Pilgrimage

"We aren't of the People-not entirely. Father was not of the People. We're half-breeds."
There was a startled silence.
"You mean your mother married an Outsider?" Valancy's voice was filled with astonishment. "That you and Bethie are-?'
"Yes she did and yes we are!" I retorted. "And Dad was the best-" My belligerence ran thinly out across the sharp edge of my pain. "They're both dead now. Mother sent us to you."
"But Bethie is a Sensitive-" Valancy's voice was thoughtful
"Yes, and I can fly and make things travel in the air and I've even made fire. But Dad-" I hid my face and let it twist with the increasing agony.
"Then we can!" I couldn't read the emotion in Valancy's voice. "Then the People and Outsiders-but it's unbelievable that you-" Her voice died.
In the silence that followed, Bethie's voice came fearful and tremulous, "Are you going to send us away?" My heart twisted to the ache in her voice.
"Send you away! Oh, my people, my people! Of course not! As if there were any question." Valancy's arm went tightly around Bethie, and Karen's hand closed warmly on mine. The tension that had been a hard twisted knot inside me dissolved, and Bethie and I were home.
Then Valancy became very brisk.
"Bethie, what's wrong with Peter?"
Bethie was astonished. "How did you know his name?" Then she smiled. "Of course. When you were sorting me!" She touched me lightly along my sides, along my legs. "Four of his ribs are hurt. His left leg is broken. That's about all. Shall I control him?"
"Yes," Valancy said. "I'll help."
And the pain was gone, put to sleep under the persuasive warmth that came to me as Bethie and Valancy came softly into my mind.
"Good," Valancy said. "We're pleased to welcome a Sensitive. Karen and I know a little of their function because we are Sorters. But we have no full-fledged Sensitive in our Group now."
She turned to me. "You said you know the inanimate lift?"
"I don't know," I said. "I don't know the words for lots of things."
"You'll have to relax completely. We don't usually use it on people. But if you let go all over we can manage."
They wrapped me warmly in our blankets and lightly, a hand under my shoulders and under my heels, lifted me carrying-high and sped with me through the trees, Bethie trailing from Valancy's free hand.
Before we reached the yard the door flew open and warm yellow light spilled out into the dusk. The girls paused on the porch and shifted me to the waiting touch of two men. In the wordless pause before the babble of question and explanation I felt Bethie beside me draw a deep wondering breath and merge like a raindrop in a river into the People around us.
But even as the lights went out for me again, and I felt myself slide down into comfort and hunger-fed belongingness, somewhere deep inside of me was a core of something that couldn't quite-no, wouldn't quite dissolve-wouldn't yet yield itself completely to the People. III
LEA SLIPPED soundlessly toward the door almost before Peter's last words were said. She was halfway up the steep road that led up the canyon before she heard the sound of Karen coming behind her. Lifting and running, Karen caught up with her.
"Lea!" she called, reaching for her arm.
With a twist of her shoulder Lea evaded Karen and wordlessly, breathlessly ran on up the road.
"Lea!" Karen grabbed both her shoulders and stopped her bodily. "Where on earth are you going!"
"Let me go!" Lea shouted. "Sneak! Peeping Tom! Let me go!" She tried to wrench out of Karen's hands.
"Lea, whatever you're thinking it isn't so."
"Whatever I'm thinking!" Lea's eyes blazed. "Don't know what I'm thinking? Haven't you done enough scrabbling around in all the muck and mess-?" Her fingernails dented Karen's hands. "Let me go!"
"Why do you care, Lea?" Karen's cold voice jabbed mercilessly. "Why should you care? What difference does it make to you} You left life a long time ago."
"Death-" Lea choked; feeling the dusty bitterness of the word she had thought so often and seldom said. "Death is at least private-no one nosing around-"
"Can you be so sure?" It was Karen's quiet voice. "Anyway, believe me, Lea, I haven't gone in to you even once. Of course I could if I wanted to and I will if I have to, but I never would without your knowledge-if not your consent. All I've learned of you has been from the most open outer part of your mind. Your inner mind is sacredly your own. The People are taught reverence for individual privacy. Whatever powers we have are for healing, not for hurting. We have health and life for you if you'll accept it. You see, there is balm in Gilead! Don't refuse it, Lea."
Lea's hands drooped heavily. The tension went out of her body slowly.
"I heard you last night," she said, puzzled. "I heard your story and it didn't even occur to me that you could-I mean, it just wasn't real and I had no idea-" She let Karen turn her back down the road. "But then when I heard Peter-I don't know-he seemed more true. You don't expect men to go in for fairy tales-" She clutched suddenly at Karen. "Oh, Karen, what shall I do? I'm so mixed up that I can't-"
"Well, the simplest and most immediate thing is to come on back. We have time to hear another report and they're waiting for us. Melodye is next. She saw the People from quite another angle."
Back in the schoolroom Lea fitted herself self-consciously into her corner again, though no one seemed to notice her. Everyone was busy reliving or commenting on the days of Peter and Bethie. The talking died as Melodye Amerson took her place at the desk.
"Valancy's helping me," she smiled. "We chose the theme together, too. Remember-?
" 'Behold, I am at a point to die and what profit shall this birthright do to me? And he sold his birthright for bread and pottage.' "I couldn't do the recalling alone, either. So now, if you don't mind, there'll be a slight pause while we construct our network."
She relaxed visibly and Lea could fed the receptive quietness spread as though the whole room were becoming mirror-placid like the pool in the creek, and then Melodye began to speak ….
POTTAGE
YOU GET tired of teaching after a while. Well, maybe not of teaching itself, because it's insidious and remains a tug in the blood for all of your life, but there comes a day when you look down at the paper you're grading or listen to an answer you're giving a child and you get a boinnng! feeling. And each reverberation of the boing is a year in your life, another set of children through your hands, another beat in monotony, and it's frightening. The value of the work you're doing doesn't enter into it at that moment and the monotony is bitter on your tongue.
Sometimes you can assuage that feeling by consciously savoring those precious days of pseudofreedom between the time you receive your contract for the next year and the moment you sign it. Because you can escape at that moment, but somehow-you don't.
But I did, one spring. I quit teaching. I didn't sign up again. I went chasing after-after what? Maybe excitement-maybe a dream of wonder-maybe a new bright wonderful world that just must be somewhere else because it isn't here-and-now. Maybe a place to begin again so I'd never end up at the same frightening emotional dead end. So I quit.
But by late August the emptiness inside me was bigger than boredom, bigger than monotony, bigger than lusting after freedom. It was almost terror to be next door to September and not care that in a few weeks school starts-tomorrow school starts-first day of school. So, almost at the last minute, I went to the placement bureau. Of course it was too late to try to return to my other school, and besides, the mold of the years there still chafed in too many places.
"Well," the placement director said as he shuffled his end-of-the-season cards, past Algebra and Home Ec and PE and High-School English, "there's always Bendo." He thumbed out a battered-looking three-by-five. "There's always Bendo." And I took his emphasis and look for what they were intended and sighed.