consciousness. I gritted my teeth but Bethie moaned again.
"Help her, help her!" I pleaded to the two fuzzy figures leaning over us as I tried to hold my breath to stop the jabbing.
"But she's hardly hurt," Karen cried. "A bump on her head. Some cuts."
With an effort I focused on a luminous clear face-Valancy's-whose deep eyes bent close above me. I licked the rain from my lips and blurted foolishly, "You're not even wet in all this rain!" A look of consternation swept over her face. There was a pause as she looked at me intently and then said, "Their shields aren't activated, Karen. We'd better extend ours."
"Okay, Valancy." And the annoying sibilant wetness of the rain stopped.
"How's the girl?"
"It must be shock or maybe internal-"
I started to turn to see, but Bethie's sobbing cry pushed me flat again.
"Help her," I gasped, grabbing wildly in my memory for Mother's words. "She's a-a Sensitive!"
"A Sensitive?" The two exchanged looks. "Then why doesn't she-?" Valancy started to say something, then turned swiftly. I crooked my arm over my eyes as I listened.
"Honey-Bethie-hear me!" The voice was warm but authoritative. "I'm going to help you. I'll show you how, Bethie."
There was a silence. A warm hand clasped mine and Karen squatted close beside me.
"She's sorting her," she whispered. "Going into her mind. To teach her control. It's so simple. How could it happen that she doesn't know-?"
I heard a soft wondering "Oh!" from Bethie, followed by a breathless "Oh, thank you, Valancy, thank you!"
I heaved myself up onto my elbow, fire streaking me from head to foot, and peered over at Bethie. She was looking at me, and her quiet face was happier than smiles could ever make it. We stared for the space of two relieved tears, then she said softly, "Tell them now, Peter. We can't go any farther until you tell them."
I lay back again, blinking at the sky where the scattered raindrops were still falling, though none of them reached us. Karen's hand was warm on mine and I felt a shiver of reluctance. If they sent us away . . . ! But then they couldn't take back what they had given to Bethie, even if-I shut my eyes and blurted it out as bluntly as possible.
"We aren't of the People-not entirely. Father was not of the People. We're half-breeds."
There was a startled silence.
"You mean your mother married an Outsider?" Valancy's voice was filled with astonishment. "That you and Bethie are-?'
"Yes she did and yes we are!" I retorted. "And Dad was the best-" My belligerence ran thinly out across the sharp edge of my pain. "They're both dead now. Mother sent us to you."
"But Bethie is a Sensitive-" Valancy's voice was thoughtful
"Yes, and I can fly and make things travel in the air and I've even made fire. But Dad-" I hid my face and let it twist with the increasing agony.
"Then we can!" I couldn't read the emotion in Valancy's voice. "Then the People and Outsiders-but it's unbelievable that you-" Her voice died.
In the silence that followed, Bethie's voice came fearful and tremulous, "Are you going to send us away?" My heart twisted to the ache in her voice.
"Send you away! Oh, my people, my people! Of course not! As if there were any question." Valancy's arm went tightly around Bethie, and Karen's hand closed warmly on mine. The tension that had been a hard twisted knot inside me dissolved, and Bethie and I were home.
Then Valancy became very brisk.
"Bethie, what's wrong with Peter?"
Bethie was astonished. "How did you know his name?" Then she smiled. "Of course. When you were sorting me!" She touched me lightly along my sides, along my legs. "Four of his ribs are hurt. His left leg is broken. That's about all. Shall I control him?"
"Yes," Valancy said. "I'll help."
And the pain was gone, put to sleep under the persuasive warmth that came to me as Bethie and Valancy came softly into my mind.
"Good," Valancy said. "We're pleased to welcome a Sensitive. Karen and I know a little of their function because we are Sorters. But we have no full-fledged Sensitive in our Group now."
She turned to me. "You said you know the inanimate lift?"
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know the words for lots of things."
"You'll have to relax completely. We don't usually use it on people. But if you let go all over we can manage."
They wrapped me warmly in our blankets and lightly, a hand under my shoulders
and under my heels, lifted me carrying-high and sped with me through the trees, Bethie trailing from Valancy's free hand.
