People No Different Flesh

“She’s-she’s afraid!” I gasped. “Maybe she thinks-we’ll-kill her!”

“Here!” Nils finally caught a last flailing arm and pinioned it. “Talk to her! Do something! I can’t hold her much longer!”

“Marnie, Marnie!” I smoothed the tangled curls back from her blank, tense face, trying to catch her attention.

“Marnie, don’t be afraid!” I tried a smile. “Relax, honey, don’t be scared.” I wiped her sweat-and tear-streaked face with the corner of my apron. “There, there, it doesn’t matter-we won’t hurt you-” I murmured on and on, wondering if she was taking in any of it, but finally the tightness began to go out of her body and at last she drooped, exhausted, in Nils’s arms. I gathered her to me and comforted her against my shoulder.

“Get her a cup of milk,” I said to Nils, “and bring me one, too.” My smile wavered. “This is hard work!”

In the struggle I had almost forgotten what had started it, but it came back to me as I led Marnie to the spring and demonstrated that she should wash her face and hands. She did so, following my example, and dried herself on the flour-sack towel I handed her. Then, when I started to turn away, she sat down on a rock by the flowing water, lifted the sadly bedraggled gown, and slipped her feet into the stream. When she lifted each to dry it, I saw the reddened, bruised soles and said, “No wonder you didn’t want to walk. Wait a minute.” I went back to the wagon and got my old slippers, and, as an afterthought, several pins. Marnie was still sitting by the stream, leaning over the water, letting it flow between her fingers. She put on the slippers-woefully large for her, and stood watching with interest as I turned up the bottom of the gown and pinned it at intervals.

“Now,” I said, “now at least you can walk. But this gown will be ruined if we don’t get you into some other clothes.”

We ate dinner and Marnie ate some of everything we did, after a cautious tasting and a waiting to see how we handled it. She helped me gather up and put away the leftovers and clear the tarp. She even helped with the dishes-all with an absorbed interest as if learning a whole new set of skills.

As our wagon rolled on down the road, Nils and I talked quietly, not to disturb Marnie as she slept in the back of the wagon.

“She’s an odd child,” I said. “Nils, do you think she really was floating? How could she have? It’s impossible.”

“Well, it looked as if she was floating,” he said. “And she acted as if she had done something wrong-something-” Nils’s words stopped and he frowned intently as he flicked at a roadside branch with the whip “-something we would hurt her for. Gail, maybe that’s why-I mean, we found that witch quotation. Maybe those other people were like Marnie. Maybe someone thought they were witches and burned them-“

“But witches are evil!” I cried. “What’s evil about floating-“

“Anything is evil,” said Nils. “It lies on the other side of the line you draw around what you will accept as good. Some people’s lines are awfully narrow.”

“But that’s murder!” I said, “to kill-“

“Murder or execution-again, a matter of interpretation,” said Nils. “We call it murder, but it could never be proved-“

“Marnie,” I suggested. “She saw-“

“Can’t talk-or won’t,” said Nils.

I hated the shallow valley of Grafton’s Vow at first glance. For me it was shadowed from one side to the other in spite of the down-flooding sun that made us so grateful for the shade of the overhanging branches. The road was running between rail fences now as we approached the town. Even the horses seemed jumpy and uneasy as we rattled along.

“Look,” I said, “there’s a notice or something on that fence post.”

Nils pulled up alongside the post and I leaned over to read: “‘Ex. 20:16’ That’s all it says!”

“Another reference,” said Nils. “‘Thou shalt not bear false witness.’ This must be a habit with them, putting up memorials on the spot where a law is broken.”

“I wonder what happened here.” I shivered as we went on.

We were met at a gate by a man with a shotgun in his hands who said, “God have mercy,” and directed us to the campgrounds safely separated from town by a palisade kind of log wall. There we were questioned severely by an anxious-faced man, also clutching a shotgun, who peered up at the sky at intervals as though expecting the wrath of heaven at any moment.

“Only one wagon?” he asked,

“Yes,” said Nils. “My wife and I and-“

“You have your marriage lines?” came the sharp question.

“Yes,” said Nils patiently, “they’re packed in the trunk.”

“And your Bible is probably packed away, too!” the man accused.

“No,” said Nils, “here it is.” He took it from under the seat. The man sniffed and shifted.

“Who’s that?” He nodded at the back of Marnie’s dark head where she lay silently, sleeping or not, I don’t now.

“My niece,” Nils said steadily, and I clamped my mouth shut. “She’s sick.”

“Sick!”’ The man backed away from the wagon. “What sin did she commit?”

“Nothing catching,” said Nils shortly.

“Which way you come?” asked the man.

“Through Millman’s Pass,” Nils answered, his eyes unwavering on the anxious questioning face. The man paled and clutched his gun tighter, the skin of his face seeming to stretch down tight and then flush loose and sweaty again.

“What-” he began, then he licked dry lips and tried again. “Did you-was there-“

“Was there what?” asked Nils shortly. “Did we what?”

“Nothing,” stammered the man, backing away. “Nothing.

“Gotta see her,” he said, coming reluctantly back to the wagon. “Too easy to bear false witness-” Roughly he grabbed the quilt and pulled it back, rolling Marnie’s head toward him I thought he was going to collapse. “That’s-that’s the one!” he whimpered hoarsely. “How did she get-Where did you-” Then his lips clamped shut. “If you say it’s your niece, it’s your niece.

“You can stay the night,” he said with an effort. “Spring just outside the wall. Otherwise keep to the compound. Remember your prayers. Comport yourself in the fear of God.” Then he scuttled away.

“Niece!” I breathed. “Oh, Nils! Shall I write out an Ex. 20:16 for you to nail on the wagon?”

“She’ll have to be someone,” said Nils. “When we get to Margin, we’ll have to explain her somehow. She’s named for your sister, so she’s our niece. Simple, isn’t it?”

“Sounds so,” I said. “But, Nils who is she? How did that man know-? If those were her people that died back there, where are their wagons? Their belongings? People don’t just drop out of the sky-“

“Maybe these Graftonites took the people there to execute them,” he suggested, “and confiscated their goods.”

“Be more characteristic if they burned the people in the town square,” I said shivering. “And their wagons, too.”

We made camp. Marnie followed me to the spring. I glanced around, embarrassed for her in the nightgown, but no one else was around and darkness was failing. We went through the wall by a little gate and were able for the first time to see the houses of the village. They were very ordinary looking except for the pale flutter of papers posted profusely on everything a nail could hold to. How could they think of anything but sinning, with all these ghosty reminders?

While we were dipping the water, a small girl, enveloped in gray calico from slender neck to thin wrists and down to clumsy shoes, came pattering down to the spring, eyeing us as though she expected us to leap upon her with a roar.

“Hello,” I said and smiled.

“God have mercy,” she answered in a breathless whisper.

“Are you right with God?”

“I trust so,” I answered, not knowing if the question required an answer.

“She’s wearing white,” said the child, nodding at Marnie.

“Is she dying?”

“No,” I said, “but she’s been ill. That is her nightgown.”

“Oh!” The child’s eyes widened and her hand covered her mouth. “How wicked! To use such a bad word! To be in her-her-to be like that outside the house! In the daytime!” She plopped her heavy bucket into the spring and, dragging it out, staggered away from us, slopping water as she went. She was met halfway up the slope by a grim-faced woman, who set the pail aside, switched the weeping child unmercifully with a heavy willow switch, took a paper from her pocket, impaled it on a nail on a tree, seized the child with one hand and the bucket with the other, and plodded back to town.

I looked at the paper. Ex. 20:12. “Well!” I let out an astonished breath. “And she had it already written!” Then I went back to Marnie. Her eyes were big and empty again, the planes of her face sharply sunken.

“Marnie,” I said, touching her shoulder. There was no response, no consciousness of me as I led her back to the wagon.

Nils retrieved the bucket of water and we ate a slender, unhappy supper by the glow of our campfire. Marnie ate nothing and sat in a motionless daze until we put her to bed.

“Maybe she’s subject to seizures,” I suggested.

“It was more likely watching the child being beaten,” said Nils. “What had she done?”

“Nothing except to talk to us and be shocked that Marnie should be in her nightgown in public.”

“What was the paper the mother posted?” asked Nils.

“Exodus, 20:12,” I said. “The child must have disobeyed her mother by carrying on a conversation with us.”

After a fitful, restless night the first thin light of dawn looked wonderful and we broke camp almost before we had shadows separate from the night. Just before we rode away, Nils wrote large and blackly on a piece of paper and fastened it to the wall near our wagon with loud accusing hammer blows. As we drove away, I asked, “What does it say?”

“Exodus, Chapter 22, verses 21 through 24,” he said. “If they want wrath, let it fall on them!”

I was too unhappy and worn out to pursue the matter. I only knew it must be another Shalt Not and was thankful that I had been led by my parents through the Rejoice and Love passages instead of into the darkness.

Half an hour later, we heard the clatter of hooves behind us and, looking back, saw someone riding toward us, waving an arm urgently. Nils pulled up and laid his hand on his rifle. We waited.

It was the anxious man who had directed us to the campsite. He had Nils’s paper clutched in his hand. At first he couldn’t get his words out, then he said, “Drive on! Don’t stop! They might be coming after me!” He gulped and wiped his nervous forehead, Nils slapped the reins and we moved off down the road. “Y-you left this-” He jerked the paper toward us. “‘Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him-’” the words came in gasps. “‘Ye shalt not afflict any widow or fatherless child. If you afflict them in any wise, I will surely hear their cry and my wrath shall wax hot-’” He sagged in the saddle, struggling for breath. “This is exactly what I told them,” he said finally. “I showed it to them-the very next verses-but they couldn’t see past 22:18. They-they went anyway. That Archibold told them about the people. He said they did things only witches could do. I had to go along. Oh, God have mercy! And help them tie them and watch them set the shed afire!”

“Who were they?” asked Nils.

“I don’t know.” The man sucked air noisily. “Archibold said he saw them flying up in the trees and laughing. He said they floated rocks around and started to build a house with them. He said they-they walked on the water and didn’t fall in. He said one of them held a piece of wood up in the air and it caught on fire and other wood came and made a pile on the ground and that piece went down and lighted the rest.” The man wiped his face again. “They must have been witches! Or else how could they do such things! We caught them. They were sleeping. They fluttered up like birds. I caught that little girl you’ve got there, only her hair was long then. We tied them up. I didn’t want to!” Tears jerked out of his eyes. “I didn’t put any knots in my rope and after the roof caved in, the little girl flew out all on fire and hid in the dark! I didn’t know the Graftonites were like that! I only came last year. They-they tell you exactly what to do to be saved. You don’t have to think or worry or wonder-” He rubbed his coat sleeve across his face. “Now all my life I’ll see the shed burning. What about the others?”

“We buried them,” I said shortly. “The charred remains of them.”

“God have mercy!” he whispered.

“Where did the people come from?” asked Nils. “Where are their wagons?”

“There weren’t any,” said the man. “Archibold says they came in a flash of lightning and a thunderclap out of a clear sky-not a cloud anywhere. He waited, and watched them three days before he came and told us. Wouldn’t you think they were witches?” He wiped his face again and glanced hack down the road. “They might follow me. Don’t tell them. Don’t say I told.” He gathered up the reins, his face drawn and anxious, and spurred his horse into a gallop, cutting away from the road, across the flat. But before the hurried hoofbeats were muffled by distance, he whirled around and galloped back.

“But!” he gasped, back by our wagon side. “She must be a witch! She should be dead. You are compromising with evil-“

“Shall I drag her out so you can finish burning her here and now?” snapped Nils. “So you can watch her sizzle in her sin!”

“Don’t!” The man doubled across the saddle horn in an agony of indecision. ” ‘No man having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom.’ What they’re right? What if the Devil is tempting me? Lead me not into temptation! Maybe it’s not too late! Maybe if I confess!” And he tore back down the road toward Grafton’s Vow faster than he had come.

“Well!” I drew a deep breath. “What Scripture would you quote for that?”

“I’m wondering,” said Nils. “This Archibold. I wonder if he was in his right mind-“

“‘They fluttered up like birds,’” I reminded him, “and Marnie was floating.”

“But floating rocks and making fire and coming in a flash of lightning out of a clear sky!” Nils protested.

“Maybe it was some kind of a balloon,” I suggested.

“Maybe it exploded. Maybe Marnie doesn’t speak English. If the balloon sailed a long way-“

“It couldn’t sail too far,” said Nils. “The gas cools and it would come down. But how else could they come through the air?”

I felt a movement behind me and turned. Marnie was sitting up on the pallet. But what a different Marnie! It was as though her ears had been unstopped or a window had opened into her mind. There was an eager listening look on her tilted face. There was light in her eyes and the possibility of smiles around her mouth. She looked at me. “Through the air!” she said.

“Nils!” I cried. “Did you hear that! How did you come through the air, Marnie?”

She smiled apologetically and fingered the collar of the garment she wore and said, “Gown.”

“Yes, gown,” I said, settling for a word when I wanted a volume. Then I thought, Can I reach the bread box? Marnie’s bright eyes left my face and she rummaged among the boxes and bundles. With a pleased little sound, she came up with a piece of bread. “Bread,” she said, “bread!” And it floated through the air into my astonished hands.

“Well!” said Nils. “Communication has begun!” Then he sobered. “And we have a child, apparently. From what that man said, there is no one left to be responsible for her. She seems to be ours.”

When we stopped at noon for dinner, we were tired. More from endless speculation than from the journey. There had been no signs of pursuit and Marnie had subsided onto the pallet again, eyes closed.

We camped by a small creek and I had Nils get my trunk out before he cared for the animals. I opened the trunk with Marnie close beside me, watching my every move. I had packed an old skirt and shirtwaist on the top till so they would be ready for house cleaning and settling-in when we arrived at Margin. I held the skirt up to Marnie. It was too big and too long, but it would do with the help of a few strategic pins and by fastening the skirt up almost under her arms. Immediately, to my surprise and discomfort, Marnie skinned the nightgown off over her head in one motion and stood arrow-slim and straight, dressed only in that undergarment of hers. I glanced around quickly to see where Nils was and urged the skirt and blouse on Marnie. She glanced around too, puzzled, and slipped the clothing on, holding the skirt up on both sides. I showed her the buttons and hooks and eyes and, between the two of us and four pins, we got her put together.

When Nils came to the dinner tarp, he was confronted by Marnie, all dressed, even to my clumping slippers.

“Well!” he said, “a fine young lady we have! It’s too bad we had to cut her hair.”

“We can pretend she’s just recovering from typhoid,” I said, smiling. But the light had gone out of Marnie’s face as if she knew what we were saying. She ran her fingers through her short-cropped curls, her eyes on my heavy braids I let swing free, Indian-fashion, traveling as we were, alone and unobserved.

“Don’t you mind,” I said, hugging her in one arm. “It’ll grow again.”

She lifted one of my braids and looked at me. “Hair,” I said.

“Hair,” she said and stretched out a curl from her own head. “Curl.”

What a wonderful feeling it was to top out on the flat above Margin and to know we were almost home. Home! As I wound my braids around my head in a more seemly fashion, I looked back at the boxes and bundles in the wagon. With these and very little else we must make a home out here in the middle of nowhere. Well, with Nils, it would suffice.

The sound of our wheels down the grade into town brought out eager, curious people from the scattering of houses and scanty town buildings that made up Margin. Margin clung to the side of a hill-that is, it was in the rounded embrace of the hill on three sides. On the other side, hundreds and hundreds of miles of territory lost themselves finally in the remote blueness of distance. It was a place where you could breathe free and unhampered and yet still feel the protectiveness of the everlasting hills. We were escorted happily to our house at the other end of town by a growing crowd of people. Marnie had fallen silent and withdrawn again, her eyes wide and wondering, her hand clutching the edge of the seat with white-knuckled intensity as she tried to lose herself between Nils and me.

Well, the first few days in a new place are always uncomfortable and confused. All the settling-in and the worry about whether Marnie would go floating off like a balloon or send something floating through the air as she had the bread combined to wear me to a frazzle. Fortunately Marnie was very shy of anyone but us, so painfully so that as soon as the gown was washed and clean again and we borrowed a cot, I put Marnie into both of them, and she lay in a sort of doze all day long, gone to some far place I couldn’t even guess at.

Of course we had to explain her. There had been no mention of her when we arranged to come, and she had no clothes and I didn’t have enough to cover both of us decently. So I listened to myself spin the most outrageous stories to Mrs. Wardlow. Her husband was the schoolmaster-lay-preacher and every other function of a learned man in a frontier settlement. She was the unofficial news spreader and guardian of public morals.

“Marnie is our niece,” I said. “She’s my younger sister’s girl. She is just recovering from typhoid and-and brain fever.”

“Oh, my!” said Mrs. Wardlow. “Both at once?”

“No,” I said, warming to my task. “She was weakened by the typhoid and went into a brain fever. She lost her hair from all the fever. We thought we were going to lose her, too.” It didn’t take play acting to shiver, as, unbidden into my mind, came the vision of the smoke pluming slowly up-“My sister sent her with us, hoping that the climate out here will keep Marnie from developing a consumption. She hopes, too, that I can help the child learn to talk again.”

“I’ve heard of people having to learn to walk again after typhoid, but not to talk-“

“The technical name for the affliction is aphasia,” I said glibly. “Remember the brain fever. She had just begun to make some progress in talking, but the trip has set her back.”

“She-she isn’t-unbalanced, is she?” whispered Mrs. Wardlow piercingly.

“Of course not!” I said indignantly. “And, please! She can hear perfectly.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Wardlow, reddening, “of course. I didn’t mean to offend. When she is recovered enough, Mr. Wardlow would be pleased to set her lessons for her until she can come to school.”

“Thank you,” I said, “that would be very kind of him.” Then I changed the subject by introducing tea.

After she left, I sat down by Marnie, whose eyes brightened for my solitary presence.

“Marnie,” I said, “I don’t know how much you understand of what I say, but you are my niece. You must call me Aunt Gail and Nils, Uncle Nils. You have been sick. You are having to learn to speak all over again.” Her eyes had been watching me attentively, but not one flick of understanding answered me. I sighed heavily and turned away. Marnie’s hand caught my arm. She held me, as she lay, eyes closed. Finally I made a movement as if to free myself, and she opened her eyes and smiled.

“Aunt Gail, I have been sick. My hair is gone. I want bread!” she recited carefully.

“Oh, Marnie!” I cried, hugging her to me in delight. “Bless you! You are learning to talk!’” I hugged my face into the top of her curls, then I let her go. “As to bread, I mixed a batch this morning. It’ll be in the oven as soon as it rises again. There’s nothing like the smell of baking bread to make a place seem like home.”

As soon as Marnie was strong enough, I began teaching her the necessary household skills and found it most disconcerting to see her holding a broom gingerly, not knowing, literally, which end to use, or what to do with it. Anybody knows what a needle and thread are for! But Marnie looked upon them as if they were baffling wonders from another world. She watched the needle swing back and forth sliding down the thread until it fell to the floor because she didn’t know enough to put a knot in the end.

She learned to talk, but very slowly at first. She had to struggle and wait for words. I asked her about it one day. Her slow answer came. “I don’t know your language,” she said. “I have to change the words to my language to see what they say, then change them again to be in your language.” She sighed. “It’s so slow! But soon I will be able to take words from your mind and not have to change them.”

I blinked, not quite sure I wanted anything taken from my mind by anyone!

The people of Margin had sort of adopted Marnie and were very pleased with her progress. Even the young ones learned to wait for her slow responses. She found it more comfortable to play with the younger children because they didn’t require such a high performance in the matter of words, and because their play was with fundamental things of the house and the community, translated into the simplest forms and acted out in endless repetition.

I found out, to my discomfort, a little of how Marnie was able to get along so well with the small ones-the day Merwin Wardlow came roaring to me in seven-year-old indignation.

“Marnie and that old sister of mine won’t let me play!” he tattled wrathfully.

“Oh, I’m sure they will, if you play nicely,” I said, shifting my crochet hook as I hurried with the edging of Marnie’s new petticoat.

