Pilgrimage: The Book of the People

“First, monitors pass the composition paper.” Esther and Abie scuffled hurriedly around with the paper, and the pencil sharpener got a thorough workout. At least these kids didn’t differ from others in their pleasure in grinding their pencils away at the slightest excuse.

“Now,” I gulped, “we’re going to write.” Which obvious asininity was passed over with forbearance, though Miriam looked at me wonderingly before she bent her head and let her hair shadow her face. “Today I want you all to write about the same thing. Here is our subject.”

Gratefully I turned my back on the children’s waiting eyes and printed slowly:

I REMEMBER THE HOME

I heard the sudden intake of breath that worked itself downward from Miriam to Talitha and then the rapid whisper that informed Abie and Martha. I heard Esther’s muffled cry and I turned slowly around and leaned against the desk.

“There are so many beautiful things to remember about the Home,” I said into the strained silence. “So many wonderful things. And even the sad memories are better than forgetting, because the Home was good. Tell me what you remember about the Home.”

“We can’t!” Joel and Matt were on their feet simultaneously.

“Why can’t we?” Dorcas cried. “Why can’t we?”

“It’s bad!” Esther cried. “It’s evil!”

“It ain’t either!” Abie shrilled, astonishingly. “It ain’t either!”

“We shouldn’t.” Miriam’s trembling hands brushed her heavy” hair upward. “It’s forbidden.”

“Sit down,” I said gently. “The day I arrived at Bendo Mr. Diemus told me to teach you what I had to teach you. I have to teach you that remembering the Home is good.”

“Then why don’t the grownups think so?” Matt asked slowly. “They tell us not to talk about it. We shouldn’t disobey our parents.”

“I know,” I admitted. “And I would never ask you children to go against your parents’ wishes, unless I felt that it is very important. If you’d rather they didn’t know about it at first, keep it as our secret. Mr. Diemus told me not to bother them with explanations or reasons. I’ll make it right with your parents when the time comes.” I paused to swallow and blink away a vision of me leaving town in a cloud of dust, barely ahead of a posse of irate parents. “‘Now, everyone, busy,” I said briskly. “‘I Remember the Home.’”

There was a moment heavy with decision and I held my breath, wondering which way the balance would dip. And then-surely it must have been because they wanted so to speak and affirm the wonder of what had been that they capitulated so easily. Heads bent and pencils scurried. And Martha sat, her head bowed on her desk with sorrow.

“I don’t know enough words,” she mourned. “How do you write ‘toolas’?”

And Abie laboriously erased a hole through his paper and ticked his pencil again.

“Why don’t you and Abie make some pictures?” I suggested. “Make a little story with pictures and we can staple them together like a real book.”

I looked over the silent busy group and let myself relax, feeling weakness flood into my knees. I scrubbed the dampness from my palms with Kleenex and sat back in my chair. Slowly I became conscious of a new atmosphere in my classroom. An intolerable strain was gone, an unconscious holding back of the children, a wariness, a watchfulness, a guilty feeling of desiring what was forbidden.

A prayer of thanksgiving began to well up inside me. It changed hastily to a plea for mercy as I began to visualize what might happen to me when the parents found out what I was doing. How long must this containment and denial have gone on? This concealment and this carefully nourished fear? From what Karen had told me it must be well over fifty years-long enough to mark indelibly three generations.

And here I was with my fine little hatchet trying to set a little world afire! On which very mixed metaphor I stiffened my weak knees and got up from my chair. I walked unnoticed up and down the aisles, stepping aside as Joel went blindly to the shelf for more paper, leaning over Miriam to marvel that she had taken out her Crayolas and part of her writing was with colors, part with pencil-and the colors spoke to something in me that the pencil couldn’t reach, though I’d never seen the forms the colors took.

The children had gone home, happy and excited, chattering and laughing, until they reached the edge of the school grounds. There, smiles died and laughter stopped and faces and feet grew heavy again. All but Esther’s. Hers had never been light. I sighed and turned to the papers. Here was Abie’s little book. I thumbed through it and drew a deep breath and went back through it slowly again.

A second grader drawing this? Six pages-six finished adult-looking pages. Crayolas achieving effects I’d never seen before-pictures that told a story loudly and clearly.

Stars blazing in a black sky, with the slender needle of a ship, like a mote in the darkness.

The vasty green cloud-shrouded arc of earth against the blackness. A pink tinge of beginning friction along the ship’s belly. I put my finger to the glow. I could almost feel the heat.

Inside the ship, suffering and pain, heroic striving, crumpled bodies and seared faces. A baby dead in its mother’s arms. Then a swarm of tinier needles erupting from the womb of the ship. And the last shriek of incandescence as the ship volatilized against the thickening drag of the air. I leaned my head on my hands and closed my eyes. All this, all this in the memory of an eight-year-old? All. this in the feelings of an eight-year-old? Because Abie knew-he knew how this felt. He knew the heat and strivings and the dying and fleeing. No wonder Abie whispered and leaned. Racial memory was truly a two-sided coin.

I felt a pang of misgivings. Maybe I was wrong to let him remember so vividly. Maybe I shouldn’t have let him …

I turned to Martha’s papers. They were delicate, almost spidery drawings of some fuzzy little animal (toolas?) that apparently built a hanging hammocky nest and gathered fruit in a huge leaf basket and had a bird for a friend. A truly out-of-this-world bird. Much of her story escaped me because first graders-if anyone at all-produce symbolic art and, since her frame of reference and mine were so different, there was much that I couldn’t interpret. But her whole booklet was joyous and light.

And now, the stories…

I lifted my head and blinked into the twilight. I had finished all the papers except Esther’s. It was her cramped writing, swimming in darkness, that made me realize that the day was gone and that I was shivering in a shadowy room with the fire in the old-fashioned heater gone out.

Slowly I shuffled the papers into my desk drawer, hesitated and took out Esther’s. I would finish at home. I shrugged into my coat and wandered home, my thoughts intent on the papers I had read. And suddenly I wanted to cry-to cry for the wonders that had been and were no more. For the heritage of attainment and achievement these children had but couldn’t use. For the dream-come-true of what they were capable of doing but weren’t permitted to do. For the homesick yearning that filled every line they had written-these unhappy exiles, three generations removed from any physical knowledge of the Home.

I stopped on the bridge and leaned against the railing in the half dark. Suddenly I felt a welling homesickness. That was what the world should be like-what it could be like if only-if only…

But my tears for the Home were as hidden as the emotions of Mrs. Diemus when she looked up uncuriously as I came through the kitchen door.

“Good evening,” she said. “I’ve kept your supper warm.”

“Thank you.” I shivered convulsively. “It is getting cold.”

I sat on the edge of my bed that night, letting the memory of the kids’ papers wash over me, trying to fill in around the bits and snippets that they had told of the Home. And then I began to wonder. All of them who wrote about the actual Home had been so happy with their memories. From Timmy and his “Shinny ship as high as a montin and faster than two jets,” and Dorcas’ wandering tenses as though yesterday and today were one: “The flowers were like lights. At night it isn’t dark becas they shine so bright and when the moon came up the breeos sing and the music was so you can see it like rain falling around only happyer”; up to Miriam’s wistful “On Gathering Day there was a big party. Everybody came dressed in beautiful clothes with flahmen in the girls’ hair. Flahmen are flowers but they’re good to eat. And if a girl felt her heart sing for a boy they ate a flahmen together and started two-ing.”

Then, if all these memories were so happy, why the rigid suppression of them by grownups? Why the pall of unhappiness over everyone? You can’t mourn forever for a wrecked ship. Why a hidey hole for disobedient children? Why the misery and frustration when, if they could do half of what I didn’t fully understand from Joel and Matt’s highly technical papers, they could make Bendo an Eden?

I reached for Esther’s paper. I had put it on the bottom on purpose. I dreaded reading it. She had sat with her head buried on her arms on her desk most of the time the others were writing busily. At widely separated intervals she bad scribbled a line or two as though she were doing something shameful. She, of all the children, had seemed to find no relief in her remembering.

I smoothed the paper on my lap.

“I remember,” she had written. “We were thursty. There was water in the creek we were hiding in the grass. We could not drink. They would shoot us. Three days the sun was hot. She screamed for water and ran to the creek. They shot. The water got red.”

Blistered spots marked the tears on the paper.

“They found a baby under a bush. The man hit it with the wood part of his gun. He hit it and hit it and hit it. I hit scorpins like that.

“They caught us and put us in a pen. They built a fire all around us. Fly ‘they said’ fly and save yourselfs. We flew because it hurt. They shot us.

“Monster ‘they yelled’ evil monsters. People can’t fly. People can’t move things. People are the same. You aren’t people. Die die die.”

Then blackly, traced and retraced until the paper split:

“If anyone finds out we are not of earth we will die.

“Keep your feet on the ground.”

Bleakly I laid the paper aside. So there was the answer, putting Karen’s bits and snippets together with these. The shipwrecked ones finding savages on the desert island. A remnant surviving by learning caution, suppression and denial Another generation that pinned the evil label on the Home to insure continued immunity for their children, and now, a generation that questioned and wondered-and rebelled.

I turned off the light and slowly got into bed. I lay there staring into the darkness, holding the picture Esther had evoked. Finally I relaxed. “God help her,” I sighed. “God help us all.”

Another week was nearly over. We cleaned the room up quickly, for once anticipating the fun time instead of dreading it. I smiled to hear the happy racket all around me, and felt my own spirits surge upward in response to the lightheartedness of the children. The difference that one afternoon had made in them! Now they were beginning to feel like children to me. They were beginning to accept me. I swallowed with an effort. How soon would they ask, “How come? How come you knew?” There they sat, all nine of them-nine, because Esther was my first absence in the year-bright-eyed and expectant.

“Can we write again?” Sarah asked. “I can remember lots more.”

“No,” I said. “Not today.” Smiles died and there was a protesting wiggle through the room. “Today we are going to do. Joel.” I looked at him and tightened my jaws. “Joel, give me the dictionary.” He began to get up. “Without leaving your seat!”

“But I-!” Joel broke the shocked silence. “I can’t!”

“Yes you can,” I prayed. “Yes, you can. Give me the dictionary. Here, on my desk.”

Joel turned and stared at the big old dictionary that spilled pages 1965 to 1998 out of its cracked old binding. Then he said, “Miriam?” in a high tight voice. But she shook her head and shrank back in her seat, her eyes big and dark in her white face.

“You can.” Miriam’s voice was hardly more than a breath.

“It’s just bigger-“

Joel clutched the edge of his desk and sweat started out on his forehead. There was a stir of movement on the bookshelf. Then, as though shot from a gun, pages 1965 to 1998 whisked to my desk and fell fluttering. Our laughter cut through the blank amazement and we laughed till tears came.

“That’s a-doing it, Joel!” Matt shouted. “That’s showing them your muscles!”

“Well, it’s a beginning.” Joel grinned weakly. “You do it, brother, if you think it’s so easy.”

So Matt sweated and strained and Joel joined with him, but they only managed to scrape the book to the edge of the shelf where it teetered dangerously.

Then Abie waved his hand timidly. “I can, teacher.”

I beamed that my silent one had spoken and at the same time frowned at the loving laughter of the big kids.

“Okay, Abie,” I encouraged. “You show them how to do it.”

And the dictionary swung off the shelf and glided un-hastily to my desk, where it came silently to rest.

Everyone stared at Abie and he squirmed. “The little ships,” he defended. “That’s the way they moved them out of the big ship. Just like that.”

Joel and Matt turned their eyes to some inner concentration and then exchanged exasperated looks. “Why, sure,” Matt said.

“Why, sure.” And the dictionary swung back to the shelf.

“Hey!” Timmy protested. “It’s my turn!”

“That poor dictionary,” I said. “It’s too old for all this bouncing around. Just put the loose pages back on the shelf.”

And he did.

Everyone sighed and looked at me expectantly.

“Miriam?” She clasped her hands convulsively. “You come to me,” I said, feeling a chill creep across my stiff shoulders. “Lift to me, Miriam.”

Without taking her eyes from me she slipped out of her seat and stood in the aisle. Her skirts swayed a little as her feet lifted from the floor. Slowly at first and then more quickly she came to me, soundlessly, through the air, until in a little flurried rush her arms went around me and she gasped into my shoulder. I put her aside, trembling. I groped for my handkerchief. I said shakily, “Miriam, help the rest. I’ll be back in a minute.”

And I stumbled into the room next door. Huddled down in the dust and debris of the catchall storeroom it had become, I screamed soundlessly into my muffling hands. And screamed and screamed! Because after all-after all!

And then suddenly, with a surge of pure panic, I heard a sound-the sound of footsteps, many footsteps, approaching the schoolhouse. I jumped for the door and wrenched it open just in time to see the outside door open. There was Mr. Diemus and, Esther and Esther’s father, Mr. Jonso.

In one of those flashes of clarity that engrave your mind in a split second I saw my whole classroom.

Joel and Matt were chinning themselves on nonexistent bars, their heads brushing the high ceiling as they grunted upward. Abie was swinging in a swing that wasn’t there, arcing across the corner of the room, just missing the stovepipe from the old stove, as he chanted., “Up in a swing, up in a swing!” This wasn’t the first time they had tried their wings! Miriam was kneeling in a circle with the other girls and they were all coaxing their books up to hover unsupported above the floor, while Jimmy vroomm-vroomed two paper jet planes through intricate maneuvers in and out the rows of desks.

My soul curdled in me as I met Mr. Diemus’ eyes. Esther gave a choked cry as she saw what the children were doing, and the girls’ stricken faces turned to the intruders. Matt and Joel crumpled to the floor and scrambled to their feet. But Abie, absorbed in his wonderful new accomplishment, swung on, all unconscious of what was happening until Talitha frantically screamed, “Abie!”

Startled, he jerked around and saw the forbidding group at the door. With a disappointed cry, as though a loved toy had been snatched from him, he stopped there in midair, his fists clenched. And then, realizing, he screamed, a terrified panic-stricken cry, and slanted sharply upward, trying to escape, and ran full tilt into the corner of the high old map case, sideswiping it with his head, and, reeling backward, fell!

I tried to catch him. I did! I did! But I caught only one small hand as he plunged down onto the old wood-burning heater beneath him. And the crack of his skull against the ornate edge of the cast-iron lid was loud in the silence.

I straightened the crumpled little body carefully, not daring to touch the quiet little head. Mr. Diemus and I looked at each other as we knelt on opposite sides of the child. His lips opened, but I plunged before he could get started.

“If he dies,” I bit my words off viciously, “you killed him!”

His mouth opened again, mainly from astonishment. “I-” he began.

“Barging in on my classroom!” I raged. “Interrupting classwork! Frightening my children! It’s all your fault, your fault!” I couldn’t bear the burden of guilt alone. I just had to have someone share it with me. But the fire died and I smoothed Abie’s hand, trembling.

“Please call a doctor. He might be dying.”

“Nearest one is in Tortura Pass,” Mr. Diemus said. “Sixty miles by road.’”

“Cross country?” I asked.

“Two mountain ranges and an alkali plateau.”

“Then-then-” Abie’s hand was so still in mine.

“There’s a doctor at the Tumble A Ranch,” Joel said faintly. “He’s taking a vacation.”

“Go get him.” I held Joel with my eyes. “Go as fast as you know how!”

Joel gulped miserably. “Okay.”

“They’ll probably have horses to come back on,” I said. “Don’t be too obvious.”

“Okay,” and he ran out the door. We heard the thud of his running feet until he was halfway across the schoolyard, then silence. Faintly, seconds later, creek gravel crunched below the hill. I could only guess at what he was doing-that he couldn’t lift all the way and was going in jumps whose length was beyond all reasonable measuring.

The children had gone home, quietly, anxiously. And after the doctor arrived we had improvised a stretcher and carried Abie to the Peterses’ home. I walked along close beside him watching his pinched little face, my hand touching his chest occasionally just to be sure he was still breathing.

And now-the waiting…

I looked at my watch again. A minute past the last time I looked. Sixty seconds by the hands, but hours and hours by anxiety.

“He’ll be all right,” I whispered, mostly to comfort myself.

“The doctor will know what to do.”

Mr. Diemus turned his dark empty eyes to me. “Why did you do it?” he asked. “We almost had it stamped out. We were almost free.”

“Free of what?” I took a deep breath. “Why did you do it? Why did you deny your children their inheritance?”

“It isn’t your concern-“

“Anything that hampers my children is my concern. Anything that turns children into creeping frightened mice is wrong. Maybe I went at the whole deal the wrong way, but you told me to teach them what I had to-and I did.”

“Disobedience, rebellion, flouting authority-“

“They obeyed me,” I retorted. “They accepted my authority!” Then I softened. “I can’t blame them,” I confessed. “They were troubled. They told me it was wrong-that they had been taught it was wrong. I argued them into it. But oh, Mr. Diemus! It took so little argument, such a tiny breach in the dam to loose the flood. They never even questioned my knowledge-any more than you have, Mr. Diemus! All this-this wonder was beating against their minds, fighting to be set free. The rebellion was there long before I came. I didn’t incite them to something new. I’ll bet there’s not a one, except maybe Esther, who hasn’t practiced and practiced, furtively and ashamed, the things I permitted-demanded that they do for me.

“It wasn’t fair-not fair at all-to hold them back.”

“You don’t understand.” Mr. Diemus’ face was stony. “You haven’t all the facts-“

“I have enough,” I replied. “So you have a frightened memory of an unfortunate period in your history. But what people doesn’t have such a memory in larger or lesser degree? That you and your children have it more vividly should have helped, not hindered. You should have been able to figure out ways of adjusting. But leave that for the moment. Take the other side of the picture. What possible thing could all this suppression and denial yield you more precious than what you gave up?”

“It’s the only way,” Mr. Diemus said. “We are unacceptable to Earth but we have to stay. We have to conform-“

“‘Of course you had to conform,” I cried. “Anyone has to when they change societies. At least enough to get them by until others can adjust to them. But to crawl in a hole and pull it in after you! Why, the other Group-“

“Other Group!” Mr. Diemus whitened, his eyes widening.

“Other Group? There are others? There are others?” He leaned tensely forward in his chair. “Where? Where?” And his voice broke shrilly on the last word. He closed his eyes and his mouth trembled as he fought for control The bedroom door opened. Dr. Curtis came out, his shoulders weary.

He looked from Mr. Diemus to me and back. “‘He should be in a hospital. There’s a depressed fracture and I don’t know what all else. Probably extensive brain involvement. We need X rays and-and-” He rubbed his hand slowly over his weary young face. “Frankly, I’m not experienced to handle cases like this. We need specialists. If you can scare up some kind of transportation that won’t jostle-” He shook his head, seeing the kind of country that lay between us and anyplace, and went back into the bedroom.

“He’s dying,” Mr. Diemus said. “Whether you’re right or we’re right, he’s dying.”

“Wait! Wait!” I said, catching at the tag end of a sudden idea. “Let me think.” Urgently I willed myself back through the years to the old dorm room. Intently I listened and listened and remembered.

“Have you a-a-Sorter in this Group?” I asked, fumbling for unfamiliar terms.

“No,” said Mr. Diemus. “One who could have been, but isn’t.”

“Or any Communicator? Anyone who can send or receive?”

“No,” Mr. Diemus said, sweat starting on his forehead. “One who could have been, but-“

“See?” I accused. “See what you’ve traded for-for what?

Who are the could-but-can’ts? Who are they?”

“I am,” Mr. Diemus said, the words a bitterness in his mouth. “And my wife.”

I stared at him, wondering confusedly. How far did training decide? What could we do with what we had?

“Look,” I said quickly. “There is another Group. And they-they have all the persuasions and designs. Karen’s been trying to find you-to find any of the People. She told me-oh, Lord, it’s been years ago, I hope it’s still so-every evening they send out calls for the People. If we can catch it-if you can catch the call and answer it they can help.

I know they can. Faster than cars, faster than planes, more surely than specialists-“

“But if the doctor finds out-” Mr. Diemus wavered fearfully.

I stood up abruptly. “‘Good night, Mr. Diemus,” I said, turning to the door. “Let me know when Abie dies.”

