Зенна Гендерсон - Holding Wonder

that were trying to relax to rest. Staggering away from my curtailed car, I fell face down, my poked-forward elbows crunching; in the sand of the dry wash. I held onto the thought and the feeling of that crunching fall as things slid and wrinkled and the sand became a taste and a smell and I dissolved.
There was a man crouching there in the sand across the narrow pool of water from me, eyeing me warily. I tried to spit the sand off my tongue, but only managed a dry, breathy thppppp. The second attempt went a little better. I wavered to my hands and knees and surged shakily forward against the tension that threatened to yank me back if I relaxed even slightly. It felt as though every corner of me was connected to a tightly drawn elastic band. But I wanted water –the water in the pool beyond which the man crouched. I plodded and plodded on all fours. I made it. My face splashed down into the water.
There was a flare of shadowy lights and echoing rainbows and I nearly drowned myself before I could get strength in my neck and elbows to lift myself. I rolled a little away from the pool's edge and blinked my eyes free of the water. Even my eyelids seemed to work against the stretching tension.
The man still crouched across from me, but now he was staring incredulously at something he clutched in both hands. Shakily he lifted the thing and pointed it at me. It was a weapon and the slight flare of the muzzle wavered hardly three yards away from my face. His hands tightened and the echoes and rainbows and lights came on again. Then his hands dropped and he stared at me. I stared back, tonguing a last sand grain out of my mouth, feeling the water trickling down the sides of my face. The weapon slid to the sand as he slowly got to his feet, his eyes intent on me. He backed away until the outthrust of orangy gold granite boulders stopped him. He glanced up and my eyes followed his.
A long shiny metallic curve pointed down at him. At first glance I thought it was an artillery shell of some kind. Then I saw that it was some kind of vehicle, slanting out of a clear sky-half a vehicle. It stopped just as my car did. Just quit a few inches behind an open hatch. Just wasn't beyond that point. It hung there, stuck through the sky.
"Well," I laughed shakily. "Welcome to the club, only I thought Sputnik was round."
"You can speak!" He was startled. So was I. I could understand him but his mouth didn't match what I heard-like a poorly synchronized sound track. And something was going on between his saying and my hearing.
"Sure I can speak," I said. "What did you expect-smoke signals?" "Are you co-eval with savages?" he asked.
"Co-eval? Oh, brother! Vocabulary!" I grinned. "Savages? What savages?"
"It must be a time warp," he said, "though none was charted-"
"I'll pull the next corny line," I said. "What movie are you making?"
"How did you find me?" he asked sullenly. "This sector has been deactivated for decades. And I didn't know KAFKA had developed a defense against the ZAPT. They told everyone there was no defense."
"Fugitive, huh?" I said. "Was that thing supposed to kill me?"
"No need for four letter obscenities," he said, frowning with a prissy distaste. "It was supposed to cinder you." He reached out and nudged the weapon with his toe. Then his eyes sharpened. "What uniform is that? It isn't
KAFKA's."
"Uniform?" I asked, looking down at my ranch clothes. "Levi Strauss's latest. No uniform-well, not exactly anyway."
"On what basis is your time computed?" he asked.
"Time?" I relaxed a little against the sand. As long as he talked, he was forgetting that ZAPT thing. "Days? Hours? Months? What time?"
"Years," he said, "I want to know how far back I've gone."
"Back?" I asked. "How do you know you haven't gone forward? After all, your ZAPT thing didn't cinder me much."
"Idiot" he snarled. "I doubt if you're even Tech! Any Tech knows you can't go forward in time. Time isn't until it's been-"
The sand yanked sideways and pulled into wrinkles up the edge of the sky and we both went sprawling. As I whirled over in the wrinkles, I saw the sky vehicle above me slide down another yard or so. I thudded against my car and became aware of an added rear wheel by thumping my head on the right rear hubcap. The door above me swung open as the front wheels elongated and crept up the sky. I clutched the door and clung. I heard the glove compartment snap open and the accumulated miscellany cascaded down to the slanting floor. Without consciously planning to, I surged forward and grabbed my .22 pistol as it slithered from under a road map.
Then I remembered the other fellow-a little late, because all I saw of him was his distorted face as he launched himself toward me, his weapon reversed to make a club. My arm went up protectively around my forehead, my hand tightening to a fist as it did so. There was a spaaat from the pistol and a yowl from the fellow. He rolled back and forth in the sand, nursing his hand between his knees and yelping like a coyote.
I backed away from him warily, pulling my tension along with me. "I musta missed," I said thankfully.
The fellow scuttled back under the overhang of his vehicle, still clutching his wrist. "Some weapon!" he spat. "Didn't even singe me!" "It wasn't aimed," I said. "And it doesn't singe. It perforates. Anyway, why should I want to singe you? The thing went off accidentally. What's with your wonderful weapon?"
"Your force beam knocked it out of my hand," he said sullenly.
"What force beam?" I asked. "That was a solid chunk of lead." His head lifted, interested. "You mean your weapon propels solids? Then you are primitive. Practically Techless!" He relished the insult.
"Oh?" My eyebrow humped up inquiringly. "My weapon smashed the daylights out of yours. Yours didn't even singe me! And if that solid had hit you instead of your gun, you'd be leaking blood all over the place!"
His face shut down almost into a pout and he had no answer. He flicked a look of hatred at me, then his eyes widened as they focused at something out to one side of me and out of range of my peripheral vision. His jaw dropped.
"That's an old one," I said, "Can't you-" And then my jaw dropped as I looked down stupidly at the shiver of my shirt sleeve and the arrow-head that had
creased a fire along my forearm as it ripped the fabric.
"Well, hell-a-mighty!" I spluttered. "How come I'm fair game, coming and going?" I yanked the arrow out of my sleeve and whirled.
Maybe it was an Indian glaring at me, but it was the hairiest one I ever saw. He was crouching behind the stiff crackle of some kind of animal hide that covered him diagonally from one shoulder to the opposite knee. I just had time to hit the sand before another arrow streaked past me and the almost inaudible twaaaaang of the bow was swallowed up in a howl from the other fellow. This arrow had creased him from mouth corner to ear and red was seeping from under his pressing hand. His eyes were staring, astonished and pained.
I meant to try for the bow arm with my .22 but, as I felt the shot jerk off against the ever-present tension, I knew with a sinking in my stomach, that the muzzle had been dead centered on the hide over the savage's hairy belly. I gulped and dropped my gun, waiting for him to fall. He stood and glared and made no move at all. I backed away, my hands groping behind me on each side until my car stopped me. "Brother! I'm sure glad I'm such a lousy shot! I musta missed again!"
"With what?" He had that unsynchronized sound and lip motion, too. "You're not armed." He reached for another arrow from the quiver behind his shoulder and, with a smooth continuation of movement, pulled back until the stone point met the bent bow.
"Hey!" I protested. "Why so bloodthirsty? Why's everyone so all-fired set on perforating me? I haven't been around long enough to do anything to anyone!"
"You're a stranger." That was sufficient for the savage.
"I have to get you before you get me." That was the other fellow.
"Well, I'm peaceable," I said. "And it won't kill either one of you to talk for a minute. Sit down!" I gestured toward the other fellow. "There, under your vehicle, if that's what it is. Don't you wonder why it's hanging up there like that? "
"And you," I pointed at the savage. He pointed back with the arrow that edged back against the bowstring again. "You can see we're not armed. Neither of us can reach you. Put that thing down for a while." Slowly he lowered his arms.
"What's that?" he asked, gesturing with his chin towards my car.
"That?" I asked. "That's my car. It really has four wheels, not three." I was embarrassed for it. "I ride in it from here to there." I hoped whatever it was that made it possible for us to understand each other, was feeding him some meaning to my words.
"Why not walk?" (Apparently the whatever was on duty!)
"A hundred miles?" I asked. "Two hundred?"
"Why go so far" he asked.
"Well, because what I want is that far away."
"How do you know?"
"Because I've been there before. Brother! You've sure got curiosity!"
"Why didn't you stay there then if what you want is there?"
"Well," I scratched the bridge of my nose. "I want lots of things. Not all of them are here nor there. They're all over the place."
"Food's food," said the savage, "and females are females."
"There are other things to want," I said.
"Shelter from cold and from beasts too big to kill-" He dismissed them with a shrug.
"There are other things," I insisted. "Life isn't just-just-there are other things."
"To live by?"
"To live by." I was positive in the face of his skepticism. "Even if you can't touch them or show them-" My face was getting hot. I wasn't at ease with this type of discussion-nor this type of audience.
The savage opened his mouth, paused, looked puzzled and then thoughtful. One of his hands went to his shoulder and his mouth closed.
I turned to look at the other fellow, feeling lines of tension twist up from both my ears to some point above and out as my head moved.
"If I had my ZAPT-" he snarled.
"Why are you so set on killing?" I asked. "No one's a danger to you at the moment." "Everyone's a danger to me every moment!" He fingered his smashed weapon. "You cinder or get cindered-any Tech knows that from Cindergarten on up." His face crumpled a little, sickly weary. "That `Cindergarten' is supposed to be a joke-at least it used to be, a joke. But the law now is that everyone is armed from first public appearance. They say a third of the kindergartners never make it through their first year. A real live ZAPT is so much fun when you first get it."
"You mean everyone you know is as bloodthirsty as you are? That you kill because someone's in front of your ZAPT thing? There must be dead people all over the place! Wall-to-wall corpses!"
"If I had an operational `ZAPT thing,"' he burlesqued my phrase savagely, his face harshly distorted, "you'd be cindered by now for your obscene speech!" He was white with anger and disgust.
"Kill and dead and blood and corpse?" I questioned, laying out before him again the words that had stung him. "Obscenities? But you apparently kill as casually as you breathe-"
"There are acceptable terms," he insisted. "Only the unTech have such limited vocabularies that they have to resort to such language-" I shook my head, wonderingly, and decided to change the subject.
"I want to know," I started.
"What good would it do?" asked the savage.
"Why bother?" asked the other fellow.
"I want to know," I insisted, "how we got here. I was going to town-"
"I was trying to find refuge," said the other fellow, his face bending again, "I get so tired of trying to stay alive-"
"I was hunting," said the savage. "This water hole-" We all looked at the quiet water in silence, then­
"But I still want to know," I persisted. "How come we landed here together? We don't belong together. What's happened to us?" The two looked at me warily, and then at each other. "And I want to know why your gun couldn't singe me." The other fellow's eyes fell to his battered weapon and he muttered sullenly. "And why my gun couldn't hurt you." I nodded at the savage. "But it blasted his ZAPT." I waved my chin at the other fellow. "And why your arrows nearly got both of us." The savage and I exchanged looks.