“They won’t neither!” And he prepared to bellow again. His bellow rivaled the six o’clock closing whistle at the mine, so I sighed, and laying my work down, took him out to the children’s play place under the aspens.

Marnie was playing with five-year-old Tessie Wardlow. They were engrossed in building a playhouse. They had already outlined the various rooms with rocks and were now furnishing them with sticks and stones, shingles, old cans and bottles, and remnants of broken dishes. Marnie was arranging flowers in a broken vase she had propped between two rocks. Tessie was busily bringing her flowers and sprays of leaves. And not one single word was being exchanged! Tessie watched Marnie, then trotted off to get another flower. Before she could pick the one she intended, she stopped, her hand actually on the flower, glanced at Marnie’s busy back, left that flower and, picking another, trotted happily back with it.

“Marnie,” I called, and blinked to feel a wisp of something say Yes? inside my mind. Marnie!” I called again. Marnie jumped and turned her face to me. “Yes, Aunt Gail,” she said carefully.

“Merwin says you won’t let him play.”

“Oh, he’s telling stories!” cried Tessie indignantly. “He won’t do anything Marnie says and she’s the boss today.”

“She don’t tell me nothing to do!” yelled Merwin, betraying in his indignation, his father’s careful grammar.

“She does so!” Tessie stamped her foot. “She tells you just as much as she tells me! And you don’t do it.”

I was saved from having to arbitrate between the warring two by Mrs. Wardlow’s calling them in to supper. Relieved, I sank down on the southwest corner of the parlor-a sizable moss-grown rock. Marnie sat down on the ground beside me.

“Marnie,” I said. “How did Tessie know what flowers to bring you?”

“I told her,” said Marnie, surprised. “They said I was boss today. Merwin just wouldn’t play.”

“Did you tell him things to do?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” said Marnie. “But he didn’t do nothing.”

“Did nothing,” I corrected.

“Did nothing,” she echoed.

“The last flower Tessie brought,” I went on. “Did you ask for that special one?”

“Yes,” said Marnie. “She started to pick the one with bad petals on one side.”

“Marnie,” I said patiently, “I was here and I didn’t hear a word. Did you talk to Tessie?”

“Oh, yes,” said Marnie.

“With words? Out loud?” I pursued.

“I think-” Marnie started, then she sighed and sagged against my knees, tracing a curve in the dirt with her forefinger. “I guess not. It is so much more easy (“Easier,” I corrected.) easier to catch her thoughts before they are words. I can tell Tessie without words. But Merwin-I guess he needs words.”

“Marnie,” I said, taking reluctant steps into the wilderness of my ignorance of what to do with a child who found “no words more easy,” “you must always use words. It might seem easier to you-the other way, but you must speak. You see, most people don’t understand not using words. When people don’t understand, they get frightened. When they are frightened, they get angry. And when they get angry, they-they have to hurt.”

I sat quietly watching Marnie manipulate my words, frame a reply, and make it into words for her stricken, unhappy lips.

“Then it was because they didn’t understand, that they killed us,” she said. “They made the fire.”

“Yes,” I said, “exactly.

“Marnie,” I went on, feeling that I was prying, but needing to know. “You have never cried for the people who died in the fire. You were sad, but-weren’t they your own people?”

“Yes,” said Marnie, after an interval. “My father, my mother, and my brother-” She firmed her lips and swallowed. “And a neighbor of ours. One brother was Called in the skies when our ship broke and my little sister’s life-slip didn’t come with ours.”

And I saw them! Vividly, I saw them all as she named them. The father, I noticed before his living, smiling image faded from my mind, had thick dark curls like Marnie’s. The neighbor was a plump little woman.

“But,” I blinked, “don’t you grieve for them? Aren’t you sad because they are dead?”

“I am sad because they aren’t with me,” said Marnie slowly. “But I do not grieve that the Power Called them back to the Presence. Their bodies were so hurt and broken.” She swallowed again. “My days are not finished yet, but no matter how long until I am Called, my people will come to meet me. They will laugh and run to me when I arrive and I-” She leaned against my skirt, averting her face. After a moment she lifted her chin and said, “I am sad to be here without them, but my biggest sorrow is not knowing where my little sister is, or whether Timmy has been Called. We were two-ing, Timmy and I.” Her hand closed over the hem of my skirt. “But, praise the Presence, I have you and Uncle Nils, who do not hurt just because you don’t understand.”

“But where on Earth-” I began.

“Is this called Earth?” Marnie looked about her. “Is Earth the place we came to?”

“The whole world is Earth,” I said. “Everything-as far as you can see-as far as you can go. You came to this Territory-“

“Earth-” Marnie was musing. “So this refuge in the sky is called Earth!” She scrambled to her feet. “I’m sorry I troubled you, Aunt Gail,” she said. “Here, this is to promise not to be unEarth-” She snatched up the last flower she had put in the playhouse vase and pushed it into my hands. “I will set the table for supper,” she called back to me as she hurried to the house. “This time forks at each place-not in a row down the middle.”

I sighed and twirled the flower in my fingers. Then I laughed helplessly. The flower that had so prosaically grown on, and had been plucked from our hillside, was glowing with a deep radiance, its burning gold center flicking the shadows of the petals across my lingers, and all the petals tinkled softly from the dewdrop-clear bits of light that were finely pendant along the edges of them. Not unEarth! But when I showed Nils the flower that evening as I retold our day, the flower was just a flower again, limp and withering.

“Either you or Marnie have a wonderful imagination,” Nils said.

“Then it’s Marnie,” I replied. “I would never in a million years think up anything like the things she said. Only, Nils, how can we be sure it isn’t true?”

“That what isn’t true?” he asked. “What do you think she has told you?”

“Why-why-” I groped, “that she can read minds, Tessie’s anyway. And that this is a strange world to her. And-and-“

“If this is the way she wants to make the loss of her family bearable, let her. It’s better than hysterics or melancholia. Besides, it’s more exciting, isn’t it?” Nils laughed.

That reaction wasn’t much help in soothing my imagination! But he didn’t have to spend his days wrestling hand to hand with Marnie and her ways. He hadn’t had to insist that Marnie learn to make the beds by hand instead of floating the covers into place-nor insist that young ladies wear shoes in preference to drifting a few inches above the sharp gravel and beds of stickers in the back yard. And he didn’t have to persuade her that, no matter how dark the moonless night, one doesn’t cut out paper flowers and set them to blooming like little candies around the comers of the rooms. Nils had been to the county seat that weekend. I don’t know where she was from, but this was a New World to her and whatever one she was native to, I had no memory of reading about or of seeing on a globe.

When Marnie started taking classes in Mr. Wardlow’s one-room school, she finally began to make friends with the few children her age in Margin. Guessing at her age, she seemed to be somewhere in her teens. Among her friends were Kenny, the son of the mine foreman, and Loolie, the daughter of the boardinghouse cook. The three of them ranged the hills together, and Marnie picked up a large vocabulary from them and became a little wiser in the ways of behaving unexceptionally. She startled them a time or two by doing impossible things, but they reacted with anger and withdrawal which she had to wait out more or less patiently before being accepted back into their companionship. One doesn’t forget again very quickly under such circumstances.

During this time, her hair grew and she grew, too, so much so that she finally had to give up the undergarment she had worn when we found her. She sighed as she laid it aside, tucking it into the bottom dresser drawer. “At Home,” she said, “there would be a ceremony and a pledging. All of us girls would know that our adult responsibilities were almost upon us-” Somehow, she seemed less different, less, well I suppose, alien, after that day.

It wasn’t very long after this that Marnie began to stop suddenly in the middle of a sentence and listen intently, or clatter down the plates she was patterning on the supper table and hurry to the window. I watched her anxiously for a while, wondering if she was sickening for something, then, one night, after I blew out the lamp, I thought I heard something moving in the other room. I went in barefootedly quiet. Marnie was at the window.

“Marnie?” Her shadowy figure turned to me. “What’s troubling you?” I stood close beside her and looked out at the moonlight-flooded emptiness of hills around the house.

“Something is out there,” she said. “Something scared and bad-frightened and evil-” She took the more adult words from my mind. I was pleased that being conscious of her doing this didn’t frighten me any more the way it did the first few times. “It goes around the house and around the house and is afraid to come.”

“Perhaps an animal,” I suggested.

“Perhaps,” she conceded, turning away from the window.

“I don’t know your world. An animal who walks upright and sobs, ‘God have mercy!’”

Which incident was startling in itself, but doubly so when Nils said casually next day as he helped himself to mashed potatoes at the dinner table, “Guess who I saw today. They say he’s been around a week or so.” He flooded his plate with brown meat gravy. “Our friend of the double mind.”

“Double mind?” I blinked uncomprehendingly.

“Yes.” Nils reached for a slice of bread. “To burn or not to burn, that is the question-“

“Oh!” I felt a quiver up my arms. “You mean the man at Grafton’s Vow. What was his name anyway?”

“He never said, did he?” Nils’s fork paused in mid-air as the thought caught him.

“Derwent,” said Marnie shortly, her lips pressing to a narrow line. “Caleb Derwent, God have mercy.”

“How do you know?” I asked. “Did he tell you?”

“No,” she said, “I took it from him to remember him with gratitude.” She pushed away from the table, her eyes widening. “That’s it-that’s the frightened evil that walks around the house at night! And passes by during the day! But he saved me from the fire! Why does he come now?”

“She’s been feeling that something evil is lurking outside,” I explained to Nils’s questioning look.

“Hmm,” he said, “the two minds. Marnie, if ever he-“

“May I go?” Marnie stood up. “I’m sorry. I can’t eat when I think of someone repenting of good.” And she was gone, the kitchen door clicking behind her.

“And she’s right,” said Nils, resuming his dinner. “He slithered around a stack of nail kegs at the store and muttered to me about still compromising with evil, harboring a known witch. I sort of pinned him in the corner until he told me he had finally-after all this time-confessed his sin of omission to his superiors at Grafton’s Vow and they’ve excommunicated him until he redeems himself-” Nils stared at me, listening to his own words. “Gail! You don’t suppose he has any mad idea about taking her back to Grafton’s Vow, do you!”

“Or killing her!” I cried, clattering my chair back from the table. “Marnie!” Then I subsided with an attempt at a smile.

“But she’s witch enough to sense his being around,” I said.

“He won’t be able to take her by surprise.”

“Sensing or not,” Nils said, eating hastily, “next time I get within reach of this Derwent person, I’m going to persuade him that he’ll be healthier elsewhere.”

In the days that followed, we got used to seeing half of Derwent’s face peering around a building, or a pale slice of his face appearing through bushes or branches, but he seemed to take out his hostility in watching Marnie from a safe distance, and we decided to let things ride-watchfully.

Then one evening Marnie shot through the back door and, shutting it, leaned against it, panting.

“Marnie,” I chided. “I didn’t hear your steps on the porch. You must remember-“

“I-I’m sorry, Aunt Gail,” she said, “but I had to hurry. Aunt Gail, I have a trouble!” She was actually shaking.

“What have you done now to upset Kenny and Loolie?” I asked, smiling.

“Not-not that,” she said. “Oh, Aunt Gail! He’s down in the shaft and I can’t get him up. I know the inanimate lift, but he’s not inanimate-“

“Marnie, sit down,” I said, sobering. “Calm down and tell me what’s wrong.”

She sat, if that tense tentative conforming to a chair could be called sitting.

“I was out at East Shaft,” she said. “My people are Identifiers, some of them are, anyway-my family is especially-I mean-” She gulped and let loose all over. I could almost see the tension drain out of her, but it came flooding back as soon as she started talking again. “Identifiers can locate metals and minerals. I felt a pretty piece of chrysocolla down in the shaft and I wanted to get it for you for your collection. I climbed through the fence-oh, I know I shouldn’t have, but I did-and I was checking to see how far down in the shaft the mineral was when-when I looked up and he was there!” She clasped her hands. “He said, ‘Evil must die. I can’t go back because you’re not dead. I let you out of a little fire in this life, so I’ll burn forever. “He who endures to the end-”’ Then he pushed me into the shaft-“

“Into the-” I gasped.

“Of course, I didn’t fall,” she hastened. “I just lifted to the other side of the shaft out of reach, but-but he had pushed me so hard that he-he fell!”

“He fell!” I started up in horror. “He fell? Child, that’s hundreds of feet down onto rocks and water-“

“I-I caught him before he fell all the way,” said Marnie, apologetically. “But I had to do it our way. I stopped his falling-only-only he’s just staying there! In the air! In the shaft! I know the inanimate lift, but he’s alive. And I-don’t-know-how-to-get-him-up!” She burst into tears.

“And if I let him go, he will fall to death. And if I leave him there, he’ll bob up and down and up and-I can’t leave him there!” She flung herself against me, wailing. It was the first time she’d ever let go like that.

Nils had come in at the tail end of her explanation and I filled him in between my muttered comforting of the top of Marnie’s head. He went to the shed and came back with a coil of rope.

“With a reasonable amount of luck, no one will see us,” he said. “It’s a good thing that we’re out here by ourselves.”

Evening was all around us as we climbed the slope behind the house. The sky was high and a clear, transparent blue, shading to apricot, with a metallic orange backing the surrounding hills. One star was out, high above the evening-hazy immensity of distance beyond Margin. We panted up the hill to East Shaft. It was the one dangerous abandoned shaft among all the shallow prospect holes that dotted the hills around us. It had been fenced with barbwire and was forbidden territory to the children of Margin-including Marnie. Nils held down one strand of the barbwire with his foot and lifted the other above it. Marnie slithered through and I scrambled through, snatching the ruffle of my petticoat free from where it had caught on the lower barbs.

We lay down on the rocky ground and edged up to the brink of the shaft. It was darker than the inside of a hat.

“Derwent!” Nils’s voice echoed eerily down past the tangle of vegetation clinging to the upper reaches of the shaft.

“Here I am, Lord.” The voice rolled up flatly, drained of emotion. “Death caught me in the midst of my sin. Cast me into the fire-the everlasting fire I traded a piddlin’ little shed fire for. Kids-dime a dozen! I sold my soul for a seared face. Here I am, Lord. Cast me into the fire.”

Nils made a sound. If what I was feeling was any indication, a deep sickness was tightening his throat. “Derwent!” he called again, “I’m letting down a rope. Put the loop around your waist so we can pull you up!” He laid the rope out across a timber that slanted over the shaft. Down it went into the darkness-and hung swaying slightly.

“Derwent!” Nils shouted. “Caleb Derwent! Get hold of that rope!”

“Here I am, Lord,” came the flat voice again, much closer this time. “Death caught me in the midst of my sin-“

“Marnie,” Nile said over the mindless mechanical reiteration that was now receding below. “Can you do anything?”

“May I?” she asked. “May I, Uncle Nils?”

“Of course,” said Nils. “There’s no one here to be offended. Here, take hold of the rope and-and go down along it so we’ll know where you are.”

So Marnie stepped lightly into the nothingness of the shaft and, hand circling the rope, sank down into the darkness. Nils mopped the sweat from his forehead with his forearm.

“No weight,” he muttered, “not an ounce of weight on the rope!”

Then there was a shriek and a threshing below us. “No! No!” bellowed Derwent, “I repent! I repent! Don’t shove me down into everlasting-I” His words broke off and the rope jerked.

“Marnie!” I cried. “What-what-“

“He’s-his eyes turned up and his mouth went open and he doesn’t talk,” she called up fearfully from the blackness. “I can’t find his thoughts-“

“Fainted!” said Nils. Then he called. “It’s all right, Marnie. He’s only unconscious from fright. Put the rope around him.”

So we drew him up from the shaft. Once the rope snatched out of our hands for several inches, but he didn’t fall! The rope slacked, but he didn’t fall! Marnie’s anxious face came into sight beside his bowed head. “I can hold him from falling,” she said, “but you must do all the pulling. I can’t lift him.”

Then we had him out on the ground, lying flat, but in the brief interval that Nils used to straighten him out he drifted up from the ground about four inches. Marnie pressed him back.

“He-he isn’t fastened to the Earth with all the fastenings. I loosed some when I stopped his fall. The shaft helped hold him. But now I-I’ve got to fasten them all back again. I didn’t learn that part very well at home. Everyone can do it for himself. I got so scared when he fell that I forgot all I knew. But I couldn’t have done it with him still in the shaft anyway. He would have fallen.” She looked around in the deepening dusk. “I need a source of light-“

Light? We looked around us. The only lights in sight were the one star and a pinprick or so in the shadows of the fiat below us.

“A lantern?” asked Nils.

“No,” said Marnie. “‘Moonlight or sunlight or enough starlight. It takes light to ‘platt’-” She shrugged with her open hands.

“The moon is just past full,” said Nils. “It’ll be up soon-“

So we crouched there on boulders, rocks, and pebbles, holding Derwent down, waiting for the moonrise to become an ingredient in fastening him to the Earth again. I felt an inappropriate bubble of laughter shaking my frightened shoulders. What a story to tell to my grandchildren! If I live through this ever to have any!

Finally the moon came, a sudden flood through the transparency of the evening air. Marnie took a deep breath, her face very white in the moonlight. “It’s-it’s frightening!” she said. ” ‘Platting’ with moonlight is an adult activity. Any child can ‘platt’ with sunlight, but,” she shivered, “only the Old Ones dare use moonlight and sunlight together! I-I think I can handle the moonlight. I hope!”

She lifted her two cupped hands. They quickly filled with a double handful of moonlight. The light flowed and wound across her palms and between her fingers, flickering live and lovely. Then she was weaving the living light into an intricate design that moved and changed and grew until it hid her arms to the elbows and cast light up into her intent face. One curve of it touched me. It was like nothing I’d ever felt before, so I jerked away from it. But, fascinated, I reached for it again. A gasp from Marnie stopped my hand.

“It’s too big,” she gasped. “It’s too powerful! I-I don’t know enough to control-” Her fingers flicked and the intricate light enveloped Derwent from head to foot. Then there was a jarring and a shifting. The slopes around us suddenly became unstable and almost fluid. There was a grinding and a rumbling. Rocks clattered down the slopes beyond us and the lip of East Shaft crumpled. The ground dimpled in around where the shaft had been. A little puff of dust rose from the spot and drifted slowly away in the cooling night air. We sorted ourselves out from where we had tumbled, clutched in each other’s arms. Marnie looked down at the completely relaxed Derwent. “It got too big, too fast,” she apologized. “I’m afraid it spoiled the shaft.”

Nils and I exchanged glances and we both smiled weakly.

“It’s all right, Marnie,” I said, “it doesn’t matter. Is he all right now?”

“Yes,” said Marnie, “his thoughts are coming back.”

“Everything’s fine,” muttered Nils to me. “But what do you suppose that little earth-shaking has done to the mine?”

My eyes widened and I felt my hands tighten. What, indeed, had it done to the mine?

Derwent’s thoughts came back enough that he left us the next day, sagging in his saddle, moving only because his horse did, headed for nowhere-just away-away from Margin, from Grafton’s Vow, from Marnie. We watched him go, Marnie’s face troubled.

“He is so confused,” she said. “If only I were a Sorter. I could help his mind-“

“He tried to kill you!” I burst out, impatient with her compassion.

“He thought he would never be able to come into the Presence because of me,” she said quickly. “What might I have done if I had believed that of him?”

So Derwent was gone-and so was the mine, irretrievably. The shaft, laboriously drilled and blasted through solid rock, the radiating drifts, hardly needing timbering to support them because of the composition of the rock-all had splintered and collapsed. From the mine entrance, crushed to a cabin-sized cave, you could hear the murmur of waters that had broken through into, and drowned, the wreckage of the mine. The second day a trickle of water began a pool in the entrance. The third day the stream began to run down the slope toward town. It was soaked up almost immediately by the bone-dry ground, but the muddy wetness spread farther and farther and a small channel began to etch itself down the hill.