His cold hand shook on my arm.

“Can’t you see!” he cried. “I’ve been taught, too-longer and stronger than the children! We never even dared think of rebellion! Help me, help me!”

“Get your wife,” I said. “Get her and Abie’s mother and father. Bring them down to the grove. We can’t do anything here in the house. It’s too heavy with denial.”

I hurried on ahead and sank on my knees in the evening shadows among the trees.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I cried into the bend of my arm. “I have an idea but I don’t know! Help us! Guide us!”

I opened my eyes to the arrival of the four.

“We told him we were going out to pray,” said Mr. Diemus.

And we all did.

Then Mr. Diemus began the call I worded for him, silently, but with such intensity that sweat started again on his face. Karen, Karen, come to the People, come to the People. And the other three sat around him, bolstering his effort, supporting his cry. I watched their tense faces, my own twisting in sympathy, and time was lost as we labored.

Then slowly his breathing calmed and his face relaxed and I felt a stirring as though something brushed past my mind. Mrs. Diemus whispered, “He remembers now. He’s found the way.”

And as the last spark of sun caught mica highlights on the hilltop above us Mr. Diemus stretched his hands out slowly and said with infinite relief, “There they are.”

I looked around startled, half expecting to see Karen coming through the trees. But Mr. Diemus spoke again.

“Karen, we need help. One of our Group is dying. We have a doctor, an Outsider, but he hasn’t the equipment or the know-how to help. What shall we do?’”

In the pause that followed I became slowly conscious of a new feeling. I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was-a kind of unfolding-an opening-a relaxation. The ugly tight defensiveness that was so characteristic of the grownups of Bendo was slipping away.

‘“Yes, Valancy,” said Mr. Diemus. “He’s in a bad way. We can’t help because-” His voice faltered and his words died. I felt a resurgence of fear and unhappiness as his communication went beyond words and then ebbed back to speech again.

“We’ll expect you then. “You know the way.”

I could see the pale blur of his face in the dusk under the trees as he turned back to us.

“They’re coming,” he said, wonderingly. “Karen and Valancy. They’re so pleased to find us-” His voice broke.

“We’re not alone-“

And I turned away as the two couples merged in the darkness. I had pushed them somewhere way beyond me.

It was a lonely lonely walk back to the house for me-alone.

They dropped down through the half darkness-four of them. For a fleeting second I wondered at myself that I could stand there matter-of-factly watching four adults slant calmly down out of the sky. Not a hair ruffled, not a stain of travel on them, knowing that only a short time before they had been hundreds of miles away-not even aware that Bendo existed.

But all strangeness was swept away as Karen hugged me delightedly.

“Oh, Melodye,” she cried, “it is you! He said it was, but I wasn’t sure! Oh, it’s so good to see you again! Who owes who a letter?”

She laughed and turned to the smiling three. “Valancy, the Old One of our Group.” Valancy’s radiant face proved the Old One didn’t mean age. “Bethie, our Sensitive.” The slender fair-haired young girl ducked her head shyly. “And my brother Jemmy. Valancy’s his wife.”

“This is Mr. and Mrs. Diemus,” I said. “And Mr. and Mrs. Peters, Abie’s parents. It’s Abie, you know. My second grade.” I was suddenly overwhelmed by how long ago and far away school felt. How far I’d gone from my accustomed pattern!

“What shall we do about the doctor?” I asked. “Will he have to know?”

“Yes,” said Valancy. “We can help him but we can’t do the actual work. Can we trust him?”

I hesitated, remembering the few scanty glimpses I’d had of him. “I-” I began.

“Pardon me,” Karen said. “I wanted to save time. I went in to you. We know now what you know of him. We’ll trust Dr. Curtis.”

I felt an eerie creeping up my spine. To have my thoughts taken so casually! Even to the doctor’s name!

Bethie stirred restlessly and looked at Valancy. “He’ll be in convulsions soon. We’d better hurry.”

“You’re sure you have the knowledge?” Valancy asked.

“Yes,” Bethie murmured. “If I can make the doctor see-if he’s willing to follow.”

“Follow what?”

The heavy tones of the doctor’s voice startled us all as he stepped out on the porch.

I stood aghast at the impossibility of the task ahead oŁ us and looked at Karen and Valancy to see how they would make the doctor understand. They said nothing. They just looked at him. There was a breathless pause. The doctor’s startled face caught the glint oŁ light from the open door as he turned to Valancy. He rubbed his hand across his face in bewilderment and, after a moment, turned to me.

“Do you hear her?”

“No,” I admitted. “She isn’t talking to me.”

“Do you know these people?”

“Oh, yes!” I cried, wishing passionately it were true. “Oh, yes!’”

“And believe them?”

“Implicitly.”

“But she says that Bethie-who’s Bethie?” He glanced around.

“She is,” Karen said, nodding at Bethie.

“She is?” Dr. Curtis looked intently at the shy lovely face. He shook his head wonderingly and turned back to me.

“Anyway this one, Valancy, says Bethie can sense every condition in the child’s body and that she will be able to tell all the injuries, their location and extent without X rays! Without equipment!”

“Yes,” I said. “If they say so.”

“You would be willing to risk a child’s life-?”

“Yes. They know. They really do.” And I swallowed hard to keep down the fist of doubt that clenched in my chest.

“You believe they can see through flesh and bone?”

“Maybe not see,” I said, wondering at my own words. “But know with a knowledge that is sure and complete.” I glanced, startled, at Karen. Her nod was very small but it told me where my words came from.

“Are you willing to trust these people?” The doctor turned to Abie’s parents.

“They’re our People,” Mr. Peters said with quiet pride.

“I’d operate on him myself with a pickax if they said so.”

“Of all the screwball deals-!” The doctor’s hand rubbed across his face again. “I know I needed this vacation, but this is ridiculous!”

We all listened to the silence of the night and-at least I-to the drumming of anxious pulses until Dr. Curtis sighed heavily.

“Okay, Valancy. I don’t believe a word of it. At least I wouldn’t if I were in my right mind, but you’ve got the terminology down pat as if you knew something-Well, I’ll do it. It’s either that or let him die. And God have mercy on our souls!”

I couldn’t bear the thought of shutting myself in with my own dark fears, so I walked back toward the school, hugging myself in my inadequate coat against the sudden sharp chill of the night. I wandered down to the grove, praying wordlessly, and on up to the school. But I couldn’t go in. I shuddered away from the blank glint of the windows and turned back to the grove. There wasn’t any more time or direction or light or anything familiar, only a confused cloud of anxiety and a final icy weariness that drove me back to Abie’s house.

I stumbled into the kitchen, my stiff hands fumbling at the doorknob. I huddled in a chair, gratefully leaning over the hot wood stove that flicked the semidarkness of the big homey room with warm red light, trying to coax some feeling back into my fingers.

I drowsed as the warmth began to penetrate, and then the door was flung open and slammed shut. The doctor leaned back against it, his hand still clutching the knob.

“Do you know what they did?” he cried, not so much to me as to himself. “What they made me do? Oh, Lord!” He staggered over to the stove, stumbling over my feet. He collapsed by my chair, rocking his head between his hands. “They made me operate on his brain! Repair it. Trace circuits and rebuild them. You can’t do that! It can’t be done! Brain cells damaged can’t be repaired. No one can restore circuits that are destroyed! It can’t be done. But I did it! I did it!”

I knelt beside him and tried to comfort him in the circle of my arms.

“There, there, there,” I soothed.

He clung like a terrified child. “No anesthetics!” he cried.

“She kept him asleep. And no bleeding when I went through the scalp! They stopped it. And the impossible things I did with the few instruments I have with me! And the brain starting to mend right before my eyes! Nothing was right!”

“‘But nothing was wrong,” I murmured. “Abie will be all right, won’t he?”

“How do I know?” he shouted suddenly, pushing away from me. “I don’t know anything about a thing like this. I put his brain back together and he’s still breathing, but how do I know!”

“There, there,” I soothed. “It’s over now.”

“It’ll never be over!” With an effort he calmed himself, and we helped each other up from the floor. “You can’t forget a thing like this in a lifetime.”

“‘We can give you forgetting,” Valancy said softly from the door. “If you want to forget. We can send you back to the Tumble A with no memory of tonight except a pleasant visit to Bendo.”

“You can?” He turned speculative eyes toward her. “You can,” he amended his words to a statement.

“‘Do you want to forget?” Valancy asked.

“Of course not,” he snapped. Then, “I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t often work miracles in the wilderness. But if I did it once, maybe-’”

“Then you understand what you did?” Valancy asked, smiling.

“Well, no, but if I could-if you would-There must be some way-“

“Yes,” Valancy said, “but you’d have to have a Sensitive working with you, and Bethie is it as far as Sensitives go right now.”

“You mean it’s true what I saw-what you told me about the-the Home? You’re extraterrestrials?”

“Yes,” Valancy sighed. “‘At least our grandparents were.” Then she smiled. “But we’re learning where we can fit into this world. Someday-someday we’ll be able-” She changed the subject abruptly.

“You realize, of course, Dr. Curtis, that we’d rather you wouldn’t discuss Bendo or us with anyone else. We would rather be just people to Outsiders.”

He laughed shortly, “Would I be believed if I did?”

“Maybe no, maybe so,” Valancy said. “Maybe only enough to start people nosing around. And that would be too much. We have a bad situation here and it will take a long time to erase-” Her voice slipped into silence, and I knew she had dropped into thoughts to brief him on the local problem. How long is a thought? How fast can you think of hell-and heaven? It was that long before the doctor blinked and drew a shaky breath.

“Yes,” he said. “A long time.”

“If you like,” Valancy said, “I can block your ability to talk of us.”

“Nothing doing!” the doctor snapped. “I can manage my own censorship, thanks.”

Valancy flushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be condescending.”

“You weren’t,” the doctor said. “I’m just on the prod tonight. It has been a day, and that’s for sure!”

“Hasn’t it, though?” I smiled and then, astonished, rubbed my cheeks because tears had begun to spill down my face. I laughed, embarrassed, and couldn’t stop. My laughter turned suddenly to sobs and I was bitterly ashamed to hear myself wailing like a child. I clung to Valancy’s strong hands until I suddenly slid into a warm welcome darkness that had no thinking or fearing or need for believing in anything outrageous, but only in sleep.

It was a magic year and it fled on impossibly fast wings, the holidays flicking past like telephone poles by a railroad. Christmas was especially magical because my angels actually flew and the glory actually shone round about because their robes had hems woven of sunlight-I watched the girls weave them. And Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, complete with cardboard antlers that wouldn’t stay straight, really took off and circled the room. And as our Mary and Joseph leaned raptly over the manger, their faces solemn and intent on the miracle, I felt suddenly that they were really seeing, really kneeling beside the manger in Bethlehem.

Anyway the months fled, and the blossoming of Bendo was beautiful to see. There was laughter and frolicking and even the houses grew subtly into color. Green things crept out where only rocks had been before, and a tiny tentative stream of water had begun to flow down the creek again. They explained to me that they had to take it slow because people might wonder if the creek filled overnight! Even the rough steps up to the houses were being overgrown because they were so seldom used, and I was becoming accustomed to seeing my pupils coming to school like a bevy of bright birds, playing tag in the treetops. I was surprised at myself for adjusting so easily to all the incredible things done around me by the People, and I was pleased that they accepted me so completely. But I always felt a pang when the children escorted me home-with me, they had to walk.

But all things have to end, and one May afternoon I sat staring into my top desk drawer, the last to be cleaned out, wondering what to do with the accumulation of useless things in it. But I wasn’t really seeing the contents of the drawer, I was concentrating on the great weary emptiness that pressed my shoulders down and weighted my mind. “It’s not fair,” I muttered aloud and illogically, “to show me heaven and then snatch it away.”

“That’s about what happened to Moses, too, you know.”

My surprised start spilled an assortment of paper clips and thumbtacks from the battered box I had just picked up.

“Well, forevermore!” I said, righting the box. “Dr. Curtis! What are you doing here?”

“Returning to the scene of my crime,” he smiled, coming through the open door. “Can’t keep my mind off Abie. Can’t believe he recovered from all that-shall we call it repair work? I have to check him every time I’m anywhere near this part of the country-and I still can’t believe it.”

“But he has.”

“He has for sure! I had to fish him down from a treetop to look him over-” The doctor shuddered dramatically and laughed. “‘To see him hurtling down from the top of that tree curdled my blood! But there’s hardly even a visible scar left.”

“I know,” I said, jabbing my finger as I started to gather up the tacks. “‘I looked last night. I’m leaving tomorrow, you know.” I kept my eyes resolutely down to the job at hand. “I have this last straightening up to do.”

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” he said, and we both knew he wasn’t talking about straightening up.

“Yes,” I said soberly. “Awfully hard. Earth gets heavier every day.”

“I find it so lately, too. But at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that you-“

I moved uncomfortably and laughed.

“Well, they do say: those as can, do; those as can’t, teach.”

“Umm,” the doctor said noncommittally, but I could feel his eyes on my averted face and I swiveled away from groping for a better box to put the clips in.

“Going to summer school?” His voice came from near the windows.

“No,” I sniffed cautiously. “No, I swore when I got my Master’s that I was through with education-at least the kind that’s come-every-day-and-learn-something.”

“Hmm!” There was amusement in the doctor’s voice. “Too bad. I’m going to school this summer. Thought you might like to go there, too,”

“Where?” I asked bewildered, finally looking at him.

“Cougar Canyon summer school,” he smiled. “Most exclusive.”

“Cougar Canyon! Why that’s where Karen-“

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s where the other Group is established. I just came from there. Karen and Valancy want us both to come. Do you object to being an experiment?”

“Why, no-I cried, and then, cautiously, “What kind of an experiment?” Visions oŁ brains being carved up swam through my mind.

The doctor laughed. “Nothing as gruesome as you’re imagining, probably.” Then he sobered and sat on the edge of my desk. “I’ve been to Cougar Canyon a couple of times, trying to figure out some way to get Bethie to help me when I come up against a case that’s a puzzler. Valancy and Karen want to try a period of training with Outsiders-” he grimaced wryly, “-that’s us-to see how much oŁ what they are can be transmitted by training. You know Bethie is half Outsider. Only her mother was of the People.”

He was watching me intently.

“Yes,” I said absently, my mind whirling, “Karen told me.”

“Well, do you want to try it? Do you want to go?”

“Do I want to go!” I cried, scrambling the clips into a rubber-band box. “How soon do we leave? Half an hour? Ten minutes? Did you leave the motor running?”

“Woops, woops!” The doctor took me by both arms and looked soberly into my eyes.

“We can’t set our hopes too high,” he said quietly. “It may be that for such knowledge we aren’t teachable-“

I looked soberly back at him, my heart crying in fear that it might be so.

“Look,” I said slowly. “If you had a hunger, a great big gnawing-inside hunger and no money and you saw a bakery shop window, which would you do? Turn your back on it? Or would you press your nose as close as you could against the glass and let at least your eyes feast? I know what I’d do.”

I reached for my sweater.

“And, you know, you never can tell. The shop door might open a crack, maybe-someday-“

IV

“I’D LIKE to talk with her a minute,” Lea said to Karen as the chattering group broke up. “May I?”

“Why, sure,” Karen said. “Melodye, have you a minute?”

“Oh, Karen!” Melodye threaded the rows back to Lea’s corner.

“That was wonderful! It was just like living it for the first time again, only underneath I knew what was coming next. But even so my blood ran cold when Abie-” She shuddered.

“Brother! Was that ever a day!”

“Melodye,” Karen said, “this is Lea. She wants to talk with you.”

“Hi, fellow alien,” Melodye smiled. “I’ve been wanting to meet you.”

“Do you believe-” Lea hesitated. “Was that really true?”

“Of course it was,” Melodye said. “I can show you my scars-mental, that is-from trying to learn to lift.” Then she laughed. “Don’t feel funny about doubting it. I still have my 3 A.M-ses when I can’t believe it myself.” She sobered. “But it is true. The People are the People.”

“And even if you’re not of the People,” Lea faltered, “could they-could they help anyway? I don’t mean anything broken. I mean, nothing visible-” She was suddenly covered with a sense of shame and betrayal as though caught hanging out a black line of sins in the morning sun. She turned her face away.

“They can help.” Melodye touched Lea’s shoulder gently.

“And, Lea, they never judge. They mend where mending is needed and leave the judgment to God.” And she was gone.

“Maybe,” Lea mourned, “if I had sinned some enormous sins I could have something big to forgive myself so I could start over, but all these niggling nibbling little nothingnesses-“

“All these niggling little, nibbling little nothingnesses that compounded themselves into such a great despair,” Karen said.

“And what is despair but a separation from the Presence-“

“Then the People do believe that there is-?”

“Our Home may be gone,” Karen said firmly, “and all of us exiles if you want to look at it that way, but there’s no galaxy wide enough to separate us from the Presence.”

Later that night Lea sat up in bed. “Karen?”

“Yes?” Karen’s voice came instantly from the darkness though Lea knew she was down the hall.

“Are you still shielding me from-from whatever it was?”

“No,” Karen said. “I released you this morning.”

“That’s what I thought.” Lea drew a quavering breath.

“Right now it’s all gone away, as though it had never been, but I’m still nowhere and going nowhere. Just waiting. And if I wait long enough it’ll come back again, that I know. Karen, what can I do to-not to be where I am now when it comes back?”

“You’re beginning to work at it now,” Karen said. “And if it does come back we’re here to help. It will never be so impenetrable again.”

“How could it be?” Lea murmured. “How could I have gone through anything as black as that and survived-or ever do it again?”

Lea lay back with a sigh. Then, sleepily, “Karen?”

“Yes?”

“Who was that down at the pool?”

“Don’t you know?” Karen’s voice smiled. “Have you looked around at all?”

“What good would it do? I can’t remember what he looked like. It’s been so long since I’ve noticed anything-and then the blackness-But he brought me back to the house, didn’t he? You must have seen him-“

“Must I?” Karen teased. “Maybe we could arrange to have him carry you again. “Arms remember when eyes forget.’ “

“‘There’s something wrong with that quotation,” Lea said drowsily, “‘But I’ll skip it for now.”

It seemed to Lea that she had just slipped under the edge of sleep when she heard Karen.

“What!” Karen cried. “Right now? Not tomorrow?”

“Karen!” Lea called, groping in the darkness for the light switch. “What’s the matter?”

“The matter!” Karen laughed and shot through the window, turning and tumbling ecstatically in midair.

“Nothing’s the matter! Oh, Lea, come and be joyful!” She grabbed Lea’s hands and pulled her up from the bed.

“Not Karen! No!” Lea cried as her bare feet curled themselves away from the empty air that seemed to lick at them.

“Put me down!” Terror sharpened her voice.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” Karen said, releasing her to plump gently down on her bed. She herself flashed again across the room and back in a froth of nightgowny ruffles. “Oh, be joyful! Be joyful unto the Lord!”

“What is it!” Lea cried, suddenly afraid, afraid of anything that might change things as they were. The vast emptiness began to cave away inside her. The blackness was a cloud the size of a man’s hand on the far horizon.

“It’s Valancy!” Karen cried, shooting away back through the window. “I have to get dressed! The baby’s here!”

“The baby!” Lea was bewildered. “What baby?”

“Is there any other baby?” Karen’s voice floated back, muffled. “‘Valancy and Jemmy’s. It’s here! I’m an aunt! Oh, dear, now I’m well on the way to becoming an ancestress. I thought they would never get around to it. It’s a girl! At least Jemmy says he thinks it’s a girl. He’s so excited that it could be both, or even triplets! Well, as soon as Valancy gets back-” She walked back through the door, brushing her hair briskly.

“What hospital did she go to?” Lea asked. “Isn’t this pretty isolated-“

“Hospital? Oh, none, of course. She’s at home.”

“But you said when she gets back-“

“Yes. It’s a far solemn journey to bring back a new life from the Presence. It takes a while.”

“But I didn’t even notice!” Lea cried. “Valancy was there tonight and I don’t remember-“

“But then you haven’t been noticing much of anything for a long time,” Karen said gently.

“But anything as obvious as that!” Lea protested.