Before any of us could open his mouth there came the twisting and the dragging again. The three of us were tumbled together and shaken thoroughly together. I grabbed at memory as I hunched myself trying to avoid flying elbows and heels. Mom's voice was calling to me out of the darkness-"If you kids don't stop fussing, I'll put you all in a sack and shake you up and see which one comes out first!"
We all three came out together. There I was, face down in the edge of the water hole across the back of the savage's legs, holding him down effectively and murderously, the other fellow lying across the small of my back, holding me down. I humped and sent the other fellow sprawling. I grabbed the savage out of the water. He sputtered and spewed and gasped deeply a couple of times between spouting water as I thumped him on the back. Then he scuttled away warily and paused within hiding distance of a goodsized boulder.
Then I saw! There were two more! About my age! They were standing patiently, waiting to be noticed. They looked to me like telephone linemen, or maybe highway surveyors, except that their edges shimmered and crinkled-at least to me. I wondered what they looked like to the savage and the other fellow.
"Okay now?" My ears heard the easy colloquialism, but my eyes saw mouth-movings that didn't equate. We all three nodded. Well! We did share something in common! We could all indicate no!
"Catch you, too?" I half-asked, half-stated. "Whatever it is"
"No. We came," said the one whose edges crinkled faintly cerise, "to uncatch you."
"What-?" I gulped. I must know these fellows! There was a familiarity I couldn't understand-a sudden awe-full feeling clogged my throat. "Why-"
"If you'd finish a question," suggested the Crinkle-green one.
"Who are you?" I asked.
Crinkle-green shot a side glance at Crinkle-cerise. "I knew it'd catch up with me. I never did learn my era-terminology tables very well. Who are we here?"
Crinkle-cerise grinned. "He asked you. It's your answer. Go on, tell the man!"
"Well," said Crinkle-green. "I did learn this terminology table once on a bet-the whole thing though, without the eras. So here goes. We're-" And he started doggedly down a list of terms, none of which made any sense to me. But about six terms down, the savage gasped and staggered back against a boulder. He groped under his garment's shoulder fastening and fumbled out a small, knobby package. He clutched it in his shaking hand as he slid down slowly to the foot of the boulder, his eyes so wide they must have ached him. Crinkle-green smiled reassuringly, said, "Don't be afraid," and went on with his catalog. Suddenly a hint of familiarity caught me, then another, then­"Angels!" I gasped. "You're angels?"
"Apparently in your era," said Crinkle-green and went on for several more phrases until the other fellow jerked and let his jaw fall stupidly.
"But you don't exist!" he gulped. "It's just un-Tech folklore!"
"We're here," said Crinkle-cerise gravely.
The other fellow turned a sickly yellow-white. "Then it's possible that what the un-Techs say about something existing higher than Tech-that we're responsible to someone-" You could see the nausea sweep over his face and he turned away retching deeply, as though physical vomiting could rid him of an intolerable idea.
"Actual messengers from God?" I gasped, still trying to take in the idea.
"Among other things, messengers," said Crinkle-green. "Which brings up the matter in hand. It's your era that's the trouble spot," he said to me. "Building traffic exchanges all over the place. Unfortunately, some of the best designs for them are patterns that will penetrate. And when they puncture through, they drag all the other linearities out of line, and we end up with this kind of confrontation. We've come to mend this penetration and to seal it against a repetition.
"First, we have to restore order-" Crinkle-cerise was up in the air, pushing against the nose of the vehicle hanging in the sky. With his feet braced lightly against nothing and the flat of his hand up against the vehicle, he pushed back and back until there was a slow sloooop, and the vehicle was gone. The sky curved scarlessly blue above us. Crinkle-cerise bounced lightly down to the sand by the water hole.
"Where-where-" The other fellow came staggering on rubbery legs toward Crinkle-cerise, the back of his hand trying to erase the awful taste of useless retching from his mouth. Crinkle-cerise held out his cupped hands, brimming with water, to him.
"Don't touch me!" The other fellow edged around him. "You don't exist! You're nothing but a four-letter obscenity to anyone who's Tech! You can't be true, because then, senior to you there would be-" He bogged down in the enormity of the ideas assailing him.
"Well, you're Tech," suggested Crinkle-cerise. "If you see us and know we exist, then we must exist. You could tell the others-"
"Tell the others!" yelped the other fellow. "I know lapse-fatigue when it hits me! Tell them? And be euthanized?"
Crinkle-cerise shook his head with a sigh and picked up the other fellow's damaged weapon. He ran his finger the length of it and held it out, as complete and mutedly bright as it had been before my bullet hit it. The other
fellow snatched it in one feverish lunge and backed away, the muzzle of the weapon swinging in a small, deadly arc to cover us all.
"Now!" he gritted, visibly trying to force the nausea back behind his teeth, "Now!"
Echoes, rainbows, lights! Everything was gone except the fireworks that bathed me all over. The two angels were gone-disappeared into a vast silvery reflection that stood squarely up to the sky before it shimmered and slid back down to the quivering glitter of the water hole.
The other fellow was sobbing over his clenched hand and his weapon. The savage, backed against his boulder with his arms curved tightly back against it, his head strained back, rolled large white eyes at me. With a deep sense of deprivation, I blinked toward the spot where the angels had stood.
There they were! As though they had never moved! Crinkle-cerise flicked his fingers. The other fellow was gone, his departure marked by a slight kishshsh.
"Poor, stormy, aimless era." Crinkle-green shook his head wonderingly, then looked at Crinkle-cerise. "Say, no one told us this was a changing point! I suppose this is where the awakening started, because he will tell, you know, and try to teach. And they will euthanize-" He squatted down on the sand and ran his fingers over the area, somehow covering the whole place without moving from his position. Then he was inspecting the cupped palm of his hand. "Four hairs, one fingernail and two drops of blood from the scratched cheek. He never did quite manage to up-chuck his revulsion. That's the lot." He stirred his other forefinger around his palm and there was a sudden intensified green crinkle. After it flicked out, he dusted his palms together briskly.
Crinkle-green turned to the savage who had gathered himself together and stood straight and still, his hands clasped around his little bundle.
"Don't be afraid," I heard Crinkle-green say, though his lips didn't move that way.
"Let me fear," said the savage in a voice that wavered and then steadied. "It is a good fear. To bear it one time or maybe two is to be strong. To bear it more is to be mad and a shouting voice of confusion to the others." He held out the little package on the flat of his hand. "Touch my Luck that I may be a leader to my people, to tell them there is something else to live by besides the hunt and the belly." Crinkle-green reached toward the Luck. The green intensified until it became almost audible. Then it paled and the savage, with tender reverent hands, tucked the Luck away inside his garment again.
"Now," said Crinkle-green briskly. "We'll put you back just after your kill. Good feasting! Short winter!" And he flicked his fingers. The savage was gone.
"A worthy fore-runner of David," said Crinkle-green. "King David, that is-"
"I know David," I said, reflecting that my utterance was quite an anticlimax after the savage's well-rounded phrases. We lose a lot by being afraid to be emotional or corny nowadays! And there I was, left alone by the water hole with my bob-tailed car and two angels. Angels! One of which was, in effect, vacuuming the sand wash of any remnants of the vanished savage.
"You don't look very angelic," I mentioned casually.
"Ever try to tidy up three continuums-continua-umm-three linearities while wearing a white robe and a halo and-and-a harp!" Crinkle-cerise was reading my
ideas-and incidentally, speaking direct without the unsynchronized bit-and ended up on an incredulous yelp. "You've got to dress for the part, especially when it's a combination-or equivalent-well, we're sort of-well, plumbers, electricians, jacks-of-all-trades-one thing for sure, I've got to get in on a refresher course in terminology!"
"I thought angels spent most of their time in praising God-" I began.
"What else is honest work?" retorted Crinkle-cerise. "But getting back to the matter in hand-"
"But I want to know!" I protested, questions swarming like hornets without my being able to lay a tongue on a one.
"Like what?" asked Crinkle-green as he began pushing; my car back through the side of things.
"Characteristic," reminded Crinkle-cerise, combing the sand for any of my personal debris. "Always in this era their curiosity is so strong they forget to be scared-"
"Like how can a pattern of a cloverleaf puncture-"
"Well, look," said Crinkle-green, "or maybe I should say `behold'?" He looked at me. I shook my head. He shook his. "Wrong terminology again. That goes with `Fear not'. Well, look then. Everytime is so close to everytime-as close as if they were painted on plastic film, one on each side-"
"You mean the past and the present and the future are all simultaneous?" I asked.
Crinkle-green sighed again. "You'd have to define your terms. Boy! Talk about loaded! Past present future-simultaneous! Anyway, being so close, they naturally interact. That's as it's supposed to be. But intermingling throws all kinds of monkey wrenches. So when this traffic exchange pattern evolved, we found it penetrated-well, you see for yourself. So we have to go around and restore linearity and sign the spots against recurrence."
"Sign them?" I asked. "You can make a sign to end something like this?"
"Sure," said Crinkle-cerise. "If he's not forgotten his sign manual, too!"
"Aw, cut it out," protested Crinkle-green. "I outpointed you in the qualifiers:"
"Yeah, three points!" retorted Crinkle-cerise. "And you must have put a squitch on the Recorders to do that!" Crinkle-green suddenly remembered me and coughed delicately behind a somewhat grubby hand. "You were asking-?" He gave me his full attention.
"The sign," I reminded.
"Oh, yes," he said matter-of-factly. "Any sign is an inplace-of-something. In-place-of words, or in-place-of an action, or in-place-of a function. We use the tripartite sign of creation." He paused, but noticed that I was still waiting expectantly for an explanation. "Uh-" His lips moved silently, and I supposed he was galloping down another terminology list. Finally he brightened and suggested, "Trinity?"
"Trinity, like in church?" I asked, taken aback.
"Yes," he nodded, pleased. "Unless you are more familiar with-" But my ears gave me no clue to the movement of his mouth. "Trinity," he said, nodding again. "So when we get the linearity straightened out, we just sign it and the function implicit in the sign holds everything secure!" He ended triumphantly.
"Now, your vehicle," said Crinkle-cerise briskly and the two finished shoving my car back through the rip. I felt a little lonely as I heard its reluctant slooop. Long bands of tension twanged from it to me as it moved. "And you-" Crinkle-cerise lifted his fingers to flick me out.
"Wait! Wait!" I put out a protesting hand. "Wait a minute!" The two exchanged patient looks.
"Yes?" said Crinkle-cerise.
"Why couldn't that fellow's ZAPT hurt me? And yet the savage could wound both of us with his arrows!" I asked, grabbing at one of the million questions that swarmed around me.