It doesn’t take long for a town to die. The workmen milled around at the mine entrance for a day or two, murmuring of earthquakes and other awesome dispensations from the hand of God, hardly believing that they weren’t at work. It was like a death that had chopped off things abruptly instead of letting them grow or decrease gradually. Then the first of the families left, their good-bys brief and unemotional to hide the sorrow and worry in their eyes. Then others followed, either leaving their shacks behind them to fall into eventual ruin, or else their houses moved off down the road like shingled turtles, leaving behind them only the concrete foundation blocks.

We, of course, stayed to the last, Nils paying the men off, making arrangements about what was left of the mining equipment, taking care of all the details attendant on the last rites of his career that had started so hopefully here in Margin. But, finally, we would have been packing, too, except for one thing. Marnie was missing.

She had been horrified when she found what had happened to the mine. She was too crushed to cry when Loolie and Kenny and the Wardlows came to say good-by. We didn’t know what to say to her or how to comfort her. Finally, late one evening, I found her sitting, hunched on her cot, her face wet with tears.

“It’s all right, Marnie,” I said, “we won’t go hungry. Nils will always find a way to-“

“I am not crying for the mine,” said Marnie and I felt an illogical stab of resentment that she wasn’t. “It is a year,” she went on. “Just a year.”

“A year?” Then remembrance flooded in. A year since the sullen smoke plumed up from the burning shed, since I felt the damp curling of freshly cut hair under my fingers-since Nils grimly dug the multiple grave. “But it should be a little easier now,” I said.

“It’s only that on the Home it would have been Festival time-time to bring our flowers and lift into the skies and sing to remember all who had been Called during the year. We kept Festival only three days before the angry ones came and killed us.” She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “That was a difficult Festival because we were so separated by the Crossing. We didn’t know how many of us were echoing our songs from Otherside.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said. “But go on-cry for your dead. It will ease you.”

“I am not crying for those who have been Called,” said Marnie. “They are in the Presence and need no tears. I am crying for the ones-if there are any-who are alive on this Earth we found. I am crying because-Oh, Aunt Gail!” She clung to me. “What if I’m the only one who was not Called? The only one!”

I patted her shaking shoulders, wishing I could comfort her.

“There was Timmy,” she sniffed and accepted the handkerchief I gave her. “He-he was in our ship. Only at the last moment before Lift Off was there room for him to come with us. But when the ship melted and broke and we each had to get into our life-slips, we scattered like the baby quail Kenny showed me the other day. And only a few life-slips managed to stay together. Oh, I wish I knew!” She closed her wet eyes, her trembling chin lifting. “If only I knew whether or not Timmy is in the Presence!”

I did all that I could to comfort her. My all was just being there.

“I keep silent Festival tonight,” she said finally, “trusting in the Power-“

“This is a solemn night for us, too,” I said. “We will start packing tomorrow. Nils thinks he can find a job nearer the Valley-” I sighed. “This would have been such a nice place to watch grow up. All it lacked was a running stream, and now we’re even getting that. Oh, well-such is Life in the wild and woolly West!”

And the next morning, she was gone. On her pillow was a piece of paper that merely said, “Wait.”

What could we do? Where could we look? Footprints were impossible on the rocky slopes. And for a Marnie, there could well be no footprints at all, even if the surroundings were pure sand. I looked helplessly at Nils.

“Three days,” he said, tightly angry. “The traditional three days before a funeral. If she isn’t back by then, we leave.”

By the end of the second day of waiting in the echoless ghostliness of the dead town, I had tears enough dammed up in me to rival the new little stream that was cutting deeper and deeper into its channel. Nils was up at the mine entrance watching the waters gush out from where they had oozed at first. I was hunched over the stream where it made the corner by the empty foundation blocks of the mine office, when I heard-or felt-or perceived-a presence. My innards lurched and I turned cautiously. It was Marnie.

“Where have you been?” I asked flatly.

“Looking for another mine,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Another mine?” My shaking hands pulled her down to me and we wordlessly hugged the breath out of each other. Then I let her go.

“I spoiled the other one,” she went on as though uninterrupted. “I have found another, but I’m not sure you will want it.”

“Another? Not want it?” My mind wasn’t functioning on a very high level, so I stood up and screamed, “Nils!”

His figure popped out from behind a boulder and, after hesitating long enough to see there were two of us, he made it down the slope in massive leaps and stood panting, looking at Marnie. Then he was hugging the breath out of her and I was weeping over the two of them, finding my tears considerably fewer than I had thought. We finally all shared my apron to dry our faces and sat happily shaken on the edge of our front porch, our feet dangling.

“It’s over on the other side of the flat,” said Marnie. “In a little canyon there. It’s close enough so Margin can grow again here in the same place, only now with a running stream.”

“But a new mine! What do you know about mining?” asked Nils, hope, against his better judgment, lightening his face.

“Nothing,” admitted Marnie. “But I can identify and I took these-” She held out her hands. “A penny for copper. Your little locket,” she nodded at me apologetically, “for gold. A dollar-” she turned it on her palm, “for silver. By the identity of these I can find other metals like them. Copper-there is not as much as in the old mine, but there is some in the new one. There is quite a bit of gold. It feels like much more than in the old mine, and,” she faltered, “I’m sorry, but mostly there is only silver. Much, much more than copper. Maybe if I looked farther-“

“But, Marnie,” I cried, “silver is better! Silver is better!”

“Are you serious?” asked Nils, the planes of his face stark and bony in the sunlight. “Do you really think you have found a possible mine?”

“I don’t know about mines,” repeated Marnie, “but I know these metals are there. I can feel them tangling all over in the mountainside and up and down as the ground goes. Much of it is mixed with other matter, but it’s like the ore they used to send out of Margin in the wagons with the high wheels. Only some of it is penny and locket and dollar feeling. I didn’t know it could come that way in the ground.”

“Native silver,” I murmured, “native copper and gold.”

“I-I could try to open the hill for you so you could see,” suggested Marnie timidly to Nils’s still face.

“No,” I said hastily. “No, Marnie. Nils, couldn’t we at least take a look?”

So we went, squeezing our way through the underbrush and through a narrow entrance into a box canyon beyond the far side of the flat. Pausing to catch my breath, almost pinned between two towering slabs of tawny orange granite, I glanced up to the segment of blue sky overhead. A white cloud edged into sight and suddenly the movement wasn’t in the cloud, but in the mountain of granite. It reeled and leaned and seemed to be toppling. I snatched my eyes away from the sky with a gasp and wiggled on through, following Marnie and followed by Nils.

Nils looked around the canyon wonderingly. “Didn’t even know this was here,” he said. “No one’s filed on this area. It’s ours-if it’s worth filing on. Our own mine-“

Marnie knelt at the base of the cliff that formed one side of the canyon. “Here is the most,” she said, rubbing her hand over the crumbling stone. “It is all through the mountain, but there is some silver very close here.” She looked up at Nils and read his skepticism.

“Well,” she sighed. “Well-” And she sank down with the pool of her skirts around her on the sandy ground. She clasped her hands and stared down at them. I could see her shoulders tighten and felt something move-or change-or begin. Then, about shoulder high on the face of the rock wall, there was a coloring and a crumbling. Then a thin, bright trickle came from the rock and ran molten down to the sand, spreading flowerlike into a palm-sized disk of pure silver!

“There,” said Marnie, her shoulders relaxing. “That was close to the outside-“

“Nils!” I cried. “Look!” and snatching up the still-hot metallic blossom, I dropped it again, the bright blood flowing across the ball of my thumb from the gashing of the sharp silver edge.

It doesn’t take long for a town to grow. Not if there’s a productive mine and an ideal flat for straight, wide business streets. And hills and trees and a running stream for residential areas. The three of us watch with delighted wonder the miracle of Margin growing and expanding. Only occasionally does Marnie stand at the window in the dark and wonder if she is the only one-the last one-of her People left upon Earth. And only occasionally do I look at her and wonder where on Earth-or off it-did this casual miracle, this angel unawares, come from.

“This angel unawares.” Bethie’s whisper echoed the last phrase of the Assembly.

“Why I’ve been in Margin!” cried Meris. “I was there their last Founding Day and I didn’t hear a word about Marnie!”

“What did you hear?” asked Bethie, interested.

“Well, about the first mine collapsing and starting the creek and about the new mine’s being found-“

“I suppose that’s enough,” said Bethie. “How would you have included Marnie?”

“At least mention her name!” cried Meris. “Why even the burro a prospector hit with a piece of ore and found Tombstone or Charleston or wherever is remembered. And not word one about Marnie-“

“Maybe,” suggested Bethie, “maybe because that wasn’t her real name.”

“It wasn’t!” Meris’s eyes widened.

“Do you think she was called Marnie on the Home?” teased Mark. “Look what we did to Lala’s name. At least “Marnie’ couldn’t be that bad a miss.”

“Who was she then?” asked Meris. “What was her real name?”

“Why I thought you knew-” Bethie started.

“Marnie was Lytha. She used both names later on-Marnie Lytha.”

“Lytha!” Meris sat down absently, almost off the chair, and scooted back slowly, “Lytha and Timmy. Oh! Of course! Then Eva-lee’s promise to them must have come true-“

“She didn’t promise them each other,” reminded Mark.

“Only love.”

“Only love!” mocked Meris. “Oh, Mark! Only love?”

“I was just thinking,” said Mark slowly. “If Marnie was Lytha, then all those people who died in the fire-“

“Oh, Mark!” Meris drew a breath of distress. “Oh, Mark! But Eve wasn’t one of them. Bethie’s mother escaped!”

“Others did, too,” said Bethie. “The flow of Assembling about Marnie kept right on in the same general area and I didn’t stop when Marnie’s segment was finished. The next part-” She hesitated. “It’s hard to tell what is bright and happy and what is dark and sad. I’ll let you decide. The boy-well, he wasn’t sure either-“

Bethie gathered up the two willing hands gently and began-

TROUBLING OF THE WATER

Sometimes it’s like being a castaway, being a first settler in a big land. If I were a little younger, maybe I’d play at being Robinson Crusoe, only I’d die of surprise if I found a footprint, especially a bare one, this place being where it is.

But it’s not only being a castaway in a place, but in a time. I feel as though the last years of the century were ruffling up to my knees in a tide that will sweep me into the next century. If I live seven more years, I’ll not only be of age but I’ll see the Turn of the Century! Imagine putting 19 in front of your years instead of 18! So, instead of playing Crusoe and scanning the horizon for sails, I used to stand on a rock and measure the world full circle, thinking-the Turn of the Century! The Turn of the Century! And seeking and seeking as though Time were a tide that would come racing through the land at midnight 1899 and that I could see the front edge of the tide beginning already!

But things have happened so fast recently that I’m not sure about Time or Place or Possible or Impossible any more. One thing I am sure of is the drought. It was real enough.

It’s the responsibility of the men of the house to watch out for the welfare of the women of the house, so that day I went with Father up into the hills to find out where Sometime Creek started. We climbed up and up along the winding creek bed until my lungs pulled at the hot air and felt crackly clear down to their bottoms. We stopped and leaned against a boulder to let me catch my breath and cool off a little in what shadow there was. We could see miles and miles across the country-so far that the mountains on the other side of Desolation Valley were swimmy pale against the sky. Below us, almost at our feet because of the steepness of the hill, was the thin green line of mesquites and river willows that bordered Chuckawalla River and, hidden in a clump of cottonwoods down to our left, was our cabin, where Mama, if she had finished mixing the bread, was probably standing in the doorway with Merry on her hip, looking up as I was looking down.

“What if there isn’t a spring?” I asked, gulping dryly, wanting a drink. I thought Father wasn’t going to answer. Sometimes he doesn’t-maybe for a day or so. Then suddenly, when you aren’t even thinking of the same thing, he’ll answer and expect you to remember what you’d asked.

“Then we’ll know why they call this Sometime Creek,” he said. “If you’ve cooled down some, go get a drink.”

“But we’ve always got the river,” I said, as I bellied down to the edge of the plunging water. It flowed so fast that I couldn’t suck it up. I had to bite at it to get a mouthful. It was cold and tasted of silt. It was shallow enough that I bumped my nose as I ducked my hot face into its coldness.

“Not always.” Father waited until I finished before he cupped his hands in a small waterfall a step upstream and drank briefly. “It’s dropped to less than half its flow of last week. Tanker told me yesterday when he stopped for melons that there’s no snow left in the Coronas Altas, this early in the summer.”

“But our orchard!” I felt dread crawl in my stomach. “All our fields!”

“Our orchard,” said Father, no comfort or reassurance in his voice. “And all our fields.”

We didn’t find a spring. We stood at the bottom of a slope too steep to climb and watched the water sheet down it from the top we couldn’t see. I watched Father as he stood there, one foot up on the steep rise, his knee bent as if he intended to climb up sheer rock, looking up at the silver falling water.

“If the river dries up,” I offered, “the creek isn’t enough to water everything.”

Father said nothing but turned hack down the hill.

We went down in half the time it took us to climb. Part way down I stumbled and fell sideways into a catclaw bush. Father had to pull me out, the tiny thorns clinging to my clothes like claws and striping the backs of my hands and one of my cheeks with smarting scratches.

“People have to drink,” said Father. “And the animals.”

We were leveling out on the flat by the house when I finally figured out what Father meant. He had already given our young orchard back to the wilderness and turned his back on the vegetable crops that were our mainstay and on the withering alfalfa fields. He was measuring water to keep us alive and still clinging to Fool’s Acres Ranch.

Mama and Merry met us as we came down the path. I took the burden of Merry and carried her on down to the house. I wasn’t supposed to know that Mama was going to have a baby in a couple of mouths. Boys aren’t supposed to notice such things-not even boys who are past fifteen and so almost men.

That night we sat around the table as usual and read to each other. I read first. I was reading Robinson Crusoe for the second time since we came to the ranch and I had just got to where he was counting his wheat seeds and figuring out the best way to plant them. I like this part better than the long, close pages where he talks philosophy about being alone and uses big, hard to pronounce words. But sometimes, looking out across the plains and knowing there is only Father and Mama and Merry and me as far as my eye can reach, I knew how he felt. Well, maybe the new baby would be a boy.

I read pretty well. Father didn’t have to correct my pronunciation very often. Then Mama read from Sense and Sensibility and I listened even if it was dull and sleepy to me. You never know when Father is going to ask you what a word means and you’d better have some idea!

Then Father read from Plutarch’s Lives, which is fun sometimes, and we ended the evening with our Bible verses and prayers.

I was half asleep before the lamp was blown out, but I game wide awake when I heard Mama’s low carrying voice.

“Maybe mining would have been better. This is good mining country.”

“Mining isn’t for me,” said Father. “I want to take living things from the earth. I can feel that I’m part of growing things, and nothing speaks to me of God more than seeing a field ripening ready for harvest. To have food where only a few months before was only a handful of seed-and faith.”

“But if we finally have to give the ranch up anyway-” Mama began faintly.

“We won’t give it up.” Father’s voice was firm.

Father and I rode in the supply wagon from Raster Creek Mine over the plank bridge across the dwindling thread of the river to our last gate. I opened the gate, wrestling with the wire loop holding the top of the post, while Father thanked Mr. Tanker again for the newspapers he had brought us. “I’m sorry there is so little for you this time,” he said, glancing back at the limp gunny sacks and half-empty boxes. “And it’s the last of it all.”

Mr. Tanker gathered up the reins. “Reckon now you’re finding out why this is called Fool’s Acres Ranch. You’re the third one that’s tried farming here. This is mining country. Never be nothing else. No steady water. Shame you didn’t try in Las Lomitas Valley across the Coronas. Artesian wells there. Every ranch got two-three wells and ponds with trees and fish. Devil of a long way to drive for fresh garden truck, though. Maybe if we ever get to be a state instead of a Territory-“

Father and I watched him drive away, the wagon hidden in dust before it fairly started. We walked back to the planks across the stream and stopped to look at the few pools tied together with a thread of water brought down by Sometime Creek that was still flowing thinly. Father finally said, “What does Las Lomitas mean in English?” And I wrestled with what little Spanish I had learned until that evening at the table. I grinned to myself as I said, “It means ‘The Little Hills,’” and watched Father, for a change, sort through past conversations to understand what I was talking about.

Mama’s time was nearing and we were all worried. Though as I said, politeness had it that I wasn’t supposed to know what was going on. But I knew about the long gap between Merry and me-almost fourteen years. Mama had borne and buried five children in that time. I had been as healthy as a horse, but after me none of the babies seemed able to live. Oh, maybe a week or so, at first, but finally only a faint gasp or two and the perfectly formed babies died. And all this back East where there were doctors and midwives and comfort. I guess Mama gave up after the fifth baby died, because none came along until after we moved to Fool’s Acres. When we knew Merry was on the way, I could feel the suspense building up. I couldn’t really remember all those other babies because I had been so young. They had come each year regularly after me. But it had been ten years between the last one and Merry. So when Merry was born out in the wilderness with Father for midwife, none of us dared breathe heavily for fear she’d die. But she was like me-big lungs, big appetite, and no idea of the difference between day and night.

Mama couldn’t believe it for a long time and used to turn suddenly from her work and go touch Merry, just to be sure.

And now another baby was almost due and dust and desolation had settled down on the ranch and the whole area except for our orchard. Father explained the upside-down running of the rivers in a desert area that was, so far, keeping our young trees alive.

Anyway, there came a day that I took the water bucket and went to find a new dipping place because our usual one where the creek flowed into the river was so shallow even a tin dipper scooped up half sand at each attempt.

I had started up Sometime Creek hoping to find a deeper pool and had just stopped to lean in the thin hot shade of a boulder when it came.

Roaring! Blazing! A locomotive across the sky! A swept-back fountain of fire! A huge blazing something that flaked off flames as it roared away across Desolation Valley!

Scared half to death, I crouched against my boulder, my eyes blinking against the violence and thundering speed, my front hair fairly frizzling into beads from the impression of heat. Some of the flames that flaked off the main blaze blackened as they zigzagged down out of the sky like bits of charred paper from a bonfire. But some flakes darted away like angry hornets and one-one flame that kept its shape as it blackened and plunged like an arrow down through the roaring skies-headed straight for me! I threw my arms up to shield my face and felt something hit below me with a swishing thud that shook the hill and me.

And stillness came back to the ranch.

Only a brief stillness. I heard the crackle of flames and saw the smoke plume up! I scrambled downhill to the flat, seeing, like lightning, the flames racing across our cinder-dry fields, over our house, through our young orchard, across the crisped grass of Desolation Valley, leaving nothing but a smudge on the sky and hundreds of miles of scorched earth. It had happened other places in dry years.

I skidded to a stop in the edge of the flames, and, for lack of anything else I could do, I started stamping the small licking tongues of flame and kicking dirt over them.

“Barney!” I heard Father’s shout. “Here’s a shovel!”

I knuckled the smoke tears out of my eyes and stumbled to meet him as he ran toward me. “Keep it from going up the hill!” And he sped for the weed-grown edge of the alfalfa field.

Minutes later I plopped sand over the last smoking clump of grass and whacked it down with the back of my shovel. We were lucky. The fire area was pretty well contained between the rise of the hill and the foot of the field. I felt soot smudge across my face as I backhanded the sweat from my forehead. Father was out of my sight around the hill. Hefting the shovel, I started around to see if he needed my help. There was another plume of smoke! Alerted, I dropped the point of my shovel. Then I let it clatter to the ground as I fell to my knees.

A blackened hand reached up out of a charred bundle! Fingers spread convulsively, then clenched! And the bundle rolled jerkily.

“Father!” I yelled. “Father!” And grabbed for the smoldering blackness. I stripped away handsful of the scorching stuff and, by the time Father got there, my hands were scorching, too.

“Careful! Careful!” Father cautioned. “Here, let me.” I moved back, nursing my blistered fingers. Father fumbled with the bundle and suddenly it ripped from one end to the other and he pulled out, like an ear of earn from its shuck, the twisting body of a person!

“He’s badly burned,” said Father. “Face and hands. Help me lift him.” I helped Father get the body into his arms. He staggered and straightened. “Go tell your mother to brew up all the tea we have in the house-strong!”

I raced for the house, calling to Mama as soon as I saw her anxious face, “Father’s all right! I’m all right! But we found someone burned! Father says to brew up all our tea-strong!”