Before we reached the yard the door flew open and warm yellow light spilled out into the dusk. The girls paused on the porch and shifted me to the waiting touch of two men. In the wordless pause before the babble of question and explanation I felt Bethie beside me draw a deep wondering breath and merge like a raindrop in a river into the People around us.
But even as the lights went out for me again, and I felt myself slide down into comfort and hunger-fed belongingness, somewhere deep inside of me was a core of something that couldn't quite-no, wouldn't quite dissolve-wouldn't yet yield itself completely to the People.
LEA SLIPPED soundlessly toward the door almost before Peter's last words were said. She was halfway up the steep road that led up the canyon before she heard the sound of Karen coming behind her. Lifting and running, Karen caught up with her.
"Lea!" she called, reaching for her arm.
With a twist of her shoulder Lea evaded Karen and wordlessly, breathlessly ran on up the road.
"Lea!" Karen grabbed both her shoulders and stopped her bodily. "Where on earth are you going!"
"Let me go!" Lea shouted. "Sneak! Peeping Tom! Let me go!" She tried to wrench out of Karen's hands.
"Lea, whatever you're thinking it isn't so."
"Whatever I'm thinking!" Lea's eyes blazed. "Don't know what I'm thinking? Haven't you done enough scrabbling around in all the muck and mess-?" Her fingernails dented Karen's hands. "Let me go!"
"Why do you care, Lea?" Karen's cold voice jabbed mercilessly. "Why should you care? What difference does it make to you} You left life a long time ago."
"Death-" Lea choked; feeling the dusty bitterness of the word she had thought so often and seldom said. "Death is at least private-no one nosing around-"
"Can you be so sure?" It was Karen's quiet voice. "Anyway, believe me, Lea, I haven't gone in to you even once. Of course I could if I wanted to and I will if I have to, but I never would without your knowledge-if not your consent. All I've learned of you has been from the most open outer part of your mind. Your inner mind is sacredly your own. The People are taught reverence for individual privacy. Whatever powers we have are for healing, not for hurting. We have health and life for you if you'll accept it. You see, there is balm in Gilead! Don't refuse it, Lea."
Lea's hands drooped heavily. The tension went out of her body slowly.
"I heard you last night," she said, puzzled. "I heard your story and it didn't even occur to me that you could-I mean, it just wasn't real and I had no idea-" She let Karen turn her back down the road. "But then when I heard Peter-I don't know-he seemed more true. You don't expect men to go in for fairy tales-" She clutched suddenly at Karen. "Oh, Karen, what shall I do? I'm so mixed up that I can't-"
"Well, the simplest and most immediate thing is to come on back. We have time to hear another report and they're waiting for us. Melodye is next. She saw the People from quite another angle."
Back in the schoolroom Lea fitted herself self-consciously into her corner again, though no one seemed to notice her. Everyone was busy reliving or commenting on the days of Peter and Bethie. The talking died as Melodye Amerson took her place at the desk.
"Valancy's helping me," she smiled. "We chose the theme together, too. Remember-?
" 'Behold, I am at a point to die and what profit shall this birthright do to me? And he sold his birthright for bread and pottage.' "I couldn't do the recalling alone, either. So now, if you don't mind, there'll be a slight pause while we construct our network."
She relaxed visibly and Lea could fed the receptive quietness spread as though the whole room were becoming mirror-placid like the pool in the creek, and then Melodye began to speak ….
POTTAGE
YOU GET tired of teaching after a while. Well, maybe not of teaching itself, because it's insidious and remains a tug in the blood for all of your life, but there comes a day when you look down at the paper you're grading or listen to an answer you're giving a child and you get a boinnng! feeling. And each reverberation of the boing is a year in your life, another set of children through your hands, another beat in monotony, and it's frightening. The value of the work you're doing doesn't enter into it at that moment and the monotony is bitter on your tongue.
Sometimes you can assuage that feeling by consciously savoring those precious days of pseudofreedom between the time you receive your contract for the next year and the moment you sign it. Because you can escape at that moment, but somehow-you don't.
But I did, one spring. I quit teaching. I didn't sign up again. I went chasing after-after what? Maybe excitement-maybe a dream of wonder-maybe a new bright wonderful world that just must be somewhere else because it isn't here-and-now. Maybe a place to begin again so I'd never end up at the same frightening emotional dead end. So I quit.