"Oh, that," said Crinkle-cerise. "Because the invention of the arrow pre-dated both of you. Neither of your weapons had any effectiveness against the savage, but he could have killed both of you, and you could have killed the other fellow, but he, poor kid, couldn't have killed either of you, not by firing his ZAPT. His weapon couldn't penetrate any time before his-not as an effective agent, anyway. See?"
"Oh," I said blankly. "Yeah. Okay. But then-well-" I felt my face tighten with awkwardness. "Are you two really angels?"
"Angels!" The answer rolled around me like distant thunder.
"And you've actually been in the presence of God?"
"The presence of God!" The voices multiplied against the hills. I blinked against the dazzle of their faces. They weren't my contemporaries any more. They were timeless.
"And you've actually seen Him in all His glory?"
"All His Glory!" It was as though a multitude of the heavenly hosts augmented the answer and the two were too bright for me to look at.
"And you've been touched by His loving hands-?"
"His loving Hands!" The morning stars joined in the hallelujas that were one surge of joy with no noise at all.
"Then-then-" I gasped as I covered my eyes with the curve of my arm. "Let me-let me touch you!"
"You can't." Flatly the words spatted me back to the dullness of sand and the sullen glint of water.
"Why not!" I cried sharply, anger the obverse of ecstasy.
"Don't misunderstand," said Crinkle-cerise, nineteen again, or maybe twenty-one and in his lineman's outfit. "We didn't say we wouldn't let you. You just can't. We only stated a fact. See?" He held out his hand to me and I tried to take it. I couldn't. I didn't even stub my fingers against anything.
I flipped my own hand around, through, and among his hand, but I couldn't touch it.
"Sorry," he said. "That's linearity for you. Penetration makes too many problems. Have to have special permits, and on our level, we don't even aspire to such a thing."
"Then you're not here," I said, feeling cheated, "Or else I'm not there-"
"Here-there!" Crinkle-cerise smiled. "Loaded words again." And his fingers flicked.
Again-again-again– The whispered echo ran around the horizon. I was standing by my car just off the pavement on the far side of the cloverleaf, repeating, "Again, again, again!" pleadingly.
A second later I shook my head sheepishly and blinked around me at the familiar scene, feeling oddly light, freed from the ever contracting and expanding bands of tension.
"Well!" I thought, getting back into the car, "I met an angel! Two of them!"
So. That was it. I go over the whole experience every once in a while, to my own comfort, especially after very loud, dark headlines. It's been a help all these years knowing that there is a sign by which a cloverleaf can be set right. Because, if a cloverleaf, surely vastly more important things are under control, too. So I try to practice patience instead of panic. It's pleasanter.
The sign? Oh, I found out about that. It can be found somewhere on every traffic exchange. Even the builders don't know why it's there, and sometimes don't even know it's there. It's scrawled somewhere on the steel innards of the structure. Or maybe built into the pattern of a guard rail. Or sometimes it's the contractors' name and the date, tapped somewhere into the smooth wet concrete. Look for it some time. It's always there somewhere-three-cornered and secure.
THE TASTE OF AUNT SOPHRONIA
IT CAME from Space. One of the Explorer probes, returning, clucking contentedly over the mass of data accumulated in its innards, homing in on Space Base with lovely precision, brought it back. The men who loaded the prober or the truck, those who brought it into Base Operations, those who opened it and removed memos, those who seized the memos for processing, all of them laid down their tools at day's end, looked at each other in bewilderment, went home enveloped in the flare of fever, leaned against their wives and died. Every one of them, to a man.
Their children wept for their dead fathers, wept until the fever dried their tears and then their tender bodies and then they died. Every one, to a child.
The wives and mothers put their mortal and immortal houses in order, and waited to die-some with hysterical outbursts of fear, some with incredulity, some with prayerful preparation and resignation.
And they waited. And waited At first the Pain was no more than a twitching away from a needle point, a discomfort to shrug away from. Then it came in crashing, plunging surges that roared and tumbled through the body as though a dam had burst. There was no isolating the Pain. It was as omnipresent as the skin, or the lining of the body cavities. And nothing stopped it or even alleviated it. Nothing. Some of the women finally found a way, though. With
guns or blades, or poison.
Six months after Prober Pain, as it had been tagged, had returned, the incident was closed. No new cases had occurred. No more suicides. No more mention in the daily news except for one last squib in a remote corner, a single sentence on a newscast. "The six surviving victims of the Pain have been put into Suspension."
The six survivors, all that was left of a thriving subdivision of technicians and other Base personnel-six child-bereaved widows who still lived in a Pain that had no anodyne and to which they could build no immunity. So they were put into Suspension, into deep freeze-freeze so deep it rivaled the cold of the Space that the Pain had come from. And the six lay neatly in their Suspension slots waiting for the toiling researchists to come up with an answer to their illness.
Periodically they were awakened to try some new development, to let them breathe consciously for a while and to let them be reminded that the world still existed. And the years pleated into decades while the research plodded doggedly on.
Then came the waking when Thiela lay slenderly in the brisk white precision of the hospital bed, watching shadow patterns of blowing leaves on the wall, too relaxed to turn her head to see the leaves themselves. She was watching for the first flutter of waking from Ruth, who lay in the bed next to her. For a blessed little while the Pain was in abeyance, though soon it would signal its presence and come welling and flooding, filling and probing like a heavy tide across the flats. Thiela's tongue outlined her pale lips quickly, easing the smile she needed to hold before Ruth's fluttering eyelids, her waking eyes.
"Hi!" she said softly. "Beat you this time!"
"Then I'll see you off to Suspension first," said Ruth, her voice a mere shaping of an outflowing breath. "Awake." She blinked at the ceiling. "Thank God for waking."
"Amen," said Thiela, "and for Suspension." Ruth's face made no answer to Thiela's smile and she had no echoing "amen." "How many are we?" she asked.
"Four," said Thiela. "Gwen died in mid-Suspension."
"But I'm still alive," said Ruth, "And life is no gift any more." Tears slipped thinly down her cheeks.
"Ruth," Thiela reached a hand out to touch the quiet arm nearest her. "They may have found something this time. They've had Gwen to help them for half of the Suspension. Maybe-"
"Have they said yet?" Ruth's voice quickened. "Have they?"
"I haven't had a chance to ask," said Thiela, "But the longer we wait to know, the longer we can hope." She laughed softly, "Oh me of little faith!"
"Even if they haven't," whispered Ruth, "I don't go into Suspension again."
"Oh, Ruth," Thiela was shaken, "If you don't "
"I know," said Ruth. "The Pain. Rather that. It wouldn't be too long. The exhaustion-"
"What's the matter, Ruth?" asked Thiela, troubled. "You never talked like this before."
"Sorry." Ruth's smile was pinched. "Nice dreams?"
"Oh, wonderful!" Thiela's eyes shone. "So many about Gove and the kids. Gove had a slick little black moustache this time!" She laughed softly, not to waken the napping pain. "You can imagine how odd it looked with his blond blondness!"
"I used to dream like that, too," said Ruth, "But now– Oh Thiela! Do you suppose my brain is beginning to rot?" She lifted herself up on one wavery elbow. "It's not only nightmares doubled and tripled, but nightmares oozing putrescence and slime! Horribleness I had no idea I was capable of imagining, let alone living through!" She fell back against her pillow, careless that sudden movement could start the Pain smoldering sooner.
"Oh!" said Thiela. "Oh, how awful! Dreaming is about the only thing that keeps me sane. If my dreams should turn against me-" She shook her head. "But surely the, doctors-"
"Dream pills?" Ruth rubbed her tears against the pillow. "Dream pills? A blue one for love? A green one for adventure? I've never heard of a pill for dreaming."
"Sleep too deep for dreams?" suggested Thiela.
"Any deeper than Suspension?" asked Ruth.
"Ask anyway," urged Thiela, "you never know. In this, advanced age-"
Evening pouring softly through the windows was an event to celebrate. "Look!" cried Thiela. "The sunset! The sunset!" She bounced on the bed. "Oh, Ruth! Twelve hours and moving as much as we have and no Pain! No Pain!
"Yet," said Ruth wanly.
"Oh, come!" chided Thiela. "The conscious Now is all we can live at one time anyway and we are still conscious. Oh bless Gwen! She helped them find this-."
"This stop-gap." Ruth could not let go of the dread waiting so closely the other side of waking.
"Watch me! Watch me!" cried Thiela, a happy child. "Watch me walk! Clear to the window!" Daringly, she dangled her feet over the side of the bed and wavered upright, clutching at the footboard. "Look! Look! All the way!" She shuffled and staggered and half-fell the four steps to the window. She leaned panting against the window frame and melted slowly down to the floor, holding herself chin-high to the window sill.
"The sky's still there," she reported to Ruth who lay, eyes closed, flatly pillowless on the bed. "And the Mescalita Mountains, still as bare and rocky as they ever were. And the old umbrella tree has grown back from the roots. I knew they couldn't get rid of it by chopping it down. It's a thicket now, almost head high, and full of blossoms. Smell the lilac-like?" "No." Ruth let the one word out grudgingly.
"I've dreamed of the smell," said Thiela. "It still means spring to me. I remember gathering big handsful of the blossoms and getting as drunk as a bee on the smell." She sighed and laughed. "But handsful or not, there were always plenty of flowers left to change into chinaberries to use in wars in the summed And did you ever bite down on a softening chinaberry?" "No." Ruth refused to move anything but her tongue.
"I did once and I thought I was going to die because it was so squishy, mealy, nasty! Tasted just like my Aunt Sophronia!"
"Tasted like your aunt!" Ruth's eyes flipped to Thiela in outrage.
"Yes," Thiela laughed at having roused her. "Aunt Sophronia was called the Weed Woman. She concocted the awfullest things you ever tasted out of all sorts of weeds she gathered from the ditch banks-right out there, they were. You know, of course, that they used a corner of our old ranch to build this hospital-research unit on. They took over the whole ranch when they established the Space Base here in our county." She sobered and sighed. "I never dreamed that I'd be here in Suspension some day with all of everything-" She shook back her hair. "Anyway, Aunt Sophronia used to make up those horrible messes and managed to pour them down us kids in the spring for tonics and summer for blood thinners and fall for blood thickeners and in winter just to empty her bottles for the spring crop of weeds." Thiela melted on down to the floor and leaned back against the wall. "My blood could use a little thickening about now," she whispered as she crept, hampered by gown and robe, on her hands and knees back to her bed. She climbed into it wearily, "Ruth, how long has it been?"
"I don't know," said Ruth.
"They say we age very little in Suspension," said Thiela. "And Gove and the kids are as close as yesterday to me still. Time-" She fell silent, watching the light drain out of the room. Her eyelids drooped, trembled, stilled and suddenly opened. "Ruth! We're going to sleep! Just think! We're going to real sleep! And we'll wake up in a real morning after a real night!" She sat up and hugged her knees to her chest, laying her cheek on them. "To sleep!"