Mama disappeared into the cabin and I heard the clatter of stove lids. I hurried back to Father and hovered anxiously as he laid his burden down on the little front porch, Carefully we peeled off the burned clothes until finally we had the body stripped down and put into an old nightshirt of Father’s. The fire hadn’t got to his legs nor to his body, but his left shoulder was charred-and his face! And arms! A tight cap thing that crumpled to flakes in our hands had saved most of his hair.

Father’s mouth tightened. “His eyes,” he said. “His eyes.”

“Is he dead?” I whispered. Then I had my answer as one blackened hand lifted and wavered. I took it carefully in mine, my blisters drawing as I closed my fingers. The blackened head rolled and the mouth opened soundlessly and closed again, the face twisting with pain.

We worked over the boy-maybe some older than I-all afternoon. I brought silty half bucket after half bucket of water from the dipping place and strained it through muslin to get the silt out. We washed the boy until we located all his burns and flooded the places with strong cold tea and put tea packs across the worst ones. Mama worked along with us until the burden of the baby made her breathless and she had to stop.

She had given Merry a piece of bread and put her out in the little porch-side pen when we brought the boy in. Merry was crying now, her face dabbled with dirt, her bread rubbed in the sand. Mama gathered her up with an effort and smiled wearily at me over her head, “I’d better let her cry a little more, than her face will be wet enough for me to wash it clean!”

I guess I got enough tea on my hands working with the boy that my own burns weren’t too bad. Blisters had formed and broken, but I only needed my right thumb and forefinger bandaged with strips from an old petticoat of Mama’s. We left Mama with the boy, now clean and quiet on my cot, his face hidden under the wet packs, and went slowly down the path I had run so many times through the afternoon. We took our buckets on past the dipping place where a palm-sized puddle was all that was left of the water and retraced our steps to where the fire had been.

“A meteor?” I asked, looking across the ashy ground. “I always thought they came only at night.”

“You haven’t thought the matter over or you’d realize that night and day has nothing to do with meteors,” said Father. “Is meteor the correct term?”

“How funny that that fellow happened to be at the exact place at the exact time the piece of the meteor hit here,” I said, putting Father’s question away for future reference.

“‘Odd’ is a better word,” Father corrected. “Where did the boy come from?”

I let my eyes sweep the whole wide horizon before us. No one on foot and alone could ever have made it from any where! Where had he come from? Up out of the ground? Down out of the sky?

“I guess he rode in on the meteor,” I said, and grinned at the idea. Father blinked at me, but didn’t return my smile.

“There’s what set the fire,” he said. We plopped through feathery ashes toward a black lump of something.

“Maybe we could send it to a museum,” I suggested as we neared it. “Most meteors burn up before they hit the ground.”

Father pushed the chunk with his foot. Flame flared briefly from under it as it rocked, and a clump of grass charred, the tips of the blades twisting and curling as they shriveled.

“Still hot,” said Father, hunkering down on his heels beside it. He thumped it with a piece of rock. It clanged. “Metal!” His eyebrows raised. “Hollow!”

Carefully we probed with sticks from the hillside and thumped with rocks to keep our hands from the heat. We sat back and looked at each other. I felt a stir of something like fear inside me.

“It’s-it’s been made!” I said. “It’s a long metal pipe or something! And I’ll bet he was inside it! But how could he have been? How could he get so high in the sky as to come down like that? And if this little thing has been made, what was the big thing it came from?”

“I’ll go get water,” said Father, getting up and lifting the buckets. “Don’t burn yourself any more.”

I prodded the blackened metal. “Out of the sky,” I said aloud. “As high and as fast as a meteor to get that hot. What was he doing up there?” My stick rocked the metal hulk and it rolled again. The split ends spread as it turned and a small square metal thing fell out into the ashes. I scraped it to one side and cautiously lifted it. The soot on it blackened my bandages and my palms. It looked like a box and was of a size that my two hands could hold. I looked at it, then suddenly overwhelmed and seared by the thought of roaring meteors and empty space and billowing grass fires, I scratched a hasty hole against a rock, shoved the box in, and stamped the earth over it. Then I went to meet Father and take one of the dripping buckets from him. We didn’t look back at the crumpled metal thing behind us.

Father could hardly believe his eyes when he checked the boy’s burns next morning. “They’re healing already! he said to Mama. “Look!”

I crowded closer to see, too, almost spilling the olive oil we were using on him. I looked at the boy’s left wrist where I remembered a big, raw oozing place just where the cuff of his clothes had ended. The wrist was dry now and covered with the faint pink of new skin.

“But his face,” said Mama. “His poor face and his eyes!” She turned away, blinking tears, and reached for a cup of water. “He must have lots of liquids,” she said, matter-of-factly.

“But if he’s unconscious-” I clutched at my few lessons in home care of the sick.

Father lifted the boy’s head and shoulders carefully, but even his care wasn’t gentle enough. The boy moaned and murmured something. Father held the cup to his blistered mouth and tipped the water to the dry lips. There was a moment’s pause, then the water was gulped eagerly and the boy murmured something again.

“More?” asked Father clearly. “More?”

The face rolled to him, then away, and there was no answer.

“He’ll need much care for a while,” Father said to Mama as they anointed his burns and put on fresh bandages. “Do you think you can manage under the circumstances?”

Mama nodded. “With Barney to help with the lifting.”

“Sure I’ll help,” I said. Then to Father, “Should I have said meteorite?”

He nodded gravely. Then he said, “There are other planets.” And left me to digest that one!

Father was spending his days digging for water in the river bottom. He had located one fair-sized pool that so far was keeping our livestock watered. We could still find drinking water for us up Sometime Creek. But the blue shimmer Of the sky got more and more like heated metal. Heat was like a hand, pressing everything under the sky down into the powdery dead ground.

The boy was soon sitting up and eating a little of the little we had. But still no word from him, not a sound, even when we changed the dressings on his deeply charred left shoulder, or when the scabs across his left cheek cracked across and bled.

Then, one day, when all of us had been out of the cabin, straining our eyes prayerfully at the faint shadow of a cloud I thought I had seen over the distant Coronas, we came back, disheartened, to find the boy sitting in Mama’s rocker by the window. But we had to carry him hack to the cot. His feet seemed to have forgotten how to make steps.

Father looked down at him lying quietly on the cot. “If he can make it to the window, he can begin to take care of his own needs. Mother is overburdened as it is.”

So I was supposed to explain to him that there would be no more basin for his use, hut that the chamberpot under the cot was for him! How do you explain to someone who can’t see and doesn’t talk and that you’re not at all sure even hears you? I told Father I felt like a mother cat training a kitten.

“Come on, fellow,” I said to him, glad we had the cabin to ourselves. I tugged at his unscarred right arm and urged him until, his breath catching between clenched teeth, he sat up and swung his feet over the cot edge. His hand went out to me and touched my cheek. His bandaged face turned to me and his hand faltered. Then quickly he traced my features-my eyes, my nose, my ears, across my head, and down to my shoulders. Then he sighed a relieved sigh and both his hands went out to rest briefly on my two shoulders. His mouth distorted in a ghost of a smile, and he touched my wrist.

“What did you expect?” I laughed. “Horns?”

Then I sat back, astonished, as his fingertip probed my temple just where I had visualized a horn, curled twice and with a shiny black tip.

“Well!” I said. “Mind reader!”

Just then Mama and Father came back into the cabin. The boy lay down slowly on the cot. Oh, well, the explanations could wait until the need arose.

We ate supper and I helped Mama clear up afterward. I was bringing the evening books to the pool of light on the table around the lamp when a movement from the cot drew my eyes. The boy was sitting on the edge, groping to come to his feet. I hurried to him, wondering what to do with Mama in the room, then as I reached for the boy’s arm, I flicked a glance at Father. My mouth opened to wonder how I had known what the boy wanted and how he knew about the Little House outside. But a hand closed on my arm and I moved toward the door, with the boy. The door dosed behind us with a chuck. Through the starry darkness we moved down the path to the Little House. He went in. I waited by the door. He emerged and we went back up the path and into the house. He eased himself down on the cot, turned his face away from the light, and became quiet.

I wet my astonished lips and looked at Father. His lips quirked. “You’re some mother cat!” he said.

But Mama wasn’t smiling as I slid into my place at the table. Her eyes were wide and dark. “But he didn’t touch the floor, James! And he didn’t take one single step! He-he floated!”

Not one single step! I swiftly reviewed our walk and I couldn’t remember the rhythm of any steps at all-except my own. My eyes questioned Father, but he only said, “If he’s to mingle with us, he must have a name.”

“Timothy,” I said instantly.

“Why Timothy?” asked Father.

“Because that’s his name,” I said blankly. “Timothy.”

So after awhile Timothy came to the table to eat, dressed in some of my clothes. He was wonderfully at ease with knife and fork and spoon though his eyes were still scabbed over and hidden behind bandages. Merry babbled to him happily, whacking at him with her spoon, her few words meaning as much to him as all our talking, which apparently was nothing. He labored at making his feet take steps again and Mama didn’t have his steplessness to worry about any more. He sat with us during our evening readings with no more response than if we sat in silence. Except that after the first evening he joined us, his right hand always made some sort of sign in the air at the beginning and end of our prayer time. His left arm wasn’t working yet because of the deep burns on his shoulder.

Though Mama’s worries over Timothy’s steplessness were over, I had all kinds of worries to take my mind off the baking, dust-blown fields outside and even off the slow, heartbreaking curling of the leaves on our small orchard trees. I was beginning to hear things. I began to know when Timothy was thirsty or when he wanted to go to the Little House. I began to know what food he wanted more of and what he didn’t care for. And it scared me. I didn’t want to know-not without words.

Then Mama’s time came. When at last the pains were coming pretty close together, Father sent me with Timothy and Merry away from the house, away from the task the two had before them. I knew the worry they had plaguing them besides the ordinary worry of childbirth and I prayed soundlessly as I lifted Merry and herded Timothy before me out to our orchard. And when my prayers tripped over their own anxiety and dissolved into wordlessness, I talked.

I told Timothy all about the ranch and the orchard and how Father had found me the other night pouring one of my cups of drinking water on the ground by my favorite smallest tree and how he’d told me it wouldn’t help because the roots were too deep for so little water to reach. And I talked about all the little dead babies and how healthy Merry was but how worried we were for the new baby. And-and-well, I babbled until I ran out of words and sat under my dying favorite, shivering in the heat and hugging Merry. I pushed my face against her tumbled hair so no one could see my face puckering for tears. After I managed to snuff them back, I looked up and blinked.

Timothy was gone. He was streaking for the house, with not even one step! His feet were skimming above the furrows in the orchard. His arms were out in front of him like a sleepwalker but he was threading between the trees as though he could see. I started after him, fumbling with Merry, who was sliding out of my arms, leaving her crumpled clothes behind, her bare legs threshing and her cries muffling in her skirts. I snatched her up more securely and, shucking her dress down around her as I ran, dropped her into her porch-pen. Timothy was fumbling at the door latch. I opened it and we went into the home.

Father was working over a small bundle on the scrubbed kitchen table. Timothy crouched by Mama’s bed, his hands holding one of hers tightly. Mama’s breath was quieting down in shuddering gulps. She turned her face and pressed her eyes against her free wrist. “It hasn’t cried,” she whispered hopelessly. “Why doesn’t it cry?

Father turned from the table, his whole body drooping. “It never even breathed, Rachel. It’s perfectly formed, but it never breathed at all.”

Mama stared up at the roof of the cabin. “The clothes are in the trunk,” she said quietly, “and a pink blanket.”

And Father sent me out to find a burying place.

The light went out of our house. We went the weary round of things that had to be done to keep living and even Merry stood quietly, her hands on the top board of her porch-pen, her wide eyes barely overtopping it, and stared out at the hillside for long stretches of time. And Father, who had always been an unmoved mainstay no matter what happened, was broken, silent and uncommunicating.

We seldom mentioned the baby. We had buried my hoped-for little brother up on the hill under a scrub oak. When Mama was well enough, we all went up there and read the service for the dead, but no one cried as we stood around the tiny, powdery-dry, naked little grave. Timothy held Mama’s hand all the way up there and all the way back. And Mama half smiled at him when we got back to the house.

Father said quietly, as he laid down the prayer book, “Why must he hang onto you?” Mama and I were startled at his tone of voice.

“But, James,” Mama protested. “He’s blind!”

“How many things has he bumped into since he’s been up and around?” asked Father. “How often has he spilled food or groped for a chair?” He turned a bitter face toward Timothy. “And hanging onto you, he doesn’t have to see-” Father broke off and turned to the window.

“James,” Mama went to him quickly, “don’t make Timothy a whipping boy for your sorrow. God gave him into our keeping. ‘The Lord giveth-“

“I’m sorry, Rachel.” Father gathered Mama closely with one arm. “This ‘taking away’ period is bad. Not only the baby-“

“I know,” said Mama. “But when Timothy touches me, the sorrow is lessened and I can feel the joy-“

“Joy!” Father spun Mama away from his shoulder. I shook for the seldom seen anger in his face.

“James!” said Mama. “‘Weeping may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning.’ Let Timothy touch your hand-“

Father left the house without a glance at any of us. He gathered up Merry from the porch-pen and trudged away through the dying orchard.

That night, while Mama was reading, I got up to get Timothy a drink.

“You’re interrupting your mother,” said Father quietly.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “Timothy is thirsty.”

“Sit down,” said Father ominously. I sat.

When our evening was finished, I asked, “May I get him a drink now?”

Father slowly sat down again at the table. “How do you know he wants a drink?” he asked.

“I-I just know,” I stumbled, watching Timmy leave the table. “It comes into my mind.”

“Comes into your mind.” Father seemed to lay the words out on the table in front of him and look at them. After a silence he said, “How does it come into your mind? Does it say, Timothy is thirsty-he wants a drink?”

“No,” I said, unhappily, looking at Father’s lamplight-flooded face, wondering if he was, for the first time in my life, ridiculing me. “There aren’t any words. Only a feeling-only a knowing that he’s thirsty.”

“And you.” His face shadowed as he turned it to look at Mama. “When he touches your hand, are there words-Joy, have joy?”

“No,” said Mama. “Only the feeling that God is over all and that sorrow is a shadow and that-that the baby was called back into the Presence.”

Father turned back to me. “If Timothy can make you know he is thirsty, he can tell you he is. You are not to give him a drink until he asks for it.”

“But, Father! He can’t talk!” I protested.

“He has a voice,” said Father. “He hasn’t talked since he became conscious after the fire, but he said some words before then. Not our words, but words. If he can be blind and still not stumble, if he can comfort a bereaved mother by the touch of the hand, if he can make you know he’s thirsty, he can talk.”

I didn’t argue. You don’t with Father. They started getting ready for bed. I went to Timothy and sat beside him on the cot. He didn’t put out his hand for the cup of water he wanted. He knew I didn’t have it.

“You have to ask for it,” I told him. “You have to say you’re thirsty.” His blind face turned to me and two of his fingers touched my wrist. I suddenly realized that this was something he often did lately. Maybe being blind be could hear better by touching me. I felt the thought was foolish before I finished it. But I said again, “You have to ask for it. You must tell me, ‘I’m thirsty. I want a drink, please.’ You must talk.”

Timothy turned from me and lay down on the cot. Mama sighed sharply. Father blew out the lamp, leaving me in the dark to spread my pallet on the floor and go to bed.

The next morning we were all up before sunrise. Father had all our good barrels loaded on the hayrack and was going to Tolliver’s Wells for water. He and Mama counted out our small supply of cash with tight lips and few words. In times like these water was gold. And what would we do when we had no more money?

We prayed together before Father left, and the house felt shadowy and empty with him gone. We pushed our breakfasts around our plates and then put them away for lunch.

What is there to do on a ranch that is almost dead? I took Pilgrim’s Progress to the corner of the front porch and sat with it on my lap and stared across the yard without seeing anything, sinking into my own Slough of Despond. I took a deep breath and roused a little as Timothy came out onto the porch. He had a cup in his hand.

“I’m thirsty,” he said slowly but distinctly, “I want a drink, please.”

I scrambled awkwardly to my feet and took the cup from him. Mama came to the door. “What did you say, Barney?”

“I didn’t say anything,” I said, my grin almost splitting my face. “Timmy did!” We went into the house and I dipped a cup of water for Timmy.

“Thank you,” he said and drank it all. Then he put the cup down by the bucket and went back to the porch.

“He could have got the drink himself,” Mama said. wonderingly, “he can find his way around. And yet he waited, thirsty, until he could ask you for it.”

“I guess he knows he has to mind Father, tool” I laughed shakily.

It was a two days’ round trip to Tolliver’s Wells and the first day stretched out endlessly. In the heat of noon, I slept, heavily and unrefreshingly. I woke, drenched with sweat, my tongue swollen and dry from sleeping with my mouth open. I sat up, my head swimming and my heart thumping audibly in my ears. Merry and Mama were still sleeping on the big bed, a mosquito bar over them to keep the flies off. I wallowed my dry tongue and swallowed. Then I staggered up from my pallet. Where was Timothy?

Maybe he had gone to the Little House by himself. I looked out the window. He wasn’t in sight and the door swung half open. I waited a minute but he didn’t come out. Where was Timothy?

I stumbled out onto the front porch and looked around. No Timothy. I started for the barn, rounding the corner of the house, and there he was! He was sitting on the ground, half in the sun, half in the shade of the house. He had the cup in one hand and the fingers of the other hand were splashing in the water. His blind face was intent.

“Timmy!” I cried, and he looked up with a start, water slopping. “Daggone! You had me scared stiff! What are you doing with that water?” I slid to a seat beside him. His two wet fingers touched my wrist without fumbling for it. “We don’t have enough water to play with it!”

Ha turned his face down toward the cup, then, turning, he poured the water carefully at the bottom of the last geranium left alive of all Mama had taken such tender care of.

Then, with my help, he got to his feet and because I could tell what he wanted and because he said, “Walk!” we walked. In all that sun and dust we walked. He led me. I only went along for the exercise and to steer him clear of cactus and holes in the way. Back and forth we went, back and forth. To the hill in front of the house, back to the house. To the hill again, a little farther along. Back to the yard, missing the house about ten feet. Finally, halfway through the weary monotony of the afternoon, I realized that Timmy was covering a wide area of land in ten-foot swaths, back and forth, farther and farther from the house.

By evening we were both exhausted and only one of Timmy’s feet was even trying to touch the ground. The other one didn’t bother to try to step. Finally Timmy said, “I’m thirsty. I want a drink, please.” And we went back to the house.

Next morning I woke to see Timmy paddling in another cup of water and all morning we covered the area on the other side of the house, back and forth, back and forth.

“What are you doing?” Mama had asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s Timmy’s idea.” And Timmy said nothing.

When the shadows got short under the bushes we went back to the porch and sat down on the steps, Merry gurgling at us from her porch-pen.

“I’m thirsty. I want a drink, please,” said Timmy again, and I brought him his drink. “Thank you,” he said, touching my wrist. “It’s sure hot!”

“It sure is!” I answered, startled by his new phrase. He drank slowly and poured the last drop into his palm. He put the tin cup down on the porch by him and worked the fingers and thumb of his other hand in the dampness of his palm, his face intent and listening-like under his bandaged eyes.

Then his fingers were quiet and his face turned toward Merry. He got up and took the two steps to the porch-pen. He reached for Merry, his face turned to me. I moved closer and he touched my wrist. I lifted Merry out of the pen and put her on the porch. I lifted the pen, which was just a hollow square of wooden rails fastened together, and set it up on the porch, too.

Timmy sat down slowly on the spot where the pen had been. He scraped the dirt into a heap, then set it to one side and scraped again. Seeing that he was absorbed for a while, I took Merry in to be cleaned up for dinner and came back later to see what Timmy was doing. He was still scraping and had quite a hole by now, but the dirt was stacked too close so that it kept sliding back into the hole. I scraped it all away from the edge, then took his right arm and said, “Time to eat, Timmy. Come on.”