But by late August the emptiness inside me was bigger than boredom, bigger than monotony, bigger than lusting after freedom. It was almost terror to be next door to September and not care that in a few weeks school starts-tomorrow school starts-first day of school. So, almost at the last minute, I went to the placement bureau. Of course it was too late to try to return to my other school, and besides, the mold of the years there still chafed in too many places.
"Well," the placement director said as he shuffled his end-of-the-season cards, past Algebra and Home Ec and PE and High-School English, "there's always Bendo." He thumbed out a battered-looking three-by-five. "There's always Bendo." And I took his emphasis and look for what they were intended and sighed.
"'Bendo?"
"Small school. One room. Mining town, or used to be. Ghost town now." He sighed wearily and let down his professional hair. "Ghost people, too. Can't keep a teacher there more than a year. Low pay-fair housing-at someone's home. No community activities-no social life. No city within fifty or so miles. No movies. No nothing but children to be taught. Ten of them this year. All grades."
"Sounds like the town I grew up in," I said. "Except we had two rooms and lots of community activities."
"I've been to Bendo." The director leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head. "Sick community. Unhappy people. No interest in anything. Only reason they have a school is because it's the law. Law-abiding anyway. Not enough interest in anything to break a law, I guess."
"I'll take it," I said quickly before I could think beyond the feeling that this sounded about as far back as I could go to get a good running start at things again.
He glanced at me quizzically. "If you're thinking of lighting a torch of high reform to set Bendo afire with enthusiasm, forget it. I've seen plenty of king-sized torches fizzle out there."
"I have no torch," I said. "Frankly I'm fed to the teeth with bouncing bright enthusiasm and huge PTA's and activities until they come out your ears. They usually turn out to be the most monotonous kind of monotony. Bendo will be a rest."
"It will that," the director said, leaning over his cards again.
"Saul Diemus is the president of the board. If you don't have a car the only way to get to Bendo is by bus-it runs once a week."
I stepped out into the August sunshine after the interview and sagged a little under its savage pressure, almost hearing hiss as the refrigerated coolness of the placement bureau evaporated from my skin.
I walked over to the quad and sat down on one of the stone benches I'd never had time to use, those years ago when I had been a student here. I looked up at my old dorm window and, for a moment, felt a wild homesickness-not only for years that were gone and hopes that had died and dreams that had had grim awakenings, but for a special magic I had found in that room. It was a magic-a true magic-that opened such vistas to me that for a while anything seemed possible, anything feasible-if not for me right now, then for others, someday. Even now, after the dilution of time, I couldn't quite believe that magic, and even now, as then, I wanted fiercely to believe it. If only it could be so! If only it could be so!
I sighed and stood up. I suppose everyone has a magic moment somewhere in his life and, like me, can't believe that anyone else could have the same-but mine was different! No one else could have had the same experience! I laughed at myself. Enough of the past and of dreaming. Bendo waited. I had things to do.
I watched the rolling clouds of red-yellow dust billow away from the jolting bus, and cupped my hands over my face to get a breath of clean air. The grit between my teeth and the smothering sift of dust across my clothes was familiar enough to me, but I hoped by the time we reached Bendo we would have left this dust plain behind and come into a little more vegetation. I shifted wearily on the angular seat, wondering if it had ever been designed for anyone's comfort, and caught myself as a sudden braking of the bus flung me forward.
We sat and waited for the dust of our going to catch up with us, while the last-but-me passenger, a withered old Indian, slowly gathered up his gunny-sack bundles and his battered saddle and edged his Levied velveteen-bloused self up the aisle and out to the bleak roadside.
We roared away, leaving him a desolate figure in a wide desolation. I wondered where he was headed. How many weary miles to his hogan in what hidden wash or miniature greenness in all this wilderness.
Then we headed straight as a die for the towering redness of the bare mountains that lined the horizon. Peering ahead I could see the road, ruler straight, disappearing into the distance. I sighed and shifted again and let the roar of the motor and the weariness of my bones lull me into a stupor on the border between sleep and waking.
