Holding Wonder Part 19

"Where do you suppose they s.h.i.+pped Gayla home from?" I asked.

"Gayla?" said Peter. "Where did you get that name? Did someone call her by it?"

I felt goose b.u.mps run down my arms to the elbows. "No," I said, thinking back over the recent events. "No one mentioned any names, but-but her name is-was-is Gayla!"

We eyed one another and I plunged back into words.

"Maybe from Phoenix," I said. "It was rather fleshpotty in the old days"

"Or Tombstone, maybe?" suggested Peter. "It was even more so."

"Did Tombstone have a railway?" I asked, lifting my cup. "I don't remember seeing a depot there even nowadays. I think Benson would be the closest."

"Maybe it wasn't by rail," said Peter. "Maybe freight. You know, those big wagons."

"It was by rail," I said, grimacing at the taste of cold coffee. Peter laughed. "Well," I said, "I don't like cold coffee."

"It wasn't that," said Peter. "You're sure her name is Gayla and that she came home by rail, but you can't remember whether or not Tombstone has a depot and we were through there last week!"

"Peter," I said through the pluming steam of a fresh cup of coffee. "'That brings up something interesting. This-this thing is progressive. First I only saw still things. Then moving things. Then people. Then I heard thoughts.

Today I heard two people talk out loud. And now I know something about them that I didn't see or hear. How far do you suppose-"

Peter grabbed both my hands, slos.h.i.+ng coffee over our tight fingers. "Don't you dare!" he said tensely, "Don't you dare take one step into whatever this is! Look if you want to and listen when you can, but stay out of it!"

My jaw dropped. "Peter!" My breath wasn't working very well. "Peter, that's what you said when I was going to go into that store. Peter, how could I hear then what you didn't say until now? Or are you just saying again what you.

said then-Peter!"

Peter mopped my hands and his. "You didn't tell me that part about the store."

So I did. And it shook him, too. Peter suddenly grinned and said, "Whenever I said it, it's worth repeating. Stay out of this!" His grin died and his handstightened on mine. His eyes were troubled.

"Let's go home," I said, tears suddenly biting the back of my eyes. "I don't call this enjoying." .

As we left the cafe, I said, "Peter, do you think that if we went back up there we could pick up the procession:. again and follow it again-"

"No," he said. "Not unless we could duplicate everything-time, temperature, humidity, mental state-maybe even the color of lipstick you had on once today." He grinned at me. "You look a little bedraggled."

"Look bedraggled?" I eased myself into the car. "How do you suppose I feel?

And the bicycling hasn't helped matters, either. I think I sprained something."

Later that week I was trying to find an address in a new subdivision of curved streets, cul-de-sacs too narrow to turn in, and invisible house numbers.

Finally I even forgot the name of the stravenue I was looking for. I pulled up to park along a school fence on Fort Lowell Road. I was rummaging in my purse, trying to find the paper I had written the address on, when I stopped in mid-rummage.

From the corner of my eye I could see the school grounds-hard packed adobe around a swing and teetertotter, and the front door of a tiny, one-roomed schoolhouse. The children were outside for a ghostly recess. I heard no sound.

I studiously kept my eyes on the city map spread out on the steering wheel as I counted twelve children, though one hyper-active little boy might have been number one, nine and twelve, he moved so fast.

I was parked next to a three-strand barbed-wire fence lined by chaparral more than head-high in places. It formed a rough hedge around the school grounds.

Right by my car was a break in the brush through which I could see the school.

Clouds were stacking above the school in tumbled blue and white. Over the Catalinas a silent lightning flicked and flicked again. With the squeal of the children spattered by a brief gust of raindrops, the audio of the scene began to function.

The clang of a handbell caught all the children in midstride and then pulled them, running, toward the schoolhouse. I smiled and went back to comparing the map that stubbornly insisted that the east-west stravenue I sought was a north-south calle, with the address on the paper.

A side movement brought the playground back into my periphery. A solid chunk of a child was trudging across the playground, exasperation implicit in the dangling jerk of her arms as she plodded, her nondescript skirts catching her s.h.i.+ns and flapping gracelessly behind her. She was headed straight for me and I wondered ruefully if I was going to get walked through, body, bones and car.

Then the barbedwire fence and the clumps of brush focused in.