He ate and went back to the hole he had started. Seeing that he meant to go on digging, I gave him a big old spoon Merry sometimes played with and a knife with a broken blade, to save his hands.

All afternoon he dug with the tools and scooped the dirt out. And dug again. By evening he had enlarged the hole until he was sitting in it, shoulder deep.

Mama stood on the porch, sagging under the weight of Merry who was astride her hip and said, “He’s ruining the front lawn.” Then she laughed. “Front lawn! Ruining it!” And she laughed again, just this side of tears.

Later that evening, when what cooling-off ever came was coming over the ranch, we heard the jingle of harness and then the creak of the hayrack and the plop of horses’ hooves in the dust.

Father was home! We ran to meet him at our gate, suddenly conscious of how out-of-step everything had been without him. I opened the gate and dragged the four strands wide to let the wagon through.

Father’s face was dust-coated and the dust did not crease into smiles for us. His hugs were almost desperate. I looked into the back of the wagon, as he and Mama murmured together. Only half the barrels were filled.

“Didn’t we have enough money?” I asked, wondering how people could insist on hard metal in exchange for life.

“They didn’t have water enough,” said Father. “Others were waiting, too. This is the last they can let us have.”

We took care of the horses but left the water barrels on the wagon. That was as good a place as any and the shelter of the barn would keep it-well, not cool maybe, but below the boiling point.

It wasn’t until we started back to the house that we thought of Timmy. We saw a head rising from the hole Timmy was digging and Father drew back his foot to keep it from being covered with a handful of dirt.

“What’s going on?” he asked, letting his tiredness and discouragement sharpen his voice.

“Timmy’s digging,” I said, stating the obvious, which was all I could do.

“Can’t he find a better place than that?” And Father stomped into the house. I called Timmy and helped him up out of the hole. He was dirt-covered from head to heels and Father was almost through with his supper before I got Timmy cleaned up enough to come inside.

We sat around the table, not even reading, and talked. Timmy sat close to me, his fingers on my wrist.

“Maybe the ponds will fill a little while we’re using up this water,” said Mama, hopelessly.

Father was silent and I stared at the table, seeing the buckets of water Prince and Nig had sucked up so quickly that evening.

“We’d better be deciding where to go,” said Father. “When the water’s all gone-” His face shut down, bleak and still, and he opened the Bible at random, missing our marker by half the book. He looked down and read, “‘For in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert.’” He clapped the book shut and sat, his elbows on each side of the book, his face buried in his two hands, this last rubbing of salt in the would almost too much to bear.

I touched Timmy and we crept to bed.

I woke in the night, hearing a noise. My hand went up to the cot and I struggled upright. Timmy was gone. I scrambled to the door and looked out. Timmy was in the hole, digging. At least I guess he was. There was a scraping sound for a while then a-a wad of dirt would sail slowly up out of the hole and fall far enough from the edge that it couldn’t run down in again. I watched the dirt sail up twice more, then there was a clatter and three big rocks sailed up. They hovered a little above the mound of dirt then thumped down-one of them on my bare foot.

I was hopping around, nursing my foot in my hands, when I looked up and saw Father standing stern and tall on the porch.

“What’s going on?” He repeated his earlier question. The sound of digging below stopped. So did my breath for a moment.

“Timmy’s digging,” I said, as I had before.

“At night? What for?” Father asked.

“He can’t see, night or light,” I said, “but I don’t know why he’s digging.”

“Get him out of there,” said Father. “This is no time for nonsense.”

I went to the edge of the hole. Timmy’s face was a pale blur below. “He’s too far down,” I said. “I’ll need a ladder.”

“He got down there,” said Father unreasonably, “let him get out!”

“Timmy!” I called down to him. “Father says come up!”

There was a hesitating scuffle, then Timmy came up! Straight up! As though something were lifting him! He came straight up out of the hole and hovered as the rocks had, then he moved through the air and landed on the porch so close to Father that he stumbled back a couple of steps.

“Father!” My voice shook with terror.

Father turned and went into the house. He lighted the lamp, the upflare of the flame before he put the chimney on showed the deep furrows down his cheeks. I prodded Timmy and we sat on the bench across the table from Father.

“Why is he digging?” Father asked again. “Since he responds to you, ask him.”

I reached out, half afraid, and touched Timmy’s wrist.

“Why are you digging?” I asked. “Father wants to know.”

Timmy’s mouth moved and he seemed to be trying different words with his lips. Then he smiled, the first truly smile I’d ever seen on his face. “‘Shall waters break out and streams in the desert,’” he said happily.

“That’s no answer!” Father exclaimed, stung by having those unfitting words flung back at him. “No more digging. Tell him so.”

I felt Timmy’s wrist throb protestingly and his face turned to me, troubled.

“Why no digging? What harm’s he doing?” My voice sounded strange in my own ears and the pit of my stomach was ice. For the first time in my life I was standing up to Father! That didn’t shake me as much as the fact that for the first time in my life I was seriously questioning his judgment.

“No digging because I said no digging!” said Father, anger whitening his face, his fists clenching on the table.

“Father,” I swallowed with difficulty, “I think Timmy’s looking for water. He-he touched water before he started digging. He felt it. We-we went all over the place before he settled on where he’s digging. Father, what if he’s a-a dowser? What if he knows where water is? He’s different-“

I was afraid to look at Father. I kept my eyes on my own hand where Timmy’s fingers rested on my wrist.

“Maybe if we helped him dig-” I faltered and stopped, seeing the stones come up and hover and fall. “He has only Merry’s spoon and an old knife.”

“And he dug that deep!” thundered Father.

“Yes,” I said. “All by himself.”

“Nonsense!” Father’s voice was flat. “There’s no water anywhere around here. You saw me digging for water for the stock. We’re not in Las Lomitas. There will be no more digging.”

“Why not!” I was standing now, my own fists on the table as I leaned forward. I could feel my eyes blaze as Father’s do sometimes. “What harm is he doing? What’s wrong with his keeping busy while we sit around waiting to dry up and blow away? What’s wrong with hoping!”

Father and I glared at each other until his eyes dropped. Then mine filled with tears and I dropped back on the bench and buried my face in my arms. I cried as if I were no older than Merry. My chest was heavy with sorrow for this first real anger I had ever felt toward Father, with the shouting and the glaring, and especially for his eyes falling before mine.

Then I felt his hand heavy on my shoulder. He had circled the table to me. “Go to bed now,” he said quietly. “Tomorrow is another day.”

“Oh, Father!” I turned and clung to his waist, my face tight against him, his hand on my head. Then I got up and took Timmy back to the cot and we went to bed again.

Next morning, as though it was our usual task, Father got out the shovels and rigged up a bucket on a rope and he and I and Timmy worked in the well. We called it a well now, instead of a hole, maybe to bolster our hopes.

By evening we had it down a good twelve feet, still not finding much except hard, packed-down river silt and an occasional clump of round river rocks. Our ladder was barely long enough to help us scramble up out and the edges of the hole were crumbly and sifted off under the weight of our knees.

I climbed out. Father set the bucket aside and eased his palms against his hips. Timmy was still in the well, kneeling and feeling the bottom.

“Timmy!” I called. “Come on up. Time to quit!” His face turned up to me but still he knelt there and I found myself gingerly groping for the first rung of the ladder below the rim of the well.

“Timmy wants me to look at something,” I said up to Father’s questioning face. I climbed down and knelt by Timmy. My hands followed his tracing hands and I looked up and said, “Father!” with such desolation in my voice that he edged over the rim and came down, too.

We traced it again and again. There was solid rock, no matter which way we brushed the dirt, no matter how far we poked into the sides of the well. We were down to bedrock. We were stopped.

We climbed soberly up out of the well. Father boosted me up over the rim and I braced myself and gave him a hand up. Timmy came up. There was no jarring of his feet on the ladder, but he came up. I didn’t look at him.

The three of us stood there, ankle-deep in dust. Then Timmy put his hands out, one hand to Father’s shoulder and one to mine. ” ‘Shall waters break out and streams in the desert,’” he said carefully and emphatically.

“Parrot!” said Father bitterly, turning away.

“If the water is under the stone!” I cried. “Father, we blasted out the mesquite stumps in the far pasture. Can’t we blast the stone-“

Father’s steps were long and swinging as he hurried to the barn. “I haven’t ever done this except with stumps,” he said. He sent Mama and Merry out behind the barn. He made Timmy and me stay away as he worked in the bottom of the well, then he scrambled up the ladder and I ran out to help pull it up out of the well and we all retreated behind the barn, too.

Timmy clung to my wrist and when the blast came, he cried out something I couldn’t understand and wouldn’t come with us back to the well. He crouched behind the barn, his face to his knees, his hands clasped over the top of his head.

We looked at the well. It was a dimple in the front yard. The sides had caved in. There was nothing to show for all our labor but the stacked-up dirt beside the dimple, our ladder, and a bucket with a rope tied to the bale. We watched as clod broke loose at the top of the dimple and started a trickle of dirt as it rolled dustily down into the hole.

“‘And streams in the desert,’” said Father, turning away.

I picked up the bucket, dumped out a splinter of stone, and put the bucket carefully on the edge of the porch.

“Supper,” said Mama quietly, sagging under Merry’s weight,

I went and got Timmy. He came willingly enough. He paused by the dimple in the front yard, his hand on my wrist, then went with me into the shadowy cabin.

After supper I brought our evening books to the table, but Timmy put out seeking hands and gathered them to him. He put both hands, lapping over each other, across the top of the stack and leaned his chin on them, his face below the bandage thoughtful and still.

“I have words enough now,” he said slowly. “I have been learning them as fast as I could. Maybe I will not have them always right, but I must talk now. You must not go away, because there is water.”

Father closed his astonished mouth and said wearily, “So you have been making fools of us all this time!”

Timmy’s fingers went to my wrist in the pause that followed Father’s words. “I have not made fools of you,” Timmy went on. “I could not speak to anyone but Barney without words, and I must touch him to tell and to understand. I had to wait to learn your words. It is a new language.”

“Where are you from?” I asked eagerly, pulling the patient cork out of my curiosity. “How did you get out there in the pasture? What is in the-” Just in time I remembered that I was the only one who knew about the charred box.

“My cahilla!” cried Timmy-then he shook his head at me and addressed himself to Father. “I’m not sure how to tell you so you will believe. I don’t know how far your knowledge-“

“Father’s smarter than anyone in the whole Territory!” I cried.

“The Territory-” Timmy paused, measuring Territory. “I was thinking of your world-this world-“

“There are other planets-” I repeated Father’s puzzling words.

“Then you do know other planets,” said Timmy. “Do you-” he groped for a word. “Do you transport yourself and things in the sky?”

Father stirred. “Do we have flying machines?” he asked.

“No, not yet. We have balloons-“

Timmy’s fingers were on my wrist again. He sighed. “Then I must just tell and if you do not know, you must believe only because I tell. I tell only to make you know there is water and you must stay.

“My world is another planet. It was another planet. It is broken in space now, all to pieces, shaking and roaring and fire-and all gone.” His blind face looked on desolation and his lips tightened. I felt hairs crisp along my neck. As long as he touched my wrist I could see! I couldn’t tell you what all I saw because lots of it had no words I knew to put to it, but I saw!

“We had ships for going in Space,” he said. I saw them, needlesharp and shining, pointing at the sky and the heavy red-lit clouds. “We went into space before our Home broke. Our Home! Our-Home.” His voice broke and he leaned his cheek on the stack of books. Then he straightened again.

“We came to your world. We did not know of it before. We came far, far. At the last we came too fast. We are not Space travelers. The big ship that found your world got too hot. We had to leave it in our life-slips, each by himself. The life-slips got hot, too. I was burning! I lost control of my life-slip. I fell-” He put his hands to his bandages. “I think maybe I will never see this new world.”

“Then there are others, like you, here on Earth,” said Father slowly.

“Unless they all died in the landing,” said Timmy. “There were many on the big ship.”

“I saw little things shoot off the big thing!” I cried, excited. “I thought they were pieces breaking off only they-they went instead of falling!”

“Praise to the Presence, the Name, and the Power!” said Timmy, his right hand sketching his sign in the air, then dropping to my wrist again.

“Maybe some still live. Maybe my family. Maybe Lytha-“

I stared, fascinated, as I saw Lytha, dark hair swinging, smiling back over her shoulder, her arms full of flowers whose centers glowed like little lights. Daggone, I thought, Daggone! She sure isn’t his Merry!

“Your story is most interesting,” said Father, “and it opens vistas we haven’t begun to explore yet, but what bearing has all this on our water problem?”

“We can do things you seem not able to do,” said Timmy

“You must always touch the ground to go, and lift things with tools or hands, and know only because you touch and see. We can know without touching and seeing. We can find people and metals and water-we can find almost anything that we know, if it is near us. I have not been trained to be a finder, but I have studied the feel of water and the-the-what it is made of-“

“The composition,” Father supplied the word.

“The composition of water,” said Timmy. “And Barney and I explored much of the farm. I found the water here by the house.”

“We dug,” said Father. “How far down is the water?”

“I am not trained,” said Timmy humbly. “I only know it is there. It is water that you think of when you say ‘Las Lomitas.’ It is not a dipping place or-or a pool. It is going. It is pushing hard. It is cold.” He shivered a little.

“It is probably three hundred feet down,” said Father. “There has never been an artesian well this side of the Coronas.”

“It is close enough for me to find,” said Timmy. “Will you wait?”

“Until our water is gone,” said Father. “And until we have decided where to go.

“Now it’s time for bed.” Father took the Bible from the stack of books. He thumbed back from our place to Psalms and read the “When I consider the heavens” one. As I listened, all at once the tight little world I knew, overtopped by the tight little Heaven I wondered about, suddenly split right down the middle and stretched and grew and filled with such a glory that I was scared and grabbed the edge of the table. If Timmy had come from another planet so far away that it wasn’t even one we had a name for-! I knew that never again would my mind think it could measure the world-or my imagination, the extent of God’s creation!

I was just dropping off the edge of waking after tumbling and tossing for what seemed like hours, when I heard Timmy.

“Barney,” he whispered, not being able to reach my wrist.

“My cahilla-You found my cahilla?”

“Your what?” I asked, sitting up in bed and meeting his groping hands. “Oh! That box thing. Yeah, I’ll get it for you in the morning.”

“Not tonight?” asked Timmy, wistfully. “It is all I have left of the Home. The only personal things we had room for-“

“I can’t find it tonight,” I said. “I buried it by a rock. I couldn’t find it in the dark. Besides, Father’d hear us go, if we tried to leave now. Go to sleep. It must be near morning.”

“Oh yes,” sighed Timmy, “oh, yes.” And he lay back down. “Sleep well.”

And I did, going out like a lamp blown out, and dreamed wild, exciting dreams about riding astride ships that went sailless across waterless oceans of nothingness and burned with white hot fury that woke me up to full morning light and Merry bouncing happily on my stomach.

After breakfast, Mama carefully oiled Timmy’s scabs again. “I’m almost out of bandages,” she said.

“If you don’t mind having to see,” said Timmy, “don’t bandage me again. Maybe the light will come through.”

We went out and looked at the dimple by the porch. It had subsided farther and was a bowl-shaped place now, maybe waist-deep to me.

“Think it’ll do any good to dig it out again?” I asked Father.

“I doubt it,” he answered heavily. “Apparently I don’t know how to set a charge to break the bedrock. How do we know we could break it anyway? It could be a mile thick right here.” It seemed to me that Father was talking to me more like to a man than to a boy. Maybe I wasn’t a boy any more!

“The water is there,” said Timmy. “If only I could ‘platt’-” His hand groped in the sun and it streamed through his fingers for a minute like sun through a knothole in a dusty room. I absently picked up the piece of stone I had dumped from the bucket last evening. I fingered it and said, “Ouch!” I had jabbed myself on its sharp point. Sharp point!

“Look,” I said, holding it out to Father. “This is broken! All the other rocks we found were round river rocks. Our blasting broke something!”

“Yes.” Father took the splinter from me. “But where’s the water?”

Timmy and I left Father looking at the well and went out to the foot of the field where the fire had been. I located the rock where I had buried the box. It was only a couple of inches down-barely covered, I scratched it out for him.

“Wait,” I said, “it’s all black. Let me wipe it off first.” I rubbed it in a sand patch and the black all rubbed off except in the deep lines of the design that covered all sides of it. I put it in his eager hands.

He flipped it around until it fitted his two hands with his thumbs touching in front. Then I guess he must have thought at it because he didn’t do anything else but all at once it opened, cleanly, from his thumbs up.

He sat there on a rock in the sun and felt the things that were in the box. I couldn’t tell you what any of them were except what looked like a piece of ribbon, and a withered flower. He finally closed the box. He slid to his knees beside the rock and hid his face on his arms. He sat there a long time. When he finally lifted his face, it was dry, but his sleeves were wet. I’ve seen Mama’s sleeves like that after she has looked at things in the little black trunk of hers.

“Will you put it back in the ground?” be asked. “There is no place for it in the house. It will be safe here.”

So I buried the box again and we went back to the house.

Father had dug a little, but be said, “It’s no use. The blast loosened the ground all around and it won’t even hold the shape of a well any more.”

We talked off and on all day about where to go from here, moneyless and perilously short of provisions. Mama wanted so much to go back to our old home that she couldn’t talk about it, but Father wanted to go on, pushing West again. I wanted to stay where we were-with plenty of water. I wanted to see that tide of Time sweep one century away and start another across Desolation Valley! There would be a sight for you!

We began to pack that afternoon because the barrels were emptying fast and the pools were damp, curling cakes of mud in the hot sun. All we could take was what we could load on the hayrack. Father had traded the wagon we came West in for farm machinery and a set of washtubs. We’d have to leave the machinery either to rust there or for us to come back for.

Mama took Merry that evening and climbed the hill to the little grave under the scrub oak. She sat there a long time with her back to the sun, her wistful face in the shadow. She came back in silence, Merry heavily sleepy in her arms.

After we had gone to bed, Timmy groped for my wrist.

“You do have a satellite to your earth, don’t you?” he asked. His question was without words.

“A satellite?” Someone turned restlessly on the big bed when I hissed my question.

“Yes,” he answered. “A smaller world that goes around and is bright at night.”

“Oh,” I breathed. “You mean the moon. Yes, we have a moon but it’s not very bright now. There was only a sliver showing just after sunset.” I felt Timmy sag. “Why?”

“We can do large things with sunlight and moonlight together,” came his answer. “I hoped that at sunrise tomorrow-“

“At sunrise tomorrow, we’ll be finishing our packing,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

“Then I must do without,” he went on, not hearing me.

“Barney, if I am Called, will you keep my cahilla until someone asks for it? If they ask, it is my People. Then they will know I am gone.”

“Called?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“As the baby was,” he said softly. “Called back into the Presence from which we came. If I must lift with my own strength alone, I may not have enough, so will you keep my cahilla?”

“Yes,” I promised, not knowing what he was talking about. “I’ll keep it.”

“Good. Sleep well,” he said, and again waking went out of me like a lamp blown out.

All night long I dreamed of storms and earthquakes and floods and tornadoes all going past me-fast! Then I was lying half awake, afraid to open my eyes for fear some of my dreaming might be true. And suddenly, it was!

I clutched my pallet as the floor humped, snapping and groaning, and flopped flat again. I heard our breakfast pots and pans banging on the shelf and then falling with a clatter. Mama called, her voice heavy with sleep and fear, “James! James!”

I reached for Timmy, but the floor bumped again and dust rolled in through the pale squares of the windows and I coughed as I came to my knees. There was a crash of something heavy falling on the roof and rolling off. And a sharp hissing sound. Timmy wasn’t in bed. Father was trying to find his shoes. The hissing noise got louder and louder until it was a burbling roar. Then there was a rumble and something banged the front of the house so hard I heard the porch splinter. Then there was a lot of silence.

I crept on all fours across the floor. Where was Timmy? I could see the front door hanging at a crazy angle on one hinge. I crept toward it.

My hands splashed! I paused, confused, and started on again. I was crawling in water! “Father!” My voice was a croak from the dust and shock. “Father! It’s water!”