A change in the motor roar brought me back to the jouncing bus. We jerked to a stop again. I looked out the window through the settling clouds of dust and wondered who we could be picking up out here in the middle of nowhere. Then a clot of dust dissolved and I saw
BENDO POST OFFICE GENERAL STORE Garage & Service Station Dry Goods & Hardware Magazines
in descending size on the front of the leaning, weather-beaten building propped between two crumbling smoke-blackened stone ruins. After so much flatness it was almost a shock to see the bare tumbled boulders crowding down to the roadside and humping their lichen-stained shoulders against the sky.
"Bendo," the bus driver said, unfolding his lanky legs and hunching out of the bus. "End of the line-end of civilization-end of everything!" He grinned and the dusty mask of his face broke into engaging smile patterns.
"Small, isn't it?" I grinned back.
"Usta be bigger. Not that it helps now. Roaring mining town years ago." As he
spoke I could pick out disintegrating buildings dotting the rocky hillsides and tumbling into the steep washes.
"My dad can remember it when he was a kid. That was long enough ago that there was still a river for the town to be in the bend o'."
"Is that where it got its name?"
"Some say yes, some say no. Might have been a feller named Bendo." The driver grunted as he unlashed my luggage from the bus roof and swung it to the ground.
"Oh, hi!" said the driver.
I swung around to see who was there. The man was tall, well built, good-looking-and old. Older than his face-older than years could have made him because he was really young, not much older than I. His face was a stern unhappy stillness, his hands stiff on the brim of his Stetson as he held it waist high.
In that brief pause before his "Miss Amerson?" I felt the same feeling coming from him that you can feet around some highly religious person who knows God only as a stern implacable vengeful deity, impatient of worthless man, waiting only for an unguarded moment to strike him down in his sin. I wondered who or what his God was that prisoned him so cruelly. Then I was answering, "Yes, how do you do?" And he touched my hand briefly with a "Saul Diemus" and turned to the problem of my two large suitcases and my record player.
I followed Mr. Diemus' shuffling feet silently, since he seemed to have slight inclination for talk. I hadn't expected a reception committee, but kids must have changed a lot since I was one, otherwise curiosity about teacher would have lured out at least a couple of them for a preview look. But the silent two of us walked on for a half block or so from the highway and the post office and rounded the rocky corner of a hill. I looked across the dry creek bed and up the one winding street that was residential Bendo. I paused on the splintery old bridge and took a good look. I'd never see Bendo like this again. Familiarity would blur some outlines and sharpen others, and I'd never again see it, free from the knowledge of who lived behind which blank front door.
The houses were scattered haphazardly over the hillsides and erratic flights of rough stone steps led down from each to the road that paralleled the bone-dry creek bed. The houses were not shacks but they were unpainted and weathered until they blended into the background almost perfectly. Each front yard had things growing in it, but such subdued blossoming and unobtrusive planting that they could easily have been only accidental massings of natural vegetation.
Such a passion for anonymity…
"The school-" I had missed the swift thrust of his hand.
"Where?" Nothing I could see spoke school to me.
"Around the bend." This time I followed his indication and suddenly, out of the featurelessness of the place, I saw a bell tower barely topping the hill beyond the town, with the fine pencil stroke of a flagpole to one side. Mr. Diemus pulled himself together to make the effort.
"The school's in the prettiest place around here. There's a spring and trees, and-" He ran out of words and looked at me as though trying to conjure up something else I'd like to hear.
"I'm board president," he said abruptly. "You'll have ten children from first grade to second-year high school. You're the boss in your school. Whatever you do is your business. Any discipline you find desirable-use. We don't pamper our children. Teach them what you have to. Don't bother the parents with reasons and explanations. The school is yours."
"And you'd just as soon do away with it and me, too," I smiled at him.
He looked startled. "The law says school them." He started across the bridge. "So school them."
I followed meekly, wondering wryly what would happen if I asked Mr. Diemus why he hated himself and the world he was in and even-oh, breathe it softly-the children I was to "school."
"You'll stay at my place," he said. "We have an extra room."
I was uneasily conscious of the wide gap of silence that followed his pronouncement, but couldn't think of a thing to fill. it. I shifted my small case from one hand to the other and kept my eyes on the rocky path that protested with shifting stones and vocal gravel every step we took. It seemed to me that Mr. Diemus was trying to make all the noise he could with his shuffling feet. But, in spite of the amplified echo from the hills around us, no door opened, no face pressed to a window. It was a distinct relief to hear suddenly the happy unthinking rusty singing of hens as they scratched in the coarse dust.