“Fact remains, the baby’s here and it’s Valancy’s-with a little co-operation from Jemmy-and she didn’t carry it around in a knitting bag!

“Okay, Jemmy, I’m coming. Hold the fort!” She flashed, feet free of the floor, out the door, her hairbrush hovering forlornly, forgotten, in midair, until it finally drifted slowly out the door to the hall.

Lea huddled on the tumbled bed. A baby. A new life. “I had forgotten,” she thought. “Birth and death have still been going on. The world is still out there, wagging along as usual. I thought it had stopped. It had stopped for me. I lost winter. I lost spring. It must be summer now. Just think! Just think! There are people who found all my black days full of joyful anticipation-bright jewels slipping off the thread of time! And I’ve been going around and around like a donkey dragging a weight around a stake, winding myself tighter and tighter-” She straightened suddenly on the bed, spread-eagling out of her tight huddle. The darkness poured like a heavy flood in through the door-down from the ceiling-up from the floor.

“Karen!” she cried, feeling herself caught up to be crammed back into the boundaryless nothingness of herself again.

“No!” she gritted through her teeth. “Not this time!” She turned face down on the bed, clutching the pillow tightly with both hands. “Give me strength! Give me strength!” With an effort, almost physical, she turned her thoughts. “The baby-a new baby-crying. Do babies of the People cry? They must, having to leave the Presence for Earth. The baby-tiny fists clenched tightly, eyes clenched tightly shut. All powder and flannel and tiny curling feet. I can hold her. Tomorrow I can hold her. And feel the continuity of life-the eternal coming of God into the world. Rockabye baby. Sleep, baby, sleep. Thy Father watches His sheep. A new baby-tiny red fingers to curl around my finger. A baby-Valancy’s baby-“

And by the time dawn arrived Lea was sleeping, her face smoothing out from the agony of the black night. There was almost triumph upon it.

That evening Karen and Lea walked through the gathering twilight to the schoolhouse. The softly crisp evening air was so clear and quiet that voices and far laughter echoed around them.

“Wait, Lea.” Karen was waving to someone. “Here comes Santhy. She’s just learning to lift. Bet her mother doesn’t know she’s still out.” She laughed softly.

Lea watched with wonder as the tiny five-year-old approached them in short abrupt little arcs, her brief skirts flattening and flaring as she lifted and landed.

“She’s using more energy lifting than if she walked,” Karen said softly, “but she’s so proud of herself. Let’s wait for her. She wants us.”

By now Lea could see the grave intent look on Santhy’s face and could almost hear the little grunts as she took off until she finally landed, staggering, against Lea. Lea steadied her, dropping down beside her, holding her gently in the circle of her alms.

“You’re Lea,” Santhy said, smiling shyly.

“Yes,” Lea said. “How did you know?”

“Oh, we all know you. You’re our new God-bless every night.”

“Oh.” Lea was taken aback.

“I brought you something,” Santhy said, her hand clenched in a bulging little pocket. “I saved it from our ‘joicing party for the new baby. I don’t care if you’re an Outsider. I saw you wading in the creek and you’re pretty.” She pulled her hand out of her pocket and deposited on Lea’s palm a softly glowing bluey-green object. “It’s a koomatka,” she whispered. “Don’t let Mama see it. I was s’posed to eat it but I had two-” She spread her arms and lifted up right past Lea’s nose.

“A koomatka,” Lea said, getting up and holding out her hand wonderingly, the glow from it deepening in the dusk.

“Yes,” Karen said. “She really shouldn’t have. It’s forbidden to show to Outsiders, you know.”

“Must I give it back?” Lea asked wistfully. “Can’t I keep it even if I don’t belong?”

Karen looked at her soberly for a moment, then she smiled.

“You can keep it, or eat it, though you probably won’t like it. It tastes like music sounds, you know. But you may have it-even if you don’t belong.”

Lea’s hand closed softly around the koomatka as the two turned toward the schoolhouse. “Speaking of belonging-” Karen said, “it’s Dita’s turn tonight. She knows plenty about belonging and not belonging.”

“I wondered about tonight. I mean not waiting for Valancy-” Lea shielded her eyes against the bright open door as they mounted the steps.

“Oh, she wouldn’t miss it,” Karen said. “She’ll listen in from home.”

They were the last to arrive. Invocation over, Dita was already in the chair behind the desk, her hands folded primly in front of her. “Valancy,” she said, “we’re all here now. Are you ready?”

“Oh, yes.” Lea could feel Valancy’s answer. “Our Baby’s asleep now,”

The group laughed at the capitals in Valancy’s voice.

“You didn’t invent babies,” Dita laughed.

“Hah!” Jemmy’s voice answered triumphantly. “This one we did!’”

Lea looked around the laughing group. “They’re happy!” she thought. “In a world like this they’re happy anyway! What do they have as a touchstone?” She studied the group as Dita began, and under the first flow of Dita’s words she thought, “Maybe this is the answer. Maybe this is the touchstone. When any one of them cries out the others hear-and listen. Not just with their ears but with their hearts. No matter who cries out-someone listens-“

“My theme,” Dita said soberly, “is very brief-but oh, the heartbreak in it. It’s “And your children shall wander in the wilderness.’ ” Her clasped hands tightened on each other.

“I was wandering that day…”

WILDERNESS

“WELL, HOW do you expect Bruce to concentrate on spelling when he’s so worried about his daddy?” I thumbed through my second graders” art papers, hoping to find one lift out of the prosaic.

” ‘Worried about his daddy’?” Mrs. Kanz looked up from her spelling, tests. “What makes you think he’s worried about him?”

“Why, he’s practically sick for fear he won’t come home this time.” I turned the paper upside down and looked again.

“I thought you knew everything about everyone,” I teased.

“You’ve briefed me real good in these last three weeks. I feel like a resident instead of a newcomer.” I sighed and righted the paper. It was still a tree with six apples on it.

“But I certainly didn’t know Stell and Mark were having trouble.” Mrs. Kanz was chagrined.

“They had an awful fight the night before he left,” I said. “Nearly scared the waddin’ out of Bruce.”

“How do you know?” Mrs. Kanz’s eyes were suddenly sharp. “You haven’t met Stell yet and Bruce hasn’t said a word all week except yes and no.”

I let my breath out slowly. “Oh, no!” I thought. “Not already! Not already!”

“Oh, a little bird told me,” I said lightly, busying myself with my papers to hide the small tremble of my hands.

“Little bird, toosh! You probably heard it from Marie, though how she-“

“Could be,” I said, “could be.” I bundled up my papers hurriedly. “Oops! Recess is almost over. Gotta get downstairs before the thundering herd arrives.”

The sound of the old worn steps was hollow under my hurried feet, but not nearly so hollow as the feeling in my stomach.

Only three weeks and I had almost betrayed myself already. Why couldn’t I remember! Besides, the child wasn’t even in my room. I had no business knowing anything about him. Just because he had leaned so quietly, so long, over his literature book last Monday-and I had only looked a little ….

At the foot of the stairs I was engulfed waist-deep in children sweeping in from the playground. Gratefully I let myself be swept with them into the classroom.

That afternoon I leaned with my back against the window sill and looked over my quiet class. Well, quiet in so far as moving around the room was concerned, but each child humming audibly or inaudibly with the untiring dynamos of the young-the mostly inarticulate thought patterns of happy children. All but Lucine, my twelve-year-old first grader, who hummed briefly to a stimulus and then clicked off, hummed again and clicked off. There was a short somewhere, and her flat empty eyes showed it.

I sighed and turned my back on the room, wandering my eyes up the steepness of Black Mesa as it towered above the school, trying to lose myself from apprehension, trying to forget why I had run away-nearly five hundred miles-trying to forget those things that tugged at my sanity, things that could tear me loose from reality and set me adrift …. Adrift? Oh, glory! Set me free! Set me free! I hooked my pointer fingers through the old wire grating that protected the bottom of the window and tugged sharply. 01d nails grated and old wire gave, and I sneezed through the dry acid bite of ancient dust.

I sat down at my desk and rummaged for a Kleenex and snoozed again, trying to ignore, but knowing too well, the heavy nudge and tug inside me. That tiny near betrayal had cracked my tight protective shell. All that I had packed away so resolutely was shouldering and elbowing its way …

I swept my children out of spelling into numbers so fast that Lucine poised precariously on the edge of tears until she clicked on again and murkily perceived where we had gone.

“Now, look, Petie,” I said, trying again to find a way through his stubborn block against number words, “this is the picture of two, but this is the name of two ….

After the school buses were gone I scrambled and slid down the steep slope of the hill below the gaunt old schoolhouse and walked the railroad ties back toward the hotel-boarding house where I stayed. Eyes intent on my feet but brightly conscious of the rails on either side, I counted my way through the clot of old buildings that was town, and out the other side. If I could keep something on my mind I could keep ghosts out of my thoughts.

I stopped briefly at the hotel to leave my things and then pursued the single rail line on down the little valley, over the shaky old trestle that was never used any more, and left it at the railings dump and started up the hill, enjoying fiercely the necessary lunge and pull, tug and climb, that stretched my muscles, quickened my heartbeat and pumped my breath up hard against the top of my throat.

Panting I grabbed a manzanita bush and pulled myself up the last steep slope. I perched myself, knees to chest, on the crumbly outcropping of shale at the base of the huge brick chimney, arms embracing my legs, my cheek pressed to my knees. I sat with closed eyes, letting the late-afternoon sun soak into me. “If only this could be all,” I thought wistfully. “If only there were nothing but sitting in the sun, soaking up warmth. Just being, without questions.” And for a long blissful time I let that be all.

But I couldn’t put it off any longer. I felt the first slow trickling through the crack in my armor. I counted trees, I counted telephone poles, I said timestables until I found myself thinking six times nine is ninety-six and, then I gave up and let the floodgates open wide.

“It’s always like this,” one of me cried to the rest of me. “You promised! You promised and now you’re giving in again-after all this time!”

“I could promise not to breathe, too,” I retorted.

“But this is insanity-you know it is! Anyone knows it is!”

“Insane or not, it’s me!” I screamed silently. “It’s me! It’s me!”

“Stop your arguing,” another of me said. “This is too serious for bickering. We’ve got problems.”

I took a dry manzanita twig and cleared a tiny space on the gravelly ground, scratching up an old square nail and a tiny bit of sun-purpled glass as I did so. Shifting the twig to my other hand I picked up the nail and rubbed the dirt off with my thumb. It was pitted with rust but still strong and heavy. I wondered what it had held together back in those days, and if the hand that last held it was dust now, and if whoever it was had had burdens….

I cast the twig from me with controlled violence and, rocking myself forward, I made a straight mark on the cleared ground with the nail. This was a drearily familiar inventory, and I had taken it so many times before, trying to simplify this complicated problem of mine, that I fell automatically into the same old pattern.

Item one. Was I really insane-or going insane-or on the way to going insane? It must be so. Other people didn’t see sounds. Nor taste colors. Nor feel the pulsing of other people’s emotions like living things. Nor find the weight of flesh so like a galling strait jacket. Nor more than half believe that the burden was lay-downable short of death.

“But then,” I defended, “I’m still functioning in society and I don’t drool or foam at the mouth. I don’t act very crazy, and as long as I guard my tongue I don’t sound crazy.”

I pondered the item awhile, then scribbled out the mark.

“I guess I’m still sane-so far.”

Item two. “Then what’s wrong with me? Do I just let my imagination run away with. me?” I jabbed holes all around my second heavy mark. No, it was something more, something beyond just imagination, something beyond-what?

I crossed that marking with another to make an X.

“What than I do about it then? Shall I fight it out like I did before? Shall I deny and deny and deny until-” I felt a cold grue, remembering the blind panic that had finally sent me running until I had ended up at Kruper, and all the laughter went out of me, clear to the bottom of my soul.

I crosshatched the two marks out of existence and hid my eyes against my knees again and waited for the sick up-gushing of apprehension to foam into despair over my head. Always it came to this. Did I want to do anything about it? Should I stop it all with an act of will? Could I stop it all by an act of will? Did I want to stop it?

I scrambled to my feet and scurried around the huge stack, looking for the entrance. My feet cried, No no! on the sliding gravel. Every panting breath cried, No no! as I slipped and slithered around the steep hill. I ducked into the shadowy interior of the huge chimney and pressed myself against the blackened crumbling bricks, every tense muscle shouting, No no! And in the wind-shuddery silence I cried, “No!” and heard it echo up through the blackness above me. I could almost see the word shoot up through the pale elliptical disk of the sky at the top of the stack.

“Because I could!” I shrieked defiantly inside me. “If I weren’t afraid I could follow that word right on up and erupt into the sky like a Roman candle and never, never, never feel the weight of the world again!”

But the heavy drag of reason grabbed my knees and elbows and rubbed my nose forcibly into things-as-they-really-are, and I sobbed impotently against the roughness of the curving wall. The sting of salty wetness across my cheek shocked me out of rebellion.

Crying? Wailing against a dirty old smelter wall because of a dream? Fine goings on for a responsible pedagogue!

I scrubbed at my cheeks with a Kleenex and smiled at the grime that came off. I’d best get back to the hotel and get my face washed before eating the inevitable garlicky supper I’d smelled on my way out.

I stumbled out into the red flood of sunset and down the thread of a path I had ignored when coming up. I hurried down into the duskiness of the cottonwood thicket along the creek at the bottom of the hill. Here, where no eyes could see, no tongues could clack at such undignified behavior, I broke into a run, a blind headlong run, pretending that I could run away-just away! Maybe with salty enough tears and fast enough running I could buy a dreamless night.

I rounded the turn where the pinky-gray granite boulder indented the path-and reeled under a sudden blow. I had run full tilt into someone. Quicker than I could focus my eyes I was grabbed and set on my feet. Before I could see past a blur of tears from my smarting nose I was alone in the dusk.

I mopped my nose tenderly. “Well,” I said aloud, “that’s one way to knock the nonsense out of me.” Then immediately began to wonder if it was a sign of unbalance to talk aloud to yourself.

I looked back uphill when I came out of the shadow of the trees. The smelter stack was dark against the sky, massive above the remnants of the works. It was beautiful in a stark way, and I paused to enjoy it briefly. Suddenly there was another darkness up there. Someone had rounded the stack and stood silhouetted against the lighter horizon.

I wondered if the sound of my sorrow was still echoing up the stack, and then I turned shamefaced away. Whoever it was up there had more sense than to listen for the sounds of old sorrows.

That night, in spite of my outburst of the afternoon, I barely slipped under the thin skin of sleep and, for endless ages, clutched hopelessly for something to pull me down into complete forgetfulness. Then despairingly I felt the familiar tug and pull and, hopelessly, eagerly, slipped headlong into my dream that I had managed to suppress for so long.

There are no words-there are no words anywhere for my dream. Only the welling of delight, the stretching of my soul, the boundless freedom, the warm belongingness. And I held the dearness close to me-oh, so close to me!-knowing that awakening must come ….

And it did, smashing me down, forcing me into flesh, binding me leadenly to the earth, squeezing out the delight, cramping my soul back into finiteness, snapping bars across my sky and stranding me in the thin watery glow of morning so alone again that the effort of opening my eyes was almost too much to be borne.

Lying rigidly under the press of the covers I gathered up all the tatters of my dream and packed them tightly into a hard little knot way back of my consciousness. “Stay there. Stay there,” I pleaded. “Oh, stay there!”

Forcing myself to breakfast I came warily into the dining room at the hotel. As the only female-type woman guest in the hotel I was somewhat disconcerted to walk into the place when it was full and to have every hand pause and every jaw still itself until I found my way to the only empty seat, and then to hear the concerted return to eating, as though on cue. But I was later this morning, and the place was nearly empty.

“How was the old stack?” Half of Marie’s mouth grinned as she pushed a plate of hotcakes under my nose and let go of it six inches above the table. I controlled my wince as it crashed to the table, but I couldn’t completely ignore the sooty thumbprint etched in the grease on the rim. Marie took the stiffly filthy rag she had hanging as usual from her apron pocket, and smeared the print around until I at least couldn’t see the whorls and ridges any more.

“It was interesting,” I said, not bothering to wonder how she knew I’d been there. “Kruper must have been quite a town when the smelter was going full blast.”

“Long’s I’ve been here it’s been dyin’,” Marie said. “Been here thirty-five years next February and I ain’t never been up to the stack. I ain’t lost nothing up there!”

She laughed soundlessly but gustily. I held my breath until the garlic went by. “But I hear there’s some girls that’s gone up there and lost-“

“Marie!” Old Charlie bellowed from across the table. “Cut out the chatter and bring me some grub. If teacher wants to climb up that da-dang stack leave her be. Maybe she likes it!’”

“Crazy way to waste time,” Marie muttered, teetering out to the kitchen, balancing her gross body on impossibly spindly legs.

“Don’t mind her,” Old Charlie bellowed. “Only thing she thinks is fun is beer. Why, lots of people like to go look at worthless stuff like that. Take-well-take Lowmanigh here. He was up there only yesterday-“

“Yesterday?” My lifted brows underlined my question as I looked across the table. It was one of the fellows I hadn’t noticed before. His name had probably been thrown at me with the rest of them by Old Charlie on my first night there, but I had lost all the names except Old Charlie and Severeid Swanson, which was the name attached to a wavery fragile-looking Mexicano, with no English at all, who seemed to subsist mostly on garlic and vino and who always blinked four times when I smiled at him.

“Yes.” Lowmanigh looked across the table at me, no smile softening his single word. My heart caught as I saw across his cheek the familiar pale quietness of chill-of-soul. I knew the look well. It had been on my own face that morning before I had made my truce with the day.

He must have read something in my eyes, because his face shuttered itself quickly into a noncommittal expression and, with a visible effort, he added, “I watched the sunset from there.”

“Oh?” My hand went thoughtfully to my nose.

“Sunsets!” Marie was back with the semiliquid she called coffee. “More crazy stuff. Why waste good time?”

“What do you spend your time on?” Lowmanigh’s voice was very soft.

Marie’s mind leaped like a startled bird. “Waiting to die!” it cried.

“Beer,” she said aloud, half of her face smiling. “Four beers equal one sunset.” She dropped the coffeepot on the table and went back to the kitchen, leaving a clean sharp, almost visible pain behind her as she went.

“You two oughta get together,” Old Charlie boomed. “Liking the same things like you do. Low here knows more junk heaps and rubbish dumps than anybody else in the county. He collects ghost towns.”

“I like ghost towns,” I said to Charlie, trying to fill a vast conversational vacancy. “I have quite a collection of them myself.”

“See, Low!” he boomed. “Here’s your chance to squire a pretty schoolmarm around. Together you two oughta he able to collect up a storm!” He choked on his pleasantry and his last gulp of coffee and left the room, whooping loudly into a blue bandanna.

We were all alone in the big dining room. The early-morning sun skidded across the polished hardwood floor, stumbled against the battered kitchen chairs, careened into the huge ornate mirror above the buffet and sprayed brightly from it over the cracked oilcloth table covering on the enormous oak table.

The silence grew and grew until I put my fork down, afraid to click it against my plate any more. I sat for half a minute, suspended in astonishment, feeling the deep throbbing of a pulse that slowly welled up into almost audibility, questioning, “Together? Together? Together?” The beat broke on the sharp edge of a wave of desolation, and I stumbled blindly out of the room.

“No!” I breathed as I leaned against the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. “Not involuntarily! Not so early in the day!”

With an effort I pulled myself together. “Cut out this cotton-pickin’ nonsense!” I told myself. “You’re enough to drive anybody crazy!”

Resolutely I started up the steps, only to pause, foot suspended, halfway up. “That wasn’t my desolation,” I cried silently. “It was his!”

“How odd,” I thought when I wakened at two o’clock in the morning, remembering the desolation.

“How odd!” I thought when I wakened at three, remembering the pulsing “Together?”

“How very odd,” I thought when I wakened at seven and did heavy-eyed out of bed-having forgotten completely what Lowmanigh looked like, but holding wonderingly in my consciousness a better-than-three-dimensional memory of him.

