Pilgrimage (21 page)

"'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?"