I hunched up in the darkness of my narrow bed trying to comfort my uneasy stomach. It wasn't that the food had been bad-it had been quite adequate-but such a dingy meal! Gloom seemed to festoon itself from the ceiling and unhappiness sat almost visibly at the table.
I tried to tell myself that it was my own travel weariness that slanted my thoughts, but I looked around the table and saw the hopeless endurance furrowed into the adult faces and beginning faintly but unmistakably on those of the children. There were two children there. A girl, Sarah (fourth grade, at a guess), and an adolescent boy, Matt (seventh?)-too silent, too well mannered, too controlled, avoiding much too pointedly looking at the empty chair between them.
My food went down in lumps and quarreled fiercely with the coffee that arrived in square-feeling gulps. Even yet-long difficult hours after the meal-the food still wouldn't lie down to be digested. Tomorrow I could slip into the pattern of school, familiar no matter where school was, since teaching kids is teaching kids no matter where. Maybe then I could convince my stomach that all was well, and then maybe even start to thaw those frozen unnatural children. Of course they well might be little demons away from home-which is very often the case. Anyway I felt, thankfully, the familiar September thrill of new beginnings.
I shifted in bed again, then stiffening my neck, lifted my ears clear of my pillow.
It was a whisper, the intermittent hissing I had been hearing. Someone was whispering in the next room to mine. I sat up and listened unashamedly. I knew Sarah's room was next to mine, but who was talking with her? At first I could get only half words and then either my ears sharpened or the voices became louder.
"… and did you hear her laugh? Right out loud at the table!" The quick whisper became a low voice. "Her eyes crinkled in the corners and she laughed."
"Our other teachers laughed, too." The uncertainly deep voice must be Matt.
"Yes," Sarah whispered. "But not for long. Oh, Matt! What's wrong with us? People in our books have fun. They laugh and run and jump and do all kinds of fun stuff and nobody-" Sarah faltered, "no one calls it evil."
"Those are only stories," Matt said. "Not real life."
"I don't believe it!" Sarah cried. "When I get big I'm going away from Bendo. I'm going to see-"
"Away from Bendo!" Matt's voice broke in roughly. "Away from the Group?"
I lost Sarah's reply. I felt as though I had missed an expected step. As I wrestled with my breath the sights and sounds and smells of my old dorm room crowded back upon me. Then I caught myself. It was probably only a turn of phrase. This futile desolate unhappiness couldn't possibly be related in any way to that magic ….
"Where is Dorcas?" Sarah asked, as though she knew the answer already.
"Punished." Matt's voice was hard and unchildlike. "She jumped." "Jumped!" Sarah was shocked.
"Over the edge of the porch. Clear down to the path. Father saw her. I think she let him see her on purpose." His voice was defiant. "Someday when I get older I'm going to jump, too-all I want to-even over the house. Right in front
of Father."
"Oh, Matt!" The cry was horrified and admiring. "You wouldn't! You couldn't. Not so far, not right in front of Father!"
"I would so," Matt retorted. "I could so, because I-" His words cut off sharply. "Sarah," he went on, "can you figure any way, any way, that jumping could be evil? It doesn't hurt anyone. It isn't ugly. There isn't any law-"
"Where is Dorcas?" Sarah's voice was almost inaudible. "In the hidey hole again?" She was almost answering Matt's question instead of asking one of her own.
"Yes," Matt said. "In the dark with only bread to eat. So she can learn what a hunted animal feels like. An animal that is different, that other animals hate and hunt." His bitter voice put quotes around the words.
"You see," Sarah whispered. "You see?"
In the silence following I heard the quiet closing of a door and the slight vibration of the floor as Matt passed my room. I eased back onto my pillow. I lay back, staring toward the ceiling. What dark thing was here in this house? In this community? Frightened children whispering in the dark. Rebellious children in hidey holes learing how hunted animals feel. And a Group… ? No it couldn't be. It was just the recent reminder of being on campus again that made me even consider that this darkness might in some way be the reverse of the golden coin Karen had shown me.