School kept me busy all the next week, busy enough that the old familiar ache was buried almost deep enough to be forgotten. The smoothness of the week was unruffled until Friday, when the week’s restlessness erupted on the playground twice. The first time I had to go out and peel Esperanza off Joseph and pry her fingers out of his hair so he could get his snub nose up out of the gravel. Esperanza had none of her Uncle Severeid’s fragility and waveriness as she defiantly slapped the dust from her heavy dark braid.

“‘He calls me Mexican!” she cried. “So what? I’m Mexican. I’m proud to be Mexican. I hit him some more if he calls me Mexican like a bad word again. I’m proud to be-“

“Of course you’re proud,” I said, helping her dust herself off.

“God made us all. What do different names matter?”

“Joseph!” I startled him by swinging around to him suddenly. “Are you a girl?”

“Huh?” He blinked blankly with dusty lashes, then, indignantly: “Course not! I’m a boy!”

“Joseph’s a boy! Joseph’s a boy!” I taunted. Then I laughed.

“See how silly that sounds? We are what we are. How silly to tease about something like that. Both of you go wash the dirt off.” I spatted both of them off toward the schoolhouse and sighed as I watched them go.

The second time the calm was interrupted when the ancient malicious chanting sound of teasing pulled me out on the playground again.

“Lu-cine is crazy! Lu-cine is crazy! Lu-cine is crazy!”

The dancing taunting group circled twelve-year-old Lucine where she stood backed against the one drooping tree that still survived on our playground. Her eyes were flat and shallow above her gaping mouth, but smoky flames were beginning to flicker in the shallowness and her muscles were tightening.

“Lucine!” I cried, fear winging my feet. “Lucine!”

I sent me ahead of myself and caught at the ponderous murderous massiveness of her mind. Barely I slowed her until I could get to her.

“Stop it!” I shrieked at the children. “Get away, quick!”

My voice pierced through the mob-mind, and the group dissolved into frightened individuals. I caught both of Lucine’s hands and for a tense moment had them secure. Then she bellowed, a peculiarly animallike bellow, and with one flip of her arm sent me flying.

In a wild flurry I was swept up almost bodily, it seemed, into the irrational delirium of her anger and bewilderment. I was lost in the mazes of unreasoning thoughts and frightening dead ends, and to this day I can’t remember what happened physically.

When the red tide ebbed and the bleak gray click-off period came I was hunched against the old tree with Lucine’s head on my lap, her mouth lax and wet against my hand, her flooding quiet tears staining my skirt, the length of her body very young and very tired.

Her lips moved.

“Ain’t crazy.”

“No,” I said, smoothing her ruffled hair, wondering at the angry oozing scratch on the hack of my hand. “No, Lucine. I know.”

“He does, too,” Lucine muttered. “He makes it almost straight but it bends again.”

“Oh?” I said soothingly, hunching my shoulder to cover its bareness with my torn blouse sleeve. “‘Who does?”

Her head tensed under my hand, and her withdrawal was as tangible as the throb of a rabbit trying to escape restricting hands. “He said don’t tell.”

I let the pressure of my hand soothe her and I looked down at her ravaged face. “Me,” I thought. “Me with the outside peeled off. I’m crippled inside in my way as surely as she is in hers, only my crippling passes for normal. I wish I could click off sometimes and not dream of living without a limp-sweet impossible dream.”

There was a long moist intake of breath, and Lucine sat up. She looked at me with her flat incurious eyes.

“Your face is dirty,” she said. “‘Teachers don’t got dirty faces.”

“That’s right.” I got up stiffly, shifting the zipper of my skirt: around to the side where it belonged. “I’d better go wash. Here comes Mrs. Kanz.”

Across the play field the classes were lined up to go back inside. The usual scuffling horseplay was going on, but no one even bothered to glance our way. If they only knew, I thought, how close some of them had been to death …

“I been bad,” Lucine whimpered. “I got in a fight again.”

“Lucine, you bad girl!” Mrs. Kanz cried as soon as she got within earshot. “You’ve been fighting again. You go right in the office and sit there the rest of the day. Shame on you!”

And Lucine blubbered off toward the school building.

Mrs. Kanz looked me over. “Well,” she laughed apologetically, “I should have warned you about her. Just leave her alone when she gets in a rage. Don’t try to stop her.”

“But she was going to kill someone!” I cried, tasting again the blood lust, feeling the grate of broken bones.

“She’s too slow. The kids always keep out of her way.”

“But someday-“

Mrs. Kanz shrugged. “If she gets dangerous she’ll have to be put away.”

“But why do you let the children tease her?” I protested, feeling a spasmodic gush of anger.

She looked at me sharply. “‘I don’t ‘let.’ Kids are always cruel to anyone who’s different. Haven’t you discovered that yet?”

“Yes, I have,” I whispered. “Oh, yes, yes!” And huddled into myself against the creeping cold of memory.

“It isn’t good but it happens,” she said. “You can’t make everything right. You have to get calluses sometimes.”

I brushed some of the dust off my clothes. “Yes,” I sighed.

“Calluses come in handy. But I still think something should be done for her.”

“Don’t say so out loud,” Mrs. Kanz warned. “Her mother has almost beat her own brains out trying to find some way to help her. These things happen in the best of families. There’s no help for them.”

“Then who is-?” I choked on my suppressed words, belatedly remembering Lucine’s withdrawal.

“Who is who?” asked Mrs. Kanz over her shoulder as we went back to the schoolhouse.

“Who is going to take care of her all her life?” I asked lamely.

“Well! Talk about borrowing trouble!” Mrs. Kanz laughed.

“Just forget about the whole thing. It’s all in a day’s work. It’s a shame your pretty blouse had to get ruined, though.”

I was thinking of Lucine while I was taking off my torn blouse at home after school. I squinted tightly sideways, trying to glimpse the point of my shoulder to see if it looked as bruised as it felt, when my door was flung open and slammed shut and Lowmanigh was leaning against it, breathing heavily.

“Well!” I slid quickly into my clean shirt and buttoned it up briskly. “I didn’t hear you knock. Would you like to go out and try it over again?”

“Did Lucine get hurt?” He pushed his hair back from his damp forehead. “Was it a bad spell? I thought I had it controlled-“

“If you want to talk about Lucine,” I said out of my surprise, “I’ll be out on the porch in a minute. Do you mind waiting out there? My ears are still burning from Marie’s lecture to me on ‘proper decorum for a female in this here hotel.’ “

“Oh.” He looked around blankly. “Oh, sure-sure.”

My door was easing shut before I knew he was gone. I tucked my shirttail in and ran my comb through my hair.

“Lowmanigh and Lucine?” I thought blankly. “What gives? Mr. Kanz must be slipping. This she hasn’t mentioned.” I put the comb down slowly. “Oh. ‘He makes it almost straight but it bends again.’ But how can that be?”

Low was perched on the railing of the sagging balcony porch that ran around two sides of the second story of the hotel He didn’t turn around as I creaked across the floor toward the dusty dilapidated wicker settle and chair that constituted the porch furniture.

“Who are you?” His voice was choked. “What are you doing here?”

Foreboding ran a thin cold finger across the back of my neck. “We were introduced,” I said thinly. “I’m Perdita Verist, the new teacher, remember?”

He swung around abruptly. “Stop talking on top,” he said. “I’m listening underneath. “You know as well as I do that you can’t run away-But how do you know? Who are you?”

“You stop it!” I cried. “You have no business listening underneath. Who are you?”

We stood there stiffly glaring at each other until with a simultaneous sigh we relaxed and sat down on the shaky wickerware. I clasped my hands loosely on my lap and felt the tight hard knot inside me begin to melt and untie until finally I was turning to Low and holding out my hand only to meet his as he reached for mine. Some one of me cried, “‘My kind? My kind?” But another of me pushed the panic button.

“No,” I cried, taking my hand back abruptly and standing up. “No!”

“No.” Low’s voice was soft and gentle. “It’s no betrayal.”

I swallowed hard and concentrated on watching Severeid Swanson tacking from one side of the road to the other on his way home to the hotel for his garlic, his two vino bottles doing very little to maintain his balance.

“Lucine,” I said. “Lucine and you.”

“Was it bad?” His voice was all on top now, and my bones stopped throbbing to that other wave length.

“About par for the course according to Mrs. Kanz,” I said shallowly. “I just tried to stop a buzz saw.”

“Was it bad!” his voice spread clear across the band.

“Stay out!” I cried. “Stay out!”

But he was in there with me and I was Lucine and he was I and we held the red-and-black horror in our naked hands and stared it down. Together we ebbed back through the empty grayness until he was Lucine and I was I and I saw me inside Lucine and blushed for her passionately grateful love of me. Embarrassed, I suddenly found a way to shut him out and blinked at the drafty loneliness.

“… and stay out!” I cried.

“That’s right!” I jumped at Marie’s indignant wheeze. “I seen him go in your room without knocking and Shut the Door!” Her voice was capitalized horror. “You done right chasing him out and giving him What For!”

My inner laughter slid the barrier open a crack to meet his amusement.

“Yes, Marie,” I said soberly. “‘You warned me and I remembered.”

“Well, now, good!” Half of Marie’s face smirked, gratified.

“I knew you was a good girl. And, Low, I’m plumb ashamed of you. I thought you was a cut above these gaw-danged muckers around here and here you go wolfing around in broad daylight!” She tripped off down the creaky hall, her voice floating back up the lovely curved stairway. “In broad daylight! Supper’ll be ready in two jerks of a dead lamb’s tail Git washed.”

Low and I laughed together and went to “git washed.”

I paused over a double handful of cold water I had scooped up from my huge china washbowl, and watched it all trickle back as I glowed warmly with the realization that this was the first time in uncountable ages that I had laughed underneath. I looked long on my wavery reflection in the water. “And not alone,” one of me cried, erupting into astonishment, “not alone!”

The next morning I fled twenty-five miles into town and stayed at a hotel that had running water, right in the house, and even a private bath! And reveled in the unaccustomed luxury, soaking Kruper out of me-at least all of it except the glitter bits of loveliness or funniness or niceness that remained on the riffles of my soul after the dust, dirt, inconvenience and ugliness sluiced away.

I was lying there drowsing Sunday afternoon, postponing until the last possible moment the gathering of myself together for the bus trip back to Kruper. Then sudden, subtly, between one breath and the next, I was back into full wary armor, my attention twanged taut like a tightened wire and I sat up stiffly. Someone was here in the hotel. Had Low come into town? Was he here? I got up and finished dressing hastily.

I sat quietly on the edge of the bed, conscious of the deep ebb and flow of something. Finally I went down to the lobby. I stopped on the last step. Whatever it had been, it was gone. The lobby was just an ordinary lobby. Low was nowhere among the self-consciously ranch-style furnishings. But as I started toward the window to see again the lovely drop of the wooded canyon beyond the patio he walked in.

“Were you here a minute ago?” I asked him without preliminaries.

“No. Why?”

“I thought-” I broke off. Then gears shifted subtly back to the commonplace and I said, “Well! What are you doing here?”

“Old Charlie said you were in town and that I might as well pick you up and save you the bus trip hack.” He smiled faintly.

“Marie wasn’t quite sure I could be trusted after showing my true colors Friday, but she finally told me you were here at this hotel.”

“But I didn’t know myself where I was going to stay when I left Kruper!”

Low grinned engagingly. “My! You are new around here, aren’t you? Are you ready to go?”

“I hope you’re not in a hurry to get back to Kruper.” Low shifted gears deftly as we nosed down to Lynx Hill bridge and then abruptly headed on up Lynx Hill at a perilous angle. “I have a stop to make.”

I could feel his wary attention on me in spite of his absorption in the road.

“No,” I said, sighing inwardly, visualizing long hours waiting while he leaned, over the top fence rail exchanging long silences and succinct remarks with some mining acquaintance.

“I’m in no hurry, just so I’m at school by nine in the morning.”

“Fine.” His voice was amused, and, embarrassed, I tested again the barrier in my mind. It was still intact. “‘Matter of fact,” he went on, “this will be one for your collection, too.”

“My collection?” I echoed blankly.

“Your ghost-town collection. I’m driving over to Machron, or where it used to be. It’s up in a little box canyon above Bear Flat. It might be that it-” An intricate spot in the road-one small stone and a tiny pine branch-broke his sentence.

“Might be what?” I asked, deliberately holding onto the words he was trying to drop.

“Might be interesting to explore.” Aware amusement curved his mouth slightly.

“I’d like to find an unbroken piece of sun glass,” I said. “I have one old beautiful purple tumbler. It’s in pretty good condition except that it has a piece out of the rim.”

“I’ll show you my collection sometime,” Low said. “You’ll drool for sure.”

“How come you like ghost towns? What draws you to them? History? Treasure? Morbid curiosity?”

“Treasure-history-morbid curiosity-” He tasted the words slowly and approved each with a nod of his head. “I guess all three. I’m questing.”

“Questing?’”

“Questing.” The tone of his voice ended the conversation. With an effort I detached myself from my completely illogical up-gush of anger at being shut out, and lost myself in the wooded wonder of the hillsides that finally narrowed the road until it was barely wide enough for the car to scrape through.

Finally Low spun the wheel and, fanning sand out from our tires, came to a stop under a huge black-walnut tree.

“Got your walking shoes on? This far and no farther for wheels.”

Half an hour later we topped out on a small plateau above the rocky pass where our feet had slid and slithered on boulders grooved by high-wheeled ore wagons of half a century ago. The town had spread itself in its busiest days, up the slopes of the hills and along the dry creeks that spread fingerlike up from the small plateau. Concrete steps led abortively up to crumbled foundations, and sagging gates stood fenceless before shrub-shattered concrete walks.

There were a few buildings that were nearly intact, just stubbornly resisting dissolution. I had wandered up one faint street and down another before I realized that Low wasn’t wandering with me. Knowing the solitary ways of ghost-town devotees, I made no effort to locate him, but only wondered idly what he was questing for-carefully refraining from wondering again who he was and why he and I spoke together underneath as we did. But even unspoken the wonder was burning deep under my superficial scratching among the junk heaps of this vanished town.

I found a white button with only three holes in it and the top of a doll’s head with one eye still meltingly blue, and scrabbled, bare-handed, with delight when I thought I’d found a whole sun-purpled sugar bowl-only to find it was just a handle and half a curve held in the silt.

I was muttering over a broken fingernail when a sudden soundless cry crushed into me and left me gasping with the unexpected force. I stumbled down the bank and ran clattering down the rock-strewn road. I found Low down by the old town dump, cradling something preciously in the bend of his arm.

He lifted his eyes blindly to me.

“Maybe-!” he cried. “This might be some of it. It was never a part of this town’s life. Look! Look at the shaping of it! Look at the flow of lines!” His hands drank in the smooth beauty of the metal fragment. “And if this is part of it, it might not be far from here that-” He broke off abruptly, his thumb stilling on the underside of the object. He turned it over and looked closely.. Something died tragically as he looked. ” ‘General Electric,’ ” he said tonelessly. ” ‘Made in the USA.’ ” The piece of metal dropped from his stricken hands as be sagged to the ground. His fist pounded on the gravelly silt. “Dead end! Dead end! Dead-“

I caught his hands in mine and brushed the gravel off, pressing Kleenex to the ooze of blood below his little finger.

“What have you lost?” I asked softly.

“Myself,” he whispered. “I’m lost and I can’t find my way back.”

He took no notice of our getting up and my leading him to the fragment of a wall that kept a stunted elderberry from falling into the canyon. We sat down and for a while tossed on the ocean of his desolation as I thought dimly, “Too. Lost, too. Both of us.” Then I helped him channel into speech, though I don’t know whether it was vocal or not.

“I was so little then,” he said. “I was only three, I guess. How long can you live on a three-year-old’s memories? Mom told me all they knew but I could remember more. There was a wreck-a head-on collision the other side of Chuckawalla. My people were killed. The car tried to fly just before they hit. I remember Father lifted it up, trying to clear the other car, and Mother grabbed a handful of sun and platted me out of danger, but the crash came and I could only hear Mother’s cry ‘Don’t forget! Go back to the Canyon,’ and Father’s ‘Remember! Remember the Home!’ and they were gone, even their bodies, in the fire that followed. Their bodies and every identification. Mom and Dad took me in and raised me like their own, but I’ve got to go back. I’ve got to go back to the Canyon. I belong there.”

“What Canyon?” I asked.

“What Canyon?” he asked dully. “The Canyon where the People live now-my People. The Canyon where they located after the starship crashed. The starship I’ve been questing for, praying I might find some little piece of it to point me the way to the Canyon. At least to the part of the state it’s in. The Canyon I went to sleep in before I woke at the crash. The Canyon I can’t find because I have no memory of the road there.

“But you know!” he went on. “You surely must know! You aren’t like the others. You’re one of us. You must be!”

I shrank down into myself.

“I’m nobody,” I said. “I’m not one of anybody. My Mom and dad can tell me my grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, and they used to all the time, trying to figure out why they were burdened with such a child, until I got smart enough to get ‘normal’ “You think you’re lost! At least you know what you’re lost from. You could get un-lost. But I can’t. I haven’t ever been un-lost!”

“But you can talk underneath.” He blinked before my violence. “You showed me Lucine-“

“Yes,” I said recklessly. “And look at this!”

A rock up on the hillside suddenly spurted to life. It plowed down the slope, sending gravel flying, and smashed itself to powder against a boulder at the base.

“And I never tried this before, but look!”

I stepped up onto the crumbling wall and walked away from Low, straight on out over the canyon, feeling Earth fall away beneath my feet, feeling the soft cradling sweep of the wind, the upness and outness and unrestrainedness I cried out, lifting my arms, reaching ecstatically for the hem of my dream of freedom. One minute, one minute more and I could slide out of myself and never, never, never…

And then…

Low caught me just before I speared myself on the gaunt stubby pines below us in the canyon. He lifted me, struggling and protesting, back up through the fragile emptiness of air, back to the stunted elderberry tree.

“But I did! I did!” I sobbed against him. “I didn’t just fall. For a while I really did!”

“For a while you really did, Dita,” he murmured as to a child. “As good as I could do myself. So you do have some of the Persuasions. Where did you get them if you aren’t one of us?”

My sobs cut off without an after-echo, though my tears continued. I looked deep into Low’s eyes, fighting against the anger that burned at this persistent returning to the wary hurting place inside me. He looked steadily back until my tears stopped and I finally managed a ghost of a smile. “I don’t know what a Persuasion is, but I probably got it the same place you got that tilt to your eyebrows.”

He reddened and stepped back from me.

“We’d better start back. It’s not smart to get night-caught on these back roads.”

We started back along the trail

“Of course you’ll fill in the vacancies for me as we go back,” I said, barely catching myself as my feet slithered on a slick hump of granite. I felt his immediate protest. “You’ve got to,” I said, pausing to shake the gravel out of one shoe. “You can’t expect me to ignore today, especially since I’ve found someone as crazy as I am.”

“You won’t believe—” He dodged a huge buckbrush that crowded the narrow road.

“I’ve had to believe things about myself all these years that I couldn’t believe,” I said, “and it’s easier to believe things about other people.”

So we drove through the magic of an early twilight that deepened into a star-brilliant night, and I watched the flick of the stars through the overarching trees along the road and listened to Low’s story. He stripped it down to its bare bones, but underneath, the bones burned like fire in the telling.

“We came from some other world,” he said, wistful pride at belonging showing in his “we.” “The Home was destroyed. We looked for a refuge and found this earth. Our ships crashed or burned before they could land. But some of us escaped in life slips. My grandparents were with the original Group that gathered at the Canyon. But we were all there, too, because our memories are joined continuously back into the Bright Beginning. That’s why I know about my People. Only I can’t remember where the Canyon is, because I was asleep the one time we left it, and Mother and Father couldn’t tell me in that split second before the crash.

“I’ve got to find the Canyon again. I can’t go on living forever limping.” He didn’t notice my start at his echoing of that thought of mine when I was with Lucine. “‘I can’t achieve any stature at all until I am with my People.

“I don’t even know the name of the Canyon, but I do remember that our ship crashed in the hills and I’m always hoping that someday I’ll find some evidence of it in one of these old ghost towns. It was before the turn of the century that we came, and somewhere, somewhere, there must be some evidence of the ship still in existence.”