Gayla-I knew her as I would a long-time acquaintance-was crouched under a bush on ground that had been worn floor-hard and smooth by small bodies. She was hidden from the school by the bushes but sat, leaning forearms -careful of the barbs-on the second strand of wire that sagged with repet.i.tions of such scenes. She was looking, dreamy-faced, through me and beyond me.

"Make my own way," she murmured. "Doesn't that sound lovely! A highway. Make my own way along the highway, away, away-"

"Gayla!" The plodding girl had reached the bushes. "The bell rang a long timeago! Miss Pederson's awful mad at you. This is the third time this week she's had to send for you! And it's going to rain-" The girl dropped to all fours and scrambled by one of the well-worn paths into the tiny room-like enclosure with Gayla. "You better watch out!" She s.n.a.t.c.hed her wadded skirts from under her knees. "Next thing you know she'll be telling your Aunt Faith on you."

"Aunt Faith-" Gayla stirred and straightened. With both hands she put back the dark curling of her front hair. "Know what she said this morning, Vera? This is my last year in school. She said I'm getting old enough to make my own way-" She savored the words.

"Oh, Gayla!" Vera sank back against her heels. "Isn't she going to let you finish with me? Only another year and then we'll be fourteen-"

"No. I've been a burden long enough, she said, taking food out of her own children's mouths. No-" Her eyes dreamed through me again. "I'm going to make my own way. To the City. I'm going to find a job there-"

"The City!" Vera laughed shortly. "Silly! As if your Aunt would let you go!

And what kind of job do you think you could find, being so young?"

"Ben Collins is looking for a girl again. I'll bet your Aunt Faith-"

"Ben Collins!" Gayla's startled face swung about to look at Vera. "What's the matter with Ruth?"

"She's going to live with her uncle in Central. She'd rather milk cows and chop cotton than tend that Collins bunch. You think sleeping four to a bed is crowded. At least there's room for two at each end. At Collins' you'll sleep five to a bed-cross-wise.

"Come on, Gayla! Miss Pederson's throwing a fit" She began to back out of the playhouse.

"If Aunt Faith tries to make me go there, I'll run away." Gayla was following slowly, the two girls face to face on hands and knees. "And don't you go telling, either, Vera.

I'll run away to the City and get rich and when I come back, she'll be sorry she was so mean. But I'll forgive her and give her a magnificent gift and she'll cry and beg my- "Your Aunt Faith cry!" Vera snickered. "Not that I believe for one minute that you'll ever run away, but if you do, don't ever come back. You know your Aunt Faith better than that!"

The two girls emerged from the bushes and stood erect. Vera towed the reluctant Gayla toward the schoolhouse. Gayla looked wistfully back over her shoulder at the dusty road leading away from the school. Make my own way. I heard the thought trail behind her like a banner. Seek my fortune, and someone who'll love me. Someone who'll want me.

Lightning stabbed out of the darkening sky. A sudden swirling wind and an icy spate of stinging raindrops that came with the thunder jolting across the hills, sent the two girls racing for the schoolhouse and- My winds.h.i.+eld was speckling with rain. I blinked down at my street map. There was my stravenue, right under my thumb, neither north-and-south nor east-and-west, but sidling off widders.h.i.+ns across the subdivision. I startedmy car and looked for a moment at the high cyclone fence that now enclosed the huge sprawl of the modern school. "Her own way! Was it her way-"

I suppose I could have started all sorts of scholarly research to find out who Gayla was, but I didn't, mostly because I knew it would be unproductive. Even in my birthtime, a birth registration was not required around here. Neither were death certificates or burial permits. It was not only possible, but very commonplace in those days to be one whose name was "writ in water." And an awful lot of water had been writ in since the turn of the century-if so she lived then. Then, too, I didn't care to make a cold black and white business of this seeing business. I agreed with Dr. Barstow. I preferred to enjoy. I'd rather have Gayla and girl friend swept away from me diagonally across a windy playground under a thunder-heavy sky.

Well, in the days that followed, a cactus wren built a nest roughly where the upper right corner of Peter's easy chair came, and for a while I couldn't help laughing every time I saw her tiny head peering solemnly over Peter's ear as she earnestly sat and sat.

"But no worms," said Peter firmly. "She'd better not dribble worms on me and my chair when her fine-feathered infants arrive."

"I imagine worms would be the least of your worry as far as dribbling goes," I said. "Baby birds are so messy!"

Occasionally I wondered about Gayla, my imagination trying to bridge the gap between making my own way and the person over whom no one had cared to pray.