My heart almost failed me when I saw the school. It was one of those monstrosities that went up around the turn of the century. This one had been built for a boom town, but now all the upper windows were boarded up and obviously long out of use. The lower floor was blank, too, except for two rooms-though with the handful of children quietly standing around the door it was apparent that only one room was needed. And not only was the building deserted, the yard was swept clean from side to side, innocent of grass or trees-or playground equipment. There was a deep grove just beyond the school, though, and the glint of water down canyon.
"No swings?" I asked the three children who were escorting me. "No slides? No seesaws?"
"No!" Sarah's voice was unhappily surprised. Matt scowled at her warningly.
"No," he said, "we don't swing or slide-nor see a saw!" He grinned up at me faintly.
"What a shame!" I said. "Did they all wear out? Can't the school afford new ones?"
"We don't swing or slide or seesaw." The grin was dead.
"We don't believe in it."
There's nothing quite so flat and incontestable as that last statement. I've heard it as an excuse for practically every type of omission, but, so help me, never applied to playground equipment. I couldn't think of a reply any more intelligent than "Oh," so I didn't say anything.
All week long I felt as if I were wading through knee-deep Jello or trying to lift a king-sized feather bed up over my head. I used up every device I ever thought of to rouse the class to enthusiasm-about anything, anything! They were polite and submissive and did what was asked of them, but joylessly, apathetically, enduringly.
Finally, just before dismissal time on Friday, I leaned in desperation across my desk.
"Don't you like anything?" I pleaded. "Isn't anything fun?"
Dorcas Diemus' mouth opened into the tense silence. I saw Matt kick quickly, warningly, against the leg of the desk. Her mouth closed.
"I think school is fun," I said. "I think we can enjoy all kinds of things. I want to enjoy teaching but I can't unless you enjoy learning."
"We learn," Dorcas said quickly. "We aren't stupid."
"You learn," I acknowledged. "You aren't stupid. But don't any of you like school?"
"I like school," Martha piped up, my first grade. "I think it's fun!"
"Thank you, Martha," I said. "And the rest of you-" I glared at them in mock anger, "you're going to have fun if I have to beat it into you!"
To my dismay they shrank down apprehensively in their seats and exchanged troubled glances. But before I could hastily explain myself Matt laughed and Dorcas joined him. And I beamed fatuously to hear the hesitant rusty laughter spread across the room, but I saw ten-year-old Esther's hands shake as she wiped tears from her eyes. Tears-of laughter?
That night I twisted in the darkness of my room, almost too tired to sleep, worrying and wondering. What had blighted these people? They had health, they had beauty-the curve of Martha's cheek against the window was a song, the lift of Dorcas' eyebrows was breathless grace. They were fed-adequately, clothed-adequately, housed-adequately, but nothing like they could have been. I'd seen more joy and delight and enthusiasm from little campground kids who slept in cardboard shacks and washed-if they ever did-in canals and ate whatever edible came their way, but grinned, even when impetigo or cold sores bled across their grins.
But these lifeless kids! My prayers were troubled and I slept restlessly.
A month or so later things had improved a little bit, but not much. At least there was more relaxation in the classroom. And I found that they had no deep-rooted convictions against plants, so we had things growing on the deep window sills-stuff we transplanted from the spring and from among the trees. And we had jars of minnows from the creek and one drowsy horned toad that roused in his box of dirt only to flick up the ants brought for his dinner. And we sang, loudly and enthusiastically, but, miracle of miracles, without even one monotone in the whole room. But we didn't sing "Up, Up in the Sky" or "How Do You Like to Go Up in a Swing?" My solos of such songs were received with embarrassed blushes and lowered eyes!
There had been one dust-up between us, though-this matter of shuffling everywhere they walked.
"Pick up your feet, for goodness' sake," I said irritably one morning when the shoosh, shoosh, shoosh of their coming and going finally got my skin off. "Surely they're not so heavy you can't lift them."
Timmy, who happened to be the trigger this time, nibbled unhappily at one finger. "I can't," he whispered. "Not supposed to.'"
"Not supposed to?" I forgot momentarily how warily I'd been going with these frightened mice of children. "Why not? Surely there's no reason in the world why you can't walk quietly."