His was a well-grooved story, too, worn into commonplace by repetition as mine had been-lonely aching repetition to himself. I wondered for a moment, in the face of his unhappiness, why I should feel a stirring of pleased comfort, but then I realized that it was because between us there was no need for murmurs of sympathy or trite little social sayings or even explanations. The surface words were the least of our communication.

“You aren’t surprised?” He sounded almost disappointed.

“That you are an out-worlder?” I asked. I smiled. “Well, I’ve never met one before and I find it interesting. I only wish I could have dreamed up a fantasy like that to explain me to me. It’s quite a switch on the old “I must be adopted because I’m so different.’ But-“

I stiffened as Low’s surge of rage caught me offguard.

“Fantasy! I am adopted. I remember! I thought you’d know. I thought since you surely must be one of us that you’d be-“

“I’m not one of you!” I flared. “Whatever ‘you’ are. I’m of Earth-so much so that it’s a wonder the dust doesn’t puff out of my mouth when I speak-but at least I don’t try to kid myself that I’m normal by any standard, Earth-type or otherwise.”

For a hostile minute we were braced stonily against each other. My teeth ached as the muscles on my jaws knotted. Then Low sighed and reaching out a finger he traced the line of my face from brow to chin to brow again.

“Think your way,” he said. “You’ve probably been through enough bad times to make anyone want to forget. Maybe someday you’ll remember that you are one of us and then-“

“Maybe, maybe, maybe!” I said through my weary shaken breath. “But I can’t any more. It’s too much for one day.” I slammed all the doors I could reach and shoved my everyday self up to the front. As we started off I reopened one door far enough to ask, “What’s this between you and Lucine? Are you a friend of the family or something that you’re working with her?”

“I know the family casually,” Low said. “They don’t know about Lucine and me. She caught my imagination once last year when I was passing the school. The kids were pestering her. I never felt such heartbroken bewilderment in all my life. Poor little Earth kid. She’s a three-year-old in a twelve-year-old body-“

“Four-year-old,” I murmured. “Or almost five. She’s learning a little.”

“Four or five,” Low said. “It must be awful to be trapped in a body-“

“Yes,” I sighed. “To be shut in the prison of yourself.”

Tangibly I felt again the warm running of his finger around my face, softly, comfortingly, though he made no move toward me. I turned away from him in the dusk to hide the sudden tears that came.

It was late when we got home. There were still lights in the bars and a house or two when we pulled into Kruper, but the hotel was dark, and in the pause after the car stopped I could hear the faint creaking of the sagging front gate as it swung in the wind. We got out of the car quietly, whispering under the spell of the silence, and tiptoed up to the gate. As usual the scraggly rosebush that drooped from the fence snagged my hair as I went through, and as Low helped free me we got started giggling. I suppose neither of us had felt young and foolish for so long, and we had both unburdened ourselves of bitter tensions, and found tacit approval of us as the world refused to accept us and as we most wanted to be; and, each having at least glimpsed a kindred soul, well, we suddenly bubbled over. We stood beneath the upstairs porch and tried to muffle our giggles.

“People will think we’re crazy if they hear us carrying on like this,” I choked.

“I’ve got news for you,” said Low, close to my ear. “We are crazy. And I dare you to prove it.”

“Hoh! As though it needed any proof!”

“I dare you.” His laughter tickled my cheek.

“How?” I breathed defiantly.

“Let’s not go up the stairs,” he hissed. “Let’s lift through the air. Why waste the energy when we can-?”

He held out his hand to me. Suddenly sober I took it and we stepped back to the gate and stood hand in hand, looking up.

“Ready?” he whispered, and I felt him tug me upward.

I lifted into the air after him, holding all my possible fear clenched in my other hand.

And the rosebush reached up and snagged my hair.

“Wait!” I whispered, laughter trembling again. “I’m caught.”

“‘Earth-bound!” he chuckled as he tugged at the clinging strands.

“Smile when you say that, podner,” I returned, feeling my heart melt with pleasure that I had arrived at a point where I could joke about such a bitterness-and trying to ignore the fact that my feet were treading nothing but air. My hair freed, he lifted me up to him. I think our lips only brushed, but we overshot the porch and had to come back down to land on it. Low steadied me as we stepped across the railing.

“We did it,” he whispered.

“Yes,” I breathed. “We did.”

Then we both froze. Someone was coming into the yard. Someone who stumbled and wavered and smashed glassily against the gatepost.

“‘Ay! Ay! Madre mia!” Severeid Swanson fell to his knees beside the smashed bottle, “Ay, virgen purisima!”

“Did he see us?” I whispered on an indrawn breath.

“I doubt it.” His words were warm along my cheek. “He hasn’t seen anything outside himself for years.”

“Watch out for the chair.” We groped through the darkness into the upper hall. A feeble fifteen-watt bulb glimmered on the steady drip of water splashing down into the sagging sink from the worn faucets that blinked yellow through the worn chrome. By virtue of these two leaky outlets we had bathing facilities on the second floor.

Our good nights were subvocal and quick.

I was in my nightgown and robe, sitting on the edge of my bed, brushing my hair, when I heard a shuffle and a mutter outside my door. I checked the latch to be sure it was fastened and brushed on. There was a thud and a muffled rapping and my doorknob turned.

“Teesher!” It was a cautious voice. “Teesher!”

“Who on earth!” I thought and went to the door. “Yes?” I leaned against the peeling panel.

“Lat-me-een.” The words were labored and spaced.

“What do you want?”

“To talk weeth you, teesher.”

Filled with astonished wonder I opened the door. There was Severeid Swanson swaying in the hall! But they had told me he had no English …. He leaned precariously forward, his face glowing in the light, years younger than I’d ever seen him.

“My bottle is broken. You have done eet. It is not good to fly without the wings. Los angeles santos, si, pero not the lovers to fly to kiss. It makes me drop my bottle. On the ground is spilled all the dreams.”

He swayed backward and wiped the earnest sweat from his forehead. “It is not good. I tell you this because you have light in the face You are good to my Esperanza. You have dreams that are not in the bottle. You have smiles and not laughing for the lost ones. But you must not fly. It is not good. My bottle is broken.”

“I’m sorry,” I said through my astonishment. “I’ll buy you another.”

“No,” Severeid said. “Last time they tell me this, too, but I cannot drink it because of the wondering. Last time, like birds, all, all in the sky-over the hills-the kind ones. The ones who also have no laughter for the lost.”

“Last time?” I grabbed his swaying arm and pulled him into the room, shutting the door, excitement tingling along the insides of my elbows. “Where? When? Who was flying?”

He blinked owlishly at me, the tip of his tongue moistening his dry lips.

“It is not good to fly without wings,” he repeated.

‘“Yes, yes, I know. Where did you see the others fly without wings? I must find them-I must!”

“Like birds,” he said, swaying. “Over the hills.”

“Please,” I said, groping wildly for what little Spanish I possessed.

“I work there a long time. I don’t see them no more. I drink some more. Chinee Joe give me new bottle.”

“Por favor, senor,” I cried, “dondé-dondé-?”

All the light went out of his face. His mouth slackened. Dead eyes peered from under lowered lids.

“No comprendo.” He looked around, dazed. “Buenas noches, senorita.” He backed out of the door and closed it softly behind him.

“But-!” I cried to the door. “But please!”

Then I huddled on my bed and hugged this incredible piece of information to me.

“Others!” I thought. “Flying over the hills! All, all in the sky! Maybe, oh maybe one of them was at the hotel in town. Maybe they’re not too far away. If only we knew … !”

Then I felt the sudden yawning of a terrifying chasm. If it was true, if Severeid had really seen others lifting like birds over the hills, then Low was right-there were others! There must be a Canyon, a starship, a Home. But where did that leave me? I shrank away from the possibilities. I turned and buried my face in my pillow. But Mother and Dad! And Granpa Josh and Gramma Malvina and Great-granpa Benedaly and-I clutched at the memories of all the family stories I’d heard. Crossing the ocean in steerage. Starting a new land. Why, my ancestors were as solid as a rock wall back of me, as far back as-as Adam, almost. I leaned against the certainty and cried out to feel the stone wall waver and become a curtain stirring in the winds of doubt.

“No, no!” I sobbed, and for the first time in my life I cried for my mother, feeling as bereft as though she had died.

Then I suddenly sat up in bed. “It might not be so!” I cried. “He’s just a drunken wino. No telling what he might conjure out of his bottle. It might not be so!”

“But it might,” one of me whispered maliciously. “It might !”

The days that followed were mostly uneventful. I had topped out onto a placid plateau in my battle with myself, perhaps because I had something new to occupy my mind or perhaps it was just a slack place since any emotion has to rest sometime.

However, the wonder of finding Low was slow to ebb. I could sense his “Good morning” with my first step down the stairs each day, and occasionally roused in the darkness to his silent “Good night.”

Once after supper Marie planted herself solidly in front of me as I rose to leave. Silently she pointed at my plate where I bad apparently made mud pies of my food. I flushed.

‘“No good?” she asked, crossing her wrists over the grossness of her stomach and teetering perilously backward.

“It’s fine, Marie,” I managed. “I’m just not hungry.” And I escaped through the garlicky cloud of her indignant exhalation and the underneath amusement of Low. How could I tell her that Low had been showing me a double rainbow he had seen that afternoon and that I had been so engrossed in the taste of the colors and the miracle of being able to receive them from him that I had forgotten to eat?

Low and I spent much time together, getting acquainted, but during most of it we were ostensibly sitting with the others on the porch in the twilight, listening to the old mining and cattle stories that were the well-worn coins that slipped from hand to hand wherever the citizens of Kruper gathered together. A good story never wore out, so after a while it was an easy matter to follow the familiar repetitions and still be alone together in the group.

“Don’t you think you need a little more practice in lifting?” Low’s silent question was a thin clarity behind due rumble of voices.

“Lifting?” I stirred in my chair, not quite so adept as he at carrying two threads simultaneously; “Flying,” he said with exaggerated patience. “Like you did over the canyon and up to the porch.”

“Oh.” Ecstasy and terror puddled together inside me. Then I felt myself relaxing in the strong warmth of Low’s arms instead of fighting them as I had when he had caught me over the canyon.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I answered, quickly shutting him out as much as I could. “I think I can do it okay.”

“A little more practice won’t hurt.” There was laughter in his reply. “But you’d better wait until I’m around-just in case.”

“Oh?” I asked. “‘Look.” I lifted in the darkness until I sat gently about six inches above my chair. “So!”

Something prodded me gently and I started to drift across the porch. Hastily I dropped back, just barely landing on the forward edge of my chair, my heels thudding audibly on the floor. The current story broke off in mid-episode and everyone looked at me.

“Mosquitos,” I improvised. “I’m allergic to them.”

“That’s not fair!” I sputtered silently to Low. “You cheat!”

“All’s fair-” he answered, then shut hastily as he remembered the rest of the quotation.

“Hmm!” I thought. “Hmm! And this is war?” And felt pleased all out of proportion the rest of the evening.

Then there was the Saturday when the sky was so tangily blue and the clouds so puffily light that I just couldn’t stay indoors scrubbing clothes and sewing on buttons and trying to decide whether to repair my nail polish or take it all off and start from scratch again. I scrambled into my saddle shoes and denim skirt, turned back the sleeves of my plaid shirt, tied the sleeves of my sweater around my waist and headed for the hills. This was the day to follow the town water pipe up to the spring that fed it and see if all the gruesome stories I’d heard about its condition were true.

I paused, panting, atop the last steep ledge above the town and looked back at the tumbled group of weathered houses that made up this side of Kruper. Beyond the railroad track there was enough flatland to make room for the four new houses that had been built when the Golden Turkey Mine reopened. They sat in a neat row, bright as toy blocks against the tawny red of the hillside.

I brushed my hair back from my hot forehead and turned my back on Kruper. I could see sections of the town water pipe scattered at haphazard intervals up among the hills-in some places stilted up on timbers to cross from one rise to another, in other places following the jagged contour of the slopes. A few minutes and sections later I was amusing myself trying to stop with my hands the spray of water from one of the numerous holes in one section of the rusty old pipe and counting the hand-whittled wooden plugs that stopped up others. It looked a miracle that any water at all got down to town. I was so engrossed that I unconsciously put my hand up to my face when a warm finger began to trace …

“Low!” I whirled on him. “What are you doing up here?”

He slid down from a boulder above the line.

“Johnny’s feeling porely today. He wanted me to check to see if any of the plugs had fallen out.”

We both laughed as we looked up-line and traced the pipe by the white gush of spray and the vigorous greenness that utilized the spilling water.

“I’ll bet he has at least a thousand plugs hammered in,” Low said.

“Why on earth doesn’t he get some new pipe?”

“Family heirlooms,” Low said, whittling vigorously. “It’s only because he’s feeling so porely that he even entertains the thought of letting me plug his line. All the rest of the plugs are family affairs. About three generations’ worth.”

He hammered the plug into the largest of the holes and stepped back, reaming the water from his face where it had squirted him.

“Come on up. I’ll show you the spring.”

We sat in the damp coolness of the thicket of trees that screened the cave where the spring churned and gurgled, blue and white and pale green before it lost itself in the battered old pipes. We were sitting on opposite sides of the pipe, resting ourselves in the consciousness of each other, when an at once, for a precious minute, we flowed together like coalescing streams of water, so completely one that the following rebound to separateness came as a shock. Such sweetness without even touching one another… ?

Anyway we both turned hastily away from this frightening new emotion, and, finding no words handy, Low brought me down a flower from the ledge above us, nipping a drooping leaf off it as it passed him.

“Thanks,” I said, smelling of it and sneezing vigorously. “I wish I could do that.”

“Well, you can! You lifted that rock at Macron and you can lift yourself.”

“Yes, myself.” I shivered at the recollection. “But not the rock. I could only move it.”

“Try that one over there.” Low lobbed a pebble toward a small slaty blue rock lying on the damp sand. Obligingly it plowed a small furrow up to Low’s feet.

“Lift it,” he said.

“I can’t. I told you I can’t lift anything clear off the ground. I can just move it.” I slid one of Low’s feet to one side.

Startled, he pulled it back.

“But you have to be able to lift, Dita. You’re one of-“

“I am not!” I threw the flower I’d been twiddling with down violently into the spring and saw it sucked into the pipe. Someone downstream was going to be surprised at the sink or else one of the thousands of fountains between here and town was going to blossom.

“But all you have to do is-is-” Low groped for words.

“Yes?” I leaned forward eagerly. Maybe I could learn ….

“Well, just lift!”

“Twirtle!” I said, disappointed. “Anyway can you do this? Look.” I reached in my pocket and pulled out two bobby pins and three fingernails full of pocket fluff. “Have you got a dime?”

“Sure.” He fished it out and brought it to me. I handed it back. “Glow it,” I said.

“Glow it? You mean blow it?” He turned it over in his hand.

“No, glow it. Go on. It’s easy. All you have to do is glow it. Any metal will do but silver works better.”

“Never heard of it,” he said, frowning suspiciously.

“You must have,” I cried, “if you are part of me. If we’re linked back to the Bright Beginning you must remember!”

Low turned the dime slowly. “It’s a joke to you. Something to laugh at.”

“A joke!” I moved closer to him and looked up into his face. “Haven’t I been looking for an answer long enough?

Wouldn’t I belong if I could? Would my heart break and bleed every time I have to say no if I could mend it by saying yes? If I could only hold out my hands and say, ‘I belong …’ ” I turned away from him, blinking. “Here,” I sniffed.

“Give me the dime.”

I took it from his quiet fingers and, sitting down again, spun it quickly in the palm of my hand. It caught light immediately, glowing stronger until I slitted my eyes to look at it and finally had to close my fingers around its cool pulsing.

“Here.” I held my hand out to Low, my bones shining pinkly through. “It’s glowed.”

“Light,” he breathed, taking the dime wonderingly. “Cold light! How long can you hold it?”

“I don’t have to hold it. It’ll glow until I damp it.”

“How long?”

“How long does it take metal to turn to dust?” I shrugged.

“I don’t know. Do your People know how to glow?”

“No.” His eyes stilled on my face. “I have no memory of it.”

“So I don’t belong.” I tried to say it lightly above the wrenching of my heart. “It almost looks like we’re simultaneous, but we aren’t. You came one way. I came t’other.” “Not even to him!” I cried inside. “I can’t even belong to him!” I drew a deep breath and put emotion to one side.

“Look,” I said. “Neither of us fits a pattern. You deviate and I deviate and you’re satisfied with your explanation of why you are what you are. I haven’t found my explanation yet. Can’t we let it go at that?”

Low grabbed my shoulders, the dime arching down into the spring. He shook me with a tight controlled shaking that was hardly larger than a trembling of his tensed hands. “I tell you, Dita, I’m not making up stories! I belong and you belong and all your denying won’t change it. We are the same-“

We stared stubbornly at each other for a long moment, then the tenseness ran out of his fingers and he let them slide down my arms to my hands. We turned away from the spring and started silently, hand in hand, down the trail. I looked back and saw the glow of the dime and damped it.

“No,” I said to myself. “It isn’t so. I’d know it if it were true. We aren’t the same. But what am I then? What am I?” And I stumbled a little wearily on the narrow path.

During this time everything at school was placid, and Pete had finally decided that “two” could have a name and a picture, and learned his number words to ten in one day, And Lucine-symbol to Low and me of our own imprisonment-with our help was blossoming under the delight of reading her second pre-primer.

But I remember the last quiet day. I sat at my desk checking the tenth letter I’d received in answer to my inquiries concerning a possible Chinee Joe and sadly chalking up another “no.” So far I had been able to conceal from Low the amazing episode of Severeid Swanson. I wanted to give him back his Canyon myself, if it existed. I wanted it to be my gift to him-and to my own shaken self. Most of all I wanted to be able to know at least one thing for sure, even if that one thing proved me wrong or even parted Low and me. Just one solid surety in the whole business would be a comfort and a starting place for us truly to get together.

I wished frequently that I could take hold of Severeid bodily and shake more information out of him, but he had disappeared-walked off from his job without even drawing his last check. No one knew where he had gone. The last Kruper had seen of him was early the next morning after he had spoken with me. He had been standing, slack-kneed and wavering, a bottle in each hand, at the crossroads-not even bothering to thumb a ride, just waiting blankly for someone to stop for him-and apparently someone had.

I asked Esperanza about him, and she twisted her thick shining braid around her hand twice and tugged at it.

“He’s a wino,” she said dispassionately. “They ain’t smart. Maybe he got losted,” Her eyes brightened. “Last year he got losted and the cops picked him up in E1 Paso. He brang me some perfume when he came back. Maybe he went to E1 Paso again. It was pretty perfume.” She started down the stairs. “He’ll be back,” she called, “unless he’s dead in a ditch somewhere.”

I shook my head and smiled ruefully. And she’d fight like a wildcat if anyone else talked about Severeid like that ….

I sighed at the recollection and went back to my disappointing letter. Suddenly I frowned and moved uneasily in my chair. What was wrong? I felt acutely uncomfortable. Quickly I checked me over physically. Then my eyes scanned the room. Petie was being jet planes while he drew pictures of them, and the soft skoosh! skoosh! skoosh! of the take-offs was about the only on-top sound in the room. I checked underneath and the placid droning hum was as usual. I had gone back on top when I suddenly dived back again. There was a sharp stinging buzz like an angry bee-a malicious angry buzz! Who was it? I met Lucine’s smoldering eyes and I knew.

I almost gasped under the sudden flood of hate-filled anger. And when I tried to reach her, down under, I was rebuffed-not knowingly but as though there had never been a contact between us. I wiped my trembling hands against my skirt, trying to clean them of what I had read.

The recess bell came so shatteringly that I jumped convulsively and shared the children’s laughter over it. As soon as I could I hurried to Mrs. Kanz’s room.

“Lucine’s going to have another spell,” I said without preface.

“What makes you think so?” Mrs. Kanz marked “46 1/2 %” on the top of a literature paper.

“I don’t think so, I know so. And this time she won’t be too slow. Someone will get hurt if we don’t do something.”

