Pilgrimage

They were the last to arrive. Invocation over, Dita was already in the chair behind the desk, her hands folded primly in front of her. "Valancy," she said, "we're all here now. Are you ready?"
"Oh, yes." Lea could feel Valancy's answer. "Our Baby's asleep now,"
The group laughed at the capitals in Valancy's voice.
"You didn't invent babies," Dita laughed.
"Hah!" Jemmy's voice answered triumphantly. "This one we did!'"
Lea looked around the laughing group. "They're happy!" she thought. "In a world like this they're happy anyway! What do they have as a touchstone?" She studied the group as Dita began, and under the first flow of Dita's words she thought, "Maybe this is the answer. Maybe this is the touchstone. When any one of them cries out the others hear-and listen. Not just with their ears but with their hearts. No matter who cries out-someone listens-"
"My theme," Dita said soberly, "is very brief-but oh, the heartbreak in it. It's "And your children shall wander in the wilderness.' " Her clasped hands tightened on each other.
"I was wandering that day…"
WILDERNESS
"WELL, HOW do you expect Bruce to concentrate on spelling when he's so worried about his daddy?" I thumbed through my second graders" art papers, hoping to find one lift out of the prosaic.
" 'Worried about his daddy'?" Mrs. Kanz looked up from her spelling, tests. "What makes you think he's worried about him?"
"Why, he's practically sick for fear he won't come home this time." I turned the paper upside down and
looked again.
"I thought you knew everything about everyone," I teased.
"You've briefed me real good in these last three weeks. I feel like a resident instead of a newcomer." I sighed and righted the paper. It was still a tree with six apples on it.
"But I certainly didn't know Stell and Mark were having trouble." Mrs. Kanz was chagrined.
"They had an awful fight the night before he left," I said. "Nearly scared the waddin' out of Bruce."
"How do you know?" Mrs. Kanz's eyes were suddenly sharp. "You haven't met Stell yet and Bruce hasn't said a word all week except yes and no."
I let my breath out slowly. "Oh, no!" I thought. "Not already! Not already!"
"Oh, a little bird told me," I said lightly, busying myself with my papers to hide the small tremble of my hands.
"Little bird, toosh! You probably heard it from Marie, though how she-"
"Could be," I said, "could be." I bundled up my papers hurriedly. "Oops! Recess is almost over. Gotta get downstairs before the thundering herd arrives."
The sound of the old worn steps was hollow under my hurried feet, but not nearly so hollow as the feeling in my stomach.
Only three weeks and I had almost betrayed myself already. Why couldn't I remember! Besides, the child wasn't even in my room. I had no business knowing anything about him. Just because he had leaned so quietly, so long, over his literature book last Monday-and I had only looked a little ….
At the foot of the stairs I was engulfed waist-deep in children sweeping in from the playground. Gratefully I let myself be swept with them into the classroom.
That afternoon I leaned with my back against the window sill and looked over my quiet class. Well, quiet in so far as moving around the room was concerned, but each child humming audibly or inaudibly with the untiring dynamos of the young-the mostly inarticulate thought patterns of happy children. All but Lucine, my twelve-year-old first grader, who hummed briefly to a stimulus and then clicked off, hummed again and clicked off. There was a short somewhere, and her flat empty eyes showed it.
I sighed and turned my back on the room, wandering my eyes up the steepness of Black Mesa as it towered above the school, trying to lose myself from apprehension, trying to forget why I had run away-nearly five hundred miles-trying to forget those things that tugged at my sanity, things that could tear me loose from reality and set me adrift …. Adrift? Oh, glory! Set me free! Set me free! I hooked my pointer fingers through the old wire grating that protected the bottom of the window and tugged sharply. 01d nails grated and old wire gave, and I sneezed through the dry acid bite of ancient dust.
I sat down at my desk and rummaged for a Kleenex and snoozed again, trying to ignore, but knowing too well, the heavy nudge and tug inside me. That tiny near betrayal had cracked my tight protective shell. All that I had packed away so resolutely was shouldering and elbowing its way . . .
I swept my children out of spelling into numbers so fast that Lucine poised precariously on the edge of tears until she clicked on again and murkily perceived where we had gone.
"Now, look, Petie," I said, trying again to find a way through his stubborn block against number words, "this is the picture of two, but this is the name of two ….
After the school buses were gone I scrambled and slid down the steep slope of the hill below the gaunt old schoolhouse and walked the railroad ties back toward the hotel-boarding house where I stayed. Eyes intent on my feet but brightly conscious of the rails on either side, I counted my way through the clot of old buildings that was town, and out the other side. If I could keep something on my mind I could keep ghosts out of my thoughts.
I stopped briefly at the hotel to leave my things and then pursued the single rail line on down the little valley, over the shaky old trestle that was never used any more, and left it at the railings dump and started up the hill, enjoying fiercely the necessary lunge and pull, tug and climb, that stretched my muscles, quickened my heartbeat and pumped my breath up hard against the top of my throat.
Panting I grabbed a manzanita bush and pulled myself up the last steep slope. I perched myself, knees to chest, on the crumbly outcropping of shale at the base of the huge brick chimney, arms embracing my legs, my cheek pressed to my knees. I sat with closed eyes, letting the late-afternoon sun soak into me. "If only this could be all," I thought wistfully. "If only there were nothing but sitting in the sun, soaking up warmth. Just being, without questions." And for a long blissful time I let that be all.
But I couldn't put it off any longer. I felt the first slow trickling through the crack in my armor. I counted trees, I counted telephone poles, I said timestables until I found myself thinking six times nine is ninety-six and, then I gave up and let the floodgates open wide.
"It's always like this," one of me cried to the rest of me. "You promised! You promised and now you're giving in again-after all this time!"
"I could promise not to breathe, too," I retorted.
"But this is insanity-you know it is! Anyone knows it is!"
"Insane or not, it's me!" I screamed silently. "It's me! It's me!"
"Stop your arguing," another of me said. "This is too serious for bickering. We've got problems."
I took a dry manzanita twig and cleared a tiny space on the gravelly ground, scratching up an old square nail and a tiny bit of sun-purpled glass as I did so. Shifting the twig to my other hand I picked up the nail and rubbed the dirt off with my thumb. It was pitted with rust but still strong and heavy. I wondered what it had held together back in those days, and if the hand that last held it was dust now, and if whoever it was had had burdens….
I cast the twig from me with controlled violence and, rocking myself forward, I made a straight mark on the cleared ground with the nail. This was a drearily familiar inventory, and I had taken it so many times before, trying to simplify this complicated problem of mine, that I fell automatically into the same old pattern.
Item one. Was I really insane-or going insane-or on the way to going insane? It must be so. Other people didn't see sounds. Nor taste colors. Nor feel the pulsing of other people's emotions like living things. Nor find the weight of flesh so like a galling strait jacket. Nor more than half believe that the burden was lay-downable short of death.