Pilgrimage (19 page)

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."