Matt looked unhappily over at Miriam, the sophomore who was our entire high school She looked aside, biting her lower lip, troubled. Then she turned back and said, "It is customary in Bendo."
"To shuffle along?" I was forgetting any manners I had. "Whatever for?"
"That's the way we do in Bendo." There was no anger in her defense, only resignation.
"Perhaps that's the way you do at home. But here at school let's pick our feet up. It makes too much disturbance otherwise."
"But it's bad-" Esther began.
Matt's hand shushed her in a hurry.
"Mr. Diemus said what we did at school was my business," I told them. "He said not to bother your parents with our problems. One of our problems is too much noise when others are trying to work. At least in our schoolroom let's lift our feet and walk quietly."
The children considered the suggestion solemnly and turned to Matt and Miriam for guidance. They both nodded and we went back to work. For the next few minutes, from the corner of my eyes, I saw with amazement all the unnecessary trips back and forth across the room, with high-lifted feet, with grins and side glances that marked such trips as high adventure-as a delightfully daring thing to do! The whole deal had me bewildered. Thinking back I realized that not only the children of Bendo scuffled but all the adults did, too-as though they were afraid to lose contact with the earth, as though . . . I shook my
head and went on with the lesson.
Before noon, though, the endless shoosh, shoosh, shoosh of feet began again. Habit was too much for the children. So I silently filed the sound under "Uncurable, Endurable," and let the matter drop.
I sighed as I watched the children leave at lunchtime. It seemed to me that with the unprecedented luxury of a whole hour for lunch they'd all go home. The bell tower was visible from nearly every house in town. But instead they all brought tight little paper sacks with dull crumbly sandwiches and unimaginative apples in them. And silently with their dull scuffly steps they disappeared into the thicket of trees around the spring.
"Everything is dulled around here," I thought. "Even the sunlight is blunted as it floods the hills and canyons. There is no mirth, no laughter. No high jinks or cutting up. No preadolescent silliness. No adolescent foolishness. Just quiet children, enduring."
I don't usually snoop but I began wondering if perhaps the kids were different when they were away from me-and from their parents. So when I got back at twelve thirty from an adequate but uninspired lunch at Diemuses' house I kept on walking past the schoolhouse and quietly down into the grove, moving cautiously through the scanty undergrowth until I could lean over a lichened boulder and look down on the children.
Some were lying around on the short still grass, hands under their heads, blinking up at the brightness of the sky between the leaves. Esther and little Martha were hunting out fillaree seed pods and counting the tines of the pitchforks and rakes and harrows they resembled. I smiled, remembering how I used to do the same thing.
"I dreamed last night." Dorcas thrust the statement defiantly into the drowsy silence. "I dreamed about the Home."
My sudden astonished movement was covered by Martha's horrified "Oh, Dorcas!"
"What's wrong with the Home?" Dorcas cried, her cheeks scarlet. "There was a Home! There was! There was! Why shouldn't we talk about it?"
I listened avidly. This couldn't be just coincidence-a Group and now the Home. There must be some connection …. I pressed closer against the rough rock. "But it's bad!" Esther cried. "You'll be punished! We can't talk about the Home!"
"Why not?" Joel asked as though it had just occurred to him, as things do just occur to you when you're thirteen. He sat up slowly. "Why can't we?"
There was a short tense silence.
"I've dreamed, too," Matt said. "I've dreamed of the Home-and it's good, it's good!"
"Who hasn't dreamed?" Miriam asked. "We all have, haven't we? Even our parents. I can tell by Mother's eyes when she has."
"Did you ever ask how come we aren't supposed to talk about it?" Joel asked. "I mean and ever get any answer except that it's bad."
"I think it has something to do with a long time ago," Matt said. "Something about when the Group first came-"
"I don't think it's just dreams," Miriam declared, "because I don't have to be asleep. I think it's remembering."
"Remembering?" asked Dorcas. "How can we remember something we never knew?"
"I don't know," Miriam admitted, "but I'll bet it is."
"I remember," volunteered Talitha, who never volunteered anything.
"Hush!" whispered Abie, the second-grade next-to-youngest who always whispered.