And Father was suddenly there, lifting me to my feet. We stumbled together to the front door. There was a huge slab of rock poking a hole in the siding of the house, crushing the broken porch under its weight. We edged around it, ankle-deep in water, and saw in the gray light of early dawn our whole front yard awash from hill to porch. Where the well had been was a moving hump of water that worked away busily, becoming larger and larger as we watched.

“Water!” said Father. “The water has broken through!”

“Where’s Timmy?” I said. “Where’s Timmy!” I yelled and started to splash out into the yard.

“Watch out!” warned Father. “It’s dangerous! All this rock came out of there!” We skirted the front yard searching the surface of the rising water, thinking every shadow might be Timmy.

We found him on the far side of the house, floating quietly, face up in a rising pool of water, his face a bleeding mass of mud and raw flesh.

I reached him first, floundering through the water to him. I lifted his shoulders and tried to see in the dawn light if he was still breathing. Father reached us and we lifted Timmy to dry land.

“He’s alive!” said Father. “His face-it’s just the scabs scraped off.”

“Help me get him in the house,” I said, beginning to lift him.

“Better be the barn,” said Father. “The water’s still rising.” It had crept up to us already and seeped under Timmy again. We carried him to the barn and I stayed with him while Father went back for Merry and Mama.

It was lucky that most of our things had been packed on the hayrack the night before. After Mama, a shawl thrown over her nightgown and all our day clothes grabbed up in her arms, came wading out with Father, who was carrying Merry and our lamp, I gave Timmy into her care and went back with Father again and again to finish emptying the cabin of our possessions.

Already the huge rock had gone on down through the porch and disappeared into the growing pond of water in the front yard. The house was dipping to the weight of our steps as though it might float off the minute we left. Father got a rope from the wagon and tied it through the broken corner of the house and tethered it to the barn. “No use losing the lumber if we don’t have to,” he said.

By the time the sun was fully up, the house was floating off its foundation rocks. There was a pond filling all the house yard, back and front, extending along the hill, up to the dipping place, and turning into a narrow stream going the other way, following the hill for a while then dividing our dying orchard and flowing down toward the dry river bed. Father and I pulled the house slowly over toward the barn until it grated solid ground again.

Mama had cleaned Timmy up. He didn’t seem to be hurt except for his face and shoulder being peeled raw. She put olive oil on him again and used one of Merry’s petticoats to bandage his face. He lay deeply unconscious all of that day while we watched the miracle of water growing in a dry land. The pond finally didn’t grow any wider, but the stream widened and deepened, taking three of our dead trees down to the river. The water was clearing now and was deep enough over the spring that it didn’t bubble any more that we could see. There was only a shivering of the surface so that circles ran out to the edge of the pond, one after another.

Father went down with a bucket and brought it back brimming over. We drank the cold, cold water and Mama made a pack to put on Timmy’s head.

Timmy stirred but he didn’t waken. It wasn’t until evening when we were settling down to a scratch-meal in the barn that we began to realize what had happened.

“We have water!” Father cried suddenly. “Streams in the desert!”

“It’s an artesian well, isn’t it?” I asked. “Like at Las Lomitas? It’ll go on flowing from here on out, won’t it?”

“That remains to be seen,” Father said. “But it looks like a good one. Tomorrow I must ride to Tolliver’s Wells and tell them we have water. They must be almost out by now!

“Then we don’t have to move?” I asked.

“Not as long as we have water,” said Father. “I wonder if we have growing time enough to put in a kitchen garden-“

I turned quickly. Timmy was moving. His hands were on the bandage, exploring it cautiously.

“Timmy,” I reached for his wrist. “It’s all right, Timmy. You just got peeled raw. We had to bandage you again.”

“The-the water-” His voice was barely audible.

“It’s all over the place!” I said. “It’s floated the house off the foundations and you should see the pond! And the stream! And it’s cold!”

“I’m thirsty,” he said. “I want a drink, please.”

He drained the cup of cold water and his lips turned upward in a ghost of a smile. “Shall waters break out!”

“Plenty of water,” I laughed. Then I sobered. “What were you doing out in it, anyway?

Mama and Father were sitting on the floor beside us now.

“I had to lift the dirt out,” he said, touching my wrist. “All night I lifted. It was hard to hold back the loose dirt so it wouldn’t slide back into the hole. I sat on the porch and lifted the dirt until the rock was there.” He sighed and was silent for a minute. “I was not sure I had strength enough. The rock was cracked and I could feel the water pushing, hard, hard, under. I had to break the rock enough to let the water start through. It wouldn’t break! I called on the Power again and tried and tried. Finally a piece came loose and flew up. The force of the water-it was like-like-blasting. I had no strength left. I went unconscious.”

“You dug all that out alone!” Father took one of Timmy’s hands and looked at the smooth palm.

“We do not always have to touch to lift and break,” said Timmy. “But to do it for long and heavy takes much strength.” His head rolled weakly.

“Thank you, Timothy,” said Father. “Thank you for the well.”

So that’s why we didn’t move. That’s why Promise Pond is here to keep the ranch green. That’s why this isn’t Fool’s Acres any more but Full Acres. That’s why Cahilla Creek puzzles people who try to make it Spanish. Even Father doesn’t know why Timmy and I named the stream Cahilla. The pond had almost swallowed up the little box before we remembered it.

That’s why the main road across Desolation Valley goes through our ranch now for the sweetest, coldest water in the Territory. That’s why our big new house is built among the young black walnut and weeping willow trees that surround the pond. That’s why it has geraniums windowsill high along one wall. That’s why our orchard has begun to bear enough to start being a cash crop.

And that’s why, too, that one day a wagon coming from the far side of Desolation Valley made camp on the camping grounds below the pond.

We went down to see the people after supper to exchange news. Timmy’s eyes were open now, but only light came into them, not enough to see by.

The lady of the wagon tried not to look at the deep scars on the side of Timmy’s face as her man and we men talked together. She listened a little too openly to Timmy’s part of the conversation and said softly to Mama, her whisper spraying juicily, “He your boy?”

“Yes, our boy,” said Mama, “but not born to us.”

“Oh,” said the woman. “I thought be talked kinda foreign.” Her voice was critical. “Seems like we’re gettin’ overrun with foreigners. Like that sassy girl in Margin.”

“Oh?” Mama fished Merry out from under the wagon by her dress tail.

“Yes,” said the woman. “She talks foreign too, though they say not as much as she used to. Oh, them foreigners are smart enough! Her aunt says she was sick and had to learn to talk all over again, that’s why she sounds like that.” The woman leaned confidingly toward Mama, lowering her voice.

“But I heard in a roundabout way that there’s something queer about that girl. I don’t think she’s really their niece. I think she came from somewhere else. I think she’s really a foreigner!”

“Oh?” said Mama, quite unimpressed and a little bored.

“They say she does funny things and Heaven knows her name’s funny enough. I ask you! Doesn’t the way these foreigners push themselves in-“

“Where did your folks come from?” asked Mama, vexed by the voice the lady used for “foreigner.”

The lady reddened. “I’m native born!” she said, tossing her head. “Just because my parents-It isn’t as though England was-” She pinched her lips together. “Abigail Johnson for a name is a far cry from Marnie Lytha Something-or-other!”

“Lytha!” I heard Timmy’s cry without words. Lytha? He stumbled toward the woman, for once his feet unsure. She put out a hasty hand to fend him off and her face drew up with distaste.

“Watch out!” she cried sharply. “Watch where you’re going!”

“He’s blind,” Mama said softly.

“Oh,” the woman reddened again. “Oh, well-“

“Did you say you knew a girl named Lytha?” asked Timmy faintly.

“Well, I never did have much to do with her,” said the woman, unsure of herself. “I saw her a time or two-“

Timmy’s fingers went out to touch her wrist and she jerked back as though burned. “I’m sorry,” said Timmy. “Where are you coming from?”

“Margin,” said the woman. “We been there a couple of months shoeing the horses and blacksmithing some.”

“Margin,” said Timmy, his hands shaking a little as he turned away. “Thanks.”

“Well, you’re welcome, I guess,” snapped the woman. She turned back to Mama, who was looking after us, puzzled.

“Now all the new dresses have-“

“I couldn’t see,” whispered Timmy to me as we moved off through the green grass and willows to the orchard. “She wouldn’t let me touch her. How far is Margin?”

“Two days across Desolation Valley,” I said, bubbling with excitement. “It’s a mining town in the hills over there. Their main road comes from the other side.”

“Two days!” Timmy stopped and clung to a small tree.

“Only two days away all this time!”

“It might not be your Lytha,” I warned. “It could be one of us. I’ve heard some of the wildest names! Pioneering seems to addle people’s naming sense.”

“I’ll call,” said Timmy, his face rapt. “I’ll call and when she answers-!”

“If she hears you,” I said, knowing his calling wouldn’t be aloud and would take little notice of the distance to Margin.

“Maybe she thinks everyone is dead like you did. Maybe she won’t think of listening.”

“She will think often of the Home,” said Timmy firmly, “and when she does, she will hear me. I will start now.” And he threaded his way expertly through the walnuts and willows by the pond.

I looked after him and sighed. I wanted him happy and if it was his Lytha, I wanted them together again. But, if he called and called again and got no answerI slid to a seat on a rock by the pond, thinking again of the little lake we were planning where we would have fish and maybe a boat-I dabbled my hand in the cold water and thought, this was dust before Timmy came. He was stubborn enough to make the stream break through.

“If Timmy calls,” I told a little bird balancing suddenly on a twig, bobbing over the water, “someone will answer!”

Meris leaned back with a sigh. “Well!” she said, “thank goodness! I never would have rested easy again if I hadn’t found out! But after Timmy found The People, surely his eyes-“

“Never satisfied,” said Mark. “The more you hear the more you want to hear-“

“I’ve never Assembled much beyond that,” said Bethie. Then she held up a cautioning hand. “Wait-

“Oh,” she said, listening. “Oh dear! Of course.” She stood up, her face a pale blur in the darkness of the patio. “That was Debbie. She’s on her way here. She says Dr. Curtis needs me back at the Group. Valancy sent her because she’s the one who came back from the New Home and ‘Peopled all over the place,’ as she says. I have to leave immediately. There isn’t time for a car. Luckily it’s dark enough now. Debbie has her part all Assembled already so she can-“

“I wish you didn’t have to leave so soon,” said Meris, following her inside and helping her scramble her few belongings into her small case.

“There is so much-There’s always so much-You’ll enjoy Debbie’s story.” Bethie was drifting steplessly out the door. “And there are others-” She was a quickening shadow rising above the patio and her whispered “Good-by,” came softly down through the overarching tree branches.

“Hi!” The laughing voice startled them around from their abstraction. “Unless I’ve lost my interpretive ability, that’s an awfully wet, hungry cry coming from in there!”

“Oh, ‘Licia, honey!” Meris fled indoors, crooning abject apologies as she went.

“Well, hi, to you, then.” The woman stepped out of the shadows and offered a hand to Mark. “I’m Debbie. Sorry to snatch Bethie away, but Dr. Curtis had to have her stat. She’s our best Sensitive and he has a puzzlesome emergency to diagnose. She’s his court of last resort!”

“Dr. Curtis?” Mark returned her warm firm clasp. “That must be the doctor Johannan was trying to find to lead him to the Group.”

“Is so,” said Debbie. “Our Inside-Outsider. He’s a fixture with us now. Not that he stays with the Group, but he functions as One of Us.”

“Come on in,” said Mark, holding the kitchen door open. “Come in and have some coffee.”

“Thank you kindly,” laughed Debbie. “It’s right sightly of you to ask a stranger to ‘light and set a spell.’ No,” she smiled at Mark’s questioning eyes. “That’s not the way they talk on the New Home. It’s only a slight lingual hangover from the first days of my Return. That’s the Assembly Valancy sent me to tell you.”

She sat at the kitchen table and Mark gathered up his battered, discolored coffee mug and Meris’s handleless one and a brightly company-neat cup for Debbie. There wasn’t much left of the coffee but by squeezing hard enough, he achieved three rather scanty portions.

After the flurry of building more coffee and Meris’s return with a solemnly blinking ‘Licia to be exclaimed over and inspected and loved and fed and adored and bedded again, they decided to postpone Debbie’s installment until after their own supper.

“This Assembling business is getting to be as much an addiction as watching TV,” said Mark, mending the fire in the fireplace.

“Well, there’s addiction and addiction,” said Meris as Mark returned to the couch to sit on the other side of Debbie. “I prefer this one. This is for real-hard as it is to believe.”

“For real,” mused Debbie, clasping their hands. “I could hardly believe it was for real then, either. Here is how I felt-“

RETURN

I was afraid. When the swelling bulk of the Earth blotted our ports, I was afraid for the first time. Fear was a sudden throb in my throat and, almost as an echo, a sudden throb from Child Within reminded me why it was that Earth was swelling in our ports after such a final good-by. Drawn by my mood, Thann joined me as the slow turning of our craft slid the Earth out of sight.

“Apprehensive?” he asked, his arm firm across my shoulders.

“A little.” I leaned against him. “This business of trying to go back again is a little disquieting. You can’t just slip back into the old mold. Either it’s changed or you’ve changed-or both. I realize that.”

“Well, the best we can do is give it the old college try,” he said. “And all for Child Within. I hope he appreciates it.”

“Or she.” I glanced down at my unfamiliar proportions.

“As the case may be. But you do understand, don’t you?” Need for reassurance lifted my voice a little. “Thann, we just had to come back. I just couldn’t bear the thought of Child Within being born in that strange-tidy-” My voice trailed off and I leaned more heavily, sniffing.

“Listen, Debbie-my-dear!” Thann shook me gently and hugged me roughly. “I know, I know! While I don’t share your aching necessity for Earth, I agreed, didn’t I? Didn’t I sweat blood in that darn Motiver school, learning to manipulate this craft? Aren’t we almost there?”

“Almost there! Oh, Thann! Oh, Thann!” Our craft had completed another of its small revolutions, and Earth marched determinedly across the port again. I pressed myself against the pane, wanting to reach-to gather in the featureless mists, the blurred beauties of the world, and hold them so close-so close that even Child Within would move to their wonder.

I’m a poor hand at telling time. I couldn’t tell you even to within a year how long ago it was that Shua lifted the Ship from the flat at Cougar Canyon and started the trip from Earth to The Home. I remembered how excited I was. Even my ponytail had trembled as the great adventure began. Thann swears he was standing so close to me at Takeoff that the ponytail tickled his nose. But I don’t remember him. I don’t even remember seeing him at all during the long trip when the excitement of being evacuated from Earth dulled to the routine of travel and later became resurrected as anxiety about what The Home would be like.

I don’t remember him at all until that desolate day on The Home when I stood at the end of the so-precise little lane that wound so consciously lovely from the efficient highway. I was counting, through the blur of my tears, the precisely twenty-six trees interspersed at suitable intervals by seven clumps of underbrush. He just happened to be passing at the moment end I looked up at him and choked, “Not even a weed! Not one!”

Astonished, he folded his legs and hovered a little above eye level.

“What good’s a weed?”

“At least it shows individuality!” I shut my eyes, not caring that by so doing the poised tears consolidated and fell “I’m so sick of perfection!”

“Perfection?” He lifted a little higher above me, his eyes on some far sight. “I certainly wouldn’t call The Home perfect yet. From here I can see the North Reach. We’ve only begun to nibble at that. The preliminary soil crew is just starting analysis.” He dropped down beside me. “We can’t waste time and space on weeds. It’ll take long enough to make the whole of The Home habitable without using energy on nonessentials.”

“They’ll find out!” I stubbornly proclaimed. “Someday they’ll find out that weeds are essentials. Man wasn’t made for such-such neatness. He has to have unimportant clutter to relax in!”

“Why haven’t you presented these fundamental doctrines to the Old Ones?” He laughed at me.

“Have I not!” I retorted. “Well, maybe not to the Old Ones, but I’ve already expressed myself, and further more, Mr.-Oh, I’m sorry, I’m Debbie-“

“I’m Thannel,” he grinned.

“-Thannel, I’ll have you know other wiser heads than mine have come to the same conclusion. Maybe not in my words, but they mean the same thing. This artificiality-this-this-The People aren’t meant to live divorced from the-the-” I spread my hands. “Soil, I guess you could say. They lose something when everything gets-gets paved.”

“Oh, I think we’ll manage,” he smiled. “Memory can sustain.”

“Memory? Oh, Thann, remember the tangle of blackberry vines in back of Kroginold’s house? How we used to burrow under the scratchy, cool, green twilight in under these vines and hunt for berries-cool ones from the shadows, and warm ones from the sun, and always at least one thorn in the thumb as payment for trespassing. Mmmm-” Eyes closed, I lost myself in the memory.

Then my eyes flipped open. “Or are you from the other Home? Maybe you’ve never even seen Earth.”

“Yes, I have,” he said, suddenly sober. “I’m from Bendo. I haven’t many happy memories of Earth. Until your Group found us, we had a pretty thin time of it.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Bendo was our God Bless for a long time when I was little.”

“Thank you.” He straightened briskly and grinned. “How about a race to the twenty-third despised tree, just to work off a little steam!”

And the two of us lifted and streaked away, a yard above the careful gravel of the lane, but I got the giggles so badly that I blundered into the top of the twenty-first tree and had to be extricated gingerly from its limbs. Together we guiltily buried at its foot the precious tiny branch I had broken off in my blundering, and then, with muffled laughter and guilty back-glances, we went our separate ways.

That night I lay and waited for the pale blue moon of The Home to vault into the sky, and thought about Earth and the Other Home.

The other Home was first, of course-the beautiful prototype of this Home. But it had weeds! And all the tangled splendor of wooded hillsides and all soaring upreach naked peaks and the sweet uncaring, uncountable profusion of life, the same as Earth. But The Home died-blasted out of the heavens by a cosmic Something that shattered it and scattered the People like birds from a falling tree. Part of them found this Home-or the bare bones of it-and started to remake it into The Home. Others found refuge on Earth. We had it rough for a long time because we were separated from each other. Besides, we were Different, with a capital D, and some of us didn’t survive the adjustment period. Slowly though, we were Gathered In until there were two main Groups-Cougar Canyon and Bendo. Bendo lived in a hell of concealment and fear long after Cougar Canyon had managed to adjust to an Outsider’s world.

Then that day-even now my breath caught at the wonder of that day when the huge ship from the New Home drifted down out of the skies and came to rest on the flat beyond the schoolhouse!

And everyone had to choose. Stay or go. My family chose to go. More stayed. But the Oldest, Cougar Canyon’s leader, blind, crippled, dying from what the Crossing had done to him, he went. But you should see him now! You should see him see! And Obla came too. Sometimes I went to her house just to touch her hands. She had none, you know, on Earth. Nor legs nor eyes, and hardly a face. An explosion had stripped her of all of them. But now, because of transgraph and regeneration, she is becoming whole again-except perhaps her heart-but that’s another story.

Once the wonder of the trip and the excitement of living without concealment, without having to watch every movement so’s not to shock Outsiders, had died a little, I got homesicker and homesicker. At first I fought it as a silly thing, a product of letdown, or idleness. But a dozen new interests, frenzied activities that consumed every waking moment, did nothing to assuage the aching need in me. I always thought homesickness was a childish, transitory thing. Well, most of it, but occasionally there is a person who actually sickens of it and does not recover, short of Return. And I guess I was one of those. It was as though I were breathing with one lung or trying to see with one eye. Sometimes the growing pain became an anguish so physical that I’d crouch in misery, hugging my hurt to me, trying to contain it between my knees and my chest-trying to ease it. Sometimes I could manage a tear or two that relieved a little-such as that day in the lane with Thann.

“Thann!” I turned from the port. “Isn’t it about time-“

“One up on you, Debbie-my-dear,” Thann called from the Motive room. “I’m just settling into the old groove. Got to get us slowed down before we scorch our little bottoms and maybe even singe Child Within.”

“Don’t joke about it!” I said. “Remember, the first time the atmosphere gave us too warm a welcome to Earth. Ask the Oldest.”

“The Power be with us,” came Thann’s quick answering thought.