Had she become a full-fledged Scarlet Woman with all the sinful luxury a.s.sociated with the primrose path, or had she slipped once or been betrayed by some Ben Collins? Too often a community will, well, play down the moral question if the sin is large-and profitable-enough, but a small sin is never let to die. Maybe it's because so few of us have the capacity to sin in the grand manner, but we all can sin sordidly. And we can't forgive people for being as weak as we are.

You understand, of course, that any number of ordinary things were happening during this time. These peripheral wanderings were a little like recurring headaches. They claimed my whole attention while they were in progress, but were speedily set aside when they were over.

Well, Fall came and with it, the hunting season. Peter decided to try for his deer in the rapidly diminis.h.i.+ng wilds of the foothills of the Catalinas. He went out one Sat.u.r.day to look the ground over and came back fit to be tied.

"Two new fences!" he roared. "One of them straight across Flecha Cayendo Wash and the other running right along the top of the hills above Fool's Pa.s.s! And that's not all. A road! They've 'dozed out a road You know that little flat where we like to picnic? Well, the road goes right through it!"

"Not where we wait for the lights in town to come on!" I cried.

"And now they'll use those same lights to sell those quarter million dollar houses with huge picture windows that look out over the valley and have good heavy curtains to pull across as soon as the sun goes down-"

So, in the week following, Peter found another way into the Catalinas. It involved a lot of rough mileage and a going-away before a returning-to the area he wanted to hunt. We went out one early morning armed with enthusiasm, thirty-ought-sixes and hunting licenses, but we walked the hills over all day and didn't get a glimpse of a deer, let alone a shot.We came back that evening, exhausted, to the flat where we had left the car.

We had planned, in case of just such luck, to spend the night under the stars and start out again the next day, so we unloaded.

We built our campfire of splintered, warped odds and ends of lumber we salvaged from the remnants of a shack that sagged and melted to ruin in the middle of a little flat. We ate our supper and were relaxing against a sun-warmed boulder in the flicker of a firelight when the first raindrops fell and hissed in the fire.

"Rain?" Peter held out his hand incredulously. The sunset had been almost cloudless.

"Rain," I said resignedly, having been whacked on my dusty bifocals with two big drops.

"I might have known," said Peter morosely. "I suspected all afternoon that your muttering and scrambling was some sort of incantation, but did it have to be a rain dance?"

"It wasn't," I retorted. "It was a hole in my left sock and I have the blister to prove it."

"Well, let's the get the tarp out," said Peter. "'s probably just a sprinkle, but we might as well have something overhead." We busied ourselves arranging our sleeping bags and stretching the tarp over them. I poured what was left of the coffee into the thermos and put the rest of the food back into the chuck box.

But it wasn't a sprinkle. The thrum on the tarp over us got louder and louder.

m.u.f.fled thunder followed the flash of lightning. Rain was a solid curtain between us and the edge of our flat. I felt a flutter of alarm as the noise increased steadily. And increased again.

"Boy! This is a gulley-washer!" Peter ducked his dripping head back into the shelter after a moment's glance out in the downpour. "The bottom's dropped out of something!"

"I think it's our camp floor," I said. "I just put my hand up to the wrist in running water!"

We scrambled around bundling things back into the car. My uneasiness was increased by the stinging force of the rain on my head and shoulders as we scrambled, and by the wading we had to do to get into the car. I huddled in the front seat, plucking at the tight, wet knot of my soaked scarf as Peter slithered off in the darkness to the edge of the flat and sloshed back a little quicker than he had gone.

Rain came into the car with him.

"The run-off's here already," he said. "We're marooned-on a desert island.

Listen to the roar!"

Above and underlying the roar of the rain on the car roof, I could hear a deeper tone-a shaking, frightening roar of narrow sand washes trying to channel off a cloud burst.

"Oh, Peter!" My hand shook on his arm. "Are we safe here? Is this high enough?" Rain was something our area prayed for, but often when it came, itdid so in such huge punis.h.i.+ng amounts in such a short time that it was terrifying. And sometimes the Search And Rescue units retrieved bodies far downstream, not always sure whether they had died of thirst or were drowned.

"I think we're okay," Peter said. "I doubt if the whole flat would cave into the washes, but I think I'd better move the car more nearly into the middle, just in case."

"Don't get too close to that old shack," I warned, peering through a winds.h.i.+eld the wipers couldn't clear. "We don't want to pick up a nail."