"I remember," Talitha went on stubbornly. "I remember a dress that was too little so the mother just stretched the skirt till it was long enough and it stayed stretched. 'Nen she pulled the waist out big enough and the little girl put it on and flew away."
"Hoh!" Timmy scoffed. "I remember better than that." His face stilled and his eyes widened. "The ship was so tall it was like a mountain and the people went in the high high door and they didn't have a ladder. 'Nen there were stars,
big burning ones-not squinchy little ones like ours."
"It went too fast!" That was Abie! Talking eagerly! "When the air came it made the ship hot and the little baby died before all the little boats left the ship." He scrunched down suddenly, leaning against Talitha and whimpering. "You see!" Miriam lifted her chin triumphantly. "We've all dreamed-I mean remembered!"
"I guess so," said Matt. "I remember. It's lifting, Talitha, not flying. You go and go as high as you like, as far as you want to and don't ever have to touch the ground-at all! At all!" He pounded his fist into the gravelly red soil beside him.
"And you can dance in the air, too," Miriam sighed. "Freer than a bird, lighter than-"
Esther scrambled to her feet, white-faced and panic-stricken.
"Stop! Stop! It's evil! It's bad! I'l1 tell Father! We can't dream-or lift-or dance! It's bad, it's bad! You'll die for it! You'll die for it!"
Joel jumped to his feet and grabbed Esther's arm.
"Can we die any deader?" he cried, shaking her brutally.
"You call this being alive?" He hunched down apprehensively and shambled a few scuffling steps across the clearing.
I fled blindly back to school, trying to wink away my tears without admitting I was crying, crying for these poor kids who were groping so hopelessly for something they knew they should have. Why was it so rigorously denied them? Surely, if they were what I thought them . . . And they could be! They could be!
I grabbed the bell rope and pulled hard. Reluctantly the bell moved and tolled.
One o'clock, it clanged. One o'clock!
I watched the children returning with slow uneager shuffling steps.
That night I started a letter:
"Dear Karen, "Yep, 'sme after all these years. And, oh, Karen! I've found some more! Some more of the People! Remember how much you wished you knew if any other Groups besides yours had survived the Crossing? How you worried about them and wanted to find them if they had? Well, I've found a whole Group! But it's a sick unhappy group. Your heart would break to see them. If you could come and start them on the right path again…" I put my pen down. I looked at the lines I had written and then crumpled the paper slowly. This was my Group. I had found them. Sure, I'd tell Karen-but later. Later, after-well, after I had tried to start them on the right path-at least the children.
After all I knew a little of their potentialities. Hadn't Karen briefed me in those unguarded magical hours in the old dorm, drawn to me as I was to her by some mutual sympathy that seemed stronger than the usual roommate attachment, telling me things no Outsider had a right to hear? And if, when I finally told her and turned the Group over to her, if it could be a joyous gift, then I could feel that I had repaid her a little for the wonder world she had opened for me.
"Yes," I thought ruefully, "and there's nothing like a large portion of ignorance to give one a large portion of confidence." Bur I did want to try-desperately. Maybe if I could break prison for someone else, then perhaps my own bars . . . I dropped the paper in the wastebasket.
But it was several weeks before I could bring myself to do anything to let the children know I knew about them. It was such an impossible situation, even if it was true-and if it wasn't what kind of lunacy would they suspect me of?
When I finally set my teeth and swore a swear to myself that I'd do something definite my hands shook and my breath was a flutter in my dry throat.
"Today-" I said with an effort, "today is Friday." Which gem of wisdom the children received with charitable silence.
"We've been working hard all week, so let's have fun today." This stirred the children-half with pleasure, half with apprehension. They, poor kids, found my "fun" much harder than any kind of work I could give them. But some of them were acquiring a taste for it. Martha had even learned to skip!
"First, monitors pass the composition paper." Esther and Abie scuffled hurriedly around with the paper, and the pencil sharpener got a thorough workout. At least these kids didn't differ from others in their pleasure in grinding their pencils away at the slightest excuse.
"Now," I gulped, "we're going to write." Which obvious asininity was passed over with forbearance, though Miriam looked at me wonderingly before she bent her head and let her hair shadow her face. "Today I want you all to write about the same thing. Here is our subject."
Gratefully I turned my back on the children's waiting eyes and printed slowly:
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