"Perchance to dream." Ruth's voice was flat. She turned her face away from Thiela. "Dreams. Dreams! Oh, Thiela! I'm scared! I don't want to sleep. I don't want to!"
"Maybe it's only the dreams in Suspension," comforted Thiela. "Maybe after the Gwen-shot and with real sleep-"
Ruth's head rolled on the white sheet, but she didn't answer.
Thiela was suddenly awake in the night. "Out of suspension again? So soon?" she thought confusedly. Then she sat upright in bed. "Asleep!" she whispered, delighted. "Oh! Asleep! Awake!"
Then the sound came-the cry, the anguish, the agony vocalized. Her heart lurched and she crumpled the sheet to her chest with her spasmed hands. Then she was unsteadily out of bed and shaking Ruth's writhing shoulders with both hands. "Wake up!" she cried over the tensely twanging moan that scraped her bones. "Wake up, Rut!!" But Ruth had become so lost in her anguished dreaming that she twisted out of Thiela's hands, her ghastly vocalizing aching Thiela's ears. One flailing arm swept Thiela from her feet and she scuttled on all fours, terrified, to the far side of the bed, groping for the call bell.
Then there was light and voices and comings and goings and a painful awaking
for Ruth.
The next evening Thiela cried to Ruth, "What's the use of having days and nights again if you don't use them?"
"I won't sleep," said Ruth, the words ragged with repetition. "I won't sleep."
"You'll have to, sometime," said Thiela. "If you'd only let them try to help you. If you don't sleep-"
"I won't sleep. I won't sleep."
"Oh, God!" Thiela whispered into her cupped hands. "Help me to help-" She slid to the side of the bed. "We could go see Eileen and Glenda," she suggested. "They say we can walk that far if we feel like it."
"I won't sleep," reiterated Ruth.
"You're not sparkling as a conversationalist tonight," sighed Thiela. She put a quick hand on Ruth's arm to be sure she didn't misunderstand. "Like Aunt Sophronia," she went on. "She had only one topic of conversation-weeds. She was always loudly on the defensive, of course. She maintained that weeds were like old maids-unclaimed treasures. She never actually killed anyone with her brews-at least I don't think so, though some claimed she eased Old Man Ornsdorff out of life a trifle earlier than-" She broke off, conscious of a change in the silent figure on the bed. She took a deep breath and went on as though she hadn't noticed the sharpened attention.
"I remember some fellow from the State U spent a lot of time with her one summer. He said lots of weeds and herbs have traces and sometimes more than traces of chemicals used in medicines. That's why the Weed Woman's concoctions worked sometimes.
"The day before he left, he leaned on the corral fence and watched a Servicer launching. That was a Servicer for the first space platform, you know. Even then the Base was being built, but they hadn't taken all of the ranch yet. Well, he laughed and said, `Look!' There was Aunt Sophronia coming down the lane, her dress-skirt gathered up by one hand into a bag for a big bunch of weeds. She held her load so high that it showed her bare knees with her cotton stockings rolled down over the white elastic she tied on for garters. Her other hand was dragging a big branch of sagebrush. You boil their leaves down to a solution, if you can stand the stench, and comb it through your hair daily and it'll never turn gray. Anyway, the fellow said, `Look, the Weed Woman and a Servicer launching. Can you get a bigger contrast?"
"But he got his Master's degree with a thesis on folk medicine. That thesis was almost pure Aunt Sophronia except that he eliminated the double negatives. Probably ruined a few recipes in so doing, too." Thiela smiled a softy reminiscent smile. Ruth was flaccid again, her face turned away. "He sent her a microcopy of the thesis. She couldn't-or wouldn't understand what it was-so she gave it to me and I put it with my other treasures. Let's see-two quail eggs, a snake vertebra, an Apache tear-unpolished-and a piece of pine gum. It was the first microcopy I'd ever seen and it fascinated me. Of course we had no viewer, but I'd hold it up to the light and squint and pretend I could see the pictures of the red-tops and the sore-eye weeds and the wet-a-beds. What awful names we had for pretty flowers. It didn't matter-weeds, you know.
"And the bladder vines. We used to tromple on them and shriek when we heard the pods break. It was thrillingly dangerous because they were poison and if
one drop or their juice hit you in the left nostril, you'd die. We all knew that for gospel truth. Left nostril, of course, because that is the side your heart is on."
"Sleeping potions-" Ruth's voice jerked out the words almost with a question
mark on the end. "I suppose so." Thiela eased herself back into her own bed. "It's been so long. I'd even forgotten Aunt Sophronia until the umbrella blossoms reminded me. It comes back in bits and snippits. But I remember Aunt Sophronia had a remedy for whatever ailed you."
"Whatever?" Ruth turned fretfully away. "Well, I'd hesitate to stack her stuff up against this Research Unit and the Pain, but she'd be in there whaling away at the problem with both hands." Of course, Ruth finally went to sleep and woke in a state beyond screaming and so near to madness that Thiela bit toothmarks into her own underlip as she
struggled to hold Ruth's hands to focus her attention and bring her back to sanity. "If this is part of the Pain," said Thiela to the doctors, "then it may come
to the rest of us. Is there nothing you can do for Ruth?" "You have this remission of pain," they said. "That is a step forward." "But how soon to slip back?" Thiela's smile bent a little. "And what value is
it to Ruth in her present state?" They made more notes and padded away with low murmurs. Thiela lay back on her pillow and thought. She glanced over at the bed which
was empty of Ruth. Ruth was elsewhere in the Research Unit being labored over as she fought sleep and the madness that lay in it. Being wakened at five minute intervals was helping a little.
"Aunt Sophronia," Thiela spoke aloud to the ceiling. "Surely you have something for what ails-" Memory began to jiggle something in a remote corner of her brain.
For what ails you-for what ails you! "Aunt Sophronia, that's the same bottle you poured out of for Mrs. Drummond." "So-so? So-so?" Pushing the heavy cork in. "And for Tow Lewton." "So-so? So-so?" Putting the green bottle on a high shelf. "Tow hasn't got a `falling dawn feeling right here."' "So-so? So-so?" Beginning to strip the leaves off a redbell plant. "And Mrs. Drummond doesn't have a stone bruise on her heel." "Talk too much. Go home." "I want to know."
"Special bottle," peering over her glasses. "Good for what ails you."
"Hoh! Can't work for everything!"
"Talk too much!" Down came the bottle. Slopping spoon thrust into the astonished mouth. "Good for what ails you!"
All the way back to the house with the awful taste of Aunt Sophronia in her mouth. Supper table.
"What's the matter, punkin? Not a word out of you all evening. Sick?"
"No." Hard to say. "No, papa. I'm not sick."
Good for what ails you! You talk to much!
The Nurse answered Thiela's ring as bright-eyed and brisk as though it wasn't three o'clock in the morning.
"What did they do with our personal effects we decided to keep when we first went into Suspension?" Thiela asked.
"I'm not sure," said the Nurse. "That was before my time. I'll ask tomorrow."
"Tonight," said Thiela. "Now. You find out, and if they're here at the Unit, please bring me my old cigar box with the palo verde seeds glued on it, and a microcopy viewer, too, please."
"Tonight? Now?" The Nurse glanced at her wrist watch.
"Now," said Thiela. "Now. Time out of Suspension is what I probably haven't much of."
The Nurse swooshed away on silent soles and the faint crackle of her uniform. Thiela lay back against the pillow. What was it Aunt Sophronia used for the green bottle? Such unlikely things were possible. So many unclaimed treasures.
As she lay there, she became conscious of a returning tide-just a faint flush of sensitivity up her legs, as though she waded in water a trifle too hot-or too cold. She had never decided whether the Pain was cold or hot. The tide receded and then lifted again, a little farther this time, to surge just below her breathing. But this surge was not quite so sharp. Maybe it would never be so sharp again. But sharp or not, there was a time lapse before it ebbed again and, by then, the Nurse was back with the plastifilm covered cigar box. She pulled the tab that loosened the plastifilm and stripped it from the box for Thiela.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" she said, "A bead came off." "It doesn't matter," smiled Thiela, euphoric because of Pain withdrawn. "It's really a seed, you know, a palo verde seed. Thanks. Thanks so much."
The microcopy was there among the quail eggs, the snake vertebra and the Apache tear-unpolished, but the pine gum was a dry resinous pinch of dust in one corner of the box. The microcopy was brittle with age and crudely primitive-looking, but tenderly, gently handled, it submitted to the viewer with only a few aching crackles, and Aunt Sophronia's carefully de-double-negative narrative presented itself.
For egg-sucking dogs-For removing rust-For warts-For the tobacco habit-For pin worms-For moths in wool –For riley water-For colic-For heartburn-For
scalds-For what ails you­
"Why look!" cried Thiela to herself. "It's jack-o'-lantern blossoms, mostly! Jack-o'-lanterns! I remember. They have prickles on them and blue flowers. Not many plants have blue flowers. The leaves are like fingers and prickly on the back and the backs of the flowers are prickly, too. We used to pull the heads off the flowers and press them to our clothes and they'd cling because of the prickles. And, after the flowers, little yellow balls come on the plant. That's why we called them jack-o'-lanterns. Tiny things, no bigger than the tip of a finger and so brittle they shattered when you pinched them. The seeds rattle inside and dust your fingers when you crush them."
Thiela switched the viewer off. "And they always bloom at the same time as the umbrella trees!"
She moved slowly, furniture by furniture, to the window and, leaning on the sill, breathed deeply of the heavy lilac-y fragrance of the umbrella tree outside the window. "If I can get enough blossoms and a bottle-a green one-and a big spoon-"
Pain sloshed about her ankles and seeped up her shins. It retreated slowly. "Get them in time," she whispered, "maybe Ruth can sleep without terror."
There are certain advantages to being a combination National Monument and Relic and Medical Research subject. Slightly aberrant behavior is overlooked or smiled upon gently. Thiela got her blossoms, and a green bottle and a big spoon and a free hand in a tiny kitchen alcove usually reserved to the Staff. With one eye on the microcopy and one on the walloping kettle and a nose crinkled against the heavy herb-y near-stench, Thiela labored against Ruth's nightmares, and the ever sharper inflooding of the Pain. But finally, leaning heavily against the small metal table, her robe decorated with a press-on blue flower and several splashed-on stains, she steadied herself until she was sure she could pick up the big green bottle and the big spoon without immediate danger of dropping them. She eased herself into the wheel chair, slipped the bottle and spoon between her and the side of the chair, and briskly spun down the hall.