“And the Name and the Presence,” I echoed, bowing my head as my fingers moved to the Sign and then clasped above Child Within. I moved over to the couch and lay down, feeling the almost imperceptible slowing of our little craft.

Thann and I started two-ing not long after we met and, at flahmen Gathering time, we Bespoke one another and, just before Festival time, we were married.

Perhaps all this time I was hoping that starting a home of my own would erase my longing for Earth and perhaps Thann hoped the same thing. The Home offered him almost all he wanted and he had a job he loved. He felt the pioneering thrill of making a new world and was contented. But my need didn’t evaporate. Instead, it intensified. I talked it over with the Sorter for our Group (a Sorter cares for our emotional and mental problems) because I was beginning to hate-oh, not hate! That’s such a poisonous thing to have festering in your mind. But my perspective was getting so twisted that I was making both myself and Thann unhappy. She Sorted me deftly and thoroughly-and I went home to Thann and he started training to develop his latent Motive ability. We both knew we could well lose our lives trying to return to Earth, but we had to try. Anyway, I had to try, especially after I found out about Child Within. I told Thann and his face lighted up as I knew it would, but-

“This ought to make a bond between you and The Home,” he said. “Now you’ll find unsuspected virtues in this land you’ve been spurning.”

I felt my heart grow cold. “Oh, no, Thann!” I said. “Now more than ever we must go. Our child can’t be born here. He must be of Earth. And I want to be able to enjoy this Child Within-“

“This is quite a Child Without,” said Thann, tempering the annoyance in his voice by touching my cheek softly, “crying for a lollipop, Earth flavored. Ah, well!” He gathered me into his arms. “Hippity-hop to the candy shop!”

A high thin whistle signaled the first brush of Earth’s atmosphere against our craft-as though Earth were reaching up to scrape tenuous incandescent fingers against our underside. I cleared my mind and concentrated on the effort ahead. I’m no Motiver, but Thann might need my strength before we landed.

Before we landed! Setting down on the flat again, under Old Baldy! And seeing them all again! Valancy and Karen and the Francher Kid. Oh, the song the Kid would be singing would be nothing to the song my heart would be singing! Home! Child Within! Home again! I pressed my hands against the swell of Child Within. Pay attention I admonished. Be ready for your first consciousness of Earth. “I won’t look,” I told myself. “Until we touch down on the flat. I’ll keep my eyes shut!” And I did.

So when the first splashing crash came, I couldn’t believe it. My eyes opened to the sudden inrush of water and I was gasping and groping in complete bewilderment trying to find air. “Thann! Thann!” I was paddling awkwardly, trying to keep my head above water. What had happened? How could we have so missed the Canyon-even as inexperienced a Motiver as Thann was? Water? Water to drown in, anywhere near the Canyon?

There was a gulp and the last bubble of air belched out of our turning craft. I was belched out through a jagged hole along with the air.

Thann! Thann! I abandoned vocal calling and spread my cry clear across the band of subspeech. No reply-no reply! I bobbed on the surface of the water, gasping. Oh Child, stay Within. Be Careful. Be Careful! It isn’t time yet. It isn’t time!

I shook my dripping hair out of my eyes and felt a nudge against my knees. Down I went into darkness, groping, groping-and found him! Inert, unresponsive, a dead weight in my arms. The breathless agony of struggle ended in the slippery mud of a rocky shore. I dragged him up far enough that his head was out of the water, listened breathlessly for a heartbeat, then, mouth to mouth, I breathed life back into him and lay gasping beside him in the mud, one hand feeling the struggle as his lungs labored to get back into rhythm. The other hand was soothing Child Within. Not now, not now! Wait-wait!

When my own breathing steadied, I tore strips off my tattered travel suit and bound up his head, staunching the blood that persistently threaded down from the gash above his left ear. Endlessly, endlessly, I lay there listening to his heart-to my heart-too weak to move him, too weak to move myself. Then the rhythm of his breathing changed and I felt his uncertain thoughts, questioning, asking. My thoughts answered his until he knew all I knew about what had happened. He laughed a ghost of a laugh.

“Is this untidy enough for you?” And I broke down and cried.

We lay there in mud and misery, gathering our strength. I started once to a slithering splash across the water from us and felt a lapping of water over my feet. I pulled myself up on one elbow and peered across at the barren hillside. A huge chunk of it had broken off and slithered down into the water. The scar was raw and ragged in the late evening sunshine.

“Where did it come from?” I asked, wonderingly. “All this water! And there is Baldy, with his feet all awash. What happened?”

“The rain is raining,” said Thann, his voice choked with laughter, his head rolling on the sharp shale of the bank.

“The rain is raining-and don’t go near the water!” His nonsense ended with a small moan that tore my heart.

“Thann, Thann! Let’s get out of this mess. Come on. Can you lift? Help me-“

He lifted his head and let it fall back with a thunk against the rocks. His utter stillness panicked me. I sobbed as I reached into my memory for the inanimate lift. It seemed a lifetime before I finally got him up out of the mud and hovered him hand high above the bank. Cautiously I pushed him along, carefully guiding him between the bushes and trees until I found a flat place that crunched with fallen oak leaves. I “platted” him softly to the ground and for a long time I lay there by him, my hand on his sleeve, not even able to think coherently about what had happened.

The sun was gone when I shivered and roused myself. I was cold and Thann was shaken at intervals by an icy shuddering. I scrambled around in the fading fight and gathered wood together and laid a fire. I knelt by the neat stack and gathered myself together for the necessary concentration. Finally, after sweat had gathered on my forehead and trickled into my eyes, I managed to produce a tiny spark that sputtered and hesitated and then took a shining bite out of a dry leaf. I rubbed my hands above the tiny flame and waited for it to grow. Then I lifted Thann’s head to my lap and started the warmth circulating about us.

When our shivering stopped, I suddenly caught my breath and grimaced wryly. How quickly we forget! I was getting as bad as an Outsider! And I clicked my personal shield on, extending it to include Thann. In the ensuing warmth, I looked down at Thann, touching his mud-stained cheek softly, letting my love flow to him like a river of strength. I heard his breathing change and he stirred under my hands.

“Are we Home?” he asked.

“We’re on Earth,” I said.

“We left Earth years ago,” he chided. “Why do I hurt so much?”

“We came back.” I kept my voice steady with an effort.

“Because of me-and Child Within.”

“Child Within-” His voice strengthened. “Hippity-hop to the candy shop,” he remembered. “What happened?”

“The Canyon isn’t here any more,” I said, raising his shoulders carefully into my arms. “We crashed into water. Everything’s gone. We lost everything.” My heart squeezed for the tiny gowns Child Within would never wear.

“Where are our People?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“When you find them, you’ll be all right,” he said drowsily.

“We’ll be all right,” I said sharply, my arms tightening around him “In the morning, we’ll find them and Bethie will find out what’s wrong with you and we’ll mend you.”

He sat up slowly, haggard and dirty in the upflare of firelight, his hand going to his bandaged head. “I’m broken,” he said. “A lot of places. Bones have gone where bones should never go. I will be Called.”

“Don’t say it!” I gathered him desperately into my arms.

“Don’t say it, Thann! We’ll find the People!” He crumpled down against me, his cheek pressed to the curve of Child Within.

I screamed then, partly because my heart was being torn shred by shred into an aching mass-partly because my neglected little fire was happily crackling away from me, munching the dry leaves, sampling the brush, roaring softly into the lower branches of the scrub oak. I had set the hillside afire! And the old terror was upon me, the remembered terror of a manzanita slope blazing on Baldy those many forgotten years ago.

I cradled Thann to me. So far the fire was moving away from us, but soon, soon-

“No! No!” I cried. “Let’s go home. Thann! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Let’s go home! I didn’t mean to bring you to death! I hate this world! I hate it! Thann, Thann!”

I’ve tried to forget it. It comes back sometimes. Sometimes again I’m so shaken that I can’t even protect myself any more and I’m gulping smoke and screaming over Thann. Other times I hear again the rough, disgusted words, “Gel-dinged tenderfoots! Setting fire to the whole gel-dinged mountain. There’s a law!”

Those were the first words I ever heard from Seth. My first sight of him was of a looming giant, twisted by flaring flames and drifting smoke and my own blurring tears.

It was another day before I thought again. I woke to find myself on a camp cot, a rough khaki blanket itching my chin. My bare arms were clean but scratched. Child Within was rounding the blanket smoothly. I closed my eyes and lay lapped in peace for a moment. Then my eyes flew open and I called, “Thann! Thann!” and struggled with the blanket.

“Take it easy! Take it easy!” Strong hands pushed me back against the thin musty pillow. “You’re stark, jay-nekkid under that blanket. You can’t go tearing around that way.” And those were the first words I heard from Glory.

She brought me a faded, crumpled cotton robe and helped me into it. “Them outlandish duds you had on’ll take a fair-sized swatch of fixing ‘fore they’re fit t’ wear.” Her hands were clumsy but careful. She chuckled. “Not sure there’s room for both of yens in this here wrapper.”

I knelt by the cot in the other room. There were only three rooms in the house. Thann lay, thin and unmoving as paper, under the lumpy comforter.

“He wants awful bad to go home.” Glory’s voice tried to moderate to a sick room tone. “He won’t make it,” she said bluntly.

“Yes, he will. Yes, he will! All we have to do is find The People-“

“Which people?” asked Glory.

“The People!” I cried. “The People who live in the Canyon.”

“The Canyon? You mean Cougar Canyon? Been no people there for three-four years. Ever since the dam got finished and the lake started rising.”

“Where-where did they go?” I whimpered, my hands tightening on the edge of the cot.

“Dunno.” Glory snapped a match head with her thumbnail and lighted a makin’s cigarette.

“But if we don’t find them, Thann will die!”

“He will anyway less’n them folks is magic,” said Glory.

“They are!” I cried. “They’re magic!”

“Oh?” said Glory, squinting her eyes against the eddy of smoke. “Oh?”

Thann’s head moved and his eyes opened. I bent my head to catch any whisper from him, but his voice came loud and clear.

“All we have to do is fix the craft and we can go back Home.”

“Yes, Thann.” I hid my eyes against my crossed wrists on the cot. “We’ll leave right away. Child Within will wait ‘til we get Home.” I felt Child Within move to the sound of my words.

“He shouldn’t oughta talk,” said Glory. “He’s all smashed inside. He’ll be bleeding again in a minute.”

“Shut up!” I spun on my knees and flared at her. “You don’t know anything about it! You’re nothing but a stupid Outsider. He won’t die! He won’t!”

Glory dragged on her cigarette. “I hollered some, too, when my son Davy got caught in a cave-in. He was smashed. He died.” She flicked ashes onto the bare plank floor. “God calls them. They go-“

“I’m Called!” Thann caught the familiar word. “I’m Called! What will you do, Debbie-my-dear? What about Child-” A sudden bright froth touched the corner of his mouth and he clutched my wrist. “Home is so far away,” he sighed. “Why did we have to leave? Why did we leave?”

“Thann, Thann!” I buried my face against his quiet side. The pain in my chest got worse and worse and I wished someone would stop that awful babbling and screaming. How could I say good-by to my whole life with that ghastly noise going on? Then my fingers were pried open and I lost the touch of Thann. The black noisy chaos took me completely.

“He’s dead.” I slumped in the creaky rocker. Where was I? How long had I been here? My words came so easily, so accustomedly, they must be a repetition of a repetition. “He’s dead and I hate you. I hate Seth. I hate Earth. You’re all Outsiders. I hate Child Within. I hate myself.”

“There,” said Glory as she snipped a thread with her teeth and stuck the needle in the front of her plaid shin. My words had no impact on her, though they almost shocked me as I listened to them. Why didn’t she notice what I said? Too familiar? “There’s at least one nightgown for Child Within.” She grinned. “When I was your age, folks woulda died of shock to think of calling a baby unborn a name like that. I thought maybe these sugar sacks might come in handy sometime. Didn’t know it’d be for baby clothes.”

“I hate you,” I said, hurdling past any fingering shock. “No lady wears Levis and plaid shirts with buttons that don’t match. Nor cuts her hair like a man and lets her face go all wrinkledy. Oh, well, what does it matter? You’re only a stupid Outsider. You’re not of The People, that’s for sure. You’re not on our level.”

“For that, thanks be to the Lord.” Glory smoothed the clumsy little gown across her knee. “I was taught people are people, no matter their clothes or hair. I don’t know nothing about your folks or what level they’re on, but I’m glad my arthritis won’t let me stoop as low as-” She shrugged and laid the gown aside. She reached over to the battered dresser and retrieved something she held out to me. “Speaking of looks, take a squint at what Child Inside’s got to put up with.”

I slapped the mirror out of her hands-and the mad glimpse of rumpled hair, swollen eyes, raddled face, and a particularly horrible half sneer on lax lips-slapped it out of her hands, stopped its fight in mid-air, spun it up to the sagging plasterboard ceiling, swooped it out with a crash through one of the few remaining whole windowpanes, and let it smash against a pine tree outside the house.

“Do that!” I cried triumphantly. “Even child’s play like that, you can’t do. You’re stupid!”

“Could be.” Glory picked up a piece of the shattered window glass. “But today I fed my man and the stranger within my gates. I made a gown for a naked baby. What have you done that’s been so smart? You’ve busted, you’ve ruined, you’ve whined and hated. If that’s being smart, I’ll stay stupid.” She pitched the glass out of the broken window.

“And I’ll slap you silly, like I would any spoiled brat, if you break anything else.”

“Oh, Glory, oh Glory!” I squeezed my eyes shut. “I killed him! I killed him! I made him come. If we’d stayed Home. If I hadn’t insisted. If-“

“If,” said Glory heavily, lifting the baby gown. “If Davy hadn’ta died, this’d be for my grandkid, most likely. If-ing is the quickest way I know to get the blue mullygrubs.”

She folded the gown and put it away in the dresser drawer. “You haven’t told me yet when Child Within is s’posed to come Without.” She reached for the makin’s and started to build a cigarette.

“I don’t know,” I said, staring down at my tight hands. “I don’t care.” What was Child Within compared to the pain within?

“You’ll care plenty,” snapped Glory around the smooth curve of the cigarette paper, “if’n you have a hard time and no doctor. You can go ahead and die if you want to, but I’m thinking of Child Within.”

“It’d be better if he died, too,” I cried. “Better than having to grow up in this stupid, benighted world, among savages-“

“What’d you want to come hack so bad for then?” asked Glory. “You admit it was you wanted to come.”

“Yes,” I moaned, twisting my hands. “I killed him. If we’d only stayed Home. If I hadn’t-“

I lay in the dusk, my head pillowed on Thann’s grave. Thann’s grave-The words had a horrible bitterness on my tongue. “How can I bear it, Thann?” I whimpered. “I’m lost. I can’t go Home. The People are gone. What’ll I do with Child Within? How can we ever bear it, living with Outsiders? Oh, Call me too, Call me too!” I let the rough gravel of the grave scratch against my cheek as I cried.

And yet I couldn’t feel that Thann was there. Thann was a part of another life-a life that didn’t end in the mud and misery of a lakeside. He was part of a happy adventure, a glad welcome back to the Earth we had thought was a thing of the past, a tumultuous reunion with all the dear friends we had left behind-the endless hours of vocal and subvocal news exchange-Thann was a part of that. Not a part of this haggard me, this squalid shack teetering on the edge of a dry creek, this bulging, unlovely, ungainly creature muddying her face in the coarse gravel of a barren hillside.

I roused to the sound of footsteps in the dark, and voices.

“-nuttier than a fruitcake,” said Glory. “It takes some girls like that, just getting pregnant, and then this here other shock-“

“What’s she off on now?” It was Seth’s heavy voice.

“Oh, more of the same. Being magic. Making things fly. She broke that lookin’ glass Davy gave me the Christmas before the cave-in.” She cleared her throat. “I picked up the pieces. They’re in the drawer.”

“She oughta have a good hiding!” Anger was thick in Seth’s voice.

“She’ll get one if’n she does anything like that again! Oh, and some more about the Home and flying through space and wanting them people again.”

“You know,” said Seth thoughtfully, “I heard stuff about some folks used to bye around here. Funny stuff.”

“All people are funny.” Glory’s voice was nearer. “Better get her back into the house before she catches her death of live-forevers.”

I stared up at the ceiling in the dark. Time was again a word without validity. I had no idea how long I had huddled myself in my sodden misery. How long had I been here with Glory and Seth? Faintly in my consciousness, I felt a slight stirring of wonder about Seth and Glory. What did they live on? What were they doing out here in the unfruitful hills? This shack was some forgotten remnant of an old ghost town-no electricity, no water, four crazy walls held together by, and holding up, a shattered roof. For food-beans, cornbread, potatoes, prunes, coffee.

I clasped my throbbing temples with both hands, my head rolling from side to side. But what did it matter? What did anything matter any more? Wild grief surged up in my throat and I cried out, “Mother! Mother!” and felt myself drowning in the icy immensity of the lonely space I had drifted across-Then there were warm arms around me and a shoulder under my cheek, the soft scratch of hair against my face, a rough hand gently pressing my head to warmth and aliveness.

“There, there!” Glory’s voice rumbled gruffly soft through her chest to my ear. “It’ll pass. Time and mercy of God will make it bearable. There, there!” She held me and let me blot my tears against her. I didn’t know when she left me and I slept dreamlessly.

Next morning at breakfast-before which I had washed my face and combed most of the tangles out of my hair-I paused over my oatmeal and canned milk, spoon poised.

“What do you do for a living, Seth?” I asked.

“Living?” Seth stirred another spoonful of sugar into the mush. “We scratch our beans and bacon outa the Skagmore. It’s a played-out mine, but there’s a few two-bittin’ seams left. We work it hard enough, we get by-but it takes both of us. Glory’s as good as a man-better’n some.”

“How come you aren’t working at the Golden Turkey or the Iron Duke?” I wondered where I had got those names even as I asked.

“Can’t,” said Glory. “He’s got silicosis and arthritis. Can’t work steady. Times are you’d think he was coughing up his lungs. Hasn’t had a bad time though since you came.”

“If I were a Healer,” I said, “I could cure your lungs and joints. But I’m not. I’m really not much of anything.” I blinked down at my dish. I’m nothing. I’m nothing without Thann. I gulped. “I’m sorry I broke your window and your mirror, Glory. I shouldn’t have. You can’t help being an Outsider.”

“Apology accepted,” Glory grinned dourly. “But it’s still kinda drafty.”

“There’s a whole window in that shack down-creek a ways,” said Seth. “When I get the time, I’ll go get it. Begins to look like the Skagmore might last right up into winter, though.”

“Wish we could get some of that good siding-what’s left of it-and fill in a few of our holes,” said Glory, tipping up the scarred blue and white coffee pot for the last drop of coffee.

“I’ll get the stuff soon’s this seam pinches out,” promised Seth.

I walked down-creek after breakfast, feeling for the first time the sun on my face, seeing for the first time the untidy tangle and thoughtless profusion of life around me, the dream that had drawn me back to this tragedy. I sat down against a boulder, clasping my knees. My feet had known the path to this rock. My back was familiar with its sun-warmed firmness, but I had no memory of it. I had no idea how long I had been eased of my homesickness.

Now that that particular need was filled and that ache soothed, it was hard to remember how vital and how urgent the whole thing had been. It was like the memory of pain-a purely intellectual thing. But once it had been acute-so acute that Thann had come to his death for it.

I looked down at myself and for the first time I noticed I was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt-Glory’s, indubitably. The jeans were precariously held together, bulging under the plaid shirt, by a huge blanket pin. I smiled a little. Outsider makeshift-well, let it stay. They don’t know any better.

Soon I aroused and went on down-creek until I found the shack Seth had mentioned. It had two good windows left. I stood in front of the first one, reaching into my memory for my informal training. Then I settled to the job at hand.