Mrs. Kanz laid down her pencil and folded her arms on the desk top, her lips tightening. “You’ve been brooding too much over Lucine,” she said, none too pleased. “If you’re getting to the point where you think you can predict her behavior, you’re pretty far gone. People are going to be talking about your being queer pretty soon. Why don’t you just forget about her and concentrate on-on-well, on Low? He’s more fun than she is anyway, I’ll bet.”

“He’d know,” I cried. “He’d tell you, too! He knows more about Lucine than anyone thinks.”

“So I’ve heard.” There was a nasty purr to her voice that I didn’t know it possessed. “They’ve been seen together out in the hills. Well, it’s only her mind that’s retarded. Remember, she’s over twelve now, and some men-“

I slapped the flat of my hand down on the desk top with a sharp crack. I could feel my eyes blazing, and she dodged back as though from a blow. She pressed the back of one hand defensively against her cheek.

“I-” she gasped, “I was only kidding!”

I breathed deeply to hold my rage down. “Are you going to do anything about Lucine?” My voice was very soft.

“What can I do? What is there to do?”

“Skip it,” I said bitterly. “Just skip it.”

I tried all afternoon to reach Lucine, but she sat lumpish and unheeding-on top. Underneath violence and hatred were seething like lava, and once, without apparent provocation, she leaned across the aisle and pinched Petie’s arm until he cried.

She was sitting in isolation with her face to the wall when the last bell rang.

“You may go now, Lucine,” I said to the sullen stranger who had replaced the child I knew. I put my hand on her shoulder. She slipped out of my touch with one fluid quick motion. I caught a glimpse of her profile as she left. The jaw muscles were knotted and the cords in her neck were tensed.

I hurried home and waited, almost wild from worry, for Low to get off shift. I paced the worn Oriental rug in the living room, circling the potbellied cast-iron heater. I peered ! a dozen times through the lace curtains, squinting through the dirty cracked window panes. I beat my fist softly into my palm as I paced, and I felt physical pain when the phone on the wall suddenly shrilled,

I snatched down the receiver,

“Yes!” I cried. “Hello!’”

“Marie. I want Marie.” The voice was far and crackling,

“You tell Marie I gotta talk to her.”

I called Marie and left her to her conversation and went out on the porch. Back and forth, back and forth I paced, Marie’s voice swelling and fading as I passed.

“… well, I expected it a long time ago. A crazy girl like that-“

“Lucine!” I shouted and rushed indoors. “What happened?”

“Lucine?” Marie frowned from the telephone. “‘What’s Lucine gotta do with it? Marson’s daughter ran off last night with the hoistman at the Golden Turkey. He’s fifty if he’s a day and she’s just turned sixteen.” She turned back to the phone. “Yah, yah, yah?” Her eyes gleamed avidly.

I just got back to the door in time to see the car stop at the gate. I grabbed my coat and was down the steps as the car door swung open.

“Lucine?” I gasped.

“Yes.” The sheriff opened the back door for me, his deputy goggle-eyed with the swiftness of events. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What happened?”

“She got mad on the way home.” The car spurted away from the hotel. “She picked Petie up by the heels and bashed him against a boulder. She chased the other kids away with rocks and went back and started to work on Petie. He’s still alive, but Doc lost count of the stitches and they’re transfusing like crazy. Mrs. Kanz says you likely know where she is.”

“No.” I shut my eyes and swallowed. “But we’ll find her. Get Low first.”

The shift bus was just pulling in at the service station. Low was out of it and into the sheriff’s car before a word could be spoken. I saw my anxiety mirrored on his face before we clasped hands.

For the next two hours we drove the roads around Kruper. We went to all the places we thought Lucine might have run to, but nowhere, nowhere in all the scrub-covered foothills or the pine-pointed mountains, could I sense Lucine.

“We’ll take one more sweep-through Poland Canyon. Then if it’s no dice we’ll hafta get a posse and Claude’s hounds.” The sheriff gunned for the steep rise at the canyon entrance.

“Beats me how a kid could get so gone so fast.”

“You haven’t seen her really run,” Low said. “She never can when she’s around other people. She’s just a little slower than a plane and she can run me into the ground any time. She just shifts her breathing into overdrive and takes off. She could beat Claude’s hounds without trying, if it ever came to a run-down.”

“Stop!” I grabbed the back of the seat. “Stop the car!”

The car had brakes. We untangled ourselves and got out.

“Over there,” I said. “She’s over there somewhere.” We stared at the brush-matted hillside across the canyon.

“Gaw-dang!” the sheriff moaned. “Not in Cleo II! That there hell hole’s been nothing but a jinx since they sunk the first shaft. Water and gas and cave-in sand, every gaw-dang thing in the calendar. I’ve lugged my share of dead men out of there-me and my dad before me. What makes you think she’s in there, Teacher? Yuh see something?”

“I know she’s somewhere over there,” I evaded. “Maybe not in the mine but she’s there.”

“Let’s get looking,” the sheriff sighed. “I’d give a pretty to know how you saw her clear from the other side of the car.” He edged out of the car and lifted a shotgun after him.

“A gun?” I gasped. “‘For Lucine?”

“You didn’t see Petie, did you?” he said. “I did. I go animal hunting with guns.”

“No!” I cried. “She’ll come for us.”

“Might be,” he spat reflectively. “Or maybe not.”

We crossed the road and plunged into the canyon before the climb.

“Are you sure, Dita?” Low whispered. “I don’t reach her at all. Only some predator-“

“That’s Lucine,” I choked. “That’s Lucine.”

I felt Low’s recoil. “That-that animal?”

“That animal. Did we do it? Maybe we should have left her alone.”

“I don’t know.” I ached with his distress. “God help me, I don’t know.”

She was in Cleo II.

Over our tense silence we could hear the rattling of rocks inside as she moved. I was almost physically sick.

“Lucine,” I called into the darkness of the drift. “Lucine, come on out. It’s time to go home.”

A fist-sized rock sent me reeling, and I nursed my bruised shoulder with my hand.

“Lucine!” Low’s voice was commanding and spread all over the band. An inarticulate snarl answered him.

“Well?” The sheriff looked at us.

“She’s completely crazy,” Low said. “We can’t reach her at all.”

“Gaw-dang,” the sheriff said. “How we gonna get her out?”

No one had an answer, and we stood around awkwardly while the late-afternoon sun hummed against our backs and puddled softly in the mine entrance. There was a sudden flurry of rocks that rattled all about us, thudding on the bare ground and crackling in the brush-then a low guttural wail that hurt my bones and whitened the sheriff’s face.

“I’m gonna shoot,” he said, thinly. “I’m gonna shoot it daid” He hefted the shotgun and shuffled his feet.

“No!” I cried. “‘A child! A little girl!”

His eyes turned to me and his mouth twisted.

“That?” he asked and spat.

His deputy tugged at his sleeve and took him to one side and muttered rapidly. I looked uneasily at Low. He was groping for Lucine, his eyes closed, his face tense.

The two men set about gathering up a supply of small-sized rocks. They stacked them ready-to-hand near the mine entrance. Then, taking simultaneous deep breaths, they started a steady bombardment into the drift. For a while there was an answering shower from the mine, then an outraged squall that faded as Lucine retreated farther into the darkness.

“Gotter!” The two men redoubled their efforts, stepping closer to the entrance, and Low’s hand on my arm stopped me from following.

“There’s a drop-off in there,” he said. “They’re trying to drive her into it. I dropped a rock in it once and never heard it land.”

“It’s murder!” I cried, jerking away, grabbing the sheriff’s arm. “Stop it!”

“You can’t get her any other way,” the sheriff grunted, his muscles rippling under my restraining hand. “Better her dead than Petie and all the rest of us. She’s fixing to kill.”

“I’ll get her,” I cried, dropping to my knees and hiding my face in my hands. “I’ll get her. Give me a minute.” I concentrated as I had never concentrated before. I sent myself stumbling out of me into the darkness of the mine, into a heavier deeper uglier darkness, and I struggled with the darkness in Lucine until I felt it surging uncontrollably into my own mind. Stubbornly I persisted, trying to flick a fingernail of reason under the edge of this angry unreason to let a little sanity in. Low reached me just before the flood engulfed me. He reached me and held me until I could shudder myself back from hell.

Suddenly there was a rumble from inside the hill-a cracking crash and a yellow billow of dust from the entrance.

There was an animal howl that cut off sharply and then a scream of pure pain and terror-a child’s terrified cry, a horrified awakening in the darkness, a cry for help-for light!

“It’s Lucine!” I half sobbed. “She’s back. What happened?”

“Cave-in!” the sheriff said, his jaws working. “Shoring gone-rotted out years ago. Gotter for sure now, I guess.”

“But it’s Lucine again,” Low said. “We’ve got to get her out.”

“If that cave-in’s where I think it is,” the sheriff said, “she’s a goner. There’s a stretch in there that’s just silt. Finest slitheriest stuff you ever felt. Comes like a flood of water. Drowns a feller in dirt.” His lips tightened. “First dead man I ever saw I dragged out of a silt-down in here. I was sixteen, I guess-skinniest feller in the batch, so they sent me in after they located the body and shored up a makeshift drift. Dragged him out feet first. Stubborn feller-sucked out of that silt like outa mud. Drownded in dirt. We’ll sweat getting this body out, too.

“Well,” he hitched up his Levi’s, “might as well git on back to town and git a crew out here.”

“She’s not dead,” Low said. “She’s still breathing. She’s caught under something and can’t get loose.”

The sheriff looked at him through narrowed eyes. “I’ve heard you’re kinda tetched,” he said. “Sounds to me like you’re having a spell yourself, talking like that.

“Wanta go back to town, ma’am?” His voice gentled. “Nothing you can do around here any more. She’s a goner.”

“No, she isn’t,” I said. “She’s still alive. I can hear her.”

“Gaw-dang!” the sheriff muttered. “Two of them. Well, all right then. You two are deppytized to watch the mine so it don’t run away while I’m gone.” Grinning sourly at his own wit, he left, taking the deputy with him.

We listened to the echoes of the engine until they died away in the quiet quiet upsurging of the forested hills all around us. We heard the small wind in the brush and the far cry of some flying bird. We heard the pounding of our own pulses and the frightened bewilderedness that was Lucine. And we heard the pain that began to beat its brassy hammers through her body, and the sharp piercing stab of sheer agony screaming up to the bright twanging climax that snapped down into unconsciousness. And then both of us were groping in the darkness of the tunnel. I stumbled and fell and felt a heavy flowing something spread across my lap, weighting me down. Low was floundering ahead of me. “Go back,” he warned. “Go back or we’ll both be caught!”

“No!” I cried, trying to scramble forward. “I can’t leave you!”

“Go back,” he said. “I’ll find her and hold her until the men come. You’ve got to help me hold the silt back.”

“I can’t,” I whimpered. “I don’t know how!” I scooped at the heaviness in my lap.

“Yes, you do,” he said down under. “Just look and see.”

I scrambled back the interminable distance I hadn’t even been conscious of when going in, and crouched just outside the mine entrance, my dirty hands pressed to my wet face. I looked deep, deep inside me, down into a depth that suddenly became a height. I lifted me, mind and soul, up, up, until I found a new Persuasion, a new ability, and slowly, slowly, stemmed the creeping dry tide inside the mine-slowly began to part the black flood that had overswept Lucine so that only the arch of her arm kept her mouth and nose free of the invading silt.

Low burrowed his way into the mass, straining to reach Lucine before all the air was gone.

We were together, working such a work that we weren’t two people any more. We were one, but that one was a multitude, all bound together in this tremendous outpouring of effort. Since we were each other, we had no need for words as we worked in toward Lucine. We found a bent knee, a tattered hem, a twisted ankle-and the splintery edge of timber that pinned her down. I held the silt back while Low burrowed to find her head. Carefully we cleared a larger space for her face. Carefully we worked to free her body. Low finally held her limp shoulders in his arms-and was gone! Gone completely, between one breath and another.

“Low!” I screamed, scrambling to my feet at the tunnel’s mouth, but the sound of my cry was drowned in the smashing crash that shook the ground. I watched horrified as the hillside dimpled and subsided and sank into silence after a handful of pebbles, almost hidden in a puff of dust, rattled to rest at my feet.

I screamed again and the sky spun in a dizzy spiral rimmed with sharp pine tops, and suddenly unaccountably Severeid Swanson was there joining the treetops and the sky and spinning with them as he said, “Teesher! Teesher!”

The world steadied as though a hand had been put upon it. I scrambled to my feet.

“Severeid!” I cried. “They’re in there! Help me get them out! Help me!”

“Teesher,” Severeid shrugged helplessly, “no comprendo. I bring a flying one. I go get him. You say you gotta find. I find him. What you do out here with tears?”

Before I was conscious of another person standing beside Severeid I felt another person in my mind. Before I could bring my gasping into articulation the words were taken from me. Before I could move I heard the rending of rocks, and turning I sank to my knees and watched, in terrified wonder, the whole of the hillside lift itself and arch away like a furrow of turned earth before a plowshare. I saw silt rise like a yellow-red fountain above the furrow. I saw Low and Lucine rise with the silt. I saw the hillside flow back upon itself. I saw Low and Lucine lowered to the ground before me and saw all the light fading as I fell forward, my fingertips grazing the curve of Low’s cheek just before I drank deeply of blackness.

The sun was all. Through the thin blanket I could feel the cushioning of the fine sand under my cheek. I could hear the cold blowing overhead through the sighing trees, but where we were the warmth of the late-fall sun was gathered between granite palms and poured down into our tiny pocket against the mountain. Without moving I could reach Low and Valancy and Jemmy. Without opening my eyes I could see them around me, strengthening me. The moment grew too dear to hold. I rolled over and sat up.

“Tell me again,” I said. “How did Severeid ever find you the second time?”

I didn’t mind the indulgent smile Valancy and Jemmy exchanged. I didn’t mind feeling like a child-if they were the measure of adults.

“The first time he ever saw us,” Jemmy said, “was when he those to sleep off his vino around a boulder from where we chose to picnic. He was so drunk, or so childlike, or both, that he wasn’t amazed or outraged by our lifting and tumbling all over the sky. He was intrigued and delighted. He thought he had died and by-passed purgatory, and we had to restrain him to keep him from taking off after us. Of course, before we let him go we blocked his memory of us so he couldn’t talk of us to anyone except others of the People.” He smiled at me.

“That’s why we got real shook when we found that he’d told you and that you’re not of the People. At least not of the Home. You’re the third blow to our provincialism. Peter and Bethie were the first, but at least they were half of the People, but you-” he waggled his head mournfully, “you just didn’t track.”

“Yes,” I shivered, remembering the long years I hadn’t tracked with anyone. “I just didn’t track-” And I relaxed under the triple reassurance that flooded in from Low and Jemmy and his wife Valancy.

“Well, when you told Severeid yon wanted to find us he stumbled as straight as a wino string back to our old picnic grounds. He must have huddled over that tiny fire of his for several days before we found him-parched with thirst and far past his last memory of food.” Jemmy drew a long breath.

“Well, when we found out that Severeid knew of what we thought were two more of us-we’ve been in-gathering ever since the ships first arrived-well! We slept him all the way back. He would have been most unhappy with the speed and altitude of that return trip, especially without a car or plane.

“I caught your struggle to save Lucine when we were still miles away, and, praise the Power, I got there in time.”

“Yes,” I breathed; taking warmth from Low’s hand to thaw my memory of that moment.

“That’s the quickest I ever platted anything,” Jemmy said.

“And the first time I ever did it on a scale like that. I wasn’t sure that the late sunlight, without the moonlight, was strong enough, so I was openmouthed myself at the way the mountain ripped open.” He smiled weakly. “Maybe it’s just as well that we curb our practice of some of our Persuasions. It was really shake-making!”

“That’s for sure!” I shivered. “I wonder what Severeid thought of the deal?”

“‘We gave Severeid forgetfulness of the whole mine episode,” Valancy said. “But, as Jemmy would say, the sheriff was considerably shook when he got back with the crew. His only articulate pronouncement was, ‘Gaw-dang! Cleo II’s finally gone!’ “

“And Lucine?” I asked, savoring the answer I already knew.

“And Lucine is learning,” Valancy said. “‘Bethie, our Sensitive, found what was wrong and it is mended now. She’ll be normal very shortly.”

“And-me?” I breathed, hoping I knew.

“One of us!” the three cried to me down under. “Earth born or not-one of us!”

“But what a problem!” Jemmy said. “We thought we had us all catalogued. There were those of us completely of the People and those who were half of the People and half of Earth like Bethie and Peter. And then you came along. Not one bit of the People!”

“No,” I said, comfortably leaning against my ancestral stone wall again. “Not one bit of the People.”

“You look like confirmation of something we’ve been wondering about, though,” Valancy said. “Perhaps after all this long time of detour the people of Earth are beginning to reach the Persuasions, too. We’ve had hints of such developments but in such little bits and snippets in these research deals. We had no idea that anyone was so far along the way. No telling how many others there are all over the world waiting to be found.”

“Hiding, you mean,” I said. “You don’t go around asking to be found. Not after the first few reactions you get. Oh, maybe in the first fine flush of discovery you hurry to share the wonder, but you learn quickly enough to hide.”

“But so like us!” Valancy cried. “Two worlds and yet you’re so like us.”

“But she can’t inanimate-lift,” Low teased.

“And you can’t glow,” I retorted.

“And you can’t sun-and-moonlight-platt,” Jemmy said.

“Nor you cloud-herd,” I said. “‘And if you don’t stop picking on me I’ll do just that right now and snatch that shower away from-from Morenci and drench you all!”

“And she could do it!” Valancy laughed. “And we can’t, so let’s leave her alone.”

We all fell silent, relaxing on the sun-warmed sand until Jemmy rolled over and opened one eye.

“You know, Valancy, Dita and Low can communicate more freely than you and I. With them it’s sometimes almost involuntary.”

Valancy rolled over, too. “Yes,” she said. “And Dita can block me out, too. Only a Sorter is supposed to be able to block a Sorter and she’s not a Sorter.”

Jemmy waggled his head. “Just like Earthlings! Always out of step. What a problem this gal’s going to be!”

“Yep,” Low cut in underneath. “A problem and a half, but I think I’I1 keep her anyway.” I could feel his tender laughter.

I closed my eyes against the sun, feeling it golden across my lids.

“I’m un-lost,” I thought incredulously, aching with the sudden joy of it. “I’m really un-lost!”

I took tight hold of the hem of my dream, knowing finally and surely that someday I would be able to wrap the whole fabric of it not just around me but around others who were lost and bewildered, too. Someday we would all be what was only a dream now.

Softly I drowsed, Low’s hand warm upon my cheek-drowsed finally, without dreading an awakening.

V

“OH, BUT! Oh, but!” Lea thought excitedly. “Maybe, maybe-!” She turned at the pressure of a hand on her shoulder and met Melodye’s understanding eyes.

“No,” she said, “we’re still Outsiders. It’s like the color of your eyes. You’re either brown-eyed or you’re not. We’re not the People. Welcome to my bakery window.”

“Seems to me you’re fattening on just the sight and smell then.” It was Dr. Curtis.

“Fattening!” Melodye wailed. “‘Oh, no! Not after all my efforts-“

“Well, perhaps being nourished would be a more tactful way of saying it, as well as being more nearly exact. You don’t seem to be wasting away.”

“Maybe,” Melodye said, sobering, “maybe it’s because knowing there can be this kind of communication between the People, and trying to reach it for myself, I have made myself more receptive to communication from a source that knows no Outsiders-no East or West-no bond or free-“

“Hmm,” Dr. Curtis said. “There you have a point for pondering.”

Karen and Lea separated from the happily chattering groups as they passed the house. The two girls lingered, huddling in their jackets, until the sound of the other voices died in shadowy echoes down-canyon. Lea lifted her chin to a sudden cool breeze.

“Karen, do you think I’ll ever get straightened out?” she asked.