Ruth was sleeping. Thiela raised her eyebrows at the Nurse.
"She's due to be wakened in two minutes," she said, checking the clock above the bed. "Or sooner if she appears disturbed."
"I'll waken her," said Thiela. "I have something important to discuss with her. Privately. You go have some coffee."
"But I'm no supposed-" protested the Nurse.
"I won't tell," said Thiela, smiling. "Suspension is one sure way of keeping a secret a long time. Trot along. I insist. I'll count the seconds."
The red second-hand sliced the last minute away.
"Ruth!" Thiela shook her shoulder firmly. "Waking up time!"
Ruth's eyes could hardly open, but her hand groped for Thiela's.
"What will I do?" Her voice was mushy with hopelessness. "The Pain's coming back. But I can't go back into Suspension. I can't sleep!" She twisted against the Pain. "I can't stay awake with the Pain! Oh, Thiela!"
"Ruth, I have something for what ails you," said Thiela briskly, uncorking the green bottle. "Open your mouth. The spoon has to be brimming!"
"What is it?" asked Ruth, wincing away from the spoon.
"It's Aunt Sophronia's stuff for what ails you," said Thiela. "Here, don't let it spill." She thrust the spoon into Ruth's reluctant mouth. Ruth swallowed, gagged, coughed, and gasped. "Is it poison?"
"I don't think so," said Thiela doubtfully, frowning at the bottle. "But just to keep you company-" She poured out a brimming spoonful and swallowed the dose. "Ig!" she gasped, bleary-eyed. "Tastes just like Aunt Sophronia!"
"No-wonder-people-got-well-" Ruth slid down the pillows. "Self-defense." Her eyes closed and her face smoothed.
"Ruth!" whispered Thiela, the stuff in the green bottle sloshing as she tucked it hastily away from the swoosh of the opening door. "Oh, Ruth!" "Hmmm?" Ruth snuggled her cheek to the pillow. "Hmm?" And her breath came softly and regularly.
"Is she-is she-?" The Nurse was clutching, wild-eyed, at the foot of the bed.
"She's sleeping," said Thiela, "Don't wake her. Let her sleep until the Pain comes." Ruth slept most of the week, waking with sleepy smiles and drifting off again, happy, relaxed, blissful, excepting when the Pain wakened her. Which wakenings became more and more frequent at the week wore on. All of the Gwen-shots were used up-pebbles thrown against a storm.
So, patiently, Thiela and Ruth submitted to preparations for return to Suspension. They said their last, private farewells to each other the night before, toasting, "Hope," and "Sweet dreams!" with two more gaggingly large spoonsful of Aunt Sophronia. "just in case," said Thiela, "just in case my dreams start going sour too."
"Bless Aunt Sophronia's weedy old heart," said Ruth, her cheeks inpuckered. "But couldn't she have put something in to hide the taste?"
"Medicine's not medicine," said Thiela, "unless it's nasty. How else can you know you've been medicated?" She waited out a wave of the Pain, her knuckles white on the big bottle, then she knelt at the dresser and tucked the bottle away under odds and ends of long outmoded underthings.
Suspension always seemed to Thiela like a chilly nap– one where you are awake enough to feel the need of another cover, but where you can't wake up quite enough to pull one up. Of course this was only the edge of entering and emerging from Suspension. The first consciousness was a shiver, blossoming into goosebumps across her shoulders, and then the awakening.
"Already?" She smiled at her own unthinking question. Time goes into Suspension, too. "How long?" she amended.
"Less than halfway through the period."
Thiela screened the doctor's face in her half-opened lashes and finally put a name to him-Dr. McGady. "At first," he went on, "we thought the instruments were not functioning correctly because they-"
"And Ruth?" Thiela cut into his hardly heard words.
"Beat you out this time!"
Thiela turned her head cautiously toward Ruth's bed. Ruth smiled at her as she busily braided a heavy hank of hair into a second braid to match the one over her other shoulder. "And happy dreams to you, too. Don't be so cautious. We have more Gwen-shots. According to the muchly maligned machinery we've been in Suspension long enough to make them effective again."
Thiela smiled and stretched. "And Eileen and Glenda?"
"Dead," said Dr. McGady solemnly. "They died just a while after we attempted return to Suspension. Their dreams-" The three shared a brief memorial service
for their two dead, Ruth's brimming eyes catching Thiela's questioningly.
It wasn't until Dr. McGady had left that Ruth slipped over the side of her bed and inched along its support until she managed to stagger to the dresser and unearth the green bottle and big spoon. "Bless Aunt Sophronia," she said, tacking cautiously back to the bed. "For what ails you!" she whispered as she trembled the brimming spoon to Thiela's open mouth.
"And to you, too," gasped Thiela through the jaw-locking gulp of nastiness, and Ruth downed her dose with hardly a gag. "Ruth, do you suppose if we had given Eileen and Glenda-" Thiela shuddered as she licked a stray drop off the comer of her mouth.
"That's something we are not given to know," said Ruth :firmly. "Rather give praise that we are preserved-if we are. It might not be Aunt Sophronia, you know." She put the bottle and spoon away again and climbed on her bed. She laughed. "You should have seen Dr. McGady and the others. Their ears fairly lighted up Tilt! We're not conforming the way the machines say we should-or rather the way they used to say we should."
"Well, machinery I've never liked-" Thiela began. Her words broke off and they both leaned to listen.
People were crowding down the hall past their closed door-lots of people. Heavy steps of carrying people, light., hurried child steps, half skipping. And the sounds-they both knew the sounds. The sobbing under-moan, the caught breath, the broken sentence and the heart-squeezing sudden child-cry.
"There's more!" whispered Thiela. "Go look, Ruth! There's more!"
Ruth scuttled to the door and opened it a crack. She shut it quickly as though to shut out a cold wind.
"Lots more!" she whispered. "And men and children! Some still walking. That means they're still in the fever stage! Oh Thiela! What they will have to go through!" She trembled back to the bed. "All the dead children! All the dead men!"
"Oh, no more!" cried Thiela, "No more!" She turned her grieving face to the wall.
It was all dark except for the ghosty flip of a window curtain in a breath of night wind. Thiela slid cautiously from her bed. Not trusting her recently awakened legs, she crept on all fours across the floor toward the dresser. Her outstretched hand touched something warm and moving. For a moment, fear paralyzed her, then she collapsed on the floor with a soft, relieved laugh. "After all!" she breathed. "She was my Aunt Sophronia!"
Ruth's face was a dark blur near hers. "Mine now, too," she laughed back. "How much of her is left?" She sloshed the bottle she had already extracted from the dresser drawn "No more than two thirds of a bottle. Won't go far."
"I'll make more-"' Thiela started, then remembered. "I can't. It's the wrong time of the year. No jack-o'-lantern blossoms."
"Let's get back to bed," said Ruth. "And do our figuring out.
"The children die," said Thiela from against her pillows. And so do the men. The women could wait until blossom time-"
"If we knew how many-" said Ruth.
"Even if we had enough for everyone," said Thiela, how would we ever get it into them without someone knowing? "
They both inspected a dark ceiling for a while. "Quote," sighed Thiela, "quote Aunt Sophronia, `Tell the truth and shame the Devil!' Let's tell Dr. McGady."
"He'll say `no.' He'll take Aunt Sophronia away from us." warned Ruth.
"Over my dead body!" Thiela's eyes glinted in the dark. Over my dead body!" After they had finished telling him in a breathless antiphonal style, expecting at any moment to be interrupted by laughter, Dr. McGady stood tapping his bottom teeth with thumb nail and stared at exhibit A-the big green bottle.
"We know nothing about this Pain, even yet," he said. And we're getting lots of no-answers. That's why we have fall back on Suspension. Odder things than big green bottles have happened in medical research. Just think of how leukemia was finally eliminated. And yon two aren't dead. I'd say try it."
"Well!" Thiela melted back against her pillows. "I'm almost disappointed! I armed myself with all sorts of arguments! Polished lovingly! Very moving! And here I am caught with my mouth full of unneeded eloquence!" She sobered. "But to use or not to use is not our biggest problem. It's supply and demand. It's a long time until we'll have more blossoms. Meanwhile, who lives and who dies?"
"The women live past the acute stage. Then we can put them into Suspension," said Dr. McGady. "The men die-every one of them. And so do the children."
"How many are there of the men and children?" asked Ruth, eyeing the bottle dubiously.
"Too many," said the doctor, "Unless we cut the dosage way down. And then it might not work. We'd be advised to stick to the original dosage until we find out for sure."
"We can't cold-bloodedly pick people to die or to live," said Thiela. "What shall we do?"
"We don't even know if it will work on men and children," reminded Ruth. "Or if it will work on anyone this early in the game."
"And if you two need more medication?" suggested the doctor.
"There's always Suspension," said Thiela, smiling faintly. "Until jack-o'-lantern time again."
"Well, let's start by measuring what we do have and subtracting one spoonful for the lab to get started on," said Dr. McGady. "Then at least we'll know how much we have to go on."
"There's not enough!" cried Ruth the next morning, "There's not enough for everyone. How can we decide?" Her fingers scraped distractedly back through her front hair.
Dr. McGady reached over the bed table and crossed two more names off the list that Ruth had crumpled and smoothed again. "It's closer by two more," he said, "than it was last night. How far is it off now?"
"So close-so very close!" Thiela flexed the bottom edge of the paper. "It would be so much easier if there were twice too many people for Aunt Sophronia. Then we could just draw a line across the paper and say, `Thus far it'll go and no farther!" But it's so close!"
"Just delay another day or so, then the problem will solve itself," suggested Dr. McGady.
"Just-wait-to let some more die?" Thiela pushed the list from her and gathered up the bottle and spoon. "No. I'm going now."
"How will you choose?" asked Ruth, rocking her head in her hands.
"I won't," said Thiela from the doorway. "You and Dr. McGady are going to be praying in here and I'll be praying in there and the choice will be made."
The two, left behind, exchanged startled looks. Then Ruth dropped her face into her hands, her fingers spread across her scalp under her hair, and Dr. McGady, looking most uncomfortable, sank back in his chair and contemplated the upper corner of the room with considerable intensity.
All of the stricken were in wards, segregated men, women and children. Thiela hesitated at the door of the children's ward, memory loosening her still fluid knees and making the weight of the green bottle burdensome. Her own three children had died in just such sobbing, burning suffering. Her own had cried out for cooling that didn't come short of death. The ghosty fingers of her own clung, hot and bony thin, to her wrists. She shuddered and stepped into the ward.
She took the wrist of the first child, a silent, large-eyed girl whose face seemed sunken in the mass of her disordered hair. Thiela smiled at her, folded her hand back against the scarcely lifting chest and went on to the next.