"The place was mostly 'dobe, anyway," said Peter, easing the car to a stop and setting the hand brake. "This storm'll probably finish melting it down."

We finally managed to make ourselves a little foreshortenedly comfortable in the car for the night. Peter had the back seat and I had the front. I lay warm and dry in my flannel gown-Peter despaired of ever' making me a genuine camper, A nightgown?-my head propped on the arm rest. Pulling up the blanket, I let the drumming roar of the rain wash me past my prayers in steadily deepening waves into sleep.

The light woke me. Struggling, I freed one elbow from the coc.o.o.n of my blanket and lifted myself, gasping a little from a stiff neck. I was lost. I couldn't square the light with any light in our house nor the stiff neck with my down pillow nor the roar around me with any familiar home noise.

For a moment I was floating in a directionless, timeless warm bath of Not Being. Then I pulled myself up a little higher and suddenly the car and all the circ.u.mstances were back and I blinked sleepily at the light.

The light? I sat up and fumbled for the shoe where I'd left my gla.s.ses. What was a light doing on this flat? And so close that it filled the whole of my window? I wiped my gla.s.ses on a fold of my gown and put them on. The wide myopic flare of a light concentrated then to a glow, softer, but still close.

I rolled the car window down and leaned my arms on the frame.

The room was small. The floor was dirt, beaten hard by use. Rain was roaring on a tin roof and it had come in under the unpainted wooden door, darkening the sill and curling in a faintly silver wetness along one wall. A steady dripping leak from the ceilingless roof had dug a little crater in the floor in one corner and each heavy drop exploded muddy in its center. Steam plumed up from the spout of a granite-ware teakettle on the small cast-iron stove that glowed faintly pink through its small isingla.s.s window on the front. The light was on the table. It was a kerosene lamp, its flame, turned too high, was yellow and jagged, occasionally smoking the side of the gla.s.s chimney. It was so close to me that the faint flare of light was enough to make shadowy the room beyond the table.

"It's that peripheral thing again," I thought and looked straight at the lamp.

But it didn't fade out! The car did instead! I blinked, astonished. This wasn't peripheral!-it was whole sight! I looked down at my folded arms. My sleeves were muddy from a damp adobe window sill.

Movement caught my attention-movement and sound. I focused on the dim interior of the room. There was an iron bedstead in the far corner. And someone was in it-in pain. And someone was by it in fear and distress.

"It hurts! It hurts!" the jerky whisper was s.e.xless and ageless because of pain. "Where's Jim?" "I told you. He went to see if he could get help. Maybe Gramma Nearing or even a doctor."

The voice was patient. "He can't get back because of the storm. Listen to it?"

We three listened to the roar of the flooded washes, the drum of the rain and, faintly, the plash of the leaking roof.

"I wish he was-" The voice lost its words and became a smothered, exhausted cry of pain.

I closed my eyes-and lost the sound along with the sight. I opened my eyes hastily. The room was still there, but the dampness by the door was a puddle now, swelling slowly in the lamplight. The leak in the corner was a steady trickle that had overrun its crater and become a little dust covered snake that wandered around, seeking the lowest spot on the floor.

The person on the bed cried out again, and, tangled in the cry, came the unmistakable thin wail of the new-born. A baby! I hitched myself higher on my folded arms. My involuntary blinking as I did so moved time again in the small room. I peered into the pale light.

A woman was busy with the baby on the table. As she worked, she glanced anxiously and frequently over at the bed corner. She had reached for some baby clothes when a sound and movement from the corner s.n.a.t.c.hed her away from the table so hastily that the corner of the blanket around the baby was flipped back, leaving the tiny chest uncovered. The baby's face turned blindly, and its mouth opened in a soundless cry. The soft lamplight ran across its wet, dark hair as the head turned.

"It won't stop!" I don't know whether I caught the panting words or the thought. "I can't stop the blood! Jim! Get here! G.o.d help me!"

I tried to see past the flare of light but could only sense movement. If only I could-but what could I do? I s.n.a.t.c.hed my attention back to the baby. Its mouth was opening and closing in little gasping motions. Its little chest was laboring but it wasn't breathing!

"Come back!" I cried-silently?-aloud? "Come back! Quick! The baby's dying!"

The vague figure moving beyond the light paid no attention. I heard her again, desperately, "Vesta! What am I supposed to do? I can't-"