And then Miss Carmody stood in the doorway, blinking a little against the light, muffled to the chin against the brisk fall air. A bright scarf hid her hair, but her skin was that luminous matte-cream it had looked. She was smiling a little but scared, too. I shut my eyes and-I went in, just like that. It was the first time I had ever sorted anybody She was all fluttery with tiredness and strangeness, and there was a question deep inside her that had the wornness of repetition, but I couldn’t catch what it was. And under the uncertainty there was a sweetness and dearness and such a bewildered sorrow that I felt my eyes dampen. Then I looked at her again (sorting takes such a little time) as Father introduced her. I heard a gasp beside me and suddenly I went into Jemmy’s mind with a stunning rush.
Jemmy and I have been close all our lives and we don’t always need words to talk with each other, but this was the first time I had ever gone in like this and I knew he didn’t know what had happened. I felt embarrassed and ashamed to know his emotion so starkly. I closed him out as quickly as possible, but not before I knew that now Jemmy would never hunt for another Group; Old Ones or no Old Ones, he had found his love.
All this took less time than it takes to say how-do-you-do and shake hands. Mother descended with cries and drew Miss Carmody and Father out to the kitchen for coffee, and Jemmy swatted Jethro and made him carry the luggage instead of snapping it to Miss Carmody’s room. After all we didn’t want to lose our teacher before she even saw the schoolhouse.
I waited until everyone was bedded down. Miss Carmody in her cold cold bed, the rest of us of course with our sheets set for warmth-how I pity Outsiders! Then I went to Mother.
She met me in the dark hall and we clung together as she comforted me.
“Oh, Mother,” I whispered, “I sorted Miss Carmody tonight. I’m afraid.”
Mother held me tight again. “I wondered. It’s a great responsibility. You have to be so wise and clear-thinking. Your grandmother carried the Gift with graciousness and honor. “You are of her. You can do it.”
“But, Mother! To be an Old One!”
Mother laughed. “You have years of training ahead of you before you’ll be an Old One. Councilor to the soul is a weighty job.”
“Do I have to tell?” I pleaded. “I don’t want anyone to know yet. I don’t want to be set apart.”
“I’ll tell the Oldest. No one else need know.” She hugged me again and I went back, comforted, to bed.
I lay in the darkness and let my mind clear, not even knowing how I knew how to. Like the gentle teachings of quiet fingers I felt the family about me. I felt warm and comfortable as though I were cupped in the hollow palm of a loving hand. Someday I would belong to the Group as I now belonged to the family. Belong to others? With an odd feeling of panic I shut the family out. I wanted to be alone-to belong just to me and no one else. I didn’t want the Gift.
I slept after a while.
Miss Carmody left for the schoolhouse an hour before we did. She wanted to get things started a little before school-time, her late arrival making it kind of rough on her. Kiah, Jethro, Lizbeth and I walked down the lane to the Armisters’ to pick up their three kids. The sky was so blue you could taste it, a winy fallish taste of harvest fields and falling leaves. We were all feeling full of bubbly enthusiasm for the beginning of school. We were lighthearted and light-footed, too, as we kicked along through the cottonwood leaves paving the lane with gold. In fact Jethro felt too light-footed, and the third time I hauled him down and made him walk on the ground I cuffed him good. He was still sniffling when we got to Armisters’.
“She’s pretty!” Lizbeth called before the kids got out to the gate, all agog and eager for news of the new teacher.
“She’s young,” Kiah added, elbowing himself ahead of Lizbeth.
“She’s littler’n me,” Jethro sniffed, and we all laughed because he’s five six already even if he isn’t twelve yet.
Debrah and Rachel Armister linked arms with Lizbeth and scuffled down the lane, heads together, absorbing the details of teacher’s hair, dress, nail polish, luggage and night clothes, though goodness knows how Lizbeth found out about all that.
Jethro and Kiah annexed Jeddy and they climbed up on the rail fence that parallels the lane, and walked the top rail. Jethro took a tentative step or two above the rail, caught my eye and stepped back in a hurry. He knows as well as any child in the Canyon that a kid his age has no business lifting along a public road.
We detoured at the Mesa Road to pick up the Kroginold boys. More than once Father has sighed over the Kroginolds.
You see, when the Crossing was made the People got separated in that last wild moment when air was screaming past and the heat was building up so alarmingly. The members of our Group left their ship just seconds before it crashed so devastatingly into the box canyon behind Old Baldy and literally splashed and drove itself into the canyon walls, starting a fire that stripped the hills bare for miles. After the People gathered themselves together from the life slips, and founded Cougar Canyon they discovered that the alloy the ship was made of was a metal much wanted here. Our Group has lived on mining the box canyon ever since, though there’s something complicated about marketing the stuff. It has to be shipped out of the country and shipped in again because everyone knows that it isn’t found in this region.
Anyway our Group at Cougar Canyon is probably the largest of the People, but we are reasonably sure that at least one Group and maybe two survived along with us. Grandmother in her time sensed two Groups but could never locate them exactly, and, since our object is to go unnoticed in this new life, no real effort has ever been made to find them. Father can remember just a little of the Crossing, but some of the Old Ones are blind and crippled from the heat and the terrible effort they put forth to save the others from burning up like falling stars.
But getting back, Father often mourned that of all the People who could have made up our Group we had to get the Kroginolds. They’re rebels and were even before the Crossing. It’s their kids who have been so rough on our teachers. The rest of us usually behave fairly decently and remember that we have to be careful around Outsiders.
Derek and Jake Kroginold were wrestling in a pile of leaves by the front gate when we got there. They didn’t even hear us coming, so I leaned over and whacked the nearest rear end, and they turned in a flurry of leaves and grinned up at me for all the world like pictures of Pan in the mythology book at home.
“What kinda old bat we got this time?” Derek asked as he scrabbled in the leaves for his lunch box.
“She’s not an old bat,” I retorted, madder than need be because Derek annoys me so. “She’s young and beautiful.”
“Yeah, I’l1 bet!” Jake emptied the leaves from his cap onto the trio of squealing girls.
“She is so!” Kiah retorted. “The nicest teacher we ever had.”
“She won’t teach me nothing!” Derek yelled, lifting to the top of the cottonwood tree at the turnoff.
“Well, if she won’t I will,” I muttered, and reaching for a handful of sun I platted the twishers so quickly that Derek fell like a rock. He yelled like a catamount, thinking he’d get killed for sure, but I stopped him about a foot from the ground and then let go. Well, the stopping and the thump to the ground pretty well jarred the wind out of him, but he yelled:
“I’ll tell the Old Ones! You ain’t supposed to platt twishers!”
“Tell the Old Ones,” I snapped, kicking on down the leafy road. “I’ll be there and tell them why. And then, old smarty pants, what will be your excuse for lifting?”
And then I was ashamed. I was showing off as bad as a Kroginold, but they make me so mad!
Our last stop before school was at the Clarinades’. My heart always squeezed when I thought of the Clarinade twins. They just started school this year, two years behind the average Canyon kid. Mrs. Kroginold used to say that the two of them, Susie and Jerry, divided one brain between them before they were born. That’s unkind and untrue-thoroughly a Kroginold remark-but it is true that by Canyon standards the twins were retarded. They lacked so many of the attributes of the People. Father said it might be a delayed effect of the Crossing that they would grow out of, or it might be advance notice of what our children will be like here-what is ahead for the People. It makes me shiver, wondering.