Again she lifted a wrist, but this time she dropped it and poured a carefully huge spoonful of Aunt Sophronia and, lifting the furnace-hot child, she carefully poured the concoction into her mouth. The indignant, sputtering gurgle of the child as the awful taste penetrated, sprayed Thiela's face thoroughly. She mopped off the worst of it and, releasing the child, moved on to the next one.
Minutes later, she stood at the door of the ward and looked at the children. Every one that had fought and gurgled against Aunt Sophronia was sleeping, deeply, quietly. Every one she had passed by after lifting a hot wrist, lay moaning and crying, all but the first one. They had taken Thiela went back to her room, her face coagulating where the medicine had sprayed. "You can relax a minute now," she said as she closed the door behind her and carefully deposited the big green bottle on the dresser. "I've got to wash Aunt Sophronia off me. If there should be a difference between adult and child dosage, there is," she caller back from the bathroom. "Every child spewed like a fountain when it tasted the horrible stuff."
"You know," said Dr. McGady, eyes shining as he limbered his stiff neck. "It's been rather amazing! I never tried this aspect of prayer before and I experienced the most –"
"How did you choose?" interrupted Ruth, leaning back on her pillows. "How could you possibly-"
"I touched them," said Thiela, coming back into the room, drying her hands as she came. "I took each one's wrist like this," she lifted Ruth's arm. "The ones I-skipped-I could tell just by the touch. It was like holding a limp plastic hose that had hours of hot water poured through. All limp and lax and spent. The others felt as though there was a steel spring inside that was still twanging against the fever. Once-" she swallowed with an effort, her eyes closing, "once I felt the spring go out, right while I was holding: a wrist. Just-go-out. Just like that! Poor child!" She dropped Ruth's arm and blinked to clear her eyes. She gathered up the bottle and spoon again. "To
stations, me!, Forward!" And she marched out, robe swishing her ankle as the two in the room resumed their prayerful positions.
Thiela closed the door carefully behind her and leaned against it, her head drooping, her shoulders sagging. "Just like that!" she whispered. "Oh, Ruth, the spring went out, just like that!" Then she backhanded the tears from her eyes, almost stabbing herself with the spoon, and started briskly down the hall the other way.
By now the word had spread and there were people by the door of the men's ward.
"The general's in there," said someone.
"The whole staff of our department," insisted another.
"The most brilliant mathematician," urged another.
"Don't tell me anything," said Thiela, shaking her hear:. "I don't want to know. I'm not equipped to decide who's important and who's not. They're all. sick. I'll get to all I can."
"But such a brilliant career to be cut short-" insisted someone.
"Maybe the brilliance is spent," said Thiela. "Maybe someone else is to shine now. I don't decide. Please-" She pulled the door open and went in.
The bottle poured almost empty. Two more curtained cubicles to visit. Thiela shook the scanty remnants in the bottle. If these next two lives were already spent, there would be enough for-maybe, maybe-
She slipped between the next-to-the-last curtains, and, catching the flailing wrist, held it gently for a moment. She put it aside and left, the dose unpoured. Only one to go. One more dose. If only-if only-
Under the groping of her fingers, she felt the resilience of life twanging away at death, stubbornly fighting back against the fever.
"Amen," sighed Thiela. "So be it. The last dose, here, then. The last one." She poured it out.
She fled back along the hall past the huddled group, not listening to the half-formed questions and quick, soft inquiries. She stopped in front of her door and composed herself. Quickly, quietly, she went in.
Ruth was lying flat in bed, her body hardly making a mound under the sheet. Her face was turned to the wall. Dr. McGady stood at the foot of the bed, rubbing his neck and looking bewildered.
"Just all at once," he said. "She just went limp all over."
"I know," said Thiela, rounding the bed to take Ruth's hand. "Probably even before you were born, I know." She moved into the focus of Ruth's eyes. "There isn't a drop left," she said. "Not one single bit of Aunt Sophronia left for you." She let the tears flow as she relinquished the bottle to Dr. McGady.
"Did it work?" Ruth's lips formed the words around the soft whisper of her breath.
"I think so," said Thiela. "I almost know so. But for how long, we can't tell.
We thought that we-"
"No," breathed Ruth. "Maybe you. Remember, my dreams went bad. Yours didn't-"
" But if only we had another dose-"
"No, thanks." Ruth smiled faintly. "This is dying time for me. There'll be Les and the kids. And I'll tell Aunt Sophronia-" Her eyes closed deeper and deeper-
Ruth wasn't there any more. Thiela turned away Dr. McGady walked her over to the window. "Will Aunt Sophronia be pleased?" he asked.
"Unless you refine her down to a shot or a pill." Her mouth trembled, then turned upward a little. "How can you tell you've had medicine unless it tastes bad?"
She leaned on the window sill. "We were going to go shopping," she said, "Or whatever the local equivalent is now. We had a bet on which of us would look best in the current fashions!" She turned, her hands behind her, and sagged against the wall. "You don't understand yet!" she cried. "We were going to prop each other up until we learned how to live again after dying for so many, cold, lost years! But now-but now-!"
Dr. McGady awkwardly gathered her, weeping, into his arms and clumsily patted her shaking shoulders. "Just hold on," he muttered, "Just hold on until jack-o'-lantern time. Then we'll have something for what ails you!" "Blub-blubless Aunt Sophronia!" Thiela giggled and sobbed, "Blub-bless her!"
NOTE: At the last accounting, there were a total of 187 diseases or malfunctions for which Sophronium is the specific. These conditions vary widely and seem to have no relation to each other except in that they can all be cured by Sophronium. Perhaps Aunt Sophronia is pleased to know that the taste is still there. How can you tell it's medicine unless it tastes bad? THE BELIEVING CHILD
NO ONE seeing me sitting here, my hands stubbornly relaxed, my face carefully placid, could possibly know that a terrible problem is gnawing at me. In fact, I can't believe it myself. It couldn't possibly be. And yet I've got to solve it. Oh, I have lots of time to find a solution! I have until 2:15. And the hands of my watch are scissoring out the minutes relentlessly. 1:45. What will I do! What will I do if 2:15 comes and I haven't got through to Dismey? She's sitting over there by Donna now, her scraggly hair close to Donna's shining, well-nourished curls.
That hair of Dismey's. I saw it before I saw her face that October morning and knew, with a sigh for the entry of my forty-fifth child, that she was from the campground-a deprived child. Somehow it always shows in their hair. I breathed a brief prayer that she would be clean at least. She was-almost painfully so. Her hands and ankles were rusty with chapping, not with dirt. Her sagging dress, a soft faded blue down the front, with a hint of past pattern along the side seams and at the collar, was clean, but not ironed. Her lank, bleached-burlap hair lifelessly bracketed her thin face and descended in irregular tags roughly to her shoulders. But its combed-with-water patterns were bisected by a pink-clean parting.
Well, I welcomed her to my first grade classroom, pleased that she was a girl. I was so weary of the continual oversupply of little boys. I was surprised that her mother had come with her. Usually from that area, parents just point the kids toward the bus stop and give them a shove. But there the mother was,
long in the wrist and neck and face. She was wearing Levi's and a faded plaid shirt that had safety pins for buttons. She was older than I'd expect Dismey's mother to be. Her narrow shoulders were twisted to one side and a deep convex curve bent her spine out against the shirt. I couldn't tell if it was the result of a lifetime of sagging, or was an actual deformity. Her left cheek sucked, in against no-teeth, and the sharp lines that crisscrossed her face reminded me of the cracklings of thin mud drying in the sun.
"Dismey?" I asked. "How do you spell it?"
"You're the teacher," said her mother, her voice a little hoarse as though not used much. "Spell it the way you want. Her name's Dismey Coven. She's six. She ain't been to school none yet. We been with the cabbages in Utah."
"We're suppose to have a birth certificate-" I ventured.
"Never had none," said Mrs. Coven shortly. "She was born anyway. In Utah. When we were there with the cabbage."
So I had her repeat the name and stabbed at the spelling. I put down October for a birthdate, counting backwards far. enough to give her a birth-year to match her age-usual procedure, only sometimes they don't even know the month for sure-the crops harvesting at the time, yes, but not the month.
All this time the mother had been clutching Dismey's shoulders with both hands, and Dismey had just stood there, her back pressed against her mother, her face quiet, her pale eyes watching. When I'd got all the necessary information, including the fact that unless we had free lunch for Dismey, she wouldn't eat, the mother shoved Dismey at me abruptly and told her, "Mind the teacher." And said to me, "Teach her true. She's a believin' child."
And she left without another word or a backward glance. So then, where to seat my forty-fifth child in my forty-four-seat room. I took a quick census. Every child there. Not a vacant chair available. The only unoccupied seat in the room was the old backless chair I used for a stepstool and for a sin-seat in the Isolation Corner. Well, Bannie could do with a little more distance between him and Michael, and he knew the chair well, so I moved him over to the library table with it and seated Dismey by Donna, putting her in Donna's care for the day.
I gave Dismey a pencil and crayolas and other necessary supplies and suggested that she get acquainted with the room, but she sat there, rigid and unmoving for so long that it worried me. I went over to her and printed her name for her on a piece of our yellow practice paper.
"Here's your name, Dismey. Maybe you'd like to see if you can write it. I'll help you."
Dismey took the pencil from me, holding it as though it were a dagger. I had to guide every finger to its correct place before she could hold it for writing. We were both sweating when we got through the name. It had been like steering a steel rod through the formation of the letters. Dismey showed no signs of pleasure-shy or overt-that most beginners exhibit when confronted with their first attempt at their names. She looked down at the staggering letters and then up at me.
"It's your name, Dismey," I smiled at her and spelled it to her. She looked down again at the paper, and the pencil wavered and swung until she had it dagger-wise once more. She jabbed the point of the pencil down on the next line. It stabbed through the paper. With a quick, guilty hand, she covered the
tear, her shoulders hunching to hide her face.
I opened the box of crayons and shook them out where she could see the colors, luring her averted face back toward me.
"Maybe you'd rather color. Or go around and see what the other children are doing." And I left her, somewhat cheered. At least she had known that a line is for writing on! That is a mark of maturity!
All the rest of the morning she roosted tentatively on the front four inches of her chair, stiff as a poker. At recess, she was hauled bodily by Donna to the bathroom and then to the playground. Donna dutifully stayed by her side, wistfully watching the other children playing, until time to drag Dismey to the line and to point out that there was a girl line and a boy line.
After recess, Dismey unbent-once. Just enough to make two very delicate lines on a paper with her red crayon when she thought I wasn't looking. Then she just sat staring, apparently entranced at the effect. It was most probable that she had never held a crayon before.
Lunchtime came and in the cafeteria she stared at her plate a minute and then ate so fast with spoon and scooping fingers that she nearly choked.
