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.