“If you’re not too enamored of your difficulties,” Karen said, her hand on the doorknob. “If you’re not too firmly set on remodeling ‘nearer to your heart’s desire.’ We may think this is a ‘sorry scheme of things’ but we have to learn that our own judgment is neither completely valid nor the polestar for charting our voyage. Too often we operate on the premise that what we think just has to be the norm for all things. Really, you’d find it most comforting to admit that you aren’t running the universe-that you can’t be responsible for everything, that there are lots of things you can and must relinquish into other hands-“

“To let go-” Lea looked down at her clenched hands. “I’ve held them like this so much it’s a wonder my nails haven’t grown through my palms.”

“Sneaky way to keep from having to use nail polish!” Karen laughed. “But come-to bed, to bed. Oh, I’ll be so glad when I can take you over the hill!” She opened the door and went in, tugging at her jacket. “I just ache to talk it over with you, good old Outsider-type talking. I acquired quite a taste for it that year I spent Outside-” Her voice faded down the hall. Lea looked up at the brilliant stars that punctuated the near horizon.

“The stars come down,” she thought, “down to the hills and the darkness. The darkness lifts up to the hills and the stars. And here on the porch is a me-sized empty place trying to Become. It’s so hard to reconcile darkness and the stars-but what else are we but an attempt at reconciliation?”

Night came again. It seemed to Lea that time was like a fan. The evenings were the carefully carved, tangible bones of the fan that held their identity firmly. The days folded themselves meekly away between the nights-days containing patterns only in that they were bounded on each side by evenings-folded days scribbled on unintelligibly. She held herself carefully away from any attempt to read the scrawling scribbles. If they meant anything she didn’t want to know it. Only so long as she could keep from reading meanings into anything or trying to relate one thing to another-only that long could she maintain the precarious peace of the folded days and active evenings.

She settled down almost gladly into the desk that had become pleasantly familiar. “It’s rather like drugging myself on movies or books or TV,” she thought. “I bring my mind empty to the Gatherings, let the stories flow through and take my mind empty home again.” Home? Home? She felt the fist clench in her chest and twist sharply, but she stubbornly concentrated on the lights that swung from the ceiling. Her attention sharpened on them. “Those aren’t electric lights,” she whispered to Karen. “Nor Coleman lanterns. What are they?”

“Lights,” Karen smiled. “They cost a dime apiece. A dime and Dita. She glowed them for us. I’ve been practicing like mad and I almost glowed one the other day.” She laughed ruefully.

“And she an Outsider! Oh, I tell you, Lea, you never know how much you use pride to keep yourself warm in this cold world until someone tears a hole in it and you shiver in the draft. Dita was a much-needed rip to a lot of us, bless her pointed little ears!”

“Greetings.” Dr. Curtis slid into his seat next to Lea. “You’ll like the story tonight,” he nodded at Lea. “You share a great deal with Miss Carolle. I find it very interesting-the story, that is-well, and your similarity, too. Well, anyway, I find the story interesting because my own fine Italian hand-” He subsided as Miss Carolle came down the aisle.

“Why, she’s crippled!” Lea thought in amazement. “Or has been,” she amended. Then wondered what there was about Miss Carolle that made her think of handicaps.

“Handicaps?” Lea flushed. “I share a great deal with her?” She twisted the corner of her Kleenex. “Of course,” she admitted humbly, ducking her head. “Handicapped-crippled-” She caught her breath as the darkness swelled-ripping to get in-or out-or just ripping. Before the tiny beads of cold sweat had time to finish forming on her upper lip and at her hairline she felt Karen touch her with a healing strength.

“Thank you, my soothing syrup,” she thought wryly. “Don’t be silly!” she heard Karen think sharply. “Laugh at your Band-Aids after the scabs are off!”

Miss Carolle murmured into the sudden silence, “We are met together in Thy Name.”

Lea let the world flow away from her.

“I have a theme song instead of just a theme,” Miss Carolle said. “Ready?’”

Music strummed softly, coming from nowhere and from

everywhere. Lea felt wrapped about by its soft fullness. Then a clear voice took up the melody, so softly, so untrespassingly, that it seemed to Lea that the music itself had modulated to words, voicing some cry of her own that had never found words before.

“By the rivers of Babylon,

There we sat down and wept,

When we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps

Upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive

Required of us a song

And they that wasted us

Required of us mirth

Saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’

How shall we sing the Lord’s song

In a strange land?”

Lea closed her eyes and felt weak tears slip from under the lids. She put her head down on her arms on the desk top to hide her face. Her heart, torn by the anguish of the music, was sore for all the captives who had ever been, of whatever captivity, but most especially for those who drove themselves into exile, who locked themselves into themselves and lost the key.

The crowd had become a listening person as Miss Carolle twisted her palms together, fingers spread and tense for a moment and then began ….

CAPTIVITY

I SUPPOSE many lonely souls have sat at their windows many nights looking out into the flood of moonlight, sad with a sadness that knows no comfort, a sadness underlined by a beauty that is in itself a pleasant kind of sorrow-but very few ever have seen what I saw that night.

I leaned against the window frame, close enough to the inflooding light so that it washed across my bare feet and the hem of my gown and splashed whitely against the foot of my bed, but picked up none of my features to identify me as a person, separate from the night. I was enjoying hastily, briefly, the magic of the loveliness before the moon would lose itself behind the heavy grove of cottonwoods that lined the creek below the curve of the back-yard garden. The first cluster of leaves had patterned itself against the edge of the moon when I saw him-the Francher kid. I felt a momentary surge of disappointment and annoyance that this perfect beauty should be marred by any person at all, let alone the Francher kid, but my annoyance passed as my interest sharpened.

What was he doing-half black and half white in the edge of the moonlight? In the higgledy-piggledy haphazardness of the town Groman’s Grocery sidled in at an angle to the back yard of the Somansons’ house, where I boarded-not farther than twenty feet away. The tiny high-up windows under the eaves of the store blinked in the full light. The Francher kid was standing, back to the moon, staring up at the windows. I leaned closer to watch. There was a waitingness about his shoulders, a prelude to movement, a beginning of something. Then there he was-up at the windows, pushing softly against the panes, opening a dark rectangle against the white side of the store. And then he was gone. I blinked and looked again. Store. Windows. One opened blankly. No Francher kid. Little windows. High up under the eaves. One opened blankly. No Francher kid.

Then the blank opening had movement inside it, and the Francher kid emerged with both hands full of something and slid down the moonlight to the ground outside.

“Now looky here!” I said to myself. “Hey! Lookit now!”

The Francher kid sat down on one end of a twelve-by-twelve that lay half in our garden and half behind the store. Carefully and neatly he arranged his booty along the timber. Three Cokes, a box of candy bars, and a huge harmonica that had been in the store for years. He sat and studied the items, touching each one with a fingertip. Then he picked up a Coke and studied the cap on it. He opened the box of candy and closed it again. He ran a finger down the harmonica and then lifted it between the pointer fingers of his two hands. Holding it away from him in the moonlight he looked at it, his head swinging slowly down its length. And, as his head swung, faintly, faintly, I heard a musical scale run up, then down. Careful note by careful note singing softly but clearly in the quiet night.

The moon was burning holes through the cottonwood tops by now and the yard was slipping into shadow. I heard notes riff rapidly up and cascade back down, gleefully, happily, and I saw the glint and chromium glitter of the harmonica, dancing from shadow to light and back again, singing untouched in the air. Then the moon reached an opening in the trees and spotlighted the Francher kid almost violently. He was sitting on the plank, looking up at the harmonica, a small smile on his usually sullen face. And the harmonica sang its quiet song to him as he watched it. His face shadowed suddenly as he looked down at the things laid out on the plank. He gathered them up abruptly and walked up the moonlight to the little window and slid through, head first. Behind him, alone, unattended, the harmonica danced and played, hovering and darting like a dragonfly. Then the kid reappeared, sliding head first out of the window. He sat crosslegged in the air beside the harmonica and watched and listened. The gay dance slowed and changed. The harmonica cried softly in the moonlight, an aching asking cry as it spiraled up and around until it slid through the open window and lost its voice in the darkness. The window clicked shut and the Francher kid thudded to the ground. He slouched off through the shadows, his elbows winging sharply backward as he jammed his fists in his pockets.

I let go of the curtain where my clenched fingers had cut four nail-sized holes through the. age-fragile lace, and released a breath I couldn’t remember holding. I stared at the empty plank and wet my lips. I took a deep breath of the mountain air that was supposed to do me so much good, and turned away from the window. For the thousandth time I muttered “I won’t,” and groped for the bed. For the thousandth time I finally reached for my crutches and swung myself over to the edge of the bed. I dragged the unresponsive half of me up onto the bed, arranging myself for sleep. I leaned against the pillow and put my hands in back of my head, my elbows fanning out on either side. I stared at the light square that was the window until it wavered and rippled before my sleepy eyes.

Still my mind was only nibbling at what had happened and showed no inclination to set its teeth into any sort of explanation. I awakened with a start to find the moonlight gone, my arms asleep and my prayers unsaid.

Tucked in bed and ringed about with the familiar comfort of my prayers, I slid away from awareness into sleep, following the dance and gleam of a harmonica that cried in the moonlight.

Morning sunlight slid across the boardinghouse breakfast table, casting alpine shadows behind the spilled corn flakes that lay beyond the sugar bowl. I squinted against the brightness and felt aggrieved that anything should be alive and active and so-so-hopeful so early in the morning. I leaned on my elbows over my coffee cup and contemplated a mood as black as the coffee.

“… Francher kid.”

I rotated my head upward on the axis of my two supporting hands, my interest caught. “Last night,” I half remembered, “last night-“

“I give up.” Anna Semper put a third spoonful of sugar in her coffee and stirred morosely. “‘Every child has a something-I mean there’s some way to reach every child-all but the Francher kid. I can’t reach him at all. If he’d even be aggressive or actively mean or actively anything, maybe I could do something, but he just sits there being a vegetable. And then I get so spittin’ mad when he finally does do something, just enough to keep him from flunking, that I could bust a gusset. I can’t abide a child who can and won’t.” She frowned darkly and added two more spoonfuls of sugar to her coffee.

“‘I’d rather have an eager moron than a won’t-do genius!” She tasted the coffee and grimaced. “Can’t even get a decent cup of coffee to arm me for my struggle with the little monster.”

I laughed. “Five spoonfuls of sugar would spoil almost anything. And don’t give up hope. Have you tried music? Remember, ‘Music hath charms-’”

Anna reddened to the tips of her ears. I couldn’t tell if it was anger or embarrassment. “Music!” Her spoon clished against her saucer sharply. She groped for words. “This is ridiculous, but I have had to send that Francher kid out of the room during music appreciation.”

“Out of the room? Why ever for? I thought he was a vegetable.”

Anna reddened still further. “He is,” she said stubbornly, “but-” She fumbled with her spoon, then burst forth, “But sometimes the record player won’t work when he’s in the room.”

I put my cup down slowly. “Oh, come now! This coffee is awfully strong, I’ll admit, but it’s not that strong.”

“No, really!” Anna twisted her spoon between her two hands. “When he’s in the room that darned player goes too fast or too slow or even backwards. I swear it. And one time-” Anna looked around furtively and lowered her voice, “one time it played a whole record and it wasn’t even plugged in!”

“You ought to patent that! That’d be a real money-maker.”

“Go on, laugh!” Anna gulped coffee again and grimaced.

“I’m beginning to believe in poltergeists-you know, the kind that are supposed to work through or because of adolescent kids. If you had that kid to deal with in class-“

“Yes.” I fingered my cold toast. “If only I did.”

And for a minute I hated Anna fiercely for the sympathy on her open face and for the studied not-looking at my leaning crutches. She opened her mouth, closed it, then leaned across the table.

“Polio?” she blurted, reddening.

“No,” I said. “Car wreck.”

“Oh.” She hesitated. “Well, maybe someday-“

“No,” I said. “No.” Denying the faint possibility that was just enough to keep me nagged out of resignation.

“Oh,” she said. “How long ago?”

“How long?” For a minute I was suspended in wonder at the distortion of time. How long? Recent enough to he a shock each time of immobility when I expected motion. Long enough ago that eternity was between me and the last time I moved unthinkingly.

“Almost a year,” I said, my memory aching to this time last year I could…

“You were a teacher?” Anna gave her watch a quick appraising look.

“Yes.” I didn’t automatically verify the time. The immediacy of watches had died for me. Then I smiled. “‘That’s why I can sympathize with you about the Francher kid. I’ve had them before.”

“There’s always one,” Anna sighed, getting up. “Well, it’s time for my pilgrimage up the hill. I’ll see you.” And the swinging door to the hall repeated her departure again and again with diminishing enthusiasm. I struggled to my feet and swung myself to the window.

“Hey!” I shouted. She turned at the gate, peering back as she rested her load of workbooks on the gatepost.

“Yes?”

“If he gives you too much trouble send him over here with a note for me. It’ll take him off your hands for a while at least.”

“Hey, that’s an idea. Thanks. That’s swell! Straighten your halo!” And she waved an elbow at me as she disappeared beyond the box elder outside the gate.

I didn’t think she would, but she did.

It was only a couple of days later that I looked up from my book at the creak of the old gate. The heavy old gear that served as a weight to pull it shut thudded dully behind the Francher kid. He walked up the porch steps under my close scrutiny with none of the hesitant embarrassment that most people would feel. He mounted the three steps and wordlessly handed me an envelope. I opened it. It said:

“Dust off your halo! I’ve reached the !! stage. Wouldn’t you like to keep him permanent-like?”

“Won’t you sit down?” I gestured to the porch swing, wondering how I was going to handle this deal.

He looked at the swing and sank down on the top porch step.

“What’s your name?”

He looked at me incuriously. “Francher.” His voice was husky and unused-sounding.

“Is that your first name?”

“That’s my name.”

“What’s your other name?” I asked patiently, falling into a first-grade dialogue in spite of his age.

“They put down Clement.”

“Clement Francher. A good-sounding name, but what do they call you?”

His eyebrows slanted subtly upward, and a tiny bitter smile lifted the corners of his mouth.

“With their eyes-juvenile delinquent, lazy trash, no-good off-scouring, potential criminal, burden-“

I winced away from the icy malice of his voice.

“But mostly they call me a whole sentence, like-‘Well, what can you expect from a background like that?’ “

His knuckles were white against his faded Levi’s. Then as I watched them the color crept back and, without visible relaxation, the tension was gone. But his eyes were the eyes of a boy too big to cry and too young for any other comfort.

“What is your background?” I asked quietly, as though I had the right to ask. He answered as simply as though he owed me an answer.

“We were with the carnival. We went to all the fairs around the country. Mother-” his words nearly died, “Mother had a mind-reading act. She was good. She was better than anyone knew-better than she wanted to be. It hurt and scared her sometimes to walk through people’s minds. Sometimes she would come back to the trailer and cry and cry and take a long long shower and wash herself until her hands were all water-soaked and her hair hung in dripping strings. They curled at the end. She couldn’t get all the fear and hate and-and tired dirt off even that way. Only if she could find a Good to read, or a dark church with tall candles.”

“And where is she now?” I asked, holding a small warm picture in my mind of narrow fragile shoulders, thin and defenseless under a flimsy moist robe, with one wet strand of hair dampening one shoulder of it.

“Gone.” His eyes were over my head but empty of the vision of the weatherworn siding of the house. “She died. Three years ago. This is a foster home. To try to make a decent citizen of me.”

There was no inflection in his words. They lay as flat as paper between us in our silence.

“You like music,” I said, curling Anna’s note around my forefinger, remembering what I had seen the other night.

“Yes.” His eyes were on the note. “‘Miss Semper doesn’t think so, though. I hate that scratchy wrapped-up music.”

“You sing?”

“No. I make music.”

“You mean you play an instrument?”

He frowned a little impatiently. “No. I make music with instruments.”

“Oh,” I said. “There’s a difference?”

“Yes.” He turned his head away. I had disappointed him or failed him in some way.

“Wait,” I said. “‘I want to show you something.” I struggled to my feet. Oh, deftly and quickly enough under the circumstances, I suppose, but it seemed an endless aching effort in front of the Francher kid’s eyes. But finally I was up and swinging in through the front door. When I got back with my key chain the kid was still staring at my empty chair, and I had to struggle back into it under his unwavering eyes.

“Can’t you stand alone?” he asked, as though he had a right to.

“Very little, very briefly,” I answered, as though I owed him an answer.

“You don’t walk without those braces.”

“I can’t walk without those braces. Here.” I held out my key chain. There was a charm on it: a harmonica with four notes, so small that I had never managed to blow one by itself. The four together made a tiny breathy chord, like a small hesitant wind.

He took the chain between his fingers and swung the charm back and forth, his head bent so that the sunlight flickered across its tousledness. The chain stilled. For a long moment there wasn’t a sound. Then clearly, sharply, came the musical notes, one after another. There was a slight pause and then four notes poured their separateness together to make a clear sweet chord.

“You make music,” I said, barely audible.

“Yes.” He gave me back my key chain and stood up. “I guess she’s cooled down now. I’ll go on back.”

“To work?”

“To work.” He smiled wryly. “For a while anyway.” He started down the walk.

“What if I tell?” I called after him.

“I told once,” he called back over his shoulder. “Try it if you want to.”

I sat for a long time on the porch after he left. My fingers were closed over the harmonica as I watched the sun creep up my skirts and into my lap. Finally I turned Anna’s envelope over. The seal was still secure. The end was jagged where I had torn it. The paper was opaque. I blew a tiny breathy chord on the harmonica. Then I shivered as cold crept across my shoulders. The chill was chased away by a tiny hot wave of excitement. So his mother could walk through the minds of others. So he knew what was in a sealed letter-or had he got his knowledge from Anna before the letter? So he could make music with harmonicas. So the Francher kid was … My hurried thoughts caught and came to a full stop. What was the Francher kid?

After school that day Anna toiled up the four front steps and rested against the railing, half sitting and half leaning. “I’m too tired to sit down,” she said. “I’m wound up like a clock and I’m going to strike something pretty darned quick.” She half laughed and grimaced a little. “Probably my laundry. I’m fresh out of clothes.” She caught a long ragged breath. “You must have built a fire under that Francher kid. He came back and piled into his math book and did the whole week’s assignments that he hadn’t bothered with before. Did them in less than an hour, too. Makes me mad, though-” She grimaced again and pressed her hand to her chest. “Darn that chalk dust anyway. Thanks a million for your assist. I wish I were optimistic enough to believe it would last.” She leaned and breathed, her eyes closing with the effort. “Awful shortage of air around here.” Her hands fretted with her collar. “Anyway the Francher kid said you’d substitute for me until my pneumonia is over.” She laughed, a little soundless laugh. “He doesn’t know that it’s just chalk dust and that I’m never sick.” She buried her face in her two hands and burst into tears. “I’m not sick, am I? It’s only that darn Francher kid!”

She was still blaming him when Mrs. Somanson came out and led her into her bedroom and when the doctor arrived to shake his head over her chest.

So that’s how it was that the first-floor first grade was hastily moved upstairs and the junior high was hastily moved downstairs and I once more found myself facing the challenge of a class, telling myself that the Francher kid needed no special knowledge to say that I’d substitute. After all I like Anna, I was the only substitute available, and besides, any slight-substitute’s pay!-addition to the exchequer was most welcome.

“You can live on those monthly checks, but it’s pleasant to have a couple of extra coins to clink together.

By midmorning I knew a little of what Anna was sweating over. The Francher kid’s absolutely dead-weight presence in the room was a drag on everything we did. Recitations paused, limped and halted when they came to him. Activities swirled around his inactivity, creating distracting eddies. It wasn’t only a negative sort of nonparticipation on his part but an aggressively positive not-doingness. It wasn’t just a hindrance but an active opposition, without any overt action for any sort of proof of his attitude. This, along with my disappointment in not having the same comfortable rapport with him that I’d had before, and the bone-weariness of having to be vertical all day instead of collapsing horizontally at intervals, and the strain of getting back into harness, cold, with a roomful of teeners and subteeners, had me worn down to a nubbin by early afternoon.