"Would you like some more?" I asked her. She looked at me as though I were crazy for asking. She slowed down midway through her third helping. There was a quiver along her thin cheek when she looked at me. It could haves been the beginning of a smile. Donna showed her where to put her dirty dishes and took her out to the playground.
During that first afternoon, she finally drew a picture-an amazingly mature one-of three wobbly plates full of food and a lopsided milk carton with a huge straw in it. Under Donna's urging she took up her red crayon and, down at the bottom, she carefully copied from her name paper a Di, but when the s turned backward on her, she covered it with a quick, guilty hand and sat rigid until dismissal time.
I worried about Dismey that afternoon after the children were gone. I was used to frightened, withdrawn children, terrified by coming into a new school, but nothing quite so drastic as Dismey. No talking, no laughing, no smiles, or even tears. And such wariness-and yet her mother had called her a believing child. But then, there's believing and believing. Belief can be a very negative thing, too. Maybe what Dismey believed the most was that you could believe in nothing good-except maybe three platefuls of food and a red crayon. Well, that was a pretty good start.
Next morning I felt a little more cheerful. After all, yesterday had been Dismey's first day at a new school. In fact, it had been her first day at any school. And children adjust wonderfully well-usually.
I looked around for Dismey. I didn't have to look far. She was backed into the angle of the wall by the door of our room, cornered by Bannie and Michael. I might have known. Bannie and Michael are my thorns-in-the-flesh this year. Separately they are alert, capable children, well above average in practically everything. But together! Together they are like vinegar and soda-erupting each other into the wildest assortment of devilment that two six-year-olds could ever think up. They are flint and steel to the biggest blaze of mischief I've ever encountered. Recently, following a Contradict Everything Phase, they had lapsed into a Baby Phase, complete with thumb-sucking, baby talk and completely tearless infantile wailing-the noise serving them in the same capacity as other children's jet-zooming or six-gun banging or machine-gun
rattling.
The two didn't see me coming and I stood behind them a minute, curious to see just what they had dreamed up so soon to plague Dismey with.
"And it's a lectric paddle and it's specially for girls," said Bannie solemnly.
"You stood up in the swing and the 'letric paddle is specially for girls that stand up in swings," amplified Michael soberly. "And it hurts real bad."
"It might even kill you," said Bannie with relish.
"Dead," said Michael, round of eye that shifted a little to send a glint of enjoyment at Bannie.
Dismey hunched one shoulder and drew a shaking hand across her stricken cheek. "I didn't know-" she began.
"Of course she didn't know," I said sternly. "Bannie and Michael, indoors!" I unlocked the door and shooed them in. Then I stooped and put my arms around a rigid, unbending Dismey. I could feel her bones under her scant flesh and flimsy dress.
"It isn't so, Dismey," I said. "There isn't any electric paddle. There's no such thing. They were just teasing you. But we do have a rule about standing up in the swings. You might fall out and get hurt. Here comes Donna now. You go play with her and she'll tell you about our rules. And don't believe Bannie and Michael when they tell you bad things. They're just trying to fool you." In the room I confronted the two completely unrepentant sinners.
"You weren't kind to Dismey," I said. "And she's our new student. Do you want her to think that we're all unkind here at our school?" They had no answer except Bannie's high-pitched giggle that he uses when he is embarrassed.
"Besides that, what you told her wasn't true."
"We were just playing," said Michael, trading sideglances with Bannie.
"Telling things that aren't true isn't a very good way to have fun," I reminded them.
"We were just playing," said Michael, while Bannie had recourse to his thumb.
"But Dismey didn't know you were only playing," I said. "She thought you were telling the truth."
"We were just playing," said Bannie around his thumb.
After we had gone around and around a couple more times, I sternly sent them outside. The two ran shrieking, holding the seats of their Levi's, yelling, "We got a licking! With the 'lectric paddle! A-wah! A-wah!"
And my heart sank. I had a premonition that the Baby Phase was about to give way to a Tease Dismey Phase.
Dismey came slowly to life in the classroom. She began to function with the rest of the class, catching up with ease with the children who had been in school a month before she arrived. She swooped through long and short vowels and caught us in initial consonants. She showed a flair for drawing and
painting. Her number work and reading flowed steadily into her-and stayed there instead of ebbing and flowing as it does for so many children. But all the rest of the classroom activities paled to insignificance as far as Dismey was concerned before the wonder of story time. it was after the first few sessions of story time immediately following the afternoon recess that I realized what Dismey's mother meant by calling her a believin' child.
Dismey believed without reservation in the absolute truth of every story she heard. She was completely credulous.
It's hard to explain the difference between the fairy tales for her and for the rest of the class. The others believed whole-heartedly while the story was in progress and then set it aside without a pang. But there was a feeling of eager acceptance and-and recognition-that fairly exuded from Dismey during story time that sometimes almost made my flesh creep. And this believing carried over to our dramatization of the stories too, to such an extent that when Dismey was the troll under the bridge for The Billy Goats Gruff, even Bannie paled and rushed over the bridge, pell-mell, forgetting the swaggering challenge that he as the Big Billy Goat was supposed to deliver. And he flatly refused to go back and slay the troll.
But this credulity of hers served her a much worse turn by making her completely vulnerable to Bannie and Michael. They had her believing, among other unhappy things, that a lion lived in the housing of the air-raid siren atop the cafeteria. And when the Civilian Defense truck came to check the mechanism and let the siren growl briefly, Dismey fled to the room, white-eyed and gasping, too frightened to scream. She sat, wet-faced and rigid, half the afternoon in spite of all my attempts to reassure her.
Then one day I found her crying out by the sidewalk when she should have been in class. Tears were falling without a sound as she rubbed with trembling desperation at the sidewalk.
"What's the matter, Dismey?" I asked, squatting down by her, the better to see. "What are you doing?"
"My mama," she choked out, "I hurt my mama!" "What do you mean?" I asked, bewildered.
"I stepped on a crack," she sobbed. "I didn't mean to but Bannie pushed me. And now my mama's back is busted! Can you fix a busted back? Does it cost very much?"
"Oh, Dismey, honey!" I cried, torn between pity and exasperation. "I told you not to believe Bannie. `Step on a crack and break your mother's back' isn't for true! It's just a singing thing the children like to say. It isn't really so!" I finally persuaded Dismey to leave the sidewalk, but she visibly worried all the rest of the day and shot out of the door at dismissal time as though she couldn't wait to get home to reassure herself.
Well, school went on and we switched from fairy tales to the Oz books, and at story time every day I sat knee-deep in a sea of wondering faces and experienced again with them my own enchantment when I was first exposed to the stories. And Dismey so firmly believed in every word I read that Michael and Bannie had her terror-stricken and fugitive every time a dust devil whirled across the playground. I finally had to take a decisive hand in the affair when I found Michael struggling with a silently desperate Dismey, trying to pry her frenzied hands loose from the playground fence so the whirlwind could pick her up and blow her over the Deadly Desert and into the hands of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Michael found his Levi's not impervious to a ping-pong paddle, which was the ultimate in physical punishment in our room. He also found not to his liking the Isolation outside the room, sitting forlornly on the steps by our door for half a day, but the worst was the corporate punishment he and Bannie had visited upon them. They were forbidden to play with each other for three days. The sight of their woebegone, drooping figures cast a blight over the whole playground, and even Dismey forgave them long before the time was up.
But her tender-heartedness left her only more vulnerable to the little devils when they finally slipped back into their old ways.
We finished the first of the Oz books and were racing delightedly into the first part of The Magic of Oz, and there it was! Right on page 19! We all looked at it solemnly. We wrote it on the board. We contemplated it with awe. A real live magic word! All we had to do now to work real magic was to learn how to pronounce the word.
Therein lay the difficulty. We considered the word. PYRZQXGL. We analyzed it. We knew all the letters in it, but there were no vowels except `and sometimes Y.' How could you sound out a word with no vowels and no place to divide it into syllables? Surely a word that long would have more than one syllable!
"We'll have to be careful even trying to say it, though," I warned. "Because if you do find the right way to pronounce it, you can-well, here it tells you­`. . . transform any-one into beast, bird or fish, or anything else, and back again, once you knew how to pronounce the mystical word.' "
"You could even change yourself. Wouldn't it be fun to be a bird for a while? But that's what you have to watch carefully. Birds can talk in the Land of Oz, but can they talk here?" The solemn consensus was no, except for papkeets and myna birds.
"So if you changed yourself into a bird, you couldn't ever change yourself back. You'd have to stay a bird unless someone else said the magic word for you. So you'd better be careful if you learn the way to say it."
"How do you say it, teacher?" asked Donna.
"I've never found out," I sighed. "I'll have to spell it every time I come to it in the story because I can't say it. Maybe someday I'll learn it. Then when it's Quiet Time, I'll turn you all into Easter Eggs, and we'll have a really quiet Quiet Time!"
Laughing, the children returned to their seats and we prepared for our afternoon work. But first, most of the children bent studiously to the task of copying PYRZQXGL from the board to take the word home to see if anyone could help them with it. It was all as usual, the laughing, half-belief of the most of the children in the wonderful possibilities of the word, and the solemn intensity of Dismey, bent over a piece of paper, carefully copying, her mouth moving to the letters.
The affair of Bannie and Michael versus Dismey went on and on. I consulted with the boys' parents, but we couldn't figure out anything to bring the matter to a halt. There seemed to be an irresistible compulsion that urged the boys on in spite of everything we could do. Sometimes you get things like that, a clash of personalities-or sometimes a meshing of personalities that is inexplicable. I tried to attack it from Dismey's angle, insisting that she check with me on everything the boys tried to put over on her before she believed, but Dismey was too simple a child to recognize the subtlety with
which the boys worked on occasion. And I tried ignoring the whole situation, thinking perhaps I was making it a situation by my recognition of it. A sobbing Dismey in my arms a couple of times convinced me of its reality.
Then there came yesterday. It was a raw blustery day, bone-chilling in spite of a cloudless sky, a day that didn't invite much playing outdoors after lunch. We told the children to run and romp for fifteen minutes after we left the cafeteria and then to come back indoors for the rest of the noon period. I shivered in my sweater and coat, blinking against the flood of sunlight that only made the cold, swirling winds across the grounds feel even colder. The children, screaming with excitement and release, swirled with the winds, to and fro, in a mad game of tag that consisted in whacking anyone handy and running off madly in all directions shrieking, "You're it, had a fit, and can't get over it!" It didn't take long for the vitality of some of our submarginals to run short, and when I saw Treesa and Hannery huddling in the angle of the building, shaking in their cracked, oversized shoes as they hugged their tattered sweaters about them, I blew the whistle that called the class indoors.