Slowly, steadily, nails began to withdraw from around the windows. With toil and sweat and a few frustrated tears, I got the two windows out intact, though the walls around them would never be the same again. I had had no idea how windows were put into a house. After the windows, it was fairly simple to detach the few good lengths of siding left. I stacked them neatly, one by one, drifting them into place. I jumped convulsively at a sudden crunching crash, then laughed shakily to see that the poor old shack had disintegrated completely, having been deprived of its few solid members. Lifting the whole stack of my salvage to carrying height, I started back up-creek, panting and sweating, stumbling and pushing the load ahead of me until I got smart and, lifting, perched on the pile of planks, I directed my airborne caravan up-creek.

Glory and Seth were up at the mine. I set the things down by the house and then, suddenly conscious of weariness, made my way to Thann’s grave. I patted the gravelly soil softly and whispered, “They’ll like it won’t they, Thann? They’re so like children. Now Glory will forget about the mirror. Poor little Outsider!”

Glory and Seth were stupefied when they saw my loot leaning against the corner of the shack. I told them where I’d got the stuff and how I had brought it back.

Seth spat reflectively and looked sideways at Glory. “Who’s nuts now?” he asked.

“Okay, okay,” said Glory. “You go tell that Jick Bennett how this stuff got here. Maybe he’ll believe you.”

“Did I do something wrong?” I asked. “Did this belong to Mr. Bennett?”

“No, no,” said Glory. “Not to him nor nobody. He’s just a friend of ours. Him and Seth’re always shooting the breeze together. No, it’s just-just-” She gestured hopelessly then turned on Seth. “Well? Get the hammer. You want her to do the hammering too?”

We three labored until the sun was gone and a lopsided moon had pushed itself up over the shoulder of Baldy. The light glittered on the smug wholeness of the two windows of the shack and Glory sighed with tired satisfaction. Balling up the rag she had taken from the other broken window, she got it ready to throw away. “First time my windows’ve been wind-tight since we got here. Come winter that’s nothing to sneeze at!”

“Sneeze at!” Seth shook with silent gargantuan laughter.

“Nothing to sneeze at!”

“Glory!” I cried. “What have you there? Don’t throw it away!”

“What?” Glory retrieved the wad from the woodpile. “It’s only the rags we peeled off’n both of yens before we put you in bed. And another hunk we picked up to beat out the fire. Ripped to tatters. Heavy old canvassy stuff, anyway.”

“Give it to me, Glory,” I said. And took the bundle from her wondering hands. “It’s tekla,” I said. “It’s never useless. Look.” I spread out several of the rags on a flat stone near the creek. In the unreal blend of sunset and moonrise, I smoothed a fingernail along two overlapping edges. They merged perfectly into a complete whole. Quickly I sealed the other rips and snags and, lifting the sheet of tekla shook off the dirt and wrinkles. “See, it’s as good as new. Bring the rest in the house. We can have some decent clothes again.” I smiled at Glory’s pained withdrawal. “After all, Glory, you

must admit this pin isn’t going to hold Child Within much longer!”

Seth lighted the oil lamp above the table and I spread tekla all over it, mending a few rips I’d missed.

“Here’s some more,” said Glory. “I stuck it in that other stovepipe hole. It’s the hunk we used to beat the fire out with. It’s pretty holey.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, pinching out the charred spots.

“What’s left is still good.” And she and Seth hung fascinated around the table, watching me. I couldn’t let myself think of Thann, flushed with excitement, trying to be so casual as he tried on his travel suit to show me, so long-so long ago-so yesterday, really.

“Here’s a little bitty piece you dropped:’ said Seth, retrieving it.

“It’s too little for any good use,” said Glory.

“Oh, no!” I said, a little intoxicated by their wonder and by a sudden upsurge of consciousness that I was able to work so many-to them-miracles. “Nothing’s too small. See. That’s one reason we had it made so thick. To spread it thin when we used it.” I took the tiny swatch of tekla and began to stretch and shape it, smoother and farther. Farther and farther until it flowed over the edges of the table and the worn design on the oilcloth began to be visible through it.

“What color do you like, Glory?” I asked.

“Blue,” breathed Glory, wonderingly. “Blue.”

I stroked blue into the tekla, quickly evened the edges and, lifting the fragile, floating chiffony material, draped it over Glory’s head. For a half moment I saw my own mother looking with shining eyes at me through the lovely melt of color. Then I was hugging Glory and saying, “That’s for the borrow of your jeans and shirt!” And she was fingering unbelievingly the delicate fabric. There, I thought, l even hugged her. It really doesn’t matter to me that she’s just an Outsider.

“Magic!” said Glory. “Don’t touch it!” she cried, as Seth reached a curious hand toward it.

“He can’t hurt it,” I laughed. “It’s strong enough to use for a parachute-or a trampoline!”

“How did you do it?” asked Seth, lifting another small patch of tekla, his lingers tugging at it.

“Well, first you have to-” I groped for an explanation.

“You see, first-Well, then, after that-Oh, I don’t know!” I cried. “I just know you do it.” I took the piece from him and snatched it into scarf length, stroking it red and woolly, and wound it around his neck and bewildered face.

I slept that night in a gown of tekla, but Glory stuck to her high-necked crinkle-crepe gown and Seth scorned nightclothes. But after Glory blew out the light and before she disappeared behind the denim curtain that gave me part of the front room for a bedroom of my own, she leaned over, laughing in the moonlight, to whisper, “He’s got that red thing under his pillow. I seen it sticking out from under!”

Next morning I busied myself with the precious tekla, thinning it, brushing up a soft nap, fashioning the tiny things Child Within would be needing some day. Glory stayed home from the mine and tried to help. After the first gown was finished, I sat looking at it, dreaming child-dreams any mother does with a first gown. I was roused by the sound of a drawer softly closing and saw Glory disappear into the kitchen. I went over and opened the drawer. The awkward little sugar-sack gown was gone. I smiled pityingly. She realized, I said to myself. She realized how inappropriate a gown like that would be for child of The People.

That night Seth dropped the lamp chimney and it smashed to smithereens.

“Well, early to bed,” sighed Glory. “But I did want to get on with this shirt for Seth.” She smoothed the soft, woolly tekla across her lap. We had figured it down pretty close, but it came out a dress for each of us and a shirt for Seth as well as a few necessities for Child Within. I blessed again the generousness of our travel clothes and the one small part of a blanket that had survived.

“If you’ve got a dime,” I said, returning to the problem of light, “I haven’t a cent-but if you’ve got a dime, I can make a light-“

Seth chuckled. “If we’ve got a dime, I’d like to see it. We’re ‘bout due for a trip into town to sell our ore. Got any change, Glory?”

Glory dumped her battered purse out on the bed and stirred the contents vigorously. “One dollar bill,” she said.

“Coffee and sugar for next week. A nickel and three pennies. No dime-“

“Maybe a nickel will work,” I said dubiously. “We always used dimes or disks of argen. I never tried a nickel.” I picked up the coin and fingered it. Boy! Would this ever widen their eyes! If I could remember Dita’s instructions. I spun the coin and concentrated. I spun the coin and frowningly concentrated. I spun the coin. I blushed. I sweated. “It’ll work,” I reassured the skeptical side glances of Seth and Glory. I dosed my eyes and whispered silently, “We need it. Bless me.

Bless me.”

I spun the coin.

I saw the flare behind my eyelids and opened them to the soft, slightly blue handful of fight the nickel had become.

Seth and Glory said nothing, but their eyes blinked and were big and wondering enough to please anyone, as they looked into my cupped hand.

“A dime is brighter,” I said, “but this is enough for here, I guess. Only thing is, you can’t blow it out.”

The two exchanged glances and Seth smiled weakly. “Nutty as a fruitcake,” he said. “But don’t it shine pretty!”

The whole room was flooded with the gentle light. I put it down in the middle of the table, but it was too direct for our eyes, so Seth balanced it on the top of a windowsill and Glory picked up the half-finished shirt from the floor where it had fallen and asked in a voice that only slightly trembled, “Could you do this seam right here, Debbie? That’ll finish this sleeve.”

That night we had to put the light in a baking powder can with the lid on tight when we went to bed. The cupboard had leaked too much light and so had the dresser. I was afraid to damp the glow for fear I might not be able to do it again the next night. A Lady Bountiful has to be careful of her reputation.

I sat on the bank above the imperceptibly growing lake and watched another chunk of the base of Baldy slide down into the water. Around me was the scorched hillside and the little flat where I had started the fire. Somewhere under all that placid brown water was our craft and everything we had of The Home. I felt my face harden and tighten with sorrow.

I got up awkwardly and made my way down the steep slant of the bank. I leaned against a boulder and stirred the muddy water with one sneaker-clad toe. That block of tekla, the seed box, the pictures, the letters. I let the tears wash downward unchecked. All the dreams and plans. The pain caught me so that I nearly doubled up. My lips stretched thinly. How physical mental pain can be! If only it could be amputated like-Pain caught me again. I gasped and clutched the boulder behind me. This is pain, I cried to myself. Not Child Inside! Not out here in the wilds all alone! I made my way back to the shank in irregular, staggering stages and put myself to bed. When Glory and Seth got back, I propped up wearily on one elbow and looked at them groggily, the pain having perversely quitted me just before they arrived.

“Do you suppose it is almost time? I have no way of knowing. Time is-is different here. I can’t put the two times together and come out with anything. I’m afraid, Glory! I’m afraid!”

“We shoulda taken you into Kerry to the doctor a long time ago. He’d be able to tell you, less’n-” she hesitated “-less’n you are different, so’st he’d notice-“

I smiled weakly. “Don’t tiptoe so, Glory. I won’t be insulted. No, he’d notice nothing different except when birth begins. We can bypass the awfullest of the hurting time-” I gulped and pressed my hands to the sudden emptiness that almost caved me in. “That’s what I was supposed to learn from our People here!” I wailed. “I only know about it. Our first child is our learning child. You can’t learn it ahead.”

“Don’t worry,” said Glory dryly. “Child Within will manage to get outside whether you hurt or not. If you’re a woman, you can bear the burden women have since Eve.”

So we planned to go into town the next day and just tell the doctor I hadn’t been to a doctor yet-lots of people don’t, even today. But it started to rain in the night. I roused first to the soft sound of rain on the old tin roof of the kitchen-the soft sound that increased and increased until it became a drumming roar. Even that sound was music. And the vision of rain failing everywhere, everywhere, patting the dusty ground, dimpling the lake, flipping the edges of curled leaves, soothed me into sleep. I was wakened later by the sound of Seth’s coughing. That wasn’t a soothing sound. And it got worse and worse. It began to sound as though he actually were coughing up his lungs as Glory had said. He could hardly draw a breath between coughing spasms. I lay there awake in the dark, hearing Glory’s murmurs and the shuff-shuff of her feet as she padded out to the kitchen and back to the bedroom. But the coughing went on and on and I began to get a little impatient. I tossed in bed, suddenly angrily restless. I had Child Within to think of. They knew I needed my rest. They weren’t making any effort to be quiet-Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I padded in my turn to their bedroom and peered in. Seth was leaning back against the head of the iron bedstead, gasping for breath. Glory was sitting beside him, tearing up an old pillowcase to make handkerchiefs for him. She looked up at me in the half light of the uncovered baking powder can, her face drawn and worn.

“It’s bad, this time,” she said. “Makin’ up for lost time, I guess.”

“Can’t you do something to stop his coughing?” I asked. I really hadn’t meant it to sound so abrupt and flat. But it did, and Glory let her hands fall slowly to her lap as her eyes fixed on me.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” Then her eyes fairly blazed and she said, “Can’t you?”

“I’m not a Healer,” I said, feeling almost on the defensive.

“If I were, I could give-“

“Yon wouldn’t give anybody anything,” said Glory, her face closed and cold. “Less’n you wanted to show off or make yourself comfortable. Go back to bed.”

I went, my cheeks burning in the dark. How dare she talk to me like this! An Outsider to one of The People! She had no right-My anger broke into tears and I cried and cried on my narrow Outsider bed in that falling down Outsider house, but under all my anger and outrage, so closely hidden that I’d hardly admit it to myself even, was a kernel of sorrow. I’d thought Glory liked me.

Morning was gray and clammy. The rain fell steadily and the bluish light from the baking powder can was cold and uncheerful. The day dragged itself to a watery end, nothing except a slight waning and waxing of the light outdoors to distinguish one hour from the next. Seth’s coughing eased a little and by the second rain-loud morning it had finally stopped.

Seth prowled around the cramped rooms, his shoulders hunched forward, his chest caved in as though he had truly coughed out his lungs. His coughing had left him, but his breath still caught in ragged chunks.

“Set,” said Glory, tugging at his sleeve. “You’ll wear yourself and me out too, to-ing and fro-ing like that.”

“Don’t ease me none to set,” said Seth hoarsely. “Leave me be. Let me move while I can. Got a hunch there won’t be much moving for me after the next spell.”

“Now, Seth.” Glory’s voice was calm and a little reprimanding, but I caught her terror and grief. With a jolt I realized how exactly her feelings were mine when I had crouched beside Thann, watching him die. But they’re old and ugly and through with life! I protested. But they love came the answer, and love can never be old nor ugly nor through with life.

“‘Sides, I’m worried,” said Seth, wiping the haze of his breath off the newly installed window. “Rain like this’ll fill every creek around here. Then watch the dam fill up. “They told us we’d be living on an island before spring. When the lake’s full, we’ll be six foot under. All this rain-” He swiped at the window again, and turning away, resumed his restless pacing. “That slope between here and the highways getting mighty touchy. Wash it out a little at the bottom and it’ll all come down like a ton of bricks. Dam it up there, we’d get the full flow right across us and I ain’t feeling much like a swim!” He grinned weakly and leaned against the table.

“Glory.” His breathing was heavy and ragged. “Glory, I’m tired.”

Glory put him to bed. I could hear the murmur of her voice punctuated at intervals by a heavy monosyllable from him.

I shivered and went to the little bandy-legged cast-iron stove. Lifting one of its four lids, I peered at the smoldering pine knot inside. The heaviness outside pushed a thin acrid cloud of smoke out at me and I clattered the lid back, feeling an up-gush of exasperation at the inefficiency of Outsiders. I heated the stove up until the top glowed dull red, and reveled in the warmth.

Glory came back into the kitchen and hunched near the stove, rubbing her hands together.

“How’d you get the wood to burn?” she finally asked. “It was wet. ‘S’all there is left.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “I heated the stove.”

“Thanks,” said Glory shortly (not even being surprised that I could do a thing like that!).

We both listened to the murmur of the rain on the roof and the pop and creak of the expanding metal of the stovepipe as the warmth reached upward.

“I’m sorry,” said Glory. “I shouldn’ta spoken so short the other night, but I was worried.”

“It’s all right,” I said magnanimously. “And when my People come-“

“Look, Debbie.” Glory turned her back to the stove and clasped her hands behind her. “I’m not saying you don’t have folks and that they won’t come some day and set everything right, but they aren’t here now. They can’t help now, and we got troubles-plenty of troubles. Seth’s worrying about that bank coming down and shifting the water. Well, he don’t know, but it came down in the night last night and we’re already almost an island. Look out the window.”

I did, cold apprehension clutching at my insides. The creek had water in it. Not a trickle, but a wide, stainless-steel roadbed of water that was heavy with red silt where it escaped the color of the down-pressing clouds. I ran to the other window. A narrow hogback led through the interlacing of a thousand converging streams, off into the soggy grayness of the mountain beyond us. It was the trail-the hilltop trail Glory and Seth took to Skagmore.

“I hate to ask it of you,” said Glory. “Especially after telling you off like I did, but we gotta get outa here. We gotta save what we can and hole up at the mine. You better start praying now that it’ll be a few days more before the water gets that high. Meanwhile, grab your bedroll and git goin’.”

I gaped at her and then at the water outside and, running to my cot, grabbed up the limp worn bedding and started for the door.

“Hold it. Hold it!” she called. “Fold the stuff so you can manage it. Put on this old hat of Seth’s. It’ll keep the rain outa your eyes for a while, maybe. Wait’ll I get my load made up. I’ll take the lead.”

Oh not Oh no! I cried to myself as panic trembled my hands and hampered nay folding the bedclothes. Why is this happening to me? Wasn’t it enough to take Thann away? Why should 1 have to suffer any more?..

“Ready?” Glory’s intent eyes peered across her load.

“Hope you’ve been praying. If you haven’t, you better get started. We gotta make it there and back. Seth’s gotta rest some before he tackles it.”

“But I can lift!” I cried. “I don’t have to walk! I have my shield. I don’t have to get wet! I can go-“

“Go then,” said Glow, her voice hard and unfriendly. “Git goin’!”

I caught at my panic and bit my lips-I needed Glory. “I only mean I could take your load and mine, too,” I said, which wasn’t what I had originally meant at all. “Then you could take something else. I can transport all this stuff and keep it dry.”

I lifted my own burden and hovered it while I took hers from her reluctant arms. I lifted the two together and maneuvered the load out the door, extending my personal shield to cover it all. “How-how do I get there?” My voice was little and scared.

“Follow the hogback,” said Glory, her voice still unwarmed, as though she had been able to catch my hidden emotion, as the People do. “You’ll see the entrance up the hill a ways soon as you top out on the ridge. Don’t go too far inside. The shoring’s rotted out in lots of places.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll come back.”

“Stay there,” said Glory. “Git goin’. I gotta get Seth up.” My eyes followed hers and recoiled from the little brown snake of water that had welled up in one corner of the room. I got going.

Even inside my shield, I winced away from the sudden increased roar of descending rain. I couldn’t see a yard ahead and had to navigate from boulder to boulder along the hogback. It was a horrible eternity before I saw the dark gap of the mine entrance and managed to get myself and my burden inside. For several feet around the low irregular arch of the entrance, the powdery ground was soggy mud, but farther back it was dry and the roof vaulted up until it was fairly spacious.

I put the bedding down and looked around me. Two narrow strips of rail disappeared back into the mine and an ore car tilted drunkenly off one side, two wheels off and half covered with dirt on the floor beside it. I unearthed one wheel and tugging it upright, rolled it, wobbling and uncooperative, over to the stack of bedding. I started heating the wheel, making slow work of so large a task because I had done so little with the basic Signs and Persuasions-the practices of my People.

Suddenly it seemed to me a long time since I’d left the shack. I ran to the entrance and peered out. No Glory or Seth! Where could they be! I couldn’t be all alone here with no one around to help me! I swished out into the storm so fast my face was splattered with rain before my shielding was complete. Time and again I almost lost the hogback. It was an irregular chain of rocky little islands back toward the shack. I groped through the downpour, panting to Child Within, Oh wait! Oh wait! You can’t come now! And tried to ignore a vague, growing discomfort.

Then the miracle happened! High above me I heard the egg-beater whirr of a helicopter! Rescue! Now all this mad rush and terror and discomfort would be over. All I had to do was signal the craft and make them take me aboard and take me somewhere away-I turned to locate it and signal it to me when I suddenly realized that I couldn’t lift to it I couldn’t lift around Outsiders who would matter. This basic rule of The People was too deeply engrained in me. Hastily I dipped down until I perched precariously on one of the still-exposed boulders of the trail. I waved wildly up at the slow swinging ‘copter. They had to see me! “Here I am! Here I am!” I cried, my voice too choked even to carry a yard.

“Help me! Help me!” And, in despair as the ‘copter slanted away into the gray falling rain, I slid past vocal calling into subvocal and spread my call over the whole band, praying that a receptor somewhere would pick up my message.

“There’s need!” I sobbed out the old childish distress cry of the Group. “There’s need!”

And an answer came!

“One of us?” The thought came startled. “Who are you? Where are you?”

“I’m down here in the rain!” I sobbed, aloud as well as silently. “I’m Debbie! I used to live in the Canyon! We went to the Home. Come and get me! Oh, come and get me!”

“I’m coming,” came the answer. “What on Earth are you doing on Earth, Debbie? No one was supposed to return so lightly-“

“So lightly!” Shattered laughter jabbed at my throat. All the time I’d spent on Earth already had erased itself, and I was caught up by the poignancy of this moment of meeting with Thann not here-this watery welcome to Earth with no welcome for Thann. “Who are you?” I asked. I had forgotten individual thought patterns so soon.