So I fell back on the perennial refuge of harried teachers and opened a discussion of “what I want to be when I grow up.” We had gone through the usual nurses and airplane hostesses and pilots and bridge builders and the usual unexpected ballet dancer and CPA (and he still can’t add six and nine!) until the discussion frothed like a breaking wave against the Francher kid and stilled there.

He was lounging down in his seat, his weight supported by the back of his neck and the remote end of his spine. The class sighed collectively though inaudibly and waited for his contribution.

“And you, Clement?” I prompted, shifting vainly, trying to ease the taut cry of aching muscles.

“An outlaw,” he said huskily, not bothering to straighten up.

“I’m going to keep a list and break every law there is-and get away with it, too.”

“Whatever for?” I asked, trying to reassure the .sick pang inside me. “An outlaw is no use at all to society.”

“Who wants to be of use?” he asked. “I‘11 use society-and I can do it.”

“Perhaps,” I said, knowing full well it was so. “But that’s not the way to happiness.”

“Who’s happy? The bad are unhappy because they are bad. The good are unhappy because they’re afraid to be bad-“

“Clement,” I said gently, “I think you are-“

“I think he’s crazy,” said Rigo, his black eyes flashing. “Don’t pay him no never mind, Miss Carolle. He’s a screwball. He’s all the time saying crazy things.”

I saw the heavy world globe on the top shelf of the bookcase behind Rigo shift and slide toward the edge. I saw it lift clear of the shelf and I cried out, “Clement!” The whole class started at the loud urgency of my voice, the Francher kid included, and Rigo moved just far enough out of line that the falling globe missed him and cracked itself apart at his feet.

Someone screamed and several gasped and a babble of voices broke out. I caught the Francher kid’s eyes, and he flushed hotly and ducked his head. Then he straightened up proudly and defiantly returned my look. He wet his forefinger in his mouth and drew an invisible tally mark in the air before him. I shook my head at him, slowly, regretfully. What could I do with a child like this?

Well, I had to do something, so I told him to stay in after school, though the kids wondered why. He slouched against the door, defiance in every awkward angle of his body and in the hooking of his thumbs into his front pockets. I let the parting noises fade and die, the last hurried clang of lunch pail, the last flurry of feet, the last reverberant slam of the outside door. The Francher kid shifted several times, easing the tension of his shoulders as he waited. Finally I said, “Sit down.”

“No.” His word was flat and uncompromising. I looked at him, the gaunt young planes of his face, the unhappy mouth thinned to stubbornness, the eyes that blinded themselves with dogged defiance. I leaned across the desk, my hands clasped, and wondered what I could say. Argument would do no good. A kid of that age has an answer for everything.

“We all have violences,” I said, tightening my hands, “but we can’t always let them out. Think what a mess things would be if we did.” I smiled wryly into his unresponsive face. “if we gave in to every violent impulse I’d probably have slapped you with an encyclopedia before now.” His eyelids flicked, startled, and he looked straight at me for the first time.

“Sometimes we can just hold our breath until the violence swirls away from us. Other times it’s too big and it swells inside us like a balloon until it chokes our lungs and aches our jaw hinges.” His lids flickered down over his watching eyes. “But it can be put to use. Then’s when we stir up a cake by hand or chop wood or kick cans across the back yard or-” I faltered, “or run until our knees bend both ways from tiredness.”

There was a small silence while I held my breath until my violent rebellion against unresponsive knees swirled away from me.

“There are bigger violences, I guess,” I went on. “From them come assault and murder, vandalism and war, but even those can be used. If you want to smash things there are worthless things that need to be smashed and things that ought to be destroyed, tipped apart and ruined. But you have no way of knowing what those things are, yet. You must keep your violences small until you learn how to tell the difference.”

“I can smash.” His voice was thick.

“Yes,” I said. “But smash to build. “You have no right to hurt other people with your own hurt.”

“People!” The word was profanity.

I drew a long breath. If he were younger… You can melt stiff rebellious arms and legs with warm hugs or a hand across a wind-ruffled head or a long look that flickers into a smile, but what can you do with a creature that’s neither adult nor child but puzzlingly both? I leaned forward.

“Francher,” I said softly, “if your mother could walk through your mind now-“

He reddened, then paled. His mouth opened. He swallowed tightly. Then he jerked himself upright in the doorway.

“Leave my mother alone.” His voice was shaken and muffled. “You leave her alone. She’s dead.”

I listened to his footsteps and the crashing slam of the outside door. For some sudden reason I felt my heart follow him down the hill to town. I sighed, almost with exasperation. So this was to be a My Child. We teacher-types sometimes find them. They aren’t our pets; often they aren’t even in our classes. But they are the children who move unasked into our hearts and make claims upon them over and above the call of duty. And this My Child I had to reach. Somehow I had to keep him from sliding on over the borderline to lawlessness as he so surely was doing-this My Child who, even more than the usual My Child, was different.

I put my head down on the desk and let weariness ripple up over me. After a minute I began to straighten up my papers. I made the desk top tidy and took my purse out of the bottom drawer. I struggled to my feet and glared at my crutches. Then I grinned weakly.

“Come, friends,” I said. “Leave us help one another depart.”

Anna was out for a week. After she returned I was surprised at my reluctance to let go of the class. The sniff of chalk dust was in my nostrils and I ached to be busy again. So I started helping out with the school programs and teen-age dances, which led naturally to the day my committee and I stood in the town recreation hall and looked about us despairingly.

“How long have those decorations been up?” I craned my neck to get a better view of the wilderness of sooty cobwebby crepe paper that clotted the whole of the high ceiling and the upper reaches of the walls of the ramshackle old hall that leaned wearily against the back of the saloon. Twyla stopped chewing the end of one of her heavy braids. “About four years, I guess. At least the newest. Pea-Green put it all up.”

“Pea-Green?”

“Yeah. He was a screwball. He used up every piece of crepe paper in town and used nails to put the stuff up-big nails. He’s gone now. He got silicosis and went down to Hot Springs.”

“Well, nails or no nails we can’t have a Hallowe’en dance with that stuff up.”

“Going to miss the old junk. How we going to get it down?” Janniset asked.

“Pea-Green used an extension ladder he borrowed from a power crew that was stringing some wires up to the Bluebell Mine,” Rigo said. “But we’ll have to find some other way to get it down, now.”

I felt a flick of something at my elbow. It might have been the Francher kid shifting from one foot to the other, or it might have been just a thought slipping by. I glanced sideways but caught only the lean line of his cheek and the shaggy back of his neck.

“I think I can get a ladder.” Rigo snapped his thumbnail loudly with his white front teeth. “It won’t reach clear up but it’ll help.”

“We could take rakes and just drag it down,” Twyla suggested.

We all laughed until I sobered us all with, “It might come to that yet, bless the buttons of whoever thought up twenty-foot ceilings. Well, tomorrow’s Saturday. Everybody be here about nine and we’ll get with it.”

“Can’t.” The Francher kid cast anchor unequivocally, snapping all our willingness up short.

“Oh?” I shifted my crutches, and, as usual, his eyes fastened on them, almost hypnotically. “That’s too bad.”

“How come?” Rigo was belligerent. “If the rest of us can you oughta be able to. Ever’body’s s’posed to do this together. Ever’body does the dirty work and ever’body has the fun. You’re nobody special. You’re on this committee, aren’t you?”

I restrained myself from a sudden impulse to clap my hand over Rigo’s mouth midway in his protest. I didn’t like the quietness of the Francher kid’s hands, hut he only looked slantwise up at Rigo and said, “I got volunteered on this committee. I didn’t ask to. And to fix this joint up today. I gotta work tomorrow.”

“Work? Where?” Rigo frankly disbelieved.

“Sorting ore at the Absalom.”

Rigo snapped his thumbnail again derisively. “That penny-picking stuff? They pay peanuts.”

“Yes.” And the Francher kid slouched off around the corner of the building without a glance or a good-by.

“Well, he’s working!” Twyla thoughtfully spit out a stray hair and pointed the wet end of her braid with her fingers.

“The Francher kid’s doing something. I wonder how come?”

“Trying to figure that dopey dilldock out?” Janniset asked.

“Don’t waste your time. I bet he’s just goofing off.”

“You kids run on,” I said. “We can’t do anything tonight. I’ll lock up. See you in the morning.”

I waited inside the dusty echoing hall until the sound of their going died down the rocky alley that edged around the rim of the railroad cut and dissolved into the street of the town. I still couldn’t reconcile myself to slowing their steps to match my uncertain feet. Maybe someday I would he able to accept my braces as others accept glasses; but not yet-oh, not yet!

I left the hall and snapped the dime-store padlock shut. I struggled precariously along through the sliding shale and loose rocks until suddenly one piece of shale shattered under the pressure of one of my crutches and I stumbled off balance. I saw with shake-making clarity in the accelerated speed of the moment that the only place my groping crutch could reach was the smooth curving of a small boulder, and, in that same instant, I visualized myself sprawling helplessly, hopelessly, in the clutter of the alley, a useless nonfunctioning piece of humanity, a drag and a hindrance on everyone again. And then, at the last possible instant, the smooth boulder slid aside and my crutch caught and steadied on the solid damp hollow beneath it. I caught my breath with relief and unclenched my spasmed hands a little. Lucky!

Then all at once there was the Francher kid at my elbow again, quietly waiting.

“Oh!” I hoped he hadn’t seen me floundering in my awkwardness. “Hi! I thought you’d gone.”

“I really will be working.” His voice had lost its flatness. “I’m not making much but I’m saving to buy me a musical instrument.”

“Well, good!” I said, smiling into the unusualness of his straightforward look. “What kind of instrument?”

“I don’t know. Something that will sing like this-“

And there on the rocky trail with the long light slanting through the trees for late afternoon, I heard soft tentative notes that stumbled at first and then began to sing: “Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling-” Each note of this, my favorite, was like a white flower opening inside me in ascending order like steps-steps that I could climb freely, lightly….

“What kind of instrument am I saving for?” The Francher kid’s voice pulled me back down to earth.

“You’ll have to settle for less.” My voice shook a little. “There isn’t one like that.”

“But I’ve heard it-” He was bewildered.

“Maybe you have. But was anyone playing it?”

“Why yes-no. I used to hear it from Mom. She thought it to me,”

“Where did your mom come from?” I asked impulsively.

“From terror and from panic places. From hunger and from hiding-to live midway between madness and the dream-” He looked at me, his mouth drooping a little. “She promised me I’d understand someday, but this is someday and she’s gone.”

“Yes,” I sighed, remembering how once I had dreamed that someday I’d run again. “But there are other somedays ahead-for you.”

“Yes,” he said. “And time hasn’t stopped for you either.” .And he was gone.

I looked after him. “Doggone!” I thought. “There I go again, talking to him as though he made sense!” I poked the end of my crutch in the damp earth three times, making interlacing circles. Then with quickened interest I poked the boulder that had rolled up out of the slight hollow before the crutch tip had landed there.

“Son-a-gun!” I cried aloud. “Well, son-a-gun!”

Next morning at five of nine the kids were waiting for me at the door to the hall, huddled against the October chill that the milky sun hadn’t yet had time to disperse. Rigo had a shaky old ladder with two broken rungs and splashes of old paint gumming it liberally.

“That looks awfully rickety,” I said. “We don’t want any blood spilled on our dance floor. It’s bad for the wax.”

Rigo grinned. “It’ll hold me up,” he said. “I used it last night to pick apples. You just have to be kinda careful.”

“Well, be so then,” I smiled, unlocking the door. “Better safe than-” My words faltered and died as I gaped in at the open door. The others pushed in around me, round-eyed and momentarily silenced. My first wild impression was that the ceiling had fallen in.

“My gorsh!” Janniset gasped. “what hit this place?”

“Just look at it!” Twyla shrilled. “Hey! Just look at it!” We looked as we scuffled forward. Every single piece of paper was gone from the ceiling and walls. Every scrap of paper was on the floor, in tiny twisted confetti-sized pieces like a tattered faded snowfall, all over the floor. There must have been an incredible amount of paper tangled in the decorations, because we waded wonderingly almost ankle-deep through it.

“Looky here!” Rigo was staring at the front of the bandstand. Lined up neatly across the front stood all the nails that had been pulled out of the decorations, each balanced precisely on its head.

Twyla frowned and bit her lip. “It scares me,” she said.

“It doesn’t feel right. It looks like somebody was mad or crazy-like they tore up the paper wishing they was killing something. And then to put all those nails so-so even and careful, like they had been put down gently-that looks madder than the paper.” She reached over and swept her finger sideways, wincing as though she expected a shock. A section of the nails toppled with faint pings on the bare boards of the stand. In a sudden flurry Twyla swept all the nails over. “There!” she said, wiping her finger on her dress.

“Now it’s all crazy.”

“Well,” I said, “crazy or not, somebody’s saved us a lot of trouble. Rigo, we won’t need your ladder. Get the brooms and let’s get this mess swept out.”

While they were gone for the brooms I picked up two nails and clicked them together in a metrical cadence: “Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling-“

By noon we had the place scrubbed out and fairly glistening through its shabby paint. By evening we had the crisp new orange-and-black decorations up, low down and with thumbtacks, and all sighed with tired satisfaction at how good the place looked. As we locked up Twyla suddenly said in a small voice, “What if it happens again before the dance Friday? All our work-“

“It won’t,” I promised. “It won’t.”

In spite of my hanging back and trying the lock a couple of times Twyla was still waiting when I turned away from the door. She was examining the end of her braid carefully as she said, “It was him, wasn’t it?’”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“How did he do it?”

“You’ve known him longer than I have. How did he do it?”

“Nobody knows the Francher kid,” she said. Then softly, “He looked at me once, really looked at me. He’s funny-but not to laugh,” she hastened. “When he looks at me it-” her hand tightened on her braid until her head tilted and she glanced up slantingly at me, “it makes music in me.

“You know,” she said quickly into the echo of her unorthodox words, “you’re kinda like him. He makes me think things and believe things I wouldn’t ever by myself. You make me say things I wouldn’t ever by myself no, that’s not quite fight. You let me say things I wouldn’t dare to say to anyone else.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, Twyla.”

I had forgotten the trembling glamor of a teen-age dance. I had forgotten the cautious stilted gait of high heels on loafer-type feet. I had forgotten how the look of maturity could be put on with a tie and sport jacket and how-how peoplelike teen-agers could look when divorced for a while from Levi’s and flannel shirts. Janniset could hardly contain himself for his own splendor and turned not a hair of his incredibly polished head when I smiled my “Good evening, Mr. Janniset.” But in his pleased satisfaction at my formality he forgot himself as he turned away and hoisted up his sharply creased trousers as though they were his old Levi’s.

Rigo was stunning in his Latin handsomeness, and he and Angie so drowned in each other’s dark eyes that I could see why our Mexican youngsters usually marry so young. And Angie! Well, she didn’t look like any eighth grader-her strapless gown, her dangly earrings, her laughing flirtatious eyes-but taken out of the context and custom and tradition she was breath-takingly lovely. Of course it was on her “unsuitable for her age” dress and jewelry and make-up that the long line of mothers and aunts and grandmothers fixed disapproving eyes, but I’d be willing to bet that there were plenty who wished their own children could look as lovely.

In this small community the girls always dressed up to the hilt at the least provocation, and the Hallowe’en dance was usually the first event of the fall that could serve as an excuse. Crinolined skirts belled like blossoms across the floor above the glitter of high heels, but it was only a matter of a few minutes before the shoes were kicked off, to toe in together forlornly under a chair or dangle from some motherly forefinger while unprotected toes braved the brogans of the boys.

Twyla was bright-checked and laughing, dance after dance, until the first intermission. She and Janniset brought me punch where I sat among the other spectators; then Janniset skidded off across the floor, balancing his paper cup precariously as he went to take another look at Marty, who at school was only a girl but here, all dressed up, was dawn of woman-wonder for him. Twyla gulped her punch hastily and then licked the corners of her mouth.

“He isn’t here,” she said huskily.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “l wanted him to have fun with the rest of you. Maybe he’ll come yet.”

“Maybe.” She twisted her cup slowly, then hastily shoved it under the chair as it threatened to drip on her dress.

“That’s a beautiful dress,” I said. “I love the way your petticoat shows red against the blue when you whirl.”

“Thank you.” She smoothed the billowing of her skirt.

“I feel funny with sleeves. None of the others have them. That’s why he didn’t come, I bet. Not having any dress-up clothes like the others, I mean. Nothing but Levi’s.”

“Oh, that’s a shame. If I had known-“

“No. Mrs. McVey is supposed to buy his clothes. She gets money for them. All she does is sit around and talk about how much she sacrifices to take care of the Francher kid and she doesn’t take care of him at all. It’s her fault-“

“Let’s not be too critical of others. There may be circumstances we know nothing of-and besides-” I nodded my head, “he’s here now.”

I could almost see the leap of her heart under the close-fitting blue as she turned to look.

The Francher kid was lounging against the door, his face closed and impassive. I noted with a flame of anger at Mrs. McVey that he was dressed in his Levi’s, faded almost white from many washings, and a flannel shirt, the plaid of which Was nearly indistinguishable except along the seams. It wasn’t fair to keep him from being like the other kids even in this minor way-or maybe especially in this way, because clothes can’t be hidden the way a mind or soul can.

I tried to catch his eye and beckon him in, but he looked only at the bandstand where the band members were preparing to resume playing. It was tragic that the Francher kid had only this handful of inexpertly played instruments to feed his hunger on. He winced back into the darkness at their first blare, and I felt Twyla’s tenseness as she turned to me.

“He won’t come in,” she half shouted against the take-a-melody-tear-it-to-pieces-stick-it-back-together-bleeding type of music that was going on.

I shook my head regretfully. “I guess not,” I mouthed and then was drawn into a half-audible, completely incomprehensible conversation with Mrs. Frisney. It wasn’t until the next dance started and she was towed away by Grampa Griggs that I could turn back to Twyla. She was gone. I glanced around the room. Nowhere the swirl of blue echoing the heavy brown-gold swing of her ponytail.

There was no reason for me to feel apprehensive. There were any number of places she might have gone and quite legitimately, but I suddenly felt an overwhelming need for fresh air and swung myself past the romping dancers and out into the gasping chill of the night. I huddled closer inside my jacket, wishing it were on right instead of merely flung around my shoulders. But the air tasted clean and fresh. I don’t know what we’d been breathing in the dance hall, but it wasn’t air. By the time I’d got the whatever-it-was out of my lungs and filled them with the freshness of the night I found myself halfway down the path over the edge of the railroad cut. There hadn’t been a train over the single track since nineteen-aught-something, and just beyond it was a thicket of willows and cottonwoods and a few scraggly pińon trees. As I moved into the shadow of the trees I glanced up at the sky ablaze with a skrillion stars that dissolved into light near the lopsided moon and perforated the darker horizon with brilliance. I was startled out of my absorption by the sound of movement and music. I took an uncertain step into the dark. A few yards away I saw the flick of skirts and started to call out to Twyla. But instead I rounded the brush in front of me and saw what she was intent upon.

The Francher kid was dancing-dancing all alone in the quiet night. No, not alone, because a column of yellow leaves had swirled up from the ground around him and danced with him to a melody so exactly like their movement that I couldn’t be sure there was music. Fascinated, I watched the drift and sway, the swirl and turn, the treetop-high rise and the hesitant drifting fall of the Francher kid and the autumn leaves. But somehow I couldn’t see the kid as a separate Levied flannel-shirted entity. He and the leaves so blended together that the sudden sharp definition of a hand or a turning head was startling. The kid was just a larger leaf borne along with the smaller in the chilly winds of fall. On a final minor glissade of the music the Francher kid slid to the ground.

He stood for a moment, head bent, crumbling a crisp leaf in his fingers; then he turned swiftly defensive to the rustle of movement. Twyla stepped out into the clearing. For a moment they stood looking at each other without a word. Then Twyla’s voice came So softly I could barely hear it.

“I would have danced with you.”

“With me like this?” He gestured at his clothes.

“Sure. It doesn’t matter.”

“In front of everyone?”

“If you wanted to. I wouldn’t mind.”

“Not there,” he said. “It’s too tight and hard.”

“Then here,” she said, holding out her hands.

“The music-” But his hands were reaching for hers,