The clamor and noise finally settled down to the happy hum of Quiet Time, and I sighed and relaxed, taking a quick census of the room, automatically deducting the absentees of the day. I straightened and checked again.
"Where's Dismey?" I asked. There was a long silence. "Does anyone know where Dismey is?"
"She went to the restroom with me," said Donna. "She's afraid to go alone. She thinks a dragon lives down in the furnace room and she's scared to go by the steps by herself."
"She wuz play tag weez us," said Hannery, with his perennial sniff.
"Maybe she go'd to beeg playgroun'," suggested Treesa. "We don' s'pose to go to beeg playgroun'," she added virtuously.
Then I heard Bannie's high, embarrassed giggle.
"Bannie and Michael, come here."
They stood before me, a picture of innocence. "`Where is Dismey?" I asked. They exchanged side glances. Michael's shoulders rose and fell. Bannie looked at his thumb, dry of, lo, these many weeks, and popped it into his mouth.
"Michael," I said, taking hold of his shoulders, my fingers biting. "Where is Dismey?"
"We don't know," he whined, suddenly afraid. "We thought she was in here. We were just playing tag."
"What did you do to Dismey?" I asked, wondering wildly if they had finally killed her.
"We-we-" Michael dissolved into frightened tears before the sternness of my face and the lash of my words.
"We didn't do nothing," cried Bannie, taking his thumb out of his mouth, suddenly brave for Michael. "We just put a rock on her shadow."
"A rock on her shadow?" My hands dropped from Michael's shoulders.
"Yeth." Bannie's courage evaporated and his thumb went back into his mouth. "We told her she couldn't move."
"Sit down," I commanded, shoving the two from me as I stood. "All of you remember the rules for when I'm out of the room," I reminded the class. "I'll be right back."
The playground was empty except for the crumpled papers circling in an eddy around the trash can. I hurried over to the jungle gym. No Dismey. I turned the corner of the Old Building and there she was, straining and struggling, her feet digging into the ground, the dirt scuffed up over her ragged shoes, her whole self pulling desperately away from the small rock that lay on her shadow. I sawor thought I saw-the shadow itself curl up around her knobby, chapped ankles.
"Dismey!" I cried. "Dismey!"
"Teacher!" she sobbed. "Oh, teacher!"
I had my arms around her, trying to warm her stiff little hands in mine, trembling to her shivering, wincing to the shriveled blue lips that shook with her crying.
"But, Dismey, honey!" I cried. "It isn't so! You could have come back to the room anytime! A rock can't hold your shadow! It isn't true!"
But I had to move that rock before I could pick her up to carry her back to the room. It was a subdued, worried room the rest of the day. Bannie and Michael lost all interest in working. They sat apprehensively in their chairs, waiting for lightning to strike. I didn't say anything to them. I had nothing left to say. I had said and re-said everything I could ever think of. I had done what I knew to do, and it hadn't worked. Not even a trip into the office to interview Mr. Beasley had subdued them more than half a day. I couldn't even think straight about the matter any more. I had reached the point where I believed that I had felt the tug of a tethered shadow. I had found it necessary to move a rock before I could lift a child. I was out of my depth-but completely. And I was chilled to realize that not only Dismey but I-an adult-was entrapped in this believing bit. What might happen next? A feeling that must have been psychic indigestion kept me swallowing all afternoon.
In the warmth of the room, Dismey soon stopped shivering and went quietly about her work, but her eyes slid past the boys or looked through them. Donna swished her brief skirts up to the supply table for paper for Dismey, because the boys sat between her and the table. It looked as though the iron had finally entered Dismey's soul, and I hoped hopelessly that she had finally got wise to the little monsters.
The unnaturally subdued restraint lasted until dismissal time. I had the quietest-most industrious room in my experience-but it wasn't a happy one.
At Put-away Time, Michael and Bannie put their chairs up on the table quietly-without being told to. They walked to the coat closet. They lingered by the door until they saw that I had no word for them-or smile-or even frown. They scuffled slowly off to the bus gate. Dismey scurried out of the room as if she were the guilty party and had no word or smile for me, and I scuffled off slowly to bus duty.
Children bounce back amazingly. The next day-oh, lordy! that's today!-started off normally enough. We worked well all this morning-though at the tops of our
voices. Michael and Bannie had the devilish light flickering in their eyes again. Dismey neither noticed them nor ignored them. She had a small smile that turned up the corners of her mouth a little. She played happily with Donna and I blessed the good night's sleep I'd had for my return to calmness. I hoped-oh, how I hoped this morning-that the boys had finally decided to find something besides Dismey to occupy their energies.
Lunchtime passed and the mild temperatures out-of-doors let us relax into a full-time play period. Afternoon recess came and went. The tide of children flowed across the floor to pool around my feet for story time.
"Bannie," I said automatically, "I don't want you sitting my-" Then I felt a huge sinking inside of me. My eyes flew to Dismey. She returned my look, completely at ease and relaxed, the small smile still bending her mouth.
"Where's Bannie and Michael?" I asked casually, feeling insanely that this was yesterday again.
"They tol' me they wuz go to beeg playgroun'," sniffed Hannery. "They alla time sneak up there."
"Yeh, yeh," said Treesa. "They go'd to beeg playgroun' but they comed back. They go'd to Old Building and slided on steps. Ain' s'posed to slide on steps," she added virtuously.
"Maybe they didn't hear the bell," suggested Donna. "When you play by the Old Building, sometimes you don't." I looked at Dismey. She looked back. Her small, pointed tongue circled the smile and then disappeared for the automatic swallow. I looked away, uncomfortable.
"Well, they'll miss out on the story, then," I said. "And because they've been late twice this week, they'll have to be in Isolation for twice as long as they are late." I checked my watch to time the boys and began to read. I didn't hear a word I read. I suppose I paraphrased the story as I usually do, bringing it down to first grade level. I suppose I skipped over discursive passages that had little interest for my children, but I have no way of knowing. I was busy trying to hold down that psychic indigestion again, the feeling that something terribly wrong had to be put to rights.
After the group went back to their seats and became immersed in their work, I called Dismey quietly up to my desk.
"Where are Michael and Bannie?" I asked her.
She flushed and twisted her thin shoulders. "Out on the playground," she said.
"Why didn't they come when the bell rang?" I asked.
"They couldn't hear the bell ring." The little smile lifted the corners of her mouth. I shivered.
"Why not?" Dismey looked at me without expression.
She looked down at the desk and followed her finger as it rubbed back and forth on the edge. "Dismey," I urged.
"Why couldn't they hear the bell?"
"'Cause I changed them," she said, her chin lifting a little.
"I changed them into rocks:"
"Changed them?" I asked blankly. "Into rocks?"
"Yes," said Dismey. "They're mean. They're awfully mean. I changed them." The little smile curled briefly again.
"How did you do it?" I asked. "What did you do?"
"I learned the magic word," she said proudly. "I can say it right. You know, the one you read to us. That PYRZQXGL." Her voice fluttered and hissed through a sound that raised the short hairs on the back of my neck and all down both my arms.
"And it worked!" I cried incredulously.
"Why, sure," she said. "You said it would. It's a magic word. You read it in the book. Mama told me how to say it. She said how come they put words like that in kids' books. They get away with anything nowadays. That's not a word for kids. But she told me how to say it anyway. See?" She picked up the stapler from my desk. "Be a baby rabbit –PYRZQXGL!" She sputtered the word at it.
And there was a tiny gray bunny nosing inquisitively at my blotter!
"Be what you was before," said Dismey. "PYRZQXGL!" The bunny started slightly and the stapler fell over on its side. I picked it up. It felt warm. I dropped it.
"But-but-" I took a deep breath. "Where are the boys, Dismey? Do you know?"
"I guess so," she said, frowning a little. "I guess I remember."
"Go get them," I said. "Bring them to me:" She looked at me quietly for a moment, her jaw muscle tensing, then she said, "Okay, teacher." So I sent her, heaven help me! And she came back, heaven help us all! She came back and put three little rocks or the corner of my desk.
"I guess these is them," she said. "Two of them are, any way. I couldn't remember exactly which ones they was, so I brought an extra one." We looked at the rocks.
"They're scared," she said. "I turned them into scared rocks."
"Do rocks know?" I asked. "Can rocks be scared?"
Dismey considered, head tilted. "I don't know." The small smile came back. "But if they can-they are."
And there they lie, on my green blotter, in the middle of my battered old desk, in front of my crowded room-three rocks, roughly the size of marbles-and two of them are Michael and Bannie.
And time is running out fast-fast! I can't say the magic word. Nobody can say the magic word except Dismey and her mother.
Of course I could take them to Mr. Beasley in the office and say, "Here are two of my boys. Remember? They're the ones that kept picking on the little girl in my room. She turned them into rocks because they were mean. What shall we do?"
Or I could take them to the boys' parents and say, "One of these is your boy. Which one resembles Bannie the most? Take your choice."
I've been looking down at my quiet hands for fifteen minutes now, but the rising murmur in the room and the rustle of movement tell me that it's past time to change activities. I've got to do something-and soon.
Looking back over the whole affair, I see only one possible course of action. I'm going to take a page from Dismey's own book. I'm going to be the believingest teacher there ever was. I believe-I believe implicitly that Dismey will mind me-she'll do as she is told. I believe, I believe, I believe "Dismey, come here, please." Here comes the obedient child, up to my desk. "It's almost time to go home, Dismey," I tell her. "Here, take the rocks and go outside by the door. Turn them back into Michael and Bannie. "
"I don't want to." It's not refusal! It's not refusal! It's just a statement.
"I know you don't. But the bell will be ringing soon, and we don't want to make them miss the bus. Mr. Beasley gets very annoyed when we miss the bus."
"But they were awfully mean." Her eyes are hurt and angry.
"Yes, I know they were, and I'm going to use the paddle on them. But they've been rocks a long time-scared rocks. They know now that you can be mean back at them, so they'll probably let you alone and not bother you any more. Go on, take them outside." She's looking at me intently.
"Remember, your mama said mind the teacher." Her jaws tighten.
The three rocks click together in her hand. She is going out the door. It swings shut jerkily behind her.
Now I am waiting for the doorknob to turn again. I believe, I believe, I believe-
THROUGH A GLASS – DARKLY
I FINALLY GOT SO FRIGHTENED that I decided to go to Dr. Barstow and have my eyes checked.
Dr. Barstow has been my eye doctor for years-all the way from when a monkey bit and broke one lens of my first glasses, up to the current encouraging me through getting used to bifocals. Although I still take them off to thread a needle and put them back on to see across the room, I take his word for it that someday I'll hardly notice the vast no-vision slash across the middle oЧитать дальше